Wildfire (3 page)

 

  
Thunder cracked above my head and rolled away from us, and I ducked without thinking. Lightning branched across the veil of snow like a white tree, and the sight burned into my vision so that when I closed my eyes I saw the same shape, a green tree against darkness.

 

  
The waves no longer marched by ranks, but heaved up in confusion and burst against the ship from all sides in a great froth. Oars were as useless as
straws in the heavy seas. Drudges cowered under the benches, crying out at every thunderclap and covering their ears. The ship pitched and wallowed, and sometimes she managed to climb to the peak of a wave, and sometimes dove through an oncoming wall of water, and even sure-footed sailors fell and were swept across the canting deck; a few went overboard.

 

  
I clung to the ropes of a baggage chest, willing the ship forward. There were gods in this storm, Ardor in the thunder and lightning, Torrent in the churning waters, and Crux in the snow-filled sky, all of them hurling winds at the fleet. Did they mean to founder us? Or did they contend over whether we should be saved or destroyed?

 

  
I feared worse. I feared they took no heed of us, and waged a mock battle for their sport, and all my frail hopes, and the great ambitions of the king and his sister, Queenmother Caelum, and all these ships too, were merely kindling to be broken between sky and water.

 

  
I shook in dread, in awe—but something fierce in me was not humbled, it roused in answer to the storm’s ruthlessness, so that I nearly laughed in the teeth of the wind. What did our insignificance matter, our brief lives? At that moment no more was required of me than to witness the gods storming, their vast discord. I couldn’t regret seeing it, even if it was the last sight I ever saw.

 

  
The air crackled and I felt a touch, a hand stroking upward along my spine. My skin prickled everywhere and my hair stood upright. The storm split open with a wedge of light and sound, and a blinding whiteness struck the mast and reached for me.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 1
  

  
Thunderstruck
  
  
  

 

  
I
didn’t know where my limbs were. I had no edges between inside and out, I was a heaviness that swayed, plummeted. Was lifted, fell again. Nothing steady anywhere.

 

  

 

  

  
 

 

  
I heard shouting, but couldn’t disentangle words from the crashing and rumbling and shrieking and roaring that filled everywhere.

 

  
Everywhere but here. Here was silence.

 

  

 

  

 
  

 

  
The silence. What was wrong about it, what was missing: breath, blood throb, heartbeat.

 

  

 

  

 
  

 

  
A buzzing in my ear.
They say you’re dead.

 

  
The buzz was intimate, it crawled in the whorl of my ear, so I knew I had an ear.
Buzz, buzz, buzz. Dead, dead, dead.
Left ear or right, within or without, I couldn’t tell exactly.

 

  
It was the only voice that made sense in all the clamor. It must be true that I was dead, for I no longer understood the speech of the living. I never knew the dead had a language of their own.

 

  
The droning persisted.
Your heart forgot to beat,
it said.

 

  
I didn’t recognize the voice, but I recognized its gleeful malice. It belonged to a man I knew well, though I had somehow mislaid his name. A man I detested. A man I had killed.

 

  
His was the only shade to greet me. I would have wept, but to weep takes breath.

 

  

 

  

 
  

 

  
If I was dead, I must go. I mustn’t tarry.

 

  
I willed myself to rise. But my will had come undone from flesh and shade alike, and I couldn’t move.

 

  
Nevertheless, something stirred within me, a small disturbance. And though this thing seemed weak, it found an opening in my heaviness and forced its way out. Was that my shade? That tiny frail fretful creature? How could it leave
me
behind?

 
  

 

  
Oh gods, no. It wasn’t my shade. It was my last breath departing.

 

  

 

  

 
  

 

  
“Sheesdeadintshe?”

 

  
“Ithosheedbeburntup.”

 

  
“Donstanthergawkin! Covererup!”

 

  
My friend knelt beside me and I knew her voice, and felt her great bulk near me. She dug her fingers under the corners of my jaw, and by her touch I felt my skin fastened to my skull, I knew the shape of my own face again. She said, “Firethorn! Cmoncmonbreathe! Iswearyorheartsbeatin.”

