Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (54 page)

"Baldwin?" croaked Ivar.

"She'll do it to me next, beat me like a dog, when she's forgotten how much she lusts after my face. I hate her!"

"And you love me," said Prince Ekkehard with sudden passion.

"Of course, my lord prince. I will love you and serve you as you deserve." Ekkehard laughed happily, recklessly. He was so

young, not quite fifteen, and the young men around him were no more than boys, really. But they had opened the gate to freedom.

Ivar did not resist as they bundled him aboard among chests and draped a blanket over him and Baldwin. He hurt too much to resist, and anyway, he didn't want to stay, not with Judith, not anywhere near Hugh, not by the king, and nowhere where his heart would bleed for Liath. But his heart would always bleed. It was the sacrifice he would make day in and day out, like the sacrifice made by the blessed Daisan, flayed and bleeding at the foot of the empress of all Dariya. Heart's blood blooming into roses.

"Stop talking," whispered Baldwin. "You're delirious. We'll be safe as soon as we get outside the gates."

Rough wood planks scraped the side of his face as the wagon lurched along the streets. After a while, through the veil of the blanket, he saw the hazy glare of torchlight. They passed under the gates of Autun. He smelled the tannery first, then the slaughterhouse, sharp with blood and entrails and death. Once they got beyond the environs of town, he smelled fields and dirt and the dust of harvest. It was quite cold, but Baldwin, feeling him shiver, curled around him and breathed softly into the back of his neck, warm, sweet breath that stirred the hairs at his nape.

"Liath," murmured Ivar.

"They branded her with the mark of outlaw. And excommunicated her. I thought you'd want to know. She was named as a maleficus. That's very bad, isn't it?"

Very bad.

"But Hugh—

"They're sending him south to pray under the eye of the sko-pos, to do three years penance. I'm glad. I hope he's made to kneel for days and days and that his knees bleed."

The wagon hit a pothole and threw Ivar against a chest. He grunted in pain. Blood trickled down his lower lip where it had cracked and begun to bleed. There were still tears, even though it hurt to cry. Everything hurt.

"Hush," said Baldwin. "It'll be an adventure, you'll see."

L

WHEN the hunting party came crashing through and erupted into the clearing, they flushed not boar or partridge but a ragged covey of poor. Dirty, sore-ridden men, pale women, and children as thin as sticks and filthy with grime fluttered away from their makeshift huts and came to rest in the fringe of the trees. Not one of them had shoes or even cloth to wrap their feet in, and an early frost had rimed the ground with a sparkling coat, pretty to ride over and horribly cold to walk upon.

But Alain sat in the saddle, and he wore boots, gloves, and a furlined cloak.

"Who are these?" demanded Lavastine, coming up beside one of the foresters.

The foresters did not know. They had scouted out this ground ten days ago, thinking to lead the count and his retinue on a hunt in this direction, and found no one here.

"They'll have chased off any game hereabouts. Cursed nuisances!" Lord Amalfred spat as he reined his horse aside. "Let us ride on!" The young Salian lord had arrived with Duchess Yolande's retinue, and given any choice in the matter Alain would much rather he had never arrived at all.

Lavastine surveyed the clearing with frown. The people huddled under the trees looked too exhausted to scatter and run. They simply cowered. Alain nudged his mount sideways to get a better look at the huts. These hovels scarcely deserved the name of shelter: They had been built hastily, with gaps in their walls and roofs that couldn't possibly keep rain out. Fire burned in a hearth ringed with loose stone. Someone had made a shelf of logs inside one of them, and withered greens lay there, together with acorns and a skinned rabbit.

Beyond the huts, in the shadow of the trees, lay five fresh graves, two of them smaller than the others. A sixth lay half dug, a crude wooden shovel abandoned beside it.

Finally one of the women edged forward. She held a bundle in her arms; it was so still that Alain could not tell if it were a child or a bolt of cloth. Her hands were white with cold and her skeletal feet whiter still, and there was fear in her eyes and in the pinched pale grimace of her lips. "What will you do with us, my lord?" Her voice was more cough than words, and she coughed in truth after speaking, and that woke up the child— because it was in fact a child—in her arms, which whimpered, stirred, and fell quiet again, too weak to protest.

"You must move on," said Lavastine. "Our harvest is past, and we have no room for more supplicants. You may have better luck to the south."

"We come from the south, my lord. There wasn't enough at harvest, and no work to be found. We will bind ourselves into your service if only you will pledge to feed us and give us work."

"We have as many as we can feed," repeated Lavastine. He gestured to a steward, who hurried forward. "See that some bread is given them, but then they must be off these lands."

Several of the adults dropped to their knees and blessed him for this bounty, as little as it was. The children merely stared, their eyes as dull as wilted leaves.

"Pray you, my lord, may we stay at least long enough to bury my child?" Another fit of coughing seized her, and this time the child in her arms only mewled softly and didn't stir at all.

Alain dismounted and strode over. She shrank away from him, but stopped, frightened more of disobedience and the spears of the huntsmen than of what he himself might do to her. Her breath stank of onions and her breathing had the rattling lilt of a lungfever coming on.

"Let me see," he said gently. He flicked back the thin blanket that covered its face.

The child might have been any age between three and six. Sores blistered its mouth, and at the sound of his voice its eyes flickered but were too swollen to open, ringed with a sticky yellow pus. A fly crawled along the lid. It was naked under the blanket, wasted and pale, and the blanket itself had worn almost through. He could see its toes. He took off a glove and brushed his fingers over its forehead. It burned with fever.

