In the Ruins

“You said once—” To his surprise, he faltered with the words catching in his throat, but he drove himself onward. “You said that what you saw and experienced in the heavens, with your mother’s kin, gave you peace.”

She nodded. “Yes, peace. More than that. I found joy.”

Jealousy gnawed like a worm, as the poets would say, and poets had a knack for speaking truth. “Joy,” he said hoarsely, hating the sound of the word, hating the sound of his voice because he knew that on this field he was helpless. He had no weapons and no strategy.

She caught his elbow and drew him close. “I did not stay there.” She pressed her lips into the curve of his neck.

Once, this alone would have driven all thought of trouble from his mind. Now, there were many things he wanted to say, but he let them go.

3

FOR three days they remained encamped outside of Quedlinhame, waiting. Liutgard went into seclusion. By the second day folk came down from the town to trade with the soldiers, not that the soldiers had much to trade with. The men cleaned and repaired their gear, hunted in the woodlands despite the dearth of game, and herded the horses into meadowlands to graze and rest.

With so much time on her hands, Liath flew with the Eagles, although she was no longer truly one of their nest. The twenty who had survived the trek north out of Aosta had gained another fifteen comrades, coming piecemeal into their ranks once the army reached Wendar. Most recently a very young Eagle named Ernst who had been chafing at Quedlinhame for several months had arrived at camp, proclaiming himself eager to be out of that cage. Now, in the afternoon, a dozen Eagles sat together under an awning that protected them from a drizzle. The sky had a grayer cast than usual. The fortress hill seemed colorless, set against the dreary sky. The soft light cast a glamour over the oak forest, while to the east the heavens had brightened to a pearllike gleam where the rain stopped and the clouds lightened. The sun never broke through.

“Not much snow in the mountains when we were crossing,” Hathui was saying to Ernst. “Maybe more came after we crossed. But if there isn’t snow, then the melt won’t swell the rivers come spring.”

“If spring ever comes,” said Ernst. “We had no snow at all. It was uncanny warm all winter. First, there was so much rain the fields flooded. In parts of Osterburg, streets and houses both ran underwater, all the way up to my knees! Nay, wait, that flood came in Askulavre. The bad rainstorms were earlier, back in the autumn. But now there’s only a bit of rain like this. And yet always cloud.”

“My granddad said there was one winter when he was a lad they never saw sun, and all spring, too,” said another Eagle, a southerner out of Avaria with curly dark hair and big, callused hands. “He lost two of his brothers that next winter. It was worse the year after for they’d eaten most of their seed corn. He used to talk about that time a lot when he was blind and bedridden. I’d sit with him, just to hear the tale, for he liked telling it. Still, I wonder.” He gestured toward the heavens. “Crops can’t grow without sun and rain in the right measure.”

“Too warm all winter,” said Hathui. “Too dry in the south last year, when we were down there. A terrible drought, so bad every blade of grass was brittle. Up here, everything is soggy. I’ve got mold on my feet!”

Everyone laughed, and for a while they talked about how their feet itched and how their clothes and tents stank of mildew. Everyone had mold on their feet except Liath, who was never sick and never plagued by fleas or lice or rashes. She sat as usual in the back. The other Eagles were accustomed to her presence in a way no one else could be. They ignored her. For her part, she braided fiber into rope as Eldest Uncle had taught her. At intervals she played surreptitiously at setting twigs to burn, honing her ability to call fire into smaller and smaller targets. Mostly, she listened to their news and their gossip and their conclusions as well as the information they had gleaned speaking to the locals. She listened to Ernst’s earnest report of conditions in Wendar over the last six months or more, ever since that windstorm had swept over them. Folk even so far north as Wendar had felt and feared and marked this unnatural tempest, although they had no way of knowing the truth.

The Eagles with Henry’s army had seen, and witnessed. Yet even they did not know the whole.

“I wonder,” she said aloud, and noted how they all stilled and started and turned, then waited for her to speak. She smiled as she realized in what manner she fooled herself, wanting to believe they did not scrutinize her every least movement and word for hidden meanings. She was no longer an Eagle. That part of her life was gone.