“Where, then, is Liath?” Henry gestured toward the hall as if he expected her to step forward from a place of concealment. “Why have you returned to me, with this astounding claim, without her?”
It fell away, then, the pride and the anger and the confidence. Sanglant began to weep silently, a few tears that slid down his cheeks. He made no effort to wipe them away. Weeping, after all, was a man’s right and obligation.
“Dead, or alive, I cannot say,” he whispered hoarsely. “She was stolen from me. I do not know where she is now.”
2
AS Liath descended the staircase the light faded quickly, yet where it grew dimmest she could still distinguish walls and steps with her salamander eyes. The old sorcerer matched her step for step even though she stood half a head taller. It grew markedly cool. At intervals, the murmuring of voices swept up the staircase like a wind out of the Abyss.
They walked down for a long time. At some point she stopped feeling the regular seams of worked stone and touched only the seamlessly rough walls of excavated earth. Eventually the staircase leveled out, and they walked down a short tunnel so round that a rod might have punched it out to make a circle within the rock. The tunnel opened into a broad chamber whose walls were illuminated by a small opening far above them. Plants had grown through the opening; roots dangled into empty air and twined along the ceiling, trying to gain purchase against the rock. Dust motes danced along the roof before they swirled into shadows.
The smooth floor descended down two high steps to an oval hollow that marked the meeting place, where the council members had congregated. They wore a bewildering variety of strange clothing: shifts stamped with colored patterns, feathers adorning their hair, sheaths studded with beads and colored stones bound around forearms and calves. Most of them wore some kind of cloak, pinned at one shoulder and draping down to mid-thigh. Each of the women wore a heavy jade ring piercing her nose, all except one.
They had exotic faces, broad across the cheekbones, reddish or bronze in their complexions. They looked nothing like the Wendish, but she could see Sanglant’s heritage in every face there. There were not more than thirty, waiting for her in a chamber obviously large enough to command an audience of hundreds, yet somehow the chamber felt crowded, as if the shades of those who had stood here in the past and who would stand here in the future filled the empty spaces.
Silence reigned.
She stood beneath the wings of an eagle whose semblance had been carved out of the stone archway above the tunnel. Every person seated or standing within the chamber examined her. Yet when she compared their stern and even hostile expressions to Hugh’s poisonous gaze, she could not fall into helpless terror. She had walked through the fire and survived.
Eldest Uncle shifted behind her, coughing gently.
In the center of the oval, seated on an eagle literally carved out of the stone floor, sat a very pregnant woman with a gloriously feathered cloak draped around her shoulders. Her hair was pulled back in a topknot. Alone of all the women, she wore no jade ring in her nose. Behind her stood the golden wheel, no longer turning because in this stone womb there was no wind. The emerald feathers trimming the wheel glowed with a light of their own. Feather Cloak lifted a hand and beckoned Liath to come forward.
“I am here,” Liath said in response to that languid gesture. She took a big step down, and then the second, to stand at the same level as the others. Lifting her hands, she opened them to show her palms out, empty. “I come unarmed, as is your custom. Eldest Uncle comes with me, to show that I mean no harm to your people. In the language of my people, I am called Liathano, and I seek knowledge—”
That brought them to life.
“Let her be cast out!” shouted White Feather, the woman who had come to see Eldest Uncle. “How dares she bring the name of our ancient enemy into this chamber?” The distinctive shield of white feathers bound into her hair shook as if in response to her anger, and her words unleashed the others, a chorus of discordant views, too rapid an exchange for Liath to see immediately which one spoke what words.
“It’s treachery! Kill her at once!”
“Nay, I would hear her speak!”
“We cannot trust any child born of humankind—”
“We are few, and they are many. If we do not seek understanding now, then we will surely all perish.”
“I want to know what Eldest Uncle means by bringing her here without the permission of the council. The human woman is nothing to us, however evil her name. It is Eldest Uncle who must stand before our judgment.”
One stepped forward belligerently, hard to ignore because he was a strikingly attractive man clothed only in a cunningly-tied loincloth and a plain hip-length cloak and adorned by nothing more than a wooden mask carved into the shape of a snarling cat pushed back on top of his cropped hair. He had a powerful baritone. “I say this to you, sisters and brothers: Let her blood be the first we spill. Let it, and the memory of the one who helped to ruin us, be used to strengthen us as we prepare to fight to take back what was once ours.”
