Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

“Here. I’ll soak a corner of my cloak in water and maybe we can clean his face.”

“If you wish,” said the woman in a dull voice, “but he’ll die anyway. My poor baby. Nothing can save us now. If the beast and his men don’t kill us, then hunger will. Or the plague. I heard there’s plague everywhere south of us now. So maybe it is God’s mercy on us for living a Godly life.”

“How can you say so?” demanded Hanna, aghast.

“Better to die of hunger or have your throat slit than to die of the plague. Have you seen what they look like after? I heard it from my cousin. She’d seen it, one man, two years back. He died outside her village and they let the dogs eat him. None of them touched him, not even the deacon. She said you shake and turn gray, and dying people scream that they’re being eaten alive from inside, there’s so much pain. Then the demon inside you spits you all out, through your mouth and nose and eyes, through your skin and your asshole, all blood and snot and shit and every stinking thing that it’s eaten out of you and chewed with its poison—”

“That’s enough!” said Hanna sharply. People had crept close to listen and some had begun to moan in fear. “No use catching your death standing out waiting for the snow when there’s nothing you can do to stop it whether it comes or not. That’s what my mother always says.”

“Is your mother still alive?” asked one of the prisoners.

“I pray she is. She’s in North Mark—”

“Ah,” said a thin old man with a spark of curiosity left in his expression. “That would explain your accent and that light hair. How’d you come to be a King’s Eagle?”

“The same way any do, I suppose. They were looking, and I was available.”

This earned her a few chuckles as she continued to wipe the child’s face, trying to moisten the crust around his eyes enough so that she could wipe it off without hurting him.

“What got you captured, then?” demanded the mother.

About fifty people had clustered close to watch and listen. The two men who had assaulted her sidled in as well, staring with a bitter, unsparing hatred, as if she were responsible for everything they had suffered and lost.

“I was riding from the east last winter. I left Handelburg at the order of Princess Sapientia, she who is heir to King Henry, to bring word to him of the Quman invasion. I was caught out in a snowstorm, in a forest, and was myself captured by the Quman.”

“You’ve been with the beast all this time?”

She didn’t see who had asked that question. “So I have,” she admitted, wetting the corner of her cloak in water again, trying to squeeze the caked gunk off it.

The tall man pressed forward. He’d found a stick, too, although he used it to support his weight. “And you didn’t whore with the beast all that time? How then are you so clean and fat, Eagle? Where did you get that ring?”

Quicker than she’d thought possible, he struck. His first blow glanced off the side of her head. She fell hard as the mother screamed, and the jolt when she caught herself on her arms sent pain stabbing into her injured eye. Head stinging like fire, she groped for and found her stick and brought it up just in time to catch his next blow on wood. Her stick shattered, and she scrambled backward, crablike, as his stick thwacked down in the grass first to her right and then to her left.

He raised it again. Fury knotted in her stomach. She threw herself forward and slammed into him, knocking him down. They wrestled. A thistle prickled on her back, and she flipped him over and jammed him face down into it. He shrieked, shuddered, and fell still.

Thank God for all that fighting with her elder brother Thancmar. Thank God her adversary had been so weakened by hunger. Breathing hard, she grabbed his unbroken stick and rose, staring down his trembling companion. Beyond, the Quman guards watched impassively, arms crossed.

Her face throbbed.

What had happened to Bulkezu’s promise to the owl’s master to see that she came to no harm? Blood leaked from her temple where the stick had caught her, and her ear throbbed painfully.

“I’m a King’s Eagle, damn you,” she said harshly, “and I received this ring from King Henry’s own hand in recognition of my service to him. What you do to me is as if you were doing it to the king himself.”

“Where’s the king, then?” Tall Man’s comrade confronted her. Now that he stood, she could see by the way his tunic hung on him how much flesh he’d lost. “Why hasn’t the king come to aid us?”

His words were echoed by other prisoners, many more of whom slunk closer to see what the commotion was all about. “Where is the king while we’re suffering here?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. But she had a good idea where he might be, and she didn’t want to tell these people that particular story. The crown of Emperor Taillefer would seem a sorry treasure to them who had lost everything, had watched their homes burned, their fields trampled, their daughters and sisters being raped, and their townsfolk slaughtered. “I don’t know. But I know this, my friends. We’ll all die if the strongest among us don’t help the weakest.”

o;How can you say so?” demanded Hanna, aghast.

“Better to die of hunger or have your throat slit than to die of the plague. Have you seen what they look like after? I heard it from my cousin. She’d seen it, one man, two years back. He died outside her village and they let the dogs eat him. None of them touched him, not even the deacon. She said you shake and turn gray, and dying people scream that they’re being eaten alive from inside, there’s so much pain. Then the demon inside you spits you all out, through your mouth and nose and eyes, through your skin and your asshole, all blood and snot and shit and every stinking thing that it’s eaten out of you and chewed with its poison—”

“That’s enough!” said Hanna sharply. People had crept close to listen and some had begun to moan in fear. “No use catching your death standing out waiting for the snow when there’s nothing you can do to stop it whether it comes or not. That’s what my mother always says.”

“Is your mother still alive?” asked one of the prisoners.

“I pray she is. She’s in North Mark—”