Firethorn (28 page)

Some of Hazard's Auspices worship Fate alone, and claim that even the lowliest drudge walks a preordained path, from which it is impossible to stray. These Fatalists preach that Chance and Peril are merely masks for Fate's workings, nothing in themselves, and moreover that all the gods move at Fate's bidding. Their followers take comfort in thinking that their every deed is meant to be; it excuses all manner of meanness.

These zealots are much opposed by other priests, who say instead that Fate is a realm; it lies as close to ours as tongue to teeth. Kings and queens are born in it. The rest of the Blood should pray their paths never take them inside. The temples are filled with such wrangles, as if the priests believe they can, by disputation, lay bare the nature of the gods and their manifold powers, and resolve for all time why everything that takes place does and must take place.

Let the priests argue. I took the finger bones of Na and the Dame from my pouch and held one in each hand. In daylight I might have cast them and asked for guidance. But I was too intent on the dim light from the lamp that glowed behind the canvas wall of the tent and spilled through the slit. I looked through the hole again. Galan slept, but he was not restful. I could see the sheen of sweat on his skin. He'd pushed the fleece away as if it stifled him, baring the neat crisscrossed bandage under his ribs, and yet he was shivering. Where was the carnifex? Galan needed tending.

I would sacrifice to Hazard in the morning, but I'd not send my prayers by way of Chance and her blind priestess. I'd bid the priest of Fate make the kill. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure Galan had been spared for Hazard Fate's purposes, and not because Chance had winked at him. Sow one bad seed and reap a hundred, and you are in Fate's realm. Just so with Galan's wager. All these consequences begotten by one careless coupling—the maid dying, her father and Semental dead, and Galan nearly so—didn't they show he had unwittingly trespassed? And yet, who can say he crossed into Fate's domain there and then? If the Fatalists are right, maybe all his steps were meant to lead to that act and no other.

Divine Xyster came in with one of his varlets, and they woke Galan. They bathed his face and limbs with water, and he went from shivering to shaking. Then they purged him, first with an emetic of mustard seeds, then an enema. I watched all this and cursed them in silence, for I could see it was a torment to him. Spasms wracked him. The emetic brought up a thin dark vomit; the enema not so much substance as a foul smell. He lay on his side facing toward me and stared at nothing at all.

The carnifex was nearly silent, save to tell Galan to turn or swallow. Galan was also silent, I think for fear that if he opened his mouth, moans would come out of it. He shook and shook, even after the priest and his man covered him against the cold.

The other two Auspices of Crux came in with their servants. They unrolled their beds—no heather for the priests; they lay on feather beds heaped with quilts. A boy went around to snuff the lamps and candles, but left the candlebark and consolation burning in the brazier on the altar.

I listened to Galan's breath, how it limped, halted, stumbled. He was the worse for their care. He had puked and shat until there was nothing left and opened his wound with the strain of it; the bandages were spotted red. Then they went to sleep and gave him nothing for the pain but the smoke of consolation. Perhaps the purging was necessary; it must be so. But I could have given him more ease.

My own guts ached. They were strung tight as catgut strings on a dulcet and quivered as if they'd been plucked. If the priests of Fate are right, we all of us, all the time, resonate to Fate's thrumming, even though the note is too low to hear. It frightened me to think of it.

I became aware again of the finger bones in my hands, gripped so hard they scored my palms. In one hand was the Dame. She had never honored Hazard, in any form: despised gamblers and those who craved danger, and scorned anyone who mistook their own faults and foolish choices for destiny. I flushed with shame to think how she would have condemned Sire Galan for his folly and me for being his sheath.

I had been selfish and kept her finger bone. That meant she knew my state and must be grieved to see me come step-by-step to this stinking ground between the tents.

