He slipped out the doors before her attention drifted back to him. He was so ashamed. He didn’t want her to recognize him, to see what a poor wretch he had become, no longer a man at all, used and discarded many times over. He remembered the pride shining in her face on that day years ago when he had left their village to walk as a missionary into the east. She must never know what had really happened to him. Better that she believe he was dead.
He took the food and drink offered to him, took his goat and his worn pack and left the palace complex as quickly as he could in case she should come looking, to assuage her curiosity. West, Humbert told him, the road toward Bederbor.
So he walked, alone, nursing his despair. What he had seen, what had been done to him, what he had himself acquiesced to, had opened a chasm between him and his family that could never be bridged. All that was left him was the secret language of the stars, the clouds of black dust and the brilliant lights, the silver-gold ribbon that twisted through the heavenly spheres, the beauty of an ineffable cosmos in whose heart, perhaps, he could lose himself if only he could come to understand its mysteries.
Determined and despondent, he trudged west on the trail of the prince.
2
USING a stout stick as his sword, Sanglant beheaded thistles one by one, an entire company hewn down by savage whacks.
“You’re in a foul mood,” observed Heribert. The slender cleric sat on a fallen log whittling the finishing touches into the butt of a staff. He had carved the tip into the likeness of a fortress tower surmounted by a Circle of Unity. Behind them, half concealed by a copse of alder, Captain Fulk supervised the setup of a makeshift camp among the stones of an ancient Dariyan fort long since fallen into ruin.
“The king was right.” Sanglant kept decapitating thistles as he spoke. He could not bear to sit still, not now, with frustration burning through him. He felt as helpless as the thistles that fell beneath his sharp strokes. “How can I support a retinue without lands of my own?”
“Duke Conrad’s chatelaine made no protest. She put us up in the hall at Bederbor for a full five days.”
“And Conrad did not return, nor would she tell us where he had gone or when she expected him back. Thus leaving us to go on our way. We’re dependent on the generosity of other nobles. Or on their fear.”