The Book of Earth (46 page)

“An unlikely spot for secret meetings.” Hal waved a dubious hand around the room. “Too public. Look how just anyone can drop on by.”

“Exactly. Who would suspect the odd coming and going? How else could a King’s Knight be standing here before me within my own closely guarded walls? How else could Guillemo’s witch and her rescuer have already evaded me for several hours? The royalists may have gotten them out by now, for all I know.” He watched Hal closely for a betraying sign.

“I’d much prefer a real dragon,” said Hal.

Köthen tried and failed to suppress a laugh.

“No, it’s not true! They’re not gone!” barked Guillemo, a little too loudly. He jabbed an agitated finger at the straw-dusted floor. “The specific persons may be obscured in my visions, but the force lines definitely meet here. They will be joined. It must be! There is . . . there is . . . here. It must be here!”

The priest began to pace his tight circle again, faster and faster. The three barons looked on with varying degrees of incredulity, concern, and contempt. Cringing behind the feed bin, flattened against its splintery slats, Erde knew not a whisper of contempt. She took in the priest’s circling as
the mouse blindly senses the hawk above and freezes in primal, animal terror. She called again to the dragon, a final attempt, a desperate yearning fling of her mind into the void that was still, unbelievably, dragonless.

And the priest, circling, also froze, and listened. “It . . . ? Or she . . . ? She.
She!
She is here! Here! Now I understand it! Now I see it all!” He lunged back into motion, circling still but even wider, brushing unseeing past the men who watched dumbfounded, shoving Hal aside as the knight stepped deliberately into his path.

“Really, Dolph, can’t you do something with the man?”

Josef von Alte moved aside warily.

Köthen said, “Guillemo . . .” and reached for him.

“No!” The priest swerved, batting his arm away. “She. You. Didn’t believe me. I knew. Here now. Right . . .” He circled toward the feed bin. Hal moved to intercept him, but Köthen stopped him short with a broad arm across his chest.

“It’s the lad. He’ll . . .”

“Easy. He’ll come to no harm.”

“Dolph, you don’t know . . .”

“You keep saying that.”

“Here!” shrieked Guillemo like a malicious child in a game of tag. He reached behind the bin, grabbed Erde by the back of her jerkin and hauled her into view. He snatched off her prentice cap and shoved her roughly forward so that she stumbled and went sprawling facedown on the dirty straw. The mud-stained boots she saw a short yard from her nose were not Baron Köthen’s, but her father’s.

“Behold the witch-child!” Guillemo bellowed in triumph. “Ha, Josef! I told you she lived still!”

E
rde pressed her face into the straw and prayed for dragons.

Josef von Alte stared. He glanced at Brother Guillemo uncertainly, then back at the person sprawled at his feet. “Witch-child? I thought . . .”

“You thought! You’re a fool, Josef! You listened to rumor and the words of inferiors! But I told you what the truth was!” The priest jabbed both arms toward Erde, his hands as stiff as blades. “Now you will have faith! Now you will believe me!”

Von Alte did not move. Erde wished and did not wish that she could see his face. Would it be rage or joy that she’d find there? Slowly, she drew in her limbs beneath her, until she was curled in a turtlelike posture of retreat and submission. She wished she’d tried to learn the dragon’s skill of invisibility. She was sure she could make herself still enough to vanish. She heard Baron Köthen murmur to Hal, but did not catch the older man’s reply. Soon Hal stepped forward with a sigh and a rustle of straw, and bent down to grasp her arm and ease her ceremoniously to her feet.

“The granddaughter of Meriah von Alte need bow to no one.” He brushed dry wisps from her cloak and hair, then backed away to Köthen’s side.

Erde understood his unspoken message. She made herself stand tall and proud, the focus of all attention. It was easy to pretend to ignore the priest. Raising her eyes to meet her father’s was the thing she could not manage.

“A woman?” Köthen marveled.

“A girl,” amended Hal.

“His daughter? The one who was kidnapped?”

“No! Bewitched!” yelped Guillemo, beginning an agitated dance. “Corrupted! Suborned by the agents of Satan!”

