Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

  “It’s treason to kill a King’s Eagle,” said Lord Dietrich’s elder cousin.

  “So it is,” snapped Ekkehard. “Leave her be.”

  “How is being a traitor worse than being a heretic?” asked Lothar, genuinely puzzled.

  Ekkehard had no answer to such a difficult question. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I promised Prince Bayan I’d see the Eagle safely to the seat of the Villams, and so I will. After that, she’s on her own to return to the king.”

  But Hanna noted how Lord Dietrich’s cousins fell a little behind, talking intently to each other where the others could not hear them.

  A warm sun rapidly turned the snow to heavy slush, and Hanna pitied the men who had to walk at the front to make a way for the horses. The weather remained changeable, freezing at night, sometimes warm and sometimes cold with a froth of snow during the daytime. One horse slipped and broke a leg, and although they ate well of its flesh over the next few days, the poor man who’d been thrown in the accident and hit his head finally lost consciousness completely and died of a seizure. One of the soldiers who did most of the trail breaking lost the use of his feet to frostbite, and when the infection began to stink, he begged them to kill him, but Ekkehard hadn’t the guts for it. Instead, they abandoned him in a hamlet in the care of an old woman who claimed to know herbcraft. Hanna smelled the stink of witchcraft in that place, but there was nothing she could do to countermand Ekkehard’s orders. She could hear the man’s screaming for leagues afterward, long after they had marched out of earshot.

  That night, Lord Dietrich’s cousins and seven men deserted.

  In the morning, Ekkehard would have upbraided the sentries, except it was the very men who’d been on watch who had left. They followed the trail made by the others, bold prints across virgin snow, but as the day wore on, bitterly cold, one of the foot soldiers fell gravely ill and had to be carried by his comrades. They fell farther and farther behind.

  Here in the marchlands, forest ranged everywhere, woodland cut frequently by meadows, marsh, and higher heath lands. They took refuge that night within the remains of a deserted village. Most of the buildings had fallen in or been demolished but one had half a roof intact. Thatch scavenged from the outbuildings made decent sleeping pallets, and there was plenty of wood for a fire.

  Ekkehard paced impatiently at the limit of the fire’s light as the rest of them listened to the sick man struggle to breathe. Lord Lothar, too, was ill; his breath rattled in and out as he huddled miserably by the fire. Hanna stood with one foot up on the ruined foundations, watching the land.

  The stars shimmered beyond a veil of night haze, strangely luminous. Snow-shrouded trees lay in perfect stillness. The moon’s light etched shadows across the abandoned village and once or twice she thought she saw the shade of one of the lost inhabitants scurrying across the common yard on an errand, but it was first an owl and a second time simply a phantasm glimpsed out of the corner of her eye. The snow lay untouched except where their own feet had churned it. A sentry, stationed in the ruins of a pithouse right on the edge of the forest, coughed. Behind her the horses, crowded in with the men for warmth, stamped restlessly.

  She stroked her hands down her braid. A cold suspicion was growing in her that Bayan had sent them all out here knowing they might well die. Was he more ambitious than he seemed? Did he mean to eliminate any possible threat to Sapientia’s crown? Was it actually possible that Bayan could flirt as outrageously as he had with her and then send her out on such a dangerous journey? After all, the Quman could be anywhere, although surely they wouldn’t ride abroad in this weather. Only a fool would march cross-country at the mercy of winter—a fool, or an Eagle sent about the regnant’s business.

  But, of course, Bayan hadn’t made her an Eagle. She’d accepted the position, knowing its dangers. Any person who rode long distances was at risk, and if anything her Eagle’s cloak and badge gave her a measure of security most travelers never knew.

  Nay, Bayan wasn’t bent on revenge or intrigue. In truth, Prince Ekkehard was a nuisance: young, untried, immature, and reckless. And as big a fool as Ivar to get mixed up in heresy. In Bayan’s place, she would probably have done the same thing. Only she wished right now that she was snug in that sleeping platform in Biscop Alberada’s hall instead of standing out here in the middle of wilderness with no fortified holding within a day’s ride on either side. This was just the kind of place a small party like theirs could be attacked and overwhelmed.

