He chuckled, then looked around nervously before recalling, she thought, that there was no one to hear them except his own men. "Perhaps so. The church would not approve your words."

"Look!" She pointed. A lumbering shadow moving away into the forest and vanished in the brush.

“An aurochs! Mayhap we'll have game tonight for our supper."

They did. In the rear guard a scout hauled in a deer. At the fore, a pair of men ranging in the woods to seek out trouble shot an aurochs that had stopped to graze in a clearing a spear's toss off the road.

"It might do for a campsite," said one of the scouts, coming to report the kill to the captain. "There's an old stone circle, and cleared ground."

"Let me see," said Liath.

She went with an escort of a dozen soldiers while the rest waited on the road. At the clearing, the other man had already begun butchering the aurochs, and the sharp smell of its blood hit her first. As she pushed aside the low-hanging branches, she saw what manner of place they had come to.

She shook her head, scanning the wide span of ground where a low field layer of feather grass and flowering honeysuckle grew. No trees had encroached despite the passage of time. The stones stood upright.

"Some power has raised this crown recently," she said. "See the pattern of growth around them. You can see where the stones once lay on the ground."

"Who could raise such big blocks of stone without leaving a track of their labor?" asked the scout.

Sorcery could raise the crowns, but she could not imagine anyone having so much power. After all, how many were left in the world who could even weave the crowns?

Me.

And Hugh of Austra.

She looked at Thiadbold.

He nodded. "We'll march on and hope to find a better spot."

"No," she said, because she did not like to surrender to fear. "Easier to rest here and eat that good aurochs. My mouth is already watering."

He shrugged. "If you don't like it, we'll move on. I've seen my fair measure of strange places. I know to respect their power."

She smelled nothing but vegetation, moist soil, and the innards of the dead animal spilling free as the scout cut a slit in its belly. "If bandits come upon us, we'll have a better view for our archers if we bide here with the stones as cover. What do you think, Captain?"

He took his time considering. He paced the circumference of the clearing, and walked through the stones, but there were no holes, tunnels, or hiding places. It was a dead place, all five stones standing, their faces unnaturally smooth and unmarked with moss or lichen. Although she had seen many a fallen stone cracked and hollowed by centuries of rain and ice, none of these stones showed any such wear.