Wildfire (44 page)

 

  
She looked at me as if I’d betrayed her, as indeed I had. What had I been thinking, threatening to abandon her in the woods? I shouldn’t wonder at her reluctance. She’d been stolen from the kitchens and thrust into the midst of strangers, but the strange had become familiar, even comforting. Garrio
had saved her morsels from his master’s dinner, and Mox had given her a stolen doll made of rags, and Chunner had teased her and made her laugh. She thought she was safe with them.

 

  
I put down the dagger and clasped both her hands between mine. “Contenta, I think we must seek a tillage, village, don’t you think? We don’t know who
won,
sweethearth. We must go forthwith, not back. And you’ll feel warmer walking.”

 

  
She didn’t agree. We sat on the cold ground and quarreled, a dispute of few words and many silences. In the end she gave in, though I hadn’t convinced her. She was frightened into it, more like, afraid of my anger. I hated to bully her, but it had to be done.

 

  
We turned east, and it was strange, after journeying so long southward, to head resolutely in another direction. I saw no paths, but there were signs of men: hazel coppices and stumps of trees felled by axes; a place where pigs had rooted for acorns. Catena slithered in her pattens on the icy banks and fell often, jerking the chain and galling us both. I scraped resin from a pine tree and smeared it on her wooden soles to make them sticky. She sulked and wouldn’t speak.

 

  
We walked a long way before I dared climb to the top of a hill. The only smoke I saw was behind us, roiling up in a black column. They must have been burning the dead of the battle. To the south, the mountains glared white, glazed in ice. Already the day was half gone, and we were closer to the battlefield and the mountains than I expected to be. No village in sight, no village anywhere.

 

  
By the time the Sun descended toward a notch between two peaks, Catena had tired. I tried carrying her on my back; she was lighter than when she’d left the temple kitchens, but by the gods she was still too heavy.

 

  
We halted on the edge of a steep bluff. The valley below held twilight, and a shining silver river edged with a lace of ice and fringed with golden reeds. I’d hoped to get farther east before turning north, and it would be good to put that river between us and any pursuers. But how could we ford it chained together?

 

  
I looked up and down the valley, and saw gray dots of sheep on a distant slope. Ice turned rosy in the last sunlight. I prayed to Ardor as I had prayed all day, and this time with more hope:
Ardor, guide us to a smith.

 

  
We descended the bluff, slipping sideways down the path of an old landslide. Down by the river night had fallen, and I stood on a marshy shore, wet up to my shins where I’d crunched through the ice. My feet burned from the cold. I heard rustling in the bracken, and turned to see a lynx slouching out on the rim of ice to drink. It looked our way and its eyes
flashed gold. We stared at each other, more curious than frightened. It had a fine white ruff around its neck, and jaunty black topknots on its ears. The lynx turned to the water and lapped, and blinked at me again, and then crept into the river and swam. The current carried it sideways, but I saw its head bobbing until it reached the other shore.

 

  
Lynx offered to guide me, but to what destination? Lynx Foresight had made me captive in the first place; Lynx Mischief might lead me astray for a prank. But one couldn’t ask for a clearer sign. We’d seek a crossing tomorrow, when the Sun could warm us and dry our clothes.

 

  
I used my stolen flint to cajole a flame from shredded bark, and soon had a fire going, and put stones in it to heat. Catena wrapped herself in my cloak and fell asleep. I fanned the fire so no sharp-eyed pursuer would see a dark smear of smoke across the stars, but in truth I’d already made up my mind we were not followed. Perhaps the king had lost the battle—perhaps he was dead.

 

  
There was an unwelcome thought in my mind. It had been there ever since I’d broken the point of the dagger on the iron link: how much more easily the blade would cut flesh and even bone. Poachers say a badger will gnaw off its own foot to free itself from a snare. To sacrifice one hand would free us both—though the wound would be grievous, it would bleed and bleed and it might mortify. It might kill. I held the edge of the blade to the back of my wrist, to see what it would feel like. I pressed hard and drew a red line.

