The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

After a while he walked, dripping, back into the audience chamber.

Constance did not look up, but her quill paused. “She is gone?”

“She is gone, Your Grace.”

She nodded. Her pen resumed its scratching across the parchment, driven with the same stern determination that had kept this tiny community going, although they might all so easily have lost heart.

He left and went outside, finding shelter in the mouth of the byre where the sheep sheltered during the winter. From here he had a good view of the palisade. This high fence had originally been erected across the mouth of the valley to keep out the enemies of Queen Gertruda, the founder of this tiny community dedicated to St. Asella but commonly referred to as Queen’s Grave. Yet a refuge that kept enemies out might as easily be turned inward. Since Constance’s arrival, the palisade had grown to enclose the community on all sides, zigzagging through woodland and running below the high ridge that closed in the valley at the far end. Guards patrolling the walls day and night kept them locked in. The high ridge walls and the palisade bounded their world, yet it was not precisely an evil existence, only a curtailed one.

What made it evil dwelled in the world, not in their hearts. Yet he could not believe that they were better off waiting in here than fighting out there.

2

FOR a long time Zacharias could hear but not see, could feel a jostling all along his torso and limbs that at long last and for no obvious reason ceased.

“Is this the one? He reeks.”

“Yes, Holy Mother.”

“He and the servant were found in the crown at Novomo?”

“Yes, Holy Mother. It took six days for them to convey him here in a cart. As you see, he is crippled, mute, and blind.”

“But not dead?”

“Not dead. The message speaks of a poison that both paralyzes and preserves.”

“This is the parchment that was pinned to his robes?”

“Yes, Holy Mother.”

“Brother Marcus has appended his name at the end. I recognize the imperfect curve of his ‘r’s.”

“Yes, Holy Mother.”

The woman’s voice lowered as she read the words in a murmur, phrases rising and falling out of earshot. “… akreva … Sister Meriam left this receipt for a nostrum that will counteract the poison … she has departed without further incident, but where she has landed I know not. She will send a servant back to me, but I do not know when to expect … I remain here to safeguard this crown and prepare for the conjunction … Brother Lupus’ treachery … our calculations with the locations and angles necessary to locate each crown and link them together according to the ancient spell … but it will be necessary to double-check against these calculations from the tables of Biscop Tallia …”

The voice lulled him back into that stupor, prey to the touch of hands and the play of water and then cloth over his body as servants washed and dressed him and exclaimed over his mutilation. He knew when the haze lightened and became something more than a gray fog, when vague forms took on shape and he recognized forms as people bending over him to examine his skin and eyes. He knew when his sense of smell returned because of the unexpected scent of hot bread fresh from the ovens that caused him to salivate, and then to swallow.

The sensation of movement shocked him. Was he so utterly paralyzed? How had they been feeding him all this time?

Yet he was not dead.

When he tried his tongue, only that stubborn ‘gah’ sound clawed in his throat. Day after day he struggled against this muteness until he dared not attempt speech at all because it was worse to imagine that he had lost the ability to talk altogether. Day after day folk came to marvel, for what reason he did not know and could not ask. Mute. Speechless. Nothing could be worse. Even death was preferable.

But one day as the sober-looking servant called Eigio who always tended him rolled him to one side in order to change the bedding beneath him, he tried again because he could not stop trying to talk.

“Where have I come to?”

The man shrieked, dropped the half-cleared bedding, and ran from the room, leaving him propped up on his side like a board.

Was that truly his own voice, so rough and low? He tried again.

“Where have I come to? What day is it?”

Elation spilled tears from his eyes, streaming down his cheeks to spot the rumpled bedding. Emboldened, he tensed and rocked, overbalanced, and tipped forward to land facedown on the lumpy mattress at a tilt, caught between the mattress and the ridges made by the half-stripped blankets. A hollow cradled his face so he could breathe, inhaling the musty smell of straw ticking and coarse canvas cover moist with his sweat and effusions.

“Yes! He spoke as clear as can be, Your Excellency. God in Heaven! Look there! He’s rolled himself forward.”