Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

“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.”

“Easy for you to say, eating like a queen and sleeping between the beast’s silks. Maybe he threw you out now, but that doesn’t change what you were before.”

She pointed the stick at him and let the end press against his sternum, pushing hard enough that he skipped back a half step. No one laughed, or even spoke. They had fallen silent. “It’s true I ate the food he gave me, and ate better than any of you have. But I never slept between his silks. He never raped me.” She let the stick fall to her side, keeping it ready for a fast strike, and turned so they could all see her Eagle’s badge. “He didn’t dare touch me.” She hesitated. A complicated kind of hope and cynicism warred in their expressions. What did these folk know of Kerayit women and shamans who had the body of a woman joined with that of a mare? “He didn’t dare touch me because he didn’t dare insult King Henry. For what he does to me it’s as if he does it to the king himself. He knows in the end that the king will have revenge. For me. For all of us.”

As would she, by God.

At that instant, she knew what she had to do. Bulkezu had forgotten one thing when he’d thrown her out of his tent.

“But the king needs our help. And I need yours.”

The guards did not stop her as she gathered firewood at the fringe of the forest, although maybe they thought she was crazy for thinking of building a fire on such a hot day, especially when she had nothing to eat. Twilight closed over them as she laid sticks for a fire. Wool thread teased off the sleeve of her tunic made a bowstring and a supple branch the tiny bow, wood scraps and dry leaves the tinder, and a notched wedge of wood a cup for her hand. With the bowstring looped around a stick, she drilled the end of that stick into the tinder until friction woke heat, heat smoke, and smoke fire.

Flames licked up through the kindling. Prisoners gathered around, as many as could stand doing so in order to block the view of the Quman guards, and the old man began telling a story.

“Here we begin by telling the tale of Sigisfrid, who won the gold of the Hevelli. He was born out of a she-wolf and a warrior—”

Hanna sat cross-legged by the fire, letting the tale drift past her, riding the flow of the words. Under Bulkezu’s constant watch, she dared not use her Eagle’s sight. But here, among the prisoners, she was free.

“See nothing, not even the flames,” Wolfhere had told her. “It is the stillness that lies at the heart of all things that links us.”

“Liath,” she whispered. The fire wavered, and for a moment she saw faint shadows of men clothed in armor, she heard the clash of arms, but the vision faded into the snap of flame. Liath remained hidden from her. Was she dead?

Was everyone she cared for dead?