by Kate Elliott
Now, as summer flowers bloomed alongside the high mountain pass, she—mercifully unbetrothed—was on her way south across the Alfar Mountains, an agent of the king on an important errand to the skopos herself. Truly, her life had taken a sudden and surprising turn. How distant Heart’s Rest seemed now!
From the outcropping she could see down to the road and, farther back, partially hidden by the thrusting shoulder of a ridge, the hostel where their party had halted for the night. The stone buildings nestled into the ridge’s spine. Under the protection of the skopos, the hostel was run by monks from the Order of St. Servitius. According to Wolfhere, those monks stayed up in these inhospitable heights through the winter. A merchant in their party had been snowed in one terrible winter, or so he claimed, and he had regaled the party with a horrific story of fire salamanders, cannibalism, and avenging spirits. The story sounded so true when he told it, but Wolfhere had stood in the shadows of the campfire that night, shaking his head and frowning.
She had seen heaps of snow in shadowed verges beside the road and huge fields of ice and snow on the slopes above, giving credence to the tale, but she had also seen flowers aplenty, pale blue, butter yellow, scarlet and orange, scattered across tough grass and ground-clinging shrubs. She had seen sky so deep a blue that it shaded into violet as if brushed with a stain of beet juice. She laughed at herself. Their party included a bard journeying to Darre to make his fortune, and he never used such prosaic images as beet juice to describe the sky.
No one traveled the mountains alone, not even King’s Eagles. They had found a party assembling in the city of Genevie and joined it. Now they counted among their companions the bard, seven fraters, a high and mighty presbyter returning to the skopos with an important cartulary and his train of clerics and servants, and a motley assortment of merchants, wagons, and slaves—and the two prisoners she and Wolfhere and ten of King Henry’s Lions escorted to the palace of the skopos in Darre.
A breeze skirled down from the heights, and the sun slid behind a low-lying ridge. The moon’s pale disk gleamed softly against the darkening sky. Dusk. She shuddered.
Where was Wolfhere? How was she to make her way back down that path in darkness? What if he had fallen and hurt himself?
A bird called. She had a sudden, awful feeling of being watched.
She spun and there, perched on a stub of rock jutting out from the cliffside that demarked one side of the narrow defile, sat a hawk. She let out a nervous chuckle and fanned herself, abruptly flushed though the day was cooling fast. The hawk did not stir. Uncanny, with eyes as dark as amber, it stared unblinking at her until she felt chills run up her back.
And there was something else … a suggestion of something hovering just where the path dipped out of sight. Something there and yet not there, a figure glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, a pale woman creature whose skin had the color and texture of water. But when she looked directly, she saw nothing, only shadows sliding along the rock like the ripple of water over pebbles in a stream.
The hawk launched itself up in a flurry of wings. She ducked instinctively and heard a gasp. Was it her own or someone else’s, someone hidden?
The hawk was gone. A light bobbed into view. Wolfhere, whistling, came up the path around the shoulder of the cliff face.
“Lady Above!” she swore. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”
He stopped and looked around, then cocked an eyebrow and resumed walking past her and down the path toward the hostel. To keep in the light she had to hurry after; the moon was not yet half full and did not give enough illumination for her to negotiate the hillside track.
“Where did you get that lantern?” she demanded, angry that she had waited for so long but would evidently get no explanation.
“Ah,” he said, hoisting the lantern a little higher.
He did not intend to answer her. Fuming, she followed him down the path, stumbling now and again over a rock or a thick tuft of grass grown untimely in the middle of the track. By now the hostel appeared below them only as a dark encrustation against the blacker ridge; a single lantern burned at the enclosure’s gateway. So did a light burn all night, every night, a beacon for any lost traveler caught out and struggling toward safe haven just as after the body’s death the soul struggles upward to the Chamber of Light—or so the bard had said, thinking it a poetical conceit.
“Where did you go?” Hanna asked, not expecting an answer. Wolfhere gave her none. She watched his back, his confident walk, the gray-silver gleam of his hair in the twilight, his ancient, seamed hand steady on the lantern’s handle.
