Hanna had seen fire before, but never anything like this.
The fire roared. The hot wind streaking off the flames baked her where she stood, though the day was cold and beyond town a thin blanket of snow covered field and forest. Half the palace was on fire, sheets of flame rising into the heavens, a second wall that mirrored the wooden wall of the palisade. In the town, ash rained down on women loading their valuables into carts, on children carrying infants out of houses, on men and women hauling buckets of water up the rise toward the burning palace. Gaping, she sucked in ash; the sharp bite in her throat made her hack.
“Too little water!” shouted Folquin, the fastest runner among the Lions. Panting hard, he came up beside her and leaned, coughing, on his spear. “They’ll never put that out! Pray to the Lady it doesn’t catch the roofs in town.”
Hanna dismounted and thrust reins into the Lion’s hands. “Let young Stephen take the horse and hold it for us,” she said. “Then you and Ingo and Leo follow me up. We must aid those we can.”
“I pray the king is not inside—” he said, but she gave him a look, and he drew the Circle of Unity at his breast and shut up.
She ran up the hill, easily outpacing people burdened with buckets. A ragged procession filed past her down the hill, some with empty buckets, some with handcarts heaped with furniture and books and chests and every kind of item salvaged from the fire. A cleric clutched an ancient parchment codex to her chest; her face was streaked with ash and she had a weeping red welt on her right arm where her cleric’s robe was ripped open. Other clerics followed behind her, each holding something precious. One man had pressed unbound parchment sheets against him, hands struggling to keep them all together. A woman held her robe out as a basket, full of quills and inkpots, stands and styluses and tablets all jumbled together, ink leaking through the fine gold fabric of her rich vestment. The youngest of them stumbled behind, looking stunned, carrying a magnificent eagle’s feather quill and a little pot of red ink that, tipping, had stained his fingers. A child cried. Servants staggered under loads of bedding salvaged from the blaze.
“Make way!” cried a man in Lion’s tabard. “Make way for the princess!”
Hanna stepped aside as Princess Sapientia was carried past reclining on a camp bed. She looked only half conscious, but both of her hands clasped her swollen abdomen and she moaned as she passed Hanna. Behind her, sobbing or gabbling like panicked geese, more servants hauled chests, tapestries that kept coming unrolled, even the splendid chair carved with lions and dragons and an eagle’s wings that Hanna recognized as belonging to King Henry.
At the palace gate, grim-faced guards forced back the curious and only admitted those persons carrying water—as though such a trifle could stem the inferno. The wind off the fire singed her skin, and her eyes stung with heat and burning ash.
“Make way!” she cried, pushing forward to the guards. “Where is the king?”
“Out on the hunt, thank God!” shouted the one nearest her. He had no helmet; part of one ear was missing—but it was an old scar. His red hair was stained with ash. “There were few enough therein, by Our Lord’s Mercy, but surely some have perished.”
“Is there anything I can do?” she yelled. She had to yell to be heard above the roar of flames. Already her voice was hoarse from heat and ash.
“Nay, friend. This is one foe we can’t fight. Ah!” he exclaimed, a gasp of relief. “There’s one of your comrades who’s run mad. Can you calm her?”
Shifting to look past him, she saw a crowd of some twenty people, a handful of men in Lion tabards, servants, and one man in noble garb who directed the others. He had golden hair, and as she watched he reached to help two figures struggling out of the smoke: a dark-haired young woman in an Eagle’s scarlet-trimmed cloak who half-dragged and half-led a man in a singed and dirty Lion’s tabard.
“Liath!” Hanna bolted toward the fire.
A sudden pop sounded, followed by a low thundering gasp of air, a thousand breaths drawn in. People stumbled back from the courtyard, crying out, as the roof of the back portion of the palace collapsed in a huge unfolding bloom of flame and smoke and stinging red hot ash. Four men grabbed the harness shaft of a wagon loaded to bursting with iron-bound chests: the king’s treasure.
“Liath!” shouted the golden-haired nobleman as Liath turned and vanished back into the boiling smoke, back into the burning palace. He started after her. Three soldiers broke forward, grabbed him, and dragged him away from the raging fire.