Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

Shock gave way to a curious, almost luminous clarity. Even in the darkness, with a waning quarter moon and the lamp’s faint glow their only light, she could see the medusa’s face, carved out of a marble so white that it seemed to gleam, leprous and pallid, an evil spirit sent to overhear the complaints of travelers come to burden the regnant with their petty cares and quarrels.

“Villam is in danger.” The words tolled in her heart like the knell of death, singing the departed up through the spheres toward the Chamber of Light. “We cannot act hastily, for they have power against which our good faith avails us nothing. We must catch Villam before he does something rash. Come.”

Hathui knew the servants’ corridors in the skopos’ palace well, since she often carried messages from regnant to skopos. A pair of guards at the entrance to the kitchens chatted amiably with her for a few moments about the current favorites for the horse races to be held in three days, then let her through without questions. Quickly, Hathui led them into the main portion of the palace. Even in the middle of the night a few servants walked the back corridors, carrying out trash or chamber pots, hauling water for the many presbyters and noble servitors of the skopos who would need to wash in the morning. None seemed suspicious when Hathui asked if they had seen the king; the Eagle had a natural gift with words and an easy confidence, although it clearly cost her to put a careless face on things. But in the end, servants saw everything: the king, escorted by Presbyter Hugh, had gone up to the parapet walk. They had not seen Queen Adelheid.

A spiral staircase of stone led from the guards’ barracks all the way up to the parapet walk. By the time they reached the top, Rosvita was puffing hard. The night air, pooling along the walk, had at last a hint of autumn in it. A breeze cooled the sweat on her forehead and neck. Hathui started forward along the walkway, which angled sharply along the cliff’s edge overlooking the river below, now hidden in darkness.

“Wait.” Rosvita took the lamp from the Eagle and, wetting thumb and forefinger, snuffed the wick. “Better that we approach without being seen.”

They waited for their eyes to adjust, but fanciful lamps molded in the shapes of roosters, geese, and frogs rode the walls at intervals, splashes of light to guide their path along the narrow walkway. Wisps of cloud obscured the stars in trails of darkness. Was that Jedu, Angel of War, gleaming malevolently in the constellation known as the loyal Hound? Hathui, walking ahead, put out a hand to stop her in a pool of shadow between two broadly spaced lamps.

A faint stench of decay rose off the river, the dregs of summer. According to the locals, only the winter rains would drive it away. The wind shifted, and Rosvita pulled her sleeve across her nose to muffle the smell.

She heard voices, two men, one angry and one as sweetly calm as a saint.

With Hathui beside her, she moved forward cautiously, hugging the interior wall, until they came to a sharply angled corner of a main tower and could see onto a wider section of the walkway, set between the square tower at their back and its twin, opposite. Three men stood there, one silent beside a landing that led to a second set of stairs, one leaning gracefully on the waist-high railing that overlooked the abyss, and the third halfway between the two, as though to make a shield of his body. Even without the light of two lamps set on tripods, Rosvita would have known two of them anywhere.

The bell rang for Vigils.

“But Margrave Villam,” said Hugh most reasonably as he rested against the railing while the wind played in his hair and lifted the corners of his presbyter’s cloak, “you do not understand fully the gravity of the dangers facing all of us, which remain hidden from mortal eyes. Like my mother, I act only to serve the king.”

Villam seemed ready to spit with fury. She could see it in the way he held himself as he took a single threatening step toward Hugh, the way his hand brushed his sword’s hilt. Hugh was unarmed. “You! Sorcerer! I never knew what you did at Zeitsenburg, but the whole court knows what your blessed mother thought a fitting punishment for you, her golden child! To humble you by making you walk into the north like a common frater. What would she say to this night’s treachery?”

“What treachery is that? King Henry walks beside me to meet with the Holy Mother. Who has been speaking to you, friend Villam?”

Villam glanced at the man standing rigidly beside the stairs. In that moment, Rosvita realized that she had not recognized him; his posture and stance were utterly wrong, not her beloved king’s at all. “Your Majesty,” Villam entreated, “do we not ride out in two days’ time to return to Wendar, where the people cry out in hope that you will soon come to aid them?”