Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  Rosvita nodded sadly. “That is hope enough for me, then. Let us pray you are right.”

  5

  “LI-AT-DANO.”

  She woke disoriented and still blind. She hadn’t meant to doze off, knowing that something moved in the darkness with her, but the lingering effect of the poison had swallowed her.

  “Li-at-dano.”

  The voice was female, caustic, and familiar. It came from out of the darkness but from no particular direction.

  “Why am I here?” she asked. It was difficult to speak. She was desperately thirsty.

  “Accident, perhaps. The favor of the gods, perhaps. Do you know who I am?”

  “I know who you are. Let me go free. Let me return to your son.”

  “The rock that cages you is more powerful than the sorcery that runs in your veins.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You lie at the Heart-of-the-Mountain-of-the-World’s-Beginning. You can burn stone, I suppose, but not quickly. It will tire you. You will not work your way free of this place easily.”

  “I will be dead of thirst and hunger before then. If that’s your aim.”

  “It might be more effective than the snake’s poison, now that I think on it. You will find water and food against the wall.”

  “Why keep me alive at all?”

  “I have a use for you.”

  “Show yourself.”

  “I will not.”

  “I could burn you!”

  “If you did, you would still be trapped. You do not know the way out. Only I do.”

  Liath rose, but she hadn’t the strength to keep to her feet. She left one rock shard to mark her old position and moved as quickly as she could, hoping to creep up on her enemy. She had to crawl, despite knees and hands already abused and scraped raw. It hurt to crawl, and the ache in her thigh was worse than before.

  Five hundred hand paces from her starting point, she found a cache of leather vessels where there had been none before. The water was cool, and there was enough for several days, if rationed carefully. She drank first, almost weeping as she savored the touch of liquid in her parched mouth. She felt, then tasted, wedges of salty, dried fish, nibbled to test tough rounds of flatbread, and explored the oblong shape and smooth skin of a dozen sweet fruits. The softest proved easy to peel open with the edge of her rock scraper; its moist sweetness had a flavor she had never tasted before, like ambrosia, surely—the food of the gods in ancient Arethousa. She ate and drank cautiously, not sure if she would feel nauseated again, but the worst effects of the toxin had passed.

  Food and drink then, enough for a hand or so of days.

  Of Kansi-a-lari, whose voice had mocked her, she heard and felt no sign.

  6

  IVAR had been left behind with a dozen outriders to guard the horses in case the bandits slipped away from Captain Ulric and the strike force. They waited in a clearing ringed with beech trees. Faint trails of mist spun away through the forest. He gazed downslope, where oak trees encroached and bramble flourished. Beyond, at the base of the long hill, lay a fen populated by low-growing wet birch, stands of alder, and every manner of sedge and meadow grass. The captain knew better than to ride into such ground; the soldiers had gone in at dawn on foot.

  Ivar and the others listened. Because of the lay of the ground, they heard the attack as if it were the peal of distant chimes: the ring of weapons clashing; a shout; a dog barking; a silence as the wind turned; and scattered shouts and noises as the wind shifted back. He blew on his hands. Sentries prowled at the edge of his sight. Two dogs snoozed on the damp ground. Above, clouds lingered, but it seemed to him that the mist was white and the heavens whiter still, as though the sun were trying to burn through.

  “You’d think it’d be warmer, or that summer would come,” muttered one of the grooms, stamping his feet.

  “Hey!” shouted a sentry. “It’s Erkanwulf!”

  Ivar stayed aloof as the others crowded to meet the returning hero, who had blood on his cheek and a frown on his face.

  “Well, it’s over.” He caught Ivar’s gaze, and nodded. “Dedi got slashed on the thigh, and Guy got knocked cold, and a couple of lads have scrapes and bruises, but we’re all safe. We took them by surprise. We got a dozen prisoners for the biscop. The rest are dead.”

  “For Lord Geoffrey,” objected the man who had complained about summer. He was a Lavas retainer.

  “For the biscop,” repeated Erkanwulf. “For justice.”

  The smell of smoke cut the air, wafting up from the fen.

  “What about those murdered girls?” asked Ivar.

