Wildfire (22 page)

 

  
The summoner’s bloodshot eyes singled me out at once, and when I felt his gaze strike, my heart seemed to lurch to a stop. I stood still. He beckoned me, and my heart thudded again, and slowly I came near him. When I was in reach he clasped my hand and jerked me closer. For a man so thin, his grip was strong. Around his neck was a string of bone beads carved to look like skulls. He smiled, and his stained teeth were chipped, as if he’d been chewing stones. “Have you the toll?” he asked. His voice was guttural and deep.

 

  
I opened my old divining compass and held it between us where no one else could see it, thinking I should have found something more valuable to give him—something better than a circle of painted leather, with a few shell beads and an ivory hand on the drawstring. But he accepted the toll.

 

  
“Take off your clothes,” the summoner said.

 

  
“Why?” I was shivering. I’d been shivering since I saw him.

 

  
“We have other garments you must wear. Hurry. We’ve waited too long for you already.”

 

  
Mai had said to trust him. I didn’t, but I trusted her. Two of his followers came forward, and one slipped the cloak from my shoulders. I unwrapped my headcloth and took off my overdress. The other woman—tall and nearly as thin as the summoner—unrolled a length of red sacking with a ragged hole cut in the middle. I was reluctant to part with my gauze underdress, but the summoner was impatient. I shucked it off and the woman pulled the sacking over my head. The summoner smeared chalk on my face and arms, and tied a girdle around my waist to keep the crude garment from flapping open. Clackers dangled from the girdle: wooden skulls with loose-hinged jaws that rattled as I moved.

 

  
All the while I was thinking,
Nonsense!
and Sire Rodela was agreeing,
Nonsense, nonsense!
And I was so cold. I didn’t see how I could be colder and still live.

 

  
The summoner took my arm and led me through the reeds to the river. The hidden Sun, already westering in the short day, cast blue shadows from trees on the opposite bank. The water was under ice and the ice under burnished snow, a flawless smooth surface, save for the black hole in the ice with snow heaped around it. When I saw the hole I pulled away, crying, “No!” and he held on and marched me toward it. He was asking, “Are you willing?” I barely heard him over Sire Rodela’s din. He said again, “Are you willing?” and gave me a shake. “You’ve paid the fee. The shade doesn’t want this, but you do.”

 

  
I think I heard Sunup saying, “What are they doing?” and Sweetpea answering in a soothing murmur.

 

  
The summoner pointed to the water showing in the maw of ice. “Go in and come out the other side,” he said.

 

  
Sire Rodela’s whine rose in pitch and drove an awl of pain into my ear. I jumped in. The water came up to my chest and stole the breath right out of me. If I’d been able to imagine what it would feel like, I’d never have done it. The summoner put his hand on my back and when I hesitated he pushed me under the water in a rush of bubbles. My skin tingled as the cold touched me everywhere and I wished I could go numb, but it hurt.
I’m willing,
I thought, but my body was unwilling. I began to thrash and the summoner’s hands held me under. Cold burrowed into me, even into the channels that held my marrow, into the rooms of my heart, searching for my hearthfire to snuff it out. It was a trick and he was going to kill me, punishment for something, some offense to his mistress, the Queen of the Dead, and like a fool I’d gone with him. Rodela shrieked in my ear and I felt the dead swarming all around, tugging at my garment with the strong river currents.

 

  
The same hands that had pushed me down in the water heaved me out
onto the ice. I lay on my stomach, shaking and fighting to take a breath, and water drained from my mouth. I was seized, pulled upright, and I stood there gasping and raising clumsy hands to push hair out of my eyes, and I saw the summoner was gone and Rift Queen of the Dead had taken his place. She sang in a high shrill voice, and Pinch and the summoner’s women drummed to drive the song swiftly along. Sunup shook a gourd rattle. They raised a great commotion and I was led stumbling back to the trodden circle of reeds.

 

  
It didn’t matter that I saw through the summoner’s disguise, that the Queen’s mask was a black sack painted with a crude white skull, that her hair was made of hanks from the tails of horses, that her red robe was patched and stained, that her hands had the summoner’s crooked fingers and dirty nails. She was in him.

