The Burning Stone
He could not bear it. He unpinned the cloak and swung it off his own shoulders to drape over the stooped shoulders of the woman, so that it covered the child as well. At once the others grasped at it and tugged, trying to get it into their own hands, fighting over it.
“Stop!”
They shrank back, even the one he had gifted. The child in her arms lay still and silent. For all he knew it had already expired.
A sick despair settled on him, a weight far heavier than the cloak had been. He shuddered in the biting autumn wind, spun, and hurried back to his horse. A groom was there to lace hands under his foot and hoist him up.
“God save us from beggars!” cried Lord Amalfred as the hunt made ready to leave. Harness jingled, horses snorted, and his leashed hounds lunged toward the children, who scattered with screams and cries. Amalfred laughed and gathered his companions around him as they plunged into the trees. Foresters vanished into the wood before them, and far away they heard the solitary bell of a hound marking a scent.
“It isn’t right to mock them,” said Alain to the count, who had come up beside him.
“Poor creatures. I would have given them my boots, but then I saw how they would fight over them and it would only be worse. Ai, Lord! What suffering.”
“It is a mystery, indeed.”
“What is a mystery?”
“Why God allows suffering in the world.”
“The deacons say it is a just punishment from God for those who have sinned.”
Hounds belled, and their belling blossomed into a sudden rash of barking. The young lords attending Lord Amalfred whooped and cheered and raced ahead into the forest, leaving Alain, Lavastine, and some few men who by reason of age or prudence chose to ride at a slower pace with their host.
Alain had lost his appetite for the hunt. “But surely sometimes desperation may drive you to sin,” he objected, watching branches whip and still as the forward party vanished into the trees.
“It is true that we aren’t made guilty by those things that lie outside our power, but certainly we aren’t justified by them either. Evil is the work of the Enemy. It is easier to do what is right.”
“You were laid under a compulsion. What you did while under that spell was no choice of your own.”
“And that, my son, is why the church must keep her hand closed tight around all matters pertaining to sorcery.”
“I’ll go look,” said Alain quickly. Sorrow and Rage bristled, hackles up. They had coursed silently around to place themselves between Lavastine’s horse and the undergrowth where the other two hounds thrashed and barked within a thicket that rattled and swayed as if a wild wind had been bound into the spot.
“My lord count.” Several servingmen rode forward, but Alain pressed past them, dismounted, and with his sword out forged into the brush, batting aside branches, getting a mouthful of dry tern leaves as he shoved through. Sorrow followed him, still barking. Rage stayed behind with Terror. Steadfast and Fear had cornered something in the densest comer of the thicket strewn with brier and fern. He saw it, a flash of dead white darting here, and then back, seeking an exit. Dread hit like the blast of cold wind, making him shake.
“Alain!” called Lavastine.
“Don’t follow me!”
It darted past Fear’s snapping jaws. Alain cut. His sword hit loam, sprayed bits of leaves. Steadfast leaped past him. Sorrow bounced. A creature scurried away under the leaves. He saw it again where leaves parted and it darted into a screen of briers, that unnatural white gleam like bone washed clean and polished by the sea. He stabbed again at it but only got his hand scratched by thorns.