Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  Eventually she discovered that some among these men had known Hanna rather better than the others.

  “Yes, it’s true, lady,” said the one called Ingo, a broad-shouldered, good-looking man with a scar and a wicked smile. “We knew her from before, from the march east with Prince Bayan, may he rest at peace in the Chamber of Light. We’re them who found her at the Veserling. We ripped her from the hands of the monster. We marched with her west and got her settled at Gent, although she was deathly ill there. It’s a miracle she survived, but survive she did. And she did come with us, then, to Osterburg. After that she was sent south to Aosta. As you’ve already heard.”

  “She spoke of you,” said the youngest of them, shyly.

  “She is a good friend to me,” said Liath. “I’d be pleased to know she has survived this tempest.”

  She found it easy to chat with these men. They acted, at moments, in awe of her knowledge and education, but Thiadbold and the cheerful scamp called Folquin had no fear of questioning her about what they did not understand. The older men could not be intimidated; they had seen too much. She had saved the life of one of their own. That was enough for them to accept her as a comrade. The endless battles waged on the royal progress had no claws here.

  Later, when the sentry changed, those few men still awake lay down to sleep, but Liath was restless, as if the night’s insomnia that often afflicted Sanglant had passed into her. You would think that afflictions might be rubbed from skin to skin or breathed from mouth to mouth. Anyone who studied medicine knew that sick people often left illness in their wake. Why not other afflictions as well?

  She paced around the sentry circle, pausing between each bonfire to stare up at the heavens. Clouds veiled the stars, yet it seemed to her that she could almost see the faint threads of their light trailing down into the waiting crown. Would it be possible to weave the crowns if the heavens weren’t clear? Any good mathematicus armed with an astrolabe and a table and a knowledge of the date and approximate hour could predict which star was rising and which setting. Could point near enough to the place in the sky where this constellation, or that one, rode and turned as the hours passed.

  She had none of these things, only her memory, and even her capacious memory could not quite hold as much information as an astrolabe. That, after all, was why the Jinna astronomers had devised them.

  “Hey!”

  The shout turned her around to stare at the bonfire burning at her back, beyond the crown, about forty strides away. A sentry staggered back, a hand clapped to his right shoulder.

  “’Ware! ’Ware! I’ve been shot!”

  Sentries called out. A pair of men grabbed sticks and lit them out of the fires to create swift-burning torches. She ran to the cursing sentry. By the time she got there, the captain and Sergeant Ingo were standing beside him, examining the arrow. It was a shallow wound. The arrow danced up and down each time the man winced and swore.

  “Where?” she asked him.

  “Don’t know,” he said through gritted teeth. “Aih! Either pull it free or stop touching it!”

  “Back here so I can see if the point is barbed,” said Ingo, and hauled him away.

  “Silence!” she said, as the camp roused around them, men calling to each other, swords thudding against shields and mail giving its distinctive slinky rattle as men armed themselves.

  “Silence!” roared Thiadbold.

  In that silence, quickly fallen, she heard a twig snap, straight ahead, in the trees. She needed no bow. She bent her will to the crown of the trees and called fire.

  The forest flashed into a ghastly bright false day as treetops caught fire, revealing a dozen raggedly dressed men armed with spears and sticks and bows. They ranged just out of the halo of light given by the bonfires, under the shadow of the trees, but with sparks and ash raining down over them and the flames blazing above, they fled into the darkness. Arrows skittered after them, until Thiadbold called the cease. The Lions cheered and hooted to see their foe routed.

  “That’s a neat trick,” said Thiadbold somberly, studying the flames, “that might turn a battle or two. Yet I wouldn’t try it in dry lands. Will it spread?”

  “I hope not.”

  This was no white-hot anger, no blast of fear, to create a wildfire. It was a bigger fire than she had intended, scorching six trees altogether, but with some effort she managed to pinch off its edges so it would burn itself out. The sentry had taken only a slight wound, quickly bandaged. The men settled down as the captain set out a double guard for the rest of the night.

