Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (97 page)

Not, Hanna reflected as she crested a rise and saw Lavas Holding below, that she sought martyrdom as had the saints of old, but she
was
Henry's loyal servant and hoped she could serve him as faithfully as St. Samais had served the blessed Daisan. Manfred had died in Henry's service, and she hoped she had courage and loyalty enough to die as honorably as Manfred had, if it came to that.

Yet a wasp sting burned in her heart, nagging, incessant, uncomfortable. She still dreamed of the Kerayit princess every night.

A Lion standing sentry hailed her. "Friend Hanna! How fares it with you? What news of Princess Sapientia?" It was her old friend, Ingo, looking fit and well-fed.

"Princess Sapientia was well enough when I saw her last. She and Prince Bayan won a victory over the Quman."

"God be praised! And you, friend?"

She laughed. "I'm happy to see that I won't be riding any farther today. King Henry moves swiftly. I lost three horses to lameness in the past month alone, and there was so much rain! It seemed as if I'd always stay two days behind him. What news here, friend?"

"You hadn't heard? Queen Mathilda is dead, may she rest in peace in the Chamber of Light. The king received word in Autun. Ai, Lord! He prayed for seven days and nights clad only in a pauper's robe." Ingo sighed and wiped a tear away. "His grief moved every soul there to tears. I still weep, to think of it."

"May her memory be blessed," said Hanna, as was proper. "What then brought you here to Lavas?"

"There's a terrible great judgment being held here." His mood changed abruptly and he spat on the ground in disgust. "Nobles, fighting over land again. Greedy bastards always wanting more for their favorite children. You'd think they'd be content with what they've got, but it's never so. When will it ever end?" He said. "Ai, well. Count Lavastine was a fair man. It's too bad he died."

"I don't recall him seeming old or ill," said Hanna, surprised at this news.

"He was not. God's ways are a mystery, truly." He lifted a hand to beckon her closer, and she had to lean down from her saddle to hear him. "Perhaps it
was
sorcery, as some are saying."

She straightened, struck by the way he had moved her aside from his companions, had regripped his spear, as if fearing an attack. "Everyone seems to be speaking of sorcery these days. What news of Prince Sanglant?" It was an oblique way to ask about Liath.

"You were still with the king when the prince rode off, weren't you? Well, he's never come back nor has anyone heard one word from him. It was your comrade who bewitched him, they say."

"Do they still say that?" she asked cautiously.

"Ah," he said, reading something in her expression she hadn't concealed. "You hadn't heard the news, then. The council held at Autun excommunicated her for trafficking in sorcery."

The blow was a hard one and easier to absorb alone. She thanked him and went on her way, and as she rode down into the holding she noticed the tight silence of the local people and, like its counterpoint, the constant whispering of the court's servants, who seemed to be enjoying themselves rather more than they ought given the grave nature of the charges and the death of a good man. Was it in the nature of humankind that they should take pleasure in another's misfortune?

She handed her horse off to a groom, brushed the worst of the dirt off her clothing, and made her way to the hall, a fine timber edifice with whitewashed walls and huge roof beams painted with tar to keep the vermin out. She had never been here before, although Liath had visited here a year or more ago and told Hanna a little of what had transpired between her and Lord Alain. It seemed now that fate would conspire to keep her and Liath apart. God alone knew where Liath was now, and in what condition. And she had forgotten to ask Ingo about Hugh.

Her old comrades Folquin and Stephen were standing on guard at the door into the great hall, and they clapped her on the back and whispered greetings, then let her through although perhaps a hundred people had gathered outside, forbidden entrance. And no wonder: so many had crowded inside that it was reeking and hot despite the cool, damp spring weather. Someone had thought to strew mint in with the rushes on the floor, but the sweat of so many people overwhelmed any other odor. She had to elbow her way forward because people were so intent on the scene before them that they took no notice of her Eagle's badge.

It was slow work. Somewhere at the front of the room, people were giving testimony about Lavastine, his first marriage, the horrible death of his only known legitimate child, and the mistress he had once slept with who had died in childbirth.

She squeezed past two stewards dressed in fine linen, like chickens tarted up as swans as her mother would have said, but fetched up behind a hugely broad nobleman who seemed immune to her nudging. He was short enough that she could see over his shoulder and glimpse the dais, where Henry sat on his throne. The king looked tired. He had lines in his face that hadn't been there six months ago. Hathui stood behind him; she had mastered the blank face of the loyal servingwoman. His niece Tallia sat to his left, Helmut Villain to his right. On opposite sides sat Lord Alain and Lord Geoffrey, the disputants.

Henry lifted a hand, and a steward called forward the next witness, a heavyset older woman who, by the evidence of her stained apron, had evidently been called in from the kitchens. The nobleman in front of Hanna kept shifting as she tried to press forward, and she just couldn't get past him and by now was wedged between him, a bench, and a table. The atmosphere in the hall was so tense and focused that she hadn't the courage to shout out, as Hathui would have, "Make way for the King's Eagle," even though she had the right to do so.

She shoved her way up on the bench beside a trio of finely-dressed boys and was able to hear as the cook told her story with remarkable self-possession.

"Yes, Your Majesty, that would have been Cecily. She's the girl we all knew was Count Lavastine's mistress, may she rest in peace, but she wasn't the one who gave birth to Count Alain. She gave birth to a misshapen lad, our Lackling. Alas, he died two years ago, poor child. Fell in the river and drowned, we think, for his body was never recovered."

"You don't think he might have run off, that he might still be alive?" asked Hathui.

"Nay, Eagle, he'd never have left here. That's how we know he died. He vanished one day and never come back."

"Did Count Lavastine know that this boy Lackling was his mistress' child?" asked Henry.

