Your notice.
At those innocuous words, every person present turned to stare at Alain. “I—” he started to say.
Lavastine raised a hand. Alain fell silent. “In the spring, I will know my requirements. I will send word with my chatelaine, Mistress Dhuoda, when she comes around on her usual progress.”
Terror stood, baring his teeth, and Mistress Garia drew back, frightened. Alain quieted the hound and got him to lie down. Sorrow nudged up against him, sticking his head under Alain’s hand for a caress. The company returned their attention, firmly, to the table.
After the main courses, instead of entertainment, Count Lavastine questioned the townsfolk of Osna about the Eika.
Two Eika ships had been sighted the summer after the monastery had been sacked, another three this past summer, but they had all sailed by Osna Sound, keeping out beyond the islands. No reports had come of villages nearby being burned; no one had heard any rumors of winter encampments. A forester—one of Garia’s cousin’s sons who ranged wide looking for game and exceptional stands of timber—had seen nothing along the coast for two days’ walk in either direction, nor had he heard tales from those he met on his travels.
Lavastine questioned the merchants in greater detail, and from them he heard more varied stories. None had himself run afoul of Eika, but merchants traded not just goods but gossip. Four Eika ships poised along the coast just north of the rich emporium of Medemelacha had suddenly turned north and sailed away. A noble’s castle in Salia had been the scene of a vicious attack; one city had held out two months against a siege; refugees from a monastery burned on the island kingdom of Alba had arrived in a skin boat in Medemelacha late in the summer with an awful tale of slaughter and looting.
Alain sat dutifully and listened, but what he most wanted to ask he dared not ask: Where was Henri? Why did he not sit among the Osna merchants? What had happened to his family?
Not my family any longer.
Mistress Garia’s bed, the best in the house, was given to the count and his heir for the night. Their servants commandeered pallets or slept on the floor around them, and, in the warmth of the longhouse with a hearth burning throughout the cold late autumn’s night, all were comfortable. The smell of old timber, the wreath of smoke curling along the roof beams, the smell of babies and sour milk nearby and of livestock crowded into the other end of the hall comforted Alain; they reminded him of his childhood. He had slept in such a house for many years, and his dreams had been good ones.
In the morning he drew Deacon Miria aside as the grooms saddled the horses and the soldiers made ready to leave. “Where are Bella and Henri? What has become of them and the family?”
“Alain!” Lavastine had already mounted and now gestured impatiently for Alain to join him.
“You’re a good boy, Alain, to ask after them,” she replied with a look compounded of sympathy, distaste, and amusement. Then she recalled to whom she was now speaking. “My lord.”
“But where are they?”
“At the old steward’s house. They come to Mass each week faithfully, but many of the others can’t forgive them their good fortune.”
“Alain!”
“Thank you!” He would have kissed the old deacon on the cheek but he was not sure, with so many folk standing about and staring, if the gesture was one he was now allowed to make. She inclined her head with formal dignity.
He mounted. As the count and his retinue rode out of the village, children trotted at a safe distance behind them, giggling and pointing and shouting.
“What did you ask?” demanded Lavastine.
They rode past the stink of pig sties and the winter shelters for the sheep and cows. They crossed through the southern palisade gate and skirted the stream which was bounded on its eastern shore by a small tannery and the village slaughterhouse—still busy with the butchering of the animals who couldn’t be wintered over. Alain held a hand over his nose and mouth until they got downwind. If the stench bothered Lavastine, he did not show it; his attention remained focused on Alain.
“I asked about my foster family,” said Alain at last, lowering his hand. “I found out where they’ve gone to.”
“They’ve gone somewhere?” Lavastine said without much curiosity, although for an established family to pick up and move was unheard of.
“They’ve taken the steward’s house….” He hurried on since Lavastine clearly did not know what he meant. “It’s a small manor house. It was built in Emperor Taillefer’s reign for the steward who oversaw these lands then. That was before the port was established. An old man lived there. He was the grandson of the last steward, but he’d little to keep and no servants … the fields went fallow. And he’d no ship to send out, though there’s a decent landing spot below the house.”