His voice seemed to come from a great distance, for the Dauphin of Terre d’Ange was envisioning gone the ropes, the crowds, the ubiquitous priest-vendors; gone, all gone, until there was only the harsh, splendid sprawl of the Vralian landscape, the wide, blue-burning eye of the lake and the martyred stone, forever branded with Sithonia’s bloody footprints. Trying to imagine how she must have felt, Chrétien shuddered and lifted his face to the bright, cruel sky. His heart expanded and his eyes welled with sudden tears.
And then one of the Sithonian pilgrims broke his reverie, pushing out of the crowd to thrust a handful of coins into the purse of the priest-vendor who kept the shrine.
The shrinekeeper drew back a rope and admitted the aspirant onto the sacred stone. The man hitched up his trousers, murmuring under his breath; prayer or instruction, it was impossible to tell. He placed his feet carefully on the first two Steps.
“What happens if he succeeds?” Chrétien whispered.
“He won’t.”
One, two, three Steps; a turn, then several quick steps, then a spinning lunge and the man lost his balance, overcompensated, and set a foot down on bare stone. His shoulders slumped. The crowd sighed.
“Do you think it could be done?” Rikard asked Chrétien, who shrugged.
“By a D’Angeline master of dance? Yes and no. Oh, we could probably devise something that would trace the Steps, but the odds of duplicating Sithonia’s dance are one in ten thousand.”
“Truly?” Rikard sounded surprised. Chrétien glanced at him.
“You can’t choreograph exaltation,” he said, and Rikard stared at the crimson-patterned stone, frowning.
When it came, the wordless shout seemed to shatter the hard, bright air. Rikard was half-aware, as he turned, that he had been hearing for some time a muttering disturbance behind them; he was half-aware too, as a second shout, awful and despairing, ripped across the sky, that Chrétien had already whipped about, begun to draw his sword and paused, shoving it back into its scabbard.
The terrible sound came from a young man, scarce past adolescence, who stood with his legs astraddle on a tall, jutting boulder at the eastern edge of the shrine. Even as Rikard watched, he threw back his head and shouted again, the cords in his throat swelling visibly with the raw force of it.
“Ikon-breaker,” someone behind Rikard muttered fearfully.
Several of the Prince-Protectorate’s troops emerged at a run from the distant edge of the forest, their black and silver uniforms in stark monochromatic contrast to the stony terrain.
“Vral protect us!” said another voice. “It’s Miodrag the Cobbler’s son. He’s lost his wits!”
Rikard spun about, saw the woman who had spoken and caught her wrist. “What’s his crime? The cobbler’s son, what’s his crime?”
She blinked in fear, wrenched her wrist from his grasp and backed away from him, but someone else, a tall man with the black-pored face of a coal miner, answered. “Killed two Vralkaani soldiers. They’d come to take his father to debtor’s prison.”
“Vralkaani? Why?”
The miner’s eyes were bleak. “Cobbler was in debt to the Church. Wife was dying. He purchased healing prayers on credit. Wife died anyway. He couldn’t honor the debt.”
“Here? In St. Sithonia?”
“Aye.”
Rikard cursed.
“The cobbler died too,” a second man added. “Blow to the head. The Vralkaani beat him when his boy escaped.”
On the boulder, the cobbler’s son cried aloud, “Sithonia!” His hands knotted spasmodically into fists, his eyes were wild and full of sunfire. Except for a ragged breechclout, he was naked, begrimed and thorn-scratched.
Left to himself while Rikard questioned onlookers, Chrétien thought, ah, Elua; this one, he is not calling on the saint only, he is calling on the city, he is calling on them all. Shivers raced over his skin.
“Hear me, Sithonia, for I will soon be dead! You, who were once a savior of Vralia, have become its whore!” With another wordless cry, the cobbler’s son leapt from the boulder. The crowds parted before him. “You!” His finger pointed, his arm swung, encompassing the crowd. “All of you. Blasphemers!”
In a few swift strides, he crossed to the nearest booth, set a shoulder to it, and heaved. Shelves laden with fine enamel work crashed to the ground, graven images shattering.
“Here is your truth,” the cobbler’s son said bitterly. “Broken faith.” He grasped shards of the broken ikons with both hands. “Sithonia did not die that you might bear children,” he said, almost gently, extending one hand to a young woman who shrank back from him. His fist clenched about the shards, and blood dripped to the ground. “Nor that you might be made young,” he said to an elderly man leaning on a crutch, and clenched the other fist. His blood ran in scarlet ribbons. A sound like a moan rippled through the crowd.
“No! Sithonia died to keep the Wheel of Vral from the Profaners!” the youth cried, and dashed the shards to the ground.