“He? Who?”
“The dragon, my lord baron.”
Köthen rolled his eyes, but Erde shivered. Was it possible? Could he actually sense the dragon’s presence, even when she couldn’t? She wouldn’t put it past him.
Guillemo walked his rapid little circle and halted in front of Hal. “Who’s this?” He grabbed the short-cropped nap at Hal’s temples and jerked his head back to see his face. Hal did not resist. He stared up at the priest with a vengeful death’s head grin. Guillemo stared back for a breathless second, then let go and sprang backward with a bone-chilling screech. His continued wails brought three of his brothers crowding to the door.
“Out!” Köthen snapped. “You, out! All of you! This is a gentlemen’s discussion, Guillemo. I want them out of here!”
Guillemo got hold of himself enough to cease his shrieking, but continued to stare and point, his whole arm outstretched as if reaching to touch the knight while keeping as far away from him as possible. “How did you get here? You’re not supposed to be here!”
“What’s the matter, Guillemo? Did you hope I’d died or something?” Hal rose from the nail keg and walked to the door to glance purposefully up at the glowering sky. The three white-robes backed away into the snow.
The priest balled his fist and dropped it to his side like a hammer. “I should have known it would be you!”
“I see you two are acquainted,” noted Köthen dryly.
Hal turned smoldering eyes on him.
Köthen spread his hands. “What, what?”
“Christ Almighty, Dolph. If you’re going to come charging in to steal a crown, you ought to at least take time to find out what goes on in the kingdom.” The extremity of Hal’s anger gave him strength to hold it in check. “Surely you’re the only man left in God’s Creation who doesn’t know it’s this so-called priest who made me a homeless wanderer!”
“Him? Thought it was your sons.”
“He put the weapon in their hands.”
Under the heat of Köthen’s glare, Guillemo glanced aside but raised his chin. “He is the Anti-Christ.”
“Who is?”
Guillemo jutted his chin in Hal’s direction. “Him. Him.”
“Hal Engle is the Anti-Christ? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“He has converse with dragons.”
“Ah, yes. Dragons.” Köthen eyed Hal sympathetically. “You see what comes from too much study? It’s that old reputation, getting you in trouble again.”
“Mock, mock, my lord, on peril of your soul!” The priest was pointing again. “He brings the ice in summer! He brings dragons to lie in wait!”
Hal smirked at Köthen with sour satisfaction. “And you said nobody took it seriously.”
Guillemo saw his advantage slipping away. He collected himself with effort. He tightened his robe a bit and smoothed its folds across his chest. “You may well mock, my lord baron, but do you consider it mere coincidence that finds us all here together at this moment?”
“What should I consider it?”
“Destiny, my lord of Köthen.”
Erde absorbed the loaded word with a shudder and wished with every nerve in her body that she was back in Deep Moor. She’d used the distraction of Guillemo’s screeching to gain the cover of the feed bin, but she still felt completely visible to him, sure that it was only a question of when he would choose to notice her.
“Destiny.” Hal made a rude sound.
“Yes! The forces of Destiny have drawn us together! He should not be here now, and yet he is, with all that he can summon from the cold depths of Hell! It is not on the battlefield but in this humble unmarked place that the true contest will be won or lost!”
Köthen had no answer for that. He shrugged. “A battle of the spirit, then, good Brother, which I as a mere soldier can leave to your superior knowledge and experience. Heinrich, gather your kit and your boy. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave your dragons behind. Let’s find someplace warm and get some food in our bellies. Damned unseasonable weather, isn’t it?”
Erde knew it would not be that easy.
“You leave at the peril of your immortal soul, Baron Köthen.” The priest’s voice was suddenly flat and sane, more like the Guillemo that she remembered.
“Ah, but I stay at the peril of my health and my stomach,” Köthen returned with scant civility. “What a dilemma.”
Erde’s father watched this exchange avidly, as if to see if Köthen had any better luck mastering the priest than he’d had.
“You do not fear God or the Devil?” Guillemo gathered himself a little more. It was like watching a man rein himself in on a leash. “Then perhaps a threat to your newly acquired scepter will concern you more.”
