Wildfire (80 page)

  
I tried to mince the truth with a few lies. “He was beardless, as is the fashion among the young warriors of Corymb. I couldn’t see the tattoo on his cheek. Perhaps he was one of King Thyrse’s bastards; he had so many, I didn’t know them all.”

 

  
“What color was his hat?”

 

  
“It was dark.” How I wished they had served food. A woman could hide behind the business of eating, holding a hand before her mouth to conceal her chewing, to hide the trembling of her lips.

 

  
“So the dream took place at night?” said the king.

 

  
“No. I mean the hat was dark.”

 

  
“Black?”

 

  
“I couldn’t tell exactly.”

 

  
“There, you see she’s lying,” said the king to his strategos.

 

  
“That’s of no consequence, since we know what she’s lying about: someone she knew, a young man to whom she is loyal. Is it so hard to name him?”

 

  
“Sire Galan dam Capella by Falco of Crux,” said the king, and Galan’s name on his lips made me shiver.

 

  
“A harlot should be a better liar,” the priest said, and he allowed himself to show amusement by raising an eyebrow.

 

  
“You didn’t say your blade was a man of such importance,” King Corvus said to me.

 

  
“I didn’t think he was.”

 
  

 

  
Garrio seemed to think that if I was going to be a whore, it was fine so long as I was his king’s whore. Or at least that’s what I thought he was trying to say, sometime in the third passage of the night, after I’d left the silence of the king’s bedchamber—after I’d pulled pins from my hair, and smeared the yellow powder on my arms, and walked into the courtyard with my sandals in one hand and a flask of doublewine in the other.

 

  
Garrio and I woke up the horseboys Lame and Chunner, and we all sat in the open door of the stable loft, with the comforting smell of hay and horses prickling our noses. It was easy to guess what the men needed to hear about their king. “I thought he deserved some sleep,” I said, and we all laughed. I made them take an oath of secrecy, knowing it for the surest way to spread a tale.

 

  
The talk was bawdy, and I thought I heard a resonant doubling of my voice, a rough buzz beneath my shrillness, when I spoke of Sire Vafra and how I wouldn’t let him, and of Sire Quislibet, the big boar-bore, and how he’d grunted. I mocked and boasted and they laughed as if I were a man. Was it all the same to them, Firethorn or Alopexin?

 

  
There in the Lambaneish night, Mount Allaxios sighed after a hot day, a scented exhalation rising from gardens and watercourses and baked earth. In summer it was hard to believe in winter, and in the existence of the Ferinus. But we believed. We poured out doublewine for the shades of Mox and Lino and Mano and even Chunner’s favorite mule, all dead and left behind in the mountains. We got to talking about Wolves, and how the king had sent them scurrying back to the queenmother with their tails tucked between their bony buttocks. I told them about Mox’s fight with the Wolf on Boarsback Ridge, and how they ran at each other and collided, and each man claimed the other as prisoner. I got up and used an old ax haft for a sword and a pile of hay for the enemy to show them how Mox fought—
how he gave the man a tap and dodged away, so dainty with his blows. This roused the braggart, Sire Rodela, to show how it should have been done, and we capered all around the hayloft, slaying shadows until the haft broke on a post.

 

  
Lame finished the flask of doublewine and we raided the storerooms for another. I drank until I no longer cared, which was exactly what I craved. But it couldn’t last.

 

  
Garrio and the horseboys chose a gelding for me to ride. The dark streets were empty except for the koprophagais pulling their stinking barrows and wains. As we passed they shuttered their lanterns and stood still, vanishing under the cover of their shawls so as not to offend us with their presence.

 

  
Garrio put his hand on a stirrup. “I hate to see you go back to that whorehouse. You deserve better. Didn’t you just save the king’s life? He’d never have put on the gorget without your message. Divine Aboleo didn’t warn him—what good are his auguries if he can’t foretell a thing like that?”

 

  
“Oh, the Auspex is a fine oracle,” I said. “He predicted I’d make a whore, didn’t he? I never had a middenhead that I know of, so don’t mourn for my lost virtue.”

 

  
Garrio looked up, smiling. “I won’t then.”

 

  
“Me neither,” Lame said stoutly. Chunner, hanging on to the gelding’s tail and stumbling after us, was too drunk to say anything.

