Firethorn (31 page)

Now that I was sure of his answer, I dared to ask, “Do you mean to banish me again?”

“No,” he said.

“Just as well. I wouldn't have gone.”

“Stubborn,” he said. I heard fondness in it. “That's a flaw in a woman.”

“You have the same fault,” I said.

“It's no fault in a man.”

One of the priests stirred on his feather bed and I waited until he was quiet. “I say it is. You were so set upon the sacrifice of your horses, you got up from your sickbed beforetimes and it nearly killed you.”

“Ah, but I'm too stubborn to die.”

My lips near the canvas, I murmured, “Then I'm glad of it. If the shades won't have you because you're mule headed, I suppose it's some use after all.”

I heard a muffled laugh that stopped short with a gasp. “Less chaff, please,” Galan said. “I haven't the stomach for it tonight.”

Our whispers made free of the dark, went where we ourselves couldn't go, as if lips brushed against an ear, as if sound were touch. And if we talked nonsense, what of it? It eased me to spar with him. Yet we crossed wits near a precipice; one misstep and we might fall.

I put my eye to the slit. The lamps were out, but his face was clear before me. His cheek and jaw were shadowed by beard; the rest was white as bone. He turned on his side, toward me, and cradled his head on his arm. To turn made him wince, but he smiled when he said, “I have a chill. Come and warm me.—

I did imagine creeping in to lie beside him on the pallet, and the thought burned. But I said, “Divine Xyster doesn't sleep as soundly as you suppose. You have only to stir and he'll come running.”

“I'll risk it.”

“I will not.”

There was no smile on his face now. He labored to sit. The covers slid down, leaving his torso bare save for the bandage crisscrossing his midriff. He bowed his head and his hair fell over his face; his breath came harsh and quick. He began to hitch himself across the floor toward me. Only days ago he'd have covered the ground between us in one stride.

“What are you doing?”

“If you won't come to me, I must come to you,” he said.

“Then you're reckless, and a fool besides.”

“Fool, is it?”

“What would
you
call a man who throws everything away on a whim and a wager? Even his life—for you'll lose that too if you're not careful.” I was reckless myself. I hadn't meant to speak so bluntly, but my anger was hasty, and wouldn't tarry for wisdom.

He reached out his hand and touched the wall between us. “Hush,” he said. “I've had time and enough these last days to reckon how much of a fool I am, and of what sort. I don't need you to tell me. But tell me this:
have
I lost everything? I dreamed I lost you too. Is it true?”

I said, “I know why you want me, why you keep me. It's for luck, only for luck. You've said so yourself. Now your luck has turned, what use am I?”

“What use?” he asked. “What use is breath?”

I answered, “None, to a dead man. So lie you down and rest.” But the words lingered between us and now I heard them better:
What use is breath?
I'd sought this when I bound him, that I should be as necessary to him as air, water, and bread. Yet I had reason to mistrust his words.

He wouldn't lie down. I had the advantage, for I could see him where he saw only darkness. I searched for omens in the furrows of his brow and the corners of his mouth. I should be able to interpret him well; I'd studied his signs, since we'd met, as carefully as any priest studied auguries. I'd taken his long silence as a token of sorrow and of rage that he'd been cast down. Nor did I forget his anger at me. Had I misread him? There was both sorrow and rage, I was sure of it; but if he was contrite, it meant he'd turned his fury most of all upon himself.

I traced the line of his profile from brow to nose to lips, and there I tarried. I could barely hear him. “You'll leave me now, sure as Chance has abandoned me.”

He turned away, and by the hunch of his shoulders, the angle of his nape, the curve of his back, this much was plain: he grieved, and yet refused to weep. What could I say to ease him? I had nothing as precious to offer as what he'd lost—Chance's favor, horses, the regard of his fellows. I'd already given what little I had, and as far as I could tell, sweet words aside, he didn't value that little so highly.

