The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“If she spoke, I could not hear her. Yet Mother Obligatia spoke, when she saw her.”

“The abbess also saw this apparition?”

“Indeed she did. She recognized her.” “Recognized her?”

“She called her ‘Bernard’ before realizing her mistake, that it was no man who stood before her but rather a creature with a woman’s form.”

“Bernard,” he mused. “But of course there was a striking resemblance between father and daughter. Yet if that is true, then how—?”

“You are puzzled by something, Brother Hugh.”

He started as might a child who looks up to find himself discovered in the midst of secret mischief. “Nay, Sister. I am only wondering whether I seek a mule or a hinny.”

She chuckled. “You are speaking of Liath. Do you suspect that she is not in truth Anne’s child?”

Turning, he looked away as though to hide his face and what it might reveal, but when he turned back his expression remained bland, veiled. Only a certain tightening of the skin about his eyes betrayed his intense interest. “It is difficult to know what to think.”

“The world is full of mysteries,” she agreed, watching him closely. “I trust that Anne will reward her supporters with that which they desire most, whatever my own feelings. Or at least, were I in her position, it is what I would do.”

“Would you?”

“Oh, I would. God reward us all in the end with that we desire most. It is the fate of most people not to understand their desire until they have been swept into the Abyss—but upon reflection they can see that their entire lives were simply one long dialogue with the evil inclination. Yet there are a few who remain clear-sighted and who serve God and receive what they deserve in the end.”

“We must all hope to ascend to the Chamber of Light,” he said with a pious nod, “else we will suffer eternity with God’s face turned away from us.”

“Is that what you wish, Father Hugh?”

He trembled. The movement was slight but noticeable to a woman so long immured in the pit that she had come to rely on hearing, touch, and breath to capture any nuance of life and being around her.

“Or would you risk everything only to possess her?”

He could not answer.

She smiled and rested a comforting hand on his fists where they were clenched in his lap. With his gaze lowered humbly, he displayed his profile to advantage; even in the shade his hair shone as though the sunlight were caught in it. It was difficult to imagine how any young woman could resist him.

“Anne will never give her to you. But I will.”

He flushed, but he did not look up at her. “That is a bold promise. How do you capture a woman who is only half humankind? How do you intend to defy Anne?”

“Anne need not know that I still live. If she believes that I died here, then she has no reason to guard herself against me. I mean no harm to Anne. She has set herself a great and worthy task. There is no one else who can accomplish it except her—”

“And those who aid her, the Seven Sleepers. Of whom you are, or were, once a part.”

“It is true I learned much during my time among the Seven Sleepers. I also learned that when they weave a powerful spell, the weakest among them dies. The spell exacts its price for the power they draw down.”

That she had startled him was obvious from the way he looked at her, leaned forward with hands pressing on the rock. Evidently he had never considered this striking and unfortunate possibility. “Is this true? The cauda draconis is struck dead?”

“I have suffered in the pit for two years, Father Hugh, but those two years have given me time to ponder much that mystified me before. Surely I will be accounted weakest among the Seven Sleepers now. Anne gathers and manipulates the power of the sorceries we weave, but she does not risk herself. That is why she needs a cauda draconis, although in truth I proved stronger than she expected, I suppose, since it was poor foolish Zoë who died.”

“Are you not willing to die in order to enact God’s will on Earth?”

“Certainly I am. But I am not convinced that Holy Mother Anne knows everything, that she knows or understands all of God’s will. I come of royal stock in my own right. I served faithfully as biscop in the north before I was myself betrayed and cast aside. I have certain magics of my own and, as I said, I have been granted a very long time to meditate, pray, and think.”

She smiled as he settled back. She had set wheels turning, made promises, exposed herself. He would now, of course, feel that he stood in a stronger position than she did, and that would make him reckless.

“So you see, Father Hugh, I am at your mercy now. You may arrest me for disloyalty and turn me over to Anne, thus insinuating yourself into her good graces.”

He was too elegant and well bred to protest that such a deed would be beneath him. The presbyters in the service of the skopos bought, sold, and betrayed each other at every opportunity in order to curry favor or gain a better position within the skopos’ court.