Crown of Stars (Page 124)

Anna saw the old man’s face. Her mouth dropped open. He caught her gaze and shook his head in a warning. She closed her mouth, and for an instant she was dizzy, wondering whether it was God, or the Enemy, who had answered her.

After all, it was God’s work.

She knew better than to ask questions, but that night they sat beside a campfire, just seven of them, munching on freshly roasted rabbit and a stringy haunch of very old and unidentifiable meat, and she could hold in her questions no longer.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “My lady.”

“West,” said the one who was married to Prince Sanglant. The lady, Liathano, was a sorcerer, no more human than her Ashioi companions, only Anna found the Ashioi far less terrifying than she found this woman, although she did not know why.

Ai, Lady and Son! This woman had a soft fire about her, visible only at night and no more solid than the flash of steaming air visible on a cold night when breath is exhaled.

“I know what happened to Princess Blessing, my lady,” Anna ventured, although the woman had not asked. She was neither kind nor cruel; in truth, she seemed indifferently tolerant of Anna’s presence.

The lady glanced at her, and fixed on her face a false and chilling smile. “I know where she has gone. But that she lives was beyond my knowledge, before I came here. To know that she survived must sustain me.”

No one had told Anna how the lady had come to Ashioi country, or why she had left the prince, her husband. She dared not ask. She ate, and she drank a little, and she even slept, although the dusty ground made her wake sneezing a dozen times before dawn lit the east.

They trudged all morning along the road, faces set to the west. It was a clear day, a faint haze lightening the sky to a blue-white pallor. The earth baked around them. Thorny bushes and swathes of dry grass rattled when the wind gusted. Off to their left, the sea shone like polished crystal, a dense lapis field cut off by the southern horizon.

In the heat of the day they rested under the shade of an awning tied up between stunted juniper trees. The mask warriors talked among themselves and occasionally with the old man, and the two young men flirted with the lady in that way men have when they’re not being quite serious while the two young women made jokes with the lady as they teased the young men. No one took any notice of Anna because she was nothing. Only, that being so, why had they bothered to bring her along, to rescue her from her prison among Lord Hugh’s soldiers?

As they broke camp in midafternoon she stood beside the lady, and spoke.

“Are we going to Aosta, my lady? To follow the army? All the others, the soldiers, they said the Ashioi army was marching to Novomo.”

The lady smiled bitterly but did not answer. When they began walking, Anna tried asking the old man, but he could not understand Wendish and, because no one spoke to her, she had learned almost nothing of the Ashioi language in the months she had been their captive.

They walked through the remainder of the hot afternoon. On occasion, they sipped a nasty brew that made her whole face pucker but which quenched her thirst each time for another league or so of walking. The sun set among streamers of rich red cloud. In the east, a full-faced moon slipped heavenward, cloaked at intervals by stripes of haze and other times shining brightly down upon them. Still they walked, because where the moon shone the White Road gleamed as if it caught and reflected that light.

When the moon had walked a third of the way up into the sky, they paused to rest where an arrangement of flat rocks made pleasant benches. Anna drank, and chewed on one of the tasteless, tough flatbreads they carried for journey bread.

The lady lay on her back on one of the rocks, with an arm outstretched. She raised it and lowered it and raised it again, measuring those stars she could see. She spoke under her breath; Anna saw her lips moving, but she couldn’t quite hear what the lady was saying. Eldest Uncle crouched beside the lady on the ground with his head tilted back. A tiny lizard scuttled within a crack in the stone. Anna shuddered, remembering that when she was young a boy had told her that such creatures were beloved of the Enemy.

Eldest Uncle rose and came to her, unrolled a blanket, and draped it over her shoulders. She smiled, because she didn’t know how to tell him that she wasn’t cold.

The old man padded to the warriors, and they began the familiar routine of leavetaking: taking a last sip of mahiz, tucking away leaf-wrapped journey bread, tightening the ropes on the baskets they carried before slinging them over their backs.

Anna got to her feet. The lady stood. In the moonlight, Anna saw tears on the other woman’s cheeks.

“What are you looking at?” Anna whispered.