Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars #7)

How had Hugh of Austra come to be allied with the Ashioi?

She moved forward in darkness, knelt, and patted the ground until its cool blade came under her hand. Good iron, this. The hilt bore an embossed crest which she read by touch: the letter ‘A’ surrounded by a circle.

“Liath, you must hurry,” he said.

She rose, gripped the rope, and looked up. The rock clouded her vision, and the vision that lay beyond those things seen with the open eye. Rock was heavy and slow moving, but there was something there, a presence. It was as if she could smell the edge of Hugh, like smelling a perfume: lavender for beauty, wolfsbane for deadliness, and something less tangible, twisted and rotten.

She could not quite grasp him, but she forged with her awareness as high as she could reach up the rope to a place where it tightened against a curve in the ceiling, perhaps a narrow vertical tunnel. There, where the rope receded into oblivion, she kissed the sleeping fire within it, and told it to burn.

His shout woke fire. The rope burned hard, far above her, just out of her sight. The red glow spit flakes of ash, and she yanked. The rope tumbled down around and on top of her, the fraying end smoldering and blackening at the tip.

“Ai, God! Liath!”

No need to answer. She had what she wanted. The glow gave just enough light for her salamander eyes. She coiled the rope over and under around shoulder and torso like a bulky sash, holding the slowly burning end out away from her, and tested the knots of the complicated arrangement of food and drink tied up against her body. It would hold.

She pushed into the darkness. When she approached the black spire, she found what she had prayed for: a stairway into the depths.

10

IN the late afternoon he rode into a clearing ringed by stately beech trees just coming into leaf. Beyond lay a tangle of mixed woodland with many massive trees listing sideways or fallen to the ground and slender saplings and a thick layer of shrubs grown up in a profusion that blocked all lines of sight. An ancient wall formed a crumbling pattern within the clearing. No place along the wall was more than knee-high, but it provided a barrier of sorts where otherwise they must lie open to whatever the forest might bring them. Within this ruin he found canvas tents being erected and fires burning and the deer being skinned and butchered and prepared for spit roasting over the remains of stone hearths. The offal was thrown to the hunting dogs, to keep them strong, although in any village such fare would have been served up as a stew. Alain had put aside some bones saved out from yesterday’s dinner, and these Rage and Sorrow gnawed on while he walked through the camp speaking here and there to servants and soldiers.

He came at length to the cloth screens set up on poles that divided the main portion of the camp from the smaller camp where the nobles would eat and sleep. No guards patrolled this gate, situated where a second inner ruin lay within the first.

Servants and soldiers moved about freely, but none lingered where the nobles sat on stools at their leisure while waiting for their roasting supper. The lords and ladies laughed and chatted, at their ease. He went to pee, leaving camp behind and stepping under the trees for a little privacy. The dogs lifted their heads and beat their tails one two, growling to warn him that he was being followed. Finished, he greeted Duke Conrad, who came accompanied by a swarm of nobles, servants, and faithful soldiers. Half of them followed the duke’s lead in taking a piss, a social activity on any noble’s progress, but when the duke was finished, he waved his retainers away and gestured toward a mossy stretch of thigh-high wall thrust up from the dirt and grown about with honeysuckle and crocus.

“A pleasant bench,” Conrad said amiably, but in his smile Alain saw the expectation of obedience.

They sat, and considered the woods around them, oak and hornbeam with a scattering of ash and this one proud circle of beech, obviously planted decades ago for an unknown purpose. Ivy had worked its way along the shadowed folds. Sorrow and Rage settled at Alain’s feet, staring fixedly at Conrad.

“You’re a quiet one,” said the duke, “most of the time.” A servant approached, Conrad dipped his head slightly, and the man retreated. The swarm had spread out of earshot, leaving them a measure of peace. “What do you think of, Lord Alain? What goad whips your mount? Do you envy me my wife?”

“Do you believe I must?”

He smiled as he glanced away from Alain, then back again. “It would be natural to envy the man who holds the treasure you once possessed yourself.”

Alain waited. Conrad, by all appearances a restless and energetic man, had the unusual ability to sit without the least appearance of becoming impatient. Men walked out in the woods, and over by the unseen fires singing broke out, a lewd song relating the amorous adventures of a young man peculiarly afflicted with a member whose size varied depending on the weather. “But when the sun came out, oh! When the sun came out!”