Wildfire (38 page)

 

  
I lay down beside him and didn’t mind the ice and the hummocks beneath us, or the cold water soaking my clothes. I took off his helmet and padded cap, which no doubt had saved his life, and lifted his head so my arm could be his pillow. His eyes fluttered open. He wasn’t surprised to see me, though he should have been. And I remembered I was only dreaming.

 
  

 

  
I woke up and turned on my pallet. My feet were cold. I’d slept the night through and day was breaking over the valley. I stared at the carved rafters of my porch. Long ago they had been painted blue to ward against malice, and the paint was worn and faded. I heard a rider and sat up. I heard footsteps on the stairs and took the sheathed knife from under my pallet, but the voice that called my name was his. When he came he always came without warning. Had he been riding all night?

 

  
He was looking for me indoors, in the cabinet bed. His footsteps were fast and hard striking. I remembered then I was only dreaming. I was unwilling to wake. I called him to me instead.

 

  
He banished my cat and stripped and crawled under the blankets, complaining that my pallet was too hard and narrow and my feet were cold, and why did I sleep out of doors when there was a perfectly fine bed inside?

 

  
“To hear the Sun come up,” I said.

 

  
“Why, is she noisy?”

 

  
“Oh, very noisy here on top of the world. I can hear her footsteps.”

 

  
“You’re a strange one,” he said, surprised. As if he could have forgotten.

 

  
He had white scars on his body, and here and there were some I didn’t recognize. I rubbed the welts with my fingers. I was fond of his scars because they were the marks of wounds that had failed to kill him. We had to learn each other again after every parting.

 

  
His cheek scraped against mine. I said, “Are you growing a beard? Is that the new fashion among the hotspurs?”

 

  
“I was in haste,” he said.

 

  
My quim was tender-skinned and I cried out without meaning to. He grinned down at me and eased out, and I gripped his shoulders to slow him down when he drove into me again, and his eyes narrowed and his breath caught, and I clenched hard against him, and he liked that game and so did I, and it was all pleasure by then.

 
  

 

  
I didn’t want to wake up, and I returned again and again to the dream even after it ceased to be a true dream with the taste of Galan’s sweat and the smell of mountain weather on a winter morning, even after Galan became, not his own self, but a creature of my fancy who could no longer surprise me.

 

  
I sank deeper, down past the swimming dreams in the shallows toward the fathomless embrace of Sleep’s ocean. But a thought swam into my mind, that if these dreams of Galan were true, he was alive, and today I would find him.

 

  
I awoke so suffused with desire that the rub of the cloak against my sore nipples and the weight of it against my belly and groin, and the touch of my lips one against the other—all these aroused me, and I was once again the bare, peeled stripling I had been after the lightning struck, without bark to harden me against such exquisitely soft blows.

 
  

 

  
Temples of Lynx are famous for the dreams that may be granted to supplicants there: healing dreams from Sleep, foretelling dreams from Foresight. Mischief sometimes sends dreams as well, but those are unsought and
unwelcome. Though I hadn’t slept in the dormitory for worshippers, Foresight had given me true dreams. I knew by the smell of them: mountain air, sweat, blood, smoke. And Sleep had granted me, for a good part of a night, the oblivion so long denied, the respite I’d been craving. I was grateful.

 

  
There was a shrine for mudfolk underground, near the kitchen. I gave what I could in sacrifice, some barberry root I’d dug up for the fever, which could also be used in a dye recipe to make the orange hue sacred to Lynx. It was customary to tell dreams granted in the temple, so the omens could be interpreted, so I told mine to the attendant, a young drudge in the service of Sleep. He was in some manner intoxicated, his pupils enlarged, his speech slurred as if his tongue were weighty. I recounted both dreams, the one within the other, but I chose not to say it was Sire Galan who wore the armor of King Thyrse. The god would know already, but it was a secret best kept from men. The drudge as he listened stopped yawning, sat upright on his three-legged stool.

 

  
He led me upstairs, and the building was loud with the sounds of many people, but I saw few in the corridor. By then I was impatient to find Mouse and my mule and be on my way. He said, “It won’t be long,” and shut me in a small room. The plastered walls were painted orange to shoulder height and whitewashed above. A thick wool curtain divided the room down the middle. I peeked behind it and no one was there, in the three chairs carved of cedar with horn inlays. Such chairs were not for me. I sat on my saddlebags and waited.

 

  
Air from an open door stirred the hanging, and from the other side I heard the scrape of boot soles against the floor, and the slither of one layer of gauze over another. A woman behind the curtain questioned me. I supposed her to be an Auspex of Lynx Foresight, unwilling to demean herself by speaking to a mudwoman directly, but obliged to listen. Foresight sometimes chooses humble mouthpieces.

 

  
I told my dreams again. The Auspex had questions: Did you know the man in the king’s armor? Did you see or hear any birds? What kinds? What weapons did the killer carry? What shapes did the clouds make? What were the words, the exact words, uttered by the queenmother? The man? Why did another man wear the king’s armor?

 

  
I said, “Because King…Tryst…Thrust died of the shiver-and-shade before the battle. They didn’t want his men to know, lest they lose hardness, heart.”

 

  
Did you dream that too?

 

  
“I did, another time.”

 

  
I told the truth, all but Galan’s name, for fear that if I lied, I’d offend Foresight, Lynx’s cat-headed avatar.

 

  
The woman commanded me to wait, and left me long enough for my belly to begin gnawing on itself. There was a door on the other side of the curtain. When I peered out I saw a warrior sitting on the low wall of a colonnade surrounding a courtyard, the hollow center of the temple. He barked at me to get back inside. I slammed the door, still seeing in my mind’s eye the sword in his lap, the fine cuirass in the style of Incus, and the tattoo on his cheek marking him as Blood of Rift. A long red cut on his jaw was crossed with black stitches. Not one of our warriors. The courtyard was full of horses, hundreds of them crowded together. In the kitchens they’d been baking bread all night for an army, not a festival. For our enemies.

 

  
Those must have been sentries, pretending to be owls hooting in the dark. They’d let me ride up to the temple, and why not? I was harmless, a woman with a screaming child, seeking sanctuary in a holy place.

 

  
Too late now to recall gossip I should have remembered last night, about the clan of Lynx in Incus, and how they were old enemies of Queenmother Caelum. When her husband, King Voltur, was killed twelve years past, she accused the Firsts of Lynx and four other clans of plotting to kill him. She had them executed in a terrible and ingenious fashion, torn limb from limb by carthorses. The clan of Lynx still treasured their grudge against her.

 

  
I opened the other door and looked into the windowless corridor. A mud soldier stood outside with a billhook. He winked in an unfriendly way. I retreated, and sat in the corner with my back against two walls. It seemed safer there, though it was nothing but a trap. Mischief up to his pranks again.

 
  

 

  
When he came in and pushed the curtain aside, I knew him. Hadn’t I seen his sharp profile on a golden coin? Hadn’t I heard the rumormongers sing of his raven black hair and eyes of sapphire blue? Yet when they had made much of his broad shoulders in their songs, they had broadened the truth. He was narrow and tall. I had a glimpse of his face before I knelt and bowed my head. I saw it divided top from bottom, not left from right. In his eyes, sorrow and fear; in the set of his mouth and jaw, frigid anger.

 

  
By the reckoning of the songs, he was little more than twenty years of age. This was the fourth winter since he’d attained his majority, his kingdom, and his wife. The fourth winter since he’d banished his mother to a keep in the barren northlands of Incus. He looked older than twenty. He was neither a boy nor a prince. He was a man and a king. Our rumormongers had lied about that.

 

  
He had with him an Auspex of Rift Warrior, as tall as his king but of greater girth, burly as a bear. A man old enough to be the king’s father, with
heavy jowls and rolls of fat on his nape, and a red rooster tattooed on his bare scalp. I thought of the priest of Rift lying dead in a stream, and his stolen bearclaw, wrapped in a cloth in my saddlebags, and I flushed.

 

  
King Corvus came too close to me and I kept my face downturned. He pushed back my headcloth and pulled loose a lock of my hair and rubbed it between his fingers as one might rub cloth to judge of the weave.

