Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 1

I
A Storm from the Sea
25

II
The Book of Secrets
49

III Shadows from the Past
78

IV The Treasure-House
115 V

The Inner Heart
162

VI
The City of
Memory
2
16

VII
Leavetaking
253

part
Two

THE DEEDS OF THE GREAT PRINCES

VIII On The King's Progress
279

IX The Dragons
295

X The Sin of Pride
345

XI A Mouse's Hunger
386

XII
Bloodheart
432

XIII
The Shadow of the
Guivre 511

XIV The Promise of Power 557

ON a
hill surrounded on three sides by forest and on the fourth by the ruins of a fortress stood a ring of stones. They crowned the hill with stark beauty, like the bones of a castle buried so deeply in the soil that only the battlements of the tallest tower rose above the earth. It was said by some that chambers lay beneath the standing stones, rooms filled with treasure, with haunts, with creatures not of human form. It was said that passageways led out from these chambers like rivers stretching from a landlocked lake, leading from this hill across the land, even to the cold sea in the north, even to the great mountains far to the south.

On the third day of the month of Avril, as afternoon faded into twilight and the full moon shone low in the darkening sky, a lone traveler made her way up through the tumbled stones of the old fortress. She wore leggings, a plain linen tunic, and sandals laced up to her knees, human clothing which she had become accustomed to here in this foreign land but not what she felt comfortable in. With a staff gripped in one hand and a small pouch tied to her belt, she negotiated the maze of walls as if she knew it by heart.

The ruins lay on a gentle incline, stretching from the banks of a narrow river up to where the last wall, no taller than a year-old child, lay crumbling into the dirt and grass. The forest rose beyond. A single watch fire burned on the other side of the river, past the stumps of felled trees and fields newly burned for a spring planting
o
f barley, marking the only village that lay within sight of the hill crowned by stones.

The traveler paused before she stepped over the last wall of the fortress. She threw back her hood. Her hair was so pale it seemed to shine with a light of its own. She reached into the pouch and drew out a scrap of torn cloth, stained with red. With a grimace, she made to cast it to the ground, as if by throwing it away she would free herself from its binding power before she passed into the wild majesty of the stones.

But she paused, cocking her head to one side, listening. And she cursed. She hesitated, and that moment was enough for the lead horseman to spot her.

It was dusk, but her hair was bright and his eyes were young and keen, and he was looking for her.

"Alia!" he cried. "Beloved!" Recklessly, he urged his horse forward, picking his way up through the fort. More riders appeared behind him. He paused, reining his mount aside, so men on foot, carrying torches, could catch up and guide him forward. He used only one hand on the reins. In his other arm he carried a bundle of cloth tucked against his chest.

She winced away from the sight of that small burden. The vow she had made years ago, as humans measured time, seemed rash and ugly now. She had stood up in front of the assembled council and spoken boldly, but she had not known then what she would suffer in the world of men.

Then her gaze caught on a banner. A battle-scarred man in a gold and black surcoat closed the gap between himself and the young prince. Upright and arrogant in the saddle, he held in one hand the dragon banner, symbol of the elite guards who protected the heir and by extension the kingdom itself: a black dragon coiled on a gold background; a cluster of seven brilliant stars studded the gold field above the dragon's figure. She traced this constellation with her gaze to remind her-seif of what it stood for, the Crown of Stars worn by the ruler of the ancient Empire, half-forgotten now in the
world of humankind but destined to return. It was for this she had made the sacrifice.

By this time, aided by her hesitation, the young prince had pulled his horse up beside her. Torches threw wings of light over the ruins, and their heat surrounded her like a prison built with walls of fire.

"Why did you follow me?" she asked. "You knew I intended to leave."

"How can you leave?" he demanded, like a child wailing against being abandoned. But he was so young, barely a man, only eighteen years old according to the calendars of this world. With an effort he schooled his expression to one of haughty disdain and tried a different path. "Surely you will stay until the child is a year or two old, so you might know that it lives and thrives."

"No disease known to you will touch him, nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death." She spoke without thinking.

