Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (95 page)

"But you think St. Johanna wrote of the future," said Liath, toying with the pages of the book, running a finger over the old writing as if the ink itself could reveal secrets.

"Nay," said Anne. "I think she wrote of both past and future, of what happened two thousand seven hundred yeas ago, and of what will happen in five years if we do not stop it in time."

This time, he felt it hit her before she moved, eyes widening, jaw setting hard as she reached almost blindly and grabbed his arm. Through her skin he felt the pulse of her heart and, distantly, a second pulse, fine and faint and swift, that slowed as the pain peaked and then quickened again. As the wave passed, Liath spoke in a whisper that carried no farther than the good wool of his tunic.
"I have been to the place the Aoi now live."

"Not lost at all," he said aloud, amazed that he hadn't seen it before. Had he not really believed her stories of the Aoi sorcerer? Or had he dismissed them as something inexplicable? "How could they have been lost if my mother could walk on earth? What if they were only hidden—?"

"We know that the Aoi vanished from earth long ago, leaving only their half-breed children behind," said Anne. "It was those half-breed children who founded and built the Dariyan Empire."

"The Aoi are not utterly vanished from the earth," objected Liath. "There are shades in the deep forest."

"Are these shades truly of earth, or are they only trapped somehow between the living and the dead, between substance and aether, doomed to live as shadows?"

Like the servants, doomed to live in bodies that only mimicked those of humankind. But he did not voice the thought out loud. He knew better than to challenge an opponent in an open battle when he was outnumbered and held inferior weapons. He wasn't desperate yet.

"You have not listened carefully, Liath," scolded Anne. "Bis-cop Tallia was the first scholar we know of since the days of the Dariyan Empire who gained enough knowledge to calculate the message written in the heavens. For the heavens do not lie. They only record God's creation. She discovered that on the date that you mentioned, great forces might be unleashed. From ancient records pieced together out of the archives of the old Dariyan Empire, she discovered that we have enemies lying in wait to destroy humanity. For this service to humankind, Biscop Tallia was humbled by the church at the Council of Narvonne, because they envied her."

When neither of them responded, she went on. "But Biscop Tallia did not let her knowledge die with her. She passed it on through her companion in the arts, Clothilde, who in her turn made sure that there would always be others to follow her. We are the ones who seem to be sleeping while the world wakes around us, only we are in fact waiting here in our hidden place to save humanity from that which threatens it. Seven is our number, because we are in number like to the seven planets: the Sun, the Moon, fleet Erekes, bright Somorhas, Jedu, who is the Angel of War, stately Mok, and sage Aturna."

"The Seven Sleepers," murmured Liath. "I've been so blind. Ai, God, here comes another one."

He let her clutch him, fingers digging into his arm. There was nothing else he could do.

"You should not have allowed yourself to become distracted from your true purpose," said Anne coolly, not moving to touch Liath as the wave came and went. "It is Bernard who is to blame for this weakness in you."

Liath made a sound halfway between a cry and a gasp. But it wasn't from physical pain. "You have no idea what we went through! Da
died
to protect me." Suddenly tears came, unbidden, unexpected, as if all of it, the memory, the fear, her utter helpless despair at losing him, had finally crashed down with the weight of the heavens. Sanglant had never seen her weep over her dead father. Now it overwhelmed her.

The storm was brief but tempestuous, and Anne waited it out without any response except to carefully take the old book from her and close it so that the pages wouldn't get damp. She locked it away in the cupboard, flicked a finger toward the ceiling, and the servant fluttered down and vanished.

"Sit down, Liath. You are overwrought. The servant will bring you something to drink to restore yourself."

Liath sat obediently, shoulders shuddering under the weight of that old grief. Sanglant did not sit. He, too, had lost a parent and never cried for that loss. "Where did my mother come from?" he asked now.

Anne seemed as usual unsurprised by the question. "Henry found her in Darre, but she had before that been in Salia, or so we assume, because Salian was the tongue she spoke best. From whence in Salia she came no one knew or could guess, and she revealed nothing."

" 'There will come a moment,'" said Liath in the steady voice she used when she quoted from memory, " 'when all the power that churns through the universe, the force that moves the spheres themselves, can be touched by human hands. When it can be drawn down and manipulated for the greater good by those who have the knowledge and the will to risk themselves in such an undertaking.' That's the art of the mathematici. Which was learned from the Babaharshan magicians, who learned it from the Aoi long ago, so the stories say." She grimaced, shifting awkwardly, and for an instant he thought another pain was coming, but she was only uncomfortable. If God willed, the child would come soon and without incident. That would truly be a blessing. Liath looked up at Anne accusingly. "That's what you've been hiding all along. You believe the Aoi manipulated the power in the heavens to remove themselves from earth."

The servant returned and set a tray with three cups of cider on the table, then skittered away into the eaves. Anne glanced at the tray, surprised by the cider or by the number of cups; he wasn't sure which. He handed Liath a cup and made sure she drank before he drained his own. Anne had already begun to speak.

"There is much we do not yet comprehend about the universe, but we know that there are many interstices within the fabric of the universe that may be traversed by those who know how to do so. We call that cluster of stars that the Child is reaching for a 'crown of stars,' yet don't we also call the great stone circles which we find through the land 'crowns'? Magic built those circles long ago, and I believe that it was the Aoi who built them, at the height of their power. I believe that those were the mechanisms by which the Aoi hurled themselves elsewhere. Did you and Bernard ever travel to the cliffs of Barakanoi, southeast of Aosta?"

