Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

She choked down a cry of surprise, and reached for the sword she no longer carried.

“It’s just me,” Eldest Uncle said.

She shrieked, and laughed as her heart pounded and her hands shook.

“Shhh!” he whispered. “We must get you out of here, Bright One.”

“How did you find me?”

He smiled. “Despite your attempt to conceal yourself, you are visible from the road. I took a walk to seek out a particularly good meadow of earth-apple that lies a morning’s walk from here. Its oil eases the ache in my joints, and the long walk does me good. Coming back, I saw you. I diverted the twilight patrol. Best we move quickly.”

She grimaced, rubbing her thighs. “Yes. What do you suggest?”

“Only the patrols walk the outer roads these days. The great armies have run west and east to combat our enemies.”

“Have the Ashioi gone to war?”

“There is much news to tell you.”

“I have my own news. What I have seen—!”

He nodded. “In time, we can discuss all this. Meanwhile, there is also a person you can help, if you wish to. As soon as it is full night, we will walk in the shroud of darkness.”

She looked up at the heavens. A high haze obscured the zenith. All that she had seen, climbing the thread of aether, was hidden to her. She could not see the fixed stars, the wandering stars, or even the moon. Only in the west did she glimpse the flash of a star in that gash along the far hills where the haze had not yet settled.

“Very well.”

That easily she trusted him, as she would trust a beloved grandfather, or a grandmother. He was related to her, after all, by the bonds of marriage. But it was not the civil contract that allowed her to sling her coiled rope over her shoulders and slide down the steep slope in his wake, to begin walking westward with him along the White Road. It was a different contract, one she could not easily explain.

She trusted him.

That was all that was necessary.

IX

ALLIES AND TRAITORS

1

AFTER Zuangua took Blessing away, Anna wept. She wept out of fear for the girl but mostly because she had failed in her duty. She had not protected Blessing from the girl’s own impulsive and immature nature.

Now the princess was gone away with the Ashioi army. It made Anna sick to think of it. What kind of barbarians allowed children to march to war? It made her cry, and cry she did. No one paid the least attention to her, who was a prisoner in the midst of prisoners. Lord Hugh’s soldiers also remained behind, corralled like cattle in a structure ringed by a strong stone palisade and a garrison of bored guards, but their situation looked very different from her own. Anna sat on a shaded porch whose roof was woven out of saplings and, as time passed, watched her companions go about their business throughout the hot and dusty days.

Scarred John and Captain Frigo had set up a carpenter’s shop with their iron adze and axes. Over the weeks they had developed an astonishing parade of customers. The iron tools and swords fascinated the Ashioi. Liudbold had once spent a pair of years apprenticing in a smithy, and he was soon carted away to the toils of their captor’s furnaces. At first, Anna supposed they had slaughtered him or tortured him, but at intervals he returned to visit, each time looking sleeker and fatter. Most recently, he had arrived for his visit accompanied by a sly-faced young Ashioi woman, who was pregnant.

Theodore the archer also had discovered an easy camaraderie with the locals. They admired his skill with the bow; he, like the other men, admired the easy manners of the women.

They were all deserting her, seduced by the flesh, but Anna could not blame them. She had made that same mistake herself, and anyway she did not regret it. Why should they? They could never go back to Darre, because they had betrayed their queen.

She cried again, just a little, thinking of Thiemo and Matto.

No use regretting the dead. Nothing she could do would bring them back, and nothing she had done had halted Blessing in her headlong rush to impress her powerful great uncle, the bold and handsome warrior Zuangua.

This day, scarred John was sitting out in the courtyard, on a stump under a shade roof, dressing wood. Captain Frigo was grinding down wood nails. One of the soldiers trotted over to him, leaned to speak, and in reply the captain nodded, got up, and ambled over toward the gate. Another man braided rope, while in the garden a pair of soldiers fussed among their green plants.

Anna regarded the basket at her feet with irritation. The rushes the Ashioi used for baskets cut her fingers and were too stiff to plait easily. Sometimes she saw the Ashioi guards snickering as they looked at her licking her bleeding fingers, and she had a terrible feeling that she was missing something about the task. She had tried soaking them in water but that only made them fray, while drying them made them crumble. No one helped her. Hugh’s soldiers ignored her, and, in truth, no young Ashioi men looked twice at her, preferring their own half naked women. She was no use at all, not here and not anywhere. In Gent they had long since forgotten her, no doubt. Who missed her? Who thought of her at all?

Tears burned again, hot and angry. It was getting tiresome, crying all the time, but she worried about Blessing and she worried about herself, lost and drifting in a place that would never be her home. She had a body but she felt as if her soul had come unmoored and left her trapped in a husk. The constant dusty haze kicked up by men going about their lives ground into her skin, wearing her away until eventually she would dissolve into nothing.