“A child fleeing for her life,” Hal countered. “The only evil she knows is the one she escaped.” He looked to the priest. “Him.”

“Liar!” Guillemo shrieked. He danced toward Hal but skittered sideways when Köthen did not move from his path. “Ha! I know! I see it now! It was you, wasn’t it, all along? The signs were there but I . . . I misread them! I should have seen, when my visions perplexed me, that it was you, the knight in my dreams. The Devil’s Paladin!”

The knight in his dreams.
Erde shivered. Too much coincidence with Guillemo. But she knew that the knight in her own dream, the dragon’s dream, was not Hal Engle.

“It was you who thwarted me at Tor Alte! It was your spells that broke the locks and put the weapons in their hands! You . . .”

“I wasn’t even in the neighborhood,” Hal said sourly.

“What proof is that? The Eye of Darkness sees farther than . . .”

Köthen’s patience ran dry at last. “Brother Guillemo, stop your ranting! You disgrace your holy office!” To Erde’s surprise, the priest subsided, though he continued to mutter and wave his arms. Köthen shook his head. “Well, you’re right, Heinrich. This complication I would not have guessed. Von Alte’s lost daughter. Where did you find her?”

“Starving in the forest. But my usefulness is ended now. You must give her your protection, Dolph.”

“I? It’s her father should do that, not me.”

“He didn’t the first time. Please, Dolph, she’s too young for politics. Take her in. Does a young girl flee into the wilderness unless she’s truly desperate?”

“Or very brave,” mused Köthen. “Or both. Well, what about it, von Alte? Does the father say nothing?”

When her father did not reply, Erde could finally muster the courage to meet his tongue-tied stare. The eyes she looked into were distant and horrified. They rebounded from hers as if she had struck him a blow. They flew to
the priest, then back again like frightened birds to look her up and down, taking in the details of her shorn hair and her travel-stained man’s garb. At last they slid upward to meet hers furtively as if, Erde thought, he was peering at her from behind a shutter, or through a veil.

He’s scared
, she realized.
He sees someone he recognizes but does not know. It frightens him how much I’ve changed.
She watched her father run his tongue along dry lips and gather himself to speak.

“Is this truly my daughter Erde?”

She didn’t believe that he could really doubt it. Without thinking, she opened her mouth to answer him. Her breathy wordless rasp made him recoil and glance away, first at the priest—who had ceased his dancing and circling to watch this exchange with his predator’s eye—and then at the open doorway, where the grim gray light of day was already waning.

“See!” hissed Guillemo. “Beware, Josef, for your soul’s sake. What was your daughter is no longer.”

“He knows nothing of souls—don’t listen to him,” Hal warned. “She’s your own flesh, von Alte. Meriah’s dear blood.”

“Ah!” murmured Köthen beside him. “Now it comes clear. I’d quite forgotten.”

Baron Josef shifted his weight a few times, regarding the snow-drifted doorsill with elaborate interest. At length, he wagged his head slowly back and forth, without looking at anybody. “No, this cannot be her. This is not my daughter.”

Erde started toward him instinctively, hands outstretched to deny his denial. Only then did he meet her straight and square, his eyes warning her off with a stare that said,
I know you and I reject what you are, what you have become.

Erde felt a binding loosen within her, a constriction she’d hardly known was there. Though his denial could mean death for her, she breathed more easily. Her spine straightened of its own accord, as if its burden had lifted. She thought:
But I’m proud of what I am.
In her mind’s eye, she saw a great gray sea from which Tor Alte stood up as a lonely island, and herself drifting away from a diminished and diminishing father who stood at the gate as if it were a dock. She was a boat cast off from its mooring, drawn
swiftly away by the tide that was Life. Then the current eddied, leaving her without momentum, without identity. If she was not von Alte’s daughter, who was she?

Yet despite her confusion, the moment had a certain inevitability to it. She’d chosen a new mooring, more like a sea anchor, that stabilized without denying movement and change. Her new identity would be forged with the dragon. Erde did not permit herself to wonder if Earth’s silence was permanent. She wished her father would act on his doorward impulse and simply walk away, thus ennobling this family rupture with a clean and dignified break.

