The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

“Nay.” He tossed his head impatiently and finally slewed round to look at them. “I did not mean it of you, but of the ladies and lords who flock round the court. I beg you, take no offense from my coarse way of speaking.”

“You are not coarse, my lord, but blunt.” Hathui grinned charmingly.

“Not as eloquent as my wife,” he said, with a pride that startled Liath.

At this moment Liath had more pressing concerns. She tugged on Hanna’s sleeve. “Come with me outside, Hanna, I beg you. I’m not accustomed to—with so many people about—”

She was in disgrace, not in prison, and while she preferred to use the privies built up over the edge of the ramparts rather than the chamber pot, she dared not venture out alone for fear of meeting Hugh. Hanna seemed more cheerful out of the close chamber, or away from Sanglant. Servants wandering the grounds pointed and whispered.

“Do you think I’m a fool, Hanna?” The constant scrutiny made her uneasy. Her entrance onto the stage as Sanglant’s declared wife had made her a beacon, visible to everyone.

“Yes. Better to serve him as an Eagle than as his mistress. As an Eagle you are bound to the king by oaths. As his mistress, he can put you aside whenever he tires of you, and then where will you go?”

“Spoken like Wolfhere!”

“Like Wolfhere, indeed!” Hanna waited to one side while Liath used the privies, but she started up again as soon as Liath rejoined her. “Wolfhere became an Eagle during King Arnulf’s reign. Everyone knows he was one of Arnulf’s favorites. Then Henry took the throne, and dismissed Wolfhere from court—but he could not dismiss him from the Eagles! That is the measure of an Eagle’s security.”

“Such as any of us have security,” murmured Liath, remembering bones scoured clean on a roadside. She scrambled up the rampart to view the surrounding countryside. Up here the evening wind blew fresh into her face. Below the bluff, the river wound away into darkening forest. Fields patched the nearer ground in narrow strips of lush growth: beans, vetch, and barley. Small figures walked in a village that seemed only a stone’s throw from her position, although she knew it lay much farther away. The morning thunderclouds had long since vanished into the northeast, and the sky was clear with the moon already risen halfway to the zenith. The sun had set, but its glow colored the western sky. Brilliant Somorhas rode low on the horizon; the sky was still too bright to see any but the brightest stars in summer’s sky: the Queen’s sky.

“Would I be a queen?” she murmured, and was then so appalled at the thought of presiding over a court—a pit of intrigue, indeed!—that she shuddered.

“Are you cold?” Hanna draped a companionable arm over her shoulders. A roar of laughter erupted from the great hall, which lay hidden behind them by chapel tower and stables.

“It’s only because he can’t rule,” said Liath suddenly. “If he’d had any ambition to be king after his father, I couldn’t have endured that!”

Hanna laughed sharply. “If he’d had any ambition to be king he’d never have married you! He’d have married a noblewoman whose kin will support him.”

“I deserved that, I suppose!”

“Maybe he’s right.” Hanna’s expression drew taut in an expression of wonder and worry. “You aren’t what you seem, Liath Maybe he’s wiser than the rest of us. They say Aoi blood tunes you to magic just as a poet tunes his lyre before he sings, knowing what sounds sweetest.”

“Is that what they say?”

“Some at court say that Prince Sanglant grew so strange under Eika captivity because the enchantments polluted his mind. That’s why—” She broke off, then smiled apologetically. “That’s why he acts like a dog. The dogs became part of him, or he of the dogs, like a spell bound into his body by the Eika chieftain.”

It arrived noiselessly and settled down on a ragged outcropping of rock. At first, Hanna didn’t notice it, but Liath saw the owl immediately.

She gently shook off Hanna’s arm and took a cautious step forward, then knelt. “Who are you?” she asked of the owl. I blinked huge golden eyes but did not move.

“Liath,” whispered Hanna. “Why are you talking to an owl?’

“It isn’t an ordinary owl.” She kept her gaze fixed on the bird. It had ear tufts and a coat of mottled feathers, streaked with white at the breast. It was the largest owl she had ever seen—she who had spent many a night in silent contemplation of the stars and thus with her keen night vision seen the animals that woke and fed in the night. “Who are you?”