King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1)

King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1) Page 4

One by one they bowed their heads, acquiescing to her judgment, until only one man remained, head unbowed. He rested a hand on the woman’s shoulder and spoke. “You will not be alone.”

In this way they considered in silence. The great ruins lay around them, echoing their silence, the skeleton of a city unattended by ghost walls or visions of past grandeur. Sand skirled up the streets, spattering against stone, grain by grain erasing the vast murals that adorned the long walls. But where the walls marched out to the sea, where the knife-edge cut them clean, the shadow form of the old city mingled with the waves, the memory of what once had been—not drowned by the sea but utterly gone.

Stars wheeled above on their endless round.

The candles illuminated the gleaming surface of the obsidian altar. In its black depths an image of the distant ring of stones, far to the north, still stood, and the last torches borne by the prince’s retinue flickered and faded into nothing as they passed beyond view.

PART ONE

THE

MOTHERLESS

CHILD

I

A STORM FROM

THE SEA

1

WHEN winter turned to spring and the village deacon sang the mass in honor of St. Thecla’s witnessing of the Ekstasis of the blessed Daisan, it came time to prepare the boats for the sailing season and the summer’s journeying to other ports.

Alain had tarred his father’s boat in the autumn; now he examined the hull, crawling beneath the boat where it had wintered on the beach on a bed of logs. The old boat had weathered the winter well, but one plank was loose. He fastened the plank with a willow treenail, stuffing sheep’s wool greased with tar into the gap and driving the nail home onto a grommet also made of wool. Otherwise the boat was sound. After Holy Week his father would load the boat with casks of oil and with quern-stones brought in from nearby quarries and finished in workshops in the village.

But Alain would not be going with him, though he had begged to be given the chance, just this one season.

He turned, hearing laughter from up the strand where the road ran in to the village. He wiped his hands on a rag and waited for his father to finish speaking with the other Osna merchants who had come down to examine their boats, to make ready for the voyage out now that Holy Week had ended.

“Come, son,” said Henri after he had looked over the boat. “Your aunt has prepared a fine feast and then we’ll pray for good weather at the midnight bell.”

They walked back to Osna village in silence. Henri was a broad-shouldered man, not very tall, his brown hair shot through with silver. Henri spent most of the year away, visiting ports all up and down the coast, and during the winter he sat in his quiet way in his sister Bel’s workshop and built chairs and benches and tables. He spoke little, and when he did speak did so in a soft voice quite unlike his sister’s, who, everyone joked, could intimidate a wolf with her sharp tongue.

Alain had darker hair and was certainly taller, lanky enough that he was likely to grow more just as certain spring days are likely to bring squalls and sudden bursts of rain. As usual, Alain did not quite know what to say to his father, but this day as they walked along the sandy path he tried, one more time, to change his father’s mind.

“Julien sailed with you the year he turned sixteen, even before he spent his year in the count’s service! Why can’t I go this year?”

“It can’t be. I swore to the deacon at Lavas Holding when you were just a new babe come into the world that I would give you to the church. That is the only reason she let me foster you.”

“If I must take vows and spend the rest of my life within the monastery walls, then why can’t I have just one season with you to see the world? I don’t want to be like Brother Gilles—”

“Brother Gilles is a good man,” said Henri sharply.

“Yes, he is, but he hasn’t set foot off monastery lands since the day he entered as a child of seven! It isn’t right you condemn me to that. At least one season with you would give me something to remember.”

“Brother Gilles and his fellow monks are content enough.”

“I’m not Brother Gilles!”

“We have spoken of this before, Alain. You are of age now and promised to the church. All will pass as Our Lord and Lady have decreed. It is not for you or me to question their judgment.”

By the way Henri set his mouth, Alain knew that his father would not reply to any further argument. Furious, he strode ahead, his longer strides taking him out in front of his father, though it was rude. Just one season! One season to see something of the world, to see distant ports and unfamiliar coastlines, to speak with men from other towns, from other lands, to see something of the strange lands the deacon spoke of when she read the lessons and saints’ lives of fraters—the wandering priests—who brought the Holy Word of the Unities to barbarous lands. Why was that so much to ask? He crossed through the livestock palisade and by the time he reached Aunt Bel’s longhouse, his mood was thoroughly foul.