Hanna did not distrust Wolfhere, but neither did she precisely trust him. He kept his secrets close by him, for secrets he clearly had. Starting with the one he had never answered: How had he come so fortuitously this past spring to the inn at Heart’s Rest just in time to save her dear friend Liath from slavery? He had freed Liath and taken her away from the village, made her a King’s Eagle like himself. Like a leaf drawn in the wake of a boat, Hanna had been dragged along also. She, too, had been made a King’s Eagle, had left the village of her birth to begin these great adventures. Wolfhere was not a man of whom one asked questions lightly, but Hanna was determined to see Liath remain safe. So she had asked questions, which was more than Liath was willing to do. How had he known Liath was in Heart’s Rest and in danger? From what was he protecting her? Wolfhere had never taken offense at those questions; of course, he had never answered them either.
They left the narrow defile and mysterious valley behind and, soon enough, the hillside path deposited them on the smooth stone of the old Dariyan road a few hundred paces from the enclosure’s gateway. Stars bloomed above, a sudden harvest of bright flowers; ahead, a lantern flared as it swung back and forth in the breeze.
On a bench beside the gateway sat a monk, brown-robed, hooded, and silent. The lantern hung from a post, illuminating him in a pool of soft light. He lifted a weather-roughened hand at their approach and without speaking opened the gate to let them in. Because she was a woman and thus could not be admitted to the innermost cloister, she had seen few of the monks. Of those, only the genial cellarer—the monk in charge of provisions—and the guest-master seemed willing, or permitted, to speak to visitors. Many monks and nuns took a vow of silence, of course. The brothers at Sheep’s Head were rumored never to speak at all once they had passed out of the novitiate, communicating only with hand signs.
Wolfhere opened his lantern and blew out its flame. Together, they trudged in pale moonlight past the ripe-smelling dung heap. A fence scraped her thigh and she smelled the rich tang of plants as they walked alongside the garden. Beyond this enclosure stood half a dozen squat beehives. Finally, they came in among the outbuildings: stables, kitchen, bakery, kiln, and forge—dark and empty at this hour except for a single form sitting beside the dull red coals, tending the fire. The hostel of the monks of St. Servitius was famous, Wolfhere had told her, not just because some of them lived here the winter through, despite snow and ice and bitter cold, but also because they kept a blacksmith.
As they came up to the guest house, a young monk, unhooded, hurried out the door and away to the right, toward the infirmary. His reddish-pale hair and coltish gait reminded Hanna abruptly and painfully of her milk brother Ivar.
Was he well? Had he forgiven her for choosing to stay with Liath rather than go with him?
Wolfhere sighed suddenly and squared his shoulders. Shaken out of her thoughts, Hanna heard shrill voices from the entryway. They mounted the wood steps into the entry chamber, now lit by four candles, and right into the middle of an argument.
2
“THIS guest house is reserved,” said a sallow man Hanna immediately identified as the insufferable manservant to the presbyter, “for those who arrive on horseback. It is quite impossible that these common soldiers be stationed here.”
“But the prisoners—” This objection, raised by the inoffensive guest-master, was quelled at once by the presbyter him
self, who now stepped out of the shadows.
“I will not let my rest be disturbed by their shuffling and muttering,” said the presbyter, his Wendish marred by a thick accent. He had a thin, aristocratic voice, fully as imperious as that of the nobles she had observed during her weeks attending King Henry’s progress. But of course he, too, was a man of noble birth; with a perpetually curled-down lip, soft, white hands, and the imposingly portly demeanor of a man who feasts more days than not, one could never have mistaken him for a farmer or a hard-working craftsman. “The two guards who are standing watch over the prisoners must be moved. If that means the prisoners must be moved, so be it.”
Wolfhere responded blandly. “Are you suggesting Biscop Antonia and Brother Heribert be quartered in the stables with the servants?”
The presbyter’s eyes flared, and he looked mightily irritated, as if he suspected Wolfhere of baiting him. “I am suggesting, Eagle, that you and those you are responsible for do not disturb my rest.”
