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“Is it different among you, when you contract alliances?” Alia seemed genuinely puzzled. “For an undertaking of great importance, are you not sealing bargains and binding allies who will be bringing the most benefit to your own cause?”
Henry laughed sharply. “Had you some undertaking in mind, Alia, when first you put yourself in my way in Darre? How well I recall that night!”
She gestured toward the garden, dark now except for the light of moon and stars. Inside, the stewards had gotten all the lamps lit. St. Thecla’s many figures on the tapestries shimmered in the golden light; her saint’s crowns had been woven with silver threads, and the lamplight made them glimmer like moonglow.
“What other undertaking than the making of the child? Was this not our understanding?”
“Truly, it was my understanding. I understood why I needed to get a child, even if the getting of the child came second to my passion for you. But never did I understand that you wanted a child as well.” He spoke bitterly. “You abandoned the two of us easily enough. What could you have wanted a child for if you were willing to walk away from him when he was still a suckling babe?”
She walked forward full into the light from the four dragon-headed lamps that hung from hooks in the ceiling to illuminate the center of the chamber. Despite her tunic, she could not look anything but outlandish, foreign, and wildly unlike humankind. “In him, my people and your people become one.”
“Become one?”
“If there is one standing between us who carries both my blood and yours, then there can be hope for peace.”
Fortunatus stirred beside Rosvita, and she pressed a hand to his wrist, willing him to remain silent while, around them, Henry’s attendants whispered to each other, puzzling over her words.
How could Alia’s people seek peace when they no longer lived on Earth, and perhaps no longer lived at all? Of all their fabled kind, Alia alone had walked among them once, some twenty-five years ago, and then vanished utterly, only to reappear now looking no older for the intervening years.
But the years had not left Henry unscarred. He pulled out a rust-colored scrap of cloth and displayed it with angry triumph. Alia recoiled with a pained look on her face, as if the sight of the scrap physically hurt her.
“I held this close to my heart for all these years as a reminder of the love I bore for you!” In those words Rosvita heard the young Henry who, coming into his power, had not always known what to do with it, and not the mature Henry of these days who never lost control. “You never loved me at all, did you?”
“No.” His outburst might have been foam flung against a sea wall for all the impact it had. “I made a vow before the council of my own people that I would sacrifice myself for this duty, to make a child who would be born with the blood of both our peoples.”
Finally, as if his voice had at last reached his ears, he schooled his expression to the haughty dignity worthy of the regnant. “For what purpose?”
“For an alliance. A child born of two peoples has the hope to live in both their tribes. We are hoping that the boy will be the bridge who will be bringing your people into an alliance with mine. We knew you would not be trusting us. That is why I left him with you, so that you and your people would come to love him. I was thinking he would be raised to be the ruler after you, in the fashion of humankind. In this way our task would be made easy. Now I return and I find him as an exile. Why were you not treating him as you promised to me?”
“I raised him as my own!” cried Henry indignantly. “No man treated a son better! But he was a bastard. His birth gave me the right to the crown, but it granted him nothing save the honor of being trained as a captain for war. I did everything I could, Alia. I would have made him king after me, though everyone stood against me. But he threw it back in my face, all that I offered him, for the sake of that woman!” He was really angry now, remembering his son’s disobedience.
Sanglant walked in from the garden. Folk parted quickly to let him through their ranks. He came to rest, standing quietly between the king and the Aoi woman, and all at once the resemblance showed starkly: his father’s forehead and chin and height, his mother’s high cheekbones and coloring and broad shoulders: two kinds blended seamlessly into one body. But he had nothing of Alia’s inhuman posture and cold, harsh nature. In speech and gesture he was entirely his father’s child.
“Liath is the great granddaughter of the Emperor Taillefer.” Without shouting, Sanglant pitched his voice to carry strongly throughout the long chamber. “Now, truly, my father’s people, my mother’s people, and the lineage of Emperor Taillefer, the greatest ruler humankind has known, are joined in one person. In my daughter, Blessing.” He indicated Brother Heribert, who had come in behind him carrying Blessing. “Is that not so?”
Henry lifted a hand, a slight movement, and his Eagle stepped forward to answer the prince. “What proof have you that the child is born of Taillefer’s lineage?” Hathui asked.
“Do you accuse me of lying, Eagle?” he asked softly.
“Nay, Your Highness,” she replied blandly. “But you may have been misled. Sister Rosvita believes that a daughter was born to Taillefer’s missing son. Any woman might then claim to be the lost grandchild of Taillefer.”
“Who would know to claim such a thing?” He shook his head impatiently. “This is an argument that matters little. If proof you will have, then I will get proof for you, and after that no person will doubt Blessing’s claim.”
“Son.” How strange to hear Alia’s voice speaking that word. It made Sanglant seem a stranger standing among them, rather than a beloved kinsman. “It is true that I was hoping when first I crossed through the gateway into this country to make a child with a descendant of Taillefer. But it was not to be. That you have done so—” She had a fatalistic way of shrugging, as if to say that her gods had worked their will without consulting her. “So be it. I bow to the will of She-Who-Creates. Let proof be brought and given if humankind have no other way of discerning the truth. But proof will be mattering little if all of you are dead because of the great cataclysm that will fall upon you.”
Most of Henry’s retinue still seemed to be staring at Blessing, who had stirred in Heribert’s arms, yawning mightily and twisting her little mouth up as she made a sleepy face and subsided again.
But Henry was listening. “What cataclysm do you mean?” He regarded her intently.
“You are knowing an ancient prophecy made by a holy woman among your people, are you not? In it is she not speaking of a great calamity?”
Rosvita spoke, unbidden, as words came entire to her mind. “‘There will come to you a great calamity, a cataclysm such as you have never known before. The waters will boil and the heavens weep blood, the rivers will run uphill and the winds will become as a whirlpool. The mountains shall become the sea and the sea shall become the mountains, and the children shall cry out in terror for they will have no ground on which to stand. And they shall call that time the Great Sundering.”’
“Are you threatening my kingdom?” asked Henry gently.
“By no means,” retorted Alia with a rare flick of anger. “Your people exiled mine ages ago as you know time, and now my people are returning. But the spell woven by your sorcerers will rebound against you threefold. What a cataclysm befell Earth in the long ago days is nothing to what will strike you five years hence, when what was thrown far returns to its starting point.”
o;For an alliance. A child born of two peoples has the hope to live in both their tribes. We are hoping that the boy will be the bridge who will be bringing your people into an alliance with mine. We knew you would not be trusting us. That is why I left him with you, so that you and your people would come to love him. I was thinking he would be raised to be the ruler after you, in the fashion of humankind. In this way our task would be made easy. Now I return and I find him as an exile. Why were you not treating him as you promised to me?”
