Wildfire (6 page)

 

  
Now he was grinning. “I thought maybe you’d come, because I know how you are—stubborn. You traveled with Sire Torosus’s woman, is that it?”

 

  
I shrugged again. But I couldn’t help smiling.

 

  
“I’ll find out,” he said, laughing, and crossed the room in a few long paces and pushed the table aside. I saw a new scar, still raw and red, just under the green dots of the clan tattoo on his cheek. He put his arms around my waist and pulled me against him and I felt a shiver and shock pass between us that left the sweat prickling on my skin. I’d felt that before when we touched, and now I knew it for what it was: lightning’s caress, Wildfire surging in the blood. I tasted the wine Galan had drunk, his full lower lip, his curving upper lip, and I was a starveling at a feast, my kisses all hunger and gluttony, and his were the same.

 

  
Galan released me and took a step back. Now he saw me up close, and there was something more—and less—than gladness on his face. Upright furrows appeared over the bridge of his nose, and his mouth tightened. Such a slight alteration, to make such a difference.

 

  
“What’s this?” He touched my cheek.

 

  
“Thunderbright!” I made the gesture I’d made for Penna, two fingers pointing and zigzagging through the air, striking myself on the chest. “On the way, the waves, the…swimming flying thing, the the the—”

 

  
“The what?” Galan frowned. It frightened me.

 

  
One of the jacks muttered, “She sounds a proper naught-wit, or half-wit, anyway.” That was Spiller talking: I knew his name now and that of Galan’s other jack, Rowney, just as I knew Spiller was fond of his own wit even when others failed to admire it.

 

  
Sire Edecon looked at me over Galan’s shoulder. He had straight hair the color of wheat straw and a fair beard. His nose was crooked and flattened, probably broken more than once, giving him the rakish look of a man who likes a good brawl. He said, “Is it a tattoo?”

 

  
I covered my cheek. I couldn’t imagine what caused such wonderment.

 

  
“It’s no tattoo,” said Galan. “I don’t know what it is.”

 

  
“It was thunderbright, thunderbright!” My voice rose. I was convinced I had the right word, and didn’t know why they failed to understand. “In on the…float—the boat, the ship, there was a…harm, there was flicking everywhere.”

 

  
“A harm? You mean a shipwreck?”

 

  
“No, a
harm
—with clouts and snow and will and terrible, terrible…” I gestured, showing the turmoil in the air.

 

  
“A storm?”

 

  
“Yes, and it licked me, you see?”

 

  
Galan flinched. It pained him to hear me speak.

 

  
“Perhaps she means lightning, Sire,” said Penna, coming up behind Sire Edecon. She wasn’t shy, that one. “I think she was struck by lightning.”

 

  
“You were struck by lightning aboard ship?” He spoke slowly, as if he feared I couldn’t understand.

 

  
I nodded. My face was numb.

 

  
“How can it be lightning? You aren’t burned.”

 

  
I looked down. Did he doubt me? Wildfire had marred me, made my speech foolish and my body feeble. Surely he could see and hear for himself that I’d been wounded.

 

  
“And you lived.” He pulled at the buckles of his baldric, and Spiller came forward to help him. Galan gestured him away. He dropped the baldric on the table and the hilts of his weapons clattered against the inlaid tabletop: the greater sword, the lesser, the mercy dagger.

 

  
“Well, so—here I am,” I said, gesturing to myself, trying to smile. “But I think my start stopped…I don’t know. And and and when I broke up, I was all in a fuddle, a fussle—a muckle.” I covered my mouth so he wouldn’t see how my smile sagged on one side into a frown. So he wouldn’t know how ugly I’d become.

 

  
Galan reached for me and I hid my face against his shoulder and neck. His surcoat was thick with embroidery and gold-wrapped threads. I took in the smell of him and began to cry. A judging self observed my wailing and whimpering, remembering how Galan had reckoned me unfit to be his companion in wartime—and now I was. Ardor Wildfire had made me so.

 

  
Galan held himself stiffly, as if he were angry. His arms were hard and confining. But one of his hands pressed the small of my back, and the other, under my shoulder blade, began to rub in small circles, as a horsemaster rubs a restive horse. At last I quieted enough to match the rhythm of my breath to his. I wiped my face on the abundant sleeve of Mai’s gown.

