Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

He had not worked with words alone. Fear of her, of what he had told them of her, could not drive them back, but the harsh weather did. They shuddered in the gale pouring down onto them out of the north. They retreated to porches, where the walls offered meager shelter. But the closer she came to the main compound, the harder it became to fight the winter. Men struggled even to walk. They bent, folded over, as they pushed their way to buildings that might shield them.

  The wind howled down. With each breath, with each step, she felt the ice spreading. Where a walkway led between two dormitories, a passageway into the central courtyard, she discovered two novices curled up and sleeping, their lips blue and their fingers white from cold, breath bleeding white clouds into the air.

  Cold kills, but she dared not stop to help them.

  Her feet rapped on stone as she came out of the covered walkway into the famous unicorn courtyard, with its pillared colonnade, rose garden, and trim hedge of cypresses. Four stone unicorns reared on their hind legs. They gleamed, having been scrubbed clean since she saw them last, and all streaks had been scoured from the mosaic basin. Water spouted from their horns in four arched streams, but as she crossed the empty cloister those slender sprays of water crackled and turned to ice, falling in a patter of shards to earth.

  And still the cold wind pressed down from the heavens, until it seemed the air cut as with knives.

  The scent of burning—of blessed heat perfumed with lavender—teased her with the sting of magic. Sorcery, like the wind, poured down over her, over all of them. This was Hugh’s work. What did he care how many died, as long as he got what he wanted? Always he worked his worst against those helpless to stand against him.

  The wind tore away that trace of warmth. She pushed on, hunched over as she fought across the courtyard to reach the chapter house and the side entrance to the church. Her hands were so numb she could scarcely bend them. Her eyes frosted open.

  It was so cold.

  Cold had defeated her once, when only the pigs had offered her comfort. But the spark of will had never quite died, not even in the depths of that awful winter in Heart’s Rest, although she had surrendered in the end in order to save her own life.

  Not this time.

  All the guilt and grief of those days, which she had carried with her for so long, had burned away. Now the cold, the sorcery, was simply another battle to fight.

  A monk sprawled across the doorway into the church, unconscious or asleep. He was shockingly pretty, so perfect in feature that briefly she felt moved to smile, but she could not really move her lips. She knelt beside him and pressed her hands to his cheeks. He had lost so much heat that his skin actually was colder than her chapped and freezing hands. She wasn’t sure he was even breathing. Ice rimed his nostrils. With the fine touch of one wielding a needle and not a knife, she carved warmth out of her own core and poured it into his flesh. Although his skin turned red, he rattled and stirred, and a mist of milky breath poured from him as he coughed out a gasp and sucked in air. His eyelids fluttered, but he did not wake. The magic would not let him wake, and save himself.

  “Ivar,” he murmured.

  Startled, she sank back on her haunches and stared at him. Had she seen him before? His was a hard face to forget, and Ivar had spent time in a monastery and might have become acquainted with such a man. Still, Ivar was a common enough name. Her thoughts wound down dreamily, for it really wasn’t so much that she was cold but that she was weighed down by an overwhelming crush of exhaustion. It would be so nice to sleep. It would be best to sleep.

  “Liath.”

  The voice roused her. That voice was itself the creep of ice into her body, a hot pain even when it flashes cold. The act of rising bit into her knees and hips, which were by this time so stiff that she wondered if they were freezing into blocks of ice.

  Fire is such a fragile thing. Stone and water and earth all smother fire.

  “Liath,” he said again.

  She was not sure whether he meant to wake her, or to lure her into a sleep that would leave her as helpless as the others. Best not to wait to find out.

  She stalked through the open door and into the church. Hersford boasted a modest church with fine friezes along the capitals, braided circles enclosing leaves, vines, and birds. She crossed the bema and approached the apse with its dome and piers. Three wide stair steps led up to the altar. A slender form lay athwart these steps, a girl-child dressed in a simple linen shift with her coarse black hair pulled back into a topknot in the manner of the Ashioi, only this girl was Blessing, as limp and lifeless as if she were dead.

