Flesh and Fire (23 page)

“Fetch two, and bring them to me in my study.”

THERE WERE SEVEN messenger pigeons in the hutch, and a single sleepy-looking slave, huddled in the straw for warmth, who scooted to the back when Jerzy entered. The boy child bowed down, straw stuck in his hair. The sight made Jerzy pause, even as he was reaching for a bird.

He had been that boy, once. Terrified of notice. Terrified of someone’s hand being raised against him, terrified of doing something wrong, so he tried not to do anything at all. It was better here in the hutch, where you had space to sleep, birds to coo over, but you were still at the mercy of everyone else, from the overseer on down to anyone larger or meaner or faster than you were. And at this boy’s age, everyone was larger and faster.

“Boy.” His voice cracked a little, but he didn’t think the slave noticed; he was so busy trying to hide his head in the straw. “Boy, I need two birds. Fetch them for me.”

He had given orders to slaves before. He had told the house-servants what to do. He had even given direction to Detta, although carefully and knowing that she saw him as an extension of Master Malech. Never before had he tried so hard to make his voice sound right. Strong, but not cruel. Commanding, but without force. Like Malech when he decanted a spell, or the princeling when he gave an order to his men.

It seemed to work: the boy raised his head out of the straw and crawled forward, casting sidelong looks at Jerzy as though trying to determine if he was going to lunge at him or throw something. Jerzy kept as still as possible, his hands in plain sight, his shoulders relaxed, even though he wanted to shake the boy to make him move faster.

“Two birds, Master? Fast, or steady?”

Jerzy had no idea. “Fast.”

The boy reached in and caught one of the birds and placed it into a waiting wicker cage, then went back for another, carefully not ruffling their feathers or getting pecked for his trouble. “This is Dag, and this is Ruffa. They’re young but wise, and very fast.” When speaking of the birds, he lost his hesitation, although he still would not raise his head to look at Jerzy.

Jerzy reached out to take the cage, and the slave flinched, but did not otherwise react.

Malech would have cuffed him for that reaction, and the overseer would have knocked him into the ground, not for showing fear, but offering insult by his fear. Jerzy merely took the cage and left, feeling sick in his own stomach. Not for the slave’s reaction, but his own.

His shame, and Detta’s words to him before his bath, came tumbling together, unlocking memories.

A dark room, the wheels rattling underneath. Taking them farther and
farther away from where they had been, and toward somewhere else. He was sick, and bruised all along his arms and legs where others pinched and poked him. Not the slavers; they did not mistreat their cargo. The other boys, fighting for food, for air, for space, for some sort of ranking that would be destroyed the moment they were sold; they took their fists and feet to this new boy, small and scared.

“Boy. Come here, boy.” One of the slavers, an older man. “Come here, I have a salve for those bruises, make them stop hurting.”

Even then he knew to doubt.

“Boy, do you want to hurt? I can make no money off a limping, ill boy. Come here.”

He did not want to hurt, and so he went into the slaver’s grasp, the warm, hard hands that applied ointment, and did. . .other things, too.

The gut sickness made his bowels clench, and then he was out in the fresh air, the wicker cage clenched in his hand, aware only that Master Malech waited for him—his master, and a mystery.

Everything else was in the past, and the past no longer mattered.

THE CARRY CASE had been replaced, the vials emptied and left out to dry, by the time Jerzy came into the study, the cage held awkwardly in front of him. Malech was sitting behind his desk, carefully blotting a note before rolling it into a tiny scroll and placing it inside a small leather casing.

One of the birds, perhaps sensing it was to be let fly, batted its wings noisily inside the cage. Jerzy placed the cage on the stool, and waited.

“When was the last time I communicated directly with another Vineart, and asked for their help?”

It took no thought at all to answer that. “Not in the time I have lived in the House.” Before then, Malech could have dyed himself green and danced in the hallways with a dozen other Vinearts, for all Jerzy would have known.

“Not in all that time, and seven years longer,” Malech said. “So long, it has taken time to remember who yet lived, and who might have died.”

He laughed, a slight exhale of sound, and made a rueful expression. “And so we follow the Commands. And so, now, I am prepared to break them. Come, boy, bring me one of the birds.”

