“True,” Feronantus said. “But not so different, for all that.”
She snapped out the next few words and regretted them immediately. “What, you are a war-born bastard too?”
Feronantus’s face clouded, but only briefly, and his gaze on her flashed wariness before he smiled again. That infuriating, fatherly smile, which so fascinated her, yet made her fists clench.
Then he looked aside and reined his horse back, no longer riding parallel.
Cnán ultimately had this effect on those who were not kin-sisters, and so had her mother before her, the lashing tongue of truth. The value of the Binders lay in the services and information they offered. Otherwise no one would stand for them.
“Your horse whickers because he likes your manner,” Feronantus said. “He is coming to trust you. Horses are naive that way. Of all the savagery of war, I regret the disappointment and agony of the horses most of all.”
“More than men?” Cnán said over her shoulder.
“Men—knights, at least, and others who ride horses—have some hope of advantage from war. Horses carry burdens and get fed, if they are lucky. Mostly, though, they suffer and die.”
“We will take them north of here, away from the Mongol highways,” Cnán said, feeling a chill. “Will you say prayers for the team you sent to the circus?”
“I will.”
“To a Christian God?”
“Yes. To Him.”
“And to others as well?”
Feronantus dropped back farther and motioned her to lead on. Then he wheeled about to confer with Istvan, and what they said she could not hear. Cnán galloped ahead for a while; she told herself to make certain this was the route she had taken before, but also to be alone. To think.
Her contemplative mood continued as the fiery sunset came to pass. The sky filled with the bushy tails of flaming animals. Slowly the fires died, dusk fell, night came on. Stars held steady and aloof against ghostly wisps.
All of this land was turning into mulch. The aftermath of devastation was a renewed garden. Soon the musty stench of Legnica would fade. The winds would blow, snow would fall thick, the land would be softly quieted…then spring would come, the dead would molder into dust, flowers would push up. Mongol-appointed tax collectors, possibly the survivors of old noble families—the black sheep who never found favor in good times—would hire thugs as riders and set up their tables as farmers harvested new crops, woodsmen harvested the forests to rebuild, lime kilns were restacked from old toppled bricks.
Her kind of leaf blew across the land until it too found the anonymity of mulch, but always in the wilderness, never in a field or a garden…never to help push up shoots or flowers.
They stayed away from the known routes, and after a few days they entered a dense forest of great oaks, oaks old enough to revive a deep sense of reverence in Cnán and keep the knights more than usually quiet. Cnán remembered these trees had been sacred to the Slavic war god, Perun, now fled (or tempered) by the Greek Christos. The high-arching green branches reduced what little sunlight passed through the thick, eastward-sweeping clouds to a few silvery shafts, and as the summer rains began, water dripped constantly from the leaves, leaving the litter boggy and the horses moody.
Cnán watched the riders, both as they traveled and as they pitched their spare camps in forest and field. She studied the knights’ interactions with their leader, Feronantus, and closely observed each member of the party, as her mother had taught her.
“We study all men as we would the beasts. Thus we know them better, and they learn nothing of us,” her mother had said. “No one has known our people, nor will they ever.”
The eleven travelers in turn paid her little attention. They now seemed to regard her as an irritating little sister, or perhaps a dog, if they thought of her at all. She liked being ignored, even by Percival, who had never shown her much interest anyway.