"What do you mean? Say more!"

Theophanu would not be drawn.

"Thus is the spider's web of deceit woven," said Scholastica as she pulled her hands out of Theophanu's grasp.

"You are being stubborn," said Sanglant, pacing back to stand with his hands on the wings of his chair.

"I am? You are the one being stubborn, Sanglant. You, a bastard, born of a foreign woman. King Arnulf said all along that Henry was indecently obsessed with that woman. That Henry had made rash promises to bring her to his bed. I am only a few years younger than Henry. I recall it well!" She smiled mockingly. 'An obedient son. Our father's favorite. Yet for a woman he defied the king. How like Henry you are!"

"1 can think of no greater compliment than to be compared to my beloved father," he said grimly.

She cut him off. "Yet when I look at you, when any person looks at you, they see your mother's face. They see the face of a people already at war with us."

There, she struck the blow that stopped him. "At war with us? What do you mean?"

"You have not heard? Ah." Her eyes tightened. Her mouth became a flat line as she regarded him.

Liutgard shifted.

Theophanu sat back.

"I pray you, Nephew, account for me the disposition of your forces. Who rides with you, and who remains behind? Then I will tell you the reports I have heard. I hope they will surprise you."

"I am already surprised." He sat, but he was too restless to stay still. He tapped a foot a dozen or more times against the floor before switching to the other one. "What do you mean?"

"I mean villages and estates in the lands west of Quedlinhame have been attacked most viciously by the Lost Ones made flesh. Our enemies look like you." She surveyed the hall. Her silent clerics, her noble kinsmen, the distant guards: all had a similar Wendish robustness, light hair, big builds. His coloring and his features alone were markedly different. He alone was the bastard, with an outland mother.

Theophanu touched him on the knee as if to remind him that she, too, had an outland mother, a foreigner who had never quite been trusted by good honest Wendish folk. Still, Theophanu resembled her father more than her Arethousan mother.

"There are some who murmur that you have brought this down on us," said Scholastica. "There are many who wonder how you have come to be regnant. If it is all part of a larger plot to conquer Wendar from without and rule over us. You see, the survivors of these recent assaults have told us that when the Lost Ones attack, they call out your name."

3

"Can you not bide here?" she asked him, troubled because all yesterday evening he had gone about his business in such an unusual silence. "Until I return from St. Valeria?"