The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

“She was the woman who gave birth to me.”

“Your mother!” cried Zoë, looking amazed at the revelation, or perhaps only amazed that a woman like Anne had actually had a mother.

“Nay. She was not my mother except that it was in her womb that I was conceived and nurtured, her womb from which I was expelled. I never saw her.” Anne lifted the armillary sphere. It was large for her to carry alone, but the ripples that marked the servants helped her, blowing the air beneath her hands to give her lift. She set it down heavily, and the whole table shuddered under its weight. Erekes spun lightly. Mok shifted a finger’s breadth, and the bright halo of the Sun shook but did not move. “The woman whom I consider my mother is the one who raised me. It is her influence that guided what I have become.”

Antonia could puzzle out most of the rest, but a few questions remained unanswered. “Was this Lavrentia the daughter of Emperor Taillefer, or his daughter-in-law?” And if she had been related only by marriage, then how had Queen Radegundis hidden her son?

Anne merely looked at her, then spun Aturna. The mechanism was ponderous on the outermost sphere, and the planet of wisdom moved only a short way. “It is true that I am the daughter of Emperor Taillefer’s son. But he and Lavrentia form the lesser part of my lineage. I was raised by a woman named Clothilde, and it was she who tutored me in the arts of the mathematici, just as she herself was tutored by Biscop Tallia. First and foremost, it is to Biscop Tallia that I claim kinship. In truth, the biscop was my aunt, but in every other way I think of her as the woman who created me. She is the mother who gave birth to all of us, the Seven Sleepers, the ones who, in the last hundred years, have labored to prevent this catastrophe.”

So Liath, and so Sanglant: two children born out of enemy camps. If the Seven Sleepers prepared for cataclysm on Earth, then surely the Aoi were making their own plans—wherever they might be, concealed in the aether. Why else go to the trouble to travel through the veils that separated one sphere from the next? Why else send one of their women to Earth to make a child bred half out of humankind and half out of Aoi?

Once, she had supported Sabella’s claim because she believed in it. But Sabella was under the care of Biscop Constance in Autun now. She held no grudge against Sabella for her failed attempt at the throne; God had chosen to lend Their support in another place. And perhaps They had chosen otherwise because, like the angels and the daimones, They could see both into the past and into the future. They had seen this day coming.

And she knew just how to take advantage of it.

4

LIATH returned unexpectedly. Sanglant had just settled Blessing into Jerna’s embrace. The infant was a silent, efficient eater; she would latch on and suckle, and when she was done, she was done. She had the heft to show for it, all pudgy arms and legs, but sometimes he wondered exactly what kind of nourishment she was imbibing, and why she seemed to be growing so fast.

Better not to think too much about that. When a man extended a hand to you when you were drowning, you didn’t stop to ask him his rank and breeding, or if he had leprosy.

“Sanglant.”

He heard it as a whisper. By the time he got up and came round the side of their hut, she was just reaching the door. She saw him, grasped him by the elbow. She was in the grip of such an overpowering emotion that her skin almost burned him. He put a hand to her forehead, to draw it off, but she only caught his other arm and gazed at him fiercely.

“Are any of the servants near?”

He listened. Whistled. “Nay, none but Jerna. She’s nursing the baby.”

She dropped her voice to a whisper anyway. “There are four goats with kids down by the stock shed. We’ll need one of them. As long as Sister Anne’s sorcery binds this valley, Jerna won’t be able to leave.”

“I’ve never heard you refer to her as ‘Sister Anne’ before. What’s amiss, Liath?”

She leaned into him as if to embrace him—dangerous enough in itself—but she spoke so softly into his ear that even a servant dancing on the wind nearby would not have been able to overhear. “We will leave tonight.”

“What’s amiss, Liath?” he repeated. It was a windless day, remarkably so, and yet, from this angle of the valley he could see trees swaying down by the tower and hall. Up here, on the middle slope, it was quiet.

Hidden behind the hut, Blessing began to wail. Liath bolted, but he caught her and passed her up, came around the side of the hut to see the tree where Jerna usually settled when it was time for a feeding. Jerna was gone. Blessing lay tumbled on the ground, screaming, linen swaddling bands a little unwound as though she’d hit the ground and rolled. He caught her up and held her against his chest, and she quieted almost at once. Then, in the way of babies, to whom past and future seem equally meaningless, she began to coo and smile.

“Ai, Lady,” said Liath, coming up beside him. She put out her arms. He laid Blessing in them, and the little girl babbled sweetly as Liath stood there with tears running down her face. “She killed him.”

The wind down by the lower buildings had picked up. He could actually hear its rustle and murmur now, and yet it wasn’t climbing the slope as would a natural wind. Were they all thrashing and moaning in an eddy centered about Anne? Was all of this, inevitably, about Anne?

“She killed Da.”

“Ah.” That exhausted his eloquence. What else could he possibly say? I can’t believe she would do such a thing? But he could believe it. That was the problem.

“Da was running from her all along. From them, from the magi. Why did he steal me from them? What did he know that would make him do something so drastic? He must have known they would pursue him. He must have thought it was worth the risk. Why didn’t he tell me what he knew? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Sit down,” said Sanglant, and she sat. Shock had made a puppet of her. “Who can we look to for aid?”

She laughed bitterly. “No one. None of them.”

“But Sister Venia seems discontent. She wasn’t happy that Sister Anne let Heribert go.”

“She is better than the others, in some ways. She doesn’t treat me as if I’m diseased just because I have a child and a husband. I like Sister Meriam, but I don’t believe she will help us if helping us means going against Sister Anne. Ai, Lady. I let them lull me. They taught me only what they wanted me to know, and I listened to their promises and sat by passively all these months while they threw me the crumbs. Just enough. Just enough to keep me content, like a cow never looking past the fence.”

The low rumble of a distant avalanche shuddered the air, but when he gazed up at the high ridges and peaks that hemmed them in, he saw no telltale rise of dust, no plume of white haze. A moment later he heard a sharp crack, like distant thunder, but there were no clouds today except for the plumes that often were tethered at the highest peaks.