Wildfire (39 page)

  
Corvus
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
T
he temple smith put his hand around my wrist and I didn’t realize he was taking my measure. He shaped an iron band into a small circle, with ends that didn’t meet. He bent back the ends and punched holes through them, and by then I knew what he was making, and tried to run. His apprentices seized hold of me, and I struggled and got blows and bruises. I might have been a whinnying horse for all the heed they paid to my pleas and curses. The smith quenched the iron in a barrel of water. The manacle was still warm when he put it around my left wrist and hammered a rivet through the flanges. It was a tight fit, pressing against my wrist bones.

 

  
An apprentice led out a sturdy, plump girl, maybe eight or nine years of age, with a broad little face and braided hair the color and sheen of bronze. A temple servant, in a shift of orange wool. She must have been used to fair treatment, for she didn’t cringe the way some drudges do, in expectation of blows; she seemed more bewildered than afraid, until the smith put a cuff around her wrist. She started to shriek when he riveted it closed, and he went on unperturbed. He fastened us manacle to manacle by a heavy length of chain.

 

  
I could not mistake the sign of Ardor Smith on these doings, the god shackling me to some new purpose.

 

  
A horseboy lifted me up on a spirited bay horse, and put the girl in the saddle in front of me. It was a cataphract’s saddle, with a high pommel and cantle, and the two of us fit as snugly as an armored man. The horseboy mounted another horse and led ours by a long rope tied to his saddle. I had no blade to cut the rope, they’d taken my knife and the saddlebags with the hidden bearclaw.

 

  
They wouldn’t let me see Mouse. He was to be a foundling after all. I touched the pouch holding the bones of the Dame and Na, hidden under my skirts, and prayed he would, like me, find those who cherished him.

 
  

 

  
King Corvus rode in the vanguard and set a hard pace, heading east into the hills before turning south. The roads were narrow tracks churned to slush
and mud. The girl and I rode amidst a rabble of jacks and horseboys—men who’d lost their masters in the battle for Malleus, I supposed, and followed the king to save themselves. Warriors of the rear guard drove the stragglers, flogging mounts and riders. I could only guess at the number of the king’s men. Galan’s company had almost a hundred men on horseback, the greater part mud soldiers. King Corvus had maybe five times that many, maybe more.

 

  
The girl had never ridden before and was frightened to be cantering along so far above the ground. She shivered from cold and fear and I wrapped my cloak around both of us. She wore her thin dress and wooden pattens with straps for her feet, unfit for winter. I had warmth to spare, for I could strike heat from my fury. I asked why she was a prisoner. She didn’t know; she’d done nothing. Her name was Catena. She worked in the kitchen, and she was scouring pots when a soldier came and dragged her upstairs to the smithy. I didn’t want to believe the girl was chained to me for no reason but to keep me from running.

 

  
No more than two leagues from the temple, we were set upon by the queenmother’s Wolves, who came howling down on us from wooded hills on either side of the road. It was a fine spot for an ambush. All was confusion: the war cries of the Wolves and shouts of the king’s men, a roaring in my ears that drowned out the clamor of steel. I tightened my arms around Catena and gripped the pommel with both hands, wishing I had reins and feeling helpless. Men milled around us, a mob without purpose, deaf to orders. Some of them were fighting. Most looked frightened, trying to stay on frightened horses. This aimlessness seemed to last a long moment, then the mob surged uphill toward the trees, running away, and we had no choice but to go with them, after the horseboy with the lead. We rode into the woods, ducking and swerving to avoid branches, and I urged the bay on, trying to keep his head next to the rump of the lead horse, afraid they’d go on opposite sides of a tree and we’d all tumble, brought down by the rope between us.

 

  
Fleeing men are easier to cut down. Someone hit the horseboy and he fell from the saddle, and we were following a riderless horse. I was sure I’d be next; I felt it right in my neck, that I was going to be struck there. I leaned over Catena, afraid my bony back would be but a poor shield for her. She was clinging to the saddle, and the pommel must have been hitting her in the chest, driving the breath out of her. If she made a sound, I didn’t hear it. An unhorsed mudman managed to snag the reins of the lead horse, and suddenly we were turning, and he had one foot in the stirrup and was hopping up and down and we were going the wrong way, toward the fight. It didn’t matter, they were fighting all around us now, bald warrior priests
running silently downhill through the trees, taking the Wolves by surprise. And then the Wolves were running, gone almost as suddenly as they’d appeared.

