“Ah,” said Lavastine. “Captain, what do you say to this?”
“It is a long march to Gent,” said the captain. “I don’t rightly know how far, but it lies a good way into Wendish lands, up along the north coast. We heard many stories, at Autun, that the Eika chieftain was an enchanter, that he had brought a hundred ships to Gent together with a thousand Eika savages.”
“You were at Gent,” said the young lord suddenly. Alain. That was his name. He had offered her his name in the way of equals. She could not stop sneaking looks at him. Tall, broad-shouldered but slender, with dark hair and the thinnest down of pale beard on his face so that it almost appeared as if he had not yet grown a beard, he looked nothing like his father. Ai, Lady. He had spoken so gently to her, in the same way one coaxed a wounded animal into shelter.
“You were at Gent?” demanded Lavastine, suddenly interested in her. Before, she had only been, like a parchment letter, a medium through which words reached him.
“I was there at the end.”
So again she had to tell the whole awful story of the fall of Gent. And yet, telling it at almost every hamlet she had slept at these past two months had softened the pain. Told again and again, it could hardly be otherwise. “If you pound your head against the wall enough times,” Da would say with a bitter smile when she was furious with herself for making a mistake, “it will finally stop hurting.”
Lavastine questioned her closely about the lay of the city, the land thereabouts, the approaches from the west, from the north and south, which she knew little about, and from the east, which she had never seen. He asked her about the river, how close the city lay to the river’s mouth, how the island on which the city lay was situated, how the bridges gapped the water and in what manner the gates and walls stood in reference to roadway and shoreline.
“This tunnel,” he said. “The farmer claimed the cave ended in a wall.”
“So he did, my lord count. I have no reason to disbelieve him. It was a miracle that anyone survived or that the tunnel appeared.”
“But a tunnel did appear,” said Lavastine.
“And you survived,” said the young lord, and blushed.
His father glanced sharply at him, frowned, and then played absently with the ears of the hound that lounged at his feet. “Dhuoda,” he said to the woman seated to his left, the only other person so honored in the chamber. “Can you be without so many men for another summer’s season? If we leave after sowing, I don’t know if we can return by harvest.”
“Much depends on the weather,” she said. “But despite everything, last year’s harvest was decent and this winter has been mild. It could be done if you muster after the Feast of St. Sormas … if you think it worthwhile.”
“The king’s favor and a just reward.” Both he and the noblewoman looked at the young man. “Eagle, where is Lord Geoffrey?”
“Lord Geoffrey remained behind to hunt with the king. He will follow later and will meet you here by the time you muster your troops.”
“Was the king so certain I would agree?”
“He said, my lord count, that he would grant you the reward you asked for.”
The young Lord had the propensity to blush a fierce red. He did so now. Liath could not imagine why. But at this moment she did not much care about the embarrassments of the nobly born. She only wanted to stand in this room, to shelter in this safe hall, for the rest of her life.
“Tallia!” said Lavastine in the tone of a man who has scented victory. “He will give us Tallia.” He stood. “Let it be done. Eagle, you will return to the king to let him know that I hereby pledge to free Gent from the Eika.”
4
HE climbs upward on the old path through a forest of spruce, pine, and birch. Soon the forest fades to birch only and at last even these stunted trees fall away as he emerges onto the fjall, the high plateau, home of the WiseMothers. The wind blows fiercely at this height, whipping his ice-white hair. A rime of frost covers the ground.
The OldMother, who is both his mother and his aunt, sent him here. “Speak to them, restless one,” she said. “Their words are wiser than mine.”
He finds the youngest of the WiseMothers still on the trail, her great bulk easing upward toward her place with the others. He sees them now in the distance like stout pillars surrounding a hollow burnished to a bright glare by the glittering threads that mark the spawning net of ice-wyrms. But he does not mean to brave the ice-wyrms’ venomous sting this day.
Instead he stops beside the youngest of them, who has not yet reached their council ground. Although she passed the knife of decision to his OldMother before his hatching, it has taken her these many years to get as far as a morning’s hard walk for him. But she, like her mothers and mothers’ mothers before her, grew from that same substance that carves the bones of the earth. She has no reason to move swiftly in the world: She will see many more seasons than he can ever hope to, and long after her bones have hardened completely, her thoughts will still walk the paths of earth until, at last, she departs utterly to the fjall of the heavens.