Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4) Page 7

Lifting the mirror, she began the prayers to waken the stones:

“Heed me, that which opens in the east.

Heed me, that which opens in the west.

I pray to you, Fat One, let me spread the warp of your heavenly weaving so that I can walk through the passage made by its breath.”

She shifted the mirror until the light of the stars that made up the Grindstone caught in its polished surface. Reflected by the mirror, the terrible power of the stars would not burn her. With her staff she threaded that reflected light into the loom of the stones and wove herself a living passageway out of starlight and stone. Through the soles of her feet she felt the keening of the ancient queens, who had divined in the vast loom of the stars a secret of magic that not even the Cursed Ones had knowledge of. Threads of starlight caught in the stones and tangled, an architecture formed of insubstantial light woven into a bright gateway. She stepped through into rain. Her feet squished on sodden ground, streaking the grass with the last traces of chalk. The air steamed with moisture, hot and heavy. Rain poured down. She bumped up against a standing stone, her shoulder cushioned by a dense growth of moss grown up along the stone.

It was, obviously, impossible to see any stars. Nor could she see the path. But Falling-down had built a shelter nearby, and she stumbled around in darkness until she bumped up against its thatched roof. A hummock of straw that stank of mold made a damp seat. While she waited, she worked her part of the pattern of the great working in her mind’s eye over again. She could never practice enough the precise unfolding of the ritual that would, after generations of war, allow those who suffered under the plague of the Cursed Ones to strike back.

As the day rose, the rain slackened. She walked down the hillock on a trail so wet that her feet got soaked while her shoulders remained dry. Fens stretched out around her, glum sheets of standing water separated by small islands and dense patches of reeds.

Falling-down’s people had built a track across the fens, hazel shoots cut, split, and woven together to make a springy panel on which people could walk above the marshy ground. As she walked along the track, the clouds began to break up, and the sun came out. On a distant hummock, a silhouette appeared. A person called out a “halloo” to her, and she lifted a hand in reply but did not pause. It was easily a morning’s walk to the hills at the edge of the fens, where Falling-down and his tribe made their home.

Birds sang. She paused once to eat the curds she had brought with her; once she waded off the track to pick berries. Grebes and ducks paddled through shallow waters. A flock of swans glided majestically past. A heron waited in solitary splendor, queenly and proud. It stirred suddenly and took wing with great, slow flaps. A moment later she heard a distant trumpeting call, and she hunkered down on the track and watched silently as a huge winged shape passed along the horizon far to the south and then vanished: a guivre on the hunt.

At last the track gave out onto dry land that sloped upward to become hills. Abandoned fields overgrown with weeds gave way to fields ripe with barley and emmer. Women and men labored with flint sickles harvesting one long strip of emmer. A few noticed her and called to the others, and they all stopped to watch her. A man blew into a small horn, alerting the village above.

Soon she had an escort of children, all of them jabbering in their incomprehensible language, as she walked up to the scatter of houses that marked the village. On the slopes above lay more fields and then forest.

It was still hot and humid, the fever days of late summer. Sweat trickled down her back as she came among the houses. Two women coiled clay into pots while a third smoothed the coils into a flat surface on which she spread a fine paste of paler clay. A finished pot, still unfired, sat beside her, stamped with the imprint of a braided cord. Four men scraped hides. Two half-grown boys toiled up the slope carrying water in bark buckets.

The headwoman of the village emerged from her house. Adica offered her the bead necklace from the north country, a proper meeting gift that would not disgrace her tribe, and in return the headwoman had a girl bring warm potage flavored with coriander and a thick honey mead. Then she was given leave, by means of certain familiar gestures, to continue on up the slope to the house of Falling-down, the tribe’s conjuring man.

As she had hoped, he was not alone.

Falling-down was so old that all his hair was white. He claimed to have celebrated the Festival of the Sun sixty-two times, but Adica could not really believe that he could have seen that many festivals, much less counted them all. He sat cross-legged, carving a fishing spear out of bone. Because he was a conjuring man, the Hallowed One of his tribe, he put magic into the spear by carving ospreys and long-necked herons along the blade to give the tool a bird’s success in hunting fish. He whistled under his breath as he worked, a spell that wound itself into the making.