“Your rest is of supreme importance to me, Your Honor,” said Wolfhere with no apparent irony, “but I swore to King Henry of Wendar and Varre that I would deliver Biscop Antonia and her cleric to the palace of the skopos, Her Holiness Clementia. This building—” he gestured to stone walls and tight shutters,“—grants me a measure of security. You know, of course, that Biscop Antonia is accused of sorcery and might be capable of any foul act.”
The presbyter grunted. “All the more reason to remove her from this guest house.” He signed to his manservant, turned with a swirl of rich fabric, and climbed the steps into the gloom above where another servant waited to light him to his chamber.
Wolfhere turned to the guest-master. “My apologies for inconveniencing you again, good brother. Have you any other chamber that might serve our purpose?”
The guest-master glanced at the presbyter’s manservant, who sniffed audibly, steepled his fingers, and tapped his thumbs together impatiently. “At times it happens that a brother or traveler is disturbed by evil spirits who have insinuated themselves into his mind, and at those times we must isolate him in a locked chamber in the infirmary until an effusion of herbs or a healing can extricate the creature from his body. It is not what I would choose for a biscop, even one accused of such, um, undertakings, but—” He hesitated, perhaps fearing that Wolfhere’s reaction would be as explosive as that of the presbyter, but in the end he glanced again toward the manservant. Worse to insult a presbyter than one of King Henry’s Eagles, especially considering—Hanna reminded herself—that they were not in Henry’s kingdom now.
“That will do very well,” said Wolfhere easily. “But will it inconvenience the Brother Infirmarian?”
“I think not. At this time we have only one aged brother resting there who is too feeble for our daily rounds.”
“Hanna.” Wolfhere nodded at her. “Go fetch the other Lions. Once the Brother Infirmarian has made all ready, we will transfer the prisoners to their new cell.”
Satisfied, the manservant hurried up the stairs to deliver this news to his master. The guest-master grimaced, then quickly smoothed the expression over as he retreated out the door. Hanna moved to follow him, but Wolfhere said her name softly. She turned to see him open the lantern’s glass shutter and reach inside. He murmured a word under his breath, and the touch of his fingers to the dark wick ignited a flame. She started back, surprised, but he merely handed the lit lantern to her and waved her away. Outside, Hanna hoisted the lantern to light her way to the stables.
The guardsmen had already bedded down for the night on the straw in the loft, wrapped in their cloaks. They rousted easily enough. King’s Lions all, they were used to night alarms and swift risings for an early march, and they followed her back to the guest house without grumbling. They served the king and did not complain at the tasks given them. Such was the strength of the oaths they had sworn to Henry.
At Hanna’s entrance, the guest-master nervously shook his ring of keys and led the way into the back passage where two Lions stood guard at a locked door. Inside the chamber, Biscop Antonia sat, wide awake, in the room’s only chair while Brother Heribert sat on the edge of one of the two beds, fingering the silver Circle of Unity that hung on a chain at his chest. A carpet, thrown down as a courtesy, covered the plank floor; the windows were closed and shuttered, barred from the outside.
“Your Grace,” said Wolfhere. “I beg pardon for disturbing you, but it has become necessary to move you to different quarters.”
A stout woman of respectable age, Biscop Antonia wore her episcopal dignity with gentle authority and a benign expression. “No unbearable hardship afflicts the faithful,” she said mildly, “for is it not said in the Holy Verses that ‘thy daughters and sons did not succumb to the fangs of snakes?’”
Wolfhere did not reply but merely signed for her and the cleric to precede him out the door. Heribert rose and went out first. A quiet, attractive, neat young man, he had the soft, delicate white hands of an aristocrat born, one who had never put those hands to labor more taxing than prayer, the folding of vestments, and the occasional writing of a deed or royal capitulary. All the monks here in the hostel of St. Servitius had, like Hanna, work-roughened hands, but Heribert was a cleric whose duties were to pray, read, and act as scribe in the episcopal chancellery or the king’s chapel. With her hands folded quietly in front of her, Antonia followed after him, smiling and nodding first at Wolfhere and then at Hanna.
