Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

  “Living!” murmured Liath as hope flowered in her heart. “At least he is free, and alive.”

  “The Holy One brought him to me from the land of the dead. Is this that land?” The woman gestured toward the merry folk feasting in the hall as they celebrated the coming investiture.

  “Nay,” she said bitterly, “this is the land below the moon, but I cannot reach them. I cannot stop them from doing the very thing they must not do.”

  “I do not understand,” admitted her comrade, coming forward to stand beside her. “I thought this might be the Fat One’s realm.”

  “That land I do not know.”

  “Of course you know it. The Fat One is the giver of all things, pain and death as well as plenty and pleasure. Can you not see her hand here as well, in this place wreathed half in light and half in shadow?”

  “Who are you? Where are you from? Where is Alain now?”

  “I am called Adica, Hallowed One of the Deer people. I come from the land of the living but it is true that I walk now in the land of dreams and visions, as you do. Alain sleeps beside me, in the heart of skrolin country, deep within the earth.”

  “Now I am the one who does not understand,” said Liath with a smile.

  A horn blew. Like curtains rippling in wind, the hall shuddered as a rich, golden light spilled over the scene, folding like days running together. Had the world come undone? Was the belt twisting?

  Liath staggered, dizzy, and found herself grasping her new companion’s hand in a sober hall lined with dark wood and filled with a crush of people, as silent as ghosts.

  The empty throne of the Holy Mother stood upon a smaller dais wrought entirely of ivory and gems which was itself placed upon a larger dais carpeted in gold and red. A procession worked its way forward through the throng, presbyters cloaked in silken cloaks, clerics swinging thuribles as the smoke of frankincense rose in stinging clouds, giving Liath a headache. Bouquets of roses and lilies wreathed the base of lamp stands and ornamented the closed shutters. Anne walked at the forefront, escorted by Hugh and three other presbyters, all of whom were far older than he was. He outshone them as easily as the sun outshines the moon.

  “Ai, God,” said Liath desperately, “I cannot let them make such a mistake. But I’m trapped here, because I’m walking the spheres, not standing in Aosta. I can’t stop it now.”

  Adica had a serious face but such a pleasant expression that the words she said next shocked Liath, so agreeably were they spoken. “Yet if she threatens you and your people, then you must do whatever it takes to stop her. Can’t you kill her?”

  “Even if I had the power, I just can’t,” she whispered, “It would be unnatural.”

  As Anne reached the steps leading to the lower dais, her four companions stepped aside. Only the skopos could set foot on the ivory steps leading to the Holy Mother’s seat. When she set her foot on the highest step, she turned to look back over the crowd. Liath saw clearly the resemblance in her stern features to that of her grandfather’s death mask, rendered in stone in the chapel at Autun. None could mistake her who had seen Taillefer’s recumbent statue. Here, in flesh, stood his missing heir, child of the son born and raised in secrecy to spare the infant boy a potentially fatal contest for the imperial throne.

  With Anne as skopos, sovereign over the holy church, who would truly be more powerful? Henry, or Anne?

  “Is killing unnatural when we hunt deer to feed ourselves? Is killing unnatural when we seek to protect our children from that which would harm them? Is killing unnatural when we fight off our enemies who wish to burn our villages and enslave us?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” The hall had fallen into such a profound silence, waiting for Anne to take her seat, that Liath had a crazy notion that she had gone deaf. But her voice still worked. “She is my mother.”

  “Your mother? But you have a heart of fire.”

  Adica touched Liath over her heart and closed her eyes. Lips pursed, expression intent, she swayed her head from side to side as though seeking, listening. Her eyes popped open, but her irises had rolled back in her head, leaving only the whites visible. A thin line of drool dribbled down her chin.

  She spoke in a hoarse whisper not at all like the easy tone she had used before, as though her inner sight had made a voice for itself out of smoke and ash. “Child of Flame, look inside yourself. She is not your mother.”

  The ring on Liath’s hand flared with a blinding blue light. Cold stung her finger, shooting up her arm until it stabbed into her heart.

  She screamed.

  She heard their booming voices, far away, calling her “child.”

