The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

“The dog!” He had surprised Anne.

“My retinue,” he said sardonically. “If I leave it here, they will kill it. It saved my life more than once.”

“Ghastly creature!” she muttered, but then that flicker of emotion fled and she merely nodded, as if the exchange—and the presence of the dog—were too trivial for her to notice.

He had to go quietly. In the chapel, clerics sang Vigils. Their voices rose and fell so sinuously that he almost lost step and forgot to walk, caught in their melodious prayer. Lions snored lustily at his door; none had woken from their magicked sleep. He crossed the threshold, hoisted the dog, and hauled it back to the gates. He threw it like a sack of grain over the back of one of the pack mules and fastened it there with rope, then calmed the mule, who did not take well to the smell of Eika on its back. But even working quickly, he did not finish in time.

Soldiers came out of the gloom, twenty or thirty of them, all of them leading horses burdened with a soldier’s kit.

“My lord prince!”

Yet they spoke in whispers, not in a shout that would wake the palace and the gate guards who still slept at their posts.

“Who are these?” asked Anne mildly.

“My lady Sister!” Well trained to a man, they knelt respectfully as such milites would before any noble cleric. Surprised Sanglant glanced at her. She had pulled a golden strip of cloth over her hair to cover it; no gold gleamed at her throat to betray her exalted rank. “I beg your pardon, my lord prince,” continued their spokesman, the same Captain Fulk, “but when your recent trouble came upon you, we met together and pledged an oath all as one: That we would follow you if you left the king. We beg you, Prince Sanglant. Let us ride with you. We will follow you even into death if only you will give us your pledge to lead us faithfully.”

“Ai, God.” How could he answer them? Yet such a thrill of joy throbbed through him at the thought of men he could lead, comrades to live and fight beside, that he was at once stricken to tears at the memory of his brave Dragons.

Anne answered before he could find his voice. “Nobly offered. But where we go, they cannot follow. We cannot support so many in idleness, and in idleness they would grow bored and difficult. Nay, the contemplative life is not for such as these.”

The men muttered at her words, but they waited for his answer. So many faces turned up to him: all of them young and newly come to soldiering except for two weathered-looking men, one of whom was Captain Fulk. Sanglant met each man’s gaze and nodded at him, and each in turn responded in his own way with an answering nod, a cocky grin, a serious frown, a bob of excitement, a tightening of the jaw as resolve set in.

“Sister Anne’s words ring true enough,” he said finally. His heart ached for what had been offered but was not his to take Not now. Not yet. “I mean to go into seclusion … until my father’s anger toward me cools. I would gladly lead you, my comrades, but it would be no fit life for you, and it is true you would only grow bored and contentious, and you would fight among yourselves.”

“Then what are we to do, my lord prince?” asked Captain Fulk, almost pleading.

He owed them consideration. They had offered him everything that mattered to a soldier: to stand beside him. He could not simply dismiss them. “Go to Princess Theophanu. I tender you into her care. She keeps her own counsel, and she will watch over you. She rides south to Aosta soon enough, where you will see plenty of fighting. When I have need of you, then I will know where to find you. I will fight no battle without you at my side.”

“We will do as you wish, my lord prince. But we will be waiting for your call.”

He walked in among them, then, took each man’s hand between his own as a sign of their fidelity. He recalled the names of those who had been at Ferse, and asked the names of the others. All twenty-seven had strong shoulders and an iron glint in their eyes: Men who dared defy the king to ride with him. He admired them, and he knew their worth.

Anne and Liath had already mounted, Anne upon one of the mules like a good churchwoman and Liath on the smaller horse, leaving Resuelto for his greater weight. They waited for him, and in the end he had already made his choice. It was time to go.

But God knew how hard it was to leave behind his life as prince, lord, and captain, made doubly hard by the oaths just freely offered to him.

“We will wait for you, Prince Sanglant,” repeated Captain Fulk, and the men murmured those same words and by speaking them made them binding. Then, as if Fulk understood that their presence was a chain binding the prince, he directed the soldiers to disperse, which they did with dispatch and admirable efficiency. They had even muffled their horses’ hooves in cloth to cover the sound of so many riding out.