Wildfire (8 page)

 

  
Sire Pava was the Dame’s nephew, and he’d been my master after the Dame died; I knew his armiger well, though I couldn’t for the moment recall his name—he was the priest in our village before he became Sire Pava’s toady and armiger. I wouldn’t lament him. As for the other dead, neither their names nor their faces came to me. It was as if the battle had not taken place, and there was no one for whom I need grieve.

 

  
Yet it had taken place. The wind was from the sea, and carried to us the stench of the burning tower. I asked, “What of them? The ones there?”

 

  
Rowney said, “They’re gone.”

 

  
“What, gone? Where?”

 

  
Spiller answered me with a gesture, drawing the edge of his hand like a blade across his throat.

 

  
“Spilled?” I said.

 

  
“You could say that.”

 

  
Penna scraped a burned frycake onto a wooden plate. She didn’t eat with her fingers, as we did, but delicately, with the tip of a small knife. I wondered she didn’t cut her tongue. She watched us warily. Sire Rodela was getting louder, shriller; I think he delighted in our meanness in speaking so that Penna wouldn’t understand. But wouldn’t it have been worse if she knew what we were saying?

 

  
Rowney sat down with Galan’s helmet in his lap, and buffed the visor with a doeskin. His face was vacant, as if he’d gone into hiding behind it. “It was an old feud, see? Very bitter. It was mostly between the clans of Crux and Torrent, but the city wasn’t safe for anyone, especially when other clans started taking sides. So they all raised walls around their keeps, and built these watchtowers—and when one clan made their spire taller, all the others did the same. But one side couldn’t get the better of the other, not until we came along. Queenmother Caelum said the only way to make peace in the city was to destroy Torrent’s holdings in Lanx, and make sure there was no one left alive to carry a grudge.”

 

  
“Even the—even the vermin?” I could see by Rowney’s puzzlement I didn’t have hold of the right word. I pointed to Penna and myself and said, “The…wifemen?”

 

  
“Women too,” he said. Spiller grinned at the muddle I’d made; I would have laughed myself, in disbelief, if not for the look on Rowney’s face.

 

  
Spiller said, “We left the maids so the queenmother could marry them off as prizes. Divine Hamus had to prick them with his thumb to make sure of their maidenheads. They should have given the task to a man who knew how to enjoy it. Though they’re slippery little minnows, not a proper woman among them.” His grin wavered. It was a sham anyway. He wasn’t as hard a man as he proposed to be, not yet.

 

  
“And the dodges of the keep—the…grudges, the drudges? Them too?”

 

  
“If there was no use for them.
She’s
one of the lucky ones. Sire Edecon took a fancy to her.” Spiller nodded toward Penna. Perhaps Sire Edecon wasn’t to blame for the bruises on her face and neck; maybe he’d saved her from someone else.

 

  
Sire Rodela seemed to revel in this talk of killing, and he filled my left ear with a pulsating, needling whine at the thought—which I couldn’t help thinking—of some man having his way with Penna while others, maybe Spiller, maybe Rowney too, waited their turn, meaning to kill her after. I cupped my hands over my ears and he was just as loud. I wondered no one else heard him.

 

  
Rowney said, “Their enemies did that, the clan of Crux in Lanx. Them and the queenmother’s Wolves. It wasn’t us.”

 

  
“I did my part, I don’t know about you,” Spiller said. “I was after them like a ferret into every little hidey-hole.”

 

  
Rowney looked at him with disgust. “We did some killing. They did the murdering.”

 

  
“You should’ve seen Sire Galan,” Spiller said. “He’s like a fire when he gets going. They couldn’t douse him!”

 

  
I rubbed my temples, for there was a circlet of pain around my head. “Aren’t you afaird? She said spill them all, so there’d be none left to fardle a a grutch, a grouch. But what of…Current?” I wasn’t sure what to call the god, but the names of its avatars—the Sailor, Wellspring, and the Waters—came to me unexpectedly, like coins found in the street. “Don’t you fear revenys?”

 

  
I spoke in the High this time, so Penna too could understand, but it might as well have been a foreign tongue. Spiller twiddled his lower lip, making mock of me. Rowney looked uneasy. He was a brave man in a fight, but wary of me. He’d decided I was a cannywoman after he found out I could see in the dark; what must he think of me now?

