Child of Flame

Page 132

Suzanne craned her neck to see the front of the congregation. The Lord’s place near the altar stood empty. “He hasn’t missed a Hefensday Eve service once since Lord Wichman quit the city. That must be fully eight months ago.”
“Nay, love, he missed services that one time when he was caught out in a storm and broke his nose.”
Suzanne stifled a giggle. In Steleshame she hadn’t laughed much. No one had smiled much in Steleshame, but after being thrown to the dogs by her Aunt Gisela, Suzanne had had less reason to smile than most. Yet, in time, prosperity had cured her ills. She seemed content enough.
Anna only wished she felt content as well, but every night she dreamed of the young lord, Count Lavastine’s heir. She couldn’t remember his name. It seemed to her that he was weeping and lost, torn between sorrow and rage at the indignities and pain suffered by those he had loved.
Surely she could have helped him, if she had only spoken up. That must be the reason God were punishing her.
The clerics led the congregation in a hymn as the biscop entered from the side porch and took her place in her high seat behind the altar.
“Like a dry and thirsty land that has no water,
so do I seek God.
With my body wasted with longing,
I come before God in the sanctuary.
As I lift my hands in prayer
I am satisfied as with a feast,
and in the watches of the night
I trust in the love which shelters me.”
The cleric leading the singing faltered, face washing pale, and a hush poured forward like a wave from the great doors at the entrance to the cathedral. Everyone turned to look.
A nobleman stood in the entryway. He seemed frozen, hesitant, as if he could not make his feet move him forward into the nave. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had a sharply foreign look about him: a bronze-complexioned face, high cheekbones, and night-black hair cut to hang loose at his shoulders. His features struck Anna with a disquiet that made her mouth go dry. He seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Lord Hrodik waited awkwardly behind him, staring at the big man in awe.
Suzanne staggered, and Raimar steadied her on his arm. “Prince Sanglant,” she whispered.
The nobleman’s gaze swept the congregation. For an uncanny instant, Anna actually thought he found and fastened on Suzanne, alone of the throng. Suzanne made a noise in her throat—whether a protest or a prayer was hard to tell—and hid her face against Raimar’s shoulder.
As if that muffled sound goaded him forward, he strode up the aisle without looking to his left or to his right. The altar brought him up short. He stared at the chain lying at rest in a heap at the stone base, nostrils flaring like those of a spooked horse. The biscop hurried forward from her seat, but he dropped down to a crouch without greeting her and reached to touch the chain as though it were a poisonous snake.
“God save us.” Matthias grasped Anna’s arm so tightly that his grip pinched her skin. “It’s the daimone!”
Anna shook her head numbly. The daimone trapped here by Bloodheart had not been human; it had only taken on human form when it had been forced down out of the heavens and into its painful imprisonment within the bounds of earth.
“It wasn’t a daimone at all,” Matthias went on breathlessly, “but a noble man, that same prince they spoke of. By what miracle did he survive?”
Sweating now and shaking, the prince settled to his knees before the altar and looked unlikely to budge. Lord Hrodik hurried forward as if to remonstrate with him, but a slender cleric placed himself between the two men and with an outstretched hand waved to the young lord to move away.
Biscop Suplicia was not easily startled, although for an instant her lips parted in astonishment. She gestured to her clerics to step back, resumed chanting the service alone in a resonant soprano. Slowly, in stuttering gasps, her clerics joined in, although many of them could not stop staring at the man in his rich tunic and finely-embossed belt who had fallen to his knees right there before the altar. It was hard to tell if he were remarkably pious, stricken by God’s mercy, or simply striving not to fall apart altogether, for his hands clutched at that chain until his knuckles whitened and a trickle of blood ran from one scraped finger.
In this way, the congregation, led by an anxious Lord Hrodik, dutifully followed the service to completion. The prince spoke not one word throughout, and when the biscop lifted her hands to heaven at the close of the final prayer, he bolted up as though he’d been nipped. That fast, like a wind from heaven, he fled down the aisle toward the entryway, then suddenly cut through the crowd, who parted fearfully before him.