The Book of Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

he spoke German like a native. It was his foreigner’s accent that was learned. She stored this detail away to pass on to Alla later.
    Erde had no trouble searching out her real-Guillemo, but now she was painfully cautious in her surveillance. She did note that he placed himself well inside the ranks of his brothers, along the right side of the horseshoe, and that while the robed and hooded man to her father’s right spoke of the cold summer and bad harvest and made an elaborate show of taking a spartan meal of bread, cheese, and spring water, the platter in front of her chosen Guillemo bore onlya nibbled crust and some apple parings. But Erde spied him helping himself covertly from his neighbors’ bowls and flagons—and only from those portions they had already tasted. Now and then, she caught him staring in her direction.
    She herself could barely eat. She considered the group gluttony of feasting to be the least appealing aspect of ceremonial occasions, and resented the probability that this noisy throng of red-faced, greasy-fingered eaters had struggled through the wet, unseasonable cold not to bid the baroness a loving farewell but to stuff themselves with a good meal.
    Tonight, particularly, she felt heavy and stupid from the unaccustomed heat in the hall. The din of forced joviality beat harshly at her ears. She drank some wine to wet her nervous throat, and wished the priest would stop looking at her. She knew that, as a baron’s daughter, she would always be stared at and would always have people seeking to use her somehow, but she particularly hated feeling drawn into this man’s game. It was like being sucked into a current too strong to swim against.
    For relief, she watched Rainer as he wandered the circuit of the tables, restless, a mug of ale in hand for camouflage. She found herself thinking how fine he looked, as if she had never really noticed before, how tall and bronze-blond he was in his black captain’s tunic. Fricca had once called Rainer “delicate,” and it was true that he was not brawny like most of the baron’s Guard, the beefy bearded men whom the chamber-women cooed over. His shoulders were not overbroad and he often had to be reminded to stand up straight. But Erde had watched him spar with his men in the stable yard. He was easily their equal in strength and agility, and his greater height gave him an added advantage. What Fricca thought overanxious and fragile, Erde saw as sensitive and elegant. Certainly he was the only member of the baron’s Guard who’d learned how to read. The baroness had seen to that. After all, Rainer’s father had served His Majesty the King.
    How steadfast he seemed to her now as she watched him pace along the tapestried wall, how concerned and reliable. She considered taking him into her confidence and pointing out the real-Guillemo to him, but what if he didn’t believeher? Or worse still, what if Alla was right, that both Rainer and her father had noted the deception long ago, and only she, a foolish little girl, thought it was such a big secret? She wouldn’t want to seem foolish to Rainer.
    “Your table is a marvel, my lord, in times of such hardship.” The false-Guillemo drained his cup and refilled it from a clay pitcher of springwater.
    “Hospitality is one of our Lord’s commandments, is it not?” returned the baron dryly, gesturing for his own cup to be filled with hearth-warmed wine.
    Erde fanned herself covertly. Was her father calling the hooded band’s bluff with this merciless indoor heat? She found his forbearance with his lecturing guest to be quite remarkable, even as the man detailed far beyond courtesy the plight of the lands he had traveled most recently, how the fertile river plains were plagued with drought and the uplands so unseasonably cold and wet that the frost-killed crops rotted in the fields before ripening.
    “Peasant and lord, they’re declaring it a punishment from God, my lord baron, and being God-fearing folk,