Crown of Stars

Wind gusted through the dark opening where the rose window had once shone. Every lamp flame shuddered. A cold breeze kissed Alain’s face, whispering around him. A tickle of cool air slipped in his ears and mouth and nose. For one instant, the essence that is the aether breathed through his limbs and his chest, embracing him, and then it poured away and into a different vessel.

Liath leaped to her feet as Sanglant’s eyes snapped open. They shone with sharp blue fire, easy to see in the gloomy light.

She shrieked with rage. “Go! Go! Get out of his body!” Alain stepped up beside her and stilled her with a hand on her arm.

“You are come back,” he said.

“I found what we spoke of,” said the daimone through Sanglant’s lips, in a voice that was like and yet utterly unlike Sanglant’s familiar and well loved voice. “I brought it back.”

“Then you have done as he would have done.”

The head nodded, an awkward movement learned rather than natural. “I have done as he would have done.”

“Go in peace,” said Alain.

The flame in those dead eyes wavered. The mouth moved, and after a moment sound came out. “Can I ever find him again?”

Alain touched his cheek to the cool wood of the staff. It was Adica he saw, walking the trail that leads to the land where the meadow flowers bloom. A place far away and long ago, lost to him. He looked up, into the eyes of the daimone.

“Sometimes we are forever separated from the one we love. But, in truth, I do not know what lies beyond the veil.”

“Then I will keep looking.”

A breath gasped out of those lips.

Liath groaned as the body went slack. She collapsed to the floor.

Now and again, silence is a caught breath, all creation suspended between one heartbeat and the next. No one spoke. No one moved. The lamps burned, but they could not obliterate the shadows.

“He is breathing,” said Countess Lavrentia, once known as Mother Obligatia.

Sanglant opened his eyes, dark with the look of his mother’s kin. He blinked, as if trying to focus, and he did so finally as Liath staggered to her feet and stared at him incredulously.

“Liath,” he said, and he reached for her hand.

XIV
THE CROWN

1

“I PRAY you, Sister. Wake up.”

She sighed, wishing for this instant that she might not have to open her eyes and walk into the new day.

Fortunatus chuckled. “You must wake. It is already accomplished three days ago. Fear not. We will stand beside you. But come quickly. Sister Hathumod is asking for you.”

She opened her eyes to see his dear face hovering above hers. He had gained weight over the last year. He looked well. The girls—in truth they had earned the right to be called young women, but they would always be girls to her—waited impatiently, all bright smiles and shiny faces, and there was Brother Jehan and the new scribe, shy Baldwin, the frail scholar Brother Sigfrid, genial Brother Ermanrich, and more besides, clerics, presbyters, deacons, fraters, abbesses and abbots, monks and nuns, biscops, and even the humble lay brothers and sisters who worked the holy estates.

Hers, now. All of them.

The chamber was an opulent one, clothed in silks and tapestries. The couch on which she had taken her nap was embroidered in the Salian style with scenes cross-stitched into the fabric, in this case, episodes from the life of the Emperor Taillefer. There he rides with his black hounds upon the hunt; there he stands with staff and book, one hand raised, remarking on the stars in the heavens; there he sits with the crown of stars on his brow while he passes judgment over the famous dispute between two beekeepers; there he weds for the fourth time, and there he dies, hand clasping the wrist of his young queen, Radegundis, who is soon to be known as a saint.

The journey is a long one, and none can know when or where it will end.

They helped her to rise, and arrayed her in heavy robes, which she did not like. She thought longingly of her books. Surely there would be an hour here or there to continue the Deeds of the Great Princes once all the fuss died down.

They escorted her down a wide corridor, down steps to the lower level, and through a garden heavy with the scent of roses.

Last summer had remained cool, and the first frosts had come early. The winter had been hard, and many had died, and spring had come late again, but the skies had begun to clear. All summer they had been fortunate in days of lingering heat that caused the flowers to bloom wildly and in fierce colors.

She heard the swell and murmur of the crowd in the octagonal chapel, constant like the mutter of the sea along the shore, but Brother Fortunatus steered her to a suite opening off the rose garden. The shutters were closed because, here at the end, the light hurt the dying woman’s eyes.