The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“I do not know how you call her. Your names are puzzling and difficult to pronounce.”

Liath squelched her frustration. This was no time to irritate her allies. “Do you have any way of knowing for how long she is safe?”

“Only the Holy One can see both ways through time. She can see across great distances and pierce the veil of time through the heart of the burning stone. Can you not as well?”

“I can see through fire, but not into the heart of the crowns. I saw glimpses of past and future when I crossed through the burning stone, but that sight is closed to me here on Earth.”

“Then what does it mean, to ‘see through fire’?”

“It is a gift known to those who have taken Eagle’s vows in my country, to see folk and places through fire. The Eagles are messengers for the regnant. In this way they can be also the regnant’s eyes and ears.”

“Can you teach me this sorcery? Or is it forbidden?” Her tone dropped wistfully. “There is so much I wish to learn, but there is much that is forbidden to me. We live under the tutelage of the Horse people. They have always been our allies and our mothers, our guardians.” She shifted sideways on the couch, smoothing out a lump in the embroidered cushion she sat on, moving a little closer to Liath. “I know I am impatient. Some days I hope that my fate leads me westward where I can see new things.”

“Are you a prisoner?”

As if a muffling blanket had dropped down around them, the hiss of burning oil became the only sound. Liath could not even hear the breathing of the two servants. Of the camp outside, surely audible through the walls, she heard nothing. It was as if magic had torn them away from normal intercourse with the world and thrust them into the heart of a maze, where sight and sound altered and warped until they might stand a spear’s length from their companions and yet be utterly separated from them by a wall of stone or a veil of sorcery.

“I am a prisoner of my power.” Sorgatani spoke in the same matter-of-fact tone with which the steward of an estate proclaimed which cattle were marked out for the Novarian slaughter. “The Horse people are immune, as are my blood kin and the other shamans. Those who serve me are bound to me by magic so that they do not suffer in my presence.”

“Nothing has happened to me.”

“You, like me, possess a soul that was passed on to you from another being. Mine came from my aunt. Yours came from a creature born of fire.”

“Have you seen with your own eyes the fate suffered by ordinary humans who are brought into the presence of one of your kind?”

“Nay. This lore I had from my teacher.”

“Has it been tested? If you have not seen it for yourself, how do you know it is true and not just a superstition?”

Sorgatani laughed bitterly. “What if it is true, Liat-ano? Am I to walk into a camp of strangers with no care that I may bring death down upon people I do not know? We tell stories, in our tribe, of how a Kerayit shaman destroyed an entire tribe, one who warred against us, by walking through their camp at midday. Every soul there died, and their tribe vanished from Earth and memory. I dare not risk it. I seek knowledge, not death. I am not a warrior.”

“I am no warrior either, although at times I must fight. After everything I have seen, I wish it were not to a war that I have returned, for there is so much to learn and to study. This war seems like a desert to me, a barren wasteland. But still, it must be crossed.”

“You speak as if with my own heart.” Sorgatani’s earrings chimed as she shifted on her cushion. Her words seemed freighted with reticence, the speech of a woman shy of speaking her deepest feelings because she had never had a close companion before, only the comradeship of duty, the tutelage of one more powerful than she, and the inevitability of the isolated life that she would inherit when she came fully into her powers.

Power frightened those who did not possess it, and well it might when It resided in the flesh of an otherwise ordinary woman.

“You must be lonely,” said Liath. The bitterness of the solitude she had suffered with her father as they lived as fugitives all those years was as fresh now as it had been when she had lived through it. It was impossible to trust when you were always running. It was hard to clasp hands with people soon to be left behind, never to be met again. Her years in Heart’s Rest had been Da’s last gift to her, and giving that precious respite to her, granting her the time to develop affectionate bonds with Hanna and Ivar, had killed him. He had given his enemies time to catch up with him, because he wanted to make his daughter happy.

Impulsively, Liath reached out. “We are alike, you and I. We might be sisters.” She grasped the other woman’s dark hand.

A spark burst where their skin touched. A report like the clap of thunder deafened her as she recoiled. The servants leaped up, bells jangling, but Liath nursed her hand and, when tears stopped stinging and she had enough courage, turned it over to examine it. Red blisters bubbled on her palm. They burned like sin.

“I pray you, forgive me!”

“Nay, you must forgive me.” Sorgatani sounded near tears. She cracked an order at the servants, and the older one hurried to the chest and brought out a tiny leather bottle. Bowing low before Liath, she produced a salve and, when Liath held out her burned hand, smoothed the sweet-smelling paste over the burned skin.

“I should have warned you not to touch me,” continued Sorgatani. “I should not have let you sit so close. If I could wish one thing it would be that you do not abandon me, now that you know the truth. You see how it is.”

“I see how it is,” said Liath, wonderingly, lifting her gaze. The sting had dissipated the sorcerous veil that disguised the Kerayit girl’s features. She could now see Sorgatani clearly—a beautiful, almond-eyed woman no older than herself, with black hair neatly confined in braids, an oval face broad at the cheekbones, and a lovely dark complexion. “I see you. I could not see you clearly before.”

Sorgatani stared back, taking her measure, and they both smiled and, in unison, glanced down. Liath blew on her palm. The cooling touch of her breath and of the salve eased the pain.

“May no person touch you? Can you never have a husband?”

“No Kerayit woman will ever have a husband. That is the law. We are the daughters of the Horse people. Just as they have no husbands, so do I and my sisters have no husband. There was one of us who married many years ago—it was allowed because he was her luck. When he died, the luck passed into the body of her son. They are both dead now, mother and son. Such is fate.”

“Do you live always alone, confined in this wagon?” Such a fate seemed so ghastly to Liath that she struggled to hide the pity in her tone. Sorgatani deserved better than pity.