 

  
Galan’s voice was muffled against my headcloth. “I’ll keep you safe if I can, even from the gods themselves.”

 
  

 

  
The bed’s high wooden walls were pierced with a pattern of stars and swallows. We climbed up onto the mattress, which crackled and smelled of some sweet herb, and Galan drew the curtain behind us and we were in a room within the room. He put his sword, unsheathed, on a narrow ledge along the wall of the bed, and hung his mercy dagger from a hook. A
lantern inset with amber glass spilled light on white linens and a fur blanket and treasures heaped and scattered about: coins and golden cups and gossamer silk stitched with gems. I sat down cross-legged and picked up a coral box inlaid with a silver boat and silver net. The workmanship was so fine, I wondered if the artisans here were people like myself, or belonged to a race with nimbler fingers and keener eyes.

 

  
These luxuries were his plunder from the battle, I supposed. But the luxury I treasured was to be with Galan, and be alone with him. For too long we had slept in a tent with his men, and nothing to hide us from them at night but the bedcovers. Now he knelt with his back to me, his shirt hanging loose about him as he searched for something. I put my hand on the bare skin of his calf and wondered if it was still my privilege to touch him as I pleased.

 

  
Galan turned and said, “Here, this is for you.” He held a mirror before me, and I misunderstood, thinking it a strange sort of gift to show me to myself.

 

  
I’d sometimes peered in the Dame’s mirror, but she hadn’t cared to be reminded that she was plain, and her bronze mirror had been tarnished and dim. This one had a disk with a flawless sheen. It seemed more a window than a mirror, as if I looked through glass at someone else. The woman looked so strange, so stricken. It was hard to find myself in her.

 

  
The right side of the face was a mask, with the mouth turned down and the eye hiding like a shy cunning creature under the drooping eyelid. On the left, the eyebrow and eyelashes were singed away, and there was a glitter of fear and surprise in the tiny black mirror of the pupil.

 

  
And on the left cheek, the mark that had caused so much wonderment: jagged lines radiated from a spot near the outward corner of my left eye, branching and branching again into finer lines, like frost feathers, like lightning itself, if lightning could be stilled. I touched my face, following the widest bolt, which went over my jaw and neck. The lines were as ruddy as burns, but they weren’t raised proud to the touch like a blister or a welt.

 

  
I’d been branded as plainly by Ardor Wildfire as were the Blood of the god’s own clan, who had Ardor’s godsign tattooed on their cheeks as infants. I’d never seen or heard of such a mark; would it fade, or stay with me for life?

 

  
Galan watched me, and I wondered that he looked at me the way he used to do, though I was so much altered. I put the mirror facedown on the bed.

 

  
He tugged on the coppery cord Mai had used to bind up the folds of the gown, and the knot came undone at once. She was a clever woman, and I daresay she’d tied the cord just so, thinking of the untying of it. Galan smiled, saying, “Why are you wearing this? Where are your clothes?”

 

  
My mouth was dry. “My own was was—” I took off my headcloth, and my hair, released from the wool, crackled and rose around my head like a cloud. I spread out the cloth to show him that it was a scrap of the pine green dress he’d had made for me, and how it was tattered and charred.

 

  
“Gods,” he said, putting his hands in my hair and pulling me closer, pulling me down onto his plunder. He lifted himself on an elbow and pushed everything aside. I found a dagger with a jeweled sheath under my back and laughed as I threw it away.

 

  
“Wait,” he said, and he knelt and blew out the lantern, and I saw his prick standing upright under his shirt. But when he lay on his back in the dark he did nothing but hold me and stroke my shoulder. He tucked my head under his chin. The lamplight outside made its way through the pierced wooden walls of the bed, casting wavering stars and swallows with flickering wings over his white shirt and the bedclothes. Someone in the room beyond picked at a dulcet without making a tune.

 

  
His prick had softened. I put my hand under his shirt, on his thigh. “Why not?”

 

  
He muttered, “You’re hurt.”

 

  
I thought:
he doesn’t want me now.
That was my fear, whispering in a voice like Sire Rodela’s.

 

  
Whores had taught me how to be brazen; I’d heard them bantering about what to do if a man flagged. I would not be shy. With my fist and little nips from my teeth, I showed Galan I didn’t want him to be too careful.

