The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

“Follow us.”

There are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. They move on the winds that blow far above the sphere of the Moon, and now and again their gaze falls like the strike of lightning to the Earth below, where it sears anything it touches. Their bodies are the breath of the Sun coalesced into mind and will.

She cannot follow them, and her heart breaks.

Yet as the light of their passing faded, she began to search around herself, found herself walking through endless twisting halls that, scoured and scalded by their passage, glowed with a faint blue luminescence. She was inside the vision made by fire, which is the crossroads between the worlds. She had to find her way home.

But she didn’t even know where home was.

There! A boy slept with six companions, heads pillowed on stone, bodies resting on a rich hoard of treasure.

There! Misshapen creatures crawled through tunnels, trapped there by the element of earth that coursed through their blood.

There! A dying man slumped against the burning stone, two great hounds nudging him and licking him as though these attentions would bring him back to life. He stirred, and she recognized him with horror and grief: It was Alain.

She leaped for him, but she misjudged the currents in this place. They swept her into the stone, through the gateway, and she could only grab for him as she passed by. Her hand caught on a mailed shoulder—

He sees a woman clothed in cold fire, and her fiery touch hauls him ruthlessly sideways until he falls free and slams into the ground. He lies there for an interminable time, in a stupor, so washed in pain that he is blind. Then the tongues lick him again, driving him, always driving him to live.

Weeping, he staggers up, not truly able to stand because the wound has pierced so deep, but their great shoulders give him support. He still stands in the hill fort, but even numbed by pain he sees that he is no longer where he once was. It is absolutely silent. No bodies litter the ground, dashed and broken. No horns ring, nor do men cry out in pain, nor does the flooding river’s roar overpower the rumbling of distant thunder. The sun rises in the east to reveal a clear and pleasant day.

Impressive ramparts twine down the hill, some of them freshly dug. Where a low mist kisses the low-lying ground still half in shadow below, he sees a river winding through a sparse woodland of pine and beech, only the river does not follow the same course as the river he crossed this morning. It is a different river in the same place. Yet why, then, does the hill fort look so new? Why, at the crown of the hill fort, do all seven stones stand upright where moments ago they all lay fallen in a lichen-swamped heap?

No blue-fire stone burns in the middle of the circle. Instead, within the ring of stones he sees a sward, hacked down so that grass bobs raggedly at various heights. Cowslip and yellow dew-cup give scattered color to the grass. Pale purple-white flax flowers ring the squat upright stones. Mist veils the farthest reaches of the hilltop and twines around the more distant of the standing stones.

On a low, flat stone situated in the center of the circle stands a huge bronze cauldron incised with birds: herons and ducks, ravens and cranes. From its rim hang rings, each one linked to a second ring, from which dangles a bronze leaf. He can smell that the cauldron is filled with water. The pure scent of it teases his lips and nostrils. Truly he no longer has any reason to live. He doesn’t even know where he is anymore. It would be better just to lie down and die peacefully here, to lay aside his anger at the injustice of his fortune, lay aside his grief at what he’s lost and what he failed to do. Yet his legs move anyway. With a hand on either hound to support his weight, he staggers forward toward the cauldron because he has an idea that one sip of that water will heal him, even though he wants to die because the pain is so bad, both the physical pain and the pain of anger and grief. Yet those same feet keep taking their stumbling, weak steps because he can’t even despair enough to fall down and die. He wonders if it is possible to love life too well.

Yet why would the world be so beautiful if it wasn’t meant to be lived in and loved?

It seems to him that a woman moves toward him. As she emerges from the mist in the gap between two stones he sees that she isn’t truly a woman at all. She has long black hair that falls to her waist and a complexion the creamy rich color of polished antlers. Her eyes don’t look right; the pupils are sharp, not round, and her ears aren’t round either, they pull into a point tufted with dark hair. Where her waist slopes to her hips, her body changes to become a mare’s body, sleek and black like her hair.

She is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen.