Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

Fortunatus padded over barefoot and took the unbound sheets carefully off the travel desk so that Aurea could fold it up. “I’ll care for these, Sister,” he said.

The mule was brought, and Rosvita mounted with a grimace. Her bones creaked and popped constantly these days. With Hathui as escort she rode forward along the lines, passing knots of soldiers and stands of dismounted horsemen like copses of trees. The road led down a steep valley, walled here by cliffs ribboned with slender waterfalls whose spray made little rainbows in the air, quickly seen and as quickly vanished.

Carefully, they picked their way down the path until they reached a broadening in the valley where the royal party had stopped to take advantage of a pleasant meadow as a haven for their noontime rest. The king and queen waited at their leisure while servants watered the horses and brought their sovereigns ale, cheese, and bread as well as greens plucked from the hillsides. Adelheid sat on a blanket, so big-bellied in her pregnancy that she found the ground a more comfortable seat than her throne.

Henry conducted business a short way away from her, consulting with his captains and stewards and noble companions and dispensing judgment over disputes that had arisen in the train. Occasionally he would refer two quarreling parties to Adelheid, and they would hasten over to kneel before her. A steward hurried forward to Rosvita and, taking her travel desk, set it up at Henry’s side. She sat on a stool, trimmed her quill, and readied her ink as Henry listened to the complaints of a wagoner who had gotten into a fight with a Lion over a chicken looted from a farmer’s shed. A knife fight had ensued, and both men had been wounded.

“Yet what of the injury you inflicted upon the householder whose chicken you stole?” demanded the king. “Made you any recompense to her for the loss of the chicken?”

“Nay, but, Your Majesty, she was just an Aostan woman, not of our people at all.” On this point both men agreed.

“Yet were she a Wendish woman, would you have treated her so disrespectfully? Will the Aostans rally to our cause if we treat them as we would our enemies? They are not meant to suffer as our enemies but to prosper as our subjects. Let both of you make her some restitution. I will send an Eagle back to the village with this fine. As for the two of you, you will dig privies side by side for a week, so that you may learn to work together.”

He dismissed them, then beckoned to a steward. “Here is Sister Rosvita, Wito. Make your report.”

Rosvita duly cataloged the steward’s report. It had taken them three weeks to cross the mountains, moving at not more than five leagues a day. The weather had held fair, for the most part, and they had lost only twelve horses, eighteen wagons, and twenty-five soldiers, seventeen of them to an outbreak of dysentery that had luckily been confined to the rear guard.

When the steward finished, Henry’s captains came forward to discuss the route, and Rosvita looked back over the hapless Brother Eudes’ precise entries that in spare language told the story of the abortive attempt to cross the mountains last autumn, when the weather drove them back to the north and they spent a miserable winter moving from one palace to another pursued by sleet, snow, spoiled food, and a scarcity of ale and wine. It had been either too cold to travel or else not cold enough to freeze the ever-present mud slop that turned roads and stable yards into mires. The army had lost seventy-nine horses and forty-two cattle to foot rot alone, and ninety-four soldiers to lung fever and dysentery, mostly from that first awful outbreak. Indeed, Brother Eudes himself had barely survived that first outbreak of dysentery, and since then he had suffered several relapses, the worst after their second failed attempt to cross in the spring.

Henry sent his captains away, and for a moment peace reigned. Rosvita closed her eyes and listened to the murmur of Adelheid’s noble companions and the laughter of Henry’s personal retinue, most of whom had wandered down to the stream to cool their faces.

For an instant, Rosvita’s hearing sharpened so intensely that she could hear Queen Adelheid speaking. “Yet a wealth of sun does not bode well. I do not like the sere golden color of the grass. There should have been more rain over the winter and spring. I see too little green.”

“Sister Rosvita.” Henry spoke in a voice that carried only to her ears. “What if it is true that his wife is the great granddaughter of the Emperor Taillefer? She could claim the empire.”

Startled, Rosvita dropped her quill. Henry sat with his chin resting on a hand, elbow propped up on the arm of his throne. He stared into the distance, at the pine forest or perhaps at his fears and doubts. Marriage to Adelheid had lifted years from his face, but it also meant that he was even more rarely alone than during the years of his widowerhood. He rarely had opportunity these days to open his most private thoughts to her.