 

  
I didn’t know then that the king’s outriders had spied the Wolves lying in wait, and the king had sent some of his honor guard, priests of Rift Warrior, to outflank them on the heights. That made sense, afterward. As it made a ruthless kind of sense that the king had ridden knowingly into a trap, to trap his pursuers. But what didn’t make sense, what never made sense, was why Catena and I lived when so many around us died. No wonder Sire Galan worshipped Chance, and pursued her fickle favor.

 
  

 

  
Long after dark the king took shelter in a small keep built on a mound. In the Kingswood it would have been thought a fine manor; here in Incus it was a middling poor one. The master and his wife and his seven children and his servants prostrated themselves before the king, and the master bade him welcome, and indeed the king welcomed himself to everything they had, food, drink, beds, and horses. I was so weary I slept as soon as I lay down on the stone floor of the loft. Catena shared my cloak and my warmth. I knew nothing and forgot everything, for the blessing of Sleep had been restored to me in the temple of Lynx.

 

  
I came awake all of a sudden, from blissful oblivion to misery. Catena was nestled against me, breathing with her mouth open. How trusting of her to sleep, I thought. How trusting of me.

 

  
King Corvus sat in the dark. He had taken the master’s chair of stout oak, most unlike the spindle-legged furniture of Lanx. He slouched with his long legs straight out before him, crossed at the ankle, and his head resting against the chair’s carved backrest. His eyes glinted, staring up at nothing.

 

  
Maybe I made a sound. He turned his head and blinked, and asked a question in that other language. When I didn’t answer he asked in the High, “Did you dream?”

 

  
“I wish it was a drame, Sire. But I see it wasn’t.” I lifted my arm and shook the heavy chain that bound me to Catena, and woke her up.

 

  
King Corvus drew in his legs and stood abruptly. He stepped over two sleepers to crouch beside Catena and me. She cringed and I put out my hand to keep her quiet. He said, “The Auspex of Foresight believes you told the truth, that you dreamed what you saw. She doesn’t think you are Kyphos’s creature. If that is so, dream true for me. Dream true.”

 

  
He straightened up and walked away. His voice had been quiet and cold. I understood that he didn’t need a reason to kill me; he needed one to let me live.

 
  

 

  
The bay had a bone-rattling trot, and the sound of hooves thudded in my ear, every footfall a blow. I began to feel queasy, as if I rode a boat, not a horse. The sky had cleared and the brightness of the snow stabbed into my skull. My eyes rolled in sockets lined in coarse, scratchy wool. I was cold, so why was I sweating? No, I was hot. I tried to take off the cloak, but Catena said to leave it be. I wondered why I swayed in the saddle and why the ground tilted this way and that as we passed over it.

 

  
The shiver-and-shake was stealthy, it clouded my mind so I wouldn’t recognize it. When at last I did, I was outraged, as if I, of all people, should have been spared. I had cared for the afflicted, and pitied them, but I’d been unable to imagine their torment, and I’d supposed that I wouldn’t give way to groaning and screaming as they did. Now I heard a thin noise that coincided with my exhalations, and realized I was whimpering.

 

  
Catena turned in the saddle, saying, “What’s wrong?”

 

  
My teeth chattered as I answered. “I have a feeble. You must hold my arms so I don’t fall, and pinch me if I start asleep. Can you do that for me?”

 

  
Catena wasn’t the fluffy gosling she at first appeared to be, but fierce as a goose. When a mud soldier rode too close and rubbed his hand up my thigh, I was too weak to push him off. She hissed and pecked at him with her fist, until the varlet who led our horse turned around in the saddle and shouted at the soldier to keep his pricking hands off me.

 

  
“You just want the sow yourself, you greasy gruntling,” the soldier said, crowding next to us. “You think because you lead her you can have her.”

 

  
“She’s the king’s fancy. She’s not for the likes of you,” said the fellow who led us—the same one who’d caught the horse during the battle. A horseboy, but not a boy. A scrawny man, in a quilted linen tunic and leggings that served for armor; by the faded blue-green color of the linen, he was a servant of clan Growan. A cut had laid open his sleeve and arm.

 

  
“She’s not for you either, Mox,” the soldier said. “So what about the other one? She’s a plump little thing.”