  Erkanwulf made a face. “Yeah, we found them. Dragged off to one side like rubbish. Seems to me they treat their soil better, burying it, like, so it doesn’t attract flies. Animals had gotten into them. I didn’t stay, but I know the captain meant to bury them there instead of hauling their bones back, which we couldn’t do anyway seeing as how what was left was all scattered.” He had gotten red as he talked, and he wiped his forehead with the back of a hand, although it wasn’t at all warm.

  “Bad?” asked Ivar, and Erkanwulf looked right at him and nodded. They had traveled far enough together that they no longer needed long explanations to be understood. “I could have said a prayer over them.”

  “Captain’s orders,” said Erkanwulf. “He wanted you to command the rear guard.”

  “He didn’t want me to come along at all, as I recall.”

  “You’re a cleric, Ivar. You’re not meant to be soldiering.”

  But Ivar was restless. Since Biscop Constance had established herself at Lavas Holding, he felt himself betwixt and between. He had few clerical skills to bring to her schola, but likewise he was no soldier to serve her in that guise. In truth, as hard as that journey with Erkanwulf had been, he had liked it best of all the things he had experienced and suffered in the last few years. It made him think of Hanna, riding as an Eagle. On the road, he had felt that he was at least going somewhere, and the rescue of Baldwin had brought him a measure of peace even if Baldwin was no longer what he had been.

  So are we all changed, he thought.

  He wished Hanna was there, so he could tell her his thoughts as he had used to do, but no doubt she would only laugh at him. If she was even alive to do so. Fear pinched him, and he ducked his head, rubbing his eyes.

  “Good land there at Ravnholt Manor,” continued Erkanwulf, oblivious to these signs. “Shame to see it gone fallow, like, with no one left to farm it.”

  “There they come!” called a sentry.

  Captain Ulric led the company out of the mist. Among that number walked Gerulf and Dedi, the two Lions Ivar and his friends had rescued at Queen’s Grave. They saw Ivar and nodded to acknowledge him. Dedi was limping.

  The victors had bound the bandits with rope at the ankles and wrists. The prisoners shuffled with heads down, broken in spirit, wounded, sniveling, and groaning. One man with a bloodied nose staunched the flow with a fist pressed against his blistered lips. A younger lad cradled a bleeding hand in the other arm. Lord Geoffrey walked at the end of the line, but everyone knew that Captain Ulric had plotted the raid and commanded it in all but name.

  “They’ll be shown more mercy than those girls they murdered,” said Erkanwulf.

  “How so?” asked Ivar, who was wondering how any folk could fall so low as these. They looked worse than he felt! They were the filthiest people he had ever seen, coated in dirt and worse things, besides their sins.

  “They’ll receive a trial, and their death’ll come quick. Lucky for them.” He spat.

  “There was a woman, the one that man Heric said goaded them to murder the girls.”

  Erkanwulf looked away and wiped his mouth. “She was dead. I don’t know who killed her.”

  The lad with the injured hand wept. To Ivar, the day seemed dark; the clouds would never lift. Ravnholt Manor was avenged, but no one seemed likely to rejoice.

  In Lavas Holding, the prisoners were locked into the kennels o
nce reserved for Count Lavastine’s famous pack of hounds. Ivar paused to speak to Sergeant Gerulf, who had been assigned to the first shift of guards.

  “How is Dedi?”

  “He’ll do, as long as the wound doesn’t get infected, but Biscop Constance knows a bit about healing and anyway that one, Brother Baldwin, can heal him, surely, if it comes to that.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “You doubt it?” asked Gerulf, with a hint of a smile. “They say he’s a saint, that one.”

  Ivar sighed, but he and Gerulf had a bond sewn up out of grim circumstances survived together. “It’s difficult for me to see Baldwin as—what you say.”

  “It might explain his handsome face, since some say that’s a sign of God’s favor.” Gerulf chuckled. “There now, my lord, I’m just joking. Dedi will do well enough. It was a shallow cut.”

  “Are you satisfied, still, with your service with Captain Ulric?”

