The hounds remained strangely silent. Nor did they leap forward to attack the prince.
The creature flexed his arms and legs, stretching. Then he turned.
He was fast. Alain didn’t see the lunge coming until it was too late. The prince grabbed hold of Alain’s left arm. With a powerful, almost careless swipe of one hand, the Eika prince slashed the back of Alain’s hand with the white claws that sprouted from his knuckles. Blood spurted out. Alain was too horrified to move, too appalled at his own stupidity: Now I will die. But surely the Lady and Lord will forgive me, if the error rose from compassion. The hounds did not stir, did not bolt forward to attack the prince, and that itself was a marvel.
The Eika prince raised Alain’s bleeding hand to his mouth and lapped up the blood. Alain was so appalled he felt dizzy. He could only stare as the prince cut his own left hand with his claws and lifted the hand … for Alain to do the same, to return the gesture.
“Go free,” said the prince. “Paier sanguis.” Pay blood.
Sorrow whined. Rage growled deep in her throat, her head turning to look toward the gate.
There was no time to waste. Gagging, Alain took one lick. The blood was staggeringly sweet, like honey. He reeled back. His vision clouded. He heard, distantly, the murmuring of a small group of people as they advanced across the outer court. He heard the soft scrape of metal knives rustling against cloth. He smelled the fetid odor of the latrines, as if the people he heard were downwind from the latrines, although with the wind this night that should have been much too far away from the stockade for him to be able to hear or smell such things.
“Mi nom es fil fifte litiere fifte.” Then the prince was gone.
Alain dug his knuckles into his eyes, rubbing hard. The hounds nudged him, and when he opened his eyes, he saw a shadow on the ladder. It climbed, threw itself over the top, and vanished from his sight. He ran.
He got to the top of the ladder in time to see a thin wink of shadow fade into the forest. Gone free. Alain’s hand throbbed. He touched the cut to his lips reflexively, tasting the sharp tang of blood.
The forest is alive at night with strange creatures. Bare feet sink into the loam of last autumn’s fallen leaves. It is cool, and dark, and leaves skitter in the night breeze in patterns of shadow made plain against darker shadow.
Alain shook himself free. There! He saw a party of six people emerge from the palisade gate beside the latrines. Oddly enough, the taste of honey still lingering on his tongue, he knew at once the figure in the center was Biscop Antonia, although it was too dark to make out more than the suggestion of their presence.
They were coming here.
He scrambled down the ladder and unchained the hounds. He would face Master Rodlin’s wrath in the morning and pretend to be asleep tonight. It was the coward’s way; he knew that. He ought to confront her … but she was a biscop! A great woman of the court. He was nothing, no one, not compared to those of high rank.
He hid in the lean-to while they tapped on the gate.
The hounds leaped and barked and growled. After a while, the biscop and her party went away.
“All is prepared,” he heard the biscop say with his newly uncanny hearing as she and her clerics walked back toward the palisade. “It is necessary that we act. We must find another to consecrate at the altar. One who will not be missed.” The words faded into a sudden vision of running at a steady lope through the night forest.
Mi nom, the Eika prince had said, using the Salian words. My name is Fifth Son of the Fifth Litter. Alain shook his head. He was still dizzy, from fear, from excitement, from guilt, from the taste of blood. He had heard wrong.
“One who will not be missed.”
The hounds whined. Sorrow finally nosed loose the latch on the lean-to door and shoved inside, pressing himself up against Alain, licking his face and then, like a healer mending wounds, the fresh cut on his hand.
There was only one person in this stronghold besides the Eika prince who would not be mourned or missed should he vanish. Fear nosed his hand and licked his fingers.
He whistled the hounds to obedience and took Sorrow and Rage with him for protection. But by the time he got to the stables, Lackling was gone.
Stricken, terrified, he took the two hounds up the old path that led by dim and twisting ways into the hills, to the old ruins. He ran, as well as he could, but the path was narrow and the turns sudden and more than once his foot caught on a patch of loose rock or on a root and he slipped, going down hard. The hounds loped along beside him, stopping only to lick and nuzzle him when he fell.
When he came at last to the edge of the clearing and looked out over the old ruins, he thought for an instant that the waning gibbous moon had splintered into two moons and that its other half burned in the ruins, attended by brilliant Seirios, the star known to navigators as the Burning Arrow. But those were lanterns, not moon or star. They stood around the altar house like sentries. A hazy light rose from within, shining up out of the roofless walls.
