PROLOGUE (34 page)

Wind shook the cottage and rain lashed the walls and roof. Surely no one would venture out to this isolated hillside in such weather. Why had she responded to the summons? For weeks now they had been led through the hinterlands of Karrone and northernmost Aosta like idiot sheep. Lured by signs as elusive as sparrows, she found at each turn that these mysterious messages fluttered away just when she thought she might grab hold of them. But she had nowhere else to go. She could not return to Mainni, not yet, not now. The courts of King Henry of Wendar and Varre and Queen Marozia (her aunt) of Karrone were closed to her; they would only detain her again and send her south to Darre to await trial before the skopos. Many lesser nobles might take her in for a month or two, not yet knowing of the accusations made against her, but she hated living on the sufferance of others.

If she could not clear herself, if the false and misguided testimony of others was to be used against her, then she would simply have to bide her time until she could rid herself of her enemies. Until that time, she followed such will-o'-the-wisps as had led her here, to this Lady-forsaken cottage on a windswept barren hillside on the southern slopes of the Alfar Mountains. They had only reached the spot with difficulty; poor Heribert had had to walk alongside her mule up the rugged path that led here. Technically, she supposed, this cottage rested in the queendom of Karrone or perhaps on the northern boundaries of one of the Aostan principalities. But it was so isolated that in truth no princely jurisdiction reigned here, only that of wind and rain and the distant mercy of God in Unity.

The latch snicked open. A gust of wind slammed the old door so hard against the wall that one of the door planks splintered. Heribert yelped out loud. He lifted a hand to point.

She rose slowly. Biscop Antonia, granddaughter and niece of queens, did not show fear. Even if she were afraid. A
thing
loomed outside the door, not one of the dark spirits such as she had learned to compel but something
other,
something made of wind and light, shuddering as rain rippled its outlines and wind shredded its edges into tatters. It wore the form of an angel, of which humankind is but a pale wingless copy, and yet there was no holy Light in its eyes. By this means Antonia knew the creature was a daimone coerced down from a higher sphere to inhabit the mortal world for a brief measure of time.

If a human hand could control such as
this,
then certainly she could learn to compel such creatures. She gestured Heribert to silence, for he was mumbling frantic prayers under his breath as he clutched his holy amulet.

"What is it you want?" she demanded. "Whom do you serve?" The
thing
stretched as if against a hidden mesh of fine netting. /
serve none, but I am bound here until this deed is accomplished.

It had no true mouth but only the simulacrum of a mouth, a
seeming,
as its corporeal body was obviously more seeming than physical matter. The rain, now waning, fell through it as through a sieve. Beyond it,
through
it, she saw the stunted trees and wild gorse as through thick glass, distorted by the curves and waves of its form. It was as restless as the wind, chafing in a confined space. Antonia was entranced. Into how small a space could such a creature be bound until it screamed with agony? Would fire cause it to burn? Would iron and the metals of earth dispel it or obliterate it entirely? Would water wash it away or only, like the rain, pour through it as a river pours through a fisherman's net?

"Do you not serve that person who has bound you?" she demanded.

/
am not meant to be trapped here below the moon,
it answered, but not with anger or frustration such as she understood. Such as humankind felt. It had no emotion in its voice she could comprehend.

"Ai, Lady," murmured Heribert behind her, his voice made delicate by terror.

"Hush," she said without turning to look at him. His sensitivity irritated her at times; this was one of them. Sometimes boys took too much of their nature from their father's transitory and fragile seed and not enough from their mother's generative blood. "It cannot hurt us. It does not belong to this sphere, as any idiot can see. Now come forward and stand beside me."

He obeyed. It had been a long time since he had failed to obey her. But he shook. Those pale, soft, perfectly manicured hands clutched at her cloak and then, sensing her displeasure, he merely sniveled and twisted the rings on his fingers as though the fine gems encrusted in gold
—gems dug from the heavy earth—could protect him from this aery being.

"What is it you wish, daimone?" she asked the creature, and it swayed at the utterance of the word, "daimone," for any being, mortal or otherwise, is constrained by another's knowledge of its name and thus its essence.

/
wish to be free of this place.
It stretched again. The rain had passed and the wind lulled, but still its shape was blown and whipped by unseen and unfelt winds, perhaps not earthly winds at all but a memory of its home in the upper air, above the sphere of the moon.
Come. I will lead you to the one who awaits you.

"Dare we go with it?" whispered Heribert, nearly on his knees with fright.

"Of course we dare!"

In this way she had been punished for the one sin, the one occasion of weakness. She had been younger and not
— then—immune to the desires of the flesh, though she had rid herself of such desires since that time some twenty-six years ago. And to have succumbed to
his
blandishments, of all people! His concupiscence was legendary. He simply could not keep his hands off women, of any station. Someday that desire would be his downfall, she sincerely hoped.

The child gotten of the union she loved immoderately
— she recognized that—but she also despised him, because he was weak. Yet he was hers, and she would take care of him. She had in the past, and she would in the future.

"Come, son," she said sternly. Without more than a squeak, Heribert followed her over the threshold. The sky was clearing rapidly. The glowering front receded to the east, tearing itself to shreds against the imposing heights of the mountains. Behind it, ragged bands of high white clouds striped the sky.

Like the storm, the daimone receded before her. It did not walk; neither did it fly. Like the wind, it simply moved across the land. Its humanlike shape bulged and shrank in conformity to its own nature or to the weather in some far-off clime. It moved up the hill on a muddy footpath, though it left no imprint of its passage except the disturbance in the air that was its presence. She followed, wondering what had become of the mule and the old laborer who had led her and Heribert up to this abandoned cottage. It was very very cold, far too cold to stay in the heights overnight. The laborer, cowed by her importance, had asked no questions and had himself no answers to give her, though she had compelled answers from him; he was as stupid as the beasts he shepherded.

They walked until Heribert coughed as he labored upward and even Antonia felt winded. The daimone, of course, showed no sign of strain; it could easily have outpaced them, but did not. Antonia wondered if such creatures felt impatience. Was it without sin, as all humanfolk were not? Or was it beyond salvation, soulless, as some in the church claimed?

They crossed a field of rubble.

"It's an old fort," said Heribert, his words more breath than voice; he coughed more frequently as they climbed higher. But she heard spirit in his voice. Old buildings were his passion; had she not forbidden it, he would have left her to train as an architect and builder in the school at Darre or traveled even as far as Kellai in Arethousa to become an apprentice in the schools there. But if he went so far away from her, then she could not watch over him. Now, of course, he never questioned her at all.

He paused, leaning on dressed stone tumbled to the ground, and surveyed the ruins. "It is an old Dariyan fort. I recognize the pattern."

"Come," she said. The daimone had not waited; it coursed ahead like a hound that has scented its prey. "Come, Heribert." With a wrench, he pulled himself away from this strange ruin, an old fort lost
—or abandoned—in such desolate country.

They climbed and, in the odd way of slopes in such country, ground that seemed level ahead proved to be the crest of a hill. Coming over it, they saw in the vale below a ring of standing stones.

"A crown!" breathed Heribert. He stared.

Antonia gazed with astonishment. Broken circles she had seen aplenty; they were well known in the border duchy of Arconia at whose westernmost border stood the city of Mainni
—across the river to the west of the cathedral lay the kingdom of Salia. But this circle stood upright, as if it had been built yesterday. It did indeed have a superficial resemblance to a giant's crown half buried in the earth, but that was peasant superstition, and Antonia despised the credulity of the common folk.

The daimone surged down through bracken; bare twigs whipped at its passing as if a gale had torn through them. She sent Heribert to find a trail, and on this paltry track
— the poor lad had to beat back as much undergrowth as if there had been no path at all—they descended into the
vale. Down in the bowl the wind slackened to silence, and the undergrowth gave way to a lawn of fine grass clipped as short as if sheep had grazed here recently.

The daimone circled the standing stones and paused before a narrow gateway made of two upright stones with a lintel placed over them. Air boiled where the creature stood, like a cloud of translucent insects swarming. Antonia halted just far enough away from it and looked in through the flat gateway toward the center of the stone circle. She felt, in her bones and as a throbbing in the soles of her feet, the power that hummed from the circle. The ground here was impossibly flat, as if it had been leveled by human labor
—or some other force.

Heribert gazed at the sky, then at the circle, and whispered, "It's the eastern-facing doorway. Does that mean something?"

"Of course it means something," she said. "It means this doorway looks toward the rising sun, perhaps at midwinter or midsummer."

He shuddered. As the sun set behind the hills opposite them, west across the eerie architecture of stones, it threw long shadows out from the stones that made weird patterns, almost like writing, on the short grass. The rising moon, its pale face lifting above the distant mountains, heralded night.

Enter by this gate,
said the daimone.

"Certainly," said Antonia graciously. "I will follow you."

/
go no further. I cannot enter the halls of iron. My task is done once I have guided you here.

"If we choose not to go?"

It vanished. One moment its disturbance roiled the air, the next the sun slipped down below the hills and the moon breathed paler light across a landscape empty of wind or the pulsation of air that had marked the daimone's presence.

"What do we do?" whimpered Heribert, shivering harder. "We don't know what's in there. How could anyone drag such huge stones up these foothills?"

"We enter," said Antonia calmly. "We have no fire, no food, no shelter. We'll freeze out here. We have chosen to put ourselves at the mercy of our mysterious correspondent. We must go forward."
And take our revenge for this insulting treatment later,
she finished in her own thoughts. Such sentiments she could not share with poor, weak Heribert.

She did not wait for him to go first. They would be here all night while he gathered up his courage. "Take hold of my cloak," she said, "so that we can by no means become separated."

"But it's only a stone circle. We'll freeze
—!"

THERE
are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. They move on the winds that blow above the sphere of the moon, and now and again their gaze falls like the strike of lightning to the earth below, where it sears anything it touches. Their voices have the snap of fire and their bodies are the conjoining of fire and wind, the breath of the sun coalesced into mind and will.

All this she sees inside the vision made by fire. Here she runs as would a mouse, silent and watchful, staying in the shadows. She braves the unknown passageways and the vast hidden halls where other creatures lurk. This skill alone
—
that of seeing through fire
—
Da did not strip from her, or perhaps the skill manifested only because Da died. It may be all that saves her, if she can learn to use it to spy on those who seek her out, to hide herself from whatever
— whomever—
murdered Da.

It may even be that someone who also can see within the vision made by fire can help her. Can
save
her.

Ai, Lady, no one can save her.
Hugh
has returned, as he promised he would. How foolish she was to think she had escaped him. All this time she thought she had at last won free of him, but she cannot now and never will be free of him on the realm of earth where his power is vast and hers insignificant, only here, in the vision made by fire, where he cannot follow her. And in the vision made by fire, other things stalk her.