“Abbot Luviar has been most concerned about you,” he said as I reveled in the savory broth and tiny bits of succulent poultry deemed suitable for an invalid. “He’s had prayers said, asked blessings as we sit at table. He’ll be in to see you now I’ve sent word you’re awake.”
“Mmm,” I said, holding the last warm spoonful in my mouth before I let it trickle down my throat. “Iero’s holy angels…all of you.” I was feeling quite devout.
He grinned, an expression distinctly odd for a badger. “I’ll get you more.”
I had never shared Boreas’s horror of monks, but then I had never been fool enough to creep over a priory wall with a bursar’s coffer on my back. Boreas had been sentenced to the loss of one hand, a flogging, and a week in pillory, but managed to escape before suffering any of the three. Now he was convinced that every monk and lay brother passed his description about the realm tucked in sleeves or under scapulars, and that every abbot and prior was determined to hang him.
Sadly, my own direst peril had less to do with lawbreaking or sin than with birth and blood, circumstances for which no sanctuary could be granted. But I had no reason to believe that my loathsome family or the Pureblood Registry could find me here or anywhere. I’d shed them both at fifteen and had long since drowned myself in a sea of anonymity. I had no intention of bobbing to the surface. Ever.
Two more bowls of the brothers’ heaven-kissed soup and I took even the changing of the dressing on my thigh with good humor. Warm, fed, and clean—indeed someone had washed me head to toe while I slept—and out of the weather, and no one coming after me with arrows, pikes, lances, or hands outstretched for money…perhaps the boy Jullian was indeed the archangel who guarded the gates of Paradise. The truest wonder was that he had let me in.
I fell asleep as promptly as a cat in a sunbeam. When my eyes drifted open again sometime later, a long-limbed man of more than middling years sat on the stool at my bedside. A golden solicale dangled from his neck—the sunburst symbol of Iero’s glory worked in a pendant so heavy it must surely be an abbot’s ensign. Instead of effecting a modest tonsure like the infirmarian’s, he had shaved his head entirely clean.
Holding in mind my present comforts, I bowed my head and shaped my greeting in the Karish manner. “In the name of holy Iero and his saints, my humblest gratitude be yours, holy father. Truly the One God led my wayward footsteps to this refuge when the world and all its ways had failed me.” I didn’t think it too grovelish.
“Iero commands us offer his hand in charity,” said the abbot, “and so we have done. It remains to be seen what he has in mind for you.” His full-shaven pate, fine arched nose, and narrow, pock-grooved face made his cool gray eyes seem very large.
I squirmed a bit, suddenly feeling even more naked than I already was under my lovely blankets.
A younger monk, full-shaven as well, but with unmarked skin and dark brows that made a solid line above deep-set eyes, stood a few steps behind the abbot, hands tucked piously under his black scapular. Though his expression remained properly sober, his brow lifted slightly and his mouth quickened with amusement as he observed me under the abbot’s eye.
“What is your name, my son?” The abbot took no note of his attendant’s improper levity.
“Valen, holy father.”
“Valen. Nothing else, then?”
“Nay, holy father.” No title to mark me as nobility or clergy. No town or profession to mark me as a rooted man even if my father was unimportant. No association with any of the three provinces of Navronne—Ardra, Morian, or Evanore—or with their contentious princes. And certainly no colineal surname to proclaim my family pureblood, and thus my future beyond even an abbot’s right to determine. Especially not that. “Just Valen.”
“Valen Militius, perhaps?”
Another dangerous topic. The young attendant monk’s dark brows lifted slightly. Attentive. At the worktable, Brother Robierre’s head was bent over his mortar and pestle, plants and vials, but his hands grew still.
Though I tried to dip my own head farther, being propped on my side made it difficult. “Not a professional soldier, holy father, far from it, nor even a worthy freeman-at-arms. But I once carried a pike for King Eodward, Iero cherish his soul, and stood behind him as he drove the Hansker barbarians back across the sea. He called us his men of light, and so we all felt more than what we were born.” All true. And now the test would come…
“And what of noble Eodward’s sons?” He touched the clean linen that wrapped my shoulder and made a blessing sign upon it. My flesh warmed beneath the bandage. “Which of the three princes owns your fealty? Or do you hope for this ghostly Pretender of current rumor?”
“None of them, holy father. Though the sign of three speaks of heaven, these three sons are so far from worthy of their kingly father that an ignorant lout such as I am cannot choose. And though I reverence any issue of good King Eodward, I fear that naught but tavern gossip has delivered him a fourth son.”
Unless I could discover with which prince this man’s favor rested, I dared not say more. Perryn of Ardra, whom I had chosen as being the most intelligent and least openly brutal of the half brothers, was surely dead by now, or in chains, babbling his plans and the names of his noble supporters to his brother Bayard’s torturers. In either case, my oath to him was moot. He had shown himself mean and so stubbornly inept that my loyalty had been ruined much earlier. He certainly was not worth dying for.
I glanced up. The gray eyes held steady, the long, slender bones of the abbot’s face unmoved. “So your wounds were not earned in battle, then?”
Well, the battle had been over months before we’d charged Prince Bayard’s line at Wroling—in the spring when Bayard of Morian had allied with Sila Diaglou and her Harrowers. But such quibbling wouldn’t carry weight with this abbot. Not with a wound in my back, and the admission requiring me to declare not only that I had run away, but which side I had deserted. I needed a better story.
“Nay, holy father, rather my wounds stem from a private dispute with another man regarding property that belonged to me. Though right was with me in the matter, I believed I was going to die and so confessed my sins to a village practor. He sent me on the road with my wounds untended as penance, saying the One God would put me in the way of death or life as was his will.”
I held still and listened carefully, fighting the urge to add more words to this collection of nonsense, such as what village I’d come from or why I had suffered the strikes of arrows rather than knife or club. It seemed a very long time until the abbot spoke again.
“Was this, by chance, the disputed property, Valen?”
The dark-browed monk stepped forward, pulled a book out of his black gown, and passed it to the abbot. The abbot laid it on the bed in front of my face, a squarish book some three fingers thick, its brown leather binding tooled in gold with gryphons and dragons, long-limbed angels, roundels, vine leaves, and every flourish of the leather gilder’s art. Slightly damp at one corner, but I quickly verified that the dampness had not touched the fine vellum pages enough to damage them or smear the ink.
“If so, and if you have any idea of what you carry and can tell me how you’ve come by it, then I may believe your story.”
I swallowed, puffed out a strong breath, and touched my finger to the golden letters on its cover and the familiar sigil of a gryphon carrying a rolled map in its claws. “Of course, holy father. This is the original volume of Maps of the Known World, created by the pureblood, Janus de Cartamandua-Magistoria, the most famous cartographer in all of Navronne’s history.” That part was true, of course. My mind raced. “It was given me…seven years ago…when, with Iero’s grace, my service…scouting…preserved the Mardane Lavorile’s troop from capture by the Hansker. Knowing a scout would understand its worth, his lordship said it was fitting recompense for the lives I had saved. One of these wild Harrowers tried to take it. They think to burn all books, you know.”