In a while he turned toward me. His eyes were narrowed and his mouth was grim. “You'll leave me, sooner or later. Well—you may try—but you'll find you don't have my leave to go.”

“It was a dream,” I said.

“It was a
true
dream.”

“It was false. Why say this? I've been steadfast.
You
are the one who dallied elsewhere.” Vehement words, constrained by a whisper.

“And perhaps I will again. That means nothing.” He was jealous of the breeze touching my skin; a sheath hadn't the same prerogative.

“You paid dear for that nothing.”

“And if I lose you too, I will have paid too much.”

“Fine words. If you mean them.”

“Do you willfully mistake my meaning? I have been plain as I can be. I've tried to please you, haven't I? I thought you were content.”

“With a headcloth, a length of wool, and a pair of slippers.”

“If it's gifts you want—if that's all you want—you shall have them. What rare and precious thing do you lack? I'll get it for you. You forget my uncle left me something when he took my pride. He left me my money.”

I pressed my cheek against the tent. My face was wet. A torrent of words had carried us this far, farther than I'd meant to go. Yet not far enough—I should speak of that maiden now, and how she too had paid for what they'd done. But I was afraid to speak of it. And I was selfish; never had bitter words sounded so sweet.

Galan said, “I gave you something I thought you wanted more. You're a hawk by nature; very well, I let you slip your jesses and hunt about the Marchfield with your fat friend amongst the dames and the whores, and make a few coins. Maybe I misjudged. I see I got no thanks for it.”

“So you had me watched.” I thought of Noggin, simple Noggin, always at heel like my own shadow. I should have guessed he was carrying tales.

“If you keep one secret from me, you may keep many. I may be a fool, but I'm not foolish enough to take a woman's word for how she spends her time,” he said harshly.

“Then judge me by my deeds, not my word—as I judge you by yours. What cause do
you
have for mistrust? Why accuse me, say I will leave? Is it because you want me to go? I'm just a sheath, and when the war is over, you'll put away your sword and cast me off. If that time has already come, tell me quick and have done with it.” I looked away from the peephole, from his face and his blind staring eyes.

“Enough,” Galan said. “Is this your revenge for a few nights away from your bed? You'd mock me to death.”

“I'm not mocking you,” I whispered.

“Maybe I deserve it of you. I've laid waste to all I've touched, even this, even what I hold most dear.”

“Now you mock me.”

“No, never.”

There was a long, long silence. In that silence much noise that I hadn't heard before: the wind, the spatter of rain on the tents, dogs barking, a man snoring. I'd been so intent on Galan, I'd nearly forgotten the priests and their drudges asleep in the tent. I'd followed his voice deep into the quiet between us, where we could speak no louder than a breath and be heard, and no other would hear us.

When he spoke again I felt he had picked his words with great care before he let them go. “When I first saw you, you caught my fancy; maybe for the color of your hair. I thought a tumble or two would suffice. But the more I had, the more I wanted. On the third night, when I asked you to come with me, I asked myself why I should be so content to lie beside you while you slept. And yet—you agreed too readily and that made me wonder, and I was not the first and that made me jealous—and so I was discontent. On the fourth night I thought: what appetite grows the more it is fed, and finds no surfeit? I asked the same on the fifth night and the sixth and every night thereafter. I thought that the little maiden might cure my craving; I wagered on it, you might say. But all she cured was my doubt.” He paused. In a voice less than a whisper, he said, “If you truly don't know this—if you don't know I'm starving now for the sight of you—I fear it's not mockery but something worse: indifference. It means you don't feel the same want.”

If a woman can be unmanned, I was. Unmanned and disarmed. I leaned on the tent and put my palms against the canvas and my eye to the slit and saw him sitting still and tense with his head cocked, as if he listened for something—for me.

“Galan,” I said, and went no further. I had never called him Galan without “Sire” before it. I started again. “You sent me away, but here I sit. Why else would I be here?”

He smiled faintly. He said, “To torment me, I suppose,” but he breathed freer.

