Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

“Where are we going?” murmured Rosvita, risking speech.

“Not dead,” repeated Hathui a final time as she paused behind a pillar that might shield her lamp from prying eyes. Her face, made gray by shadow, loomed unnaturally large in the lamplight as she leaned closer to Rosvita. “Spelled. Bewitched. I saw it happen.”

She shifted, drawing a leather thong over her head. “I almost forgot this. You must wear it to protect you against the sight.” She pressed an amulet into Rosvita’s hands. The silver medallion stung Rosvita’s palm.

Did the king protect himself against the sight of his own Eagles, or was he already suspicious of Anne? As Hathui moved out into the courtyard, Rosvita caught her arm and drew her back.

“Nay, Eagle. You must tell me what you saw before I take one step farther. Here.” She retreated backward into the shelter of an alcove, where travelers could refresh themselves and wash their faces before they entered the regnant’s hall. A fountain trickled softly, but when Hathui held out her lamp, a leering medusa face glared out at them, water dribbling from the mouths of its snake-hair into the basin below. The Eagle gasped out loud and turned her back on the hideous sculpture.

“What I saw… nay, first put on the amulet, Sister.” Rosvita obeyed, and Hathui went on. “I sleep in an alcove of the king’s chamber. I woke, for I swear to you that an angel woke me, Sister. I woke to see the bed curtains drawn back and Hugh of Austra holding a ribbon above the king’s sleeping form. The ribbon twisted and writhed like a living thing, and in truth, for I can scarcely believe it myself, I saw a creature as pale as glass and as light as mist pour out of that ribbon and into the king’s body. King Henry jerked, once, and opened his eyes, and the voice he spoke with then was not his own.”

Rosvita caught herself on the lip of the basin. Water splashed her hand and cheek, spitting from the mouths of snakes. “Hugh,” she whispered, remembering the passage he had read from The Book of Secrets that day when she and Theophanu and young Paloma had overheard him in the guest chapel at the convent of St. Ekatarina’s. Remembering the daimone he had bound into a silk ribbon that night when he had helped Adelheid, Theophanu, and the remnants of their entourages escape from Ironhead’s siege of the convent. “A daimone can be chained to the will of a sorcerer, and if he be strong enough, he can cause it to dwell in the body of another person, there to work its will. ‘Until one mouth utters what another mind whispers.’”

“Can it be true, Sister?”

“If you saw what you describe, it cannot be otherwise. But I tremble to think it might be true.” Her heart was cold, not hot. Her hands seemed frozen, and her mind clouded and useless. The amulet burned at her breast. “Yet where was the queen?”

“Ai, worst of all! She stood to one side and watched him do it! Cool as you please she told her servingwoman to tell the skopos that the deed was done and that from now on matters would proceed as they knew was best.” Calm, practical, levelheaded Hathui, a common woman with so much good sense and simple courage that she had been granted the king’s signal regard, broke down and wept, tears flowing down her cheeks in echo of the monstrous fountain behind them. But she was able to do it silently, so that her sobs would not alert the night guards.

Rosvita took the lamp from her hand. “Do you know where Villam is?”

“I went to him first, but when we got back to the king’s chambers, the king was gone and his steward said he had gone to hold an audience with the skopos. Villam sent me to rouse you. He said we must meet him in the skopos’ palace. He thought if we got hold of King Henry before the spell bit too deep—”

Shock gave way to a curious, almost luminous clarity. Even in the darkness, with a waning quarter moon and the lamp’s faint glow their only light, she could see the medusa’s face, carved out of a marble so white that it seemed to gleam, leprous and pallid, an evil spirit sent to overhear the complaints of travelers come to burden the regnant with their petty cares and quarrels.

“Villam is in danger.” The words tolled in her heart like the knell of death, singing the departed up through the spheres toward the Chamber of Light. “We cannot act hastily, for they have power against which our good faith avails us nothing. We must catch Villam before he does something rash. Come.”

Hathui knew the servants’ corridors in the skopos’ palace well, since she often carried messages from regnant to skopos. A pair of guards at the entrance to the kitchens chatted amiably with her for a few moments about the current favorites for the horse races to be held in three days, then let her through without questions. Quickly, Hathui led them into the main portion of the palace. Even in the middle of the night a few servants walked the back corridors, carrying out trash or chamber pots, hauling water for the many presbyters and noble servitors of the skopos who would need to wash in the morning. None seemed suspicious when Hathui asked if they had seen the king; the Eagle had a natural gift with words and an easy confidence, although it clearly cost her to put a careless face on things. But in the end, servants saw everything: the king, escorted by Presbyter Hugh, had gone up to the parapet walk. They had not seen Queen Adelheid.

