Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4) Page 394

The land where Eldest Uncle’s people made their home is ripped right up by the roots, like a tree wrenched out of its soil by the hand of a giant, and flung into the sky. All the Ashioi walking beyond the limits of their land are dragged outward in its wake, drowned in its eddy, but they cannot follow it into the aether. They get yanked into the interstices between Earth and the Other Side, caught forever betwixt and between as shades who can neither walk fully on Earth nor yet leave it behind.

But they are not the only ones who suffer.

The cataclysm strikes innocent and guilty alike, old and young, animals and thinking creatures, guivres and mice, human children and masked warriors, Ashioi children and human soldiers armed with weapons crafted of stone. The Earth itself buckles and strains under the potency of the spell. Did the sorcerers themselves understand what they were doing? Did they know how far the effects of their spell would reach ? Did they mean to decimate their people in order to save their people?

Impossible to know, and she can never ask them: they are long dead, never to be woken.

Blue winked within the lightning radiance of the spell. All at once, she saw Alain on his knees on a low hill, with a hound on either side of him. The hounds tugged desperately at him, trying to drag him back from the edge of a blazing circle of stones. Alain clawed helplessly at the body of the girl who lay crumpled on the ground. Wasn’t it the same antlered girl who had met her in the realm of Mok? Who had seen with such keen sight into Liath’s own heart before even Liath had been able to fathom those depths? The girl was so unbearably young, younger even than Liath, maybe not more than seventeen, but she was quite dead. In an instant more, when the spell’s last storm-surge struck back at the looms in which it had been woven into life, Alain would be dead, too.

Liath unfurled her wings. She reached into the past, caught hold of him and his hounds, and dragged them with her back to the world they had left behind months, or even years, before.

EPILOGUE

THE queen with the knife-edged smile, called Arrow Bright, is long dead yet strong enough still to see with the heart and eyes of the woman who at dawn leads the remnants of her people through what remains of the forest. They emerge at last from the shelter of charred and blistered trees, most of the children crying, a few horribly silent, and every surviving adult injured in some way. Standing here at the edge of the cultivated fields, they numbly survey the ruin of their village.

“Come,” says the one called Weiwara, leaning on her staff. She has a bright heart, made fierce by anger, by wisdom bought too dearly, and by the twin babies, barely more than one year old, who rest against her body, one slung at her chest and the other against her back, and the three-year-old tottering along gamely at her side. “The Cursed Ones are gone. It is safe now.”

They stagger out into an oddly soft morning. Burned houses smolder in the village, although amazingly the council pole thrusts intact out of the collapsed roof of the council house. Mist wreathes the tumbled logs of the palisade. Bodies litter the ground, Cursed Ones who died in the first attacks. She recognizes Beor’s form, fallen into the ditch just beyond the gates. He led the charge when they chose at last to break out of the doomed village, and he took the brunt of the Cursed Ones’ retaliatory attack. It is due to his courage and boldness that anyone escaped the besieged village at all. The bronze sword he wielded lies half concealed under his hip. A fly crawls over his staring eye. A child sobs out loud to see the horrific sight.

“Come,” she says sternly, herding them on: about forty children of varying ages and not more than a dozen adults, pregnant women, elders, and Agda and Pur, both of whom would have preferred to stay and fight but whose knowledge—of herbs and midwifery and of stoneknapping—is too valuable to lose.

They follow the detritus of the fight along the path that leads to the tumulus. There lies Urtan, abdomen sliced open. A blow crushed Tosti’s head. Beor’s sister, Etora, looks as if she were trampled by horses and expired at last after trying to drag herself back to the village. Many Cursed Ones lie dead, too, but of the injured they find no sign.

A shout reaches them. Folk pour out from behind the earthworks that guard the tumulus. Battered, bloody, limping, exhausted, they remain triumphant despite the destruction littering the ground around them and the death on every side. But Weiwara has no heart for rejoicing. She weeps when she sees her dear husband. He can’t walk, but the wound that cut through the flesh of his right thigh to reveal bone looks clean and might heal well enough. Little Useti flings herself on her father, bawling, and after Weiwara has spoken with Ulfrega of Four Houses, she climbs grimly on up through the maze of earthworks.