Wildfire (42 page)

  
A
couple of warm days melted the last of the snow. We climbed between two hills, and black and white goats bolted away from us, their bells clanking, chased by a couple of varlets who wanted meat for dinner. The goatboy leaned on his stave and watched, helpless. I looked past him and saw a blue wall of mountains across the southern horizon.

 

  
We rode toward them. There was a rumor that the king hoped to claim refuge in the southern kingdom of Lambanein, which was ruled by King Kyphos, his father-in-law. The rumor outraged common sense. To get there the army would have to cross the mountains, and cross them in winter, when its passes were—as everyone knew—impassable.

 

  
One of the jacks had grown up hereabouts, and been the butt of mockery for his country ways and his southern accent. He unwillingly bore the nickname Wheezer. Now it pleased him to frighten us with tales of avalanches, killing storms, walls of ice, and cold that could freeze a beard so brittle the whiskers broke off. And there were wolves, real wolves, not like the queenmother’s lapdogs who followed us, and mountain lions and cave wights, and also man-eating bandits—they preferred little girls, Wheezer said, poking Catena—but they were hungry enough to eat men, and we would be too, soon enough.

 

  
We climbed into foothills, drab and dun. Villages were scarce, and where the land was cultivated it looked likely to bear nothing more than a fine crop of stones. Pastures were grazed down to scurf by sheep and goats, or abandoned to thickets. Trees huddled in copses or steep gullies cut by streams.

 

  
Always before us reared the true mountains, fortresses with spires of black granite, fluted turrets of ice, and parapets roofed with snow. Their summits belonged to a realm partly of earth, partly of sky, but altogether hostile to life. They gathered weather around them according to their moods, sometimes appearing as massy bulks, stark black and white, that tore tufts of clouds from the Heavens; sometimes hovering gray and gauzy
over mists that hid their heavy earthen foundations. They were called the Ferinus, and after I saw them, the round peaks of the Kingswood were forever diminished in my memory, made small and tame, less deserving of the title of mountains.

 
  

 

  
The closer we came to that wall, the more it was borne in upon us that the unbelievable rumor was true. The king was not merely running from the Wolves who were nipping at his heels; he was going where all along he had meant to go, to Lambanein. And taking us with him.

 

  
I didn’t intend to be with the king when he tried to cross the mountains. There were others of the same opinion, even among the warriors of the Blood. Men sent out in foraging parties never came back. Did the Wolves get them, or had they deserted? One cataphract from the clan of Lynx slipped away with his armiger, horseboy, and jack, and when he was caught the king made no more speeches of good riddance. He had priests of Rift execute the mudmen outright. The cataphract and armiger were given more honorable deaths. They fought on foot, armed with scorpions and swords, against a priest with a bearclaw. It was over so quickly that people argued for days about exactly what had happened.

 

  
The men were sullen. The king’s counselors quarreled, and their disagreements, which should have been secret, were taken up by cataphracts and varlets alike, as every man seemed to think himself wise enough to advise the king, if the king were only wise enough to listen.

 
  

 

  
I tried to bribe Mox to let the rope slip—there were many such mishaps on the road, he wouldn’t be blamed for it. Or he could ride with us, didn’t he want to get away? But he was the king’s man now, an important fellow, and he refused. I was vexed, but I could hardly blame him for being more afraid of the dangers he knew—the Wolves, the king’s priests—than the unknown Ferinus. We were all between one and the other, between sword and wall, as the saying goes. Mox watched us more warily after, and so did Garrio, when he found out.

 

  
And then the shiver-and-shake returned for its second visit, bestowing on me three more days of fever and chills, aches in my head and joints, aches everywhere. My strength was at such an ebb that I swayed in the saddle, and Catena had to haul me upright to keep me from toppling. I was near enough to dying that the veil between realms thinned, and I saw companies of the fallen mingling with those still alive. I glimpsed Penna perched on a bare stump of a fir that looked like the mast of a ship. I asked if she could help me and she called the way gulls do, as if laughing or weeping, and flew away southward.

 

  
My left eye saw the forelegs of our mare flashing as they struck the ground, one leg black, one with a white stocking, and every step closer to the Ferinus. My right eye saw Tobe, and here was the strange thing: he was walking on the bottom of a transparent lake, its waters turquoise in the shallows, cobalt in the depths, and I could see him clearly with his black hair floating about his face, and his skin blue, a blue boy. The stones of the lake bed seemed to be covered with snow that puffed up in a white cloud at his every footfall. The bright lake was in a round, steep-walled valley on the very peak of a mountain. I smelled and tasted the sharp tang of the vapors smoking up from the lake’s surface. I called to Tobe, but he was too deep to hear me, or too intent on his journey.

 

  
The next morning the king was alone when he summoned me. I told him about the boy in the blue water, without telling him I’d dreamed it while awake. He asked what it meant. I said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your prate?” and the king was angry. Afterward Garrio told me I should be more respectful.

 
  

 

  
My misery eased. The Heavens favored us, stilling the winds and giving us clear skies and the Sun’s warmth. The Ferinus seemed near enough to touch, yet they were many leagues away. In another day’s ride we came upon a solitary conical mountain rising from a high plateau, its slopes piebald with patches of snow and black scree. A lake was set in the hollow summit like a jewel in a stone clasp. There was no reason to climb the mountain; our way led past it. But the king sent Garrio to ask if it was the lake of which I’d dreamed, and I said yes.

 

  
Garrio took me to King Corvus. This time the king was attended by Divine Aboleo. I had to tell what I’d seen all over again, and my voice quavered when I spoke. Catena held my left hand, my fingers burning, hers cold.

 

  
The Auspex said the omen was clear as daylight. The lake belonged to the Queen of the Dead, and its color was of the blue that protects against the malefic eye. “We must ascend,” Divine Aboleo said to the king, “and you must bathe in that lake and ask protection of the Queen of the Dead. The Wolves are the queenmother’s baleful eye upon us, and that eye must be shut. She has cursed our every step so far.”

 

  
The Auspex could read omens in a horse’s entrails or the cawing of a couple of crows, and to him I was of the same order as horses or crows, nothing more than a vessel of signs. The king, however, seemed to see
me.
He looked on me with some distrust.

 

  
The four of us climbed the mountainside, and I took some secret amusement from seeing the king and his priest slow their pace to that of Catena.
With every step we slid and started cascades of stones down the slope. At the summit the walls of the lake were of jagged rock, coarse and dark as cinders.

 

  
King Corvus looked at the lake and the lake looked back, and it was hard to say which had the bluest stare. Wind ruffled the surface of the water and stirred the vapors, which smelled as they had in my dream of Tobe. I put my hand in the water and it was not merely warm, it was hot.

 

  
“Go in,” the king said to me. “You enter first and we shall see.”

 

  
Catena started sobbing. I asked her what the matter was and she wailed, “I can’t swim!”

 

  
“Never you mind,” I said. “You sit here on the sure and I’ll go in.”

 

  
It was awkward to disrobe while manacled. I took off my headcloth, and pulled my dress and underdress over my head and passed them to Catena with the left sleeve around the chain. I gave my pouch into her keeping. The cold air raised gooseflesh all over me. I was bony as the Crone herself, and ashamed to be seen naked by the king and his priest.

 

  
The water was clear and the bottom of the lake fell away steeply until it vanished into cobalt blue depths. I stepped onto a boulder, ankle deep, and white silt billowed around my feet. I winced at the heat and the king asked what was wrong. I shook my head and climbed down onto a ledge, and squatted with my left arm outstretched toward Catena. She reached toward me, the chain taut between us. The water was up to my neck and it was blissful. I was warmed through, even my cold right side. I put my face underwater and opened my eyes on a blue world. I took a sip of the lake and it tasted of salt and clay and metal, and was hot as a medicinal tisane. I sank deeper and my hair stirred around my face like sea hay in a rising tide. The water wakened me all over, cleansed me of the rough hide of dead skin and dirt I had lived in so long. I thanked Tobe for showing this lake to me.

 

  
Catena tugged on the chain and I lifted my head out of the water. She was crying as if she thought I meant to drown myself and pull her in after me.

