“His heart,” Sanglant whispered suddenly. “How did you know he had hidden his heart in the priest’s body? Whose heart lies hidden in Rikin fjall, then? It must be the priest’s.”
“I don’t understand.” But perhaps she was beginning to. She said it more to keep him talking, to hear his voice. She had thought never to hear that voice again.
“He couldn’t be killed because he didn’t have a heart. He hid it. He—” Then he halted as suddenly as if he had lost his power of speech between one word and the next.
“It’s done,” she said quickly, to say something, anything, torn as she was between the promise of this intimacy he had thrust upon her and her complete ignorance of what manner of man he now was and how much he might have changed from the man she had fallen in love with in besieged Gent. “It will have to do, unless you’d like me to comb it out, for I hope I still have my comb in my pouch.” Then she flushed, cursing her rash words; only mothers, wives, or servants combed a man’s hair if he did not do it himself.
Instead of replying he stood and turned—but not to look at her. Belatedly she turned as well when she heard the crashing in the trees. Another party approached.
The soldiers were already kneeling. She was too stupid, too astounded, to do so, and only at the very last moment, when the king broke from the trees, did she drop down as was fitting.
The king strode forward and stopped dead some ten paces from the prince. There was silence except for the rushing mutter of the stream and the gurgle of water tumbling over the fallen log—and an echoing whisper from the king’s retinue, who followed him out from the trees and stood staring at the scene before them.
The sun eased below the highest trees. All lay bathed in the mellow glow of midsummer’s late afternoon, the opening hour of the long twilight. As the silence drew out, the warbler quieted but now other birds, made bold by the quiet, began to call and sing: a thin “zee-zee-zee” among the treetops and the monotonous “chiff-chaff” song in the scrub. A woodpecker fluttered away, rising and swooping down and rising again, yellow rump a flash against the green foliage. Liath still held the knife in one hand and a last hank of Sanglant’s hair in the other.
At last the king spoke. “My son.” It had a harsh sound, startlingly so, but when she saw the tears start from his eyes and course down his cheeks, she understood that the harshness stemmed from the depth of his remembered anguish and the fresh bloom of joy.
He said nothing more, but he removed his finely embroidered short cloak from his own back, unfastening the gold-and-sapphire brooch, and wrapped it around Sanglant’s shoulders with his own hands, like a servant. This close, Liath could see his hands shaking under the weight of such a powerful emotion: the incredible and almost overpowering pain of seeing alive the beloved son he had thought dead.
Sanglant dropped abruptly to his knees, exhausted or overcome by emotion, and laid his damp head against his father’s hands in the way of a sinner seeking absolution or a child seeking comfort.
“Come, son, rise,” said the king raggedly. Then he laughed softly. “I have already heard many stories about your courage on the field and how you rallied troops who had fallen into disarray.”
The prince did not look up, but when he spoke, there welled up from him so much enmity that the force of his emotion alone might have felled an entire company of Eika. “I would have killed more of them if I could.”
“May God have mercy on us all,” murmured Henry. He took Sanglant by the elbow and helped him rise. “How did you survive?”
As if in answer—the only answer he knew how to give—Sanglant turned his head to look at Liath.
5
THE hounds smelled him coming first. They broke away from Alain—all of them, even Sorrow and Rage—to bound down the hill with happy barks, their tails whipped into a blur. Beyond, a company of mounted soldiers approached the ruined camp. Alain picked his way down through the dead and dying to meet Count Lavastine.
Along the ramparts where Eika dead lay in heaps and the few survivors dug among the corpses to find any wounded who might yet have a hope of living, Alain handed the ragged standard to Lavastine. “I thought you must be dead,” he said, then burst into tears.
Lavastine raised one eyebrow. “Did I not say I would return to you through the Eika host and meet you here? Come now, son.” He took him by the arm and led him down, away from the terrible work yet to be done, stripping and then burning the dead Eika and giving a decent burial to the hundreds who had fallen. The river plain beyond held a scene just as dismaying to look upon: as if high waters had overtaken the fields and ditches, washing in a flood tide of corpses and depositing them in eddies or along invisible streams where strong currents had once flowed.