The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

“Hush,” said Baldwin. “It’ll be an adventure, you’ll see.”

6

WHEN the hunting party came crashing through and erupted into the clearing, they flushed not boar or partridge but a ragged covey of poor. Dirty, sore-ridden men, pale women, and children as thin as sticks and filthy with grime fluttered away from their makeshift huts and came to rest in the fringe of the trees. Not one of them had shoes or even cloth to wrap their feet in, and an early frost had rimed the ground with a sparkling coat, pretty to ride over and horribly cold to walk upon.

But Alain sat in the saddle, and he wore boots, gloves, and a fur-lined cloak.

“Who are these?” demanded Lavastine, coming up beside one of the foresters.

The foresters did not know. They had scouted out this ground ten days ago, thinking to lead the count and his retinue on a hunt in this direction, and found no one here.

“They’ll have chased off any game hereabouts. Cursed nuisances!” Lord Amalfred spat as he reined his horse aside. “Let us ride on!” The young Salian lord had arrived with Duchess Yolande’s retinue, and given any choice in the matter Alain would much rather he had never arrived at all.

Lavastine surveyed the clearing with frown. The people huddled under the trees looked too exhausted to scatter and run. They simply cowered. Alain nudged his mount sideways to get a better look at the huts. These hovels scarcely deserved the name of shelter: They had been built hastily, with gaps in their walls and roofs that couldn’t possibly keep rain out. Fire burned in a hearth ringed with loose stone. Someone had made a shelf of logs inside one of them, and withered greens lay there, together with acorns and a skinned rabbit.

Beyond the huts, in the shadow of the trees, lay five fresh graves, two of them smaller than the others. A sixth lay half dug, a crude wooden shovel abandoned beside it.

Finally one of the women edged forward. She held a bundle in her arms; it was so still that Alain could not tell if it were a child or a bolt of cloth. Her hands were white with cold and her skeletal feet whiter still, and there was fear in her eyes and in the pinched pale grimace of her lips. “What will you do with us, my lord?” Her voice was more cough than words, and she coughed in truth after speaking, and that woke up the child—because it was in fact a child—in her arms, which whimpered, stirred, and fell quiet again, too weak to protest.

“You must move on,” said Lavastine. “Our harvest is past, and we have no room for more supplicants. You may have better luck to the south.”

“We come from the south, my lord. There wasn’t enough at harvest, and no work to be found. We will bind ourselves into your service if only you will pledge to feed us and give us work.”

“We have as many as we can feed,” repeated Lavastine. He gestured to a steward, who hurried forward. “See that some bread is given them, but then they must be off these lands.”

Several of the adults dropped to their knees and blessed him for this bounty, as little as it was. The children merely stared, their eyes as dull as wilted leaves.

“Pray you, my lord, may we stay at least long enough to bury my child?” Another fit of coughing seized her, and this time the child in her arms only mewled softly and didn’t stir at all.

Alain dismounted and strode over. She shrank away from him, but stopped, frightened more of disobedience and the spears of the huntsmen than of what he himself might do to her. Her breath stank of onions and her breathing had the rattling lilt of a lungfever coming on.

“Let me see,” he said gently. He flicked back the thin blanket that covered its face.

The child might have been any age between three and six. Sores blistered its mouth, and at the sound of his voice its eyes flickered but were too swollen to open, ringed with a sticky yellow pus. A fly crawled along the lid. It was naked under the blanket, wasted and pale, and the blanket itself had worn almost through. He could see its toes. He took off a glove and brushed his fingers over its forehead. It burned with fever.

“Poor child,” he murmured. “I pray you will find healing and shelter and food, pour souls. God will walk with you.”

She began to cry noisily, hopelessly, coughing hard.

“Alain,” said Lavastine, both warning and command.

He began to step back, could not. The children—about ten of them—had crept forward so silently that he hadn’t noticed their coming, and now they trapped him, pressed so close that one ragged child—impossible to tell if it were boy or girl—reached out and touched his boots as if they were a holy relic. Another brushed the hem of Alain’s cloak and exclaimed something that might have been a word or only a bubble of amazement.

He could not bear it. He unpinned the cloak and swung it off his own shoulders to drape over the stooped shoulders of the woman, so that it covered the child as well. At once the others grasped at it and tugged, trying to get it into their own hands, fighting over it.

“Stop!”

They shrank back, even the one he had gifted. The child in her arms lay still and silent. For all he knew it had already expired.

A sick despair settled on him, a weight far heavier than the cloak had been. He shuddered in the biting autumn wind, spun, and hurried back to his horse. A groom was there to lace hands under his foot and hoist him up.

“God save us from beggars!” cried Lord Amalfred as the hunt made ready to leave. Harness jingled, horses snorted, and his leashed hounds lunged toward the children, who scattered with screams and cries. Amalfred laughed and gathered his companions around him as they plunged into the trees. Foresters vanished into the wood before them, and far away they heard the solitary bell of a hound marking a scent.

“It isn’t right to mock them,” said Alain to the count, who had come up beside him.

Lavastine did not speak until they had left the clearing behind. “You can’t clothe them all.”

“Poor creatures. I would have given them my boots, but then I saw how they would fight over them and it would only be worse. Ai, Lord! What suffering.”