Wildfire (45 page)

 
  

 

  
The king and I were both stubborn. He went on summoning me, and I went on saying I hadn’t dreamed, or couldn’t remember. Some days he was alone; sometimes Divine Aboleo was at his side. Often Garrio waited in attendance, ignored by the king as if he were a chair or a dog. Garrio would plead with me afterward to tell the king something, anything—to avoid the king’s wrath, he said. But I knew Garrio thought I could help, and refused for spite.

 

  
In truth I dreamed vividly, plentifully—of tables piled with food and beds piled with quilts, dreams that left me neither full nor warm. But some were more nourishing. I dreamed of the house on Mount Sair, where it was spring. I worked in the garden, dividing and transplanting roots, sowing seeds, planting slips of red osier to make a living fence, for willow is quick to root. I ate ramps and spinach and pintle shoots and fiddleheads, every
thing green and full of life. Dreams of no use to the king, even if I’d recounted them.

 

  
By then many of King Corvus’s men believed I was a dreamer blessed by Lynx Foresight. One day a cataphract sent his jack, Voro by name, with a question: Has my wife taken a lover? I told Voro I would fish for a dream, and the next morning he returned for an answer.

 

  
I had dreamed of the king. He visited a keep in company with its owner, and the owner’s dogs, shaggy, dun-colored hounds, greeted the king with gladness, fawning and groveling and licking his hands. Days later he returned to the keep alone, and the dogs attacked him. I told this dream to Voro without mentioning the king. And I believe I said something like
dog-collared horneds
instead of dun-colored hounds, along with a few other mishaps of the tongue. Voro smirked and gave me a gift from his master, a hood lined with squirrel fur and adorned with tippets of squirrel tail, which I gave to Catena.

 

  
The dream lacked the lucidity or odor of a true dream, but I thought there might be truth in it nevertheless, and a warning I refused to deliver, about the welcome the king might expect, arriving uninvited at the home of his wife’s father in Lambanein.

 

  
The king summoned me and I told him I hadn’t dreamed. I suffered the same belly-clenching fear I felt every day that I refused him, but this morning I felt satisfaction besides. Garrio was right, I was spiteful.

 

  
If I could have dreamed a true dream by command, surely I would have dreamed a way to escape. At night I threw the bones and searched for patterns, hoping the Dame and Na would offer guidance. By day we climbed and climbed and our road seemed that much steeper to me because every step led away from Galan.

 
  

 

  
We camped about noontime near a forest of stunted trees, mostly oak and pine—I’d seen this in the Kingswood, how the higher one climbed, the shorter the trees became, and the more twisted by the wind. The king ordered his men to gather firewood, for soon we must cross stony heights where there would be nothing to burn but what we carried with us.

 

  
We’d used up the flour, turnips, and coleworts taken from the last village we’d passed, days before. Catena complained of hunger. She hadn’t gone a day without eating in her life and thought she might die of it. Hard work in the kitchens had toughened her, but she was used to kitchen comforts too, plentiful scraps and warm ovens. She wasn’t the only one going hungry. By now, besides Mox and Lame and Chunner, five or six lads shared a fire and food with us at night, masterless horseboys or those with cruel masters, who came to us after being turned away from other campfires.

 

  
I saw no reason we should go hungry, when the gods offered gifts of food even in these austere wintry mountains. Usually I was forced to pass them by, and it irked me that I couldn’t forage, hampered as I was by the chain, watched always to see I didn’t stray.

 

  
Tonight we would dine well, I told the horseboys, if they would help. Mox scoffed at this, asking if I expected to feast on snow soup.

 

  
I said, “I wager we can make some snow sop that even you will find eatable.”

 

  
“Out of what?”

 

  
“Out of haycorns, of course.”

 

  
Mox said only swine ate acorns. He came from Malleus, and distrusted any crop that didn’t need the help of man to thrive. But in the Dame’s village, people ate acorns in lean years, and I’d always found them tasty. Mox let us go gathering, and came along to keep an eye on us. It was late in the year to be harvesting, but we filled several sacks with acorns, and then sat by the fire, discarding worm-eaten ones, hulling good ones, and pounding the kernels with stones to make a coarse meal. Catena and the boys talked and laughed, and with so many hands the work went fast. We boiled some of the meal to leach out the bitterness, and the rest we tied in sacks and left to leach in a swift-flowing stream, under the ice.

