Wildfire (41 page)

 

  
“When were you struck by lightning?”

 

  
“Some while ago, Rovus—”

 

  
He made a swift gesture, saying, “Don’t speak my name at all if you cannot speak it better! Now go on. When?”

 

  
“At the very begging of the war.”

 

  
“How is it you weren’t burned and disfigured?”

 

  
He was not the first to want some outward proof. I started to make a
truthful answer—to say I didn’t know why Wildfire had spared me—but I thought better of it. “I was begared,” I said. “On my bark…”

 

  
“Show me.”

 

  
I had hoped he wouldn’t ask. I pulled off my cloak and turned my back to him, and Catena grumbled in her sleep. The chain drew taut against my left hand. I loosened the laces of my overdress and shrugged it below my wingbones, and bent my neck to show him the burn scars on my back, nape, and shoulders.

 

  
It was true Wildfire had given me those wounds, but not by way of lightning. It had happened when men of Ardor set Galan’s tent on fire in the Marchfield, and Wildfire nearly ate me. I’d never seen the scars myself, of course, but I had felt them after they healed, small ridges and lumps where burning canvas had fallen on me.

 

  
King Corvus held up an oil lamp and I felt the warmth of the flame on my neck. “Did you know that some of these burns have the semblance of the constellation of Ardor? Here, here, here, here, and there.” I felt a pressure so light it troubled the fine downy hairs of my nape and shoulder without touching my skin. I feared he would see the flush rising on my neck. I waited, kneeling with my head bowed and my back to him until the heat subsided. He made too much of a scattering of sparks; Galan had never seen a pattern in the burns.

 

  
Good. Let the king be credulous. I felt his eyes searching me down to the quick. I tied up my laces and faced him, and found he wasn’t looking at me at all. After a long moment he turned his gaze my way. “Were you always a dreamer?”

 

  
“No more than anybony else.” I pointed to my head. “Wilefire augered a hole in my hat. But the streams, dregs that entered there come from Lynx Forcesight, I suppose.”

 

  
“So now you dream true.”

 

  
“Only betimes.”

 

  
“And tonight?”

 

  
I shrugged. “The dream was fault, false, I think. I couldn’t smell it.”

 

  
“Could not what? Spell it? Do you mean find godsigns in it?”

 

  
“No, no!
Smell.
” I tapped my nose.

 

  
He let out a short, sharp laugh. “So I must inquire of oracles if their dreams stink?”

 

  
“I don’t know. It’s just me, mishaps.”

 

  
“And the dream of my wife—did it stink?”

 

  
“It smelt of fire and flood…blood.”

 

  
It had smelled of other things as well: Galan’s sweat, horses, snow,
mud, icy bog water, and the queenmother’s heavy perfume of muskmallow and lily.

 

  
In the long pause I heard mice scrabbling in the thatch overhead. I risked a look at the king’s face. He rested his chin on his palm and hid his mouth behind his hand, and I imagined weakness, his lips trembling. But he straightened up and took his hand away, and his mouth was hard, frowning. His eyes were sad.

 

  
He said, “The king of Corymb is dead. That much is true. They say he fought bravely and died of his wounds after the battle.”

 

  
No doubt he had his spies. They must have ridden their horses to death to catch us. I dared ask, “Who is kinged now?”

 

  
“Why don’t you dream and tell me?”

 
  

 

  
Despite myself I made acquaintances among the king’s followers. I had sores under my manacle to remind me to hate them, but it was hard to bear a grudge against the men who looked after us—a small group among the nameless multitude. Garrio had taken me in charge, another of his many duties, since his king required my services. I dimly remembered him caring for me when I had the shiver-and-shake. Mox had lost his master in the battle, and later his master’s spare horse, so it was a bit of good luck for him that he’d ended up leading us. Now he was assured of food when there was food to be had. Lame and Chunner were the king’s horseboys (his horsemaster and jack had died of wounds); Lame had one leg shorter than the other, which was no trouble when he was riding, but hampered him on foot. Chunner was a lad about Fleetfoot’s age, with bright eyes, a snub nose, and a head of curly hair.