The slave had made picking up a bird look almost simple. The first hard peck against his hand made Jerzy jerk back with a yelp, and rethink that. A glance over his shoulder showed that Malech was busy writing a second message, and not paying his student any attention whatsoever.

A spellwine to calm beasts would be useful right now. But short of. . .

It stays in the blood.

Malech’s words came back to Jerzy, almost like the flutter of a moth. Admittedly, he had been talking about a spellwine used hundreds if not thousands of times, over years. . .but it had only been yesterday when he drank the spellwine not once, but twice. Might not there be something left in him? But how to find it? And quickly, before the bird put a hole in his hand!

His thoughts churned madly before finally settling on one thought. Malech would sometimes ask him, midmeal, about a tasting they had done earlier that day. How did he recall those? He consciously made his mouth water, and thought back to the sensations he had felt when that liquid had been the spellwine. . ..

It was more difficult than those mealtime tests, because the impressions he got were of salt air, and exhaustion, and fear. But underneath it, a tang of something fruit and spice, sharp and full, crackling in his mouth the way only a commanded spellwine did.

Barely anything. Barely enough. Jerzy spit into his hand anyway, then reached with that hand back into the cage. “Bird, little bird, little bird, hush you now, hush, hush.” He didn’t add the command form at the end, but the contact of his damp palm with the bird’s feathers seemed to be enough—or perhaps the bird simply recognized what it had been trained to do, and calmed of its own accord.

Triumphant, he cupped both hands carefully around the bird, and brought it over to Malech’s desk, pushing the cage door shut with his foot to prevent the other bird from getting any ideas. The tiny heart thrummed under its feathered breast, reminding Jerzy of how delicate the creature was—despite the sharpness of its beak.

With an ease that could come only from experience, Malech tied the leather case to the bird’s skinny leg with narrow thongs, testing them to make sure they were secure. “This one is to go to the watchtower of Armanica.”

The birds could not simply be sent anywhere, of course. There were relay stations they knew, within their flying range. Once they arrived there, the message would be taken off and either given to a runner or placed on another bird to go the next distance.

Once the bird felt the weight on its leg, it settled down, and Jerzy was able to easily replace it in the cage and retrieve its companion, which was in turn fitted with a message, this one going in the opposite direction, south to the island of Corse, off the coast of Corguruth.

Jerzy visualized the tapestry hung in Malech’s study, depicting the ancient
Lands Vin
. The second message almost certainly went to Vineart Corse, who had taken the name of the rocky lands he worked, as his master had before him, while the first. . .could be to either the Vineart Seisan or Master Vineart Denson. All were coastal vineyards, fronting the same waters as the villages that had been attacked.

The birds both back in the cage and the latch closed securely, Jerzy turned once again to Malech. “You asked them if they had seen anything like that beast?”

“In a delicate fashion, yes. Corse is. . .eccentric, but they are men I believe I can trust. And yet . . . we do not share well, we Vinearts. Our training is to obey Sin Washer’s Command that we maintain our knowledge, but not reach for that which was forbidden, not overreach the boundaries given to mortal man. And so we have taken that to mean each should hoard his own knowledge, his own skills, his own magic, and not share with others. . . .Even if that sharing might be to our benefit.”

Malech tapped the thin lines of his mouth with a forefinger, looking pensive. The gold band reflected the light, sending shivers of red along the rim.

“It’s not a bad thing, over all, that we follow the Command thus. Sin Washer knew us, even then. We are not passive men, for all that the vines require our patience. The Command was made to save us from our arrogance, our need to do more, better, prove our spellwines the stronger. . ..It is good to know your boundaries, to be restrained, even as we tie up the vines that they might grow toward the sun and not into shadow and muck.”

Malech stared at his desk and exhaled, an unhappy sound. “Yet, vines can be trimmed badly, and boundaries drawn too narrowly, and all things die without room to grow. I would not have wanted to live in such a time, but we are not given that choice. Enough. Take the birds and have them sent off, then you—” He looked closely at Jerzy, so much so that the boy squirmed a little under the inspection. “You have worked your body enough and your mind as well, these past few days. I think this evening you have earned a short respite.”

