Child of Flame

  Unlike his kinsman Kel, Urtan had the gift of patience, and he fell back to walk beside Alain to teach him new words: the names of trees, the parts of the body, the different tools and the type of stone they were made of. Beor strode at the front with various companions walking beside him. Now and again he shot an irate glance back toward Alain. But unlike an arrow, a glance could not prick unless you let it. Beor might hurt and even kill in a fit of jealous rage, but he could never do any other harm because he hadn’t any subtlety.

  The village feasted that evening on fish, venison, and a potage of barley mush flavored with herbs and leaves from the forest, sweetened by berries. Urtan ate with his family, his wife Abidi and his children Urta and a toddler who didn’t seem to have an intelligible name, leaving Alain to eat with the unmarried men, all of them except Beor little more than youths. Adica ate by herself, off to one side, without companionship, but when Alain made to get up to go over to her, Kel grabbed him and jerked him back, gesturing that it wasn’t permitted. Adica had been watching him, and now she smiled slightly and looked away. The burn scar along her cheek looked rather like a congealed spider’s web, running from her right ear down around the curve of the jawline to fade almost at her throat. The tip of her right ear was missing, so cleanly healed that it merely looked misshapen.

  Beor rose abruptly and began declaiming as twilight fell. Like a man telling a war story, he went on at length. Was he boasting? Kel and Tosti started to yawn, and Adica rose suddenly in the middle of the story and walked right out, away into the village. Alain wanted to follow her, but he wasn’t sure if such a thing was permitted. At last, Beor finished his tale. It was time for bed. Alain’s friends had given him a place to sleep beside them but at the opposite end of the men’s house from Beor. He was tired enough to welcome sleep, but when he rolled himself up in the furs allotted him, stones pressed into his side. He groped and found the offending pebbles, but they weren’t stones at all but some kind of necklace. It hadn’t been there earlier.

  At dawn, when he woke, he hurried outside to get enough light to see: someone had given him a necklace of amber. Kel, stumbling out sleepily behind him, whistled in admiration for the handsome gift, and called out to the others, and they teased Alain cheerfully, all but Beor, who stalked off.

  Down by the village gates, Adica was already up, performing the ritual she made every day at the gateway, perhaps a charm of protection. As if she heard their laughter, she glanced up. He couldn’t see her face clearly, but her stance spoke to him, the way she straightened her back self-consciously, the curve of her breasts under her bodice, the swaying of her string skirt as she walked from the gates over the plank bridge. It was difficult not to be distracted by the movement of her hips under the revealing skirt.

  Kel and Tosti laughed outright and clapped him on the shoulder. He could imagine what their words meant: gifts and women and longing looks. Some things didn’t change, even in the afterlife.

  He had come a long way. He no longer wore the ring that marked him as heir to the Count of Lavas. He no longer had to honor the vows pledged between him and Tallia. He no longer served the Lady of Battles. With a smile, he put on the amber necklace, although the gesture made his friends whoop and laugh.

  That day they hoisted the poles they’d cut the day before into place in the new palisade. Once, Beor neglected to brace while Alain was filling in dirt around a newly upright pole, and the resultant tumble caused two poles to come down. Luckily no one was hurt, but Beor got a scolding from one of the older men.

  Alain went down with Kel and Tosti to the river afterward to wash. “Come!” shouted Kel just before he dove under the water. “Good!” he added, when he came up for air. “Good water. Water is good.”

  Alain was distracted by the sight of the tumulus. Here, upstream from the village, the river cut so close below the earthworks that the ramparts rose right out of the water except for a thin strand of pebbly beach from which the men swam. He couldn’t see the stone circle from this angle, but something glinted from the height above nevertheless, a wink like gold. The twisting angle of the earthworks reminded him of the battle where he had fallen. He heard Thiadbold’s cries as if a ghost whispered in his ear. The past haunted him. Did the bones of their enemies lie up there? Two days ago, he had wandered off the height in a daze, following Adica. He hadn’t really looked.

