by Kate Elliott
—and was baffled. The Eagle read not in Wendish or in Dariyan, but in another language, one Rosvita could not “hear” through seeing. Where had such a young person learned to read? What on earth was she reading?
Rosvita glided softly out of the room, passed through an arch, and emerged into the library hall, blinking at the sudden shift in light. Here, at individual carrels, several nuns read. Cabinets stood along the walls, shut and latched. The catalog rested on a lecturn carved with owls peeking out from oak trees. It lay open. Rosvita skimmed the titles listed on the page: St. Peter of Aron’s The Eternal Geometry, Origen’s De Principiis, Ptolomaia’s Tetrabiblos, Abu Ma’shar’s Zīj al-hazārāt.
Rosvita blinked back amazement. Could it be this book that the girl read? She recognized the language, here transposed into Dariyan script, though she could not read Jinna herself. Did the girl claim Jinna ancestry, revealed in her complexion? Had she been trained to read the Jinna language? This was a mystery indeed. The young Eagle would bear watching.
Given the company it kept, the book appeared to be about matters astronomical. Surely even the librarian here, for all her faults, would catalog books about the weather—which took place in the sky—near to those about the heavens. Rosvita flipped idly through the pages, searching for what she was not sure, but could find nothing that seemed to be what she wanted.
Distracted, she shrugged and stretched and examined the room. From here she could see into the scriptorium, where nuns and monks worked in silence writing correspondence and making copies of missals and old texts. The monastery had recently received from a sister institution six ancient papyrus scrolls written in Dariyan and Arethousan. These were being recopied onto parchment and bound into books.
Drawn by the light pouring in through the windows and the quiet murmur emanating from the scriptorium, Rosvita wandered past the cabinets and out under a wall set with arches into the scriptorium. Here some of the novices had assembled to observe the scribes at work—work they would themselves be engaged in once they became monks. One restless boy, his hood slipped back to reveal curly red-gold hair and a pale freckled face, sidled up to the schoolmaster and made a hand sign: Necessarium. With obvious disgust, the schoolmaster signed assent. No doubt the poor boy had been consigned to the monastery against his will and now chafed at the discipline: Rosvita had seen such novices in her time at Korvei.
With a sudden and violent start she recognized the boy. Ivar had not yet been born when she entered Korvei Convent, and she had actually only met him on two occasions. Perhaps she was mistaken; perhaps this was not Ivar at all but merely a northcountry boy who resembled him in coloring. But their father, Count Harl, had written to her not six months ago telling her that Ivar was to be pledged as a novice at Quedlinhame. It had to be him.
Ivar hurried out of the scriptorium, not noticing Rosvita. But he went on into the library rather than going outside. And meanwhile, three other novices distracted the schoolmaster, asking him about a parchment laid on one of the desks. Clearly they meant him not to notice where Ivar had gone.
So Rosvita followed him.
He hurried through the library hall and vanished into the warren of dim rooms beyond. She entered cautiously and was quickly rewarded by the sound of voices, so soft that had she not been listening for them she might have thought it the sough of the wind heard through the windows. By listening for direction and sound, as the fulgutari were said to observe the movement of storms, she managed to creep close enough to overhear without being seen.
“But your vows—”
“I care nothing for my pledge! You know that. My father forced me to become a novice here, just because of—” Here he bit off a word. “I’m not like Sigfrid, I have no vocation. And I won’t be like Ermanrich who resigned himself long ago—”
“But is it so easy to be released from that pledge? Ai, Lady. Ivar, I’m flattered—”
“You don’t want to marry me!”
Rosvita almost stumbled and gave herself away, but she had just enough presence of mind to lay a palm against the carven door of one of the cabinets: the same one, she noted with a dry smile, in which resided Isidora’s Etymologies. She recognized the image carved into the oak door. It was St. Donna of Pens, the famed librarian of the first convent founded by St. Benedicta, holding scroll and quill pen. If only Quedlinhame’s librarian had followed the good saint’s example, this fine collection of books would not be arranged in such disorder.
Lady and Lord! Her little brother, now a novice, wanted to marry some unknown and unnamed woman! Their father would be furious.
“Ivar,” said the unknown and unnamed woman in a calm voice. Her accent was slight but peculiar. “Ivar, listen to me. You know I have nothing, no kin—”
This was all it took, that he would become infatuated with a kinless woman! No wonder Count Harl had sent him to the monastery: to get him out of trouble.
“—or none who know me. I have safety in the Eagles.”—The Eagles!—“Surely you understand that I can’t marry you unless you offer me that kind of safety.”
The Eagle Rosvita had seen loitering in this chamber earlier had waited here for this very assignation! At that moment, groping as for a stone, Rosvita could not recall the young woman’s name. Instead, the cleric leaned against the carved cabinet doors and settled herself for a long wait while she listened to her brother launch into an impassioned, if whispered, plea for love, marriage, indeed every part of the world which six months ago on entering Quedlinhame he had sworn to renounce forever.
7
“I’LL leave the monastery,” Ivar concluded. “We’ll travel east and find service in the marchlands. There’s always need for soldiers in the east—”
“But don’t you understand?” she said with fine disregard for his sincerity. Did she not think he could do what he pledged? Did she not understand that he would do anything for her? “Until you had such a place, until I was assured of such a place, I can’t leave the Eagles. How can you ask me to?”
“Because I love you!”
She sighed, brushing a hand across her lips, breathing through her fingers. He wanted to kiss those fingers but dared not. After their first embrace—in the privies—she had become, not cooler but more distant.
“I love you as well, but as a brother. I can’t love you—” Here the hesitation. “—in that way.” Her second hesitation was longer and more profound. “I love another man.”
“You love another!” Angry, he said the first name that came to his lips. “Hugh!”
She went still and cold and deathly rigid.
“Ai, Lord, forgive me, Liath. I didn’t mean to say it. I know—”
“It doesn’t matter.” She shook herself free. Dim light sifted in through the stout cabinets of books, books upon books upon books, so many that their weight alone felt like a pile of stones crushing him. Just as Liath’s words crushed him. “This man’s dead. I trust you, Ivar, but if it ever came to pass that all obstacles were put aside and we married, you must understand I could never love you in the way I loved him.”
If. “If” sounded to Ivar like a very good word.
“Lady!” She rested a hand—too briefly—on his shoulder. The warmth of her flesh burned him through his coarse robes. “I sound so selfish. But I’m alone in the world. I have to protect myself.”
“No, I am here.” He gripped her hand in his, the clasp of kinship. “I am always here. And Hanna is with you, surely.” In the privies, he had not had time to ask about Hanna, only time to arrange this meeting—only time to kiss her. He had dreamed of Liath last night and embarrassed himself in his sleep, but the others, Baldwin, Ermanrich, and Sigfrid, had helped him hide the traces.
“Hanna was sent south with Wolfhere, to escort Biscop Antonia—” She shook her head, impatient with herself. “You wouldn’t know about that. I beg you, Ivar, understand that—it’s not just Hugh I need to be safe against. It’s … it’s other things, things that chased Da and me for years until they fi
nally caught up and killed him, and I don’t know what they are. Ai, Lady.” She leaned forward, against him—but not to embrace him as he wished, only to whisper as if she feared the walls themselves, the books in their silent waiting, might hear. “Do you understand?”
A year ago, Ivar would have dismissed all these concerns with a wave of the hand and with grandiose plans that came to nothing. But he was older now, and he had, amazingly, learned something.
“All right, then,” he said, as calmly as he could, for she was still leaning against him. “You will marry no man but me.”
She gave a caught-in laugh, more a sob perhaps. “I could never have married him. If not him, then you, because I can trust you.” But she said it wistfully, as if she still mourned that other man whose name she dared not utter out loud.
Ivar felt he might float, he was so happy. She trusted him.
In time, he thought, she would forget the other man. In time she would love Ivar alone and only remember as a kind of hazy dream that she had spoken so about another man, a dead man. A dead man was no rival to a living one. And, because he had learned, for the first time he thought rather than acted impulsively. She was kinless, so needed kin, clan, family. There was Hugh to deal with; but Ivar wanted his revenge on Hugh, and he understood Hugh well enough to know that if Ivar had Liath, then, sooner or later, Hugh would appear. There remained only how to get out of the monastery. He must find a way to escape. But this would take planning.
“It will take time,” he said at last and with reluctance. “Will you wait for me?”
She smiled sadly. “I will stay an Eagle. That much I can promise you. They are my kin now.”
“Hush,” he said suddenly, pressing her away from him. A rustling more like mice than wind sounded from the hidden corner of the room. “Who’s there?” Ivar demanded.
She came out quietly from behind a row of cabinets. It took Ivar a few moments to recognize her in the dim room, and then his mouth dropped open in astonishment.
“Are you my sister Rosvita?” he demanded.
“Ai, Lady,” swore Liath. She jerked away from him.
“Yes, Ivar.” As soon as the cleric spoke, he knew it for truth. “My brother,” she continued, expression bland and eyes bright with—laughter? anger? He did not know her to be able to judge. “My brother novice,” she went on, gesturing toward his coarse brown robe, “this is most irregular. I will have to report you to Mother Scholastica.”
But at those words, Ivar exulted. “Very well,” he said, drawing himself up. “I will go willingly.” Brought to Mother Scholastica’s notice for the sin of consorting with a woman, surely—surely—the mother abbess would throw him out of Quedlinhame once and for all time.
It was a serious enough offense that Ivar had only to wait through Sext, the midday prayers, kneeling like a penitent on the flagstone floor in front of Mother Scholastica’s empty and thereby imposing chair, before the door opened behind him and the abbess entered her study. Rosvita walked with her. Ivar could not read his sister’s expression. He wished he knew her, so that he might guess what she had told the abbess, might guess whether Rosvita was sympathetic or hostile to his cause. But he did not know and dared not guess.
“I gave you no leave to look up, Brother Ivar,” said Mother Scholastica.
He flinched and dropped his gaze, watched feet shift, a dance whose measure and steps he could not follow. To his horror, Rosvita retreated from the room to leave him alone with the formidable abbess. He clenched his hands together, wrapping the fingers tightly around each other, and bit down on his lower lip for courage. His knees hurt. There was a carpet, but he had been strictly enjoined not to kneel upon anything that would soften his penance.
Mother Scholastica sat down in her chair. For a long while, though he dared not look up, he knew she studied him. A knob, an uneven hump in the stone, dug into his right knee. It was so painful he thought he would cry, but he was afraid to utter any complaint.
She rules with a rein of iron, so they all said. She was the king’s younger sister. Why had he ever ever thought, in that wild liberating moment in the library, that he could face her down?
She cleared her throat as a prelude to speaking. “In our experience,” she said, “when the king visits Quedlinhame with his court, there runs in his wake like the wash of a boat on the waters a shiver of restlessness through those of the novices and some few of the brothers and sisters who are not at that moment content in their vows. Always a few, seduced by the bright colors and the panoply and the excitement, mourn their loss of the world and seek to follow the king. It is our duty to rescue these fragile souls from their folly, for it is a fleeting temptation, dangerous but not, I think, unforeseeable.”
“But I never wanted—”
“I did not yet give you leave to speak, Brother Ivar.”
He hunched down, nails biting into knuckles. She did not have to raise her voice to make him feel humiliated and terrified.
“But I do mean to give you leave to speak. We are not barbarians, like the Eika or the Quman riders, to enslave you for no cause but our own earthly enrichment. It is your soul we care for, Ivar. Your soul we have been given charge of. That is a heavy burden and a heavy responsibility.” She paused. “Now you may speak, Brother.”
