Crown of Stars

“What of the child?”



“Is he some kinsman of yours?”



“I found him abandoned in the woods, just as I said.”



“Then why burden yourself with him? Look at him! That child’s half dead, crippled, useless. Can it even speak?”



“Dog,” said the babe.



“Dog!” snorted the youth. “A good name, don’t you think? We could clean him up and take him in the barracks as a mascot, Calos. Put him up on a chair by the door and teach him to say ‘dog’ every time one of Captain Alfonse’s Salian braggarts comes past.”



Calos choked down a laugh, but it was easy to see the notion amused him.



“The lady has Salian soldiers in her retinue?” Alain asked.



“Oh, plenty of them, the cursed snails!” said the youth with the good humor of a man who has suffered no real harm from disparaging his comrades. “Foul-tempered and gluttonous. They come with that Salian lord who is one of my lady’s commanders but I don’t recall his name. Lots of Salians. They’ve got no king now. All at each other’s throats, so it’s said. No wonder they come east, these ones. It’s safer here.”



“It wasn’t for those driven out into the woods,” said Alain, waving an arm back the way he had come.



“They brought their own trouble down on them,” said Calos with a sneer. “What of the little lad? I’m liking this idea of Jochim’s the more I think on it. Up their craw, and them not daring to hurt a tiny babe so crippled as this one is.”



“Would you treat a dog so?” Alain asked, angered by their suggestion.



“We treat our dogs well!” retorted Calos indignantly. “What do you take us for? Any dog we take in, we treat well. Train it. Feed it.”



“You’d treat this child as nothing more than that?”



Calos shook his head. “What are you thinking, friend?” he said, with a tilted smile and a narrowed gaze, as if he were scolding Alain or laughing at his naivety. “This poor child has never in his life been treated as well as us troopers under the command of Captain Lukas treat our good dogs. I’ll swear to you he’ll do as well. Better than he’s done. We need a laugh in our barracks.”



“What happens to the child when you go home to your villages?”



Both of them laughed, but the laughter concealed pain. “I was born in town,” said Calos. “The lady’s service is my life, friend. As for Jochim here, he’s got no village to go back to. Flooded out, it was, when the river went running backward last autumn. His whole family died in them floods and most of the other folk in the place likewise. The rest had to beg in the lanes and I suppose most of them died over the winter and early spring. He’s lucky to get a meal every day and a bed to sleep in. He’s lucky we took him in, seeing him a likely soldier. So will you be—lucky if we take you in. Or haven’t you heard? Times are hard. If these frosts don’t lift, if the sun don’t come, if the crops don’t grow, they’ll get worse. Much worse.”



“I pray you,” whispered young Jochim, wiping a tear from his eye. “Don’t speak such ill words. The Enemy hears us.”



“Are you coming?” asked Calos. “Can we adopt the little lad?”



He wasn’t afraid to meet Alain’s gaze, dead on, searching as much as he was searched. An honest man, of his kind, not compassionate but not cruel either; he meant what he said. He did his job, and was loyal to those he had pledged his loyalty to. Maybe he was right about the child. Maybe the most a beggar’s crippled and abandoned orphan son could hope for in these days was to be treated as well as a well-kept dog.



2



CAPTAIN Lukas was a hard-living man who found the idea of a child mascot who could only say the word “dog” just as amusing as did his soldiers. That he hated the Salian interlopers need not be spoken out loud. The locals in Autun had always hated the Salians. It was in their blood. That the beloved Emperor Taillefer had been himself a Salian, had been emperor of Salia and Varre and much more land besides, and had built his famous chapel and palace in Autun and ruled from here as much as he ruled from any one place, was beside the point. That he had chosen to be buried here just went to show that Taillefer wasn’t a Salian, not really. He’d been born on an estate in what was now Varingia, so the story went, so he was really of Varre and that meant that Varre had once conquered Salia, not the other way around.



“I like it,” said the captain, laughing with his sergeants as Calos and Jochim looked on. He slapped his thigh. “Yes! Best keep him well fed, though, and get the dogs to guard him, so we can say he’s just speaking to them. All innocent!”