The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  “I pray you,” interjected Alain, startled by these tidings. “What was her name?”

  “Whose name? Meanwhile, the king is marrying Sapientia to some barbarian, and sent her east to fight the savages. That can’t bode well for her chances at the throne. He would never have married her to an Ungrian had he meant her to rule after him. He sent Theophanu south to Aosta, so perhaps it’s her he favors, but she’s so coldhearted. She never shows her feelings like a true person. It’s her mother’s blood that marked her, I swear to you. The boy he sent off to Gent to be abbot. What make you of these tidings, Cousin? It seems to me that Henry thinks none of his legitimate children are fit for the throne.”

  Tallia started, flushing. She had a way of listening without listening; Alain recognized it now. Yolande’s talk had flowed over her like water over a stone, and she hadn’t even realized how all of it was directed at her.

  Finally, with a nervous glance, she responded. “What of my mother?”

  “I was only allowed to see Lady Sabella with Biscop Constance in attendance.” Yolande laughed bitterly. “For my father’s crimes against Henry, I am still not trusted. But she is well. Your father has taken vows as a conversi at Firsebarg. They say he is content there. Your mother is not so content, although she knows well enough to hold her tongue. I told her of your vision of Our Holy Mother, who is God, and Her Blessed Son.”

  Tallia came alert, like a hound to the scent. She was so beautiful when she was passionate. Yet the nail weighed against Alain’s chest, the heaviest burden he had ever carried—except for the lie he had told Lavastine and the oath he had broken to his foster father, Henri. “What did my mother say? Did she embrace the True Word? Does she understand the miracle of His sacrifice and redemption?”

  Yolande shrugged casually. “She said that the one who is regnant can use her power to influence the church.”

  “Oh!” Tallia glanced at Alain, then away. Her color was high; her slender hands twitched as if she held the leash of an excitable dog. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said softly, and then abruptly shut her mouth and stared fixedly at the church porch as they came in under its shadow. They waited inside the nave for a moment to let their eyes adjust. Then, in a group, they went forward to the bier.

  “Ah! I misunderstood,” continued Yolande. “I thought you said that Lavastine himself was laid to rest today. What fine workmanship this is! It is very lifelike. I swear I have seen nothing like it even at the chapel in Autun. There is a stone statue of the great emperor himself, lying in state, rather like this, but I swear that the workmanship is not so excellent.”

  Tallia whispered. “It was a curse.”

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Yolande sharply, glancing at Alain. Geoffrey had come forward and he ran a hand over one stone shoulder, then pulled his hand back quickly as if he had felt something disturbing.

  “God cursed him for not letting me build a chapel in honor of Our Mother and Her Son,” said Tallia. “That is why he died. But everything will be different, now.”

  “So it will,” murmured Yolande, glancing at Geoffrey, “if you make it so. What of an heir? Are you pregnant yet?”

  Geoffrey’s head came up. Stillness settled so profoundly over the group that Alain heard dust falling from the eaves and mice scrabbling in the walls. Tallia took in breath to speak. The last lance of sunlight through the western windows made a path along the stone floor, trembling, as brief as a human’s lifespan, one passing tremor in an angel’s wings.

  It flickers, a pale rose curtain in the air, light trembling in the sky and then fading. Was that the passage of an angel’s wings? Nay. He knows better. The WiseMothers say that the curtain of light seen sometimes in the winter sky is wind off the sun, blown to earth. He supposes they are correct; they see much farther than he does. But on such a night as this, he wonders if it is not wind at all but a kind of water, some deep inexplicable tide that drags back and forth, rising and falling, between the earth and the heavens. Here he stands, caught in the current, waiting.

  The air breathes around him with the slow exhalation of earth, warmth rising into the chill night sky as heat fades off the rocks. He waits in a crater, a bowl of stone on the high fjall. He waits alone, because he alone was marked by the spoor of Hakonin’s OldMother. Because he defeated Hakonin’s warriors five seasons ago, because he earned a name by becoming chieftain of Rikin tribe, because he drove off Jatharin’s raiders who harried Hakonin’s outlying farms, because of all this, he was chosen by Hakonin’s OldMother to enter the nesting cave deep in the rock. The ways are hidden from all but the SwiftDaughters, traps and pitfalls await the reckless, those who seek what is forbidden, the secret of the nests.

