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“I will never love any man but him.”
Said so long ago, spoken so recklessly, what had she bound herself to when she made that declaration before Wolfhere?
He turned. If he saw her among those who waited for him, he gave no sign of it. He extended a hand. “A knife.”
But the captain stripped off his own armor and his own tunic, and with tunic and knife he advanced cautiously. The dogs nipped at him, but Sanglant waded out of the deeper water and called them away.
Liath could not help but look. Now that he was somewhat clean she could see that although his hair was long and tangled, he still had no beard even after a year without any means to shave it clean. He had no hair on his chest, either, but lower down he resembled his human kinsmen in every respect. She looked away quickly, for this was not like the work she and Fell’s soldiers had done at the river’s mouth, all of them equals in labor and none of them having the leisure to be shy about what needed to be done. He was not a curiosity to be stared at, or at least ought not to be.
When she looked up again he had the tunic on, a plain garment of good, strong weave and stained with sweat along the neck and under the arms, but compared to what he had worn before it looked fitting for a prince. It hung loosely around his frame, though it was a little short: He stood half a head taller than the robust captain, and despite his thinness he was still a big man. Now, taking the knife, he began to hack at his hair.
“I beg you, my lord prince,” said the captain. He had a kind of weeping plaint to his voice as if he were about to burst into tears out of pity. “Let me cut it for you.”
Sanglant paused. “No,” he said. Then, and finally, as if only when he had scrubbed himself clean of the breath of his captivity dared he acknowledge her, he looked up to where she stood half hidden among the rest. He had known she was there all along. “Liath.”
How could she not come forward? The knife had a good sharp edge and she had trimmed Da’s hair many a time, although this was utterly different.
He knelt suddenly and with a sharp sigh. A tang of the old smell, the reek of his imprisonment, still clung to him and no doubt would for some time, but standing this close was no punishment. Ai, Lady, his hair was coarse and too matted to be truly clean yet, but when sometimes she had to shift him to get a better angle for cutting, she touched his skin and would bite her lip to stop herself from trembling, and go on.
“What is this?” She scraped the back of her hand on the rough iron collar that ringed his neck. Under it, the skin had been rubbed raw countless times and even now began to leak blood.
“Leave it.”
She left it. No one dared go forward to pick up sword and torque, not with the dogs guarding these treasures.
The long rays of the sun splintered into glitters on the rippling current of the stream. Black mats of hair littered the ground as she cut. Made cautious by the noise and the thrashing in the water, the birds had fallen silent, all but a warbler among the reeds who sang vigorously to complain about the disturbance. Far away, a horn lifted its voice and fell silent. Horses shifted and snorted. A man whispered. Another peed, though she could only hear him, not see, for he had faced into the trees to do his business.
“His heart,” Sanglant whispered suddenly. “How did you know he had hidden his heart in the priest’s body? Whose heart lies hidden in Rikin fjall, then? It must be the priest’s.”
“I don’t understand.” But perhaps she was beginning to. She said it more to keep him talking, to hear his voice. She had thought never to hear that voice again.
“He couldn’t be killed because he didn’t have a heart. He hid it. He—” Then he halted as suddenly as if he had lost his power of speech between one word and the next.
“It’s done,” she said quickly, to say something, anything, torn as she was between the promise of this intimacy he had thrust upon her and her complete ignorance of what manner of man he now was and how much he might have changed from the man she had fallen in love with in besieged Gent. “It will have to do, unless you’d like me to comb it out, for I hope I still have my comb in my pouch.” Then she flushed, cursing her rash words; only mothers, wives, or servants combed a man’s hair if he did not do it himself.
Instead of replying he stood and turned—but not to look at her. Belatedly she turned as well when she heard the crashing in the trees. Another party approached.
The soldiers were already kneeling. She was too stupid, too astounded, to do so, and only at the very last moment, when the king broke from the trees, did she drop down as was fitting.
The king strode forward and stopped dead some ten paces from the prince. There was silence except for the rushing mutter of the stream and the gurgle of water tumbling over the fallen log—and an echoing whisper from the king’s retinue, who followed him out from the trees and stood staring at the scene before them.
The sun eased below the highest trees. All lay bathed in the mellow glow of midsummer’s late afternoon, the opening hour of the long twilight. As the silence drew out, the warbler quieted but now other birds, made bold by the quiet, began to call and sing: a thin “zee-zee-zee” among the treetops and the monotonous “chiff-chaff” song in the scrub. A woodpecker fluttered away, rising and swooping down and rising again, yellow rump a flash against the green foliage. Liath still held the knife in one hand and a last hank of Sanglant’s hair in the other.
At last the king spoke. “My son.” It had a harsh sound, startlingly so, but when she saw the tears start from his eyes and course down his cheeks, she understood that the harshness stemmed from the depth of his remembered anguish and the fresh bloom of joy.
He said nothing more, but he removed his finely embroidered short cloak from his own back, unfastening the gold-and-sapphire brooch, and wrapped it around Sanglant’s shoulders with his own hands, like a servant. This close, Liath could see his hands shaking under the weight of such a powerful emotion: the incredible and almost overpowering pain of seeing alive the beloved son he had thought dead.
Sanglant dropped abruptly to his knees, exhausted or overcome by emotion, and laid his damp head against his father’s hands in the way of a sinner seeking absolution or a child seeking comfort.
“Come, son, rise,” said the king raggedly. Then he laughed softly. “I have already heard many stories about your courage on the field and how you rallied troops who had fallen into disarray.”
The prince did not look up, but when he spoke, there welled up from him so much enmity that the force of his emotion alone might have felled an entire company of Eika. “I would have killed more of them if I could.”
“May God have mercy on us all,” murmured Henry. He took Sanglant by the elbow and helped him rise. “How did you survive?”
As if in answer—the only answer he knew how to give—Sanglant turned his head to look at Liath.
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