  She ran, dropped down beside the girl, and pressed her cheek to Blessing’s chest and a hand to her throat. The girl’s lips were as cold as ice, the lips of a corpse. Liath’s own breath ceased, her heart seemed to stop, as she listened, yet after all the child’s steady respiration eased in and out as faint as the patter of a mouse’s heart.

  She was not dead, only sleeping. Freezing to death, like all the others.

  A flare of anger burned bright, but she swallowed it. Anger would not help her now. She stood.

  Light bled through the rose window, the holy Circle of Unity bounded on all sides by the glorious wisdom of God, who are Lord and Lady and thereby united. That soft light suffused the space around the altar, and here, naturally, Hugh knelt in the perfect repose of a man who is smiled upon by the angels, looking like an angel himself, serene in God’s mercy. His palms were pressed together in prayer. His forehead touched his fingers.

  “Liath,” he said, not looking at her. His voice was as soft and warm as that of a man coaxing a hurt child or wounded dog. “Come in now. Come in.”

  He stood, turning to face her.

  In this way, in the arctic church with the wind whistling in through open doors and with light spilling over him, she stared up at his beautiful face.

  God help her. All those years ago he had abused her. For all the years after he had terrified and tormented her. These memories still had the power to move her, but she was moved with pity and with anger for the helplessness she had endured. She was not the only one who had suffered at his hands, nor was she the only one suffering now. Fumes rose from a brazier burning steadily a few paces away from the altar. The odor of these bindings and workings bled through the monastery to put so many innocents into such a dangerous sleep, as the fierce cold he had called out of the north with his weather working chewed into their sleeping flesh.

  Seeing that she watched him, he spoke the words of the psalm in his beautiful voice. “‘You who sit in my garden, my bride, let me hear your voice.’”

  “I have a great deal to say to you,” she replied. She mounted the last step and halted in front of him. They might as well have been alone in the world. In a way, she had been alone with him for far too long. She had been walking for years now with the memory of what he had done a constant burden, never shaken from her back.

  No more. She would bear that burden no longer.

  Her voice was clear and strong. “A prince without a retinue is no prince. A lord without a retinue is no lord. You are alone, Hugh. You have cut every tie, severed every bond of kinship. Betrayed every ally. I am come to fetch my daughter. When I leave, you will have nothing.”

  He did not waver. His grave demeanor gave him an authority that made his words fall with a great weight, like a benediction. “I knew you would come into your power. Now you see what you are. What I always knew you could be.”

  She shook her head. “I know what you want. But it’s not yours and it never will belong to you. This much mercy I have within me. Go now. Go, now, and I’ll not kill you. Find what shelter you can—if you can escape the vengeance of the Ashioi. They wait beyond the stockade.”

  She was cruel enough to enjoy the flash of alarm that widened his eyes and startled the smooth assurance of his heavenly smile. But he recovered swiftly. He always did.

  “How can you not see it, my rose? To hurt me would be like hurting yourself. We are alike, you and
I.”

  “So is an adder like a phoenix, for they each have two eyes.”

  “By denying it, you admit it. We are alike. You fear the truth, knowing it to be the truth.”

  “It’s true we are alike in that we seek knowledge. I do admit it. I’ve seen it to be true. But the outer seeming does not necessarily reflect the inner heart. We are not alike, because you seek to possess and I seek only to comprehend.”

  “Is that what you believe? You, who could have anything you wanted? Don’t you know the truth about yourself, Liath?”

  “That my mother was a fire daimone, and my father born out of the house of Bodfeld. What else is there to know?”

  He laughed. “You don’t know! You haven’t guessed! This is rich irony! Taillefer’s great grandchild does not wear the gold torque that is her birthright.”

  “I am not Taillefer’s descendant! Anne was not my mother.”

