Wildfire (7 page)

 

  
“Yes, that’s it—godsight—but to me it seems just notsense. So? What does it say?”

 

  
“Ah. Before the battle I made a promise to Hazard: I dedicated my left hand to Chance and my right to Fate.”

 

  
He let me pry open his right fist. I leaned over his palm. Inscribed on his skin were the lines with which he was born, minute and delicate whorls, and the creases and calluses he’d made by his deeds, by years of grasping weapons and reins, taking and letting go. What was this labyrinth in his palm, if not a map of what he was born to do and what he had chosen to do? And at the center of the labyrinth, the godsign of Fate. I recognized it now, recalling how Hazard’s stars had always looked to me like a skein of geese in flight. The wavy line underneath meant an elemental avatar:

 

  
I knew there were syllables to go with the signs on his palms. I couldn’t recall them; reading was still denied to me. But Ardor Wildfire had been merciful and had restored the god Hazard to my memory.

 

  
I looked up to find Galan watching me with one eyebrow cocked. A chill raised gooseflesh on my arms. A dedication, he called it, but it seemed arrogant to me, as if he claimed to deal Fate with one hand, Chance with the other. And besides, it seemed almost a womanish thing to do, marking himself with the indelible sign of another god, the way a dame receives the godsign of her husband on her cheek when she marries outclan. He’d courted Hazard Chance a long time—did he mean to wed her now? She might smile on his presumption. She does love a dare.

 

  
I couldn’t risk a quarrel, being without the means to speak my mind. Instead I asked—and I meant it to be sharp, though it was blunt by the time
I finished—“Where is the other, the third thing of the god, the third…vanity, avanitte? Is the sign on your…prink, your prankle there? Hmm?” I pointed to his dangle.

 

  
He grinned and reached for his longsword, a new sword and a fine one, with a hilt covered in pebbled hide and ornamented in golden fish. He turned the blade to show me the engraving of Hazard Peril’s godsign: The upward slash of a male avatar was a deep gouge that marred the otherwise perfect steel.

 

  
Galan put the sword back on the ledge beside the mattress and I scowled at him. “So why? Have you become a beast now? No—I mean a prill, a priest. Do you claim to do dog’s bidding?”

 

  
“It isn’t a claim. It’s an offering.” He looked down at his hands again, as the right one concealed the left. His grin faded. “I offered Hazard my hands and my blade, to use as the god wills.”

 

  
I said, “How will you know?”

 

  
“Know what?”

 

  
“What the goad wills?”

 
  

 

  
I lay listening to Galan sleep; sometimes his breath came quickly, sometimes slowly, so that I held my own breath waiting for it. The wooden cot in the room beyond creaked as Sire Edecon coupled with Penna, and she moaned, a soft helpless sound that could have been distress or pleasure. I doubted it was pleasure.

 

  
Later, scurrying thoughts and a fierce cramp in my leg drove me from the bed. I pulled Mai’s dress over me and opened a tall shutter and found it was a door leading to a small wooden balcony that clung to the masonry of the tower. The balcony walls were of spindles and lattice painted several shades of green. I looked down into the branches of a cedar that gave off a spicy fragrance. I’d never been in a building taller than a tall tree before; how had they raised the huge stones so high? Far below me were walled courtyards and gardens. Moonlight made quicksilver of water confined in stone channels, the brightness cut by dark bridges.

 

  
I held Sire Galan’s gift, the mirror. I tilted it this way and that, and caught the reflection of the moon hovering over the city and the sea. The gift was a treasure, valuable for the silver alone, and more precious still for the superbly cast handle, a fox standing on hind legs, holding the polished disk between outstretched forepaws. Na had told me a story about the fox—I remembered it now—she said Crux Moon was jealous of his sister the Sun, and tried to steal her light by making a mirror of his face. He polished his skin, taking off one dull layer after another to get to the bright silver underneath—but he polished too well, until the fox he is inside showed through.

 

  
And once again the moon was the Moon, Crux Moon, and I saw the fox in the dark smudges on his bright face. It helped to have a story, even a simple one told to children. It put the god Crux back into Sun and Moon, and filled the Heavens with import. Crux was Galan’s clan, and Crux the godsign on his cheek.

