Wildfire (21 page)

 

  
Sickness was rife while we were snowbound, especially the squirts and a deep cough we called the rattle. Neither was likely to be fatal, but a woman craves being looked after at such a time of weakness. I brewed up a tisane to ease the rattle, and made up a mash of barley bran to dry up the squirts, and went visiting as a greenwoman once again, accompanied by Fleetfoot and Piddle. By now everyone seemed to know that I’d been struck by lightning, and I do believe some whores sent for me just to marvel at my muddled way of talking.

 

  
I stopped by Sire Erial’s tent to bring Mole another decoction of willow bark and soothe-me. I’d been seeing her daily and only now was she willing to look straight at me, from time to time. She was sitting on her pallet, wrapped in my old sheepskin cloak—that cloak had served me well, keeping me warm all winter in the Kingswood, but with a sigh I gave up all thought of getting it back.

 

  
Today Mole had put on a headcloth. It was a sure sign she was better, that she took the trouble to cover her hair. I sat beside her and spoke quietly so the bagboy wouldn’t overhear. “Are they leaving you be?”

 

  
She looked sideways at me and nodded. She whispered, “Will you take this back, please?” Her hand darted out from under the cloak to put a goldenhead in my palm—no doubt the same one I’d given her. “One of them will steal it. It makes me too afraid, I can’t stop worrying about it.”

 

  
She didn’t seem to be joking. I tucked the coin in my money sack. “If this gilt, glit, glower…glowdenhead is keeping you awake at fright, I’ll keep it. But you can ask if you need it.”

 

  
“I’ll get by,” she said, a little sullen. Defiant even.

 

  
So she could be something other than meek. Maybe she thought I looked down on her because she’d chosen to stay; and because I had just one man, a generous one who gave me golden coins, while she had Sire Erial and the others. But truly I understood. I’d been foolish to think she might be better off with strangers in a foreign land than among people who knew her. How I must have frightened her with my strange notions and speech, when she’d been so ill and afraid already!

 

  
Before I left I managed to make her laugh at something I said, something bungled and backward.

 
  

 

  
Fleetfoot and Piddle and I wandered a labyrinth of icy trails, between mounds of snow higher than our heads, looking for the copper banners of Delve. We found Sire Torosus’s tent, but Mai wasn’t in it. She was staying in her oxcart. If she was avoiding men, she must be nearly ready to give birth.

 

  
The oxcart was up to its axles in snow, and the small cleared space before it had been much trampled and befouled by the ox confined there. Tobe and Sunup were playing outside, and Tobe came running so I could pick him up. Every time I saw him he was steadier on his feet. Piddle and the piebald dog barked at each other and then made peace.

 

  
Mai sat in the cart with her legs stretched out before her.

 

  
“Is your travile come so soon?” I said.

 

  
“It could be now or in a hand of days,” Mai said, “whatever Mouse decides. Remember I told you I lost the last child bearing it? I took to my bed beforehand for a tennight, and when it stopped moving about inside I knew I was in for terrible travail. But Mouse is still thumping. What a bruiser he promises to be! So I don’t mind the wait.”

 

  
I rubbed my hands up and down Mai’s legs gently, more gently than I kneaded my own legs when they cramped. “Do your pegs ache?” I asked.

 

  
“Oh, indeed. But can you rub my back? That hurts worse. Push right there, push hard. Ah, that’s good. You’re stronger than Sunup.”

 

  
“You said you could get help for me soon, May. When will it be? I can’t sleep, the haint is always business in my ear.”

 

  
“The summoner says tomorrow is a most propitious day for it, couldn’t be better. At Longest Night the Queen of the Dead hears all petitioners.”

 

  
“A suddener? I need a vanisher, banisher to rid me of this…” I pointed to my ear.

 

  
Mai lowered her voice. “Trust me, Coz, as I trust you. Pinch will take you to him tomorrow. Do as the summoner asks, for he’s wise in the ways of the dead. Now, what have you got to give him?”

 

  
“I already gave you quits—two blands, two goldenheads, remember?”

 

  
“But you still need to pay the toll, with something you’d be loath to give away. I never saw you disinclined to part with coins,” she said. “Something dearer.”

