Wildfire (28 page)

 

  
I made a fire outside the tent and waited for Galan. Waited and worried. Sometimes my worries took wing and became prayers. Bloodspiller went to the market and came back with an amulet, an unglazed clay bead the size of a plum; he already had three just like it that he’d bought from revelators.

 

  
I waited until he was snoring to take the priest’s bearclaw from my saddlebag and slip it over my fingers. It was made for a large hand, but I could wear it. I made a fist and the claws showed; I opened my hand and the claws were hidden between my fingers. The blades were curved steel, bright and sharp. The iron rings were inlaid with delicate silver filigree. It was a tricky weapon to use, for it was all too easy to cut fingers on the blades.

 

  
My wounds hadn’t pained me during the fight, but I felt them now. The cuts on my upper arm were shallow; on my thigh the claws had dug deeper. Before we marched that day I’d poulticed and bandaged my wounds, and sewn up the rents in my skirts and sleeve, and washed off the blood.

 

  
I wanted to mourn Mole but I was having trouble remembering her face as it was before it was torn open. Likely she’d be alive now if she’d run away instead of staying to throw stones at the priest. I wondered why she’d done it. I wondered why I’d followed the priest instead of running myself when I had the chance—I hadn’t thought, hadn’t chosen. Was this what bound Sire Galan to his battle companions? I’d seen the bond from outside, and never before felt its tug.

 

  
In Mole’s honor I cut off a lock of hair and watched it scorch and shrivel on the fire. Then I wrapped the bearclaw in an old sack and put it back in my saddlebag.

 
  

 

  
Toward dawn the dogs south-of-east of camp began to bark and a sentry blew the alert on his horn. The camp stirred like a kicked anthill. I sat up on the bed and waited, and in a few long moments the sentry sounded three falling notes that meant “No danger.”

 

  
It was the Crux and Sire Galan and the others returning to camp in rowdy high spirits. But bad news outruns good, and they were sober by the time they reached us, having learned that our camp had been attacked while they were off hunting for the missing outriders.

 

  
They’d tracked the outriders and their captors halfway to Malleus before the Crux’s dogs lost the trail—and here Chance played a fine prank on Sire Galan, sending him luck of no profit to him personally. The cataphracts separated to search in different directions. In the middle of the night, Galan and
Sire Edecon crept up on a camp of soldiers guarding fifty warhorses, some of excellent breeding, some jades—mounts from Prince Merle’s own herds, on the way to Malleus. According to a horseboy Galan had captured, the horses were to be kept in reserve during the battle. Which suggested that Prince Corvus intended to meet us in battle, rather than wait to be beseiged.

 

  
It was the first I’d heard of a prince named Merle. Prince Corvus’s younger brother, Galan said. The rumormongers and rhapsodists of our army had never seen fit to sing about him.

 

  
The Crux and his party returned without the outriders, but with fifty new mounts. Merle’s men were even now being questioned. Sire Galan’s good fortune in war had won him horses he wasn’t allowed to ride, and gilded his already golden reputation. But he told us that he counted himself unlucky, coming back to find the camp had been raided in his absence.

 

  
Spiller peeled off Galan’s wet hose, which were stuck to his feet with ooze from his blisters. His soles were cracked and rough. Galan waved Spiller away, saying, “You let the fire go out? Get it going.”

 

  
“Nothing left to burn, Sire.”

 

  
“Well, find something! Beg or borrow if you have to. And ask Cook for something to eat. We’re famished. Get something for the boy too. We’ve been running for two nights while Sire Edecon and Rowney rode, the lazy bastards.”

 

  
He’d warm himself with vexation if a fire wasn’t handy. Fleetfoot sat on the ground, easing his own sore feet. The boy’s lips were purplish and he looked more exhausted than hungry. Piddle lay by his side, too worn out to do more than thump her tail on the ground.

 

  
Galan pointed to my dress, which was stained where blood had seeped through the bandage on my thigh. “You were hurt?”

 

  
I shrugged.

 

  
“Let me see.”

 

  
“I don’t want to uncover them, the scuts. They mend best if they are not pestered.”

 

  
Galan said, “And where was Bloodspiller when you were hurt?”

