The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5)

The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5) Page 97

Hugh coughed. “They’re coming more frequently.”

“God are angry that we have not acted more swiftly and decisively to drive out the Arethousan interlopers. Sister Abelia, bring the brazier. Fan the coals into flame.” The cleric nodded and went out behind the curtain.

“It won’t work,” said Hugh curtly.

“Do you think not, Brother Hugh?”

“If I could not, then how can she?”

“It may be so, but we must leave no avenue untrod. It will take months, even years, to locate and rebuild the lost crowns. My envoys have heard stories of an intact crown by the sea in Dalmiaka, but the Arethousan despots who rule there refuse to let them travel to that place. On every side we are thwarted. We are too few, and our enemies too many. Sister Venia is missing and St. Ekatarina’s Convent closed up and apparently abandoned. We must have seven when the time comes, aided by tempestari so we can be assured of clear skies. I need my daughter.”

“Is it wise to speak so freely, Holy Mother?”

“To you, Brother Hugh? You have joined our Order willingly, and with a clear purpose. Is there some reason I should not trust you?”

“I meant before this Eagle, Holy Mother.”

“The Eagle? She is only a servant.”

“Even servants have tongues, Holy Mother.”

Hanna kept her head down, but she felt the touch of that devastating gaze. So might a fly feel before being swatted. So might a fly, holding still, be passed over as being of too little account to bother with when there were more annoying pests to exterminate.

“If my daughter trusted her, that bond may yet link them.”

The cleric returned and set a brazier on the step in front of Hanna, then stepped back to work a small bellows so coals shimmered and flames licked along their length.

“Watch carefully and learn, Sister Abelia,” said the skopos before turning her gaze on Hanna. “Use your Eagle’s Sight to seek the one you know as Liathano.”

One did not say “No” to the skopos.

She leaned forward, hearing the hound’s menacing growl at her movement and the command of the skopos, calling the dog to heel. It was hard to concentrate, knowing how nearby that fierce creature bided. It hadn’t seemed so menacing when Lord Alain had commanded it. Without meaning to, she recognized it. She had last seen this hound, and Lord Alain, when she had watched King Henry pluck the county of Lavas out of Alain’s hands and give it over to Lord Geoffrey and his young daughter.

A Lavas hound.

No person who had ever seen the Lavas hounds could mistake them for any other dog. How had the skopos acquired this one? Hanna had last seen Alain on the field of battle with the Lions. Hadn’t he died there?

Her gaze fell forward through the veil of fire.

The only way he can bear his sorrow is to keep silence and let work soothe his soul into a stupor. There is plenty of work for a pair of able hands on a well-run estate in the autumn: pressing apples for cider, rhetting flax, splitting and sawing, cutting straw to repair roofs. He binds wood with trimmings from flax and soaks the bundles in beeswax and resin for the torches needed to light the winter months. His hands know how to do the work. Just as well, because his head seems stuffed with wool, hazy, clouded, distant.

“Did you live by the sea?” asks Brother Lallo, stopping beside him where he sits on the porch of the Laborers’ dormitory. The hounds lie docilely at his feet. “You have a knack for plaiting and net-making.”

Vaguely surprised—what was he thinking about just then?—he notices that he is Weaving willow rods into a kiddle that the fishermen will place in the river to catch fish. “I beg your pardon, Brother?”

“The Enemy is pleased with feet that wander off the path of good works! Keep your thoughts here with us. I asked you, did you live by the sea?”

To remember the sea makes him recall Adica and that long voyage, towed by the merfolk, when they had stared into the watery depths and seen the vast whorl of a city unfold beneath, strange and wonderful. All dead now.

Pain drowns him. Grief makes him mute. It is a kind of madness.

Maybe it was all a dream.

Lallo tugged at his own ear with a frown. “You’re a hard nut to crack. Enough of this. It’s time for prayer, Brothers.” He shepherds his charges to church for Vespers.

Alain sets down the half-woven kiddle and follows with the others. Dusk has a way of sliding over the monastery, catching him in twilight unawares. Maybe he has been walking in twilight for a long time and never noticed it. Sorrow and Rage pad alongside. Despite their fearsome aspect, they behave as meekly as lambs. No man here fears them, and the monks willingly give him scraps with which to feed them. Each hound eats as much as one man, and they provide no labor for the benefit of the monastery, so he works doubly hard—when he doesn’t forget himself and fall into that dreaming stupor. He wants to earn the hounds’ portion as well as his own.