  Stung by curiosity and foreboding, he began to climb. His companions shouted after him, good-humoredly at first, then disapprovingly and, finally, as he got over the first earthwork and headed for the next, with real apprehension. But no one followed him. At the top a wind was rising and he heard the hoot of an owl, although the sun hadn’t yet set. Where it sank in the west, clouds gathered, diffusing its light. The stones gleamed. He ran, with the hounds beside him, sure he would see his comrades, the Lions, fallen beside their Quman enemies, whose wings would be scattered and molting, melting away under wind and sun.

  As soon as he crossed into the stone circle, mist boiled up, drowning him, and he floundered forward. Was that the ring of battle in the distance? If he walked far enough, would he stumble back to the place he’d come from?

  Did he want to?

  He struck full against the altar stone, banging his thighs, and held himself up against the cold stone. The ringing had a gentle voice, not weapons at all but the click of leaves on the bronze cauldron.

  “Why come you to the gateway?” said a voice he recognized from his dream.

  He looked up but could see only a shape moving in the mist and the spark of blue fire, quickly extinguished.

  “Why am I here? Where am I?”

  “You have not traveled far as humankind measures each stride of the foot,” she answered. “I brought you off the path that leads to the Other Side. Has it not been told to you that you are to be the new husband of the Hallowed One of this tribe?”

  He touched the amber necklace at his neck, remembering the way Adica had invited him to sleep beside her. He had been angry, then, because he felt his desire was shameful. “None here speak in a language I understand, nor can they understand me. How is it that we can speak together, you and I, while 1 speak as a foreigner would with the others? You aren’t even human.”

  “By my nature I am bound to what was, what is, and what will be, and so my understanding is alive in the time to come as well as the time that is and the time that was.” Abruptly her tone changed, as though she were speaking to someone else. “Listen!” Her voice became faint. He heard the soft percussion of her hooves on the ground, moving away. “I am called. Adica comes looking.” Fainter still: “Beware. Guard the looms. The Cursed Ones walk!”

  “Can’t you give me the gift of speech?” he called, but she was already gone.

  “Alain!”

  The mist receded as suddenly as it had come. Adica hurried to meet him as twilight settled over the stones. He sat down, worn out by labor and by strangeness.

  Adica stopped before him and looked him over, both alarmed and concerned and, maybe, just a little irritated. She was handsome rather than pretty, with a wickedly sharp gaze and a firm mouth. This close, he had the leisure to study her body: she had the pleasing curves of a woman who usually gets enough to eat, but she had a second quality about her, an intangible strength like the glow off a hidden fire. In a funny way, she reminded him of Liath, as if magic threw a cloak over its wielders, seen as a nimbus of power.

  Her next words reproved him, although he couldn’t be sure for what. Abruptly, she saw the line of the amber necklace where it lay concealed under his linen tunic.

  Reproof vanished. She brushed a finger along the ridge the string of amber made under the soft fabric, then flushed.

  “You gave this to me, didn’t you?” he asked, lifting it on his fingers to display it.

  She smiled and replied in a tone half caressing and half flirtatious.

  “Ai, God, I wish I could understand you,” he exclaimed, frustrated. “Is it true I’m to be your husband? Are we to co
me to the marriage knowing so little of each other? Yet I knew nothing of Tallia on the day we were taken to the wedding bed. Ai, Lady, so little did I know of her!” He could still feel the nail in his hand, proof of her willingness to deceive.

  Mistaking his cry, or responding to it, Adica took hold of his hand and pulled him to his feet. For an instant, he thought she would kiss him, but she did not. In silence, she led him back to the village. The clasp of her hand made his thoughts swim dizzyingly until they drifted up at last to the centaur shaman’s last words. Who were the Cursed Ones? What were the looms? And how could he tell Adica, when they had no language in common?

  2

  “COME, up, to morning sun!” Kel prodded Alain awake. “To work!” He made an expansive gesture that included himself, Tosti, and Alain. “We go to work.”

  Three more days had passed in the village. It was a prosperous place, twelve houses and perhaps a hundred people in all. They had about a fourth of the outer palisade raised and today headed back to the forest to fell trees. Work made the day pass swiftly.