  Even so, Liath could not sleep. Only when the fire had died completely did she lie down, and even then whenever she closed her eyes she saw burning men, their flesh melting off their bodies.

  Is this why Da had sealed her off from her own magic? Had he only been trying to protect her from herself? But this question struck her as impossibly naive. Da’s motives could not be so easily divined, nor were they simple. Da was not stupid, even if he hadn’t had the strength of will necessary to combat Anne.

  Without the stars to mark the passing of time, the night dragged on as if forever, but at length the air lightened and a bird chirped. The sound made her jump. A bird! She rose, unsteady on weary legs, and listened hard and peered into the surrounding foliage, but she did not see it or hear that call again.

  5

  THE outpost had a name, Freeburg, and a population of some four-score wary persons housed in an impressive walled holding consisting of five thatched longhouses, a dozen or so smaller buildings and, remarkably, the blunt spire of a tiny chapel. One lonely cottager lived outside the walls, just where the path emerged from the forest, but it wasn’t clear if this spry old fellow had chosen his exile or lived close by the protecting palisade on sufferance. He watched their company march past without saying a word and turned back to clearing his garden. Six beehives lay within his fence.

  The gates lay open. Folk worked in the fields and women washed clothes in the sparkling river. Meat dried under fenced-in shelters, ready to be brought in and cured. The ring of a blacksmith’s hammer surprised them; smiths, like gold, were usually found in more exalted settlements.

  Folk paused to watch them. A dozen young men stood along the palisade rampart armed with bows.

  “They’re not trusting,” murmured Liath to Thiadbold, but he only nodded thoughtfully and led the Lions right into what might be a trap, crossing over the ditch and through the open gate. The Lions halted inside the gate, in an open area with enough space for arms practice, or a market, or foot races. Soon they were surrounded. The council of elders met them.

  “We heard news of you along the road,” said their spokesman, a genial man with silver hair, silver beard, and a twisted smile from a palsy afflicting the left side of his face. He looked otherwise hale. “I’m called Master Helmand.”

  “I’m called Captain Thiadbold. We’re on the regnant’s business—my Lions and these three Eagles—on our way to St. Valeria’s. If we might bide one night within your walls, we’d be grateful. We were attacked by bandits last night. One of our men got hurt, but we drove them off.”

  “Where was that?” asked Master Helmand as the folk around him whispered and nodded.

  “There’s a stone circle. That’s where we camped last night.”

  “Old ghosts walk there. No one goes willingly to that place.”

  It was clear to Liath that the man thought them fools for having camped on haunted ground, but the confession seemed to peel off a layer of suspicion from his scrutiny. After all, how badly can fools threaten an armed village?

  “You know the convent?” she asked him. “We had hoped to ask for a guide to show us the way.”

  “Oh, yes. They come twice a year to trade with us and sing a mass and read the prayers for the dead.”

  Liath gestured toward the chapel, seen now to be so small that no more than twenty folk could crowd into its nave. “You have a chapel, I see.”

  “Yet no deacon.” He hesitated, g
lanced at the other elders, and went on as they fluttered their hands and nodded their heads eagerly. “Perhaps you’d take a request to the regnant, Eagle. We’ll host you gladly, though we haven’t much in our stores after this long winter and no good spring. We’re beholden to the regnant here, as you know. Freeholders. We have a charter!”

  “Have you?” Liath asked with interest. “When was it written?”

  He cleared his throat. Everyone looked embarrassed. “Well, then, in the time of the old Henry, father to the first Arnulf, long since. We only hear it read aloud but twice the year at spring and fall, and this year at springtide none came from the convent to us.”

  “Did they not?” Liath looked at Thiadbold. He shrugged. “Have any gone to see if there is trouble there?”

  “The river flooded. The ford hasn’t been passable for months. There’s no other way through.”

  “Is there no hope of us winning through?”

