The Hidden Stars Part 15

She went in search of Skerry, finally running him to earth at the stable where he kept most of his horses. Kivik, she immediately realized, had already warned him; he greeted her appearance with something less than the ardor that might be expected of a young lover.

"What is it you want of me?" Skerry asked with a wary look, as he closed the gate of the stall that housed dapple-grey Grani and stepped out into the aisle.

She drew a long breath, inhaling the dusty sweet scents of wheat straw and oats, the earthier odors that came of the horses. "A place among your riders, disguised as a man. It would work. I am tall enough, and I ride well enough."

"Madness," he answered, latching the gate behind him. "Utter madness. You'd be discovered at once, if not much sooner. And how would we ever explain our disobedience to the King?"

She gnawed on her lower lip, clenched her hands into fists. "You were not so ready to bow to tyranny three years ago when we exchanged tokens!"

"We were children then, selfish and heedless. What we mistook for your uncle's tyranny was merely his kindness...and his very good common sense! I hope that we're wiser now."

Winloki felt the world close in on her, a lump rise in her throat. Sensing her agitation, the horses grew restless in their stalls: grey stallion Grani, gentle mare Gisl, chestnut Arvak and his half brother Bavor, stamping their heavy hooves and whickering in protest. As they sensed her anger, Winloki knew their distress.

"Do you regret it, then, that secret pact we made between us?" she asked, stiffly, angrily, feeling betrayed where she had placed the most trust. "Do you wish we had waited for the King's consent?"

"Do I regret pledging myself to you? No," Skerry said emphatically. He reached out to lay a placating hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it away. "But this that you ask of me now-I can't and won't!"

She wanted to cry out: And what becomes of us if they take me away? Where is our pledge then? But that was the one argument she was too proud to use against him. She could only look at him, bewildered and angry. "I never took you for a coward, Skerry."

Another man might have taken offense, but he knew her temper of old. He knew how it flared up suddenly and pa.s.sed almost as quickly-that she did not hold grudges or take petty vengeance-but while the mood was on her there was simply no reasoning with her. He did not even attempt it; he merely folded her hands between both of his and turned on her a deep, clear glance.

There they stood for several long minutes: Skerry patient, silent, waiting her out; Winloki seething, and nursing her anger. She knew when she was being managed. In truth, they knew each other far too well, she often thought. This time she was determined not to yield to his wordless influence.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed her hands away with a violent motion and turned her back on him. "If you have any respect for me at all-" she began.

"No," said Skerry, gently but forcefully. "I do love you, Winloki, but I won't go against the King in this, scold how you will."

And so, after all, she was forced to take matters into her own hands. With a plan but half-formed in her mind, Winloki headed for the Healers' Hall.

It was a large house three stories high, of split logs on a stone foundation, with runes of great virtue carved above the door. There as elsewhere, the activity was frantic: simples being brewed, herbs being ground up in mortars or dried in ovens, powders and compounds and salves sealed up in gla.s.s bottles or earthenware jars with blots of red wax, then packed away in chests to be transported in the morning.

She felt a brief twinge of guilt as she slipped past the stillroom, knowing that she ought to be in there helping. It was because she was expected to be with the healers that she had been able to move so freely all day, without her usual flock of attendants.

I have other business that is even more vital, she reminded herself, as she climbed two flights of narrow wooden stairs to the top of the house In one of the dormitory bedchambers under the eaves, Winloki found Aija, the youngest healer, nervously packing for her journey on the morrow. "So you, too, are going. Every healer in the hall but the old, old women-and me!"

"There will be a need for healers here as well." Aija looked up from rummaging through a clothes chest at the foot of her bed, where she had been sorting through woolen stockings, linen shifts, and bright woven hair ribbons. "Children will be sick. Women will deliver babies-"

"And there will be nursemaids and midwives to attend them," Winloki finished for her, sitting down on a bench by an open dormer window, where the late-afternoon sun came through in a golden bar.

It was a long room, bright and airy, with five low wooden beds lined up in a row, a chest at the foot of each bed, and a beautifully carved clothespress of solid oak opposite the window. But Aija had it all to herself now; the other healers who used to sleep there had left with the army months ago.