 

  
Now I had Ardor, Hazard, and Crux, and surely the other gods had not withdrawn from the world, it only seemed to be vacant of them. Soon Ardor might permit me to recollect them all.

 

  
This hope was perilous. It must have been the feckless Moon who made me so imprudent as to think I might be healed, and speak again as I used to when thoughts and words had been entwined, when often I discovered what I was going to say in the act of saying it. I wondered at the wealth of words I’d owned before, without counting myself rich. Now I lacked two words to rub together that made sense.

 

  
Impoverished in words, impoverished in recollection, but not impoverished in mind, that was one mercy Ardor had shown me. The face in the mirror was not exactly mine, but the self within, however injured, was the same. Was me. A ceaseless river of thought and feeling still flowed within me, even without words to channel it, even though it was dammed up when it came time to speak. But the river was unruly now, a turbulent flood that cast up imaginings and the wreckage of memories and dragged them under again. And I was awash in it, a surge of hope one moment, despair the next. Or fear.

 

  
As now, in bed again, I lay rigid alongside Galan, hands fisted, jaw clenched, sinews taut, while dread swelled up huge in me, crowding out my breath. “You are not one of Hazard’s,” Galan had said. “Ardor, the god of my enemy, has claimed you.” Would he keep me now that he no longer believed I was Chance’s favorite? He had other reasons to care for me, I knew that, but I saw how he winced when I mangled words. So I must speak less.

 

  
I turned away from Galan, and he turned with me in his sleep and put his arm over my waist. I took comfort from his touch. And I thought, what was this terror of mine but a visitation, another god rediscovered, an old acquaintance? Having no body of its own, Rift Dread makes free of ours.

 

  
On and on I endured the passage of the night. I was adrift on a river of thought that flowed toward the bountiful ocean of sleep, but I never reached that ocean, and all about me was salty water, and I couldn’t slake my thirst.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 3
  

  
Oracle
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
W
e were in the war now, yet the day dawned very peaceable and ordinary. Spiller and Rowney were up in the twilight before sunrise. I’d waited a long time for someone to stir.

 

  
Spiller and I weren’t friends, but we were allies of a sort. We’d both hated Sire Rodela. I’d ignored Spiller’s little thefts from Sire Galan and he’d treated me tolerably well, considering I was a woman and his master’s sheath, and therefore both below him and above him. We had the habit of honing our wits, each on the other’s tough hide. But my wit was blunted now. I said a good day to him when he arose, but it came from my mouth as dog day, and when I set out to chaff him for sleeping late, I called him a slayabed instead of a layabout. He bested me easily, and made me laugh against my will.

 

  
Today was a Peaceday, the one day of rest in a tennight of labor, but there were some tasks that couldn’t be shirked. To prove I could still be useful, I went to fetch water from the courtyard fountain to fill the barrel beside the door. I descended the winding stairway, which had uneven stone steps worn smooth and slick in the middle, only to find that I’d forgotten the leather waterskins. I climbed back up and forgot the chore altogether until Rowney reminded me. He went downstairs with me to see I didn’t misplace myself too.

 

  
I was ahead of him as we climbed back up, carrying the sloshing waterskins. I stopped to rest, for with every breath came a sharp pain under my ribs. When I turned around I caught Rowney looking at me. He ducked his head and his ears turned pink. “It’s too much for you, climbing all these stairs,” he said.

 

  
“Let me just…” I sat down and panted.

 

  
“The mark is going away.” There was worry and wonderment in his face.

 

  
Spiller cooked heavy frycakes of yesterday’s porridge, standing close enough to the hearth for the grease to spatter his already filthy jerkin. His hair was the dun color of old thatch, and like old thatch it stood out every
which way. He tasted a bit of frycake and wrinkled up his nose. “Faugh! They must feed fish to the pigs, because even the bacon fat tastes of fish. And nothing but stinking fish sauce for seasoning.”

 

  
Despite Spiller’s complaints, the frycakes were delicious, and I ate as though I hadn’t eaten for days. I was surprised the smell of the food didn’t awaken Sire Galan and his armiger, but they slept on.

