“I have to believe it. Else my sense of what is just would suffer grievous harm. I have met too many nobles who are fools to believe otherwise.”
He chuckled, then looked around nervously before recalling, she thought, that there was no one to hear them except his own men. “Perhaps so. The church would not approve your words.”
“Look!” She pointed. A lumbering shadow moving away into the forest and vanishing in the brush.
“An aurochs! Mayhap we’ll have game tonight for our supper.”
They did. In the rear guard a scout hauled in a deer. At the fore, a pair of men ranging in the woods to seek out trouble shot an aurochs that had stopped to graze in a clearing a spear’s toss off the road.
“It might do for a campsite,” said one of the scouts, coming to report the kill to the captain. “There’s an old stone circle, and cleared ground.”
“Let me see,” said Liath.
She went with an escort of a dozen soldiers while the rest waited on the road. At the clearing, the other man had already begun butchering the aurochs, and the sharp smell of its blood hit her first. As she pushed aside the low-hanging branches, she saw what manner of place they had come to.
She shook her head, scanning the wide span of ground where a low field layer of feather grass and flowering honeysuckle grew. No trees had encroached despite the passage of time. The stones stood upright.
“Some power has raised this crown recently,” she said. “See the pattern of growth around them. You can see where the stones once lay on the ground.”
“Who could raise such big blocks of stone without leaving a track of their labor?” asked the scout.
Sorcery could raise the crowns, but she could not imagine anyone having so much power. After all, how many were left in the world who could even weave the crowns?
Me.
And Hugh of Austra.
She looked at Thiadbold.
He nodded. “We’ll march on and hope to find a better spot.”
“No,” she said, because she did not like to surrender to fear. “Easier to rest here and eat that good aurochs. My mouth is already watering.”
He shrugged. “If you don’t like it, we’ll move on. I’ve seen my fair measure of strange places. I know to respect their power.”
She smelled nothing but vegetation, moist soil, and the innards of the dead animal spilling free as the scout cut a slit in its belly. “If bandits come upon us, we’ll have a better view for our archers if we bide here with the stones as cover. What do you think, Captain?”
He took his time considering. He paced the circumference of the clearing, and walked through the stones, but there were no holes, tunnels, or hiding places. It was a dead place, all five stones standing, their faces unnaturally smooth and unmarked with moss or lichen. Although she had seen many a fallen stone cracked and hollowed by centuries of rain and ice, none of these stones showed any such wear.
“It seems dry,” he said, and sent a man to fetch the rest of the company. “We’ll set fires as our perimeter.”
She laughed, liking his pragmatism. “Fair enough, Captain.”
They ate well around six fires set at points around the clearing just beyond the crown’s circle. Deadwood came easily to hand. It caught and burned with relish, and the meat tasted good, better than any meal she’d had in days because she sat easily with her companions and chatted about nothing and everything.
Eventually she discovered that some among these men had known Hanna rather better than the others.
“Yes, it’s true, lady,” said the one called Ingo, a broad-shouldered, good-looking man with a scar and a wicked smile. “We knew her from before, from the march east with Prince Bayan, may he rest at peace in the Chamber of Light. We’re them who found her at the Veserling. We ripped her from the hands of the monster. We marched with her west and got her settled at Gent, although she was deathly ill there. It’s a miracle she survived, but survive she did. And she did come with us, then, to Osterburg. After that she was sent south to Aosta. As you’ve already heard.”
“She spoke of you,” said the youngest of them, shyly.
“She is a good friend to me,” said Liath. “I’d be pleased to know she has survived this tempest.”
She found it easy to chat with these men. They acted, at moments, in awe of her knowledge and education, but Thiadbold and the cheerful scamp called Folquin had no fear of questioning her about what they did not understand. The older men could not be intimidated; they had seen too much. She had saved the life of one of their own. That was enough for them to accept her as a comrade. The endless battles waged on the royal progress had no claws here.
Later, when the sentry changed, those few men still awake lay down to sleep, but Liath was restless, as if the night’s insomnia that often afflicted Sanglant had passed into her. You would think that afflictions might be rubbed from skin to skin or breathed from mouth to mouth. Anyone who studied medicine knew that sick people often left illness in their wake. Why not other afflictions as well?
She paced around the sentry circle, pausing between each bonfire to stare up at the heavens. Clouds veiled the stars, yet it seemed to her that she could almost see the faint threads of their light trailing down into the waiting crown. Would it be possible to weave the crowns if the heavens weren’t clear? Any good mathematicus armed with an astrolabe and a table and a knowledge of the date and approximate hour could predict which star was rising and which setting. Could point near enough to the place in the sky where this constellation, or that one, rode and turned as the hours passed.