The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars #3)

“Wait for us. Come to us.”

She hesitated.

“Run,” Da would answer. “Run, Liath.”

The compulsion to wait slid from her like rainwater off a good roof. With fear and anger fueling her, she urged her mount forward. It eagerly broke into a canter. She glanced back, and her heart almost died within her. Creatures formed like columns of living oily smoke streamed along the road, chasing her. They had voices, a rustling murmur like countless leaves stirred in a gale, underscored by that terrible dull tolling bell-voice. That they were living creatures she did not doubt.

And they were gaining on her.

She freed her bow from its quiver, readied an arrow. On the wind she smelled a hot stench like that of the forge. Her horse bolted, and she let it run while she turned in the saddle and, drawing, measured the distance between her and her pursuers. She loosed, but the arrow fell harmlessly onto empty road.

The shout came as warning. “Hey, there! Look where you’re going!”

Ahead, in the dimness, she saw a small party: two riders and an escort of four men-at-arms. A minor lord, perhaps, or a steward about the business of his lady: She did not recognize the sigil of a deer’s head on white that marked the shields. They swung wide to make room for her headlong flight.

But as she drew breath to shout a warning to them in turn, light flashed to her right, and beyond the road where the ground swelled up to make a neat little tumulus, fire flashed and beckoned from a shadowy ring of standing stones.

An owl glided past, so close that her horse shied away rightward, breaking off the road. She needed no more urging than that. With her bow in one hand and the reins in the other, she let the horse have its head. It jumped a low ditch to reach the grassy slope that marked the tumulus. From the road, men shouted after her.

A moment later she heard screaming.

The horse took the slope with the speed of a creature fleeing fire, and yet it was fire that greeted them in the center of the tiny stone circle: seven small stones, two of them fallen, one listing. And in the center stood an eighth stone as tall as a man of middling height; it burned with a blue-white fire that gave off no heat.

The shrieking from the road turned into garbled noises that no human ought to be able to utter. She dared not look behind. Ahead, the owl settled with uncanny grace onto the top of the burning stone, and the horse leaped—

She shouted with surprise as blue-white flame flared all around her. Her horse landed, shied sideways, and stopped.

With reins held taut and the horse quiet under her, Liath stared around the clearing: beaten earth, a layer of yellowing scrub brush, and thin forest cover made up of small-leafed oak as well as trees she had never seen before. But her voice failed her when the man sitting on a rock rose to examine her with interest. Not a human man, by any measure: with his bronze-tinted skin and beardless face and his person decorated with all manner of beads and feathers and shells and polished stones, he was of another kinship entirely. Humans named his kind Aoi, “the Lost Ones,” the ancient elvish kin who had long since vanished from the cities and paths trodden by humanity.

But she knew him, and he knew her.

“You have come,” he said. “Sooner than I expected. You must hide until the procession has passed, or I cannot speak for what judgment the council will pass on you and your presence here. Come now, dismount and give me the horse.”

He looked no different than in the vision seen through fire, although he was smaller in stature than she expected. The feathers with which he decorated himself shone as boldly as if they had been painted. The flax rope at his thigh was perhaps a finger longer than when she had last seen him, weeks—or was it months?—ago. A tremulous moan sounded from the depths of the forest, and a moment later she recognized it as a horn call. She shaded her eyes, and there along a distant path seen dimly under shadows she saw a procession winding through the trees. At the head of the procession, a brilliant wheel of beaten gold and iridescent green plumes spun, although no wind blew.

“How did I come here?” she asked hoarsely. “The creatures were chasing me, and then I saw an owl … and the burning stone.” She turned in the saddle to see the stone still blazing, blue-white and cold. No owl flew.

“An owl,” he mused, fingering a proud feather of mottled brown and white, one dull plume among the many bright ones that trimmed his forearm sheath. He smiled briefly, if not kindly. “My old enemy.”

“Then the horse leaped, and I was here,” she finished haltingly. She felt like a twig borne down a flooding stream. Too much was happening at once.

“Ah.” He displayed the rope and the fiber he twined to create it. “Out of one thing, we make another, even if there is no change or addition of substance. Sometimes it is the pattern that matters most. These strands of flax, alone, cannot support me or aid me as this rope can, and yet are they not both the same thing?”