The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  There.

  An aurochs bolted through the distant trees. Its curving horns caught a stray glance of sunlight, vivid, disturbing, and then it was gone. The noise of its passage faded into the heavier silence of the forest, which was not a true silence at all but rather woven of a hundred tiny sounds that blended so seamlessly as to make of themselves that kind of silence which has forgotten, or does not know of or care about, the chatter of human enterprise.

  As the last rustle of the aurochs’ passing faded, Liath heard, quite clearly, the clop of hooves behind her. She swung round in her saddle but could see nothing. What if it were Hugh?

  Ai, Lady! That bastard Hugh had no reason to follow her. He would wait in the safety of the king’s progress because he knew she had to return to the king. She had no freedom of her own to choose where she went and how she lived; she was a mere Eagle living on the sufferance of the king, and that was all and everything she had, her only safety, her only kin.

  “Except Sanglant,” she whispered. If she said his name too loudly, would she wake herself up from a long and almost painful dream and find the prince still dead at Gent and herself sobbing by a dying fire?

  The sound of hooves faded as a wind came up, stirring the upper branches into movement punctuated by the eruption into flight of a dozen noisy wood pigeons. That suddenly, she saw a flash of red far back in the dim corridor of the road. At once she slipped her bow free of its quiver and drew an arrow to rest loosely along the curve of the bow.

  A branch snapped to her left and she started ’round, but nothing showed itself in the thickets. What use was running, anyway? She and Da had scuttled from shadow to shadow, but in the end his enemies had caught them.

  She reined up her horse and peered into every thicket and out along an unexpected vista of tree trunks marching away into shadow like so many pillars lining the aisles of a cathedral. Nothing. What approached came from the road. And she heard no tolling of bells.

  Yet her face was flushed and she was sweating. She nocked her arrow and waited. A King’s Eagle expected respect and safe passage. She had endured so much, she had escaped from Hugh twice.

  She was strong enough to face down this enemy.

  As the rider came clear of the shadow of the trees, she drew down on a figure dressed in ordinary clothing marked only by a gray cloak trimmed with scarlet. A familiar badge winked at his throat.

  “Wolfhere!”

  He laughed and, when he came close enough, called to her. “I’ll thank you not to look quite so intimidating with that arrow aimed at my heart.”

  Startled, she lowered the bow. “Wolfhere!” she repeated, too dumbfounded to say anything else.

  “I had hoped to catch you before nightfall.” He reined in beside her. “No one likes to pass through the forest alone.” He rode a surly-looking gelding. Her own mare, sensing trouble, gave a nip to the gelding’s hindquarters to let it know at once which of them took precedence.

  “You’ve ridden all the way from Darre,” she said stupidly, still too amazed to think.

  “That I have,” he agreed mildly. He pressed his gelding forward into a walk and Liath rode beside him.

  “It took Hanna months to track down the king, and it’s only the twenty-fifth day of Quadrii.”

  “That it is, the feast day of St. Placidana, she who brought the Circle of Unities to the goblinkin of the Harenz Mountains.” She saw immediately that he was trying not to smile.

  “But you know perfectly well that no passes over the Alfar Mountains are clear until early summer. How did you get to Weraushausen so quickly?”

  He slanted a glance at her, eyes serious, mouth quirking up. “I knew where the king was.”

  “You looked for him through fire.”

  “So I did. It was a mild winter, and I made my way across the Julier Pass earlier than I had hoped. I watched through fire when I could. I know Wendar well, Liath. I followed the king’s progress with that vision and saw where they were bound. Once I saw that King Henry had left the children of the schola at Werauschausen, I knew he would have to return by that way or at the least send a message by one of his Eagles, who would know what route he planned to take. I had hoped it might be you.”

  How much had he seen of her? Did he know Hugh was tormenting her again? Had he seen her burn down the palace at Augensburg, or fight the lost shades in the forest east of Laar, or kill Bloodheart? Had he heard Sanglant’s words to her? Had he seen her cross through the gateway of burning stone?

