Wildfire (16 page)

 

  
I sat under a hazel tree and watched water slide between the straight walls of a watercourse. There were minnows just under the surface. I wished I’d closed my eyes before Penna died, and not just after, so that I would not have seen Sire Edecon stumbling forward, streaked with red, and Penna falling toward him.

 

  
They took the dead daughters of Torrent to the charnel grounds outside the city, on the southern bank of the river, and built elaborate pyres for them. The servants of Torrent were burned with less ceremony. They didn’t trouble to sort the living drudges from the dead before setting the fires.

 

  
The brides had made a pact to kill themselves on their wedding night, and seven of them had done so. Some denounced the brides who had drowned, calling them dishonored, and some denounced those who had refused to kill themselves. It was not for me to judge them or Penna, my friend. Surely it had taken courage to die, yet I wished Penna had found the courage to go on living.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 6
  

  
March
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
thought I would be walking, since Sire Galan had to walk, but he would have none of that. He’d bought a jenny mule for me, and I straddled her bony back and the two fat sacks she carried. Her name was Frost, and she was white with a rime of gray on her roached mane. She went heavy laden, and I suppose she was more saddle sore than I was, but not by much.

 

  
We were five days and less than twenty leagues from Lanx, marching westward to the city of Malleus, and Sire Galan said we would be there in a score of days, more or less—more if we kept dawdling. There was a rumor, so widely believed that most took it for a fact, that Prince Corvus would sit snug in Malleus and make us besiege him, rather than march forth to stop us; though some soldiers claimed he wouldn’t fight at all, he’d run away before we got there and deprive us of a battle.

 

  
The army on the march was an ungainly armored beast nearly a league long, and we in the baggage were in its swollen belly, flanked on either side by foot soldiers in the fields. Wherever the great beast crawled, it left a wide swath of destruction: orchards pruned to stumps for firewood, yards turned to middens, fields and pastures trampled, hedges and fences breached.

 

  
Every company had its place in the order of march, and the clan of Crux was part of the vanguard, far ahead of the baggage. Sire Galan set out every morning before dawn, striding along on foot among his fellow cataphracts on their great warhorses, and I wouldn’t see him again until we made camp in the afternoon. He went lightly armored, wearing a padded linen shirt and leggings, and his new hauberk with enameled links, which I thought too delicate for battle. He hung his greater and lesser swords and his mercy dagger from his baldric. His armiger Sire Edecon rode at his side, and Spiller and Rowney took turns riding behind him, carrying his helmet, buckler, and scorpion. His plate armor was packed away in the baggage.

 

  
Sire Galan kept the pace, staying close by his uncle’s stirrup; in silent rebuke, some said, for an unjust punishment. But Galan never said so, never offered a word of complaint, though he was quick to take offense if he
thought he was being slighted for walking. He was more often praised, as most young hotspurs accounted it a great exploit that he went on foot. Of course none saw fit to praise his three foot soldiers, Cinder, Nift, and Digger, who walked just as far every day, carrying heavy burdens, and then labored in gangs to dig ditches, cut wood and fodder, build fences, and haul water when we reached camp.

 
  

 

  
We were following a fine straight road, paved with crushed stone and wide enough for two carts side by side, across a region of Incus called the Wolds. It was a fertile countryside, full of towns and villages, but a nuisance for travelers heading west, as we were. The land rose in long swells running mostly north to south, so that we had to climb one hill after another. In many of the valleys between these ridges there were lakes to ride around, or rivers to cross.

 

  
About midday we came to an unexpected halt. No one knew why. A ford ahead, probably. The slow and ponderous stoppage started in the front of the line and only gradually became known in the rear, so that those of us in the middle were crammed together, or forced off the raised gravel road into muddy ditches and fields. Men and horses and mules lost their tempers. Cook, the Crux’s provisioner, swore at Sire Farol’s bagboy, who had scraped his oxcart so close to one of the Crux’s that if he moved he’d break some spokes.

