Wildfire (11 page)

 

  
They asked me other questions, but I refused to say more. I’d misled them already, trying to speak the truth. It made me distrust everything I’d ever heard from Auspices. Why did they need my answers? Didn’t they have their own auguries? Or was I just one portent among the many that begged for interpretation?

 

  
I was incapable of uttering what the god might say. I knew this, even if the Auspices didn’t, for the knowledge had been impressed upon me when I groveled before the altar. If that was what Ardor required of me, then I had failed. Perhaps the fault was in me, because I was mudborn, without a divine lineage to strengthen my clay. A flawed pot will crack in the kiln—perhaps this remnant of me, aching and twitching, halting and slow, was all that was left after the god had fired me and found me an unfit vessel.

 

  
Would my speech be fettered to the end of my days? How would I
endure it? I resolved to banish hope; it was too bitter when hope was overthrown.

 
  

 

  
Sire Galan was waiting for me with his friends, standing in the heat of Wildfire’s altar. When he saw the paint on my face he took in a short breath, saying, “Did they hurt you?”

 

  
I put my hand out to reassure him. “It will wash.”

 

  
“Don’t, though.”

 

  
“What don’t?”

 

  
“Don’t wash it off.”

 

  
“Why not? It’s just taint. I thought they tainted me to pure me, you know—for a a melody, a meredy. But you can hear how I’m still brangled.”

 

  
“They wanted something of you—what was it?”

 

  
“I think a a…orator? Or no—a miracle? No—I mean…oracle. An oracle.”

 

  
“Ha! Indeed?” Galan took my arm above the elbow, and he set such a pace through the temple that I had to hurry to keep up. Many men stood before the door, and among them Ardor’s clansmen. Surely they didn’t mean to fight on a Peaceday, in a temple sanctuary, but they stared at me, they whispered and hissed. Galan’s grip was painful, but when I looked at him sidelong he grinned. He had a font of joy that bubbled up in him when there was danger. It fizzed through my own body as if I’d drunk of the same perilous waters. He didn’t slow down. Again they moved aside. Just enough.

 

  
He hadn’t come here to flaunt himself; he’d come for me, to make sure his enemies would know I’d been touched by the god. To keep me from harm. No wonder he was pleased by the paint on my face.

 

  
Galan said, “And were you?”

 

  
“What?”

 

  
“An oracle?”

 

  
I remembered the priest bending toward me in earnest inquiry, and the priestess writing down nonsense, and I began to laugh. “I was, I am an oracle!” I said loudly so the men of Ardor would hear. “See what is written on my disgrace? In this taint? Ask the Suspiciouses what it said, I can’t say, I have a torn tongue, a thorn tongue, a tongue of fire.” I stopped searching for the right words, I laughed and let them all fly out, and how the onlookers gaped! We passed through the portal into daylight and ran down the steps, and Galan was laughing too, and also Sire Edecon at my left shoulder, Sire Guasca on Galan’s right, and the others behind. As if I were one of them.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 4
  

  
The Black Drink
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
A
hand of days we’d been in Lanx, a hand of nights I’d been without sleep. Last night there had been a great storm over the city. I’d felt it coming from a long way off, by the smell in the night wind and by some other faculty of perception I hadn’t known I had—as if a weight pressed on some faraway part of me. An approaching tread.

 

  
Then thunder had rumbled around like carts over cobbles, and Wildfire had scrawled across the sky and lit up the slashing rain. I sat in the balcony watching, frightened, unable to look away. There had been strange melodies in the storm. The spire above me hooted with every gust from north-of-west, and when the winds shifted, another spire would answer in its own distinctive voice, for each clan tower had a windcatcher that sounded only when the wind came from the direction ruled by its god. This was how the city sang its ships home in a storm. The windcatchers’ sounds had been there all along, crooning with every breeze, but I hadn’t heard.

 
  

 

  
By dawn the storm had passed and I was wearier than the night before. I sat in the balcony trying to do a bit of sewing, while Penna sat across from me working on Sire Edecon’s brigandine, replacing tow padding stained with sweat and blood. We worked quietly together, and I found it restful. Sire Rodela buzzed—he always did—but I could ignore him more easily during the day, when I kept busy.

