“I don’t want to go to the tower! I want to go to—”

“You deserted me,” Antonia said, keeping her voice low so others would not hear. Long had it festered. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how angry he had made her. “You disobeyed me! I never gave you permission to leave me.”

“I remember you,” said Heribert in a voice not his own. “He never liked you.”

“What do I care if he liked me or not! He is a bastard, no better than a dog! It is your desertion of the one to whom you owe allegiance that offends God.”

“I acted because of what was in my heart. I loved him, but he is lost to me and I can love no other.”

She slapped him.

His face, so finely bred and once so familiar, seemed that of a stranger as he carefully drew his sleeve out of her grasp and turned to the guards. “I would follow them I know,” he said with his back to her as if she were no better than a servant. No one to whom he owed fealty. No one who mattered one whit to him.

She fell, and fell, into the Pit, into a fit of coughing furious sickening rage, but he was already beyond her and she would not make a scene with servants walking past and Captain Falco watching beside the door with rebuking curiosity.

‘Are you well, Your Excellency? I pray you are not ill.”

Falco did not so pray. He distrusted her. Few could love the righteous. They envied and hated them instead.

But her son. Her own son, for whom she had sacrificed so much!

Heribert would be punished, of course. Did it not state in the Holy Verses that children were commanded to respect and honor their mothers and fathers, or else be stoned to death?

Yet Heribert was weak. She knew that because she had raised him to be weak and compliant. It was the bastard, the false one, the enemy—Prince Sanglant—who had corrupted him.

Therefore, it was Sanglant who had to fall.

PART THREE

ABVENTUS

IX

WELL MET

1

THE adventus of Sanglant, son of Henry, into the ancient citadel of Quedlinhame at the head of his victorious army would be commemorated in poetry and song, Liath supposed, but no doubt the poets would sing of fine silken banners rippling in the breeze and gaily caparisoned horses prancing under the rein of their magnificently-garbed riders, a host splendid and brilliant beyond description, shining in the light of the sun. That’s what poets did. This ragged army and dreary day offered no fodder for song, so song would make of them something they were not.

But march they did along the road, silent, weary, hungry, but not beaten. On this gray, late winter day, the view before them was dominated by the hill and its ancient fortress, now the cloister ruled by Sanglant’s aunt, Mother Scholastica. The fields on one side of the road lay in stubble, and on the other a field of winter wheat had sprouted mostly weeds.