 

  
“Cat, Cat…Catena,” I said, “don’t fret, it’s quite safe.” Clothed as I was in water, I dared to glance at the king. He abruptly looked away.

 

  
Divine Aboleo said, “Get out, and be quick about it.”

 

  
I stood, and water ran down my skin and mist rose up from me. I wished I could have stayed in the lake all night. I climbed out and Catena pushed my clothing toward me over the chain. I dressed, first the left arm, then the rest of me, and the cloth stuck to my wet skin.

 

  
Divine Aboleo said, “Why do you wear the red cord around your waist?”

 

  
I kept my eyes on the ground and said, “To humor the Keen of the Dead. I mean honor her.”

 

  
The Auspex grunted as if he doubted me. He said to the king, “Come, we must go around the lake. Can’t you see the water is sullied here?”

 

  
We waited, eyes averted, as the king disrobed and entered the water, and Divine Aboleo followed him in, singing and chanting. In time the sky overhead became as dark as the blue heart of the lake.

 

  
Later Catena and I sat by a fire with Mox and Lame and Chunner, and they wanted to know why we had climbed the mountain with the king. Mox made rude guesses, and I told them the truth, seeing no harm in it. Rumor crept from one campfire to the next, and men slipped away to climb the mountain, by ones and twos at first, and then in groups with torches, to seek the lake’s protection against the malefic eye of Queenmother Caelum.

 

  
The king’s men held me in higher regard afterward. Cataphracts who had never spoken to me before greeted me by name; mud soldiers, on the contrary, grew tongue-tied. It was the Auspex who had claimed the lake for Rift Queen of the Dead, and said it would protect them—I knew nothing of that. It seemed to me the healing waters of that lake were sacred to many gods, Torrent and Ardor among them.

 
  

 

  
In the middle of the night, Garrio came to say the king summoned me. He had to carry Catena, who refused to wake up. King Corvus had a hut to himself. He sat cross-legged on a wool blanket over a pile of rushes. He wore his grimy red silk underarmor, and his long-boned feet were bare. Behind him was an upright loom with a half-finished blanket patterned in undyed wool, from black, white, and brown sheep such as we’d seen pastured in these hills.

 

  
Garrio put Catena down and left. I knelt beside her and looked at the floor.

 

  
“Did you dream?” the king asked.

 

  
It vexed me to be awakened to share his sleeplessness, and I was unready. I’d been too weary to cast the bones that night to fashion a dream that might please him. “I was just having a fish when Gabbery came to wake us. Now it’s swimming off, I can hardly recollect it.”

 

  
“Tell me what you remember.”

 

  
I told him my real dream as best I could, though I protested it wasn’t a true dream, as there were no odors in it. “I dreamt a whitewashed place, an inside place, a…room, all the color of skinned milk except for a row of four blue collars—pillars—that seemed to float in all the witness. Something was missing from that room, something red and tall that should have stood behind the blue uprights.”

 

  
I watched the king’s face from the corner of my left eye, seeing shadows cast there by the fire. He tried to be impassive, but the shadows made visible the smallest twitch of an expression.

 

  
“Is that all?” he said.

 

  
“I think—I think what was missing was a staring of a god. About so high, of wood or stone, and painted dread.”

 

  
“You’ve been there, in that temple,” he said in accusation.

 

  
I shook my head. “No, I never. Where is it?”

 

  
He spoke harshly in the language I now knew was that of Lambanein. I couldn’t understand the words, but I understood the threat in them.

 

  
I bowed until my forehead touched the ground. “I swear I’ve never seen that white temper before. If you punish me for dreaming, I will dream no more.”

 

  
“If I punish you, it will be for lying.”

 

  
“I’m an honest seek, I can’t always say what you wish to hear.”

 

  
“Do you call yourself honest?”

 

  
“I told what I saw, but I don’t see so well. I’m going blunt in one eye.” I raised my head and pointed to my right eye. “My sight is dimming, but now and then I catch visitors, visions there.”

 

  
The king came close and peered at my eye, and I stared over his shoulder. He said, “The webeye. How did you come by it so young?”

 

  
I’d been afraid it was webeye. I knew a woman once with webeye in both eyes, her blind irises like milky moonstones. “It came after the lightening.”