The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

“Who is she, the woman they took?” his mother asked.

But he could only shake his head, too choked with rage and sorrow to speak.

4

SHE could not see. She could not hear. Yet she was neither deaf nor blind, only drowning in a wash of such brilliance and overwhelming sound that it had all become a flood, one note, one tone, one absence of color that was pure light. She wasn’t sure she was actually breathing, or that there was any air, and yet she wasn’t dead either. Oddly enough, she also wasn’t afraid. For the first time in years, she understood that there was nothing to fear. The grain of her bow lay comfortably against her palm, gripped tight. The tip of her sheathed short sword, Lucian’s friend, grazed her thigh. Her quiver of arrows weighed on her back even as a shift in her position caused the leather straps to press against her collarbone, shifting the gold torque that lay heavily at her throat. A stray curl of hair tickled an ear.

Blue winked.

An instant or a thousand years later she saw it again: the blue flash of the lapis lazuli ring that Alain had given her. Somewhere, where her hand flailed at the tip of her nose or a hundred leagues away from the rest of her body, the ring found purchase and sparked color, a thread her vision could follow.

They were rising. She had a direction now. Her wings beat steadily in time with the others, the sound of their wings as variegated as the voice of a great river. But she didn’t have wings. They were carrying her. They had lifted her with them as they sprang to the heavens.

They had named her “child.”

In the seven-gated city of memory, in the tower of her heart, at the center of her being, rested a chamber set with five doors. Four faced the cardinal directions, north, east, south, and west. Da had taught her all this, the secrets of memory. With his tutoring, she had constructed the room in her mind. But the fifth door, set impossibly in the center of the room, he had built; through the keyhole she could see only fire, which he had locked away even from her.

Now she knew why.

Whose child was she?

Above her, blue flickered again, and as she reached with one hand to touch the other, she saw not the lapis lazuli ring but a tenuous curtain roiling the air, rimmed by blue-white flame whose outline had the same contours as the burning stone she had seen on Earth. Was this another gateway? Was the burning stone only one of many passages from one sphere to the next, from one plane of existence to another?

How was she to pass through, if she could not walk or ride?

They said, “Fly, child.” And let her go.

But she didn’t have any wings.

She plunged. The air was suddenly too thin to breathe. Flailing, she managed only not to drop her precious bow. And for that moment, as she fell, she saw the world laid out below her, a dense black carpet of earth with only the barest pale limning of receding sunlight far to the west where ocean surged restlessly at the edge of her vision. Yet against the vast carpet of land, far below, seven crowns gleamed, seven crowns with seven blazing points each, a central crown and six surrounding it, flung far from that center as though the central crown marked the axle and the other six glittering points along a wheel’s rim. She recognized it at once: it was Emperor Taillefer’s crown of stars writ large across the breadth of the land, encompassing many kingdoms and uncounted leagues. It was the great wheel, the true crown of stars. The ancient map she had seen at Verna made sense now: seven crowns in seven locations. Was this wheel the loom by which the Aoi had woven their immense and cataclysmic working two thousand seven hundred years ago?

At that moment, sucking in air that didn’t give her enough substance to breathe, she also realized that she was going to die.

Then the glorious creatures blazed around her again.

“She is too heavy to cross into the higher spheres.”

“She is not all of the same substance as are we.”

“She has no wings.”

They gathered her into them, and at their touch she knew an intense joy unlike anything she had ever experienced. They blazed with pure fire, fierce and bright, and the door that Da had locked against her was consumed in that flame. As it opened, she saw for the first time into her innermost heart, the core of her being:

Fire.

Not as fierce as theirs, truly, but of the same substance, impossibly intermingled with her human flesh.

Whose child was she?

They reached the shimmering curtain of light, and she passed through it as through a waterfall, waves of light pouring down over her. Yet she was no longer rising. She seemed caught in the eddy, and they had begun to fade as if they flew on and she remained behind.

“Wait!” she cried. But they had already moved beyond her reach, wings thrumming as one voice caught on the smooth shell where a higher sphere overlapped a lower: