Wildfire (5 page)

 
  

 

  
I fled the dream, and woke to find the uproar was real. Soldiers and sailors aboard ship were whooping and bellowing. The glad news spread throughout the fleet by way of shouts and drumbeats; three lanterns were lit on every prow. The men sent ahead had taken the town and secured the port. Lanx was ours.

 

  
It was early morning. The sea and sky ahead shone a luminous blue, divided, one from the other, by a dull uneven gray line. Land.

 

  
The sun sent low rays across the water, and the land took on color and shape. We sighted the walls and spires of Lanx, and as we drew nearer, their stone turned from gray to gold in the sunlight—a golden city on steep hills, held fast between two branches of a wide river on its way to the sea.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 2
  

  
Marked
  
  

 

  

 

  
O
arsmen rowed us into harbor. The passengers stared and pointed and exclaimed at the wonders of Lanx—the towering lighthouse, the quays lined with two-story arcades, the palatial gilded barges, the squalid hutboats moored side by side so that people strolled across the decks as if they were streets, the massive iron water gates that spanned the murky reaches where the river emptied into the sea—and all that was just the harbor, beyond which was a most marvelous city of bridges and towers, with houses piled so high that one’s doorstep was another’s rooftop.

 

  
Lanx was the first city I ever saw, and I couldn’t endure the sight of it—or the smell either, from shoals of debris stinking of shit and tanneries and dead fish. I lay down under my shaggy old cloak and pulled it close around my ears.

 

  
To see was to be bewildered, and I was weary to my marrow of bewilderment. Curiosity had plagued and served me all my life. I hardly knew myself without it.

 
  

 

  
Gulls alighted in the rigging and jested and laughed their harsh, mocking laughs. I swear I could understand them nearly as well as I could understand people—which is to say, not well. As the fleet assembled in the harbor, sailors counted the stragglers to see how many ships had been lost to the storm. Foot soldiers and cataphracts alike wagered on whether the queenmother’s ships or the king’s would be first past the water gates, for their precedence would be telling. The long day passed in gossiping and waiting, and I dozed, rocking in my cradle.

 

  
The whiphands whistled and oars dipped and rose with sparkling pendants of water drops, and we glided between the open gates. We turned from the broad river into a narrow stone-walled channel, and the hills rose up around us, close enough that a man looking down from his doorstep could spit on us. One man did just that. A boy on a drawbridge threw a handful of stones that skittered across the deck. Women watched us from small
square windows, half hidden behind latticework shutters. Someone jeered. I cared for none of it. None of it. Only let me find Galan, let him be alive.

 

  
Mai’s old dog settled down beside me and gave me a wistful look so I would scratch under his chin. In time we both slept.

 

  
Perhaps I was still asleep when we landed, for what I recall is a dream of streets and stairs, daylight and darkness. Pain was the one sure thing, the wedge splitting my left temple, and the rope twisted around my chest so that I labored to breathe. My arms and legs tingled and went numb. The hissing in my left ear went on without pause.

 

  
Aboard the ship sleep had been my healer; I’d slept and slept and each time I’d awakened with some small gain. I could move my right hand, and smile somewhat from both sides of my face, and understand speech without puzzling at it word by word. These small victories had misled me into believing that I was meant to live. Now the pains in my head and chest told me I’d taken too much for granted. Wildfire might yet kill me.

 
  

 

  
Mai said, “Getupgetup, we’ve found out where Sire Galan is quartered!”

 

  
I forgot to be glad he was alive, because I forgot I’d ever doubted it. I was fearful instead. Galan wouldn’t want what lightning had made of me. Why would he desire a lopsided sheath, weak and muddled, too backward in mind, too forward in chasing after him?

 

  
I don’t remember saying good-bye to Mai, but I must have done so. I left a warm room and struggled up steep narrow streets paved with crushed white shells. The ground seemed to tilt as it had on the ship, and I shuffled along afraid of losing my balance. It was dark down between the high walls, but above, the heavens shone the pure lapis blue of twilight. I stopped to catch my breath, and looked up to see doves fly across the ribbon of sky overhead as suddenly as if they’d been flung. I swayed, and a man let me lean on him. That was Tir, Sire Torosus’s jack. He was long legged and impatient. They had sent five men to escort me to Sire Galan’s quarters. I didn’t think to wonder why so many.