"What use am I here," asked Winloki bitterly, "making charms for colicky infants and hysterical mothers, when men are dying-men I might save?"

Aija found the thing she had been so desperately looking for: a little triskele amulet carved of ivory on a thin leather cord. She slipped it on over her head. "You could have my place in one of the wagons for all of me," she muttered. "I'd trade places with you a thousand times over."

But then-glancing up to see her companion glowing, triumphant-she cried out, "No, no, I didn't mean that. Besides, my lady, you know that we can't. They would never allow it."

On Winloki's face, the bright look died. "Yes, I know," she said, with uncharacteristic meekness, as she left her seat on the bench and began to help the other girl pack up her things. "But it's very hard luck for the colicky infants. You were always much better with them than I was."

"Bad luck all around," said Aija. Her breath came quickly, and she seemed close to tears. But when the princess commented on her agitation, she pa.s.sed it off with a wave of her hand. "It's just excitement, that is all that it is."

In the evening, Winloki sent a message to her servants at the Heldenhof, telling them that she meant to spend the next few days working with the healers. No one would be surprised, no one would think anything amiss if she did not come back to her rooms during all of that time. There was work in plenty to be done in the Healers' Hall, and after the coming morning very few hands to do it.

Then she went into the stillroom, knelt by the hearth, where the coals were still red, and stirred up the fire.

That was a pleasant room, fragrant with the herbs that hung drying from the ceiling, cluttered but still orderly, even after the recent spate of activity. As the flames rose, there was dazzle of light off of bottles on the shelves, crystal and alabaster and dark green gla.s.s; off jars of salt-glazed clay, and off boxes of cedarwood, ebony, and bra.s.s. There, too, were piles of brittle old papers or parchments bound together by cords or string, antique scrolls stored upright in brown jars, codices bound in crumbling leather: compendiums of herb lore and spells for healing, learned treatises writ down in Niadhelen-all of the books and most of the writing that remained in Luckenborg. Books were a part of that discredited past abandoned along with the cities. Very few people could read anymore and fewer write-only the healers, the King and his family, and a handful of officers in Ristil's army who sent messages back and forth, laboriously inscribed.

But Winloki had no need to consult those tattered old volumes. She knew what she had to do, and she had to work swiftly, lest anyone come in to ask awkward questions. She moved quickly around the room, gathering up the things she would need, trying not to drop or break anything in her haste.

Returning to the hearth, she heated milk in a pannikin over the fire. When it was warm, she poured it very carefully into a beaten copper cup with a wooden handle. With shaking hands, she took a small staghorn flask off one of the shelves, unstoppered it, and let three drops of a clear amber liquid fall, turning the milk a deep b.u.t.tercup-yellow and scenting the air with honey and spring flowers.

"To help you rest-you'll be calmer and stronger tomorrow, if you can sleep tonight," she said a short while later, standing by Aija's bed with the cup in one hand and her heart rattling against her ribs, wondering if such a transparent device could possibly succeed.

She thought she might compel Aija's cooperation if the younger girl balked, her will being so much stronger-only that was a magic she had never tried, to enforce her desire on the mind of another. It was also a line she was reluctant to cross.

But Aija was caught up in her own fears, her own dread of the night still ahead, and of all the days and nights to follow. She accepted the potion with a grateful look. "I'm to rise before dawn," she said, sniffing at the cup. "If I were to oversleep, to have trouble waking-"

"I measured it out with the greatest care. But if you would like-" Winloki pretended that the suggestion had suddenly occurred to her. "If you would like, I will sit by your bed, stay with you until the rest of the house wakes, make certain that nothing goes wrong."

Aija lifted the cup and swallowed the potion in three short gulps. "You are kind, Princess. I don't know how to thank you."

Taking back the cup, Winloki put it down on the chest at the foot of the bed. She reached out to take the other girl's hand, gave it a rea.s.suring squeeze. "As to that," she said, with the faintest blush, "I am doing no more than I ought. Rest now, my friend, and fear nothing."

