Here, within a ring of head-sized stones rolled and levered into place by their captors, they were allowed to set up their tents. Water arrived during the night, carried in leather buckets by unseen hands. Lord Hugh rationed their stores carefully, but already they had been forced to slaughter two of the horses and soon—in another ten or so days—they would run out of grain.
Along the southeast boundary of the campsite, a chalky road ran more-or-less west to east. South of the road lay land that appeared magnificently lush to Anna’s eyes, although compared to the fields and woodland around Gent it looked dusty and parched, with dry pine, prickly juniper shrubs, and waxy myrtle, and the ubiquitous layer of pale grasses. It wasn’t lush at all; it only seemed so because they had ridden through a wilderness of rock for so many days that any land untouched by destruction seemed beautiful in comparison. Yet there were tiny yellow flowers blooming on vines growing low to the ground. A spray of cornflowers brightened an open meadow. She hadn’t seen flowers for so long. It was hard to believe it was spring.
“If they haven’t killed us yet,” Hugh was saying to one of the men for the hundredth time, “it is because they are waiting for someone.”
“It was well you knew the secret of their parley language,” said Captain Frigo, “and that talisman name. Otherwise we’d all be dead.”
Hugh nodded thoughtfully. “Never scorn any mine of information, Captain. What seems crude rock may turn out to have gold hidden away in deeper veins. Who would have thought that unfortunate frater would possess such an intimate knowledge of the very noblewoman we are here to negotiate with?”
Their captors remained hidden. Anna wasn’t sure they were even human. They emerged only at night to retrieve the empty water buckets and return them full. They had animal faces, not human ones. But Lord Hugh said those animal faces were actually masks and that behind the masks the Lost Ones looked just like Prince Sanglant, with bronze-colored skin, dark eyes, and proud faces.
Maybe so.
Princess Blessing sat in the middle of the clearing with hands and feet bound. She stared into the foliage day and night, when she wasn’t sleeping. She hadn’t spoken a word for days, but now and again Anna caught her muttering to herself the way clerics and deacons murmured verses as a way to calm their minds.