PROLOGUE (24 page)

Under the shadow of the pines she slid her bow back into its case and let the spray of color ease her eyes. Eldest Uncle stood beside her without speaking or moving, beyond the thin whistle blown under his breath and an occasional tinkle of bells as he shifted the haft of his spear on the needle-strewn ground.

"How do I walk the spheres?" she asked finally, when Eldest Uncle seemed disinclined to move onward or to say anything at all.” Where do I find the path that will lead me there?"

"You have already walked it." He gestured toward the flower trail that led down to the river.” Why do you think I bide here, out of all the places in our land? This place is like a spring, the last known to us, where water wells up from hidden roots. Here the land draws life from the universe beyond, because the River of Light that spans the heavens touches our Earth at this place."

Wind stirred the flowers. Cornflowers bobbed on their high stalks, and irises nodded. The breeze murmured through crooked rows of lavender that cut a swathe of purple through tangles of dog roses and dense clusters of bright peonies. Marigolds edged the trail, so richly gold that sunlight might have been poured into them to give them color.

The view humbled her.” I thought you camped here because of the burning stone." She gestured toward the river, and the clearing that lay beyond it, where she had first crossed into this land.

"There are many places within our land where a gateway may open at intervals we cannot predict. It is true that the clearing in which I wait and meditate is one of those. But it is this place that I guard."

"Guard against what?"

"Go forward. You have walked this trail many times in these last days."

Wind cooled the sweat on her forehead and made the flowers dance and sway in a delirious mob of colors. Why hesitate?

Reflexively, she checked her gear, all that she had brought with her, everything and the only things she now possessed: cloak and boots, tunic and leggings; a leather belt, small leather pouch, and sheathed eating knife; her good friend Lucian's sword; the gold torque that lay heavily at her throat; the gold feather that Eldest Uncle had once given to her, now bound to an arrow's haft; the griffin quiver full of strong iron-pointed arrows and her bow. Seeker of Hearts; the lapis lazuli ring through which Alain had offered her his protection. The water jar did not belong to her, so she set it down on the path. When she stepped forward, crossing from shadow into sun, the blast of the sun hit her so hard she staggered back, raising a hand to shield herself.

Something wasn't right. Hadn't she learned more than this, even in her short time here in the country of the Aoi? Every spell, drawn out of an interaction with the hidden architecture of the universe, must be entered into correctly and departed from correctly, just as all things have a proper beginning and a proper ending.

By what means did a sorcerer ascend into the spheres? How could any person ascend into the heavens in bodily form, because the heavens were made up of aether, light, wind, and fire? Mortal substance was not meant to walk there.

Would she have to study many days and weeks and even months more, before she could walk the spheres and seek out her true power? Even if she ought to, she could not wait.

On Earth, days and weeks passed with each breath she exhaled here in this country. In the world beyond, her child grew and her husband waited, Anne schemed and Hugh flourished and Hanna rode long distances at the mercy of forces greater than herself. What of the Lions who had befriended her? What of Alain, whom she had last seen staggering, half dead, through the ruins of a battlefield? Where was he now? How could she leave them struggling alone? How much longer would she make them wait for her?

In one day and one night, as measured in this country, Cat Mask and his warriors would come hunting her.

It was time for her to go.

Yet how did one reach the heavens?

With a ladder.

She shut her eyes. Wind curled in her hair like the brush of Da's fingers, stroking her to sleep. Ai, God, Da had taught her exactly what she needed, if she had only believed in him.

She knelt to set he"" palm against the earth. As she rested there for the space of seven breaths, she let her mind empty, as Eldest Uncle had taught her. Dirt lay gritty against her skin. When she let her awareness empty far enough, she actually felt the pulse of the land through her hand, thin and fragile, worn to a thread. But it was still there. The land was still, barely, alive.

With a finger, she traced the Rose of Healing into the dirt, brushing aside dried-up needles and desiccated splinters of pine bark so that the outline made a bold mark on the path. Heat rose from that outline, and she stood quickly to step over it and into the sunlight.

At first her voice sounded hesitant and weak, a frail reed against the ocean of silence that lay over the land.

"By this ladder the mage ascends: First to the Rose, whose
child
or
flame
i touch is healing." She took two more steps before bending to trace the next sigil into the dirt.” Then to the Sword, which grants us strength."

Three steps she forged forward now, and either perhaps the heat had increased or maybe only the strong hammer of the sun was making her light-headed, because some strange disturbance had altered the air around her so that the air resisted her passage as porridge might, poured down from the sky.

She crouched, and drew.” Third comes the Cup of Boundless Waters."

When she straightened, the flowers flowing out from either side of the trail had taken on a shimmering, unearthly cast, as though they bloomed with something other than material substance. Poppies flared with impossible scarlet richness. Lilacs lay a tender violet blush over swaying green stalks, shading into the complicated aftertones seen at sunset, although the sun still rode high above her.

She pressed forward four steps as a hazy glamour rose off the path like mist. Through this soft fog she reached, searching for the ground at her feet. It was hard now to see the path beneath her, but the dirt felt the same. Into the cool soil she traced the next pattern.

"Fourth lies the blacksmith's Ring of Fire."

Fog billowed up along the path, swirling around her knees as she took five steps forward. Ahead, through the hazy shimmer that now lay over the meadow, she saw the river. A figure stood on the far bank, caught in a moment of indecision among the rocks at the ford. Even from this distance, Liath recognized the stocky body and distinctive face of one of the Ashioi, but the woman was dressed so strangely, in human clothing, with human gear. She looked utterly out of place and yet entirely familiar as she gazed at the scene unfolding before her.

