Wildfire (40 page)

 

  
The rooks argued too,
Caw! Caw! Caw!
They contested over which could cast more scorn on the king. Some called him a caitiff coward. Did he think he’d find kindness in another kingdom, cowering at the foot of another king’s throne, now that he’d lost his own? Cozened of it by a cunning canny. They shrieked with laughter, making such a din that men paused to listen.

 

  
The First of Torrent in Incus said the king should skirt the mountains and march to the Outward Sea, sail from the harbor at Urtica. The First of Delve pleaded with the king to take refuge in his clan’s copper mines on Mount Somno—easily defended, he said.

 

  
Some rooks cawed at this, said copper couldn’t cut steel, said the king couldn’t cower behind the clan of Delve, beware of their custody.

 

  
I laughed to see the priests attending so prayerfully to the rooks’ gibes, and said, “Listen to the rooks mock the cock of crows!” Garrio tried to hush me up.

 

  
The quarrel went on, but the king had already decided on his course, heedless of advice from birds or counselors. He refused the hospitality of the First of Delve, who was affronted. The Delve took his men and rode away west.

 

  
The king stood in his stirrups and pointed after them, shouting out that any man who lacked heart should follow them, he’d let them go gladly. He didn’t need such men, they were already forgotten. He was the better contented with the men who remained with him, knowing they were both brave and loyal, when so many had proved otherwise. In brighter times—for there were bright times to come—he would remember those who stayed beside him in this dark time, he would show how he prized them. His face was flushed, and his voice carried far.

 

  
Some score or more of mudmen did canter off after the First of Delve, but the king turned his back on them. The rooks’ concourse was done. They rose up in a great thunderclap of wings and flew away south, and we followed.

 
  

 

  
I lay beside Catena at the bottom of a well, under stars and rags of clouds and doves perching on long poles. The doves cooed and jostled and settled into slumber. The floor we lay upon was plastered with their droppings. This must be a well of Sleep, blue-black Sleep, and I was drowning in it. I could hardly breathe. If I climbed that ladder, could I catch a breath?

 

  
I got up, amazed by how easy it was to stand, to climb the notched log ladder and step through a narrow window onto a rickety balcony of poles—but only half of me did this, my right-hand self, for I was divided left from right. The right self was chilled, the skin covered with goose bumps. No manacle.

 

  
The left-hand self was lying down at the bottom of the well, burning and sweating, shackled to Catena. Nothing united these half selves but a strand thin as spider silk, no more substantial than a gleam.

 

  
Up on the balcony I saw a sentry dozing with his mouth agape. His teeth were stained as if he’d drunk woad. His feet hung over the edge of the balcony and his hand rested protectively over his prickguard. This was a tower, not a well: a ruined watch tower on the border of a kingdom long forgotten. Three tall firs beside the tower swayed in the night wind, and I clung to my perch and shivered, and turned my one-eyed head to look at the ground below.

 

  
The right self had the bad eye, and saw everything tinged with yellow, dim and haloed, shimmering with a rank luminescence. Huts of mudfolk were built against the tower walls, fragile as the papery nests of wasps. I spied motion downhill among trees and boulders, one, three, six, many shapes that glimmered when they moved, like pale grubs in a spadeful of dirt. Enemies, Wolves.

 

  
Not my enemies; let them come. It was not for me to wake the sentry on the balcony, dreaming of a boy he knew when he was six, the two of them fishing. I could see his dream, a minnow nibbling at his beard.

 

  
I kept my mouth shut, but my voice made mischief, buzzing in the sentry’s ear. “Wake up! Wake up!” Doves flew out of the roofless tower in a sudden clatter of wings. The sentry sat up as if he’d been stung and peered over the edge of the balcony. “To arms!” he bellowed, and howled in imitation of a wolf.

 

  
The Wolves howled back and sprinted uphill. They lit torches, and set the thatched huts on fire, and the inhabitants fled. A few were cut down as they ran, but they weren’t the real quarry.

 

  
A man with a shortsword in a scabbard on his back climbed the ladder to the balcony. He was a young priest of Rift, and the eye tattooed in indigo on his bald scalp was wide open. He clouted the sentry on his ear for failing in his duty, and the sentry groveled. “How many?” the priest asked. I whispered to him, but he never heard, and he never saw me, not even with his tattooed eye. I was afraid of the Wolves; I wasn’t sure if they would save or slay us, Catena and me.