 

  
Catena called them both winkly spitboys and said their dangles were all pungled, or some such. She’d been long enough in the kitchens to learn how to curse like a cook. Mox laughed at this, showing a lot of brown teeth, but he reined in so the soldier had to ride around him, and he put his boot on the rump of the soldier’s horse and gave a push, sent him trotting away.

 

  
We halted after sunset. Catena and I slid off the horse and my legs folded under me. Mox hoisted me up and dragged me into the lee of a tall hedge, where men were making camp, and Catena had to follow on the leash of chain. She sat next to me and began to weep. “Are you dying?” she asked. Though I denied it, I wasn’t as sure as I pretended.

 
  

 

  
Late at night, after everyone had gone to sleep but the sentries, I had to piss. I found I couldn’t stand. I didn’t even have the strength to sit up. I rolled out from under the cloak we shared, as far as I could get from Catena, and yanked my shift above my hips and let the hot piss come gushing out. I rolled back, cursing the wetness on my legs and buttocks, and pulled the shift down again. The filth shamed me.

 

  
I covered myself with the cloak, then I burned and pushed it off, then shivered and tried to tug it away from Catena, resenting the comfort she found in sleep. I wept for self-pity. I had left the cursed army behind, and the curses had followed me. If the king found out I had the shiver-and-shake, he would probably abandon me or kill me out of hand. Abandonment would offer a chance to escape—but suppose he left me chained to Catena, and I was unable to walk? Better to die quickly.

 

  
Living meant terrible exertion and suffering. Living meant I must search for Galan, and I didn’t have the strength, just then, to hope I might find him. He was far away, and death seductively near.

 
  

 

  
When dawn was just a promise, the men were roused to break camp. The king sent his body servant to summon me. When he found I couldn’t stand, the servant got two men to drag me while Catena walked behind. They dropped me at the king’s feet and I slumped sideways. Catena crouched next to me.

 

  
“What’s wrong with her, Garrio?” the king asked his servant.

 

  
Garrio touched my forehead and said, “Fever, Master.”

 

  
In the dim light the king looked more a shadow than a man, and like a shadow, expressionless. He said, “Put her on the horse.”

 

  
Garrio was old enough, or worried enough, to have acquired gray hairs in his beard and lines across his brow. He helped Mox hoist me into the saddle, and put Catena up behind me. I drooped over the pommel, clutching the bay’s mane. I thought the girth of the saddle was loose, for I was slipping sideways, falling.

 

  
Garrio saw I couldn’t hold on, so he had a drudge who was clever with his hands, Mano they called him, weave a basketwork of withies and fasten it to the front of the saddle to prop me up. They trussed me so I wouldn’t fall. We rode closer to the king now, where Garrio could keep an eye on us. Mox still held the lead rope.

 

  
For some time after, I wasn’t sure where we went or where we halted. I dreamed all the time, in delirium. Day and night lost their meaning, their orderliness. Sometimes we galloped, and sometimes I was unloaded like baggage. Catena washed me as roughly as she would scrub a pot, and the cold
water felt delicious. Garrio crouched at a campfire and gave me barley water. My voice was brittle and cracked, worn out from speaking. He listened, but what was it I said? My right hand was limp and the right side of my face drooped, and the shiver-and-shake burned through me like slow lightning.

 

  
I lay on my back, shaking with chills. Catena lay beside me under the cloak, sharing her warmth like a cat or an ember. I was grateful, but I made her cold. I took more than she gave. Move away, I told her, I think I told her. Move away.

 
  

 

  
We seemed to be on a steep, stony goat track, and the bay’s hooves started cascades of pebbles at every footfall. I leaned on the wickerwork prop and panted, staring down at the road. We climbed to a grove of wide-spreading oaks on a hilltop bronze with beaten grass. Rooks were thick as leaves on the leafless branches. The Auspices studied the birds, which are sacred to Rift, and the king’s counselors quarreled over the omens. King Corvus heard them out, his face stern and still under a tall hat covered with the glossy wings of ravens. One of his priests was a bear, seen by my right eye; my left eye saw him as a man in a bearskin cloak, brown fur with silver-tipped guard hairs. I’d seen him before, in the temple of Lynx and on the road, always at the king’s left side like an armiger. The king’s strategos. He said we should go through the town of Saxetum to get horses and provisions, on the way to Owl Pass.