The Burning Stone

She poured all of it into the fist-shaped depression, and as it spread and spread, backed up while she stayed with her feet in the water. She plucked the feathers, one as gold as the sun, one as green as the spring earth, one as black as the pit, and let them fall.



When they struck the water, a steam rose from it, a mist that eddied, then cleared. Within the mist he saw a vision so lifelike that he felt he ought to be able to reach out and touch the woman within.



A young woman with skin the color of burned cream reads by candlelight, lips moving but making no sound. Her right hand turns the pages, one by one. Her left hand rests on her hugely pregnant belly.



He heard a hiss, sharp, between clenched teeth; a moment later he recognized it as Kansi-a-lari’s breath, her voice. “He is nearby. I can feel him.”



A man moves into the room cautiously. He is tall, broad-shouldered, graceful in the way of big men who are at ease in their bodies. There is a glint in his eyes that might be fury—or laughter. This man he has seen twice before in visions.



His companion breathed out a Salian word, sharply, on an exhalation: “Sanglant!” She stamped her foot three times, and shook the spear threateningly toward the sky with a high cry like that of a hawk.



The vision vanished together with the water and tinctures she had poured out on the marble floor. Wind cut the mist into tatters and the sun rose on a bright spring morning full of promise. They stood alone on an oval plaza; the sea huffed and murmured below. The Aoi woman had a grim, satisfied smile on her face. She handed him the other leather bottle.



“Drink now. After that, we will eat what is left of our stores. We will rest here for a day, and begin our descent tomorrow at dawn.”



He would have gulped it all down, but he had too much respect for his good companion, the horse, so he poured water into his palm and let it snuffle it up. Only then did he sip himself, three swallows, then three more, sparingly.



When he had his voice back, he turned to her. “Who was the young woman? She was beautiful.”



“I don’t know.” She sat at her ease by the shallow pit, eating the last of the dried goat’s meat.



“Who was the man?”



She shredded the tough meat to tatters and ate each string of it, then licked her fingers before she finally replied.



“That is my son.”



2



TALLIA whined and complained, but in fact once any order was given firmly enough, she obeyed it. It was the tack he ought to have taken all along. He understood that now, finally. She certainly outranked him, but birth wasn’t everything; she was weak, just as Lavastine had said. He remembered Duchess Yolande’s hints and intrigues about crowns and thrones. Yet Tallia wasn’t even strong enough to rule herself. How could she be expected to rule a queendom?



It took her a long time to recover because she had come so close to starving herself. For a while she lay ill, often feverish. Certain foods gave her the flux. Others she vomited up. At first she refused food from any hand but his, so he had to feed her minuscule portions six times a day like the invalid she was. But growing up in Bel’s house he had spent time caring for sick children, he knew how to handle them, obstinate one moment and malleable the next. Eventually she became accustomed to eating normally again, and after some weeks she began to gain strength. The Feast of St. Herodia came, and went, the month of Askulavre wept to its chill conclusion, and Duchess Yolande did not arrive.



In the last days of Askulavre, heavy gray clouds covered the sky and for two days it snowed industriously. For weeks they could travel no farther than the river and the little convent dedicated to St. Thierry. It had been established by Lavastine’s grandfather, Charles Lavastine the Elder, the year his mother, Countess Lavrentia, had died giving birth to her second child, Lord Geoffrey’s grandfather, who had also been named Geoffrey.



St. Oya’s Day came, and Tallia proved strong enough to sit beside him as he welcomed the girls who in the year past had been blessed with their holy courses. She garlanded them with wreaths of juniper and holly, since the snow precluded the customary violets. At church that day, the girls so recognized were allowed to sit on the women’s benches in recognition of their new status. But St. Oya’s Day released nothing in Tallia’s womb. Her breasts did not swell, as they would if she were pregnant. No holy blood stained her thighs as the moon waxed and waned. Several gnarled wisewomen from the village examined Tallia and said that because of her illness her womb had withered and needed time to become fertile again, time together with various teas steeped in blind nettle and dittany, or a potion of Lady’s Mantle, every woman’s cloak against illnesses of the womb. Given time and a diet strong in meat and beans, they said, her womb would swell again and be ready to grow a child. But they warned him that, until then, he and she must not resume the marriage bed.