Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

Seeing her, they halted, set down their buckets, and stared. Whispers passed between them. One of the lads had a scarred chin and hollow cheeks; his companion was bow-legged, with a gimpy foot. The girl had scarcely hips or breasts to speak of because she was so skinny, but her gaze measured Anna without fear, and it seemed to Anna that she was the leader of this little clan. When the girl spoke, it was in a language Anna did not know, and when she could not answer them in a language they knew, they shrugged, picked up their buckets, and went in through the gate.

For a long while she stood in the middle of the road, going nowhere. At last, as her head began to throb from the midday heat, she turned around and went back inside.

She had nowhere else to go.

“Come, Anna! It’s time to go!”

The words yanked her out of a doze. They had offered her a place to rest her tired feet within the cool and dark confines of a pit house.

Beyond the brightness of the low doorway—there was no door, only strings of wooden beads knocking together—the lady stood, her outline softened by the yellowing light of late afternoon.

“We’re going, Anna. Come.”

“Where are we going?” she asked before thinking, and then winced, because she ought not to ask. She ought only to obey.

But the lady took no notice. She answered the question tolerantly. “We are going to Novomo. It’s a dilemma, whether to wait here for the army to return or to go after them, knowing that the tides within the crowns might bring us to cross without meeting. Yet I just don’t know. I must act. I must find Blessing, now that I know she is alive. And you’ll take care of her when we’ve found her.”

“We’re going to Novomo?” She felt wooly-headed. “But that’s where the army went. They’ll capture us.”

“Maybe not, Anna. I have allies now, among the Ashioi.”

“How can you have allies, my lady? Do they mean to join Prince Sanglant’s army, if he is king now in Wendar, as I heard? Yet, if they do so, won’t they be traitors to their own kind?”

The lady had already turned her head to look toward a sight Anna could not see. She replied, but her thoughts seemed already half a league away. “Not that kind of ally. We do not deal in land and gold but in something more precious to us. Something I have that they want, and that I am willing to share.”

“What is that, my lady?”

Seen in profile, she grinned fiercely, and the dim room seemed suddenly brighter. “The secrets of the mathematici.”

2

DIE EICHE was a huge oak tree with a massive trunk and a canopy of branches so wide and thick that grass did not grow beneath it. The crossroads was not precisely a village except for the straggle of houses built here because of a decent strip of arable land and the chance to house travelers in exchange for coin or goods. This hamlet, too, had been abandoned, but a large company had camped here recently. The interiors had been ransacked, and boards pried out of walls to throw onto campfires. Several animals had been killed, skinned, and eaten; their remains were scattered. Ortulfus weighed a scapula in his hands. With a finger, he traced the marks of a knife where it had scraped the bone. A single fresh grave stood in the shadow of the surrounding forest, beside a crop of young oak sprouting where there was no shade to kill them.

The company rested, exhausted more by fear than by the slow pace. Father Ortulfus sent monks with buckets to the nearby stream. A pair of lads offered to lead the horses to drink as Ivar and Baldwin examined the roads from this safe distance. The broader path, most traveled, struck southeast along the route made by the stream, while a grassier way pushed straight east into the trees.

ady stared, rendered speechless by this apparition. At length, she reached for it, and it was given into her hands. She turned it and spun it and held it at arm’s length and laughed and cried and at length gave it back. And spoke an Ashioi word that Anna knew.

“Yes.”

After this, as the council broke up and the lady walked away with the other woman, deep in conversation, Anna found herself in a backwater, unwanted and forgotten. When she wandered to the gate, no one stopped her or called after her. She walked through the gate and crossed the plank bridge fixed over the ditch. A square guard’s tower rose at the northeastern corner of the palisade. There, a mask warrior with his mask pushed up onto his hair spotted her but looked away as quickly, uninterested.

She could run. She could escape.

She laughed, because it was better than crying. Would she never be able to go home?

A trio of young people—two boys and a girl—came walking up the road carrying buckets half full with water over their shoulders. They were born of humankind, as she was, with sweetly familiar features although they were dark-haired and with complexions neither as pale as Wendish nor as reddish bronze as Ashioi, but with a dusky olive cast. Southerners. Aostans.

Seeing her, they halted, set down their buckets, and stared. Whispers passed between them. One of the lads had a scarred chin and hollow cheeks; his companion was bow-legged, with a gimpy foot. The girl had scarcely hips or breasts to speak of because she was so skinny, but her gaze measured Anna without fear, and it seemed to Anna that she was the leader of this little clan. When the girl spoke, it was in a language Anna did not know, and when she could not answer them in a language they knew, they shrugged, picked up their buckets, and went in through the gate.

For a long while she stood in the middle of the road, going nowhere. At last, as her head began to throb from the midday heat, she turned around and went back inside.

She had nowhere else to go.

“Come, Anna! It’s time to go!”

The words yanked her out of a doze. They had offered her a place to rest her tired feet within the cool and dark confines of a pit house.

Beyond the brightness of the low doorway—there was no door, only strings of wooden beads knocking together—the lady stood, her outline softened by the yellowing light of late afternoon.