In the Ruins (Crown of Stars #6)

In the Ruins (Crown of Stars #6) Page 174

“Nay, my lord! You’ll wait in the lord’s audience chamber. It would be fitting!”

“I pray you, Mistress Dhuoda,” he said in a softer voice. “Make no trouble for the innocent souls standing here around. I prefer to wait in the church, if you don’t mind it. I wish to pray beside the count’s bier.”

“Of course!” She flushed red. “Of course, my lord!”

“Who is this man?” demanded the captain, stepping off the porch that fronted the hall. “He’s not welcome here!”

Somehow or other the servants got moving right away and impeded his path, leaving Alain and Dhuoda to walk in solitude out to the stone church set apart from the other buildings beyond the palisade.

“What does Lord Geoffrey fear?” asked Alain, indicating the new earthworks.

“He fears justice, my lord. He fears Lady Sabella.”

“Why should he fear her? Is she not in the custody of Biscop Constance in Autun?”

“Not for many years, my lord. Lady Sabella usurped her old seat. She holds Biscop Constance prisoner and rules Arconia again. Lord Geoffrey offered his allegiance to Biscop Constance, but it’s likely the noble biscop cannot help us. There are bandits roaming the lands. Have you not heard of our troubles?”

“What particular injuries has Lavas Holding sustained?”

“Ravnholt Manor was burned to the ground last autumn a few weeks after the great storm. Eight people were murdered, and perhaps more, because it was hard to discover remains within the ruins of the hall. A dozen or more we found later hiding in the woods, but four girls were never accounted for although witnesses had seen them alive and running from the conflagration. They were not little ones but youths, and one recently wed. You will have no doubt about what the bandits wanted with them, poor things.”

“Did no one seek them out? What happened to the bandits?”

“There was a single skirmish, my lord, two days later. Then the bandits vanished, or so Lord Geoffrey’s scouts said. I don’t know the truth of it.”

“Do you not believe them?”

She shrugged, reluctant to say more. After the silence grew thick, she went on. “The girls who were taken were only servants’ daughters. Two were slaves—their parents had sold them into service to discharge the debts they owed Ravnholt’s steward.”

“Did Ravnholt’s steward not seek to recover those lost souls?”

“The steward was killed in the raid.”

“Who is in charge there now?”

Her dark look matched the dreary day and the ominous swell of wind in distant trees. “Lord Geoffrey left the land fallow. Said he’d see to it later. Yet we’ve desperate need of planting. Surely you know … it’s hard to think of planting with frosts still coming hard every night. There is a blight in the apple trees here and eastward. There may be no apple crop at all this year. In the south a black rot has gotten into the rye …” She looked sideways at him, blushing again. “Yet you must know, for that’s where you were found, wasn’t it? In the south, by a mill.”

“Mad, so they tell me,” he said as they came up to the church and its narrow porch. He stepped into the shadow and turned to look at her, who stood yet in the muted daylight.

“Not mad,” she said, but she didn’t mean it. “You had the dancing sickness, my lord.”

“And much else besides, I am thinking. I sustained an injury to my head. For a long while I wandered without my faithful hounds. I was lost and blind.” He snapped his fingers, and the hounds waggled up to him and licked his hands. He patted them affectionately and rubbed his knuckles into their great heads, just how they liked it, and scratched them behind their ears.

She wrung her hands together, gaze fixed on the dirt. “Now you are come back to us, my lord.”

“No,” he said kindly. “I am only passing through. I will not stay.”

She wept silently, nothing more than tears running down her cheeks.

“Do not despair,” he said. “The one you seek will come.”

He went inside into the gloomy nave, so shadowed that he had to stop four steps in and stand there for a while to let his eyes adjust. The hounds panted beside him.

“Come,” he said at last.

They walked forward to the bier set halfway along the nave, flanked by benches. Rage and Sorrow sat at the foot of the bier, below Terror, and Alain knelt at Lavastine’s right hand. The statue had been “dressed” in a long white linen shift overlaid with a wool tunic dyed to the blue that had always been Lavastine’s preferred color. The cloth looked well brushed, though a little dusty. An embroidered border of leaping black hounds encircled half the hem, the kind of painstaking work that revealed the hand of an experienced needleworker. He wondered if the embroidery was work begun recently and as yet unfinished or if some woman’s heartfelt task had been interrupted. Lavastine’s feet were vulnerably bare, and his sharp features were as familiar as ever, with his beard neat and trim and eyes shut. No doubt folk new to the holding believed this a masterful piece of stone carving. Who would believe this was the man himself?