The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

Hanna was beginning to feel sick to her stomach. Waves of stench accompanied the prisoner. He made no sound as the Wendish soldiers held his left hand, fingers splayed, against the block of wood. Prince Bayan drew his knife and with one sharp hack cut off the man’s little finger.

A sound escaped the prisoner, a “gawh” of pain caught in as blood flowed. Bayan addressed him in a language Hanna did not recognize, but the man merely spat again in answer. Bayan cut off the next finger, and the next, and then Hanna had to look away. She thought maybe she was going to vomit. Bayan questioned the prisoner in a calm voice that did not betray in its tone the torment he was inflicting; she hung on to that voice, it was her lifeline. The man screamed.

She looked up to see him lolling back, handless now as blood pumped from the stump of his wrist. Thrown back as he was, she could see clearly the object that hung from his belt: black and wizened, headlike in shape with a dark mane of straw hanging from it, it had one side molded into the grotesque likeness of a face. Then the hot iron rod was brought forward to sear the wound, and as he screamed, she stared and stared at that ghastly little thing hanging from his belt so that she wouldn’t have to watch his agony and after forever she realized that it was, in fact, a hideous little human head, all shrunken and nasty, with a glorious mane of stiff, black hair.

“I’m going to be sick,” she muttered. Brother Breschius moved aside just in time and she threw up in the corner while, apparently oblivious to her, Prince Bayan got back to work on the right hand. He broke the fingers first, one by one, then cut off the little finger, then the next, then the middle finger; but the prisoner only grunted, stoic to the end.

Bayan finally cursed genially and slit the man’s throat, stepping back nimbly so that he wouldn’t get any blood on him. “Once sword hand crippled, he never speak because he have nothing to go back to in his tribe, because he no longer a man,” he explained. He shrugged. “So God wills. These Quman never talk anyway. Stubborn bastards.” Then he laughed, an amazingly resonant and perverse sound in the stinking cellar. “That a good word, yes? Taught to me by Prince Sanglant. ‘Stubborn-bastards.’”

He chuckled and wiped at his eyes. He did not even give the corpse a second glance. It meant as little to him as a dead dog lying at the side of a road. “Come,” he said to Hanna. “The snow woman must wash away this smell and be clean like the lily flower again, yes? We go to the feast.”

They went to the feast, where Bayan entertained Lady Udalfreda and her noble companions with charming and somewhat indecent tales of his adventures as a very young man among the Sazdakh warrior women who, he claimed, could not count themselves as women or warriors until they had captured and bedded a young virgin and then cut off his penis as a trophy. Hanna couldn’t touch a bite, although Brother Breschius kindly made sure that she drank a little wine to settle her stomach.

In a way, she was relieved when two scouts came in all dust-blown and wild-eyed with a report of a Quman army headed their way.

The Ungrian warriors slept, ate, and entertained in their armor. They were mounted and ready to ride so quickly that they made the good Wendish soldiers in Sapientia’s train look like rank, newcomers, awkward and fumbling. Even the colorfully painted wagon of Bayan’s mother rolled into line and waited there like a silent complaint long before Princess Sapientia finished arming, and mounted.

“Prince Bayan’s mother will ride with us?” demanded Hanna. Breschius nodded toward the wagon, his gaze alert. With its closed shutters and curtained door, it resembled a little house on wheels, and it would have looked rather quaint except for the clean white bones hanging from the eaves like charms, although they were, mercifully, not human but animal bones. At the peak of the roof a small wheel decorated with ribbons turned in the wind, fluttering red and yellow and white and blue as it spun. “The shamans of the Kerayit tribe do not carry their luck in their bodies as the rest of us do. Their luck is born into another person, someone born on the same day at the same time. It is said that Bayan’s mother’s luck was born into the child who later became Bayan’s father, a prince of the Ungrian people, which is the only reason she agreed to marry him. But he died on the day Prince Bayan was born, so by their way of thinking her luck passed from father into son. That’s why she must stay close by Prince Bayan, to watch over him.” He smiled as if laughing at himself. “But she is in no real danger. Not even the Quman would harm a Kerayit princess, for they know what fate awaits the clan of he who touches a Kerayit shaman without her consent. You will see. She is useful.”