Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  “The actions of humankind are a mystery,” he said at last, “since many do evil things who ought to know better, and some do good when they mean to do ill.”

  Geoffrey grunted as if irritated and set out for the gate to greet the newcomers. Ivar hastened after him, and came to the hall in time to hear a haughty young man, with the bearing of a youth raised in a noble house, speak to Geoffrey and Constance while a crowd gathered to listen.

  “Lady Sabella sends this message to Lord Geoffrey of Lavas, regent for Lavrentia, count of Lavas. ‘Tidings have reached me that you are sheltering Biscop Constance, who has fomented rebellion against me. Turn her over into my custody, in Autun, or your sons will be forfeit, executed for your treason.’”

  “Treason!” Geoffrey raged. The messenger held his ground, unmoved by the lord’s anger. “They are children! The younger hasn’t seen four summers.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead and muttered curses while his daughter sat small and quiet behind him. “It would have been better if they had died with their mother!”

  Lavrentia’s face crumpled as she fought to restrain tears.

  “Despair is a sin, Geoffrey,” said Constance, taking hold of his arm and drawing his hands down.

  “Am I to rejoice instead?”

  She caught his gaze and held it, and after a moment his wild look subsided to something more like shame. Ivar squeezed forward through the ranks to his friends, who were waiting beside the hearth. The messenger glanced their way, attracted by Ivar’s movement through the assembly, and dismissed them with a smirk.

  “I would not have burdened you with my presence if I had known Sabella would threaten you in this particular way,” said Constance.

  “She’s listening to Salian advisers!” Geoffrey seemed ready to laugh. “Salians are always murdering their children to clear their own path to the throne or to riches.”

  “So the chronicles suggest,” agreed Constance in a mild tone that was meant to warn him, but Geoffrey was not able to listen.

  “They might be dead already. Then nothing will be served by giving you up to her as well. Better stick with what we know is true. Or Sabella may be bluffing. She may not have the heart to kill two innocent children.”

  “Do you think so?” asked Constance.

  He swayed, jerking side to side as though tugged this way and that by a sharp pull on a rope. “I don’t know what to think! How can it have all gone wrong? I must go! I’ll exchange myself for them! Let her kill me if she wishes! I would welcome death!”

  “Lord Geoffrey! For shame!”

  He hid his face. His daughter sobbed into her hands, echoing her father. The company of retainers and servants stood in awful silence, and a few crept away like beaten dogs hoping not to be noticed. The messenger watched carefully, absorbing the scene into his memory so that, Ivar suppose, he might report Geoffrey’s weakness to Sabella.

  “You must stay here in Lavas and guard your daughter and these lands, Geoffrey. Captain Ulric and his company will remain behind. Consider that this may be a feint to draw you out.”

  “Why? Lavas County is nothing to Sabella, surely. She wants you because you represent Henry’s claim to sovereignty in Varre. Because you are the rightful duke of Arconia, after Sabella forfeited the title by her own rebellion. She is the traitor! I am not. I am not! Anyway, if you go to her, she will have no reason to give up my sons. Then she’ll have you back, to do with as she please—even to kill—and she’ll still hold my sons.”

  “No child of Arnulf would dare kill her own sibling,” said Constance. “We are not Salians!”

  “I must go, or I’ll be dishonored!”

  “You must stay, and guard Lavas together with Captain Ulric. I’ll leave you a hostage in your turn—this messenger.”

  The young man started and took a step back, looking around as for an escape route, but Ulric had already moved his men into position to block his retreat.

  “I will take my trusted retainers.” She gestured toward her clerics.

  “Then it is all for nothing,” moaned Geoffrey, “freeing you from Queen’s Grave. All this! It has all rotted in my hands!”

  “We are not dead and defeated yet, Geoffrey!” She got hold of her walking stick and pushed to her feet, and her smile might have come because of the pain of rising or her annoyance at Geoffrey, or because Sabella’s messenger looked so flummoxed at being outflanked as he realized he was now a prisoner. “Trust in God. I do.”