 

  
He spoke harshly to me in a language I didn’t understand. When I failed to answer he tugged on my hair and raised his voice, asking the same question or another, I couldn’t tell. He nudged my thigh with his boot. “I know you understand me,” he said in the High. His words were roundly shaped, precisely cut. “Did the arkhon send you? Were you there on the field to gather tales of my ignominy?”

 

  
He stepped away and I found I’d been holding my breath. I dared the briefest glance at his face. His nose was long and thin and had a hump where it had been broken, and his nostrils were pinched as if he smelled something rank. He spoke again in the unknown language and I shook my head.

 

  
He began to pace back and forth. He wore soft leather on his feet, the lining for the steel shoon of his armor. Four paces from door to door, four paces back, and he had to shorten his stride to fit. He bore himself straight. “They tell me,” he said in the High, “that you speak with a strange accent and confuse your words, so I know this is not your native tongue. Did her father send you? Did you see her die?”

 

  
I shook my head again. My eyes were lowered, but a drudge knows how to see without being seen to look. He had a trimmed black beard along his jaw and stubble on his cheek. He’d washed his face and neglected to wash his neck, which was spattered with mud and blood. Likewise his clothing. He had stripped off his armor and left on the red cloth underarmor. The color was as brilliant as fresh blood, and the quilting was intricate. Everywhere the cloth showed signs of hard use, smears and stains, tears and slits where the tow stuffing poked out, rust marks and wear from the buckles of his plate armor.

 

  
“Answer!” he said.

 

  
If I said what country I came from, he might have me killed. “No, Sire, I came to this tempest in search of a wet norice to nurse little Noose, for I can’t feed him, and Catsight sent me a dream. That’s all. I’m nothing, a muckwoman.”

 

  
The priest opened the door and said to someone, “Find this Noose. She came with someone called Noose.”

 

  
A woman outside said, “I heard she arrived with a newborn babe, no one else.”

 

  
The priest shut the door and turned to me. “Is Noose your child?”

 

  
“Not Noose…Mouse, I meant, Divise, Divine, I beg pardon. He isn’t mine, the bait. He belongs of my friend. She didn’t want him.”

 

  
The priest watched me, and I felt his impassive gaze as a weight, a threat, and a judgment. Yet it was impossible to tell from his face what judgment he made. He turned to his king. “It’s not a true dream. King Thyrse is alive, we all saw him on the field.”

 

  
King Corvus said, “Why do you pretend Foresight sent you a dream? You were there on the battlefield, else your clothing would not be so stained with blood. You saw my wife’s killer. You saw my mother set her corpse afire. I’ll take you with me so you can tell your master how his daughter died, and I will tell him to his face how I found her burning and cut my son, his grandson, from her body but it was too late, and maybe then he will rue that the soldiers he promised me never came.” In his mouth
mother
was a curse.

 

  
He turned away as he spoke, but not before I saw the grief come to his mouth, and how his lower lip weakened.

 

  
I wondered why his wife had donned armor and ridden to battle, gravid as she was. The most fearsome thing about her had been her helm. Underneath was a girl in woman’s estate, not the Kalos of songs, the shape-shifting serpent woman, the dreadful lamia. In the yellowish haze of my right eye, I could see her last ride, and the king’s golden banner tied to her baldric, streaming fire in the wind.

 

  
I thought Foresight had sent the dreams to grant me sight of Galan. But that inner dream was never meant for me. It was sent to torment this man, King Corvus, as if he were not tormented enough by what he’d seen for himself: the impaled eye, the burning rider. A terrible dream, and I’d told my questioner the worst of it, how Queenmother Caelum had knocked on the cuirass and taunted the unborn child, the soon-to-be stillborn child. An avatar had used me to tell King Corvus one last poisonous truth. So the gods foment enmity among mortals. But we are apt to enmity, and have no need of help.

 

  
“She is cruel, Sight,” I said, thinking of Foresight. Thinking of Queenmother Caelum.

 

  
He turned toward me, having mastered all signs of his sorrow. He spoke bitterly in that other language. The only word I could pick out was Kalos.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 15