The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

She left, and Rosvita was alone, yet not alone at all because of the creatures who stared at her from the walls, accusing, plaintive, proud, and angry. They are not like us. They looked hard and cruel, arrogant and cunning and unforgiving. What was it the church mothers had written of elvenkind? “Born of the mating between humans and angels.” With all the cold beauty of angels and the bestial passions of humankind.

Sanglant’s mother had looked so. Rosvita had seen her one time, when she was herself a very young woman newly come to King Arnulf’s court. The elven woman had called herself. “Alia,” which means “other,” in Dariyan; no one had ever known her real name. She had wanted something, and everyone had first thought she wanted the child, but then she had abandoned him soon after his birth.

as dizzy with hunger and pain, and everything seemed so strange to her. Her lips burned as with words unspoken.

“What was the Great Sundering?” she asked. But no one answered, and she closed her eyes to blessed darkness.

A long time later she swayed as on the ocean, and the gulf of air opened beyond her so that if she inhaled deeply enough, she could breathe in the entire universe and all the stars which lay within reach of her hand, there beyond the chasm. She saw ground far below and a cliff at her shoulder, rubbed by the huge basket in which she sat all curled up. She was jerked upward, fainted again, and then there was rock beneath her feet and hands to lift her up. Many voices echoed around her, and it was terribly dark, as dark as the Abyss, into which none of God’s light shines, for it is not the presence of the Enemy that is torment as much as the absence of God.

But the air was sweet, and she was laid down on a soft bed and water soothed her skin and then an ointment eased the terrible pain that had gripped her back and shoulders and she was fed a gruel so soft and mildly warm that it slipped down her throat like a salve for the dolorous heart.

But no one had yet answered her. A face swam into view, as blurry as a shifting shoal of minnows underwater. It was ancient, wrinkled like an apple left over from the last autumn’s harvest.

“What was the Great Sundering?” Rosvita asked, surprised to hear her own voice, such as it was, coarsened by pain and the hardship of the journey and their failure. Why was she asking this question? Where had it come from?

The ancient crone smoothed a salve onto her cheeks. For a moment it stung, then faded. “You are suffering from a lack of water, and a surfeit of sun and pain and anxiety, my child,” she said in a voice made reedy by age. “Who has spoken to you of the Great Sundering?”

“I don’t know,” said Rosvita, marveling. Her eyes had adjusted. Two slits in the rock chamber let in air and light, and she realized that she lay on a pallet in the middle of a circular room hewn from rock. The plastered walls were entirely covered with frescoes that had long since cracked and peeled with immense age. People—nay, not people, but creatures like to humankind—stared at her with jade green eyes and skin now discolored to a greenish bronze. They wore plumage more than clothing, bold feathers, crudely cut skirts sewn of leather and furs, cunningly tied loincloths, shawls woven of shells and gold beads and precious stones. There was some narrative written into these paintings, a lush land torn by invasion, a desperate, overwhelmed population, the workings of magi each of whom held a staff carved out of black stone. A man of their kind was flayed alive, and his blood gave birth to warriors. Great cities of a vast and intricate architecture burned and toppled. And there was a crown of stars: a stone circle set out under a night sky brilliant with stars. Only one constellation was picked out in jewels above the stone circle, that of the Child who will be Queen; she reached for the sparkling cluster of seven stars, itself called the Crown, that lay directly above Rosvita at the height of the curved dome that was the ceiling of the stone chamber.

“Where am I?” Rosvita whispered.

“We are here in the convent of St. Ekatarina, she who prayed and fasted in the desert for many days until in the heavens she saw a vision of titanic battles and of dragons flying in the sky. And a voice said to her: ‘All that is lost will be reborn on this earth because of a Great Unveiling like to that Great Sundering in which vanished the Aoi.’ Then she came to this place. Here she found these paintings which spoke to her of that terrible time when the Lost Ones ruled mortal lands. Here she established a convent, and so we few have followed after her in caring for what God have preserved.”

“Are these relics of the Aoi themselves?”

“Who can know, child? These were painted long ago. Perhaps they represent the last testament of the Aoi. Perhaps they represent the memories of those humans who lived in that long ago time, before they had the means to record their remembrances in writing. But you must rest now. You must sleep.”

“The others?”

“They are safe.”

