The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3) Page 279

When the boy came in, leading the bolted horse, he was sent to the village with the news. Wichman ordered half his men to seek out the rest of the lost horses. Poor Mindless, the only casualty, was dying fast of blood loss and trauma: the beast had ripped his arm from its socket. They didn’t bother to carry him anywhere, only made him comfortable on the ground and, squirting wine from their wineskins down his throat, got him drunk to kill the pain. Those who remained pulled feathers from the beast as well as they could, but they had to give up their looting because its blood blistered them even through gloves. When the villagers finally paraded in with cries of triumph and a garland of fireweed and pansies to drape around Prince Ekkehard’s bruised neck, they had brought flagons of ale and a lit lamp.

Ekkehard still couldn’t lift his arms, so he merely nodded when the old village woman offered him the lamp. “It injured you more than us,” he said magnanimously. “Let the one of you who lost the most livestock set it on fire.”

“But none of us lost any livestock, my lord,” she said. “It were so cruel and fearsome looking, living so nearby, that we feared it might begin to stalk us.”

Ekkehard blinked several times in quick succession, as if her words didn’t quite make sense to him. Then, with a shrug, he sent Milo forward to fling the lamp onto the corpse from a safe distance.

Flames exploded from the body. Useless, still hanging about hoping to glean a few more feathers, got singed and skipped back, yelping like a hurt dog.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Ermanrich demanded of Ivar for the fourth time.

Ivar could only shrug. Sigfrid knelt at a safe distance from the bonfire and began to pray, lips moving although no intelligible sound could come out. He was still weeping.

The fire roared, and as feathers crisped and evaporated in the heat, Ivar began to see shapes in the flames: a multitude of honey-colored doves borne upward by the smoke; lions pacing into an unseen distance, sleek and pale; silvery roes leaping away as up invisible stair-steps of rock, vanishing into the heavens; salamanders delighting in the flames, their bright bodies more red than coals and their eyes sparking blue fire.

“I think we made a terrible mistake,” he whispered. Beyond the fire, where the rejoicing hadn’t slackened and no one seemed aware of these strange emanations except as a heady cloud of incense wafting heavenward, an argument erupted as violently as had the fire out of the great bird.

“You’re lying to us, you old bladder!” Wichman towered over the old woman who had first spoken to them, threatening her with a bloody-knuckled fist. “I know you hid your daughters. You admit yourself that it was a lie that the beast ate any of them. I saw some of them running into the woods.”

“Leave them alone,” said Ekkehard suddenly. He was still sitting on the ground, Milo, Baldwin and Udo hovering behind him as his servingmen agonized over how to get the bloodied mail shirt off without aggravating his injured shoulders. “What right have you to molest them?”

“The right of a commander who just lost a soldier to defend these miserable vermin!”

“I grieve for Lord Altfrid, too, but that’s no reason to rape their daughters in exchange.”

Wichman snorted, throwing his arms out and taking a big step to one side. He had a way of flinging his body into any space nearby when he was in a foul mood, the way a person took up room to show that he could. He wiped blood from his nose. “Now here’s a change of heart from the randy little boy who was never happier than when groping his sluts in Gent. Or are you happy enough with your pretty attendant Baldwin? If he’s not sword enough for you, I can loan you Eddo here, for he’ll probe the canals of quite any creature, human, animal, or otherwise.”

“Don’t mock me,” said Ekkehard in a low voice. “And don’t molest these people.” He had gone white along the jaw, but at least blood wasn’t dripping anymore. The wind was blowing the inebriant smoke from the beast’s pyre directly into his face, although he didn’t seem to notice.

Wichman had, of course, stepped wisely out of the heaviest stream of smoke. “How do you mean to stop me? I have fifteen experienced men to your fourteen half-grown boys. We could chop you into pieces and go on our way without breaking a sweat.”

“And pork the village girls besides,” added Thruster enthusiastically. “Did they really hide them from us? Mean of them!”

“My father—” began Ekkehard, almost squeaking with anger.

“Ai, God!” cried Wichman, clapping a hand to his head in the familiar, mocking way. “What will dear Uncle Henry do to me? I’m kin. And he needs my mother’s support, doesn’t he? So just shut up, little Cousin, and go back to your novices and your prayers, or have you forgotten that you’re a monk, not a soldier?”