Crown of Stars

“Do we go back?” asked Falcon Mask, all her weight riding on her toes like a dog straining at a leash.

Best to hurry, but Liath herself felt leashed, as if something bound her here. “No. I want to look around first.”

Falcon Mask dashed at once to the rock wall rising behind the hut and began to climb. She had a mad grin on her face. Buzzard Mask prowled to the edge of the open space, marking its boundaries. The track itself went no farther. It ended here, where the hill ended, cut off by the precipitous drop in front and the rock wall behind. Forest covered the lands below. In the distance Liath saw a thread of smoke.

She walked over to the hut. Cautiously, she pushed on the door of lashed branches. It resisted for the space of two breaths, and then gave way. She held her breath. She knew where she was, absolutely and without doubt. The discovery of the skeletons beneath the mound had told her what she needed to know. This confirmed it. She knew who had lived long years in confines so small that a man could not lie down in comfort lengthwise. Had they buried his body elsewhere, or did his remains still rest inside?

She stepped over the threshold.

The narrow dirt floor lay empty and unmarked by even the dusty prints of woodland animals, which might be expected to have come scavenging. A wooden bowl and a wooden spoon hung from a wooden hook, strung up by a slender strand of fraying rope so dry that she feared that, if she touched it, it would crack and crumble.

A leather bucket had tipped over in one corner. A faint, sweet aroma drifted from that corner, but the curl of air inside the hut blew it away in an instant. She took another step in, righted the bucket, and found it empty but discolored at the bottom. Beneath, some creature had dug a hole in the ground, like a dog seeking a bone, but it was empty. There was no other sign of the holy man who had bided here for so many years.

This man was supposed to have been the only son and heir of Taillefer and Radegundis; the father of Anne; the husband, however briefly and illicitly, of Mother Obligatia. Once, Liath had believed that Brother Fidelis was her grandfather, but now she knew he was not. All they had in common, if the stories she heard could be believed—and she did believe them—was that he had once sat in the circle of the Seven Sleepers. That he had abandoned their councils, believing them to be corrupt.

He had taken the more difficult path, the life of an ascetic. Some had called him a saint, blessed with that halo of righteousness that the church mothers call the crown of stars.

It was ironic, then, that Brother Fidelis had the right to wear such a crown twice over, once as the heir to Taillefer’s empire and once as a holy man who had cut himself off from the court of worldly power in order to pray for the souls of the living and the dead.

Bowl and spoon and bucket were all that remained of him, except his precious book, the Vita of St. Radegundis, taken away by Sister Rosvita and still held in her possession.

“Bright One!” Buzzard Mask’s voice was breathless, fading into a wheeze of terror.

She stepped sideways out of the hut, and turned. The shock actually made her go rigid. Not six steps from her lay a bold, golden lion, washing its paws with its tongue.

“Bright One!” hissed Falcon Mask from above and to the right. “Step aside. I have an arrow ready.”

“Leap back,” said Buzzard Mask, to her left. “I’ll thrust at its heart.”

“Hold.”

The lion neither startled nor moved, but kept licking. An arm’s length in front of its massive head and fearsome teeth rested a quite ordinary wooden staff.

“If it meant to leap, it would already have done so.”

She took one step toward it, and paused. Lowered to a crouch, and paused. She might have been the wind, for all the notice it took of her. Its tongue worked at the pads. She reached, and touched the staff. Its huge slit eyes lifted. It stared at her for an age and an eternity, and she spun into that gaze, falling

a man stands in darkness, holding a newborn. A woman cloaked in robes and shadow faces him, her graceful hands crossed at her chest. He is anxious and troubled. She is as patient and peaceful as death.

“It is a girl,” he says with disgust and dismay. “I will not after all these years and all my expectations be superseded by a squalling brat. Yet I dare not. I dare not … it would be wrong to kill hen.”

The cleric answers, softly and persuasively. “I have a use for her. She will vanish. None will ever know, my lord, that she existed. I will be midwife to her transformation. Her twin brother will serve you well enough. No one will ever suspect there was another infant. Your mother is already dead, poor soul. The labor was too much for her.”