 
  

 

  
“I believe I’ve finished my lament,” Sire Edecon said that evening. “Would you like to hear it?”

 

  
Galan curtly answered, “No,” as if speaking to a servant. Sire Edecon put the dulcet down with a thump, and the strings whispered in vexation.

 

  
“Oh, never mind,” Galan said. “Let’s hear it.”

 

  
Sire Edecon had to be coaxed, but it wasn’t long before he played the song through for us without fumbling more than once or twice. A good rumormonger made a song of parts that fit together tightly and rightly, so that even if you’d never heard it before, and couldn’t guess how it would go, once it had been played it seemed it could have been made no other way. Perhaps because of Sire Edecon’s ignorance of the craft, his song had a haunting strangeness. He’d written it for his dead wife.

 

  
He sang of how he offered his bride life and she chose death, saying god and kin called her to do her duty. He asked if she did not bear a greater duty to him, her husband, and she replied she could not be an honorable wife if she were not first an honorable daughter, and she must seek the terrible embrace of death rather than the delightful embrace of her husband. And so forth at length. When Sire Edecon was done there was a long silence, during which he began to blush and fidget.

 

  
I felt a chill pinch on the back of my neck. Didn’t he fear his wife’s shade at all? Did he think he could appease her with flatteries, by calling her graceful and beautiful, which she was not, and by putting eloquent lies in her mouth? Perhaps she could be cheaply bought, but not Penna. I thought of Sire Edecon lying with his sheath on his wedding night. He would never sing of her.

 

  
I wondered why, though his song was false, it caused me to weep. Which much amused Sire Rodela.

 

  
Sire Galan said, “I wouldn’t have believed such a fine song could be patched up from the oddments I’ve heard from you these past days.”

 

  
“Then—what do you think of it?”

 

  
“You’ve made me shed tears for her. Isn’t that answer enough? It saddens me to think of your wedding night, which should have been joyful. And that terrible morning…I believe your song will live a long time—long after us.”

 

  
“You do?”

 

  
“We probably won’t outlive the tennight, but I’ll wager the song will last
a month at least,” Galan said, and all the men laughed, even Sire Edecon, and that eased the mood. “Edecon, listen. Give it to a rumormonger—you know the one named Lark?—with a couple of silverheads, and let him polish it up and make the song famous. But keep your name out of it, it’s bound to sting the She-wolf like a swarm of hornets.”

 

  
“Mmm,” said Sire Edecon. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

 

  
It was a thing I didn’t understand, why the men of the king’s army laid the blame for the brides’ curse in the lap of Queenmother Caelum—which meant they blamed her for all manner of hardships, from rain and snow to mildew on harnesses. They said the queenmother had demanded the massacre of the clan of Torrent in Lanx from sheer bloodlust. All her lusts were ungovernable, but most especially her desire to rule.

 

  
“The king will like it. He’s fond of a good song,” said Sire Galan. “And it makes the She-wolf look the bitch she is, doesn’t it?”

 

  
“It’s unnatural for a woman to be so ambitious,” Sire Edecon said, and quoted the old saying:
If you let a woman wear the spurs, she’ll ride you to ruin.

 

  
Sire Galan said, “Have you met my mother?”

 

  
“Yes, I had that honor, on the occasion of Sire Destello’s wedding to Dame Mollete—my cousin, you know, on my mother’s side. Why do you ask?”

 

  
“I wondered if you’d noticed the spurs.”

 
  

 

  
There was an uproar in the camp and Spiller went to find out why, and came back excited. There was to be a hanging! Everyone ran to see it, everyone but me. I stayed behind to sew my new compass. I had all the cloth I needed now, with what I’d stolen from the clothier. I hadn’t taken much, after all, just scraps he might have used for patches, none of them bigger than my hand. I sorted out the proper colors and cut the scraps into arcants of equal size, and arranged them to make a circle, starting with the gods whose places I knew for certain because I’d memorized their godsigns: Ardor, Crux, Delve, and Hazard. I placed the other gods where I thought they should go, then moved the pieces around, uncertain. It was quiet in the tent, but not so in my mind.

