The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

The sigh that escaped Mother Obligatia’s lips whispered out like an echo to the rhythmic wheeze that serenaded them: schwoo schwhaa schwoo schwhaa. “I feared as much. I knew she would not abandon us. I pray she rests at peace in the Chamber of Light with Our Mother and Father of Life.” She murmured a prayer, and Rosvita joined her, the words falling easily from her tongue. How many times had she said the prayer over the dead?

Too many.

“After that a cleric came. She sought access to our library, saying she came from the schola in Darre to examine old chronicles. We had no reason to distrust her.”

“You do not think she came to study old chronicles in the library?” Rosvita asked, rearranging the bolster that allowed the old woman to lie somewhat propped up. Obligatia grunted in pain as Rosvita helped her sit up.

“The good sisters move me frequently,” she said, “yet still I have sores from being bedridden. Yet is it not a just punishment for my blindness?”

“Your blindness?”

“She called herself Sister Venia.”

Heriburg and Fortunatus had crept forward to listen.

“I recall no such cleric,” said Heriburg.

“The name seems passing familiar,” said Fortunatus. “There are so many clerics in the palace schola, but I believe a woman who went by that name served the skopos.”

Obligatia’s lips pulled up, but not in a smile. “I know she did not. She came to kill us. She murdered poor Sister Lucida and used her warm blood to summon a creature that had no earthly form or substance and a stench like iron. This thing she sent to kill us, or to kill me, I suppose, although the only one it killed was Sister Sindula. It consumed Sindula as though it were fire, leaving only her scorched bones. May God have mercy on her.” A frail hand sketched the Circle of Unity in the air. “Yet I believe I was Sister Venia’s target all along. They know who I am, and they will stop at nothing to murder me.”

“So be it. I have no kind words in which to tell you this, Mother Obligatia. I found out what happened to your daughter.”

Obligatia shut her eyes. A tear squeezed out from the closed lids, sliding down to dissolve in the whorl of one ear. “My daughter,” she said softly. “Even after so many years, I still grieve for what I lost.”

How did one speak, in the face of such sorrow, knowing that the next words would only compound sadness? She had to go on. Without the truth being laid bare, they had no hope of winning free.

“Your daughter is now the skopos. She is called Anne, and she is a mathematici, a powerful sorcerer.”

“My daughter.” The words brushed the air as might a feather, a tickle, ephemeral. Obligatia was silent for a long time, but she wept no more tears. “Then it is my daughter who wishes to make sure I am dead.”

Rosvita looked up to see Fortunatus’ dear face close by, pale with concern. “We should have listened to Prince Sanglant. He warned us against Anne and her cabal of sorcerers before we traveled south to Aosta. We did not heed him.”

“How could we have guessed?” said Fortunatus. “Do not blame yourself, Sister.”

“Now that they have raised Taillefer’s granddaughter to a position worthy of her eminence, she fears what I know,” said Obligatia. “What I am.”

“Perhaps,” said Rosvita. “But do not think others elevated Anne. She raised herself. When Holy Mother Clementia died, may she rest at peace in the Chamber of Light, Anne came before the king and queen and displayed her power to them. In this way, she seduced them into supporting her election as skopos. She told him—” She recalled the words as clearly as if they had been spoken an hour ago. That was the price she paid for her prodigious memory: that every painful moment she had ever endured might be relived with awful clarity at unlooked for and unwelcome intervals. “She said, ‘Without my aid, you will have no empire to rule.’”

“You have a powerful memory, Sister.”

“I spent two years in the dungeon of the skopos. I had time to meditate, to pray, and to read back through my book of memory.”

Yet this time had allowed her to complete, in her mind, her long neglected History. It had allowed her to master the skill that might allow them to escape their current predicament.

The wheeze sucked in and out, and by now she recognized on her skin the slight pressure in and suction out of air that accompanied the sound, not a breeze but more like the action of a bellows shifting the air. The temperature within this cavern remained cool, yet not as cold as the chill night would be outside. Fearing for their lives, they remained in more comfort than Hugh’s men. The irony made her smile.

“I had another child,” said Obligatia into their silence. “Another child.” She faltered, her voice trembling as badly as her hands. She groped down the blanket that covered her slight body until she found Rosvita’s hand and clutched it tightly. “What became of Bernard? I saw him—”

“You saw him?”

“Nay, nay, I saw him in his child.”

“You saw his child?”

Sister Hilaria returned with a bucket of water, which she set down beside the abbess. Kneeling next to the pallet, she dipped a linen cloth into the water and bathed the old woman’s forehead and throat. “You are tiring her, Sister Rosvita,” she scolded.

“So I must, if we are to survive this. What do you mean, Mother? How could you have seen his child? If this man is the one I think he is, he had no child.”