The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  They found the king seated on a couch with his arm bandaged and his expression severe. Sapientia sat at his right hand, Theophanu at his left. He dismissed all of his attendants except for Helmut Villam, Sister Rosvita, and Hathui. Liath caught a glimpse of Hanna, face drawn tight with fear, before she vanished with the others. A half-dozen stewards remained.

  Liath knelt. But her hands were steady. Sanglant hesitated, but then, slowly, he knelt also: supplicant before the king’s displeasure.

  “What did Hugh say to you?” Henry asked Sanglant in a perfectly collected voice.

  The question surprised her, but Sanglant got a stubborn look on his face and set his mouth mulishly.

  “What did he say to make you attack him in that way?” repeated the king, each word uttered so distinctly that they fell like stones.

  Sanglant shut his eyes. “‘Do you cover her as a dog covers a bitch?’” He croaked out the words, his voice so harsh she could barely understand him. Then he buried his face in his hands in shame. And she burned.

  An unlit candle set on the side table snapped into flame.

  Henry started up in surprise, and Sapientia leaped up beside him and took hold of his elbow, to steady him. Villam murmured a prayer and drew the sign of the Circle at his breast. But Theophanu only glanced at the candle and then nodded to Rosvita, as if to answer a question. Hathui sighed softly from her station behind the king’s couch.

  “What is this, Sanglant?” demanded Henry. “A sign of your mother’s blood at last?”

  “Merely a trick, learned as a child and then forgotten,” said Sanglant without looking at Liath.

  “Nay,” Liath said, although her voice shook. “I cannot let you shoulder the burden which is properly mine.”

  “Sorcery!” hissed Sapientia. “She’s bewitched Hugh. That’s why he’s gone mad for her. Just like she’s bewitched Sanglant.”

  “You’re a fool, sister!” retorted Theophanu. “She saved my life. It’s your beloved Hugh who is the maleficus!”

  “Hush,” said the king. He touched Sapientia on the arm and she let him go at once so that he could walk forward. The injury to his shoulder had not wounded the dignity of his gait. Frozen, Liath dared not move as he stopped in front of her and then circled her as a man does a caged leopard he means to slay. “Have you bewitched my son?”

  “Nay, Your Majesty,” she stammered, dry-eyed with terror.

  “How can I believe you?”

  “She has not—!” Sanglant began, head flung back.

  “Silence! Or I will have you thrown out while I conduct this interview in your absence. Now. Speak.”

  The king could crush her flat in an instant, with the merest flick of his hand command his soldiers to kill her. “It’s true I know some few of the arts of sorcery, as part of the education my father gave me,” she began hesitantly, “but I’m untrained.”

  “Hah!” said Sapientia as she paced behind Henry’s couch. Sanglant shifted where he knelt, as if he, too, wanted to pace.

  “Go on,” said the king without looking toward his daughter. His gaze, fixed so unerringly on Liath, made her wonder if perhaps it wasn’t better just to get that spear through the guts and have done with it.

  “My Da protected me against magic, that’s all. He told me I’d never be a sorcerer.” It all sounded very foolish. And dangerous.

  “Her father was a mathematicus,” said Rosvita suddenly. Ai, Lady: the voice of doom.

  Henry snorted. “She arrived at my progress an avowed discipla of Wolfhere. It is a plot.”

  “Wolfhere didn’t want her to leave,” said Sanglant. “He argued against her leaving him, most furiously. He wanted her to stay with him.”

  “The better to fool you into taking her with you. And marrying her! A royal prince!”

  “Nay, Father. Hear me out.” Sanglant did rise now. Sapientia stopped pacing and with flushed cheeks studied her half brother. Theophanu, as cool as ever, had clasped her hands at her belt. Villam looked anxious, and Rosvita, who might be her best ally or her worst enemy, wore a grave expression indeed “Hear me out, I beg you.”

  Henry hesitated, fingered the bandage that wrapped his arm. Oddly, he glanced back toward Hathui.

