The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

Trees begin to sway. Leaves toss in a rising wind. Where a notch cuts the bulge of a mountain, a bright yellowish star appears. The woman chants and with the shaft and the rippling gold feather bound to its end, she seems to draw down that light until it tangles in the stone circle, weaving through the standing stones a pattern of faint light not unlike those sigils inscribed into the stone gate before him. She uses the shaft like a weaver’s shuttle as she sights on the brilliant light of the evening star, now sinking down on the horizon of high hills almost opposite that of the rising yellow star. This light she draws into the stone as well, and where the two lights meet, one malevolently yellow and the other as bright as an angel’s gaze, a thin archway of light forms between two of the standing stones.

“Hurry,” she says to her companion, and with his free hand he grabs the reins of the horse. His cloak parts to reveal a good, strong mail coat underneath. A baby begins to cry. His shoulders quiver and shift, and little arms bat aside the corner of cape thrown over it: He is carrying an infant strapped to his back in place of his long sword. The goat bleats, tugging against the leadline as though it is itself being hauled backward by an invisible ebb tide.

But there is a tide, drawing his gaze away from the scene by the stones and into the darkness, down into the valley below where a stone tower stands watch over a handsome timber hall. A stream burbles gaily past, and all is quiet; too quiet. In the stone tower, three figures sit deep in meditation, strange diagrams mark the table before them, and a silvery light gleams from the wood grain along the outline of those diagrams, a stylized rose, a sword, a crown, a staff, and others he has no time to decipher because the tide has dragged his body outward to the livestock pens beyond the tower where shadows have smothered even the light of the stars. From these shadows he can hear the whispers of the malcontent.

“I am against it. It is rash to kill him now, when he could serve us in other ways if we are only patient.”

“Nay, Sister. You are reluctant only because you do not comprehend the whole. We are all that protects humankind from the Lost Ones. You are either with us, or against us, and if you are against us, Sister Venia, then I have been instructed by Sister Anne to kill you.”

“Very well.”

He hears the panicked bleat of a goat just as he sees, as its echo, the flash of a knife. Night half conceals the gruesome sacrifice: a frowning woman cuts open the thrashing goat, which is held down by a man in cleric’s robes. She thrusts a hand inside its ribs as blood pumps out over her arm. She gropes, tugs, and pulls out its still beating heart. Somehow, horribly, the goat is still alive.

“Light the lamp,” she says, and it is done. The glow of the lamp lends a slippery unreality to the scene as the goat bleats weakly and the heart beats liquidly in her hand. She begins to chant.

A smell rises all around, like the breath of the forge, leaching somehow even through the iron gate that seals him away from the vision. Hairs rise on the nape of his neck, and his hands tingle as he is drawn on a wave of shadows in the grip of the tidal current that flows up the hill and back to the man and the woman and the growing archway of light that now manifests within the stone circle.

Abruptly, light flares from stone to stone, a cascade of brilliance, a patterned web like to one of the diagrams he glimpsed in the tower room below. The woman throws up a hand to shade her eyes, but it is too late. They are discovered. Figures pour out of the darkness, but he cannot tell what are shades and what are real, which are doubts and which are solid human forms. One of them cuts through the light-woven gateway with a polished black staff, and the threads unravel and fray into nothing as the man takes a cautious step backward, shoulder bumping up against the steady horse, and raises his sword.

“Hurry,” said Kansi-a-lari. Her breath came in short bursts. Sweat had broken, streaming, on her brow. She hooked her spear haft between his body and the rose gate, and he now realized that he was flattened against it all along the length of his body, as if suction held him there. The haft pressed into his ribs, broke him free, and he stumbled back.

“Hurry,” she repeated. As she turned to run down the path between the high walls, she was already getting her bow ready, and she drew out the first of the arrows fletched with griffin feathers, whose touch dissolves magic.

He had to run to keep up. The tide dragged against him, but the horse, and her urgency, pulled him forward against the flow.

Then the ebony gate shone before him. Through its glamour, he saw the sea lapping at its base, a white-capped storm surge. The path gleamed underneath his feet, rimed with a frostlike gleam. He knelt, entirely out of breath, and even with both hands to brace himself on the ground, he could barely hold himself up.

