The Burning Stone
But she was comfortable here lying on straw and surrounded by good plank walls. Horses stamped in the stalls below them; their scent and warmth drifted up, and one by one her comrades drifted off to sleep. She slept, and she dreamed.
She is lost, battering her way through a tangle of high growth that scratches her hands and slaps her face. Swordlike leaves taper to points swaying far above her reach, a forest of grass. The sky is turgid with clouds. A strange humming tickles the air, a whistle with more weight than breath in its tone. She stumbles over a hump, trips, and lands with her hands buried in the oozing, stinking innards of a huge silver-furred bear that, eviscerated and hacked into parts, sprawls in death along the ground.
Just then, a heavy shadow overtakes her. She feels the wind of talons swiping at her back and hears a shrill trumpet of disappointment. Wings beat like bellows above her. She bolts, terrified, and flails through the grass, hands weeping blood and effluvia, but the wind of its passage returns, hot and staggering. She cannot see it precisely, she is too afraid to look up, but it is some monstrous creature, and as she cries out, the talons settle on her shoulders, grip her, and in the next instant her feet no longer touch the earth.
She kicks helplessly as they go up and up and the ground drops away so quickly that her head spins, and it is all she can do to clutch her spear tight. She isn’t imprisoned by bird’s talons at all, but by something more like lion’s claws, and yet she glimpses a noble and terrifying eagle’s head far above, with tufts for ears and armed with a fearsome beak. Beyond massive hind legs poised below her lashes a golden tail. At the heart of the blinding sheen of iron-gray feathers where she might plunge in her spearpoint, she sees a single pale spot on its breast, but they have made height so fast that she fears if she kills it, and it drops her, she will be dead from the fall.
She doesn’t want to find out.
Ahead, grass dies away into hillocks of sand and fields of rock, boulders tumbled into odd, veined shapes by some ancient cataclysm. Ahead, the ground gleams all silver and gold. The creature descends until she sees that the plain opening before her is a desert strewn with sands that resemble seas of golden granules interwoven with channels of silver dust. The sun sets, bathing the glimmering sands in rose light. Abruptly, darkness comes but for a single light, a campfire. She sees no moon.
Firelight illuminates a figure walking toward her, but she knows that form as she knows her own heart, always, for her, an easy depth to fathom.
“I called you,” says the princess, giving her a hand and helping her rise.
“What was that creature?” Hanna demands as she brushes off the knees of her trousers. In an odd way, she has become used to these meetings.
“Do you control it?” she asks, feeling faint.
“Nay, I only asked for its help. Just as I ask for your help.” Hanna sees her clearly now with firelight and starlight and the princess’ own shroud of magelight to guide her. Four huge bear claws hang heavily from a leather thong around her neck. Several miniature pouches hang from a belt at her waist, each one cleverly tied closed with thread as fine as spider’s silk. Her felt conical hat is missing, and she wears no covering at all on her head; her braids have been tied back behind her neck to keep them out of the way. She has a healing cut across the knuckles of one hand, and her leather coat has a huge rent in it, as though it was recently slashed and mended. Meat is cooking, and fat is boiling. Her nose is smudged with soot.