Free The Book of Earth by Marjorie B. Kellogg Page A

goblet. A white-robe hurried to fill it. Erde was hauled up and led to a stool to one side of the dais. Her guard stood near. Erde’s eyes sought the carved dragon capitals for comfort.
    Two of the white-robes dragged Rainer in. His wounds had not been washed or dressed, and his torn black tunic was gray and slick with mud. When Erde rose to her feet in shocked protest, her guard shoved her back down again. Now the court murmured covertly. She could hear a few of the women praying. Rainer could hardly stand, but he shrugged off his escort to face the throne alone, where the baron had now drawn himself up with a drunken glare of hatred. Rainer did not look Erde’s way, and she resolved to avoid even a glance, lest it harm his cause.
    Brother Guillemo stepped forward to present the charges. Rainer was not allowed to speak in his own defense. Erde tried several times and was silenced, first by Guillemo’s command, finally by the callused palm of her guard. Both were made to sit and listen while Guillemo detailed his own twisted version of the events, to listen while the sniveling laundry-maid described what she’d seen in even more lurid detail, to listen while silly helpless Fricca admitted, yes, she had found the baron’s daughter weeping and distraught after the captain had left her. It wasn’t until the priest had nearly completed his case that Erde understood that only Rainer was on trial. An actual trial, no mere public scolding or wrist-slapping. Sitting rigid on her stool, Erde felt real fear creep into her heart. She noticed that the von Alte dragon tapestries, which had hung onthese walls for a hundred years, had been taken down, exposing the pale cold stone. Surely if her father was sober, he would not let all this go on. She sought again the dragons in the upper shadows, but they could offer only silent comfort.
    The only voice raised on Rainer’s behalf was Alla’s, blunt and indignant, and so very sane. Guillemo heard her out without comment, did not even question her testimony, and Erde wondered why he had let her speak at all. His motive surfaced when Alla had said her piece and limped proudly from the hall. Then the priest shook his head warningly. “Satan’s wings have brushed us, oh my people. Clearly what this old witch-woman says can never be taken as truth. My lord, she must be looked into. I fear some deeper plot here.”
    Not long thereafter, Brother Guillemo asked for a verdict, and Erde heard her father slur even the few words required to condemn Rainer to death by hanging, sentence to be carried out the next morning.
    She began to scream and did not stop, even when one of Guillemo’s white-robes clamped a fist over her mouth and dragged her from the hall.

C HAPTER S IX

    E rde knew now what caused a caged animal to go mad and gnaw at its own flesh. Mere tears were not desperate enough for such a catastrophe.
    She stood all night on the high sill of her window. She began in the chill silence of thought. After a while, thought became fantasy, and she called on the Mage-Queen to appear and carry Rainer and herself far away to safety. But the fantasy did not sustain her and the early hours of dawn found her rocking and moaning. She had determined that there was no conceivable way she could free Rainer from his cell, and so she went to work on building up the courage to fling herself onto the cobblestones sixty feet below. Maybe then the baron would set Rainer free out of remorse. In truth, her life experience thus far did not include a world in which, when the time came, her father would actually execute his favorite guardsman.
    But what finally kept her frozen to the sill was the sight of the chicken-crone sitting on the well-head in the middle of the storm, grinning up at her toothlessly and beckoning.
    Then there was a muffled thump outside her door and the scrape of a key in the lock. Erde stayed where she was. If it was her father or the priest come to make her watch Rainer hang, it would