The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  Yet why would the world be so beautiful if it wasn’t meant to be lived in and loved?

  It seems to him that a woman moves toward him. As she emerges from the mist in the gap between two stones he sees that she isn’t truly a woman at all. She has long black hair that falls to her waist and a complexion the creamy rich color of polished antlers. Her eyes don’t look right; the pupils are sharp, not round, and her ears aren’t round either, they pull into a point tufted with dark hair. Where her waist slopes to her hips, her body changes to become a mare’s body, sleek and black like her hair.

  She is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen.

  She comes to a halt before the cauldron, dips her hands in, and lifts them. Water trickles down between her fingers.

  “Do you want to live?” Her voice is a melody. “If you want to live, you must give me everything you carry with you. Then you may taste the water of life.”

  He wants to live. But it is so hard to give up what he has carried for so long.

  Yet his hands move anyway because he thirsts for that water. The promise of water is like an infusion of woundwort and poppy, giving him strength to cast aside his belt and boots, to struggle out of his mail coat and tabard. The entire left side of his wool tunic is soaked in blood, but he peels it off and discards it with his leggings so that he kneels naked now beside the cauldron while the hounds lick the seeping blood off his side. Pain and the agony of thirst have numbed him, he can barely feel their tongues or the terrible aching pressure under his ribs.

  “Yet you have not given me everything,” she says, and he sees that it is so. He hasn’t given her the pouch. It hangs at his neck as heavy as lead. It is so hard to lift his arms, to dip his head, to pull it free. The pouch gapes open, string unwound, and the rose, wilting now, falls beside the stained nail onto the ground.

  “Yet you have not given me everything,” she says. “Two things you carry with you yet.”

  He knows the last burdens he carries, but they are not objects he can pass from hand to hand. “How can I give them to you?” he asks, gasping as blood leaks from his wound faster than Rage and Sorrow can lick it clean. Blood trickles from his lower lip, bubbling in time to his breathing. “How can I give you the oath my foster father made, that I forswore? How can I give you the lie I spoke to Lavastine because I wanted him to die at peace?”

  “Now they are mine,” she says. She sidesteps in the graceful way of horses.

  Where she stood, he sees a young woman kneeling in an attitude of intent meditation, so still that she surely must have been there all along even though it is manifestly impossible for two creatures to inhabit the same space at the same time. The young woman does not seem to see him or even hear the conversation, and she is dressed quite strangely, in a tightly-fitted cowskin bodice with sleeves cut to the elbows and an embroidered neck, and a string skirt whose corded lengths reveal her thighs. Copper armbands incised with the heads of deer bind her wrists, and a gorgeous broad bronze waistband ornamented with linked spirals and hatched, hammered edges covers her midriff. She wears a necklace of amber beads and a gold headdress decorated with finely incised spirals and two curling, gold antlers. In one hand she holds a polished obsidian mirror fixed to a handle of wood carved in the shape of a stag. Her expression is pensive, but it is the contrast between eyes drowned in sadness and a generous mouth that seems ready to smile given the least provocation that makes her handsome.

  Then the centaur woman moves between him and the cauldron, so he can no longer see her. He can barely cant his neck back to look up into her face. A bubble of blood swells and pops in his nose as his lungs draw sustenance out of his heart. His vision fades, comes into focus again, and he sways. Her body looms, not because she is as big as the warhorses that carry Wendish lords into battle but because he realizes now that she is not mortal in the same way he is.

  She holds out her cupped hands and brings them to his lips. He sucks, and the water slides down his throat like nectar.

  Like nectar, it spreads its essence quickly. He no longer feels any pain in his ribs, and the shock of healing is so profound that he falls forward in a daze. Oddly, he feels the prick of the rose on his right cheek, where his skin presses into the earth. The hounds nose him, then settle down contentedly on either side of his prone body. He is so tired.

  But he is alive.

  Then he hears movement, and a moment later a woman’s voice gasps out surprise and a hand touches his naked back with the kind of stroke reserved for a lover.

  “Here is the husband I have promised you, Adica,” says the centaur-woman. “He comes from the world beyond.”

  “Did he come from the land of the dead?” This new voice, eminently human and close by his ear, is low, a little ragged, not musical but rather the voice of a woman who is courageous enough to walk open-eyed into the arms of death.

  “Truly it was to the land of the dead that he was walking. But now he is here.”

  Her hand rests pleasingly on the curve of his right shoulder, as if she is about to turn him over to see what he looks like. But when she speaks, her voice breaks a little on the words.

  “Will he stay with me until my death, Holy One?”

  “He will stay with you until your death.”

  —and then she had lost him and tumbled free, landing hard on her knees with the wind knocked out of her lungs. Her bow lay beside her on the sandy ground. Branches rattled in a dry wind, and a gold feather drifted down through the air to catch in her hand. Coughing, she got to her feet.

  “Well,” said the old Aoi sorcerer, letting the half-twined rope fall to the ground as he stood. “This time you have surprised me.”