 

  
We in the baggage were in a valley; the head of the army was over the next hill, and the tail over the hill behind. The weather was cold and blustery, and it was raining hard. Spiller grumbled. It was his turn to lead Sire Galan’s baggage mules, and he thought it beneath him. He said that Sire Galan should have made Rowney a bagboy, he didn’t need two jacks. Or he should get a new bagboy, a horseboy too. Spiller had good cause for complaint, but I was tired of hearing it.

 

  
“I’m going to see Fie,” I told him.

 

  
“Fie? Who’s that?”

 

  
“You know, my my friend.”

 

  
“The broad-buttocked sow? Give her a kiss for me, eh?”

 

  
Delve’s baggage was ahead of us in the line of march, so I rode Frost into the ditch beside the road and up the other side and trotted through a field. Mai’s oxcart had a canopy of hides, stretched over wooden arches, that resembled nothing so much as the flanks of a starving cow. I called out to Mai and she waved and gave me a cheery greeting. I tied Frost to the cart and climbed into the back, past Pinch sitting on the driver’s seat with a long switch. Mai, Sunup, Tobe, and the piebald hound had a nest back there on sacks of grain and beans.

 

  
I took Mai’s hand and said, “Have you been eating?” Her nails were chewed to the quick and had white spots. Her belly looked like she’d swallowed a barrel and was just as hard, but the rest of her flesh, what I could see of it, hung in heavy swags. I visited her most days on the road or in camp to see how she was.

 

  
She laughed. “Mouse doesn’t have a taste for fish, and what else is there? I could dwindle by half and still make twice of you, so stop fretting.” There was a powerful stink in the cart from a cask of pickled herring. No wonder she lacked appetite.

 

  
Tobe climbed into my lap, and he explained something to me in his own peculiar language that daily came more and more to resemble our own, which only Mai and Sunup could understand. Then he got bored and squirmed to get away, as if he wanted to go and play among the cartwheels and hooves. Sunup took him in hand and they lay down on grain sacks near the dog. She murmured to Tobe, telling him a story.

 

  
I told Mai the war was not what I’d expected. “I thought there’d be fighting, big boffles. But it’s more like a feastable every night, a feastival.”

 

  
“Ha, boffles,” she said. “Are you bored? We’ll go in easy as a greased pig, but I daresay we won’t be so quick to come out again. By the time we get where Corvus wants us, we’ll be cold and weary and hungry and he’ll still be cosy in Malleus.”

 

  
“We won’t go hungry so long as we have…stick, stack…stackfish.” I was trying to make a jest of sorts. We had bales of stockfish, everyone did, and everyone loathed it. It was dried cod, hard as a plank and just as tasty. One had to pound it with a hammer all evening before it was fit to soak and stew.

 

  
Sunup was saying to Tobe, “You see, it was because the Moon was hungry. He dressed up like a silver fox and followed the wolves. He said, ‘I’m your cub, leave some for me,’ and the wolves said, ‘You don’t smell right.’” Tobe giggled when she pretended to sniff him.

 

  
Mai said, “I’ve got something for you.” She fished out her purse from under her tight bodice, and gave me a silver coin, a graybeard.

 

  
“What’s this for?”

 

  
“For talking to Flammakin yesterday.”

 

  
Mai had invited me to her tent yesterday evening, and I’d arrived to find she had another visitor already, a woman I’d never met, this Flammakin. She was the sheath of a Wolf. The queenmother’s Wolves were from the northern borderlands of Incus; they kept themselves aloof from King Thyrse’s warriors, and rumor made them out to be fearsome creatures, hardly men at all. But Flammakin seemed ordinary enough, dithering on about two men she was seeing behind her cataphract’s back, and which of
them she should run off with now that her Wolf was getting tiresome. I thought she was there to consult Mai, who was canny in the arts of Carnal Desire.

 

  
I said, “Why so? We didn’t have much of a…convention…consternation.” Flammakin spoke the High with the accent peculiar to the northerners, so that I could hardly understand her. And I’d had the usual trouble making myself understood.

 

  
When Mai laughed, the whole cart shook. “She was perfectly well satisfied. She’s going to take your advice.”

 

  
“What advise?”

 

  
“She’s going to take up with Sire Noctambule.”

 

  
“Which one was he, the rich or the handersome?”