Given leave to speak, he also took the chance to shift his right knee off the digging knob of rock. Then he took a breath. Once begun, he could not hide his passion. “I don’t want to be here! Let me go with the king. Let me be a Dragon—”
“The Dragons are destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” The news shook him out of his singleminded fury.
“They were overwhelmed by a force of Eika, at Gent.”
Destroyed. Trying to make sense of this, he looked up at her. He had never actually seen Mother Scholastica from this close before; only the rare novice, like Sigfrid, came into contact with the abbess. She had a handsome face, her hair tucked away inside a plain linen scarf draped and folded over her head and twisting in neat lines down over her shoulders. She wore dark blue robes to distinguish her from the other nuns, a gold Circle of Unity studded with gems on a gold chain that hung halfway down her chest, and the golden torque that signified her royal kinship around her neck. Her gaze remained cool; she was not one bit flustered by this meeting or by the circumstances which had brought him here. He had a sudden, awful notion that she had judged many a boy or girl whose complaint was similar to his.
He would not let himself be overawed by her consequence! He was also the son of noble parents, if not of a king. “Then—then they’ll need more Dragons,” he blurted out. “Let me go, please. Let me serve the king.”
“It is not my decision to make.”
“How can you stop me if I refuse to take vows as a monk when my novitiate is ended?” he demanded.
She raised an eyebrow. “You have already pledged yourself to enter the church, an oath spoken outside these gates.”
“I had no choice!”
“You spoke the words. I did not speak them for you.”
“Is a vow sworn under compulsion valid?”
“Did I or any other hold a sword to your throat? You swore the vow.”
“But—”
“And,” she said, lifting a hand for silence—a hand that bore two handsome rings, one plain burnished gold braid, the other a fine opal in a gold setting, “your father has pledged a handsome dowry to accompany you. We do not betroth ourselves lightly, neither to a partner in marriage—” He winced as she paused. Her gaze was keen and unrelenting. “—nor to the church. If a vow can be as easily broken as a feather can be snapped in two—” She lifted a quill made from an owl feather from her table, displaying it to him. “—then how can we any of us trust the other?” She set down the feather. “Our oaths are what make us honorable people. What man or woman who has forsworn his noble lord or lady can ever be trusted again? You swore your promise to Our Lady and Lord. Do you mean to forswear that oath and live outside the church for the rest
of your days?”
Said thus, it all sounded so much more serious. No man or woman who made a vow and then broke it was worthy of honor. His knees ached; his back hurt. His hood had slipped back, and the hem of his robe had doubled up under his left calf to press annoyingly into the flesh.
“No. I—” He faltered. Had he actually imagined scant hours ago that he could get the better in a debate with Mother Scholastica?
“Why now, Ivar?” She, too, shifted in her chair, as if her back hurt her, and for one uncharitable moment he hoped it did. “You are a good boy and never rebellious, never like this. Was it the king’s arrival?”
He flushed. Of course she must already know.
“You are tempted by the presence of so many women who are not bound by vows,” she went on, as if toying with him, though her voice remained level and her expression clear and calm. “Do not be ashamed to admit such to me, Ivar. I understand that we who pledge ourselves to the church have to battle the temptations of the flesh in order to make ourselves worthy. Those who remain in the world do their part as well, but theirs is a different path. We in the church strive to set the darkness behind us, to make of ourselves an immaculate chamber, to set aside the taint of darkness that lies within each of us, that is part of each of us. For did the blessed Daisan not preach that although we are bound by our nature, God’s goodness to humankind was in giving us liberty?”
“‘Keep clear of all that is evil,’” responded Ivar dutifully, for these sayings had been drilled into the novices, “‘which we would not wish to befall ourselves.’”
“Good is natural to us, Ivar. We are glad when we act rightly. As the blessed Daisan said, ‘Evil is the work of the Enemy, and therefore we do those evil things when we are not masters of ourselves.’”
