Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (6 page)

"Certainly his manners are excellent, and his mother is a powerful prince. I would not like to make an enemy of him. Nevertheless, he has thrown his weight behind Sapientia, and all that influence comes to naught if she does not become regnant after her father."

"I don't like him because of what he did to Liath," muttered Alain.

Lavastine raised an eyebrow and regarded his son skeptically. "You have only her word—that of a kinless Eagle—that he behaved as she describes. In any case, if she was his legal slave, then he could do what he wished with her." That easily he dismissed Liath's fears and terrors. "Still, the Eagle has uncommon gifts. Keep an eye on her, if you will. We may yet use her again to our advantage."

Prince Sanglant had retreated to the river, away from the kill and the commotion. His new hangers-on, uncertain of his temper as always, kept a safe distance although they made an obvious effort to distinguish themselves from those who flocked around Sapientia. The prince stood on the verge where the bluff plunged away to the water. The fishermen had stopped to stare at the sight of a noble lord and his fine retinue.

"He'll go in," said Alain suddenly, and as if his words— surely too distant for the prince to hear—triggered the action, Sanglant abruptly began to strip at the bluff's edge.

Tittering came from Sapienta's entourage. They had seen this behavior before: Prince Sanglant had a mania for washing himself. But to be without clothing in such a public setting was to be without the dignity and honor granted one by noble birth. Only common folk making ready to wash themselves or to labor on a hot day would as unthinkingly strip before all and sundry as kneel before God to pray.

The prince left his clothing on the ground and scrambled down the slope into the water. He had an astonishing number of white scars on his body, but he had begun to fill out. Alain could no longer count his ribs.

As the wind turned and positions shifted, Alain heard Father Hugh's pleasant voice on the breeze. "Alas, and like some dogs, he'll leap into any body of water if not restrained. Come, Your Highness. This is not fitting."

Sapientia's party retreated to the woodland while the huntsmen dealt with the kill, although some few of the ladies with her could not resist a backward glance.

Lavastine sighed audibly. A flurry of movement came from within the king's party as certain riders—mostly women—made to leave with Princess Sapientia's party while others, including the king, began to dismount.

"Come," said Lavastine as he signaled to his attendants. "I return now to the king. Alain, you must choose your place as you think fit."

By this time half a dozen of Prince Sanglant's entourage had begun to strip, to follow him into the water, and Alain saw that the king meant to bathe as well, as if to lend royal sanction to his son's action.

Alain felt it prudent to stay near the king, so he followed Lavastine and in this way was able to jest with several young lords whom he had befriended. Steadfast forged ahead, still on a scent. She growled, and Fear padded forward to snuffle in the grass beside her.

Where the bluff gave way to a negotiable embankment, servants had come forward to hack through brush clinging to the slope to make a path for the king down to the water. The prince, waist-deep in the sluggish current, now plunged in over his head and struck out for the opposite shore. Upstream, the fishermen collected their baskets and made ready to leave. They lingered to stare as the king made his way down the embankment and left his rich clothing to the care of his servants while he took to the cool water. The splashing and shouting and laughter had long since drowned out any sound of Sapientia's party as it retreated into the forest.

"Do you mean to come in, Son?" Lavastine swung down off his horse. As soon as the count's feet touched the ground, Terror tried to herd the count away from a thicket of brambles while the other hounds set up such a racket of barking that the prince paused half out on the opposite shore to turn and see what the commotion was, and King Henry spoke a word to an attendant who scrambled back up the embankment.

"Peace!" Lavastine frowned at the hounds, who swarmed around him more like puppies frightened by thunder than loyal fighting hounds.

A creature rustled in the thicket. The hounds went wild. Terror closed his jaw over the count's hand and tugged him backward while Steadfast and Fear leaped into the brambles, teeth snapping on empty air. Hackles up, Sorrow and Rage circled the bramble bush and Ardent and Bliss tore up and down between Lavastine and the thicket. But there was nothing there.

"Peace!" snapped Lavastine. He so disliked it when his orders were not obeyed instantly.

Steadfast yelped suddenly, a cry of pain. The other hounds went into such a wild frenzy around the thicket that servants and noblemen scattered in fear, and then the hounds spun and snapped and bolted away as if in hot pursuit, the entire pack running downstream along the embankment. "Alain! Follow them!"

Alain quickly followed the hounds, with only a single servant in attendance. The hounds ran far ahead now, scrambling in a fluid, furious pack down to a rocky stretch of beach. He glanced back in time to see Lavastine strip and make his careful way—as had the other courtiers before him—down the slope to the river. While the younger men braved the crossing to follow after the prince, the king and his mature councillors took their ease in the shallow water and talked no doubt of Gent and the Eika and recent reports of Quman raids in the east and certain marriage alliances that must be accepted or declined.

The hounds had disappeared, so Alain broke into a trot and found them clustered just around the river's bend on the last strip of narrow beach. Stiff-legged, they barked at the water. Alain thought he saw a flash of something tiny and white struggling in the current. Then, slowly, their barking subsided into growls, growls to silence, and the hounds relaxed into a steady vigilance as they regarded the flowing river.

Had he only imagined that flash of movement? The sun made metal of the water as it streamed along. Its bright flash made Alain's eyes tear, and he blinked rapidly, but that only made the water shimmer and flow in uncanny forms like the shift of a slick and scaly back seen beneath the waves or the swift passage of a ship along a canyon of water.

Ahead lies the smoke of home, the cradle of his tribe. Who has arrived before him ? Will he and his soldiers have to fight just to set foot on shore, or has he come first to make his claim before OldMother so that she may prepare the knife of decision ?

