PROLOGUE
BEYOND Gent, moving into the east toward the marchlands, the king’s progress journeyed slowly because of the immense damage caused by the great winds of autumn. Along the roads and in every village they passed through the regnant heard the same desperate complaints: the farmers dared not plant because frost kept coming long past its accustomed time; there was no sun; too little rain fell despite the haze that covered the sky.
They ate on short rations and collected a meager tithe from the estates and villages they passed through, but none among the king’s progress complained, because they ate every day. Each afternoon when they set camp and gathered wood for fires, folk approached the camp, materializing out of woodland, out of the dusk, out of the misty night air.
“I pray you,” a ragged child might whisper, clutching the hand of an emaciated younger child, both barefoot although the ground had a sheen of frost. “Have you bread? Any crust?”
Haggard young women and youths beckoned from the twilight. “Anything you want, for a bite of food. Anything.”
Peddlers made the rounds. “Rope. Cloth. Nice carved bowls. For a good price. Very cheap. I’ll take food in trade.”
Exhausted stewards and villagers begged to see the regnant. Noble lords and ladies grown lean with hardship asked for an audience.
“A plague of rats, Your Majesty. They ate all of our grain. Even that we had set aside for seed. Gnawed through half the leather we had tanned and worked. They came out of nowhere, a flood of them. Horrible!”
“It’s this frost. We daren’t plant because it will kill the seedlings. Yet if we wait, there’ll not be enough season for the crops to ripen.”
“Have you seen the sun on your travels, Your Majesty?”
“Wolves carried off a child, Your Majesty, and killed two of our milk cows. We hunted them, but they attacked us when we tracked them to their lair. They killed four men. I’m an old man. I’ve never seen them so bold as they are now.”
“My husband and sons were killed, Your Majesty. They were only walking to market. I have no one to plow the field. My daughters are just now barely old enough to be married. My husband’s cousins claim the land and wish to turn me and the girls out homeless, with nothing.”
“Bandits, Your Majesty. No one is safe on the roads without an armed escort. I have but a dozen milites in my service. The rest were called to serve King Henry, may he rest in peace in the Chamber of Light. They never returned from Aosta.”
Their desperation gave Liath a headache, but Sanglant would sit for hours and listen even and especially when there was nothing he could do for them except listen.
“I have been told,” he might say, “that if you cover the fields with straw it protects seedlings from frost. There lies plenty of deadwood because of the tempest. Set bonfires at night to warm the air along the rows.”
“Here is a deed to the land, signed by my schola. If you have no nephews or kinsmen who can help with the land, then here are a pair of crippled soldiers in my retinue who agree to marry into your house. They can’t fight, but together they can manage the fieldwork.”
“Speak to Lady Renate of Spelburg. She is also plagued by bandits, no doubt the same group. Her estate lies only two days’ march east of here. You must pool your resources. If you have lost this much of your population, then for the time being you must consolidate in one place. Offer protection there for the common folk who rely on you. Combine your milites. If you do not cooperate, you will certainly drown.”
“The sun will return. Be patient. Act prudently until the crisis has passed. Do not abandon those who will turn on you if they have no other way to save themselves.”
These pronouncements his audience absorbed with an almost pitiable gratitude, but in only one case could he act immediately. A guide led them to the wolves’ lair. Liath called fire down within the warren of caves where the wolf pack laired, and the soldiers killed over a dozen as the beasts tried to escape flames and smoke. The wolves were dangerous predators, but they were beautiful, too, in the way of dangerous things, and she hated to see them slaughtered like sheep. Yet afterward they found the much-gnawed bones of several children in the outer cave. The wolves had grown too bold. Such a pack could not be allowed to keep hunting.
“A small act in a desperate time,” Sanglant said the next day, when they were riding again. His voice was hoarse with apprehension and the helpless anger of seeing so much trouble that could tear the realm asunder, but then, he always sounded like that. “I am ashamed to have them fall at my feet with such praises. If the weather does not improve, half of them will be dead by next spring.”