  In the distance, a wolf howled, the only sound in the lonely landscape. Whispered talk died by the fire as men paused to listen, but nothing replied to that solitary call. A twig snapped at the fringe of the trees.

  Was that a shape, creeping in among the snow-laden branches? Were those pale wings, advancing through the trees?

  “Who’s there?” demanded the sentry. His voice trembled.

  “Hsst!” Ekkehard stepped forward, sword drawn, to stand beside Hanna. “What do you see, Eagle?” he whispered. Behind, his companions drew their swords while the soldiers scrambled to ready spears and shields. Hands shaking, she hoisted her bow and nocked an arrow.

  There was nothing there. Snow tumbled from a heavily-laden fir tree, shrouding the imagined wing shape, and all was still. The moon’s light cast a drowsy glamour over the silent forest.

  “Hai!” cried the sentry, so startled that his spear fell, clattering on stone foundations.

  It arrived noiselessly and settled down in the midst of a stretch of untouched snow. Despite its size, it did not break through the hard crust. It was the largest owl she had ever seen, with tufted ears and a coat of mottled feathers, streaked with white at the breast. The owl gazed at her, unblinking, incurious, looking ready to snatch her up as it would a delectable mouse.

  “That would make a tasty meal,” muttered Ekkehard, elbowing Hanna. “Shoot it.”

  “Nay, my lord prince,” she answered, suddenly afflicted by dread at the thought of shooting this magnificent creature, “for everyone knows that the flesh of an owl is like poison to a human being.”

  Ekkehard hesitated. In that instant, the owl took flight and was gone.

  “Damn it! We’ve few enough provisions, Eagle. One owl shared between us wouldn’t have sickened any one of us more than the rest!” He seemed ready to go on chastising her when Lord Benedict hurried up.

  “Your Highness, come quick. The sick man is vomiting blood, and the old sergeant thinks he’s going to die. You’d better give him a blessing so his soul will be safe when he passes to the Other Side.”

  The poor man did die, a little before dawn. Hanna paced all night, wrapped in her cloak, too cold and nervous to sleep, while the moon set and the forest sank into a deeper slumber. As Ekkehard’s company drifted in and out of their fitful sleep, interrupted now and again by Lord Lothar’s hacking coughs, she wondered if she would have been better off if the deserters had invited her to join them.

  They found their bodies the next day.

  They had saddled up their remaining eight horses in the morning and started down the road, following the tracks left by the others. The cold had frozen a crust over the snow heavy enough to take a man’s weight for a few moments before he broke through, and while that made the traveling easier for the men, it doubled the effort for the horses. Hanna quickly dismounted to lead her horse, and after a few more struggling steps, the young lords did so as well. They weren’t fools about horseflesh. Hanna had long since observed that many noble folk had more concern for their hounds, horses, and hawks than for the common people bound into their service.

  “Look here,” said Frithuric, who had taken the lead as usual.

  “There’s a set of tracks leading off the path, into the forest. Back toward the abandoned village. Should we follow them? Maybe one of these damned deserters had a change of heart and came back to look for us.”

  “Nay,” said Ekkehard impatiently, “we’ll want shelter tonight and I’ve no intention of wasting time on them, since they’r
e the ones who left us behind.”

  They went on, breath steaming in the cold air. The exercise made Hanna sweat, but her feet stayed cold and her toes ached incessantly. They had followed the path for less than half a league when Lord Frithuric, still ranging ahead, gave a strangled cry. Hurrying forward, they saw him beside a wayside shelter, chasing away crows.

  Lord Dietrich’s cousins and their seven fellow deserters had made their final stand at the wayside shelter, vainly attempting to use its walls as protection. Three of the men were missing their heads; the rest were simply dead, stripped of their weapons, any decent armor, and, of course, the three horses. Blood soaked the snow. Fire had scorched the thatch before burning itself out harmlessly. Singed straw lay scattered downwind along the snowy ground as far as Hanna could see. By the evidence of hoofprints, the deserters had been attacked by at least a dozen horsemen. A few stray feathers trampled in the snow or caught beneath the corpses left no doubt that their assailants had been a Quman raiding party.