  She knew it for truth, because truth hurts far more than a lie.

  “Did Alain send you, to protect me?” she cried when she could speak again. “To guide me?” She understood the trap of Mok now, the obstacle laid before her: the trap of false obligation. She had believed blindly, without trusting in her own judgment and wisdom and instinct. “If I am not the heir of Taillefer, then I am free of his shadow and of his burden. I am free to act as I must.”

  She pulled off the ring and thrust it into Adica’s hands. “I pray you, Sister, keep this for him in return for the help he gave me. Let it protect him, when he is in danger, as he has protected me. If he ever needs me, I will come to him.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Liath let her wings of flame flower into life, but she was sorry to see the other woman step back in awe. “To the sphere of Aturna, the Red Mage, who rules with wisdom’s scepter. To find my mother.”

  Without the ring to bind her to Mok’s realm, Liath rose easily on a draft of wind cloudy with incense as, below her, Anne took her seat in the throne of the Holy Mother and grasped the jeweled scepter wielded by the skopos of the church of the Unities.

  3

  SILENCE and stillness startled Alain awake. He was lying in the dirt with Adica’s weight pinning his left arm to the ground and Sorrow licking his ear. Jagged pebbles stung his rump. He groaned, shifting to pull out from under Adica, and sat up, rubbing his hand. It hurt to touch it, still, but once he chafed the prickling needles out of it, he could close it into a firm fist. The snake’s poison had neither killed nor crippled him, but he still had that faint ringing in his ears.

  Dust motes floated in a shaft of daylight that cut through a cave’s mouth. His staff, their empty provision sacks, and Adica’s pack with her holy regalia all sat on the earth nearby. Rage whined in the dim recesses of the cave, scratching at the rock face that closed off the back. Laoina, with her spear, was poking at the rock wall as though to flush out snakes. Adica slept, hands clenched. Sorrow sniffed Adica’s ear, then flopped down beside the Hallowed One and rested his huge black head on his forelegs. Doleful eyes regarded him. He rubbed Sorrow’s head with his knuckles, and he grunted contentedly. Rage yipped, padding over to get a pat as well.

  “Where are we?” Alain asked, picking up his staff. He tested the height of the cave’s opening and measured the tumbled boulders. They could climb out, but it would be difficult to hoist the hounds out.

  Laoina turned. “I am thinking it is a good thing that these Bent People do not want humans as their slaves, because to me it looks like they have powerful magic. They have ships that can sail through rock, maybe. How else could we have come here? By some sorcery the vessel carried us under the land to the country of Shu-Sha’s tribe. When I was an apprentice to the Walking Ones, I met a man who walked all the way from Shu-Sha’s tribe to Horn’s tribe. That was when the Cursed Ones destroyed the stone loom and the fine city built by Shu-Sha’s people. That man left at the waxing quarter moon, and he saw three full moons before he came to Horn’s tribe. That’s a long path to walk in one journey. I don’t know what magic the Bent People used to make us sleep so soundly, but I’m not thinking we slept as long as three courses of the moon.”

  “That’s a long way,” he agreed, thinking that maybe Laoina had lost her mind or gotten confused. Something had changed about th
e way she spoke, too; the hitches and pauses had vanished, as though the language of the Deer people flowed more easily from her tongue. And anyway, he could not explain any better than she could the things they had seen in the city of the skrolin. “How do you know where we are now?”

  She indicated the opening behind him. He scrambled up, scraping his knees. Dirt rained on his head from rootlets stirred as he pulled himself out where he could see. At first it was too bright to recognize anything, but gradually the patterns of light and shade resolved into a rugged defile plunging deep into shadow. The far slope was covered in spiny bushes clinging desperately to the precipitous slope. At the top of the ridge opposite, he saw a massive wall rising up out of the hill like a waking dragon.

  Laoina tugged on his foot. “Come back down, quick. That fort belongs to the Cursed Ones.”

  He dropped back down. Adica still slept. Rage snuffled along the cave’s wall. “I thought you said we were in the land of Shu-Sha’s tribe.”