“Grandson.” Her voice shook through the earth.

But he had no time to answer her. Kansi-a-lari had already cut one of her palms and smeared the blood over the black stone. She cut his palm in the same manner, with more haste than care. As he swiped his bleeding hand over the stone she nicked the horse on the shoulder and wiped its blood there, too, dark smears soaking into the slick obsidianlike surface. Sweating now, grunting with desperation and anger, she laid both hands against the ebony gate. She spoke one word.

The gate swung open on silent hinges. Water poured in to swallow their feet, and he followed her across the threshold into the maelstrom.

XIV

THE SOUND OF THEIR WINGS

1

HANNA had just about had enough rain for one summer, and she was one of the lucky ones: riding, her feet weren’t perpetually damp. Unlike half the Lions, she didn’t have foot rot. In the woodlands, low ground shone with a sheet of shallow water, ponds that bred mosquitoes so persistent and numerous that every soul in their party scratched constantly. They were plagued by spiders. Any helmet left on the ground would soon swarm with the nasty creatures; any tent, unrolled and set up, would rain spiders from its ceiling all night. By Aogoste they had lost all the whores and beggars.

At the fortress of Machteburg, dysentery hit their ranks. Lady Fortune still marched with them: only one Lion died, although the disease devastated the camp followers and at least a dozen of the cavalry’s servants had to be buried by the roadside. They lost ten days before Captain Thiadbold and Lord Dietrich proclaimed them ready to march on. They were ferried across the Oder River on barges, and then they headed east on a grassy track. A dozen stubborn camp followers boasting two handcarts between them plodded in their wake. She couldn’t understand why they would follow the Lions into the wilderness where nothing awaited them except war. But perhaps those dozen souls had nothing to go back to, and no place else to go.

It was still raining.

Three abysmally slow days of marching later, on a soggy summer’s day in early afternoon, they came to a village of ten longhouses and a dozen more pit-houses and sheds. Ringed by an inner palisade and ditch, the village lay at a crossroads and was prosperous enough to boast a tiny church built just beyond the inner ditch. A second ditch surrounded the gardens, fields, and a half-dozen corrals, and within this second ditch a fair number of folk labored. But as soon as they caught sight of the host approaching, they hoisted their tools and ran to the safety of the palisade even though they all could see the Wendish banner that marked this as an army marching under King Henry’s personal seal.

Thiadbold halted his Lions beyond the outer ditch and sent Hanna in with an escort of a dozen Lions. The cavalry was content to disperse in the surrounding meadowland so that their horses could graze.

The gate remained stubbornly closed as they approached. “Nay, you cannot come in,” said the young man keeping watch there, peering down at them from a square wooden tower. “I pray you, we’ve had enough trouble. I’m under orders not to let in any armed men.” He spoke Wendish with an accent, hissing his “p”s and “t”s. “But the Eagle, now. She can come in with her news.”

Ingo was with her. “As like they’re bandits themselves in this town,” he grumbled. “I don’t know if we can trust them.”

“Nay, I’ll go,” said Hanna. “They’re only being cautious. Why would they harm me with an army of two hundreds of Lions and thirty cavalry outside?”

Ingo and the others moved back, the pedestrian gate was opened, and she walked through into the village. It stank because most of their livestock had been driven inside. There were a few gardens, and a fair number of dirty children underfoot. A stream muddied by the summer rains, or by sewage, ran down a narrow canal with reinforced stone walls. There was a well at the center of the village; a pair of young villagers, one girl and one boy, stood guard over the stone housing, monitoring the flow of buckets. A child appeared, wiped its runny nose, and beckoned to her. She followed it to the longhouse that lay closest to the well. Three men and three women waited for her, seated at a huge wooden table much pitted with knife scars and burns. It had one leg freshly fixed on, of a lighter shade than the others. They greeted her politely. After she sat, a girl dressed in a remarkably clean linen gown brought her a fine strong mead.

o;Hurry,” said Kansi-a-lari. Her breath came in short bursts. Sweat had broken, streaming, on her brow. She hooked her spear haft between his body and the rose gate, and he now realized that he was flattened against it all along the length of his body, as if suction held him there. The haft pressed into his ribs, broke him free, and he stumbled back.