  During one leisurely break, Kel finished carving a stout staff out of oak, ornamenting each end with the face of a snarling dog. When next Beor hoisted his ax near Alain with a surly and threatening grimace, Kel made a great show of presenting the newly carved staff to Alain and even got Tosti to stand in for a demonstration of how the snarling dogs could “nip” at a man’s most delicate parts.

  The men’s laughter came at the expense of Beor this time, and he grunted and bore it, since to stalk off into the forest would have made him look even more ridiculous. Grudgingly, he let Alain work in peace as the afternoon wore on.

  But that evening they returned home to a somber scene. During the day, a child had died. By the stoic look on the faces of the dead child’s relative, they’d known it was coming. Alain watched as women wrapped the tiny body in a roughly-woven blanket, then handed the limp corpse to the father. He laid it in a log split in half and gouged out to make a coffin. After the mother placed a few trinkets, beads, feathers, and a carved wooden spoon beside its tattooed wrist, other adults sealed the lid. Together, they chanted a singsong verse that sounded like prayer.

  A strange half-human creature emerged from Adica’s house, clothed in power, with gold antlers and a gleaming torso. It took him two breaths to recognize Adica, dressed in the garments of power she had been wearing when he had first arrived.

  She blessed the coffin with a sprinkling of scented water and a complicated series of gestures and chants. Four men carried it out of the village as Adica sealed their path, behind them, with more charms and chants. The entire village walked in silent procession to the graveyard, a rugged field marked by small mounds of earth, some fresh, some overgrown with nettles and hops. Male relatives laid the coffin in a hole. The mother cut off her braid and threw it on top of the coffin, then scratched her cheeks until blood ran. The wailing of the other women had a kind of ritual sound to it, expected, practiced; the mother did not weep, only sighed. She looked drained and yet, in a way, relieved.

  Maybe the child had been sick a long time. Certainly Alain had never seen this one among the children who ran and played and did chores in the village all day.

  The grave was filled in and the steady work of piling and shaping a mound over the dead child commenced. In pairs and trios, people returned to the village, which lay out of sight beyond a bend in the river. Alain remained because Adica had not yet left. Sorrow and Rage flopped down, resigned to a long wait.

  Twilight lay heavily over them. Even in the five days he had been here, he noticed how it got darker earlier every night as the sun swept away from midsummer and toward its midwinter sleep. By the harvest and the weather, he guessed it was late summer or early autumn.

  A few men worked steadily, bringing sod in a wheelbarrow shaped all of wood, axle, wheel, supports, and plank base. He pitched in to help them while Adica stood by, arms raised, silently watching the heavens or praying in supplication. In her hallowing garb she seemed as much alarming as wondrous, a spirit risen out of the earth to bring help, or harm, to her petitioners.

  Dusk blurred the landscape to gray. Other men brought torches and set them up on stout poles so the work could continue, as it did steadily as night fell and the moon rose, full and splendid. Adica shone under its rays, a woman half deer and half human, a shape changer who might at any moment spring away four-footed into the dark forest and run him a merry chase.

  He saw them, suddenly, as starlight pricked holes in the blindness that protects mortal kind: he saw the ghosts and the fey spirits, half-seen apparitions clustering around the living people who sought to inter the dead. Was that the child’s soul, clamoring for release, or return? Sobbing for its mother, or screaming that it had been betrayed into death?

  Yet the spirits could not touch the living, because Adica in her garb of power had thrown up a net, as fine as spider’s silk, to keep them away. It shone under the moonlight as though touched with dew fallen from the fiery stars. No hungry spirit could pass through that net. Inside its invisible protection, the men labored on, a little nervous in the darkness in the graveyard, but trusting. They understood her power, and no doubt they feared her for it.

  Sorrow whined.

  That fast, the vision faded, but her lips continued to move as she chanted her spells. The moon rose higher and began to sink. Very late the mound was finished, a little thing, lonesome and forlorn in the deathly-still night. The father wiped his eyes. They gathered their tools and headed back toward the village, not without apprehensive looks behind them.

