The Gathering Storm (35 page)

The liturgy slides by as smoothly as water pours down a rock. The abbot marks the stations of the service by moving from lamp to lamp in a complicated pattern that, were he attached to thread, might weave truth into the stone. Praying, Father Ortulfus seems agitated, distracted by a gnawing annoyance that causes his mouth to slip down into a fierce frown when he forgets himself. When he returns to the altar to deliver his homily, his indignation takes flower as he scolds the congregation with quotations from the Holy Verses.

“‘I have heard such things often before, you who make trouble, all of you, with every breath.’ It is the Enemy who makes you so stubborn in argument, who makes your speech trouble the hearts of the simple man and the credulous woman. ‘Can it be that God have thrown us into the clutches of malefactors, have left us at the mercy of those who are given over unto wickedness?’ If you will walk with God, then walk in silence and free your heart from the Enemy’s grasp. Let there be no more of these tales, which spread like a plague upon the Earth!”

The stone columns absorb this castigation in aloof silence. Carved flowers crown each column, and on this flowery support rest ceiling vaults ornamented with vines. High up on the wall above the central altar stand the stucco figures of martyrs, each displaying a crown of sainthood. Their grave faces do not move; they cannot, of course, they are only representations, and yet their steady gaze pierces to his heart
.

Dead. Dead. Dead

All dead

Mice live in the nave. He has coaxed a few out of their hiding places when, late at night before Nocturnes, he can’t sleep and wanders like a shade from one place to another within the compound, rootless and lost. They shelter in his hands, so small and helpless and warm, giving him trifling comfort. Is that their scratching now?

He has had keen hearing ever since the day he bound himself to the Eika prince now known as Stronghand. He hears not the clatter of mice on wood but a human gasp and the scrabbling of fingers on another’s arm, seeking attention. Looking to the right, he catches sight of two men wearing the mended but clean tabards of Lions.

They stare at him in shocked amazement, mouths open, prayer forgotten. They are no longer listening to the abbot’s homily—any more than he is—as it thunders to a close and as
the prayer for forgiveness swells up among the gathered monks, novices, laborers, and visitors.

They stare at him as though they recognize him
.

The high halls reel around him. The vaulted ceiling shudders, and vines writhe. Distantly, he hears Rage whimper
.

Isn’t that the young Lion called Dedi, who won a tunic off poor, foolish Folquin one night, gambling at dice? The older man called himself the boy’s uncle, and probably he was. Yet they died in the east long ago. Is this church a gathering place for dead souls caught in purgatory, like him?

Why isn’t Adica here with him?

He doubles over as men all around him drop to their knees in prayer, but he can no longer see or hear as he fights hot tears. Grief cuts into his belly. Claws are shredding his heart in two
.

All he can do is sag forward beside the other laborers and hang on as the fit drowns him
.

“Who is that young man she sees?”

The words dragged Hanna back as questions crowded her mind.
How is it that he still lives? What grieves him
?

Nay, she must concentrate. It seemed so long ago that she had last seen Liath, in disgrace at the palace at Werlida when she had married Sanglant against the wish of King Henry. She had ridden off secretly one night, never to return, but Hanna still saw her clearly, tall, a little too slender as if she never quite had enough to eat, her hair caught back in a braid, her eyes a fiery blue, as brilliant as the stars. In Heart’s Rest no one had ever believed Liath and her father to be anything except nobly born, brought down in the world by fortune’s wheel. But Liath had never treated Hanna differently by reason of birth. Liath had seen her as another soul, equal in the sight of God.

Ai, God. Where was Liath now?

Fire flared brightly among the coals before dying back as abruptly as if an icy wind smothered them.

She sank back onto her heels, sweating and trembling. Tears streaked her face. Was she crying for Liath, for Alain, or for herself? She wiped her nose.

“Nothing,” said Hugh. “As I told you, Liath no longer walks on Earth.”

“Who is that young man she saw?” the skopos asked again. “He looks familiar…. Nay, I do not know him.”

“He was attended by hounds who might have been litter-mates to the one who guards me. Is this one not a descendant of Taillefer’s famous hounds? Why do I see its kinfolk at the side of a common boy? Eagle, what man was that you saw in the flames?”

