Prince of Dogs (Crown of Stars 2)

“I can’t,” she says, half weeping. “I can’t. How do I get there?”

“One strand of flax has no strength.” He twines a single unwound thread of flax around a finger. Straining, he snaps it through. Then he wraps the finished rope around a hand. “Twined together, they make a strong rope. But it takes time to make rope, just as it takes time to twine strands of knowledge together to make wisdom.”

Abruptly he stands, glancing around as if he has heard something. “They are coming.”

In that instant she sees beyond him down a path which snakes oddly through the trees. A short procession winds its way along the path, rather like King Henry’s progress but in smaller numbers. Bright colors so overwhelm her sight that she can make no sense of what walks there. One thing she sees: a round standard carried on a pole, a circular sheet of gold trimmed with iridescent green plumes as broad across as a man’s arms outstretched. It spins, like a turning wheel. Its brilliance staggers her.

“You must go,” says the sorcerer firmly. He licks a finger and reaches forward with it into fire as though to douse a wick. Moisture sizzles and snaps, popping into her face. She jerks back, blinks, then with a gasp leans forward again. But the veil has closed.

She saw nothing but raging fire and the mist of water rising as steam into the cool spring air.

“Liath!” A hand closed on her elbow, but it was only Alain, kneeling beside her. “I thought you were going to walk right into the fire.”

She licked her finger, reached out toward the fire as if to extinguish it—but nothing happened. “If only I could have.”

“Now, there,” he began, meaning to soothe her while behind him the hounds growled at the flames.

She shook out of his grasp and stepped back. The skin on her face felt baked; when she touched it, it smarted. “I saw the Aoi sorcerer. He said he’d teach me, if I could find a way to get to where he is.”

He glanced at the fire suspiciously. “Can you trust a Lost One? They don’t even believe in the God of Unities!”

“Maybe that’s why,” she said slowly, trying to understand it herself. “I’m a curiosity to him, that’s all. He doesn’t want anything from me—unlike the others.”

“But why can you see him through fire?”

“I don’t know.”

“It is a mystery, like my dreams,” he agreed, mercifully letting the unanswerable question drop. He raised a hand in front of his face, absorbing some of the heat. “How it burns!” he exclaimed, and she hung her head, ashamed, thinking he would realize what a monstrous thing she had done and be repelled by her now that he knew what she was: sorcerer’s child, untrained, ignorant, and uncontrollable. “Only think of what you could do with such fire!”

“Haven’t I already done enough?” she asked bitterly, thinking of the Lions she had killed.

“We are none of us without sin,” he pointed out. “But if you could learn to do something useful with it …”

“Call it down on the Eika,” she replied caustically. “Burn Gent and all the poor dead bodies rotting there!”

“Nay, don’t say that! If you could only scare them with it, enough to make them run—”

“Ai, Alain! You’ve fought the Eika. Fire won’t scare them.”

“And there are slaves in the city, or so it has been reported. If the city burned, they would burn, too.” He frowned, then looked at her. “We must tell my father.”

“No!” This she had no doubts about. “If the king knew I had burned down the palace at Augensburg, if the biscops knew, what do you think they’d do with me?”

Troubled, he busied himself with flicking ashy flakes of wood off his cloak. “They’d condemn you as a maleficus and send you to stand trial before the skopos,” he said reluctantly. “But I would speak up for you! I trust you.”

“They’d only accuse me of binding you with charms. Nay, they’d never trust a maleficus who can call fire. And why should they believe I can’t control it? Only that I don’t want to—or that I’m more dangerous for being flawed.”

“You can’t control it?” He glanced nervously toward the raging fire.

“I can’t even put it out,” she said with disgust. “I can only make it light.”

“But I must tell my father, Liath. He won’t condemn you. He has too much on his own conscience to cast stones at others.”

“But he might order me to call fire onto Gent, wouldn’t he? If he did, and if I could do it, how many innocent slaves will die in the conflagration?”

He hesitated. By his expression he clearly feared she was right, that Count Lavastine would sacrifice a few slaves, even if they had once been honest freeholders, for the sake of taking Gent. For the sake of getting a noble bride for his heir.

Out of mist and rain and steam, they heard a shout. “They’ve discovered I’m gone,” Alain said. “You cut around the back. Then they won’t know you’ve been gone. If they find this fire, they won’t associate it with you.”