She'd wanted a dragon hatchling. She'd wanted someone else to bear the risk of stealing it. And there were things she hadn't bothered to tell him when she made him steal Dougal's boots and pants and shirt and Brian's camouflage poncho to muddle the scent trail he left behind him.
He could have stolen the huntsman's leather jerkin, or even gauntlets and a shirt of chain mail, if he'd known. The scent would have been the same.
No, she'd wanted more than just the hatchling. She'd wanted a lab rat for one of her experiments.
He eased through the cool stone of the cellar wall, making use of the welcome that the masons and quarrymen had left behind when they departed, centuries ago. Human or Old One, slave or master, all men who worked and understood and loved good stone were kin.
An empty corridor waited -- no deadly witches. He felt tension drain out of his shoulders and reminded himself that each breath he drew was a gift, after facing Fiona in her maze. And this deep-worked living stone was a gift. Dusty and musty, black as pitch to normal eyes, the walls glowed for him, gently giving off the Power they'd soaked up since the sun had last shone on their faces.
What did this dark maze hide from prying eyes?
He brushed his fingers over the fine-grained sandstone, feeling the magic within it. It hummed like a faceted diamond scattering fire. And yet unlike, as well, as if the light it broke and spread had been stolen from another kind of sun.
It centered on that hidden room. So did the deep and ancient pain he'd felt, and the anger. He traced his own glowing footprints back to it, puzzled again by the faint older prints that went in and came out, relieved by the smaller recent prints that did leave and took their deadly steel with them. He'd rather not meet that surprise again.
Good manners told him to enter by the door, not asking the stone to let him pass through unless he had no choice. He'd often wondered if others could do the things he did with stone, if they only treated it with respect and worked it the way it wanted to be worked. If they spoke to it and listened to the answers.
He scowled at the crude plane gouged into the side of the central menhir, the cruder Christian idol hung on it. They broke the shape the stone's heart had asked from ancient hands. They weakened and changed the Power and brought dissonance into the song that whispered in his ears. He brushed his fingers across the pillar and asked it if it could be made whole again, if the stone felt another shape still hidden within the five faces it showed the world.
Something woke after long dreaming. Facets glowed back at him, bedding lines in the stone's grain where hands like his could guide a chisel and redirect the power that flowed from beneath his feet. The heart could be healed. It reached out to him, tentative with something very close to hope.
But what did it do? He studied the flow of energy across the floor and through the labyrinth and swirling into the quartz starburst set before the menhir, he read faint traces of Ogham runes held as memories rather than visible marks in worn old stone, he watched as phantom feet traced the pattern and left their smears on the dust and vanished between one step and the next. He shuddered as cold fingers walked like those footsteps down his spine.
Crude as it might look, the chisel-work defacing this focus had been deliberate and precise, guided by malice and a mind that read stone as clearly as Fergus ever could. Cool blue flows of energy struck the damage and scattered, sparking purple at his touch like a mountain crag that felt a coming thunderstorm. Some unknown hand had broken the magic with precise strokes of iron on stone. No, he thought, bent rather than broken. Power still flows. It just no longer flows the way the original work intended.
That unknown hand had turned the labyrinth into an eddy out of the stream. He had no way to calculate where the portal had once led, but now the way was blocked. He preferred to leave it closed until he knew what waited on the other side. He felt too much pain and anger here to act without long thought.
He knelt and studied the quartz focus. Like the paving pattern of the labyrinth, it showed the hand of a master. Milky opalescent stone formed a perfect Solomon's Seal, six-pointed and as smooth as glass, as broad from point to point as the length of his arm, yet carved from a single crystal. It fitted into the natural stone of the floor as if it had grown there. This work had escaped damage. And it hid something. He could feel it.
He touched the face and eased his thoughts into the crystal lattice. His hand followed, flesh moving like water through the spaces between atoms of silicon and oxygen. Cool power flowed back along his wrist, soothing the throb and burn under his bandages.
Down, down, down into the stone he reached, drawn as much by the ease of pain as by curiosity. His wrist entered, and his forearm, and finally his elbow until he lay flat on the floor and reached the full length of his arm and knew that the quartz crystal was as deep as it was wide, pure and flawless. Only Power could form a crystal of that size and quality.
His fingers touched ice and told him it was fire.
