Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

“It’s closed to such as me,” said the prince bitterly. “Ai, God, Heribert, my heart is torn out of me. Five months have passed. Was it only a vision I saw at Angenheim? Liath must be dead.”

“Nay, do not say so. How can we know? There are so many mysteries we do not comprehend.”

The prince threw back his head and howled like a dog. The horrible sound reverberated through the crypt, echoing and whispering down the vaults and through the many chambers. The cleric stumbled back in surprise, bumping into Anna, and almost dropped the torch.

The prince shuddered all over, pressing a palm to his head. Light shivered over him, steadying as Heribert got a good grip on the torch.

“Your Highness?” the cleric asked softly.

Prince Sanglant dropped his hand. His expression was grim and angry, but his gaze was quite sane. “Nay, I beg your pardon, my friend. Liath stood here with me once, that day Bloodheart breached the walls.” He caught in a breath, then went on. “Lord help me. I never thought I’d have the courage to touch those chains.”

“Come,” said Heribert, “you’ve had courage enough for one day. Lord Hrodik promises to entertain us with the best wine in Saony.”

“That’s not the worst thirst I’m suffering.” He walked to the edge of the flickering light thrown off by the torch and surveyed the gloom. With his back to her, Anna could not see his expression. “I heard it told that my Dragons were thrown down here to rot, but I see no sign of them.” He stood there for a while in silence. The torch snapped and popped. Smoke tickled her nose. She sniffed hard and sneezed.

“Come,” said the prince, as if the sound spurred him out of his reverie. He took the torch from the cleric and led them back up into the light.

“Why did you go down into the crypt?” Suzanne demanded later, when they had escaped the crowd and gotten home to a still-burning hearth, just enough warmth that they could take off their cloaks and sit sipping cider to warm their stomachs. A servant girl, left behind to tend to the house, served them, bringing mugs to pass around before taking a drink herself from the ladle. “It’s dark down there. You might have gotten hurt.”

Anna said nothing.

Suzanne sipped at her cider but could not leave the question alone.

“What did he say to you?” Her fingers asked another question, playing self-consciously with her hair. She glanced at Raimar, who regarded her with thoughtful concern and a flicker of distress in his expression. “Why did you follow the prince down into the crypt?”

Anna couldn’t answer, not even with such signs as she had learned to communicate with. She couldn’t answer because she didn’t know.

There were so many mysteries that humankind simply could not comprehend.

2

TO his surprise, Zacharias had come to admire the prince in the months they had journeyed eastward from one noble estate to the next. Prince Sanglant was frank, fair, honest, and a resolute leader, and he never asked anyone to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.

“Nay, I never expected willingly to follow along in a noble lord’s retinue,” Zacharias said to Heribert as they shared a platter in the great hall of the mayor’s palace in Gent, where wine flowed freely and a young apprentice poet mangled a hymn celebrating the encounter between the aged Herodia of Jeshuvi and the blessed Daisan in which the future saint had prophesied that the young Daisan would bring light to a benighted world.

“In truth, I never thought I would sit down to eat with a common man,” replied Heribert thoughtfully. Sanglant sat at the high table, drinking heavily and speaking little as young Lord Hrodik boasted about a recent boar hunt in which he’d broken his nose.

“It was to escape men such as you that I became a frater rather than a monastic, for in a monastery I’d have had to bow down to a master born of noble kinfolk. My grandmother despised nobles as thieves and louts. She said they lived off the labor of honest farmers, and forced their foreign God of Unities onto those who preferred to worship in the old ways.”

“She was a heathen?”

“Truly, she was. She worshiped the old gods. They repaid her faithfulness with a long life and prosperity and many grandchildren.”

Heribert sighed. The young cleric had a lean, clever face, almost delicate, and the most aristocratic manners of any nobly born person Zacharias had ever come into contact with, although in all honesty he had not rubbed shoulders with noble folk much in his life. He had spent more of his adult life among the barbaric Quman tribes, to his sorrow.

“What fate befell your grandmother is long since settled. It is your soul I fear for, Zacharias. You do not pray with us.”

“Yet I pray in my own way, and not to my grandmother’s gods. Let us not have this conversation again, I beg you, for nothing you say will change my mind. I saw a vision—”

“Who is to say that it was not the Enemy who cast dust into your eyes?”

“Peace, friend. I know what I saw.”

Heribert lifted a hand in capitulation.

Zacharias chuckled. “I will not pollute your ears with another description of the vision granted me. You are safe from that, at least.”

“Safer from that than from this poet’s waning.”