The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

Rosvita smelled burning juniper, a sharp incense underlaid with a second, sour scent. Still singing, Hugh knelt to place nine small stones on the ground in the same layout as the greater stones that made up the stone circle and, with a polished walking stick much like that on which Mother Obligatia leaned, he traced a pattern of angles and intersections between those stones in the sandy oval. Rosvita blinked rapidly, thinking surely that her vision was distorted, because as he drew the lines on the oval patch she thought that these same angles and intersections glimmered into life among the stones, like a huge cat’s cradle of faint threads woven in and out between the monoliths.

Light flashed within the stones with the pulse of lightning, and she heard a wail. She expected Hugh to fall, stricken, and she clutched at Mother Obligatia’s arm, to drag her backward to safety if she could, but it was not Hugh who had cried out. For an instant, the creature swelled until it towered over them, and she saw it clearly: It had the delicacy of blown glass and the sharp glitter of a drawn sword. Its wings, encompassing half the sky, seemed feathered with glass. Was this how the angels appeared?

o;Where is Mother Obligatia?” Rosvita asked after she had paid her respects.

“She has gone ahead with Lord Hugh,” said Adelheid. “The rest of us will remain here until we hear the horn. That will mark that it is safe to proceed.”

“If it will ever be safe,” murmured Theophanu. But she stood resolutely beside her mount, as calm as ever. She had accepted Rosvita’s decision without objection, almost without reaction. The groom holding the reins of her mount looked nervous, shifting his feet as he stared up the path cut into the rock. It vanished around a curve in the rock, leading toward the summit. Was that a glimmer of light there, or only the trick of her eyes?

“I must speak with her alone,” said Rosvita. “Let me go up.”

“Nay, Sister!” said Theophanu sharply. “I will not lose you!”

“Mother Obligatia warned us not to follow her until she knew it was safe,” said Adelheid. “What if Lord Hugh cannot bind the creature? It might turn its killing gaze on you as well, Sister. And you are innocent.”

“No more innocent than that soldier who died,” said Rosvita. “Nay, Your Highness. I pray you, do not attempt to stop me. I will be cautious. But I must speak to her.”

Theophanu said nothing, neither to give permission nor withhold it, so Rosvita walked on. Wind bit at her face, and she chafed her hands together to warm them as she kept her gaze fixed on the ground, always aware of sheer cliff dropping off to her right and the distant tiny campfires of Ironhead’s encampment far below. But the path unrolled before as broad and easily negotiable as the apocryphal road that leads the unwary and the foolish and the wicked to the Abyss.

She labored up the slope and where the path cut left through a series of squat pinnacles, it gave out suddenly onto a flat summit. The standing stones blotted out the stars at even intervals. A faint tracery of white slipped between them like mist blown on the wind. Littered among the circle of stones lay putrefying bodies, a dozen at least, mangled, arms outflung, faces blackened, weapons broken and lying askew.

She staggered back from the sight, heard a warning whisper. A hand caught her elbow.

“You must go back, Sister Rosvita. It is dangerous for you to stay here.”

“Someone must witness.” Understanding had freed her: she was risking not just her body but her immortal soul, and she intended to see all there was to see.

“I have taken responsibility to witness,” whispered Mother Obligatia. Rosvita felt the old woman’s walking stick pressed against her hip, and she marveled that the abbess had strength enough to walk so far on her crippled legs. She could not leave her alone.

“I will stay with you. I must speak to you of what I have discovered—”

She saw him then, walking forward in plain sight, tall and glorious in moonlight as he crossed toward the circle of stones and halted about three paces in front of the first gaping archway of standing stones and lintel where an oval patch of sandy soil turned the ground white. A translucent figure darted forward through the stone circle, curling around the lintel sparking with the reflected glint of starlight. Hugh began to sing, hands lifted with fingers outspread. The wind died, and such an unnatural stillness settled over the height that she could hear his voice as clear and sweet as that of the angels.