 

  
The acorn soup was bland and sweet, and Mox liked it well enough once he was persuaded to try it. We also roasted pine cones so the scales would open, and shook out the seeds and cracked them between our teeth. Garrio came to our fire late in the evening, after tending to the king’s comfort, and he brought us mutton bones and an onion; we started a new soup, having eaten the other all up. A jack came by and stood watching us, not begging, not saying anything. Lame went to shoo him away, and I said, “Let him sit. There’s enough to go about.” His name was Marestail, and he took a dead snow hare from his pack and shared it with us.

 

  
The next morning I made heavy cakes of roasted acorn meal, mixing it with dried currants and lard Garrio gave me—cakes to eat and cakes to carry. And we loaded sacks of acorns and pine cones on our horses, though men laughed at us.

 
  

 

  
We entered the domain of ice and stone. It was so cold it hurt to breathe. Snow did not fall there, it flew, and scoured skin from our faces even as the wind tried to pry flesh from our bones. When we were not blinded by snow, we were blinded by the Sun, which made our eyes water so that our eyelashes froze. Men grew icicles from their mustaches and beards. I tore strips from a stolen blanket to wrap Catena’s head and hands and feet, and she wore what was left like a cloak. We covered our faces with gauze, and
soon the cloth was frozen hard. The iron manacles stuck to our wrists and pulled off scabs and skin.

 

  
Many horses were lost, and men had to walk, and our pace slowed. The mounted men in the forefront of the line sometimes were able to stay on top of the snow crust, but more often had to advance through the drifts. It was no easier for those behind, tramping through slush, or breaking through the crust only to be caught by the pocked ice beneath. Ice balled up under the horses’ hooves, and they couldn’t stay on their feet.

 

  
Sometimes the king’s outriders found promising routes—false promises, wasting days, wasting lives. We were all disheartened by it. The king was no longer searching for Owl Pass. He wanted to go south, so we went south, and when we couldn’t we went east or west or turned north until we could go south again. He was as implacable as the weather.

 

  
Lame’s horse died, and it was hard for him on foot, with one leg shorter than the other. We came upon him sitting in the snow, and he said he was giving up, he couldn’t go any farther.

 

  
I slid down from the black mare, and told him to climb up behind Catena. Lame shook his head in mute denial. He had such a look in his eyes, as if he were already dead and long departed on his journey, too far away to care about the living. I couldn’t lean over to shake him, because of the chain, so I kicked snow at him and yelled, “Are you weaker than a little glad, a little girl? Look at Taken…Caten, she isn’t complaining.”

 

  
“I can’t feel my feet,” he said.

 

  
“Then you shouldn’t walk on them for a while. Come on, up you go.”

 

  
Mox was ashamed then, and offered his horse to Lame, and all afternoon we took turns riding, the horseboys and me. Walking was so hard, I didn’t wonder Lame had wanted to give up.

 

  
In camp that night I looked at his feet. The tips of his toes and toenails had turned white and hard and wooden from frostbite. I wrapped his toes in gauze torn from my underdress, and tucked one foot under my arm and held the other in my left hand, and gave him heat. When the flesh thawed the pain was so bad that Lame wept.

 

  
Garrio asked me to warm his hands, which had turned red and speckled from chilblains, and what Garrio knew, others were sure to find out. Some I couldn’t help; it was too late to stop their fingers or toes from the blackening. A certain jack who had pestered me before came by to tell me his dangle was frostbitten and stiff, and asked if I would thaw it. I warmed his hands, and said he must do the rest himself, as I was sure he knew how. The horseboys drove him away with their laughter.

 

  
Frostbite was painful and disfiguring, but the mountains sent more
deadly afflictions too. Sometimes the afflictions killed outright, sometimes by making a man daft, so he made foolish mistakes that killed him. I could help with the chills that caused a man to shake and turn white and suffer confusions; I gave him heat, and steadied his hearthfire with my warm hand over his heart. But I didn’t know what to do about the drowning, which caused a man to suffocate on bloody froth from his bellows.