 

  
These men and the boy Chunner rode with us by day and shared a fire and food with us at night. I learned their qualities, for when a man is weary, frightened, cold, and hungry, you see him at his worst or at his best, depending on his nature. Catena and I needed our guardians. Yet I couldn’t forget they were also our captors.

 

  
Catena and I were protected by rumors too, many of them absurd, such as that King Corvus nightly summoned me to his bed; I was a thrush—a spy—from his wife’s father; I was a highborn foreigner, and my ransom would pay for the king’s next campaign; I was the king’s oracle, who would lead them to safety. The soldiers didn’t know what to make of me, so they made much of me.

 

  
Daily I had reminders of what could happen if we were not so well guarded. Men fell sick, or their wounds festered, or their horses foundered, and if they couldn’t keep up, no man tarried to help. There were quarrels, especially among the masterless horse soldiers. I saw a man stabbed because
he refused to give up a warm place by a fire. Sickness, wounds, fights—these killed more of the king’s men than the Wolves, though they were less feared.

 

  
As for women, this army had no sheaths or whores to ease the men, for the king had never reckoned on retreat. Some men took maidens and women from villages we passed through, as they took food, horses, fodder, firewood, anything they fancied. Took them, used them for a night or several, left them alive or left them for dead. I didn’t know if King Corvus knew this, or cared.

 

  
Most of the townspeople went unharmed if they gave provisions to King Corvus. But when they did, Wolves came along after us and burned them out. Wildfire running south.

 
  

 

  
I meant to escape when I’d regained my strength, when I saw a good chance. Until then I needed the king’s protection. If I was his dreamer, I must give him dreams. True dreams were granted by the gods, and I knew no way to summon them. Very well, I’d give him false dreams that seemed true, and if he was misled by them, so much the better. To that end I applied myself to gossip, listening to rumors, reports of things half overheard, boasts—not that one should trust anything a mud soldier said, but it was all there was to go on.

 

  
One night by the fire, I asked Garrio and the horseboys what had happened in the battle for Malleus. They quarreled over the facts until it seemed they had fought different battles entirely, for Mox had been with his master in the right flank, the king’s horseboys had been in the center, holding spare mounts for their master, and Garrio had been waiting on a hill, and had seen it from a distance. They all agreed on this: the commander of Corvus’s left flank had turned his companies against the center and scythed through it, cutting down many of the king’s loyal men straightaway.

 

  
The man King Corvus had trusted on his left, his shield side—the man who betrayed him—was his brother Merle. When the king’s men spoke of Merle, they called him the Starling. They didn’t dare utter his name in the king’s presence.

 
  

 

  
I threw the bones. Catena and I were curled up knee to knee and she was asleep. In the space between us, in the darkness under the cloak, I opened the divining compass with my unchained hand, and smoothed it out. The last time I’d thrown the bones was for Tobe and Mai, and now I sought foretelling rather than healing. I wanted the Dame and Na to show me how I might escape. On the first throw, for my character, they pointed to Iron and Chance, which I took to mean I must be strong and lucky. On the sec
ond throw, for time, they spoke of the past and present, Hunger and the Sun; but of the future—which I sought to know—they didn’t speak. On the third throw, for the gods, Na told me to look to Hazard Fate, and the Dame rolled outside the compass and said nothing.

 

  
I prayed to Fate as Na advised, though I thought it was useless. I found it easier to believe that Chance or Peril, those mighty personages, would yield to my prayers than bodiless, boundless Fate. Fate was a realm for men of consequence, and if I trod a maze within that realm now, it was not by choice.

 

  
I thanked the shades and kissed the bones and tucked them away, none the wiser for their advice. But I’d learned to wait for their meaning to come to me. I hoped they would point the way as we rode, and their counsel would become manifest in the unfolding of events.

 

  
That night I didn’t dream, and hardly slept. In the morning King Corvus summoned me, and I rubbed charcoal on my eyelids before I went to see him, so I might look more like a revelator. Divine Aboleo, his strategos, was with him. I was afraid of the Auspice, afraid that, through divination or some arcane art particular to Rift, he’d find out about the dead priest in the bear cloak, or be able to tell a false dream from a true one.

 

  
I almost faltered, but I remembered Chance and how she loves boldness. My voice shook. I wove a tale from the way the bones had fallen the night before, the godsigns one after another. The tale took shape in my mouth, it seemed, and found its way to my hazy right eye, so I saw it as I spoke. As if I’d dreamed it after all. I said, “I dreamed of your bother…mother, sitting down to a feat. She pulled an iron dudgeon, no—I mean a dagger—from her sheath and it was covered with rust, Dastard Chance’s color. Oh, she was famished, she set to table do-gladly and began devouring everything. What she ate—she had a little blackbard…blackbirth, a a startling on her plate, and she carved it up and ate the wings and the plump boast, breast. She had fathers sticking out of her mouth. She sat out-of-sorts, not in a room, and it was white snow she spread the feast upon. The bird was stuffed with reasons and hazenuts. The…queenmaster ate alone. She pricked her hand on the rusty daglet, and I saw a drupe of blood, red as a cherry, swell on her pall.”

 

  
“I cannot understand you,” King Corvus said. “You talk such nonsense.” Yet he seemed not at all displeased to hear his mother had bled. He wished her ill. I couldn’t deny he had cause.

 

  
Divine Aboleo too seemed pleased with the dream. I supposed he was there to tell the king what it meant. I might dream of signs, but it was not left to me to interpret them.

 
  

 

  
Another day as we rode along, I asked Garrio if the king’s wife, Princess Kalos, had been a lamia, as the rumormongers sang it. Was she covered with fine scales, and could she turn into a snake? He said he knew one of Queenwife Kalos’s handmaids, who claimed the queenwife wasn’t scaly at all, but she had a tattoo of a serpent wrapping around her waist, quite a frightful thing.

 

  
“Did she wear it in horror of…the dreadful one, of of Cleft Dread?”

 

  
“She didn’t worship Rift,” he said.

 

  
“Which gaud did she worship?”

 

  
“Who knows? They are full of strange notions where she came from. But she made sacrifices to a serpent.”

 

  
“A torpent!”

 

  
“She kept one in her bedchamber and offered it tribute—little frogs and mice and crickets. That’s what her handmaid told me.”

 

  
I asked if the queenwife had married King Corvus in order to curse Incus, and Garrio said of course not, that was slander spread by Caelum to give a reason for war. When everyone knew it was the queenmother who had cursed Queenwife Kalos, causing her to miscarry twice.

 

  
“Why did she ride to war, Raggio? Why risk the chide she carried?”

 

  
He had no answer.

 

  
Sometimes I couldn’t help but remember what the king had said when I told him my dream in the temple: how he’d cut their son out of his wife’s dead body, and the child too was dead. And I remembered him that night in the stone manor house, sleepless, staring into the dark with his eyes dry as stones.

 

  
I threw the bones again, and asked again how I might be free. The next morning I told King Corvus I’d dreamed of a woman who swallowed two stones the size of eggs, and her belly swelled and became egg shaped. She was in turn swallowed by a serpent, and I could see the shape of her under its scaly hide.

 

  
“I see,” he said. I was afraid he did see, that he guessed it wasn’t a dream at all, much less a true one, but rather a lie patched up from godsigns and threadbare gossip. His mouth turned down as if he tasted something bitter.

 

  
I had caused King Corvus suffering. I was perhaps a little sorry, not for him, but that I’d misused what the Dame and Na had told me. Yet they seemed to collude in what I did, or at least show me how to do it. In the second cast, for time, the Dame had pointed to Mischief.

 

  
I could almost admire the king. He seemed tireless on the march, riding in the vanguard or up and down the line, and his height made him visible
at a distance. His seat on a horse was if anything too perfect, too upright and stiff. He spoke to one cataphract or another to give them encouragement, but he had not the ease to make other men easy, as our king did—had done, when he was alive.

 

  
I could almost admire him. Yet I couldn’t help but hold him in contempt for being fool enough to take me for a seer and my lies for omens.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 16
  

  
Boarsback Ridge