PROLOGUE (13 page)

She stumbled back. Groping, she found the door; shak
‍
ing, she fumbled with the latch, and at last they got it open and fell inside. The soldier slammed the door shut and latched it behind them. The roar deafened her; it filled the air as if it were itself part of the air. Then, slowly, it subsided, faded, until once more the wind was all the sound they heard, the endless tearing wind and the hail of rain and snow and pebbles against the wood walls.

Inside, it was warm and dark. The nervous horses stamped; the stablekeeper spoke in a soothing voice. Hanna heard, also, others of the Lions moving 'round the stable, calming the animals. The guest-master sobbed softly.

"What was that noise?" she asked as the building creaked and groaned and the wind shook the rafters and the low throb of bells numbed her down to her boots. Her hip and shoulder ached. She rubbed her hands to warm them.

"Avalanche," said the guest-master through his tears. "Ai, Lady, I know that sound well, for I have lived in these mountains twenty years. And close by, it was. I fear me that the cloister
—" No farther could he go. He began to weep again.

"What were those creatures?" she asked.

Wolfhere untied her.
"Galla,"
he said. The word had a hard, foreign, ugly sound, the "g" more of a guttural "gh."

"What are galla?" she asked.

"Something we should not speak of now, with them walking abroad, for they might hear their name spoken a third time and seek us out who know of them," he said in such a tone she knew he meant to say no more. "We must wait out the storm."

It was a long night. She could not sleep, nor did Wolfhere, though perhaps some of the Lions did. That the guest-master did sleep, fitfully, she knew because his weeping slackened at last.

Just as the gale slackened at last. Come dawn, Wolfhere ventured out with Hanna right behind him. It was a cloudless morning, the sky a delicate, washed-out blue. The mountains stood in all their glory, white peaks gleaming in the pale new sun. There was not a breath of wind. But for the debris scattered everywhere, the gate and much of the fence enclosure knocked down, the woodpile torn apart and scattered, shutters torn from hinges, and goats milling in confusion in the middle of the garden, she would never have guessed there had been a storm at all. Oddly, the beehives stood unscathed.

But the infirmary was gone.

There monks and merchants scurried, a swarm of them buzzing round the huge pile of boulders and earth that covered what had once been the infirmary. Built of stone and timber, it was obliterated now, melded with the great bank of mountain that had slid down on top of it.

They hurried over. The monks had managed to pull from the rubble the bodies of their ancient brother and of two Lions. Of the other two soldiers
—Hanna recognized these as the two who had been posted outside, along the wall behind the cell that had imprisoned Antonia and Heribert—one had a broken leg and the other lay on the ground, moaning, his skin unbroken but something broken inside him. The Brother Infirmarian knelt beside him, probing his abdomen gently. Tears wet the monk's face.

"It happened so fast," the monk said, looking up when Wolfhere knelt beside him. "I ran outside, hearing the noise, and then saw
—nay, I did not see it but
felt
it, felt its power. Then the avalanche came. Lady forgive me, but I ran. Only when I saw it was too late, only when I saw the infirmary would be overwhelmed, did I recall poor Brother Fusulus, who was too weak to save himself."

"You were spared," said Wolfhere, "because you have yet work to do in this world. What of this man, here?"

The Infirmarian shook his head. "God will decide if he is to live."

Wolfhere rose and paced over the edge of the avalanche. Hanna followed him but kept back, not wanting to venture too close. She could see the bones of the infirmary underneath rock and rubble, mortared stones torn up by their roots, planks strewn like so much offal, a bed overturned but its rope base untouched, a three-legged stool with one leg broken, dried herbs once tied in bundles now scattered every which way on the torn grass.

"What of the prisoners?" asked Wolfhere when he turned back to the others.

The abbot himself came forward. He had been soothing the presbyter, who had already sent his servants to the stables to make ready to leave. "We cannot find their bodies,"

he said. "This is most distressing. The rocks have buried them utterly. We will try to dig them out, but
—

"No matter." Wolfhere surveyed the huge scar, the trail of the avalanche, that now scored the side of the ridge. Something shifted in the rubble and a few pebbles bounced down to land at his feet. He backed away nervously. "Search only if it is safe. The prisoners are lost to us now."

"What will you do?" asked the abbot. "What of the two injured men? Brother Infirmarian says this poor man must not be moved any distance, and the other will not be able to walk for many weeks."

"Can they remain here until they are healed?"

"Of course." The abbot directed his monks to move the injured men away.

"Come, Hanna," said Wolfhere. He walked back toward the stables, leaving the Lions to help.

"Why did you say it in that way? That the prisoners are 'lost to us.' Not that they're dead."

He looked at her curiously. "Do you think they are dead? Do you believe she lies there under the rocks? That someday, if the monks can dig the building out, they will find their two crushed bodies or their shattered bones?"

"Of course they must be dead. They were locked in the cell. How could they have escaped
—" Seeing his expression, she broke off. "You don't think they're dead."

"I do not. That was no natural storm."

No natural storm. A blizzard blown up in the midst of mild summer weather. Strange unnatural creatures he had named galla walking abroad, stinking of the forge.

"Where will she go, Hanna? That is the question we must ask ourselves now. Where will she go? Who will shelter such as her?" "I don't know."

"Sabella might, if she could reach Sabella. But Sabella is herself in prison, so Wendar and Varre are closed to Antonia, for now." He sighed sharply and stopped at the stable door, turning back to look up at the mountains, so calm, so clear, above them. "I should have known. I should have prepared for this. But I underestimated her power." "Where will
we
go?"

He considered. "Alas, I fear we must split up. One of us must continue on to Darre to lay the charges against Biscop Antonia before the skopos. That way we remain prepared, whatever Antonia means to do. One of us must return to Henry and warn him, and hope he believes us." He smiled suddenly then, with a wry expression that made Hanna remember how much she liked him. "Better that one be you, Hanna. You will take four of the Lions, I the other two
— when I journey back this way, I will pick up the two who remain here, if they survive."