Then the Dame spoke up from my right hand. I knew that tone of voice. There was nothing in it so soft as sorrow or weak as sympathy. Instead vexation, impatience, and a tinge of weary disappointment, as if she feared that, after all, my clay might not be fit to mold. She said she'd never raised me to be willful and wayward, and yet I was. And even though I had by my own recklessness strayed into Fate's realm, I should be wise enough to know there was more than one way to cross it. That was all she said.

I'd displeased her, a thing I always feared to do. Even so, I felt her care. She was a long way gone on her journey and had traveled far to speak to me. I kissed her finger bone—such a tiny thing, the last joint of the chiefest finger of the right hand—and saw the Dame before me, not her face, but her hands at rest upon the taut warp of a newly strung loom. Every other thread was raised by the heddle, and her hands lay on the shining strands without weighing them down. Her skin was reddened and scored by tiny cuts from the warp thread. Her knuckles were chapped, no matter that every night she'd rubbed her skin with lanolin; it was cold in the weaving room in winter and she needed the shutters open for the light. The square fingernails were trimmed close to the quick to keep from snags while she worked. I couldn't remember ever seeing her hands lying this still, for they were never idle when she was alive.

She turned her hand upward, and before me in the lines that crisscrossed her palm, in the folds and swellings of her hand, I saw Fate's kingdom. It was like a map with every path marked and every crossroads and all the floods and precipices that made the ways treacherous. I saw how we'd arrived here, how we'd chosen one road above all others; those byways faded into the Dame's hand even as I watched, until they were nothing more than faint lines, and only the way we'd taken was plain, a deep crease across her palm. Yet from this moment on, nothing was clear. The crease branched and branched again; there were many ramifying ways, and paths crossed in confusion.

But I searched, and at last I found a way that led out of Fate's domain. The path was narrow and precarious. Galan had been spared so he could go forward. He might choose to go on as he had been, blind and rash, reaping a crop of ill consequence; or he might make amends. He must make amends.

He should pay for what he'd stolen. He must take the maiden who was no longer a maid to his tent before her aunt could kill her entirely. I would nurse her back to health so Galan could send her home. Then let his wife care for his concubine, let them suffer the sight of each other.

A strait road, a hard one. I could refuse it. Couldn't I heal her in the tent of her kinsmen—wouldn't that be enough? But I saw that path too on the map in the Dame's palm; it led to the maiden's death, and mine for meddling, and no end to the feud. She must be brought under Galan's protection; even that was a chance, not a certainty, a way beset by hazards. I saw it now, and saw it plain, that this was a burden laid on me. This was surely why Ardor had chosen me in the Kingswood, saved my life, bound me to Galan, and brought me here: to save one of his Blood. If I gave Ardor the maiden's life, I'd be quit of my debt and god-bothered no longer.

But it was cruel that it should fall to me to make her bloom again, in Galan's tent, in his bed. It was more than I could do.

It was all that I could do.

The Dame closed her fist, and she was gone. I was on my knees rocking beside the tent, still clutching the finger bones. There was a scorched taste in my mouth and I was cold, cold, cold.

Through the slit in the tent wall, I saw Galan lying awake, the whites of his eyes gleaming like shells. How could I convince him of what must be done? I needed no omens to foresee he'd be hard to persuade.

In the morning I'd try. In the morning. For now the priests and their men were sleeping, and it was better not to quarrel, not to rouse them. To let Galan know I still kept vigil there, I began to hum, low and quiet. He turned his head toward me and smiled. Bits and pieces of melodies came to me, songs the Dame had sung at her loom, the reapers'chants, Na's lullabies: somehow the tune the bird had sung to me in the firethorn tree twined around the others, made of them one song. It eased me; I hoped it was some comfort to Galan.

Before dawn Divine Xyster got up to see to him. He asked Galan if he slept, and Galan said no, a bird kept him awake. A while after the priest went back to his bed, Galan whispered, “I thought if a bird was singing, it must mean dawn is near. Isn't this the longest night ever?” I thought to myself, L
ong as it is, you may wish it never ended
, but I said, “Morning will come, it always comes.”