 

  
“The rich one,” Mai said.

 

  
“I never said such. What did I say?”

 

  
“It hardly mattered. Flammakin just wanted to be advised to do what she’d already decided to do.”

 

  
“So for this you took coins on my behand? What was your shave?” The more Mai guffawed, the more indignant I was.

 

  
“I don’t see the harm,” she said when she was done laughing. “Flammakin was delighted, and you’re the richer for it.”

 

  
“Still. I’m not a revelicker, a a revelighter. Don’t do it again,” I said.

 

  
The cart lurched forward as the army started to move. Pinch began to whistle. And Sunup said to Tobe, “The fox said, ‘That’s because I’m hungry. I’ve been eating pease pottage and coleworts, I’ve been eating radishes and onions, no fit food for wolves like us.’ So the wolves caught a stag and ate up every scrap of meat. And the fox stared and stared with his tongue hanging out until they took pity on him and let him gnaw on the shin bones…,” and she pretended to bite Tobe’s leg until he squealed, “and the thighbones and the hip bones and the rib bones and the neck bones and the skull,” and every time she named a bone she nibbled on Tobe until he was laughing and shrieking. “And that’s how the Moon got full!”

 
  

 

  
The hungry new Moon was due to show himself tonight, if the clouds would only part so we could see him. The month called Long Nights was beginning and long nights meant short days and short marches. While it was still afternoon, the army made camp near the brow of a hill, beside a steep ravine that offered some protection, firewood, and a good fast stream at the bottom for water.

 

  
Rowney and I headed down the wooded slope. It wasn’t safe for me to forage alone. I had acquaintances in every clan company, and no longer trembled every time a man looked too long at me or called me a lewd
byname, as I used to do when I was a newcomer to the Marchfield. But with so many men roaming in packs, there was reason to be wary.

 

  
I collected dead branches, working my way downstream and keeping my eyes open for childbane bushes, which prefer wet feet. I’d been searching for it since we left Lanx, and I was beginning to fear it didn’t grow in this kingdom. I’d used the last of the berries Mai had given me. My tides weren’t late, not yet.

 

  
I knotted my skirt to make a carry sack, and gathered red haws from a thorny tree. They were sweeter than usual; perhaps I could give some to Cook in exchange for an egg. It galled me that I couldn’t think of the name of the tree, for it was common in hedges and thickets. The Dame had taught me its song, a riddle and incantation, and now the tune came back to me with but a few words. Something about throat’s ease—
It bears the fruit we call throat’s ease,
that was all I recalled. I sang it over and over, hoping it would lead me to the rest of the song and the name. Why should it matter what the tree was called, so long as I knew what could be done with it? Yet it did matter.

 

  
Something rustled in dried leaves under the briars. Rowney crept forward, and pulled off his leather jerkin and scooped something up with it, saying, “Aha!” He’d caught an unlucky hedgehog that had come nosing out of the thicket to see what kind of evening it was. I heard a muffled thump as Rowney dispatched it with the blunt side of his ax.

 

  
“Hawtorn!” I said to Rowney, pleased to have remembered the name. The haws would make a good relish for the winter-fat hedgehog. We’d sup well tonight.

 

  
“Hmm?” he said.

 

  
We climbed up the banks of the ravine and I stopped to catch my breath and hitch up my bundle of firewood. All day dirty fleeces of cloud had covered the Sun. Now the rain had stopped and the Sun’s face showed between the clouds and the horizon. As her orange disk touched the rim of the world, the bristling back of the ridge to the west was edged in fire. It was a fine sight to see the encampment whole, in the ruddy sunset light: a great wheel with King Thryse’s large pavilion at the hub, and the rest of the pavilions in orderly lines between the spokes, with bright banners flickering in the wind, and plumes of smoke curling up from campfires. And it was a fine thing to be part of something so much grander than myself. I’d be content to march forever, so long as we never reached a battle.

 
  

 

  
A dream came to me at the end of a wakeful night. In the dream I wandered the terraces seeking remnants of the old gardens, plants that had survived in sheltered spots, or their offspring, sown by the wind. Even on the near