She had grown used to Wolfhere and now, abruptly, was afraid to travel without him. "How long will it take you? How soon will you return to Wendar?"

He shrugged. "I cannot say. I may be able to get back across the pass this autumn, but most likely I won't be able to return until next summer.
You
must convince Henry, child." He touched her, briefly, on her Eagle's badge, newly made and still as bright as if the memory of Manfred's death lit it. "You have earned this, Hanna. Do not think you are unequal to the task." He went inside the stables.

Hanna lingered outside, staring up at the three great peaks so beautiful, so silent, so at peace in their vast strength, their sheer living force, that it seemed impossible to believe at this instant that three
—brief—human lives had been extinguished in the shadow at their feet. What was it the bard had called them?
Youngwife.
Monk's Ridge. Terror. She shaded her eyes against the rising sun and looked for the hawk, but no birds flew in the sky this fair morning.

She would return to Wendar, to the king's progress, without seeing the city of Darre and the palace of the holy skopos. Without seeing, perhaps, a few elves or other strange creatures not of humankind. And yet, this also meant she would return to Liath sooner.

Thinking of Liath made her think of Hugh, though she did not want to think of Hugh. Beautiful Hugh. And thinking of Hugh made her remember what he had done, and so she thought of Ivar. Ai, Lady, where was Ivar now? Had he reached Quedlinhame safely? Did he like it there? Was he resigned to his fate? Or did he still fight against it?

IVAR
hated Quedlinhame. He hated the monastery, he hated the daily round of monotonous prayer, and most of all he hated the novices' dormitory, which was a narrow barracks of a building where he spent all of his nights and much of his day in miserable silence along with the other novices. Worst, because of the careful reckoning of days at Mass and in prayerbooks, he knew exactly how many days he had been imprisoned here.

One hundred and seventy-seven days ago, on St. Bonfil-ia's Day, he had knelt before the postern gate in a cold rain and after a night of utter wretchedness had been admitted onto the grounds of Quedlinhame. They did not even give him a tour of the famous church. Instead, his new keepers immediately led him to the novitiary and locked him in with the rest of the poor souls consigned to this purgatory.

The poor male souls, of course. Quedlinhame was a double monastery; the abbess, Mother Scholastica, ruled over both monks and nuns who lived apart but prayed together. The novices' dormitory let out onto a small cloister, a courtyard marked off by trim columns. A high wood fence ran down the center of this cloister, dividing it into two smaller courtyards, one for the male novices and one for the female novices whose dormitory lay on the opposite side.

Ivar prayed briefly at that fence every day unless the weather was awful, once in the morning just after the service of Terce and once in the afternoon before Vespers. Or at least, he appeared to be praying. In fact, in these, his only unsupervised moments of the day, he studied the wood planks. In the last five months, he and the other three first-year novices had examined that fence finger's breadth by finger's breadth, each upright plank, each horizontal beam, each crack and warp and weathered knot. But he could not find any chink through which to see onto the other side.

Were the female novices young? Almost certainly. Like him, most of them would have been put into the church
— most willingly, some not—by their families when they reached adolescence.

Were they pretty? Perhaps. This goal he had set himself soon after he arrived: to identify each female novice by name and face. It kept him from going crazy, even though he knew it was wrong and against the rules. Or perhaps
because
it was against the rules.

Right now, his fellow first-year novice, Baldwin, had finished digging dirt out from under his nails with his shaving knife and now he stuck that knife into the minute gap between two warping planks. He wiggled the blade back and forth in what Ivar supposed would be a vain attempt to try to widen the gap enough to peer through. Baldwin, however, would not give up. In all things, fair-haired Baldwin knew that eventually he would get his way.

Ermanrich lumbered up and plopped down beside Ivar. He shivered in the cool autumn wind, which Ivar found pleasant after a hot summer confined within walls, but Ermanrich, though stoutest in body of their band of four, was also most susceptible to fevers and runny noses. He coughed now and wiped running eyes and squinted at Baldwin's handiwork.

"There must be a weak spot," Ermanrich muttered. He picked at his nails, which were dirty from turning over soil in the garden now that all the vegetables were harvested. "Hathumod says the first years all think Baldwin is very handsome." Hathumod was Ermanrich's cousin and in her second year as a novice. She and Ermanrich had mysterious ways of communicating which Ivar had not yet divined the nature of.

"What does Hathumod think of our Baldwin?" Ivar asked. "She won't say."

Baldwin glanced at them and grinned, then went back to his work.

He had every reason to be vain of his looks, but of course, according to his own account, it was those looks that had landed him in the monastery. He was, indeed, the handsomest fellow Ivar had ever laid eyes on...with the exception of Prater Hugh.

Ai, Lady! Even thinking of that bastard Hugh made Ivar angry all over again, trapped by helpless fury. He had tried to free Liath but had been made to look a fool and then gotten condemned to this life in the bargain. All of it Hugh's fault, that damned arrogant handsome bastard. What had happened to Liath? Was she still Hugh's concubine? At least, if reports were true, Hanna was with her.

Ivar could not begrudge Hanna her choice
—service with Liath rather than with him. Liath needed Hanna more than he did, and anyway here at Quedlinhame he was not allowed to converse with any woman except Mother Scholastica. He had brought two male servants with him, and they tended to his clothing and his bed and with the other servants tidied the dormitory and in general did whatever manual labor he himself did not have time for, since as a novice his main duties were to pray and to study. Had he brought Hanna, she would have been sent to work as a laundress or cook, and he would never have seen her. Better that she stayed with Liath. He sighed heavily.