Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

A rime of frost covered the ground. The youngest WiseMother had made some progress on the trail since he had last come this way. He brought her an offering, as he always did: this day, a dried portion of the afterbirth from a slave. Let it serve as a symbol of life’s transience, and his impatience. He did not stay to speak with her, since even a brief exchange might take hours. Instead, he walked on along the trail toward the ring of WiseMothers. At first they appeared like stout pillars but as he closed in, careful to avoid stepping on the snaking lines of silvery sand that marked the trails made by the deadly ice wyrms, the WiseMothers’ shapes came into focus. Although they had all but stiffened entirely into stone, the curve of limbs and heads remained apparent, a vestige of their time among the mobile.

The WiseMothers congregated in a circle at the rim of the nesting grounds. Here he paused, checking the stones gathered into his pouch, watching the smooth hollow of sand that lay before him. Only the WiseMothers knew what they were incubating under that expanse of silver sand.

One stone at a time, he made his careful way out to the hummock that bulged up in the center of the hollow. The smooth, rounded dome radiated warmth and smelled faintly of sulfur, but once he was standing on it, he was safe from the ice wyrms that inhabited the glimmering hollow around which the WiseMothers gathered. There, in the solitude afforded him by the perilousness of his surroundings, he contemplated the path he had walked so far, the place he stood now, and the journey that still lay before him.

A stray leaf fluttered over the hollow and came to rest, so lightly, on the sand. A gleaming, translucent claw thrust up from beneath the sands, hooked the leaf, and yanked it under. All was still again. The wind sighed around his body. He heard a distant rockfall as a low rumble, so far away that it might have been a dream. But when he closed his eyes to slide into the resting trance, the same blank emptiness met him, dull and gray.

Alain was still gone, their link shattered.

He was utterly alone.

Night fell. Standing as still as any ancient stone lost under the canopy of stars, he heard the WiseMothers speaking.

Move. South. Press. East. Shift. The. Fire. River’s. Flow. Westward. Ten. Lengths.

The. Sea. Waters. Will. Rise.

Listen.

Earth. Cries. For. Earth.

What. Was. Torn. Asunder. Returns.

Make. Room.

His were not the only new ideas. Others among his people were learning to think. The words of Tenth Son rose in his memory: “We could trade. We could seek news in the ports of humankind.”

In the old days, before the rise of the warring chieftains in the time of Bloodheart’s own sire, the RockChildren had traded with the human tribes and, of course, with the fisherfolk. The wars for supremacy had changed all that. The rich harvest brought by slaving, the ease of plunder, and the joy of raiding had altered the old ways. What need to trade for what you could take for nothing?

Yet every stone thrown into calm water casts ripples. Just as tribes that warred incessantly among themselves could never truly grow strong, no clan which built its power solely on plunder had any hope of long-lasting success. The store of riches Bloodheart had amassed would serve Stronghand, but by themselves these treasures were just objects. They had only what worth others set on them. Of course that was a kind of worth he could exploit. War had its uses, yet it alone could not achieve all things.

He stood in the center of the nesting grounds and listened to the waking “awks” of gulls. The horizon paled toward dawn. Any one life span mattered little in the long unwinding of the world’s life, whose span was measured by the conversations of the WiseMothers and not the transitory and quickly forgotten struggles, as brief as those of the mayflies, of mortal creatures. That he thought and planned did not make him any more consequential than the least of Earth’s creatures. But maybe it gave him more freedom to act.

A ruler who controls trade controls the passage of goods, controls taxes laid upon those goods, controls who gets what and what goes where. There was more than one way to stretch the hand of rulership over the ruled.

With dawn, the WiseMothers settled into their daylight stupor. One stone at a time, he made his way back across the sands of the nesting grounds. The day, shortening as autumn overtook them, was half gone by the time he reached the safety of solid ground. He retrieved his staff from its hiding place in the crack of a towering rock and started down the path that led off the fjall and into the valley. Passing the youngest WiseMother, he laid a sprig of moss in her rough grasp, and walked on.

An arrow of honking geese passed overhead. A kestrel skimmed a distant rise. Stronghand crossed from fjall to birch forest and down into the denser pine and spruce woodlands. In the distance ax blows rang to a steady rhythm. The chopping ceased, and a man called a warning. The sound of a tree cracking and falling splintered the air. The thud of its impact shuddered along the wind, and that same voice shouted orders.