 

  
“It was in the stark and everyone was running and we got desperated. Separated.” I could read the signs of anger in his face. I knew them well. I reached out and dabbed at a streak of mud on Galan’s jaw with my sleeve. “You’re not wounded yourself, are you?”

 

  
“Nothing a warm bed won’t cure.” But his smile came and went too quickly. Perhaps he was remembering he was angry with me.

 

  
Galan and his men didn’t have time to rest, not then, for the sky was turning gray and drudges were stirring, and we marched at dawn.

 
  

 

  
A boy came late the next night, when everyone but me was asleep, to ask if I would tend a sick woman, and Galan said no. I got up anyway and he grabbed my wrist. I reached for my underdress and he tightened his hold on me. “Who is it? Who’s sick?” he asked the runner. The boy might have been five years old or seven; he was small and underfed, clad in a filthy tunic made from a grain sack stamped with a quatrefoil crest, with rags tied around his feet.

 

  
The boy didn’t answer. Galan said, “Come closer! Tell me who is sick.”

 

  
He approached, staring at Galan in fear as if he didn’t understand. So I asked him in the Low who was sick, and he answered in the same language: “My my mother.”

 

  
“What clan?” Galan asked, in the Low this time. It always surprised me to hear it from his mouth.

 

  
“No clan,” said the boy. His torch trembled in his hand.

 

  
“No clan? Is she some muddy whore then? Answer me!”

 

  
I jerked away from Galan and pulled my shift over my head. “Why do you shout so loud, don’t you see the chill is frightened?”

 

  
Galan stood up naked behind me and caught me by the scruff of my neck. I felt a jolt from the crown of my head to the root of my spine, and stiffened my back against his grip. “You’re not going,” he said. “You don’t even know the woman, do you? Or is this another false summons?”

 

  
I couldn’t turn to face him because he held me too tightly. “Please, Sire, she must be very ill, if they sent the tad for me.” I had to go, didn’t he see that? It was more than duty; I was compelled to it. I needed to help where I was needed. To deny healing opened a chasm in me between what I was and what I ought to be.

 

  
But what could I do? I could insist on going and take a beating and still be unable to go. He didn’t even have to raise a hand against me—he could quell me with a glance, I was so afraid of losing his favor. A coward. My shoulders slumped. I bowed my head and began to weep, and Galan let go of me. The boy stared, not understanding what had happened.

 

  
But Galan amazed me. I could be so sure I knew what he was thinking, and so wrong. He pulled on his hose, laced up his prickguard, put on his shirt, his surcoat, his boots—dressed himself, letting Bloodspiller and Rowney sleep. I looked at him in wonder, and he looked back without giving up one hoarded mite of anger, and said, “I mean to see what you do.”

 

  
The boy led us through the camp and past sentries, whom Sire Galan appeased with a couple of copperheads, and down a mud-slick trail to a small lake in the valley below. Galan’s lantern made me blind to anything outside the swinging circle of its light. It started to rain, and Galan cursed. In a copse of slender willows by the water, the boy knelt before a briar
patch, frosted purple wands of raspberry and green coils of dog rose. He rooted under the thicket and disappeared. I crouched and peered after him.

 

  
His mother lay on a nest of matted grasses under the briars. Her face looked like a yellow bone. I’d never seen her before, but it was plain she was a laundress; she had but one possession worth stealing, a kettle for boiling linen. Galan cursed again when I crawled in beside her. There was no room for him too. He knelt and handed me the lantern, and I set it down between us. Let him look, if he was so determined. The brambles were propped up with forked sticks, but every time I moved I snagged on thorns.

 

  
The woman didn’t own a blanket, only a couple of torn sacks, which she’d thrown off. She was burning, hot and dry, as if she’d sweated all she could. Her dress was twisted about her waist, and soiled—she had the squirts and she was too weak to crawl from the nest to relieve herself. I leaned close to smell her breath, but it was hard to tell one stink from another.

 

  
The boy squirmed out of the shelter to fetch me water in a clay pot. The laundress’s tongue was dry and brown. I dribbled water over her cracked lips and then made a teat out of a rag for her to suck. She roused herself to look at me. “What…?” she said. But she seemed too tired to sustain fear; she turned her head away, as if resigning herself to whatever might come.

