Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4) Page 393

A boy sleeps with six companions, their beds made of precious treasure, shining baubles and golden armbands, silver vessels and ivory chests, scarlet beads and ropes made of pearls.

A winter storm swirls snow around a monastery where a large encampment of soldiers shelters, some in outbuildings, others in tents. Hanna, in the company of Lions, chops wood. Her face is taut, her body tense, but each time she strikes ax into wood and splits a log she swears, as though she’s trying to chop rage and grief out of herself.

A woman clothed in the robes of a nun meets a sandy-haired, slender young man at the edge of a birch forest. Waves of wind ripple light through silver leaves. To him she gives the leashes of a half-dozen huge black hounds in exchange for a tiny swaddled figure, an infant girl sleeping softly as she is handed over from one grim-faced guardian to the other.

An army marches in good order through the grassy plains of the eastern frontier. Poplars line the banks of creeks and shallow rivers, giving way to hawthorn and dogwood and at last to the broad expanse of feather grass and knapweed. Spring flowers carpet the open lands with white-and-yellow blooms, as numerous as the stars. Is that Sanglant marching at the head of the army, a glorious red cape streaming back from his shoulders and a gold torque winking at his neck? Is that Blessing, grown impossibly old, looking like a well-grown girl of five or six? At the confluence of two rivers, a king waits to receive the army in peace. His banner flies the double-headed eagle of the Ungrian kingdom. Strange that the first gift Sanglant offers to him, as they meet and clasp hands and give each other the kiss of peace, is a wine barrel.

A woman, aged and arthritic, sits in her tower room, writing laboriously. A map lies open on the table beside her, a crude representation of Salia, held down by stones at each curling corner, but the figures on the wax tablet interest Liath more: a horoscope written for a day yet to come, or a day long past, when cataclysm racked the Earth. The elderly cleric lifts her head to call for an attendant. The woman who comes is the same woman who gave the hounds and took the child, although here she looks much older as she offers her mistress a soothing posset.

“What news, Clothilde?” asks the first woman in the tone of a noblewoman born to command. Is this Biscop Tallia, Taillefer’s favorite child? Her voice is already smoky from the growth in her neck that will kill her.

“It is done, Your Grace,” says the other woman, “just as we planned. The girl is pregnant. The child she bears will be related to the emperor through both parents.”

Shadows ripped a gap through the image. Other sights shuddered into existence only to be torn away, as though at the heart of the crossroads the very worlds were becoming unstable, echoes of ancient troubles and troubles yet to come.

Hunched and misshapen creatures crawl among tunnels, hauling baskets of ore on their backs. An egg cracks where it is hidden underneath an expanse of silver sand, and a claw pokes through. A lion with the face of a woman and the wings of an eagle paces majestically along the sands; turning, she meets Liath’s astonished gaze.

A centaur woman parts the reeds at the shore of a shallow lake. Her coat has the dense shimmer of the night sky, and her black hair falls past her waist. A coarse pale mane, the only contrast to her black coat, runs down her spine; it is braided, like her hair, twined with beads and the bones of mice. “Look!” she cries. “See what we wrought!”

She looses an arrow.

The burning course of its flight drove Liath backward through the crossroads of the worlds, far into the past, when the land was riven asunder.

A vast spell has splintered and split the land. Rivers run backward. Coastal towns along the shore of the middle sea are swallowed beneath rising waters, while skin coracles beached on the strands of the northern sea are left high and dry as the sea sucks away to leave long stretches of sea bottom exposed to sunlight and fish drowning in cold air.

Along a spine of hills far to the south, mountains smoke with fire, and liquid red rock slides downslope, burning everything in its path.

In the north, a dragon plunges to earth and in that eyeblink is ossified into a stone ridge.

Liath sees the spell now, seven stone looms woven with light drawn down from the stars. She can barely see the heavens themselves because the light of the spell obscures them, but her sight remains keen: the position of the stars in the sky this night matches the horoscope drawn by Biscop Tallia.

The spell like a coruscating knife cuts a line through the Earth itself. The power of its weaving slices along a chalk path worn into the ground to demarcate the old northern frontier of the land taken generations before by the Ashioi. It cuts right through the middle of a huge city overlooking the sea. It cuts through the waves themselves, like successive bolts of lighting tracing an impossibly vast border around the land where the Ashioi have made their home. The seven sorcerers weaving that spell in each of the seven looms die immediately as the spell’s full force rebounds upon them.