The exhaustion Jerzy had not allowed himself to acknowledge swept in at those words. The idea of an evening where he had no duties, no lessons, no responsibilities. . .

“One evening only. On the morrow we will begin again, to make up for the time lost while you ran errands. You are taking initiative, making deductive—and foolish—leaps. It is clearly time for me to step up your training.”

A heartbeat ago, Jerzy would have sworn that all he wanted to do was crawl upstairs to his room, shut the door and fall face-first onto the bed, and not move again until morning meal. Now he could barely wait for that time to pass.

Malech chuckled, and the sound wasn’t entirely kind. “Go, enjoy your rest while you’re granted it.”

Jerzy ducked his head in gratitude and backed out of the room before the Vineart could change his mind.

* * *

AT BARELY PAST dawn the next morning, as Malech ordered, they began again.

“What do you taste here?”

There were seven decanters lined in front of Jerzy, each made of a smoke-dark glass that did not allow him to see the
vin
inside. Like that first day in the study, he was tasting blindly. Unlike that first day, he knew what to expect and—hopefully—what he was tasting.

He measured his words carefully before he spoke them. “It tastes like stone and lime, no softness at all. It’s green, young. So it hasn’t aged very long, maybe just went into the barrel?” It was a question, but he didn’t wait for an answer that wouldn’t come. “There was a tingling on my tongue, but no numbness, so it’s not a healspell.” Heal-spells were the most varied of the legacies; the red-black grapes were better for physical ailments, while the rose ones treated the humors, the emotional pains and mind-sickness. The one thing they all had in common was a rich, flinty taste, and the aftereffect of numbing the caster’s tongue.

Malech merely sat in front of him, watching and listening. He was wearing a simple brown robe over the shirt and trou, similar to Jerzy’s own, and his graying hair was tied back away from his face: what Jerzy now recognized as casual working attire. And yet, despite the familiarity, despite the relaxed pose, there was a mad sort of thought running through Jerzy’s mind: this was the Master. This was the voice of life or death, the sole authority. And he. . .he was standing in the same room with him. Sipping spellwines, looking the Master in the eye and giving an opinion.

And he was afraid. Not of death—of failure. Of not knowing enough, not being enough, of being too slow, too stupid, to be considered acceptable. Of having his master sigh the way he did, and turn away. To be cast away from the smell of the mustus, the taste of the ripened grape bursting between his teeth, the finished wine sliding down his throat, and the magic tingling through his body, causing the result he desired. . .

It was power of a sort he had never imagined. And he was afraid, so afraid he could barely swallow, much less speak.

And Malech still waited for his answer. The first two wines had been simple: a harsh berry-ripe healspell for bone-setting, and a gentle, spicy white that made his entire body quiver—that had been a growspell, likely used to make soil more receptive to seeds. He had blushed when telling Malech that, and the Master had laughed, but not said that he was wrong. That meant he had been right.

This one stumped him. Stumped, he could not impress Malech. If he could not impress the Vineart, he might. . .

He would not fail. He could not. The fear he seemed to feel all the time hardened into something hot and cold, inside. He had ridden all night to save a village, had done what a princeling could not, and been wise enough to trade gold for beast flesh. . ..He was no slave to cower before a challenge. He was a Vineart—or would be, once he proved himself. He must prove himself, until Malech was satisfied.

“A young, sharp wine,” he said, thinking it through out loud. “One I’ve not tasted before. It’s not one of ours—yours,” he caught himself swiftly, and looked up from under lowered lashes to make sure the Vineart had not taken offense. “And yet, it is familiar. So it was grown in similar soil, similar conditions?” There were three other Vinearts in The Berengia, but one of them cultivated only the rare aethervine, and the other two had yards that did not match those of Master Malech’s enclosures.

“Similar soil, and similar conditions. . .somewhere else.” His mind raced, trying to remember where the conditions might produce a similar wine. The map flashed in front of his eyes, and he tried to focus on it, willing the right location to come into his thoughts. “Corguruth. The region of Aleppan is known for. . .” He had to search for the information. “Windspells. Windspells taste like healspells?”