Sorgatani lifted a hand, and the older servant brought the silver cup over on the tray, now cleared of bowls. She set it down before Liath and retreated.
Liath passed a hand over the shimmering surface of flame, as smooth as water licked by ripples of fire. With ease, she drove a path through the flame and sought Hanna.
Only the coruscating blue-white flicker of the burning stone met her seeking gaze, as if Hanna were caught within the gateway, wandering the ancients paths woven between the stone crowns.
“How can this be?” she whispered.
Shadows danced, and faded, making her dizzy, and she found herself back in Sorgatani’s tent. The oil in the cup had all burned up to reveal, in the bottom, an astonishing wheel of horses’ heads, spinning like a pinwheel, one galloping after the next, until she realized that she was staring at a pattern beaten into the silver. She took her hands off the cup. The jangling of tiny bells announced the arrival of the older servant, and the cup was removed.
“She does not walk on Earth,” said Liath, surprised to find she could still speak. The effort had tired her, and the question of Hanna’s fate weighed on her, an impossibly heavy burden. Hanna was her northern star, the one sure stable point in a tumultuous world. “I pray she is not dead.”
“She walks the crowns,” said Sorgatani carelessly, as if to walk the crowns was no greater a feat than a morning’s stroll down to the river.
“Who but the Seven Sleepers knows the secret of the crowns?”
“A woman, I think, whom Hanna saved from a deep pit, which you call a dungeon. Now they walk the crowns to escape those who pursue them. She is safe.”
“What woman?”
“I do not know how you call her. Your names are puzzling and difficult to pronounce.”
Liath squelched her frustration. This was no time to irritate her allies. “Do you have any way of knowing for how long she is safe?”
“Only the Holy One can see both ways through time. She can see across great distances and pierce the veil of time through the heart of the burning stone. Can you not as well?”
“I can see through fire, but not into the heart of the crowns. I saw glimpses of past and future when I crossed through the burning stone, but that sight is closed to me here on Earth.”
“Then what does it mean, to ‘see through fire’?”
“It is a gift known to those who have taken Eagle’s vows in my country, to see folk and places through fire. The Eagles are messengers for the regnant. In this way they can be also the regnant’s eyes and ears.”
“Can you teach me this sorcery? Or is it forbidden?” Her tone dropped wistfully. “There is so much I wish to learn, but there is much that is forbidden to me. We live under the tutelage of the Horse people. They have always been our allies and our mothers, our guardians.” She shifted sideways on the couch, smoothing out a lump in the embroidered cushion she sat on, moving a little closer to Liath. “I know I am impatient. Some days I hope that my fate leads me westward where I can see new things.”
“Are you a prisoner?”
As if a muffling blanket had dropped down around them, the hiss of burning oil became the only sound. Liath could not even hear the breathing of the two servants. Of the camp outside, surely audible through the walls, she heard nothing. It was as if magic had torn them away from normal intercourse with the world and thrust them into the heart of a maze, where sight and sound altered and warped until they might stand a spear’s length from their companions and yet be utterly separated from them by a wall of stone or a veil of sorcery.
“I am a prisoner of my power.” Sorgatani spoke in the same matter-of-fact tone with which the steward of an estate proclaimed which cattle were marked out for the Novarian slaughter. “The Horse people are immune, as are my blood kin and the other shamans. Those who serve me are bound to me by magic so that they do not suffer in my presence.”
“Nothing has happened to me.”
“You, like me, possess a soul that was passed on to you from another being. Mine came from my aunt. Yours came from a creature born of fire.”
“Have you seen with your own eyes the fate suffered by ordinary humans who are brought into the presence of one of your kind?”
“Nay. This lore I had from my teacher.”
“Has it been tested? If you have not seen it for yourself, how do you know it is true and not just a superstition?”
Sorgatani laughed bitterly. “What if it is true, Liat-ano? Am I to walk into a camp of strangers with no care that I may bring death down upon people I do not know? We tell stories, in our tribe, of how a Kerayit shaman destroyed an entire tribe, one who warred against us, by walking through their camp at midday. Every soul there died, and their tribe vanished from Earth and memory. I dare not risk it. I seek knowledge, not death. I am not a warrior.”