The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  The other hounds, who had remained silent at their vigil throughout the day, began to howl. A musky odor seemed to steam up from their bodies, like the heavy scent of mourning. From across the palace grounds, all the other dogs and hounds joined in until their mourning became cacophony.

  Lavastine sat on the bed with head bowed and chin resting on his folded hands. With some difficulty, Alain got out from under Ardent’s weight and, with his legs tingling, grimaced as he knelt beside her. Tears came. He could not bear to take his hand off her cold head. Her ears had the same stiff curl as would a sheet of metal molded to form such a shape. The servants stayed back, well aware of the uncertain temper of the other hounds, who might lunge without warning.

  Finally Lavastine stirred, and rested a hand on Alain’s hair. “Hush, Son. There is nothing you can do for her now.”

  Sorrow barked and the other hounds growled as the servants moved aside to make way for a tall figure.

  “Your Highness.” Lavastine stood.

  Terror took two stiff steps forward to growl at the prince as he entered the chamber, and immediately all the hounds coursed forward protectively. The servants bolted back out of range. The prince lifted a gloved hand like a weapon and, seemingly without thinking, growled back at the hounds from deep in his throat, a hoarse sound as threatening as the one made by the hounds.

  Prince and hounds faced off, not retreating, not attacking. Then, hackles still raised, Terror took a wary sidestep as if to signal to the rest that this foe was worthy of respect—if not friendship. The prince glanced once around to check their positions, then knelt beside Ardent. By every twitch of Prince Sanglant’s body, by his very stance, Alain could see he would strike at any aggressive movement, but the hounds behaved themselves except for a low growl that escaped Rage at intervals.

  Alain wiped his nose and tried to speak in greeting, but he could not get words past the grief lodged in his throat.

  “I heard the tale,” said the prince, “and I helped the huntsmen beat the bushes on the cliffs and down by the river, but we found nothing. The adder must have gone back into its den.” He glanced again toward the hounds, aware of their least shifting movements. Rage growled again, all stiff-legged, but did not rush in: She knew a worthy opponent when she saw one. “May I look at the wound?”

  “I thank you,” said Lavastine.

  Alain made to shift Ardent’s right foreleg to turn over her paw … and for a moment could not, until he braced himself and heaved. She was almost too heavy to be moved.

  “Strange,” said Sanglant as he examined the paw. “It’s as if she’s turned to stone.” He bent to sniff along her body exactly as a dog would.

  Behind, the servants whispered as they watched him, and abruptly Sanglant jerked up, hands clenching at his side, as if he’d heard them. Bliss barked a warning. Outside, the baying and howling had subsided.

  “She smells like the Eika.” He shook his head as a hound flings off water. He traced the curve of her ear and the grain of her nose, dry and as cold as stone. “Are you sure it was an adder that bit her?”

  “What else could it have been?” asked Lavastine. “She was at the threshold, there—” He pointed to the door of the chamber.

  “You saw nothing?” The prince looked at Alain. He had startlingly green eyes and an expression as guarded as that of a caged panther which, given room to bolt free, suspects a hidden weapon is poised to strike it down as it runs.

  “I wasn’t here—” Alain felt himself blush.

  “Of course not,” said the prince curtly. “I beg your pardon.” He paced to the window, stared out as if searching for someone, then abruptly turned back. “I saw a creature among the Eika that was dead and yet was animated by Bloodheart’s magic.” When he spoke the name of his captor, his gaze flinched inward. He touched the iron collar that ringed his neck, noticed that he had touched it, and jerked his hand down to his belt. A flush spread across his fine, high cheekbones, a dull stain over his golden-bronze complexion.

  Lavastine waited, toying with Ardent’s leash, tying it into knots and untying it again without once glancing at his hands.

  At last Sanglant shook his head impatiently. “Nay, it is impossible that such a thing could live past Bloodheart’s death. Or that it could follow us so far, when only sunlight animates it and we travel swiftly by horse and it is no bigger than a rat.”

  “What you speak of is not at all clear to me, Your Highness.” Lavastine gestured to the servants and, as one, they retreated out the door to leave the count, his heir, and the half-wild prince alone with the living hounds and their dead companion.

