Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

“Easy for you to say, eating like a queen and sleeping between the beast’s silks. Maybe he threw you out now, but that doesn’t change what you were before.”

She pointed the stick at him and let the end press against his sternum, pushing hard enough that he skipped back a half step. No one laughed, or even spoke. They had fallen silent. “It’s true I ate the food he gave me, and ate better than any of you have. But I never slept between his silks. He never raped me.” She let the stick fall to her side, keeping it ready for a fast strike, and turned so they could all see her Eagle’s badge. “He didn’t dare touch me.” She hesitated. A complicated kind of hope and cynicism warred in their expressions. What did these folk know of Kerayit women and shamans who had the body of a woman joined with that of a mare? “He didn’t dare touch me because he didn’t dare insult King Henry. For what he does to me it’s as if he does it to the king himself. He knows in the end that the king will have revenge. For me. For all of us.”

As would she, by God.

At that instant, she knew what she had to do. Bulkezu had forgotten one thing when he’d thrown her out of his tent.

“But the king needs our help. And I need yours.”

The guards did not stop her as she gathered firewood at the fringe of the forest, although maybe they thought she was crazy for thinking of building a fire on such a hot day, especially when she had nothing to eat. Twilight closed over them as she laid sticks for a fire. Wool thread teased off the sleeve of her tunic made a bowstring and a supple branch the tiny bow, wood scraps and dry leaves the tinder, and a notched wedge of wood a cup for her hand. With the bowstring looped around a stick, she drilled the end of that stick into the tinder until friction woke heat, heat smoke, and smoke fire.

Flames licked up through the kindling. Prisoners gathered around, as many as could stand doing so in order to block the view of the Quman guards, and the old man began telling a story.

“Here we begin by telling the tale of Sigisfrid, who won the gold of the Hevelli. He was born out of a she-wolf and a warrior—”

Hanna sat cross-legged by the fire, letting the tale drift past her, riding the flow of the words. Under Bulkezu’s constant watch, she dared not use her Eagle’s sight. But here, among the prisoners, she was free.

“See nothing, not even the flames,” Wolfhere had told her. “It is the stillness that lies at the heart of all things that links us.”

“Liath,” she whispered. The fire wavered, and for a moment she saw faint shadows of men clothed in armor, she heard the clash of arms, but the vision faded into the snap of flame. Liath remained hidden from her. Was she dead?

Was everyone she cared for dead?

“Ai, God,” she whispered, “can I not find you, Ivar? Where have you gone?”

A new log made the fire flare with blue streaks of heat, hot and bright. Were there women moving in the flames? Queens walked under a grave mound, one young, one old, and one as golden as the sun, but they held out empty hands and by the hard flint gleam in their eyes she knew them for the old gods, the Huntress, the Fat One, and the Toothless Hag who cuts the thread of life.

Ivar was lost to her.

For a while she sat mired in grief while some other hand fed the flame and the fire burned merrily on, twisting and popping.

She is the owl, gliding over the treetops, searching for the one she has lost. The streaming wind carries her far to the east, to the land where the grass grows as high as a man. Two griffins stalk at the edge of sand, closing in on their prey.

Tents shimmer in the distance, but it is the woman wandering on the shore of the desert who catches her eye. Here, among the Bwrfolk, Sorgatani has no need of veils or concealment. As she walks, she speaks passionately to her companion.

Hanna has never before seen the Bwr shaman so clearly: her glossy gray mare’s coat and the creamy color of her woman’s skin. Her face and upper body are striped with green-and-gold paint. Pointed ears, tufted with coarse black hair, peek out through her unbound hair which falls like silver water all the way to the place where her torso slips easily from a woman’s hips into a mare’s shoulders. She holds a bow in her hands, the horn curve carved with the semblance of pale dragons.

“Why can we not attack?” Sorgatani is saying fiercely, hands gesturing wildly. “He spits on us by holding her prisoner.”

“She had a chance to come to you,” replies her companion. “Now she suffers the fate she chose.”

“Is there no way to rescue her? Is our magic of so little use?”

“Do not forget that magic protects him as well.” She shakes her head as might a cleric surveying the ruins of her once magnificent church. “We are not what we were. Our numbers are much diminished because of the plague. Now is our time of greatest weakness, so we must use caution. We dare not reveal ourselves too soon. But do not fear—” She glances up, her gaze sharp as an arrow. “Who watches?”