But she knows as soon as she wonders, for within the vision she can see into the pumping mass of flesh veined with stone that serves him as a heart. He, too, is looking for Alain.
Mist sweeps in like a wave, blinding her. The tendrils that coil around her burn as brightly as if they are formed out of particles of fire. She sees into them and beyond them.
There are spirits burning in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. Yet one among them sinks, weighted with mortality. This one falls, blazing, into a threshold composed of twisting blue fire, the passageway between worlds. Through the gate this falling woman sees onto the middle world, the world known to humankind: there in the middle world, a huge tumulus ringed by half-ruined ramparts rests in silence. Dead warriors lie scattered along the rampart walls and curves. A killing wind has blown them every which way. Like leaves the dead lie tumbled up against a ring of fallen stones, some shattered, some cracked in half, that stands in ruins at the height of the hill.
Adica prays for the protection of the Fat One and the courage of the Queen of the Wild, though no words pass her lips—or if they do, she cannot hear them. She knows this hill and these ramparts, now worn away, crumbling under the hand of an immeasurable force she cannot name. She recognizes the ring of fallen stones, covered by lichen and drowned by age. It is Queens’ Grave, but it is not the Queens’ Grave she knows, with freshly dug ramparts ringing the queens’ hill and a stone loom newly set in place on the summit in the time of her own parents.
It is Queens’ Grave garbed as the Toothless One, the hag of old age. Its youth and maturity have long since been worn away by the bite of the seasons and the winds and the cold rain. It is like glimpsing herself as an aged woman, old and ruined and forgotten.
Yet one stone still stands within the stone loom. Clothed in blue-white fire, it shelters a dying warrior. Clothed in metal rings, slumped against the burning stone, he waits for death attended by two spirits clothed in the forms of dogs. The falling woman cloaked with blazing wings of aetherial fire whirls past Adica’s sight. She reaches for the dying warrior, and as she grasps him and pulls him after her, Adica recognizes Alain. But the blazing woman’s grip tears away, off his shoulders, and he is lost, torn off the path that leads to the land of the dead so that he walks neither in the world where he lived or on the path that should take him to the Other Side. He is lost, with his spirit guides crowded at his feet, for the space of a breath and a heartbeat, until the Holy One’s magic, the binding power known to the Horse people, nets him and drags him in. He lands, bleeding, dying, and lost, on the great womb of the queens.
She gasped into awareness at the same moment his hand found her shoulder and closed there. He said her name and dropped down onto his knees behind her, his face wet against her neck.