Child of Flame

“Did you ?” she demanded, unable not to want to know what secrets the ancient text held.

“What I read changed my life. God has shown me how wrong I have been, and how I must change.” The shadow gave depth to his expression, his handsome eyes, the curve of his mouth as he frowned. “Nay, but it began before that. First of all it was the woman who took you away from Werlida. She humbled me. She made me think. Change does not come easily.”

A mellow wind chased itself through the colonnade archways, stirring the wisteria wound down and around the stone pillars. A faint chiming ring serenaded them, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from, everywhere and nowhere. The two servants waited patiently a stone’s toss away, by the archway that led out toward the courtyard linking the two palaces, one secular and one religious, regnant and skopos.

I know where I am. I am in Darre, the holy city, home of the Holy Mother who presided over the church.

She could practically breathe in the ancient stones, the memory of the empire that had risen here centuries ago and then collapsed into ruins, devastated by the raids of the Bwrmen and their savage allies and by its own internal corruption. If she crossed under that archway, she could walk away into the city—except that she could not move.

“Where is the book?” her voice asked.

He glanced up, face lit by the simple question. “If you will.” He indicated the passageway. “I have my own suite of chambers in the skopos’ palace. All of the presbyters do, of course, except those who travel as ambassadors.” He did not stumble over his words. He was far too well educated, too composed, too experienced in a courtier’s smooth affability. “There’s also the library. Ai, God, Liath! You can’t believe the library here! So much that one could never hope to learn it all! Sometimes I just go down and sit there among the books, breathing in the weight of them. I wish I could just press them against my skin and let the voice of each writer melt into my body.”

Had it gotten hot suddenly? Fire burned in her cheeks.

“Do you know what I found there?” he asked, letting her precede him down a hall lined with thick curtains long enough to conceal oneself in. But before she could ask and he answer, a presbyter hurried up, a lean man with a cadaverous face. “I pray you, Your Honor. A delegation from the townsfolk has come. There’s trouble in the city again. You know how it is with these mercenaries that Ironhead has hired. They will harass the townspeople, but with the Holy Mother so ill there’s no one to mediate between them. Ironhead can’t be spoken to—”

“I’ll come.” Hugh turned to Liath. “One of my servants will show you to the library. I’ll come there once I’m free.” Again, he hesitated. “But only if—well, I’ll say no more. If it pleases you.”

Her voice answered. “I’ll wait for you there.”

Soon enough she stood again at the catalog, running her fingers over the vellum, scanning the titles. Commentary on the Dream of Cornelia by Eustacia. Artemisia’s Dreams. A copy of the Annals of Autun lay abandoned on the table next to her, a chronicle complete through the end of the reign of Arnulf the Younger and bound together with a full account of the moon’s phases and movements through the zodiac over a period of one hundred and sixty-eight years.

Her hands turned the pages idly as her mind tried to concentrate on the words. Taillefer’s youngest daughter, Gundara, married off to the Duc de Rossalia… but she kept looking toward the doors, wondering if that man walking in was Hugh, wondering if she could find Hugh in whatever hall or official chamber was set aside for such delicate negotiations as he was now conducting, an attempt to keep the peace in a troubled kingdom where conflict would only lead to the death of innocents.

Finally, she just gave in to that stifling grip that teased her mind and eddied through her body. She sat on a bench and let the weight of so many books caress her, breathing them in. Could all those words, written by so many scribes and scholars, drift through the air and into her pores, melding with her body, becoming one and always a part of her? It is always easier just to let go, to give in.

She dozed.

In her dreams, she walks in a daze through a rose mist, trying to find the path, but she is lost, forever lost, and she has to find the way upward but someone has hold of her, she is chained at the throat with a ribbon of silk that has slid down all the way through her entire body, and she can’t get away.

“Liath.”

She woke suddenly, heart hammering, flinching away from his hated touch. But as she sat up, feeling the ache in her back from the hard bench and a knot in her hip where the edge of the quiver had jammed into the bone, she saw Hugh, standing an arm’s length from her. The great domed chamber had gotten dim, as if the sun had set. Two servants stood behind Hugh carrying a lamp to light his way.