PROLOGUE (86 page)

Under the unsparing eye of the sun, the prince appeared perhaps more pathetic than appalling. Yet he was a shocking enough sight with the five monstrous dogs in attendance as if they were all that remained of his proud Dragons. " King's Dragon he had once been. Now, except for his shape and the princely authority of his bearing, he was scarcely different from those dogs.

But he had not forgotten how to kill.

Their skirmishes were brief, and though Lavastine had lost three men in the fight within the cathedral, he lost none now, not with Sanglant at their head. Eika were as like to run from them, seeing the prince in his madness, as join the fray.

The gates lay open and they found Ulric and most of his party on the bridge, staring at the river plain beyond where the battle still raged. Clouds of dust as well as the lay of the land obscured the fighting.

"My lord count!" cried Captain Ulric when he recognized their group.

"Beware!" shouted one of his men. A volley of arrows showered into them. Two soldiers dropped, one with a hand clasped to his thigh, another pierced in the throat.

Sanglant growled and leaped, dogs after him, into a stand of brush that moments later Liath saw contained four skulking Eika. She made ready to shoot...

But there was no need. Sanglant struck down two even as his dogs bowled over and rended the others, although one of the dogs was slashed so badly that its fellows immediately turned on it and bit through its throat.

"There!" shouted Lavastine. Liath wrenched her gaze away from Sanglant to see a troop of horsemen riding out Doos of the dusty murk that was the battleground. At once men shouted and waved, and within moments Lord Geoffrey reined up. He had but twenty men remaining as well as some extra horses following along.

"Cousin!" he cried, and he flung himself off his horse to clap Lavastine vigorously on the shoulder. "Ai, Lord! I thought you dead, surely."

"Any news of those who remained behind on the hill?"

Lord Geoffrey could only shrug. Then, eyes widening, he stared at the apparition that, silent but all the more frightening because of that silence, now commandeered one of the riderless horses and swung up onto it. "Lady have mercy!" he breathed. "What is it?"

The prince flung away the spear and galloped northwest toward the thickest cloud of dust.

"Eagle! Take a horse and ride after him. The king will have my head if he gets himself killed. I doubt he is in his right mind." With this cool assessment, Lavastine turned back to his cousin. "Has the king arrived?"

"I know not, cousin. It is madness out there, and most of our people long since lost."

"You've done well to survive this long." But Lavastine did not seem to mean the words as praise, any more than he meant his earlier comment, calling Sanglant out of his right mind, as censure. "Eagle!" His gaze tripped over her where she still stood, gawping, frozen, unable to act. "Go!"

It was easier to obey than to think. She took the mount offered her and left them just as a party of Eika came running and a new skirmish was joined.

Chaos.

Through the streaming battle she rode on the trail of Sanglant, who was himself all movement. Eika fled in confusion or retreated in disciplined groups, and cavalry charged through and reformed and charged back, scattering them, cutting down those who ran and pounding again and again those who held steady.

Sanglant drove his horse wherever the fight was thickest. Certainly he was brave; perhaps he was also insane. After he rallied a group of horsemen who had gotten cut off from their captain, she heard his name called out above the riot of noise like a talisman.
She
tried merely to keep away from Eika, for in this tempest she had few clear shots and plenty of chances to get hacked down from behind, though most Eika seemed to be running for their lives. It was all she could do to keep Sanglant in her sight.

Through the haze of dust she caught a glimpse of Fesse's banner. Then it vanished, whipping against the wind as its bearer galloped away in another direction with Fesse's duchess and troops.

They had come so far over the ground that she did not know where she was. Her eyes streamed from the dust kicked up and the glare of the westering sun. Ahead, a soldier leaned from his horse and struck down one of the dogs following Sanglant and rode on, spear ready to pierce the next which, loping after the prince, was unaware of the threat to its back.

But Sanglant was not unaware. He reined his horse hard around and brought the flat of his sword down against the soldier's padded shoulder. The man tumbled to the ground and the dogs leaped forward, only to be brought up short. Liath could not hear what the prince shouted, only saw the terrified soldier scramble back onto his horse.

Then, horns. "To the princess! She's surrounded!"

"To me! Form up!" the prince cried, his hoarse tenor ringing out over chaos. Shining with the heat of battle on him, he was not as frightful a sight as he had first appeared when he was Bloodheart's prisoner, a wild, chained beast. Men came riding to form up around him, and as his company gathered, they shouted jubilantly, sure of victory. Where Princess Sapientia's banner had gotten trapped in a strong current of Eika battling their way to the river, Sanglant and the newly regrouped cavalry drove in and scattered the enemy before them.

"The king! King Henry comes!"

Liath could not see the princess, for the entire flank had crumbled. But as the Eika line dissolved into rout, she saw Sanglant struggle free of the crush and ride northwest out beyond the fighting to where neglected fields lay drowsy under the afternoon sun. She fought her way out of the press and galloped after him.

He rode on, not looking back. Three Eika dogs pursued him as he left the battle behind, and she was too far away to shout a warning. At her back she heard horsemen, and she glanced behind to see a dozen or so men wearing the tabards of those he had rallied on the field.

Ahead, a line of trees and scrub marked the course of a tributary. There she lost sight of him as he crashed in among the trees. When she found his abandoned horse, she dismounted and prudently waited until her pursuit came up beside her.

