Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars #7)

Constance touched the girl on the arm, and she piped up in a clear, soft voice. “Where are you from?”

“We call it Shaden, my lady. Begging your pardon, Your Holiness, but is it true there’s a new count? We heard some folk say so, which is why we folk at Shaden thought to send one of us to speak, but it seems from what I hear at the holding they were talking nonsense.”

“Lord Geoffrey still stands as regent for his young daughter, Lavrentia,” Constance said, indicating Lavrentia. “Is that who you meant?”

He ducked his head, too flabbergasted to speak. The girl stared at him but said nothing, and finally looked at Constance.

Before her injuries, Constance might simply have overawed him, being a noble woman so grand and mighty that a simple farmer would be too tongue-tied to utter a word in her presence, but what she had suffered had made her less formidable in appearance, although Ivar knew that she had not changed.

“Lord Geoffrey is resting, and I am here with Count Lavrentia, as you see. We will write down your statement, here,” she gestured to Sigfrid, “if you will tell us to what purpose your village sent you.”

A man might frown so, Ivar thought, making ready for a charge against an armed and powerful enemy. But the man swallowed, braced himself by letting out a sharp exhalation, and began in a firm if slightly rushed tone.

“We lost our deacon last summer to the black rot, and most of our seed corn, as well as a dozen or more good folk in our village. We were hoping the count might see fit to send another deacon our way so that we can live properly and pray when it is fitting and hear the stories of the Holy Verses told out to us. We were promised a few year back that we’d have the use of this new plough we heard tell of, to break up some bottomland, but we’ve heard no more of it. It would aid us this year especially with the weather bad as it is. We’ve had a score settlers come to our valley, driven out of a pair of villages that were torn right down in the great storm last autumn. We can’t feed all without this new land put to the plough. And with them, we’re asking we be allowed to pay a lower tithe this year, to hold back more of what we grow so as to feed the many more mouths we have and will have next winter. My lady. And if I may be bold, Your Holiness.”

“Go on.”

Sigfrid’s quill scratched as he wrote. Baldwin was staring dreamily at the fire.

“We have a tax we pay to Lady Hildegard, but she died when the roof of her hall fell in the storm.”

“Yes, it’s been recorded,” said Constance. “She left no immediate heirs. I’ve been told there is a cousin from farther east who will inherit, but there’s been some trouble finding her.”

“Yes, Your Holiness. So we pray, Your Holiness, for the lady’s steward has dealt poorly with us in the past and now is threatening to come with men-at-arms and rob us to pay our back taxes. If the lady doesn’t come soon, we are come to ask if another steward might be set over us who will govern more justly.”

“You are bold,” said the girl.

“Begging your pardon, my lady. We are desperate, Your Holiness. We thought all was lost last year, and then—” He faltered, twisting the cap.

Baldwin smiled in that way that calmed because it dazzled.

“Go on,” said Constance kindly.

“There were signs and portents, Your Holiness. A scythe I had borrowed—I lost its iron blade in the pond, and yet it was returned to me although it was hopelessly lost in the water and weeds. My niece, a good girl, was killed when a wall fell in on her, I swear to you in God’s name that she stopped breathing, but she lived, and lives still, a sharptongued brat but one we all love. These were portents of change. Don’t you think?”

“Miracles,” said Constance sternly.

He bowed his head.

“Tell us again, and in more detail,” she said, “for I have a wish that my clerics will record all these stories. I have heard many tales these days, here in Lavas, and others on the road. Strange tidings.”

Lavrentia looked at her hands.

Constance looked at Ivar and nodded, but he was of no use to her. He could barely scratch out his letters in the crudest fashion imaginable, and unlike some clerics he had no trained memory to recall the Holy Verses in their entirety or recite the genealogy of regnants and nobles back to the tenth generation.

The farmer began telling a confused story about a madman dressed only in dirt and moss. As Baldwin began writing, Ivar went outside where he kicked pebbles across the courtyard and all the way to the gate and farther yet to the fosse and walked aimlessly before coming to the little church where the peculiar and unsettling stone effigy of the last count rested.