Crown of Stars

“It’s better you are dead than lost to me!”

“God help me,” she rasped. “You dragged off my daughter only to lure me. You threaten my beloved, because you hope to make me weak, knowing I was weak before. But I have walked the spheres. I have survived the storm. I am no longer weak.”

“Yet neither am I, my rose. Fear me, as you did once.”

Lightning lit the rose window. Its snap sent a shock wave through the entire stone edifice. Thunder broke as if between them, inside the church itself. The rose window shattered. Its shards rained over them like so many slivers of ice.

She called fire into the slow glass, and the fragments poured as shooting stars and peppered the smooth slate floor of the apse. Hugh staggered back against the altar. He slapped the burning remnants off his sleeves and his golden hair. Yet when he looked up, he raised a hand as against a blinding light shining into his eyes.

“Fear you?” The anger burned at such a blue-white heat that she could no longer contain it. In her fury, unbidden, unasked, her wings unfurled with a roar. “I am not the one you will harm! How many more who are innocent will suffer because of you? God forgive me for thinking I should let you go unharmed. Because you will run, and who will be able to find you, when you can weave the stars and walk the crowns?”

He saw her, or saw beyond her, into the heart of her blazing wings. He saw what she had become and what she truly was, and his expression changed. In the wreckage of the rose window he slipped and scrambled.

He fled from what he saw.

A surge of furious triumph scalded her, shameful as it was, to know that he feared her as she had once feared him. How easy it would be to make him grovel and plead, to make him obey her, to make him crawl.

But she let it go. She had to let it go. Hate makes you blind.

She reached and, with her touch, with the knowledge of the fire that slumbers in all creation, she found the recesses within his eyes where the smallest of messages pass from the world to the mind.

“I beg you.” He fell to his knees.

She found the depths within his eyes that formed the passageway of sight, and in this place she sought the slumbering fire. Called fire, with a needle touch, precise and delicate.

Burned him.

Hate makes you blind. And so would he become, who had been blinded by hate and envy for his whole life long.

With a strangled cry, he fell to the floor in spasms as the pain bit deep, but she had already let him go.

Blessing coughed, and came up spitting and growling like a wild creature. Footsteps hammered, and voices shouted outside. The mask warriors poured into the nave, Zuangua in the lead with his obsidian sword held high for the killing stroke.

“Halt!” she cried.

They clattered to a halt and backed away from her, all but Zuangua, who strode boldly up the dais and straddled the wounded man. The Ashioi had a wide, white grin on his face, eerie to look on. Here was a man who enjoyed his revenge.

“I made a pledge—I swore he would live,” said Liath. Already she felt the wings furl, die away, because the faint current of aether could not support that blaze.

He looked at her, the unburned side of his face twisted up in a look of disbelief although the other, still red and raw, was pulled tight and unmoving. “You cannot be so stupid.”

“The words have been said. I said I would not kill him.”

“So you admit it!” He laughed.

“Or let him be killed. The words have been said.”

It was clear he did not intend to provoke her by challenging her. “I’m not greedy, Bright One. I see you have crippled him. You’ve taken his sight. That means he can never weave the looms. He can’t threaten us. I’ll accept that. I need only proof for my people that we have taken our share, and gained a measure of vengeance for Feather Cloak’s death.”

He acted so quickly she had no time to react. He bent, tugged Hugh’s right arm out straight, and chopped down in a strong stroke, cutting off the hand just above the wrist.

Hugh screamed. He rolled and thrashed.

The Ashioi laughed and howled as they pounded their spears on the paving stones and stamped their feet. She jumped up beside Zuangua, put her hand over the stump pumping bright red blood over the floor, and cauterized it. Hugh gasped—the only noise he could get out—and fainted.

The smell made her sick, and even Zuangua leaped back to get away from that sizzling odor. He retreated down the steps as she rose with blood dripping from her hand and Hugh passed out beside the Hearth.

“Your people have been murdering the Wendish,” she said, understanding now the reaction of the monks and villagers. “Packs of them, like roving wolves. That’s why they feared me, and hate you. How could you be so foolish as to squander the alliance Sanglant would have offered you?”