The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

Then the vision vanished, and the stone snuffed out as though a blanket of earth thrown on the fire had smothered it.

Stone and fire both were utterly gone.

A moment later the lick and spit of everyday flame flowered into life. The woman fed a common campfire with dried dung and twigs. As soon as it burned briskly, she made a clucking sound with her tongue, stood, and turned to face him.

Ai, Lord! She wore leather sandals, bound by straps that wound up her calves, and a supple skirt sewn of pale leather that had been sliced off raggedly at knee length. And nothing else, unless one could count as clothing her wealth of necklaces. Made of gold and beads, they draped thickly enough that they almost covered her breasts—until she shifted. A witch, indeed.

She did not look human. In her right hand she held a spear tipped with an obsidian point.

“Come,” she said in the Wendish tongue.

It had been so long since he had heard the language of his own people that at first he did not recognize what he heard.

“Come,” she repeated. “Do you understand this tongue?” She tried again, speaking a word he did not know.

His knees ached as he straightened up. He shuffled forward slowly, ready to bolt, but she only watched him. A double stripe of red paint like a savage’s tattoo ran from the back of her left hand up around the curve of her elbow, all the way to her shoulder. She wore no curved felt hat on her head, as Quman women did, nor did she cover her hair with a shawl, as Wendish women were accustomed to do. Only leather strips decorated with beads bound her hair back from her face. A single bright feather trailed down behind, half hidden. The plume shone with such a pure, uncanny green that it seemed to be feathered with slivers from an emerald.

“Come forward,” she repeated in Wendish. “What are you?”

“I am a man,” he said hoarsely, then wondered bitterly if he could name himself such now.

“You are of the Wendish kin.”

“I am of the Wendish kin.” He was shocked to find how hard it was to speak out loud the language he had been forbidden to speak among the Quman. “I am called—” He broke off. Dog, worm, slave-girl, and piece-of-dung were the names given him among the Quman, and there had been little difference in meaning between the four. But he had escaped the Quman. “I—I was once called by the name Zacharias, son of Elseva and Volusianus.”

“What are you to be called now?”

He blinked. “My name has not changed.”

“All names change, as all things change. But I have seen among the human kin that you are blind to this truth.”

To the east, the rim of sun pierced the horizon, and he had to shade his eyes. “What are you?” he whispered.

Wind had risen with the dawning of day.

But it was not wind. It sang in the air like the whirring of wings, and the sound of it tore the breath out of his chest. He tried to make a noise, to warn her, but the cry lodged in his throat. She watched him, unblinking. She was alone, as good as unarmed with only a spear to protect her; he knew with what disrespect the Quman treated women who were not their own kin.

“Run!” he croaked, to make her understand.

He spun, slammed up against stone, and swayed there, stunned. The towering stone block hid him from view. He could still flee, yet wasn’t it too late once you could hear their wings spinning and humming in the air? Like the griffins who stalked the deep grass, the Quman warriors took their prey with lightning swiftness and no warning but for that bodiless humming vibrating in the air, the sound of their passage.

He had learned to mark their number by the sound: at least a dozen, not more than twenty. Singing above the rest ran the liquid iron thrum of true griffin wings.

He began, horribly, to weep with fear. The Quman had said, “like a woman”; his own people would say, “like a coward and unbeliever,” one afflicted with weakness. But he was so tired, and he was weak. If he had been strong, he would have embraced martyrdom for the greater glory of God, but he was too afraid. He had chosen weakness and life. That was why They had forsaken him.

She shifted to gaze east through the portal made by standing stones and lintel. He was so shocked by her lack of fear that he turned—and saw.

They rode with their wings scattering the light behind them and the whir of their feathers drowning even the pounding of their horses’ hooves. Their wings streamed and spun and hummed and vibrated. Once he had thought them real wings, but he knew better now: They were feathers attached by wire to wooden frames riveted to the body of their armored coats. That armor had a scaly gleam, strips of metal sewn onto stiff leather coats. On a standard fixed to a spear they bore the mark of the Pechanek clan: the rake of a snow leopard’s claw. The Quman had many tribes. This one he knew well, to his sorrow.