 

  
I feared I didn’t have the strength to cut off my own hand; it would have to be Catena’s. The knife was dull and I would have to saw back and forth. I doubted I could saw through the bone. I’d have to get the knife between the knobs of the joints, like a carver taking apart a goose. She wouldn’t sleep through it. She would fight.

 

  
If there came a time when I must, when she would die or I would die if I didn’t—then I would.

 

  
But by then I might not have the strength. I should do it now. How could I swim across the river with one arm bound and Catena on my back? I’d seen her when we forded rivers, clinging in terror to the saddle. Likely she’d choke me.

 

  
Even my thoughts were shackled, every one brought up short by the chain.

 

  
I put the dagger down and draped the chain over a flat rock and took up the heaviest stone in reach and pounded on a link with all my strength. Once, twice, thrice. The chain jumped and twisted under the blows. Catena started awake and asked what I was doing, and I kept pounding, praying to Ardor Smith, asking if ever he favored me to make the iron brittle. The
stone cracked and split in my hand and I took up another one, ignoring how my palm stung with every blow. The sound of the hammering carried across the hills, each clang with its diminishing echoes, and it was too loud but I. Would. Not. Stop.

 

  
I was weeping. No use, no use, no use, the hammering said, until at last I was defeated. Catena sat with her shoulders hunched, as if she feared I’d strike her next.

 

  
I looked up and saw a man standing between birch trees. He had a shaven head and a black cloak, and for a moment I thought he was the shade of the priest Mole and I had fought. But he was truly there, a living man and not a shade, I could tell by the orange fire reflected in his black pupils, which flickered as his eyes glanced from Catena to me. I recognized him by his unmoving, ever-open eye, the one tattooed on his scalp: Divine Volator, the young priest who had executed the king’s sentries when they failed in their duties. He moved forward and squatted by the fire, and held out his empty hands to warm them. A peaceable gesture. He wasn’t planning to kill us.

 

  
I let out the breath I’d been holding. “So the king won,” I said.

 

  
It wasn’t a question, and he made no answer. He never spoke to us, not once on the long way back.

 

  
I was ashamed before the priest, as if he could tell by looking at me that I had contemplated severing Catena’s hand. I was ashamed also to feel relief that he had found us. He had spared me the decision and the act, and was it so much easier to be told what to do? I was a coward twice over, once for being willing to maim Catena to save my skin, and again for lacking the boldness to do it. Twice shamed, twice craven, and captive once again.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER
17
  

  
Lost
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
B
y the time Divine Volator led us back to the army, the dead had been tallied and praised and burned and the Battle of Boarsback Ridge had become a storied victory. Each man told his friends what he’d seen and boasted of what he’d done. Though their accounts didn’t agree in every particular, all swore that the king had slain many Wolves himself, three or four at least. The enemy broke, and there was a fine chase, and the Wolves were hunted down like the stray dogs they were. They’d harry us no more.

 

  
I made my own tallies of who was missing, and I learned roundabout, for it went unspoken, that the king had lost more men after the battle than in it. Many had frozen to death during the sleet storm, weakened by wounds, fatigue, and sickness. I should have rejoiced that the king had lost so many followers. But I saw the shade of a horseboy named Lino, who’d stolen grain from his master for our mare, and his eyes were rimed with frost, staring at nothing. I saw Mano with his clever hands turned to marble, cold and hard and veined with gray. I was sorry I’d learned their names. As for the nameless dead, the smudges of shadow I saw in my right eye—I refused to look.

 

  
Catena and I had run in the wrong direction. Not a league west-of-south was a village with a smithy. We stopped there so the farrier could make calked sandals with spikes for the horses to wear on the icy roads of the mountains. Garrio was sorry about it, but he conveyed the king’s orders to the farrier, who shortened the chain between Catena and me until it measured the length from my elbow to my wrist. Awkward, impossible, a torment to us both. Catena wept that night with her head on my shoulder. She blamed me, but she took what comfort I could give.

 

  
We were never going to get away. We were going to die in the mountains. Or if we lived to see the other side, I’d be a world away from Galan.

 
  

 

  
I decided never to tell the king a dream again, and I waited to see if he would kill me or let me go.

 

  
King Corvus summoned me. The victory had cheered his men, but he looked at me with a familiar bleak expression. He had a split lip and bruises on the bony prominences of his face, and bandages on one leg and both arms. A wolfskin cloak covered his back, with the forelegs tied loosely around his throat. He asked what I had dreamed, and I told him I couldn’t remember. He didn’t dismiss us, but turned his eyes away, and Catena and I stood leaning upon each other, waiting, while cold climbed from the ground into our feet and up our legs, until Garrio hissed at us to leave.

 

  
I told King Corvus the same thing the next morning, and by then he must have known I was lying. He didn’t threaten, but all the same it frightened me to defy him.

 

  
For two days the king didn’t send for me, and I began to hope he would forget about us, so we could fall behind, slip away. A couple of jacks sought me out to say that now I’d lost the king’s favor, they’d be having sport with me, and Catena too. Nothing like a virgin to whet a man’s prick, they said, being the kind of men who enjoyed a girl’s fright. Garrio and Mox saw them off, but I was reminded that even the king’s indifference was dangerous.

 
  

 

  
We followed the road to Owl Pass, and rumpled foothills became the skirts of the mountains, and peaks glowered down on us from all sides. The road dwindled to a goat track, and the track forked and the forks branched, and many small trails climbed over naked shoulders of rock, leading to nowhere but high pastures, windswept or buried under snow.

 

  
We were lost. Not a man in what was left of the king’s army knew the way.

 

  
After two days of wandering, we came to a village walled around by thornbushes, in a long and narrow valley. I was amazed anyone could live in such a stony place. The thatched roofs of the huts swept nearly to the ground, reminding me of the conical straw hats of reapers. The men of the village prostrated themselves before the king. All the women had fled.

 

  
Wheezer said around here they didn’t care much for kings. He’d been born in a village like this, and knew every trick they used to hide what they had from tax collectors. He took pleasure in searching out beets and turnips and baskets of grain buried under the dirt floors, and bacon in the rafters. But they were poor folk, and there wasn’t much to go around, not for hundreds of men.

 

  
The king’s men took carved spoons, blankets, furs, hay, firewood, sheep, goats, and shaggy mountain ponies from the village. Some cataphracts stole a few women too, or rather girls no older than Sunup, whom they found hiding in a cave farther up the valley. To be sure a maid is fit to bed,
the saying goes, pluck one too young to wed. When the girls screamed and wept they were beaten.

 

  
The king commanded the village headman to guide us, and for three days he led us on trails marked with high cairns of stones. Often we had to dig passage from one cairn to the next through snowdrifts. The guide spoke in such a rough accent that it was hard to tell he was speaking the High, and sometimes Wheezer had to translate his assurances: Yes, this was the path to Owl Pass, didn’t he know every path in these mountains? Of course it was impossible, this was not the season for it—we should try next summer; nevertheless it was the way to Owl Pass.

 

  
The headman led us to the burrow of an old mine, in a canyon with no way out but the same dangerous way we’d come in. Then he had the audacity to taunt the king, and boast he’d led him into a trap in revenge for his daughter, who had been among the girls taken. She’d died of her injuries. He was stoned to death like vermin, and his body left for wolves, the real wolves that sang nightly from ridge to ridge. We doubled back for two days, treading in our own footprints, until we found another route. Rumor had it the king sent priests all the way back to the village to burn it to the ground.

 

  
I’d tried to save the headman’s daughter, but I hadn’t been able to stop her bleeding. In truth, I’d wanted to shun her and the other girls as if their plight was a pestilence. As if it might happen to me. There was little enough I could do for them: give them bandages or poultices or the warmth of my hand. I never asked their names. A few days of hard use smothered the spark of life in their eyes, and they stared back at me as distant as shades. And then they were gone—set free or abandoned, it amounted to the same thing. I wondered how many found their way home, and what welcome they got there.