  Sanglant hissed between his teeth. “Lady preserve me,” he whispered as if struggling against some inner demon. “It was a curse, that’s all I know.” He measured his words slowly, as if he did not quite have control of them—like a nervous horseman given an untried mount to ride. “A curse Bloodheart wove to protect himself from any man or Eika who wished to kill him. Let you and your people accompany me, Count Lavastine. I have certain … skills. Together with your hounds, if there is aught that stalks this place, we can catch it.” He paused, set a hand on Ardent’s cold paw, and shut his eyes as he considered.

  Suddenly he started up with such violence that the hounds began barking madly.

  “Peace!” said Lavastine over their noise, and they subsided.

  “It isn’t you at all,” said the prince. “It’s seeking her. She’s the one who killed him.”

  That quickly, and without warning or any least polite words of parting, he was out the door and vanished from their sight. They heard the servants scattering out of his way as he strode down the corridor, and then much murmuring, leaves settling to earth after a gale blows through.

  Lavastine sat for a long while in silence, so stem of face that the servants, glancing in, retreated at once. “A curse,” he muttered finally. He lowered his eyes to the tangled leash, and sighed as Alain wiped a tear from his own eye. Poor, good-natured Ardent. It seemed impossible that she wasn’t barking cheerfully, begging to be let out for a run.

  Then he lifted a hand and touched a finger to his lips as he did when he meant Alain to listen closely. “Prince Sanglant is beholden to me for rescuing him. He favors you, and Henry favors him—which is not surprising. Princess Sapientia is brave but impulsive and unsteady. I have not seen Princess Theophanu, but she is said to be coldhearted. Alas for Henry that the prince is only half of human kin, and a bastard besides. Watch and listen carefully as we ride with the king’s progress. I believe the king wishes to make Sanglant his heir—”

  “But Prince Sanglant was conceived and borne to give King Henry the right by fertility to reign. Not to rule after him!”

  “Henry must give him legitimacy, but he cannot simply confer it upon him as he—and I—conferred legitimacy upon you. The princes of the realm will not stand aside and watch a half-human bastard become regnant, no matter how respected a war leader he is. Nay, he’s scarcely better than a dog at times now.” He nudged Ardent’s corpse with his shoe, then looked surprised and rubbed his toe. With a frown, he touched the hound’s ears and with that same hand wiped away tears before turning back to his son. “Which is why the prince seeks to bring me into his circle by showing me such marked favor. He must cultivate powerful allies, and he must marry well.”

  “Someone like Tallia.” Heat flushed Alain’s skin and scalded his tears away.

  “Yes. Now that you are married to Tallia, no one will remember that you were once a bastard. I believe that Henry will send Prince Sanglant to Aosta. It is what I would do in his place, and Henry is a strong and cunning king.” He whistled the dogs to heel. “Come. Let us lay poor Ardent to rest.”

  They made a solemn procession: the count, his heir, their servants, and the six black hounds. It took six men to carry the corpse on a litter, whose woven branches had to be reinforced twice over before it could take the weight of the dead hound.

  Servants had gone ahead to dig a grave outside t
he lower ramparts. Robins hunting for worms along the banks of newly-turned earth fluttered away as the funeral procession came up beside the open pit. The men carrying the litter set it at the lip of the grave and heaved up one side to roll the body out. The corpse did not budge until they hoisted the litter almost perpendicular, faces strained and backs sweating, and then the body tumbled down. It hit dirt with an audible thud.

  Alain winced. Ai, Lady, what a strange death had overtaken her! The hounds snuffled around the upturned earth, but they seemed not to recognize the remains which lay in the grave as those of their sister and cousin. She no longer smelled of the pack.

  A space chipped into the bank of soil as the servingmen began to fill in the grave. Clumps of dirt rained down, drowning her, as if sorrow could be buried together with the corpse of a loved one. The patter fell like hailstones. Somewhere, in the distance, he heard a horse galloping off down the southward road. He smelled the perfume of soil, roots and earth and crawling things intertwined. A worm wiggled out of the unforgiving stare of the sun where it had been upended by the grave-digging and slid away into a heap of moist earth.

  The fragrance engulfed him, made his head spin….

