Crown of Stars (Page 182)

Brother Gilles stuck through with a spear by a ravening Eika marauder who rips the precious holy book out of the old man’s trembling hands.

Aunt Bel standing in the doorway, staring out into the wet night wondering what has become of her foster nephew.

Sparrows eating crumbs off Lackling’s hands as the halfwit weeps silently with joy.

Stronghand chained and a prisoner, howling to provoke the hounds.

Lavastine sitting at the count’s table, measuring Alain with a keen blue gaze.

Lady Sabella with her hair plaited back and dressed in gold-and-silver ribbons, but left uncovered, like a soldier’s.

Brother Agius hand in hand with Biscop Constance as they whisper late in the night, captive both in body to their enemy and in heart to each other—a marriage long ago forbidden and impossible. Beyond them, Biscop Antonia’s eyes are open, and she watches as they comfort each other. She is a huge yawning maw sucking in life and air, a gate through which the most unnatural forces can cross. Envy is the shadow of the guivre, the wings of death.

She has called the galla from a far place that is no part of this world, or of the aether that circulates through all things, through the cosmos itself.

“Go,” he whispered into the dirt. He shoved himself up. He faced the guivre and caught it with his stare. “Go! As I command you, who spared you once, this favor I am owed in recompense. Go to the field of battle. Fly there until I say otherwise.”

On the ground it was an ungainly thing, but when it leaped and caught the high wind, it flew with a grace that makes a man smile with joy to see God’s hand in the heavens working such beauty. It cried out once, and then he lost sight of it as it winged away over the trees. He brushed off his forearms and his legs, and pulled a twig out of his hair. Sorrow and Rage sat watching, panting although the wind was brusque enough to make eyes sting when you faced into it. The sky overhead was as dark as pitch, but it was not raining, although it ought to have been. The Lady had called this storm, and it followed no natural course.

“Come.” He broke into a steady run. The hounds loped with him, one before and one behind. Yet it was too late. Too late. The battle had already started; he had not prevented it after all.

Except that it is never too late. The world continues on its path despite the accidents and tragedies and joys that unfold in the life of any given individual. You must press forward so long as you have breath. Toil in those fields that God cherish most. You have done as well as any man.

So Lavastine had said. But Alain had lost Tallia, and he had lost Lavastine as well. He had watched the count turn to stone, his own effigy.

Memories chased him as he ran, images rising and falling away in time to the beat of his footsteps pounding on earth.

A dawn battle against the Eika when the Lady of Battles rode at his side.

Henri accusing him of lying in order to gain a count’s favor.

Liath weeping by the hearth fire.

The battle at Gent, and the ragged, half-wild prince stumbling away from the victory feast, retching because he was unable to tolerate food after starving for so long.

Tallia on their wedding night. Always there would be a measure of pain, remembering this. Remembering the nail she had used to scar her own hands.

I have been tricked.

He had lost the county of Lavas in the end and marched east as a Lion, where he had killed a man to show mercy and had been himself killed.

Death had taken him to Adica, and death had taken Adica from him—although surely Adica had never belonged to him or he to her in those ancient days, forgotten now by humankind. Only the burial mounds remain, which is memory of a kind, a thing tangible but mute.

He had found peace at Hersford Monastery for a short time, yet peace had a fragile heart and this was soon broken. Falling into the hands of bandits, he had killed the man once known as Brother Willibrod, a creature without a soul who had sucked the life out of others to maintain his rotting shell.

After that, memory scattered. He lost his anchors—Rage and Sorrow—and it seemed to him that his memories of that time toiled around and around in an endless circle until a sharp blow sent him plummeting into the pit. He wandered for a time in darkness and after this in light, and for a time he was caged and after this the tempest rose and the sea swamped him and the dragon broke free of the earth that had imprisoned it for a time beyond memory. Beyond any memory but his own, who because of the intervention of sorcery had witnessed the ancient spell which had set all this in motion.

Who else recalled it?

One: the centaur shaman. But when he sought the breath of her soul in the living world, he could not find it.