All night, Hans drifted in and out of consciousness. He was aware of a room built of rocks and mortar, and of smoke drifting up from a stone hearth to a blackened timber ceiling. The air smelled of eucalyptus. A few of the hermits warmed his hands and feet with its oil and made him breathe over a steaming pot of pine needles. They laid him before the hearth under a pile of goat hides. Angela was nearby under a second pile.
Peter the Hermit sat between them. He stroked their hair, wiped the sweat from their brows with rags, and raised their heads so they could drink a bitter tea of roots and bark. All the while, he whispered encouragement and prayers.
The other hermits ringed the room singing in Latin. Some knelt on the ground, heads rolled back, palms extended upward. Others twirled in a circle, white robes billowing around them.
“Is this the hermitage?” Hans murmured.
Peter squeezed his hand. “It’s home,” he said. “Wherever you are is home.”
Their fevers broke before dawn; by noon, they were propped up slurping chicken broth from tankards. The other hermits were off on their daily chores. Peter had stayed behind, their health his sole concern.
Hans marveled at their host. He was dressed in leather motley with a patchwork cloak that swept from his broad shoulders over his muscular arms and chest. A man of all seasons, his broad face and hands were worn by the sun, while his bright, blue eyes pierced the gloom like a harbor lamp. Most striking of all was his spectacular shock of hair and beard. It looked like a nesting ground for sparrows.
Hans tried not to stare. “How did you know where to find us?”
“The lookout spotted you at midday,” Peter said. “We watched you climb through our telescope, uncertain if you were friend or foe. When it got dark, we decided to act. It’s much more agreeable fetching live bodies than dead ones.”
Angela took a glug of her soup. “Why do you have a lookout?”
“Aren’t you happy that we do?” Peter smiled.
Angela scrunched her nose. “Is that an answer?”
“It’s the one you’re getting,” Peter laughed. “But here are a couple of questions for you: Who are you? Why are you here?”
“Well, to begin, I’m Countess Angela Gabriela von Schwanenberg, and this is my best friend, Hans.”
“Angela Gabriela von Schwanenberg,” Peter said with a start. “I gave you your name. Your mother and father let me sleep in your haymow.”
“Yes,” Angela said, “and now I’ve come to seek sanctuary with you. The archduke has imprisoned my parents; he seeks our deaths.”
“What?”
Angela told him their tale, Peter shaking his head and rocking as the occasion required. When she described her burial, he leaped from his stool. When she spoke of her rescue by Hans, he gave the lad a fatherly hug. “Blessèd be the grave robbers!”
“I’m just an apprentice.” Hans blushed.
“To return to the point,” Angela said crisply, “my parents say you’re wise. I need you to tell me how to rescue them.”
“First, you must rest,” Peter replied. “No child fresh from her deathbed is fit to confront the power of the archduke and his necromancer.”
“But time is short. My parents are in danger.”
“Time is never so short as life itself.”
Angela kicked her foot under the covers. “You don’t understand. How can you? The archduke’s never harmed you.”
“No?” The color drained from Peter’s cheeks. “That villain caused the death of my son. My only child.”
“I’m sorry,” Angela said. “I didn’t know.”
The hermit’s eyes filled with tears. “My wife had passed away in childbirth. When I lost my child as well, I wandered the land, unhinged by grief. That’s how I came upon your parents. They restored my mind and I retreated here, far from the horrors of the world.” He blinked. “I grow tiresome. Come, bundle yourselves and step to the porch.”
The porch of the great hall was constructed of thick planks resting on small stone pillars. From here, Hans and Angela looked over the hermitage grounds. It was a large, triangular plateau: One side, a hundred yards wide, marked the mountain face on which they’d nearly died. The other two sides backed onto a steep V-shaped slope that towered to the mountain’s summit.
“This porch is our altar,” Peter said reverently, “the plateau our chapel.”
Hans was awestruck. Sheltered on three sides, but open to the southern sun, the plateau was like a meadow in early spring. A few sheep and goats munched on hardy grasses; daffodils, crocuses, and bluebells poked through clumps of snow at the base of berry bushes; and the inner walls of the mountain were covered in moss and evergreens.
Angela pointed at the hermits. They were standing around a large tree stump at the center of the grounds. Each held a heavy wooden sword and took turns attacking the stump with thrusts and roars.
“They’re pell training!” Angela exclaimed.
“It’s their daily exercise,” Peter said.
“But pell training is what knights do before tournaments and battle.”
“Knights are what they were, the sons of noble families, before grief brought them to this mountain as it brought me.”
“Where did they come from?” Hans asked.
“From as far away as it took them to get here,” Peter said.
Angela rolled her eyes at Hans: A hermit speaking in riddles was as irritating in real life as it was in storybooks. As mysterious, too.
Peter combed his fingers through his hair. His mood brightened. “Our stump is one of the finest pells around. You’re welcome to train when you’re able.”
“I’d love to,” Hans said.
“I’d rather not perspire if I don’t have to,” Angela said. “But I’ll need to do something till I’m well enough to rescue my parents. At home, I made puppets. Do you have a workshop?”
Peter pointed across the plateau. “We make wine barrels and caskets in that barn over there. Use whatever tools you wish.”
Hans saw a series of carved openings in the rock wall behind the barn. “What’s in those holes?”
“They’re hermit cells, where we contemplate by day and sleep by night. We’ll prepare one for each of you.”
“I’ve spent my life in a cave,” Hans said. “Could we please sleep in the great hall instead?”
“Unchaperoned?” Peter raised his bushy eyebrows. “What would your parents say to that?” he asked Angela in amusement.
“They’d say one of us should stay in the main building, the other in the barn. And since I’m a girl and a countess, well . . .” She smiled at Hans.
“Fine,” Hans grumped. “I’ll take the barn. If it gets too cold, I guess I can cuddle up to the sheep.”
Peter patted him on the back. “Good lad.” He began to lead them back inside.
“Wait,” Angela said. “What’s that hidden by the pines up the mountain?”
Peter paused. “My private chapel. The one place you must never go. Never, on pain of banishment.”
“Why?”
Peter’s eyes flashed. “Because I say so.” He turned abruptly and marched across the grounds. Hans and Angela watched him in stunned silence.
“Banishment?” Angela frowned. “Why is the chapel so important?”
“I don’t know and I don’t intend to find out.”
“But it’s all so strange. Who was Peter before he became a hermit? Why did Arnulf kill his son? And what are the secrets hidden in his chapel?”
“One thing’s certain,” Hans said. “Peter the Hermit is not what he seems.”