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.