Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

The meadow came to an abrupt end where a finger of pine woods thrust out along the hillside. The drought had taken its toll here as well, and the wood quickly degraded into a grassy heath. At the height of the hill stood a tumble of worked stone that had once been a lookout station. She climbed to the highest safe point, where she crouched on a ledge, bracing herself against what remained of the rock wall, and looked out over the land.

The hillside fell away precipitously, as if the watchtower had once looked over a valley, but in fact there was nothing to be seen below except fog.

According to the old sorcerer, this was the outer limit of the land. Nothing lay beyond the mist. She stared at it for a long time. Above, the sky shaded from the merciless blue of drought-stricken country into an oddly vacant white, more void than cloud.

The silence oppressed her. Out here, at the edge of the world, she didn’t even hear birds, nothing except a solitary cricket. It was as if the land were slowly emptying out, as if the heart and soul of it were leaching away into the void. Like her own heart.

Setting quiver and sword aside, she settled down cross-legged. She clapped once, a sound to split away the ordinary world from the world where magic lived, or so the old sorcerer had taught her. With patterns he had shown her, she stilled her mind so that, below the clutter of everyday thoughts, she could listen into the heart of the world: the purl of air at her neck, the slow shifting of stone, the distant babble of water, and beneath all those, the nascent stirring, like a flower about to bloom, of vast power held in check by its own peculiar architecture.

“Humankind was crippled by their hands,” the old sorcerer had said. “They came to believe that the forces of the world could only succumb to manipulation. But the universe exists at a level invisible to our eyes and untouchable by our hands, but comprehensible by our minds and hearts. That is the essence of magic, which seeks neither to harm nor to control but only to preserve and transform.”

In every object, all the pure elements mix in various proportions. If she could calm her own breathing, draw her concentration to such a narrow point that it blossomed into an infinite vista, then she could illuminate the heart of any object and draw out from it those elements which might be of use to her in her spells.

In this way, the daimones who had enfolded her within their wings had called fire even from stone, even from the very mountains. This was the magic known to the Aoi.

But she had a long way to go to master it.

At last she ascended through levels of awareness and clapped her hands four times, a sharp sound that brought her squarely back to the ordinary world. One of her feet had fallen asleep. She scratched the back of her neck, tickled by a withered leaf, and blinked a mote of dust out of one eye. Slinging her quiver over her shoulder, she clambered back down, testing each stone as she went, bypassing those that rattled or shifted under her probing foot.

In the shade at the base of the tower, she drank sparingly and finally allowed herself to eat: some desiccated berries, a coarse flat bread made palatable by being fried in olive oil, the sugary, withered carob pods she gathered every day, and today’s delicacy, a paste of fish-meal and crushed parsnip flavored with onion and pulped juniper berries. There was something so desperate about each meal here that she had quickly learned that the old sorcerer would neither watch her eat nor let her watch him.

After she had licked every crumb off her fingers, she turned to her coil of rope. Twisting fiber into rope was the most tedious of the tasks the old sorcerer had set her but one he insisted she master. She had amassed a fair length of rope. She measured it out against an outstretched arm: forty cubits worth. It would have to be enough.

Tying one end around her waist, she cinched it tight and, with her weapons slung about her, walked to the edge of the fog. She tied the other end of the rope to the trunk of a pine tree, tugging to test the knot, before she swept her gaze along the hillside. Nothing stirred. A bug crawled through the dry grass at her feet, startling because it was the only sign of movement except for the swaying of trees in a delicate wind.

She walked cautiously into the fog. In five steps she was blind. She could not even see where the rope left the fog. She could not see her hands held out in front of her face, although blue flashed from her finger: the lapis lazuli ring given to her by Alain which, he had promised her, would protect her from evil.

She wasn’t sure what to expect: the edge of an abyss? A barricade? A dead land drowned in cloying mist?

In another five steps, she walked out onto a ridgeline. At her back drifted the wall of fog. Right in front of her grew a dense tangle of thorny shrubs. As she jerked sideways to avoid them, her trailing hand brushed a thorn. A line of red welled up on her skin. She stuck the scrape to her mouth and sucked. A serpent hissed at her from the shelter of the thornbush and she sidled away slowly as superstitious dread clutched at her heart.