Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  “How could you?” demanded Hanna at last. “They owe us shelter. …” She sputtered, too angry to continue.

  Rosvita paced alongside them. The entire cavalcade moved slowly enough to accommodate the wagons, which seemed always to be half mired in muck, but in truth Rosvita had not weakened on this journey. She had grown wiry, strong enough to walk all day without flagging. She often commented, with surprise, how much better her aching back felt, although she slept on the ground most nights.

  “I know that look in a man’s eye, Eagle,” she said now. “This is not a battle worth fighting.”

  “What can have made them so desperate?”

  Bertha snorted, half laughing. “War between neighboring lords. The Quman barbarians. Plague. The great storm. What else may have afflicted them I cannot tell.”

  “I am puzzled,” said Rosvita, “by what he meant by men with animal faces. Why he turned against us when Lady Bertha mentioned Prince Sanglant. It makes no sense.”

  “Any man may shake his fist at the regnant when he suffers, and love the king when he prospers,” said Bertha dismissively. “Yet I wonder. We have seen few enough folk in these last weeks when we ought to have seen more. Seven abandoned villages. Children hiding in the woods without their parents. Freshly dug graves. Solitary corpses. This is not just famine at work.”

  “What, then?” asked Rosvita.

  Bertha shrugged. Hanna, too, had no answers.

  II

  ARROWS IN THE DARK

  1

  IN the end they camped along the damp road. The next day when they rode into the ruins of Augensburg, Lady Bertha insisted they set up camp where they had at least some shelter against the unrelenting mizzle that Hanna could not quite bring herself to call rain.

  In some ways, theirs was an impressive procession, with fifteen horses, three wagons, one noblewoman, eleven ragged clerics, fourteen stolid soldiers, one sequestered Kerayit shaman and her slave, the goats, the clucking chickens, and the steadfast dogs. Many had died after the battle with Holy Mother Anne’s forces: all of the Kerayit guardsmen, Sorgatani’s two slaves, and sixteen of Bertha’s war band. But since that day in Arethousa when Hanna had joined them, they had, miraculously, lost no one else and had sustained only one permanent injury, to a soldier whose right foot had been crushed when the smaller wagon had slipped sideways down an incline at the side of a mountain path while he walked alongside.

  Two men scouted for the water supply while Sergeant Aronvald set up a perimeter around the remains of the stone chapel attached to the palace. The wagon wheels were braced against rocks and the horses taken out to graze, water, and roll. Soldiers tossed tiles out of the ruins of the chapel to make room for sleeping while some of the clerics rigged up canvas to shelter the apse where the altar had once stood. Brother Breschius emerged from the Kerayit cart. Carrying two covered bronze buckets, one riding light and the other heavier, he walked toward the rear of the palace compound where kitchens once stood.

  Lady Bertha paused beside her. “Will you come with me, Eagle? Sister Rosvita and I mean to look through the ruins of the town to see if there’s anything we can scavenge.” A trio of soldiers loitered behind her, chafing their hands to warm them.

  “I’ll walk through the palace ruins,” said Hanna. “If I may.”

  “A good idea. No telling where the rats are hiding. Come!” The last was addressed to her retainers. They left.

  After rubbing down her horse and turning it out with the others, Hanna walked through the ruins of the palace. Fallen pillars striped the ground. She traced corridors and rooms reduced to outlines on the ground. A strange feeling crawled along her skin, like fire that warmed but did not burn. She had walked here with Bulkezu and his brother Cherbu. In this place Cherbu had discovered the name of the woman whose sorcery had consumed the vast building.

  “Liathano,” she said softly. She shut her eyes and listened, but all she heard was the hiss of a light rain on the ruins and the grass and the rattle of wind in the distant trees. This was a dead place.

  “What happened to the town?” asked Brother Fortunatus, coming up beside her.

  She coughed and jumped.

  “I beg your pardon!” he said, chuckling a little as he touched fingers to her elbow. “I did not mean to startle you.” She offered him a false grin, but he narrowed his eyes. “What ails you, Hanna? Ghosts?”

  From this vantage point they could see most of the town below, a skeletal presence rising in the midst of deserted fields and the outraged wreck of a substantial orchard. A number of trees had fallen, most likely torn down by the storm. Dusk-drawn mist drifted along the broken palisade.

  “Not ghosts, but memories. Ghosts enough, I suppose, if memories haunt us.” She swallowed and found even that trifling movement caught and choked her.

  “Memories are the worst ghosts of all.” His hand curled around her elbow, and the gesture gave her courage.

  “Years ago. The Quman army rode through this place when I was their captive. There are no good memories for me here.”

  “I’m sorry. Did they burn the town?”

  Meadow grass and fescue had swept over the ruins, grown everywhere they could take root. Hawthorn and twining canes of raspberry had found a foothold as well. Nettles thrust up where the last stains of ash mottled the earth. Soon The Fat One would overtake what the princes had built and cover it in flowers, although only a few dusky violets bloomed now.

  “It’s late in the season for violets,” she said, pointing to a spray of delicate petals.

  He cocked his head, considered her, then followed where she led. “It’s the cloud cover. I fear we’ll face a late growing season. And a short one.”

  “I forgot about the town,” she added. “I don’t know what happened to the town. After the palace burned, it was still standing. The flames never touched the town. We took shelter there that night, all of us in the king’s progress. King Henry stayed in the hall of a prosperous merchant, slept in the man’s own bed. How can that all be gone? Where did it go? Did Bulkezu burn it down? I don’t remember.”

  An odd spark of color caught her eye and she knelt and swept aside chaff and dirt and ash and the detritus of years of abandonment to uncover a brass belt buckle shaped in the form of a lion.

  “Look here! I wonder if it belonged to one of the Lions who died in the fire.” She looked up. Fortunatus was smiling sadly down at her. He had gotten leaner, cutting his face into sharper planes, but somehow more kind. If Bertha was the goad that drove them and Rosvita the sustenance that gave them heart to keep going, then Fortunatus was the arm that steadied Rosvita whenever she faltered.

  “Liath burned down the palace,” she said, although he asked nothing. “Hugh attacked her. He meant to rape her. She was so scared. She called fire. She never meant to. Her fear burned down the entire palace. She killed a dozen or more people.”

  “I know, Hanna,” he said gently. “I was here when it happened.”

  “Ai, God, of course. Of course. I forgot. I came late. We came over the hill, the Lions and I. We saw the smoke. That was: Ingo, Folquin, Leo, and young Stephen, who wasn’t a Lion yet but he wanted to become one. …” Once started, she could not stop herself, not even when the story wound into that terrible captivity among the Quman. She babbled on for a time while Fortunatus waited and nodded and listened and murmured the occasional meaningless word to show that it mattered to him that these memories overwhelmed her.

  In time as the drizzle melted away to become a gauze of mist ghosting up from low-lying ground, the rain of words abated.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He smiled in a way that warmed her heart, offered her a hand, and helped her to rise. “We all must speak sometime. You endured much.”

  “Not as much as others. Not as much as those who died.”

  “No use comparing, unless you were the one who chose who lived and who died.”

  His hand touched her shoulder, but a ghost clutched her heart. She remembere
d Bulkezu’s voice as clearly as if he stood beside her. “Mercy is a waste of time. If I choose, I will leave ten behind for the crows.”

  “It was always ten,” she whispered. “For them, life. And for the rest, death.”

  “It was not truly your choice, Hanna. If you had not chosen, then ten more would have died. At least you saved ten where you could. You must forgive yourself. I pray you.” He had tears on his cheeks.

  “Thank you, Brother.”

  He kissed her on the forehead as a benediction. He was a cleric, after all, able to plead with God on behalf of those who have repented and those who suffer although they are innocent.

  From here they could see the flickering light cast by the fire although not the fire itself, tucked away within the stone walls of the chapel. One of the soldiers laughed, another Stephen, an older man who had ridden for years with Lady Bertha. She knew all their laughs now, their favorite swear words and curses; she knew Ruoda’s confident way with the dogs and Gerwita’s fear of the big boarhound called Mercy, Jerome’s shy way of stammering when he had to speak with more than two people paying attention to him and the dry sound of Jehan’s constant nagging cough. She knew each silhouette, such as the one ambling along a fallen length of wall as aimlessly as a sheep.

  “Strange,” she said.

  “What is strange?”

  “I never think to count Princess Sapientia, although surely she must be counted before all others in our party. Even Lady Bertha forgot to mention her when those farmers refused to let us pass.”

  He turned to look where she looked. Sister Petra caught up with her charge and herded her back toward the safety of the chapel and the fire.

  “What will become of her?” Hanna asked.

  Fortunatus only shook his head, but she could not tell whether the gesture meant “I do not know” or “may God have mercy” or “all hope for her is lost.”

  A shout rang out of the twilight. They turned to see five shadowy figures and the three dogs striding along the road that led from the town. The tautness of those shoulders and the cant of those heads told of trouble.

  Hanna ran to meet them, but Lady Bertha brushed past her and hurried on toward the camp with the three soldiers. Sister Rosvita halted, took hold of Fortunatus’ arm, and bent to catch her breath.

  “Whh!” She gripped her side as at a spasm, but when she saw Sister Petra shepherding Princess Sapientia within the walls of their makeshift fort, she frowned. “Best hurry. What of the men who went to the well?”

  Without waiting for their answer she climbed on, and Hanna and Fortunatus followed, looking at each other. There was nothing to say. As they picked their way through the fallen remains of the portico, they heard Lady Bertha speaking.

  “Bring the horses up. We’ll need a guard on them all night. I want those men sent to fetch water called in, and a double sentry all night.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Hanna.

  From this angle the slope of the hill hid the town. It was by now too dark to see the fields as anything distinct, only alternating shades of gray in patches that ended abruptly in the darker line of trees.

  “The orchard trees were chopped down, not blown down,” Rosvita said, still wheezing. “Fresh sawdust from the chopping, scattered everywhere. The mist hid the pockets of smoke. This fire and destruction is recent. The town might have been attacked yesterday.”

  “God have mercy,” murmured Fortunatus, drawing the circle at his chest.

  “Were there corpses?” Hanna asked. “Any survivors?”

  “We did not search closely. If an enemy waits in the forest, they know we’re here. Morning will be soon enough.”

  A whistle carried on the breeze, a silky, twisting tune Hanna had never heard before. Soldiers came alert. Swords were drawn and arrows measured against bowstrings. A rank of spears lowered. Yet the dogs barked in greeting not in challenge. The figure who emerged out of the ruins carried two covered buckets, one sloshing with water and the other empty. Brother Breschius set his buckets down beside the painted cart and turned, seeking first one face then another.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “You found the well?” asked Lady Bertha.

  “I did. Set somewhat back where the hill is steep. I came through Augensburg many years ago. I recalled it because of a particular …” He shook his head. “What is it?”

  “Laurent and Tomas went before you. Did you see them there?”

  “No sign of them. Did they know where to look? They might be lost in the ruins.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  When they told him, he rubbed his clean-shaven chin with the stump of his right arm as if he had momentarily forgotten that he lacked the hand.

  “Do we send out a search party?” asked Sergeant Aronvald.

  By now night had swept in. Beyond the halo lent by the campfire it was impossible to see anything except the wall of darkness that marked the distant line of trees.

  “They can see our campfire,” said Lady Bertha. “They can shout, if they are injured.”

  She was a hard commander. Hanna had seen her drive her men over mountain paths more suitable to goats, had seen her set her own noble shoulder to pushing the wagons where the road became nothing more than a series of dry rills dug into earth by runoff. She had suffered an injury in the infamous battle against Anne’s forces that no one would talk about in detail, and had lost most of the range of motion in her left arm, but if the injury pained her day in and day out she never complained. Yet she never smiled, and her frown dug deep as she faced her muttering retainers.

  “If they have been ambushed, then sending out a search party will only offer our adversaries more swift kills. If they are lost, and in no danger, they can find us by the light of the campfire or at dawn.”

  “There’s some rough ground back there,” said Brother Breschius. “A defile, a few drops where the ground falls away. This palace was built to take advantage of the high ground. They might have fallen.”

  Her expression did not change. “They might have. If so, it is unlikely in this darkness we will find them. We’ll search at dawn.”

  She looked at Sister Rosvita. After a moment, with genuine reluctance, Rosvita nodded to show she agreed. Hanna looked past the two women to the fire where Sister Petra had gotten her charge seated and was fussing to get her to drink broth out of the stewpot.

  Princess Sapientia stared into the flickering fire. She did not look as if she had lost her mind. She did not act as would a madwoman, babbling and cursing and flailing her arms in the manner of the moon-mad who had lost their wits, or spitting and frothing at the mouth as might a soul possessed by a demon. She just did not speak and did not respond and seemed to have cut the thread that binds one person’s actions to those of her companions, which threads are all that stitch the world of living things into a single fabric of being. She acted as if she were already dead.

  “Pull the two cargo wagons across the open side,” Bertha was saying. “Fix shields to cover what they can. Set men up where they can watch along the height of the wall on the other sides. Yes, even up there, in those rafters that can take their weight.”

  “Eagle.” The sergeant addressed her. “First watch, if you will, out at the second line of wall. Keep a particular eye out for will-o-the-wisps, any strange glamour of light. Listen hard.”

  The other Stephen joined her about fifty paces out from the opening of the chapel, where a low stone wall made a protected vantage point. He was a good dozen or more years older, pale-haired, blue-eyed, steady, smart, patient, and tough.

  They braced themselves a body’s length apart to get the broadest view of the slope of the fore hill and the lower ground, all lost in night. In good weather they might have marked the passing of time by the rise and fall of the stars, but as it was they just sat, watching and listening. Now and again a shimmer of rain passed over, but it always faded. It was silent and cool. He shifted occasion
ally, feet scraping on the ground. For some reason her hands ached, and twice she inhaled a curious scent of charred wood melded with the acrid flavor of juniper.

  Stephen said, “did you hear that?”

  “No.”

  Night noises, nothing more: a brief hiss of rain, the crackle of branches where the wind stroked them. The shifting and settling of the earth as it cooled. A cold breeze poured out of the heavens, seeming to drop right down on them from the height of the sky.

  We are alone in the world, she thought.

  And then: All things are alone, yet nothing is alone, it is all tangled together, woven as in a weir to create an obstacle or diversion or as in a tapestry to make out of its parts a vision of a greater whole.

  She felt Stephen’s presence, how he shifted to find a more comfortable position for his right knee, how he stifled a cough by turning it into a grunt. She felt the pool of air beyond where the land sloped away downward. She smelled the sparks and ash of the wood fire and the aroma of horsehair and horse piss and horse manure. A man coughed, back in the shelter of the chapel.

  She yawned, swaying, and slipped into that semi-alert twilight state that is neither waking nor sleep.

  The wind picked her up as if she were a downy feather, and she spun away across the ruins, across a river, across forest and distant hamlets and stretches of meadowland and woodland farther and farther still, uncounted leagues flashing beneath her until the landscape that fell away under her feet was grass and only grass, pale in the dawn twilight. There comes blindingly and amazingly a glimpse of the rising sun tinted blue behind a veil of dust as it shoulders up over a golden-green horizon of grass. A procession moves at a steady pace through this grass, strange folk with almond-shaped eyes and eastern complexions. Some are Quman, wearing feathered wings attached to their armored coats; some are women whose hips flow into and become the bodies of horses. One is a shaman stippled with the tattoos of his kind, the spirit companions whose magic he can call on at need. She follows them. They are taking her where she needs to go.