  He walked through rock halls and along the phosphorescent gleam of tunnels, following the faint chime and scatter of the golden girdle of the SwiftDaughter who led him. She brought him here, up stairs carved into the rock, to this bowl of stone open to the air, stung by the wind off the fjall. Here, he waits.

  He perceives it first as a tickle along the back of his neck, a penetrating pain at the base of his spine. All at once the scent blooms as sharp as obsidian’s edge.

  Hakonin’s YoungMother has spawned.

  The smell hits him hard. Pain rips through his belly. He is torn in half, eviscerated. All of his senses reel under the onslaught. As with a needle, a thread is sewn through him, woven into him, so there is no ending to what he was before and no beginning to what he is now. When the tide comes in, the strand is helplessly engulfed; when a waterskin is filled too full, the water bursts and spills over because it cannot contain more than what it is: when a smoldering fire catches dry tinder, it rages.

  He is in the grip of it. He is lost to it, a mass of feeling. The smell of moist nests freshly expelled stings him like a rain of arrows showering down on him, each one piercing him to the bone.

  Pity poor Alain. For him, every day is as this day, scarred by the pitiless and bottomless maw of emotion.

  Hakonin’s YoungMother emerges from shadow, a graceful, massive shape like to the most beautiful granite. She watches him steadily, the weight of judgment in her gaze. Beyond her, fresh nests glisten in shallow pools, masses of tiny globes whose colorless membranes are bathed rose-red under the curtain of heavenly light dancing above, the wind off the sun. Their complex perfume tangles with the thread grown into his body to make him part of the weave. Down by his groin, a sac buds and swells, ready to erupt. Others follow.

  He is no longer his own creature. For this night, he belongs to Hakonin’s Mothers, and he will serve their purpose, which is the life of the tribe. He staggers forward, hating this, reveling in this as his last rational thoughts are obliterated by the raw red hunger of a thing he cannot name in his own language but only in the language of Alain, which is “desire.”

  The stripe of sunlight shivered and vanished as the sun set in the west. He felt her breathe beside him, the merest tremor as she let out the breath she had taken in a moment ago; ages ago. Her fingers brushed his; she flinched and shied off, like a butterfly, as beautiful, as fragile. He remembered it all, then. All of the desire he had ever felt for her swept him as does a wave the shore. She was even more beautiful now, the palest rose color in her cheeks, her hair washed and clean and as fine as the tawny stands of wheat under the summer sun. Her neck had the supple grace of a swan’s. She had put on enough weight that her breasts pressed against her gown and her hips swelled under the fabric, a resting place for loving hands.

  She did not look at him, but she flushed, the color of a woman who sees her beloved for the first time in the intimacy of the bedchamber. Was it not obvious that she loved him, he who was surely not worthy of her, the granddaughter of queens and kings?

  At last, she spoke in as firm a voice as he had ever heard from her. “God has heard my prayers. I remain a virgin. I am not pregnant.”

  Geoffrey let out a sharp, satisfied breath, turning to Yolande. “Did I not predict this? God have made him impotent! It is a sign
. If he was the rightful heir, he would have gotten her with child by now.”

  Ai, God. His own desire had blinded him. Tallia stared at him defiantly. Finally, he stammered out words. “Say what you mean, Lord Geoffrey.”

  “I mean,” said Geoffrey, warming to his subject, “that you duped my cousin Lavastine. You are a fraud. I knew it all along. I have already sent a message to King Henry asking him to judge this matter.”

  “King Henry has already judged this matter,” retorted Alain. “He himself sealed my father’s claim. I didn’t ask to be acknowledged as my father’s heir. Lavastine himself took me forward before the king before I knew what he meant to do!”

  “So you say now. But everyone knows Lavastine was ensorcelled at that time. I was loyal to King Henry all along. But you consorted with that Eagle, the one who was outlawed and excommunicated for sorcery. You gave her gifts. Who is to say you didn’t ensorcell my cousin Lavastine? That you convinced him of what was never true? He was taken by a fit, that is all, a fit brought on him by witchcraft. That is why he named you as his heir.”

  Duchess Yolande watched him with the weight of judgment—and opportunity—in her gaze. Hadn’t her own father ridden with Sabella, against Henry? Who could know where her loyalties lay? Tallia had a legitimate claim to the throne. Geoffrey had a wife with powerful kinsfolk, and an infant daughter whom he had, until last spring, expected to install as count of Lavas. And Yolande had an infant son, second child, who—if he lived—would need to marry a powerful noblewoman.

  Ai, God! No wonder Lavastine had had little patience for court. Intrigue was nothing more than a palace of coils, all tangles and knots, and once you wandered in, it was impossible to find your way out. There you would starve, and the scavengers would eat you, flesh and blood and bone.

  Alain turned to Tallia, but she only smoothed her hands down over her virgin womb. She would not even look him in the eye. And that, of course, was what hurt worst of all. She might as well have scoured his hands with the nail as her own. The pain wouldn’t have been as great as this.

  He whistled, and at once the duchess’ attendants scattered as the hounds bounded in, growling, and ringed him. Tallia began to cry, Geoffrey took five steps back and set a hand on his sword. Duchess Yolande called to her guards, but they hesitated at the door, afraid to come any closer.

  “Then what of the hounds?” Alain demanded. “If you or your daughter are the rightful heir, then why do the hounds obey me?”

  “More of your sorcery!” hissed Geoffrey. “It wasn’t my grandfather who was cursed by the hounds. He was only the younger brother of Charles Lavastine, he who became count after his mother died. Ai, God, don’t you know the story? Countess Lavrentia had only the one child, the boy she named Charles Lavastine. They never liked each other. She prayed every day for a girl, who would take precedence over the son, but she didn’t became pregnant. Not until Charles Lavastine was eighteen. Everyone was surprised that a woman of full forty years was carrying a child. Her husband died in a hunting accident while she was still pregnant, and then she herself died in childbed. Some say she died of disappointment that she had given birth to another boy instead of the girl she longed for. Some say Charles Lavastine murdered her to make sure she wouldn’t get pregnant again. But he was count now, and it fell to him to name the infant. He called the baby Geoffrey—my grandfather. He founded a convent at St. Thierry and scoured the countryside for foundling girls to become nuns, so they could pray for his mother’s soul. That’s where he laid his mother to rest. But it was right after she died that the hounds came to Lavas County, that he began to hunt with them and go everywhere with them, as though they were his bodyguard. No one knows how, or why, or where they came from. But everyone said it was witchcraft, that he had traded something precious for the hounds. Ever after those hounds obeyed only him, and then his son the younger Charles, and then his son, the younger Lavastine.”

  “And now they obey me,” retorted Alain softly. Ai, Lord and Lady! He was furious, and yet the anger lay muted, red-hot coals banked by ash. Geoffrey had concealed his plans all this time. Had Lavastine suspected? No doubt he had. That was why he had wanted Geoffrey to appear at his deathbed, to swear an oath; Geoffrey hadn’t come.

  “But if it was witchcraft all along, then you could have witched the hounds as well. You have no other proof that he sired you. I’ll call every soul in this county forward to swear to what they saw, or didn’t see, eighteen years ago when that servingwoman was brought to bed with the child she claimed was his bastard. Any woman can lie. Or you could have lied, hearing the story, and pretended you were what you are not. God Above!” Geoffrey turned to Duchess Yolande, as though pleading to her. “How can we trust the testimony of these hounds? They’re creatures of the Enemy. Everyone knows that these very hounds killed my cousin’s wife and infant daughter, ripped them to pieces.”

  Tallia whimpered and shrank against Yolande, whose eyes had widened with appreciative interest. “If this is true,” said Yolande, “then how could Lavastine tolerate such beasts in his train afterward?”

  “She lied to him,” said Alain hoarsely. “The child wasn’t sired by Lavastine but by another man.”

  “So he said,” replied Geoffrey. “So he said to cover his own guilt. No one spoke of it, no one accused him, because they feared him.”

  This was too much. “His own people trusted him because he was a good lord to them and looked after his own!”

  “Who will look after them now?” Geoffrey turned again to Duchess Yolande. “The hounds are a curse, not a gift. But the curse was laid on my great-uncle Charles Lavastine, not on my own grandfather. The curse passed from the elder Charles to the younger Charles and then to Lavastine, who was swayed by sorcery and duped by this boy. But my line is free of the curse, and my daughter is healthy. She was named by Lavastine as his heir on the day she was born. She is the rightful heir to this county, not this—this—” He did not look at Alain, merely gestured toward him as toward an animal about to be led to the slaughter. “This common-born boy who defames all of us by pretending to be of noble birth.”

  Fear lunged.

  “Peace!” cried Alain, but the damage was done. Fear bowled Geoffrey over, knocked him flat, and would have torn off his face if Alain hadn’t leaped forward to grab his collar and yank him back.

  “If there are any besides me to whom you should owe allegiance,” said Alain furiously to the straining hound, “then go to them now!” He let go of Fear’s collar.

  Fear bolted for the door. Guards jumped out of the way, frantically hacking at the great hound with their spears. Yolande shouted a command and they formed up, belatedly, making a wall to protect Yolande, Tallia, and the prostrate Geoffrey. Outside, retainers scattered and shrieked.

  Rage growled but did not stir. Sorrow stalked forward two steps, and halted, shuddering, when spears lowered to graze his big head.

  “Peace,” said Alain, more softly, although his voice trembled. The two hounds sat obediently.

  Geoffrey climbed to his feet, brushing him off. “So you see,” he said to Yolande. “The hound went.” He no longer looked at Alain; he turned his back on him.

  “The king must judge what you have laid before me,” said Yolande. “Come, Cousin,” she said to Tallia, who was is white as death and scarcely more mobile than a corpse. “You must lie down. Be assured that I will protect you until I see that justice is served.”

  They moved off together, strength in numbers. Tallia didn’t even look back once.

  It was quiet in the church. Lavastine lay still in death, a statue in all but truth. Did his spirit mourn, hearing Geoffrey tear his hopes asunder? Or did he already rest in peace in the Chamber of Light?

  “Ai, God.” Rage nosed his hand, then licked his fingers. He started, recalling himself and where he was. Two of his stewards remained, looking restless and troubled. Sorrow whined softly and padded over to the door, ready for his nightly run. Alain led the hounds outside. Some of his servingme
n had waited for him outside; some had left with the duchess.

  He looked for Fear in all his usual haunts: the kernel, the bedchamber, Lavastine’s empty chamber where only the musky scent of stone remained and the track of the sledge they had used to drag Lavastine’s stone corpse over the floor. But Fear had vanished.

  In the morning he looked again, but he found no trace of him even with Sorrow and Rage hunting at his side. Then he went to take the noon meal with Duchess Yolande, in the chambers allotted to her.

  “Where is my wife?” he asked her, seeing that Tallia did not appear for the meal.

  “She is not feeling well,” said Yolande smoothly. “But have no fear for her well-being, Count Alain. She rests under the care of my physicians.”

  “I would like to see her, my lady duchess,” said Alain stubbornly.

  “Alas. She is sleeping, and I think it best that she not be disturbed, don’t you? I will let you know when she wakes.”

  But she didn’t let him know. He visited her chambers eight times that day, and Tallia remained indisposed, resting asleep, or under the care of the physicians, whose work couldn’t be disturbed. Had Yolande made a pact with Geoffrey? Had they planned this abduction all along, for it seemed like an abduction to him. If he could only speak with Tallia, surely she would return to his side. But he didn’t know the protocols; he could scarcely call out his soldiers to attack the duchess and her retainers. In truth, he didn’t know what to do.