The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  Beyond the huts, in the shadow of the trees, lay five fresh graves, two of them smaller than the others. A sixth lay half dug, a crude wooden shovel abandoned beside it.

  Finally one of the women edged forward. She held a bundle in her arms; it was so still that Alain could not tell if it were a child or a bolt of cloth. Her hands were white with cold and her skeletal feet whiter still, and there was fear in her eyes and in the pinched pale grimace of her lips. “What will you do with us, my lord?” Her voice was more cough than words, and she coughed in truth after speaking, and that woke up the child—because it was in fact a child—in her arms, which whimpered, stirred, and fell quiet again, too weak to protest.

  “You must move on,” said Lavastine. “Our harvest is past, and we have no room for more supplicants. You may have better luck to the south.”

  “We come from the south, my lord. There wasn’t enough at harvest, and no work to be found. We will bind ourselves into your service if only you will pledge to feed us and give us work.”

  “We have as many as we can feed,” repeated Lavastine. He gestured to a steward, who hurried forward. “See that some bread is given them, but then they must be off these lands.”

  Several of the adults dropped to their knees and blessed him for this bounty, as little as it was. The children merely stared, their eyes as dull as wilted leaves.

  “Pray you, my lord, may we stay at least long enough to bury my child?” Another fit of coughing seized her, and this time the child in her arms only mewled softly and didn’t stir at all.

  Alain dismounted and strode over. She shrank away from him, but stopped, frightened more of disobedience and the spears of the huntsmen than of what he himself might do to her. Her breath stank of onions and her breathing had the rattling lilt of a lungfever coming on.

  “Let me see,” he said gently. He flicked back the thin blanket that covered its face.

  The child might have been any age between three and six. Sores blistered its mouth, and at the sound of his voice its eyes flickered but were too swollen to open, ringed with a sticky yellow pus. A fly crawled along the lid. It was naked under the blanket, wasted and pale, and the blanket itself had worn almost through. He could see its toes. He took off a glove and brushed his fingers over its forehead. It burned with fever.

  “Poor child,” he murmured. “I pray you will find healing and shelter and food, pour souls. God will walk with you.”

  She began to cry noisily, hopelessly, coughing hard.

  “Alain,” said Lavastine, both warning and command.

  He began to step back, could not. The children—about ten of them—had crept forward so silently that he hadn’t noticed their coming, and now they trapped him, pressed so close that one ragged child—impossible to tell if it were boy or girl—reached out and touched his boots as if they were a holy relic. Another brushed the hem of Alain’s cloak and exclaimed something that might have been a word or only a bubble of amazement.

  He could not bear it. He unpinned the cloak and swung it off his own shoulders to drape over the stooped shoulders of the woman, so that it covered the child as well. At once the others grasped at it and tugged, trying to get it into their own hands, fighting over it.

  “Stop!”

  They shrank back, even the one he had gifted. The child in her arms lay still and silent. For all he knew it had already expired.

  A sick despair settled on him, a weight far heavier than the cloak had been. He shuddered in the biting autumn wind, spun, and hurried back to his horse. A groom was there to lace hands under his foot and hoist him up.

  “God save us from beggars!” cried Lord Amalfred as the hunt made ready to leave. Harness jingled, horses snorted, and his leashed hounds lunged toward the children, who scattered with screams and cries. Amalfred laughed and gathered his companions around him as they plunged into the trees. Foresters vanished into the wood before them, and far away they heard the solitary bell of a hound marking a scent.

  “It isn’t right to mock them,” said Alain to the count, who had come up beside him.

  Lavastine did not speak until they had left the clearing behind. “You can’t clothe them all.”

  “Poor creatures. I would have given them my boots, but then I saw how they would fight over them and it would only be worse. Ai, Lord! What suffering.”

  “It is a mystery, indeed.”

  “What is a mystery?”

  “Why God allows suffering in the world.”

  “The deacons say it is a just punishment from God for those who have sinned.”