And so it did, a gray morning with the Sun in hiding. On its heels came the Crux, with his burden of bad news and ire. He dismissed the priests and their servants. I wasn't the only one listening with cocked ears outside the tent walls, but with my eye at the slit I could see what others could not. It was darker inside than without. Smoke from the brazier hazed the air. The Crux came and stood by Galan's pallet, looking down at him. His face was grim, but his voice, when he began, was mild. He told Galan the blade that cut him was made of steel, and Galan unwisely said he'd wondered if it was.

“And why did you wonder?” asked the Crux, in a reasonable tone. “Did you think the man might have cause to bring steel to a tourney of courtesy?” Out of respect for the dead, the Crux avoided using Sire Voltizo's name.

Sire Galan held his tongue.

The Crux waited. While he was waiting he began to pace, and the silence grew heavier until it could not be borne.

Galan said—hesitating, as if he had some doubt about the matter—“I thought he might.

“You thought he
might
,” said the Crux, turning to face Galan.

Galan said, “Perhaps he didn't welcome my courtship of his daughter.” He thought he could banter with his uncle, as he often did, that he faced nothing more caustic than a little sarcasm. He should have listened harder.

The Crux came three steps back and crouched by Galan's head. He leaned close, as if to make sure no words could escape on their way from him to Galan, and he spoke quietly, deliberately, and his voice shook for being held so strictly in check. He said, “As sure as you are lying on your back with your belly opened, you are lying with your tongue. The man would have welcomed courtship, but you took his daughter's virtue, and for no other cause than a wager. And here's what's come of it: your precious Semental is dead, and the maiden's father is executed, and last night someone caught Sire Alcoba's armiger out alone and stove his head in, and now Alcoba is hot to spill Blood for Blood. Do you see an end to this?”

“Semental is dead?” asked Galan. I could barely hear him.

“Yes, dead.” The Crux laughed harshly. “But I'm sure it will solace you to know he accounted well for himself before he died. Which is more than I can say of the maiden's father.” He stood, and from this greater height said to Galan, “The carnifex says this is not a mortal wound; see to it that it doesn't kill you, for I have other plans. I told you this once already, Nephew. It seems you didn't listen. I said if you tried my patience too hard, you would go walking: home to your father or behind me. If your wound isn't healed by the time the king is ready to go to war—and that time is nearly upon us—I'll send you back to your father, and I'll have your word on it you'll walk every step of the way. If you're well enough, you can follow me. But you'll come on foot, you'll fight on foot, and if luck is with you and the gods permit, I'll be able to tell your father you died as bravely as your horse.”

The Crux turned and left the tent. I heard him say curtly to the priests waiting outside, “Let him be for a while.”

While the Crux had spoken to him, Galan had lain on his back, stiff and unmoving. Now everything that was rigid in him bent. He turned on his side, face to the wall, and labored hard not to make a sound, but failed. Such moans and sobs tore from him that I could not bear to see or hear, and I sat rocking on my haunches with my hands covering my ears.

When he was spent he quieted. I took my hands from my ears and heard him turn on the pallet. He said, in a voice rough from misuse, “Are you still there?”

He could only be speaking to me. I whispered, “Yes.”

“Did you know all this?”

“Not all of it.”

He said bitterly, “I called you my bird. I should rather have called you a carrion crow. All this long night and you didn't think to give me one word to warn me of what was to come.”

“I thought it kinder not to tell you.”

“Did you know Semental had died—and the man too?

“I had heard. I wasn't there to see it, I was here in the camp waiting for news of you.”

“And yet you didn't tell me.”

“It wasn't my place to tell you.”

“That's a cowardly lie,” he shouted. “Your place? Were you ever so chary of overstepping it? You seem free enough to me. You have a ready tongue when it pleases you to be insolent. It is not your
place
, as you say, to keep anything from me that I have need to know.”