PROLOGUE (62 page)

But he watches. Is this event the one he must use as his guide? What does the funeral presage? His own death if he returns to his father's army? Or the death of the Soft Ones whom Bloodheart will attack?

Risk much or risk little.

In the end, staring through the branches at the small mourning party, he knows he always knew the answer to his question. He is too restless to stay. Death is only a change in existence; it is neither ending nor beginning, no matter what these Soft Ones may think. He will return to Hundse, to
Gent.

The mourners file past him on the narrow track. One of them, a young female with hollow eyes and a body frailer than most, still cries her salt tears though the others attempt to soothe her. Did the infant come from her body? And if so, how was it planted there? Are they the same as the beasts, who also plant their young in and feed them out of the mother's body? But though the Soft Ones resemble brute animals, he thinks it cannot be completely true. They speak, as people do. They gaze above themselves into the fjall of the heavens and wonder what has brought them to walk on the earth. This, also, true people do. And they do something he has seen no other creature, not RockChildren, not animal, not the small cousins of the earth nor the fell beasts of the ocean water, do.

They weep.

Alain woke to the profound silence of Lavas stronghold asleep in the dark and cold of a late winter's night. But a tickle nagged at him, like a hound scratching at the door. Rage slumbered on. As he rose, Sorrow whuffed softly and clattered to his feet, following him. The other hounds lay curled here and there on the carpet or near the bed. Terror lay atop Lavastine's feet, the two of them snoring softly together, in concert. Alain slipped on a tunic. He had heard something, or perhaps it was only the residue of his dream.

He latched the door carefully behind him and placed a hand on Sorrow's muzzle. It was cold in the hall and cold on the stairs. A draft leaked up the stone stairwell, a breath of warmth from the hall. He followed its scent and at last, beneath the breathing silence of hall and stone, heard what he was listening for: the sound of weeping.

It was so soft that he only found its source when he was halfway into the hall, attracted by the red glow of hearth fire. In the alcoves, servants and men-at-arms slept; others would have returned to their own huts outside the palisade or down in the village. But a single heaped shape more like a forgotten bundle of laundry lay by the fire, shuddering.

The Eagle wept alone on her rough pallet by the fire.

Sorrow whined nervously.

"Sit!" Alain whispered, leaving the hound sitting in the Doos middle of the floor with his tail thumping in the rushes. He approached the Eagle.

She did not notice him until he was almost upon her. Then, gasping aloud, she choked on a sob, started up, and reached for a stick in the fire.

"Hush," he said. "Don't be scared. It's only me. Alain. Don't burn yourself."

"Oh, God," she murmured, but she drew her hand away from the fire and used it to wipe her nose instead. He could not make out much of her face, but he could smell the salt of her tears in the smoky air.

"Why are you crying?" he asked.

"Ai, Lady," she whispered. "It wasn't so bad, riding away. But now I must go back."

"Go back where?"

She shook her head, trying now to dry her tears, but they still came despite her wish. "It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters!"

She was silent for so long that he began to think he would have to speak, or that he had somehow offended her.

"Why should it matter to you?" she asked at last, haltingly.

"It should matter to every one of us when we see one of our kinsfolk lost in sorrow."

"We are not kin, you and I." The words came choked from her mouth. "I have no kin."

"We are all the sons and daughters of God. Isn't that kinship enough?"

"I
—I don't know." She stirred restlessly and held out her hands toward the coals to warm them. Reflexively, he fetched some sticks from the woodpile just inside the door and fed the fire. She watched him, still silent.

"You don't want to go back," he said, settling beside her and pulling his knees up to his chest. Sorrow whined softly but kept his distance. "I saw you," he added, "when you rode in from Gent, when the king was in Autun. You and the other Eagle. I don't know his name."

"Wolfhere."

"Aren't Eagles your kin?"

"In a way."

"You've really no one at all?"

"My mother died about ten years ago. And Da is dead." How bitter this admission came he could hear in the tight rein she held on her voice. "Ai, Lady, almost two years ago now. He was all I had."

"And I was granted a wealth of fathers," he said, suddenly struck by how great his good fortune had been.

"How can you have a wealth of fathers? How can you have more than one?"

He hung his head, shamed to think with what anger he had left Merchant Henri at their last meeting, how badly he had behaved. Would Henri ever forgive him for that pride and anger? "I was fostered to one, a good man, and grew up calling him 'Father.' I came lately to the second."

"Oh, yes." She turned toward him, expression almost visible in the darkness. "King Henry granted Count Lavastine the right to name you as his heir. Isn't that right?"

"And I only a bastard before," he said lightly, but even so, and even though Lavastine's soldiers and servants had now accepted him, the memory of their visit to the manor of Lady Aldegund and Lord Geoffrey still stung.

"Who was your mother?" she asked, then said, embarrassed, "I beg your pardon, my lord. I've no right to ask such a thing."

"No, no, I asked
you
questions. You may ask me questions in my turn. She was a servingwoman here, gotten with child by my father and put aside when he married."

"That story has been told before," she said sharply. "Noble lords never ask if their attentions are welcome. That is the last thing they think of." Then, while he was still so astonished by this accusation that he could only blink, eyes tearing from the smoke, she huddled away from him, cowering as if she expected to be hit. "I beg your pardon. I meant no such thing. Forgive me."