  “I cannot know everything that is in Wolfhere’s mind,” Hathui said, as if in response to a spoken question. “I have no doubt he has seen and done much that I have never—and will never—hear about. But I do not think he ever intended Liath for any path but following him—and—” She glanced toward Sapientia, who had paused beside the window to run her fingers down the ridges of the closed shutters. “—to free her from Father Hugh.”

  Amazingly, Sapientia said nothing, appeared not even to hear the remark except that her tracing faltered, stopped, and began again.

  At last, Henry nodded to Sanglant. “You may speak.”

  “You wouldn’t have taken Gent without her aid. She killed Bloodheart.”

  “She? This one?”

  “You did not hear the story from Lavastine?”

  “She was under his command. What story is there to tell?”

  “If you cannot believe me, then let Lavastine come before you and tell the tale.”

  “Lavastine was ensorcelled before,” began Sapientia. “Why not again—?”

  “He and his retinue left this morning,” said Henry, cutting her off, “So his tale must be left untold.”

  “Count Lavastine has gone?” Now Sanglant paced to the door, and back, like a dog caught on a chain. Liath hissed his name softly, but he worried at his knuckles until Henry brought him up short by placing an open hand on his chest and stopping him. “I must ride after him—to warn him— If the curse does not follow her—” He faltered, came back to himself, and glanced around the room. “A messenger must be sent. You cannot begin to imagine Bloodheart’s power.”

  “It was rumored that he was an enchanter,” said Villam.

  Sanglant laughed sourly. “No rumor. I myself witnessed—” He swiped at his face as if brushing away a swarm of gnats that no one else could see. “No use telling it. No use recalling it now, what he did to me.”

  That quickly, she saw Henry’s face soften. But it was brief. He touched the bandage again, and his mouth set in a grim line. “There is much to explain.”

  Sanglant spun, took Liath by the elbow, and pulled her up. She did not want to fight against that pull, but she also did not want to stand rather than kneel before the king. “Only someone with magic could have killed an enchanter as powerful as Bloodheart.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “You know yourself he had powers of illusion, that he could make things appear in the air that had no true existence. Or perhaps you didn’t see that. We saw it.” He grimaced and turned to look at Liath. “She alone—Ai, Lord! Had I only listened to her at Gent, my Dragons would still be alive. But we let them in, we opened the gates, thinking they were our allies.”

  “Young Alain spoke of a curse,” said Henry, “but I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “He had protected himself against death,” Sanglant went on, not hearing the comment. “He had taken his heart out of his own body so that he could not be killed. He protected himself with some kind of grotesque creature that he kept in a chest. He spoke a curse at the end, but whether he released the creature I can’t know. I didn’t see it again. By all these means did Bloodheart protect himself.” He turned to gesture toward her, and with that gesture everyone looked at her. “No man or woman acting alone could have killed Bloodheart. But she did.”

  The silence made Liath nervous. She stared at the couch, finest linen dyed a blood red and embroidered with a magnificent hunting scene in gold-and-silver thread: Henry, standing in front of her, obscured part of it, but she could see lions grappling with deer, and a stag bounding away in front of three riders while partridges flushed from cover.

  “That is why a messenger must be sent to Count Lavastine,” finished Sanglant. “If Bloodheart’s vengeance doesn’t stal
k Liath, if she is somehow protected against magic by her father’s spells, then it must be stalking Count Lavastine. Bloodheart’s magic was powerful—”

  “Bloodheart is dead,” said Henry.

  “Yet no harm can come,” said Hathui suddenly, “in sending an Eagle to warn him, even if naught comes of it.”

  “It was the hound,” said Sanglant. “The hound that died. It smelled of Bloodheart.”

  “What must we tell him?” asked Hathui. “How does one overcome such a curse?”

  Sanglant looked helplessly at Liath, but she could only shrug. In truth, like Henry, she didn’t truly understand what he was talking about: Was this a madness brought on by his captivity, the months in chains he had spent at Bloodheart’s feet? Or was he right? Did some terrible curse stalk her or, thwarted by Da’s magic, stalk Lavastine instead?

  “Send an Eagle,” said Henry to Hathui, “telling everything you have learned here. Then return.” She nodded and left quickly.

