The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

“I curse you! You will never be more than a slave, and always a worm! And I will kill you! I swear this on Tarkan’s bones!”

Like an echo of the threat, the iron-hard feathers sliced Zacharias’ skin with each least touch until his palms and fingers were a mass of seeping cuts. Blood smeared his hands and made them slick while Bulkezu struggled and cursed but could not free himself from his bindings as Zacharias denuded his wings.

He took everything, all but one, and when he was finished, his hands bled and his heart rejoiced. “Kill him now!” he cried.

“His blood will slow me down.” She said it without emotion, and by that he understood there was no possible argument. “Nor will you touch him,” she added. “If you will serve me, then you will serve my cause and not your own.”

She grasped Zacharias’ hands and licked them clean of blood, then let him go and indicated that he should stow most of the feathers in the quiver. She fletched several of her stone-tipped arrows with griffin feathers, afterward hefting them in her hand, testing their weight and balance. When she was satisfied, she went to the eastern portal and began to shoot, one by one, the riders who circled her sanctuary. At once they sprayed a killing rain of arrows back into the stones. She had downed four of them before they truly understood that although neither they nor their arrows could get into the circle, her arrows could come out. At last they retreated out of arrowshot with their wounded. As from a great distance Zacharias saw them examine the arrows and exclaim over them while one rider galloped away eastward.

“My tribe will come soon with more warriors,” said Bulkezu, even though he knew by now that the woman did not understand his words. He had recovered himself and spoke without malice but with the certainty of a man who has won many battles and knows he will win more. “Then you will be helpless, even with my feathers.”

“And you will be helpless without them!” cried Zacharias.

“I can kill another griffin. In your heart, crawling one, you will never be more than a worm.”

“No,” whispered Zacharias, but in his heart he knew it was true. Once he had been a man in the only way that truly counted: He had held to his vows. But he had forsaken his vows when God had forsaken him.

Bulkezu glanced toward the woman. He could move his neck and shoulders, wiggle a bit to ease the weight on his knees and hands, but he was otherwise pinned to earth, no matter how he tried to force or twist his way free of her spell. “I will raise an army, and when I have, I will burn every village in my path until I stand with your throat under my heel and her head in my hands.”

Zacharias shuddered. But he had come too far to let fear destroy him. Against all hope he was a free man again, bound by his own will into the service of another. He might be a worm in his heart, but hearts could change. She had said that all things change.

“Come, you who were once called Zacharias-son-of-Elseva-and-Volusianus.” She had stepped back from the edge of the stone circle and hoisted two baskets woven of reeds and slung them from the ends of Bulkezu’s spear, then balanced and bound the spear as a pole over the saddle. To the saddle she tied three pale skin pouches, odd looking things that each had five distended fingers probing out from the bottom as if they had been fashioned from a cow’s misshapen udder or a bloated, boneless hand. She tossed dirt over the fire. She whistled tunelessly and wind rose, blowing the fog outside the sanctuary of the stone circle into tufts of a wicked, cutting gale. The distant riders retreated farther away.

Bulkezu strained against the spear with its many rootling arms that clasped him to the earth, but he still could not shift at all. The remaining griffin feather hissed and fluttered in the rising wind. While she tested the harness, ignoring him, he tested his shoulders to see how far he could slide his wings out, or if he could wedge himself down far enough to cut at the magicked staff with the iron edge of that last feather. “I will have my revenge!”

She took no notice of his threat. Instead, when everything was to her liking, she returned to the eastern portal to watch. Fog shrouded the land, and in this fog she—and Zacharias with her—could easily make their escape, concealed from the eyes and ears of the waiting riders. But how long would they have until the Quman riders tracked them down?

She turned to smile at him as if, like the spotted thrush, she had divined his thoughts. Carefully, she wiped drying blood from her abdomen, then clapped red-streaked hands together and spoke words. A flash of heat blasted Zacharias’ face, and suddenly, as the burning stone winked back into existence in the center of the stone circle, he knew that the Aoi woman would not leave this sanctuary by any earthly road.

The woman regarded him unblinking, as if testing his courage. Bulkezu said nothing. Zacharias dropped the horse’s reins and untied the bedroll behind the saddle, shook it out to reveal the fine knee-length leather jacket that Quman men wore when they did not wear armor. He offered this to her so that she could cover herself, because not even necklaces covered her upper body now, only the smears and drying tracks of her own blood.

The stone burned without sound. Wind swirled round them, whistling through the stones.

Bulkezu threw back his head and howled, the eerie ululation that according to the shamans was the cry of the he-griffin. Zacharias had heard that call once, from far away, when the Pechanek clan had wandered the borderwild of the deep grass—the land beyond human ken into which only heroes and shamans might venture. Ai, God! He had never forgotten it.

But he would not let it rip his hard-won courage from him now.

She stepped forward. Zacharias followed, leading the horse.

The heat of fire burned his face, but just before he could flinch back from the flame, they passed through the gateway. Bulkezu’s call, the high-pitched song of wind through grass and stone, the moist heat of a midsummer day blanketed by fog—all of these vanished as completely as though they had been sliced away by a keen and merciless blade.

PART ONE

THE DEAD HAND

I

THAT WHICH BINDS

1

THE ruins stretched from the river’s bank up along a grassy slope to where the last wall crumbled into the earth at the steep base of a hill. Here, on this broken wall under the light of a waning quarter moon, an owl came to rest. It folded its wings, and with that uncanny and direct gaze common to owls it regarded the ring of stones crowning the hilltop beyond.

Stars faded as light rose and with it, shrouded in a low-hanging mist, the sun. The moon vanished into the brightening sky. Still the owl waited. A mouse scurried by through the dew-laden grass, yet the owl did not stir to snatch it. Rabbits nosed out of their burrows, and yet it let them pass unregarded. Its gaze did not waver, although it blinked once. Twice. Thrice.

Perhaps the mist cleared enough for the rising sun to glint on the stones that made up the huge standing circle at the height of the hill. A light flashed, and the owl launched itself into the air, beating hard to gain height. From above the stones it swooped down into the circle, where certain other stones lay on the soil in a pattern unreadable to human eyes. Flame flickered along the ancient grain of a smallish standing stone in the center of the ring. Out of the flame came faint words overheard in the same way that whispers escape through a keyhole, two voices in conflict.

rias shuddered. But he had come too far to let fear destroy him. Against all hope he was a free man again, bound by his own will into the service of another. He might be a worm in his heart, but hearts could change. She had said that all things change.