How could she lie to a sorcerer so powerful that she could see into the vision formed by Hanna’s own Eagle’s Sight? “His name is Alain, Holy Mother. He was heir to Count Lavastine until—”

“Lavastine!”

Hanna winced at the sharp tone, but that slight movement alerted the hound, which scrabbled out from under the throne to loom over her. The growl that rumbled in its throat was so low as to be almost inaudible. She shrank back. With only a word’s command, it would rip her face off.

“Lavastine.” The word was whispered with the calculation of a general about to embark on a holy campaign. “Sister Abelia, you will leave tomorrow to seek out Brother Severus. I want the one called Alain found and brought to me.”

“Yes, Holy Mother.”

The skopos rose and left the room with her attendant. The hound click-clacked after her; its nails needed filing. Hanna wondered, wildly, idly, who dared groom it.

“Do you know where Liath is, Hanna?” asked Hugh once the curtain had fallen into place behind the skopos and her attendant. “Have you seen her in the flames?”

“I have not, Your Excellency.”

“Do you know what happened to her, Hanna?”

“I have heard the tale Prince Sanglant tells—that fiery daimones stole her.”

“Do you believe it?”

She fixed her gaze on the mural. The temblor had shaken open a crack that split the plaster base right through the blessed Daisan’s left foot. “For what reason would Prince Sanglant lie, Your Excellency?”

“Indeed, for what reason?”

A glance told her everything she needed to know: he was not Bulkezu, who savored the battle of wills. He was not even looking at her; he had dismissed her already. The monster Bulkezu had seen her as a person of some account, almost as a peer, because she was the luck of a Kerayit shaman. Because she dared stand up to him. To Hugh she was only a servant. He recalled her name because of her bond with Liath. She did not matter to him at all; only Liath did, then and now.

Which gave her a measure of freedom she had never had with Bulkezu.

“Prince Sanglant is no poet, Your Excellency. It is poets who make up tales to confuse and beguile their listeners. I do not think he could have concocted a false trail to lead his enemies astray. That is not his way.”

He gave a slight noise in assent. “No, he is not an educated man. There is a child as well. Does she live still?”

“When I last saw the prince, she did.”

“Does she look like her mother?”

Strange that a cold draft should twist through the hall, chilling her neck. “In some manner, Your Excellency. She resembles both her mother and father. She is very young still.”

“Very young still,” he agreed, as if to himself, as if he had forgotten Hanna was there, “and soft, as youth is soft and malleable. It is too bad Brother Marcus failed. Still, there may yet be a way….”

She braced herself, expecting more questions.

None came.

He had forgotten her already. She shifted her weight to her heels to take some of the pressure off her knees. Outside, the raking started up again. As Hugh’s silence dragged on, she began to count the strokes.

She had reached four and ninety when Hugh spoke.

“Yes. That is the way to do it.” He walked toward the doors, paused, turned back. “Come, Hanna. You must make your report and a cleric will write it down.”

“Your Excellency.” She stood. “It is an Eagle’s duty to report to the regnant directly.”

He waited in a stripe of sunlight. “Your loyalty is commendable. But it will not be possible for you to give your report to the king today. He will be far too busy to see you.”

“Then I will wait. It is by the regnant’s own command that we Eagles report to him alone, when we come to his court. I dare not go against the king’s express command, Your Excellency. Pray do not ask me to go back on the oath I swore to King Henry.”

The quirk of anger twitched on his lips, and he clenched his right hand, the one he had most often struck Liath with. But this was not the reckless, arrogant young frater who had suffered the indignity of ministering to the half-pagan common folk of the North Mark with barely concealed contempt. This man had a presbyter’s rank, the respect of his peers, the love of the common-born Aostans, and an unknown wealth of power made palatable by his modest demeanor and undeniable beauty. He spoke easily with the Holy Mother herself and stood at the right hand of the king and queen who would soon be emperor and empress.

“Nay, nor should you,” he said at last with perfect amiability. “Your oath to the king is what gives an Eagle honor. You were taken prisoner by the Quman alongside Prince Ekkehard, I believe?”

“I was, Your Excellency.”