A murmur, like the breath of wind through a forest, passed through the assembled soldiers, those close enough to hear her prophesy whispering her words to those who stood farther away. The old soldier urged his horse forward to halt beside the young prince. The dragon banner lapped over the saddle, brushing the young man's arm.

At that moment, the bundle stirred. The baby woke, batting aside the swaddling with blind infant groping. She saw the black shock of hair that crowned the baby's head, the tiny face and its open, staring eyes, as vivid as fine green jade, its skin that marked it as flesh of her flesh, a fine burnished bronze nothing like the northern pallor of the young prince's complexion even where it was roughened by exposure to sun and wind. The tiny hand closed on a corner of the dragon banner, gripping it with infant strength. The men-at-arms pointed and exclaimed over this omen: The bastard child born of no human woman sensed its fate already, though it was not yet two months old.

The prince turned his face away, not wanting to look.
I
nstead, he carefully
—so carefully!—handed the baby over to the old soldier, who gave the banner into another man's hands in order to hold the infant. Then he dismounted, gestured to his men to move away, and faced her. "You care nothing for the child?" She did not look after the old soldier as he guided his horse to a patch of ground less racked with loose stone and sudden sharp drop-offs that might catch a horse unawares.

"He is no longer mine."

"How can you say so? He is the most beautiful child I have ever seen!"

"Only because he is yours!" "Yours as well!"

"Not mine! I carried it inside me, gave birth to it, bled enough blood to cover the fields that surround the village we just passed through! Never mine, and never meant to be. Leave me, Henri." She had never learned the eastern accent and still spoke his name as a Salian would. "I never promised you anything but the child. Let me go in peace."

The young man said nothing for a long time, or at least, not in words. He had an expressive face, but he was learning to control it. She wondered, watching him, what he wanted to say, and what he would say. When she had first met him a year ago, he'd always blurted out the first words that came to his tongue. Now, made heir by right of fertility, he was learning to think before he spoke.

"I do not want to let you go," he said at last. "By the invocation of your name, Alia, I beg you to stay with me." "Alia is not my name, Henri. It is only what you call me."

"You aren't well enough to go. You were so ill after the birth."

"I arn well enough now."

"Then why did you come to me? Don't you love me at all?" His voice broke on the last words and a moment
l
ater he caught himself and tensed, his face freezing into a mask of stone.

That mask,
she thought,
will be the one he wears most often when he becomes king.

She thought of telling him the truth, because she did not dislike him. He was still young, a little callow, but he had strength in him, and he was ambitious, and clever, and handsome in a human way, elegant and proud.

But the truth was not hers to tell, nor his to know. King he might become, but he was only a pawn in hands whose power was greater than his would ever be as regnant of two kingdoms. She and he were both pawns, and this gave her some sympathy for him.

She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. "I am not immune to human charms," she lied. "But my duty lies elsewhere." That at least was true.

She could not bear to hear more from him. She could stay in this world no longer. It weighed too heavily on her; it had stolen so much of her precious blood. She fingered the scrap of bloody cloth, torn from the sheets in which she had given birth; it
—and what it signified, her link to the child—was the last thing that bound her here. She let go of the bloody rag, and it fluttered to the ground.

As he knelt to pick it up, she stepped across the last crumbling wall. He rose, calling after her, but he did not try to follow. Nor could she really hear his voice any longer as the stones rose up before her and she heard at last the faint music of their alignment singing to her.

With her inner sight she touched the wind stone, the stone of light, the stone of blood, of water, of fire, the other stones, each according to its properties. Here, in the human world, in order to touch the heart of any object, to find and manipulate its essence, she had to trace winding paths around the walls and barriers built by human magi, for they chose to constrain and then master what they could not understand. But as she
e
ntered the precinct of stone, those walls fell away. She lifted a hand. Mist arises from the commingling of water and air, and so mist rose around her, at her suggestion, hiding her from view as she entered the ring of stones.

Above her, unobscured by the mist that surrounded her, stars shone. She read their alignment and called down the power that sang from them and melded it to the alignment of the stones, each to each, a choir raising its voice to heaven. She called to the heart of her own land, and at the altar of fire and blood a portal opened.