Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars #7)

Even that noise failed, as if she had fallen deaf and the world gone mute.

She stumbled out, cautious of her feet, seeing shapes tangled on the ground where they had fallen, and sought through the weeds and stone until she found Sorgatani awash in a pool of pale light shrinking around her. She was kneeling. Retching. Braced on her hands, shoulders heaving as she coughed and spat.

Hanna crouched beside her but did not touch her. “Sorgatani?”

The light contracted, stealing back into her robes. Ribbons of angry brilliance twisted along the ground like brilliant snakes but these, too, faded. At last they waited together in night. A slight, copper gleam still shone from Sorgatani’s palms but otherwise shadow covered them.

“The curse is real,” Sorgatani said in a hoarse whisper. Hanna could make no sense of her expression. Was she resigned? Triumphant? Appalled? Detached?

“You saved us,” Hanna said.

The shaman rose, staring at her shining palms. “I am a weapon the Cursed Ones do not know and cannot remember. My kind was not yet bound to the Horse people, our mothers. Do you think it is for this we Kerayit were made?”

“It is only a few of you who are so cursed.”

“It needs only a few.” She did not look at Hanna. All the Eagle saw was her troubled profile, eyes and brow tightened with disquiet, lips pressed firm, and the golden net of wire and beads that covered her black hair gleaming uneasily where the light gilded its webbing.

“Can the Horse people have been planning for so long?”

Sorgatani looked at her, half laughing, half grim. “Can they not have been? The Holy One is as old as the exile of the Cursed Ones is long. She must have wondered if they would return, if the spell might weave itself with its own pattern, unknown to us until it was too late.”

“What will you do?” Hanna did not want to walk in the morning out among the dead. She did not want to make an accounting. Yet it would be done.

“Make sure ours are still hiding. I must go to my cart.”

Back to her exile. Her prison.

For the first time, Hanna really understood what it meant. Even Sorgatani’s slaves had more freedom than she did.

2

AT first light they crawled out from under the wagons and gathered their dead: the archers Peter and Rikard; Brother Jerome; Aurea, Rosvita’s beloved servingwoman; Stephen and Wilhelm and Gund who had been out on sentry duty. It wasn’t clear if Gund had been killed by the enemy or by the curse, because he was quite a ways away, caught in the midst of a group of warriors as though they had captured him and dragged him off still alive.

It scarcely mattered now. Lady Bertha was dead, and their enemy wiped out. They gave up counting enemy dead when they reached nineteen. There was some talk of burning the corpses, but no one wanted to touch them because these were creatures who appeared scarcely human. They had bronze-colored complexions and frightening animal masks and bronze body armor, molded to fit the slopes of their bodies as good masons built cunningly along the contours of hills. In truth, no one wanted to take their weapons or steal even such a trove of armor. No one wanted anything except to leave as quickly as possible. Sister Rosvita told them that the convent of Korvei lay ten or twelve days’ journey from here, in the borderlands between the duchies of Avaria and southeastern Fesse. From Korvei they could head north toward Quedlinhame and Gent, or west to Autun.

Hanna helped dig two graves, one for the soldiers and Jerome and Aurea, and a separate pit for Lady Bertha. Sister Rosvita and the older nuns stripped her and wrapped her in her cloak; in this fur-lined shroud they buried her. Rosvita sang the blessings over the dead. Bertha’s seven surviving soldiers wept. Everyone wept, all but Hanna, who had no tears, and Mother Obligatia, who had seen too much death to be scoured even by this.

“How comes it that those who attacked called the name of Prince Sanglant?” asked Sergeant Aronvald.

“I do not know,” said Rosvita.

“They’re like him in looks. His kinfolk.”

“It’s true,” she agreed, looking troubled.

“Think you he has betrayed us?” asked the sergeant.

“You traveled with him last of all, Sergeant. What do you say?”

He stared at the mound of dirt. “My lady trusted him. Yet the creatures did call his name. How could they know it, if he was not in league with them? Yet my lady would not put her trust in one who meant to betray her.” He glanced sidelong at Princess Sapientia, who remained mute and emotionless, like a puppet dangling from slack strings. “Better if this one had died, than our bold lady,” muttered the sergeant, but he was careful to pitch his voice so only Hanna heard him.