The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“This is it?” he asked, after a perfunctory greeting and after banishing his servants from the chamber. There remained only one beardless, thin man who cowered at the door looking ready to flee and never spoke one word as Hugh set hands on the table and studied the map.

From this angle, examining him, she understood why Lady Lavinia had cause to be grateful to this man beyond his service to the lady by saving her young daughter from rape. God favored few souls with such exceptional beauty. Yet he did not overplay his hand; he dressed plainly, without unseemly flourishes. He wore clothing of such fine weave it seemed invisible, his over-tunic dyed to a muted wheat gold and beneath it a reddish-golden under-tunic shining with the intensity of hot coals, barely seen but startling, the kind of detail that made you look twice. He wore three simple rings—emerald, citrine, and lapis lazuli—and his gold presbyter’s chain and Circle of Unity. Only the gold chain, and his cleanshaven face, marked him as a churchman, although one might guess at his vocation because his hands were so remarkably clean, nails trimmed, and the skin smooth and unlined. No calluses or blisters marred his hands, but in truth they looked strong enough to throttle any soul who did not do his bidding. The mute manservant shifted nervously, took a step forward to get a look at the map, but when Hugh glanced at him, he slunk back to the door and quivered.

“This is the tale you gleaned from the convent’s chronicle,” said Hugh at last.

“It is.”

The sheepskin had arrived six months ago with the known lands inked in by a master cartographer, the hinterlands marked in cruder dimensions—a sheep’s head to represent the western island kingdom of Alba, the horns of a goat to suggest the northern reaches where the Eika barbarians nested, the blank emptiness of untracked deserts beyond the shore of the Middle Sea, and the geometric oblong marking the unknown reaches of the Heretic’s Sea that lay north and east of the Arethousan capital. Dragons lay to the east and beyond them grass and sand and the distant glories of Katai. By careful measurement and guesswork, she had marked on this map each stone circle mentioned in the nuns’ chronology.

“Every one you have marked here?” he asked.

“Every one, to the best of my knowledge of the land and as well as it is described within the text. The nuns of St. Ekatarina’s recorded all things precisely. No fables and superstitions marred their pages. They set down what they heard as accurately as possible. I did the same.”

“Here.” He placed a finger on the map east of the Wendish marchlands and a little north of the kingdom of Ungria, although the borderlands of such places could not be marked with any precision, since they fluctuated with the season and the year.

She waited.

“Here,” he repeated. His finger covered a circle representing a known crown, with the number of stones inked inside. Seven. “The Holy Mother has commanded me to journey east. I will oversee the crown discovered by Brother Marcus during his travels through the wilderness lands that lie north of Ungria and south and east of Polenie. Seven stones. One of the original crowns, so Mother Anne has decided.”

“How will you get there? That is a journey of many months’ undertaking, through perilous country.”

He removed his finger. The servingman moved a foot, and a plank creaked; and the poor man winced, as startled as if a lion had burst out of the woodwork. “I will travel by means of the crowns. Now that we have a better idea of the placement of each of the crowns, it is apparent—” He brushed a hand over The Eternal Geometry. “—that by using geometry the threads can be woven to open a passage from one specific crown to another. Depending on the rising and setting of the stars and their altitude at the time of passage, and allowing for angle and distance, I must reach east and north from Novomo using the threads from stars in those quadrants.”

“Other crowns stand between Novomo and this distant place. Might these not confuse your passage?”

“It is possible. If I can move swiftly enough, then I can correct for my mistakes and try again. I am confident that my calculations are correct. They have been double-checked by the Holy Mother herself. Her skills as a mathematicus are unequaled.”

“Except perhaps by her daughter.”

The felicity of his expression stilled and became rigid. He drew his finger south from the Ungrian border to the Heretic’s Sea and farther south yet into desert wilderness surrounding the holy city of Says, west to the ruins of Kartiako, then west and northwest to the disputed lands lying between southern Salia and the Jinna kingdom of Aquila, yet north and west again to the sheep’s head that marked Alba, and farther north yet to Eika country, inscribing a vast circle—a crown of sorts—across the continent of Novaria. By the time this was done he had recovered the mobility of his smile.

He beckoned. The servingman shuffled forward and handed him a brass disk engraved with marks and adorned with a bar on one side and a curling nest of circles, a smaller one superimposed on a larger, on the other.

“Except perhaps by her daughter,” he echoed. “Do you know what this is?”

“I do not,” she admitted.

He did not offer to let her hold it. “It is an astrolabe, which the Jinna use both as an observational instrument and a calculating device. It offers precision, and foreknowledge. I need only determine the altitude of a single star and with that information can tell which stars are about to rise and which have just set. You see there are several disks nestled here, each one a climate for a different latitude. If I am pulled off course, it will be quick work to forge a new path. I will get there.”

“Geometry holds many mysteries for me still, Father Hugh. Now that you must journey east, what thought have you given to my role here in Darre?”

After a measure of silence, during which the servingman shifted twice onto the creaking board before moving to avoid it, Hugh sat on the bench opposite Antonia and set his fine hands flat on the map, covering Wendar and Varre. “The Holy Mother Anne has departed Darre for the east with the emperor and the army.”

“To the old imperial lands of Dalmiaka, so I have heard.”

“What you have heard is true. For many years Anne supposed the central crown of the great crown lay at Verna, but now she realizes she is mistaken. This crown—” He pointed to a mark lying on the shore of the Middle Sea about halfway between Aosta and Arethousa. “—must come into our control. Therefore, a conquest. Empress Adelheid is pregnant again—”

“Again!”

“—so she remains in Darre. I have encouraged her to bring you into her schola. Go there now. Prepare the ground.”

“Prepare the ground?”

“We have spoken of this before. The cauda draconis has a particular role to play when a great spell is cast.”

The cauda draconis died, but since he did not say so out loud, neither did she. She waited. Let him show his strengths and weaknesses first; then she would know how much to conceal and reveal.

“Yet we need not stand passively.”