  He smells blood and cautiously approaches the tumble of boulders. Tenth Son of the Fourth Litter lies splayed in death, limbs bent at awkward angles, throat ripped clean and one arm torn off. The pebbles sprayed everywhere, scuffed ground, moss torn into scraps all around the bloody soil might as well be signs recording in their ephemeral writing the course and outcome of the duel. By next summer, after winter scours the earth clean, no one will be able to trace in this arena that one fought and the other died.

  He grips one copper-skinned shoulder of the corpse and rolls it over to reveal the back of the neck: The braid is shorn free. He touches the braid now coiled around his right arm. After he cut it off Second Son, he bound it to his own arm as both trophy and proof, just as one of the other brothers now carries the cut braid of Tenth Son in like manner. Where is that brother now?

  He hears a scuff, and the wind shifts to bring him the whisper of a girdle shifting along thick flanks as someone steps stealthily toward him behind the cover of rocks. That quickly, he bolts.

  That he is slender makes him swift. Fourth Son of the Ninth Litter thunders after him, but his vast girth makes him as slow as he is brutishly strong. This brother could rend him limb from body with a casual yank—as he did to Tenth Son.

  Fifth Son gauges distance and speed and, like lightning forking, veers right to sprint for Lightwoven River, where his second trap waits.

  “Hai! Hai! Hai! Coward and weakling!” howls Fourth Son.

  He minds it not but keeps running, although he slows to a lope, knowing that Fourth Son cannot catch him even with a burst of speed. He need only stay far enough ahead to be free of that overpowering grip and yet close enough that Fourth Son will keep after him rather than give up to go hunt one of the others.

  River gravel spins under his feet. He leaps for the narrow footbridge that spans the rushing waters here where they funnel toward the cliff and the great spill of Lightfell Waterfall. The planks sway dangerously under him; he feels the weakened ropes creak and can almost smell the strands fray further.

  Then he is across, and he spins back just as Fourth Son hits the planks with his heavy pounding run. With the merest snick of his claws, he finishes off the rope struts that are already cut through and frayed to the breaking point.

  The bridge collapses under Fourth Son’s considerable weight. Planks skitter and tumble and rope handholds drop away. He falls into the icy water—not that the water will drown him, but here the current runs narrow and strong as it pours itself over the cliff and spills and spins and sprays down.

  Down he falls over the Lightfell Waterfall. His body strikes rocks, spins, bumps, tumbles down the ragged cliff face and finally is doused in the pounding roar at the base where the rush of water hammers into the fjordwaters and erupts as mist.

  He goes under.

  Fifth Son waits atop the ridge, scanning the waters.

  There! A head bobs up, ice-white braid a snake upon the water. Arms stroke with stubborn resolve. Beaten, bloodied, and battered by the fall, Fourth Son is yet alive.

  He expected this.

  But he does not have to wait long for what he knows will come next.

  Farther out, where the fjordwaters lie still, movement eddies. A slick back surfaces and vanishes, swift and silent as it circles in. There, to its left, another ripple stirs the surface of the water. And another.

  Fourth Son strokes toward shore. He is not dead, of course, but he does not need to be dead. He only needs to be bleeding.

  Waters part as a tail skims, flicks up, and slaps down. Too late Fourth Son realizes his danger. The waters swirl with sudden violence around him. He thrashes, goes under. Wet scales gleam, curving backs swirl, a ghastly head rears up, water streaming from the netlike hair which itself winds and coils like a living thing. Fourth Son emerges from the roiling waters clawing at his attackers. From his station at the height of the cliff, Fifth Son hears a howl of triumph as one of the merfolk shudders and sinks, while an inky black trail bubbles in its wake. The merfolk close in. Water boils. Fourth Son vanishes beneath the cold gleam of the fjordwaters. Like a churning mill, the eddies run round, slow into ripples, smooth over.

  All is still again—except for the shattering roar of the falls. Blood stains the water and mingles with inky fluid torn out of the merman.