  No one dared speak for fear their voices would carry on the still winter air across the sea of snow and blanketed forest to the waiting Quman. Surely they were still out there.

  They hadn’t the time or the energy to dig graves in the frozen ground, so they just left them for the wolves, not even building a cairn of rocks over them as they had for the man who’d died during the night. What else could they do?

  As the others made ready to go, Hanna grimly followed the tracks of the raiding party a short way, just to get an idea what direction they were heading. That was the eeriest thing of all: the Quman riders had obviously ridden back down the trail toward the abandoned village. One man had been bleeding enough to leave a faint trail of blood in his wake, quickly churned away by the passage of his fellows. It seemed possible, in retrospect, that the solitary hoofprints veering off from the trail a stone’s throw from the abandoned village had been those of a Quman scout rather than one of the deserters. Had it only been a dream that she’d seen pale wings moving among the trees last night?

  Of course it had. If the Quman had spotted them, they would have attacked. They hadn’t spotted them, and they hadn’t attacked.

  Never argue with Lady Fortune, her mother would say.

  Nervous every time a branch creaked or cracked under the weight of snow, she returned to the others. They were eager to be gone from the scene of carnage.

  “Didn’t they kill even one?” demanded Lord Frithuric. “I thought Lord Dietrich’s cousins were strong fighters.”

  “Maybe they were taken unawares,” said Hanna, which shut them up.

  Maybe she had ridden under worse conditions in her time as an Eagle, but she couldn’t think of any. The silence became excruciating. Little arguments flared up over nothing, tempers goaded into flame by anxiety. They slogged on and on and on along the path that led them deeper into the forest, far past the woodland fringes where they had traveled thus far, on into the old uncut heart, a vast tract of trees and silence. They saw no living creatures except themselves. The path was their only landmark. They waded knee-deep through snow along a narrow track bounded by trees. Except for a detour here and there to cut around an escarpment or dip down to a ford in a stream, the path took a fairly straight course through the old forest. Luckily for their feet, the streams had all frozen over, making every crossing easy.

  The worst part of the whole long, cold, nerve-racking, miserable day was that it got dark so early, leaving them caught in twilight deep in the forest without shelter.

  Fortunately, the old sergeant, Gotfrid, knew woodcraft. He spotted a dense stand of fir trees off to the right of the path. In their center, under overhanging branches, they discovered a living cathedral blanketed with needles and almost free of snow. The air lay close and quiet underneath the overarching branches. In an odd way, Hanna felt protected here, as though they had stumbled upon an ancient refuge. Eighteen people and the eight horses could all crowd in, as long as two men were posted as sentries at the fringes to peer out into the darkening forest. Clouds hung low, seeming to brush the tops of trees, and snow skirled down, spinning and drifting.

  “It’s really beautiful,” she murmured to old Gotfrid. She had come up beside his sentry post to survey their situation. “Or would be, anyway, if we had a fire and mead.”

  “And no Quman lurking like wolves to feed on us,” he agreed. He was a good man, stable, shrewd, and steady, who had spent most of his adult life as a Lion.

  “There’s something I don’t understand, though, Gotfrid.” She glanced back to make sure the others couldn’t hear them. Several ranks of trees, each taller and broader than the last, separated them from the hidden center. “Why would a practical man like you throw away everything for a heresy?”

  He chuckled, taking no offense at the question, as she’d guessed he wouldn’t. He was old enough to have white in his hair and a few age spots on his face. “You’re thinking that those young lords might be taking to a heresy just because they’re young and rash and fools, aren’t you? That’s because you’re a practical young woman, as I’ve seen.” He spoke the words approvingly, and it was a measure of the respect she’d gained for him on this desperate journey that she smiled, pleased with the compliment. “But it isn’t a whim, friend.” He faltered, growing suddenly serious.

  Snow fell softly throughout the vista beyond, a mantle of white over everything. It was almost too dark to see.

  “Have you ever seen a rose?” he asked finally.

  “Truly, I have seen one or two in my time. I saw the king’s rose garden at Autun.”

