Wildfire (78 page)

  
“We saw no reason you should fret about something that might never happen. We sent a messenger, but the embassy is chancy—all Incus is in an uproar, and armed men are roving everywhere.” He leaned forward. “But now we know: the messenger will get through and you’ll stand before Merle with red-clad guards at your back. I’d hardly dared hope for it.”

 

  
I hadn’t meant to mislead when I told the dream that way; I thought it made a better tale. It never occurred to me that he might take such comfort from it. I raised the same objection I had in my dream. “Suppose he marries me, what then? The Starling knew a real princess of Lambanein once, and he won’t be fooled by me.”

 

  
This time the king didn’t admit there would be no need for me to charm his brother, because his brother was to die. He said, “You think not? I think you’ll do very well. You’re already so accomplished that princes of the kingdom dote on you. I daresay Merle will not be difficult.”

 

  
I trusted Moonflower more than I trusted the king. Of course he concealed his intentions from me; it was a vile thing to kill a brother.

 
  

 

  
The day was hot, but I was cold, goosefleshed. The king took off his surcoat so as not to wrinkle it, but left on his hose and thin muslin shirt. I said, “Servants are everywhere, hmm? They see what you do, or don’t do. Without servants, nothing can be said to have occurred. I think you should bite me here, along my forearm, where it will show.” I held my left arm in front of his face, so he had to look; I showed him my palm and inner arm, powdered yellow from wrist to elbow. “Five stings: here here here here and there.”

 

  
I was the whore-celebrant Alopexin; that was why I could speak to him that way. And my whorish heart was tried when he took the thin skin of the crook of my elbow between his teeth, and nipped the scarred skin at my wrist and three places in between. He knew the trick of biting hard enough to leave a mark without drawing blood. I groaned. My hands were in fists and I drove my nails into my palms.

 

  
When he looked up his eyes were despairing, and his mouth and the black hairs of his beard and mustache were smudged with yellow powder. He said, “I’d forgotten how it tasted.”

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 30
  

  
The Hunt
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
W
asps crawled on the rind of the melon we’d eaten for breakfast. In the shade of the portico, Adalana and I copied a list of Permissible Causes of Duels, including the Insulting Poem and Insolent Staring. I knew better than to ask Tasatyala questions, such as how long does it take for a look to become a stare? It was an accomplishment that she’d memorized so many of the Taxonomies at her age; understanding them would take years.

 

  
My stylus seemed to be writing without any effort on my part, going swiftly along. I never felt awe toward the Lambaneish syllabary as I did for the godsigns of Incus; yet they were beautiful in their way, the little dancers.

 

  
I smelled the clay and the sweet decaying melon and the flowers under the Sun in the courtyard, and felt a surge of love, of Fellow Feeling for my Sisters. I heard Aunt Cook Angadataqebay swearing in the kitchen, as she often did, first in Lambaneish at a tharos servant, and then in Ebanakan, “Shit on you, grandmother!”—a curse addressed to the squat wooden protector of the kitchen, a goddess brought all the way from Ebanaka. Aunt Cook gave offerings to the statue daily, but she also screamed at her whenever food burned or a pot cracked on the fire. My Fellow Feeling swelled to encompass the tharos servant and Aunt Cook and the wooden goddess too, who surely did bless the kitchen, for the food was always good.

 

  
When we were done copying, I asked Second, “May we practice now?” We three younger Sisters were trying to master a difficult song in the middle of the Epic of Oxys and Pachys, where the bride Eikenain sings of her Lightning Passion for a man whose name she doesn’t know, while he—Pachys—hides in the garden, trying to catch a glimpse of her. He is equally smitten; mischievous Peranon has seen to that. I’d understood none of this, of course, when I saw the epic enacted on the night of the White Petals banquet.

 

  
Tasatyala danced Eikenain, wearing bells around her wrists and ankles, and I was Pachys, while Adalana played and sang the part of the nightingale, who is Peranon disguised. I didn’t take offense when Second and Third
laughed at my mistakes, but began to mock myself, turning the Lover into an oaf and his yearning song into bluster. I strutted and stumbled, pretending to be drunk, and the clowning awakened Sire Rodela, who hummed with pleasure and stretched my legs. Adalana played faster and faster, and I demonstrated prowess—mine and Sire Rodela’s—by jumping back and forth across the narrow pool that divided the courtyard, over the carp and the sleepy, tolerant meneidon, between the two bronze gazelles. How long could I leap without stumbling, and how fast? That was the joy of it. Adalana took up her flute made from the wingbone of a swan, and played a high whistling nightingale song. Wasps followed me as I danced, as though I were sweet as honey, and I thought I’d never fall.

 
  

 

  
On the morning of the arkhon’s Hunt, a cat jumped through the open window and woke us up by walking across the bed I shared with Second, Third, and Mother Yafeqer. It was still dark, but time to rise, and Tasatyala dutifully got up, and rousted Adalana, and I turned over onto my belly and pulled a shawl over my head. I’d stayed late at a banquet and earned a chance to sleep. But the cat sat on the small of my back and kneaded me with his claws. He felt heavy and hot, a purring brazier. I told him to go away and he did, leaping to the windowsill and down into the courtyard. But soon I felt him treading about my head, and I lifted the shawl to see him carrying a large dead crow in his mouth. The cat placed his offering on the bed with pride. The bird was still warm.

 

  
I went to wake up Aghazal’s brother Kabara, who slept in the entrance hall. “I need you to take a message now,” I told him. “And if anyone tries to catch you, smash it up before they can read it, ein?” I gave him a writing tablet with the message scratched in godsigns on the clay: They will try to kill him today. “Take this to the Court of Tranquil Waters, to the king’s servant Garrio. Do you remember him? He came with me the day Aghazal took me in. He has a beard, grizzled, with more white on the chin than on the sides, but his eyebrows are black. He has furrows across his forehead. Ask for him, everyone knows him there. Tell him this comes from the king’s dreamer. No, never mind. Just say Garrio. Garrio, ein?” I wrote on the clay the four signs that made Firethorn. As an afterthought I cut a lock of my hair and wrapped it around the quill of a crow’s feather, and pressed them into the clay. The boy couldn’t speak the High; Garrio knew little Lambaneish.

 

  
Kabara ran off and I worried. Perhaps I should have gone myself. But no, the boy could run faster. The king received so many messages daily, I feared he might ignore mine, and furthermore I doubted Kabara would be admitted quickly to his presence. Therefore Garrio. But Garrio would be fussing over his master’s garments—useless fripperies for a man going hunting.

 

  
Likely they’d try during the Hunt, in the arkhon’s tame forest, among the captive animals. I knelt before a moonflower in the dining court and made a libation of blood and doublewine, and I prayed to Moonflower—though I was forewarned that she had a strange way of answering prayers. I’d prayed for a true dream of Galan, and she’d shown me King Corvus sitting on a high terrace in a surcoat embroidered with pomegranates: a dream false in most particulars, but true in every way that mattered.

 

  
I begged her now to send another true dream of the king, that I might give him a clearer warning than the one the cat had given me. I swore that if she helped me, I’d submit to her instruction whenever she was offered, no matter how foolishly she made me behave.

 

  
I plucked from the moonflower a dried thornapple that had split into four neat sections, and shook nine dark seeds into my palm. I ground them up and steeped them in hot water and drank the brew down.

 

  
All this I did while Aghazal slept. By the time she awoke I was dressed and ready for the Hunt. The tharais servant had arranged my hair on wicker ram’s horns that curved around my ears, and added white orchids for gaiety, so that it looked as if butterflies had landed there. I sat on the marble bench and watched Aghazal bathe. Happiness burned in her like oil in a lamp, and I didn’t know why. Though I sat still, I felt I was rushing with wind in my ears. My throat was parched. Aghazal stood before me, asking some question, with water in silver beads all over her skin and hair. In my webeye she looked far away.

 
  

 

  
Aghazal and I sat in a pavilion in the royal hunting park, in the dappled shadow of marble lattices and oak trees. The pavilion was in the treetops, raised high on eight carved pillars. From time to time the trees would be shaken by a passing wind, and the stiff oak leaves would shiver like brass cymbals. We surely had climbed a ladder to get up there, though I couldn’t remember it.

