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Rosvita lingered, bitten by curiosity. The young Eagle remained kneeling. A few tears streaked her cheeks, but she made no sound, moved not at all even to wipe them away. She simply stared fixedly at the cold stone floor.

“Eagle!” called Sapientia from her seat at the central table. “Attend me!”Advertisement

She rose and, silent, attended her new mistress.

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A DEER IN THE FOREST

1

“I still don’t like her,” said Sapientia to her companion, Lady Brigida, whose status as Sapientia’s current favorite gave her the privilege of combing the princess’ hair in the evening before bed. “That skin of hers. It’s so … so …”

“Dirty? She might wash more.”

“It isn’t dirt. It doesn’t come off. I rubbed at it yesterday.” The princess giggled. “Perhaps she’s the lost sister of Conrad the Black, or his by-blow.”

“Hmm. She’s too old to be his by-blow … but perhaps not, if he bedded some girl when he was young Brother Constantine’s age. Perhaps she’s a Jinna slave girl who escaped her master.”

“Then how would she know how to speak our language?” demanded Sapientia.

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“Duke Conrad’s mother didn’t enter the convent after the elder Conrad died, did she? Perhaps this is her second child by another man.” Lady Brigida had the unfortunate habit of snorting when she giggled, and she giggled a great deal, possessing ample inheritance in lands but little in wit or sense. “You wouldn’t think she would have had to hide the child unless there was something wrong with the lover she had taken.”

“I believe she lives quite retired. Still, there’s something in what you say, Brigida, that she must have Jinna blood in her, for they’re all brown like that. But I still say she must have some Wendish blood in her, or she’d not be able to speak our language.”

“Didn’t Father Hugh say any bird can be taught human speech?”

Liath endured this without flinching. Their idiocy and arrogance bothered her not one whit. At this moment, Hugh was not in the room, and after three days as Sapientia’s Eagle that was the only mercy she lived for.

“Keep brushing,” said Sapientia. “Whom should I marry, Brigida?”

“Lord Amalfred,” said Brigida instantly. “He’s very handsome and he killed a bear last week with his own hand, as you saw, as well as a dozen deer or more. I should like a husband like that. When I inherit from my mother, I’ll expand her lands eastward, and I’ll need a strong fighting man at my side.”

“He’s only the son of a Salian duchess. I must marry a man with royal connections.”

“Isn’t King Henry going to send for an Arethousan prince for you to marry, since your mother was an eastern princess?”

Sapientia sighed sharply and tossed her head, disturbing the smooth flow of black hair that Lady Brigida had been stroking with the comb. “Even my Eagle knows better than that, Brigida. Isn’t that so, Eagle? Why can I not marry an Arethousan prince?”

In three days Liath had learned that Sapientia liked her to be stupid. “I don’t know, Your Highness.”

Although, in this case, she did know. But the humiliation at Hugh’s hands still stung bitterly, not least because he had been right as well as wrong. It was true she read well and that Da had taught her a great deal—but when Hugh had paraded her ignorance publicly, to torture her, she had suddenly realized that Da had taught her narrowly. She knew far more than Hugh and probably any person at court of the knowledge hoarded by the mathematici, and yet how could she judge how much Da had truly known?

She was young, and she had been educated on the run and in the way of arrowshots toward a hidden foe—scattered far and wide and toward no set target. There was so much she did not know that any person educated in the king’s schola or a cathedral school, in the convents and monasteries, would know and would be expected to know in order to be considered educated. Yet, if truth be told, she had no interest in Macrina’s The Catechetical Orations or in the Lives of the early saints. The wisdom of the ancients drew her—as long as it concerned the heavens, sorcery, or natural history and the workings of the physical world. That Da had taught her to construct her city of memory, and thus she had many facts available to her stored away in that city—such as Arethousan inheritance practices—did not mean she was educated as anyone else understood the term.

“Poor thing,” said the princess. “The Arethousan princes are never allowed to leave the palace, you see, my dear Brigida, because they are such barbarians that only a male can become emperor among them, and only one among the sons and nephews and cousins of the reigning emperor can become emperor after him. So if any of them get away, then they might have a claim to the throne and come back to the palace with their own army and cause a civil war. That is why there are never any civil wars in Arethousa, because once the new emperor is chosen, all of the royal princes of his generation are poisoned by his mother.” pqdm.com