  “Duke Conrad assigned us to the captain, and I hold no grudge against the duke, since he treated us fairly considering the lady wished us all dead. It must have been for a reason that Dedi and I came to Ulric’s troop. My loyalty remains to King Henry, my lord, and I serve Henry by serving his sister, don’t you think?”

  “If Henry still lives.”

  “Then Henry’s heir. That’s not all. There’s a widow in Ulric’s following I’ve a mind to marry. That lad Erkanwulf got to talking about taking a small company of men to settle Ravnholt Manor, now that it’s abandoned. It’s something to think about, especially for a man of my age. I’m content, my lord Ivar. Are you?”

  Ivar shrugged, and Gerulf smiled crookedly, as if to say he knew what words Ivar would speak, if he dared—which he did not. Restlessness ate at him, a mortal disease. Somewhere, surely, events of great importance transpired and as usual he was stuck here waiting in the backwaters while the battle moved on and left him behind.

  In the hall, Constance was seated beside the blazing hearth with her schola and young Lady Lavrentia in attendance, listening to testimony from a pair of woodsmen.

  “That was a few years back, Your Holiness. We got a good look at these refugees, and we knew they was likely to be dead come winter. But the next year we swung back that way on the trail of a boar and they were still living. They said it was the cloak, that they had been blessed by God or some such. It were a little hard to understand them being as they did not speak quite right, coming up from the south as they did.”

  Baldwin and Sigfrid were writing, and Ermanrich was cutting quills on the opposite side of the table. Lavrentia was seated awkwardly on a chair beside Constance, with her hands folded in her lap and her twin canes resting against her knees. She uttered no word and made no sign, and Ivar could not tell what she might be feeling except that when, on occasion, Constance smiled at her, the girl smiled back.

  On the other side of a hall a trio of wounded soldiers lay on the floor. Hathumod knelt beside one of them, smearing a white salve on the cut that had opened his thigh. That was Dedi, grimacing at the pain, but then he gave a snort of a laugh as Hathumod said something that amused him.

  The woodsmen left. A man twisting a soft cap in his hands walked forward hesitantly.

  “Do not fear,” said Constance gently. “Are you the one who came all the way up from the southern borders of Lavas County? Lady Hildegard holds the land in that part of the county. I hear it was a long walk—five days!”

  He dropped to his knees as if she had shot him. “Six, Your Holiness. I was sent by our village to bring our request to the count.” He glanced around the hall apprehensively, looked at Lady Lavrentia, rubbed his cap against his chin, and coughed. “I wasn’t sure who to speak to, Your Holiness.”

  Constance touched the girl on the arm, and she piped up in a clear, soft voice. “Where are you from?”

  “We call it Shaden, my lady. Begging your pardon, Your Holiness, but is it true there’s a new count? We heard some folk say so, which is why we folk at Shaden thought to send one of us to speak, but it seems from what I hear at the holding they were talking nonsense.”

  “Lord Geoffrey still stands as regent for his young daughter, Lavrentia,” Constance said, indicating Lavrentia. “Is that who you meant?”

  He ducked his head, too flabbergasted to speak. The girl stared at him but said nothing, and finally looked at Constance.

  Before her injuries, Constance might simply have overawed him, being a noble woman so grand and mighty that a simple farmer would be too tongue-tied to utter a word in her presence, but what she had suffered had made her less formidable in appearance, although Ivar knew that she had not changed.

  “Lord Geoffrey is resting, and I am here with Count Lavrentia, as you see. We will write down your statement, here,” she gestured to Sigfrid, “if you will tell us to what purpose your village sent you.”

  A man might frown so, Ivar thought, making ready for a charge against an armed and powerful enemy. But the man swallowed, braced himself by letting out a sharp exhalation, and began in a firm if slightly rushed tone.

  “We lost our deacon last summer to the black rot, and most of our seed corn, as well as a dozen or more good folk in our village. We were hoping the count might see fit to send another deacon our way so that we can live properly and pray when it is fitting and hear the stories of the Holy Verses told out to us. We were promised a few year back that we’d have the use of this new plough we heard tell of, to break up some bottomland, but we’ve heard no more of it. It would aid us this year especially with the weather bad as it is. We’ve had a score settlers come to our valley, driven out of a pair of villages that were torn right down in the great storm last autumn. We can’t feed all without this new land put to the plough. And with them, we’re asking we be allowed to pay a lower tithe this year, to hold back more of what we grow so as to feed the many more mouths we have and will have next winter. My lady. And if I may be bold, Your Holiness.”