“Because we are bound, you and I,” I said truthfully. If I could believe him, he was tied to me even before I buried the womandrake. Now we must be twice bound—but this I forbore to say. “It's a tight knot. Only a blade can undo it.”

I pressed against the wall between us. Under one finger I felt a seam that held together two lengths of the canvas, running up and down the wall. Wax was thick over the seam to keep out rain, but the stitches were coarse and long.

“Galan, do the priests still sleep?”

“So it seems. Like bears in winter.”

I put my knife to the heavy thread of the seam, cut it through, and with knife and fingertips began to unpick the stitching. I cursed under my breath that I had not thought of this before, how I might unseam a bit of the wall and sew it up again before daybreak, and none the wiser.

Galan laughed a short, breathless laugh. I heard him drag himself closer. “And you call
me
a fool,” he said.

ivine Xyster was true to his word, sending Sire Galan home to his tent on the morrow. Those who'd wagered on Sire Galan dying paid up and made new wagers on whether he'd go home or go to war. A few fools bet that the Crux would relent and let him ride. A race was on between Sire Galan's mending and the war beginning.

The king's men had finished cutting their road to the sea, leaving a wide white scar behind them, paved with chalky rubble. The sledgehammers were silent. But down by the boatworks, the thump of caulkers pounding tow between the cracks with heavy mallets echoed off the cliffs; the armories in the market sent up a thudding, ringing, clanging, tapping, rasping, hissing din from the various hammers, large and small, and from the files, chisels, bellows, and hot metal doused in cold water. All that would go on until we departed, and after; such work was never finished.

Why, then, did the king dally in the Marchfield with winter coming on? At night our breath clouded the air and some mornings there was a rime of frost on the gorse bushes. It was not the cold alone that people feared, but the damp that came with it; those two companions roamed the encampment, spreading ague and other ills, making mischief. From our own tents a two-day fever called the burning carried off Sire Limen and left the Crux with the unlucky number of sixteen cataphracts; it also took Sire Erial's jack, Ware, and five foot soldiers. One of them was Dag, from my village. The carnifex bled the sick in the tents and dosed them with some kind of fever-soothe, and left the foot soldiers to fend as best they could. They said Divine Xyster could tell a man was likely to die by the color of his blood, for it would be nearer black than red. Most who got the burning recovered from it as swiftly as it had come, whether Divine Xyster bled them or not. As for the others, the soldiers shrugged and said Chance wanted their bones for dice.

But restlessness too was catching. “Sow out of time and reap a poor harvest,” the drudges said, meaning war had its seasons and winter was not one of them. The longer King Thyrse waited, the more we'd suffer for it, food and fodder and shelter all harder to come by. The rumormongers claimed he had a reason for delay, but no two agreed on what it might be, or when we might leave. The Crux, who spent hours closeted with the king, said nothing, and time proved rumors to be lies.

Once I asked Mai why the king tarried. She shrugged and told me I must learn to love the waiting. She said it was a soldier's lot to wait and wait and never know why, and the rest was dust and mud and a hard slog followed by a sudden sharp poke in the eye, and if a man lived through that, there'd be more of the same. Much like a sheath's life, she said, only we mind so much when we got poked.

Sire Galan was determined to mend fast. He aimed to go to war even if he had to walk. He promised to obey Divine Xyster, to sleep when he was bidden and to lie abed until he was bidden to rise, to eat and drink as he was bidden and in everything be more biddable than I'd ever found him.

I hoped he might be as obliging to me, for I must try him on the matter of Maid Vulpeja; already I'd waited too long. At times I'd doubted she was poisoned, but then I'd think how a slow poison was better disguised. Nearly a tennight ago Mai had said the maid had no more than a few days to live, and yet she lingered. But I had no doubt she'd die soon if she didn 't leave her clan's tent for better care. That was a race too, though no one wagered on it.

That first night Galan was back in his own bed, I pinched the wick of the last burning lamp between my fingers and bent over him.

“I'll lie on the floor,” I whispered, “for your comfort.”

“I think not,” he said.

We were alone in the tent save for Noggin, asleep on his pallet by the grain sacks. The rain had moved on, east toward the mountains, and fog had come in its stead, settling on the camp near evening. The Blood had taken their supper outside and now most of them sat up late around the common hearth, a ring of blackened stones. Sire Guasca's jack brought out his pipes and another man a pair of gourd drums, and they played melancholy tunes at first and then the raucous songs that follow too much wine. The fire waxed and waned as it was fed a bit of driftwood, damp gorse, or one of the bundled sheaves of salt hay that could be gotten cheap; the firelight hollowed out a vault within the white fog.

I untied my headcloth and shucked off my dress and crawled in beside Galan. I was afraid I'd hurt him. The cot had never seemed so narrow. No room to lie unless we clasped tight, or one turned when the other did. Galan didn't smell sweet; he had the sour taint of fever sweat still on him.

I hadn't tied the door flap and it snapped in the wind. A draft of cold air found its way inside, fraying the ribbon of smoke rising from consolation flowers on the brazier. A faint red glow breathed from the coals. I would have gotten up to fix the door, but I was grateful for air that carried the smell of the sea.

Galan and I lay face-to-face. His skin burned against me except where the bandage covered him. I put my arm under his neck and he tucked his head between my shoulder and cheek; he sighed and I sighed. Then he began to shake, and after a moment I realized he was laughing silently. “Oh,” he said, “I'll never forget it, how you opened a door in the tent last night where none should be. You're a clever seamstress.”

“Maybe. But don't boast about it or the Crux will throw me to the dogs. He promised to do it once if I got underfoot, and he's a man of his word.”

“Ah, yes. My
amiable
uncle …,” he said, and there was a freight of bitter pride in those few words. He claimed the Crux had taken his pride when he'd disgraced him, but it was there regardless—and no small part of it was pride in his Blood, his house, his uncle, and his uncle's favor. But Galan had spent that favor lavishly, spent it until it was gone. There'd be no leniency from the Crux, no kindness beyond the one mercy he'd already been offered.

Thinking of this, I moved my head so I could look him in the eye, and said urgently, “Galan, you must take your time mending. Or feign sickness, if need be. No one will blame you if you're not well enough to go to war. Accept your uncle's charity and go home. Why should you cast your life away? You won't please the Crux-he's past pleasing.”

He laughed. “You've not met my father. It's no safer at home.”

I was vexed that my fear amused him; I'd not show it again. I mocked him, saying, “So your father frightens you?”

“More than any army,” he said, and took a kiss before I expected it.

And soon he had one leg between my legs and a hand traveling down my back, and his mouth was on my neck and the question I'd thought of asking was flown. And then I had my leg on his waist and the blanket slipped down, and then his teeth on my lower lip and his arm under my knee and yet some sense enough left to both of us to know he couldn't take my weight on him nor should he lie on me, so we stayed side by side and it was awkward until we found our fit. Then I opened my eyes and found Galan watching me with a narrow smile. He moved a little and no more, gave a little and no more, my hips a cradle for this rocking. My breath caught at the intolerable sweet torment and I closed my eyes against his smile. Then he grasped my shoulders and his hands tangled in my hair and he pulled me down hard.

Afterward he lay sighing against my neck and there was honey in my veins. My limbs felt full and heavy and warm even as cold air licked sweat from my skin. He asked if I was content and I was sorry he'd spoken, for I was content, and wished I could remain so, side by side with him through a peaceful night. I waited too long to answer, making excuses to myself that Maid Vulpeja would keep till the morrow, and if perchance she didn't outlive the night, the gods could hardly fault me for it. Knowing all the while that my courage was failing and all the speeches and words I'd mustered against this moment had run off like so many deserters. He pressed me and still I hesitated and he pressed me harder, thinking I kept a secret from him. By then I had so vexed him with my silence I might as well speak up, and I told him I'd be content if he would pay Maid Vulpeja's price and bring her to his tent as his concubine and save her life. He surprised me by laughing long and hard.