  As if he read her thoughts in her expression, he spoke again. “Although I couldn’t be sure you still rode with the king’s progress and not with Princess Theophanu or on some other errand. You are difficult to vision through fire, Liath. It’s as if there’s a haze about you, concealing you. I suppose Bernard laid some kind of spell over you to hide you. I’m surprised the effect has survived so long after his death.”

  Like a challenge, the words seemed to hang in the air between them. They rode some paces in silence while in the branches above the purring coo of turtledoves serenaded them and was left behind.

  “You strike straight to heart of the matter, and at once, do you not?”

  “Alas, I’m not usually accused of such a weakness.” His tone was dry and his smile brief. “To what do you refer, my child?”

  She laughed, light-headed, a little dizzy. “I don’t trust you, Wolfhere. Maybe I never will. But I’m grateful to you for saving me at Heart’s Rest. And I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

  This time the smile sparked in his eyes, a pale flicker in gray.

  She did not wait for his answer but went on, determined to bring it all to light immediately. “Why were you looking for me? Why did you save me at Heart’s Rest?”

  He blinked. She had surprised him. “When you were born, I promised Anne that I would look after you. I had been looking for you and your father for eight years, ever since you disappeared. I knew you were in danger.” He looked away to the verge where road and forest met and intertwined. When he frowned, lines creased his forehead, and she could see how old he truly was; she had seen only a handful of people whom she supposed to be older than Wolfhere, and certainly none of them had been as hale and vigorous. What magic made him so strong although he was so old? Or was it magic at all but rather the kiss of Lady Fortune, who for her own fickle reasons blessed some with vigor while inflicting feebleness upon others? “Had I found you earlier,” he continued, still not looking at her, “Bernard would not have died.”

  “You could have protected us?” He had not seen Da’s body or the two arrows stuck uselessly in the wall.

  “Only Our Lady and Lord see all that has happened and all that will happen.” A jay cried harshly and fluttered away from the path, its rump a flash of white among dense green. He turned his gaze away from his contemplation of a riot of flowering brambles that twined along the roadside, and with that pale keen gaze regarded her again. “What of you, Liath? Have you been well? You seem stronger.”

  Did he understand the fire she held within her, which Da had tried to protect her from? She didn’t want him to see its existence, her knowledge of its existence, as if some change in her might betray it to his penetrating gaze; she was sure he watched her so keenly to see what she might unwittingly reveal. Da always said there were two ways to hide: to scuttle from shadow to shadow, or to talk in plain sight on a busy road at midday. “Talk too much about nothing, or be silent about everything,” he would say, but Wolfhere couldn’t be misled by babble, and she no longer dared hide behind silence. Once she had thought silence would shield her. Now she knew that ignorance was more dangerous than knowledge.

  “I was afraid to ask you questions before,” she said finally, not without a catch in her voice. “Even though I wanted to know about Da and about my mother. I was afraid you would make me tell you things. That you were one of the ones hunting us. But I know you were one of the ones hunting us.”

  “I would not have phrased it so: ‘hunting’ you.”

>   “Aren’t you named for the wolf. Doesn’t the wolf hunt?”

  “The wolf does what it must. Unlike humankind, it only kills when it is threatened, or when it is hungry—and then only as much as it needs.”

  “How did you come to know my mother and father?”

  “Our paths crossed.” He smiled grimly, remembering as well as she did the conversation, more like a sparring contest, they had had last spring in the tower at Steleshame. “What do you know of magic, Liath?”

  “Not enough!” She reconsidered these rash words, then added, “Enough to keep silent on that subject. I’ve only your word that you made a promise to my mother to protect me. But she’s dead, and Da never once mentioned your name. Why should I trust you?”

  He looked pained, as at a trust betrayed or a kindness spurned. “Because your mother—” Then he broke off.

