The Burning Stone

“Ah! I misunderstood,” continued Yolande. “I thought you said that Lavastine himself was laid to rest today. What fine workmanship this is! It is very lifelike. I swear I have seen nothing like it even at the chapel in Autun. There is a stone statue of the great emperor himself, lying in state, rather like this, but I swear that the workmanship is not so excellent.”



Tallia whispered. “It was a curse.”



“I beg your pardon?” asked Yolande sharply, glancing at Alain. Geoffrey had come forward and he ran a hand over one stone shoulder, then pulled his hand back quickly as if he had felt something disturbing.



“God cursed him for not letting me build a chapel in honor of Our Mother and Her Son,” said Tallia. “That is why he died. But everything will be different, now.”



“So it will,” murmured Yolande, glancing at Geoffrey, “if you make it so. What of an heir? Are you pregnant yet?”



Geoffrey’s head came up. Stillness settled so profoundly over the group that Alain heard dust falling from the eaves and mice scrabbling in the walls. Tallia took in breath to speak. The last lance of sunlight through the western windows made a path along the stone floor, trembling, as brief as a human’s lifespan, one passing tremor in an angel’s wings.



It flickers, a pale rose curtain in the air, light trembling in the sky and then fading. Was that the passage of an angel’s wings? Nay. He knows better. The WiseMothers say that the curtain of light seen sometimes in the winter sky is wind off the sun, blown to earth. He supposes they are correct; they see much farther than he does. But on such a night as this, he wonders if it is not wind at all but a kind of water, some deep inexplicable tide that drags back and forth, rising and falling, between the earth and the heavens. Here he stands, caught in the current, waiting.



The air breathes around him with the slow exhalation of earth, warmth rising into the chill night sky as heat fades off the rocks. He waits in a crater, a bowl of stone on the high fjall. He waits alone, because he alone was marked by the spoor of Hakonin’s OldMother. Because he defeated Hakonin’s warriors five seasons ago, because he earned a name by becoming chieftain of Rikin tribe, because he drove off Jatharin’s raiders who harried Hakonin’s outlying farms, because of all this, he was chosen by Hakonin’s OldMother to enter the nesting cave deep in the rock. The ways are hidden from all but the SwiftDaughters, traps and pitfalls await the reckless, those who seek what is forbidden, the secret of the nests.



He walked through rock halls and along the phosphorescent gleam of tunnels, following the faint chime and scatter of the golden girdle of the SwiftDaughter who led him. She brought him here, up stairs carved into the rock, to this bowl of stone open to the air, stung by the wind off the fjall. Here, he waits.



He perceives it first as a tickle along the back of his neck, a penetrating pain at the base of his spine. All at once the scent blooms as sharp as obsidian’s edge.



Hakonin’s YoungMother has spawned.



The smell hits him hard. Pain rips through his belly. He is torn in half, eviscerated. All of his senses reel under the onslaught. As with a needle, a thread is sewn through him, woven into him, so there is no ending to what he was before and no beginning to what he is now. When the tide comes in, the strand is helplessly engulfed; when a waterskin is filled too full, the water bursts and spills over because it cannot contain more than what it is: when a smoldering fire catches dry tinder, it rages.



He is in the grip of it. He is lost to it, a mass of feeling. The smell of moist nests freshly expelled stings him like a rain of arrows showering down on him, each one piercing him to the bone.



Pity poor Alain. For him, every day is as this day, scarred by the pitiless and bottomless maw of emotion.



Hakonin’s YoungMother emerges from shadow, a graceful, massive shape like to the most beautiful granite. She watches him steadily, the weight of judgment in her gaze. Beyond her, fresh nests glisten in shallow pools, masses of tiny globes whose colorless membranes are bathed rose-red under the curtain of heavenly light dancing above, the wind off the sun. Their complex perfume tangles with the thread grown into his body to make him part of the weave. Down by his groin, a sac buds and swells, ready to erupt. Others follow.



He is no longer his own creature. For this night, he belongs to Hakonin’s Mothers, and he will serve their purpose, which is the life of the tribe. He staggers forward, hating this, reveling in this as his last rational thoughts are obliterated by the raw red hunger of a thing he cannot name in his own language but only in the language of Alain, which is “desire.”