King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1)

The prince turned his face away, not wanting to look. Instead, he carefully—so carefully!—handed the baby over to the old soldier, who gave the banner into another man’s hands in order to hold the infant. Then he dismounted, gestured to his men to move away, and faced her.

“You care nothing for the child?”

She did not look after the old soldier as he guided his horse to a patch of ground less racked with loose stone and sudden sharp drop-offs that might catch a horse unawares.

“He is no longer mine.”

“How can you say so? He is the most beautiful child I have ever seen!”

“Only because he is yours!”

“Yours as well!”

“Not mine! I carried it inside me, gave birth to it, bled enough blood to cover the fields that surround the village we just passed through! Never mine, and never meant to be. Leave me, Henri.” She had never learned the eastern accent and still spoke his name as a Salian would. “I never promised you anything but the child. Let me go in peace.”

The young man said nothing for a long time, or at least, not in words. He had an expressive face, but he was learning to control it. She wondered, watching him, what he wanted to say, and what he would say. When she had first met him a year ago, he’d always blurted out the first words that came to his tongue. Now, made heir by right of fertility, he was learning to think before he spoke.

“I do not want to let you go,” he said at last. “By the invocation of your name, Alia, I beg you to stay with me.”

“Alia is not my name, Henri. It is only what you call me.”

“You aren’t well enough to go. You were so ill after the birth.”

“I am well enough now.”

“Then why did you come to me? Don’t you love me at all?” His voice broke on the last words and a moment later he caught himself and tensed, his face freezing into a mask of stone.

That mask, she thought, will be the one he wears most often when he becomes king.

She thought of telling him the truth, because she did not dislike him. He was still young, a little callow, but he had strength in him, and he was ambitious, and clever, and handsome in a human way, elegant and proud.

But the truth was not hers to tell, nor his to know. King he might become, but he was only a pawn in hands whose power was greater than his would ever be as regnant of two kingdoms. She and he were both pawns, and this gave her some sympathy for him.

She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. “I am not immune to human charms,” she lied. “But my duty lies elsewhere.” That at least was true.

She could not bear to hear more from him. She could stay in this world no longer. It weighed too heavily on her; it had stolen so much of her precious blood. She fingered the scrap of bloody cloth, torn from the sheets in which she had given birth; it—and what it signified, her link to the child—was the last thing that bound her here. She let go of the bloody rag, and it fluttered to the ground.

As he knelt to pick it up, she stepped across the last crumbling wall. He rose, calling after her, but he did not try to follow. Nor could she really hear his voice any longer as the stones rose up before her and she heard at last the faint music of their alignment singing to her.

With her inner sight she touched the wind stone, the stone of light, the stone of blood, of water, of fire, the other stones, each according to its properties. Here, in the human world, in order to touch the heart of any object, to find and manipulate its essence, she had to trace winding paths around the walls and barriers built by human magi, for they chose to constrain and then master what they could not understand. But as she entered the precinct of stone, those walls fell away. She lifted a hand. Mist arises from the commingling of water and air, and so mist rose around her, at her suggestion, hiding her from view as she entered the ring of stones.

Above her, unobscured by the mist that surrounded her, stars shone. She read their alignment and called down the power that sang from them and melded it to the alignment of the stones, each to each, a choir raising its voice to heaven. She called to the heart of her own land, and at the altar of fire and blood a portal opened.

Neither a door nor a wispy shimmering of air, it looked like an arbor, a lush flowering vine grown over an arch. She smelled snow and felt the cold sting of a winter wind beyond. Without hesitation she stepped through and left the world of humankind behind.

Prince Henry, heir to the kingdoms of Wendar and Varre, watched Alia walk away from him, up into the ring of stones. He steeled his face, his heart, his whole body, and when the mist rose and covered her, he simply tightened his hand on the scrap of cloth she had left behind that contained all he had left of her: her blood.