 

  
Someone lit a lamp behind a high window, a square of yellow brilliance in a dark wall. I saw a woman silhouetted against the light as she closed the shutters. Wind dodged around corners and harried us.

 
  

 

  
We climbed many stairs in a tower. Sire Galan’s room was cold and deserted. Tir and a cantankerous porter with a smoking torch went away and left me alone in the dark. I dropped my cloak in a heap by the door. Thick panes of glass, inset in the fletch-patterned shutters, silvered in the moon’s radiance. The room was crowded with furniture, more than could be useful, and the tables and chairs had the delicacy and slender legs of the
palfreys they breed for dames to ride; I was used to sturdier stuff. A bed with latticed walls stood on a platform three steps above the floor. Sire Galan’s baggage squatted here and there, dark barrels and sacks and baskets. His camp cot had been unfolded in a corner.

 

  
I crossed the floor to a niche in the stone wall that served as a hearth. A clay statue of Ardor Hearthkeeper knelt in a smaller niche above it. Her name came to mind so easily now; I marveled that I could have forgotten it. Though her dress was glazed clay, her headcloth was made of real silk. One end of the cloth was draped over her face, concealing one eye and her mouth, for she is a keeper of secrets.

 

  
The spark, ever ready, is one of her many gifts to us. I took the flint from the statue’s outstretched hands and kindled a small fire using apple wood I found in a basket. I stood unmoving before it, in a state of prayer no less prayer for being wordless, in gratitude for the warmth of Hearthkeeper’s embrace, the loving touch of fire tamed and contained. I felt the constriction loosen around my chest, easing the passage of my breath. Fire curved around the logs, a veil of orange and blue, and flames pried their way under bark and licked out through every crack, and I watched as the wood was transmuted to garnets and rubies. Such beauty, I couldn’t look away. Hearthkeeper whispered to me:
Burn bright, burn fast. Give what light you can, the rest is ash.

 
  

 

  
Much later I heard the door open, and I turned away from the embers. A woman entered, carrying a basket overflowing with white linen. She set it down on Sire Galan’s cot, saying, “Who are you?” She spoke in the High, but she rounded and clipped the words oddly. Her gown was thin as a harlot’s, showing her nipples and woman’s beard like shadows through gauze dyed the yellow-green of willow leaves in spring. Galan had given me a headcloth of that color—the green that signifies beginning—when he and I were new together. Had Sire Galan already taken a whore into his bed, or put another sheath in my place?

 

  
“Who are
you
?” I said, using the Low, the language of mudfolk, thinking she was vain to use the High. Did she suppose I’d mistake her for one of the Blood?

 

  
“What?” She spoke again in the High. Her face had not been unfriendly before. Now it was.

 

  
I tried the High this time: “Who are
you
?”

 

  
She pursed her lips and was silent. Her eyes were outlined with black ink and she had yellowing bruises on her face and around her neck.

 

  
I saw she wouldn’t answer before I did. “I’m, I’m Firetorn. I’m Sire…Sire Galleon’s grief—” I heard myself and winced. “No, that’s the way
wrong. I mean to say his his his…” I couldn’t find the right word—or any word—so I made a lewd gesture that anyone could understand.

 

  
“Why don’t you just say it—you’re Sire Galan’s codpiece, aren’t you? Are you too proud?” The woman took a candlestick from a ledge above the cot and lit the taper, and came close to me. “You must like the dark,” she said. “What’s that, a birthmark?”

 

  
I touched my face. She was peering at my left cheek, but it was the right side that was lopsided. Perhaps I had a burn there, though it didn’t feel sore. “No. I don’t know. We were crossing in the swarm, there was riled ire…dire and dirdam everywhere and rumble thumping. It was thudderbright…thunderbright, that’s what did it!” I made a zigzag gesture and struck myself on the chest, pleased to have come upon the exact word I needed. “You see? Thunderbright!”

 

  
“Why do you talk that way? Are you a clack?”

 

  
“A what?”

 

  
“A clack. A dimwit.”