But Josef von Alte was plagued with the weak man’s need to justify. He took a step back, gesturing dismissively. “Not her. You’re right, Guillemo. My Erde is a lady and an innocent, not some broken-down knight’s whore and camp follower.”

Hal growled deep in his throat and lunged. Köthen caught him, pulled the older man back again. “If your concern is for her virtue, von Alte, you’ve never known this particular knight very well.” His dry chuckle held little humor, only scorn. “Might have been better for you if you had.”

Hal eased himself free and brushed at his sleeves needlessly. “If she wouldn’t marry me, she’d hardly have asked me to foster her son.”

Köthen shrugged. “That’s two bad decisions.”

Brother Guillemo grew restless with being a mere audience to confrontation. He clapped both palms to his face and cried out, “Ah! I see! The vision clears! I should not fear the witch-woman’s escape. It was trivial and temporary. It was a sign, to remind me of my true Mission! Oh, glory be to God who lends me such iotas of his omniscience!” He dropped his hands to his sides, palms outward in prayerful reverence, and beamed at the three uncomprehending barons. “Don’t you see? It’s so clear! It must be obvious, even to the likes of you!”

“And what ‘like’ is that, good Brother,” asked Köthen darkly.

“The unenlightened, my lord baron, but it’s no fault of yours. We cannot all be conduits of the Will of Heaven.”

Hal spat loudly into the straw.

“Please enlighten us, good Brother.”

“Oh my lord of Köthen, it’s perfect! It’s sublime! Our ceremony and great preparations were not wasted!” Guillemo began to circle again, as if he could not speak and be still at the same time. “It was all to make us ready for
this
moment, for
this
inevitability. But we were impatient. We were willing to be satisfied by a trivial burning. We tried to deny Destiny. So the Lord took us in hand and swept away our mistake, so that our holy pyre could await the true cleansing fire!” He halted suddenly and whirled to face Erde, his eyes glittering with lust and anticipation. “It will be the pinnacle of glory! God’s Will be done at last! We will burn the witch-child! We will burn them all, and the Devil’s Paladin, too!” He reached for Erde, his fingers like a claw fisting in the folds of her garment.

Quickly, Köthen stepped between them. He pulled the priest off her firmly but gently, as a chirurgeon would a leech. “Not so fast, good Brother. I think we must hear more of this before we put some innocent peeress to the torch.”

“Innocent?” the priest yelped.

Köthen put him at arm’s length and pushed him away. He turned Erde to face him and took a long moment to study her, long enough so that Erde tired of staring at her feet and raised her eyes to his out of mere curiosity. She tried to follow Hal’s example: stand easy but strong. Köthen’s gaze was frankly appraising. His dark eyes were surprisingly warm and she saw in them something that from a man, she had known only from Hal: respect.

“So, my lady . . . Erde, is it? . . . can you speak or no?”

Erde shook her head. She was trying to understand what it was about Adolphus of Köthen that made her feel so girlish and awkward.

“Ah. A pity. I should very much like to hear your side of this story.”

Then Köthen smiled at her, a brief, almost intimate flash of complicity, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. Heat flushed her cheeks, every nerve focusing on the pressure of his hand on her arm. Erde dropped her eyes, grateful for the afternoon gloom already settling into the barn.

Köthen let her go, as if reluctantly, and turned back toward Hal. “Well, I’ll do what I can for her.”

“No, you shall not!” bellowed the priest. “She is mine!
Mine! The prophecy must be fulfilled, and then we will be saved! The sun will return and the flocks will fatten in the fields—but only if the witch-child burns!”

A burly white-robe ducked in breathlessly at the doorway, his brows beetled with expectation. “Holy Brother, there’s motion in the street.”

Guillemo started, then collected himself visibly. He drew in his shoulders and his flailing arms. He stilled, became rodlike with purpose. “Go. Tell them to prepare as we agreed. The moment is now. The final coincidence of forces. Go.” He turned to von Alte, then Köthen, formally in turn, pulling up to his tallest and putting on his deepest voice. “My lord barons, ready your men. What we thought lost to us returns. Destiny approaches.”