The single mild glance she gave Hanna made the young Eagle horribly uncomfortable. Biscop Antonia appeared as kindly and wise as an old grandmother who had lived her life in perfect harmony with the God of the Unities and been blessed with a prosperous family and many surviving grandchildren. But she was accused of base sorcery, such as even the church could not countenance, and Hanna herself had heard the biscop speak words of such searing contempt at the parley before the battle between King Henry and his sister Sabella that she knew Antonia’s kindly mien disguised something dark and unpleasant beneath.
Better not to be noticed by such folk. Or, as the saying went in Heart’s Rest, “Let well enough alone and turn over no rock unless you care to be knowing what’s underneath it.”
But after one glance, Antonia no longer appeared to notice Hanna. As the guards escorted them out of the building and down the stony path to the infirmary, she kept up a one-sided conversation with Wolfhere. “I have been reflecting on the words of St. Thecla, in her Letter to the Dariyans, when she speaks of the law of sin. Is not God’s law higher than the law of sin?”
Wolfhere grunted. His lips twitched as if he were restraining words. He turned so that the lantern light hid his expression in shadow.
“And yet do we not, in our ignorance, in our flesh, remain slaves to the law of sin?” she continued. “By what means do they judge who have not wholly united themselves to the life-giving law of the God of the Unities and the Holy Word?”
Wolfhere made no answer. They came to the infirmary steps. Here the Brother Infirmarian met them, lantern in hand, and showed them to a small cell where he had hastily erected a cot next to the single pallet. He bowed several times, bobbing up and down so that the lantern light rose and dipped nauseatingly; he was clearly distraught at the idea of closing a holy biscop into such mean quarters, but he obeyed the commands of his superiors—and Wolfhere carried letters from both King Henry and Biscop Constance as proof of his authority to carry out his mission.
Antonia and Heribert walked into the cell. The Brother Infirmarian shut and locked the door behind them and hung the key on a ring at his belt. Two Lions stationed themselves on either side of the door. Wolfhere directed two more Lions to sleep outside on the ground beneath the shuttered and barred window that let air into the cell.
“On no account,” Wolfhere finished, looking sternly at the Infirmarian, “is any person to enter into that cell without me beside him.”
Then he and Hanna and the other six Lions returned to the stables. In the loft, Hanna kicked hay into a
pile, threw her cloak over the prickly mound, and pulled off her boots before lying down and shaking her blanket open on top of herself. Wolfhere bedded down in the hay beside her. Already she heard the snores of the soldiers from the other end of the loft.
She waited for a long while but was not sleepy. The loft door stood open to let in air. Through it she saw the black hulk of mountain, a blot against the night, and a single patch of sky brilliant with stars.
“You don’t like her,” she whispered finally, thinking that Wolfhere, too, did not sleep.
There was a long pause and she began to think the old man was in fact asleep, that she had mistaken his breathing.
“I do not.”
“But if I didn’t know what she had been accused of, if I hadn’t heard her speak that one time, at the parley with Lord Villam, then I would never suspect she was—” She hesitated. Wolfhere made no comment, so she went on. “It’s just hard to imagine she could do such terrible things—murder a lackwit in cold blood so she could raise creatures to control Count Lavastine’s will, cast a spell on the guivre to put it under her power, and send her servants to catch living men for it to feed on. It’s just that she seems … such a good and generous soul, so mild and compassionate. And she is a biscop besides. How can the Lady and Lord allow a person with such an evil heart to be elevated in Their church?”
“That is indeed a mystery.”
This answer did not satisfy Hanna, who frowned and shifted on her makeshift pallet. Under the cloak, hay poked through the cloth against her back, tiny blunt pinpricks. She wiped the dust of old hay and last summer’s straw from her dry lips. “But you must have some idea!”
“She is related on her mother’s side to the reigning Queen of Karonne, and her kin on her father’s side had land near the city of Mainni, where she was some years ago elevated to the episcopal chair. Do you suppose the skopos nominates only the most worthy?”
