Firethorn (3 page)

I could hardly draw breath indoors, when I knew that pintle shoots were green by the river and maiden's kiss in bloom in the high meadow, and it was past time to collect the seeds of prickly comfort. So I learned to lie my way past the gates, telling Steward one thing and Dame Lyra another; I learned the barefaced lie, the lie of omission, and all the other ways a drudge can tie the truth in knots.

In those first tennights I prayed to any god I thought might hear me, but most of all to Wend. I offered twists of dyed lamb's wool to one of the god's avatars, the Weaver, whose little statue stood in a niche in the Dame's workshop—for though the Dame was descended from the god Crux, Wend had favored her. I prayed to know my place, to be woven in, smoothed down. The smell of burning wool brought the Dame to mind more than the god, and gave me no peace. My heart grew as hard and swollen as a gall around a worm.

Now I think that Wend Weaver did answer me, in her way, for her right hand carries the shuttle, but her left holds the shears.

The first time Sire Pava came to my pallet at night, I did not expect it. Besides his wife, just two months in his bed, he had brought from his father's house a mudwoman no better than the rest of us, except she already had a five-month belly and no duties to mention. He put her in a mud hut stuck to the outside of the manor wall like a swallow's nest, and he'd visit her when he pleased, no matter that Dame Lyra threw slippers and wailed.

I thought Sire Pava must be well occupied between these two. But what did I know of the appetites of men? Most of us in the Dame's house had been women, growing old with her; I was by far the youngest. The men who'd served her had been very old or very young, from the ancient priest to the boys who worked as scullions in the kitchen. Then Sire Pava came with his steward, jack, varlets, huntsman, forester, gardeners, and a toady of a horsemaster.

At night the hall was crowded with the pallets of those drudges who had a right to sleep there. If not for the sweetfern in the mattresses, the close air would have been too rank to breathe. I slept beside the master's bed closet, so Dame Lyra could wake me to fetch water or wine or empty her pisspot or kill a fly buzzing by her head.

I'm taking a roundabout road to this part of my tale, and what is it, anyway, but a tale so worn it hardly needs telling? Sire Pava came to my pallet one night. I put him off, told him my tides were flowing. A woman's blood—especially the unclean blood from her womb—can make a man fall sick. Unless it's blood from a broken maidenhead, which makes a man potent and is a cure for the canker besides. He went away, but I knew he'd be back.

I woke Na, who slept on the pallet next to me, to tell her what had happened. “What shall I do, Na, next time he comes?” I was so roiled that my voice rose above a whisper.

“Hush,” Na said. “It would be well if Sire Pava took a liking to you. Get you out from under Steward's eye and Dame Lyra's heel.”

This was not the advice I expected to hear. “I don't want him or anyone else,” I said.

“Are you dead below the waist, then?” she asked me. “More's the pity. You're fifteen years old and still wear your hair down. You must be bred or wed; there's no hiding under the Dame's skirts anymore. If you don't please Sire Pava, you'll be sport for his men. So you'd best be thinking how to keep him, not send him away.”

At these words I began to cry. Na came to my pallet and lay beside me, stroking my hair. I could see the waxy glimmer of her face near mine. “Now, now, hush now, Luck,” she whispered, close to my ear. “I know a thing or two the Dame never taught you, to keep Sire Pava tied to your thumb. We'll find some kindlecandle and Cook will put it in his dish—but you must take it to him with your own hands. It will stiffen him up for an hour, and he'll think it's owing to your charms, for that's more than his wife can do. Haven't you heard them at night? Pava is quicker than a dog. No wonder Lyra is cross as two sticks.”

I was angry with Na, not liking her counsel, and kept silent around her as if she were to blame for Sire Pava's wandering eye. Cook had better advice; she said dampwick would make his prick limp, and showed me where to find it, and she never said a word when I used it to season the dishes I served to Sire Pava. I also gathered the white berries of childbane, which the women in our mountains take against conception. If one didn't work, I would need the other. I knotted the hair between my legs to barricade the entrance to my womb. Many nights I lay awake, but he did not come to my pallet again.