 

  
I took in a shallow breath and I wasn’t numb anymore. Ropes of pain tightened around my chest. I wanted to hold on to that breath forever, but I had to let it go.

 

  
The next breath was a long time coming. And the next.

 

  

 

  

 
  

 

  
I awoke. There was no part of me that didn’t hurt. I wouldn’t open my eyes. I feared what I might see, the confusion of it.

 

  
I swallowed. It was a victory to command that least little act.

 

  
A cloth settled over me, rough and scratchy. It was outside, I was inside, I was flesh again, and the boundary of skin between me and all else was raw, exquisitely tender.

 

  
I lay on my side, drawn up tight from spasms, taking shallow breaths because a deep breath was like tearing something open. I thought my friend was rocking me, rocking me so hard I feared falling from my bed. I heard her saying, “Podeahmydeahomydeahpodeah.” As if I were a child. I opened my eyes and saw her broad face looming over me. A crystalline nimbus flared around her head. Words were given shape by her lips: “Poor dear!” Her daughter was there too, and the boy, his hand wrapped in his mother’s dress. The sky flashed, too white, too bright. I closed my eyes and saw a green throb. Sound spilled over us and drained away.

 

  
The girl dabbed a cloth under my ear. It came away red.

 

  
There were men watching, jabbering. I should have been able to understand them. I was no longer dead.

 

  
My friend wiped her eyes on her headcloth. She took my hands between hers and began to chafe them, saying, “Yorhandsersocold. Podeah. Ithotardorhadkilledyu.” It hurt, it hurt. I pulled my left hand away, but the right hand wouldn’t answer to me. The shadows around the edges of everything flickered and closed in.

 
  

 

  
If I was alive, why did the shade still pester me? I heard him hissing, in a fury that he’d been cheated of my death; I saw him too, and he was noth
ing but a fly, a manfly, a shade so puny his mightiest shout was a mere
bzzzzz.
He darted about, circling my head. I almost laughed at him.

 

  
But when I slept, he was huge and heavy and his rage nearly swallowed me whole. He lay down on me backward, my bones a scaffold for his weight. He braced his knee against my throat and stoppered up my breath while he took his trophy, flesh from the woman’s beard at my groin. He sawed away at a flap of skin covered with tightly coiled coppery hairs. He smelt of the sour sweat of a sick man. I choked and coughed and tried to push him off me. This happened again and again.

 
  

 

  
I awoke. He was still there, droning in my left ear. A sound I couldn’t banish. I would have killed him again, if a shade could be killed. I moaned. The sound worked its way out of me, into the tumult of the wind and waves, and was carried away.

 
  

 

  
Above my friend’s head I saw a tall tree with one broken branch. Petals of snow fell from a white sky and I was soothed by their cold touch on my brow. Perhaps I said, “What happened?” She leaned toward me, but when she spoke, I heard a different voice—I thought it was her unborn child. He said, “Wildfire ate you.” I was delighted he spoke so clearly.

 
  

 

  
I awoke. This time it was dark. I was being rocked. A cradle. A ship.

 

  
My head was pillowed on Mai’s thigh. She was there with me, she’d been there always when I awoke. She rested against a wooden wall with her head tilted back. For a moment I couldn’t make sense of her face, seeing it from underneath: the soft swags of flesh under her chin, the darkness within her nostrils and her open mouth, the pale swelling cheeks that hid her eyes. Her breathing was loud, whistling.

 

  
I turned onto my back. I could move both legs, but my numb right arm
didn’t obey me. I picked up my right hand with my left and let it rest, curled up, on my belly. My other limbs ached with a bone-deep ache. I held my left hand before my face. The skin had cracked open between my fingers and along the deep creases of the palm, but the cracks were dry, not bloody.

 

  
The sea slapped the hull of the ship.

 

  
I looked at the tree. The mast. As the ship rolled, the mast tilted overhead, and the lopsided moon slipped through the net of rigging. Stars shimmied like minnows.

 

  
Mai’s daughter sat nearby. Her eyes glistened. She leaned toward me and said, “Firethorn, aruthursti?”

