Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  “Very well.”

  That easily she trusted him, as she would trust a beloved grandfather, or a grandmother. He was related to her, after all, by the bonds of marriage. But it was not the civil contract that allowed her to sling her coiled rope over her shoulders and slide down the steep slope in his wake, to begin walking westward with him along the White Road. It was a different contract, one she could not easily explain.

  She trusted him.

  That was all that was necessary.

  IX

  ALLIES AND TRAITORS

  1

  AFTER Zuangua took Blessing away, Anna wept. She wept out of fear for the girl but mostly because she had failed in her duty. She had not protected Blessing from the girl’s own impulsive and immature nature.

  Now the princess was gone away with the Ashioi army. It made Anna sick to think of it. What kind of barbarians allowed children to march to war? It made her cry, and cry she did. No one paid the least attention to her, who was a prisoner in the midst of prisoners. Lord Hugh’s soldiers also remained behind, corralled like cattle in a structure ringed by a strong stone palisade and a garrison of bored guards, but their situation looked very different from her own. Anna sat on a shaded porch whose roof was woven out of saplings and, as time passed, watched her companions go about their business throughout the hot and dusty days.

  Scarred John and Captain Frigo had set up a carpenter’s shop with their iron adze and axes. Over the weeks they had developed an astonishing parade of customers. The iron tools and swords fascinated the Ashioi. Liudbold had once spent a pair of years apprenticing in a smithy, and he was soon carted away to the toils of their captor’s furnaces. At first, Anna supposed they had slaughtered him or tortured him, but at intervals he returned to visit, each time looking sleeker and fatter. Most recently, he had arrived for his visit accompanied by a sly-faced young Ashioi woman, who was pregnant.

  Theodore the archer also had discovered an easy camaraderie with the locals. They admired his skill with the bow; he, like the other men, admired the easy manners of the women.

  They were all deserting her, seduced by the flesh, but Anna could not blame them. She had made that same mistake herself, and anyway she did not regret it. Why should they? They could never go back to Darre, because they had betrayed their queen.

  She cried again, just a little, thinking of Thiemo and Matto.

  No use regretting the dead. Nothing she could do would bring them back, and nothing she had done had halted Blessing in her headlong rush to impress her powerful great uncle, the bold and handsome warrior Zuangua.

  This day, scarred John was sitting out in the courtyard, on a stump under a shade roof, dressing wood. Captain Frigo was grinding down wood nails. One of the soldiers trotted over to him, leaned to speak, and in reply the captain nodded, got up, and ambled over toward the gate. Another man braided rope, while in the garden a pair of soldiers fussed among their green plants.

  Anna regarded the basket at her feet with irritation. The rushes the Ashioi used for baskets cut her fingers and were too stiff to plait easily. Sometimes she saw the Ashioi guards snickering as they looked at her licking her bleeding fingers, and she had a terrible feeling that she was missing something about the task. She had tried soaking them in water but that only made them fray, while drying them made them crumble. No one helped her. Hugh’s soldiers ignored her, and, in truth, no young Ashioi men looked twice at her, preferring their own half naked women. She was no use at all, not here and not anywhere. In Gent they had long since forgotten her, no doubt. Who missed her? Who thought of her at all?

  Tears burned again, hot and angry. It was getting tiresome, crying all the time, but she worried about Blessing and she worried about herself, lost and drifting in a place that would never be her home. She had a body but she felt as if her soul had come unmoored and left her trapped in a husk. The constant dusty haze kicked up by men going about their lives ground into her skin, wearing her away until eventually she would dissolve into nothing.

  If only there would come a miracle.

  “Whsst! Anna!” Scarred John sauntered up. “There’s an old man come to the gate, asking after you. Says he needs a servant to help him draw water and fetch wood and plait baskets.” He grinned easily as he eyed her half made and utterly useless basket. The handsome, cunning baskets plaited by the Ashioi hung from the rafters of their huts, both beautiful and useful as she could never be. “Captain says you might as well go. You’re no use to us now the lady princess has scampered off. Even if she comes back, she’s gone to live among her noble relatives.” He snorted derisively. “Likes them better than her own kind! Not that she’s really like us.”

