Wildfire (75 page)

 

  
The half-Moon was bright. It made the shadows of the cypresses seem to be holes in the ground, holes deep enough, perhaps, to reach the Overworld. I stumbled into one such shadow-hole and lay on my back looking at the stars and the three black trees—for cypresses were always planted in threes—that went up and up like pillars upholding the Heavens. Where was Galan? I prayed to the Moon, which was perhaps unwise.

 
  

 

  
A tharos servant crouched in the moonlight, waiting for me to order her to do something. She had wide eyes and a small nose and mouth. How invisible servants had become to me of late! But now I wondered what she was thinking. I fumbled to untie a cord on my headdress, so I could pull off a golden beadcoin. I beckoned and gave it to her. She knelt and touched her head to the ground and waited.

 

  
“It’s not a message. It’s for you,” I said.

 

  
She crawled closer and kissed the hem of my dress. I would never have done such a thing myself. “Oh, go away!” I said, but she didn’t go far. I saw her hiding behind a tree. Was she spying now, or hoping I’d fall asleep so she could cut my cords with a little knife and steal all my beadcoins? Snip snip. Such things happened to drunks. I didn’t care. She wasn’t a person, she was a patient watching cat.

 

  
I began to sing Mox’s drinking song, the one his dead father had taught him in a dream. In Lambaneish it sounded more poignant. My heart pounded along.
It is better to die drinking, than to lie thinking, that I, even I, must die.
I sat up so I could sing better. The long tree shadow in which I sat stretched out before me, pointed like the prow of a boat. In it I navigated the night, singing to embolden myself on the journey.

 
  

 

  
A man came up the stairs carrying a silver lamp with a flame the size of my thumb. He sat beside me in the boat. I hailed him, and asked in the High, “Where are we going, Corvus Rex Incus, Master of Bastards?”

 

  
He said, “What do you mean?”

 

  
“In our boat, in our boat.”

 

  
“You’re drunk.” He put his hand on my arm above the scarred wrist, and his touch went lightning quick all through me, head to toe.

 

  
“Drunk as I should be, as you ought to be. Wherefore I sing this drunken song. Do you remember it? We sang and snow came roaring down from the rocks.”

 

  
“You’re reckless.”

 

  
“Would it be any use to be otherwise, Master of Masters? I’ll sing a new song for you now, a thrush song. Arthygater Keros has already betrayed her betrothed, betrayed her betrothed.” (I liked the sound of that.) “With a little singer, some no one. That’s why her parents and aunt are giving her away. I thought it was because she was fatuous, I mean fair and virtuous, didn’t you? But no, it’s a banishment, a punishment—married off to a strange-ignorant carrion-eater.”

 

  
“Keep your voice down,” King Corvus said. My voice was a dog, leaping up and pawing her master, licking his face. Poor bitch. Very well, I would be silent. “What else?” he asked.

 

  
I shook my head. I wasn’t much of a thrush, my song not much of a song. He took his hand away and I wished he hadn’t.

 

  
“You should watch out for those princes,” King Corvus said. “They get up to all sorts of mischief, with no one to naysay them.”

 

  
I stared at him. “At least they have something to get up.” Had I said that, or was it the Moon talking?

 

  
The king looked away, fury on his brow. “Just be careful.”

 

  
“I’m doing as you bade me.”

 

  
“You can’t keep your wits about you if you’re drunk.”

 

  
“They aren’t my wits anymore, I gave them to Alopexin. Besides, you’re the one who ought to be careful. No one is trying to kill
me.
”

 

  
He said, “Your eyes look strange tonight. One has turned black and the other is white. Is someone trying to kill me?”

 

  
“Of course. Some hunter. There’s a cat watching you.”

 

  
“A cat?”

 

  
“She’s over there somewhere.” But the cat-servant was gone, and so was the beadcoin. What a wastrel I was, giving gold to a cat. Aghazal would scold me if she found out.

 

  
I looked at the king with my left eye. In the moonshadow of the cypress, lamplight touched his cheeks and brow. He was crowned with a flowerless wreath of greenthorn and juniper, meaning solace in adversity, offering protection. His hosts lied. They should have given him a garland of the speckled leaves and stems of oxtongue, for falsehood. I put my hand on the sleeve of his surcoat to see if he was real or a moonflower dream. Pomegranates were appliquéd on his cuff in red kidskin. My forefinger stirred, stroking the garnets stitched in rows to look like pomegranate seeds, but he felt nothing.

