PROLOGUE (37 page)

After the main courses, instead of entertainment, Count Lavastine questioned the townsfolk of Osna about the Eika.

Two Eika ships had been sighted the summer after the monastery had been sacked, another three this past summer, but they had all sailed by Osna Sound, keeping out beyond the islands. No reports had come of villages nearby being burned; no one had heard any rumors of winter encampments. A forester
—one of Garia's cousin's sons who ranged wide looking for game and exceptional stands of timber—had seen nothing along the coast for two days' walk in either direction, nor had he heard tales from those he met on his travels.

Lavastine questioned the merchants in greater detail, and from them he heard more varied stories. None had himself run afoul of Eika, but merchants traded not just goods but gossip. Four Eika ships poised along the coast just north of the rich emporium of Medemelacha had suddenly turned north and sailed away. A noble's castle in Salia had been the scene of a vicious attack; one city had held out two months against a siege; refugees from a monastery burned on the island kingdom of Alba had arrived in a skin boat in Medemelacha late in the summer with an awful tale of slaughter and looting.

Alain sat dutifully and listened, but what he most wanted to ask he dared not ask: Where was Henri? Why did he not sit among the Osna merchants? What had happened to his family?

Not my family any longer.

Mistress Garia's bed, the best in the house, was given to the count and his heir for the night. Their servants commandeered pallets or slept on the floor around them, and, in the warmth of the longhouse with a hearth burning throughout the cold late autumn's night, all were comfortable. The smell of old timber, the wreath of smoke curling along the roof beams, the smell of babies and sour milk nearby and of livestock crowded into the other end of the hall comforted Alain; they reminded him of his childhood. He had slept in such a house for many years, and his dreams had been good ones.

In the morning he drew Deacon Miria aside as the grooms saddled the horses and the soldiers made ready to leave. "Where are Bella and Henri? What has become of them and the family?"

"Alain!" Lavastine had already mounted and now gestured impatiently for Alain to join him.

"You're a good boy, Alain, to ask after them," she replied with a look compounded of sympathy, distaste, and amusement. Then she recalled to whom she was now speaking. "My lord."

"But where are they?"

"At the old steward's house. They come to Mass each week faithfully, but many of the others can't forgive them their good fortune."

"Alain!"

"Thank you!" He would have kissed the old deacon on the cheek but he was not sure, with so many folk standing about and staring, if the gesture was one he was now allowed to make. She inclined her head with formal dignity.

He mounted. As the count and his retinue rode out of the village, children trotted at a safe distance behind them, giggling and pointing and shouting.

"What did you ask?" demanded Lavastine.

They rode past the stink of pig sties and the winter shelters for the sheep and cows. They crossed through the southern palisade gate and skirted the stream which was bounded on its eastern shore by a small tannery and the village slaughterhouse
—still busy with the butchering of the animals who couldn't be wintered over. Alain held a hand over his nose and mouth until they got downwind. If the stench bothered Lavastine, he did not show it; his attention remained focused on Alain.

"I asked about my foster family," said Alain at last, lowering his hand. "I found out where they've gone to."

"They've gone somewhere?" Lavastine said without much curiosity, although for an established family to pick up and move was unheard of.

"They've taken the steward's house..." He hurried on since Lavastine clearly did not know what he meant. "It's a small manor house. It was built in Emperor Taillefer's reign for the steward who oversaw these lands then. That was before the port was established. An old man lived there. He was the grandson of the last steward, but he'd little to keep and no servants . . . the fields went fallow. And he'd no ship to send out, though there's a decent landing spot below the house."

"Make your point, son, if there is one you intend." But the road made Alain's point for him: The packed-dirt way forked ahead. The wider left fork continued south, where it would eventually veer east to join the road that took the traveler to Lavas Holding.

"The path to the right leads to the steward's house, which lies down in a sheltered vale by the bay." "And?"

But Alain knew he would never forgive himself if he did not see them. "I beg you, Father, may we go see them?" Lavastine blinked. He looked, for an instant, the way a man might who has just been told that his wife has given birth not to a child but to a puppy. But he pulled up his horse just before the fork in the road, and his soldiers, obedient, halted behind him.

Alain's breath ran shallow as he tried desperately to hold back further words, but could not. "I beg you," he burst out. "Just this one time."

Alain knew of no window into Lavastine's soul and thoughts. His curt speech, his brusque gestures, his impatience and his efficiency, all melded into a whole so seamless that Alain could only suppose, as the church taught, that the outer man mirrors the inner. Only Prater Agius had taught differently: that an outer seeming might mask the inner heart
—just as pious Agius had, until the end, concealed his belief in the heretical doctrine of the flaying knife and the death and redemption of the blessed Daisan. "Very well," said Lavastine crisply. Whether he approved this course or disliked it Alain could not have said, nor did he really wish to know. He had to see Aunt Bel and Stancy and Julien and little Agnes and the baby, if it still lived. He had to speak with Henri, to be sure that he didn't— Didn't what?

Didn't condemn him as an oath breaker for not entering the church?

He took in a breath and started forward. His mare, a meek creature at the best of times, picked her way through the litter of leaves shrouding the trail. Lavastine let him lead their little cavalcade down the narrow path that wound through oak and silvery birch, maple and beech. He saw the outline of buildings past bare branches, a small estate with a house, stables, cookhouse, and outbuildings set around an open court that could also serve as corral. They passed out of the forest and into the scrub surrounding the estate, stumps not yet burned and dug out, brushy undergrowth and new seedlings struggling up toward the light, strips of field cut out of the brush, wisps of winter wheat growing in neat green rows along soil ridges.

