The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3) Page 163

What glinted in his gaze belied the pleasant smile on his lips and the congenial tone. It flashed, a bone-deep core of unforgivingness, startling to glimpse in a man who seemed as easy going and pleasant as the warm glow of the summer sun—until you were caught out under its heat for too long.

“Your children will be my children. Yes?”

“That is the agreement!” retorted Sapientia, looking affronted. She reached across the bed to touch the sword, caressing the blade. It was a handsome piece of metal, slightly curved; letters had been carved into the blade, but Hanna could not read them. Gold plated the hilt. “But I am a warrior, too! I will swear no less an oath than you do!”

“Then you and your fighting men will ride beside me when we go in the morning, to hunt these Quman raiders?” The unforgiving glint had vanished. He laughed out loud. “‘Strong is my woman. She is hunter like the lion queen!’ Together, we ride to war!”

3

PRINCE Ekkehard’s servants managed to conceal Ivar and—more importantly—Baldwin from old Lord Atto for ten days during which Ivar had either to trudge alongside the wagons with a cowl over his head like a common laybrother or be jolted about in the back of one of those same wagons. In a way, it was a relief to be discovered, despite Lord Atto’s explosive reaction.

“Lord Baldwin must be sent back to Autun at once! What were you thinking, my lord prince? This is a grave insult to Margrave Judith. Feuds have destroyed whole families on lesser grounds than these!”

Ekkehard did not quail before this onslaught. “She need never know, and I and my people certainly won’t be the ones to tell her.” He did not really have the stature to stare down Lord Atto, who had the burly physique of a man who has fought in many battles, but he was free of the schola, young, and out on his own for the first time. “Baldwin stays with me!”

“He’ll be sent back in the morning, my lord prince. It’s what your father would command.”

But Lord Atto wasn’t as young as he used to be, and his left leg and right arm had sustained enough damage over his years of fighting that no one thought it particularly odd when, in the morning, he slipped while mounting. Maybe the mild paralysis that sometimes afflicted him chose that moment to reappear. Ekkehard and Baldwin hurried over to assist the poor old man, fussing around him and his horse, and by the time anyone thought to check the saddle, the girth was good and tight.

Atto was left at the manor house to recover from the fall, with two servants in attendance. Prince Ekkehard rode on with his party otherwise intact and Baldwin riding at his right hand. No one mentioned the matter again. But they rode at a good clip, always aware that the news would get back to King Henry eventually.

Yet such a pace couldn’t tire them. They were young, and reckless, and happy to be free of restraint. Happy, that is, except for Ivar.

At first he didn’t join in at their nightly revels at whatever manor or guesthouse put them up. They drank heavily, wrestled, sang, and entertained themselves with whatever young female servants were on hand and more or less willing; if no women were available, they entertained themselves with each other.

Ekkehard took to calling him “my prim frater,” and it became a joke among them that of all of them, Ivar stayed “pure,” just like a good churchman. But Baldwin was always pestering him, and on those nights when Ivar and Baldwin shared a blanket for warmth, Baldwin had a discomforting way of rubbing up against him that aroused thoughts of Liath. He was tired of thinking of Liath. Sometimes he hated her for the way her memory surfaced again and again in his mind. Maybe Hugh was right: maybe Liath had cast a spell over him. Why did the thought of her grip him bodily with such violence? He could hardly think of her at all anymore without embarrassing himself, and then they would all notice. They would all know he wasn’t any purer than they were.

But he wasn’t pure. No one was, nothing could be, trapped in the impure world. Alone, he couldn’t even find the courage to preach the True Word, and he resented Baldwin—now free of Judith, after all—for not joining him in prayer. There wasn’t any satisfaction in praying alone. Indeed, after enough days in their company, he began to wonder why he should stay sunk in pain and grief when he might as well be as careless and fickle as they all were.

A terrible rumor greeted them when their party rode into Quedlinhame: Queen Mathilda was dying. Ekkehard’s steward found Ivar and Baldwin lodging in the house of a Quedlinhame merchant, since they dared not risk them being recognized at the monastery itself, where the prince would stay with his aunt. But the merchant spent all his time at the town church praying for the health of the old queen. They had no fire, and it was cold and miserable with an autumn drizzle shushing on the eaves above them.