“Matthias guide me, Mark protect me, Johanna free me, Lucia aid me, Marian purify me, Peter heal me, Thecla be my witness always, that the Lady shall be my shield and the Lord shall be my sword. Sanctify me, God, and destroy all that is evil and wicked. Free me from all attacks of the Enemy. Let no creature harm me. May the blessing of God be on my head. God reign forever, world without end.”

Rosvita smelled burning juniper, a sharp incense underlaid with a second, sour scent. Still singing, Hugh knelt to place nine small stones on the ground in the same layout as the greater stones that made up the stone circle and, with a polished walking stick much like that on which Mother Obligatia leaned, he traced a pattern of angles and intersections between those stones in the sandy oval. Rosvita blinked rapidly, thinking surely that her vision was distorted, because as he drew the lines on the oval patch she thought that these same angles and intersections glimmered into life among the stones, like a huge cat’s cradle of faint threads woven in and out between the monoliths.

Light flashed within the stones with the pulse of lightning, and she heard a wail. She expected Hugh to fall, stricken, and she clutched at Mother Obligatia’s arm, to drag her backward to safety if she could, but it was not Hugh who had cried out. For an instant, the creature swelled until it towered over them, and she saw it clearly: It had the delicacy of blown glass and the sharp glitter of a drawn sword. Its wings, encompassing half the sky, seemed feathered with glass. Was this how the angels appeared?

“What are you?” said Hugh, more command than question.

It had a humanlike form, but perhaps it was only imitating Hugh’s figure or the form of the soldiers it had destroyed. It cried out again, a dissonant lament, and now Rosvita saw that it writhed against the threads woven through the stones, as if they trapped it. “Lost, lost,” sang the creature in a vibrant bass tone that had the resonance of a bell.

It danced and leaped like flame within the pattern, its aetherical shape growing and shrinking according to an unseen tide, and Rosvita felt a chill boiling off it so deep that the backwash made her fingers and cheeks burn with cold. She could actually see through its figure into the sky and the stones.

“The path is closed behind me and before me. I only stepped down to see what had opened when the earth exhaled, oh, that was not a moment ago, or has it not happened yet?” The creature sang more than spoke in such a melange of language that Rosvita thought she was hearing Wendish and then Dariyan and then Aostan and then Arethousan, or all of them together or none of them, as if the human speech it drew over its utterances was a cloak patched together from many scraps of wool.

“What are you?” said Hugh. “From whence do you come?”

“Lost, lost,” it wailed. “The road is closed before me and behind me. The air lies heavy here. It breathes with a foul wind full of dying things. Why have I been trapped below the moon? I should have followed them upward for they escaped this place, they above us, and I am below and lost here.”

“I can only help you if you can speak sense to me,” said Hugh coaxingly.

The creature flared suddenly, as if in anger, and Rosvita threw up a hand to protect her eyes from the blinding light. As the glare faded, she peered out between her fingers to see clearly the cage of insubstantial architecture that surrounded the daimone: lines and angles and intersections lancing up from the earth toward the heavens, each one glittering as if a thousand thousand dewdrops of pure and brilliant aether clung to it, delineating its length in the same way a line of lit candles delineates a path in a garden sunk in night. Each scintillant thread shot as straight as an arrow’s flight up into the dome of heaven, and each thread pulled taut against a star. Two threads, thicker than the others, more powerful, had hooked planets: the hard flood-red glare of Jedu, the Angel of War, and the honey gleam of wise Aturna. A thread as gauzy as uncombed wool touched the moon as if its substance had been grabbed and pulled and tretched.

This was sorcery, the art of the mathematici who could bind the heavens to their will and weave its power to alter earth. Or so she had heard whispered. Even the most lenient of the church mothers had condemned it, and a hundred years ago as powerful a churchwoman as Emperor Taillefer’s daughter, Biscop Tallia, had been censured for studying it.

But it was beautiful.