Köthen hesitated, and Josef von Alte smiled knowingly.
“Not acquired yet,” Hal threw in uselessly.
“What is it, priest? Can’t you ever just say what you mean?” Köthen crossed his arms. He knew he’d been snared and wasn’t happy about it.
“I have, my lord. I am. I always do.” Guillemo took up his diffident advocate’s stance, though it remained a bit stiff and artificial, his brain demanding a posture his mad heart could no longer support. But his insinuating tone of voice sent another hot surge of memory through Erde’s skull, a face again and blood, a young man’s body flying through the air, then nothing. But now she knew it was only in hiding. She felt it lurking, just out of reach, the entire memory, awaiting its cue. Guillemo took up a slow back and forth pacing, and Erde heard the slap of sandals on stone, even though the floor was dirt and the priest was barefoot. “Perhaps the meaning is sometimes obscure to you, my lord Köthen, but I say it nonetheless, without concealment. And what I am saying now is that your soul is in danger and your power is threatened. I will leave it to you to decide which peril concerns you more, but how much clearer do you need me to be?” He turned to face Köthen with elaborate politesse.
“Go on,” said Köthen.
“There is a conspiracy at work here, my lord, and it is both treasonous and unholy. My own heaven-sent visions are explained and proven out by the information I had from a man who I thought was your messenger but who now I see had fled to me in righteous terror to bare his soul of what he’d witnessed.”
Guillemo turned to point at Hal again, a bit too fast, a bit too avidly, and jerked himself back into a more reasonable stance. “I’d thought, my lord, that I had prevented this, months ago, but alas, the Fiend has found a way around me to do his foul work. Tonight, the poor man told me, this devil’s minion will tryst with the escaped witch and her rescuer, whom some call the Friend. But he is no friend to the godly. You will notice, my lord, how the name becomes ‘fiend’ with the subtraction of a mere letter. So then, when they are all met, this one here will summon his dragon familiar and spirit them away to the un-Friend’s encampment so that the accursed witch can do her black magic with his godless mob. This I have seen in my visions over and over, though I did not at first comprehend it. The witch will render the mob into an invincible army, which will march on Erfurt in the name of the deposed king.” Guillemo paused, lowered his pointing arm. “Does that stir your interest at all, my lord Köthen?”
“Do we know it was the Friend who rescued her?”
“I say it was.”
The younger man stared thoughtfully at the floor, toed some broken straw around with his boot, then sighed and looked at Hal.
Hal chuckled. “I’d do it if I could, you know that.”
“Except for the dragon part, my knight, it all sounds too plausible to be ignored.”
“Ah, but the dragon part seems fairly essential. How am I to spirit them away otherwise?”
“How about the dragon part as a metaphor for the royalist underground? I know the town’s riddled with . . . ‘friends.’ This place in particular.” Köthen nodded toward the shadowed corners of the barn. “I’ve had my eye on it for weeks. Haven’t been able to catch anyone in the act . . . before now.”
; “An unlikely spot for secret meetings.” Hal waved a dubious hand around the room. “Too public. Look how just anyone can drop on by.”
“Exactly. Who would suspect the odd coming and going? How else could a King’s Knight be standing here before me within my own closely guarded walls? How else could Guillemo’s witch and her rescuer have already evaded me for several hours? The royalists may have gotten them out by now, for all I know.” He watched Hal closely for a betraying sign.
“I’d much prefer a real dragon,” said Hal.
Köthen tried and failed to suppress a laugh.
“No, it’s not true! They’re not gone!” barked Guillemo, a little too loudly. He jabbed an agitated finger at the straw-dusted floor. “The specific persons may be obscured in my visions, but the force lines definitely meet here. They will be joined. It must be! There is . . . there is . . . here. It must be here!”
The priest began to pace his tight circle again, faster and faster. The three barons looked on with varying degrees of incredulity, concern, and contempt. Cringing behind the feed bin, flattened against its splintery slats, Erde knew not a whisper of contempt. She took in the priest’s circling as the mouse blindly senses the hawk above and freezes in primal, animal terror. She called again to the dragon, a final attempt, a desperate yearning fling of her mind into the void that was still, unbelievably, dragonless.