 

  
Sire Rodela was afraid, and he tried to drown out the drumming, but it came to me through the soles of my feet and the twitching of my shoulders. I stamped one foot, then the other. I was cold as a corpse, even my warm hand was chilled, and my flesh was unwieldy, thick, heavy, and numb. But every time I stamped I jarred pain into my feet, and it was better than no feeling at all.

 

  
I raised my hands to my cheeks. The hands felt cold and strange to the face and the face likewise to the hands. I drove my deadened legs against the ground, stamp, stamp, stamp, driving sensation upward, heel, ankle, shin, knee, thigh, cleft. The Queen of the Dead sang one tune after another, I did not know why; her words, in the tongue of the dead, were unintelligible to me. Sire Rodela strove against her with all his might, screeching with desperate dissonance. He no longer lingered in the portal of my ear, but entered deep inside my skull.

 

  
Rift Queen fixed on a melody, chanting the same line over and over, and Sire Rodela was snagged by it. His buzzing began to follow hers, entwining the way two threads entwine between the spinner’s thumb and finger, until it was one song inside and outside of me. She had found his song, and the music seized me, seized us, Rodela and I. The song demanded a heavy tread with stiff shoulders and elbows jutting out. The song wanted the body to swagger, to trample everything underfoot, and it wanted the mouth to sneer, lopsided, and the belly to jerk, grunting out a song,
Bitch, bitch, bitch!

 

  
I saw Pinch gaping even as he hammered on the drum, and I went and danced before him, staring until he lowered his eyes, while I sang,
Whoreson, whoreson, whoreson!
and fizzed with laughter. The jaws of the wooden skulls clattered as I stamped.

 

  
Rodela was full of gloating satisfaction to be so enlarged after his con
finement as a fly. His rage was powerful and tireless, and he drove me spinning around the circle. Heavy sacs hung between my thighs, and a stiff prick wagged, and I strutted toward Sunup and made her afraid of me. And I found I had my little knife out of its sheath, and to cool myself and quench an overweening thirst I raked the blade across my scalp until the blood trickled down and I tasted it.
Bitch, bitch, bitch!

 

  
Now I compelled the music, and even the Queen of the Dead herself must follow my song, faster and faster. I was full of strength and in the ecstasy of the dizzying dance I saw the living and the dead gathered around me in the circle. The reeds nodded and rustled like a crowd of stately personages, and in the shadows gathered among them I saw shades taking shape and dissolving, and from the corner of my eye I saw the white hem of Penna’s kirtle, and against my breast I felt the Dame and Na, tucked away small in their finger bones in the pouch.

 

  
I’d believed that the realm of the Queen of the Dead shared but one border with our world, and that was death, from which the dead set forth to cross her barren lands. But her realm was closer than I’d guessed. It did not lie beyond our world so much as alongside it. What did it take to slip between this world and that one? Dying, that was all. The dead journeyed beside us, not away.

 

  
I danced that netherworld closer until there was not even the thinnest gauze between that world and this one. The dead far outnumbered the living. Why did I fear to join them? Why should it matter when I died—a moment, a day, a year or many years from now? For in the realm of the Queen of the Dead can be found eternity.

 

  
I danced until Sire Rodela’s shade was sated, until I regained dominion of every length and joint of my body. In the nearness of death, green life swelled in me, and I reveled in the sweetness of living. And for the first time I gave thought to how I’d cheated Sire Rodela of his days to come, cheated him of his miserable pleasures, such as tormenting those beneath him, and counting over and over, the way a miser fingers his gold, the slights inflicted by those above him. What else had he savored when he was alive? Maybe the sight of his bay horse with green ribbons braided into the mane, or the scent of spring arriving on a late-winter breeze, maybe even such simple joys. I didn’t know. What I’d taken from him was beyond my reckoning, yet I’d measured it, priced it at the cost of a scrap of my flesh and the humiliation I’d suffered over his lies. For that I’d poisoned him and stolen his life.

 

  
My dance came to an end. I knelt shaking on the ground, and one of the women wrapped me in my cloak. Sire Rodela’s fretful buzz subsided to a drone as faint as the undersong of my coursing blood: something that could be forgotten.