  “Truth rises with the phoenix,” muttered a voice in the crowd.

  “So I have come to believe.”

  Ulric met her by the door into the inner apartments.

  “Your Grace. We know that bandits haunt the roads, and worse things, perhaps. Wolves. Shadows. I trust God, but I wish you will take armed men on the road to protect you.”

  “Sabella has kindly sent an escort. I’ll return with them, all except for the messenger, who will remain here. Most of my schola are too frail to travel, and I trust you will see them well cared for here, Captain. But I think a few of my faithful clerics can accompany me!” She smiled at Ivar, Sigfrid, Ermanrich, and Hathumod. Her gaze lingered longest on Baldwin, whom she examined with a slight frown.

  “They may even be able to bear weapons,” said Ulric with a look of disapproval, “although I don’t know how much good they’ll do you in a fight, Your Grace.”

  “We’ve fought!” said Ivar. “We’ve ridden into battle with Prince Ekkehard.”

  Ulric began to roll his eyes, but stopped himself with an inhalation and a sharp cough.

  “My bold clerics!” she said, and somehow, from her lips, the statement did not sound mocking.

  7

  WHAT woke her? She lay still, listening, but heard nothing and saw nothing. A sour scent teased her; it was as pungent as rotten eggs but fading fast.

  At length she decided that nothing unusual had woken her. She shifted, sitting up, and in that moment a puff of sulfurous air gusted against her cheek. She heard two scrapes as of a weight dragged across gritty rock, a sigh like those of a bellows, and again two scrapes. The stink of the air made her eyes water, but it had direction, wafting at her from the north-northwest if she deemed her back against the rock wall to measure due south. Out there, some movement made the air shift. Where there was a breeze, there was a breach to the outside.

  She tested her thigh. The old blood was flaking off, and there was only a smear of moistness at one end of the wound where it had ripped a little. A long scab was beginning to form. She still ached throughout her body, but food and drink and rest had eased these hurts and her mind had regained its clarity.

  I can win free, if I can only be patient and clever.

  She sat for a long while and listened. The weight of rock oppressed her, but power lived here, too, felt as a hum deep in the earth. Kansi-a-lari had called this place “the Heart-of-the-Mountain-of-the-World’s Beginning.”

  The Ashioi cities she had seen looked different than the towns and habitations erected by humankind, which rose haphazardly although any one might be built around a central building grounded with sacred power—a cathedral or church or, in older days, a fort. The crowns held power; weaving threads into a stone crown brought to Earth the melody of the spheres.

  She breathed into her belly, into the stone, and it seemed to her that the deeper she breathed the deeper she fell. The Ashioi understood the power that lies in the landscape, and they built to encourage and enhance it. This heart was a kernel around which the city had risen. So deep, and so high, and pulsing with a force whose heat and contours, almost too faint for her to perceive, had the taste of the aether, funneled into this place as canals channel rainwater into a central pond.

  She stood, and called her wings.

  They flared golden, and she lifted a hand’s breadth off the ground. A vast ceiling vaulted so high that its peaks lay in shadow. Above, frozen spears of lightning glistened, rock formations hanging from the ceiling like so many points. The cavern wa
s immense, its far walls lost in dimness. The floor stretched smooth and unbroken.

  Except there.

  A narrow, black spire, somewhat taller than a man, rose out of the floor, so far from her that it was barely visible in the gloom. Blue fire flickered along its length where the aetherical glamour cast by her wings brushed it. Like a shadow, a second, insubstantial pillar blossomed into existence beside it, a burning stone through which she could see

  “Liat’dano! Where are you?” The shaman speaks to her from beyond that gateway. The centaur woman is insubstantial but nevertheless present. She shades her eyes as against a harsh light and peers through the gateway toward Liath.

  “I am here, at the Heart-of-the-Mountain-of-the-World’s Beginning!” Liath cries.