She looked nervous then, wringing her hands in her apron. "Nay, Your Majesty. A poor beggar woman was brought in that same night, and both she and her child died, so we said that Lackling was hers and Cecily's babe was the one who died. I don't suppose more than three of us knew the truth, and we all swore never to speak of it, for the young count had just gotten betrothed and his bride was a jealous woman, all full of her own hurt feelings, may God grant her peace. We wanted to protect him."

"So you lied."

"So we did, Your Majesty. I'm sorry for the sin, but I suppose I'd do the same thing again. It's for God to judge the matter, not me."

"Who knew the truth?"

"Well, then, I knew, and Deacon Marian knew, and old Agnes knew. Deacon and old Agnes attended every birth here, and I helped Agnes when she needed helping, bringing her clothes and water and ale for the laboring women, and so on. They're both gone, now, may God bless them. I'm the only one living who attended those births, for there was four babes born in the space of three nights. One was the poor dead beggar child, may God rest him and his mother. One was Lackling. One was Count Alain. And the last was a tiny little thing, a girl I never saw again because her mother and father fled with her the next morning though the poor woman was still weak. I think they were afraid, for the other three mothers died. They thought it an ill omen, They were afraid she would die, too, if they stayed."

At these words, Geoffrey made to speak.

"Hold, hold," said Henry, lifting a hand. "If you knew that this child Lackling was the baby borne by Lavastine's mistress, and that the child Alain was borne by a different woman, then why did you say nothing when Count Lavastine named this young man as his heir?"

The old cook looked troubled. "What was I to say, Your Majesty? Was I to tell the count his own business? Was I to rule for him?"

"You could have told him what you knew."

She gestured toward Alain. "There was the hounds, Your Majesty."

Of course everyone looked. A hound sat on either side of Alain. He had a hand buried in each one's neck, as if holding them back—or as if they were all that was holding him up. Yet she could read nothing in his expression except perhaps a kind of resigned calm. His black hair had been recently cropped; his clothes were neat and handsomely fitted. But except for the hounds he sat unattended even by a servant while Lord Geoffrey was flanked by noble kinsmen who, with empty sword belts and arms crossed menacingly, looked ready to solve the problem with their fists. Lord Geoffrey had the kind of red face that comes of too much choler seeping from the blood into the mind. He looked as if he were about to burst into wrathful speech at any moment.

"The hounds?" asked Henry.

"He has the gift with the hounds, Your Majesty. Just as Count Lavastine did, and his father before him and his father before him, may their souls rest in peace in the Chamber of Light."

She frowned at a sight unseen by the rest of them, glanced over her shoulder as if looking at someone in the crowd, then rubbed her bulbous nose self-consciously. "Poor Rose. That's the girl who was Count Alain's mother, for I know she bore him truly enough. I saw him come from her body, just as I saw poor Lackling born out of Cecily, No mixing those two boys up, because Lackling come out of Cecily with his face all bent and legs funny and Alain was as perfectly-formed a baby as I ever saw. Yet Cecily was the good girl, obedient and quiet. She never went to any man but the count, and I'm not sure that wasn't more his choice than hers, begging your pardon, Your Majesty. She always said there was a young man in her village she meant to marry, when she returned home. Rose, now, alas, she was a whore, there's no kinder word for it. Pretty as a rose, that girl. That's where she got the name, for she never claimed to have one of her own. She and her people come up from Salia a year or two before to find harvest work and she hadn't anything of her own, as poor as the mice in the church. They was even too poor to have a lord take them in. The man who called himself her father just called her 'girl,' and we all suspected that he was doing that to her that goes against nature, if you take my meaning. Your Majesty."

People chuckled and whispered around Hanna, finding amusement in this salacious tidbit. Henry frowned and rapped his scepter once, hard, on the floor. Everyone quieted. "Pray give this woman silence in which to testify." She rubbed her nose again, which had gotten quite red from the heat of the hall, or of the king's regard. "She were so poor and so poorly treated by her father who was always slapping her and calling her indecent names right out where everyone could hear that it's no wonder she went looking for what she could get wherever she could get it. Everyone knew she made her assignations up in the old ruins. She were always going on about meeting the Lost Ones there, and how a prince of the old people was coming in to her and was going to make her a queen. Who's to say she didn't meet the young count up in the ruins one night? Every man in this holding looked at her with lust in his eyes, she was that pretty and had that kind of way with her that made you know that if you just gave her the right thing she'd, well, begging your pardon, she'd make it worth your while. It's as likely that Count Alain was Count Lavastine's son as any other man's, Your Majesty."

Lord Geoffrey looked ready to burst, and he burst now. "He might have been the get of any man in this holding! He might have been the lowest stable boy's by-blow! Ai, Lord! He's as likely to be the ill-begotten product of an incestuous union between the girl and her father!"

"Begging your pardon, my lord," the cook retorted with astonishing asperity, "but what about the testimony of the hounds, then? Not any man but the counts of Lavas can touch them hounds. They obey Count Alain just as they obeyed Count Lavastine. That was good enough for Count Lavastine, and he was a careful man and a good lord to us. We trusted him and never saw reason to question his judgment. He only did one foolish thing in his life, when his poor daughter was killed, and he repented that the rest of his days."

"Strong words," said Henry. His niece Tallia shifted in her seat as if his voice had startled her, but she did not look up from her study of her knees. She had a pale face, pale hair, and pale hands, was almost colorless, quite in contrast to the plump young noblewoman who stood in attendance on her with her hands folded quietly before her and her serious gaze flicking now and again toward Alain.

"What about this boy, Lackling?" asked Henry. "You seem sure he was Count Lavastine's bastard. Could he touch the hounds?"