And the priest, circling, also froze, and listened. “It . . . ? Or she . . . ? She. She! She is here! Here! Now I understand it! Now I see it all!” He lunged back into motion, circling still but even wider, brushing unseeing past the men who watched dumbfounded, shoving Hal aside as the knight stepped deliberately into his path.
“Really, Dolph, can’t you do something with the man?”
Josef von Alte moved aside warily.
Köthen said, “Guillemo . . .” and reached for him.
“No!” The priest swerved, batting his arm away. “She. You. Didn’t believe me. I knew. Here now. Right . . .” He circled toward the feed bin. Hal moved to intercept him, but Köthen stopped him short with a broad arm across his chest.
“It’s the lad. He’ll . . .”
“Easy. He’ll come to no harm.”
“Dolph, you don’t know . . .”
“You keep saying that.”
“Here!” shrieked Guillemo like a malicious child in a game of tag. He reached behind the bin, grabbed Erde by the back of her jerkin and hauled her into view. He snatched off her prentice cap and shoved her roughly forward so that she stumbled and went sprawling facedown on the dirty straw. The mud-stained boots she saw a short yard from her nose were not Baron Köthen’s, but her father’s.
“Behold the witch-child!” Guillemo bellowed in triumph. “Ha, Josef! I told you she lived still!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Erde pressed her face into the straw and prayed for dragons.
Josef von Alte stared. He glanced at Brother Guillemo uncertainly, then back at the person sprawled at his feet. “Witch-child? I thought . . .”
“You thought! You’re a fool, Josef! You listened to rumor and the words of inferiors! But I told you what the truth was!” The priest jabbed both arms toward Erde, his hands as stiff as blades. “Now you will have faith! Now you will believe me!”
Von Alte did not move. Erde wished and did not wish that she could see his face. Would it be rage or joy that she’d find there? Slowly, she drew in her limbs beneath her, until she was curled in a turtlelike posture of retreat and submission. She wished she’d tried to learn the dragon’s skill of invisibility. She was sure she could make herself still enough to vanish. She heard Baron Köthen murmur to Hal, but did not catch the older man’s reply. Soon Hal stepped forward with a sigh and a rustle of straw, and bent down to grasp her arm and ease her ceremoniously to her feet.
“The granddaughter of Meriah von Alte need bow to no one.” He brushed dry wisps from her cloak and hair, then backed away to Köthen’s side.
Erde understood his unspoken message. She made herself stand tall and proud, the focus of all attention. It was easy to pretend to ignore the priest. Raising her eyes to meet her father’s was the thing she could not manage.
“A woman?” Köthen marveled.
“A girl,” amended Hal.
“His daughter? The one who was kidnapped?”
“No! Bewitched!” yelped Guillemo, beginning an agitated dance. “Corrupted! Suborned by the agents of Satan!”
“A child fleeing for her life,” Hal countered. “The only evil she knows is the one she escaped.” He looked to the priest. “Him.”
“Liar!” Guillemo shrieked. He danced toward Hal but skittered sideways when Köthen did not move from his path. “Ha! I know! I see it now! It was you, wasn’t it, all along? The signs were there but I . . . I misread them! I should have seen, when my visions perplexed me, that it was you, the knight in my dreams. The Devil’s Paladin!”
The knight in his dreams. Erde shivered. Too much coincidence with Guillemo. But she knew that the knight in her own dream, the dragon’s dream, was not Hal Engle.
“It was you who thwarted me at Tor Alte! It was your spells that broke the locks and put the weapons in their hands! You . . .”
“I wasn’t even in the neighborhood,” Hal said sourly.
“What proof is that? The Eye of Darkness sees farther than . . .”
Köthen’s patience ran dry at last. “Brother Guillemo, stop your ranting! You disgrace your holy office!” To Erde’s surprise, the priest subsided, though he continued to mutter and wave his arms. Köthen shook his head. “Well, you’re right, Heinrich. This complication I would not have guessed. Von Alte’s lost daughter. Where did you find her?”
