Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars #7)

“Ivar! Ai, God, Ivar!” Baldwin ran over, having abandoned the horses at the trough. “What happened?”

“Let’s go,” he said in a choked voice, staggering up. Each step made his throat seize up again, and by the time he reached the horses he had retched a dozen more times. Fumbling for the reins, he flung his body up and over, as clumsy as a rag doll. Good horse. She waited for him to get into the saddle while Baldwin fussed. “Get. Now. Go.”

He couldn’t speak for forever. Baldwin stewed and fretted and his mount shied at every leaf fluttering on the road, until Ivar found his voice.

“Dead thing,” he said. “We just go on. Dibenvanger Cloister is close along this way. I recall coming past here. They’ll have news.”

When the cloister’s orchards appeared, he knew at once that they would find nothing different here. Death marched before and behind them.

“It’s those creatures, the ones with animal faces,” said Baldwin in a low voice. “They’ve come before us. They’re the Lost Ones, only they’ve come back to get their revenge.”

“We’re doomed,” muttered Ivar, and was ashamed to hear himself speak the words.

“For shame! Ivar! Do you not believe in the phoenix?”

“Of course,” said Ivar, and he added, “I have to.”

“Don’t despair,” said Baldwin affectionately, and his smile was so kind and so heartening and so beautiful that Ivar found his own dark mood cracked by a sliver of hope.

The cloister had housed a score of monks, novices, and lay brothers within a compound made of a tiny church, a miniature cloister with a separate novice’s house, a workshop, a byre, and a cunningly designed mill now at rest. The gardens had been turned over and planted. The millrace burbled. But no one was home. Because it was getting on toward evening, they loosed the horses into the byre, brushed them, and fed them from the store of grain. While there was still light, Ivar sent Baldwin to find what he could from the storehouse and herb garden while Ivar walked through the cloister. The slap of his feet made the only sound. The wind had died. Not even the earth seemed to breathe. Beyond the cloister lay the cemetery, budding with twenty-six fresh graves. Where had the others gone? He checked in every cell, but he found no bodies.

“Must we sleep here?” Baldwin asked him when they met at the byre. “There must be better beds in the cloister.”

“Yes, here by the horses. What did you find?”

“These turnips, although they’re half rotten. Lavender. This oil, but I think it’s turned.”

“Eh! Phew! Throw that out.”

“Peas. How I hate porridge!” He set down bunches of herbs, neatly bundled, and displayed a pair of loaves so hard that the knife wouldn’t cut into them. “Plenty of grain, though.”

Ivar nodded. “We can lade the spares, and walk as much as ride so they won’t founder. We’ll ride out at dawn.”

They bedded down in the straw, back to back for warmth. That night they heard birds calling in the woods, as if a flock swept past from south to north.

“Are those geese?” Baldwin whispered.

“Hush! Those are no geese I’ve ever heard!”

He did not sleep after that, but the next day he nodded off twice in the saddle. They pushed the horses on a fine edge. A knife seemed held to Ivar’s throat, ready to cut, but no one met them on the road coming or going. Over the next many days they traveled through a dozen more hamlets, all deserted. All ornamented with fresh graves. They might have been wandering alone in the world after Death had scoured the land. At length even Baldwin fell silent though, after all, it would have been preferable to hear his inane chatter.

What had become of Biscop Constance and the others?

Increasingly, Ivar’s thoughts drifted, unmoored by the solitude and the constant expectation of some worse surprise lurking around the next bend in the road.

Life had been so easy in Heart’s Rest with Liath and Hanna. Bright and brilliant Liath; all of the old anger at her was wrung out of him, and he thought of her now with a nostalgic fondness. He could never have resisted her, and it was idiocy to think she would ever have looked twice at him. She had never been faithless. She had befriended him, and Hanna, and they had been friends to her in return. It was unselfish, in its way, a bond that came not from family ties but from outside them.

Everyone said Liath was still alive. Rumor called her queen to Sanglant, but also a heretic and a maleficus. Excommunicated.

Except that, if she were a heretic, that meant she believed in the True Faith, in the rising of the phoenix and the glorious Redemption.