 

  
Aruthursti. Aru thursti. Thursti. Thirsty.

 
  

 

  
I slept and slept, I slept so long that I was confused by the twilight I saw on awakening. Was it evening or dawn? The blushing sun hovered by the horizon as if undecided whether to sink or rise, and I, who had always known east from west without giving it a thought, didn’t know which way we sailed as we sailed away from her. I was unmoored. I was on the ship, but where was the ship on the sea and when were we in the day?

 

  
The sea wasn’t a place, it was a terrifying in between, without landmarks, nothing fixed. The waves went rolling away, nothing to them but motion.

 

  
The storm had chased the fleet in every direction like wolves among sheep. Suppose the helmsman too was lost?

 
  

 

  
I drank ale from a curved shell that stood on a silver tail chased with scales. I devoured the flesh of a porpoise, and wheaten pottage dyed gold with saffron, and then five minnows in pastry, one after the other, so many because they were so small. Still I was hungry. And so thirsty.

 
  

 

  
I sent my left hand under the scratchy blanket to make an exploration. I found smooth skin. I touched, naming throat and breast and nipple and navel and belly and cleft and thighs. Under my fingers the skin was roused to a sensation just shy of an itch. Hard to bear. A teasing pain. The right hand lay useless on my belly, colder than the other flesh. It didn’t belong to me.

 

  
I was not clad in garments, but there were rags twisted around my legs and shoulders. The edges of the cloth crumbled between my fingers. Why? Charred. Burnt. My fingers sorted the rags into smooth thin and soft thick, which I recognized as kinds of fabric, though I could not at the moment name them. Fire had shredded my clothing. Why wasn’t I burned too?

 

  
This I’d seen before, how one thing burned while another was spared, one lived while another died.

 

  
I found a burn on my left hip. The skin was raw and blistered, and as soon as I touched the wound, it insisted on hurting. I peeked at it under the blanket. The burn was shaped like the blade of a knife.

 

  
I remembered the storm. Thunder and lightning and snow and wind and waves and then nothing.

 

  
And all these memories of sleeping and waking, waking and dreaming, daylight and darkness and daylight—they were as jumbled as beads in a sack, and I couldn’t string one after another. I had no idea of how long.

 
  

 

  
I loaded ashes in a barrow on a cloudy day, and trundled along the rutted path to the terrace just below the house. I meant to plant herbs there. The crows raised a fuss at me, jeering,
Whah! There she goes, there she goes!
I scattered ashes over the dun hay stubble. I noticed the roof of the house had a slate missing; I needed to see to that. My shoulders ached. I warmed my hands in my sleeves, and watched two crows play chase-the-wagtail. The air smelled of clean cold. Snow was coming.

 
  

 

  
My forgetfulness was vast, beyond reckoning. I lay awake in the dark, making an inventory of what I could remember.

 

  
I made lists of names: Firethorn, Sire Galan. Mai, her daughter Sunup, her son Tobe. Mai’s cataphract, Sire Ferocious. The shade, the fly—Sire Rodela.

 

  
Ship, mast, sail.

 

  
I knew I was aboard a ship. I knew Galan wasn’t here. Where was he?

 

  
I tried to conjure him beside me, the unruly hair falling over his brow, his eyes giving me a look. His eyelids tilted downward at the outer corners; sometimes this made him seem lazy or amused when he was not. Then there was the proud line of his nose, never yet broken, and the lips indented at the corners; the thin white scar under his jaw and his long neck with the beating pulse; the way he wore the laces of his surcoat loose so that the pleated gauze shirt spilled out at his chest and sleeves. I would untie a green-dyed leather thong and pull it free from the embroidered eyelets of his surcoat, and then untie the white cord of his shirt below the notch at the base of his throat. Under his shirt I would find skin paler than his face.

 

  
His strong long fingers, elegant but for the scars, the thickening at the knuckles. A warrior’s hands. The hard palms.

 

  
I saw him by glimpses, pieced together, mismatched. My summoning didn’t quell the longing, it made me restless, shifting against the hard planks under my hip. I touched my hand to my mouth, seeking the taste of his last touch.