Child of Flame

Captain Fulk moved up beside him. “Do you see anything, my lord prince? I believe we killed them all. They’ll not be back to trouble your daughter this day.”

“Nay, it’s not that, although we have to win the battle at hand before we can be sure we’re free of trouble.” Sanglant had a momentary illusion that hornets were swarming all around his head, but it sloughed off quickly. Yet he still could not shake the sense that someone was watching him. “Ai, Lord, Fulk, it’s hard enough knowing the danger my sweet child faces every day, that I’ve brought on her. Lord knows I’ve done things I’m not proud of these last months, but God forgive me, I still think of Liath constantly. Will I ever see her again?”

“I pray that you will, my lord prince.”

At times like these, battle was almost a relief. Better to fight than to dwell on his grief and his fears. He lifted his hand again, calling for a new lance to be brought for him.

A crack of thunder splintered the air around them. Horses neighed, rearing. Men raised their voices in alarm, but as suddenly quieted. As though silence itself commanded attention, men began to look around. Sanglant, too, looked back over his shoulder to see a tiny figure descending from the knoll. A veil concealed her face, but her ancient hands, gnarled with arthritis, betrayed her age. Scarcely taller than a child, Bayan’s mother wore rich gold robes elaborately embroidered with scenes of griffins and dragons locked in battle. When she commandeered a horse from a soldier—who promptly dropped to his knees as though felled—and mounted with assistance from one of her slaves, Sanglant saw that the robes were split for riding. Hastily, he rode over to her as soldiers reined away, made superstitious by the stories they had heard and by the uncanny behavior of the rain.

“My lady,” he began in Wendish, “I pray you, forgive me for not knowing the proper address for a woman of your birth and rank.” Though she was mounted now on a huge warhorse whose size dwarfed her, she did not look ridiculous. Sanglant towered over her. “I beg you, you will be safer here in the rear now that we have—”

One of her slaves stepped forward. “Stand not in the way of the holy woman.” He was a huge man with a dark complexion and thick shoulders and arms, not the kind worth tangling with in a fight unless necessary.

“She is safer—”

She rode away. Her feet didn’t even reach the stirrups.

“The holy woman has seen that her luck is in danger,” said the slave. “She must go.”

Her luck?

That quickly, Sanglant remembered the old Kerayit custom, that a shaman woman’s luck resided in the body of another person.

Her luck was her son.

This time when he raised a hand, twin horns blared. In the distance, he heard the answering bell of Druthmar’s horn. Afflicted all at once with a horrible sense of foreboding, Sanglant signaled the advance. With his forces marshaled and Druthmar waiting farther down to join them, Sanglant led them back along the road at a trot.

Long ago, at besieged Gent, when she saw him for the first time, he had been wearing that same dragon helm, splendid and handsome. Just as he was then. Just as he is now. Desire is a flame, a torch burning in the night. No traveler can help but be drawn toward it.

Ai, God, she misses him. She misses the feel of him.

But she has to go on. She has to choose wisely, never forgetting that she isn’t truly on Earth but rather ascending the last sphere.

No creature male or female can harm him. Remembering this, she stayed her hand through the worst of the fighting. In battle, truly, Sanglant can take care of himself. She hasn’t forgotten the lesson she learned in the sphere of jedu, the angel of war.

She hasn’t forgotten the horror of being killed, over and over again, by the one she loves.

But those hornets bother her. She saw them as aetheric darts stinging at his face and hands. He shook them off, but it is obvious to her that another hand works magic, hoping to harm the prince. She touches the golden robes of the old woman, the veiled one, but although the crone starts around surprised, feeling her touch, the woman cannot see her, only sense her gaze. The old woman has a face so wrinkled that it is hard to see the soul beneath, like an insect protected by its carapace. Despite her great age her hair is still as black as a girl’s. Her complexion is dusky, and her dark eyes are pulled tight at the corners in the shape of an almond. These features mark her as a steppe dweller, a woman from the eastern tribes, the people who live on the endless plains of grass with their herds and their tents.

She has powerful magic, the air hums around her as though infested with bees, but it isn’t her magic that threatens Sanglant. Regretfully, Liath leaves Sanglant, Blessing, and the old woman behind and speeds onward, an arrow on the aetheric winds binding the Earth. She has become the bow.