Crown of Stars (Page 216)

“Ivar,” he murmured.

Startled, she sank back on her haunches and stared at him. Had she seen him before? His was a hard face to forget, and Ivar had spent time in a monastery and might have become acquainted with such a man. Still, Ivar was a common enough name. Her thoughts wound down dreamily, for it really wasn’t so much that she was cold but that she was weighed down by an overwhelming crush of exhaustion. It would be so nice to sleep. It would be best to sleep.

“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.”