The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

Then, because he could barely stand, he, too, leaned against the gate. The pale stone warmed his skin.

He smells burning fennel, and as his eyes adjust to night he sees two figures standing in darkness on the slope of a hill crowned with stones. One holds aloft a tightly-wrapped stick of herbs that smolders. His shoulders are strangely humped, and he holds a sword in one hand. Behind him, waiting patiently, stands a silent, strong warhorse, reins hanging loose over its head to trail on the ground. A shield is fixed to the saddle. A leadline attached to the saddle slithers and whips, and a moment later he sees a goat pulling restlessly against the resolute warhorse, which stands firm.

The second figure, armed with a short sword and a bow, kneels and with an arrow’s shaft begins to trace a diagram in the dirt. The shaft has neither point nor fletching, but a gold feather that glows with a feeble light is bound to one end. The figure stands, sighting with that shaft toward the eastern horizon which, oddly enough, lies above her. By the curve of her body under her tunic he sees she is female, tall enough but not as tall as her companion, who by the breadth of his malformed shoulders must be male. It is too dark to make out features or expressions.

Trees begin to sway. Leaves toss in a rising wind. Where a notch cuts the bulge of a mountain, a bright yellowish star appears. The woman chants and with the shaft and the rippling gold feather bound to its end, she seems to draw down that light until it tangles in the stone circle, weaving through the standing stones a pattern of faint light not unlike those sigils inscribed into the stone gate before him. She uses the shaft like a weaver’s shuttle as she sights on the brilliant light of the evening star, now sinking down on the horizon of high hills almost opposite that of the rising yellow star. This light she draws into the stone as well, and where the two lights meet, one malevolently yellow and the other as bright as an angel’s gaze, a thin archway of light forms between two of the standing stones.

“Hurry,” she says to her companion, and with his free hand he grabs the reins of the horse. His cloak parts to reveal a good, strong mail coat underneath. A baby begins to cry. His shoulders quiver and shift, and little arms bat aside the corner of cape thrown over it: He is carrying an infant strapped to his back in place of his long sword. The goat bleats, tugging against the leadline as though it is itself being hauled backward by an invisible ebb tide.

But there is a tide, drawing his gaze away from the scene by the stones and into the darkness, down into the valley below where a stone tower stands watch over a handsome timber hall. A stream burbles gaily past, and all is quiet; too quiet. In the stone tower, three figures sit deep in meditation, strange diagrams mark the table before them, and a silvery light gleams from the wood grain along the outline of those diagrams, a stylized rose, a sword, a crown, a staff, and others he has no time to decipher because the tide has dragged his body outward to the livestock pens beyond the tower where shadows have smothered even the light of the stars. From these shadows he can hear the whispers of the malcontent.

“I am against it. It is rash to kill him now, when he could serve us in other ways if we are only patient.”

“Nay, Sister. You are reluctant only because you do not comprehend the whole. We are all that protects humankind from the Lost Ones. You are either with us, or against us, and if you are against us, Sister Venia, then I have been instructed by Sister Anne to kill you.”

“Very well.”

He hears the panicked bleat of a goat just as he sees, as its echo, the flash of a knife. Night half conceals the gruesome sacrifice: a frowning woman cuts open the thrashing goat, which is held down by a man in cleric’s robes. She thrusts a hand inside its ribs as blood pumps out over her arm. She gropes, tugs, and pulls out its still beating heart. Somehow, horribly, the goat is still alive.

“Light the lamp,” she says, and it is done. The glow of the lamp lends a slippery unreality to the scene as the goat bleats weakly and the heart beats liquidly in her hand. She begins to chant.

A smell rises all around, like the breath of the forge, leaching somehow even through the iron gate that seals him away from the vision. Hairs rise on the nape of his neck, and his hands tingle as he is drawn on a wave of shadows in the grip of the tidal current that flows up the hill and back to the man and the woman and the growing archway of light that now manifests within the stone circle.

Abruptly, light flares from stone to stone, a cascade of brilliance, a patterned web like to one of the diagrams he glimpsed in the tower room below. The woman throws up a hand to shade her eyes, but it is too late. They are discovered. Figures pour out of the darkness, but he cannot tell what are shades and what are real, which are doubts and which are solid human forms. One of them cuts through the light-woven gateway with a polished black staff, and the threads unravel and fray into nothing as the man takes a cautious step backward, shoulder bumping up against the steady horse, and raises his sword.