The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  “My God,” said Liath, and she walked out.

  There was silence, of a kind. The light in the celestial globe dimmed and winked out.

  “Who was Bernard?” repeated Antonia.

  “He was once one of us. He stole Liathano from us when she was only eight years old, and you can see what the years under his care wrought of her. That was eleven years ago. We have a great deal of work to do to make her into the vessel through which our plans can be fulfilled, our work completed, and Earth rescued from its terrible fate.”

  “Indeed,” said Severus primly, “she was brought into this world precisely because she is, given what she is, the only one who has any hope of killing Prince Sanglant. ‘No disease known to you will touch him, nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death.’ She is the only one who can stop them.”

  “But why would he steal her? Didn’t he understand the whole?” As a mother herself, Antonia found Anne’s cold-blooded statements startling, although one had to admire her singlemindedness. But wasn’t it a little unnatural for a woman to be so willing to sacrifice her only child? How many noblewomen, and poor ones, too, had come to make confession at the altar in the great cathedral of Mainni, begging God to give them a child? She had lost count. Indeed, for a long time Antonia had wondered if the one sin, the one slip that had led to Heribert’s birth, hadn’t been God’s way of allowing her to understand their desire. For as the blessed Daisan had said: “The road to purification arises out of conception and birth.”

  “Bernard was misguided,” said Anne sternly. “He loved the world too well.”

  Marcus sighed loudly, pulling the ivory-covered book back toward himself and tapping on the filigree with impatient fingers. “Have we done with this scene?” he asked. “I am reminded of the theater in Darre, which is quite the rage these days now that Ironhead has taken the throne and is quite eager to investigate the charms of every stage dancer who strikes his fancy, which seems to be most of them. But I have other news. I found Lavrentia, just where Brother Lupus said she would be.”

  Anne turned and walked to the shelf. She reached toward the spinning armillary sphere, and its turning metal bands stilled abruptly. Without turning back, so that her face was hidden, she asked, “She is truly still alive?”

  “She is Mother at the convent of St. Ekatarina.”

  “Brother Lupus was misled,” said Anne quietly.

  “Nay,” said Marcus. “He was baldly lied to those many years ago. She must have grown suspicious. She must have taken refuge there, and the nun who was then mother of the convent must have taken her in and sent the message that she had died. I call that lying, myself.”

  “Forty years ago,” muttered Severus. “It is a long time to live concealed from us.”

  “Have you ever visited the convent of St. Ekatarina, Brother?” asked Marcus, not a little sarcastically.

  “Nay, I have not. I will thank you not to take that tone with me, Brother.”

  “Then I will only say that it is an isolated place and very difficult to gain access to. What are we going to do about her? Is she a danger to us?”

  Anne did turn now. Whatever expression she had turned away to hide had vanished. She looked as cool and collected as ever. “Did she seem to you a danger?”

  “She seemed evasive. She is called Mother Obligatia now, but I did not see her face. I had nothing to judge her by except her voice, and she sounded old and frail, not robust.”

  “Voices can be deceptive. We were misled once. There is more here than meets the eye.”

  Truly, thought Antonia, there was far more here than met the eye. Sister Anne did not have all of Earth under her control, although after a year or more at Verna one might begin to think so. Who was Lavrentia? Why was she important enough to be discussed in such terms? But she had already asked enough questions. She did not want to draw any suspicion that she might be less loyal to their cause than she appeared on the surface. Mercifully, Zoë did not fear to speak her mind.

  “Who is this Lavrentia, and this Mother Obligatia, or whatever you call her?” she demanded. “I’ve never heard of her. Of what interest is she to us?”

  Even Marcus remained silent, watching Sister Anne.

  “She was the woman who gave birth to me.”

  “Your mother!” cried Zoë, looking amazed at the revelation, or perhaps only amazed that a woman like Anne had actually had a mother.

  “Nay. She was not my mother except that it was in her womb that I was conceived and nurtured, her womb from which I was expelled. I never saw her.” Anne lifted the armillary sphere. It was large for her to carry alone, but the ripples that marked the servants helped her, blowing the air beneath her hands to give her lift. She set it down heavily, and the whole table shuddered under its weight. Erekes spun lightly. Mok shifted a finger’s breadth, and the bright halo of the Sun shook but did not move. “The woman whom I consider my mother is the one who raised me. It is her influence that guided what I have become.”

