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But she was not going to think about Hugh. She could not. Hugh looked like someone who could be trusted. Beautiful Hugh. She touched a hand to her cheek, remembering the pain when he hit her.
“You are free of Hugh,” she whispered, if only to stop this pointless endless fruitless speculation.
Thunder cracked and rumbled on and on and on, directly overhead. She shuddered, seized by a sudden intense wave of fear, as if fear were a living being, a daimone that had set its claws into her and tightened them, drawing blood and entrails and sucking all the spirit out of her. Rain drummed on the roof.
Abruptly the doors to the stables opened and servants and horses flooded in. They talked all at once, chattering, excited, exuberant. She shrank back into the stable where her and Hathui’s gear lay together. Hiding in shadow, she listened: Sapientia, sent off on her heir’s progress after the battle at Kassel, had returned to the king’s progress triumphantly pregnant with the child who, if born alive and healthy, would guarantee her claim to become ruler after her father.
On the heels of their arrival the hunters returned, escaping the full force of the storm. Every stall was needed to stable horses. Liath gathered up her and Hathui’s meager bundles and hauled them up to the loft where she arranged them in a safe corner. It took time. It kept her out of the way. It made her just another anonymous servant, someone who would be overlooked.
But not, alas, forever.
Hathui, wet through, came up the ladder and onto the plank floor. She wrung water out of her cloak. Her hair lay matted to her head and in streaks down her neck.
“You’re back!” she said with surprise.
“I am.”
“You should have been waiting for the king,” scolded Hathui. Then, distracted by the stamp and bustle of folk below, she added, “I hear Princess Sapientia has returned, though I haven’t seen her.”
“I haven’t seen her either,” said Liath. “She and her party must have been riding just behind me.”
“They came in by the western road.” Hathui gathered her saddlebags and bedroll. “I’m off to Quedlinhame to announce the news to Queen Mathilda and Mother Scholastica. You must go now and attend the king. At once.”
Liath nodded dutifully. She nudged her saddlebags into the corner and threw her bedroll over them to conceal them. Hathui hoisted her bedroll over her shoulders and, with a brisk nod at Liath, climbed back down the ladder. Liath followed.
Rain pounded outside. She paused as Hathui got a new horse, freshly saddled. Ducking out by a side door, she hesitated under the eaves as water coursed down from the thatch roof and puddled at her feet, as rain pummeled the dry-packed earth of the courtyard into a shallow sea of mud. Hathui, coming outside by the main stable doors, swung onto her horse and forged out through the open gate into the teeth of the storm. Liath gazed across the courtyard at the whitewashed wall of one long side of the great hall, where all the living and feasting and sleeping went on. It looked no different than it had an hour ago, when she had entered hoping to find solitude there. But now, as if brought by the storm, she felt that wave of fear again, such a hideous swell of dread that her knees almost gave out under her.
She must not give in to the old fear. She touched the hilt of her sword, her “good friend,” and shifted her shoulders to feel the comfortable weight of her bow, Seeker of Hearts, and her quiver full of arrows.
She braced herself against the wall, then thrust forward into the storm, dashing as fast as she could across the sloppy ground. She reached the other side without being too thoroughly drenched, and a Lion standing guard under the protection of the eaves gave her a smile for her trouble and opened the door. Warmth and smoke roiled out. She stepped up to enter the hall.
It was much changed now. The industrious clerics had been overwhelmed by loud, wet, laughing, bragging courtiers, noble folk newly ridden in from the hunt. Though a large chamber, the hall seemed cramped, reeking with the smell of wet wool and sweaty, jovial men and women. Liath weaved her way through them toward the hearth at the other end of the hall, where the king’s chair stood. With each step, dread clawed in her, a sharp-fingered hand digging through her soul, groping up the paved streets of her city of memory on the track of her sealed tower. She had to force each foot forward, one step after the next.
What was wrong with her? Why had this fear come on her?
How much easier it would be to turn and flee. But that was what Da had done, and in the end it hadn’t saved him. In order to live, she was going to have to do better than Da.
They parted before her, making way for the King’s Eagle. Henry sat in his chair, looking tired. With one hand he toyed with a hound’s leash, knotted and tangled. His other hand rested on a thigh; he opened and closed it over and over. He looked distracted, staring without seeing toward his two younger children who sat on stools beside the fire. Sapientia stood beside him, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other, glancing again and again toward a knot of people kneeling to her left. These, her courtiers, stooped over a finely carved chest in which she probably had stored her fine clothing as well as mementos of her sacred progress, whose successful outcome would mark her as fit to rule as Queen Regnant after Henry’s death.
Thunder boomed, rattling the timbers and shaking the barred shutters, and hard on top of that came a second crash, resounding through the hall, stilling their chatter. The princess’ courtiers rose and transformed themselves into a new pattern, one made bright and focused by the man who stood at their heart, the man at whom Sapientia stared, her gaze fixed avidly and jealously on his face.
His beautiful face.
As the thunder faded, Liath heard the gentle snap and rustle of the hearth’s fire.
Hugh.
PART TWO
CAPUT DRACONIS
V
THE HAND OF THE LADY
1
WIND scours his skin but he minds it not. Mere cold, mere sting of blown snow, cannot drive him from the stem of the ship. He sails on the wings of the storm, driving down on the northcountry to tear out the throats of those warleaders who have refused to bare their throats to his father, Bloodheart. This was the duty given him.
