The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“The Eagle? She is only a servant.”

“Even servants have tongues, Holy Mother.”

Hanna kept her head down, but she felt the touch of that devastating gaze. So might a fly feel before being swatted. So might a fly, holding still, be passed over as being of too little account to bother with when there were more annoying pests to exterminate.

“If my daughter trusted her, that bond may yet link them.”

The cleric returned and set a brazier on the step in front of Hanna, then stepped back to work a small bellows so coals shimmered and flames licked along their length.

“Watch carefully and learn, Sister Abelia,” said the skopos before turning her gaze on Hanna. “Use your Eagle’s Sight to seek the one you know as Liathano.”

One did not say “No” to the skopos.

She leaned forward, hearing the hound’s menacing growl at her movement and the command of the skopos, calling the dog to heel. It was hard to concentrate, knowing how nearby that fierce creature bided. It hadn’t seemed so menacing when Lord Alain had commanded it. Without meaning to, she recognized it. She had last seen this hound, and Lord Alain, when she had watched King Henry pluck the county of Lavas out of Alain’s hands and give it over to Lord Geoffrey and his young daughter.

A Lavas hound.

No person who had ever seen the Lavas hounds could mistake them for any other dog. How had the skopos acquired this one? Hanna had last seen Alain on the field of battle with the Lions. Hadn’t he died there?

Her gaze fell forward through the veil of fire.

The only way he can bear his sorrow is to keep silence and let work soothe his soul into a stupor. There is plenty of work for a pair of able hands on a well-run estate in the autumn: pressing apples for cider, rhetting flax, splitting and sawing, cutting straw to repair roofs. He binds wood with trimmings from flax and soaks the bundles in beeswax and resin for the torches needed to light the winter months. His hands know how to do the work. Just as well, because his head seems stuffed with wool, hazy, clouded, distant.

“Did you live by the sea?” asks Brother Lallo, stopping beside him where he sits on the porch of the Laborers’ dormitory. The hounds lie docilely at his feet. “You have a knack for plaiting and net-making.”

Vaguely surprised—what was he thinking about just then?—he notices that he is Weaving willow rods into a kiddle that the fishermen will place in the river to catch fish. “I beg your pardon, Brother?”

“The Enemy is pleased with feet that wander off the path of good works! Keep your thoughts here with us. I asked you, did you live by the sea?”

To remember the sea makes him recall Adica and that long voyage, towed by the merfolk, when they had stared into the watery depths and seen the vast whorl of a city unfold beneath, strange and wonderful. All dead now.

Pain drowns him. Grief makes him mute. It is a kind of madness.

Maybe it was all a dream.

Lallo tugged at his own ear with a frown. “You’re a hard nut to crack. Enough of this. It’s time for prayer, Brothers.” He shepherds his charges to church for Vespers.

Alain sets down the half-woven kiddle and follows with the others. Dusk has a way of sliding over the monastery, catching him in twilight unawares. Maybe he has been walking in twilight for a long time and never noticed it. Sorrow and Rage pad alongside. Despite their fearsome aspect, they behave as meekly as lambs. No man here fears them, and the monks willingly give him scraps with which to feed them. Each hound eats as much as one man, and they provide no labor for the benefit of the monastery, so he works doubly hard—when he doesn’t forget himself and fall into that dreaming stupor. He wants to earn the hounds’ portion as well as his own.

The hounds sit obediently outside the church. He goes in with the others.

As they file through the transept and thence into the dark nave, he notices the Brother Sacrist hurrying into the church with more oil for the lamps burning at the five altars. The lamps flicker, wicks running dry, but as he takes his place with the other laborers at the back of the nave, as he murmurs reflexive words of prayer, the sacrist makes a startled exclamation and halts halfway down the aisle. A side door opens. The elegant abbot enters in company with the prior as well as certain nobly-cut figures unknown to him. Have these visitors been here before? Were they here yesterday? One is a remarkably beautiful young man, unnaturally handsome and strangely familiar, who smiles and nods whenever Father Ortulfus speaks without making any reply himself. His redheaded companion answers the abbot’s queries.

The lamps at the main altar and the seven stations dedicated to the disciplas burn strongly. Brother Sacrist hesitates in confusion but when Father Ortulfus lifts his voice in the opening chant, he slips into his place at the front with the other monastic officials, setting the unused pot of oil at his feet.

Father Ortulfus has a reedy voice, not full but true. “Blessed is the Country of the Mother and Father of Life, and of the Holy Word revealed within the Circle of Unity, now and ever and unto ages of ages.”

The liturgy slides by as smoothly as water pours down a rock. The abbot marks the stations of the service by moving from lamp to lamp in a complicated pattern that, were he attached to thread, might weave truth into the stone. Praying, Father Ortulfus seems agitated, distracted by a gnawing annoyance that causes his mouth to slip down into a fierce frown when he forgets himself. When he returns to the altar to deliver his homily, his indignation takes flower as he scolds the congregation with quotations from the Holy Verses.

“‘I have heard such things often before, you who make trouble, all of you, with every breath.’ It is the Enemy who makes you so stubborn in argument, who makes your speech trouble the hearts of the simple man and the credulous woman. ‘Can it be that God have thrown us into the clutches of malefactors, have left us at the mercy of those who are given over unto wickedness?’ If you will walk with God, then walk in silence and free your heart from the Enemy’s grasp. Let there be no more of these tales, which spread like a plague upon the Earth!”

The stone columns absorb this castigation in aloof silence. Carved flowers crown each column, and on this flowery support rest ceiling vaults ornamented with vines. High up on the wall above the central altar stand the stucco figures of martyrs, each displaying a crown of sainthood. Their grave faces do not move; they cannot, of course, they are only representations, and yet their steady gaze pierces to his heart.

Dead. Dead. Dead

All dead

Mice live in the nave. He has coaxed a few out of their hiding places when, late at night before Nocturnes, he can’t sleep and wanders like a shade from one place to another within the compound, rootless and lost. They shelter in his hands, so small and helpless and warm, giving him trifling comfort. Is that their scratching now?