When he ran me to ground, he was on horseback and I was on foot, gathering fiddleheads down the hill by the ravine. He said I'd led him a fine chase, as if the fox runs for the hounds' amusement. I'd planned to yield if I was cornered, but when the moment came, I scrambled down the bank toward the river stones. Before I could get a rock in my hand, he caught me by my skirt. I acquitted myself about as well as a stray cat, marking him with bites and scratches.

Shortly he was done. He got up and I pulled down my skirts. Everywhere I was seeping: tears, sweat, snot, bile.

He looked down at his prick as he tucked it into his leather prickguard. He straightened his hose and tightened the laces. “Where's the blood?” he said. “You had me fooled, going with your hair unbound as if you were a maiden. Did some horseboy have you first?”

I spat at him and jeered, “A horseboy rides better than you, Sire. It's just as your wife says: you can't stay in the saddle long.” Dame Lyra had never confided so much in me, but I wanted to poison his mind as he'd poisoned mine.

I saw this taunt go home, but his smile didn't change. “I won't be in a hurry next time we meet,” he said. “I'll clap on my spurs and teach you not to balk.”

By then I was crying and couldn't speak. I've thought on it many times, what I should have done, what I failed to do, and I've dreamed about it too, bloody dreams; but unlike dreams, the past can't be altered.

When he got up on his horse, he tossed a scarf at me—a rag he'd tied to the pommel of his saddle—saying, “I brought you a headcloth. Put it on and stop wailing. Why all the fuss if you already gave it away? In all my life I never heard such an uproar.”

I went down to the river and sat in the water to wash away the stains of mud and grass and white blood. And it was true; there was no red blood, though I'd never lain with a man before. The hairs I'd tied together over my quim had prevented easy entrance, like a hymen. Where they had pulled I was swollen and sore.

I wrapped the headcloth around my head with shaking fingers and went down the hill. It was a sign anyone could read.

Sire Pava didn't bother me again, despite his bluster. I think he preferred his women willing. And Na was right: it would have been better if I had pleased him. The spite of Dame Lyra, half-moon scars on my arm from her pinches, the japes and hands of Sire Pava's men, now that I was no longer his quarry, the steward's whispers in a dark corner, the coldness between me and Na, for we no longer understood each other—Wend Weaver cut the threads that held me, one by one.

In the village early spring is the leanest season; the grain is half dust from the granary floor, the hams have been scraped to the bone, and there's not much else but old coleworts and turnips. In the Kingswood deer stripped the buds from low branches. The weakest fell prey to wolves or lay down and suckled scavengers, even as linnflower trees flushed red at the bud and willows burned with a green flame by the riverside. Ferns uncoiled and the shoots of bulbs pushed their way through the dead leaves.

I felt sorrow uncoiling too, less tainted than the bitter thoughts that had kept me company so long. I missed the Dame, not just the place she'd made for me, but the woman herself. I recalled her face, how she would brown in the summer except under her starched blue coif, how I teased her about her pale forehead when I dressed her hair at night. On her right cheekbone she wore the small blue tattoo of her clan, Crux; her left was marked with the godsign of Lynx.

Lynx was her husband's clan. He'd been killed in one of the king's wars before I'd come to the manor, and Na said his kin had sent the Dame back to her father, claiming she was barren. Her father had settled her in his humblest manor for as long as she should live, or until she married again. But she never married again. “I'd not suffer it twice,” she told me once, and that was all she said about it.

Two lines appeared between her brows when she was vexed. I was more afraid of that look than I'd ever been of Na's whippings. The Dame would turn it on me when I was careless in my work, or too haughty with the other drudges.

I feared her shade might be angry with me, for now I weighed up my ingratitude and it was heavy indeed. The pride was my own, nothing forced upon me. She owed me nothing, and yet she had bequeathed to me what she knew. She'd given me her eyesight, that I might see beauty in the patterns the world makes, and all the colors, named and unnamed, that dye the seasons. Was it any wonder I'd come to love what she had loved?

