Free The Book of Earth by Marjorie B. Kellogg

his most trusted bodyguard, over the word of his own and only daughter. How could such a thing be?
    The window rattled and the drafts howled in the ceiling vaults. The wind hurled sleet and ice against the shivering panes of glass. Winter crept into the room, and still no one came. Erde imagined her father still raging drunkenly around the castle, and the servants too frightened to come to her aid. She made tasks for herself, to ward off the cold and her sense of drifting unmoored in an alien sea. She rationed the remaining firewood. She tore up the white gown and fed the pieces to the flames. She drank the stale water in the pitcher by her washbasin. She moved her chamber pot to the farthest corner to avoid the stink.
    She understood nothing that had happened. Her father was always a dangerous drunk, but his rages had never been this violent before. Still, there was a chance it would all be over when he finally sobered up.
    The next evening, someone came at last, an older guardsman she did not recognize. He admitted Fricca with a pail of cold water and orders to make Erde presentable.
    “It’s cold!” Erde complained, “Doesn’t he think I’ve been punished enough?”
    Fricca said nothing. The guard stood by the open door and watched until Fricca insisted he turn his back. Erde was outraged. Did the man not know his place? She begged for news, for something to eat.
    Fricca shook her head, weeping as she sponged Erde’s shivering arms. “Oh, such goings on, my lady!” Her pale murmur was nearly drowned out by the splash of the water into the pail. “Your father is in a mad drunken fury like I’ve never seen! Who knows where we’d be if the Holy Brother’d not been there to soothe him and read Scripture to him and be responsible until he’s himself again.”
    The notion of Guillemo in charge made Erde shiver all the more. “My father needs a healer, not a priest. Where’s Alla?”
    Fricca laid a finger to her lips. “They’ll not let her see him, for fear she’ll enrage him further.”
    “Then what of Rainer?” Erde whispered. “How’s Rainer?”
    “Locked away, my lady. Oh, the poor foolish lad!”
    “Foolish?” Erde pulled away. “Don’t tell me now you believe these lies? You know better than that!”
    “Oh, my dearest lady-child, I know what
seems
, but in black times like these . . . I mean, what can we know about such things?”
    “What things?”
    “Well, the holy brother says . . .”
    “The holy brother knows nothing!” Erde yelled. But she could see he did, that he was in fact fiendishly clever, for he was keeping her father from the very people who might coax him back to sanity. What she didn’t understand was why.
    At her yell, the guard snapped around and ordered them to silence, bidding Fricca to hurry. She wept and wept, but would not speak another word.
    When she was done and had departed, still weeping, the guard took Erde to the great-hall, where her father sat on the baronial throne in near-darkness. The assembled court stood grimly silent. Erde thought they looked frightened, a bit confused. Guillemo’s robed entourage lined the walls, where Rainer’s men should have been. Torches flared hereand there, and a few people carried lanterns, but the great twin hearths were still and cold, and no candles burned. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light, Erde understood the courtiers’ dismay. The baron, always so concerned with protocol and a pristine public image, was unshaven, slumped carelessly in his chair, and still wearing his feast robe, which a day later was badly wrinkled and wine-stained. One hand balanced a goblet on his knee. In the shadows behind the throne stood Brother Guillemo.
    Erde awaited the stern, perhaps even slightly raving lecture about her behavior, a humiliation she could probably live through. But her father did not even seem to notice her. The guard pushed her to her knees before him, and the Baron glanced unsteadily aside and raised his