She could not see far ahead of her, but she felt the air had a flavor untouched by burning and war and death. She smelled oats, a touch caught on a bare wisp of a breeze borne down from distant hills. That gave her heart. The deacons pressed up behind her, the wooden chest which contained the saint’s relics jutting into her back. A child said, in a high, wavering voice: “But it’s so dark. Where is my momma?”
She walked on into the darkness. She led them, counting until it became ridiculous to count, past one thousand and two thousand and beyond that. The tunnel ran straight, like an arrow toward its intended victim.
She wept as she walked, plain good tears, quiet ones. She could not afford to sob. She could not afford to be blinded by grief. Behind, she heard those who followed, the thin wails of infants and the helpless weeping of children who could not understand what was happening to them. The deacons murmured in soft voices to the rhythm of their step, the words of the psalm they had sung in the cathedral:
“‘For She has charged Her angels to guard you wherever you go, to lift you on their hands.’”
On she walked, leading them. On and on, away from the fall of Gent. So few would be saved.
“We will hold them as long as we are able.” His last words.
He was not meant for her, of course. It was foolish, an infatuation, not love, surely, for love is built on ties of blood or of shared work and companionship, not on a glance or the stray wanderings of stubborn and insistent desire. Never meant for her, even if he had lived. It was not only the difference in their births, for she believed what Da had told her, that she need only bend her knee before the king. They were freeborn, of an old lineage, so Da always said, though he had never given her more information than that. Of a lineage that had gained lands in return for lordship over themselves, beholden to no count or duke but only to the king. As Hathui’s people had, in these times, in the eastern marches.
No, it was more than that, and utterly different.
“Be bound, as I am, by the fate others have determined for you.” So Sanglant had said. Was it not the duty of the captain of the King’s Dragons to die in the service of his king? And hers to live, if she was able?
Was she not bound by that other mystery, of Da’s death, of her mother’s death eight years before, of the treasure-house, the secret, that she both carried in her saddlebags and even perhaps in her own person? Of her own person? She had been made a slave because of another man’s desire to possess what was hidden within her. She was now always and ever marked by that slavery, just as she was marked by Da’s murder and by the mystery of the white feather she had found next to his dead body. Deaf to magic—or guarded against it. But bound to it, whichever was true.
Some destinies cannot be escaped.
So she walked and left Gent behind. She felt nothing in her body, not truly. She could not afford to be crippled with grief, and during those long months with Hugh she had learned how to put strong emotion away from her, locking it away behind a sturdy door.
But she allowed herself tears. She wept for Sanglant and for what could never be. She wept for Da, for her mother, for Wolfhere and Manfred, for the dead Eagle whose badge she had inherited. For all the souls, the brave biscop and her people, who would die. Liath had seen the Eika enchanter who named himself Bloodheart. She did not believe he would show mercy or respect the sanctity of the Hearth. Why should he? He had not been brought within the Circle of Unity. He had slaughtered Count Hildegard and then used her banner as part of an unscrupulous trick. He wanted Sanglant for reasons she could not fathom. But he and Sanglant were engaged in a duel set in motion before they had ever set eyes on one another.
Her torch burned steadily and did not go out or expend its substance. She held it in front of her as a beacon; it was the only light left to her.
Not the only light. She had to believe Hanna was alive. She would find Hanna again.
She reached up without thinking and touched her badge, felt the eagle embossed on brass. Hanna was all, except for the Eagles. She truly was one of them now. And that, perhaps, gave her a place where she might find safety.
So she walked. The tunnel ran on and on and on. If those behind her faltered, she did not know. She led them and did not look back.
5
THE Eika had breached the eastern gates just after dawn. It was midday by the time Liath emerged, blinking, half-blinded, and exhausted, from a narrow cave mouth into the glaring light of a fine spring day.
Behind her, the refugees from Gent staggered out, stumbling after a steep climb up several hundred steps. The tunnel itself had been long and made arduous because of fear. But Liath feared the final climb, up steps carved into rock, would prove too much for the smallest and weakest of the refugees, thus holding up those who tried to escape behind them.