In the Ruins

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.

Late one afternoon, Anna sat beside her and wiped her brow. Grit came off on her fingers. The breeze off the wasteland carried dust, and it had filtered into every crevice of their baggage. No matter how much she combed her hair, or Blessing’s hair, the coarse dust never came out.

A twig snapped.

“Hey!” Theodore, standing sentry, raised his bow with an arrow set to the string. In the forest, humanlike figures scattered into the trees.

Anna scrambled to her feet, staring. This was as close as she had seen any of the masked figures during the day, but already they vanished into the landscape as would animals fleeing from the noise and smell of humankind.

“Hold!” said Hugh. “Be calm, Theodore.”

In the distance, a cry like that of a horn rose and stretched on, and on, before arcing into silence. Within the foliage, green and gold spun into view before disappearing behind a denser copse of pine. Anna placed herself between Blessing and the threat, but the girl pushed at her knees.

“I want to see!” she whispered.

“Put your weapons down,” said Hugh to the soldiers. “They outnumber us. These rocks are too low to create a defensive perimeter. Let us use our best and only shield.”

He crossed to Blessing, took her by the arm, and invited her to stand with a gesture. She looked sideways up at him, glanced back toward the company moving nearer through the forest, then got to her feet with a remarkable show of cooperation. Anna did not trust the stubborn set of the girl’s mouth, but she merely took two steps sideways and kept her own mouth shut, ready for anything, hands in fists.

The foreigners appeared at the bend where the chalk-white road curved away out of sight. The shadow of the trees lay across the wide path. These formidable creatures were after all not cursed with animal heads. A few wore painted masks: a fox-faced woman, a man with the spotted face of a leopardlike cat, a green and scaly lizard. There were also a half dozen who possessed no mask. One of them was a man so old and wizened that he might have seen a hundred years pass. He wore only a short cape, a kirtle, and sandals. A younger woman, scarcely better clothed, stood beside him with a hand cupped unobtrusively under his elbow. Other figures sheltered within the trees, half concealed. Anna thought she heard a baby’s belch, but if there was a baby, it remained hidden.