Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

If only there would come a miracle.

“Whsst! Anna!” Scarred John sauntered up. “There’s an old man come to the gate, asking after you. Says he needs a servant to help him draw water and fetch wood and plait baskets.” He grinned easily as he eyed her half made and utterly useless basket. The handsome, cunning baskets plaited by the Ashioi hung from the rafters of their huts, both beautiful and useful as she could never be. “Captain says you might as well go. You’re no use to us now the lady princess has scampered off. Even if she comes back, she’s gone to live among her noble relatives.” He snorted derisively. “Likes them better than her own kind! Not that she’s really like us.”

He wore much-mended clothing, but he’d abandoned his worn boots in favor of the sandals favored by the Ashioi. He shaved like a churchman, as all the soldiers did now, because the women liked it better. Ashioi men did not have beards.

“I don’t want to go,” she said.

“Even an old man would be better than none, unless you have a sweetheart at home waiting for you.” He grinned, to make the words twist more deeply, before turning and walking off. He would not protect her. None of them would.

Captain Frigo came to fetch her. She thought about fighting them, but she knew it was hopeless. She possessed a leather pack with a spare tunic and belt and her boots tucked away together with a comb and a precious silver spoon, now tarnished, but hers. These and other oddments were all that belonged to her, all that weighted her to the world from which otherwise she might just float away into the air without an anchor. She slung it over her back and plodded—in Ashioi sandals, because to wear closed boots in this climate made feet itch and rash and crack and bleed—to the gate. She was a husk, nothing more. She might be torn up and discarded, but she could no longer be hurt.

At first she did not see him, because he stood so unobtrusively beside four stately young mask warriors, Dog Spotted Leopard and Buzzard and Falcon. He produced, from a small basket, a number of stones and tokens, the kind the Ashioi used when they exchanged goods. Ashioi guards as well as Captain Frigo took a share, and then they all turned their backs in the way of folk refusing further responsibility.

ed John and Captain Frigo had set up a carpenter’s shop with their iron adze and axes. Over the weeks they had developed an astonishing parade of customers. The iron tools and swords fascinated the Ashioi. Liudbold had once spent a pair of years apprenticing in a smithy, and he was soon carted away to the toils of their captor’s furnaces. At first, Anna supposed they had slaughtered him or tortured him, but at intervals he returned to visit, each time looking sleeker and fatter. Most recently, he had arrived for his visit accompanied by a sly-faced young Ashioi woman, who was pregnant.

Theodore the archer also had discovered an easy camaraderie with the locals. They admired his skill with the bow; he, like the other men, admired the easy manners of the women.

They were all deserting her, seduced by the flesh, but Anna could not blame them. She had made that same mistake herself, and anyway she did not regret it. Why should they? They could never go back to Darre, because they had betrayed their queen.

She cried again, just a little, thinking of Thiemo and Matto.

No use regretting the dead. Nothing she could do would bring them back, and nothing she had done had halted Blessing in her headlong rush to impress her powerful great uncle, the bold and handsome warrior Zuangua.

This day, scarred John was sitting out in the courtyard, on a stump under a shade roof, dressing wood. Captain Frigo was grinding down wood nails. One of the soldiers trotted over to him, leaned to speak, and in reply the captain nodded, got up, and ambled over toward the gate. Another man braided rope, while in the garden a pair of soldiers fussed among their green plants.

Anna regarded the basket at her feet with irritation. The rushes the Ashioi used for baskets cut her fingers and were too stiff to plait easily. Sometimes she saw the Ashioi guards snickering as they looked at her licking her bleeding fingers, and she had a terrible feeling that she was missing something about the task. She had tried soaking them in water but that only made them fray, while drying them made them crumble. No one helped her. Hugh’s soldiers ignored her, and, in truth, no young Ashioi men looked twice at her, preferring their own half naked women. She was no use at all, not here and not anywhere. In Gent they had long since forgotten her, no doubt. Who missed her? Who thought of her at all?

Tears burned again, hot and angry. It was getting tiresome, crying all the time, but she worried about Blessing and she worried about herself, lost and drifting in a place that would never be her home. She had a body but she felt as if her soul had come unmoored and left her trapped in a husk. The constant dusty haze kicked up by men going about their lives ground into her skin, wearing her away until eventually she would dissolve into nothing.

If only there would come a miracle.

“Whsst! Anna!” Scarred John sauntered up. “There’s an old man come to the gate, asking after you. Says he needs a servant to help him draw water and fetch wood and plait baskets.” He grinned easily as he eyed her half made and utterly useless basket. The handsome, cunning baskets plaited by the Ashioi hung from the rafters of their huts, both beautiful and useful as she could never be. “Captain says you might as well go. You’re no use to us now the lady princess has scampered off. Even if she comes back, she’s gone to live among her noble relatives.” He snorted derisively. “Likes them better than her own kind! Not that she’s really like us.”

He wore much-mended clothing, but he’d abandoned his worn boots in favor of the sandals favored by the Ashioi. He shaved like a churchman, as all the soldiers did now, because the women liked it better. Ashioi men did not have beards.

“I don’t want to go,” she said.

“Even an old man would be better than none, unless you have a sweetheart at home waiting for you.” He grinned, to make the words twist more deeply, before turning and walking off. He would not protect her. None of them would.

Captain Frigo came to fetch her. She thought about fighting them, but she knew it was hopeless. She possessed a leather pack with a spare tunic and belt and her boots tucked away together with a comb and a precious silver spoon, now tarnished, but hers. These and other oddments were all that belonged to her, all that weighted her to the world from which otherwise she might just float away into the air without an anchor. She slung it over her back and plodded—in Ashioi sandals, because to wear closed boots in this climate made feet itch and rash and crack and bleed—to the gate. She was a husk, nothing more. She might be torn up and discarded, but she could no longer be hurt.

At first she did not see him, because he stood so unobtrusively beside four stately young mask warriors, Dog Spotted Leopard and Buzzard and Falcon. He produced, from a small basket, a number of stones and tokens, the kind the Ashioi used when they exchanged goods. Ashioi guards as well as Captain Frigo took a share, and then they all turned their backs in the way of folk refusing further responsibility.

Anna saw the old man’s face. Her mouth dropped open. He caught her gaze and shook his head in a warning. She closed her mouth, and for an instant she was dizzy, wondering whether it was God, or the Enemy, who had answered her.

After all, it was God’s work.

She knew better than to ask questions, but that night they sat beside a campfire, just seven of them, munching on freshly roasted rabbit and a stringy haunch of very old and unidentifiable meat, and she could hold in her questions no longer.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “My lady.”

“West,” said the one who was married to Prince Sanglant. The lady, Liathano, was a sorcerer, no more human than her Ashioi companions, only Anna found the Ashioi far less terrifying than she found this woman, although she did not know why.

Ai, Lady and Son! This woman had a soft fire about her, visible only at night and no more solid than the flash of steaming air visible on a cold night when breath is exhaled.

“I know what happened to Princess Blessing, my lady,” Anna ventured, although the woman had not asked. She was neither kind nor cruel; in truth, she seemed indifferently tolerant of Anna’s presence.

The lady glanced at her, and fixed on her face a false and chilling smile. “I know where she has gone. But that she lives was beyond my knowledge, before I came here. To know that she survived must sustain me.”