"Poor child," he murmured. "I pray you will find healing and shelter and food, pour souls. God will walk with you."

She began to cry noisily, hopelessly, coughing hard.

"Alain," said Lavastine, both warning and command.

He began to step back, could not. The children—about ten of them—had crept forward so silently that he hadn't noticed their coming, and now they trapped him, pressed so close that one ragged child—impossible to tell if it were boy or girl— reached out and touched his boots as if they were a holy relic. Another brushed the hem of Alain's cloak and exclaimed something that might have been a word or only a bubble of amazement.

He could not bear it. He unpinned the cloak and swung it off his own shoulders to drape over the stooped shoulders of the woman, so that it covered the child as well. At once the others grasped at it and tugged, trying to get it into their own hands, fighting over it.

"Stop!"

They shrank back, even the one he had gifted. The child in her arms lay still and silent. For all he knew it had already expired.

A sick despair settled on him, a weight far heavier than the cloak had been. He shuddered in the biting autumn wind, spun, and hurried back to his horse. A groom was there to lace hands under his foot and hoist him up.

"God save us from beggars!" cried Lord Amalfred as the hunt made ready to leave. Harness jingled, horses snorted, and his leashed hounds lunged toward the children, who scattered with screams and cries. Amalfred laughed and gathered his companions around him as they plunged into the trees. Foresters vanished into the wood before them, and far away they heard the solitary bell of a hound marking a scent.

"It isn't right to mock them," said Alain to the count, who had come up beside him.

Lavastine did not speak until they had left the clearing behind. "You can't clothe them all."

"Poor creatures. I would have given them my boots, but then I saw how they would fight over them and it would only be worse. Ai, Lord! What suffering."

"It is a mystery, indeed."

"What is a mystery?"

"Why God allows suffering in the world."

"The deacons say it is a just punishment from God for those who have sinned."

Lavastine grunted in a way that suggested he was not convinced. "I have listened to the Holy Verses, and it seems to me that they have not heeded the words of the blessed Daisan. Some things are within our nature. Just as lions eat meat, sheep eat grass, and scorpions sting, we eat and drink, sleep and wake, grow up and grow old, are born and then die. But wealth and sickness, poverty and heath: these things are brought about purely by the decree of Fate. Not everything happens according to our will. Yet we also have liberty to choose our own actions, as you did just now by giving that poor woman your cloak. She has liberty to make use of the gift or to cast it away, and the others with her may steal it, or leave it in her hands. That is the measure of our worth to God: how we act with what we are given, and whether we chose to obey God's law whatever our circumstances."

Hounds belled, and their belling blossomed into a sudden rash of barking. The young lords attending Lord Amalfred whooped and cheered and raced ahead into the forest, leaving Alain, Lavastine, and some few men who by reason of age or prudence chose to ride at a slower pace with their host.

Alain had lost his appetite for the hunt. "But surely sometimes desperation may drive you to sin," he objected, watching branches whip and still as the forward party vanished into the trees.

"It is true that we aren't made guilty by those things that lie outside our power, but certainly we aren't justified by them either. Evil is the work of the Enemy. It is easier to do what is right."

"You were laid under a compulsion. What you did while under that spell was no choice of your own."

"And that, my son, is why the church must keep her hand closed tight around all matters pertaining to sorcery."

All five black hounds broke into a chorus of barking. Steadfast and Fear bounded away into the brush. Lavastine pulled up and began to dismount, but suddenly Terror was beneath him, nudging him with his head as if to keep him in the saddle.

"I'll go look," said Alain quickly. Sorrow and Rage bristled, hackles up. They had coursed silently around to place themselves between Lavastine's horse and the undergrowth where the other two hounds thrashed and barked within a thicket that rattled and swayed as if a wild wind had been bound into the spot.

"My lord count." Several servingmen rode forward, but Alain pressed past them, dismounted, and with his sword out forged into the brush, batting aside branches, getting a mouthful of dry fern leaves as he shoved through. Sorrow followed him, still barking. Rage stayed behind with Terror. Steadfast and Fear had cornered something in the densest corner of the thicket strewn with brier and fern. He saw it, a flash of dead white darting here, and then back, seeking an exit. Dread hit like the blast of cold wind, making him shake.

"Alain!" called Lavastine.

"Don't follow me!"

It darted past Fear's snapping jaws. Alain cut. His sword hit loam, sprayed bits of leaves. Steadfast leaped past him. Sorrow pounced. A creature scurried away under the leaves. He saw it again where leaves parted and it darted into a screen of briers, that unnatural white gleam like bone washed clean and polished by the sea. He stabbed again at it but only got his hand scratched by thorns.

There it was again. He stabbed. And missed.

The
thing
scuttled past Fear. That fast, it turned to bolt toward the horses. Sorrow snapped. Alain jumped after it. Beyond, he saw movement among the trees, horsemen closing in.

"Don't dismount!" he cried, but no one could hear him over the clamor of the hounds barking. Steadfast dove headfirst into a bush. She yelped, and then, abruptly, everything was still except for the distant blare of a hunting horn.

Terror growled, and Rage joined him, and then Sorrow and Fear as well, a shield wall of hounds at Steadfast's back. The sound crawled up Alain's spine like poison. His neck prickled, and he spun round, sword raised. A flutter in the leaves. He hacked at the bush, but a wren struggled away, broke free, and flew off.

That ragged breathing was his own.