Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 1 (12 page)

Round and white. That building was the altar house.

A shadow moved, detaching itself from a far wall. Alain jumped to his feet, then shuddered, suddenly unable to move. It was not Withi.

It walked with a man's form, moving toward the altar house.

Yet it was not a
man's
form. Tall and slender he was, yes, but indefinably different in the subtle grace with which he walked and in the strange cut of his garments. The figure halted at the shaded entrance to the altar house and slowly turned, surveying the ruins. At first pass his gaze traveled right over Alain, as if he could not perceive him at all.

He had a wonderful, disturbing consistency to him, partly shade and partly real. He was very dark, but Alain could still see his features clearly. A thin face, more bronze than northern pale, and deep, old eyes under a shock of black hair.

Black hair. Like Alain's black hair. The
man
was clean-shaven or else beardless, although how any man could truly be called a man unless he wore a beard Alain did not know. Unless he was no true
man.
He wore a fine metal cuirass decorated with intertwined beasts whose twining points led down onto the leather fringe that

ended halfway to his knees. Under it he wore a plain linen tunic, and he held a white cloak draped over his left arm. He was looking for someone. Or meeting someone.

Alain heard the whisper of a tentative footstep. Over to his right, through a gap in the stone, he saw the opaque shape of a girl appear. But she had a leaden, earthy heaviness to her that marked her instantly in Alain's eyes as a mortal, like himself. She stared around, looking straight at the shade without appearing to see it, and then caught sight of Alain. Or at least, of his lantern.

"Alain?" she said, her tone low and uneasy. "Is that you?"

Alain took one step forward. The shade took a step forward, mirroring him, and their gazes met.

Dizziness swept him. The distant roar of flames sounded in his ears. He smelled smoke thick and oily in his nostrils.

"Where has Liathano gone?" The shade now held in his hand a lance, pointed and deadly, but it was held upright, not threatening Alain.

"I
—I don't know," Alain stammered. He could not break his gaze away from the shade's eyes. They gleamed, like the altar house, like the fine outline of the shade's entire body, more gold than white. He heard the pound of horses galloping past, a haze of distant shouting, a faint horn caught on the wind.

"You are not of the blood," said the shade abruptly, lifting the lance like a challenge. "And yet, how else could you be here? What is your name? Who is your mother? How have you come here?"

Though he could not look away from the shade, Alain saw with his peripheral vision the shapes of the buildings. They stood tall, beautiful, and surprisingly delicate for such massive stone structures, but even now the dull red of flame cast its color across them. Burning. Burning. Smoke swelled from the burning and wind swept the thick oily stench across his face. He coughed.

A lost prince, truly. For,now Alain understood what was happening, what he saw: The final destruction of this fort. The sounds of fighting came inexorably closer, the terrible music of fate.

"My name is Alain," he said, wanting desperately to help, yet knowing that this fort was already doomed. What could he possibly do? Who was Liathano? Was this shade his true father? "I don't know how I came here. I don't know who my mother is."

"You are a
man,"
said the prince, and his eyes widened with elegant astonishment, "and yet marked. If only we had time to unravel this enigma." But his chin lifted. He broke his gaze away from Alain as if he had heard his name called.

A voice shrieked in terror. Alain staggered and flung a hand up to press against his pounding temples.

"It
is
you, Alain!"

Through the pain in his head he heard her stumble toward him across the cracked paving. "Did you see it? Did you hear it?" She threw herself on him. He staggered back under the force of her fear and dropped the lantern. It sputtered out. "All black, they were, running through the sky like the count's own hounds but screaming with hunger! If they had caught us, they would have devoured us."

The heat of her body pressed against him drained the fog from his mind. He pushed her away though she was still babbling about red eyes and six-legged dogs, grabbed the lantern, and ran to the altar house. But the shade was gone.

"Don't go in there!" she screamed as Alain crossed the empty threshold.

But there was nothing inside, nothing except the gleam of the ruined stone walls and an ovoid stone of pale marble
—what those like Cook would call an altar—embedded in the earth at the center of the chamber. Nothing else except for grass and one scraggly bush whose waxy leaves left a trail of sticky ooze on his
fingers. From outside he heard sobbing and then the sound of Withi running away down the broken avenue. He sat down on the altar stone. This place, this outpost of the old Dariyan Empire, had stood here in all its glory so very long ago, for how many years he could not imagine, knowing only that the Lost Ones lived many more years than did men. Only in the end it had died, in its way, burning, while the lost prince searched for his Liathano and horses galloped away into a night drawn red with fire.

The gleaming stone faded to dull shadows. The stars lost their miraculous glamour and moved onward, ever westward on their endless'round. He lifted a hand to his face and discovered his eyes were wet with tears. A shadow raced overhead, but it was only the owl, hunting in the night.

SUMMER passed. Alain did not have the heart to go back to the old ruins, knowing he would only find them empty. There was no answer for him there. Withi no longer spoke to him, and when he watched her, remembering her embrace, how she had clasped him close against her, he knew she was whispering of him to the others. Bitter, he kept to himself.

No other strange incidents disturbed the quiet of long summer days. Spelt was harvested. The oats were almost ripe. Chatelaine Dhuoda returned to the fortress with Lady Aldegund, wife of Lavastine's cousin Geoffrey. A girl of about fifteen, she arrived at Lavas faint from exhaustion and from her advanced pregnancy. A wandering laborer, come to Lavas for the harvest work, had been one month ago in Osna village; he reported that Aunt Bel and her family were all well and had given him

three days' work hauling stone for quernstones from the quarry to Bel's workshop.

On the feast day of St. Tiana the Joyous, holy martyr of the town of Bens, a messenger rode in. Alain looked up from the shed where he had been stacking bundled hay from the second crop cut on the south quarter.