Already, Aija was growing drowsy; it seemed she could hardly hold her eyelids up, they had grown so heavy. She yawned, sat down on the bed. Without undressing, she laid her head down on the coa.r.s.e woolen blankets and was almost immediately asleep. Winloki watched the hectic flush fade from her face, then bent down and loosened her laces and removed her shoes, that she might rest more comfortably.

True to her word, the princess remained by her friend's bedside for many hours. But when the other healers in the house began to stir just before dawn, she did not wake Aija. Instead, she lit a stub of wax candle and stood over the bed, watching the other girl's slow, steady breathing. She had indeed measured the potion most carefully. Aija was certain to sleep all through the day and into the night, nor was anyone likely to disturb her in this great empty house.

Moving swiftly by candlelight, Winloki bound up her red-gold hair and pinned it in place. She donned Aija's cloak of plain brown wool, pulled the hood well forward. Then she took light from the candle into her hands and deftly shaped it into a mask to cover her face and blur her features. It would serve only so long as no one looked at her too closely or too steadily.

It was the simplest of spells: something she had been forced to teach herself as a child, finding no worthy teachers among the runestone readers and healers of Skyrra. She had employed it then to escape from nursemaids and servants, to slip out of the Heldenhof unattended, but never recently, thinking herself too old to play tricks on her attendants, accounting it a subterfuge unworthy of a princess.

But this was different. I am stronger than Aija, she reminded herself, and more fit for the work.

Picking up the bundle at the foot of the bed, Winloki extinguished the candle with a thought and went downstairs in the other girl's place. But she paused on the threshold under the lintel inscribed with the runes, before going out to the yard where wagons were waiting.

She glanced up at the sky, sniffed at the wind, gathering omens. The stars were already fading, they told her nothing. But a breeze from the east smelled heavy with moisture, and if that was not precisely an omen, at least it was a very good thing. It would be foggy before the sun was well up, and the mist was an ally that would help to conceal her. She could hardly have arranged things better herself.

16.

All day and into the evening the army was on the move. b.u.mp, b.u.mp, b.u.mp went the wagon in which Winloki and some of the other healers traveled, and creak, creak, creak went the wheels, but the sounds came m.u.f.fled and dreamlike in the heavy fog. So also the slow, steady hoofbeats of the broad-backed draft horses, the low, growling thunder of some six hundred warhorses to the front of the column (at least two for each man, and more for the officers), the light, quick canter of the smaller and fleeter steeds belonging to the scouts and the messengers, who went back and forth constantly between the mounted troops and the long train of wagons and carts-all subdued, all sounding hollow and distant, even when one of the couriers rode by like a shadow in the fog only yards away. Sometimes the mist thinned and gave a promise of daylight ahead; but that promise was never fulfilled, and the air soon became thick with cloudy moisture again.

For Winloki, perched atop a wooden chest full of medicines in one of the wagons, the day dragged on as pure misery. Aside from the boredom, the damp, and the all-pervading chill, she had never dreamed there could be such jolting discomfort as she was experiencing. To ride in a wagon was not in the least like riding on horseback. In the saddle, one learned to fall into a harmonious rhythm, to move as the horse moved, so that the two became one. A wagon offered no such harmony, no such communion. As she pitched and tossed on her uncomfortable seat, she could never quite gain a dependable feel for the road. A b.u.mp would come, and Winloki was all unprepared. It rattled her teeth, jarred her very bones, and if she was not careful she would bite her tongue, filling her mouth with the taste of blood.

Much of the time, she suffered from motion sickness, her head swimming and her stomach roiling. She would have gladly climbed down and walked between the wagons like some of the other women, but she feared recognition. On foot, some of the scouts might try to talk to her, as they did speak from time to time with the girls who walked. So long as she remained, clammy and miserable, on the coffinlike box of herbs and salves, with her head bowed and Aija's brown cloak wrapped tightly around her, everyone apparently thought it kinder to leave her alone.

This is the price that I pay for my deception, Winloki told herself. It is all my own doing, and I must bear it. That was hardly a comforting thought, but it was all she had to keep up her courage.

After hours of such misery, the mist began to grow greyer and darker, a sign that night was finally descending. Some of the riders lit torches, which glowed like small suns in the fog, casting haloes of light about the men who carried them.