“Then how are we to know that you did not turn traitor against your countryfolk as well, if this tale of Prince Ekkehard’s treachery is true? How can we be sure that any of these stories you bring to us are truth, and not lies? Do you support the rightful king? Or do you support those who rebel against him?”

God, what a fool she had been to think she could outmaneuver him.

He smiled sadly. The light pouring over him made him gleam, a living saint. “So it is, Eagle, that the king must consider you a traitor as well. You know how he feels about Wolfhere, whom he banished on less account than this. How can he treat a traitor otherwise? How can he even bear to speak to one of his own Eagles if he believes that Eagle has betrayed him together with his dearest children?” Although he had not moved, he seemed to have grown even more imposing, a power which, like the sun, may bring light to those trapped in darkness—or death to those caught out under its punishing brilliance.

“I will do what I can to see that you are not imprisoned outright for treason, Hanna. I have done that much for you already. The dungeons here are not healthy. The rats grow large. Yet if you do not cooperate with me, then there is nothing I can do, no case I can make before the king. If that happens, I do not know what will happen to you then. Do you understand?”

GASPING, he came to himself as everyone around him rose. The service had ended. The two Lions no longer sat on the benches to his right. Maybe he had only hallucinated them. He was dreaming, confusing past and present.

Only Adica seemed real—she, and the bronze armband bound around his upper right arm that he could not pull off.

“F-friend.” Iso had a limp and a stutter. Abandoned by his parents, he had been a laborer at the monastery for half of his life. Although he didn’t act any older than sixteen, he looked aged by pain and grief and an unfilled childhood hunger. “It’s a—uh—it’s a—uh—a hurt one. Come.” He had bony fingers that no amount of porridge could fatten up, and with these he tugged at Alain’s sleeve as the laborers waited for the monks to file out before them. The abbot sailed out with a fine stern expression on his face and his guests quite red with consternation behind him, but Iso kept pulling on him and his quiet pleading dragged Alain out of his distraction.

“I’ll come.” He let Iso lead him out of the church and, with the hounds following, to the stables.

Iso didn’t have many teeth left, which was why he could only take porridge and other soft foods. Sometimes his remaining teeth hurt him; one did tonight. Alain knew it because now and again Iso brushed at the lower side of his right jaw as though to chase away a fly, and a tear moistened his right eye, slipping down to be replaced by another. Iso never complained about pain. Maybe he didn’t have the words to,
and anyway it was probably the only existence he knew. Perhaps he had never experienced a day in the course of his entire life without physical pain of some kind nagging him, the twisted agony of his misshapen hip, the withered ruin of his left hand, burned and scarred over long ago, the nasty scars on his back.

Yet for all the pain Iso lived with, and maybe because of it, he hated to see animals suffer. More than once he had taken a rake from a furious cat when he’d saved a mouse from its clutches, or risked being bitten by a wounded, starving dog at the forest’s edge when he offered it a scrap to eat.

The beech woods had been so heavily harvested in the vicinity of the estate that the nearby woodland was dominated by seedlings and luxuriant shrubs. The hounds smelled a threat in the undergrowth beyond the stable, and they bristled, curling back their muzzles as they growled. Twigs rattled as a creature shifted position. It sounded big. The twilight gloom amplified the sense of hugeness.

Alain gripped Iso’s shoulder, holding him back. The smell of iron tickled his nostrils, and a taste like fear coated his mouth. Although he saw only the suggestion of the shape where young beech trees struggled with honeysuckle and sedge for a footing, his skin crawled.

In the east, a waning gibbous moon, just two days past full, was rising.

“Th—they’ll kill it if th—they f-find it.” Tears slipped from Iso’s chin to wet the back of Alain’s hand.

“Hush now.” Alain signed to the hounds and they sat obediently, although they didn’t like it. Cautiously, he stepped forward to part the brush.

The creature lying under the shadow of sedge flicked its head around, and where its amber gaze touched him, torpor gripped his limbs. Iso whimpered. Sorrow yipped. The creature was as big as a pony, with a sheeny glamour. It scrabbled at the earth with its taloned feet. Leaves sprayed everywhere. It had the head of an eagle with the body of a dragon, and a whiplike tail that thrashed against the bole of the sedge behind it. Awkwardly, it heaved itself backward. It was meant to fly, but its wings were still down, not yet true feathers.