The Burning Stone
He heard it as a whisper. By the time he got up and came round the side of their hut, she was just reaching the door. She saw him, grasped him by the elbow. She was in the grip of such an overpowering emotion that her skin almost burned him. He put a hand to her forehead, to draw it off, but she only caught his other arm and gazed at him fiercely.
“Are any of the servants near?”
He listened. Whistled. “Nay, none but Jerna. She’s nursing the baby.”
She dropped her voice to a whisper anyway. “There are four goats with kids down by the stock shed. We’ll need one of them. As long as Sister Anne’s sorcery binds this valley, Jerna won’t be able to leave.”
“I’ve never heard you refer to her as ‘Sister Anne’ before. What’s amiss, Liath?”
She leaned into him as if to embrace him—dangerous enough in itself—but she spoke so softly into his ear that even a servant dancing on the wind nearby would not have been able to overhear. “We will leave tonight.”
“What’s amiss, Liath?” he repeated. It was a windless day, remarkably so, and yet, from this angle of the valley he could see trees swaying down by the tower and hall. Up here, on the middle slope, it was quiet.
Hidden behind the hut, Blessing began to wail. Liath bolted, but he caught her and passed her up, came around the side of the hut to see the tree where Jerna usually settled when it was time for a feeding. Jerna was gone. Blessing lay tumbled on the ground, screaming, linen swaddling bands a little unwound as though she’d hit the ground and rolled. He caught her up and held her against his chest, and she quieted almost at once. Then, in the way of babies, to whom past and future seem equally meaningless, she began to coo and smile.
“Ai, Lady,” said Liath, coming up beside him. She put out her arms. He laid Blessing in them, and the little girl babbled sweetly as Liath stood there with tears running down her face. “She killed him.”
The wind down by the lower buildings had picked up. He could actually hear its rustle and murmur now, and yet it wasn’t climbing the slope as would a natural wind. Were they all thrashing and moaning in an eddy centered about Anne? Was all of this, inevitably, about Anne?
“She killed Da.”
“Ah.” That exhausted his eloquence. What else could he possibly say? I can’t believe she would do such a thing? But he could believe it. That was the problem.
“Da was running from her all along. From them, from the magi. Why did he steal me from them? What did he know that would make him do something so drastic? He must have known they would pursue him. He must have thought it was worth the risk. Why didn’t he tell me what he knew? Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Sit down,” said Sanglant, and she sat. Shock had made a puppet of her. “Who can we look to for aid?”
She laughed bitterly. “No one. None of them.”
“But Sister Venia seems discontent. She wasn’t happy that Sister Anne let Heribert go.”
“She is better than the others, in some ways. She doesn’t treat me as if I’m diseased just because I have a child and a husband. I like Sister Meriam, but I don’t believe she will help us if helping us means going against Sister Anne. Ai, Lady. I let them lull me. They taught me only what they wanted me to know, and I listened to their promises and sat by passively all these months while they threw me the crumbs. Just enough. Just enough to keep me content, like a cow never looking past the fence.”
The low rumble of a distant avalanche shuddered the air, but when he gazed up at the high ridges and peaks that hemmed them in, he saw no telltale rise of dust, no plume of white haze. A moment later he heard a sharp crack, like distant thunder, but there were no clouds today except for the plumes that often were tethered at the highest peaks.
“Something has distracted them,” he said, watching wind whip tree branches into a frenzy below. It remained calm and windless here, not two hundred strides above the little storm. “In the chest there should still be that little pouch of sheep’s gut. We can use that to feed Blessing. I’m sure she’ll take goat’s milk now. There’s a small sack of barley and some beans hanging from the rafters. There’s fennel and mint, already dried—”
“We’ve got chestnuts, too.”
He nodded. “When you’ve filled the packs and saddlebags, hide them in the chest. I don’t believe the servants can find it there. I only ever saw one of them able to move into wood, and I haven’t seen him since Heribert left.”
“I pray he’s well,” murmured Liath.