  She waited. There was more than one kind of silence: that of the indifferent forest; that of a man hesitant to speak and a woman waiting to hear a truth; the silence that is choked by fear or that which wells up from a pure spring of joy. This silence spread from him into the forest; the sudden stillness of birds at an unexpected presence walking among them; the hush that descends when the sun’s face is shrouded by cloud. His face had too much weight in it, as at a decision come to after a hard fight.

  When he finally spoke, he said what she had never expected to hear. “Your mother isn’t dead.”

  6

  TEN steps, perhaps twelve, on a path through a dessicated forest whose branches rattled in a howling wind brought Zacharias and the woman to another hard bend in the path. Coming around it, coils of air whipped at his face as he followed the Aoi woman through a bubble of heat. The ground shifted under him, and suddenly he slipped down a pebbly slope and found himself slogging through calf-deep drifts of sand. The horse struggled behind him, and he had to haul on it to get it up a crumbling slope to where the Aoi woman stood on a pathway marked out in black stone. Barren land lay everywhere around them, nothing but sun and sand and the narrow path that cut sharply to the right.

  Disorientation shook him, his vision hazed, and when he could see again, they walked through forest, although here the trees looked different, denser than that first glimpse of forest he had seen, like moving from the land where the short-grass grows to the borderwild beyond which the tall grass of the wilderness shrouds the earth and any who walk in its shadow.

  The Aoi woman spoke in a sharp whisper, holding up a hand to stop them. Zacharias yanked the horse to a halt. In the distance, he heard a moaning horn call and saw a green-and-gold flash in the vegetation; someone was on the move out in the forest. They waited for what seemed an eternity, although Zacharias drew perhaps twenty breaths.

  “Hei!” said the woman, waving him forward. She looked nervous, and her pace was brisk.

  This time when the path veered left, Zacharias knew what to expect. The ground shifted, but he kept his balance, only to lose it as his boots sloshed in water and a salty wind stung his lips. Water lapped his ankles. He looked up in surprise to see waves surging all the way to the horizon. He staggered and barely caught himself on the horse’s neck. Where had all this water come from? Where did it end?

  On his other side, mercifully, lay a long strand of pebbles and beyond it hummocks of grass and scrub. A gleaming path shone under the water, cast in bronze.

  “What is this place?” he whispered. The woman did not answer.

  The ghost lands, his grandmother would have said. The spirit world. Was he dead?

  The path veered right, and the Aoi woman disappeared into a dense bank of fog. Zacharias shook off his fear and followed her to where light streamed in the mist, a fire flaming blue-white and searing his face with its heat—and then it vanished.

  He sucked in a breath of grass-laden air and collapsed to his knees next to a dead campfire. Water puddled from his robes and soaked onto the earth. An instant later he gulped, recognizing their surroundings. They had come back to the very stone circle where the witch had defeated Bulkezu. He groped for the knife, then saw the sky and hissed his surprise through his teeth.

  It was night, and the waning gibbous moon laid bare the bones of the stone circle and the long horizon of grass, a pale silver expanse under moonlight.

  Four turns on an unearthly path had brought them not to a different place but back to the same place at a different time.

  He knelt beside the old campfire and stirred the cold ashes with a finger. Chaff had settled there together with a drying flower petal. “Six days, perhaps seven,” he said aloud, touching ash to his tongue. He looked up, suddenly afraid that she would punish him for his fear … or for his knowledge. But if she had meant to kill him, surely she would have done so by now. “Did we walk through the ghost lands?” he asked.

  She stood beneath a lintel, gazing west over the plain. Bulkezu’s jacket, laid over her shoulders, gave her the look of a Quman boy.

  But she was no boy.

  She lifted her spear toward the heavens and spoke incomprehensible words, calling, praying, commanding: Who could know? As she swayed, her leather skirt swayed, as supple as the finest calfskin.

  Except it wasn’t calfskin.

  “Ah—Ah—Ah—! Lady!” Terror hung hitches into his words, forced out of him by shock.