  “I didn’t expect to come here,” she admitted. She had to lean with hands braced on her thighs, catching her breath. Catching the sobs that shook her. She wanted to weep, but that was one of the lessons that Da had taught her, that she’d learned so well that it had become habit: “If you’re crying, you can’t hear them coming up behind you.”

  Ai, God. There was nothing she could do for Alain. But she had to be strong enough to find Sanglant and Blessing; she had to be strong enough to come to their aid. She rose, letting her breath out with a shudder, tucked the feather away, and brushed dirt from the knees of her leggings and from her palms. She checked herself reflexively for her possessions: bow, quiver, sword, dagger, cloak, Alain’s ring, the torque Sanglant had given her. Of Blessing she had nothing but the link of shared blood.

  “I meant to leave Verna,” she continued, still stunned by the departure of the creatures who had meant to take her with them. “But I didn’t know I’d end up here.”

  “Yet you are here.”

  “I am here,” she agreed, “But—” But still she hesitated.

  “You are still bound to the other world,” he said, not dismayed, not irritated, not cheerful. Simply stating what was true.

  “I am still bound to the other world.” Without thinking, she set her hand against the blue-white fire of the stone, and she looked inside.

  He leans back against the rock face and lets the glorious heat of the sun warm him. They came clear of the valley an hour or so after dawn and, with the birds singing around him and his mother walking beside him, he understands he is free for now of Sister Anne and her threats and her war. Yet how can he be free from that war knowing what he has learned, that his mother’s people mean to return to Earth from whatever place they have been hiding, or exiled? True, his mother desires to go to Henry. But what will she tell him? And what will he say to his father? Whose story can he believe? On whose side will he muster?

  He opens his eyes. Resuelto and the pony crop at what grass they can find upon the hillside. Below, smoke curls up from the cookhouse of the hostel below, and he sees robed figures hastening about. The monks are agitated today. Even the bees are agitated, swarming around flowers but not landing to sip nectar.

  His mother crouches to one side of the path, spearpoint driven into the ground by her feet. With
her forearms braced on her knees, she intently watches Jerna, who is suckling Blessing. The sight clearly fascinates her, although he isn’t sure why it ought to. Before he begged her to clothe herself in Liath’s spare tunic, it was obvious that the women of the Lost Ones are built no differently than human women in certain regards.

  Ai, God. Where is Liath now? He listens, but he cannot hear her.

  He dreams that she calls to him across the gulf of the heavens.

  “Sanglant,” she says. “Beloved.”

  Blessing pulls her head back from Jerna’s breast and babbles, batting at the air as if to grab something only she can see. But he sees and hears nothing.

  “You are weeping, child,” the old man said as he rested a companionable hand on her shoulder.

  “So I am,” she agreed. But this time she let the tears fall.

  “Truly, there is more to you than even I first saw.” He regarded the burning stone with a frown as light flickered along its length and began to die. “I can only see through the gateways using the power of blood. Yet you can simply look, and thereby see.”

  Startled, she turned on him. “I thought you were a great sorcerer. Can’t you teach me everything I need to know?”

  He smiled at her and walked away, but he was only going to sit on his bench of rock. He picked up the rope and began to twist the strands against his thigh.

  “In the end, only one person can teach you everything you need to know, and that is your own self. If you wish to learn with me, you must be patient. Now.” He gestured toward the burning stone. “You must make your choice—there, or here. The gateway is closing.”

  The flames flickered lower until they rippled like a sheen of water trembling along the surface of the stone.

  She was still weeping, gentle tears that slid down her cheeks. “Ai, Lady! What must I do? How can I leave them?”

  Yet she had known all along that it might come to this. She could never regret the choice she had made before and, knowing what she had known then, she would make the same choice again: to return to Sanglant.

  But she knew a lot more now.

  Now she knew who her enemies were. This decision had been made when Anne had tried to set her against Sanglant, when Anne had proved herself willing to let her own granddaughter die. This decision had been made when Brother Marcus had told them that Hugh had worked the sorcery of the crowns. This decision had been made when Anne had admitted that she had herself bound and commanded the daimone that had murdered Da. This decision had been made in that first glorious instant when they had emerged through the gate and called her “child.”

  “I’m no use to him or to anyone until I master my own power,” she said softly. “They thought I should have wings, and if that’s true, then I have to find them—or find out what they meant and what they are.”

  She crossed to the old sorcerer, set down her weapons, and sat at his feet. Without a word, he handed her strands of flax and, saying nothing more, resumed twisting flax fiber into rope against his thigh. She waited for a moment, expecting him—like Severus—to begin lecturing her. But he did not. He simply twisted flax into rope, humming a little under his breath.

  Behind her, the burning stone flickered, faded, and the last glint of blue fire died into the stone until it was only a dark pillar, mute and as solid as rock. Slowly, clumsily, and with many false starts, she began to twist the slender, single strands into a stronger cord.