Only when it was truly dark did they stop and begin to set up camp, on land that had once been good for grazing before the movements of armies had wounded and trampled it. It was long before the last of the wagons rolled into camp. By that time the tents were already up: pavilions of silk or canvas for the n.o.bles and officers, smaller and ruder shelters for the healers, but many of the other women-the wives of common soldiers, as well as the less respectable camp followers who drove some of the carts-found their way into both sorts of tents.

Winloki shared a lean-to st.i.tched out of hides with two of the healers, Thyra and Sivi, and with a weather-beaten woman and her sixteen-year-old daughter, who had somehow insinuated their way in. Winloki at least was not minded to turn them out. In the chatter and confusion of so many settling down to rest in the dark tent, she was able to go unrecognized for at least one night. That was reason enough to be grateful for their presence.

But she slept very ill with only a bedroll between her and the cold, hard ground, only a single blanket and Aija's cloak to cover her-she who had never slept but on a goose-down mattress, with a feather pillow and an eider-stuffed quilt and fair linen sheets. She woke in the morning with a stiff neck and a mood of the very blackest, which had not improved in the slightest by the time the tents were lowered and bundled away, and the women returned to the wagons.

That day was as murky and obscure as the day before. Winloki took a seat in a different wagon this time, on top of a grain sack, wedged between a bushel of apples and some rough burlap bags with an earthy smell that might contain turnips.

Like a farmer's daughter, she thought. Which for all she knew, she might very well be: a poor man's child with a gift for magic, sent north because someone felt threatened by that gift. Yet she did not think she was a farmer's or a herdsman's daughter: all of her dreams, the good and the bad alike, were of palaces and temples and other such marvelous places.

On the evening of the third day, Winloki's wagon, as one of the heaviest and slowest, arrived in camp long after nightfall, when the fires were already lit and the supper cooking. She had dozed off earlier on her sack of grain, but she woke when the wagon creaked to a halt, to a fragrance of woodsmoke, the sound and the scent of sausages and onions sizzling in a pan. Her stomach had still not settled, and she felt too weary and ill to move. She merely curled up again in her uncomfortable nest, and slept for the rest of the night.

But waking both hungry and parched to the braying of horns at dawn, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes, climbed over the side of the wagon, and set out in search of water. She could smell the horses all around her, hear the stamping of their heavy feet, their soft whickering, and she could also hear the gurgle of a stream running over stones somewhere nearby. She felt her way through the gradually lightening mist, past wagons and tents, past cookfires being lit and men arming up and belting on their weapons, moving always toward the sound of running water.

She fell in with a party of women on a similar errand, some carrying buckets and some carrying pans. Before she had gone more than a few yards in their company, she heard a clink of metal, and two men in steel hauberks appeared out of the fog, one of them carrying a lantern.

"Orders," he said. "No women to leave camp without an escort. We're in dangerous territory now."

So...they had left the frequent villages and wide, cultivated fields of the Herzenmark for the more spa.r.s.ely settled Haestfilke, far too close to the border and Eisenlonde. With this realization came an unhappy stir among the females, an exchange of wide-eyed, nervous glances. Some hung back, but Winloki went on ahead with the men, and soon she could hear the others following behind.

Reaching the banks of a shallow but swift-running stream, they found a party of scouts already before them, watering their horses and simultaneously receiving orders from a stocky young man in a long green cloak. Winloki paid them scant heed, intent as she was on washing and drinking.

Kneeling on wet gra.s.s at the edge of stream, she splashed water on her face. It was shockingly cold, but the sound and the scent of the water so near made her thirst nearly unbearable; she bent lower still, and scooped up a handful to drink. It tasted of minerals washed down from the mountains, and it was by far too chill for her empty stomach. A sudden sharp pain took her breath away and doubled her up on the gra.s.sy embankment.

She unbent with an effort, reciting a charm to ease the cramp. But as she straightened, the hood of her cloak slipped off; the hair tumbled down over her shoulders in a ma.s.s of red-gold tangles. Somewhere behind her a familiar voice uttered a cut-off obscenity and called out her name.