  Antonia could puzzle out most of the rest, but a few questions remained unanswered. “Was this Lavrentia the daughter of Emperor Taillefer, or his daughter-in-law?” And if she had been related only by marriage, then how had Queen Radegundis hidden her son?

  Anne merely looked at her, then spun Aturna. The mechanism was ponderous on the outermost sphere, and the planet of wisdom moved only a short way. “It is true that I am the daughter of Emperor Taillefer’s son. But he and Lavrentia form the lesser part of my lineage. I was raised by a woman named Clothilde, and it was she who tutored me in the arts of the mathematici, just as she herself was tutored by Biscop Tallia. First and foremost, it is to Biscop Tallia that I claim kinship. In truth, the biscop was my aunt, but in every other way I think of her as the woman who created me. She is the mother who gave birth to all of us, the Seven Sleepers, the ones who, in the last hundred years, have labored to prevent this catastrophe.”

  So Liath, and so Sanglant: two children born out of enemy camps. If the Seven Sleepers prepared for cataclysm on Earth, then surely the Aoi were making their own plans—wherever they might be, concealed in the aether. Why else go to the trouble to travel through the veils that separated one sphere from the next? Why else send one of their women to Earth to make a child bred half out of humankind and half out of Aoi?

  Once, she had supported Sabella’s claim because she believed in it. But Sabella was under the care of Biscop Constance in Autun now. She held no grudge against Sabella for her failed attempt at the throne; God had chosen to lend Their support in another place. And perhaps They had chosen otherwise because, like the angels and the daimones, They could see both into the past and into the future. They had seen this day coming.

  And she knew just how to take advantage of it.

  4

  LIATH returned unexpectedly. Sanglant had just settled Blessing into Jerna’s embrace. The infant was a silent, efficient eater; she would latch on and suckle, and when she was done, she was done. She had the heft to show for it, all pudgy arms and legs, but sometimes he wondered exactly what kind of nourishment she was imbibing, and why she seemed to be growing so fast.

  Better not to think too much about that. When a man extended a hand to you when you were drowning, you didn’t stop to ask him his rank and breeding, or if he had leprosy.

  “Sanglant.”

  He heard it as a whisper. By the time he got up and came round the side of their hut, she was just reaching the door. She saw him, grasped him by the elbow. She was in the grip of such an overpowering emotion that her skin almost burned him. He put a hand to her forehead, to draw it off, but she only caught his other arm and gazed at him fiercely.

  “Are any of the servants near?”

  He listened. Whistled. “Nay, none but Jerna. She’s nursing the baby.”

  She dropped her voice to a whisper anyway. “There are four goats with kids down by the stock shed. We’ll need one of them. As long as Sister Anne’s sorcery binds this valley, Jerna won
’t be able to leave.”

  “I’ve never heard you refer to her as ‘Sister Anne’ before. What’s amiss, Liath?”

  She leaned into him as if to embrace him—dangerous enough in itself—but she spoke so softly into his ear that even a servant dancing on the wind nearby would not have been able to overhear. “We will leave tonight.”

  “What’s amiss, Liath?” he repeated. It was a windless day, remarkably so, and yet, from this angle of the valley he could see trees swaying down by the tower and hall. Up here, on the middle slope, it was quiet.

  Hidden behind the hut, Blessing began to wail. Liath bolted, but he caught her and passed her up, came around the side of the hut to see the tree where Jerna usually settled when it was time for a feeding. Jerna was gone. Blessing lay tumbled on the ground, screaming, linen swaddling bands a little unwound as though she’d hit the ground and rolled. He caught her up and held her against his chest, and she quieted almost at once. Then, in the way of babies, to whom past and future seem equally meaningless, she began to coo and smile.

  “Ai, Lady,” said Liath, coming up beside him. She put out her arms. He laid Blessing in them, and the little girl babbled sweetly as Liath stood there with tears running down her face. “She killed him.”

  The wind down by the lower buildings had picked up. He could actually hear its rustle and murmur now, and yet it wasn’t climbing the slope as would a natural wind. Were they all thrashing and moaning in an eddy centered about Anne? Was all of this, inevitably, about Anne?

  “She killed Da.”

  “Ah.” That exhausted his eloquence. What else could he possibly say? I can’t believe she would do such a thing? But he could believe it. That was the problem.

  “Da was running from her all along. From them, from the magi. Why did he steal me from them? What did he know that would make him do something so drastic? He must have known they would pursue him. He must have thought it was worth the risk. Why didn’t he tell me what he knew? Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “Sit down,” said Sanglant, and she sat. Shock had made a puppet of her. “Who can we look to for aid?”

  She laughed bitterly. “No one. None of them.”

  “But Sister Venia seems discontent. She wasn’t happy that Sister Anne let Heribert go.”

  “She is better than the others, in some ways. She doesn’t treat me as if I’m diseased just because I have a child and a husband. I like Sister Meriam, but I don’t believe she will help us if helping us means going against Sister Anne. Ai, Lady. I let them lull me. They taught me only what they wanted me to know, and I listened to their promises and sat by passively all these months while they threw me the crumbs. Just enough. Just enough to keep me content, like a cow never looking past the fence.”

  The low rumble of a distant avalanche shuddered the air, but when he gazed up at the high ridges and peaks that hemmed them in, he saw no telltale rise of dust, no plume of white haze. A moment later he heard a sharp crack, like distant thunder, but there were no clouds today except for the plumes that often were tethered at the highest peaks.

  “Something has distracted them,” he said, watching wind whip tree branches into a frenzy below. It remained calm and windless here, not two hundred strides above the little storm. “In the chest there should still be that little pouch of sheep’s gut. We can use that to feed Blessing. I’m sure she’ll take goat’s milk now. There’s a small sack of barley and some beans hanging from the rafters. There’s fennel and mint, already dried—”

  “We’ve got chestnuts, too.”

  He nodded. “When you’ve filled the packs and saddlebags, hide them in the chest. I don’t believe the servants can find it there. I only ever saw one of them able to move into wood, and I haven’t seen him since Heribert left.”

  “I pray he’s well,” murmured Liath.

  “As God wills. No need to touch my armor. I’ll put it on tonight. I’ll go down now to the shed and bring up one of the goats. I’ll bring up Resuelto.”

  She nodded, began to get to her feet.

  “Can you open the gate, Liath?”

  Poised to rise with the baby held tight against her shoulder, she looked at him. Her hair seemed to actually spark, in that instant, and he thought the grass at her feet might burst into flame. But she controlled herself. “If Hugh can do it,” she said in a soft, furious voice, “then so can I.”

  * * *

  He wondered where Jerna had gone, and why she had departed so precipitously. She had never abandoned Blessing before. Someone or something had called her away. Judging by the disturbance in the trees in the lower part of the valley, he guessed it was Anne.

  Resuelto was eager enough to come with him; the gray gelding always looked forward to their daily rides. The goat was less eager, but he got hold of her kid and she followed meekly enough, although she had a tendency to try to butt him from the rear and she kept pulling away from the path to nip at any delectable flower or weed.

  He had buried the dog along the path, just below their hut, as a reminder to Anne and the others that he hadn’t forgotten their treachery. After two months, all the grass and wildflowers had withered on the mound that marked the burial, leaving only dirt and dead things. In a sour kind of way he liked the look of it; at times, chafing at the elegant bonds that held him, the barren little tumulus matched his mood.

  He was still fuming. As soon as Jerna had sung open the concealed pathway up in the high meadow, he should have thrown Liath over Resuelto and taken them all out, not just Heribert, but he had chosen caution. Maybe he had been right to be cautious: it had been a trap, after all. But it galled to know they had been so close to escape.

  And yet, how far would they have gotten before Sister Anne sent her servants after them? He knew how Liath’s father had died, and while he didn’t fear for himself, or even Liath, he wasn’t sure that he could protect Blessing.

  He went so deep into this sort of fruitless musing that he actually tied up Resuelto and the goat to opposite ends of the post by the trough before he realized that Liath was talking to someone, inside the hut. He halted, hearing Blessing fuss a little, and there was a silence. Perhaps she had only been talking to herself.

  “Nay,” Liath said with anger, “you’re too kindhearted a soul to trust a man like Hugh of Austra.”

  “Is he a dangerous man, then, set loose in Darre?”

  “With Da’s book, and a daimone at his command? He is.”

  “But a clever one, evidently.”

  Liath grunted. Sanglant dipped a hand in the cold water of the trough, and waited. “Hugh told me once that you could only hate what you could also love. But you can never trust him. Never, ever.” Sanglant had never heard her speak with such passionate and almost gleeful fury. “If that had been Hugh who was here when I was ill, he would have sat beside my bed and read aloud to me, and reminded me that Sanglant can’t read. Hugh would have knelt beside me as I measured the angle of rising or plotted the course of the moon through the zodiac, and he would have mentioned just so elegantly that Sanglant has learned some of the names of the constellations and stars, enough to navigate the night sky, but it doesn’t truly engage him. That he doesn’t have the passion for knowledge. Not like I do. Not like Hugh does.”

  “Not all of us are granted that particular passion,” said Venia soothingly, as if nervous of Liath’s anger. “I must confess that I find the computus to be tedious beyond measure. All those long strings of calculations! But I can see that for a woman who loved them, it would be easy to feel affection for a person who could love them in his turn.”

  “That isn’t what I meant at all.” Then she let out such a drawn-out, tense sigh that Sanglant only came to himself when he felt the goat chewing at the hem of his tunic. He shoved it back and stepped away. “I don’t wear a slave’s collar anymore. I don’t have to. And I never will again. Don’t trust Hugh of Austra because he’ll twist every word you utter and warp every thought that passes through your mind to his own use. He has to live
with his hand clutched at the throat of any creature he wants to possess.”

  Sister Venia made no answer. Perhaps it would have been more prudent to remain outside, but truth be told, he was too stung by the unflattering comparison made between him and Hugh. He stepped over the threshold to see Sister Venia holding the baby while Liath stood with one foot up on the chest and her gaze turned away from both of them.

  “Ah,” said Venia. “Prince Sanglant.”

  “What are you thinking of with that grim look on your face?” Sanglant asked his wife.

  She didn’t look at him. “Freedom,” she said, and for an instant he thought he heard the cold arrogance of Anne in her tone. Then she shook free of it and turned to indicate their visitor. “Sister Venia has come, as you see. She says that the council broke up with much disagreement on all sides, and that the servants are in a frenzy.”

  Venia smiled compassionately. “You are in a difficult situation. I took advantage of the servants’ confusion to speak with you. But I dare not remain long.”

  Sanglant sighed. “Are you here to propose something?”

  “Nay, Prince Sanglant. Only to make a point.” She clucked at the baby for a moment, and Blessing smiled and reached for the shiny gold Circle of Unity that hung at her breast. Venia flicked the jewelry briskly away. “It seems to me that the Aoi in their distant home plotted to create Prince Sanglant for their own purposes. It seems that Sister Anne and her cabal plotted to make Liath—Princess Liathano—for their own purposes. But why succumb to their plans? Why simply fight them without any vision of your own?” She waited, letting the baby grab her forefinger. They tussled gently. Blessing chortled.

  “Go on,” said Sanglant.

  Venia shrugged as if to make light of her own words. “What do I see here in this common hut, locked away in a mountain valley? I see Emperor Taillefer’s great-granddaughter, of legitimate issue, wed to the favorite son of King Henry, the most powerful regnant in the western realms, and who is also quite likely born out of a royal line of his mother’s people, the very ones, we have heard, who seek to rule in their own right when they return. Yet neither of you have experience in these matters. Princess Liathano was born into a magi’s villa, and then, it appears, spent much of her life as a fugitive. Prince Sanglant was raised as a fighter, not a courtier. Because of this, you haven’t seen how you can mold the situation to your own advantage.”