“Then she is the one I seek!” cried the frater triumphantly. He extended a hand, trembling a little, wanting the scrap back.
With some reluctance, Sanglant handed it over. “You saw what became of her, surely. She was stolen by fire daimones.”
The soldiers had heard the story before, but they murmured among themselves, hearing the words spoken so baldly. At times, it amazed Sanglant that they rode with him despite his defiance of his father and regnant, despite the reputation of his wife, who had been excommunicated by a church council for the crime of sorcery and had vanished under mysterious circumstances from Earth itself. Despite the inhuman daimone who attended him as nursemaid to his daughter.
“Ah.” Zacharias considered the goats, who had resolved their dispute by pulling to the limits of their ropes where they had found satisfaction in a bramble. His profile seemed vaguely familiar to Sanglant, but he couldn’t place him. Had he seen him before? He did not think so, yet something about the man rang a resonance in his heart. The frater had a bold nose, a hawk’s nose, as some would have been wont to say, and a vaguely womanlike jawline, more full than sharp. He had the thinness of a man who has eaten poorly for a long time, and a shock of dark hair tied back at his neck. Like a good churchman, he had no beard. But his gaze was clear and unafraid. “Do you believe she is lost to you, Your Highness?”
“I will find her.”
Zacharias considered the words, and the tone, and finally nodded. “May I travel with you, then, my lord?”
Oddly, the question irritated Sanglant. “Why do you seek her?”
. “So that she may explain to me these calculations. She, too, seeks an understanding of the architecture of the universe, just as I do. She must know something of the secret language of the stars—”
“Enough.” The man spoke so like Liath that Sanglant could not bear to hear more of it. Ai, God, it reminded him of the conversation he had overheard between Liath and Sister Venia: Hugh could read, could navigate the night sky, could plot the course of the moon; Hugh had a passion for knowledge, and Sanglant did not. Would Liath like Zacharias’ company better than his? She lived at times so much in her mind that he wondered if she ever noticed that with each step her feet touched the ground. Maybe her feet no longer touched Earth at all, not now. Perhaps all the secrets of the stars had been revealed to her on some distant sphere, and she need never return to the Earth he understood and lived on.