  “She was not. Truly, she was not. But who was your father’s mother? And who was your father’s mother’s mother?” He opened his hands in the manner of a supplicant. His voice was pleasing, and his grace and elegance might persuade any woman or man to listen, and to believe. “Have you ever met the hounds of Lavas?”

  And here she stood, talking, talking, while the killing cold drowned the monastery and its inhabitants. She found the heart of the fire burning in the brazier, and extinguished it. It snuffed out, wisps of smoke rising with a last, sharp aroma of lavender.

  “Enough! Your beauty is undeniable. Your voice is lovely. Your words and your eloquence astound me. But I no longer fear you, I can never trust you, and I will not fall prey to you, in any way or in any manner. Nothing you say can shake me. This is your last warning. Go.”

  “Can it not?” he asked her. “Nothing I say? I am not done with you, Liath. None will have you, if I cannot. Sanglant is dead.”

  “Is this the best you can do? Ai, God. You are become pathetic.”

  She was not fool enough to turn her back on him. She backed up cautiously, felt for the step with a foot, and knelt down to gather Blessing’s body into her arms. The girl was all limbs, awkward to hold but not particularly heavy.

  He did not move, preferring to remain in the light of the rose window that painted him with its pleasing glow. “I would think, my beautiful Liath, that after all this you would know better than to dismiss my words so lightly. I sent Brother Heribert north because he is infested by a daimone. Heribert is dead. I don’t know how he died or how and when the daimone got into his body, although I believe it happened at Verna. But the daimone seeks Heribert, whom it professes to love. I told the daimone to seek Heribert within the body of Sanglant. Once the bastard is possessed—”

  She set the girl down.

  She rose.

  She stepped away from Blessing, for fear of engulfing her in that instant of unbridled rage and fear.

  Hugh was ready. A cold howl of wind ripped in through the open doors, so strong that benches tipped over in the nave and slammed into the stone floor. Her clothing writhed around her body, tangling in her legs, and she had to lean backward, overbalancing into the force of that wind, to keep from falling to her knees before him.

  Thunder boomed outside. In its wake, shouts and frightened cries split the air and folk shrieked and clamored as Hersford’s residents woke from their enchanted sleep to find themselves caught beneath a tempest. The wind screamed over the valley, rumbling along the roof, blasting into the nave like a raging current of water. Hugh’s hands were working, in fists and then open, part of the magic of binding and working.

  Always, his fingers choked that which he wished to control. Always, he throttled that which did not obey him.

  Struggling against the howling wind, she straddled her daughter, a foot fixed on either side of the child’s prone body. She fought against sorcery, no longer protected from it by the shield of Da’s magic.

  How could it be that he knew the secrets of the tempestari and she did not? What would she give for such knowledge? How much would she give up?

  They were alike, after all. Ai, God. It was true.

  “I am afraid!” she cried in a voice that carried over the growl of the wind and the cracking shout of the thunder. “I am afraid of becoming like you. But I never will.”

  At these words, she saw the truth within him: the twisted fury that distorted his expression as she defied him.

  “It’s better you are dead than lost to me!”

  “God help me,” she rasped. “You dragged off my daughter only to lure me. You threaten my beloved, because you hope to make me weak, knowing I was weak before. But I have walked the spheres. I have survived the storm. I am no longer weak.”

  “Yet neither am I, my rose. Fear me, as you did once.”

  Lightning lit the rose window. Its snap sent a shock wave through the entire stone edifice. Thunder broke as if between them, inside the church itself. The rose window shattered. Its shards rained over them like so many slivers of ice.

  She called fire into the slow glass, and the fragments poured as shooting stars and peppered the smooth slate floor of the apse. Hugh staggered back against the altar. He slapped the burning remnants off his sleeves and his golden hair. Yet when he looked up, he raised a hand as against a blinding light shining into his eyes.

  “Fear you?” The anger burned at such a blue-white heat that she could no longer contain it. In her fury, unbidden, unasked, her wings unfurled with a roar. “I am not the one you will harm! How many more who are innocent will suffer because of you? God forgive me for thinking I should let you go unharmed. Because you will run, and who will be able to find you, when you can weave the stars and walk the crowns?”