 

  
Both my hands did my bidding without weakness, but I noticed a strange thing: my right hand was always cold now, my left always warm. I squinted at the stitches, which didn’t march as straight as they should. I’d persuaded Sire Galan I couldn’t go about in wintertime clad in a thin shift, no matter if it was the fashion, and he’d given me green wool enough to make two dresses. Penna had helped me cut it, and now I was stitching an overdress with sleeves that laced to the bodice at the shoulders, and slits along the front and back up to my thighs. That way I could show off one of the gauze gowns Galan had bought me as an underdress, without showing too much of myself.

 

  
He’d given me other presents: boots that laced about my calves, sturdy enough for many miles; a shiny willow green headcloth with a white cord to wrap around it; a small knife with an ivory handle to replace the one destroyed by Wildfire; a leather girdle with an oilskin wallet. I didn’t refuse his gifts. I’d lost that quarrel; by my master’s largesse I was reminded of my place.

 

  
Mud soldiers were saying the king planned to spend the winter in Lanx and march on Malleus when better weather came in springtime, and I wouldn’t have minded. But Sire Galan said we’d be gone inside of the tennight, as soon as the army had provisioned. Today he and his men were off to the market of Carnal to buy horses (to buy whores, Spiller said, trying to make me jealous, for both were ruled by Carnal). The Crux had asked Galan to go, saying he had an eye for horseflesh. I thought it was cruel to send Galan to buy horses he couldn’t ride, but Galan seemed flattered to be entrusted with the task. The Crux’s horsemaster, Thrasher, would do the dickering, for in Incus the Blood would not soil themselves by buying and selling, and left all such negotiations to the mudborn. The custom had been readily adopted by the cataphracts of our army—and a fine custom it was too, for feathering a drudge’s bed.

 

  
I tried to thread the needle, but my hands shook and the needle seemed to change size when I stared too long. I held the needle and thread out to Penna, and said, “Can you…?”

 

  
Sire Edecon hadn’t bought Penna wool or boots. Perhaps he just wanted her for his convenience here in Lanx. I hoped she would march with us, for it would be good to have her company. She never spoke of her plans, nor of what had happened in the keep of Torrent. I allowed her the reticence she seemed to prefer; she allowed me my ignorance.

 

  
I said, “I have wood enough for two, for two things you wear on yourself—two like this…” I lifted the dress to show her what I meant. “I’ll gift you one, if you like. So you can stay warm this cold, this…Crone. While we are on camping.”

 

  
We had a small brazier on the balcony floor between us, and she leaned down to put more sticks on the fire, and didn’t answer.

 

  
“I’ll help you stew it, stetch it,” I said.

 

  
She looked up with something of a smile. “I’ve seen the way you sew.”

 

  
“I know. It’s all cracked, all crooked. Like my speak.”

 

  
We went back to our sewing, and there was silence again.

 

  
Someone opened the door to Galan’s room and called out, “Is anyone here?”

 

  
I dropped my sewing and ran from the balcony into the room, and embraced Mai, so glad to see her I had to blink back tears. She was wheez
ing hard, and I fetched her the sturdiest chair I could find. “I can’t stay long,” she said. “And if I’d known there would be so many stairs to climb, I’d not have come at all.”

 

  
“I’m so pleaded you did,” I said. “But did you come all one? Isn’t it perilment?”

 

  
“I left Trave and Pinch and the others downstairs, so they wouldn’t stick their long noses in our business. What happened to your face? Did the bruise turn blue? It looks frightful. But you’re not so lopsided, and you sound better. Do you have your strength back?”

 

  
“And you? No more seavexness?”

 

  
“Thank the gods. I thought I’d die of it. I thought we were all going to die, to tell the truth. When the lightning struck, it brought half the mast down, did you know that? Crushed two men, and almost capsized the ship before they cut it clear. But why the paint on your face? Who did that?”

 

  
Penna came to the balcony doorway, and she and Mai eyed each other. I tried to introduce them, but their names came out all wrong, and they laughed and introduced themselves. Soon I had Mai settled by the hearth with a brazier at her feet and a wooden cup of ale in her hand. Penna and I went on stitching, and I told Mai about the Auspices of Ardor, and how they had painted me and I’d called a crown a crow and a fire a pyre, and she was much amused by it. “I told you people would take notice,” she said.