 

  
I was grateful to be cured, but the summoner warned me that from time to time the shade might demand the release of a dance; and I might be called upon to join in rites for others afflicted in the same way, to drum until the dead were satisfied. Henceforth, he said, I was to obey the prohibitions of the Queen of the Dead, avoiding the touch of anything dyed violet, and abstaining from the flesh of hedgehogs, which play at being dead. He gave me a red cord to wear around my waist, under my dress, as a reminder of my obligation to her.

 

  
That night when I lay naked with Galan, he slipped his fingers under the cord and asked me what it was for. I said to give me courage. The next day I hung my new divining compass from the cord hidden under my skirts.

 

  
This red cord was a talisman, like the cheap tin amulet I wore around my neck that was stamped with Wildfire’s godsign. With it I divided myself in half. Below the waist I kept my fear of death and desire to live, above the waist I kept the courage to strive against or embrace the inevitable. I’d been split left from right by Wildfire, and top from bottom by Rift; yet this splitting helped to heal me. When first I was thunderstruck, I was nothing but a thin skin around chaos; now I was like the compass, territory partitioned by the gods, by division made more orderly and comprehensible.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 9
  

  
Mischief
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
W
e marched away from the encampment, setting forth between walls of crusty snow, and as we couldn’t spread out beside the road, our line was long and exposed. The outriders’ horses were soon exhausted from breasting through the drifts. We halted less than a league down the road, and it hardly seemed worth the trouble to get there. But at least we didn’t have to smell the stench of the burned town.

 

  
Last night the soldiers had built a bonfire to celebrate Longest Night. Skinny old Growan Crone had eaten well of the sheep and cattle sacrificed with prayers for a mild winter, so all of us in the army had plenty of meat for once, and plenty of drink too. I watched the bonfire and listened to it roar. Drudges dashed up to feed the flames with limbs and trunks of trees from orchards, and shutters torn from houses. Two men shoved a cart full of straw into the fire and it blazed up at once, sending straws and sparks tumbling high in the air. The hot wind buffeted me and I leaned into it, glad of the heat, glad of the flames that called to what was wild in me.

 

  
There was another bonfire that night. I heard a great clamor and scrambled up a hill of snow to see what everyone was shouting about. The town in the valley was on fire. Someone had torched it—men from the company of Growan, furious over the hangings, so said the rumor that spread as fast as the flames. Soldiers streamed downhill toward the town to take what plunder they could find before it burned. Sire Rodela would have delighted in this, he would have filled my ear with his shrillness. Without him I felt pure clean dread. I prayed they got away, the clothier and his wife, the baby and the maidservant. I prayed they all got away.

 

  
But some townsfolk died in the fire; I felt them as we marched, clinging to us like the reek of smoke. The army of shades that accompanied our army was growing. And today I found no comfort in the knowledge that the dead journeyed beside us rather than leaving us behind.

 
  

 

  
By evening the weather had changed, and the snow began to thaw. I lay beside Galan, listening to water trickle and drip. Two days ago I’d made a strong decoction of horsetail stalks to bring on my tides, without success. It wasn’t the season for them, they were too brown. I must look for a bay tree and use its leaves and berries. If that didn’t work, I’d be visiting the miscarrier soon.

 

  
This was the second night since Sire Rodela had been banished. How his pestilential shade had whined whenever I was on the verge of sleep!—I’d been sure that once I was rid of him, I would sink into Sleep’s ocean every night. Not so. I lay awake with worries swarming about my head. They had been there all along, but Sire Rodela had buzzed louder. Now I knew: It was Wildfire who kept me awake, Wildfire who had altered me, so that no matter how much I needed and craved sleep, I was denied it. I prayed Lynx Sleep would cure me of this affliction, since Ardor had not relented.

 

  
I pulled on my overdress and went to sit outside the tent on one of Sire Galan’s camp chairs. After so many days of cold, the breeze seemed almost balmy, and there was a provocative scent of sodden earth that promised spring, though spring was far away, another country altogether. In the light of the full Moon I took from my pouch the linen scrip that granted me tenancy of a house on a mountain, and unfolded it on my lap. The linen was stiff, sized to make a smooth surface, and the godsigns marched in neat columns down each lengthwise pleat.