The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

Then he is across, and he spins back just as Fourth Son hits the planks with his heavy pounding run. With the merest snick of his claws, he finishes off the rope struts that are already cut through and frayed to the breaking point.

The bridge collapses under Fourth Son’s considerable weight. Planks skitter and tumble and rope handholds drop away. He falls into the icy water—not that the water will drown him, but here the current runs narrow and strong as it pours itself over the cliff and spills and spins and sprays down.

Down he falls over the Lightfell Waterfall. His body strikes rocks, spins, bumps, tumbles down the ragged cliff face and finally is doused in the pounding roar at the base where the rush of water hammers into the fjordwaters and erupts as mist.

He goes under.

Fifth Son waits atop the ridge, scanning the waters.

There! A head bobs up, ice-white braid a snake upon the water. Arms stroke with stubborn resolve. Beaten, bloodied, and battered by the fall, Fourth Son is yet alive.

He expected this.

But he does not have to wait long for what he knows will come next.

Farther out, where the fjordwaters lie still, movement eddies. A slick back surfaces and vanishes, swift and silent as it circles in. There, to its left, another ripple stirs the surface of the water. And another.

Fourth Son strokes toward shore. He is not dead, of course, but he does not need to be dead. He only needs to be bleeding.

Waters part as a tail skims, flicks up, and slaps down. Too late Fourth Son realizes his danger. The waters swirl with sudden violence around him. He thrashes, goes under. Wet scales gleam, curving backs swirl, a ghastly head rears up, water streaming from the netlike hair which itself winds and coils like a living thing. Fourth Son emerges from the roiling waters clawing at his attackers. From his station at the height of the cliff, Fifth Son hears a howl of triumph as one of the merfolk shudders and sinks, while an inky black trail bubbles in its wake. The merfolk close in. Water boils. Fourth Son vanishes beneath the cold gleam of the fjordwaters. Like a churning mill, the eddies run round, slow into ripples, smooth over.

All is still again—except for the shattering roar of the falls. Blood stains the water and mingles with inky fluid torn out of the merman.

A back breaks the surface, slides in a graceful curve back into the depths, and turns toward shore. He waits. A rock shelf juts out along one side of the base of the waterfall. Suddenly, the waters part and the creature rears up to reveal its face: flat red eyes gleaming like banked fires, noseless but for dark slits over a nodelike swelling, and a mouth grinning with rows of glittering sharp teeth. As it rises, its hair and mane begin to writhe wildly, each strand with its own snapping mouth as if eels had affixed themselves to its head and neck. It has shoulder and arms, hands tipped with razor-sharp nails, and a ridged back that the light gilds to a silvery shine. The huge tail, longer than legs and far more powerful, heaves out of the water and slaps once, hard, echoing, on the rock. It makes no other sound.

It tosses two braids—one neatly shorn, one slightly bloody—onto the rocky shelf. The merfolk are as much beast as intelligent being—or so he has always believed. But they know the contest, and they know the rules. It would not do to underestimate them. An ambitious general can never have enough allies.

With an awkward roll, arching backward, the merman spills off the shelf and hits the water hard. The huge splash melds with the waterfall’s mist. The tail flicks up, as if in salute, slaps down again, and it is gone.

All lies still.

He climbs down the steps carved into the rock beside the falls. Down here, in the cavern hidden behind the spray, the priest hid his heart in a chest. He discovered it because he was patient; he waited and watched, and he listened to the priest murmur and sing about his hidden heart. And when at last one night the priest scurried from his nest cloaked with such shadows as he could grasp in the midsummer twilight, Fifth Son followed him.

Now he controls the priest’s heart—and the priest’s obedience.

He wonders, briefly, about Bloodheart’s curse. By his own testimony the priest turned the curse away from himself But where did it fall? Who will be cursed by the poison of Blood heart’s hatred and thwarted greed?

Hate is the worst poison of all because it blinds.

He reaches the shelf, pauses to scan the waters, but they lie unsullied by any evidence of the gruesome fight conducted a short while before. Water speaks in a short-lived voice, ever-changing, mortal by reason of its endless fluidity.

Yet even water wears away rock in time, so the WiseMother say.

Out beyond the thrumming roar of the waterfall, the sun make the water gleam until it shines like a painted surface. Is that a ripple of movement, or only a trick of the light?