 

  
Smoke billowed up, and down in the haze my other self, the left one, was choking. The fire in the doorway burned through the portal of my good left eye. Wolves crowded in with their shields locked together, making the turtle’s back. Inside the door they burst apart, and King Corvus and his men were waiting.

 

  
There was a cow byre inside the ruined tower, with warhorses stabled in it, and a Wolf torched it before he fell. Fire stood up tall in the thatched roof and began to leap and caper. Wildfire was loose, and my left self was wonder-struck. The byre was made of wicker and clay, and the horses inside kicked it apart and went dashing about the tower, screaming in fear. Men shouted.

 

  
The fire was loudest of all. The tower became its throat, and its outrushing roar a song of twining winds. Its thunderous fast cadence took possession of me and everything that moved. Fire and shadow kept perfect time, for where one advanced, the other retreated, and never missed a step. I would have joined the dance for the ecstasy of it, but I was crippled and chained and I could only jiggle my leg and strike my thigh with my palm. The rattle of the iron links pleased me. I was moved to sing a firesong, which I made of words given me by the Hearthkeeper, and a melody given by a bird that had perched on a firethorn tree in the Kingswood.

 

  

 

  
Burn bright, burn fast.

 

  
Give what light you can,

 

  
The rest is ash.

 

  

 

  
Catena tugged the chain, saying, “Come on! You must—I can’t carry you.” Her round face was ruddy in the firelight, and tears glistened on her
cheeks. It was hard to move, I was limp and clumsy, only half present. I rolled over and dug in my left knee, my left elbow, and we crawled away from the burning byre. My left self saw chaos in the flames now, instead of the dance that moved the world. I remembered to be afraid. Catena was sobbing and shaking, and I gathered her close to me, and we made ourselves as small as children hiding in a linen chest in a burning house.

 

  
My right self was on the balcony, shivering, watching the priest slide down a rope. He unsheathed his dagger and ran into the darkness down the hill. I was mute. I had lost my voice in the labyrinth of his ear, whispering to him of Wolves. Wind seethed through the fir trees and I let it go through me until I was as cold as the night. I wanted to follow the priest down the rope, run away, free my right self from the anchor of the left, the heavy flesh and iron chain.

 

  
And I might have gone, but I heard a thin whisper of a song,
Give what light you can,
and my voice was in my throat again, where it belonged. The melody doubled, as I was doubled.
The rest is ash.
I was bound by threads of light and song, stitching me together, left and right, until I was one whole again.

 
  

 

  
By morning the weather in my mind was clear of mists and storms. The fever had broken. The shiver-and-shake had failed to kill me, and though I knew it would return once more, in a tennight or so, I no longer had to fear it. Yet I was perilously weak. Catena helped me sit, and Mox brought us boiled barley. I ate dutifully, queasy from the stench of pyres and smoking rubble.

 

  
It hadn’t all been a dream. Catena had saved me last night. If she hadn’t roused me, I might have stayed transfixed by Wildfire, singing until I died.

 

  
Her face was smudged with soot and streaked with tears. She ate left-handed, awkwardly, because of the chain on her right. Her wrist had swollen around the cuff. I’d been so overwhelmed by my own misery, I hadn’t been able to spare a thought for hers.

 

  
I asked Mox for water so I could clean Catena’s face. “You should see yours,” Mox said, and Catena smiled.

 

  
It stung the pride of the king and his men, down to the lowliest varlet, that the Wolves had gotten close enough to harm us. They thought they’d outridden all pursuit. The priests of Rift were most humiliated of all, having failed in vigilance. The penance they paid was secret, a matter for Rift Warrior; rumor had it his disciplines were severe.

 

  
The sentries who had failed to raise an alarm were executed. Divine Volator, the young priest of Rift with an indigo eye tattooed on his scalp, was given the task of striking off their heads, one, two, three; he was obliged to be
executioner because, unlike the other priests, he still used a sword. The first head to fall belonged to the man I’d seen on the balcony dreaming of fishing.

