In the Ruins (71 page)

“Are you speaking of Lord Hugh’s return to Novomo, Your Majesty? Certainly you rejected him swiftly enough.”

Adelheid looked at her without answering, expression twisted between annoyance and tears, and turned away to break off a twig of clematis. She rolled the leaves against her fingers until they were mashed to pulp.

“I was thinking of Conrad’s daughter,” she said reluctantly. “I regret she was killed in such a cowardly way. She did nothing to deserve it.”

“Your Majesty!” Brother Petrus hurried down the steps with a pair of stewards at his heels. “The envoys have come, Your Majesty! They’ll be here by day’s end.”

Adelheid rose and flicked away the last tear. “We must grant them a splendid reception. Captain Falco, muster all
the guardsmen and soldiers. Let them line the streets and array themselves about the palace and the courtyard and the audience hall. Brother Petrus, let my schola assemble, every one. Send Veralia to me. She will supervise my stewards. She must consult with Lady Lavinia. I will go crowned and robed. Afterward, there must be a feast, as fine a meal as can be assembled at short notice.” She recalled her company and belatedly nodded toward Antonia. “What do you wish, Holy Mother?”

Antonia hid her irritation. It was good to see Adelheid so lively, even if it was for a distasteful cause. “Surely you cannot mean to go through with this, Your Majesty?”

“What choice have I?”

“But your own daughter!”

“What choice have I?”

It had come to this. Hugh had come to them, and Adelheid had foolishly driven him off. Now his power was lost forever, and in addition they had lost two excellent hostages.

Worse, he had stolen Heribert, that faithless whore. But she could not let Adelheid know how cruelly this blow struck at her heart. She could never show weakness. She must forget Heribert, consider him dead, slice the cord herself. She should have severed the tie the day he ran away at Sanglant’s order. In this matter, Hugh was blameless. It was Sanglant who had corrupted Heribert.

And in any case, once the searchers found him and returned him to Novomo, she could devise a suitable punishment.

“Holy Mother? Is there aught that ails you?”

“Nay, nothing. I am only reflecting that you are right. What choice have we?”

But after all, Hugh was the treacherous one, doubly so, with plans afoot she could not fathom.

Knowing that they must appear in greatest state before the arriving delegation so that no one would suspect their weakness, Antonia went to the chest sealed with sorcery to fetch Taillefer’s magnificent crown of empire to place upon Adelheid’s brow.

The amulet was sealed properly; yet after all when she opened the chest, she found an empty silk wrapping. Hugh had stolen it, no doubt to crown Sanglant’s daughter as a puppet queen. And now it was lost in the woods, on the back of a panicked horse.

She could only rage while her servants cowered.

IN the afternoon of the third day, Lord Hugh and his party came down out of the hilly country closer to the sea’s shore and found an abandoned town that looked as if it had been swept clean by a towering wave. Cautiously, John scouted in through the broken gates and afterward they all followed him. They found the bones of a dog scattered beneath a fallen beam in a ruined house but no sign of recent life. A stream spilled seaward, overflowing its banks where it met the wide waters. Its water had a brackish, oily taste, but they drank anyway and filled up their leather bladders so they wouldn’t have to break open their spare cask of ale.

Lord Hugh prowled the town, seeking signs.

“See here,” he would say, where spars had lodged in the gapped teeth of the ruined palisade. “A wave caused this. Yet inland the pattern of disturbance suggested a wind out of the east southeast. There must have been two storms of destruction, one after the next. As ripples run in ponds, the second following the first.”

The town had not been large, and the shattered remains of pilings suggested it had once boasted a wharf. Farther up the strand, fish had rotted, their bones strewn like twigs along the shore. The sea lapped the strand placidly. John tried fishing but had no luck. Blessing tried to run away and after had a rope tied to her waist and had to follow along behind Frigo like a dog on a lead. He was neither cruel nor kind to her but dispassionately amused.
Hugh rarely looked at the girl at all, and when he did, he would frown and set his lips in an expression Anna could not interpret. A man might look so at a two-headed calf, or at the child sprung from the union of his bitterest rival and the woman he desired most in the world but could never have.

“Should we camp in the town, my lord?” asked Captain Frigo.

