Prince of Dogs

Page 50

The brass badge pressed painfully against the joint where arm met shoulder as he shifted, trying to find a comfortable position so that the chains did not rub him raw.
The Eagle’s badge. Her image came to his mind’s eye as sharply as if he had seen her yesterday. Her name he remembered, when he had forgotten so much else: Liath.
“My heart rests not within me but with another, and she is far away from here.” Was it true? Or had he only spoken those words as defiance, as a shield against Bloodheart’s enchantment? What if it were true? What if it could be true?
There was a world beyond this prison, if he could only imagine it. But when he imagined life, he imagined war, battle, his brave Dragons dying around him. That imagining always led him here, chained to the altar stone in this cathedral. What was the name of the city?
She would know.
Gent. It was in Gent he waited, imprisoned, scraping sometimes at his chains, sawing at them with the knife when the Eika were absent, but he could not get free.
Yet as the holy man is freed from the world by contemplating God, surely he could free at least his mind from this prison by contemplating the world outside. He was not a holy man, to meditate on Our Lord and Lady, although surely he ought to. He was too restless for that holy peace, and uneducated in the disciplines of the mind.
The world outside waned from autumn to winter. It was cold. The dying sun would be reborn, as they sang in the Old Faith, and then spring would return. And he would still be chained.
She had led others to freedom. If he only imagined himself walking beside her through a field of oats, then Bloodheart could touch him no longer.
6
YOUNG Tallia, her wheat-colored hair and wheat-colored gown rendering her almost colorless, knelt on the hard stone floor before Mother Scholastica’s chair. The girl carefully avoided the carpet laid on the floor, as if she dared not succumb to the luxury of padding beneath her much-abused knees.
“I beg you!” she cried. “I want nothing more than to dedicate my life to the church in memory of the woman I was named after, Biscop Tallia of Pairri, she who was daughter of the great Emperor Taillefer. If you would let me pledge myself as a novice here at Quedlinhame, I would serve faithfully. I would humble myself as befits a good nun. I would serve the poor with my own hands and wash the feet of lepers.”
The king, pacing, turned at this. “I have had several marriage offers for you, none of which I am tempted to act on at this time—”
“I beg you, Uncle!” Tallia had the dubious ability to make tears spring out at any utterance. But Rosvita did not think this entirely contrived: The girl had a kind of tortured piety about her, no doubt from living with her mother Sabella and her poor idiot of a father, Duke Berengar. “Let me be wed to Our Lord, not to the flesh.”
Henry lifted his eyes to heaven as if imploring God to grant him patience. Rosvita had heard this argument played out a dozen times in the last six months—indeed, Tallia seemed to have memorized the speech—and the cleric knew Henry wearied of it and of the girl’s dramatic piety.
“I am not opposed to your vocation,” said the king, turning back finally and speaking with some semblance of patience, “but you are an heiress, Tallia, and therefore not so easily removed from the world.”
The girl cast one beseeching glance toward Queen Mathilda, who reclined on a couch, then clasped her hands at her breast, shut her eyes, and began to pray.
“However,” said Mother Scholastica before the girl could get well-launched into a psalm, “we have agreed, King Henry and I, that for the time being you will reside with the novices here at Quedlinhame. But only until a decision has been made over what will become of you.”
By this means, of course, Henry and Scholastica placed Tallia as a virtual hostage in the middle of Henry’s strongest duchy. But Tallia wept tears of gratitude and was finally—thank the Lady—led away by the schoolmistress.
Queen Mathilda said, into the silence, “She seems fierce in her vocation.”
“Indeed,” said Henry in the tone of a man who has been pressed too far. “Her privations are legendary.”
Mother Scholastica raised one eyebrow. She studied the owl feather—her quill pen—that lay by her right hand; touching its feathers briefly, stroking them with the tip of a finger, she looked at her mother. “Excessive piety can itself be a form of pride,” she said drily.
“So did I observe in you,” said the old queen with the barest of smiles, “when you were young.”
“So did I come to observe in myself,” said Mother Scholastica without smiling. Here, in her private study with only family and clerics in attendance, she had let slip her white scarf to reveal hair, rather lighter than Henry’s, liberally sprinkled with gray. Only three years younger than Henry, she looked perhaps ten years younger. This contradiction was much debated in the matristic writings. Women, blessed with the ability to bleed and to give birth, suffered from that birthing if they took advantage of the blessing, while those who pledged themselves and their fertility to the church, living their lives as holy virgins, often lived much longer lives. Mathilda, who had given birth to ten children and been widowed at the age of thirty-eight, looked as ancient and frail as Mother Otta, the abbess of Korvei Convent, but Mother Otta was ninety and the queen only fifty-six.