  He beckoned to a man standing up on the walls. This one came down, and it appeared he was a hunter and tracker for the holding, one who ranged wide.

  “I’m called Wulf,” the man said by way of introduction after Helmand had explained the situation. He looked to be about Thiadbold’s age, somewhere between late twenties and middle thirties, dark-featured, wiry, tough, with handsome eyes and a warp to his chin from an old injury. “I was up that way ten days ago. It might be better now. We can try.”

  “We must try,” said Liath to him before turning to the elders. “We’ll be grateful for your hospitality. I can read that charter for you, if you’ve a wish to hear it.”

  Oh, they did.

  An entire ceremony had collected around the twice-yearly reading of their charter in the same way flotsam collects around a boulder rising from the sandy seashore. A table and chair were carried out into the open air and a cloth thrown over the table. Every household brought cups and drink and set them on the common table. Last, a pale horn was produced from a locked chest. Its call rang four times, once at each corner of the stockade, before they put it away. Lanterns were lit as the inhabitants gathered, stationing themselves in a tidy semicircle, children at the front, adults behind. All remained standing as Master Helmand emerged from the largest longhouse with a small cedar chest in his hands. He set it on the table, opened it reverently, and uncovered folded parchment. This he opened on the table, one hand pinning down the top and the other the bottom. Lanterns were set on either side, although there was still enough light for Liath, at least, to read the bold letters.

  The text was succinctly written and began on the paler, flesh side of the vellum. The cream-colored grain side was blank and the corners showed a tendency to curl in that way. The parchment had a hole in it, and the scribe had drawn her ruled lines and written in her text around the flaw. The script had an old-fashioned look to it. For one thing, it used all uncials, as they had done in those days. The scribe’s hand had no beauty; Liath could have done a better job. But she could read it.

  “‘I, Henry, by the Grace of God in Unity, Regnant over Wendar, do grant to the inhabitants of Freeburg the customs and privileges written below …’” Reading, she was reminded of that day years ago in the forest holding west of Gent, when she had read aloud a charter very like to this one. “Whoever shall acquire property by clearing wastelands shall hold it for the same price as her house…. No one, not the regnant nor anyone else, shall demand of the householders of Freeburg any requisition or aid…. They shall pay neither tariff nor tax upon their food or the wine they have grown in their own vineyards. … Whoever lives in the holding a year and a day shall afterward remain undisturbed.’”

  The formula had a parallel construction to that diploma given to the freeholders in the Bretwald by the younger Henry, although the details differed. The villagers listened as intently as scholars as she read slowly and in a clear voice.

  “‘This privilege was confirmed by Henry, by faith and oath approved and accepted by the following persons… in the year 660 since the Proclamation of the Holy Word, on the 11th day of Sormas, on the feast day of the Visitation.’” She looked up in surprise. “That’s today!”

  Having no deacon to count the calendar for them, they, too, were shocked and delighted. They set to drinking with a cheer. First the children—who would lay claim to these lands when they inherited—drank. After them, the elders, who had husbanded the land, and last of all the householders who now worked the fields. There was enough for all, a rare enough thing, Liath thought as she sipped at the sour cider, which was starting to go to vinegar but had not quite turned.

  On such an auspicious occasion all lingering suspicion vanished. Lions and Eagles were fed, and housed at random, some in the longhouses and some in byres or stock sheds on beds of heaped straw. Liath asked for no place greater for herself than any other, and the captain, seeing this without commenting on it, offered her no primacy. For the first time in many days she slept soundly, half buried in a heap of scratchy straw with only a blanket beneath and one thrown over herself where she had wrapped herself in her wool cloak. In old days, long ago, she had often slept so on the road, traveling with Da and later as an Eagle. Slipping into sleep, she could imagine Da near at hand, murmuring under his breath, talking to himself, as he often did when there was no learned adult with whom to converse. How he loved to chat. For all his lonely isolated ways, Da had loved people and loved talking and discussion and argument for argument’s sake. He had had a restless, roving mind, unsettled, dissatisfied, and most likely unsatisfiable. She tucked her saddlebags against her chest. The book was a comforting presence, for all the trouble it had caused her. It was, in a way, Da’s conversation with himself all those years. She wept a little, thinking of him, and fell asleep, and dreamed of Blessing as a tiny baby sleeping at peace in her arms.

