“She’s ill and she hasn’t enough to eat. Here. See.”
His daughter. Her grief at Da’s death choked her anew and tears flooded her eyes. Numb, she followed the man into the tiny garbage-strewn alley, a fetid corner where he had made shelter for them. The girl was perhaps eight or ten years old; it was hard to tell. She coughed incessantly, half in sleep, but when she heard her father’s footsteps she raised her arms piteously toward him.
“Da?” she whispered. “Da, I feel such a pain in my chest. I’m sorry, Da, I meant to be stronger.” Then she saw Liath. Her eyes widened and she went into a spasm of coughing.
The man knelt beside her and petted her, soothed her, until she calmed and quieted. Then, with an agonized expression, he looked up at Liath. “We are not poor folk, Eagle. I was a good farmer and paid my rents faithfully to Count Hildegard. I lost my wife two winters ago to the lungfever, and the babe she’d just born died with her. This child, my Miriam, is all I have left. But we have nothing here and no kin, no one to help us and I can find no work. Please, can you help us, Eagle. They say in the marketplace the mayor feasts every night, but out here we have nothing. I am feared she will—” He broke off and buried his face in the girl’s hair.
Liath gulped down a sob. It hit her, then, again and so sudden, so unexpected: Da was dead. He was dead and he was never coming back, never going to walk beside her again or comfort her again or teach her again. No matter what his flaws were, for they were many, he struggled with the darkness as do all of humankind, yet he did his best and he was a good man and he had always, always, taken care of her. Tears and rain mixed on her face. The girl gazed at her in awe, the man in desperate hope.
“Can you not go to the cathedral?” she asked. “The bishop has allowed many of the refugees to camp in the nave and I believe she tries to feed them as well.”
“I have tried,” he said, hope dying in his eyes, “But there are so many. We were turned away even before we could reach the steps. The mayor’s guard beat us back.”
She took her Eagle’s ring off her finger and held it out. “Take this,” she said, trembling, “to the palace and ask for entry to the stables. Tell the Dragons there that I mean for you to have employment from them. You can care for horses, can you not?”
He swallowed. “I had sheep and goats and chickens, but never a horse.”
“Chickens, then,” she said recklessly. “Take your daughter. This will gain you entrance. You must do it, for I need the ring back and so I will fetch it from you there.”
“Da!” whispered the girl, and then coughed.
The man began to thank her so profusely she was afraid he would draw attention to them, even here behind the midden. She could not save them all.
“I must go,” she said. “I have an errand.” She fled gratefully into the rain and cried the whole way to the armory and back.
Werner kept her busy for the rest of the day, and that night, to assauge his fretting, he called for a lavish feast which she had no appetite for. Afterward she took a turn on watch late into the night and then lay down to sleep just before dawn only to sleep fitfully and then be woken mid-morning by a distressed servant. He begged her to come to the hall at once.
“Eagle!” Werner paced in his hall, frantic. “Have you heard? Have you seen?”
“I beg your pardon, Mayor Werner,” she said. “I have just woken. I was on watch last—”
“Lady and Lord! What have we come to!” He threw up his hand and called for a tray, popped a sweetmeat into his mouth as if that could comfort him in his distress. “I have already sent Wolfhere and the other Eagle down to the tannery, so now what shall I do? What shall I do?”
She waited as he snapped at a passing servant. That seemed to calm his nerves enough for him to speak coherently. “A crowd of people has gathered outside the gates. Outside these gates, as if I were their enemy! What a calamity this is!”
“Have they said what their purpose is, Mayor Werner?”
“Bread and beans!” he snorted. “Bread and beans! The good citizens of Gent would never act this way if these country people were not acting as a bad influence upon them. There is at least one deacon who—imagine this!—has inflamed them with tales of feasting here in my own hall going on while their children starve! No child starves within the walls of Gent. The biscop sees to that. They are calling me a glutton and say I feast while their children starve! Imagine! Can you imagine?”
She waited, but unfortunately he appeared to expect an answer. Carefully she said, “I am here to serve you, Mayor Werner.”