Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

Without warning, a big body heaved up out of the water not a body’s length from him, high out of the water like a whale breaching. The flat face took them in, although what it could actually see with those hard, red eyes he could not be sure. The eels that were its hair writhed wildly, eyeless snouts snapping mindlessly at the empty air. It spun with a half turn backward and hit the water with such weight that water sprayed everywhere, a new shower of rain, salty and tasting of the waste that humans so thoughtlessly dumped into their harbors.

He laughed sharply and shook off the water. The Hessi woman took a startled step backward, hastily brushing herself off, but did not otherwise retreat. Her colleagues spilled backward onto the town walkways in fright. Their voices rose like those of startled crows.

A visage rose from the water, pale and stretched, hoisted by the razor-tipped hands of the merfolk. The object resolved itself into a spar, water-logged, wreathed by vinelike leaves tangled around something that resembled a face. Stronghand leaped backward as, with a final heave, the great spar clattered down onto the wooden quay and came to rest at his feet.

The spar was the remains of the mast of one of the living ships of the tree sorcerers. Caught in its leafy spire rested an object so bloated and pale that at first he did not recognize it.

“Ai, Lord have mercy!” cried the portly merchant, voice cracking. “It’s a man’s head.”

Sea worms writhed in and out of the decaying eye sockets. In places the skin had peeled away to reveal the gleam of skull beneath.

“One of the Alban ships did not escape our allies,” observed Tenth Son.

Stronghand stepped over the spar and its rotting centerpiece. The water eddied in cool circles below him. The rain had stopped, and the clouds above the islets lightened perceptibly as the sun tried to beat through.

“This was unexpected. I have not forgotten that Alba awaits.” Truly, he did not understand his mysterious allies. At first, he thought they wanted only the flesh of his enemies to sustain them, but there was a greater purpose beneath their movements, something that spoke of intelligence and a slow-moving, cetacean plan, something swallowed into the depths of the sea, shuddering on tides known only in the deep waters.

What did the merfolk want?

Negotiations remained difficult, for they didn’t share a common language. Indeed, they seemed to know what he wanted more than he knew what they desired out of this alliance. Yet surely it must be something they thought he alone could help them obtain. He couldn’t ask. He dared not show his ignorance, because ignorance signaled weakness.

Stronghand could never betray weakness. Too many knives waited to plunge into his back.

The waters roiled. A dozen tails flicked out of the muddy bay and slapped down, in tribute, in command, in question, or simply in answer. He did not know. Ridged backs cut the water as they sped bayward. With their wake spreading behind them, they vanished beyond the outermost ships, plunging into the deep channel, and were gone.

2

A SINGLE lamp burned in the chapel of St. Thecla the Witnesser, not enough light to illuminate the magnificent frescoes depicting the life of the blessed saint for which the chapel was justly famous. Nor, really, could Antonia see clearly each distinctive pillar, carved with the visage of one of the seven disciplas, that ringed the inner sanctum. The marble columns breathed quietly in shadow. The dim light granted only a glimpse of each carved face: Matthias, Mark, and Johanna to the left, and Lucia, Marian, and Peter to the right. Back by the main door the column depicting St. Thecla herself took the honored place, directly facing the eighth pillar, which stood behind the altar but had no representation carved into it, nothing but a circle of rosettes at the base and the capital.

What need to see the carved faces of the pillars when the lamp did a perfectly good job of lighting the face of the man who knelt before the altar? He had set the ceramic lamp on the marble floor between him and the altar in such a way that the flame gave his face a saintly glow, as if God had touched him with Their holy light.

Did he know that she watched? Did he suspect that during his long hours of prayer people came sometimes to stand in the gallery to look down into the inner sanctum? Where they would see him, as fair as the dawn, as pious as a saint, and sublime in his virtue?

Beautiful Hugh.

I’m too old for this, she thought, irritated at the way her thoughts were tending. Old enough to be his grandmother if she had been married off at fifteen, as her sister and cousins had been, to seal alliances between families. But she had been allowed to enter the church after the husband chosen for her had died quite spectacularly the night before the wedding. She had misjudged the dosage. She hadn’t meant to make his death messy, just final, but after all she had only been fourteen.