 

  
Sometimes men came to me for help when I was exhausted and low in spirits, and every ember of my hearthfire was smothered under a heap of ash. I had to reach deep inside me for something that could burn, and it was painful, as if I scraped marrow from my bones. But I couldn’t refuse. It made no difference whether I liked a man or disliked him, I was given the gift that I might share it. And there were times—rare and blessed—when the Hearthkeeper opened a way through me to hearthfire, forgefire, and wildfire, all of these at once: allfire, I called it. I blazed then, and never felt the cold, and by Ardor’s grace I was a hearthfire to others.

 
  

 

  
We made camp on a steep ice field, surrounded by stone spires crowded along a curved ridge like too many teeth in a jaw. The summit of the mountain rose high above the ridge. All day we’d climbed toward those stone teeth, hoping we were crossing the shoulder of the last mountain before the southern foothills, for we could see nothing higher than the peak we labored under. But when we reached the top of the ridge, we saw another mountain before us, and others ranked behind it.

 

  
From above, the ice field had looked like a wrinkled gray tongue, but as we descended to it we found the wrinkles were deep fissures. We walked a narrow path between turquoise boulders and pinnacles and crevasses. In places wind had polished the ice until it was slick and shiny; elsewhere it was littered with gravel and broken stones. The king sent scouts to find a way down, for it was too dangerous to go on.

 

  
The ice turned gold and orange as the Sun descended behind the peak that barred our way south. The sky was blue glass. Wind swooped down on us from the ridge above. Auspices sacrificed a lame horse, looking within it for a map to get us through the mountains, but the entrails were as twisted and coiled as the path we had traveled to get to that slope.

 

  
We had run out of wood. For days we had gone without campfires: no heat to guard against the devouring cold, and no light to shelter us from the immensity of night. We mudfolk warmed ourselves by the carcass of the dead horse, and ate its flesh raw—tough and chewy, but better food than none, which was what the Blood got, being forbidden to eat horse meat. And I was grateful to the horse, which had been sacrificed so we might have
guidance and warmth and sustenance, but it frightened me to see us that way, mouths and chins bloody. How close we were, after all, to beasts; Artifex made us, but it was Ardor’s blessing, fire, that made us mankind.

 

  
Men heaped ice in rough walls to make a shelter against the wind. Catena and I were in the lee of the wall, Lame on one side and Chunner on the other, in the midst of a crowd of varlets. We shared warmth and cloaks and blankets, and also lice and stink and coughs. I made sure the youngest boys stayed in the middle of the pack, and the others took turns on the outside. A man could freeze to death with his back unprotected.

 

  
I sucked on a lump of snow, and my thirst was not quenched. I heard water running in the depths below, and wondered if it flowed south out of the mountains, or if it was trapped, as we were. This ice field was a frozen torrent, and horses might die of thirst tonight for lack of the water locked in it.

 

  
The ice field rumbled and grated and creaked, and made sudden cracks that sounded like tree limbs breaking; worst of all, it moaned, long and sonorous moans that came from everywhere and nowhere. Wind keened between the stone teeth and roared down the mountainside. I heard eerie harmonies in the din, and thought of the mountains resounding night after night to this song, a song not meant for our ears.

 

  
Catena curled up beside me with her head in my lap and panted. The higher we climbed, the harder she fought for breath. Every time I dozed, I woke up afraid she might have died. I warmed her hands and feet with care, and looked for red streaks or signs of the blackening around the iron cuff on her wrist. It made me flush hot with shame to think I’d wanted to cut off her hand. I hugged her and rocked a little, praying that the gods who’d seen fit to protect her so far would keep her safe through what was to come.

 

  
I thought Catena had fallen asleep, so I was surprised when she asked me to sing. Sometimes she wanted a song, sometimes a story to comfort her. That night I said it was her turn. Didn’t the cooks sing as they worked? She must give me one of those songs.

 

  
She sat up and said she would teach me a chain.

 

  
“What’s that?”

 

  
“I sing first and then you start, and we sing the same thing round and round, making links in the chain. You see? It goes like this: