The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3) Page 21

The path veered right, and the Aoi woman disappeared into a dense bank of fog. Zacharias shook off his fear and followed her to where light streamed in the mist, a fire flaming blue-white and searing his face with its heat—and then it vanished.

He sucked in a breath of grass-laden air and collapsed to his knees next to a dead campfire. Water puddled from his robes and soaked onto the earth. An instant later he gulped, recognizing their surroundings. They had come back to the very stone circle where the witch had defeated Bulkezu. He groped for the knife, then saw the sky and hissed his surprise through his teeth.

It was night, and the waning gibbous moon laid bare the bones of the stone circle and the long horizon of grass, a pale silver expanse under moonlight.

Four turns on an unearthly path had brought them not to a different place but back to the same place at a different time.

He knelt beside the old campfire and stirred the cold ashes with a finger. Chaff had settled there together with a drying flower petal. “Six days, perhaps seven,” he said aloud, touching ash to his tongue. He looked up, suddenly afraid that she would punish him for his fear … or for his knowledge. But if she had meant to kill him, surely she would have done so by now. “Did we walk through the ghost lands?” he asked.

She stood beneath a lintel, gazing west over the plain. Bulkezu’s jacket, laid over her shoulders, gave her the look of a Quman boy.

But she was no boy.

She lifted her spear toward the heavens and spoke incomprehensible words, calling, praying, commanding: Who could know? As she swayed, her leather skirt swayed, as supple as the finest calfskin.

Except it wasn’t calfskin.

“Ah—Ah—Ah—! Lady!” Terror hung hitches into his words, forced out of him by shock.

The skirt she wore wasn’t sewn of calfskin, nor of deerskin. It wasn’t animal skin at all.

Under the lintel, the Aoi woman turned to look at him. Her leather skirt slipped gracefully around her, such a fine bronze sheen to it that it almost seemed to shimmer in the moonlight.

“Human skin,” he breathed. The words died away onto the night breeze, then were answered by hers.

“You who were once called Zacharias-son-of-Elseva-and-Volusianus. I have taken your blood into my blood. You are bound to me now, and at last I have seen how you can be of service to me and my cause.”

7

ALIVE.

At first Liath could only ride silent along the newly-cut road while the riot of forest tangled around her until she felt utterly confused. Why had Da lied to her? Had he even known? Ai, Lady. Why couldn’t it be Da who still lived, instead of her mother?

At once she knew the thought for a sin. But her mother existed so distantly from her that she could grasp no feeling for that memory which came in the wake of Wolfhere’s words more as dream than remembrance: a courtyard and herb garden, a stone bench carved with eagle claws, a slippery memory of silent servants half hidden in the shadows. Of her mother she recalled little except that her hair had been as pale as straw and her skin as light as if sun never touched it, although she remembered sitting sometimes for entire afternoons in the bright sun of an Aostan summer, a light more pure than beaten gold.

“You knew all the time.”

“No,” he said curtly. “I only discovered it now, on my journey to Aosta.”

“Hanna didn’t tell me.”

“She had already left me to return to King Henry with news of Biscop Antonia’s escape.”

“Did you tell my mother you found me? Did you tell her Da was killed? What did she say?”

“She said I must bring you to her as soon as I can.”

“But where is she now?”

Finally he shook his head. “I dare not say, Liath. I must take you to her myself. There are others looking for you—and for her.”

“The ones who killed Da.”

His silence was answer enough.

“Ai, Lady.” She knew herself to be a young woman now, having left the last of her girl’s innocence behind when Da had been killed and Hugh had taken her as his slave; she knew she must appear different to his eyes than she had on that day over a year ago when they had parted in Autun. She had grown, filled out, gotten stronger. But Wolfhere might have aged not a single day in the last year for all she could see any difference in him. White of hair, keen of eye, with the same imperturbable expression that all wise old souls wore in order to confound youthful rashness, he had weathered much in his life that she could only guess at. Surely it took some remarkable action for a common-born man to make an enemy of a king, for kings did not need to take notice of those so far beneath them in all but God’s grace. Yet the grieving Henry, at Autun, had banished Wolfhere from court as punishment for his being the messenger who had brought him news of Sanglant’s death at Gent.