The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

“My lord count.” Lady Hathumod came forward hesitantly. She looked troubled. “Lady Tallia asked to be left in solitude to commune with God.”

“So she shall be. I’ll go in alone.” He signaled his own attendants to wait outside, and the hounds flopped down at the threshold.

He hadn’t seen her since yesterday and, pausing in the nave of the shadowy church, he didn’t see her at first as his eyes adjusted. Light from the east-facing windows fell on the altar. Midway along the nave, the stone bier was rising slowly, dressed stone by dressed stone, to make a fitting resting place for Lavastine’s corpse.

Her slight figure knelt on the steps before the altar, shoulders hunched and shaking. He walked forward so quietly that she didn’t hear him, and as he came up beside her, he heard her grunting softly with pain.

“Tallia?” He gently touched her on the shoulder.

She cried out and jerked back from him. In that moment, he law what she had been doing: scraping at the wounds on her palms and wrists with an old nail. Blood oozed from the jagged cuts. Pus inflamed the gash on the palm of her right hand. Seeing his horrified expression, she began to weep helplessly.

He did not know what to do, except to take the nail away from her.

Finally, he coaxed her back to their chamber. He settled her on their bed and chased away her servingwomen, even Hathumod. She only stopped weeping because she was too weak to cry for long. Her face was sunken, almost skeletal, her skin so translucent that the veins showed blue. She hadn’t washed in a long time: he found dirt behind her ears and a collar of grime at her neck. Her feet were filthy, and her knees scabbed and scaly from all those hours of kneeling. Her wrists felt so thin he thought he might have been able to snap them in two were he angry enough.

But, strangely, he wasn’t angry. He was just very tired.

“Tallia,” he said finally in the tone Aunt Bel might have used after she’d sat up three nights running with a deathly ill child who, past the point of danger, had now begun to whine that she didn’t like her gruel, “you are not well. You will remain in bed and you will eat gruel and bread pudding every day, and greens and meat, until you are strong enough that you don’t forget yourself in this way again.”

She began to whimper. “But God must love me. God will only love me if I suffer as did Her beloved Son. It is through our suffering that we become close to God. Then I can become close to God, too. I wish you would let me build a chapel. Then God would love me more because I was so obedient.”

“I love you, Tallia,” he said, without passion. He felt astoundingly tired. The nail weighed in his hand as heavily as a grievous sin, and maybe it was. He did not wave it in her face or accuse her. Maybe the first time had been a miracle.

But she was still going on about God’s love and a shower of golden light and a pure vessel molded as Her Son’s bride, who would be clothed with the odor of sanctity granted to all saints beloved of God when in fact—even in a chamber strewn with dried lavender and honeysuckle to sweeten the closed-in scent of winter and sachets of hyssop and mint to drive off fleas and vermin—he could smell her, an odor like milk gone sour.

“You haven’t washed,” he said. He rose, fetched cloth and pitcher, and sat beside her on the bed. He was too exhausted to coax her, but he knew what had to be done. “Give me your hands.”

She complained in a weak voice as he washed her hands, her elbows, her neck and face, and her filthy feet and knees. Because he ignored her and simply did what needed to be done, she finally acquiesced to his attentions.

The water was brown when he finished. He turned the nail through his fingers, examining it, but it told him nothing except that blood stained its point. The nail could not speak. Then he looked at her to see that she was staring at the nail in her turn, eyes as wide as if she’d seen an adder resting in his hands. He sighed, pulled the pouch out from under his tunic, and drew out the rose. Its petals lay cool and sweet in his palm. A thorn pricked his finger and blood welled.

She whimpered, staring at him, or the rose, or the nail, or his blood, as if these were signs of the Enemy. Or perhaps she was just afraid he would betray her secret, and her sin.

“Lie still,” he said firmly, and, amazingly, she lay still as he stroked the delicate petals along the ugly gashes on her palm, the stroke a hypnotic rhythm as he rocked

as they rock, riding heavily on the waves as they leave the still waters of the fjord behind and come into the sound. He stands in the stem of the ship, holding an empty wooden cup in one hand and a small chest in the other. The waters part before him, stream alongside to form a frothing wake behind. Heads bob in the surf, his ever-present companions.