  He wore much-mended clothing, but he’d abandoned his worn boots in favor of the sandals favored by the Ashioi. He shaved like a churchman, as all the soldiers did now, because the women liked it better. Ashioi men did not have beards.

  “I don’t want to go,” she said.

  “Even an old man would be better than none, unless you have a sweetheart at home waiting for you.” He grinned, to make the words twist more deeply, before turning and walking off. He would not protect her. None of them would.

  Captain Frigo came to fetch her. She thought about fighting them, but she knew it was hopeless. She possessed a leather pack with a spare tunic and belt and her boots tucked away together with a comb and a precious silver spoon, now tarnished, but hers. These and other oddments were all that belonged to her, all that weighted her to the world from which otherwise she might just float away into the air without an anchor. She slung it over her back and plodded—in Ashioi sandals, because to wear closed boots in this climate made feet itch and rash and crack and bleed—to the gate. She was a husk, nothing more. She might be torn up and discarded, but she could no longer be hurt.

  At first she did not see him, because he stood so unobtrusively beside four stately young mask warriors, Dog Spotted Leopard and Buzzard and Falcon. He produced, from a small basket, a number of stones and tokens, the kind the Ashioi used when they exchanged goods. Ashioi guards as well as Captain Frigo took a share, and then they all turned their backs in the way of folk refusing further responsibility.

  Anna saw the old man’s face. Her mouth dropped open. He caught her gaze and shook his head in a warning. She closed her mouth, and for an instant she was dizzy, wondering whether it was God, or the Enemy, who had answered her.

  After all, it was God’s work.

  She knew better than to ask questions, but that night they sat beside a campfire, just seven of them, munching on freshly roasted rabbit and a stringy haunch of very old and unidentifiable meat, and she could hold in her questions no longer.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. “My lady.”

  “West,” said the one who was married to Prince Sanglant. The lady, Liathano, was a sorcerer, no more human than her Ashioi companions, only Anna found the Ashioi far less terrifying than she found this woman, although she did not know why.

  Ai, Lady and Son! This woman had a soft fire about her, visible only at night and no more solid than the flash of steaming air visible on a cold night when breath is exhaled.

  “I know what happened to Princess Blessing, my lady,” Anna ventured, although the woman had not asked. She was neither kind nor cruel; in truth, she seemed indifferently tolerant of Anna’s presence.

  The lady glanced at her, and fixed on her face a false and chilling smile. “I know where she has gone. But that she lives was beyond my knowledge, before I came here. To know that she survived must sustain me.”

  No one had told Anna how the lady had come to Ashioi country, or why she had left the prince, her husband. She dared not ask. She ate, and she drank a little, and she even slept, although the dusty ground made her wake sneezing a dozen times before dawn lit the east.

  They trudged all morning along the road, faces set to the west. It was a clear day, a faint haze lightening the sky to a blue-white pallor. The earth baked around them. Thorny bushes and swat
hes of dry grass rattled when the wind gusted. Off to their left, the sea shone like polished crystal, a dense lapis field cut off by the southern horizon.

  In the heat of the day they rested under the shade of an awning tied up between stunted juniper trees. The mask warriors talked among themselves and occasionally with the old man, and the two young men flirted with the lady in that way men have when they’re not being quite serious while the two young women made jokes with the lady as they teased the young men. No one took any notice of Anna because she was nothing. Only, that being so, why had they bothered to bring her along, to rescue her from her prison among Lord Hugh’s soldiers?

  As they broke camp in midafternoon she stood beside the lady, and spoke.

  “Are we going to Aosta, my lady? To follow the army? All the others, the soldiers, they said the Ashioi army was marching to Novomo.”

  The lady smiled bitterly but did not answer. When they began walking, Anna tried asking the old man, but he could not understand Wendish and, because no one spoke to her, she had learned almost nothing of the Ashioi language in the months she had been their captive.

