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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.”
I 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—!”
When she walked under the threshold, the heavy stone lintel almost brushed her head; Heribert had to duck. But they did not come out into the empty center of the circle with the twilit sky above them and tattered clouds blowing past the rising moon.
Once under the circle, once circled by stone—below her feet, above her head, and on her right and left—they crossed into earth without any obvious transition. They walked into a darkness relieved only by a pale globe receding before them—the constant moon—and yet when she put her hands out to either side she pressed stone walls, ragged to her touch. Stone made a ceiling above them, and smooth paving led their feet forward into the hidden dark.
Heribert caught in his breath and tugged at her cloak. “We’re in a tunnel!” he gasped.
“Come,” she said, more impressed than afraid. “This is powerful magic. Let us see where it leads us.”
2
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.
