The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

He moves forward quickly. “Are they bothering you?” he asks her, catching Hathumod by the sleeve before she can step forward into the firelight.

“Nay, my lord,” she says, and her surprise is the surprise of the guileless child who is asked if she has ever laid an offering before her grandmother’s gods. “They’ve done as you said. They’ve chosen their place. They’ve come to hear the teaching.”

2

IN the evening light, the stones looked like shrouded clerics standing watchfully at the top of the slope. Waiting for what? Since the fiasco at the old cottage, she and Sanglant had searched many times among the boulders in the high meadow but had found no path. Jerna still nursed Blessing, but her voice was gone; stolen, perhaps, or closed off by Anne’s magic, who had used the daimone to lure Sanglant away and then made sure she could not be used in that way again.

As Liath waited for the first stars to wink into life above, she spun through her fingers the gold feather she had received from the old Aoi sorcerer. There was a secret hidden in the stones, and it was being concealed from her by the very people who claimed to be her teachers: everything was shrouded, not just the stones. She hugged the sleeping Blessing against her chest, kissed her black hair. Her little soft, round body was easy to hold and easy to cradle. She had a habit of sucking on two fingers as she drowsed off. Now, fast asleep, her tiny mouth had relaxed enough that the equally tiny and perfect and somewhat chubby little fingers lay tucked between her cheek and Liath’s shoulder.

Her braid stirred. Wisps of loose hair fluttered on her neck. Was that a rising breeze, or the touch of one of the servants? Had Jerna followed her? She didn’t look.

The stone crown at Verna was not a true circle but rather more of a slightly flattened oval. That it drew in the power of the rising and setting stars, the angles of the planets each to the other as they traveled through the ecliptic, seemed obvious to her: that was the art of the mathematici. At first she had examined the circle from within, standing at the central stone and sighting outward, but no reasonable line of sight presented itself. It seemed impossible to weave the alignments of the stars from inside the circle, like trying to draw the shuttle through the warp when you yourself were within the loom and the threads, not standing outside it.

That observation, of course, had made all the difference.

She heard footsteps and now she did turn, tucking the feather between tunic and breast so it lay concealed.

He had his tunic off his shoulders, gathered by his belt at his hips so that his chest and back were bare. With his ax balanced along his shoulders, he looked a tempting sight. He swung down the ax, kissed her, then the baby, then pressed against her as if to kiss her again. The sheen of sweat on his body must have been cooling rapidly as the night breeze rose; surely he was cold, or perhaps he just didn’t notice. She was trembling, but not from cold. She touched a finger to his lips and just so slightly pushed him back.

“Ai, God,” he said, sounding frustrated.

Yet surely he was no more frustrated than she was. They had already done things they ought not to have done, not with the situation as desperate as it was. She could not risk getting pregnant again, not now.

“This isn’t a natural platform,” she said, indicating the level ground beneath her feet. She stood downslope from the stones, which from this angle lay to the west. From this angle, she looked up at the stone crown. “From this angle, the stones become the loom and I become the weaver. Before it didn’t make sense that the stones weren’t a true circle, but look—” She tucked Blessing more tightly into the crook of her left arm and, pulling the gold feather out again, used it to point. “Because of the flattened circle, those two stones, the left edge of the nearer one and the right edge of the farther one, make a line of sight that lines up with that notch in the ridge. There. Do you see it?”

He was silent for a long time. Then he moved up behind her onto the level shelf of ground, which was not more than two strides square. He was careful not to touch her, but she felt him nevertheless. He might as well have been making love with her, his presence lay so heavily on her, but that was her own desire speaking through her body. He understood the risks, too. He was the one who, when she had finally recovered her strength, had pointed out that a second pregnancy and labor might be as debilitating as the first and that to be completely sure that she was strong enough to escape at a moment’s notice, they must make sure she did not get pregnant.

At moments like this, she wondered if it were a sin to hate the woman who had brought her here and thrown her in a cage only slightly less repressive than the one Hugh had shut her in. Yet was it truly less confining just because the hand that held her had a softer touch?