  “So we are. But the Cursed Ones have killed or enslaved most of her people and have driven the rest into hiding.”

  “Why do the Cursed Ones hate humankind so much?”

  She regarded him with a quizzical look. “They need blood, or else their gods will turn against them. Maybe, too, they are like old man Joa, who buried ten skins and six stone axheads in the ground so nobody else could have them. Then he died, and when a girl accidentally found them two summers later, the skins were no good anymore. So maybe he did keep them for himself by spoiling them for anyone else. There are some people who are always wanting more, an extra piece of deer meat even though they already have enough, a handful of extra spear points even if another person must go short.”

  “You think the Cursed Ones are selfish in that way.”

  “Don’t they have enough already?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. He sighed sharply. “If this isn’t the land of the dead, then where are we?”

  “In the land of Shu-Sha’s tribe—” But she broke off, seeing that wasn’t what he had meant.’

  “I have seen dragons, and a phoenix, and lion women. I have seen a great city beneath the sea, where the merfolk live. I have seen the land underground where the ones called skrolin bide. I’ve seen the Cursed Ones, and I think they look very like the man I knew as Prince Sanglant.” He fingered the head of his staff, rubbing his thumb along the snarling dog’s mouth, touching each carven tooth. “The valley where your people live I saw in my dreams. But other people lived there once, who called themselves the Rock Children and whose mothers were like living stone.”

  Laoina looked troubled. “These I have not seen, my friend. I know of no people calling themselves children of the rocks. As for the rest well, I am a Walking One, so I have seen many things, more than most. I admit that the city of the Bent People and the sea city of the merfolk confuse me, for how can it be that they have such strong magic and we have so little knowledge of them?”

  “They live in rock and in water. How could we know of them, who live where we cannot?”

  “Then why do they not show themselves to us? Nay, there is an answer already. What if they do not care for those of us who live where they do not? What if they do not need us as the Cursed Ones do? Maybe we have nothing they want.”

  “I have seen merfolk in my dreams,” he murmured, thinking of Stronghand. “But they were like beasts. Such creatures could not have built a great city.” He knelt beside Adica, stroking her hair, wanting to wake her up gently. “All that matters, here and now, is that I protect Adica. But sometimes I just don’t understand where I am.”

  “Maybe it is better that way,” she said softly, but when he looked up, surprised at the compassion in her tone, she had turned away as if to hide her expression.

  Adica still did not stir, although she breathed evenly enough. He kneaded her clenched hands but could not get them to open, tapped her knees, stroked her under her chin, but she gave no response. At last he sat back on his heels. “She’s in a trance.” He’d seen it before; it was one of the things that made her a Hallowed One, fits taking her, convulsions, long sleeps. “How do we escape this cave?”

  Laoina made a sign against evil spirits, then spat. After that she crouched beside Alain and regarded Adica dispassionately. After all, she must have been used to the twitching and drooling, the blank stares or the sudden unbreakable sleeps, since her younger brother was the Hallowed One of the Akka tribe. “First we must wait for night.”

  Maybe there was a more harrowing way to descend into a defile overlooked by a ruthless enemy’s fort than on a moonless night with an unconscious woman tied to your back and the knowledge that your two faithful companions, left in a shallow cave, would die of thirst if for any reason you didn’t return to them within two days. At the moment, Alain couldn’t think of one.

  Laoina climbed right below him, murmuring directions: a ledge off to the right broad enough to brace his left foot; a fall of shale to be avoided; a sturdy root grown out of the hillside, suitable for grasping.

  Better to imagine himself blind as he negotiated. His arms ached horribly, and his healing hand had begun to hurt like fire. His fingers were scraped raw, and he kept inhaling dust stirred up by his passage. Adica wasn’t particularly heavy, but she was a dead weight, and the ropes that bound her to his back cut into his chest and hips. Her breath tickled his neck, but she did not respond at all. Maybe she would never wake up.

  Nay, better not to think like that. He had sworn to protect her, and he would.