  Henry touched his injured arm, winced—and caught Sanglant wincing at the same time, as if in sympathy, or guilt. Villam helped the king seat himself on the couch. Henry looked tired, but thoughtful.

  “Others have noticed her,” Henry said, studying Liath.

  “Never be noticed.” Da had been right all along: That way lay ruin. But it was too late now. She could have stayed with the Aoi sorcerer, but she had not. She could have ridden on with Wolfhere, but she had not. She could not undo what, had been done.

  And she did not want to, not even now.

  “Count Lavastine would have taken her into his retinue, and he is no fool. Even my trusted cleric, Sister Rosvita, has taken an interest in her. No doubt others have as well.” Villam coughed, then cleared his throat. “The church is right to control such powers,” Henry mused, “yet they exist nevertheless. Given what you have seen, Sanglant …” He gestured, and the steward hurried forward with a cup of wine, which the king drank from and then offered, in turn, to his daughters, to Rosvita, and to Villam. “It may have seemed more advantageous to marry a woman connected with sorcery than one who shares a claim to the Aostan throne.”

  “Why should I care what advantage she brings me? She saved my life.”

  “By killing Bloodheart. You saw the worth of such power as she has.”

  “Nay.” He flushed, a darker tone in his bronze complexion. In a low voice, he spoke quickly, as if he feared the words would condemn him. “I would have gone mad there in my chains if I hadn’t had my memory of her to sustain me.”

  “Ah,” said Villam in the tone of a man who has just seen and understood a miracle. He glanced at Liath, and she flushed, recalling the proposition he had made to her many months ago.

  Henry looked pained, then rested head on hands, as if his head ached. When he looked up, he frowned, brow furrowed “Sanglant, folk of our station do not marry for pleasure or sentiment. That is what concubines are for. We marry for advantage. For alliance.”

  “How many times was it made clear to me that I was never to marry? That I could not be allowed to? Why should I have taken such a lesson to heart? She is the one I have married, and I have given my consent and sworn an oath before God. You cannot dissolve that oath.”

  “But I can judge whether she is free to marry at all. Father Hugh was right: As my servant, she must have my permission to marry. If she is not my servant, then she is his slave, and thus his to dispose of.”

  Sapientia groaned under her breath, like a woman mourning. Theophanu made a movement toward her, as though to comfort her, but Sapientia thrust her away and hid her face with a hand. Quickly, Sister Rosvita hurried over to her.

  “We have not yet spoken of Father Hugh,” sad Theophanu in a low voice, “and the accusations I have laid before you Father. I have also brought with me—in writing—Mother Rothgard’s testimony.”

  “I, too, have a letter from Mother Rothgard,” said Rosvita. Sapientia was weeping softly on her shoulder. “Is there not a holy nun in your party, Your Highness?” she asked Theophanu “One Sister Anne, by name, who has come to investigate these matters?”

  Theophanu blinked, looking confused. “Sister Anne? She came with us from St. Valeria. A very wise and ancient woman devout, and knowledgeable. Incorruptible. But she fell ill on the journey and had to be nursed in a cottage for several days. When she emerged, she always wore a veil because the sun hurt her eyes so. I will send for her.”

  “How do we know,” sobbed Sapientia, “that it is not this Eagle who is the maleficus? If she has bound a spell onto Hugh—? But her heart wasn’t in it. Even she did not believe her own words. “God have mercy! That he should betray a preference for her, a common-born woman, and in front of everyone, and humiliate me by so doing!”

  “Hush, Your Highness,” said Rosvita softly. “All will be set right.”

  “I am not yet done with these two,” said Henry. “But be assured that any accusation of malevolent sorcery in my court will be dealt with harshly should it prove unfounded, and more harshly yet should it prove true. Sanglant.” He gestured, and Sanglant knelt beside Liath.

  “Eagle.” Liath flinched. The king had so completely recovered his composure that she felt more keenly the power he held over her. What soul, struggling to free itself from the eddy surrounding the dreaded Abyss, does not fear the gentle breath of God? With one puff of air They sweep damned souls irrevocably into the pit. “Liathano, so they call you. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  She choked out the words. “I am at your mercy, Your Majesty.”

