The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“When I last saw the prince, she did.”

“Does she look like her mother?”

Strange that a cold draft should twist through the hall, chilling her neck. “In some manner, Your Excellency. She resembles both her mother and father. She is very young still.”

“Very young still,” he agreed, as if to himself, as if he had forgotten Hanna was there, “and soft, as youth is soft and malleable. It is too bad Brother Marcus failed. Still, there may yet be a way….”

She braced herself, expecting more questions.

None came.

He had forgotten her already. She shifted her weight to her heels to take some of the pressure off her knees. Outside, the raking started up again. As Hugh’s silence dragged on, she began to count the strokes.

She had reached four and ninety when Hugh spoke.

“Yes. That is the way to do it.” He walked toward the doors, paused, turned back. “Come, Hanna. You must make your report and a cleric will write it down.”

“Your Excellency.” She stood. “It is an Eagle’s duty to report to the regnant directly.”

He waited in a stripe of sunlight. “Your loyalty is commendable. But it will not be possible for you to give your report to the king today. He will be far too busy to see you.”

“Then I will wait. It is by the regnant’s own command that we Eagles report to him alone, when we come to his court. I dare not go against the king’s express command, Your Excellency. Pray do not ask me to go back on the oath I swore to King Henry.”

The quirk of anger twitched on his lips, and he clenched his right hand, the one he had most often struck Liath with. But this was not the reckless, arrogant young frater who had suffered the indignity of ministering to the half-pagan common folk of the North Mark with barely concealed contempt. This man had a presbyter’s rank, the respect of his peers, the love of the common-born Aostans, and an unknown wealth of power made palatable by his modest demeanor and undeniable beauty. He spoke easily with the Holy Mother herself and stood at the right hand of the king and queen who would soon be emperor and empress.

“Nay, nor should you,” he said at last with perfect amiability. “Your oath to the king is what gives an Eagle honor. You were taken prisoner by the Quman alongside Prince Ekkehard, I believe?”

“I was, Your Excellency.”

“Then how are we to know that you did not turn traitor against your countryfolk as well, if this tale of Prince Ekkehard’s treachery is true? How can we be sure that any of these stories you bring to us are truth, and not lies? Do you support the rightful king? Or do you support those who rebel against him?”

God, what a fool she had been to think she could outmaneuver him.

He smiled sadly. The light pouring over him made him gleam, a living saint. “So it is, Eagle, that the king must consider you a traitor as well. You know how he feels about Wolfhere, whom he banished on less account than this. How can he treat a traitor otherwise? How can he even bear to speak to one of his own Eagles if he believes that Eagle has betrayed him together with his dearest children?” Although he had not moved, he seemed to have grown even more imposing, a power which, like the sun, may bring light to those trapped in darkness—or death to those caught out under its punishing brilliance.

“I will do what I can to see that you are not imprisoned outright for treason, Hanna. I have done that much for you already. The dungeons here are not healthy. The rats grow large. Yet if you do not cooperate with me, then there is nothing I can do, no case I can make before the king. If that happens, I do not know what will happen to you then. Do you understand?”

2

GASPING, he came to himself as everyone around him rose. The service had ended. The two Lions no longer sat on the benches to his right. Maybe he had only hallucinated them. He was dreaming, confusing past and present.

Only Adica seemed real—she, and the bronze armband bound around his upper right arm that he could not pull off.

“F-friend.” Iso had a limp and a stutter. Abandoned by his parents, he had been a laborer at the monastery for half of his life. Although he didn’t act any older than sixteen, he looked aged by pain and grief and an unfilled childhood hunger. “It’s a—uh—it’s a—uh—a hurt one. Come.” He had bony fingers that no amount of porridge could fatten up, and with these he tugged at Alain’s sleeve as the laborers waited for the monks to file out before them. The abbot sailed out with a fine stern expression on his face and his guests quite red with consternation behind him, but Iso kept pulling on him and his quiet pleading dragged Alain out of his distraction.

“I’ll come.” He let Iso lead him out of the church and, with the hounds following, to the stables.

Iso didn’t have many teeth left, which was why he could only take porridge and other soft foods. Sometimes his remaining teeth hurt him; one did tonight. Alain knew it because now and again Iso brushed at the lower side of his right jaw as though to chase away a fly, and a tear moistened his right eye, slipping down to be replaced by another. Iso never complained about pain. Maybe he didn’t have the words to, and anyway it was probably the only existence he knew. Perhaps he had never experienced a day in the course of his entire life without physical pain of some kind nagging him, the twisted agony of his misshapen hip, the withered ruin of his left hand, burned and scarred over long ago, the nasty scars on his back.

Yet for all the pain Iso lived with, and maybe because of it, he hated to see animals suffer. More than once he had taken a rake from a furious cat when he’d saved a mouse from its clutches, or risked being bitten by a wounded, starving dog at the forest’s edge when he offered it a scrap to eat.

The beech woods had been so heavily harvested in the vicinity of the estate that the nearby woodland was dominated by seedlings and luxuriant shrubs. The hounds smelled a threat in the undergrowth beyond the stable, and they bristled, curling back their muzzles as they growled. Twigs rattled as a creature shifted position. It sounded big. The twilight gloom amplified the sense of hugeness.

Alain gripped Iso’s shoulder, holding him back. The smell of iron tickled his nostrils, and a taste like fear coated his mouth. Although he saw only the suggestion of the shape where young beech trees struggled with honeysuckle and sedge for a footing, his skin crawled.

uirk of anger twitched on his lips, and he clenched his right hand, the one he had most often struck Liath with. But this was not the reckless, arrogant young frater who had suffered the indignity of ministering to the half-pagan common folk of the North Mark with barely concealed contempt. This man had a presbyter’s rank, the respect of his peers, the love of the common-born Aostans, and an unknown wealth of power made palatable by his modest demeanor and undeniable beauty. He spoke easily with the Holy Mother herself and stood at the right hand of the king and queen who would soon be emperor and empress.

“Nay, nor should you,” he said at last with perfect amiability. “Your oath to the king is what gives an Eagle honor. You were taken prisoner by the Quman alongside Prince Ekkehard, I believe?”