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“Did no one seek them out? What happened to the bandits?”
“There was a single skirmish, my lord, two days later. Then the bandits vanished, or so Lord Geoffrey’s scouts said. I don’t know the truth of it.”
“Do you not believe them?”
She shrugged, reluctant to say more. After the silence grew thick, she went on. “The girls who were taken were only servants’ daughters. Two were slaves—their parents had sold them into service to discharge the debts they owed Ravnholt’s steward.”
“Did Ravnholt’s steward not seek to recover those lost souls?”
“The steward was killed in the raid.”
“Who is in charge there now?”
Her dark look matched the dreary day and the ominous swell of wind in distant trees. “Lord Geoffrey left the land fallow. Said he’d see to it later. Yet we’ve desperate need of planting. Surely you know … it’s hard to think of planting with frosts still coming hard every night. There is a blight in the apple trees here and eastward. There may be no apple crop at all this year. In the south a black rot has gotten into the rye …” She looked sideways at him, blushing again. “Yet you must know, for that’s where you were found, wasn’t it? In the south, by a mill.”
“Mad, so they tell me,” he said as they came up to the church and its narrow porch. He stepped into the shadow and turned to look at her, who stood yet in the muted daylight.
“Not mad,” she said, but she didn’t mean it. “You had the dancing sickness, my lord.”
“And much else besides, I am thinking. I sustained an injury to my head. For a long while I wandered without my faithful hounds. I was lost and blind.” He snapped his fingers, and the hounds waggled up to him and licked his hands. He patted them affectionately and rubbed his knuckles into their great heads, just how they liked it, and scratched them behind their ears.
She wrung her hands together, gaze fixed on the dirt. “Now you are come back to us, my lord.”
“No,” he said kindly. “I am only passing through. I will not stay.”
She wept silently, nothing more than tears running down her cheeks.
“Do not despair,” he said. “The one you seek will come.”
He went inside into the gloomy nave, so shadowed that he had to stop four steps in and stand there for a while to let his eyes adjust. The hounds panted beside him.
“Come,” he said at last.
They walked forward to the bier set halfway along the nave, flanked by benches. Rage and Sorrow sat at the foot of the bier, below Terror, and Alain knelt at Lavastine’s right hand. The statue had been “dressed” in a long white linen shift overlaid with a wool tunic dyed to the blue that had always been Lavastine’s preferred color. The cloth looked well brushed, though a little dusty. An embroidered border of leaping black hounds encircled half the hem, the kind of painstaking work that revealed the hand of an experienced needleworker. He wondered if the embroidery was work begun recently and as yet unfinished or if some woman’s heartfelt task had been interrupted. Lavastine’s feet were vulnerably bare, and his sharp features were as familiar as ever, with his beard neat and trim and eyes shut. No doubt folk new to the holding believed this a masterful piece of stone carving. Who would believe this was the man himself?
Bowing his head, Alain rested his brow against that cool cheek.
“I pray you,” he whispered, “forgive me for the lie. I gave it up in order to enter the land of the meadow flowers, but now I am come home to this Earth and I must confess it to you. I said Tallia was pregnant only to spare you heartbreak, knowing you were slipping away. I do not regret sparing you pain on your deathbed. I regret only that I failed in the one task you set me. Still, it was not to be. God made it so. They knew I was not your rightful heir. If Tallia had gotten pregnant, then the threads would have tangled even more. No good rule can be based on a lie. And, God help me, Father, had Tallia not betrayed me, I would never have met Adica. I’m sorry I could not be the son you desired, but that does not change the love I cherish for you.”
When he ceased speaking, a quiet so profound settled into the church that he thought he could hear the earth’s slow respiration, the breath of stone. Pale daylight gleamed on the altar and the golden vessel and the Book of Verses, left lying open as if the deacon had been interrupted in the midst of her prayers. Behind him lay the side chapel dedicated to St. Lavrentius, who had died before the time of the Emperor Taillefer while bringing the Circle of Unity to the Varrish tribes.
It is here, he thought, that it began. He had met the Lady of Battles on the Dragonback Ridge, but he wondered now whether that was coincidence or fate or free will? Was it in her nature to ride that path when a storm blew in off the sea? Had it only been accident that they had converged there? Or had she ridden that way on purpose, knowing she would meet him and in such an hour when he would have no choice but to save those he loved by pledging himself to her cause?
It was here, in this shadowed nave, that the answer lay. Beneath him lay the crypt where the counts of Lavas slumbered in death, although their souls had surely ascended to the Chamber of Light. Here in the aisle of the nave rested the last of the line of the elder Charles.
What had he been hiding?
Sorrow whoofed softly, and in answer Alain heard the skittering of mice near St. Lavrentius’ altar as they scattered into their hidey-holes. Once he and Lackling had knelt in that chapel at this very same time of year; Lackling had wept when one trusting little creature had crept into his hand and let him stroke its soft coat. Now, all rustling and scratching ceased.
The door opened, and a man—face shadowed by the daylight behind him—entered alone.
“You are come,” the man said, more in sadness than in anger, yet there was anger as well, throttled by the stink of fear. The door closed behind him, and he halted. “Take it! Take it! It has rotted in my hands!”
“I pray you, Lord Geoffrey. Sit, if you will. I have not come here to take anything from you that is yours by right.”
Geoffrey choked down a sob of fury, but he did not move. “You have outwitted me at every turn! Was it nothing but a dumb show that you turned up here babbling and dancing? Did you mean to tempt me to do what I did, and thus discredit myself by making me seem a cruel and bitter man? By making me seem afraid of you?”
“Are you afraid?”
