Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

A leather bucket had tipped over in one corner. A faint, sweet aroma drifted from that corner, but the curl of air inside the hut blew it away in an instant. She took another step in, righted the bucket, and found it empty but discolored at the bottom. Beneath, some creature had dug a hole in the ground, like a dog seeking a bone, but it was empty. There was no other sign of the holy man who had bided here for so many years.

This man was supposed to have been the only son and heir of Taillefer and Radegundis; the father of Anne; the husband, however briefly and illicitly, of Mother Obligatia. Once, Liath had believed that Brother Fidelis was her grandfather, but now she knew he was not. All they had in common, if the stories she heard could be believed—and she did believe them—was that he had once sat in the circle of the Seven Sleepers. That he had abandoned their councils, believing them to be corrupt.

He had taken the more difficult path, the life of an ascetic. Some had called him a saint, blessed with that halo of righteousness that the church mothers call the crown of stars.

It was ironic, then, that Brother Fidelis had the right to wear such a crown twice over, once as the heir to Taillefer’s empire and once as a holy man who had cut himself off from the court of worldly power in order to pray for the souls of the living and the dead.

Bowl and spoon and bucket were all that remained of him, except his precious book, the Vita of St. Radegundis, taken away by Sister Rosvita and still held in her possession.

“Bright One!” Buzzard Mask’s voice was breathless, fading into a wheeze of terror.

She stepped sideways out of the hut, and turned. The shock actually made her go rigid. Not six steps from her lay a bold, golden lion, washing its paws with its tongue.

“Bright One!” hissed Falcon Mask from above and to the right. “Step aside. I have an arrow ready.”

“Leap back,” said Buzzard Mask, to her left. “I’ll thrust at its heart.”

“Hold.”

The lion neither startled nor moved, but kept licking. An arm’s length in front of its massive head and fearsome teeth rested a quite ordinary wooden staff.

“If it meant to leap, it would already have done so.”

She took one step toward it, and paused. Lowered to a crouch, and paused. She might have been the wind, for all the notice it took of her. Its tongue worked at the pads. She reached, and touched the staff. Its huge slit eyes lifted. It stared at her for an age and an eternity, and she spun into that gaze, falling

a man stands in darkness, holding a newborn. A woman cloaked in robes and shadow faces him, her graceful hands crossed at her chest. He is anxious and troubled. She is as patient and peaceful as death.

“It is a girl,” he says with disgust and dismay. “I will not after all these years and all my expectations be superseded by a squalling brat. Yet I dare not. I dare not … it would be wrong to kill hen.”

The cleric answers, softly and persuasively. “I have a use for her. She will vanish. None will ever know, my lord, that she existed. I will be midwife to her transformation. Her twin brother will serve you well enough. No one will ever suspect there was another infant. Your mother is already dead, poor soul. The labor was too much for her.”

“Yes, it must be,” he said. “It is better so. I am old enough. My people trust me. They expect me to inherit, not to be ruled by an infant only because my mother insisted on the old custom. Better live under a regnant now than suffer a regent for many years and all the instability that portends. Yet what seal will you give me? What pledge, what guarantee, that you will not crawl back here in fifteen years to plague me with her claim?”

Outside, heard through a shuttered window, a hound lifts its voice in a wailing howl, and a dozen similar howls answer. That eerie clamor makes him shudder, but he holds firm.

“Come, my lord. Let me show you the hounds. Then I will take the child, and you and your heirs will be guarded in truth by that which guarantees our bargain.”

“It is better so,” he repeats, trembling because he does not really believe his own words, but he follows her out through the door into the night.

Falling, Liath tumbled onto her rump as the lion rose and, with a gathering like that of a storm, loomed over her. Its hot, dry breath gusted; it yawned like the gates of the Abyss, displaying sharp white teeth.

“Bright One!”

It leaped and vanished into the rock.

Falcon Mask’s arrow skittered over the dirt and clattered out of sight beyond the rocky slopes below. Liath heard the shaft snap, then a patter of smaller falls, and then silence. After a moment, she realized she was holding her breath, and holding the staff.

The two young mask warriors jumped into view, weapons raised and eyes flared with excitement and fear. “Where did it go?”

“It won’t be coming back.” She got up.

“What is that?” asked Falcon Mask.

The staff was lovingly shaped and smoothed from polished hardwood, oak perhaps, and crowned with a magnificent carving: a pair of miniature dogs’ heads remarkably like the heads of the Lavas hounds. A nick had been cut into the haft, as ragged as a sword’s blow.

Tarangi sauntered out from the trees, shaking her head.

“I told you. A power as strong as lightning. You are fortunate to be alive.”