 

  
I cleaned her with one of the sacks, and Sire Galan watched, his face marked with disgust or queasiness. The boy looked at me with trust I didn’t deserve. She was in mortal danger from this fever. If I didn’t cure her, Galan would think me the worst kind of canny—a cozener, a cheat. I never took money for healing, surely he knew that! But he only knew I had coin he’d never given me.

 

  
If I didn’t cure her, the boy would be alone. I must put him out of mind, him and Galan both. I prayed to Ardor, who had given me the gift of drawing fever. I rubbed my hands over the woman’s bony face and limbs, her stark ribs and sunken haunches. Her thinness came from long acquaintance with hunger. My icy right hand took her heat without thawing, but the rest of me warmed, and sweat pricked out all over my back. I drew heat from her until her fever broke and she started to cool, and then to shiver.

 

  
She grew colder, too cold, so that I was frightened by it. I lay down behind her under my cloak, my chest to her back and my knees bent behind hers, the way two fond sleepers nestle. I put my left hand over her heart, which quaked within her chest. I felt a small flame within her, no bigger than that of a candle wavering in a cold wind. Such a small sensation, a mere flutter in my palm, hard to discern while her body shook. An invisible flame, but if it were to flicker out, she’d be a corpse.

 

  
Inside me the hearthfire of life burned strong and steady as a brazier full of coals, and I called on my own warmth now to warm her, and the fire blazed up obedient to my call. I held her in a close embrace, and I overflowed with heat, spilling through my skin, through my burning left hand pressed over her chest and belly. She warmed, stopped shaking. We were so close I could see beads of sweat strung on the fine hairs of her scalp.

 

  
I murmured a prayer to Ardor in thanks and wonder for this gift, newly discovered. The lightning had done this, divided my two hands, made one cold, the better to draw fire, and the other warm to give it.

 

  
I gave the laundress warmth without stinting, until I was shivering and she was hot, and then she was too hot and I took heat from her, left hand to give, right hand to take. At first this giving and taking was like breathing out and in, but more and more it became labor, and breathing too became labor, and I began to gasp, no longer sure if I was helping her or she was killing me.

 

  
One of us moaned. She was cold again, so cold, but she had stopped trembling. I had no heat left to give her. Was she dead? I stilled my own breathing to listen for hers. Cold silence. I saw her ahead of me, naked and bony, her flesh tinged blue. She stepped into a black icy river, and with every step she went deeper until the water closed over her head. I followed.

 

  
The other shore of that river is not across, but under. Currents coiled around my legs, trying to hold me back. When I was submerged, I looked up into a dark sky held in a noose of horizon above my head and saw a gull flying. The gull’s cry was wordless, full of sorrow and regret, and I knew it was Penna beating her wings endlessly against a contrary wind. The feverish woman had dwindled small, or gotten far ahead, and I was stumbling on a stony shore.

 

  
I called out to her, “You mustn’t leave your boy! What will become of him?” My heart churned. I tried to follow her through air thick as mud, I tried to run, but it took all my strength to shuffle one foot forward and then the other—all my strength and I wasn’t fast enough. She disappeared among the multitude, and I lacked the courage to seek her among so many dead, there in the netherworld.

 

  
Whether my eyes were open or closed, I saw the same thing, a world bleaker than the bleakest winter day. There was no color anywhere, nor even the notion or memory of it, as if color had never existed. And everything was too heavy. The shades were of a substance denser than flesh. The only lightness in that place was the wind that pushed against me and hissed, “Go back!” I took a step. The next step was easier, as if I waded through water instead of mud, and I knew I was leaving. No need to turn around when every direction was away.

 

  
I abandoned her there. I was running faster and faster. I was lying in shallow water, soaked and clammy, my blood thick with a slurry of ice. Strong hands clasped my wrists and dragged me onto the shore and out of the bramble lair, and Sire Galan leaned over me with his hands on either side of my face, blaspheming and praying.

 

  
He made a bonfire, and I warmed myself by it, not realizing that I warmed myself by the laundress’s pyre. The fire seemed the most beautiful sight I’d ever witnessed, so alive with color and motion, so light and free and quick. Galan cut branches with his sword and threw them on the fire, and the sparks were dazzling. The boy stood there with his filthy skin and tunic glowing. Tears made shining streaks through the grime on his face, and his open mouth welled with darkness.