  EPILOGUE

  ON that morning some time after dawn, as he crawled out from the shelter of the stone that had shielded him and thus saved his life, Zacharias met a dragon. The creature stretched from one side of the valley to the other. Where its lashing, golden tail seemed to touch a mountaintop, plumes of snow and ice streamed off the summit, whipped free. Its great head huffed and blew beyond the ridge that bounded the valley to the southeast. Sparks rained from its nostrils like so many falling stars. Its belly had the color of sulfur and each claw, tipped with gleaming steel, was as big as a house. Its golden scales lay so close-knit, one overlapping the next, that they appeared like rank upon rank of glittering, impenetrable shield wall. It hung there for fully an hour, or perhaps more, while Zacharias knelt in awe and terror and watched the shimmering undulations of its belly and the clouds of ice billowing off the peak.

  Then, with a clap like thunder, it flew up into the heavens and vanished in a wink of light.

  After a while, he staggered out of the stone circle and found a stream, where he washed his face and soothed his reddened hands. Two goats wandered haplessly beyond the blackened reeds at the shoreline, and he was too much his grandmother’s grandson to leave them there alone. He used his rope belt as a tether.

  About that time he noticed the ruined tower and hall below, and he realized that other people moved in the valley. He hid in the trees and watched for a while as two men and three women salvaged what they could from the wreckage. They seemed rather at a loss, as if they were unfamiliar with fetching and carrying, sorting and binding.

  He saw no reason to trust them, not after everything that had transpired. He faded back into the woods. In time, and with the help of the goats, he made his way to a meadow high up on the northwestern slope. Here he found several precious items in an old cottage that graced one side of the clearing: rope, an old leather sole, a small cook pot, hazelnuts and withered elderberries stored in a gourd, and a torn scrap of parchment with numbers and diagrams written on it. He wasn’t really able to read or write or cipher. The biscop of Machteburg had ordained him as a frater because his capacious memory had never failed him: under examination, he had recalled flawlessly the various services with which churchmen ministered to believers and the stout declarations with which he was enjoined to convert the heathen.

  But although he couldn’t really decipher it, he sat for a while studying that page in the shelter of the cottage while the goats tore up blackberry bushes and nettles outside. Someone had drawn circles and orbits, and stars in clusters like to the constellations his grandmother had traced for him in the sky: the Hunting Hound, the Stag, the Randy Goat, and the Rabbit. The church mothers had given the constellations other names, and yet all of these wise women and men had passed down certain immutable truths: that five stars wandered in the heavens through a band of stars known as the world dragon, that the Sun and the Moon walked northward and southward in winter and summer, that the passage of the year and the time of the night could be measured by the turning wheel of the stars.

  Here in this valley where Kansi-a-lari had brought him, someone had wondered and dreamed about the vast cosmos and the workings of the heavens. Perhaps her son was the scholar, or perhaps it was the beautiful woman he had seen first in his vision at the palace of coils and then in a moment of shining glory before she was enveloped by the fiery daimones and transported by their wings up into the heavens. Possibly the clerical figures he had seen down by the tower were the scholars, but he could not trust them after they had tried to kill him. And anyway, why would they hide this scrap up here when they had been given a fine tower and hall below in which to write and contemplate in comfort?

  No doubt he ought not to linger so long. He didn’t know what those people down there intended now, in the face of such absolute ruin. He tucked the scrap into the pot, yanked the goats away from their feasting, and found a neat, clearly-marked path leading up through a field of boulders. It took him over the ridgetop and into the arms of three skittish monks.

  They spoke Wendish poorly, and although he knew enough Dariyan to quote the liturgy fluently and at length, he had a hard time understanding their babbling explanation of mountains catching fire and portents seen in the sky. He tried to dissuade them from exploring down the path into the valley, but he failed. Apparently they had not until this day known the valley existed although the monastic hostel which they tended had been built over fifty years before by a previous generation of brothers.

  They pointed out the hostel to him. Because by this time it was afternoon, and
he hadn’t eaten for three days, he made his way down a narrow path more suitable to the goats and onto a remarkably well-preserved old stone road that passed the monastery gates. The gatekeeper was either laconic or too stunned to speak after the events of the previous night. The man simply waved Zacharias through, and with some effort, because he was by now quite light-headed, he left his goats in the care of the flustered stablemaster and found his way to the hostel. There he gratefully collapsed while the brother guestmaster brought him a bowl of steaming hot pulse porridge topped by a pat of exquisite butter.

  “These are strange times,” said the guestmaster when Zacharias had finished his meal and washed down the porridge with a cup of very bold wine. He spoke a number of languages well enough, Wendish among them.

  “Are there other guests here today?”

  “Nay, none have asked shelter of us today, Brother, although I heard that a man and a woman were seen on the road an hour after dawn. But I think poor Brother Cunradus is seeing things again, for he said they weren’t of human face though they were dressed in human clothing. The man was even armed, riding a warhorse, but he had a terrible hunched back, like a demon.”

  “Ah,” said Zacharias carefully. “I’d hope not to meet such a pair, myself. Did they go south or north?”