 
  

 

  
I had lost count of the days of my captivity and now the Moon was at half. I tied knots in the red cord around my waist, guessing it was about seven days since the battle, and my dream in the temple of Lynx.

 

  
Queenmother Caelum’s Wolves harried us southward through rolling hills. They cut down laggards and attacked the king’s outriders and foragers. Soldiers died trying to steal a nap by a hedge or a lamb from a flock. The Wolves winnowed the king’s army of stupid and weak men; likewise brave ones, the first to perish when there was fighting to be done. Above all, unlucky ones.

 

  
Such a long pursuit of a defeated enemy was unusual, but rumor had it the queenmother was sore offended by her son. He’d failed to die in battle, as he ought to have done, and furthermore he’d failed to surrender himself once defeated, as was agreed when the terms of battle were negotiated.

 

  
On the eighth day the bay could carry us no longer, he was so afflicted with saddle sores. Catena and I were given a new horse, a black mare taken from a village somewhere. It was plain good policy for the king’s men to steal mounts and leave nothing for the Wolves but jades.

 

  
When I dismounted that evening, I didn’t fall. The next morning I walked a few steps leaning on Catena’s shoulder. The shiver-and-shake had taken most of my strength, but I was obstinate. I persisted.

 

  
The ninth night Wolves burned the village in which we were encamped. It pleased them to do this, to drive us from shelter and then take their ease while we rode on in the dark. I hated them as much as King Corvus’s men did, for depriving me of rest.

 

  
By these measures I tallied the days that took me farther from Galan, each one a new knot in the red cord. That true dream of mine, which had brought me so much trouble, had at least given me reason to believe he was alive. As did the tug of the bond between us, one end of which was so knotted under my ribs that I felt it as a constant ache, a constriction that would ease only in his presence. I’d bound Galan to me in secret, but that binding was only one small strand of the cord we’d made by braiding together our days. I hoped distance could not unravel it. If Galan felt it too, he would know I lived.

 

  
I wished I’d kept that scrap of his sleeve on which he’d written the three godsigns. I would have cherished it as a talisman, as I cherished even the thought of it, as a sign of his forgiveness—no, better than that, of his acknowledgment that I didn’t need to be forgiven. A sign of his welcome should I make my way back to him.

 

  
I wondered if he searched for me. So many ways a woman could disappear, on a road in wartime. He would know that. I thought of Frost’s hoofprints in the trampled snow and knew Galan would never find me.

 
  

 

  
It seemed I was to be the king’s dreamer.

 

  
On the tenth day of my captivity, I was summoned before dawn to see King Corvus. He had taken shelter in the hovel of a charcoal burner, and the door was so low that even Catena had to stoop to enter. The hut had a few stones for a hearth, and a small fire filled the air with smoke. The king sat on a sheepskin. There was no furniture in the hut, not even a stool, and it was so small I had to kneel close to him. Catena leaned against me under my cloak, and soon she was asleep again. She had a gift for sleeping anywhere and anytime.

 

  
He asked what I had dreamed and I hardly knew how to answer. His body servant, Garrio, had instructed me on the proper way to address the king. Mudfolk were not supposed to speak to him at all, but if for some reason they were required to do so, they were obliged to say Corvus Rex Incus, Master of Masters—except for Garrio, who called him Master, for otherwise, he said, nothing would get done.

 

  
I was daunted by so many names and titles for one man. Names were the hardest words for me to say; I found it difficult to speak even an ordinary one without bungling it. And the more I feared to misspeak, the more likely I was to do it. I said, “I had no dreams worthy of your novice, Crevice—Crowish?—no, Corpus Wretch Incus, Bastard of, of…bastards. Forget me—I have a disexpedient mouth—the warts come jumbling out.”

 

  
He said, “Sometimes I wonder if you learned our language too badly or too well.”

 

  
“I beg burden, meaning no offense, Sire…Converse Rex Inkle, Mazzard of…It is my same touch; I grew up speaking it. I used to speak as well as anyone, and my tooth did my chiding, bidding. But then I was thundershucked, and now I can’t speak plaintively to save my strife. It struck me here, the lighting.” I pointed to my left cheek, under the eye. “I have not yet found a curse for it.”