“It seems to me that you have all been too gentle. A firmer hand would have solved the matter long ago and bent this one you seek to your will.”
“Nay, Sister. You do not fully understand the matter.”
“Yet do you not all admit that I have certain gifts none of the rest of you possess? Is that not why I was brought among your number? Is it not fitting that you let me try my hand in this in case your other plan fails? Then you will see what I am capable of.”
“I am against it.”
“Yours is not the final word. Let the others speak.”
Wind sighed in the distant trees and hummed through the stones. A hare bounded into view, froze, its ears twitching, and then flinched and leaped away into the cover of mustard flower and sedge.
“We risk nothing if she fails,” said a third voice. “If she succeeds, we benefit, for then our absent sister can return here quickly and we can return to our work that much sooner.”
Hard upon these words came a fourth voice, “I am curious. I would like a demonstration of these methods we have heard so much about.”
“I care not,” said the fifth voice, so faint that the sound of it almost died on the wind. “This is a trifle. Do as you wish.”
Now the first spoke again. “Then I will attempt it. What has eluded you for so long will not elude me!”
The owl glided down in a spiral. With sudden grace it folded its wings and, heedless of the flames, came to rest on the smooth knob at the top of the burning stone. The sun’s light pierced the last strings of mist and broke brightly across the grandeur of the stone circle.
Between one moment and the next, the burning stone vanished—and the owl with it.
2
IN any village, a stranger attracts notice—and distrust. But Eagles weren’t strangers, precisely; they were interchangeable, an arm of the king—his wings, so to speak—and they might come flying through and, after a meal and a night’s sleep, fly away again, never truly at rest.
Liath had discovered that as a King’s Eagle her only solitude on any errand she rode for the king came while actually on the road itself, because the roads were lightly traveled. Wherever she stopped to break her fast or for a night’s shelter, she had no rest as long as she stayed awake. Villagers, deacons, chatelaines, nuns, even simple day laborers: All of them wanted gossip of the world beyond because few of them had ever ventured more than a day’s walk from their home—and even fewer had actually seen the king and his court.
“Did the foreign queen die?” they would ask, surprised, although Queen Sophia had died almost four years ago.
“Lady Sabella rebelled against King Henry’s authority?” they would cry, aghast and amazed, although all this had taken place a full year before.
“We heard the Eika sacked the city of Gent and are laying the countryside waste all around,” they would confide nervously, and then she would calm their fears by telling them of the second battle of Gent and how Count Lavastine and King Henry had routed the Eika army and restored the ruined city to human hands.
To them, she was an exotic bird, bright, fleeting, quickly come and quickly gone. No doubt they would remember her, and her words, long after she had forgotten them and theirs.
It was a sobering thought.
In the village of Laderne full twenty souls crowded the house of her host, turning her visit into a festive gathering. They entertained her with songs and local gossip while she ate, but as soon as her host brought her a mug of beer after the meal, they turned their questions on her.
“What’s your errand, Eagle? Where did you come from? Where are you going?”
She had learned to judge how much to say: when to keep close counsel or when to be more forthcoming. Many people favored her with better food the more she told them, and this old householder clearly thought her visitor important: She hadn’t watered down the beer. “I’m riding to the palace at Weraushausen, at the king’s order. He left his schola there, many of his clerics and most of the noble children who attend the progress. His own young son, Prince Ekkehard, is among them. I’m to give them word where they are to meet him.”
“Weraushausen? Where’s that?”
“Beyond the Bretwald,” she said. They shook their heads, hemmed and hawed, and advised her to ride carefully and on no account to cut through the old forest itself.
“Young fools have tried it now and again,” said Merla, the old householder. She had about six teeth left and was proud of them. “They always vanish. Killed by wolves and bears, no doubt. Or worse things.” She nodded with satisfaction, as if pleased at their dreadful fate.