“Yes,” whispered Alain, promising it, determined to make it true. He did not want to fail Lavastine, now or ever. How keenly he felt, suddenly, that need to have Tallia beside him. It was more than liking, more than advantage. It was simpler than that. Perhaps it was not altogether pure. “Tallia,” he said, trying her name out on his tongue. Wondering how he would speak to her once they were married, once they were alone in the intimacy of the bridal chamber. He flushed and looked up in time to see Lavastine smile, so quick he might not have glimpsed it.
“And sooner,” said Lavastine casually, “rather than later.” Alain’s face burned. Was the sin of lust emblazoned on his face? “It is vital you secure the succession as soon as possible.” The count turned to the servants and signed to them to open the door. Sorrow barked. Bliss whined, tail whipping against tapestried wall, as the door was opened and the servants braced themselves well back from the path that would be taken by the hounds.
Alain let the servants help him with his boots, and then he unhooked the hounds and led them down the curving staircase to the outside where they could run—under his supervision, of course.
He sat on a bench. The snow of last week had melted, though it was still cold. The cloudy sky had the look of porridge. He chafed his hands to warm them. A servant, seeing him, ran into the hall and emerged soon after with gloves. Soft rabbit fur caressed his hands as he slipped them on.
He had, in these moments when the hounds ran, a brief time to himself. Everyone kept well away and Lavastine was already about his business, business Alain would join as soon as he put the hounds into the kennel. He closed his eyes and drew a picture of Tallia in his mind’s eye, all wheat, like the harvest, frail, bending under the weight of the wind, of her mother’s ambition and her father’s ancestry, and yet always whipping back. She seemed so … unreachable. So clean. So pure and holy, she who scarcely ate a crust of dry bread when riches sat on her plate.
That night when he lay down on the bed beside his father, he closed his eyes and thought of her again. She had never been far from his thoughts all day. The idea that he might actually marry her was so incredible that he might as well dream of being a fatherless bastard child raised by commoners suddenly elevated to the rank of heir to a powerful count.
God bringeth low and lifteth up.
With this comforting thought and the vision of Tallia as close as his own cloudy breath in the chill air, he slept.
Rain edged with slivers of ice batters the canvas tents of their camp. His warriors do not need the tents to sit out the storm, though it makes the wait more comfortable. But the human slaves do. Another warleader would let the slaves sit in the freezing rain and half of them would die. So are the weak winnowed from the strong. But he is not like the others.
He touches the Circle at his breast, circles his finger around its smooth grain in memory of the gesture made by the child—seen but not forgotten—at the door of the crypt in the cathedral at Gent. That child he had let go free, because she had reminded him of Alain.
The slaves sit in the warm billow of smoke and heat from the fire he has allowed them to start, up against a rock face beneath the canvas tent. One man stares at him, then looks quickly away when he realizes he has attracted his master’s attention.
“Why do you stare?” he asks. In his dreams he has learned the language of the Soft Ones.
The slave does not reply. The other slaves look away quickly, hunching their shoulders, their way of trying to avoid notice, of pretending to be invisible as the spirits of air and wind and fire are invisible to all but enchanters.
“Tell me,” he commands. Wind stings his neck and tines of ice shatter on his back where he crouches at the open end of the shelter.
“I beg your pardon, master,” says the slave without looking up again, but even so he cannot keep the hate out of his voice.
“You saw something.” The long winter’s night shrouds them, blanketed by the ice storm and serenaded by the howling wind. By the red sullen light of fire he watches the slaves stare at their knees and their hands, even this one, the one who spoke. The one whom he caught looking. “I will know.”
“You wear the Circle of Unity, master,” says the slave at last, knowing that to disobey is to die. “But you do not worship God.”
He touches the Circle, drawing his finger round its curve with that same remembered gesture. “I do not hide the Circle.”
“It is the way you touch it, master.” The man’s voice gains strength, of a kind. “It reminded me of … someone I once knew.”
