“With me?” It was so rare to see Mother Scholastica surprised that Ivar forgot for an instant his own troubles and his own desires. Urgent business?
The door was flung open. She had not waited outside. Ai, Lady, had she no respect for the authority of the church at all?
She came in at the head of a troop of servants, lords, ladies, and richly dressed stewards, a veritable herd of them. All laughed and chattered and then, belatedly, recalled the respect due to a formidable abbess who was also the sister of the king. All bowed in some manner, or knelt as need be. All but her. Ivar stared, mouth agape.
Oh, God,” whispered Baldwin beside him, his voice barely audible. “God, I pray You, spare me this.”
She was a great lady of middle years, a fine noblewoman dressed in great state, almost as if she were a king’s sister herself. She had height, strength, vigor, and much silver in her hair; no doubt she had children older than the young men kneeling on the floor, and perhaps a grandchild besides. She was not unhandsome, and she wore the arrogance of a great prince of the realm as easily as she wore a light summer cloak, trimmed with a cunning embroidery of birds and flowers, over her riding tunic and gold-braided leggings, but she did not look particularly likable. No doubt she cared little whether she was liked; nobles such as she demanded respect and the honor due to their position, nothing more, nothing less.
“Who is it?” hissed Ermanrich from Ivar’s other side.
“Margrave Judith,” said Mother Scholastica curtly. She did not incline her head in greeting. Margrave Judith made no obeisance.
Baldwin made a soft choking noise, as though a bone had caught in his throat. He had gone pale—although in Baldwin not even fear could dim his unfortunate beauty.
“I greet you,” continued Mother Scholastica in the same crisp fashion, “and offer you the hospitality of Quedlinhame. You are here on your way to King Henry’s progress? I fear Queen Mathilda is too ill to receive visitors.”
“I am grieved to hear it and I will pray for her quick recovery.” Margrave Judith spoke with the tone of a woman who always gets what she wants, when she wants it. “But I have other business at Quedlinhame. Indeed, a matter dear to my heart for I am certainly now old enough and powerful enough and with heirs enough to suit myself in such a matter.”
Hugh’s mother. Ivar could see nothing of the son in her except in height and in the almost contemptuous imperiousness with which she regarded the abbess.
Baldwin stirred beside him like a leaf shaken in a strong wind.
Mother Scholastica lifted a hand, palm up, to encourage the margrave to go on, but instead the margrave turned and, as a basilisk fixes its prey with a fateful gaze before it strikes, she looked directly at Baldwin.
“I have come,” she said, “for my bridegroom.”
Baldwin burst into tears.
6
LAVASTINE had chosen to camp on a low hill about a league from Gent. He stood with a hand on Alain’s shoulder as they looked out over fields long since gone to riot with half-grown wheat and barley struggling to lift their heads above weeds and grass. Herds of cattle and sheep could be seen in the distance, but all had been moved a good way from Lavastine’s position. The Eika knew they were here.
“Do you think the Eika will let us wait?”
Lavastine did not reply at once. Below, the soldiers had started digging a trench about halfway up the hill. The ring of axes sounded from above them where, at the level height of the hill, a copse of trees was being chopped down.
“Look there.” Lavastine indicated the lay of fields before them and the distant herds. “They’ve been grazed extensively. The Eika have turned all this good farmland into pasture. Strange, that they are like to us in many ways and yet so unlike.” The eastern shore lay gray-blue, with clouds streaking the horizon and tendrils of mist streaming up along the river’s bank especially around the distant city walls and the square cathedral tower. “Come.”
“Father, is it wise for me to attend a war council? What if the Eika prince sees my life in his dreams just as I see his in the hours when I sleep?”
Behind Lavastine the sun sank toward the horizon, demarked here by the tops of trees ranged along the ridgetops that signaled the start of hilly country lying above the river plain. Fires burned, smoke curling up into the sky, a clear beacon of their presence. Alain smelled meat cooking and with that sudden sharp dislocation of his senses, he could hear the hiss of the fire and taste the juices dripping down to snap and sizzle on wood burned down into red-hot coals. Flies swarmed over offal from the slaughter of cattle, and he twitched and tried to brush them off his arms before he stopped himself; the trash heap was well out of sight of the count’s pavilion. Fifth Brother had given him the gift of preternaturally keen senses—just as he had, with that exchange of blood so many months ago, given Alain the ability to dream snatches of his life.