 

  
I watched the Sun emerge from the sea and climb above the horizon. The city walls turned rosy and streets ran blue with shadows. Spiller told me this tower belonged to the clan of Crux, which was plain enough, now that I noticed the designs customary to the clan: songbirds woven in the borders of tapestries and inlaid on the backs of chairs; fletches and stars in the lattices. The style was different, the patterns familiar.

 

  
On other hills there were other towers. One of them was burning, blackened, the top gap-toothed, as if stones had been pried out and cast down. Gray smoke plumed up and a wind from the sea took it inland. I stared at the broken tower, thinking of a room such as this one, but with a dead man and woman in it. That I could see it so clearly didn’t make it true.

 

  
Pain set upon me, sharp and sudden. The tower swayed like a ship. All I could see were eddying sparks and cinders, all I could hear was Sire Rodela’s rising drone. I groped my way to a chair and sat bending over, my head down by my knees.

 

  
Rowney said, “Has she fainted?”

 

  
Spiller said, “She’d better not spew. I’m not cleaning up after her.”

 

  
I straightened up. The pain was bearable now. Through the tears, everything looked watery, sparkling.

 

  
“What’s the matter?” Rowney asked, coming to my side.

 

  
“I don’t know. A sudden rain here, a pain here in my tempest.” I held my forehead and rocked. “It’s such a, such a…torrididdlement, a torment, torrent weeping.”

 

  
Spiller laughed, saying, “Pay no mind to what makes no sense.”

 

  
Rowney said, “Torrent weeping, there’s sense in that.”

 

  
“Maybe,” Spiller said, “but it’s no more than everyone knows.”

 

  
I wiped my face on the tail of my headcloth. Penna swam into view in her sheer green shift, and a bluish corona surrounded her. I hadn’t heard her get up. She came quietly on bare feet, with her black hair still uncovered. The dark lines painted on her eyelids were smudged. “What are you saying?” she asked in her strange accent. “What is wrong?”

 

  
“Such airs she has,” Spiller said, “always talking in the High.”

 

  
Rowney said, “They don’t any of them use the Low, hadn’t you noticed? I don’t believe you speak it, do you, Penna?”

 

  
She said, “What?”

 

  
“See.”

 

  
“Indeed I do see. Even the drudges here think they’re high and mighty,” Spiller said.

 

  
“What?” Penna knew they were talking about her.

 

  
Spiller began to grin. “Look at the tits on her, will you? She’s not as scrawny as some I could mention. When Sire Edecon’s back is turned, maybe she’ll—”

 

  
“If you don’t lock your tongue behind your teeth, I’ll do it for you,” Rowney said.

 

  
“Oh, you act the prig now,” Spiller said, “now that
she’s
here. But you’d have been in line if Sire Edecon hadn’t come along, don’t pretend otherwise.”

 

  
I sat hunched in the chair, blinking. The pain ebbed and my muscles unlocked. But there was still darkness in the room, or in my eyes. Penna moved away, and in her bright dress she receded like a lantern carried into the distance. She approached again and gave me a cup of water that tasted of brine.

 

  
I thanked her in the High. I hadn’t understood, until Rowney said so, that the mudfolk here in Incus lacked a language of their own. I pitied them. Where we came from, those of us who worked closest to the Blood, the house drudges and horse soldiers, were apt to slip between tongues when we spoke amongst ourselves, two words in the Low, one in the High, according to what sounded best. The Low was a handy way to hide secrets when masters were in earshot. Though Sire Galan understood it rather too well.

 

  
Penna glanced out the window and turned away from it, her face hard and still.

 

  
“Who is that?” I asked her, pointing at the tower to show what I meant.

 

  
“That’s the keep of Torrent,” Spiller said in the Low. “Where we had the battle.”

 

  
“What happened in the fright, in the…fray? Sire…Sire Gladden wouldn’t—he never said. Was anyone cost?”

 

  
Spiller said, “We didn’t lose one, not one cataphract.”

 

  
“Two armigers were slain,” Rowney said. “One was Sire Fanfarron’s and the other Sire Pava’s. Also the jacks of Sire Gavilan, Sire Vejamen, and Sire Farol.” He didn’t name the dead men, but their masters, so that the shades wouldn’t be tempted to linger, to overhear what was said about them.