He dozed fitfully, waking frequently while around him his retinue talked quietly among themselves or napped. Breschius played chess with Lady Bertha. Sapientia snored softly. Flashes of dream brightened and faded as he twisted in and out of sleep. Liath weaving light among standing stones. Severed threads curling and writhing like beheaded snakes, like the serpent winding its way up Eudokia’s wrist. Bells. An arrow flowering into flame. Bayan, dead, and Sapientia walking in chains, a prisoner. Who had done this to her?
He started awake, troubled and restless, and this time got to his feet. Walking outside, he staggered when he hit the sunlight; in the shady arbor, he had forgotten its strength. Hathui strolled up beside him.
“By the fountain we are surely safe from listening ears, my lord prince.”
The fountain’s spray beckoned. He sat on the lip of the fountain and let the cooling mist float over him, beads collecting on his neck, sliding under the heavy torque, moistening his lips and hands. Hathui followed, shading her eyes with an arm. The rest of them prudently waited in the shade, watching him—or still sleeping away the heat of the day.
“Do you think she knows of the Seven Sleepers?” Hathui asked once she stood within the corona of the fountain’s noisy spray. “Or is in league with them?”
“I don’t know. The church condemned the mathematici a hundred years ago. I do not know if the Arethousan patriarch did the same. Perhaps Brother Breschius knows. I suppose it will be difficult to tease out the truth.”
“Do you think the asp was really poisonous?”
He laughed. “It seemed poisonous enough to me. Just as well I left my daughter back at the fort for safekeeping, since she would insist on handling the serpent herself. The question we must ask is whether it was magic, or herb-craft, that saved the eunuch. We cannot trust the Arethousans, nor should we try to bring them into affairs they are better left out of. If it’s true that my father wars against their agents and vassals in southern Aosta, then they will either seek to hinder us in order to harm him, or they will help us hoping to weaken him.”
“You would rather trust to barbarians and pagans, my lord prince? To these Kerayit that Brother Breschius speaks of?”
“They have less to gain whether we succeed or fail, do they not?”
“Yet how do we find them?”
“How do we find them?” he echoed. “Or am I simply a fool to think I can pit myself against Anne?”
“Someone must, my lord prince. Do not forget your father, the king.”
Here in the courtyard, open to the air, he heard noises from the town, a stallion’s defiant trumpeting, the rumble of cartwheels along cobbles, a man shouting.
He smiled grimly. “Nay, I do not forget him. Am I not his obedient son?”