Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

“Come if you will, Jerna. Return to your home. The way is open.”

As she reached into the whirlpool of light, wind cut her hand to ribbons. She jerked back, crying out in pain as the archway of fire collapsed into a hundred shards that spun on a whirlwind out into the sea. Reeling back, she remembered too late that she would only fall into the poisonous sea.

But she never plunged into the depths. A cool presence wrapped itself around her, lifting her.

In the aether, Jerna’s luminescence dazzled. She had form as much as softness and only the vaguest memory of the human shape she had worn on Earth.

“Come,” she said, a murmur made by the flow of her body through the aetherical wind. On Earth, Liath had not understood the speech of the daimones, not as Sanglant had. Here, all language seemed an open book to her. “The blessing needs me no longer. This last act I will grant you, her mother, so I can become free of humankind.”

She twisted upward on a trail of gauzy mist that flowered into life as Jerna ascended. Liath’s arm and leg throbbed painfully, all pins and needles, where Jerna’s substance wrapped them in a healing glow. The pain made her head pound, and the reflection of light off the ice floes and the white sea blinded her until, dizzy, she couldn’t tell what was up and what was down and whether earthly directions had any meaning in the heavens.

A rosy glow penetrated the ice-white blaze of Erekes’ farthest boundary. Silky daimones clustered along a series of arches that formed not so much a wall as a porous, inviting border, an elaboration of detail so sensuously formed that she wondered if earthly architects saw this place in fevered dreams.

“Now am I come to my home,” whispered Jerna.

But as they reached the many-gated border, weight dragged Liath down once again.

“I cannot carry you within,” said Jerna. “You still wear too much of Earth about you, Bright One. For the sake of the blessing you allowed me to nurse, I have carried you thus far, but I can hold you no longer.”

Liath panicked as she slipped out of Jerna’s grasp. Ai, God, she would plunge back into the poisonous sea. Her clumsy fingers found her belt buckle. As she loosened it, the leather slithered down her legs, caught on her foot, and the belt and the items hitched to it—her leather pouch and her sheathed iron eating knife—fell away.

Jerna released her. The many-gated wall passed beneath her, and she tumbled into the sphere of Somorhas, whose warm and rosy light embraced her.

2

THAT first night out of Handelburg, huddled in miserable cold in such shelter as a half-ruined ancient hill fort afforded them, Hanna suggested to the prince that he and his party all shave their heads. That way they could tell any folk they met that they’d battled lice and perhaps no one would suspect they had been excommunicated for heresy. Probably she risked excommunication herself for suggesting it, but it was the most practical thing to do.

She refused to shave her own head. Until that moment, she’d never known, or even considered, that she might be vain of her white-blonde hair. Maybe she hadn’t minded Prince Bayan’s attentions as much as she had protested to herself and to others. Maybe Princess Sapientia’s jealousy had saved her from temptation.

God worked in strange ways.

When a snowstorm stranded the party for a month in a fortified village five days’ march west of Handelburg, Ekkehard spoke sternly to his retinue.

“I don’t know how long it will be until we can come clear of this village,” he said, “but there’s to be no preaching.”

“But, my lord prince,” objected Lord Benedict, always the first to speak when an opinion was asked, “it’s a worse sin to remain silent when we can save lives with the truth!”

“That’s true, but I made a promise to Prince Bayan that I wouldn’t preach until the war is over and Bulkezu is defeated. I’ll lose face if I don’t keep my promise, and no one will ever respect me. We’ll ride to the Villams and fight the Quman alongside them.” How he would fight the Quman when his wounded shoulder still hadn’t healed was a consideration no one addressed.

“We’re not riding to your father, my lord prince?” Lord Frithuric was the biggest of Ekkehard’s cronies, a strapping lad somewhat younger than Hanna.

Ekkehard shuddered. “I’ll not throw myself on my father’s mercy just yet. He’s probably still mad at me for stealing Baldwin from Margrave Judith.”

Lord Lothar was the eldest of the youths and, in Hanna’s opinion, the only one with a feather’s weight of sense. “But Margrave Judith is dead, my lord prince. Her daughter, Lady Bertha, didn’t care one whit about Lord Baldwin, except for that trouble about the marriage portion.”