The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)
Impressive ramparts twine down the hill, some of them freshly dug. Where a low mist kisses the low-lying ground still half in shadow below, he sees a river winding through a sparse woodland of pine and beech, only the river does not follow the same course as the river he crossed this morning. It is a different river in the same place. Yet why, then, does the hill fort look so new? Why, at the crown of the hill fort, do all seven stones stand upright where moments ago they all lay fallen in a lichen-swamped heap?
No blue-fire stone burns in the middle of the circle. Instead, within the ring of stones he sees a sward, hacked down so that grass bobs raggedly at various heights. Cowslip and yellow dew-cup give scattered color to the grass. Pale purple-white flax flowers ring the squat upright stones. Mist veils the farthest reaches of the hilltop and twines around the more distant of the standing stones.
On a low, flat stone situated in the center of the circle stands a huge bronze cauldron incised with birds: herons and ducks, ravens and cranes. From its rim hang rings, each one linked to a second ring, from which dangles a bronze leaf. He can smell that the cauldron is filled with water. The pure scent of it teases his lips and nostrils. Truly he no longer has any reason to live. He doesn’t even know where he is anymore. It would be better just to lie down and die peacefully here, to lay aside his anger at the injustice of his fortune, lay aside his grief at what he’s lost and what he failed to do. Yet his legs move anyway. With a hand on either hound to support his weight, he staggers forward toward the cauldron because he has an idea that one sip of that water will heal him, even though he wants to die because the pain is so bad, both the physical pain and the pain of anger and grief. Yet those same feet keep taking their stumbling, weak steps because he can’t even despair enough to fall down and die. He wonders if it is possible to love life too well.
Yet why would the world be so beautiful if it wasn’t meant to be lived in and loved?
It seems to him that a woman moves toward him. As she emerges from the mist in the gap between two stones he sees that she isn’t truly a woman at all. She has long black hair that falls to her waist and a complexion the creamy rich color of polished antlers. Her eyes don’t look right; the pupils are sharp, not round, and her ears aren’t round either, they pull into a point tufted with dark hair. Where her waist slopes to her hips, her body changes to become a mare’s body, sleek and black like her hair.
She is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen.
She comes to a halt before the cauldron, dips her hands in, and lifts them. Water trickles down between her fingers.
“Do you want to live?” Her voice is a melody. “If you want to live, you must give me everything you carry with you. Then you may taste the water of life.”
He wants to live. But it is so hard to give up what he has carried for so long.
Yet his hands move anyway because he thirsts for that water. The promise of water is like an infusion of woundwort and poppy, giving him strength to cast aside his belt and boots, to struggle out of his mail coat and tabard. The entire left side of his wool tunic is soaked in blood, but he peels it off and discards it with his leggings so that he kneels naked now beside the cauldron while the hounds lick the seeping blood off his side. Pain and the agony of thirst have numbed him, he can barely feel their tongues or the terrible aching pressure under his ribs.
“Yet you have not given me everything,” she says, and he sees that it is so. He hasn’t given her the pouch. It hangs at his neck as heavy as lead. It is so hard to lift his arms, to dip his head, to pull it free. The pouch gapes open, string unwound, and the rose, wilting now, falls beside the stained nail onto the ground.
“Yet you have not given me everything,” she says. “Two things you carry with you yet.”
He knows the last burdens he carries, but they are not objects he can pass from hand to hand. “How can I give them to you?” he asks, gasping as blood leaks from his wound faster than Rage and Sorrow can lick it clean. Blood trickles from his lower lip, bubbling in time to his breathing. “How can I give you the oath my foster father made, that I forswore? How can I give you the lie I spoke to Lavastine because I wanted him to die at peace?”
“Now they are mine,” she says. She sidesteps in the graceful way of horses.
Where she stood, he sees a young woman kneeling in an attitude of intent meditation, so still that she surely must have been there all along even though it is manifestly impossible for two creatures to inhabit the same space at the same time. The young woman does not seem to see him or even hear the conversation, and she is dressed quite strangely, in a tightly-fitted cowskin bodice with sleeves cut to the elbows and an embroidered neck, and a string skirt whose corded lengths reveal her thighs. Copper armbands incised with the heads of deer bind her wrists, and a gorgeous broad bronze waistband ornamented with linked spirals and hatched, hammered edges covers her midriff. She wears a necklace of amber beads and a gold headdress decorated with finely incised spirals and two curling, gold antlers. In one hand she holds a polished obsidian mirror fixed to a handle of wood carved in the shape of a stag. Her expression is pensive, but it is the contrast between eyes drowned in sadness and a generous mouth that seems ready to smile given the least provocation that makes her handsome.
Then the centaur woman moves between him and the cauldron, so he can no longer see her. He can barely cant his neck back to look up into her face. A bubble of blood swells and pops in his nose as his lungs draw sustenance out of his heart. His vision fades, comes into focus again, and he sways. Her body looms, not because she is as big as the warhorses that carry Wendish lords into battle but because he realizes now that she is not mortal in the same way he is.
She holds out her cupped hands and brings them to his lips. He sucks, and the water slides down his throat like nectar.
Like nectar, it spreads its essence quickly. He no longer feels any pain in his ribs, and the shock of healing is so profound that he falls forward in a daze. Oddly, he feels the prick of the rose on his right cheek, where his skin presses into the earth. The hounds nose him, then settle down contentedly on either side of his prone body. He is so tired.
But he is alive.
Then he hears movement, and a moment later a woman’s voice gasps out surprise and a hand touches his naked back with the kind of stroke reserved for a lover.
“Here is the husband I have promised you, Adica,” says the centaur-woman. “He comes from the world beyond.”
“Did he come from the land of the dead?” This new voice, eminently human and close by his ear, is low, a little ragged, not musical but rather the voice of a woman who is courageous enough to walk open-eyed into the arms of death.
“Truly it was to the land of the dead that he was walking. But now he is here.”
Her hand rests pleasingly on the curve of his right shoulder, as if she is about to turn him over to see what he looks like. But when she speaks, her voice breaks a little on the words.
“Will he stay with me until my death, Holy One?”
“He will stay with you until your death.”
omes to a halt before the cauldron, dips her hands in, and lifts them. Water trickles down between her fingers.
“Do you want to live?” Her voice is a melody. “If you want to live, you must give me everything you carry with you. Then you may taste the water of life.”
He wants to live. But it is so hard to give up what he has carried for so long.
Yet his hands move anyway because he thirsts for that water. The promise of water is like an infusion of woundwort and poppy, giving him strength to cast aside his belt and boots, to struggle out of his mail coat and tabard. The entire left side of his wool tunic is soaked in blood, but he peels it off and discards it with his leggings so that he kneels naked now beside the cauldron while the hounds lick the seeping blood off his side. Pain and the agony of thirst have numbed him, he can barely feel their tongues or the terrible aching pressure under his ribs.