 
  

 

  
The king sent a handsome gift the next day: a short cape of black panther fur trimmed with brighter pard fur, tawny with black spots. He didn’t send a poem with it.

 

  
Aghazal said, “Oh, it’s splendid! Tasteful too, with the solid black and the spotted trim.” She had the cape over her arm. She’d sought me out in the back courtyard, where I sat in the shade plucking weeds. I had a foul headache. I squinted up at her and said nothing. I wondered that she couldn’t see the black fur was spotted too, black rosettes on black.

 

  
She went on talking. “A pity it’s too hot to wear it; you’ll have to wait until winter. Love Concealed, of course. Though if he supposes people don’t know already, he’s more of a fool than I took him for.”

 

  
That was one message in the gift, to be sure: the one intended for others. Let them think he’d lost his head or his heart to a celebrant, and broken a vow for a heedless heartless trull who squandered her favors on others. That was an ancient, revered game in Lambanein; whether or not he proved the loser, it would win him sympathy.

 

  
Then there was another message, to me. Only the Blood were permitted
to wear such furs in Incus; even in Lambanein, they were more suited to royalty than a whore-celebrant. I took the cape as a promise and a reminder that he meant to make of me a counterfeit Keros and send me across the cold Ferinus.

 

  
Yet I hoped the gift bespoke real gratitude. There had been one moment when the king had thanked me and touched his throat, and all the bitterness thereafter had not sullied the gesture.

 

  
Aghazal hung the cape over the latticework fence and crouched next to me. “Aunt Cook said she sent you for marjoram and mint back in the First Age of the World, and you never returned. What’s the matter?”

 

  
I shook my head.

 

  
Earlier that day I’d squatted beside Moonflower, by the big plant I’d watered with my own blood, and reviled her as Aunt Cook Angadataqebay reviled her kitchen goddess when a pot broke. I called her a false friend, a bitch, and a traitor for having abandoned me when I needed her in the hunting pavilion. I might have said as much to Aghazal, had I been speaking to her.

 

  
I’d pissed on the moonflower too. I still didn’t know what I’d done or what had been done to me, but I had a strong urge to put a knife up my quim and scrape it clean.

 

  
“Ein?” Aghazal sat in the bed of chives and pulled off a round purple flower head and ate it.

 

  
I threw a weed at a pile of its fellows, so many dead green soldiers. Grandmother Lagas’s eyes were dim these days, or she’d have seen that creeping stinkwort had invaded the marjoram. “I hear, I heard a vile rumor,” I said.

 

  
“Mmm? About me?”

 

  
“About myself. About the day of the hunt. Were you with me in the pavilion?”

 

  
“I went to meet a patron elsewhere. You don’t remember?”

 

  
I shook my head.

 

  
“What is this rumor?”

 

  
I told her. I didn’t look at her as I spoke.

 

  
“Ah, I hadn’t heard that. Do you trust the one who told you? No? Then why do you believe it?”

 

  
“I don’t know. I have scratches here, bruises…There was at least one. I wish…I wish you’d left your uncle with me, or someone. Something to stop it.”

 

  
“I warned you about Moonflower. She’s not trustworthy. Yet you chose her as your mistress instead of me. Or she chose you.”

 

  
I glared at her. How dare she chastise me when I was the one betrayed?
But she didn’t sound vexed; she spoke as one who states a fact, and looked at me with pity. She said, “Ours is a difficult art, with many ways to seek mastery. Your path is not mine, but it seemed to me I had to let you take it, even if you suffered for it.”

 

  
“I want to know who they are, the man, the men,” I said. “I want to piss on them as I pissed on Moonflower.”

 

  
She laughed. “I see it’s tempting to take revenge, but there are more elegant ways to accomplish it—supposing you want to waste your time that way, ein?”

 

  
No doubt she meant well, but it was impossible to hear good advice with Sire Rodela’s whine boring into my ears like twin augers. I gritted my teeth.

 

  
“It’s a hazard of the trade,” Aghazal said. “Something like this happened to Aeidin once, and she was so outraged she left Allaxios with her go-between on a mule behind her. She came back of course, for her art was wasted on provincials, and now she’s more famous than ever. I’ll try to find out what happened, what really happened, but if anyone speaks to you of this, you must just say you were doing Moonflower’s bidding. Which is the truth. Everyone knows how she is. At least you’ll stay away from her from now on, ein?”

