“And if you can bear mine,” Roger said.
“Though, like Finn, he is not a member of our Order and is but an honored visitor in our camp, Yasper and his knowledge of alchemical matters might serve us well, and so I invite him to come along with us.”
“I thought you would never get around to it!” Yasper said. Though in truth Cnán fancied he looked more nervous than any of the others, which only made her favor the man since it meant he was the least insane of any of them.
“Taran really ought to stay here, to be the oplo of the younger men who will have to fight in the stead of those who are going east. But with a broken heart he will be useless, and since it will break his heart to leave him behind, I summon him on the quest. Brother Rutger is more than ready to step into his place here.”
The range and intensity of emotion that had flashed across Taran’s face during this little speech had been almost frightening to Cnán, but he ended up red-faced and close to weeping, nodding his head vigorously. “Yes,” he muttered, “Rutger will serve brilliantly.”
“We have ten,” Feronantus said. “I hope and pray that the one who calls herself Vaetha will be our twelfth. Which means we need an eleventh. Any man here would serve well. But I am not oblivious to the gaze—perhaps ‘glare’ is a better word—of Istvan, who I think fancies himself as expert a horseman as Eleázar. Perhaps he is. But there is no doubting that he knows the ways of the Mongols better than any man from farther west, and so I offer to let him share our quest and our fate.”
“Accepted,” Istvan proclaimed before the sentence was even finished. He had been rocking back and forth on his chair as if it were a horse and he were even now riding it into battle.
All faces now turned again toward Cnán.
In no way did any of this make sense. They would ride hard and live like wild animals for as much as half a year before dying full of arrows on a frozen Mongolian steppe.
But she knew fate when she saw it—or rather, when it closed its grip around her throat.
“My name is Cnán,” she said, “and since it appears to be my doom, I shall, as soon as you have finished with all of your pompous words and grand gestures, get up from this chair and turn my back on the setting sun, whose warmth and beauty have been my only solace over many months’ striving, and hie to the sacred threshold of the Great Khan’s tent, as long as breath remains in my lungs. If you eleven choose to follow me, you shall find your road shorter and safer, and I may even be glad of your company from time to time.” She could not prevent her eyes from straying to Percival’s as she said this last. He was, finally, paying attention to her.
An hour later they were on the road.
Feronantus looked back on the clearing with an expression Cnán could not read. She stayed close to the leader of this group of madmen, hoping to riddle his reasons before he got them all killed.
The clearing, the old monastery, converted into a chapter house—the planks of half-rotten wood laid out to form tables and benches, the Order’s standard now flying from a pole mounted to a scalable edge of the ruined roof—the cemetery with its silent dead. Here she had come to be part of this group; here they had taken her in as an equal—mostly. She had guided a few of them across the dead lands to find Illarion, including the wise Raphael, with his Semitic countenance, and the young Haakon, with his awkward searching for whatever sort of manhood might be made available; she had watched them absorb the nastiness of Legnica and fend off Mongols with inspired trickery that, should it have been planned, would have utterly failed.
Here she had watched the beautiful Percival, and she had longed for something else, something other; trying, like the blundering Haakon, to find her way into an unobtainable embrace. A companionship she could never have.
She had listened to Illarion’s story. She had watched the knights train, and then had watched Feronantus devise a plan sure to fail. Sure to get them all killed.
Still, she would miss this place. And Feronantus? “Sorry to be leaving?” she asked.
He shook his head and smiled. “You wish to know my mind.”
“You sent the young ones off to die,” Cnán said. “A diversion for a mad journey. I wish to be certain you are not mad.”
“That forest is a wild place, happier without us. The chapter house will fall quiet. The dead will sleep more soundly, their bones not shivering ever so slightly at the presence of warriors. The deer will return, not to be hunted by such as us. The air will not ring with steel, nor sing and echo with the high voices of whelps and the gutturals of old hounds, all eager for the scrap and the hunt. The wind will blow, the trees will sough, and we now set out to relieve the burdens of others. But we are your burden, Cnán.”
She could not follow much of this, but it impressed her nevertheless. “And why is that?” she asked.