 

  
“Sorrowful king,” I said. “I’d give you solace if I could.”

 

  
The cicadas’ song diminished, then came on again like a wave approaching the shore. The king gazed bleakly at Allaxios fanned out below us, descending step by step to the plains. He said, “I don’t want solace.”

 

  
“How about forgetfulness?”

 

  
“Nor that.”

 

  
Of course he didn’t wish to be comforted, offered a poor semblance of what he’d found in the arms of his wife. As for memory, he would not pull out that thorn even if he could, lest by forgetting he become too complacent in exile.

 

  
Desire Repulsed by Scorn is one of the thirteen kinds of love enumerated in the Taxonomies; likewise Desire Met with Indifference. But the list didn’t include desire confronted with obdurate grief and willed anger.

 

  
When Tasatyala first taught me the list, I’d searched for the name of what lay between Galan and me, exhilarated to lay claim to love in any form. I had found Lightning Passion, and Lust for a Contemptible Inferior, and Adoration of a Superior, and none exactly to the purpose. How could love be named when it was first one thing then another, as mutable as fire and shadow?

 

  
Maybe the flame was all that mattered. Maybe what we called love was as promiscuous as the Sun, shining everywhere—yet we stood in each other’s light, jealous of it; we tried to name its forms by the distorted shadows we cast, which altered the appearance of anything they touched.

 

  
For a moment and one moment only I was a clear bright vessel, a glass lamp, and I felt that love could shine through me to illuminate the beloved. I saw I wasn’t fickle, for there was no contradiction in loving more than one, nothing to hoard or parcel out.

 

  
Then I was muscle and bone again, an obstruction to the light, casting a shadow: desirous, jealous, and sad. Tears rose to my eyes and I let them fall. King Corvus had immured himself—we all immured ourselves—and the walls were high and solid.

 

  
“Why did you have a limner capture my likeness?” I asked the king.

 

  
“To send to Merle. So he’ll think you are Princess Keros.”

 

  
“I don’t understand. You want
me
to marry the Starling? But he would never believe I’m Keros. He knew your wife—surely he’d see I’m not like her, not born to it…”

 

  
He let out his breath all at once in a gust of a laugh. “You need not dazzle him with your charms—the gold in your dowry will do that. You need only be admitted to his presence.”

 

  
“And then?”

 

  
“Your guards will do the rest.”

 

  
“Kill him, you mean.” I wiped my tears away with the palm of my hand.

 

  
“Are you squeamish? You wanted a way across the Ferinus and here it is. You may even find your Sire Galan in Lanx, laying siege to it—for when the army of Corymb sets sail for home this summer, Merle will be in their way. You’ll be doing them a service to get rid of him.”

 

  
I shook my head.

 

  
“You’d prefer to be a whore?”

 

  
No no of course not. “But he’s your brother—”

 

  
“Don’t call him that. He is my mother’s son; my father’s too—I never heard a rumor to the contrary—and indeed he favors my father in looks, and had my father’s favor. But he is no longer my brother.”

 

  
“He was obliged to choose between his mother and you—surely that would try any son’s loyalty?”

 

  
“Nonsense. He chose himself, as ever.”

 

  
“But you trusted him?”

 

  
“I didn’t think he’d be fool enough to believe our mother’s promises. But she outwitted us both, didn’t she? Listen,” he said, turning his bleak gaze on me. “If you wish to give me solace, as you were saying…Matricide is forbidden me. As for Merle—it would comfort me to know he was dead.”

 
  

 

  
I started at the hollow between her toes, and drew my sharpened fingernail along the top of her foot, crossing the join at the ankle, up the shin, over the round knee and soft thigh. I picked up wetness between the lips of her cleft and left a shining trail across the small mound where her womansbeard ought to be. She awoke, but kept her eyes closed. She began to smile. Up over her belly, past the folds that hid her navel, leaving a light scratch, and between her breasts and up her neck and over her chin and into her mouth.
She sucked on my finger, then opened her eyes, widened them. She must have thought I was Arkhyios Kydos, though how that could be when she lay half over him and he was sleeping, I didn’t know.

 

  
“Mixin,” I said. “You’re on my shawl.”

 

  
She had wide hips and narrow sloping shoulders, and her bones were everywhere submerged in soft flesh. Even her knees were dimpled. She put her foot on my thigh: an insulting and intimate gesture. “You can have the shawl for a kiss,” she said.

 

  
I put one hand on the backrest and the other between her legs, and leaned closer. She pushed me with her foot and pulled me with one hand behind my neck. I took her lower lip between mine. Her mouth was small, the lips dyed crimson as pomegranate seeds. Her breath smelled of anise.

 

  
Arkhyios Kydos woke up and said, “Oh, there you are. I thought you didn’t want to.”

 

  
“Why not, ein?” Why not. It was what the Moon and moonflower seemed to require of me in completion of their little jape. Though the Moon was behind Mount Allaxios now and couldn’t see.

 

  
This man, with his smooth cheeks and smooth muscles, so sated with easy delights he had to go rutting amongst the frightened women of the manufactory—I had a mind to astonish him—I who had tried only a few of the twenty-five Postures with Galan, before I knew anyone had bothered to name them. I pointed to his dangle, naked without a nest of hairs. “You don’t get far with that,” I said. “I might as well have a maidenhead—you’ll have to be sharp to prick me.” As I pointed his dangle began to stir and stiffen, and I smiled to see him obedient.

 

  
Mixin dug her toes into my leg so I wouldn’t neglect her, and I slipped three fingers into her quim, as Galan had done to me—my right hand, my cold hand. Her eyelids fluttered and I pushed deeper into the slippery softness. I took warmth from her, drawing the hearthfire of her body toward me through that portal. She moaned in a way that seemed artless, or I was taken in by a whore feigning pleasure, the oldest cheat in the world. She made room for me between her legs and I knelt there, leaning over her with my weight on my left hand, the right still inside her. I felt for her pearl with my thumb. She undid the cord and tugged down my clothing to bare me to the waist. I dragged my nipples over her.

 

  
Kydos unwound my wrapper and knelt behind me and bullied his way in, and my quim tore a little, being so dry, and I scratched Mixin inside with my fingernail to make her cry out. My tongue rasped her eyelids.

 

  
I supposed Kydos was taking me from the backside because he’d found out I was tharais. While he labored at it, I was thinking of the tharais napkins locked out of the palace to appease Misfortune and his herd, and how
the woman had braced herself against the wall of the alley, and I was thinking of the king and his contempt for his brother, to send him a tharais whore, a waste receptacle, in place of a bride—his contempt for both of us—and I might have wept had I not been dry as a desert.

 

  
Then Kydos coupled with me face-to-face, which proved I was tharos after all: I’d fooled them. When Kyanos took his place, I brought my knees up to my chest and crossed my ankles in the Locked Casket, wanting to pose a conundrum, which was solved when Perdik added her weight to his. I stole heat from all of them and my skin was scorching, and everything on it dried quickly, their sweat, the men’s white blood, and the cream of the women, leaving a rime of musk and salt. I smelled of moonflower, and I was so full of its sweet poison I exuded it from my lips, my quim, my skin, in the form of a powdery bloom, scintillant and dark. I thought it would harm them to kiss me. Which was what I wanted, to intoxicate them, to taint them, to make their hearts clamor as mine did, and burn them with my left hand and make them shiver with my right. They partook of the moonflower through me, and she was potent.

 

  
Aghazal hadn’t told me Moonflower was a sacred plant; maybe she assumed I knew. Moonflower told me herself, inflicting her sacrament upon me so that I would understand her in my body, the only way she could be understood, and I was truly her whore and celebrant.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 29
  

  
Whore-Celebrant
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
dreamed I did this, and some of it turned out to be true. I’m not sure how I got home. There were crisscrossing scratches on my back and bruises on my thighs from pinches. My quim was sore. If there had been no marks, I would have known by the gifts messengers had left at the house: princely gifts, from princes. Arkhyios Kyanos sent a shawl embroidered with the pendulous blossoms of a laburnum tree, each petal a sequin of hammered gold; Arkhyios Kydos sent two golden fingercaps that fit snugly down to the middle joints. Aghazal examined them closely and found a secret well behind one of the tortoiseshell fingernails, for opos and the like, she said. She judged from the style that the goldsmith Galakt, ten years dead, had made them; his work was treasured—she reckoned the cost at about forty-five gold beadcoins. Kyanos had sent a poem, and Kydos had sent a message of beads on a cord, which meant—according to Aghazal, for I’d not learned enough to read it—