  They walked through the remainder of the hot afternoon. On occasion, they sipped a nasty brew that made her whole face pucker but which quenched her thirst each time for another league or so of walking. The sun set among streamers of rich red cloud. In the east, a full-faced moon slipped heavenward, cloaked at intervals by stripes of haze and other times shining brightly down upon them. Still they walked, because where the moon shone the White Road gleamed as if it caught and reflected that light.

  When the moon had walked a third of the way up into the sky, they paused to rest where an arrangement of flat rocks made pleasant benches. Anna drank, and chewed on one of the tasteless, tough flatbreads they carried for journey bread.

  The lady lay on her back on one of the rocks, with an arm outstretched. She raised it and lowered it and raised it again, measuring those stars she could see. She spoke under her breath; Anna saw her lips moving, but she couldn’t quite hear what the lady was saying. Eldest Uncle crouched beside the lady on the ground with his head tilted back. A tiny lizard scuttled within a crack in the stone. Anna shuddered, remembering that when she was young a boy had told her that such creatures were beloved of the Enemy.

  Eldest Uncle rose and came to her, unrolled a blanket, and draped it over her shoulders. She smiled, because she didn’t know how to tell him that she wasn’t cold.

  The old man padded to the warriors, and they began the familiar routine of leavetaking: taking a last sip of mahiz, tucking away leaf-wrapped journey bread, tightening the ropes on the baskets they carried before slinging them over their backs.

  Anna got to her feet. The lady stood. In the moonlight, Anna saw tears on the other woman’s cheeks.

  “What are you looking at?” Anna whispered.

  The lady’s voice was slightly hoarse. “The stars. See, there. That is the Scout’s Torch, almost overhead. It’s faint because of the moon’s light and the haze. To the west, there, the Lion’s Claw is almost gone, and to the southwest—do you see it?—the blue star marking the Dragon’s Eye. In the east—well—hard to see. It’s hazy, and the moon outshines everything. The three jewels are barely visible because of the light. And to the south, the Serpent. There, that one—do you see it?—that is the Serpent’s dreadful red eye.”

  “That’s a lot of stars.”

  “Only the brightest are visible. But to see them at all!” She faltered, wiped her eyes, and with her head still canted back, staring into the heavens, she spoke in a low voice. “They’re so beautiful. It’s been so long since I have seen them. Or held my daughter in my arms.”

  They walked for several days and nights, their journey punctuated by long rests during the heat of the day and by an ongoing and protracted argument between the lady and Eldest Uncle in which Blessing’s name was spoken many times. This much Anna understood. Of the rest, nothing.

  At intervals, watchtowers guarded the approaches. They stopped at these places for supplies. The lady walked among them without fear, and they stared at her and spoke to her; Anna, they stared at but ignored.

  They came at length to a place where the White Road bent southward to intersect with the sea where the shoreline was cut by a pair of chasms opening deep into the rocky wasteland. A fort spanned the road. No guardsman seemed inclined to question Eldest Uncle. They deferred to him as to a noble lord, and let the party pass without question, although it seemed every Ashioi guardsman felt obliged to comment at length and with much laughter as the little group set out into wilderness.

  After this, they marched along a dusty road for five days—or six or seven; Anna lost count. Her feet were caked in grit. When she moved her hands, dirt ground softly between the skin of her fingers. Her face was masked with dust. Her hair itched all the time although she kept it pulled back in a tight braid and covered by a linen cloth knotted at the back of her neck.

  One time they saw a party of about a dozen mask warriors walking east, some limping and one bundled up in a fetal position and carried on the back of one of his companions. The lady pulled a hood over her face and melted away into the scrub brush grown along the side of the road, and so it was that they met the group and spoke at length with them while the lady hid. There was some discussion of Anna. She could tell by the way the newcomers indicated her by lifting their chins as they looked at her. Eldest Uncle’s authority carried them. Soon enough, the other party made their farewells and set on their way, east toward home. When all was clear, the lady emerged from the brush. They continued their journey, stopping for a long rest in the midday and for increasingly long rests at night as the moon dwindled and faded to nothing but a sliver at dawn.