  “Go on.”

  Sigfrid’s quill scratched as he wrote. Baldwin was staring dreamily at the fire.

  “We have a tax we pay to Lady Hildegard, but she died when the roof of her hall fell in the storm.”

  “Yes, it’s been recorded,” said Constance. “She left no immediate heirs. I’ve been told there is a cousin from farther east who will inherit, but there’s been some trouble finding her.”

  “Yes, Your Holiness. So we pray, Your Holiness, for the lady’s steward has dealt poorly with us in the past and now is threatening to come with men-at-arms and rob us to pay our back taxes. If the lady doesn’t come soon, we are come to ask if another steward might be set over us who will govern more justly.”

  “You are bold,” said the girl.

  “Begging your pardon, my lady. We are desperate, Your Holiness. We thought all was lost last year, and then—” He faltered, twisting the cap.

  Baldwin smiled in that way that calmed because it dazzled.

  “Go on,” said Constance kindly.

  “There were signs and portents, Your Holiness. A scythe I had borrowed—I lost its iron blade in the pond, and yet it was returned to me although it was hopelessly lost in the water and weeds. My niece, a good girl, was killed when a wall fell in on her, I swear to you in God’s name that she stopped breathing, but she lived, and lives still, a sharptongued brat but one we all love. These were portents of change. Don’t you think?”

  “Miracles,” said Constance sternly.

  He bowed his head.

  “Tell us again, and in more detail,” she said, “for I have a wish that my clerics will record all these stories. I have heard many tales these days, here in Lavas, and others on the road. Strange tidings.”

  Lavrentia looked at her hands.

  Constance looked at Ivar and nodded, but he was of no use to her. He could barely scratch out his letters in the crudest fashion imaginable, and unlike some clerics he had no trained memory to recall the Holy Verses in their entirety or recite the genealogy of regnants and nobles back to the tenth genera
tion.

  The farmer began telling a confused story about a madman dressed only in dirt and moss. As Baldwin began writing, Ivar went outside where he kicked pebbles across the courtyard and all the way to the gate and farther yet to the fosse and walked aimlessly before coming to the little church where the peculiar and unsettling stone effigy of the last count rested.

  He set foot on the porch but saw that another person knelt, praying and weeping, in the dim interior: Lord Geoffrey.

  I am not the only troubled soul. And were his troubles so very desperate? Discontent was not the same as desperation. Watching the shadowed figure from the porch of the little church, Ivar sensed that, outside, he waited under the skies of a far finer day than the one that, inside, plagued Geoffrey with rain and tempest. Lord Geoffrey had lost his wife, and his cousin—if he had held much affection for the deceased Count Lavastine, which Ivar had no way of determining. His now-crippled daughter had only a tenuous hold on the county claimed in her name, and his two young sons were being held in Autun in the tender care of Lady Sabella. The local folk muttered against him, and some said openly that Geoffrey had usurped the place of the rightful heir in order to get the lands and title for his daughter and thus—because she was still a child—himself.

  No wonder he wept.

  Back by the gate, the watch bell rang. A pair of banners fluttered in the distance as a party of riders approached the holding.

  “What news?” demanded Geoffrey, emerging from the church.

  “I don’t know,” said Ivar, taken aback by that brusque tone.

  “Didn’t Biscop Constance send you? Who are those riders?”

  “I know no more than you do.”

  “Then you know that this life is only tears and suffering! Or do you clerics have some psalm for that, to tell us otherwise?”

  Ivar couldn’t think of any. The psalms all ran together in his mind, praising God, smiting foes, rejoicing at deliverance, and punishing those who did not act as they should, although the blessed Daisan had taught that to act against what is right was, in a way, its own punishment since humankind knew that it were better and easier to do what is good than what is evil.