  “Well, then.” He hesitated again. She studied him. He wasn’t handsome or ugly but rather comfortably in between, with the broad shoulders and thick arms of a soldier. He was, perhaps, the same age as the king but rather more weathered by the hardships of life in the infantry, and if he stumbled with his words it was because he’d had a soldier’s education, not a cleric’s. “Think of a rose blooming all of a sudden in your heart.” He gestured toward the silent forest, all chill and white, a sea of winter. “Think of a rose blooming there, in the snow, where you’d never think to see it. Wouldn’t that be a miracle? Wouldn’t you know that you’d stumbled upon a little sliver of God’s truth?”

  “I suppose so.”

  He spoke so quietly that she almost couldn’t hear him. “A holy one walks among us. But we mustn’t speak of it, because God hasn’t chosen to make Her messenger known yet. But the rose bloomed in my heart, Eagle. I have no better way to explain it, how I knew it was truth when I heard the preaching about the Sacrifice and Redemption. The rose bloomed, and I’d rather die than turn my back now. I’d rather die.”

  There wasn’t a breath of wind.

  “Those seem ill-chosen words, friend, considering our situation,” said Hanna finally, not unkindly.

  “We’ve had poor luck, haven’t we? God is testing us.”

  “So They are.” The cold seeped down into her bones. She chafed her hands to warm them. “But Lord Dietrich was stricken down and died when he professed the heresy.”

  “I think he was poisoned by the biscop.” Gotfrid spoke these words so calmly that Hanna expected the sky to fall, but it did not. All she heard was the muffled noises of their party, hidden among the firs: a low mutter of conversation, the sting of smoke in her nostrils from a fire, the stamp and restless whickering of the horses. Twice she heard Lord Lothar’s hacking cough.

  “That’s a bold charge,” she said at last.

  “You think so, too,” he said grimly, “or else you’d leap to her defense. I think she poisoned him because she saw he wouldn’t back down. He was the strongest of us in faith. She hoped to frighten the rest of us into recanting.” He leaned toward her, close enough that his breath stirred her hair. “Don’t think there weren’t others among the crowd who had heard and believed. They hold the truth in their hearts as well.”

  “But hadn’t the courage to step forward.”

  “Well,” he said generously, “not everyo
ne is ready to die, if it comes to that. Someone has to survive to spread the truth, don’t they?”

  She chuckled, finding it amusing that they could debate matters of heresy while running for their lives through this vale of ice. “I like living, and I wouldn’t mind a nice hot cup of spiced wine right now.”

  “Well, lass, truly, so would we all.”

  But back in their refuge, there wasn’t anything but stale bread. She did manage to sleep curled up in her cloak until one of the soldiers woke her for a turn at watch. Within the shelter of the trees, with so many bodies crowded together, it had actually gotten not warm, of course, but bearable. As she pushed her way out through the stinging branches, she felt all the warmth sucked away by a raw cold so profound that for a moment she thought it might seize her heart. She came to the edge of the thick stand of trees and at once floundered into a thigh-high drift of new snow, all powdery soft. Snow slipped down her leggings to freeze her ankles and toes. She staggered back into the shelter of the firs and tried to make sense of the scene before her.

  She heard it, and felt it, more than saw it, because it was still too dark to see. She tasted that flavor the air has when snow falls thick and fast and the clouds weigh so heavily that one knows a blizzard is on the way. Flakes settled on her nose, and cheeks, and eyelids, and melted away.

  Ai, God, if the Quman didn’t kill them, then they would freeze to death in the coming storm.

  A thread of falling snow, dislodged from a branch just to her right, hissed down past her ear. She went as still as a rabbit who has just sensed the shadow of an owl. Something was out there.

  Beyond the veil of snow, wraithlike figures darted forward among the trees.

  Quman.

  Nay, not Quman at all. There was just enough light now, a hint of dawn, that she could make out their outlines: Slender and pale, these creatures walked rather than rode. Dark hoods obscured their faces, and where their feet brushed the snow they did not sink down through the light powder, nor did they leave tracks. They were shadows.