He sighed heavily.
Ermanrich touched a hand to his elbow, though novices were not supposed to touch, to form bonds of affection and sympathy. They were meant to devote themselves only to God. “You’re thinking of her again,” said the stout boy. “Was she really as pretty as Baldwin?”
“Utterly unlike,” said Ivar, but then he smiled, because Ermanrich always made him smile. “She was dark—”
“Dark like Duke Conrad the Black?” asked Baldwin without looking up from his scraping at the fence. “I met him once.”
“Met him?” demanded Ermanrich.
“Oh, well, not met. I saw him once.”
“I don’t know if they look anything alike,” said Ivar. “I never saw Duke Conrad. How did he get to be so dark?”
“His mother came from the east. She was a princess from Jinna country.” Baldwin had a treasure trove of gossip about the noble families of Wendar and Varre. “She was a present to one of the Arnulfs, I forget which, from one of the sultans of the east. Conrad the Elder, who was then Duke of Wayland, took a fancy to her and because King Arnulf owed him a favor, he asked for the girl. She was just a child then, but very pretty, everyone said. Conrad had her raised as a good Daisanite, for she came of heathen fire-worshipers. When she was old enough, he took her as a concubine, but of all his wives and concubines only she conceived by him, so perhaps she knew some eastern witchery, for the rumor went round that Conrad was infertile because of a curse set on him by one of the Lost Ones he raped when he was a young man.”
Ermanrich coughed again and cocked one eyebrow up.
“You don’t believe me?” demanded Baldwin, cheek ticking as he tried to suppress a grin.
“Which part do you wish to know that I believe?” asked Ermanrich.
“And then what happened?” asked Ivar, trying to imagine this Jinna girl but only able to see Liath in his mind’s eye. The thought of her made his heart ache.
“She gave birth to a baby boy, the second Conrad, whom we now know as Conrad the Black. He succeeded to the duchy when his father died. She still lives, you know, the Jinna woman. I don’t know what her old name was, her heathen name, but she was baptized with a good Daisanite name, Mariya or Miryam. Something like that.”
“They let a bastard inherit?” asked Ermanrich, looking skeptical.
“No, no. At the end of his life, when it came time to name his heir, Conrad the Elder claimed he had been married to her all along. The first tame deacon he got to say she was present at the ceremony then turned out to have been only ten years old when the marriage was supposed to have been solemnized. So Conrad finally made a huge bequest of land to the local biscop and she agreed that God had sanctified the union before the child’s birth. Look! I’ve made a crack!” He leaned down and stuck his perfectly-proportioned nose up against the wood, closed one eye, and peered through the tiny gap with the other. Then he withdrew, shaking his head. “All I can see is warts. I knew they would have warts.”
“Dearest Baldwin, doomed by warts to a life in the monastery,” said Ermanrich in a sententious voice. “Now move and let me try.” They changed places.
“Hush,” said Ivar. “Here comes Lord Reginar and his dogs.”
Lord Reginar had a pack of five “dogs”—the other second-year novices—and a thin face made ill-featured mostly because of its habitual sour expression.
“What’s this?” he said, pausing beside the three first-year boys. He touched a scrap of very fine white linen to his lips as if the stench of the first years offended him. “Are you at your daily prayers?” That he meant to insinuate something was clear, though what exactly he meant was not.
Ivar stifled a giggle. He found Reginar’s conceit so pathetic, especially compared to that of Hugh, that he always wanted to laugh. But a count’s son never ever laughed at the son of a duchess and one who, in addition, wore the gold torque around his neck that symbolized he came of the blood of the royal family and had a claim—however distant—to the throne.
Ermanrich clasped his hands tight and leaned against the fence, covering the telltale signs of cutting. He began to murmur a psalm in the singsong voice he used at his prayers.
Baldwin smiled brightly up at the young lord. “How kind of you to deign to notice us this day, Lord Reginar,” he said without any obvious sign of sarcasm.
Ermanrich made a choking sound.
Reginar touched his lips again with the linen, but even he—youngest son of Duchess Rotrudis and nephew of both Mother Scholastica and King Henry—was not immune to Baldwin’s charms. “It is true,” he said, “that two marchlanders and a minor count’s son are unlikely to receive attentions from such as myself every day, but then you are entitled to sleep near me, as are all these others.” He gestured toward his sycophants, an indistinguishable collection of boys of good family who had had the misfortune to be dedicated to the monastery last year, together with Reginar, and had by necessity—or by force—fallen into orbit around him.