“I'm in earnest. Why do you laugh?” I said.

“Save her life? Do you suppose she dies of lovesickness, and I'm the cure?”

“She lies closer to death right now than you lay these last nights. I've heard that her kin have poisoned her, and all because she let a certain pickpocket at her maidenhead, a light-fingered, ungrateful thief. A fickle thief. You've forgotten all about her—haven't you?—though she dies for you.”

He said, “Her father showed her about like a whore. He shouldn't have been surprised she turned out to be one.”

I'd stifl ed my fury a long time. Now, as it rose, my voice rose with it. I said that if she was a whore, he'd made her one, and now she was dying for it, as her father and Sire Alcoba's armiger and Semental too had died for it, and for his honor he should do something to make amends.

There was a long wait before Galan spoke, and when he did his voice was low, and where my words had rushed, his had a deliberate pace. “My honor is not in
your
keeping,” he said, and he turned on his back and stared at the ceiling of the tent.

“How good is your honor—to a woman? I wonder what you said to Maid Vulpeja in the privy tent, what promises, what swearing up and down, what oaths on your faith and by your word?” I had one arm over his chest and I felt his breathing change and his muscles stiffen. I moved my arm away. Suddenly I felt it was dangerous to touch him, though we lay so close.

He turned a look on me that held my voice in my throat. When he spoke his mouth twisted, as if the words tasted sour. “Do you think I have to forswear myself to get a maid to lift her skirts? I said no more than I needed to say, which was that she was fair and I wanted her. Which was not a lie. And since she is the seventh of seven daughters and without a dowry—and within reach of any old man with a purse of gold who thinks a virgin's blood and a tight sheath will polish up his rusty prick—do you wonder she didn't require much persuasion? She gave her maidenhead away for a good jouncing, and what she gave, she gave freely.”

He made me see it again, he meant me to see it as I had pictured it too many times unbidden since he'd won his wager: Maid Vulpeja astride his lap in the privy tent, skirts rucked about her waist, his hands gripping her hips, his voice in her ear.

I said through my teeth, “You are a notable prickmaster, I'm sure. And I'm sure you've gotten in and out of many beds and many scrapes before and never felt it touched on your honor, though you dishonored those you touched. But this is different, isn't it? Her maidenhead, which you claim you got for free, cost you your health, your horses, and will probably cost you your life before long. The rest of her will come cheap—because she
was
fair. She's not fair any longer. Now her face, which pleased you so much, looks very like a skull. Three chests of linens and fifteen good milk cows toward a sister's dowry and she's yours. Or anyone's.”

“Let anyone have her then. I owe her nothing.”

“But you dishonored her. And try as you might to gainsay it, you are dishonored too.”

He rolled toward me and his hand was over my mouth, pressing hard, and his face was so close I felt his breath on my cheek. It was then I recalled how he'd let Sire Rodela say too much before he burned off his hair. So he had let me condemn myself, word by word. But it was too late to unsay any of it.

In a hoarse voice he said, “I would kill a man for saying less than you've said tonight. And you—a mudwoman—presume to teach me what the honor of my Blood requires. It's true what they say: ‘Smite a drudge and he will favor you, favor a drudge and he will spite you.' I should have beaten you long ago. Maybe then you wouldn't despise me.”

He took his hand away and I drew breath to say I didn't despise him, I never despised him. He put his hand over my mouth again and whispered, “Be still! I'd get no joy of thrashing you, but I'll do it if you try me further.” And with that he pushed himself away and lay with his back toward me.

I wondered at his forbearance, why he hadn't struck me for the things I'd said. How could I have spoken of his honor when I knew he was so jealous of it? I'd blundered my way into this quarrel with unguarded words and lost my chance to win it. There was no shelter in his bed, so I got up and pulled on my dress; I put the blanket over Galan and he shrugged it off. Then I sat on the ground next to the cot and bowed my head.