  He saw her, or saw beyond her, into the heart of her blazing wings. He saw what she had become and what she truly was, and his expression changed. In the wreckage of the rose window he slipped and scrambled.

  He fled from what he saw.

  A surge of furious triumph scalded her, shameful as it was, to know that he feared her as she had once feared him. How easy it would be to make him grovel and plead, to make him obey her, to make him crawl.

  But she let it go. She had to let it go. Hate makes you blind.

  She reached and, with her touch, with the knowledge of the fire that slumbers in all creation, she found the recesses within his eyes where the smallest of messages pass from the world to the mind.

  “I beg you.” He fell to his knees.

  She found the depths within his eyes that formed the passageway of sight, and in this place she sought the slumbering fire. Called fire, with a needle touch, precise and delicate.

  Burned him.

  Hate makes you blind. And so would he become, who had been blinded by hate and envy for his whole life long.

  With a strangled cry, he fell to the floor in spasms as the pain bit deep, but she had already let him go.

  Blessing coughed, and came up spitting and growling like a wild creature. Footsteps hammered, and voices shouted outside. The mask warriors poured into the nave, Zuangua in the lead with his obsidian sword held high for the killing stroke.

  “Halt!” she cried.

  They clattered to a halt and backed away from her, all but Zuangua, who strode boldly up the dais and straddled the wounded man. The Ashioi had a wide, white grin on his face, eerie to look on. Here was a man who enjoyed his revenge.

  “I made a pledge—I swore he would live,” said Liath. Already she felt the wings furl, die away, because the faint current of aether could not support that blaze.

  He looked at her, the unburned side of his face twisted up in a look of disbelief although the other, still red and raw, was pulled tight and unmoving. “You cannot be so stupid.”

  “The words have been said. I said I would not kill him.”

  “So you admit it!” He laughed.

  “Or let him be killed. The words have been said.”

  It was clear he did not intend to provoke her by challenging her. “I’m not greedy, Bright One. I se
e you have crippled him. You’ve taken his sight. That means he can never weave the looms. He can’t threaten us. I’ll accept that. I need only proof for my people that we have taken our share, and gained a measure of vengeance for Feather Cloak’s death.”

  He acted so quickly she had no time to react. He bent, tugged Hugh’s right arm out straight, and chopped down in a strong stroke, cutting off the hand just above the wrist.

  Hugh screamed. He rolled and thrashed.

  The Ashioi laughed and howled as they pounded their spears on the paving stones and stamped their feet. She jumped up beside Zuangua, put her hand over the stump pumping bright red blood over the floor, and cauterized it. Hugh gasped—the only noise he could get out—and fainted.

  The smell made her sick, and even Zuangua leaped back to get away from that sizzling odor. He retreated down the steps as she rose with blood dripping from her hand and Hugh passed out beside the Hearth.

  “Your people have been murdering the Wendish,” she said, understanding now the reaction of the monks and villagers. “Packs of them, like roving wolves. That’s why they feared me, and hate you. How could you be so foolish as to squander the alliance Sanglant would have offered you?”

  Zuangua held up the severed hand. Blood drizzled, although the cut was amazingly neat, sliced by a very sharp edge. The fingers were pale, curled, and there was—she noted—only one simple gold ring on those handsome fingers. Hugh had not been a man greedy for riches. Strange to think he had been spared such a vice.

  “I am content,” said Zuangua.

  But she was not. “Do not offend me and mine, Zuangua. I will keep the peace, if you will.”

  He shrugged. “Our truce is over.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “That’s all. Let those of my people who mean to return with me come now.”

  Sharp Edge stepped out of the crowd. “I’ll weave him through, but I’m staying with you, Bright One. If you’ll have me.” She said the words with a teasing smile—the kind that men will walk leagues to taste, given the chance. At least one young mask groaned audibly, and a few others muttered and shifted their spears in restless hands.