 

  
Penna stared, her black brows drawn together. I tried again. “I don’t see how they darst, our kind, our king and queenmocker…Careless…Callous—ah, you know her fame, I can’t say it. How dared they send our flight across the flat, the wet flat, the Wasters, even as they attacked Torment’s clay? No wonder the god sent a, a a…snowbone…and then it was not flat, the wet—the rivers, the wavers, the deep steep—they highed up,” and I showed them with my hands how the waves had risen up all around, tall as hills, and fallen upon us, “and and swept the men who man the…soars, swept them underboard, and fathomed many sheep.”

 

  
Spiller said, “What are you fretting about? I heard there were but five ships lost in the storm. And the battle is won. The gods smile on a victor, they say. Besides, we have Blood of Torrent in our army too, as pure as any here in Incus. Why shouldn’t Torrent favor us?”

 

  
I couldn’t think of how to answer him, for I was puzzled by what I used to take for granted. It was long, long ago that avatars of the twelve gods had walked in human form among the mudfolk of Incus and chosen mates;
from those unions had sprung the twelve clans of the Blood. It was not so long ago, but still a long time as men count it—six generations—that an army of the Blood left Incus to conquer Corymb, the land where I was raised. Now the descendants of that army returned to Incus as invaders. Queenmother Caelum had invited our trespass so she might take back the rule of Incus from her own son, whose name I couldn’t at present remember. Prince Craven, was that it? Surely not.

 

  
I found it bewildering that one branch of the Blood would fight another, no matter that they were cousins six generations apart. But I was more confounded to learn that the clans of Incus were already at war among themselves, fighting old feuds and contending over whether Queenmother Caelum or her son should rule the kingdom. I daresay I should have known this; had I known it before the lightning, and forgotten?

 

  
It struck me now, and perhaps for the first time, that a war between mother and son was unnatural. Surely the gods found it abhorrent. Or were they drawn by this contention—mother against son, kin against kin, neighbor against neighbor—to contend against each other, or even within themselves, avatar against avatar? Perhaps Wellspring would aid one branch of the clan of Torrent, and the Sailor another.

 

  
No—the gods didn’t fight our battles; we fought theirs. Wasn’t that the way of it?

 

  
I said to Spiller, “That was no batter, what was done over there, in that burning terror. It was a slatter, a a…slayer. Slaughter. Ill begun is ill done, and I don’t belie that it, the god—that Portent, I mean—will be appleased by a few bodes, boats. You mark, you mark…” I bent over in my chair, gripping my head, in torment now from the headache and the high ceaseless whine in my ear. “A water spite, wife, is a a…Blood strife, a Flood strike.”

 

  
Spiller raised his hands and said, “Enough of this stuttering and muttering. I can’t be bothered.” He turned his back on me and stalked away. He pulled a side of bacon from a sack, and began to slice it for Sire Galan’s breakfast, holding the slab against his chest and pulling his knife toward him so the bacon curled.

 

  
Penna asked Rowney, “What is she saying?”

 

  
I hardly knew. My mind had snagged on the thread of a notion, and I couldn’t let it go, I must follow where it led: Galan entering a room such as this one with his sword drawn, with Sire Edecon at his back, maybe Spiller and Rowney too—and a naked man starting from his sleep in the lattice-walled bed—a round-shouldered woman with bedclothes clutched about her, choking on a scream—Galan striking quickly, once, twice.

 

  
I saw this bright as a memory, but it couldn’t have happened that way, because in a time of feud no one sleeps without arms at hand. So I imagined
it again, another way, with the man reaching for a sword that hung on two pegs attached to the lattice. He wouldn’t have died without drawing the blade from its jeweled sheath. And where were his servants? Lying outside the door, where they’d been cut down. Spiller stooped over one, fingering the hem of his tunic, looking for coins.

 

  
Shouts and cries should have awakened the couple. Why then was the man so startled? Why did the woman stare in disbelief as her husband was struck down, as Galan turned her way? Surely he wouldn’t have killed her.

 

  
This much I was sure of: blood on Galan’s blade and gauntlet. Blood spattering his silvered visor, a mask made to match Galan’s face, but with a blank serenity of countenance most unlike Galan—the visor held in the gaping beak of his helmet, shaped like the head of a gyrfalcon.

