“She wants to be rid of Hugh,” whispered Ekkehard. “She hates him, but she promised her mother never to harm him, no matter what, and to give him shelter when he needed it. Margrave Judith loved him best of all. Just as our father loved you, the bastard, the least deserving.”
An explosion of pigeons burst out of the arcade, fluttering away into the twilight sky. The sound of their passage faded swiftly as they flew over the town and out past the walls. Sanglant’s senses were strung so tautly that he imagined them skimming over the fields. He felt he could actually hear the pressure of wing beats against the air as their flight took them over woodland and farther yet, racing south into the uncut forest lands where beasts roamed and lawless men hid from justice.
Theophanu clutched his hand, pressed tightly. “Beware. Hugh is the most dangerous of all.”
A certain pleasant, malicious warmth suffused Sanglant. “‘Nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death.’ Was I not so cursed? Hugh can’t kill me.”
“Perhaps not,” said Theophanu, “but he can strike at your kinfolk. At your Eagle. At your wife.”
As if her words were an incantation, a shape appeared at the door, limned by the pallor of dawn. Hathui was already on her feet, ready to move.
“Liath!” He started forward to meet her, but he had not gone halfway down the nave when he halted, seeing what she carried.
Memory struck hard.
She thrust the bundle she carried into his arms. “Keep it safe for me, I beg you,” she said to him before she rode away to carry the king’s word to Weraushausen, to Ekkehard and the king’s schola. Years ago.
The book had been the talisman that had linked him to her in those days when he had thought of nothing except her, because the memory of her had been the only thing that had kept him sane when he suffered as Bloodheart’s prisoner in Gent. The book had brought her back to him. He had kept it safe, and she had married him because she trusted him where she trusted no one else.
She thrust it into his arms.
“See here, Sanglant! Touch it! Look! It’s Da’s book.”
“Where did you get it?” he said hoarsely, and even Theophanu exhaled at the anger that made his voice tight. “Hugh had this. Have you seen Hugh?”