  “Liath? Ai, God! It is her!”

  That Hanna’s voice should so trouble her dreams did not surprise her, not after marching for two days with the Lions. They were in the dream, too.

  “Well, I told you it was her,” said one, sounding aggrieved.

  “Since when should anyone believe your wild tales, Folquin?”

  “Since I learned better from following your example, Ingo!”

  “Liath!”

  That a hand should touch her shoulder in such a familiar way, jostling her out of sleep, did surprise her. She opened her eyes.

  She was still dreaming.

  For five long breaths she stared at the apparition, the dream figure floating before her but in fact not floating at all. The figure crouched in a manner very like that of any creature that has weight and heft. Her leggings creased and bunched around the knees. Her white-blonde braid of hair had pooled on her shoulder, and as the woman shook her head with a smile, it tumbled free down her torso.

  “Hanna?” Liath sat up.

  Then, after all, came the hugging and the weeping.

  VI

  NO GOING BACK

  1

  THEIR company set out at once for the convent.

  “I rode from St. Valeria with a request for some laborers to come and rebuild the damaged wall,” explained Hanna. “We thought to let our party rest there a few days in peace while I rode here to ask for aid.”

  “You managed the river crossing,” said the one called Wulf. He hadn’t been able to take his gaze off Hanna since she and Liath walked out of the byre. “Had you no guide? How high was the water running?”

  As Hanna described her journey between convent and village—she had spent the night sleeping outdoors—Liath stared at her. It seemed she had walked into a dream, something hoped for so long that she could not believe it to be true. Had Sanglant stared at her in this manner when she had returned from the aether? Yet she felt less awkwardness with Hanna than she had at first with Sanglant. She felt, more than anything, relief, as though she had discovered that the hand she thought missing was, after all, still attached.

  As Hanna finished talking, she glanced at Liath, grinned, and shook her head. �
�I still can’t believe it. I’ve thought of you so often over the years. I must still be dreaming. Sorgatani will be eager to see you!”

  These astounding tidings must all be explained. As the two women chattered back and forth without pause the day seemed, as the poets said, to fly past. They marched along a grassy track barely more than a cow path footed in mud. The river still ran high—Hanna had managed the crossing because of the weight of her horse—and they strung a rope across for the Lions to grip so they would not get swept away in the current. After this, the way wound in rugged leaps and switchbacks up into steep, forested hills troubled by ancient ravines and fresh gullies. Now and again the woodsman exclaimed over a landslide that had obliterated a portion of the path, or a new waterfall pouring down through a cleft in a rocky outcropping. Trees had snapped and tumbled. It was, in truth, a miracle that Hanna had managed to get through at all, let alone with a horse.

  “This is no ordinary steed,” she said, “but Lady Bertha’s own palfrey, a noble steed, impossibly brave and strong-hearted. She’s Wicked.”

  “Then why are you riding her?”

  Hanna chuckled. “That’s her name. The story goes that when Lady Bertha acquired her, the mare bit her. I don’t know if it’s true. She can jump, though, and she isn’t afraid of anything.”

  “I pray you, Hanna, tell me again of what has transpired since the tempest last autumn. I cannot believe—Lady Bertha survived with some few others of those that accompanied me—and yet so close to home she is killed! Are you sure of what you saw?”

  “I’ll tell you again,” said Hanna, soberly, not taking offense at the question as Liath had known she would not. “Ask me what questions you will. Maybe I’ll remember something I’ve forgot. It was a horrible night. Those arrows flying out of the darkness!” She shuddered. “Should another have spoken to me of it, I would not have believed him.”