 

  
In a room like this one he’d picked up a coral box from a table, a round box decorated with a silver boat and net. He’d raised his visor and opened the lid to smell the unguent inside. He’d given it to Rowney to carry in a sack slung over his shoulder. He’d gone on to the next room and the next. I saw him running up the winding stairs of a tower, nearly out of breath. Sweating. He’d left his visor up. On his cheek he had a cut shaped like the sickle Moon.

 
  

 

  
Sire Galan rose late, and blamed us all for letting him sleep too long, as if we should have known his mind. Before he put on a stitch of clothing, he ate a frycake standing up and washed it down with a swallow of ale. Spiller scraped his jaw with a sharp blade and rubbed his face with a pumice to smooth away the stubble, and then Galan stood on the balcony and splashed himself with water from a basin. He called for Sire Edecon to get out of bed and stripped the covers from him. Sire Edecon groaned and turned over on his stomach. He was a burly man, and the heavy muscles of his back and buttocks were smoothed over by a bit of fat. Sire Galan was lean, with broad shoulders and narrow haunches; the cords of his sinews and threads of his veins stood out under the skin.

 

  
Galan demanded a clean shirt and hose, and where were those new boots of his, and the surcoat with the foxtail tippets at the shoulders? Spiller and Rowney rooted about in the baggage, which had arrived by ship the day before, and Spiller cursed the misbegotten sod who’d packed it in his absence. He found a boot here, a prickguard there, one of Galan’s leggings missing and the other boot amongst the tent fittings. Rowney found a pair of my slippers in a sack with his saddle, and I smiled to think of Galan’s horsemaster tucking them away for me.

 

  
The jacks helped Galan dress. They put on his new hauberk, plundered from Torrent, no doubt, for each of its fine steel links had a small crescent
of colored enamel, so that the whole shimmered with rainbow scales like a colorful fish.

 

  
I sat swaddled in Mai’s gown, feeling useless. The swimming dark that had come over my vision had faded, but the world still seemed dim and flat. Except for Galan, giving off brightness.

 

  
He came over and stood behind me. Hidden from the others, he teased a lock of hair out from under my headcloth and wrapped it around his finger, and when he tugged on the hair I felt it to my roots. He said, “What shall Firethorn wear? Not this rag.” I could tell he was smiling by the sound of his voice. He went to the bed, and turned around with a gown of gauze I’d noticed the night before. It shaded from azure at the shoulder to cobalt at the hem, and tiny gems were stitched to it like stars against an evening sky. The colors were of a brilliance that could only be achieved on silk. I’d never worn silk before.

 

  
“Wear this,” he said.

 

  
“I’m not in that,” I said.

 

  
“Why not?”

 

  
I mustered the only arguments I thought he would hear. “It’s…blood, bile—it’s not, not clean.” I meant to say blue and not green.

 

  
“Not clean? It’s perfectly clean, not a mark on it.”

 

  
“No—I mean to say it should ought to be
greed.
And besight, I won’t be shown through, it’s too fin, fine, thin.”

 

  
“Are you afraid you’ll be stared at? It’s the custom of the country.” He gestured at Penna to show she wore a garment just as thin. “They’ll stare more in that sack your friend gave you.”

 

  
Penna averted her face from him, and from the way she glared at the floor I knew the gown had been looted from Torrent. Sire Edecon began to laugh. He said I was the first sheath he ever met who could still blush.

 

  
Sire Galan held out the garment. “I’d like to see you in it. I got it for you.”

 

  
“How? Whose cut did you thropple for it?” That was an argument I hadn’t meant to use.

 

  
“So it’s not your modesty that’s offended after all. You take me for a thief.” He dropped the dress into my lap and stood looking down at me. “Do you mean to give up eating and drinking?”

 

  
I didn’t know what he meant. I shook my head.

 

  
“I thought not. Because I never heard you ask where I got the coins to pay for your meat and drink. Where did the coins come from, hmm?” He leaned over, his hands on the back of my chair, his braced arms fencing me in. I thought the delicate carved chair back might give way in his grip. “What do you think a sheath is? What do you think a sheath does? Once my father took me to see a battle, and afterward I saw sheaths thick as crows after a
reaper, gleaning every coin they could find. You chose to follow me. You should have left your qualms behind on the other side of the Inward Sea.” He pushed himself away and turned his back on me.