Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

Frail Sigfrid sat at the unconscious Lion’s head, nearest to the burial altar. He looked up with the calm eyes of one who has felt God’s miraculous hands heal his body. “Don’t fear, Ivar.” The voice itself, restored to him by a miracle, was a reproof to Ivar’s fear. “God will protect us. This poor dead woman bears us no ill will.” He indicated the half-uncovered skeleton, then bent forward as the old Lion spoke to him in a low voice.

But how could Sigfrid tell? Ivar had grown up in the north, where the old gods still swarmed, jealous that the faith of the Unities had stolen so many ripe souls from their grasp. There was no telling what malice lay asleep here, or when it might wake.

Ermanrich and Hathumod sat together, hands clasped in a cousinly embrace. Both had lost a great deal of flesh. How long ago it seemed when the four youths and Hathumod had served together as novices at Quedlinhame, yet truly it wasn’t more than a year ago that they had all been cast out of the convent for committing the unforgivable sin of heresy.

Baldwin circled the stone altar and its dead queen, crouching to grasp one of the gold antlers. The light touch jostled the skeleton. Precious amber beads scattered down among the bones, falling in a rush.

“Don’t disturb the dead!” hissed Ivar. But Baldwin, eyes wide, reached right in to where strands of desiccated wool rope, whose ends were banded with small greenish-metal rods, curled around the pelvis. His hand closed over a small object, a glint of blue.

“Look!” he cried, with his other hand lifting a stone mirror out of the basin made by her pelvic bones. The polished black surface still gleamed. As Ivar took a panicked step forward to stop Baldwin from further desecration, he saw his movement reflected in that mirror.

“Ai, God, I fear my poor nephew is dead,” murmured Gerulf. “I swore to my sister I’d bring him home safely.”

Other shadows moved in the depths of the mirror, figures obscured by darkness. They walked out of the alcoves, ancient queens whose eyes had the glint of knives. The first was young, robed in a splendor as bright as burning arrows, but her mouth was cut in a cruel smile. The second had a matron’s girth, the generous bulk of a noble lady who never wants for food, and in her arms she carried a basket spilling over with fruit. The third wore her silver hair braided with bones, and the wrinkles in her aged face seemed as deep as clefts in a mountainside. Her raised hands had the texture of cobwebs. Her gaze caught him as in a vise. He could not speak to warn the others, who saw nothing and felt no danger.

Hathumod gasped. “What lies there?” Her words sent ripples through the ghosts as a hand clears away algae from an overgrown pond.

Ivar found his voice. “Baldwin! Put that down, you idiot!”

As Baldwin lowered the mirror in confusion, Hathumod crawled forward. Her hand came to rest on a bundle so clotted with dirt and mold that her hand came away green, and flakes fell everywhere, spinning away to meld with the smoke from the torch. Like Baldwin, she was either a fool or insensible. She groped at the bundle, found a faded leather pouch that actually crumbled to dust in her hands, leaving nothing in her cupped fingers except, strangely, a nail marked by rusting stains.

She began to weep just as Gerulf shook loose the rotting garments: a rusted mail shirt that half fell apart in his hands, a knife, a decaying leather belt, a plain under-tunic, and a tabard marked with the remains of a black lion. “Some poor comrade of mine must have crawled in here to die many years ago,” said the old Lion.

“Who’s there?” demanded Sigfrid, throwing his head back as if he’d heard something. Baldwin, still gripping the obsidian mirror, screamed and crumpled forward. On the ground, Gerulf’s dead nephew jerked as though a demon had poured itself into him.

The chamber flared with blue light.

Ivar cried out, but he could not hear his own voice. His throat muscles strained as he forced out air. Blue fire blinded him. The ground wrenched under his feet, throwing him sideways, and he tumbled to his knees, but no earth met his outstretched hands. He fell, endlessly, hands grasping at empty air, as the young queen with the knife-edged smile walked toward him over a carpet of brilliant fire with her arms extended as if in welcome. He reached for her, grasping for any lifeline.

Touched her hands.

And knew nothing more.

PART ONE

THE FLOWER

TRAIL

I

THE HALLOWED ONE

1

AT sunset, Adica left the village. The elders bowed respectfully, but from a safe distance, as she passed. Fathers pulled their children out of her way. Women carrying in sheaves of grain from ripening fields turned their backs on her, so that her gaze might not wither the newly-harvested emmer out of which they would make bread. Even pregnant Weiwara, once her beloved friend, stepped back through the threshold of her family’s house in order to shelter her hugely pregnant belly from Adica’s sight.

The villagers looked at her differently now. In truth, they no longer looked at her at all, never directly in the face, now that the Holy One had proclaimed Adica’s duty, and her doom.

Even the dogs slunk away when she walked by.

She passed through the open stockade gate and negotiated the plank bridge thrown over the ditch that ringed the village. The sun’s light washed the clouds with a pale purplish pink as delicate as flax in flower. Fields flowered gold along the river plain, dotted here and there with the tumbled forms of the grandmothers’ old houses, now abandoned for the safety of the new village. The grandmothers had not lived in constant fear as people did these days.

When she reached the outer ditch, she raised her staff three times and said a blessing over the village. Then she walked on.

By the river three men bent over the weir. One straightened, seeing her, and she recognized Beor’s broad shoulders and the distinctive way he had of tilting up his chin when he was angry.

How Beor had protested and complained when the elders had decreed that they two could no longer live together as mates! Yet his company had never been restful. He had won the right to claim her as his mate on the day the elders had agreed to name him as war captain for the village because of his conspicuous bravery in the war against the Cursed Ones. But had the law governing her as Hallowed One of the village granted her the right to claim a mate of her own choice, he was not the one she would have picked. In a way, it was a relief to be rid of him.