Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

eadow came to an abrupt end where a finger of pine woods thrust out along the hillside. The drought had taken its toll here as well, and the wood quickly degraded into a grassy heath. At the height of the hill stood a tumble of worked stone that had once been a lookout station. She climbed to the highest safe point, where she crouched on a ledge, bracing herself against what remained of the rock wall, and looked out over the land.

The hillside fell away precipitously, as if the watchtower had once looked over a valley, but in fact there was nothing to be seen below except fog.

According to the old sorcerer, this was the outer limit of the land. Nothing lay beyond the mist. She stared at it for a long time. Above, the sky shaded from the merciless blue of drought-stricken country into an oddly vacant white, more void than cloud.

The silence oppressed her. Out here, at the edge of the world, she didn’t even hear birds, nothing except a solitary cricket. It was as if the land were slowly emptying out, as if the heart and soul of it were leaching away into the void. Like her own heart.

Setting quiver and sword aside, she settled down cross-legged. She clapped once, a sound to split away the ordinary world from the world where magic lived, or so the old sorcerer had taught her. With patterns he had shown her, she stilled her mind so that, below the clutter of everyday thoughts, she could listen into the heart of the world: the purl of air at her neck, the slow shifting of stone, the distant babble of water, and beneath all those, the nascent stirring, like a flower about to bloom, of vast power held in check by its own peculiar architecture.

“Humankind was crippled by their hands,” the old sorcerer had said. “They came to believe that the forces of the world could only succumb to manipulation. But the universe exists at a level invisible to our eyes and untouchable by our hands, but comprehensible by our minds and hearts. That is the essence of magic, which seeks neither to harm nor to control but only to preserve and transform.”

In every object, all the pure elements mix in various proportions. If she could calm her own breathing, draw her concentration to such a narrow point that it blossomed into an infinite vista, then she could illuminate the heart of any object and draw out from it those elements which might be of use to her in her spells.

In this way, the daimones who had enfolded her within their wings had called fire even from stone, even from the very mountains. This was the magic known to the Aoi.

But she had a long way to go to master it.

At last she ascended through levels of awareness and clapped her hands four times, a sharp sound that brought her squarely back to the ordinary world. One of her feet had fallen asleep. She scratched the back of her neck, tickled by a withered leaf, and blinked a mote of dust out of one eye. Slinging her quiver over her shoulder, she clambered back down, testing each stone as she went, bypassing those that rattled or shifted under her probing foot.

In the shade at the base of the tower, she drank sparingly and finally allowed herself to eat: some desiccated berries, a coarse flat bread made palatable by being fried in olive oil, the sugary, withered carob pods she gathered every day, and today’s delicacy, a paste of fish-meal and crushed parsnip flavored with onion and pulped juniper berries. There was something so desperate about each meal here that she had quickly learned that the old sorcerer would neither watch her eat nor let her watch him.

After she had licked every crumb off her fingers, she turned to her coil of rope. Twisting fiber into rope was the most tedious of the tasks the old sorcerer had set her but one he insisted she master. She had amassed a fair length of rope. She measured it out against an outstretched arm: forty cubits worth. It would have to be enough.

Tying one end around her waist, she cinched it tight and, with her weapons slung about her, walked to the edge of the fog. She tied the other end of the rope to the trunk of a pine tree, tugging to test the knot, before she swept her gaze along the hillside. Nothing stirred. A bug crawled through the dry grass at her feet, startling because it was the only sign of movement except for the swaying of trees in a delicate wind.

She walked cautiously into the fog. In five steps she was blind. She could not even see where the rope left the fog. She could not see her hands held out in front of her face, although blue flashed from her finger: the lapis lazuli ring given to her by Alain which, he had promised her, would protect her from evil.

She wasn’t sure what to expect: the edge of an abyss? A barricade? A dead land drowned in cloying mist?

In another five steps, she walked out onto a ridgeline. At her back drifted the wall of fog. Right in front of her grew a dense tangle of thorny shrubs. As she jerked sideways to avoid them, her trailing hand brushed a thorn. A line of red welled up on her skin. She stuck the scrape to her mouth and sucked. A serpent hissed at her from the shelter of the thornbush and she sidled away slowly as superstitious dread clutched at her heart.

“Even a single drop of your blood on the parched earth will waken things better left sleeping,” the old sorcerer had said, “and every soul left in this land will know that you are here.”

The bleeding subsided, the serpent slithered away deeper into the thorns, but her thoughts continued to scatter and drop.

He meant to keep her a secret. But whether he thought she was a threat to his people, or they to her, she could not tell. As the salty tang of blood mixed with saliva on her tongue, she wondered what would happen when her monthly courses came in another hand’s span of days, or if they even would, without the influence of the moon upon her body.

Wind stirred the rope hanging loose behind her. The sun beat down, hot and heavy, on her back. The fog had led her not to the end of the world but simply to an unknown place not markedly different from the highland forest.

She stood at the edge of a plunging hillside. A broad valley ringed by highlands opened before her. On the far side of the valley’s bowl rose a saw-toothed mountain range. High peaks, denuded of snow, towered above the wide valley. A road ran along the valley floor below her, leading into a magnificent city that spanned a dried-up lakebed. It was the largest conglomeration of buildings she had ever seen, greater even than the imperial city of Darre. From this vantage point, and through air so clear that she could see the ridgelines in each of the distant peaks, she traced the city’s layout as though it were an architect’s study rolled out on a table.

Plazas, pyramids, and platforms, great courtyards flanked by marketplaces, houses arranged like flowers around rectangular pools, all of these were linked together by sludge-ridden waterways that had once, perhaps, been canals. Tiered stone gardens and islets lay desolate, furrowed by untended fields. Bridges spanned inlets and narrow straits that divided the island city into districts. Three causeways stretched across the dead lakebed, marking roads into the city.

Bleached like bone, the buildings had been laid out in an arrangement so harmonious that she wondered whether the city had been built to conform to the lake’s shallows and bays, or the lake dug and shaped to enhance the city. From this distance the city appeared deserted, empty buildings set in a vast wasteland of drained, cracking ground.

At that moment, she became aware of a solitary figure moving slowly along the road below her. It halted, suddenly, and turned as if it had felt her breath on its neck, although she stood far beyond any normal range of hearing. Its hand raised, beckoning to her, or gesturing with a curse.

The ground lurched under her feet. Stumbling backward, she pulled the rope in tight as she forged back into the fog. White swam around her, static and empty. Her foot hit a rock, and she reeled sideways, found herself up to her thighs in water. Salt spray stung her lips. Waves soughed on a pebbly shoreline, sucking and sighing over the rocks. Grassy dunes humped up beyond the beach. A gull screamed. Turning, she tugged hard on the rope and reeled herself in, one fist at a time, through the blinding fog.

When she staggered out onto the hillside, the watchtower rose before her and she fell to her knees in relief, gasping hard. Water puddled out from her soaked leggings, absorbed quickly into the parched soil.

“You are a fool, Eldest Uncle,” said a woman’s harsh voice. “You know the stories. They cannot help themselves. Already she has broken the small limits you set upon her. Already she gathers intelligence for her own kind, which they will use against us.”

The old sorcerer had a curt laugh. Although he was not a cynic, certainly he was not patient with anything he considered nonsense; this much she had learned about him in their short time together. “How can they use the knowledge of the borders against us, White Feather? There is but one human standing here among us. None but she has crossed through the gateways in all this time. Why do you suppose others intend to? Nay, she is alone, as I have told you. She is an outcast from her own kind.”

“So she would have you believe.”

“You are too suspicious.”