 

  
I asked after Sire Torosus and Sunup and Tobe, and she said they were all well, but that their lodgings were not so fine as ours. Their company was quartered with their distant cousins, the clan of Delve in Lanx, who’d been impoverished by the feud. They needed both the shipwrights of Crux and the sailors of Torrent to transport their ores; by trying to appease both sides, they had pleased neither. So their welcome to Sire Torosus’s company had been cold and stingy, as you might imagine, she said. And she didn’t doubt that they would forswear the oaths they’d been obliged to give to the queenmother as soon as our army had marched away. Of course they weren’t too fond of her son Prince Corvus either. Mai said, “You can’t trust any of these Blood from Incus. They have no idea of loyalty.”

 

  
I was afraid Penna might take offense, so I got up and made a fuss of returning to Mai the gray dress she’d lent me. And Mai mockingly praised my blue silk dress; she said she wouldn’t mind the fashion, come summertime, but Sire Torosus didn’t approve.

 

  
“You are from Corymb?” Penna said to Mai.

 

  
“Indeed,” she said.

 

  
“And you are from Lambanein?” she said to me.

 

  
“Who, me? No. Where is this? I’m for, from…Cram, Crom, Corm too.”

 

  
“I know you came from Corymb. But you were born in Lambanein, weren’t you?”

 

  
“Why do you say that?” asked Mai.

 

  
“Her red hair,” Penna said. “Many of those Lambaneish people have red hair, like King Corvus’s wife.”

 

  
I remembered how Sire Galan had once called me Hazard’s breed, and I’d disbelieved him. But was there a place ruled by Hazard, a place where red hair was common? I took up my stitching again, and my cold right hand shook more than ever. “Where is this Lamenting, this…kindom? I never heard on it before.”

 

  
“South, isn’t it?” said Mai.

 

  
Penna nodded.

 

  
I said, “I don’t know where I was bared, borne. I have had true delves of a place, a…lack, lake, and worriers riding over the highs, and and my…the man, the man-mother, he pointed to them.” Mai looked at Penna, and Penna at Mai, and I saw they hadn’t understood me. I’d had two true dreams of my father—I knew they were true because there were scents in them, and ordinary dreams are without smells. I’d dreamed we went riding over a mountain to sell a colt, and my father saw warriors behind us on another mountain, and though I was young, I understood he was afraid. In the second dream he was dressing me in an embroidered felt cap and vest to go to market. From these short dreams I’d learned two things: my father was a mudman who bred and traded horses, and he was fond of me. Impossible to explain all that, with my clumsy tongue. But I didn’t like to see Mai and Penna share such glances; were they laughing at me?

 

  
I said, “So maybe I came from this—this…lake, land, place? What did you call it? But all I have left is dernes—I mean dregs—because I dismember it. I was only little when I was taken capsized, maybe four airs of age, no one knows. And that was about a dozzle—let me think—a dozzin or thirteen ages along ago. I was a caitiff—like you, Pendant—a captif.”

 

  
Penna bent over Sire Edecon’s brigantine without saying another word, and this time it was Mai and I who conferred by glances. Maybe I was wrong to call Penna a captive. She could run, couldn’t she? Slip out the gate, disappear in the city—Sire Edecon wouldn’t know where to look for her. But where would she go, how would she live? For a moment I imagined looking through her eyes at a world suddenly emptied of every dear and familiar person, and I flinched.

 

  
Mai was the first to break the uncomfortable silence that followed my words; she offered up the latest rumor, that the commander of the Wolves had asked the queenmother’s hand in marriage—though she was thin and
hard as a plank, said Mai, and she doubted the Wolf or anyone could get a child on her, she was so old—she must be forty, at least.

 

  
“Not so old, I think,” Penna said. “Queenmother Caelum bore her eldest son, Corvus, the same year she was married, and he is twenty—and surely she was less than fifteen years of age when she wed. And what did the queenmother say to this Wolf?”

 

  
“She refused him, of course.”

 

  
Mai was still gossiping when the Crux sent his varlet Boot to fetch me. I put down my sewing and looked at Mai in a panic. The last time I’d been summoned by the Crux, he’d made me face his manhounds in a trial by ordeal, to prove I spoke the truth about Sire Rodela’s lies. Likely I’d have died then if Galan hadn’t stood beside me in the dog pen. And now Sire Galan was off on one of the Crux’s errands, and I doubted it was coincidence.