“Starving in the forest. But my usefulness is ended now. You must give her your protection, Dolph.”
“I? It’s her father should do that, not me.”
“He didn’t the first time. Please, Dolph, she’s too young for politics. Take her in. Does a young girl flee into the wilderness unless she’s truly desperate?”
“Or very brave,” mused Köthen. “Or both. Well, what about it, von Alte? Does the father say nothing?”
When her father did not reply, Erde could finally muster the courage to meet his tongue-tied stare. The eyes she looked into were distant and horrified. They rebounded from hers as if she had struck him a blow. They flew to the priest, then back again like frightened birds to look her up and down, taking in the details of her shorn hair and her travel-stained man’s garb. At last they slid upward to meet hers furtively as if, Erde thought, he was peering at her from behind a shutter, or through a veil.
He’s scared, she realized. He sees someone he recognizes but does not know. It frightens him how much I’ve changed. She watched her father run his tongue along dry lips and gather himself to speak.
“Is this truly my daughter Erde?”
She didn’t believe that he could really doubt it. Without thinking, she opened her mouth to answer him. Her breathy wordless rasp made him recoil and glance away, first at the priest—who had ceased his dancing and circling to watch this exchange with his predator’s eye—and then at the open doorway, where the grim gray light of day was already waning.
“See!” hissed Guillemo. “Beware, Josef, for your soul’s sake. What was your daughter is no longer.”
“He knows nothing of souls—don’t listen to him,” Hal warned. “She’s your own flesh, von Alte. Meriah’s dear blood.”
“Ah!” murmured Köthen beside him. “Now it comes clear. I’d quite forgotten.”
Baron Josef shifted his weight a few times, regarding the snow-drifted doorsill with elaborate interest. At length, he wagged his head slowly back and forth, without looking at anybody. “No, this cannot be her. This is not my daughter.”
Erde started toward him instinctively, hands outstretched to deny his denial. Only then did he meet her straight and square, his eyes warning her off with a stare that said, I know you and I reject what you are, what you have becom
e.
Erde felt a binding loosen within her, a constriction she’d hardly known was there. Though his denial could mean death for her, she breathed more easily. Her spine straightened of its own accord, as if its burden had lifted. She thought: But I’m proud of what I am. In her mind’s eye, she saw a great gray sea from which Tor Alte stood up as a lonely island, and herself drifting away from a diminished and diminishing father who stood at the gate as if it were a dock. She was a boat cast off from its mooring, drawn swiftly away by the tide that was Life. Then the current eddied, leaving her without momentum, without identity. If she was not von Alte’s daughter, who was she?
Yet despite her confusion, the moment had a certain inevitability to it. She’d chosen a new mooring, more like a sea anchor, that stabilized without denying movement and change. Her new identity would be forged with the dragon. Erde did not permit herself to wonder if Earth’s silence was permanent. She wished her father would act on his doorward impulse and simply walk away, thus ennobling this family rupture with a clean and dignified break.
But Josef von Alte was plagued with the weak man’s need to justify. He took a step back, gesturing dismissively. “Not her. You’re right, Guillemo. My Erde is a lady and an innocent, not some broken-down knight’s whore and camp follower.”
Hal growled deep in his throat and lunged. Köthen caught him, pulled the older man back again. “If your concern is for her virtue, von Alte, you’ve never known this particular knight very well.” His dry chuckle held little humor, only scorn. “Might have been better for you if you had.”
Hal eased himself free and brushed at his sleeves needlessly. “If she wouldn’t marry me, she’d hardly have asked me to foster her son.”
Köthen shrugged. “That’s two bad decisions.”
Brother Guillemo grew restless with being a mere audience to confrontation. He clapped both palms to his face and cried out, “Ah! I see! The vision clears! I should not fear the witch-woman’s escape. It was trivial and temporary. It was a sign, to remind me of my true Mission! Oh, glory be to God who lends me such iotas of his omniscience!” He dropped his hands to his sides, palms outward in prayerful reverence, and beamed at the three uncomprehending barons. “Don’t you see? It’s so clear! It must be obvious, even to the likes of you!”
The Book of Earth Page 34
