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“Liath.”
The voice roused her. That voice was itself the creep of ice into her body, a hot pain even when it flashes cold. The act of rising bit into her knees and hips, which were by this time so stiff that she wondered if they were freezing into blocks of ice.
Fire is such a fragile thing. Stone and water and earth all smother fire.
“Liath,” he said again.
She was not sure whether he meant to wake her, or to lure her into a sleep that would leave her as helpless as the others. Best not to wait to find out.
She stalked through the open door and into the church. Hersford boasted a modest church with fine friezes along the capitals, braided circles enclosing leaves, vines, and birds. She crossed the bema and approached the apse with its dome and piers. Three wide stair steps led up to the altar. A slender form lay athwart these steps, a girl-child dressed in a simple linen shift with her coarse black hair pulled back into a topknot in the manner of the Ashioi, only this girl was Blessing, as limp and lifeless as if she were dead.
She ran, dropped down beside the girl, and pressed her cheek to Blessing’s chest and a hand to her throat. The girl’s lips were as cold as ice, the lips of a corpse. Liath’s own breath ceased, her heart seemed to stop, as she listened, yet after all the child’s steady respiration eased in and out as faint as the patter of a mouse’s heart.
She was not dead, only sleeping. Freezing to death, like all the others.
A flare of anger burned bright, but she swallowed it. Anger would not help her now. She stood.
Light bled through the rose window, the holy Circle of Unity bounded on all sides by the glorious wisdom of God, who are Lord and Lady and thereby united. That soft light suffused the space around the altar, and here, naturally, Hugh knelt in the perfect repose of a man who is smiled upon by the angels, looking like an angel himself, serene in God’s mercy. His palms were pressed together in prayer. His forehead touched his fingers.
“Liath,” he said, not looking at her. His voice was as soft and warm as that of a man coaxing a hurt child or wounded dog. “Come in now. Come in.”
He stood, turning to face her.
In this way, in the arctic church with the wind whistling in through open doors and with light spilling over him, she stared up at his beautiful face.
God help her. All those years ago he had abused her. For all the years after he had terrified and tormented her. These memories still had the power to move her, but she was moved with pity and with anger for the helplessness she had endured. She was not the only one who had suffered at his hands, nor was she the only one suffering now. Fumes rose from a brazier burning steadily a few paces away from the altar. The odor of these bindings and workings bled through the monastery to put so many innocents into such a dangerous sleep, as the fierce cold he had called out of the north with his weather working chewed into their sleeping flesh.
Seeing that she watched him, he spoke the words of the psalm in his beautiful voice. “‘You who sit in my garden, my bride, let me hear your voice.’”
“I have a great deal to say to you,” she replied. She mounted the last step and halted in front of him. They might as well have been alone in the world. In a way, she had been alone with him for far too long. She had been walking for years now with the memory of what he had done a constant burden, never shaken from her back.
No more. She would bear that burden no longer.
Her voice was clear and strong. “A prince without a retinue is no prince. A lord without a retinue is no lord. You are alone, Hugh. You have cut every tie, severed every bond of kinship. Betrayed every ally. I am come to fetch my daughter. When I leave, you will have nothing.”
He did not waver. His grave demeanor gave him an authority that made his words fall with a great weight, like a benediction. “I knew you would come into your power. Now you see what you are. What I always knew you could be.”
She shook her head. “I know what you want. But it’s not yours and it never will belong to you. This much mercy I have within me. Go now. Go, now, and I’ll not kill you. Find what shelter you can—if you can escape the vengeance of the Ashioi. They wait beyond the stockade.”
She was cruel enough to enjoy the flash of alarm that widened his eyes and startled the smooth assurance of his heavenly smile. But he recovered swiftly. He always did.
“How can you not see it, my rose? To hurt me would be like hurting yourself. We are alike, you and I.”
“So is an adder like a phoenix, for they each have two eyes.”
“By denying it, you admit it. We are alike. You fear the truth, knowing it to be the truth.”
“It’s true we are alike in that we seek knowledge. I do admit it. I’ve seen it to be true. But the outer seeming does not necessarily reflect the inner heart. We are not alike, because you seek to possess and I seek only to comprehend.”
“Is that what you believe? You, who could have anything you wanted? Don’t you know the truth about yourself, Liath?”
“That my mother was a fire daimone, and my father born out of the house of Bodfeld. What else is there to know?”
He laughed. “You don’t know! You haven’t guessed! This is rich irony! Taillefer’s great grandchild does not wear the gold torque that is her birthright.”
“I am not Taillefer’s descendant! Anne was not my mother.”
“She was not. Truly, she was not. But who was your father’s mother? And who was your father’s mother’s mother?” He opened his hands in the manner of a supplicant. His voice was pleasing, and his grace and elegance might persuade any woman or man to listen, and to believe. “Have you ever met the hounds of Lavas?”