With a jaded and weary glance back over her shoulder, Winloki spied Skerry striding in her direction, his dark hair bristling and his green cloak flapping behind him. Knowing that the time for concealment had well and truly pa.s.sed, she resigned herself to the coming unpleasantness. Nor could she even hope to put Skerry off with her tricks or her spells-for one thing, he knew them all.

By the time he arrived at her side, she had already scrambled to her feet. Determined to brazen the thing out if she possibly could, she greeted him with her chin held high and an imperious little gesture. "You'll not tell anyone that you saw me here!"

"I?" said Skerry, between gritted teeth, as he reached out and took her firmly by the arm. "I won't say a word. What I will do is take you to our cousin, who can say to you the things that only a king's son may say to a princess!"

And he led her, whether she would come or not, up the bank from the stream, between two lines of picketed horses, and finally to the Prince's great tent of dew-drenched green silk, where she received a far from cordial welcome.

Kivik turned an ugly shade of white; he shot Skerry an incredulous glance. Receiving a tight-lipped shake of the head in response, he sputtered out an oath. "It wanted only this! What are you doing here? No, don't bother to answer, for it's plain enough. You are a wicked and willful girl-and what I am to do with you only the Powers and the Ancestors know!"

Winloki had nothing to say, now that the reckoning, which she had always expected, had finally come. Wisely, she kept her thoughts to herself and her eyes on the ground, while the Prince tore her character to shreds and cursed the day he had ever met her. Finally, he choked out another oath and fell ominously silent.

That silence continued so long, stretched on past the point where curiosity got the better of her, that she dared to raise her eyes and study the faces of both her cousins. Skerry was grinding his teeth and snorting like a warhorse in a very bad temper, while Kivik had gone from white to red, and all but breathed fire.

"Too late," he said, with a simmering glance in her direction, "by far too late to send her back. We can't spare half our army, which is what it would take to do it safely, when the enemy might just as well be behind as ahead of us-and the scouts are practically useless in this foul mirk. She will be safer with us for the time being."

"So it would seem," replied Skerry. "But let us hope that the King doesn't suspect us of abetting her from the very beginning."

At this, Winloki abandoned her resolution to suffer their displeasure in a dignified silence. "Do you think I would allow you to take the blame for what I have done?" she asked indignantly. "Do you imagine I have no more pride, no more honor, than-"

"We don't think anything of the sort. Nor does my father!" Kivik retorted. "Which is why, no matter how you protest our innocence, he will never believe you."

With a sinking sensation, Winloki realized that what he said was true. A wave of contrition swept over her-not quite sufficient to cause her to question her motives or regret her behavior, but it was an unpleasant feeling nevertheless.

"I will try to be as little trouble to you as I possibly can," she offered meekly. "I will continue to ride in the wagons with the other women and live in all respects as poor Aija would, if I hadn't taken her place."

"Which is exactly what you can't do, nor I allow, now that I know you are here," snapped Kivik, far from mollified. "I will a.s.sign four trusty men to guard you at all times. And if-if!-you really mean not to make any trouble, you will accept that arrangement with all good grace, and do nothing to evade their watch."

It hardly seemed an auspicious moment to argue that point, or indeed any at all. So Winloki merely nodded in wordless agreement and resolved to bring up the matter of the guards again later, when Kivik should be in a more equable temper, and Skerry-Skerry was acting more like himself.

As if she had expressly ordered it (and perhaps she had), the fog burned off before noon that day. Riding along between the wagons on a chestnut mare belonging to one of the scouts, with her escort of four riding ahead, behind, and to either side of her, Winloki felt remarkably conspicuous crossing that wide, rolling landscape in the broad bright noontime, the only female on horseback among three hundred riders.

And yet she was glad to give up her uncomfortable place in the wagon, pleased and excited to be in the saddle enjoying the spring sunshine, enjoying the constantly changing scenery of this pleasant green country. Up ahead, banners snapped in the wind; bronze helmets and shield bosses shone in the sun; over all stretched a shining sky of brilliant blue. It was simply not in her to be less than blissfully happy on such a day.