  Lavastine grunted in a way that suggested he was not convinced. “I have listened to the Holy Verses, and it seems to me that they have not heeded the words of the blessed Daisan. Some things are within our nature. Just as lions eat meat, sheep eat grass, and scorpions sting, we eat and drink, sleep and wake, grow up and grow old, are born and then die. But wealth and sickness, poverty and heath: these things are brought about purely by the decree of Fate. Not everything happens according to our will. Yet we also have liberty to choose our own actions, as you did just now by giving that poor woman your cloak. She has liberty to make use of the gift or to cast it away, and the others with her may steal it, or leave it in her hands. That is the measure of our worth to God: how we act with what we are given, and whether we chose to obey God’s law whatever our circumstances.”

  Hounds belled, and their belling blossomed into a sudden rash of barking. The young lords attending Lord Amalfred whooped and cheered and raced ahead into the forest, leaving Alain, Lavastine, and some few men who by reason of age or prudence chose to ride at a slower pace with their host.

  Alain had lost his appetite for the hunt. “But surely sometimes desperation may drive you to sin,” he objected, watching branches whip and still as the forward party vanished into the trees.

  “It is true that we aren’t made guilty by those things that lie outside our power, but certainly we aren’t justified by them either. Evil is the work of the Enemy. It is easier to do what is right.”

  “You were laid under a compulsion. What you did while under that spell was no choice of your own.”

  “And that, my son, is why the church must keep her hand closed tight around all matters pertaining to sorcery.”

  All five black hounds broke into a chorus of barking. Steadfast and Fear bounded away into the brush. Lavastine pulled up and began to dismount, but suddenly Terror was beneath him, nudging him with his head as if to keep him in the saddle.

  “I’ll go look,” said Alain quickly. Sorrow and Rage bristled, hackles up. They had coursed silently around to place themselves between Lavastine’s horse and the undergrowth where the other two hounds thrashed and barked within a thicket that rattled and swayed as if a wild wind had been bound into the spot.

  “My lord count.” Several servingmen rode forward, but Alain pressed past them, dismounted, and with his sword out forged into the brush, batting aside branches, getting a mouthful of dry tern leaves as he shoved through. Sorrow followed him, still barking. Rage stayed behind with Terror. Steadfast and Fear had cornered something in the densest comer of the thicket strewn with brier and fern. He saw it, a flash of dead white darting here, and then back, seeking an exit. Dread hit like the blast of cold wind, making him shake.

  “Alain!” called Lavastine.

  “Don’t follow me!”

  It darted past Fear’s snapping jaws. Alain cut. His sword hit loam, sprayed bits of leaves. Steadfast leaped past him. Sorrow bounced. A creature scurried away under the leaves. He saw it again where leaves parted and it darted into a screen of briers, that unnatural white gleam like bone washed clean and polished by the sea. He stabbed again at it but only got his hand scratched by thorns.

  There it was again. He stabbed. And missed.

  The thing scuttled past Fear. That fast, it turned to bolt toward the horses. Sorrow snapped. Alain jumped after it. Beyond, he saw movement among the trees, horsemen closing in.

  “Don’
t dismount!” he cried, but no one could hear him over he clamor of the hounds barking. Steadfast dove headfirst into a bush. She yelped, and then, abruptly, everything was still except for the distant blare of a hunting horn.

  Terror growled, and Rage joined him, and then Sorrow and Fear as well, a shield wall of hounds at Steadfast’s back. The sound crawled up Alain’s spine like poison. His neck prickled, and he spun round, sword raised. A flutter in the leaves. He backed at the bush, but a wren struggled away, broke free, and flew off.

  That ragged breathing was his own.

  “Alain?” Lavastine forced his horse into the brush. “What is going on?”

  Alain dropped the sword into the forest litter, caught Steadfast by her collar, and dragged her back. Blood swelled from her right forepaw and even as she licked it, whimpering, the wound began to swell strangely.

  “We must get her back home. I fear—” He broke off and glanced up at the servingmen, who had clustered around and all gawped at him. He gestured as Lavastine would, and the servants moved away. Alain continued in a low voice. “I saw it again, the size of a rat but without any color at all. I even thought Bliss had simply eaten it, taken it into himself to save you, but I must have been wrong. Ai, Lord! It’s the dead hand of Bloodheart, the creature Prince Sanglant spoke of. It’s followed us this far.”

  Lavastine considered him in silence, then shifted his gaze to Steadfast. A leaf spun on the wind and settled to earth. “Put her over my saddle. It would be prudent to return now and let the others hunt as they will.”

  There were many things Alain wanted to say on the ride back, but he could not make them into sentences that made sense. It was a long, quiet ride with Steadfast draped awkwardly over the neck of the nervous horse, but Lavastine kept a firm hand on the rein and the other on the hound’s back. At the stables, they handed over the horses to Master Rodlin and Lavastine himself lugged the hound up to his chamber, leaving Alain to venture into the hall where the women had settled for the day.

  They had taken over the upper half of the hall, and he paused by the door, hesitant to enter, as he watched them laughing and talking. Even Tallia engaged in the debate with an eagerness she rarely displayed for Alain. Set in the pride of place, as befit her birth, she shared a couch with the stout, handsome young woman who called her “cousin.”

  Duchess Yolande made him nervous. Halfway through her second pregnancy, she was far enough along that she didn’t care to go hunting, and if she did not go hunting, then no other woman in her train would go either. But neither were any men welcome to spend the day with the ladies, whom she had organized into a symposium in the Dariyan style, with couches and wine and certain intellectual questions to be debated.

  “The Dariyan physician Galené clearly states that males are like deformed creatures,” she was saying now. “But I suppose it is not their fault that they are the product of weaker, more sickly seed. That is why they cannot develop wombs, as females can.”

  “But She who is Mother to us all chose to voice the divine word through the lips of a man,” objected Tallia.

  “A man gave voice,” corrected the duchess, “but a woman witnessed. It was the holy Thecla’s testimony which gave rise to the church.”

  “Even so,” insisted Tallia, “men can also aspire to become like angels.”

  “Who are formed in the shape of women.”

  “Better to say that women are formed in the shape of angels,” corrected the duchess’ deacon, who seemed by turns to rein the young duchess back and then egg her on.

  “But we are all of us capable of being like the angels in purity of purpose and the sincerity of our prayer, if nothing else.” Tallia remained stubborn on this point.

  “Your beliefs, my lady, are well meant,” chided the deacon but in the most delicate manner possible, “but the church explicitly condemned as heresy the wrongful notion of the sacrifice and redemption at the Council of Addai. You must pray for God’s intervention in this matter.”

  “And so I have!” retorted Tallia defiantly.

  “Nay, let Lady Tallia speak as she wishes. I am most intrigued by God our Mother and Her only Son.”

  “My lady—!”

  “I will listen to such tidings if I wish! Do not silence her.”

  A servingwoman bent to whisper in the duchess’ ear and she looked toward the door. “Ah!” she cried with a smile that made Alain want to bolt outside. “Here is Lord Alain.” She rubbed her belly reflexively and then gestured for him to sit between her and Tallia on the couch. Compared to Tallia, she looked vast and ruddy, the kind of woman who would produce many healthy babies and live to see her grandchildren. “Alas that I did not negotiate with your father for your hand before you were stolen away by my dear cousin.”

  “My lady,” remonstrated the deacon, “think of your husband, so recently lost to you.”

  “Ah, poor Hanfred! I am truly sorry an Eika spear got him through the guts. But you will admit, cousin, that your husband is far more pleasant to look upon than my old Hanfred ever was, may his soul rest in peace in the Chamber of Light.”

  “Is he?” asked Tallia, staring at Alain as if she had never seen him before.

  “You pray too much, cousin! Come now, sit here beside us.” Alain did not budge from his station by the door. That she was rather free with her hands, knowing him a married man and therefore in her words “ripe for the sampling,” made him even less inclined to sit within her reach.

  “I beg your pardon, I must attend my father. I only came to pay my respects. Some portion of the party has ridden on, and I doubt they will return before nightfall.”

  “Lord Amalfred among them, I trust?” Yolande had a hearty laugh. The riches heaped on the platter she shared with Tallia would have fed the entire flock of starving souls they had stumbled across earlier. Alain wondered with sudden violent loathing how much of that food would be thrown to the pigs, although certainly the pigs, too, were deserving of food. “I would be sorry to hear he had returned early. He’s hoping I’ll marry him, and I confess that hearing that he shot an arrow at our dear cousin Theophanu thinking she was a deer inclines me to think well of him, but dear God he is such a bore.”

  “Why have you come back early?” asked Tallia suddenly, as if accusing Alain of ruining her day by thrusting so indelicately into the pleasant female companionship she was now enjoying.

  “Steadfast was injured.”

  She lost interest at once. No longer terrified of the hounds still, she did not care for them at all. She dismissed him with a wave of the hand mimicked from Duchess Yolande, and that stung him, to be treated like a servant; but she wore the gold torque of royal kinship and the Lavas counts did not. She might be his wife, but Duchess Yolande had not journeyed this far to see the count of Lavas but rather the woman who was the granddaughter in the direct female line of the last Varren queen.

  That was the game being played here today, and he was not part of it. He was a man, and according to Duchess Yolande men were suited for the hunt, not the hall. While men might excel on the field of battle, the true dance of power took place where alliances were sealed, rebels brought to justice, and gifts exchanged.

  Upstairs, Lavastine sat on his bed and stroked Steadfast’s head where she lay, breathing heavily, on the coverlet beside him.

  “But her father was duke before her,” said Alain, sitting or the other side of Steadfast.

  Lavastine glanced up. “You have fled the redoubtable duchess, I see. Well, her mother is of Karronish kin, and it is well known that they do not let men rule there unless no daughter, sister, or niece can be found to take up the staff. Her father Rodulf had the duchy because he had no sisters, and he devoted himself to the battlefield and let his wife administer his holdings as well as her own. She was a difficult woman. No doubt he was happier in the field.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it, that the ancient physicians wrote that male seed was weaker and that females are formed more like to the angels than are males?”
r />   “That is what the learned deacons report. If you and Tallia have a daughter, I will be well pleased.”

  “Ai, God,” whispered Alain. Steadfast lay still, eyes open and fixed on Lavastine as he curled his fingers around her ears and stroked them softly. Her right paw was hot and swollen and had an odd, grainy texture rather like stone at the very tip. “Just like Ardent.”

  Lavastine grunted. “If it is true that some creature stalks us, then we must post more guards and sentries. But if we do so, then Duchess Yolande may feel we do not trust her, and she may take offense.”

  “Why has she come?”

  “Her father followed Sabella, and he was not bespelled as I was. Sabella still lives—”

  “As a prisoner in the care of Biscop Constance, in Autun.”

  “But nevertheless alive. And Tallia is her daughter, of age, and married—so she will in time produce an heir.”

  Alain found a burr in Steadfast’s coat and busied himself worrying it free.

  “But I don’t believe she plots treason. I think she is merely paying court. Prudence dictates that she ought to. Henry is not overly pleased with his three legitimate children. Tallia has as much right to the throne as any of them do.”

  Suddenly the only noise Alain heard was the pounding of his heart and the slow wheeze of Steadfast, drawing in a labored breath and letting it out again. “The throne?”

  “You must be ready for anything.” Lavastine stroked Steadfast’s head. His frown was fleeting but more frightening because of that. “This wound is exactly like the one inflicted on Ardent. Three incidents, taken together, suggest a pattern, and while Prince Sanglant acted strangely after his rescue, still, we all heard rumors about Bloodheart’s enchantments. There is also the testimony of your dreams. Dreams are often false, but I think yours are true visions. It is better to assume we are threatened by a curse than to do nothing.”