The fjord waters mirror the deep blush of the heavens, the powerful blue of the afternoon sky. The waters are so still that each tree along the shore lies mirrored in their depths. Off to one side a merman's slick back parts the water and a ruddy eye takes their measure; then, with a flick of its tail, the creature vanishes into the seamless depths.

Teeth closed on his hand and, coming to himself, he looked down to see Sorrow pulling on him to get his attention. Only three hounds remained; the others had vanished. He started around to see his attendant sitting cross-legged, arms relaxed, as if he'd been waiting a long time.

"My lord!" The man jumped up. "The other hounds ran back to the count, and I didn't know how to stop them, but you was so still for so long I didn't know how to interrupt you…" Trailing off, he glanced nervously at the remaining hounds: Sorrow, Rage, and poor Steadfast, who sat whimpering and licking her right forepaw.

"No matter." Alain took Steadfast's paw into his hand to examine it. A bramble thorn had bitten deep into the flesh, and he gentled her with his tone and then got hold of the thorn and pulled it out. She whimpered, then set to work licking again.

A flash of dead white out in the streaming flow of the river distracted him. Downstream, a fish appeared, belly up. Dead. Then a second, a third, and a fourth appeared farther downstream yet, dead white bellies turned up to sun and air, gleaming corpses drawn seaward by the current. Beyond that he could make out only light on the water.

Rage growled.

"My lord." The servant had brought his horse.

But he walked back instead, to keep an eye on Steadfast. The thorn had done no lasting damage. Soon she was loping along with the others in perfect good humor, biting and nipping at her cousins in play. Alain would have laughed to see them; it was, after all, a pleasant and carefree day.

But when, across the river, he saw the fishermen trudging home with their baskets full of plump fish, the image of the dead fish caught in the current flashed into his mind's eye and filled him with a troubling foreboding—only he did not know why.

THE quiet that pervaded the inner court of the palace of Weraushausen had such a soothing effect, combined with the heat of the sun, that Liath drowsed on the stone bench where she waited even though she wasn't tired. Fears and hopes mingled to become a tangled dream: Da's murder, Hugh, the curse of fire, Hanna's loyalty and love, Ivar's pledge, the shades of dead elves, Lord Alain and the friendship he had offered her, the death of Bloodheart, Sister Rosvita and
The Book of Secrets,
daimones hunting her and, more vivid than all the others, the tangible memory of Sanglant's hair caught in her fingers there by the stream where he had scoured away the filth of his captivity.

She started up heart pounding; she was hot, embarrassed, dismayed, and breathless with hope all at once.

She could not bear to think of him because she wanted only to think of him. A bee droned past. The gardener who weeded in the herb garden had moved to another row. No one had come to summon her. She did not know how much longer she would have to wait.

She walked to the well with its shingled roof and whitewashed stone rim. The draft of air rising from the depths smelled of fresh water and damp stone. The deacon who cared for the chapel here had told her that a spring fed the wells; before the coming of the Daisanite fraters to these lands a hundred years ago its source had rested hidden in rocks and been worshiped as a goddess by the heathen tribes. Now a stone cistern contained it safely beneath the palace.

Was that the glint of water in the depths? if she looked hard enough with her salamander eyes, would she see in that mirror the face of the man she would marry, as old herbwomen claimed? Or was that only pagan superstition, as the church mothers wrote?

She drew back, suddenly afraid to see anything, and stepped out from the shadow of the little roof into the blast of the noonday sun.

"/
will never love any man but him."
Was it that pledge which had bound her four days ago in the circle of stones where she'd crossed through an unseen gateway and ridden into unknown lands? Had she really been foolish enough to turn away from the learning offered to her by the old sorcerer?

She shaded her eyes from the sun and sat again on the bench. It had heavy feet fashioned in the likeness of a lion's paws, carved of a reddish-tinged marble. That same marble had been used for the pillars lining the inner court.

Because the king was not now in residence at Weraushausen, a mere Eagle like herself could sit in the court usually reserved for the king rather than stand attendance upon him. It was so quiet that she could believe for this while in the peace that God are said to grant to the tranquil soul—not that such peace was ever likely to be granted to
her.

A sudden scream tore the silence, followed by laughter and the pounding of running feet.

"Nay, children. Walk with dignity. Slow down!"

The children of the king's schola had arrived to take their midday exercise, some more sedately than others. Liath watched as they tumbled out into the sunlight. She envied these children their freedom to study, their knowledge of their kin, and their future position in the king's court. One boy climbed a plinth and swung, dangling, from the legs of the old statue set there, an ancient Dariyan general.

"Lord Adelfred! Come down off there. I beg you!"

"There's the Eagle," said the boy, jumping down. "Why couldn't we hear her report about the battle at Gent?"

Next to the statue stood Ekkehard, the king's youngest child. He resembled his father although he had the slenderness of youth. At this moment, he wore a sullen expression as if it were as fine an adornment as his rich clothing and gem-studded rings, in sharp contrast to the austere expression of the stone soldier. "I asked if I could ride back with her, to my father," he said, "but it wasn't allowed."

"We must be going back to the king's court soon," retorted the other boy, looking alarmed. By the slight burr in the way he pronounced his Wendish, Liath guessed he was from Avaria, perhaps one of Duke Burchard's many nephews. "King Henry can't mean to leave us here forever! I'm to get my retinue next year and ride east to fight the Quman!"

"It won't matter, forever," muttered Prince Ekkehard. He had a sweet voice; Liath had heard him sing quite beautifully last night. In daylight, without a lute in his hand, he merely looked restless and ill-tempered. "Soon I'll be fifteen and have my own retinue, too, and then I won't be treated like a child. Then I can do what I want."