Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

ully, he fingered a parchment sheet that lay at the corner of the table, running a hand up the neat lines of its text and then down again, up and then down. “You were all that mattered. From the first day I met you it was as if I had been blinded, a veil cast over my sight. I could see nothing but you.” He fell silent, and at last went on. “I know your secret, I know what you are, but I will never betray you.”

“What am I?”

He looked up at last, meeting her gaze, and his stare was so intense and so scalding that she wished he hadn’t. Better not to see him, scarred and flawed as he was but still as beautiful as the dawn; standing this nakedly before her, his desire for her was plain to see.

“Fire,” he said hoarsely. “Ai, God, Liath, go. Go. I desire you too much. I can’t trust myself with you so close. I’ve tried to make a decent life here as a presbyter, doing what I can to serve God, and it will be enough.”

“I’ll go,” she said, stumbling over the words as the chains wrapped their silken cord around her again, wanting to say, “I’ll stay.” “But you said that you have Da’s book.”

“The book.” He lifted a hand to conceal his face. He stood so still for a moment, his emotions hidden from her, that she actually had an instant of disorientation, as though the world was spinning wildly beneath her feet and she was about to fall, or was already falling endlessly and forever down through the spheres until she would be lost in the pit and never free.

“The book.” He lowered his hand to rustle the parchment. The movement drew her gaze down to the figures neatly inscribed there.

“What is that?” she asked, enticed by the orderly lines and repetitive figures. Fetters drew tighter, binding her again as she moved to stand beside him so that she didn’t block the light. “That’s a date.”

“A date? I’ve been puzzling this out. I don’t know what it means, but there’s clearly a pattern. Do you know?”

“Yes, yes,” she said with mounting excitement. “Da and I saw a clay tablet with writing like this in the ruins of Kartiako. There was a very old man there, a sage who claimed to have knowledge of the most ancient days of his tribe. Of course I can’t read this writing, all sticks and angles, but he said it was a table charting the course of Somorhas. When it appears in the evening sky and when in the morning.”

“And the intervals of disappearance?”

“Yes, exactly! But this is a whole page! The other was only fragments. Is there more?”

“This is the only page I have seen. I believe it was copied from a more ancient source, perhaps from one of these clay tablets you mention. Do you see, here,” he pointed to a smudge, “how the scribe made a mistake and then corrected it. How does it work?”

“The ancient Babaharshans observed the stars for a thousand years. They recognized that Somorhas is both the evening star and the morning star, and that when she falls into the shadow of the sun that she vanishes for an interval, sometimes about eight days and sometimes about fifty days.”

He nodded, caught up in her excitement. “But Somorhas is part of God’s creation. Fate guides her movements. Isn’t it every eight years that she comes again to the place she was before, relative to the position of the sun?”

“Yes, of course. Look, here. That set of markings is a date, according to the sage at Kartiako. He called it—”

A moment only it took her to shift her attention into her city of memory. She skipped past the seven gates, the Rose of Healing, the Sword of Strength, the Cup of Boundless Waters, the Ring of Fire, the Throne of Virtue, the Scepter of Wisdom, passing beneath the Crown of Stars itself to the topmost part of the city where lay the astronomer’s hall, a circular building ringed with smaller, curving walls. Here in these galleries she had set her memory pictures of the cycles of the wandering stars and the precession of the equinoxes. Here, in an alcove marked with a drifting sand dune and lit by a bright sapphire no brighter than Hugh’s eyes to signify the sage’s complete love of wisdom, she found what she was looking for.

“He called it the month of ‘Ishan.’ These lines signify numbers, so that would be eleven. I don’t know how to read the rest, but this says that on the eleventh day of the month of Ishan, Somorhas would, well, that’s the puzzle, isn’t it? Her first appearance as morning star for that cycle, perhaps, or her disappearance into the sun’s glare.” She faltered, remembering how quickly others got bored when she got caught up in cycles and epicycles, conjunctions and precession, the endlessly intriguing wonder of the universe.

“Do you know,” he said slowly, absently tracing the pattern of the markings, “there has been debate here among the college of astronomers about Ptolomaia’s use of the equant point. Of course many claim that if planets move with varying speeds, then the heavens do not move in a uniform motion, as we know they must. But without the equant point, then truly we cannot account for all the movements of the planets in the heavens.”

“Unless Ptolomaia is wrong, and the Earth isn’t stationary.”

Stunned, he stared at her while the lamp flame hissed and a breeze off the parapet rustled through the papers scattered over the table.

She went on, made rash by the dreamlike quality of their meeting, by his surprise, by a fierce recklessness overtaking her, here where she could speak freely the forbidden words known to the mathematici. “What if the heavens are at rest and it is Earth which revolves from west to east?”

He leaned down, both hands on the table, shutting his eyes as he considered. “West to east,” he murmured. “That would create the same effect. Or if both the heavens and the Earth moved, one from east to west and the other from west to east.” He trailed off, too caught up in the puzzle to finish, gripped by the same passion for knowledge that had always held her in thrall.

Had she misjudged him? Had his humiliation at Anne’s hands caused him to look into his heart, deep waters indeed, and transform what he found there? How could she have felt that silken touch winding through her body as a chain and fetter, when it was what had brought her here in time to see, and to aid, the change that would make Hugh over into a new person, her heart’s desire?

A door thumped gently against the wall as the breeze caught it. The lamp flame flared up boldly, illuminating him. Wind kissed her face. He was so inadvertently close to her, eyes closed, expression almost innocent, if the desire for knowledge can ever be innocent. He smelled faintly of the scent of vineflower and cypress. This close, she felt the heat of his body, no less potent than the yearning in her heart. Was that her heart pounding? Was this what she had been looking for all along? Someone with the same passion, the same questioning, unquiet mind?

Was it her hand lifting to touch his chest, where his heart beat most strongly? Was it she who leaned closer, into him, and brushed his cheek with her lips?

He opened his lips in a soundless sigh. Turning to her, seeking, he kissed her even as she kissed him. In a moment they stood together, so close that like the aetherical daimones who mingle sometimes in ecstasy they seemed to melt one into the other, as if their bodies could actually interpenetrate and become one in truth, a union so complete that no earthly intimacy could rival the depth of their sharing.

“Ai, Liath.” He murmured her name as a caress as the lamp blazed behind him, making him shine.

A small voice shunted away into the deepest, dustiest corner of her mind, almost too faint to hear, spoke in her heart.

I’m going to wake up and find myself in Hugh’s bed.