I had gotten out of the habit of eating every day. Comfort was another habit I had lost: I no longer expected to be warm when it was cold, or dry when it was wet. In submission to weather and need, I'd learned endurance—or indifference, it may be. But famine carried a goad, and drove me through the forest. Everywhere I found the promise of plenty, and too long to wait.

So I came to the firethorn, the only tree of its kind in the woods. It stood solitary in a glade where a great oak had fallen, and all underfoot were the blue stars of tread-me-down. The Sun lit translucent orange berries in a cage of gray thorns. Silvery buds on the twigs were just unfurling the first green flags. The tree is sacred to Ardor: wood as hard as iron and fruit like flame. The Dame had told me never to touch those berries. Even the birds avoided them. I had been there before and passed them by, but winter had not shriveled them, and they looked round and ripe. And I was hungry. Maybe I was dying.

I put a berry on my tongue and the juice burst from under the skin with a savor between tart and sweet: wine on its way to vinegar, fermented on the tree. Yet nothing that tasted of danger. I knew I should wait, but I ate another, and another. I stripped the berries from among the thorns until my hands were pierced and scratched: the blood redder than the berries, the berries tasting of blood. As if I consumed myself.

I lay where I dropped, and shuddered and shook and slept. I awoke in the deepest night to find I had been divided from myself. There lay my body sleeping and dreaming, and I was outside it, awakening. When we dream we may take shapes other than our own; a man may be his brother, a woman a king, and never question it. So, with the certainty born of a dream, I knew I'd become my own shadow. It was a moonless night, with clouds covering the stars, dark as it could be, but somehow the sky was bright enough to cast shadows, to make me out of a darkness deeper than night. I lay beside my body and under it, and I was tucked into the crook of my knees and elbows and the folds of my garments, and I hid under the hair at the nape of my neck.

Because it was a dream, I knew what to do. I seeped into my body through the soles of the feet, and as I flowed through the dreamer, I gathered my darkness to me, shrinking and thickening until I was a tiny homunculus. I followed the breath out of one nostril and stood on the upper lip.

The night had quickened with shadows, nothing but shadows, wantonly joining and parting, flickering, rising. I never knew that darkness had so many colors, all of them black. I strove to make the shadows into trees, but things had escaped their edges and lost their names. The harder I looked, the more baffled I was.

I saw something from the corner of my eye that vanished when I looked at it straight. I stayed just so, glancing sideways, and saw it again: a tree with berries like sparks. The tree caught fire, growing leaves of black flame, and one of the flames made a bird, and the bird began to sing. I turned toward it again and bird and tree disappeared. They could be seen only askance.

I saw all this on one in-drawn breath. When the dreamer exhaled the wind went through me and I faltered. I lost the certainty that gave me shape. From breath to breath I hung suspended. I was too tenuous to be called a thing. Without weight, how could I stand? I rose like smoke; another breath and I might smear into the wind, dissolve into the other shadows and become nothing.

But the bird began to sing again and this time I could see the song itself. It gave off a silver flicker, it was like a string on a dulcet, trembling under the player's touch, shaking sound into the air. Being thin as air I felt it shiver all through me, and I saw it shining through my darkness.

It was not so hard then, after all, to relinquish my fear, to drift upward; the song was a tether to my sleeping self, to the body below me, which seemed to be no more than glimmers and streaks. But I'd learned that shadows were mutable; I could make something of them by seeing. From the corner of my left eye, the dreamer became a fallen tree, splotched with lichens and moss. I turned my head and from the corner of my right eye, I saw a fist of cords and sticks clutching a sheepskin cloak, a mouth filled with shadow, hair stiff with mud and twigs and leaves. A puppet of wood, no more a part of me. A song bound me to it, a song spun so fine it could break, and there would be silence.

I drifted. I almost flew. But the dreamer twitched. Eyes shifted under her eyelids. I began to feel sorry for what I'd done, for I saw how I'd remade my flesh into something wooden and numb; I'd been altogether too willing to die. But there was still a single coal of the body's fire, an ember under soot and feathers of ash. I breathed on that coal and a flame crept out, and heat with it.