  “I have been looking for you, Daughter, but the aether is thin and the gateway closes. Come to me! Quickly!”

  The pulse of the aether was too feeble, even here, to sustain her wings. They withered, and she dropped the hand’s span to Earth and stumbled as too much weight came down on her injured leg. The glowing illumination faded and the burning stone dissolved into a pale nimbus, rapidly dissipating.

  Caught in the last lambent twilight, a figure hunched out of the shadows and scuttled to the spire. It turned, and she saw that it was not human. It had luminous bulges where eyes ought to have been. Its skin had the look of granite.

  Blackness swallowed her, and it. She heard two scrapes, that bellows sigh followed by two scrapes, and then nothing.

  She dug deep, and fought to call her wings again, but the first effort had taken its toll on her and they only flickered, like the spark of a wick catching for an instant before snapping out. She could not get illumination enough to make her way to the black spire.

  She had not hallucinated that creature. Indeed, she had a good idea of what it must be, because Mother Obligatia had told her of the inhuman creatures deep in the rock beneath the convent of St. Ekatarina’s whose charity had sustained the sisters for many months. In legend, humankind had many names for them: goblins and “Old Ones” and more besides.

  Creatures who lived in the earth must have some means of moving around, just as moles shifted through tunnels. Where they could crawl, so could she. It was only a matter of having provisions and steady light.

  Ai, God, if only the gateway of the burning stone had not collapsed so suddenly. If she could step through—reach Li’at’dano—she could gain her freedom and be reunited with Blessing, if her girl lived.

  She must live.

  “I will it so,” she murmured, knowing that words are not magic in themselves but only because we weave them in a way that, like sorcery, creates a spell around our listeners.

  She sat for a long while, breathing to quiet her heart and mind but also fighting against the exhaustion that washed at her and between one breath and the next swept over her. Pain from the wound in her thigh stabbed every time she twitched, and she braced herself against the wall to stop her legs from moving. Could she reach Li’at’dano? Thoughts wound down lazily, and she dozed off.

  What had woken her?

  Liathano.

  Was that the shaman’s voice? It nagged at her. She must have heard the shaman calling her name in the dream she had just been having, which had already faded, leaving a slow trembling ringing in her ears as if she had dreamed in sounds and not images.

  Liathano.

  One voice, tolling like a bell.

  A sick dread infested her, shuddering her body inside and out.

  Ai, God. A galla.

  Kansi had captured her and meant to kill her. No, that was fear talking. She had no reason to believe that Kansi knew the galla or had ever used them.

  Liathano.

  The galla came from a plane outside of this world, and therefore they did not fully inhabit this world. Air and water meant nothing to them. Heat and cold could claw no purchase into the forms that passed for their bodies. Rock did not halt them.

  It was coming for her, and she had no weapon with which to kill it.

  Liathano.

  She was cold, and determined, and flush with the heat that comes of a racing heart and bitter knowledge. I am dead, but I will not go down without fighting.

  She rose, fixed her feet and, ignoring the pain of her wound, sought by taste and smell and hearing for the direction of the galla.

  Where is it coming from? There!

  There! The cavern was pitch-black, without light enough even to see her own hand held right in front of her nose. But the galla was blacker still. Seen in such darkness, she perceived it as a void cut through onto another place, a worse place, a plane of existence racked with torment that, to the galla, seemed a blessed mercy compared to the torments of Earth. It was not like humankind, not meant to dwell in this world even for the space of a breath, her own, one in and one out, as she stood her ground and sought deep into the rock for the scattered grains of fire embedded within the structure of stone.

  So faint they were, but she was desperate, and it rang closer and closer, floating across the vast black expanse of the cavern.

  Liathano!

  It knew her. It only wanted to go home, and she was its gateway.

  The thought gave rise to ugly hope. She swept her awareness past the grains of fire and sought those attenuated veins of aether. Through the gateway she could find griffins. She might escape through the gateway.

  She called her wings. As they flared, the towering black pillar that was the galla fluttered as in a strong wind.