 

  
“I can’t. I need her.” Else I was not a seer at all. Else I was blind and useless.

 

  
“You’d better apologize then,” Aghazal said with a wry smile. “She can’t be too pleased you pissed on her.”

 

  
I didn’t think it possible I would laugh, but I did.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 31
  

  
Alopexin
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
knelt before the moonflower plant in the dining court and asked forgiveness. In my mind’s eye I saw Moonflower as a woman with blue-tinged skin and dragonfly wings, dressed in cloth of morning dew. She hovered in the embrace of the plant and her tiny face had an enigmatic expression. I sprinkled dirt on my head and promised not to abuse her again. I had been a servant most of my days, and I knew how to grovel and beg pardon when not at fault, and how to hide my resentment. I buried two golden beadcoins at her feet, and took three more to a jeweler to fulfill my promise to have a silver pendant made for Crux Moon—the fox in the Moon, like the bridle cheekplate I’d seen in a dream.

 

  
Moonflower accepted my sacrifice, but exacted a penance: at night she made me restless, and sent me dreams so full of desire I coursed with sweat and moaned, muttered, rolled, and twisted, and awoke rank with the smell of my own secretions and male seed—they called white blood seed in Lambanein. Mother Yafeqer said I couldn’t sleep with them anymore, I was keeping them all awake.

 

  
Zarfatta took my place in the bed, and I unrolled a thin straw pallet by the long pool in the dining court. Moonflower opened huge white flowers and sent me her fragrance, and I thought it must mean she forgave me, but I didn’t forgive her.

 
  

 

  
In a house full of women, it is well known that many will be called to have their tides at about the same time. In Lambanein that was the cause of some inconvenience, for a tharos woman during her tides was, for five days or so, in a state of being tharais. She had to abstain from coupling, cooking, visiting, and eating from the same dish as the tharos. She had to use a special waste receptacle. She couldn’t weave or spin lest she tangle the thread. She wore the tharais shawl.

 

  
Tasatyala had her first tides at the same time the blood flowed for
Aghazal, her true sister Dasasana, Mother Yafeqer, and Aunt Cook’s daughters Waqesa and Zarfatta. It was our good fortune that Aunt Cook was too old to have tides anymore, or there would have been chaos in the kitchen.

 

  
Aghazal said that when Tasatyala’s tides had ebbed, she would be permitted to attend banquets; she could have patrons and gifts, and dazzle everyone with the grace of her dancing. Aunt Cook made Tasatyala’s favorite dishes, and we had a feast in the back courtyard for the women, amidst bright banners of laundry hung out to dry.

 

  
In the cool of the evening, the polluted women sat apart, eating from one dish, while the rest of us ate from another. Most of the women in my circle were too old for tides or too young. One was pregnant—Aunt Cook’s third daughter, Gazuf, who was fat and stately, and inclined to be morose since her lover had ceased to visit.

 

  
Aunt Cook asked me why I never had tides. “Are you with child?”

 

  
My hand was halfway to my mouth with a morsel of peppery fish. I put the food down. “No.”

 

  
Grandmother Lagas said something in Ebanakan. Aunt Cook said, “Ah, I see.”

 

  
“What? What does she say?”

 

  
“She says you have a knot tied around the neck of your gourd, your womb.”

 

  
Grandmother spoke directly to me, in Lambaneish. “I thought maybe you did it of yourself. So you won’t catch a…” She gestured as if plucking a feather from the air. “Catch a
fenetari,
a spirit; catch a babe, ein? Like this one did.” She patted Gazuf on the belly.

 

  
Adalana watched and listened. Her great brown eyes, her upright posture, reminded me of a fawn, wary because her dam has raised her head to seek danger on the wind.

 

  
Aunt Cook said, “It’s a good trick to close the womb that way; handy for a celebrant, ein?”

 

  
To my astonishment I began to cry. I pulled my shawl over my face as I sobbed. Did they all know the shameful thing that had happened to me? I should be glad the Initiates had cursed me, or I might have caught a babe during the Hunt without knowing who had fathered it; I might have returned to Galan carrying another man’s bastard.