  The skirt she wore wasn’t sewn of calfskin, nor of deerskin. It wasn’t animal skin at all.

  Under the lintel, the Aoi woman turned to look at him. Her leather skirt slipped gracefully around her, such a fine bronze sheen to it that it almost seemed to shimmer in the moonlight.

  “Human skin,” he breathed. The words died away onto the night breeze, then were answered by hers.

  “You who were once called Zacharias-son-of-Elseva-and-Volusianus. I have taken your blood into my blood. You are bound to me now, and at last I have seen how you can be of service to me and my cause.”

  7

  ALIVE.

  At first Liath could only ride silent along the newly-cut road while the riot of forest tangled around her until she felt utterly confused. Why had Da lied to her? Had he even known? Ai, Lady. Why couldn’t it be Da who still lived, instead of her mother?

  At once she knew the thought for a sin. But her mother existed so distantly from her that she could grasp no feeling for that memory which came in the wake of Wolfhere’s words more as dream than remembrance: a courtyard and herb garden, a stone bench carved with eagle claws, a slippery memory of silent servants half hidden in the shadows. Of her mother she recalled little except that her hair had been as pale as straw and her skin as light as if sun never touched it, although she remembered sitting sometimes for entire afternoons in the bright sun of an Aostan summer, a light more pure than beaten gold.

  “You knew all the time.”

  “No,” he said curtly. “I only discovered it now, on my journey to Aosta.”

  “Hanna didn’t tell me.”

  “She had already left me to return to King Henry with news of Biscop Antonia’s escape.”

  “Did you tell my mother you found me? Did you tell her Da was killed? What did she say?”

  “She said I must bring you to her as soon as I can.”

  “But where is she now?”

  Finally he shook his head. “I dare not say, Liath. I must take you to her myself. There are others looking for you—and for her.”

  “The ones who killed Da.”

  His silence was answer enough.

  “Ai, Lady.” She knew herself to be a young woman now, having left the last of her girl’s innocence behind when Da had been killed and Hugh had taken her as his slave; she knew she must appear different to his eyes than she had on that day over a year ago when they had parted in Autun. She had grown, filled out, gotten stronger. But Wolfhere might have aged not a single day in the last year for all she could see any difference in him. White of hair, keen of eye, with the same imperturbable expression that all wise old souls wore in order to confound youthful rashness, he had weathered much
in his life that she could only guess at. Surely it took some remarkable action for a common-born man to make an enemy of a king, for kings did not need to take notice of those so far beneath them in all but God’s grace. Yet the grieving Henry, at Autun, had banished Wolfhere from court as punishment for his being the messenger who had brought him news of Sanglant’s death at Gent.

  Except Sanglant wasn’t dead.

  “If only I could have taken you with me to Darre instead of Hanna,” Wolfhere murmured. Then he grinned wryly. “Not that I have any complaint of Hanna, mind you, but do not forget—as I have once or twice to my regret—that we Eagles do not control our own movements. We must go as and where the king sends us.”

  “If you dislike the king’s command upon you, then why do you remain an Eagle?”

  “Ah, well.” His smile gave little away. “I have been an Eagle for many years.”

  They rode on for a time in silence as the afternoon sun drew shadows across the road. A red kite glided into view along the treetops and vanished as it swooped for prey. Vines trailed from overhanging branches to brush the track.

  “Is she well?” Liath asked finally.

  “She is as she ever was.”

  “You might as well tell me nothing as tell me that. I hardly remember her. Ai, Lady! Can you imagine what this means to me?”

  “It means,” said Wolfhere with a somber expression, “that I will lose you as an Eagle.”

  It struck her suddenly and profoundly. “I’m no longer kinless. I have a home.” But she could make no picture in her mind of what that home might look like.

  “You will become what your birthright grants you, Liath. Although how much Bernard taught you I don’t know, since you will not tell me.” Though there was a hint of accusation in his voice, he did not let it show on his face.