 

  
Galan gave a choked-off laugh and said, “You thief, you little thief!” and I didn’t understand why he said it, nor did I care, for he turned to me, suddenly impatient. If I was bold enough to challenge him, he had an answer for it. I was swimming in the folds of Mai’s dress, and he rucked up my skirts and pinned me down. I dug my fingers into his buttocks and felt his muscles harden as he pushed his way in. My quim was slippery and he slid in tight, and the breath went out of me. The bristles on the ridge of his jaw rasped against my tongue.

 

  
As he bore down on me, he said again I was a thief, the thief of his peace, and I knew he was angry after all at my disobedience, but it didn’t frighten me. For once our moods did not quarrel; he wanted to take and I was of a mind to yield, or perhaps he wanted to give and I was ready to take, it was all the same. I was glad I could speak in the fluent language of touch. I tangled my fingers in the lattice and turned my head and let him ride, and gods, how sweet that was, after misspeaking and misunderstanding and missing him. He breathed into the ear I’d turned to him, his breath coming harsher and faster, and hidden in it the sound of my name.

 
  

 

  
Afterward we laughed that we’d been so hasty. By then the lamps and candles were out in the room beyond the bed, and we saw by hearth glow and moonlight. I slipped out of Mai’s dress and pulled the money sack over my head. Galan took off his shirt. He had a bandage on his back—I’d felt it under his shirt—and I asked how bad the wound was, and how he’d come by it. He said it was nothing. Chance had looked out for him in the battle, and so had Sire Edecon, who’d fought commendably well.

 

  
Galan was too offhand. I remembered how he used to brag of his deeds in tourneys of courtesy, and wondered if he found something distasteful in boasting now that the killing had started. I didn’t ask questions where questions were unwelcome, and so I banished what I didn’t care to know. It was easily done.

 

  
He had bruises and nicks in plenty, and I could match him, for when the lightning had hurled me across the deck, I’d landed hard. Besides the new knife-shaped burn on my hip, the strike had reopened old wounds, the burns on my back and shoulders I’d gotten when Ardor’s men set fire to Galan’s tent, and the flayed strip at my crotch where Sire Rodela had taken his trophy of flesh and hair. The scabs had split open, and likewise the pinkish new skin growing under the scabs. Lightning had searched out my raw places. I hadn’t felt the old wounds amidst the pains of the new, until Galan made too much of them.

 

  
I lay on my stomach with my head pillowed on my arms, aching everywhere, and all my sinews seemed tightly wound around the spindles of my bones. Galan sat beside me and stroked the ridge of my spine, and slowly the tightness eased. His hand stilled, resting on the small of my back. He said, “I shouldn’t have tried to send you home.”

 

  
“Don’t again,” I said.

 

  
“I thought you’d be safer there, without me. I began to believe Chance wanted too much for the luck she gave me, that she meant to take your life in exchange for preserving mine. But I think—”

 

  
“What?”

 

  
“A gift from a god is never without price, but to refuse a god’s gift—that too has a price.”

 

  
Hazard Chance: I remembered her now, a wooden statue on an altar in the Marchfield, clad in russet paint. She wears a blindfold to dispense good or bad luck, but everyone knows she peeks from time to time, and loves a bold man as much as she despises a cautious one. She’s partial to redheads too, that’s why Sire Galan had taken me for his sheath after the UpsideDown Days—he thought I was a talisman, a token of her favor. That was an old hurt, one that should have healed long ago. Now it pained me again.

 

  
When Galan had left me behind, he left behind his luck. So he had believed.

 

  
He crossed his arms, making fists of his hands. I reached for him, but he raised his left hand to stop me. I saw a brief flicker of a mocking smile. “It seems the gods taunt us. You’re not Chance’s gift after all; Ardor, the god of my enemy, has claimed you—claimed you for all the world to see.”

 

  
“
I’m
not your empty.” I caught his hand and brought it close, for I’d seen a mark in the center of his palm, a russet tattoo about the size of my thumb:

 

  
“What’s this?”

 

  
“An offering,” Galan said.

 

  
“But what is it, what does it say?”

 

  
“I thought you could read.”

 

  
“I could, but now, now no more…I know it’s a a…baudkin, or or knotsign—”

 

  
“Godsign?”