 

  
There were servants, two tharos women and a napkin. But no men as yet; they were hunting, and if they desired refreshment or repose they could find it at our pavilion or another. We would see nothing of the chase here, but we weren’t required as witnesses. The noblewomen, sitting in arcades around a large pen in the park, would watch the culmination of the hunt. Beaters would drive the game into this pen so hunters could slay the beasts and not a one would escape.

 

  
But now was the time for stalking and the chase, for testing the cunning, courage, endurance, and strength of man and beast, man against beast. That’s how they would kill him. No one to blame for it.

 

  
The ceiling of the pavilion was tiled blue, and we sat on a platform on
cushions of saffron silk. “You’re quiet,” Aghazal said. She knew I had moonflower in me; she had only to look at my squinting eyes, each huge pupil ringed with the thin colored band of iris. She sighed, and an attentive servant saw her tiny gesture, and set before us a platter with apricots and sugared almonds. “I forgot it was boring,” she said, and I felt as if she’d jabbed me with a thorn. But it didn’t hurt.

 

  
Today Aghazal smelled nourishing, like baking bread, though she was wreathed and garlanded in honeysuckle. She nibbled on an almond, and I wanted to lick the salt from her lips, which were stained plum purple. She couldn’t mistake how I stared at her, and she grinned without hiding her mouth, and went to the door to call a nephew who waited below. “See if you can find Kabara, ein?” She had been vexed with me, perhaps, for sending Kabara with a message of my own, but I had an important patron, I could do such things.

 

  
By the time the nephew came back with Kabara, I’d forgotten he was ever sent. Aghazal wrapped one of her rings in an oak leaf and tied it with a magenta thread pulled from her shawl, and sent Kabara off with it, who knows where. On another day I would have tried to find out what they whispered about; it was a game I played with Aghazal, to try to guess the object of her love. Now I didn’t care. Kabara had given me a glance and a nod before he left. He had delivered my message.

 
  

 

  
Mox led me through the tiny Kerastes, steep mossy crags only twice my height, with rivulets instead of rivers. He held me by a leash around my left wrist. Mox was dead, fallen into an icy crevasse, but I’d forgotten that.

 

  
We crouched on a boulder and a chamois stood on a peak above us, balanced on delicate hooves, trembling, listening. He leapt away. I held my breath and heard what the chamois had heard, something running through the woods in haste. It was the king in red hunting leathers, wearing a crown of antlers with velvety tines. The antlers looked an awkward burden, but he ran with the swift grace of a stag, dodging trees and ducking to avoid branches, so I saw he was used to the heft and breadth of his crown. His leathers were spotted with sweat.
Prey, protect him.
He was Prey on his mother’s side. Why did Prey Hunter have the body of a man and the head and antlers of a stag? Why didn’t the avatar appear as a wolf, a hunter rather than one who runs from hunters? I thought I almost understood. Because man is both.

 

  
The king ran on, out of my sight. I looked for his hunters, that I might know whom to blame when he was killed. They came on horseback, three men armed with leaf-bladed spears bound to their wrists with long cords. In Lambanein too the gods forbid weapons that leave the hand. But Mox
spoke up scornfully, saying the leash was a cowardly cheat. Sire Rodela took a grass stem from between his teeth and agreed, saying in Corymb they’d be ashamed to use a spear taller than a man for hunting. And soon they were talking about why it was better to hunt with dogs than pards, such an odd Lambaneish custom.

 

  
The first rider was one of the arkhon’s sons, Arkhyios Kyparisos, whose name I’d seen written on the wall in Aghazal’s house. The second rider was an Ebanakan guard, and the third a royal huntsman, and behind him on a special saddle sat the beast he served, a pard, a great lanky golden cat with black spots, wearing a red collar, a chain, and a cap to blind him. The riders’ horses were spotted too, all of them dappled gray.

 

  
So swiftly they followed the king-stag that they vanished while Sire Rodela was still talking about his favorite gazehound bitch. I begged Mox to let go of the leash and he ignored me. The forest gave me a gift: there by my right hand, in a crevice in the boulder, a swallowwort grew with bright yellow flowers and leaves of fresh green. I rubbed yellow sap in my eyes until they began to smart.