He glanced at the fire suspiciously. “Can you trust a Lost One? They don’t even believe in the God of Unities!”
“Maybe that’s why,” she said slowly, trying to understand it herself. “I’m a curiosity to him, that’s all. He doesn’t want anything from me—unlike the others.”
“But why can you see him through fire?”
“I don’t know.”
“It is a mystery, like my dreams,” he agreed, mercifully letting the unanswerable question drop. He raised a hand in front of his face, absorbing some of the heat. “How it burns!” he exclaimed, and she hung her head, ashamed, thinking he would realize what a monstrous thing she had done and be repelled by her now that he knew what she was: sorcerer’s child, untrained, ignorant, and uncontrollable. “Only think of what you could do with such fire!”
“Haven’t I already done enough?” she asked bitterly, thinking of the Lions she had killed.
“We are none of us without sin,” he pointed out. “But if you could learn to do something useful with it …”
“Call it down on the Eika,” she replied caustically. “Burn Gent and all the poor dead bodies rotting there!”
“Nay, don’t say that! If you could only scare them with it, enough to make them run—”
“Ai, Alain! You’ve fought the Eika. Fire won’t scare them.”
“And there are slaves in the city, or so it has been reported. If the city burned, they would burn, too.” He frowned, then looked at her. “We must tell my father.”
“No!” This she had no doubts about. “If the king knew I had burned down the palace at Augensburg, if the biscops knew, what do you think they’d do with me?”
Troubled, he busied himself with flicking ashy flakes of wood off his cloak. “They’d condemn you as a maleficus and send you to stand trial before the skopos,” he said reluctantly. “But I would speak up for you! I trust you.”
“They’d only accuse me of binding you with charms. Nay, they’d never trust a maleficus who can call fire. And why should they believe I can’t control it? Only that I don’t want to—or that I’m more dangerous for being flawed.”
“You can’t control it?” He glanced nervously toward the raging fire.
“I can’t even put it out,” she said with disgust. “I can only make it light.”
“But I must tell my father, Liath. He won’t condemn you. He has too much on his own conscience to cast stones at others.”
“But he might order me to call fire onto Gent, wouldn’t he? If he did, and if I could do it, how many innocent slaves will die in the conflagration?”
He hesitated. By his expression he clearly feared she was right, that Count Lavastine would sacrifice a few slaves, even if they had once been honest freeholders, for the sake of taking Gent. For the sake of getting a noble bride for his heir.
Out of mist and rain and steam, they heard a shout. “They’ve discovered I’m gone,” Alain said. “You cut around the back. Then they won’t know you’ve been gone. If they find this fire, they won’t associate it with you.”
“Yes, my lord.” She was not sure whether to be grateful or amused by his high-handedness. He had nothing of the nobleman’s arrogance but, like Da, he had an inexplicable dignity about him that made it impossible to do anything but respect him.
Darting forward, he grabbed a brand in each hand out of the fire and jumped back. “No use letting the poor soldiers shiver in this rain. We can start other fires with this. Go on!”
“How will you explain that?” she demanded, but he only smiled, mocking himself more than her.
“I am the count’s heir. No one will question me except my father, and there’s no reason he need ever hear about it. Now go on. I will say nothing of what I’ve seen today.” He dashed off into the woods in the direction of the shouting. The hounds loped behind him.
She lingered by the fire, but she knew that if she looked within it now, no veil would part, no gateway would open. With a sigh, she started by a roundabout way back to camp. Ai, Lady. Her knee was sopping wet; the baggy cloth of her leggings alternately stuck to her skin and, as she walked, peeled off only to slap back again, cold and slimy.
But such discomfort mattered little against the offer the Aoi sorcerer had made to her: “Find me.”
3
ROSVITA thought she recognized the book Father Hugh now carried with him. But he had such an elegant way of keeping it close against him or tucked away in the carved chest that one of his servants carried along behind him, of closing it softly, as if without thinking, or laying his hand over the binding to half conceal it, that she could never get a good look. She wasn’t quite sure that it was, in fact, the same book she had seen Liath carrying last autumn on the very day Princess Sapientia had returned to the king’s progress.