Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

“This charm protects me.”

Alain began to pant as the path steepened. “I don’t know by what name I should call you.”

“I am elder sister of Spits-last.” She did not break stride as she spoke, nor did she seem winded. Like a good Walking One, she had the stamina of an ox. “In my people’s tongue I am called Laoina.”

They came clear of the denser growth of spruce and pine whose branches drooped under a heavy load of snow and into a thinning woodland composed mostly of birch trees, combed by the wind. A glow rimmed the eastern horizon, rather like the promise of dawn, but it had an amber gleam, rich and almost solid against the veil of clouds above. No part of the sky was visible, only low-hanging clouds, gray with unshed snow. The humming sounded louder here. The rocks seemed to vibrate with the noise. It was getting dark.

He hadn’t realized he’d slept for so long. He ought to have stayed awake and watched over Adica. He hated being away from her for long. He was so afraid that something would happen to her.

“Quick. The dragons wake.”

They broke into a jog. Alain puffed and wheezed, more out of anxiety perhaps than from being winded. He had heard stories of dragons, of course, but everyone knew they no longer existed on Earth. They had all been turned into stone a long time ago, like the one at Osna Sound which had become the ridge running between the village and the now-destroyed monastery. But this talk of dragons made him nervous anyway. If they were just a story, then why did people hide away under mounds of earth?

So many things were different here. In seven months, he had not seen a single iron tool. Most of their implements were chipped out of stone. They made buckets out of bark, dug ditches with antlers, and carved canoes out of whole logs. Their ploughs were little better than a smoothed shaft of wood that couldn’t turn more than a finger’s depth of soil, and they didn’t keep any horses, although they knew what they were. Even the grains and food were different: no wheat, no oats, no wine, not even turnips and cabbage, although big game was far more plentiful. He’d never eaten so much aurochs meat in his life.

In the afterlife, if that was what this was, maybe wine had been banished, but dragons still existed.

He tried to imagine them, creatures formed out of earth and fire.

Their breath of flame might consume the unwitting traveler, and the unremarked lash of their thick tails might hammer soft flesh into the dirt.

Adica had gone up to the fjall to meet them.

He got a second wind and actually moved out in front of his companion, the nervous hounds lagging behind as though to watch their trail. As they picked their way onto the fjall, they came fully into the teeth of a strangely warm wind, almost seductively pleasant. He saw the stone circle immediately. Upright and in perfect repair, it looked nothing like the old ruined stone crowns he knew. It didn’t seem right, somehow, that it should look so… new.

A dozen human figures stood inside the stones. Eight wore the skins typical of the Akka people, furs and hides sewn into clothing. These eight bore stone mallets, and with those mallets, to a rhythm they all seemed to understand, they beat on the stones.

The stones sang. High and low harmonics rang off the rock, throbbing through the air, as first one mallet, then the next and then a third, swung into a stone and dropped away.

Laoina stopped at the edge of the scree, hunkering down in the shelter of an overhanging boulder. “We wait here.”

But the humming of the stones drew him forward to the stone circle. At the center of the circle a woman wearing an eagle-feather cloak stood behind two men. One of them, tattooed like his Akka tribesfolk, sat on a litter. His frail body rocked back and forth in time to the ringing of the mallets on stone. Beside him, an ancient man with white hair and weathered skin had tucked his face into his cupped hands, praying.

kka woman made a gesture of frustration. “She go above with the other sorcerers. Now you must go to shelter. Only in shelter is it safe from the wind of the dragons.”

“I go above, too.”

“Foolish to walk after the sorcerers. You must to shelter go. Yes?”

“No. I will go after Adica.”

They regarded each other for the space of five breaths. She flung up her hands, half laughing, half cursing. “Come.”

He fetched his pack and, with Sorrow and Rage, headed up the path that led to the fjall. The Akka guide strode beside him, seemingly unperturbed by this change of plan.

“You do not take shelter?” Alain asked her.

The woman had a tart grin, like that of a woman who has played a trick on a companion who tried to cheat her. She shook the necklace of bear claws and yellowing teeth that hung around her neck.

“This charm protects me.”

Alain began to pant as the path steepened. “I don’t know by what name I should call you.”

“I am elder sister of Spits-last.” She did not break stride as she spoke, nor did she seem winded. Like a good Walking One, she had the stamina of an ox. “In my people’s tongue I am called Laoina.”

They came clear of the denser growth of spruce and pine whose branches drooped under a heavy load of snow and into a thinning woodland composed mostly of birch trees, combed by the wind. A glow rimmed the eastern horizon, rather like the promise of dawn, but it had an amber gleam, rich and almost solid against the veil of clouds above. No part of the sky was visible, only low-hanging clouds, gray with unshed snow. The humming sounded louder here. The rocks seemed to vibrate with the noise. It was getting dark.

He hadn’t realized he’d slept for so long. He ought to have stayed awake and watched over Adica. He hated being away from her for long. He was so afraid that something would happen to her.