"My God, Eagle!" said the man, a captain by his bearing and armor. "Was that Prince Sanglant? We thought him dead!"

"Taken captive," she said.

"And survived a year." Around him, his men murmured. She heard in their voices the melody of awe, composing now the beginning, she supposed, of another story of San-giant's courage and cunning and strength. "But where's he gone?"

They followed his track, made manifest by a litter of filthy shreds of tabard and tunic and leggings, things that had once been clothing but now were only foul rags. He had dropped the sword and the gold torque by the water's edge. The current still bore sticks and grass and, once, a bloodied glove quickly carried along the far bank, but where a bend in the stream and a fallen tree made somewhat of a pool he had gone headlong into the water.

When they reached him, he was methodically tearing off every last piece of clothing that still hung on him, some of it adhered to his skin. The three Eika dogs had thrashed out after him and now ferociously worried at the odorous remains, such as they could grab in their jaws before it swirled downstream.

"My lord prince!" The captain strode forward, and at his exclamation the dogs howled and made for shore.

Sanglant barked at them. There was no other word for it; it was not a spoken command. They obeyed nonetheless and contented themselves with sitting half in and half out of water on a bank more pebble than sand, growling at any who came too near while the prince took handfuls of sand and scoured his skin and then his hair as if he meant to scrape himself raw.

"Lady bless us," murmured one of the soldiers as if for all of them, "he's so thin."

But as if in the coarse river sand lay the property of truth, something emerged from the scouring, something recognizable: the man she remembered, although he was clothed only in water and that only up to his waist.

"/
will never love any man but him."

Said so long ago, spoken so recklessly, what had she bound herself to when she made that declaration before Wolfhere?

He turned. If he saw her among those who waited for him, he gave no sign of it. He extended a hand. "A knife."

But the captain stripped off his own armor and his own tunic, and with tunic and knife he advanced cautiously. The dogs nipped at him, but Sanglant waded out of the deeper water and called them away.

Liath could not help but look. Now that he was somewhat clean she could see that although his hair was long and tangled, he still had no beard even after a year without any means to shave it clean. He had no hair on his chest, either, but lower down he resembled his human kinsmen in every respect. She looked away quickly, for this was not like the work she and Fell's soldiers had done at the river's mouth, all of them equals in labor and none of them having the leisure to be shy about what needed to be done. He was not a curiosity to be stared at, or at least ought not to be.

When she looked up again he had the tunic on, a plain garment of good, strong weave and stained with sweat along the neck and under the arms, but compared to what he had worn before it looked fitting for a prince. It hung loosely around his frame, though it was a little short: He stood half a head taller than the robust captain, and despite his thinness he was still a big man. Now, taking the knife, he began to hack at his hair.

"I beg you, my lord prince," said the captain. He had a kind of weeping plaint to his voice as if he were about to burst into tears out of pity. "Let me cut it for you."

Sanglant paused. "No," he said. Then, and finally, as if only when he had scrubbed himself clean of the breath of his captivity dared he acknowledge her, he looked up to where she stood half hidden among the rest. He had known she was there all along. "Liath."

How could she not come forward? The knife had a good sharp edge and she had trimmed Da's hair many a time, although this was utterly different.

He knelt suddenly and with a sharp sigh. A tang of the old smell, the reek of his imprisonment, still clung to him and no doubt would for some time, but standing this close was no punishment. Ai, Lady, his hair was coarse and too matted to be truly clean yet, but when sometimes she had to shift him to get a better angle for cutting, she touched his skin and would bite her lip to stop herself from trembling, and go on.

"What is this?" She scraped the back of her hand on the rough iron collar that ringed his neck. Under it, the skin had been rubbed raw countless times and even now began to leak blood.

"Leave it."

She left it. No one dared go forward to pick up sword and torque, not with the dogs guarding these treasures.

The long rays of the sun splintered into glitters on the rippling current of the stream. Black mats of hair littered the ground as she cut. Made cautious by the noise and the thrashing in the water, the birds had fallen silent, all but a warbler among the reeds who sang vigorously to complain about the disturbance. Far away, a horn lifted its voice and fell silent. Horses shifted and snorted. A man whispered. Another peed, though she could only hear him, not see, for he had faced into the trees to do his business.

"His heart," Sanglant whispered suddenly. "How did you know he had hidden his heart in the priest's body? Whose heart lies hidden in Rikin fjall, then? It must be the priest's."

"I don't understand." But perhaps she was beginning to. She said it more to keep him talking, to hear his voice. She had thought never to hear that voice again.

"He couldn't be killed because he didn't have a heart. He hid it. He
—" Then he halted as suddenly as if he had lost his power of speech between one word and the next.

"It's done," she said quickly, to say something, anything, torn as she was between the promise of this intimacy he had thrust upon her and her complete ignorance of what manner of man he now was and how much he might have changed from the man she had fallen in love with in besieged Gent. "It will have to do, unless you'd like me to comb it out, for I hope I still have my comb in my pouch." Then she flushed, cursing her rash words; only mothers, wives, or servants combed a man's hair if he did not do it himself.

Instead of replying he stood and turned
—but not to look at her. Belatedly she turned as well when she heard the crashing in the trees. Another party approached.

The soldiers were already kneeling. She was too stupid, too astounded, to do so, and only at the very last moment, when the king broke from the trees, did she drop down as was fitting.