  A back breaks the surface, slides in a graceful curve back into the depths, and turns toward shore. He waits. A rock shelf juts out along one side of the base of the waterfall. Suddenly, the waters part and the creature rears up to reveal its face: flat red eyes gleaming like banked fires, noseless but for dark slits over a nodelike swelling, and a mouth grinning with rows of glittering sharp teeth. As it rises, its hair and mane begin to writhe wildly, each strand with its own snapping mouth as if eels had affixed themselves to its head and neck. It has shoulder and arms, hands tipped with razor-sharp nails, and a ridged back that the light gilds to a silvery shine. The huge tail, longer than legs and far more powerful, heaves out of the water and slaps once, hard, echoing, on the rock. It makes no other sound.

  It tosses two braids—one neatly shorn, one slightly bloody—onto the rocky shelf. The merfolk are as much beast as intelligent being—or so he has always believed. But they know the contest, and they know the rules. It would not do to underestimate them. An ambitious general can never have enough allies.

  With an awkward roll, arching backward, the merman spills off the shelf and hits the water hard. The huge splash melds with the waterfall’s mist. The tail flicks up, as if in salute, slaps down again, and it is gone.

  All lies still.

  He climbs down the steps carved into the rock beside the falls. Down here, in the cavern hidden behind the spray, the priest hid his heart in a chest. He discovered it because he was patient; he waited and watched, and he listened to the priest murmur and sing about his hidden heart. And when at last one night the priest scurried from his nest cloaked with such shadows as he could grasp in the midsummer twilight, Fifth Son followed him.

  Now he controls the priest’s heart—and the priest’s obedience.

  He wonders, briefly, about Bloodheart’s curse. By his own testimony the priest turned the curse away from himself But where did it fall? Who will be cursed by the poison of Blood heart’s hatred and thwarted greed?

  Hate is the worst poison of all because it blinds.

  He reaches the shelf, pauses to scan the waters, but they lie unsullied by any evidence of the gruesome fight conducted a short while before. Water speaks in a short-lived voice, ever-changing, mortal by reason of its endless fluidity.

  Yet even water wears away rock in time, so the WiseMother say.

  Out beyond the thrumming roar of the waterfall, the sun make the water gleam until it shines like a painted surface. Is that a ripple of movement, or only a trick of the light?r />
  He kneels to pick up the two braids. Deftly he binds then around his upper arms like armbands. Three brothers dead. He touches his own braid, making of it a talisman.

  Only two left to kill …

  … but they will be the wiliest and smartest and strongest of Bloodheart’s sons—besides himself, of course. For them, he has laid the most dangerous trap of all—the one not even he may survive.

  Rage snapped at a butterfly and the bright creature skimmed away, lost in the spinning air.

  Alain stood alone by the filled-in grave. Only Rage and Sorrow and a single servant, standing at a safe distance, attended him. Everyone else had gone. His knees almost gave out and his head swam as he staggered to kneel beside the fresh grave. But when he touched the soil, he felt nothing but dirt. Ardent’s spirit, with her body, had vanished. A bold robin had returned to hunt these rich fields and now looked him over from a saf distance, head cocked to one side.

  “My lord?” The servant came forward tentatively.

  He sighed and rose. Now the rest of them would go on, and leave her behind. “Where are the others?”

  “My lord count has gone to begin preparations for leave-taking. The clerics have told him that tomorrow is a propitious day to undertake a long journey.”

  “The curse,” Alain whispered, recalling his dream. “I must find out what he knows.”

  “I beg your pardon, my lord?”

  “I must speak to Prince Sanglant.” He whistled the hounds to him and went to seek out Prince Sanglant.

  There was a commotion in the great yard that fronted the king’s residence: two riders spoke urgently with the king’s favored Eagle while a cleric stood to one side, listening intently. Princess Sapientia and a party of riders attired for a pleasure ride waited impatiently, but because Father Hugh lingered to hear the news, none of them dared ride out yet. The folk gathered to hear the news parted quickly to let Alain and the hounds through. But he had no sooner come up beside the Eagle when the doors into the king’s residence swung open and King Henry strode out into the glare of the afternoon sun. Dressed for riding in a handsomely trimmed tunic, a light knee-length cloak clasped with an elaborate brooch at his right shoulder, and soft leather boots, he waved away the horse brought up for him and turned on the steward who stood white-faced and nervous behind him.