Henry leaned forward and dropped his voice for all the world like a conspirator. Sanglant stilled, bread caught halfway to his mouth. “We must move slowly and plan each step with great care if we are to make you king after me.”
Sanglant set down the bread. “Why would I want to be king?”
Henry began to reply, but the wind brought a different and more distracting sound with it: Liath’s voice, her fear, her desperation. She was calling for him.
He started up so violently that the chair tipped and over-balanced. He was outside before he heard it, like the echo of his passing, thud on the ground. The guards jumped aside, startled, but he knew where he was going.
Some noble lord had laid hands on her.
Sanglant had grabbed his arm and ripped him off her before, at her gasp, he took hold of himself and stopped to see who it was.
It had been years, but he would never forget that face. “Hugh.” He opened his hand, and the other man shook him off and took a hasty step backward. He was furious; Sanglant could smell his rage.
“I beg your pardon, my lord prince. This Eagle serves Princess Sapientia, and I was just escorting her back.”
“By dragging her against her will?”
The other man’s voice changed, gentled, soothed, but the tone only raised Sanglant’s hackles. “No, she wants to come with me. Doesn’t she? Doesn’t she, Liath?”
In answer she slid sidewise to nudge up against Sanglant’s chest. The bundle she carried pressed painfully against his lower ribs.
“Liath!” said Hugh, a command. But then, even in the old days in the king’s schola, young Lord Hugh had expected obedience and resented those who would not, or did not have to, give it to him. “Liath, you will come to me!” She made a sound in her throat more like a whimper than a plea and turned her face into Sanglant’s chest.
He could not help himself. It rose in his throat and was echoed from the three dogs who remained to him, back behind the king’s pavilion: a low growl.
Hugh, startled, took another step back, but then he caught himself and smiled sweetly. “You know what they call you now, some of them, don’t you? The prince of dogs.”
“Stay away from her,” said Sanglant.
But Hugh merely measured him and arched one eyebrow sardonically. “‘Do not give what is holy to the dogs.’” He turned with an arrogant shrug and walked away.
She did not move. Without thinking he set a hand on her shoulder, drawing her closer into him. Startled, she looked up.
He had endured hunger for a long time. He had dreamed of her, but she had been a shade, a remembered shadow given brightness by his own despair and need. Now he touched her on the cheek, as she had once touched him in the silence of the crypt. She did not respond, she did not draw back, but he felt the rhythm of her breathing. His was not so steady.
“Marry me, Liath,” he said, because it was now the only thing he knew to say to her. Hadn’t she cut his hair, back there by the stream? Hadn’t she freed him from Bloodheart’s chains? Hadn’t his memory of her been all that kept him from drowning in madness?
The entrance flap to the pavilion stirred and the king emerged into a night suddenly shadowed with the first intimations of dawn: a whistling bird, a tree edged gray instead of black against the night sky, the lost moon and the fading stars.
Henry halted just as Liath saw him and started back, taking a big step away from Sanglant.
“Your Majesty!” she said in the tone of a thief caught with her hand in the royal treasure chest.
His face froze into a mask of stone. But his voice was clear, calm, and commanding. “Eagle, it is time to notify my son Ekkehard and those of the king’s schola left behind at my palace at Weraushausen that we are safe and Gent retaken. You may leave now.”
“My lord king,” began Sanglant.
But she stirred and took yet another step away. “It’s my duty. I must go.”
He let her go. He would not hold her against her will, not when he had been a prisoner for so long. He hated himself fiercely at that moment for what he had become. Prince of dogs: that was what they were calling him now, that was what Bloodheart had called him. Why should she remember anything she had felt before, or what he supposed she had felt, when they had first met in Gent?
He had always been an obedient son.
She hesitated still, glancing once nervously toward the king, and with a sudden impulsive lunge she thrust the bundle she carried into his arms.
“Keep it safe for me, I beg you,” she whispered so only he could hear. Then she turned and walked into the dawn twilight.