Crown of Stars

“What have you come for?” he demanded imperiously. “I won’t go back to Gerberga!” He drew his sword.

Sanglant motioned the others to fall back and rode himself to meet the younger man on the path. He pitched his voice to carry. “I pray you, Ekkehard, come quietly. Lady Theucinda cannot marry a man who is already married. Or do you mean to bed her and then cast her off?”

The girl looked up, hearing Sanglant, but she was just a little too far off for him to study her expression.

“I do not!” objected Ekkehard. “That’s not what I intend! I’ll marry her!”

“Are you not already wed to Gerberga?” Sanglant asked as pleasantly as he could. “Did you not already consummate the marriage?”

Ekkehard’s deep flush made him look furious and ridiculous. Sanglant felt a flash of sympathy for the rash fool, but it passed as soon as he remembered that Ekkehard had ridden with Bulkezu and his Quman invaders.

“For shame,” Sanglant said in a voice only the two of them could hear. “For shame, Ekkehard. Take your punishment, which you have earned. Does Gerberga abuse you?”

“She does not,” admitted Ekkehard sulkily. “But she doesn’t respect me. She only respects my rank and title. She wouldn’t have wanted me if I wasn’t Henry’s son.”

He brandished his sword. Sanglant’s men murmured with alarm, but Sanglant raised a hand to quiet them. Ekkehard was only expressing his frustration.

“Why can you have what you want?” added Ekkehard craftily. “Why can you, but not the rest of us? No one wants her as queen. She’s born of no particular noble house, only a minor landholding family, she admits it herself, that she isn’t really Taillefer’s granddaughter. She’s some kind of creature, a daimone. Maybe she has no soul. And she’s a sorcerer. So why must I marry for the sake of alliance, to benefit my family, if you don’t have to?”

There was no answer to this reasonable question.

Ekkehard grinned triumphantly. “It’s just that you can, and I can’t. Because you have the army, and I am a prisoner.”

Was that ringing in his ears his blood and anger rising? Everyone listened and watched. In battle, he always knew how to counterstrike, but in the courtier’s world he was not as adept.

A sharp tang as of iron made him sneeze. Had there been a chapel in that last village, where bells might be ringing?

Ekkehard lifted his chin, very much like the boy who has at last defeated his powerful rival. “You can’t answer me!” he crowed.

“Sanglant!” Her voice cut through everything else.

He turned in the saddle to see Liath pressing her mount forward, to see her speaking as she rode in a manner that caught Hathui and Fulk’s attention. His guardsmen scattered like chaff before wind.

“What?” he began.

Too late, he recognized the threat.

“Behind me!” she shouted, riding toward him. “I still have my bow and a dozen griffin feathers. Best if Ekkehard’s men spread out. They must not clump together.”

This he had seen for himself that awful night on the foothills of the Alfar Mountains.

“How many?” she asked. “I can’t see them.”

Galla.

He smelled them now. He heard their bell-like voices tolling, two of them, four of them, whispering his name and Liath’s name: Sanglant. Liathano. But he could not see them through the trees.

“Four, I think.”

“Who are they after?”

“Only you and me.”

“Ai, God.” She was furious, scared, and determined. “Who has sent them?”

“There!”

Branches swayed and snapped. Where their track led across the underbrush it left a barren trail in its wake.

“I see only three.” Her bow was already strung. She drew an iron feather out of her quiver and set it to the string, heedless of the trickle of blood on her skin.

The galla approached from the south, two of them moving one behind the next and one about thirty paces off to one side. He hissed, then shut his eyes, seeking, listening, smelling, letting the touch of the wind on his cheek speak to him. He heard a fainter set of bells, but the ringing of the other three drowned it and he could not mark its direction.

Horses screamed. Men shouted, trying to control them. He heard a man fall, the thump of his impact on the ground, a shattered bone, a weeping curse at the injury.

“Fulk!” Sanglant shouted, not looking to see where Fulk was. He dared not look away from the advancing galla. “Scatter the men and keep them away from me and Liath! Do as I say!”