"Yes, we did. I'll always remember them because they were so sharp, the way the shoreline ends and the waters begin. I remember telling Da that I thought it was like someone had cut it clean with a knife." But she faltered, looking up at Sanglant. He only shrugged. He had never been there. "There was a city there, and it ended, too. As if it had been cut away. I always thought part of it must have fallen into the sea. But it couldn't have. There wasn't any sign of ruins in the sea below. It ran deep there. There weren't even any shoals, that's what Da told me."

Anne nodded. "Those of us born out of the earth must have earth to stand on. Even magi such as the Aoi could not exist in the aether as do the daimones and the angels."

"Are you suggesting," demanded Sanglant, "that they used their magic to literally take a part of this earth with them into their exile?"

"What does it matter, anyway, if they're gone now?" muttered Liath, rubbing her belly. "If they don't walk on the Earth any longer, then they can be no threat to us."

Anne had not looked away from Sanglant since he had entered the chamber, just as one does not take one's eyes from the poisonous snake with whom you share a cozy patch of ground. "An arrow shot into the air will fall to earth in time. Any great power unleashed in the universe will rebound someday in proportion to its original power and direction. What has been accomplished once may be accomplished again, and if a channel has already been dug, how much easier will the river flow back through where it is dry?"

"Are these riddles that I'm supposed to answer?" asked Liath irritably.

"No," said Sanglant. "I think she is saying that the Lost Ones will return."

"On the tenth day of Octumbre, in the year , at midnight," said Anne, "when the paths between the spheres open and the crown of stars crowns the heaven."

Liath pressed both hands against her abdomen and shut her eyes with the kind of sigh that a person lets out when she knows that the toil before her is bound to be much harder than that which she just finished. "Why do I feel like a puppet dancing to the jerk of someone else pulling the strings?"

"If they left because humankind had driven them to such desperate straits," Sanglant asked, "then why would they
want
to return?"

"For the same reason, Prince Sanglant, that they would want a child born half of Aoi and half of royal human blood." She gestured toward him. "To take back what was once theirs: sovereignty over this world."

Wind rattled the shutters. An owl hooted in the night, and Sanglant heard the shriek of some poor creature caught in its claws. Anne shifted to look at Liath, who at that moment gripped his wrist and braced herself as another wave of pain washed over her, harder than any of the ones that had come before. She seemed to fall so far away from him, all her attention drawn inward, that it was as if she herself had been briefly cut away from him and from any part of the world beyond her womb, where the child now struggled to be born onto this earth.

"Sister Meriam should be woken," said Sanglant. "She said she would act as midwife."

Anne simply waited until Liath stopped panting. "That is why you are so important, Liathano. Why everything else in which you have engaged does not matter, and cannot matter." A little sweat beaded on Liath's forehead as she lifted her head and regarded Anne as much with annoyance for the interruption as with curiosity or awe for the solemn pronouncement being invoked.

"They have bided their time in safety hoarding their power and their magic. Now they mean to rule over us again as they once did millennia ago. They are strong and unmerciful. They will make cruel masters. They will sunder the world in order to take it back, for their return to this Earth will cause such a cataclysm as no creature alive has ever seen. 'For the mountains shall become the sea, and the sea shall become the mountains.'"

Anne moved forward until the lantern light limned her. The gold torque gleamed at her throat, and like any queen or empress, she shone with that confidence which is called power, the ability to turn others to her will.

"The only one who can stop them, my child, is you."

II

SANGLANT had not realized how much he disliked Sister Anne until he spent the rest of a night, a day, another long and exhausting night, and perhaps the most agonizing day of his life at the side of his laboring wife as she struggled silently, suffered silently, and weakened inexorably. The pains came and went in steadily heightening waves, like the tide coming in, but the baby did not come.

Heribert tended the fire, brought hot cider for Sister Meriam and Sanglant and wine for Liath to sip when she could get it down, and fretted over the birthing stool he had constructed to Meriam's specifications a month before. When Meriam needed to rest, Sister Venia sat at Liath's side and chafed her hands and kneaded her back.

"I remember what it was like for Heribert's mother," she said with feeling.

Zoe and Severus stayed away, which was no doubt for the best, but Sister Anne, too, ignored the sweating and straining in the hut, had no words of advice to give and no comfort to offer. She was too busy to attend, or she didn't want to see.

"Doesn't she remember what it was like?" demanded Sanglant finally, but Sister Meriam merely grunted. She was examining Liath again, one hand probing the shape of her belly from the outside and the other from within the passageway.

"My daughter-in-law had easier births than this," she commented. "So did I. I fear the child is breech."

"How much longer can she go on?" he asked in a low voice, but after two nights and two full days of laboring, Liath was too tired to hear him. Sister Meriam merely shrugged.

Dusk came, and with it came the evening star, a beacon above the horizon. He hadn't seen it for weeks. According to Liath it had been hiding behind the sun, but now it shone reassuringly from the safe harbor of the constellation known as the Sisters, protector of women.

Something shifted then, a last gasp, an unloosening, or perhaps it wasn't Somorhas' influence at all, perhaps it was the infusion of wormwood that Meriam got down Liath's parched throat. Meriam greased her hands with pig's fat and felt up the passageway, got a grip on something. By this time Sanglant was holding Liath up bodily on the birthing stool. She was too weak to sit on her own, and her entire weight sagged against him. "Come, my love," he said. "Push."

The baby's feet came first, then a rump, then a body all smeary-white. Liath barely had enough energy to bear down to get the head out. After that she fainted and she bled, and he thought maybe he would faint, too, not at the sight of blood but out of fear. He had never been this afraid in his life.