The tapestry of Liath’s life and lineage had always concealed more than it revealed, but Obligatia’s story wove in many of the gaping holes. So it became clear as Liath asked questions where she must and answered those she could. An hour passed as the story unfolded. She drank a cup of ale, shared with the old woman. The grandmother. It was still unthinkable to use that word, but she must use it because although it might all be a fabrication or a mistake, she knew in her gut that this piece of the story made all the rest explicable.
Bernard and Anne were half siblings. Obligatia herself had been used as a pawn in the dynastic schemes woven by the Seven Sleepers. It was hard to know what Biscop Tallia and Sister Clothilde had hoped for when they had shoved the fourteen-year-old-girl into the path of the fifty-year-old monk, except that they needed a compliant, kinless female to breed with the last direct legitimate son born to Taillefer. No one would ever know the whole, now that Anne was dead, and even Anne could not have comprehended everything because in many ways she had also been their pawn, their creation.
“Some part of the tale I learned from Sister Rosvita,” Obligatia finished. “The rest I know of my own experience.”
“Are you tired? If you must rest, I will wait.”
The hand squeezed her; strength lived there still! “No, I will go on. I have lived past my rightful measure of years. I dare wait no longer, dear child. I held on only for this, to see you and to touch you. I can see in your face that my beloved boy Bernard was your father, but how comes it that Anne claimed to be your mother? Is it true?”
“It is not. My mother was a fire daimone enticed to Earth and trapped here by a net of sorcery. Bernard loved her. Not Anne. The daimone was my mother. This I know because I have walked the spheres …”
What walking the spheres entailed, and how she had come to do so, she explained to Obligatia, who showed no sign of distaste, distress, or fear at discovering—or at any rate having confirmed—that her granddaughter was not wholly human. She was kind and generous and affectionate and wise and calm and amusing and indeed she possessed every quality that Liath had ever dreamed she might find in a grandmother, the one she had long since resigned herself to never having and never knowing.
“There is one thing, though,” Liath added. “Brother Fidelis was the son of Taillefer and Radegundis. My father was born to you and a lord born into the line of Bodfeld.”
“I always called him Maus, to tease him. His name was Mansuetus, fitting enough, for he was quiet and small and gentle.” She chuckled. The memory was so old that it no longer seemed to cause her pain. “And nervous of his aunts and uncle, though he defied them to marry me.”
“That quality runs true, then,” said Liath with a laugh. “But who were your parents?”
Obligatia smiled sadly. “No one knows. I was a foundling. I was raised at the convent of St. Thierry. I had a different name, then. Left behind like so much else.”
“Where is St. Thierry?”
“In Varre. In the duchy of Arconia.”
Liath lifted the old woman’s hands and kissed each one and set them back on her blankets. “You lost two husbands and two children—all taken from you. How can it be you have lived so long without falling prey to grief and anger?”
She lifted trembling hands toward Liath’s face, and Liath grasped them. “I suppose,” she said, her voice as shaky as her arms, fading as exhaustion overwhelmed her, “that in some part of me I was always waiting, I was always hoping.”
“For what?” Liath asked her, and bent close to listen.
“For you.”
3
“MOTHER Obligatia is a powerful ally,” said Hanna to Liath much later. They had shared a bowl of porridge—so strongly flavored with leeks that Liath could still taste them after two cups of ale—while Hanna told of her adventures in Aosta and farther east. Now, as Hanna finished her tale, they paused at the wall. Lions labored in what remained of the day’s light, lifting stones back into place.
Thiadbold left off working to come speak to them. Like most of the other Lions, he had stripped down to his under-shift and was nevertheless sweating despite the cooling temperature. He had dirt streaked on his face and his hands were caked with earth. He had tied a kerchief around his hair to keep it clean; red strands curled around his ears, and he used a wrist to wipe a strand out of his left eye.
“No stonemason would admire it,” he said, gesturing toward the hasty work and the laboring men, “but it will hold for a season or two until better work can be done.”
Folquin, down the line, waved at them, then yelped and leaped when Leo dropped a rock a hand’s breadth from his foot.
“How long will it take to fill it all in?” Liath asked.
He shrugged. “A day or two, not more with this company.” He smiled at Hanna. “You’ve seen them in action.”
“So I have,” she said, and Liath saw how she reddened, just a little, and how her smile turned crooked, just a little. “The best soldiers in the regnant’s army.”
He laughed. “Fair spoken, and even true. These Lions have served faithfully through hard trials and hard losses.” He indicated the forest. “We’ve heard there’s a witch and a wagon out in the trees. Need you an escort?”
“It’s close by,” said Hanna, “and there is some danger involved to your men, which I suppose you will have heard as well.”
“That a look from the witch’s eyes brings death? We’ve heard such a rumor.”
“To look on her will kill you, yes, and it’s no rumor. It’s a curse set on her, no sorcery that she sought of her own will.”
“A terrible fate for any person, to be always alone,” he said, and Liath saw how he looked searchingly at Hanna and how she colored, and spoke to cover her discomposure.