  She sought: At the heart of the aether lies the burning stone, the gateway—so far off, so faint…

  It bloomed, frangible but present, a man’s height and breadth in size, shimmering with the pulsing blue aether.

  The shaman stood there still—or had come again to seek her. The pale figure of the Horse woman wavered, limned in blue as she reached out her arms in a gesture of welcome.

  “Liath!” called the shaman.

  “I’m coming! There is a galla—” she cried out as she lunged forward, but her leg collapsed under her. Already the gateway was collapsing from man height to child height to knee height. Too late! Too weak! There was not enough aether to sustain it. Her wings shredded into sparks. The galla swept down upon her.

  The shaman’s voice rang clear through the last hand’s span of the opening. “I am Li’at’dano. Come quickly, to me!”

  It was the same name, blurred by the centuries into a word that breathed more softly from the lips but which in its essence had not changed.

  It was the same name, and she had carried it for far longer than Liath had.

  The stinging presence of the galla scorched her, but it passed her by and twisted through the vanishing gateway on the trail of the one called Li’at’dano. Liathano.

  There came a cry of pain, and a dazzling blaze that flared as the galla engulfed and consumed its prey.

  The last light of aetherical fire curled in on itself, and winked out as the gateway collapsed.

  Dead.

  Devoured.

  Into silence, into darkness, Liath fell. Her ears rang and her pulse throbbed, beating wildly as she knelt on the cold stone and sobbed so raggedly that it seemed she could never stop.

  8

  THE weather held fine. It did not rain, or even feel like rain. They luxuriated in a string of pleasant early summer days that might have run warm had it not been for the constant veil that concealed the sun and cooled the land. All the noble lords and ladies watched Sabella day by day to gauge her mood; it was Conrad’s heartiness that warmed the party.

  “So I said to her, ‘then, pray tell, if a woman as lovely as you has held to your vows these four years and had no congress with any man or his member, why does this toddling sprout cling to your leg and call you Mother?’ She looked me dead in the eye, and she spoke coldly, I will tell you! ‘Because I am abbess of this poor institution, my lord duke, not the serving maid you take me for. I am Mother to those who rest under my care.’”

&nbs
p; His listeners laughed, and he went on. “It is a shame, truly, that God should steal such treasures and lock them in the church. I have rarely seen a finer looking woman, as ripe as Aogoste berries. But I had no fortune that day! Her scornful look was enough to wither any man! Still, I wondered about that little child. He had a dusky complexion, you know.”

  One of the courtiers chortled. “Mayhap you came to her in the night, like an incubus, Conrad, eh! A year or two previous? She all unwitting? They say holy women have moist dreams!”

  Conrad raised a hand to stop the chatter and laughter. “Not me! I would have recalled it! Mayhap, back in those days, the Dragons of those times might have ridden by. In truth, now I think on it, I recall there was talk of them sheltering a night or more in the convent’s guesthouse two years before I came calling. Where such men shelter, one at least might have found a more inviting hall to rest himself. For you know, this was at St. Genovefa’s Convent, and she the saintly patron of dogs.”

  That brought a new round of laughter.

  “Are you only prattling, Conrad?” asked Sabella, “or do you honestly believe it to be true? Did Sanglant get some bastard child on a holy abbess back when he was captain of Henry’s Dragons? Where is this supposed to have taken place? How can the child’s existence give us an advantage? Otherwise, do not waste my time.”

  Her glare cowed the courtiers, but Conrad laughed. He had a remarkable smile, one that invited all folk to smile with him, and he was not afraid to poke fun at himself, although it seemed to Alain that he had made sure that the knife thrust more deeply into his unwitting rival’s flesh. “I will tell tales to please myself and my companions while we ride this dreary road. If not, then you must listen to me sing.”

  Even Sabella must chuckle, although the softening lasted only a moment. “Best tell your tales, for I will have none of your singing without my good clerics to make it sweet.”