 

  
At last I started sewing. I had to trust that the order was right when it felt right. I took large stitches, afraid the men might return. But the hanging was taking a long time, long enough. I warmed my cold hand with my warm one, and mashed some inkberries, and tied a bit of my hair to a stick to make a brush. I painted the three circles one inside the other, and lastly the godsigns around the horizon, each on the proper color, I hoped.

 

  
It was done; not so well done as I would have liked, but orderly nevertheless, and I could tell each god at a glance without having to puzzle out its
sign. The meaning of this compass seemed to differ slightly from the old one. The colors made each god more distinct, and yet its avatars more unified, three in one. I looked at it with my left eye and then my right; it bothered me that the colors were faded and yellowed seen with my right eye, as if the compass were already ancient.

 

  
I was ready to throw the bones, to see if the Dame and Na would still speak to me, but I heard men outside the tent, their voices loud, and I rolled the bones in the new compass and hid it away.

 

  
The jacks and Fleetfoot came in. Spiller said it had been quite a spectacle: The queenmother and the king threw money to the crowd, and promised sacrifices and a feast at the bonfire tomorrow night. Five mud soldiers from the clan of Growan swung for looting, and one of the queenmother’s men, to show how Queenmother Caelum frowned upon the despoliation of the kingdom she claimed for her own.

 

  
Rowney said he wondered that the king took it so meekly, standing beside her with his arms crossed. Was he a man still, or had she taken his sacs for a pair of baubles? Because everyone knew Wolves had been roaming the town in packs. They’d picked the townsfolk clean to the bone, and then cracked the bones and robbed them of marrow. You could tell the cataphracts of Growan were none too pleased to have their men singled out for punishment. Rowney said it was good I’d foreseen that the queenmother would execute pillagers, and saved us from doing the rope jig ourselves.

 

  
It was easier to let him think so.

 
  

 

  
Sire Edecon came back to the tent in the middle of the night without his master, and I waited up for Sire Galan. While his men slept I had time to strengthen the seams of my new compass and thread a cord around the edge for a drawstring. I took pains with the work, but I was distracted by Sire Rodela droning in one ear and the refrain of Sire Edecon’s song in the other:
I’ll have no more of life, I’ll have no more of life.

 

  
With small stitches I whiled away the long night, thinking of how Galan had spoken of his mother to Sire Edecon, and how he never said such things to me. How I’d never asked. I’d tried to wrap myself in ignorance, like a babe in swaddling cloth, telling myself it was not my place to know the whole of his life—that other life he led in Ramus, that he shared with his wife and infant son, that he would resume if he survived. And for a time, such was my jealousy, I thought I’d sooner lose him to war than to that other life.

 

  
It was nearly dawn when Galan returned. And when he undressed and lay down beside me, smelling of wine and woodsmoke, I tried to make him forget mother and father, wife and son. I thought of wives immortalized
and sheaths forgotten, and worked upon him as deliberately as a whore works on her patron, until he was slick with sweat and breathless. All the while Sire Rodela kept up his mocking buzz, until at last Desire took pity, and kindled her lamp and led me to a narrow instant where all else was forgotten, and the world was as small as the two of us, Galan and me.

 
  

 

  
Pinch and Sunup came the next afternoon to take me to the summoner. I was surprised to see Sunup, but she told me that Mai had said she ought to come and help. We followed Pinch down a narrow trail trampled in the snow, heading well south of town and the army encampment. As we went, Sire Rodela’s buzzing became louder and more frantic in the hollow of my ear. I gritted my teeth and rejoiced that he was frightened.

 

  
We reached frozen mudflats along the banks of the river, and Pinch led us into a field of tall, buff-colored reeds. We found the summoner waiting with three of his followers in a circular clearing. The reeds made a wall around us, and their heavy russet tassels swayed above our heads. Underfoot they had been trodden into a mat over the snow and ice.

 

  
The summoner was so emaciated that his face revealed the shape of his skull under the scored parchment of skin; his graying hair was long and disheveled. I’d expected his dress would be out of the ordinary, to show his trade, but he wore a plain leather tunic and wrinkled hose. His followers, however, wore long red robes. They stood warming themselves by a brazier on a tripod. I recognized one as a whore I knew by the name of Sweetpea. She was a soft little partridge of a woman, the last one I’d have expected to see there.