He stared after her. She lifted a hand to flip her braid back over her shoulder and there it swayed along her back, so sinuous and attractive a movement he could not keep his eyes from it.
“Come back inside, son,” said Henry, an order and yet also a plea. There was a tone in his father’s voice he could not at first interpret, but slowly old memories and old confrontations surfaced to put a name to it.
Jealousy.
“No,” he said. “I can’t go back inside. I’ve been inside for so long—” How long had it been since he had heard the fluting and piping of birds at dawn? Seen the brightest of stars fade into the sleepy gray dawn? Smelled fresh air, even if this was tinged with the distant aroma of burning and death?
Just before she passed out of sight beyond the distant tents, she paused and turned to look back at him, then vanished into the awakening bustle of the camp.
“I’ve forgotten how bright the sun is,” he said without taking his gaze from where he had last seen her. “How sweet the air tastes.”
“What is that she gave you?” demanded Henry.
A promise. But he did not say it out loud.
EPILOGUE
THEY came not just from Steleshame but from farther afield, folk who saw an opportunity to rebuild in Gent or farm the empty fields that lay around it. They began to trickle along the roads as soon as word spread that the Eika enchanter was dead and his army defeated. And when victory—and the chance to make one’s fortune—was the rumor, word seemed able to spread as quickly as a bird could fly, trilling its message to all and sundry.
“We’ll go back,” said Matthias. “They’ll need workers in the tannery. Lord and Lady Above, I don’t know what we’re to do with you and Helen! Two mutes!” Then he hugged her to show he wasn’t angry about it. He was scared; Anna knew that, just as she knew he was right. They had to go back to Gent. They had to find Papa Otto who had saved them so long ago.
“Master Helvidius will speak for you, won’t you, Master?” continued the young man. “It won’t matter that you can’t talk.”
But the old poet fidgeted.
They sat on a log—the ruins of an outbuilding half burned and left to rot after the Eika raid on the holding last autumn—and watched the traffic on the road. Men dragging carts, women burdened by heavy packs, two ragged deacons, laden donkeys, and now and again a rich woman with oxen drawing her wagon and a small retinue of servants following behind. Now indeed Mistress Gisela’s claim that Steleshame had once been a bustling holding along a main road seemed like truth and not an exaggeration built upon her own thwarted desire for status and wealth.
Their own small bundles leaned against the log to their right, but Matthias, for all his eagerness, could not quite make the first step onto the road, and Master Helvidius had not even removed his meager possessions from their hut.
“The army will march back by,” said Helvidius. “There are many noble lords and ladies among them who heard me declaim not four days ago. Surely they’ll wish for a poet of my skills in their retinue.”
“You’d leave us! You won’t come with us!”
Anna set a hand on Matthias’ tattered sleeve.
“What ever will I do in Gent?” whined Helvidius. “The mayor and his kin are dead. I don’t know what lady will demand the right to collect the tolls there, or if the king keeps them for himself. I heard it said that the king intends to found a royal monastery there and dedicate it to St. Perpetua, the Lady of Battles, in thanks for the deliverance of his son. Monks won’t wish to hear me sing of Waltharia or proud Helen!” He pried Helen’s grubby fingers off his knee and transferred her to Anna, but she lost interest and squatted in the dirt to rescue a ladybug about to be crushed by the old poet’s wandering sandals. “Nay, Gent won’t be the same place. I must seek my fortune elsewhere.”
“And what about us!” demanded Matthias, jumping to his feet. “You would have died over the winter if we hadn’t taken you in!”
Anna grabbed his hand and made a sign with her free hand. No. One of the lowly clerics in the retinue of Lord Wichman had seen her plight and taught her a few simple hand signs, those used among the monastics, with which to communicate.
Matthias grunted and sat back down, looking sulky.
They heard a new voice. “Go, then! After all I have done for you, raised you when your dear mother died, taught you all I know of spinning and weaving, fed you with my own—!”
“Whored me out when it suited your purpose!”