  But Alain lingered, waiting. Adica paced an oval around the tiny mound. Her golden antlers cut the heavens as she strode. Now and again she tapped her spiraling bronze waistband with her copper bracelets. The sound sang into the night like the flight of angels.

  Yet what could Adica know of angels? None here wore the Circle of Unity. He had seen their altars and offerings, reminding him of customs done away with by the fraters and deacons but which certain stubborn souls still clung to. Her rituals did not seem like the work of the Enemy, although perhaps he ought to believe they were.

  She fell silent as she came to a halt on the west side of the fresh mound. That quickly, she was simply Adica, with her frightfully scarred cheek, the woman whom he had heard in a dream ask the centaur shaman if Alain was to be her husband. She had spoken the words with such an honest heart, with such simple longing.

  “Alain!” She looked surprised to see him. With practiced movements she took off her sorcerer’s garb and wrapped them up with staff and mirror into a leather skin, not neglecting certain charms and a prayer as if to seal in their magical power.

  Slinging the bundle over her back, she began walking back to the village. He fell in beside her, finding room on the path as the hounds ambled along behind. His staff measured out the ground as they walked. The moon marked their way straight and bright.

  They passed through a narrow belt of forest and emerged west of the village. The moon’s light made silver of the river. Beyond the village rose the tumulus. Nearer, the sentry’s watch fire burned red by the village gates. Closer still lay the birthing house, and from within its confines he heard a baby cry fretfully. A nightingale sang, and ceased. The thin glow heralding dawn rimmed the eastern sky as the moon sank toward the horizon in the west. Birds woke, trilling, and a flock of ducks settled in a rush in the shallows of the river. In the distance, a wolf howled.

  Adica took his hand. She leaned into him, and kissed him. Her lips were sweet and moist. Where her body pressed against his, his own body woke hungrily. His hand tangled in the strings of her skirt, and beneath the wool cording he touched her skin.

  A small voice woke in the back of his head. Hadn’t he made vows? Hadn’t he promised celibacy to Tallia, to honor God? Oughtn’t he to remember his foster father’s promise that he would cleave to the church and its strictures?

  He let the oak staff fall to the ground as he tightened his arms around Adica
. Her warmth and eagerness enveloped him. He’d given all that away when he had come into this country. Now he could do as he pleased, and what he pleased right now was to embrace this woman who desired him.

  Once, perhaps, in those long ago days when he had been joined to Stronghand in his dreams, Alain would have heard the shouting first. Now, because he was lost in the urgency of her embrace, the blat of a horn startled him so badly he jumped. Sorrow and Rage began barking. Adica pulled away and threw back her head to listen.

  The sun hadn’t yet risen, but light glinted at the height of the tumulus, lying to the east. Distant thunder rolled and faded.

  She exclaimed out loud, words he could not understand. As she bent to grab her leather bundle off the ground, an arrow passed over her back, right where she had just been standing up straight. He dove and knocked her down. A flight of arrows whistled harmlessly past, pale shafts skittering to a halt on the ground beyond.

  Figures sprang out of the forest. The horn sounded again, and a third time, shrill and urgent.

  The masked attackers who rushed out of the forest swarmed toward the birthing house, where Weiwara sheltered with her infant twins. Adica was already up, staff in hand, leaving her bundle behind. Sorrow and Rage bolted forward in her wake, and Alain, fumbling, got hold of his staff and raced after her.

  But no matter how fast they ran, the bandits got to the birthing house first even as he heard Adica scream out Weiwara’s name. Too late.

  Weiwara shouted from the house. There came a shriek of anger, followed by the solid thunk of a heavy weight hitting wood. Two figures darted from the house, each carrying a small bundle. Adica got near enough to strike at one with her staff, hitting him forcefully enough at the knees so he stumbled. The other raced on, back to the forest, as the first turned and, with the child tucked under one arm, thrust out his sword. Dawn made fire of the metal as he cut. Adica danced aside. The rising light played over the man’s face, since he, unlike the other two, wasn’t masked. Nor was he human: he had a dark complexion, with black hair and striking features that reminded Alain of Prince Sanglant.