In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

How they all gazed at him with hopeful expressions! They were such a sturdy group, healthier than many because the forest provided so much, all but a steady supply of grain and salt which, they’d told him, they traded for. Even in lean years they could survive with less grain. They hadn’t any horses, but three milk cows. They had forage for their goats and sheep as well as certain plants and tubers out of the forest that could be eaten by humankind in hard times even if they weren’t tasty. They ate meat often, and they were proud of it, knowing that folk beyond the forest never fared so well.

He bent over the diploma. The lantern light made the pen strokes waver. He’d never read well nor did he like to, but the months in Queen’s Grave and the unrelenting supervision of Biscop Constance had forced him to labor over Dariyan, the language used both by the church and by the king’s schola for all decrees and capitularies.

They waited, so quiet that the sound of dripping rain off the outside eaves made him nervous. He kept expecting the rain to start up again. Luckily, it was not a long document. He stumbled through it without utterly shaming himself. King Henry’s promise was straightforward: the foresters would be free of service to any lord or lady as long as they kept the king’s road passable for himself and his servants and messengers and armies.

“The Eagle read it better,” murmured Martin’s wife to her husband, then blushed when Ivar looked at her.

“Eagles can’t read,” he said. “They learn the words in their head and repeat them back. That’s what she must have done.”

“Nay, she read it all right,” said one of the older men. “I recall that well enough. She touched each word as she spoke it. How could she know which was which if she weren’t reading? Strange looking girl, too, not any older than my Baltia here.” He set a hand on the head of an adolescent girl perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age. “I don’t know if she were pretty, but she sure caught the eye.”

“She was at Gent, too,” said Martin. “She was the one what saved us, those of us who escaped.”

“I know who you mean!” said Erkanwulf from his seat on the bench. “We rode with her, Captain Ulric’s band out of Autun, that is. She was riding with Count Lavastine’s army, but she was a King’s Eagle, after all. I’d wager it was the same one.”

Ivar sat down, clenching his hands. He shut his eyes, and at once they fussed around him and Martin’s wife, called Flora, brought him ale to drink to clear his head.

“I will never be free of her.” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. He laughed, seeing them stare at him. Erkanwulf looked skeptical. Martin looked puzzled. Flora’s mouth had turned up softly, and her gaze was gentle, as though she had guessed it all. She touched her young husband on the shoulder, and he started, glanced at her, and reading something in her expression—words weren’t the only marks that could be read!—he rolled up the diploma and stashed it away in the chest beneath the community’s other precious possessions.

“You said you’d give us your blessing, Lord Ivar,” he said. “Will you do so?”

“I’ll do so.”

He rose. Old memories clung. They were a stink he would never be rid of. Liath had never been his, and she would never have chosen him. She sure caught the eye. He wasn’t the only man to have thought so. But it no longer mattered. The world had changed in a way he did not yet understand.

“Stand before the hearth fire with clasped hands,” he said to Martin and Flora. He’d never witnessed a commoner’s wedding. Rarely did a deacon officiate in any case, since the law of bed and board made a marriage. He dredged for scraps of verse, God’s blessings for fecundity, the wedding of church and humankind as bride and groom, the necessity of holding fast to faith.

“For healthful seasons, for the abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times, let us pray. Have mercy upon us, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.”

Flora wept. Martin sobbed. Their son skipped around them in glee while the baby waved its chubby arms. Balt and his daughter broke out a flute and a fiddle, and the others took the table down and cleared a space for dancing. Erkanwulf tested his healing ankle by spinning Uta round and round, and he came back, laughing, to sit and rest and grimace.

“Don’t be so grim,” he said to Ivar. “Standing there with your arms crossed and a frown like my grandmam’s! Heh! She never smiled one day in her long life! My da used to say that a spell had been put on her when she was a young sprite that she’d drop dead if she was ever happy, so there you are. She was the oldest person I ever saw till the day she dropped dead.”

The story teased a grin out of him. “Was she smiling?”

“She was not! It wasn’t the curse that felled her. She got hit in the head by a piece of wood that flew free when one of my uncles was chopping up a log. A little like my poor horse, now I think on it.”

“Erkanwulf! How can you speak so disrespectfully of the dead?”

“She was a mean old bitch. That’s just how it was. No one was sorry to see her go except the dog.”

Like me. But he shook himself. It was, a lie he told himself, and he didn’t know why. He had told himself that lie for years, ever after Hanna had chosen to go with Liath over him. But he had seen how false the lie was the day Sigfrid, Ermanrich, and Hathumod had cried to see him risk his life for Biscop Constance. He had seen how false it was the day Baldwin had given up his freedom for the rest of them. He had seen how false it was the day Baldwin wept, believing him dead. Maybe Hanna, and Liath, had scorned him, but there were others who needed him. Who were waiting for him.

He grabbed Erkanwulf’s shoulder. “As soon as the road’s clear enough that the horse isn’t at risk, we’ll go.”

“If you wish,” agreed Erkanwulf. “You’ve got a strange look on your face. Has an imp gotten into you?”

“It’s time. We’ve got to act while we have the chance.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for Captain Ulric and all the men loyal to him to choose whether to act, or to give way. Princess Theophanu can’t help us. It’s up to us to free Biscop Constance. There’s only one way to do it.”

3

A burning wind struck with such ferocity that every tent in camp was laid flat. A hail of stinging ash passed over them where they huddled under whatever shelter they could find. After all this, after the rumbling and groaning of earth faded, the terrible glare of lightning gave way to a sickly gleam that Hanna at long last identified as dawn. She crawled out from under the wagon into the cloudy light of a new day in which everything had changed. She had taken shelter with Aurea, Teuda, and poor, addled Petra with her perpetually vacant expression.

o;She was at Gent, too,” said Martin. “She was the one what saved us, those of us who escaped.”