She left, and Rosvita was alone, yet not alone at all because of the creatures who stared at her from the walls, accusing, plaintive, proud, and angry. They are not like us. They looked hard and cruel, arrogant and cunning and unforgiving. What was it the church mothers had written of elvenkind? “Born of the mating between humans and angels.” With all the cold beauty of angels and the bestial passions of humankind.

Sanglant’s mother had looked so. Rosvita had seen her one time, when she was herself a very young woman newly come to King Arnulf’s court. The elven woman had called herself. “Alia,” which means “other,” in Dariyan; no one had ever known her real name. She had wanted something, and everyone had first thought she wanted the child, but then she had abandoned him soon after his birth.

What had Alia truly wanted? Would they ever know?

Beyond the fresco depicting the stone circle and an assembly of Aoi magicians, a painted obsidian knife seemed to cut away the narrative told on these walls, as if to end it. Beyond the knife-cut lay only a scene of sharp sea cliffs and shoreline and the cool expanse of empty sea. All the elves, and their cities, and their troubles, and their enemies, had vanished.

4

LIATH didn’t like being pregnant. It made her feel stupid, and ungainly, and trapped in an odd way that she had never before experienced, as if before she could have stepped off the earth into the aether without looking back and now she was anchored to the earth by the creature growing inside her. It also made her tired, and cranky, and weepy, and distracted. Her feet hurt. And she had to pee all the time.

But except for that, she was utterly and enchantingly happy. Right now, with a contented sigh, she sank down to sit on the edge of the bed. It had, of course, been the first thing Sanglant had helped Heribert build when they arrived at Verna four months ago. Sanglant tumbled into bed behind her and stretched out with one hand propping up his head and the other splayed over her belly, feeling the beat, so he always said, of their child’s heart.

“Strong and clear,” he said into her silence. “What is it, Liath?”

She had been absently scratching the head of the Eika dog, curled up half under the bed, but his words startled her into blurting out the thoughts, all chopped up and half-formed as they were, that crowded her mind with such pleasant chaos. “When I calculate the movements of the planets in the heavens into the months and years to come, I keep stopping at midnight on the tenth day of Octumbre in the year 735. On that day I see great signs of change, of powers waxing, the possibility of power and of change. Three planets at nadir, and two descendant, and the waxing crescent moon is beneath the horizon in the sign of the Unicorn, although it will rise in the early hours of the morning. Only Aturna is ascendant, rising at midnight in the sign of the Healer, well, really, right at the cusp of the Healer and the Penitent.”

“Is this soothsaying?” asked Sanglant. “I thought one could not read the future in the stars, and surely we have not yet reached the year 735. Or have we?”

“Nay, nay.” She reached for her wax tablet and toyed with the stylus tied to it, then, distracted by the round of cheese sitting on the table, cut off a wedge and ate it. “This year is 729, and it will soon turn to 730. But the movements of the wandering stars are constant, so we can predict where they’ll be at any date in the future. But when I calculate the chart for that day, I feel that I’m missing one thing. That if I had that one thing, all the portents would make sense.”

Sanglant groaned in mock pain. “Perhaps while you think you can find all the aches in my back and arms and legs. I’ve never seen such a mighty fir as the one that fell—” He broke off, rubbed at a welt on his left hand, and continued. “As the one I felled yesterday. I have hacked at unyielding wood all day and been scratched by needles, and now I itch horribly, and my back hurts.” But he said it with a laugh; he never whined. He moved closer so that he curled against her back, a hand stroking her. “Is it too much to ask for an hour of simple comfort?”

She and Da had lived without much laughter, but with Sanglant, it was easy to laugh. “I never get an hour of simple comfort anymore. Why should you?” He kindly did not reply except to roll onto his stomach, displaying his fine, muscled back in the light of the single lantern that hung from the cross-beam above them.

With Heribert’s help he had cleaned out an outlying shed, closed up the gaps in the walls, rethatched the roof, closed off the fourth side, and hung a door in the threshold. The bed had been the first piece of furniture, four posts, a lattice of rope, and a feather bed into which they sank each night with pleasure. He had also built a chest on which to sit, and in which he kept his armor, which he oiled and polished once a week. Over the last months he had made free with Sister Meriam’s herb garden and on a shelf fixed high on the wall above the chest an entire shelf of oils and salves and pouches of dried herbs lay ready.