Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

“Is belief a requirement?”

She laughed, and he smiled, in the human way, and she blushed, a surprising flush of color on her cheeks, quickly controlled as she continued speaking.

“The clerics would say belief is necessary, but I don’t know what God would say. Must we know we believe, or is it enough to follow God’s precepts and live according to the law?”

He nodded. “The WiseMothers of my people possessed the ability to see beyond the veil which blinds their shortlived children. Perhaps the wise mothers of your kin also have this far-reaching vision.”

“Perhaps. Some are wise and honest, but others struggle for power and advancement just like the rest of us. It is ever so. We are imperfect vessels, easily cracked by greed or anger or lust or envy or anguish or fear. Yet some among us are also steadfast and truehearted. Sanglant was such a man. That is why I mourn him, who was best among us.”

She wept without sobbing or keening, dignified in her grief.

He could not mourn, who had known this man only as Bloodheart’s prisoner, among the dogs. The Eika do not weep.

In truth, it served him well that the captain called Sanglant was dead, because it eliminated a powerful rival, a man who might have outplayed him on the field of blood which is called battle. He was not happy about it; nor was he sad. He used what weapons he could gather.

The invisible tide of fate dragged men to the shore, or into deep waters where they drowned. He and his tribes of Eika had been cast ashore, orphaned on the wings of the same storm that had broken the ancient threads binding the WiseMothers to the aether that was their life. In the fjall of the heavens, the WiseMothers had dreamed of the past and of the future, too steep a climb for mortal legs. No longer would their children benefit from that farsighted vision.

Yet in their passing, they had birthed a new generation of FirstMothers, the dragon kind whose blood had burned fire into stone and flesh to create the Eika long ago. So the tide turns. Who knew what wrack would wash up on the shore out of the fathomless sea?

With an embroidered scrap of linen, Theophanu wiped her cheeks. “Well,” she said. “All things die, that walk on Earth. So will we, when God will it.” She glanced outside, and gasped. “Look!”

He moved to stand beside her, not touching her, but their shoulders—of a height—so close that her shawl brushed his bare arm as she pointed.

The wind had really picked up, blowing off all but those clouds caught along the horizon. Stars glinted against the veil of night.

“Some say the stars are the souls of the dead.” Her hands gripped the sill so tightly that her knuckles were white—or perhaps it was only the cold that paled her skin.

“We call the stars ‘the eyes of the most ancient Mothers.’”

She relaxed, shoulders dropping slightly. “Do they watch over you, as kindly mothers do?”

“No. Those whose thoughts have passed into the heavens are indifferent to us, who live here upon the streaming waters and the silent earth. It is cold in the vale of black ice, which we call the fjall of the heavens. The north wind rises there. It is as sharp as a knife, a breath so bitter that it kills. Would we think them as beautiful if they were not so cold and so distant?”

When she did not reply, he turned his head to look at her, who stood so close beside him. A last tear slid down her cheek, one she did not wipe away, and she was looking at him, not at the glorious heavens.

“Perhaps not,” she said in that cool, smooth voice that gave away nothing. “Yet we become accustomed to admiring the things we can never quite grasp, and have no hope of truly possessing.”

It was obvious she meant more than she said, in the manner of humankind, but he could not quite read into the bones of her words. The span of life is short, and troublesome in large part because there is far more to understand than time to do it in.

He nodded carefully, to acknowledge that he had heard her. “Today we have won a great victory. As for the rest, as we say in my country, we must take it one stone at a time.”

3

AT dawn, Zuangua took control.

“We’re not to move out of the camp until he gives permission,” Liath said to Anna. “He says we’ve already trampled valuable sign.”

Anna obeyed without protest. What else could she do? She was grateful to have been rescued from the country of the Ashioi, but she might as well have been flotsam caught in the current, spinning and tumbling. She stood beside the fire pit, and she watched, because she could do nothing else.

The trackers were one male and one female, maskless and naked except for sandals and a loincloth tied up between their legs so it would not drag on the ground. They made a circuit of the stone crown and slowly widened this spiral to include the grassy mounds. Here, alongside one of the mounds, the female tracker lingered, while the male tracker moved swiftly toward an obvious path breaking out of the trees on the southern side of the clearing.

“Hei!” called the female tracker.

Anna followed Liath and Zuangua, who hurried to the tracker’s position. The woman pointed to scuff marks and broken stems of grass beside one of the narrow openings that led under a burial mound. They consulted, then looked around at the mask warriors who had gathered.

“Anna,” said Liath. “You’re the best fit.”

They gave her a torch, lit by a touch from the lady. The way the flame flared made Anna tremble to think of having that kind of power, and she dared not say “no.”