Haakon, the youngest of her guards, nudged his rawboned piebald gelding a little closer, so that they were riding almost knee to knee. The gelding was an ugly creature of no particular breeding, but very strong and a good deal faster than anyone might think, or so the youth had confided to her earlier. Lif was its name, and he had raised it from a foal on his father's farm. Haakon also appeared long-limbed and gangly, though he possessed a face of such singular beauty as a girl might envy. He seemed heartbreakingly young to be going to war, even to Winloki, but, just like poor Lif, there was more to Haakon than met the eye. Skerry had praised him as a fierce fighter who had already distinguished himself in battle.

"I wouldn't look quite so blithe, were I you, the next time Prince Kivik comes by," said the boy, lowering his voice, but giving her a quick conspiratorial smile under his dark eyelashes. "They say he's still in a terrible rage."

Winloki shrugged. She did not fear Kivik, and was capable, if she chose, of matching him temper for temper. Besides, Kivik had other things on his mind, compared to which, her presence here was an entirely minor and trivial matter.

Because of the fog, they had veered many miles north of the place where they were to meet Hialli and Eikenskalli and the other marshals. They could change their course, make it right again, now they could see the way, but they could not make up for lost time, not with the wagons, and the day they had agreed to meet had already come and gone. And when Kivik sent scouts ahead to the appointed meeting place by the River Nisse, they had ridden back two hours later to say that the marshals and their armies were not there, nor seemingly had ever been. How could they mistake the signs of such a large encampment, so many thousands of men and horses?

Of course, it was altogether possible that the marshals had also gone astray in the heavy mist. As for the other armies, they might only be five or ten miles off in any direction, just out of range of the scouts. Anytime now, one or two riders might come hurrying back with the welcome news that a great ma.s.s of Skyrran cavalry had been spotted over the next hill.

But for the first time, when Winloki thought of those foggy days just past, the mist did not seem so friendly. What if it had served her own purposes so admirably? There might well have been another well behind it, one that wanted to sow confusion among the armies of Skyrra.

At that idea, a cold shiver ran down her spine and she felt a cold, heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach. The mist had seemed wholly innocent, wholly natural, but what did she know of these things, truly, with her little knowledge and her untrained talents? That, too, was an uneasy thought. Winloki had always considered herself equal to or better than any person or situation she might chance to meet-but supposing there was someone nearby working magics, someone who knew more, and understood more, and could do more than she? Someone beside whom she and her fledgling gifts were negligible?

She suddenly began to doubt herself in other ways, to realize that perhaps she had never been nearly so brave as she imagined. Perhaps what she had mistaken for courage was only arrogance and ignorance. It is easy to be fearless when you think no one can best you, no one can harm you.

To banish those thoughts, she turned to Haakon, searched her mind for something she might say to start a conversation, anything to distract her from her fears, these disturbing revelations of her own character.

"You were born near here?" she ventured at last. "My cousin said that he thought you were."

"Some twenty miles to the north," the young man replied, gesturing. "But I've been all over this country." And he proceeded to regale her with stories of his youthful adventures in this wild land.

He was in the midst of a hair-raising story when his voice suddenly died, and he reached out to take the mare by the bridle. Winloki turned on him a startled and angry look, but he shook his head and advised her to listen.

She did listen, and now she could hear it, too: a rising murmur among the riders up ahead, followed by the clatter of hooves as two of the scouts came riding at great speed back toward the wagons.

"Eisenlonders," shouted one, as he rode past Winloki and her guards. "A great many of them."

What happened next was pure chaos and confusion in Winloki's eyes, though those around her seemed cool-headed enough to know exactly what they were doing. Amidst a great deal of shouting and backing of horses, the wagons changed course, heading toward the rising, more defensible, ground to the north. Reluctant to follow, in sudden doubt as to what was expected of her, Winloki hung back. "If there is going to be a battle, they will need healers."

"The healers come in after the fighting," said Haakon, taking the reins out of her hands. "Princess, begging your pardon, you'd only be in the way."

Yet Winloki remained uncertain, until she saw that the older, more experienced healers were going, too. Then she consented to be led.