It took him a moment to recognize the young man standing in unmown grass at one end of a long log set up on sawbucks. Stripped of bark and being planed down to an even curved round, the log had the lean supple strength necessary for a mast. At the far end of the log, scraping, stood Henri, his back to the road; Alain knew him instantly. The young man at the near end had the broad shoulders of a soldier, but when he turned to stare, Alain realized this was his cousin Julien, filled out to a man's stature now and half a head taller than he had been two winters ago.

Julien saw the cavalcade and cried out so loudly that first two children and then Aunt Bel came to the door of the house; several laborers Alain did not recognize emerged from the workshop. Henri looked up once and with a deliberate shrug went back to his work. But the others flooded out, all of them, Aunt Bel and Stancy, and little Agnes looking more like a woman than the girl Alain remembered. Even the baby toddled out, curly fair hair wound down around thin shoulders. Stancy had a new baby in a sling at her hips. A woman in the robes of a cleric hurried forward to stand next to Aunt Bel. A small child Alain did not recognize stood, mouth open and stick upraised, forgetting the geese she had been set to watch over. The birds strayed into the woods, but only Alain noticed because everyone else was staring at
him.

Aunt Bel walked forward to place herself between her family and the count's entourage. She folded her hands respectfully before her and inclined her head in the same manner, not quite as an equal but neither as a servant. "My lord count, I give you and your company greetings to this house."

"Mistress Bella," said Lavastine in acknowledgment, a fine mark of notice since Alain hadn't imagined the count remembered her name.

The cleric murmured a blessing upon them all.

The geese were wandering unnoticed back in among the trees while the child gawped at the soldiers in their blue tabards and at the banners that fluttered in the breeze.

"The geese!" Alain blurted as the first one vanished from his sight. There was a sudden flurry in the crowd. The goosegirl began to sob, frozen in place. Julien ran toward the wood, but that only startled the geese and sent some flapping every which way while the others hissed and snapped; one bit a laborer hard on the fingers.

Alain dismounted and flung his reins to a groom. "Move back," he said to the laborer and the few children who had pressed forward. "Down," he called to the hounds, who had started to bark and strain against their leashes. They stilled obediently. "Julien!" he scolded, coming up beside his cousin, "you know that's no way to bring in geese." "Yes, my lord," mumbled Julien, red in the face. Alain blushed. Had he sounded so proud? But the geese were scattering and the goosegirl had now hunkered down on her haunches and started bawling outright. He squatted beside her. "Hush, child." He reached out to touch her dirty chin. "This will not bring them back. Now you go stand there, by the gate to the pen, and you shut it tight once they've all gone in."

His fine clothing and his clean face and hands overawed her; he saw that by her expression and the way her gaze darted from hands to face to tunic and back again. Her bawling ceased and, though tears still ran down her cheeks, she obeyed him. He went a few steps into the forest and began the onerous job of coaxing the flustered and annoyed geese back out of the trees and into the pen. But he spoke softly and moved slowly, and in time they came, suspicious and ill-tempered but not, at this moment, intent on inflicting bodily harm. Long necks arching, still hissing at the audience of family and soldiers, they followed Alain to the pen and went inside as meekly as geese were able. At the gate, one gander hissed and retreated. Alain circled him carefully, crouched, and snaked out a hand to grab the feet from behind, sweeping the bird up while he took a firm grip on its neck with his other hand. He deposited the squawking, furious bird in the pen, jumped back, and let the goosegirl slam the gate shut. The geese subsided with a hissing and flapping of wings.

He looked back in time to see Aunt Bel trying not to laugh, the soldiers and laborers staring in outright astonishment, and his father watching with his thinnest smile
—the one always linked with his disapproval.

"I see you haven't forgotten everything you learned here," said a voice at his side. Alain turned to confront his father
—not his
father,
but his foster father. Henri.

Aunt Bel raised her voice. "My lord count, I hope you and yours will take a meal with us. My own daughters will prepare it."

Lavastine nodded curtly. He could scarcely refuse. It was practically a sin to scorn hospitality. But after he dismounted, he gestured to Alain to attend him.

"If you will allow me, my lord," Aunt Bel continued while Stancy and Agnes and the other women hurried inside and the laborers retreated to stand at a respectful distance. Julien followed Henri back to their work on the mast. "Rather than wait inside, perhaps I may show you around the manor. It was your largesse that made it possible for us to improve upon our circumstances and settle here."

"Indeed."

Aunt Bel kept a careful distance from the hounds, who growled at her while a padded handler staked them out away from the house. While the soldiers took the horses to graze and water, she conducted Lavastine and Alain on a tour; the cleric attended Aunt Bel much as if Bel were herself a noble lady. It was a fine grand house, although not of course nearly as grand as Lavastine's fortress, and included a good stretch of ground with fields, two workshops, pastureland and woodland, and a broad path leading down to a sheltered beach where the family's ship had been drawn up onto logs and covered with a thatch roof for the winter.

"My brother Henri is a merchant, my lord, and we have for some years shipped both cloth and quernstones south to Medemalacha. There is a quarry near here in the hills where we get our stone. With the generous payment we received from you, my lord, we have been able to expand our business in addition to moving to this manor. I have hired laborers to carve soapstone into vessels for cooking and storage. We will ship them to Medemalacha also. In time Henri hopes to sail north as far as Gent, although there is more risk of Eika attacks in that direction, and next year he intends to attempt his first trip northwest to Alba, to the port of Hefenfelthe on the Temes River."