But he could only gape, struck so hard by this new and unwelcome notion that it was only when a flea crawled up his ankle from the rushes matting the floor that he came to himself, scratching it off. "It never occurred to me," he said, ashamed now. "Perhaps she loved him, too
—it's possible—or wanted something from him. But maybe she never cared for him at all and had no choice—" Hard on this thought, another flashed before him in all its brilliance. "Is there a noble lord on the progress who torments you in this way? Isn't there anything the king or the other Eagles can do to stop it?"

"Ai, Lady," she whispered, and because she began to cry again, he knew his guess was right. "There's nothing Eagles can do. And nothing the king will do, for
he's
cleverer than the king and all the lords and ladies at court. They can't see
him
but only what he lays before them to see. There is no one to aid me in any case. He is the son of a margrave. I have no one to protect me!"

"I will protect you," said Alain. "I am heir to the county of Lavas, after all. That counts for something."

Suddenly she clutched his hands. Though the air was cold, her skin was hot. "I pray you, my lord, if you can do anything, if you can make it possible for me to stay here
— to send someone else in my place back to the king's progress..."

"Then what?" asked Alain, amazed by the intensity in her voice. "Is this noble lord so loathsome to you?"

She let go of him at once. "You don't understand," she said fiercely. "I have no kin, only the Eagles. Even if I had any fondness for this man
—which I do not!—if I became his concubine I would be cast out of the Eagles. Then where would I be if he tired of me? I wouldn't even have the protection of the Eagles. God help me, it doesn't matter. He'll never tire of me. He'll never let me alone."

He was afraid she was going to start weeping again. The confident Eagle he had seen on the road this morning seemed a distant memory now. She was all tears and fear. "What you're saying doesn't make sense! First you say you fear he will cast you off, and then you say you fear he'll never do so. It must be one or the other, surely, and in truth, my friend, I think you are right to fear the first more. If he favors you for a few years until he finds another younger, prettier woman, then you are kinless and without support when he puts you aside. If he never puts you aside, then surely you will live in good circumstances for the rest of your life, and any children you have by him will be well provided for."

At that, she began half to cry and half to snort with laughter. Had she gone mad? "You sound like Mistress Birta. Always calculating what is most practical."

"That's what my Aunt Bel
—the woman who raised me— taught me. No use worrying about the fox stealing the
chickens when the henhouse is safely locked and it's your house that's burning down."

Her sobs and laughter subsided into hiccuping chuckles. "That sounds like something Da would say. But you don't understand. You can't understand. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to have disturbed your rest this night."

"I want to understand!" he said, angry that she would think he
didn't
care. He sought and found her hands where she had wrapped them in an end of her cloak. "There is so much fear in you, Liath. What are you running from?" He leaned forward without thinking and kissed her on the forehead. A few stray ends of her hair tickled his nose. Her entire body stiffened and at once he dropped her hands and leaned back. Sorrow, behind them, growled softly and scrabbled forward, but not too much, not too close.

"I beg your pardon!" said Alain. What had come over him? Yet what he felt now was nothing like the sinful, intense yearning that engulfed him when he thought of Tal-lia. He simply knew he must find some way to shelter Liath, just as he had known he had to save the Eika prince that awful night when Lackling was sacrificed in place of the Eika.

By now his eyes had adjusted well enough to the gloom that he could see her fairly well, sitting stiff and straight, her cloak draped in folds down to the floor, her single braid tucked away inside the hood. When she turned her head to stare at the fire, her eyes glinted with a spark of blue.

She only needed encouragement.

Haltingly, hoping to encourage her by his own open-heartedness, he told his story. It came out all in a jumble as he skipped from one thing to the next, watching her face by firelight to see how she responded. He tqld her of Fifth Son and the hounds, of Lackling's murder by Biscop Antonia, of the
guivre
and Agius' death. Of the vision he had seen in the old Dariyan ruins, the shade who spoke the name "Liathano" and then vanished in a maelstrom of fire and smoke and battle. Of the dreams he still had, his link to the Eika prince.

When he stumbled to a close, she held a hand out to warm it over the coals. "Artemisia describes five types of dreams: the enigmatic dream, the prophetic vision, the oracular dream, the nightmare, and the apparition. It's hard to judge what you experienced. 'Enigmatic' because the meaning of your dreams is concealed with strange shapes and veils
—"

"But they don't seem like dreams at all. It's as if I see through his eyes, as if I
am
him."

"The Eika are not like us," she said softly. "They wield magics we have no knowledge of."

The comment surprised him into blurting out a careless thought. "Do you have knowledge of magic?"

Their silence drew out until it became like a living thing which, hiding in the shadows, does not know whether to bolt into the nether darkness or advance into the clear, clean light. Abruptly, in a low, almost monotone voice and in short bursts punctuated by silences, she began to talk.

She told him of a childhood faintly remembered, of the sudden flight she and her da had made from that pleasant home after the death of her mother. She told him of many years wandering in distant lands, and though she spoke as one who has lived every day in fear, he ached to hear her speak so matter-of-factly about all the far and curious places he had ever dreamed of visiting. It seemed, strangely, that inside her words he heard her wish for a safe haven, like the walls of a monastery, to which she could retire, while she had lived the very adventure he had always hoped for and known would be denied him. She had seen Darre and the wild coast of eastern Aosta. She had sailed to Nakria and roamed the ruins of dead Kartiako. She had explored the fabulous palace of the ruler of Qurtubah in the Jinna kingdom of Andalla and wandered the market stalls of busy Medemelacha in Salia. She had seen with her own eyes creatures and wonders he had never heard tell of, not even from the merchants of Osna village, the most 'traveled people he knew.