Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

A pale shape flitted in front of her, careless as a breeze. Had this daimone come to taunt her? Or did it hope to guide her? Could she hope for their aid?

“Are there any here who were made captive at Verna?” she called. “Do you know me? I am Liathano, daughter of Anne and Bernard, wife of Sanglant, mother of Blessing. Can you help me?”

She saw more of them spinning and swooping among the staggeringly bright ice floes. Their movements seemed entirely random, unfixed and purposeless. What did they care if she triumphed, or failed?

The poison filtered up her limbs. She needed a guide quickly, a creature who could survive in the aether. Truly, she only knew where to find one such creature. She had to act fast.

On Earth she had learned to mold fire into a window. It proved no different here. Even in the sphere of Erekes, frozen in ice, fire came to her call.

It flared up with an audible crack, followed by a murmurous clattering like a thousand wings battering against an unbreachable wall. The sound died quickly. In the ice floes nearest her, daimones fled from the heat.

She wrapped fire into an archway, a window to see onto distant Earth.

“Sanglant,” she called, because the link to him was the strongest chain she had.

With her poisoned hand raised to shadow her eyes, she kept the living one outstretched toward the archway of fire, bleeding and burning sparks and swirling air onto another vista, pale and blurry as through a veil. Were those vague shadows human forms? The sea hissed around her.

“Sanglant!” she cried again. A small child’s body took form beyond the archway, so bright that it shone even into Erekes, casting a shadow. “Blessing?” Her voice caught on the beloved name.

To her shock, she heard an answer.

“Mama! Mama come!”

Ai, Lady! Blessing was so big, speaking like a two-year-old. Had so much time passed in the other world already, although she had only lived among the Ashioi for a handful of days? She wanted them so badly, but she hardened her heart. How easy it was to harden her heart.

“Sanglant, if you can hear me, know that I am living, but I am on a long journey and I do not know how long it will take me.” To get back to you. She faltered. He was only a shadow dimly perceived across an untold distance. Blessing blazed in the realm of shadows, but Liath could not really be sure if anyone else heard her or even was aware of the rift she had opened between Earth and the sphere of Erekes.

“Wait for me, I beg you! Help me if you can, for I’m trapped here. I need Jerna.”

Surely if Blessing had grown so large, Liath need not feel guilty about stealing Jerna away. A child of two could thrive on porridge and soft cheese, meat and bread and goat’s milk.

A daimone flashed as a silvery form across the shadows, beyond the veil.

“I see you!” She reached out just as Jerna’s gleaming, wispy form coiled protectively around Blessing, soaking the child in Jerna’s aetherical substance. Blessing cried out in surprise and delight, a sweet sound that cut to Liath’s heart. But she could not stop now. No time to savor it. The poison had reached her left shoulder, and her right hip. If she couldn’t escape the sea of ice, she would die.

“Come if you will, Jerna. Return to your home. The way is open.”

As she reached into the whirlpool of light, wind cut her hand to ribbons. She jerked back, crying out in pain as the archway of fire collapsed into a hundred shards that spun on a whirlwind out into the sea. Reeling back, she remembered too late that she would only fall into the poisonous sea.

But she never plunged into the depths. A cool presence wrapped itself around her, lifting her.

In the aether, Jerna’s luminescence dazzled. She had form as much as softness and only the vaguest memory of the human shape she had worn on Earth.

“Come,” she said, a murmur made by the flow of her body through the aetherical wind. On Earth, Liath had not understood the speech of the daimones, not as Sanglant had. Here, all language seemed an open book to her. “The blessing needs me no longer. This last act I will grant you, her mother, so I can become free of humankind.”

She twisted upward on a trail of gauzy mist that flowered into life as Jerna ascended. Liath’s arm and leg throbbed painfully, all pins and needles, where Jerna’s substance wrapped them in a healing glow. The pain made her head pound, and the reflection of light off the ice floes and the white sea blinded her until, dizzy, she couldn’t tell what was up and what was down and whether earthly directions had any meaning in the heavens.

A rosy glow penetrated the ice-white blaze of Erekes’ farthest boundary. Silky daimones clustered along a series of arches that formed not so much a wall as a porous, inviting border, an elaboration of detail so sensuously formed that she wondered if earthly architects saw this place in fevered dreams.

“Now am I come to my home,” whispered Jerna.

But as they reached the many-gated border, weight dragged Liath down once again.

“I cannot carry you within,” said Jerna. “You still wear too much of Earth about you, Bright One. For the sake of the blessing you allowed me to nurse, I have carried you thus far, but I can hold you no longer.”

Liath panicked as she slipped out of Jerna’s grasp. Ai, God, she would plunge back into the poisonous sea. Her clumsy fingers found her belt buckle. As she loosened it, the leather slithered down her legs, caught on her foot, and the belt and the items hitched to it—her leather pouch and her sheathed iron eating knife—fell away.

Jerna released her. The many-gated wall passed beneath her, and she tumbled into the sphere of Somorhas, whose warm and rosy light embraced her.