  Laoina had many skills. She, too, was heavily laden. The only things they had left behind with the hounds were the last of their provisions and all of the water, poured out into a shallow depression in the rock. She was a patient climber and a good guide as they crept down the steep slope. It was a different world than the one he knew, even than the one he’d grown used to at Queens’ Grave. The tough shrubs smelled different, resinous or sharply aromatic, and bore narrow-bladed leaves. Many of the plants had thorns that stung his skin or caught in Adica’s corded skirt. Once they came across a narrow cave mouth where a large bird had built its nest, now empty. Here he rested on his side in a hollow of twigs lined with grass and hair and skin and the bones of the small creatures it had carried here to feed its young.

  “When we make war,” he said to Laoina, who was crouched beside him, “it’s like feeding the bones of our children to our enemy and even to ourselves, isn’t it?”

  “They’ll eat our children whether we fight them or not.” Wind sighed along the slopes, rustling the shrubs around them. “I’d rather fight.”

  “That isn’t what I meant—” Out of the gulf of air, he heard a man’s laughter, high and sharp.

  They kept still, knowing how exposed they were, yet surely with only the stars to light them they couldn’t be seen from above.

  “Come,” whispered Laoina. “There’s better cover along the stream.”

  They half slid down the last incline before it bottomed out where a stream cut through the rock. Alain was so scratched up that his skin wept trickles of blood. The pain in his injured hand had settled into a dull throbbing. Laoina held branches aside as they pushed through the dense curtain of trees to get to the stream itself, a gurgling channel of water flowing over exposed rocks, but he still stung everywhere from branches scraping him. With Laoina’s help he untied Adica’s limp body and finally settled on slinging her over his shoulder like a sack of turnips, except maybe a sack of turnips was less unwieldy.

  It was hard work wading downstream in the darkness, even with Laoina testing every step before him and with his staff to steady himself. He slipped once on a rock that tipped as he brought his weight down on it. The butt of his staff glanced off a stone and flew up as he fell down to bang his knees so painfully that tears flowed, warm salt tears sliding away into the cold spring-fed waters.

  “Let me carry her,” whispered Laoina.

  “Nay. I can manage. She isn’t a burden to me.”

 
; The sound of wind and water serenaded them; otherwise, it was silent. Where had the laughing man gone?

  Stars blazed above. The Queen’s Sword rode at zenith, almost directly above them. Adica called the Sword by a different name. She called it the Heron and had shown him how the stars outlined its broad wings, head tucked back against its shoulders, and trailing legs.

  He braced himself on the staff and, with a grunt, pushed up to his feet. Adica moaned softly, whispering inaudible words. Crickets chirped. A whirring insect brushed against his face. He flailed, taken by surprise, just as Laoina hissed sharply and grabbed his arm. He heard the man’s laughter again, closer this time and answered by a second voice. A rustling disturbed the trees. He heard a grunt from the same direction he’d heard that laughter, a “gaw” of pain, a cry, broken off and rolling into a horrible gurgle.

  Throats slit. Men dying silently.

  A child swung out of the branches just in front of them and landed nimbly in the stream. She—or he—held a bow in one hand and with the other gestured impatiently. A length of white cloth was tied around its hips; otherwise, the child was naked except for sandals and dark stripes painted across its thin chest.

  “Come,” whispered Laoina urgently.

  They cut away into the underbrush, Alain stumbling over the rough ground as he followed Laoina and the child. They hadn’t gone more than a hundred steps when a dozen figures blocked their path, each one armed with a round shield and a short sword. Because they were all painted with dark stripes across their bare chests and faces, they were hard to distinguish in the darkness since the blend of shadow and light against their skin made them fade into the night and the vegetation. Their leader, a stocky young man, spoke quickly to Laoina.

  “You heard our call.”

  “We did. Where is the Holy One?”

  “No one knows. But it is certain that the Cursed Ones have taken her prisoner. The Horse people are on the move.”

  “What must we do, then?”

  “Go quickly. The queen needs the strength of the deer girl.” He nodded toward Adica, looked again, and hastily came over to examine her. “She is caught in a vision,” he said to Laoina, ignoring Alain. “We must get her to Queen Shuashaana at once.” Without asking permission, he began to untie the ropes holding Adica over Alain’s shoulders.