The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

“Lady Sabella rebelled against King Henry’s authority?” they would cry, aghast and amazed, although all this had taken place a full year before.

“We heard the Eika sacked the city of Gent and are laying the countryside waste all around,” they would confide nervously, and then she would calm their fears by telling them of the second battle of Gent and how Count Lavastine and King Henry had routed the Eika army and restored the ruined city to human hands.

To them, she was an exotic bird, bright, fleeting, quickly come and quickly gone. No doubt they would remember her, and her words, long after she had forgotten them and theirs.

It was a sobering thought.

In the village of Laderne full twenty souls crowded the house of her host, turning her visit into a festive gathering. They entertained her with songs and local gossip while she ate, but as soon as her host brought her a mug of beer after the meal, they turned their questions on her.

“What’s your errand, Eagle? Where did you come from? Where are you going?”

She had learned to judge how much to say: when to keep close counsel or when to be more forthcoming. Many people favored her with better food the more she told them, and this old householder clearly thought her visitor important: She hadn’t watered down the beer. “I’m riding to the palace at Weraushausen, at the king’s order. He left his schola there, many of his clerics and most of the noble children who attend the progress. His own young son, Prince Ekkehard, is among them. I’m to give them word where they are to meet him.”

“Weraushausen? Where’s that?”

“Beyond the Bretwald,” she said. They shook their heads, hemmed and hawed, and advised her to ride carefully and on no account to cut through the old forest itself.

“Young fools have tried it now and again,” said Merla, the old householder. She had about six teeth left and was proud of them. “They always vanish. Killed by wolves and bears, no doubt. Or worse things.” She nodded with satisfaction, as if pleased at their dreadful fate.

“Nay, I heard at market that foresters was cutting a road through the heart of the Bretwald at the king’s order,” protested one of the men. He had a face made bright red by many hours working in the sun.

“As if any could do so,” retorted the old woman. “But you’ve said nothing of the king. Has he named an heir yet? This Prince Ekkehard, perhaps?”

“He has an eldest daughter, Princess Sapientia. She’s old enough to be named as heir now that she’s ridden to battle and borne a child.”

“Ach, yes, proven her fertility and led soldiers in war. God have marked her as worthy to rule.”

They nodded sagely all round, much struck by this sign of God’s favor, all except one thin man in the back. He sipped beer and regarded Liath with pale eyes. He was almost as brown as she was on his face and hands, but where his tunic lay unlaced at his chest—for it was still warm—she could see how pale his skin was where the sun didn’t reach. “He’d another child, a son, with a Salian name—Sawnglawnt, or something like that. He was a grand fighter, captain of the King’s Dragons. But I heard from a peddler that he and his Dragons died when the Eika took Gent.”

She flushed, and was grateful that people who did not know her well could not see any change in her complexion, dark as it was. “Not dead,” she said. How on God’s earth did she manage to keep her voice from shaking? “He’d been held prisoner, but he was freed by troops under the command of Count Lavastine. He is now safe at the king’s side.”

They exclaimed over this miracle. She gulped down her beer. But the damage had already been done. That night she slept restlessly and in the morning blushed to recall her dreams.

Ai, Lady. What had he said to her six days ago as the dawn light rose over the king’s camp, set up outside Gent?

“Marry me, Liath.”

All day the sun shone as Liath rode northwest along the great northern loop of the Ringswaldweg. She passed only a few travelers during the day: two carters hauling coarse sailcloth weighted down by a dozen bars of pig iron; a quiet pack of day laborers seeking a harvest; a peddler pushing a handcart; and a trio of polite fraters walking south with bare feet, callused hands, and sun-chapped faces. The ancient forest known as the Bretwald loomed to her left, so thick that it was no wonder travelers did not bother to try to hack through it but rather suffered the long journey round its northern fringe. Land broken up by trees, pasture, and the occasional village surrounded by strips of fields marched along on her right. She was used to traveling. She liked the solitude, the changing landscape, the sense of being at one with the cosmos, a small moving particle in the great dance of light.

But now, as the late summer twilight overtook her, the wind began to blow, and for some reason she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was following her. She glanced back along the road, but it lay empty.

Never trust the appearance of emptiness.

Clouds brought an early dusk, and she unrolled her cloak and threw it over her shoulders as rain spattered down. Because the summer had been dry, the road did not churn instantly to mud, but even so, the way bogged down and she soon despaired of reaching any kind of shelter for the night.

God knew she did not want to sleep outside on a night of storm and rain, far from any human habitation.

The rain slackened. From ahead, she heard a faint jingling of harness, and for an instant she breathed easier. She had no fear of lawful riders on the king’s road.

For an instant.

Out of the darkening sky behind her, she heard a low reverberation, a tolling like that of a church bell. But she had passed no church since midday.

Was that sound the echo of a daimone’s passing? Did such a creature pursue her again? She glanced back but saw no hollow-eyed daimone formed into the fair semblance of an angel gliding above the earth, saw no glass-feathered wings. Yet as the rising wind buffeted her, she felt a whisper:

“Liathano.”

The air shuddered and rippled on the road far behind her, just where it hooked to the right around a bulge in the forest’s girth. Columns of mist rose into the air like great tree trunks uprooted from the forest and spun into gauze.