Crown of Stars

4

SHE brooded all that day as her party traveled a little worn path, but still took time to remark on the cool late spring landscape. They followed a trail through hilly country. The great estates and farming lands of Saony lay several days’ ride west and east, anchored by Osterburg and Quedlinhame. Goslar was a hunting lodge built in uninhabited countryside where lords and regnants could find a profusion of game wandering the hills and dense forest.

None among the Eagles currently traveling with Sanglant had ever ridden this way, but Hathui had heard the directions from Wolfhere some years ago and had described them in detail to Liath. By late afternoon of the second day they would come to a small outpost, a free holding established by settlers given the imprimatur of King Arnulf the Elder. Beyond that a river crossing and another two days’ journey would bring them to the convent, sequestered in a tiny valley among rugged hills.

Liath walked in the van beside Captain Thiadbold, setting the pace along the soggy track. Her horse, saddled, was led by a groom. Ernst and Rufus rode behind her. Fore and back came the rest of the company, two-score Lions under the command of Thiadbold. Not as swift as horsemen, but, Sanglant had noted, a seasoned captain with disciplined infantrymen in his command would serve best for a journey through the wild forest hills. Common knowledge told that St. Valeria lay hidden in the hills so that the holy nuns who used scholarship to battle evil might make their study in peace. Or be cut off so none of them, tempted by the hope of power wielded through the black arts, could easily escape into the wider world.

“Although it seems to me,” she said to Thiadbold, with whom she was having this conversation, “there are folk aplenty who dabble in the black arts hoping to make their crops prosper or their heir fertile, or their rival barren. Would it not be better to train folk to combat it in its turn?”

“That may be. But some such folk will be tempted to use their power for ill, against the neighbors they’re supposed to help.”

“They do that anyway.”

“That’s true enough. The miller in my village was a prosperous man. He got a lust for a girl—a cousin of mine as it happens—and put out his old wife and made it plain to my aunt and uncle that he’d grind no grain until they gave the girl to him. They went to the deacon, who refused to help them because the miller tithed generously and she did not wish to offend him.”

“So you see, my point is made.”

His answering smile held a touch of irony. “The story’s not done. He beat her and treated her cruelly, so at length her parents went to the lord to beg him to intercede. And when he saw the girl, he took her away to become his concubine.”

“Beauty gave her no advantage.”

“Maybe so. When her parents complained again to the deacon, the holy woman said only what we all know: That it is God’s will that some are set high and others low.”

“Is it? So say the noble clerics and ladies and lords who stand atop the tower.”

“Not only them. So said my cousin, too, after she gave birth to a child who was given, as birthright, title to an estate.”

“It’s easy to say, if the advantage is yours. Yet every person stands equal in the Chamber of Light.”

“Do you believe that?” he asked her, genuinely curious. He was not, she thought, a man tempted to philosophical speculation, but he had a keen eye and a good mind.

“I have to believe it. Else my sense of what is just would suffer grievous harm. I have met too many nobles who are fools to believe otherwise.”

He chuckled, then looked around nervously before recalling, she thought, that there was no one to hear them except his own men. “Perhaps so. The church would not approve your words.”

“Look!” She pointed. A lumbering shadow moving away into the forest and vanishing in the brush.

“An aurochs! Mayhap we’ll have game tonight for our supper.”

They did. In the rear guard a scout hauled in a deer. At the fore, a pair of men ranging in the woods to seek out trouble shot an aurochs that had stopped to graze in a clearing a spear’s toss off the road.

“It might do for a campsite,” said one of the scouts, coming to report the kill to the captain. “There’s an old stone circle, and cleared ground.”

“Let me see,” said Liath.

She went with an escort of a dozen soldiers while the rest waited on the road. At the clearing, the other man had already begun butchering the aurochs, and the sharp smell of its blood hit her first. As she pushed aside the low-hanging branches, she saw what manner of place they had come to.