Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

“My stomach hurts,” moaned Weiwara, tears leaking from her eyes as she laughed.

“The village will smell a lot better now,” cried Beor’s sister, Etora, from the crowd. “Whew! Look how the river has changed color downstream.”

Adica found Alain’s wool cloak lying on the rocks. After he waded out of the water, she draped it over his shoulders. A winter spent mostly indoors and the immediate effects of the freezing water had made him pale, dimpled with goose bumps.

“Cold,” he proclaimed cheerfully as she fastened the cloak at his left shoulder with a bronze pin. He kissed her cheek.

His lips were as cold as death.

She shuddered.

“Adica.” Instantly attentive to her moods, he took her hand in his. His skin was as cold as a corpse’s. The vision hit like the slap of cold water.

Six figures, made indistinct by darkness, sit huddled in a stone chamber. A seventh rests on the floor, sleeping, injured, or dead, the figure of a lion sewn into the cloth on his heavy tunic. At the fringe of the light cast by a smoking torch lies a stone slab. On this altar a queen has been laid to rest. Her bones have been arranged with care and respect, and the garments and jewelry fitting for a woman of her status have fallen in among the bones, strands of rotting fabric, beads, a lapis lazuli ring, and armbands of gold. One of the figures lifts the torch to see better, and all at once the gold antlers placed at the skeleton’s skull spring into view.

Those are the holy antlers she wears, to mark her place as Hallowed One among her people.

“Adica.”

She swayed, clutching him. “I saw my dead body,” she whispered hoarsely. “I saw my own grave.”

He grabbed her, pulling her close. “Speak no evil words! No harm will come to you, beloved. I will not let any bad thing touch you.”

“I love you,” she murmured into his hair.

“Always you will love me,” he said fiercely as the dogs bounded up and thrust their cold noses and damp fur against her hips, trying to squeeze between them, “and always will I love you.”

She had never had the courage to tell him the full truth about the task that lay before her. It hurt too much ever to think of leaving him. That was the secret of the Fat One, whose face was twofold, wreathed half in light and shrouded half in shadow. She was the giver of all things, pain and death as well as plenty and pleasure. Was it any wonder that Adica chose pleasure when sorrow and death waited just beyond the threshold?

Meanwhile, villagers had gathered at a respectful distance, waiting for her attention.

“Hallowed One, Getsi has that cough again.”

“Hallowed One, my husband’s snare out in the south woods is being vexed by evil spirits.”

“Hallowed One, we’ve finished repairing the roof that was damaged in the snow, and it needs your blessing.”

Alain laughed. Even in repose, his face had a kind of glow to it, but’ when he smiled, his expression shone. He had the most luminous eyes of any person she had ever met. “You make the village live, so it is for me to make you live and be happy.”

It is easy to find death in the world, but a greater magic by far to bring life. He was a life bringer.

He had come to her in late summer, and in the natural order of things the days and months had passed as the moon waxed and waned and waxed again. Autumn had worked free of summer, winter had cast her white blanket over the world, and in the course of time the Green Man lifted his head from his winter’s slumber. So it went, and so it would go on, long after she was gone from the Earth. Even knowing the fate that awaited her as the wheel of the year continued to turn, when the seasons rolled from spring into summer and at last to her final autumn, she was content.

The Holy One had chosen wisely.

Right now, however, the villagers waited.

By late afternoon she finished weaving a protective spell around the snare in the south woods that was being plagued by evil spirits. Returning, she found the village gathered for the last day of feasting in celebration of the new spring. She went into her own house and, with the proper prayers and spells, put on her regalia, the antlers and bronze waistband. With staff in hand, she led the villagers in procession up the tumulus to stand outside the stone loom around the calling ground. Together, they watched the sun set a little to the right of the spring and autumn ridge that marked the equinox. Winter had left them. Now they could plant.

She sang. “I pray to you, Green Man, let the seeds take root.” She turned to welcome the full moon, rising in the east. “I pray to you, Fat One, let the village prosper. Let your fullness be a sign of plenty in the year to come.”

Every villager had brought offerings, a posy of violets, a copper armband, flint axes, beads, arrowheads, and daggers. With the moon to light their way, they circled down the tumulus and followed the path that led to the marsh at the eastern limit of the hills. Adica knew the secret trail of firm tussocks that led through the marsh to the sacred island As the oldest uncrippled man in the village, Pur the stone knapper was given the honor of carrying in the offerings in her wake.

A fish jumped. The moon made silver of the water trembling through glittering beds of reeds and around grassy hummocks. The wind brought the scent of the cook fires from the village, and the smell of roasting pig.

The sacred island was itself scarcely bigger than two men laid end to end. An old stone altar carved with cups and spirals had been set up here in the time of the ancient queens. She knelt before it and set her palms into two depressions worn into stone. Pur waited patiently. He knew how to listen, having mastered the art of letting stone speak to him, and so he didn’t fear the dark of night as some did. He recognized its familiar noises and understood the magic that lies just beneath the surface of the world. After a while she heard the ancient voice of the stone, more a drone than voiced speech, as wakeful as stone ever could be at the quarters of the year when stars and earth worked in concert. She whispered to it, telling it the hopes and wishes of the villagers as well as the various small signs she had observed over the winter: where the first violets had bloomed, how a forest stream had cut a new channel, how both Weiwara and a ewe had borne living twins, how many flocks of geese had passed overhead last autumn on their way south to their winter nesting grounds. The stone understood the secret language of earth, and it held the life of the village in its impenetrable heart.

When she was done with the prayers, she and Pur cast the offerings into the marsh, as they did every year at the festival of spring, a sacrifice for a good year.