The fragrance of roses surrounded Liath, so dense it made her woozy.

Was it dizziness? Or was that Ashioi woman actually wearing Liath's other tunic, the one she had folded away into the saddlebags thrown over Resuelto's back just before she and Sanglant and the baby had tried to make their escape from Verna?

It was too late to stop now. She couldn't pause to find out the answer. She had to go on.

She knelt, and drew. Rising, she spoke as she walked.” The Throne of Virtue follows fifth."

The field of flowers expanded around her as though the clearing had breached the bounds holding it to the earth and had begun to spread up actually into the sky. Cornflowers burned with a pale blue-fire luminescence, blazing lanterns, each one like a shard of the burning stone cracked and shattered and strewn among the other flowers. Through this dizzying terrain she took six steps. It was both hard to keep to the path and yet somehow impossible to step off of it.

"Wisdom's Scepter marks the sixth."

She was almost to the river. Ahead, the flower trail melded and became one with the river itself, but the river no longer resembled an earthly river, bound by its rock bed. Like the River of Heaven, it streamed up into the sky, a deep current pouring upward, all blue and silver. Vaguely, beyond it, or below it, she saw the shadows of those things that still stood on the land: a pale figure more shade than substance, algae-covered rocks whose chaotic patterns nevertheless seemed to conceal unspoken secrets, withered trees so dark that they seemed lifeless.

She must not pause to look back. Her feet touched the water, yet it was not water that swirled around her calves as she took seven steps forward. She waded into a streaming river of aether that flowed upward to its natural home. When she thrust her hand into its depths, the currents pooled around her, swift and hot.

She traced the outlines of the final sigil, the crown of stars. Where her hand drew, the blue-silver effluence surged away with sparks of gold fire.

"At the highest rang seek the Crown of Stars, the song of power revealed."

She climbed the River of Light.

The path opened before her, the great river spoken of by so many of the ancient writers. Was it the seam that bound together the two hemispheres of the celestial sphere, as Theophrastus wrote? Or was the theory of Posidonos the correct one, that by its journey through the heavens it brought heat to the cold reaches of the universe?

Or was it only the ladder linking the spheres? She toiled upward, the current pushing her on from behind. Beneath her feet the land dropped away into darkness. Above, stars shone and yet began to fade into a new luminescence, one with a steely white light like that of a great, shining wall, the boundary that marked the limit of the lowest sphere. Low, like the delicate thrumming of plucked harp strings, she heard an eerie music more pulse than melody.

Rivulets sprang away from the main stream, so that the river itself became a labyrinth winding upward. On the currents of aether, insubstantial figures shaped in a vaguely humanlike form but composed of no mortal element danced in the fields of air through which these rivulets ran. The daimones of the lower sphere, those that lived below the Moon. If they saw her, they gave no sign. Their dance enraptured them, caught in the music of the spheres The thin arch of a gateway manifested in the shining wall that marked the limit of the sky. With a shock like the sight of a beloved kinsman thought dead but standing alive before her, she recognized this place. She had known it all along. Da had trained her in its passages, in the spiraling path that led ever upward. Although the way seemed obscure and veiled before her, she had a feeling very like that of homecoming as she ascended to the first gate, the gate she knew so well from the city of memory in whose architecture Da had trained her.

Had he known that the city of memory reflected, like a hazy image in a pond, the true structure of the universe? Or had he merely taught her what others had taught him, and by this means passed on to her what had remained hidden to generations of magi before him?

No matter.

She knew where she was going now. Each gate was part of the crossroads that linked the worlds.

As though her thought itself had the power of making, an archway built of aether and light flowed into existence against the shining wall. Before it stood a guardian, a daimone formed out of the substance of air and armed with a glittering spear as pale as ice.

"To what place do you seek entrance?" Its voice was as soft as the flow of water through a grassy side channel.

"I mean to cross into the sphere of the Moon," she replied, determined not to quail before this heavenly creature.

"Who are you, to demand entrance?"

She knew well the power of names.” I have been called Bright One."

It stepped back from her, as though the words had struck it like a blow, but kept its spear fixed across the gateway.” Child of Flame," it whispered, "you have too much mortal substance. You are too heavy to cross. What can you give me to lighten your load?"

Even as it spoke, she felt the truth of its words. Her belongings dragged on her and, in another instant, she would plunge back to earth—or into the Abyss, falling forever. She had no wings.

Swiftly, she tugged off her boots and unpinned her cloak. As they fell away, she rose. A breath of aether picked her up bodily, and the guardian faded until she saw it only as a spire of ice sparkling by the gateway.

The way lay open.

She did not look back as she stepped over the threshold.

PROBABLY he was dead.

But when the fish twisted and slipped out of his hands to escape back into the river, it acted like a living fish. The men who laughed uproariously around him sounded lively enough, and the stocky man who had yesterday threatened him with an ax had certainly looked alarmingly alive.

He knew what death felt like. Just yesterday he had held a newborn infant in his hands that was blue with death, but he'd learned the trick from Aunt Bel that sometimes newly reborn souls needed chafing to startle them into remembering life. Just yesternight he'd stumbled through a battlefield with his own life leaking from him in flowering streams of blood.