Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

Her fist had opened. Her stern and rather bored expression had altered to one of intense interest. “Then Salian workers.”

“Raid into the nest of hornets? That’s a poor use of my soldiers. I might need them at any time.”

“Nay, nay,” she said irritably, “I meant you to take as many as you like from among the refugees. That will get them off the roads and stop them from making themselves a nuisance. Round them up and drive them in a herd. There are folk in Autun, too—some we’ve already driven out, but others you may take as you wish. More than we need. Consult with my captains. Plenty of labor here for the mines. It will save us bread later.”

“Yes,” Conrad mused, “that will work. But it will still take a long time to get benefit from those mines.”

“Better we control them than the Salians do. Better we control stores of precious metals against the coming battle.”

“Will it come to battle?” he asked her. “If Mother Scholastica means to support our cause, then it need not come to battle.”

“Do you fear the bastard?”

He snorted. “I am no fool. He’s a strong commander. Call that fear if you want, Cousin. I call it prudence.”

o;That’s not my concern.”

“It might become so, if the lady can’t feed her soldiers.”

“She’ll not turn us out. War’s coming. Perhaps you haven’t heard.”

“Coming from where?”

“They say the Wendish mean to drag us back though we’ve no wish to cower under the yoke of the Wendish regnant. Not anymore. Not now we have a queen of our own.”

To think of Tallia no longer hurt him. They entered the chapel and took a place at the back, under the ambulatory where the other servants and hangers-on waited.

This was prayer, of a kind. Lady Sabella knelt on a thick pillow, her chin resting on a fist. She stared not at the altar where a cleric intoned psalms but at the stone effigy of Taillefer. After a moment she leaned to her right to murmur to an attendant, a youthful man with the burly shoulders of a fighter and hunter. A dozen noble companions surrounded her, and the buzzing murmur of their conversation provided an undertone to the pious prayers of the clerics.

Alain had stood inside the famous chapel before. There was something missing. Alternating blocks of light-and-dark stone gave a pattern to the eight vaults opening onto the central floor. Above, the dome swept into the heavens, ringed by a second and third tier of columns. So might the faithful rise toward heaven, the righteous yet higher above, painted onto the stony piers, until at last the bright and distant Chamber of Light far above could be touched by the angels.

The chapel had not changed. The tempest had not shaken it. But something really was missing, and he had to search the chapel a second time before he realized what it was.

The hands belonging to the stone effigy of Emperor Taillefer were empty. The crown of stars was gone. The stone figure clutched at air. The sight struck Alain so strangely that he smiled. So often we grasp at the very thing we cannot keep hold of, and even after we have lost it, our life is shaped by that wish and the action of grasping. So it is with those who, like stone, are carved into an unchanging form. We make ourselves into stone because we fear to change.

“‘How can I repay God for all that They have given me?’” sang the clerics. “‘I raise the cup of deliverance and speak my vows to God in the presence of all of Their people.’”

There came in a rush through the door a pack of hearty, laughing, chattering men still sweaty and dirt-stained from their ride. Sabella looked up. Even the clerics faltered, turning to see, but one nudged another while a third put pressure on a fourth’s foot, and so the service lurched forward despite the unseemly interruption.

Conrad the Black knelt beside Sabella, pulled a dry stalk of grass out of his beard, and crumbled it into dust between his fingers.

“News from the borderlands.” Perhaps he was trying to keep his voice low in deference to the prayers of thanksgiving, but the acoustics of the hall magnified his speech so every soul in the ambulatory could hear him although he was not, in fact, shouting. “We’ve got control of the mines again, but I need workers. That Eika raid last year cleaned out the countryside. They’ve got a throat hold all along the coast and some ways down three of the rivers.”

“Haven’t you workers in Wayland?”

“The roads are worse there than here, what with the landslides and fallen trees from last autumn. Easier to march from Autun to the mines than from Bederbor to the mines, although it’s a longer road from Autun.”

Her fist had opened. Her stern and rather bored expression had altered to one of intense interest. “Then Salian workers.”

“Raid into the nest of hornets? That’s a poor use of my soldiers. I might need them at any time.”

“Nay, nay,” she said irritably, “I meant you to take as many as you like from among the refugees. That will get them off the roads and stop them from making themselves a nuisance. Round them up and drive them in a herd. There are folk in Autun, too—some we’ve already driven out, but others you may take as you wish. More than we need. Consult with my captains. Plenty of labor here for the mines. It will save us bread later.”

“Yes,” Conrad mused, “that will work. But it will still take a long time to get benefit from those mines.”

“Better we control them than the Salians do. Better we control stores of precious metals against the coming battle.”

“Will it come to battle?” he asked her. “If Mother Scholastica means to support our cause, then it need not come to battle.”