Wildfire (24 page)

 

  
The priestess’s handmaid asked us sharply, “What do you want?”

 

  
I whispered to Fleetfoot, “You’d best say. I might get it wrong and cause suspense.”

 

  
He kept his eyes on the ground and mumbled, “I’ve come to offer sacrifices to the Queen of the Dead and the Warrior.”

 

  
The priestess’s foot twitched under the puddled hem of her long overdress, which was lined with black marten fur. She must keep warm indeed in such a robe.

 

  
The handmaid said, “What do you offer?” and she spoke in the cadence of ceremony.

 

  
“Blood,” said Fleetfoot.

 

  
I opened my purse and fished out a couple of coins—not the largest, the copperheads, nor yet the smallest, the goldenheads, but two silverheads. For a drudge, it was a handsome amount. I held the coins toward the handmaid and the priestess raised her eyebrows and gave a nod of assent. She nibbled on a sweetmeat, a dried apricot.

 

  
In the Marchfield we mudfolk had been free to sacrifice at the twelve altars that stood around the king’s pavilion at the center of camp, where all directions and roads met. Now it seemed we had to beg for the privilege of worshipping. I wondered if the Auspices would soon turn us away altogether, as was done in the temples of Lanx.

 

  
Fleetfoot held out his left arm for the priestess to make the cut, and when she saw the stump she asked for the other hand. That one lacked two fingers, but she found it acceptable. She made a shallow cut and squeezed blood into the bowl. “If it please you, Divine,” Fleetfoot said, “make the next one deeper.” She looked hard at him then, as if she truly saw him, while he gazed at the brass bowl with the red pool in it. The next cut made his jaw tighten, but as he watched the blood flow, his expression eased. Sometimes one hurt will drive away another.

 

  
I offered my own arm and said, “I would be generous too, for I owe thanks to the Queen of the Deed.”

 
  

 

  
In the night I heard Fleetfoot turn and turn again, and once or twice I heard him whimper. His offering had been accepted, but it had not sufficed. I eased from under the covers and pulled on my shift, and squatted beside the lad where he lay wrapped in a blanket he’d stolen from the clothier. Piddle raised her head and thumped her tail. Fleetfoot’s eyes glistened with tears he refused to spill.

 

  
“It’s no use,” he said in a whisper. “I’d cut it off myself if it wasn’t gone already.”

 

  
How cruel of Rift to torment the boy!—but of course Rift is cruel, how foolish to wish otherwise.

 

  
“What does it feel like?”

 

  
“It itches but I can’t scratch it. And sometimes it burns and burns. Not as fire burns—more like when you’ve been working outside in the cold and
your hands and feet freeze and when you come inside it hurts worse, it burns. But it doesn’t stop burning, it just won’t go away.”

 

  
He sat up and wiped his nose on the blanket. He looked so dejected, I reached out and hugged him. He was too much the man to give way and be comforted like a child, but he allowed my embrace. I wished I could gather him up, tuck him safe in my purse, so he wouldn’t suffer further harm. I reached for his left clubbed hand and clasped it between mine. To my warm left hand, his hand was cold; to my cold right hand, it was warm. My left hand felt his hand incomplete, with stretched skin and puckered scar, but my right hand felt his fingers. This was a strange sensation, and for a moment I could make no sense of it. I held my breath and closed my eyes, and let out the breath in a sigh. “Wriggle your finders,” I said.

 

  
“I have no fingers.”

 

  
“I know, but still. Are you wiggling them?”

 

  
“No.”

 

  
“Yes, yes you are! I felt it. But only the littlest, the the nice. The niece.” There’s a children’s game everyone knows in which the fingers of the right hand are named grandfather (the thumb), father (the forefinger), brother, son, and nephew; on the left hand, of course, are grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, and niece.

 

  
“What am I doing now?” Fleetfoot asked.

 

  
I laughed and opened my eyes. “You’re wiggling all your elbows!”

 

  
He pulled his hand away and put it behind his back.

 

  
“I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you. Let me rub your arms, hands,” I said, and I was surprised he let me. “Did the…did what I gave you to drink, the thissum, thisan, help? Did you sleep at all?”

 

  
Fleetfoot shrugged. “Not much.”

 

  
I tried to stroke warmth down his arms and into what remained of his hands, to ease the cold burning he felt. His eyelids began to droop, and he leaned against me. All I could give him was the comfort of touch.

 

  
The next day we packed before the Sun rose, to be ready to march at dawn. Then the Crux sent his varlets around to tell us we were not leaving that morning, perhaps later in the day. Galan said, “A tennight’s march from Malleus and we’re supposed to sit twiddling our dangles?” and he went off to find out why.

 

  
A tennight from Malleus! I’d begun to think we would march all winter across the Wolds, up and down the rolling hills, and never arrive. This suited me, but the men, most of them, seemed eager for battle and bored without it, and the untried hotspurs boasted of feats not yet accomplished.
When Galan came back I asked why we tarried, and he said with scorn that rumor had it the queenmother was feeling poorly.

 

  
By midday we were sure we would stay another night in the camp, but no, we had to move out in haste and march a league or two. As Frost trotted along, I pondered how to help Fleetfoot, and fell into a waking dream. With one eye, my left, I saw the passing road: tall stalks of wandflower standing upright above a patch of snow, and a flock of chiffchaffs stripping the last berries from a rowan tree. With my failing right eye I saw dark loam, and my hands pushing something deep into it, some kind of white seeds that I planted a handsbreadth apart. The earth had a good rich fragrance. It was alive with reddish worms, and little sowbugs trundling over the clods, climbing their tiny mountains. I saw the seeds were finger bones, like the Dame’s and Na’s, but unpainted.

 

  
Frost stumbled and I jerked awake. I knew the smell of that dirt—I had even tasted it. It was loam from the dream garden on Mount Sair.

 

  
Despite having the odor of a true dream, this one could not be true: I’d never plant finger bones, it was absurd. Did that mean the other dreams were false too, and I’d never see the house on the mountainside?

 

  
Yet there was portent in this reverie, a sign. Na must have sent it. She was Fleetfoot’s aunt, and would do her best to guide me. I must throw the bones for him. I’d remade my compass so that by color and godsign I could find my way around it, and for the first time since lightning struck, I could hope to make sense of what the bones might say.

 
  

 

  
Sire Galan mumbled when I got up in the middle of the night, and I told him my legs had cramped and I needed to walk the stiffness out of them. It was a still night with thick clouds over the Moon and stars, and the darkness suited my purpose. I crouched outside the tent and opened the divining compass. I tried to hold Fleetfoot in mind, to see him as he once was, unmarred and untroubled; as he was now, maimed inside and out; as I hoped he could be, healed of his pain. I cast the bones three times to seek a way toward his healing: first for his nature, second for the nature of his affliction, and third for the gods who governed the remedy and might grant or withhold a cure.

 

  
I asked Na and the Dame to point the way, but on the first cast Na, the red-tipped bone, fell outside the circle, saying nothing. Why was she silent? The Dame’s blue bone landed on Artifex and crossed the line to Frenzy.

 

  
I cast the second time, and Na landed squarely on Mischief, and the Dame on the Sun.

 

  
On the third throw, Na fell upon Chance, and the tip crossed into the domain of the Warrior. The Dame landed on Mischief, with the tip of her
finger on Desire. I thought it strange that both bones landed askew, touching upon male and female, one god to another.

 

  
I cast quickly so as not to be seen, and I pulled tight the drawstring to make the compass into a pouch again with the bones hidden inside, and I went back to bed to think. I’d thrown the bones in pairs and the three casts made a chain of linked signs, but what did they mean?

 

  
The bones didn’t speak to me—maybe they never had, not the way they’d spoken to Az, conversing so that she could overhear. But they showed me images now as never before, images that were clearest in my cloudy right eye.

 

  
When the Dame touched the two avatars of Eorőe, Artifex and Frenzy, I saw Artifex digging clay from the bank of a narrow ravine. She looked like Az, a small bird-boned woman with a crooked back. She shaped a man of clay around an acorn heart—Fleetfoot himself, born of Kingswood clay. Fleetfoot’s mother had given him just such a tiny clay man with an acorn heart to wear as a talisman. I wondered if he still had it.

 

  
Artifex was the only dead avatar, and required no one’s worship, yet I revered her. She’d fashioned the first people—mudfolk—from the clay of many rivers, making them pale, ruddy, or dark, and used her last breath giving life to them.