  “So you are. Why did you marry my son?”

  She flushed, could look at no one, not even Sanglant, especially not Sanglant, because that would only recall too vividly the night they had passed so sweetly together. Instead, she fixed her gaze on the flagstone floor partly covered with a rug elaborately woven in imperial purple and pale ivory: the eight-pointed Arethousan star. “I—I swear to you, Your Majesty. I gave no thought to advantage. I just—” She faltered. “I—”

  “Well,” said Villam with a snort of laughter, “I fear me, my good friend Henry, that I see nothing here I have not seen a hundred times before. They are young and they are handsome and they are hungry for that with which the body feeds them.”

  “Is it only the young who think in this way, my good friend Helmut?” asked Henry with a laugh. “So be it. If there is threat in her beyond the sorcery her father evidently taught her and that others seek to exploit by gaining control of her, I do not see it. But.”

  But.

  The word cut like a blade.

  “I will not tolerate my son’s disobedience. Naked he came into the world, and I clothed him. He walked, until I gave him a horse to ride. My captains trained him, and he bore the arms I gifted him with. All that he has came from me, and in his arrogance he has forgotten that.”

  “I have not forgotten it.” Sanglant said it hoarsely, as if the knowledge pained him—but his voice always sounded like that.

  “You no longer wear the iron collar set upon you by Bloodheart. Where is the gold torque that marks you as blood of my blood, descendant of the royal line of Wendar and Varre?”

  “I will not wear it.” At his most stubborn, with high cheekbones in relief, the un-Wendish slant of his nose, the way he held his jaw taut, he was very much the arrogant prince, one born out of an exotic line.

  “You defy me.” Henry’s tone made the statement into a question. She heard it as a warning.

  Surely Sanglant understood that it was pointless to set himself against the king? They could not win against the king, who had all the power where they had none.

  “I am no longer a King’s Dragon.”

  “Then give me the belt of honor which I myself fastened on you when you were fifteen. Give me the sword that I myself gave into your hands after Gent.”

  Villam gasped. Even Sapientia looked up, tears streaking her face. Liath’s throat burned with the bile of defeat. But Sanglant looked grimly satisfied as he lay belt, sheath, and swo
rd at the king’s feet.

  “You are what I make you.” Henry’s words rang like a hammer on iron. “You will do as I tell you. I am not unsympathetic to the needs of the flesh, which are manifold. Therefore, keep this woman as your concubine, if you will, but since she, my servant, has not received my permission to wed, then her consent even before witnesses is not valid. I will equip an army, and arm you for this duty, and you will lead this army south to Aosta. When you have restored Princess Adelheid to her throne, you will marry her. I think you will find a queen’s bed more satisfying than that of a magus’ get—no matter how handsome she may be.”

  “But what about me, Father?” demanded Sapientia, whose tears had dried suddenly.

  “You I will invest as Margrave of Eastfall, so that you may learn to rule yourself.”

  She flushed, stung as by a slap in the face, but she did not protest.

  “And what of me, Father?” asked Theophanu more quietly. “What of Duke Conrad’s suit?”

  Henry snorted. “I do not trust Conrad, and I will not send one of my most valuable treasures into the treasure-house of a man who may harbor his own ambitions.”

  “But, Father—”

  “No.” He cut her off, and she was far too cool to show any emotion, whether relief or anger or despair. “In any case, the church will rule that you are too closely related, with a common ancestor in the—” He gestured toward Rosvita.

  “In the seventh degree, if we calculate by the old imperial method. In the fourth degree, if we calculate by the method outlined in an encyclical circulated under the holy rule of our Holy Mother Honoria, who reigned at the Hearth before Clementia, she who is now skopos in Darre.”

  “No marriage may be consummated within the fifth degree of relation,” said Henry, with satisfaction. “Conrad will not get a bride from my house.” The door opened, and Hathui returned, making her bow, but she had hardly gotten inside the door when Henry addressed her: “Eagle, tell Duke Conrad that I will hold audience with him. Now. As for Father Hugh—well—”

  “Send him to the skopos,” hissed Sapienta. “I will see him condemned!” Then she burst into noisy sobs.