“What do the men say?” Hugh asked him. “I think the shelter will do us some good, but if they prefer a more open site, if they fear plague, that is as well with me.”

Frigo nodded, scratching his beard. “They’re muttering that it’s well enough to walk a town like this in daylight, when night might bring ghosts, and devils carrying sickness. I think otherwise. There’s no sign of dogs or corpses. Deserted as we are here, it’s best to have a defensible position. They’ll see the wisdom of staying within walls if anything attacks us by night. Wolves or bandits. Those other things.”

“Wisely spoken, Captain. Set up camp.”

John and Theodore found a campsite that suited the nervous men. They planted their backs against the broken wall of a merchant’s compound with a long storehouse along one side and a stable along another. The courtyard gave them space to set up a couple of lean-tos for shelter without having to camp right within the ruins where scorpions might scuttle and ghosts poke their knuckles into a man’s ribs while he slept.

Scarred John unfolded a leather-and-wood tripod stool. Lord Hugh unrolled a map on top of the small traveling chest. He pinned the corners with an oil lamp, a heavy silver chain mounded up over a silver Circle of Unity, his knife, and his left hand. He studied the map, twisting a wick between thumb and middle finger but not yet lighting it.

“We escape tonight,” Blessing whispered to Anna as the girl trotted past in Captain Frigo’s wake. The big man glanced at her. Anna wasn’t sure how much Wendish he understood, but she guessed he couldn’t follow her conversations
with the princess as well as she could follow the Dariyan spoken between soldiers and master.

Under the shelter of sloped canvas, she unrolled the blankets she and Blessing shared, and there she sat to watch Lord Hugh as he stared at the parchment. The canvas ceiling rose and fell as a twilight wind gusted out of the east.

The men chatted companionably as they got the horses settled in the stables and sentries up onto the walls. Liudbold and scarred John set to work splitting wood from the abandoned houses to fuel the fire. Frigo sat on his saddle and, with Blessing trussed tight beside him, set to work dressing a sapling trunk with an adze.

Lord Hugh had that ability to build trust between himself and those who served him. In this same manner, Prince Sanglant led his men, knowing all their names, their home villages, their sense of humor, and which man needed a coarse joke or which a kind word to keep his spirits up. In this wilderness, Hugh’s entourage was nervous and watchful but not terrified, because they trusted him.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Elene’s blood leaking over the chessboard and pooling around Berthold’s slack fingers. She could not shake off the memory.

He glanced up, noted her regard, and dismissed it. Scarred John brought him a cup of ale. He thanked him, drained it, and handed back the empty cup. Bringing out flint and tinder, he made ready to light the wick.

A strange sound rang over the ordinary moan of the wind along the deserted walls. Every man quieted and froze in position, as though spelled. She saw their shapes like pillars, arranged out of all symmetry. For ten breaths at least, no one spoke or moved. The wind turned abruptly, and grew cold as winter’s blast, swelling out of the northwest. The sound rang down on that wind.

“Sounds like bells,” said Theodore in a low voice.

A horse snorted and sidestepped.

A man yelped and cursed. “Ah! Ah! Right on my foot!”

“More fool you for standing there!” retorted his companion.

Lord Hugh moved his right foot to the ground, set the oil lamp beside it, and slipped the Circle and chain over his head. As he rolled up the map and stowed it in the chest, he spoke.

“All must retreat within the circle I draw. Bring the horses, too.”

He took a bulging pouch out of the chest, closed it, and secured the hasp. His hands were steady as he spilled a line of flour in a circle big enough to contain men and horses together. A stench like the breath of the forge swept over them. Horses shied. Men shouted in alarm, and the three who had not yet crowded into the circle raced out of the dusk to join them. At their backs a dark storm advanced out of the heavens.

One skittish gelding broke and bolted.

“Let it go!” Lord Hugh shouted. “Come. Come. Are all within?” His gaze caught Anna, and as if struck she gasped and covered her mouth with a hand. “Not you. You must take your chances outside.”

Scarred John drew his sword.

Blessing screamed and began to kick and pummel Captain Frigo. “No! No! No! I’ll hurt you! Let her stay!”

He slapped her, but the pain meant nothing.