A spiral staircase of stone led from the guards’ barracks all the way up to the parapet walk. By the time they reached the top, Rosvita was puffing hard. The night air, pooling along the walk, had at last a hint of autumn in it. A breeze cooled the sweat on her forehead and neck. Hathui started forward along the walkway, which angled sharply along the cliff’s edge overlooking the river below, now hidden in darkness.

“Wait.” Rosvita took the lamp from the Eagle and, wetting thumb and forefinger, snuffed the wick. “Better that we approach without being seen.”

They waited for their eyes to adjust, but fanciful lamps molded in the shapes of roosters, geese, and frogs rode the walls at intervals, splashes of light to guide their path along the narrow walkway. Wisps of cloud obscured the stars in trails of darkness. Was that Jedu, Angel of War, gleaming malevolently in the constellation known as the loyal Hound? Hathui, walking ahead, put out a hand to stop her in a pool of shadow between two broadly spaced lamps.

A faint stench of decay rose off the river, the dregs of summer. According to the locals, only the winter rains would drive it away. The wind shifted, and Rosvita pulled her sleeve across her nose to muffle the smell.

She heard voices, two men, one angry and one as sweetly calm as a saint.

With Hathui beside her, she moved forward cautiously, hugging the interior wall, until they came to a sharply angled corner of a main tower and could see onto a wider section of the walkway, set between the square tower at their back and its twin, opposite. Three men stood there, one silent beside a landing that led to a second set of stairs, one leaning gracefully on the waist-high railing that overlooked the abyss, and the third halfway between the two, as though to make a shield of his body. Even without the light of two lamps set on tripods, Rosvita would have known two of them anywhere.

The bell rang for Vigils.

“But Margrave Villam,” said Hugh most reasonably as he rested against the railing while the wind played in his hair and lifted the corners of his presbyter’s cloak, “you do not understand fully the gravity of the dangers facing all of us, which remain hidden from mortal eyes. Like my mother, I act only to serve the king.”

Villam seemed ready to spit with fury. She could see it in the way he held himself as he took a single threatening step toward Hugh, the way his hand brushed his sword’s hilt. Hugh was unarmed. “You! Sorcerer! I never knew what you did at Zeitsenburg, but the whole court knows what your blessed mother thought a fitting punishment for you, her golden child! To humble you by making you walk into the north like a common frater. What would she say to this night’s treachery?”

“What treachery is that? King Henry walks beside me to meet with the Holy Mother. Who has been speaking to you, friend Villam?”

Villam glanced at the man standing rigidly beside the stairs. In that moment, Rosvita realized that she had not recognized him; his posture and stance were utterly wrong, not her beloved king’s at all. “Your Majesty,” Villam entreated, “do we not ride out in two days’ time to return to Wendar, where the people cry out in hope that you will soon come to aid them?”

gave way to a curious, almost luminous clarity. Even in the darkness, with a waning quarter moon and the lamp’s faint glow their only light, she could see the medusa’s face, carved out of a marble so white that it seemed to gleam, leprous and pallid, an evil spirit sent to overhear the complaints of travelers come to burden the regnant with their petty cares and quarrels.

“Villam is in danger.” The words tolled in her heart like the knell of death, singing the departed up through the spheres toward the Chamber of Light. “We cannot act hastily, for they have power against which our good faith avails us nothing. We must catch Villam before he does something rash. Come.”

Hathui knew the servants’ corridors in the skopos’ palace well, since she often carried messages from regnant to skopos. A pair of guards at the entrance to the kitchens chatted amiably with her for a few moments about the current favorites for the horse races to be held in three days, then let her through without questions. Quickly, Hathui led them into the main portion of the palace. Even in the middle of the night a few servants walked the back corridors, carrying out trash or chamber pots, hauling water for the many presbyters and noble servitors of the skopos who would need to wash in the morning. None seemed suspicious when Hathui asked if they had seen the king; the Eagle had a natural gift with words and an easy confidence, although it clearly cost her to put a careless face on things. But in the end, servants saw everything: the king, escorted by Presbyter Hugh, had gone up to the parapet walk. They had not seen Queen Adelheid.

A spiral staircase of stone led from the guards’ barracks all the way up to the parapet walk. By the time they reached the top, Rosvita was puffing hard. The night air, pooling along the walk, had at last a hint of autumn in it. A breeze cooled the sweat on her forehead and neck. Hathui started forward along the walkway, which angled sharply along the cliff’s edge overlooking the river below, now hidden in darkness.