  The next morning, they came to a substantial village garrisoned by a contingent of Ashioi mask warriors, Ashioi farmers and craftsmen, and a few human workers who stared at Anna from the fields as she passed them on the road. Many gathered at the gate to ask questions as they came in, but Eldest Uncle fended them off with his usual good nature and greeted a woman carrying a chubby baby on each hip. She greeted him warmly, and spoke to the lady with more reserve but with evident interest. Anna thought she had seen this woman before, but she wasn’t sure. It was difficult for her to distinguish one face from another because they looked so different from the people she had grown up with or even from the swarthy soldiers devoted to Lord Hugh. Others crowded around, so many faces that she had to look away for fear of drowning.

  Pushed to the edge of the group and ignored but avoided by all, she followed as they settled into a council held out on the open common ground, where a post stood. Mats were rolled out. The lady and Eldest Uncle and the other woman sat facing each other. Many clustered behind, crouching or standing to listen. Drink and food passed around the circle as the three in the center began to speak. The lady had a habit of accompanying her words with spacious gestures, as though her hands talked. Eldest Uncle spoke with his hands resting on his bare thighs. The other woman mostly listened, asking a question now and again and occasionally responding to a comment from one of the three persons kneeling behind her, two men and a woman who hovered like servants or children. At last she turned to one of these attendants—a noticeably attractive young woman who wielded a fierce gaze—and an object changed hands. She held it out. It was round, formed out of polished metal, like the sun.

  The lady stared, rendered speechless by this apparition. At length, she reached for it, and it was given into her hands. She turned it and spun it and held it at arm’s length and laughed and cried and at length gave it back. And spoke an Ashioi word that Anna knew.

  “Yes.”

  After this, as the council broke up and the lady walked away with the other woman, deep in conversation, Anna found herself in a backwater, unwanted and forgotten. When she wandered to the gate, no one stopped her or called after her. She walked through the gate and crossed the plank bridge fixed over the ditch. A square guard’s tower rose at the northeaste
rn corner of the palisade. There, a mask warrior with his mask pushed up onto his hair spotted her but looked away as quickly, uninterested.

  She could run. She could escape.

  She laughed, because it was better than crying. Would she never be able to go home?

  A trio of young people—two boys and a girl—came walking up the road carrying buckets half full with water over their shoulders. They were born of humankind, as she was, with sweetly familiar features although they were dark-haired and with complexions neither as pale as Wendish nor as reddish bronze as Ashioi, but with a dusky olive cast. Southerners. Aostans.

  Seeing her, they halted, set down their buckets, and stared. Whispers passed between them. One of the lads had a scarred chin and hollow cheeks; his companion was bow-legged, with a gimpy foot. The girl had scarcely hips or breasts to speak of because she was so skinny, but her gaze measured Anna without fear, and it seemed to Anna that she was the leader of this little clan. When the girl spoke, it was in a language Anna did not know, and when she could not answer them in a language they knew, they shrugged, picked up their buckets, and went in through the gate.

  For a long while she stood in the middle of the road, going nowhere. At last, as her head began to throb from the midday heat, she turned around and went back inside.

  She had nowhere else to go.

  “Come, Anna! It’s time to go!”

  The words yanked her out of a doze. They had offered her a place to rest her tired feet within the cool and dark confines of a pit house.

  Beyond the brightness of the low doorway—there was no door, only strings of wooden beads knocking together—the lady stood, her outline softened by the yellowing light of late afternoon.

  “We’re going, Anna. Come.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked before thinking, and then winced, because she ought not to ask. She ought only to obey.

  But the lady took no notice. She answered the question tolerantly. “We are going to Novomo. It’s a dilemma, whether to wait here for the army to return or to go after them, knowing that the tides within the crowns might bring us to cross without meeting. Yet I just don’t know. I must act. I must find Blessing, now that I know she is alive. And you’ll take care of her when we’ve found her.”