 

  
I looked at her closely to see how cruel she meant to be, and saw she did make mock of me, but indifferently. If she’d been jealous, there’d have been more malice in it. Either she was sure of Sire Galan, or she was not his. I said, “So what are
you
? A…a horse? Not a horse, no, but one that men ride, any many men—a hole? Whole?”

 

  
“I’m not a whore, if that’s what you mean.” She crimped her lips together and shook her head. She lit another candle, and carried her small bloom of light to golden doves that perched in the branches of a tall bronze tree. She put fire in their open beaks and I saw they were oil lamps. She kept her back to me and her motions were as eloquent as her face.

 

  
Now we were both offended, and what did that serve? I said, “Nor am I a a dum…dimdolt. What happened to me—the thunderdolt is what’s wrong. Blighting, brightening stuck me and killed me dead. But I woke up. Now my speak is tonguesy-turvy.”

 

  
The woman turned and beckoned me to a chair near the bronze tree hung with lamps. I could see how, with some effort, she put aside her vexation. I sat, and she sat nearby.

 

  
“I am called Penna,” she said. “I serve Sire Edecon—as his codpiece, I suppose. And his laundress.” One eyebrow went up. I admired the bold black strokes of her eyebrows, arched like the wings of a shearwater, and how each could swoop and rise on its own. It was easier to admire her now that I knew she did not belong to Galan.

 

  
“Sire Addlecon? Who’s that?”

 

  
“If you’re Sire Galan’s tart, how is it you don’t know that Sire Edecon is his armiger?”

 

  
“But Sire Galant’s…his man, you know the one, the man who fights besight him, on his shy side, his shield side—his, his…halibut, his hatbringer—that man is dead.”

 

  
She laughed. “That’s a fine way to put it. His halibut! His armiger is very much alive and upright, I can attest to it.”

 

  
“Is it a new harbinger then?”

 

  
Penna shrugged as if she didn’t understand. I could see she’d not been told of Sire Rodela, the armiger who’d served Sire Galan so badly. To think of Rodela was to hear him buzz, a sound lurking behind every other sound.

 

  
No doubt this Sire Edecon had been with the troop of Crux all along, but I couldn’t place his name. Had he been armiger to one of the cataphracts who’d died in the Marchfield, and therefore in need of a new master? I was quite ready to dislike him if he was the one who’d injured Penna. I pointed to her bruises and asked, “Is that his?”

 

  
Her mouth turned down. She got up and moved away from me. She took a shirt from the basket and gave it a hard snap to shake it out. She draped it over the back of a chair, where it took the shape of a man with dangling arms. Soon the room was full of these pale phantoms.

 

  
Noise in the corridor, voices and footsteps.

 

  
I stood and braced myself against a table, my breath coming fast. Under my fingers I felt tiny ridges of marquetry on the tabletop, an inlay of ivory and shell. The footsteps stopped outside the room. I could smell the smoke of pitch-pine torches and see a thread of light under the door. The voices went on, two or three men talking at once, saying farewell, and one voice cut through the others, clear laughter on a rising note, unsullied by cares. The door opened and the room filled with men, shadows crossing the light. One of the men had torchlight tangled in the curls that sprang free from under his cap. Golden threads glinted in his surcoat.

 

  
The voices stopped abruptly.

 

  
Galan took a few more steps into the room. Someone raised a torch and put it in a bracket by the door. There were but four men, though they’d seemed a multitude: Sire Galan, his two jacks, and a man I supposed was Sire Edecon. I couldn’t remember the names of his jacks, no matter that I knew the men well.

 

  
One straight look from Galan, and there might have been no others in the room. How could I have forgotten this look, this considering look, and how he could transfix me with it? He had a private smile hidden somewhere about his eyes, not worn on the lips for all to see. He seemed to take my measure, not to tally up my faults, but to savor what he held dear. What was his. What he might do. It was the welcome I’d hoped to find,
and never counted on. For that moment I believed I was whatever he saw in me.

 

  
He said, “I met the Crux’s ships. You weren’t with them.”

 

  
Perhaps he’d forgotten that he tried to send me away. I shrugged. I couldn’t trust myself to explain.