John’s sword poked Anna’s hip. She edged sideways, seeing one curve in the circle not yet sealed by flour. He poked her again. The edge bit into her flesh, and she sobbed and skipped out beyond the sword’s reach.

“No! No!”

“Stop it!” warned the captain.

“Won’t! Let her come back!” Blessing squirmed. She kicked him again, almost got her knee into his groin.

Frigo took out his horsewhip and, swearing, slashed the girl across the chest, but the pain did not daunt her.

Anna started to cry with terror as a stinging wind poured over them. It was not quite utterly dark; they had not yet crossed the boundary into night past which there is no returning. But what fell out of the heavens was blacker than night, towers of darkness that stank of iron and muttered like bells heard down a vast distance. She heard them speaking. She heard
names
.

Hugh of Austra. John of Vennaci. Frigo of Darre. Theodore of Darre. Liudbold of Tivura
. Each of them named and marked.

Blessing of Wendar and Varre, daughter of Sanglant
.

The only name that was missing was Anna’s.

“Let her come back! Let her!” shrieked Blessing, writhing, slamming her fists into air as Frigo twisted away from her blows. He slugged her on her jaw, and she went limp just like that.

“As I thought,” said Hugh conversationally to Anna as he bent to pour the last of the line into place, to seal the circle, “you were not deemed of sufficient interest that anyone could recall your name and birthplace, if they ever knew it. You are more likely to survive if you move away from us. Follow the horse.”

Flour streamed onto the earth. Hugh was speaking words she did not recognize or understand, and as night and monsters crashed over them, the thread of flour met itself and between one heartbeat and the next the men and horses huddled inside vanished.

She screamed, choked, wept. Moaned.

A breath of stinking cold horrible air rushed past her, soaking her in a chill that stabbed all the way to the bone. Death! Death! She wet herself, but the hot urine soaking her leg jarred her wits into life. Darkness swept down as on a gale, and she fled, running as the horse had, but tripped over her own feet and hit herself hard. Elbows bled. She scrambled forward as a dark shape skimmed over her.

The horse had run itself into a corner. Kicking, it lashed out at the creature. Her vision hazed. The horse screamed as a black pillar engulfed it.

Sparks spit golden above her. An arrow fletched with a shimmering tail pierced the creature, and it vanished with a loud
snap
. Bones rattled to earth where the horse had been. Its flesh had been flensed and consumed. She scrabbled forward as another
thing
swirled into view above her. Its cold presence burned her. She sobbed. A second arrow bloomed as a splash of brilliance in the heart of shadow. With a hiss, it snapped out of existence.

The hardest thing she had ever done was in that moment
to look back over her shoulder. Better not to see what would devour her, but she had to know. A haze of mist marked the spell in which Hugh had contained his retinue. Most of the galla swarmed about it, as if confused. Bells tolled in her ears. She choked on bile. She got to her knees and crawled, thinking she might not draw their attention if she remained low to the ground.

A third hiss, followed in a steady measure by two more; nothing careless, not in Theodore’s aim. She reached the scattering of steaming bones and fell among them. The clatter resounded into the heavens. A sixth bright arrow burned, and a seventh.

“Eight. Nine,” she whispered, pressed among the bones, hoping death would shield her.

Hugh of Austra
. So it murmured as it circled the sealed earth, seeking its prey but confused by the mist that concealed him. An arrow blossomed in darkness off to her right. With a snap and a roar of brilliance the tenth flicked out. A line like silver wire spun in an eddy of air before drifting to the ground.

If the galla had intelligence beyond that of hunting hounds, she could not see it in them.

Eleven
. The last shadow pushed at the haze.
Blessing
.

The fire that bloomed within its insubstantial black form almost blinded her, like the flash of the sun.

In the silence, her ears rang with bells, and after a while she heard herself sniveling. She stank of piss. The bones in which she lay stank of hot iron. Her eyes stung as she wept. She could not stop herself. She just could not stop, not even when the spell he had raised dissolved and his soldiers broke out cheering. Not even when flame sprang from the oil lamp and they set about their encampment, each one as merry as if he had faced down his own death and laughed to escape it.

She could not stop, especially when Lord Hugh came into view, carrying the burning lamp. He paused to study the bones with more interest than he studied her, a touch of that ice-blue gaze. The kiss of a winter blizzard would have been more welcome.