The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

“You will know it when you see it,” said Meriam, answering a question she hadn’t asked.

“Why must you all make it like a puzzle?” demanded Liath. “Why can’t you just tell me what I’m looking for?”

“Because you won’t truly understand what it is we work toward until you have discovered it for yourself.” Liath began to protest, but Meriam raised a hand for silence. “It is all very well to protest that because you have seen a horse ridden, you know how to ride. But you don’t know how to ride until you have yourself ridden. Isn’t that true?”

“I don’t see—”

“You don’t see because you persist in thinking that the art of the mathematici is like a story, something you can understand equally well whether it is read to you or you read it yourself. But the art of the mathematici isn’t a story, it is a skill, like riding a horse, or fighting, or administering an estate, something that takes time and effort to master. Would you set an apprentice weaver to weave the king’s royal robes? Ask a novice to illuminate the Holy Verses? Trust your life to a pilot who had never before sailed through these shoals? You, of all people, must understand fully.”

“Why?” Then Liath laughed, having picked up the habit from Sanglant. “Never mind, Sister. I know what you will say. You will say that when I understand fully, then I will also understand why I must understand fully.”

“There lies the beginning of understanding.” Was Meriam amused? It was hard to tell. She was too ancient to be easily read. Like all the magi, she held layers within layers in herself, none of which were readily peeled off.

“Is that why you’re here, to understand?”

“Nay,” she replied so quietly that a hundred misgivings congealed into a dreadful foreboding in Liath’s heart, and the night no longer seemed so tame. “I am here to save my child and my child’s children from what will come.”

Sanglant woke abruptly, was on his knees on the bed ready to lunge for his attacker before he realized that it was dawn and that Liath had just closed the door behind her on her way out. He shook sleep and fear and memory out of his head.

Sometimes he thought the dreams of Bloodheart would never end. Sometimes he remembered that one night out of two he slept in peace and didn’t dream at all.

He had woken in the night when Liath returned, and they had had a long conversation that he didn’t recall with any clarity now except that in addition to eating all the cheese and bread she had gone on about not being able to trust this nest of mathematici into which they’d been thrown. Maybe he hadn’t really been awake. Sometimes he didn’t know when Liath’s sudden attacks of foreboding were just shadows woven out of her own fears or real premonitions of a truth she only glimpsed. He knew better than to trust a nest of mathematici, especially ones as powerful and as hidden as these. Especially knowing that at least one among them wanted to kill him. Perhaps Liath only suffered because she wanted to trust them. She wanted them all to have her open delight in knowledge, to want to know things for their own sake. She wanted them to be simple, and honest, and pure.

But he had lived for a long time in court. He had fought in more battles than he cared to count, and he would fight again if need be and pray to God afterward for peace. He had seen a lot of people die. Truly, there were some people who could be trusted, some open, honest souls like his poor, dead, faithful Dragons, or even some old, wily ones, like Helmut Villam, who would hold fast at your back when you were fighting for your life. There might even be some pure souls in this world, but he doubted it.

Most people in this world, he had found, were agreeable—as long as you treated them agreeably in your turn—but they were far from pure. Even after a life of running and hiding, Liath could be remarkably naive.

But with God as his witness, he had never desired a woman as much as he desired her. And he had desired, and consorted with, a lot of women in his time.

He grinned, dressed, rousted out the dog, and went outside to find Liath shooting arrows at herself.

At first he gaped stupidly as he saw her out in the meadow beyond their hut: He had never before seen such a display of idiocy. She aimed directly above her head as if shooting at the heavens, drew, and loosed the arrow.

“Liath!” he shouted, bolting for her.

She had her back to the sun, and to him, and she had thrown her head back to watch the arrow fly up and up and up, and then, as any fool knew it would, slow, tumble, turn, and fall back to earth. At her. She took a step back, caught her foot in a hole in the ground, and fell down hard just as the arrow whoofed into flame above her head and showered to earth as ash, sprinkling her hair.

“Liath!” he cried, kneeling beside her, but she was laughing and rubbing one hip where she’d landed hard.

“I didn’t see the hole!” she said cheerfully.

“You would have seen it if you’d kept your eyes on the ground and looked where you were going!”

“But then I couldn’t have watched the arrow’s flight!”

“Ai, God,” muttered Sanglant, helping her up and, for good measure, taking the bow out of her hand. He rested a palm on her abdomen to listen for the child. Its heart beat steadily, quickening as it stirred, slowing as it settled again. No harm taken. “What on God’s Earth were you doing?”

“Just that. I’m trying to see if the Earth rotates. Because if it does, then surely an arrow shot high enough would land some distance away from the archer. That’s because the archer, standing on the Earth, would have moved as the Earth rotates in the time it takes the arrow to reach the height and fall—”

“On your head!”

“Not if you have sufficient height or speed of rotation.” She winced, kneading her bruised hip again, then rubbed the remains of the arrow into the grass with one sandaled toe, looking thoughtful.

The rising sun shone behind her, struggling up over the mountain peaks. She hadn’t rebraided her hair yet, and wisps of it trailed around her face, curling delicately along her neck. How often did he catch himself just admiring her, as if nothing else existed in that moment? It was as if a part of her had settled down inside him, taken up residency in his soul, long before he had realized she was there. He was more her captive than he had ever been Bloodheart’s, and yet in this case the chains were of his own making, and they weren’t truly chains at all. That which bound them remained invisible and yet no less strong because of that. It was at moments like this that he felt blinded by happiness.

o;There lies the beginning of understanding.” Was Meriam amused? It was hard to tell. She was too ancient to be easily read. Like all the magi, she held layers within layers in herself, none of which were readily peeled off.

“Is that why you’re here, to understand?”