 

  
Fleetfoot’s clay, his flesh. The Dame had pointed from Artifex to Frenzy, and I saw Frenzy as a clay jar with strong doublewine in it, and a broken handle: Frenzy for rage or bliss, madness or intoxication. Must Fleetfoot drown his pains in drink, like Galan’s kinsman?

 

  
The Dame said Sun, the Sun casts shadows—a shadow had to remain true in some manner to the shape that cast it. The clay jar had a broken handle, yet the shadow’s handle was whole. Its shadow, its shade. When I’d held Fleetfoot’s hand between mine, I’d felt the shape and motion of his missing fingers. The flesh was maimed and the shade was whole, the shade insisted and the flesh denied. Their quarrel caused pain, for one should fill the other, no more and no less. Suppose his shade could be remade to fit the new shape of his flesh?

 

  
I was heartened to think that on the last throw Na had pointed to Rift Warrior, by way of Chance. She seemed to say that with Chance’s favor I’d find a cure, a way to appease the seemingly implacable Warrior.

 

  
But why did she land on Mischief on the second cast? What did he have to do with the nature of Fleetfoot’s pains? And the Dame had also touched Mischief, on the third throw, while pointing to Desire—so there was Mischief in Fleetfoot’s affliction and in the cure. I saw the avatar clearly, a boy a little younger than Fleetfoot, wearing a merry and malicious smile. Mice swarmed about his feet. He was untrustworthy; he could mean an obstacle or another sign reversed. Yet the Dame said I must ask him for help.

 

  
For once I didn’t mind my wakefulness. I puzzled over the avatars, their agreements and contradictions. Night became twilight, and the army stirred, and dogs barked and men cursed, and Spiller let cold air into the tent, and still I didn’t understand. I feared I might be incapable of understanding the bones now, because I no longer remembered all the attributes of the gods and avatars, knowledge everyone else took for granted. Day by day memories had been given back to me, but how much remained forgotten?

 

  
I prayed. I prayed to Wildfire, whose sign had not appeared, and to Chance and the Warrior, Mischief and Desire, calling upon them for a cure.

 
  

 

  
Usually we halted on Peacedays to repair wagons and harnesses, and forage and rest, but today we marched to make up for the time lost the day before. I dozed on Frost’s back, and didn’t realize how much we were dawdling until I looked up and saw the baggage train far ahead. I found myself in the rearguard among clansmen of Wend. They passed by on their great horses while I tugged at the reins to persuade Frost to stop eating grass that grew in the ditch by the road. An armiger was singing in a fine voice, and I paused and raised my head, recognizing Sire Edecon’s song about that girl of Torrent. It was strange that sadness should have such a honeyed sting.

 

  

 

  
You had one night of me,

 

  
I had one night of you.

 

  
I will ever be your bride,

 

  
But I’ll never be your wife.

 

  
I’ll have no more of life.

 

  
I’ll have no more of life.

 

  

 

  
The Blood of Wend passed, and I turned off the crowded road to ride through the field alongside. Most of the snow had melted. I came to a hedge that divided one field from the next. Foot soldiers had hacked a huge gap in it so they could pass, for the hedges in this country were so thick even a goat couldn’t slip through them.

 

  
I reined in Frost and slid off her back, amazed by the abundance I saw in the verge between field and hedge. It was as if the finger bones in my dream, planted as seeds in the domain of the gods, had brought forth a harvest of signs; I would have missed them if the Dame and Na had not shown me where to look.

 

  
I gathered what was offered: from Artifex, fibrous stalks of hemp, still standing tall; from Frenzy, grains of the bearded darnel grass, which cause
drunkenness; pinecones from the Sun; a bundle of maple twigs from Chance, who favors any plant that casts its seeds on the wind; the leathery evergreen leaves of a bear’s-foot hellebore from the Warrior; a drake root from Desire, not forked like a man or a woman, as was usual, but clubbed like Fleetfoot’s hand.

 

  
As for Mischief, I already had an idea about him. I relied on Ev to bring me mice—there were always mice in the grain stores, and cats and boys to catch them.

 
  

 

  
I had something to do I didn’t want the men to see, a painstaking and grisly task. I sat in the back of Mai’s cart while she told me the gossip and what she thought of it. I stitched as we bumped along, and pricked my fingers many times. Sunup watched me sew and asked questions I wouldn’t answer.