The man had a dirty white rag tied around his head, covering his right eye and ear. Old blood stained it brown. His clothes were worn out, patched with the remains of other hose and tunics. When he dismounted next to the hall, he walked with a limp. It took Alain that long to recognize him as Heric, the brash young soldier of midsummer. His entire aspect was muted now.

Alain leaned against the low fence that hemmed in the open side of the shed and listened as Heric delivered his message in a vivid, penetrating voice to Chatelaine Dhuoda and her shadow cleric, the frater. People gathered to hear the news.

"The campaign is done for the season. The winds are changing. The Eika have sailed north back to their own ports for the winter. All along the coast they attacked. But here at the end three Eika ships bottled themselves up the Vennu after the tide had gone out. They built themselves a stockade, but the count begged for the Grace of Our Lord and Lady and led the attack. We stormed it!" He slapped a fist onto his other, open hand, grinning for the first time where he had been grim before. "Even their dogs gave way before us, and they more ferocious than their masters, for they would gladly eat any person who fell within reach of their teeth." His audience murmured appreciatively at this gruesome detail. He went on. "But this time we slaughtered them Eika like sheep. Though it's true they have tough hides. Hard as leather and gleaming like they was forged in a blacksmith's furnace, not born from a decent mam like the rest of us. Those that ran out onto the flats got caught as the tide come in, and their ugly dogs with them!"

"I heard they was shapechangers," said Cook, who

had status enough that she might press to the front. "Half fish."

Heric shrugged. The brief note of triumph died in his eyes; now he only looked weary. "They drown as well as we do. If any swam away, well then, J never saw them go. We took a captive, a prince of their kind. Lord Geoffrey wanted to kill him, but the count in his wisdom said we'd do better to give his kin someone to ransom than someone to avenge. They're bringing the barbarian back, in a cage, with the count's hounds tied to the bars, so no one can get in nor the barbarian out." He shuddered and drew the Circle of Unity at his breast.

Chatelaine Dhuoda glanced about the fortress yard, marking each listener who loitered to hear the messenger's tale. "How soon will his lordship arrive?"

"Within a fiveday. They were marching hard behind me. It was a long summer, and too much fighting. We're all anxious to be home."

"Go with Cook, then, and she'll feed you." Dhuoda nodded briskly at Cook, who took the hint and hurried back into the kitchens. "Then you'll come back to me
— what is your name again? You will give me a more detailed report." Her gaze raked the loiterers again. Alain, half hidden, watched as the others moved quickly away. He stayed where he was.

When the yard was clear, Dhuoda signaled to the messenger to wait for a moment. "Did the count give any direction as to where he wants this Eika prince confined? Below? Or in one of the tower chambers?"

"I can't be certain, Mistress," said Heric with a bowed head. Alain marveled at how much the young man-at-arms had changed since midsummer. "I believe he means to kennel him with those black hounds. I heard him say with my own ears that he can't be sure by any other means that the Eika will not find some unnatural way to escape."

The chatelaine's expression remained placid, although the frater drew the circle as against a bad omen. "That is all," said Dhuoda. "You may go."

Heric inclined his head obediently and limped off to the kitchens.

Dhuoda and the frater walked back toward the gate. Alain, shifting back against a shadowed wall, heard their voices as they passed.

"Is it true," the frater asked, "that it was those black hounds that killed Count Lavastine's own wife and daughter? That the count only keeps them because of a pact made by his grandfather with unholy devils, of which those black hounds are the living representatives?"

"I will only tell you once," said Dhuoda. Alain had to strain to hear her voice, "To talk of such things here, Frater Agius, will give you as good a reception as if you were to argue your heretical views in front of the skopos."

"But do
you
believe it to be true?" asked Agius.

"It is true that the original hounds, and the descendants born ever after of those first black hounds, obey only the trueborn counts of Lavas. Where they came from, no one knows, only that they were a gift from a Salian biscop
—

They walked on, and Alain could no longer hear them. Everyone said the black hounds traveled only and everywhere with Count Lavastine. No man otherwise could handle them, and they were known to have ravaged more than one servingman in the holding. Not even Master Rodlin, master over the stables and kennels, could control them.

"Horses," said Lackling.

Or at least, he made a noise which Alain knew he meant to signify horses because the boy then threw his head back and scraped the ground with one foot, remarkably like a horse. He sniffed the air, as if he could smell their approach. And perhaps he could. Cook sometimes called him a changeling, and it was true he had an affinity for animals, just as a child born of a goblin mother would have, though he looked human enough. The others, of course, said that animals
—God's
innocents
—were said to recognize the halfwitted as innocents like themselves.

Impatient, Lackling dashed outside.

Alain finished oiling the harness he had in his hands. Eight days had passed since Heric had come to the holding and warned them to expect the count's return. Alain could wait a bit longer to look. It was an oddly auspicious day for the count and his forces to arrive back home: At the morning service the deacon had reminded them all that this was the saint's day of St. Lavrentius, the very saint venerated with relics and a chapel in Lavas Church, which stood just outside town. Lavas Holding rested under the protection of St. Lavrentius' hand. There was an ivory reliquary in the church that contained some of the holy martyr's bones and a scrap of the leather belt that had bound him to the wheel on which he had died his martyr's death in the last years of the Dariyan Empire. But thinking of the wheel made Alain think of the stars that wheeled in the heavens on their ceaseless round. It made him think of Midsummer's Eve and the vision he had seen, and of Withi's rejection of him after.

He sighed. Well, Aunt Bel would tell him that a serving maid like Withi wasn't worth pining over in any case. And she would bluntly remind him that he was sworn to the church and, thus, to celibacy. But he couldn't help thinking of Withi, even if he knew Aunt Bel was right.