The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

These weren’t Liath’s arrows. With that odd narrow concentration given to a man in battle, he saw them clearly: shafts of an unknown wood and fletched with a metal hard feather that he knew at once, with a shiver of misgiving. A griffin’s feather.

A third arrow struck off to his right, and he could see its trail, a faint smear of blue cutting through the fell creatures that attacked him. A fourth arrow skittered over the ground, sparks glittering in its wake. It had a slick stone point, ragged and deadly.

A dull blue haze streamed from the center of the stone circle, like steam boiling out of a kettle. He saw through it to another place: a massive rampart, huge marble walls, and an ebony gate already half open. A woman emerged from that gate with bow drawn, and she had only taken one step before she shot again. He ducked instinctively, but the arrow flew over his head and he heard the sizzle of another galla banished from the sphere of Earth.

In her wake he smelled the heavy scent of the sea, could even feel the salty sea air on his lips; in her wake, a man leading a laden pony stumbled out into the stone circle. Arrows sang from her bow, and with each shaft sparks sprayed and glittered in the air and galla flicked out of existence.

He got to his feet and was rewarded by a sudden indignant squall from Blessing; she still lived. But already Anne’s voice rang through the darkness. Surprised by an unexpected enemy, she was not yet defeated. Like a general, she mustered her forces and called up reserves—or perhaps her reserves had only just arrived, called down from the higher spheres. Those who served her at Verna had the delicacy of air and the fluidity of water. These who came at her command at the height of battle had a harsher aspect: human-shaped yet faceless, with wings as pale as glass. They, too, had a voice of bells, a throbbing bass vibrato that made the air ring. They streamed like a wild wind and flung themselves at Anne’s enemy with the howling breath of a gale. Their tenuous bodies dissolved to become the tempest.

Into such a wind, the woman could not shoot. But the man at her back grabbed an arrow out of the quiver and, holding it up by the point, he swung it in a circle around himself so that the griffin fletching tracked blue sparks in an arc.

Galla swarmed up around him; Blessing wailed again, and as he fought to move forward, to get out from under them, he saw what damage the griffin feathers did: they harmed the daimones not at all, but in some way they severed the bond that Anne had used to bind her servants to Earth. One by one, daimones darted away into the heavens, to vanish into the night sky. Freed from Anne.

That was what these intruders were here for: to free him from Anne.

He recognized the woman now; he had seen her in his dreams. Wind still battered her, but she, too, had taken an arrow and with it in her hand, head thrust into the wind and her hair streaming back like a banner behind her, she cut a way toward him. With each swipe more daimones tumbled free of the cord that bound them to Anne’s spells. It seemed to him that many of Anne’s servants flung themselves willingly into the whirlwind of their fellows as if in attack—and in defeat—they sought liberty.

He sheathed his sword and scrabbled for the arrows that had struck earth beside him. The griffin fletching cut into his palms, but he heeded it not. Let it not be said that he did not fight until his last breath. With stone-tipped arrows as his only weapon, he laid about himself furiously. The galla drew back, yet they did not flee. Could such creatures even know fear? Did cutting their earthly form cause them pain? Sundered, would their spirits drift endlessly like that of a fallen warrior who has lost his faith? They throbbed and swarmed around him, held back by the threat of griffin’s feathers, nothing more than that It took all his will not to lunge into them, only to hold them at bay. He could not expose Blessing to their touch again.

A pale form slid into the circle he had drawn around himself, the length of his reach with the arrows. He began to lash out; caught himself as he recognized her fluid figure. It was Jerna, writhing, her aetherical mouth twisting and distorting as she tried to communicate with him even as another force seemed to drag her away.

He struck, then, into her pale torso. A silver ribbon shredded into filaments and vanished, and at once Jerna flung herself on him. She coiled, all soothing coolness, over his shoulders and around the crying baby. Blessing’s sobs hiccuped to a stop, and for a moment, with the galla still hanging back, he had the unexpected leisure to survey the battlefield.

For a moment.

Anne stood by one of the stones, staff raised; daimones crowded her, their light forms throwing her stern figure into relief. He couldn’t see Liath, only a cloak of utter darkness where she had stood, as if the galla had consumed her entire being. Off to his right, Resuelto had halted at the trees, whose branches whipped and slashed in the gale. The galla had only retreated out of range of the griffin feathers. That stench of forge iron was the scent of blood taken from a thousand thousand victims; they were hunters, and they had not given up on their prey.