Firethorn (39 page)

I expected Spiller to take offense, but I should have guessed better, for I knew him to be a coward. He muttered something and was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Suppose we ask the canny?”

Rowney said, “Ask her what?”

“What to do about the shade, you clodpate!”

There was another pause.

Rowney said, in a very low voice, “Very well. You ask her.”

“Well, I will,” Spiller said.

“Well—go on then.”

I heard Spiller get up and cross the tent. He shook me.

A canny. They thought me a canny! I opened my eyes and he drew back, startled. My eyes must have turned black from the dwale, like Consort Vulpeja's. The gray shadows that had dimmed my sight were gone. The tent was full of light. It was like being inside a lantern. My eyes watered and I blinked.

I opened my mouth to quarrel with him and thought again. I sat up and waited for the dizziness to pass. I felt threadbare as two-hundred-year-old linen, bleached and scrubbed too many times.

“Help me stand,” I said. “I must see to Consort Vulpeja.”

“She's sleeping,” Spiller said. “I looked in on her just now. You both slept an afternoon and a night and a morning and half the next afternoon away.”

“So long? Truly?”

He nodded.

“Why did you wake me then, if not for the concubine?” I asked, though I knew the answer. “My dreams were more pleasant than your company, I assure you.”

“It's about Sire Rodela. He's not getting better.”

“You'd best not be waking me unless he's dying.” I held my hand out to Spiller and he hesitated a long moment before he helped me to my feet. I looked to Rowney; he was closemouthed, though he'd been bold enough before.

I knelt beside Sire Rodela. He was deep in a fever dream and his legs jerked; his breathing was rough. He'd thrown off his cloak. Under it he wore only his plain shirt, and it was soaked through and twisted around his chest, leaving his body bare below. Spiller had made a loose bandage, having learned that a tight one became embedded as the arm swelled. Now the swelling reached from Sire Rodela's forearm to his shoulder; his fingers were thick and red as sausages. I can't say I pitied him and yet it was hard to think of him as a threat, he looked so slack with his hairy legs sprawling and his dangle sleeping and his face pallid under the beard.

I laid one palm on his burning forehead, the other on his chest, and silently I asked Ardor for help. All in a moment I felt my hands grow hot and the warmth travel upward, and I drew a little heat away from him. But there was a fire hidden under the bandage I was forbidden to touch. I 'd seen the blackening before, how it spreads as flame spreads, leaving charred flesh in its wake. “Have you bathed him in cold water? No? Well, bring some and quickly!”

“It' s the shade of that armiger he killed who's at fault for this,” Spiller said. “We wondered what to do about it.”

“Shade or no shade, I've already told you what to do: get the carnifex.”

Rowney and Noggin dragged a cask of water toward us. “Now you 'll need a rag,” I said to Spiller. “Wash him with the water and do it again and again till he cools down. I've seen you take better care of your horse when he's overheated! And make him drink water too, as much as he'll take. I 'll go fetch Divine Xyster myself.”

“Not so hasty,” he said. “We don't need the priest if you'll just tell us what to do about the dead man.”

I laughed at him. “What do
I
know about that? No more than you—no more than any fool knows. Why don't you burn his little trophy? Then the shade won't find him so easily.”

“That won't be enough.” Rowney spoke at last.

“No, you're right. You need the carnifex. The blackening will kill him if the fever doesn't. “ I knelt down and began to search among Sire Rodela's clothes. “Still, let's burn it. Perhaps it will help—and it can do no harm. Where is it?”

I found the pouch locked away in the small iron-bound box where Sire Rodela kept his valuables. Spiller showed me the key, for he'd spied it out long ago. It was cleverly disguised: the tongue to the buckle of Sire Rodela's knife belt. I loosened the drawstring of the pouch and pulled out the scrap of scalp by a few of the silky hairs, fine as a woman's, fine as Consort Vulpeja's. Surely Sire Bizco had been her kin, a distant cousin at least, if he was her father's armiger. Touching it made my skin creep. “Rowney, fetch his helmet.”

I dropped the grisly thing on the brazier and it began to scorch. I added a handful of candlebark and another of salt hay and the fire flared up. Rowney squatted by the brazier and threw on the lock of hair from the helmet and watched it shrivel to ash.

“Gods, what a stink,” he said.

“Like when the master burned Sire Rodela's hair,” Noggin said.

“Have you ever smelled a drowned man burning?” asked Spiller. “That's the worst.”

“Shouldn't you say something?” Rowney asked me, looking a trifle shamefaced.

“Such as what?”

“I don't know—‘Begone, Sire Bizco, and a curse on your living kin if ever you return again.' Such as that.”

“Well, you've just said it.”

“You say it too,” he said.

I began to laugh. Soon Noggin was giggling and Spiller joined in. Rowney did not. When I saw his face, the laugh stuck in my craw. I said, “I'm no hex, Rowney. I'm a greenwoman, no more than that. My curses are no more potent than yours.”

He wouldn't meet my eyes. This had come of our expedition in the dark. He was a brave man but I'd frightened him. I stood and steadied myself by gripping Rowney's shoulder, digging in my fingers. He flinched but bore it. “Tittle-tattle I may be, but I'm going for the carnifex,” I said to Spiller, and my voice came out hoarse. “Sire Rodela was left to your solicitous care and see what has come of it. You'd let him die before you'd own up that you kept something from Sire Galan he should have known.”

“Why blame me?” Spiller said. “We all kept it from him.”

“Not anymore,” I said.

“What is it you aren't hiding from me anymore?” Galan asked, pulling the door flap closed behind him. We drudges had been speaking among ourselves in the Low. I hadn't known he understood so much of it.

He gave us a thrashing, all of us. He laid on with a girth strap about our shoulders and backs and we stood still for it, one at a time, except for Noggin, who rolled on the floor and whimpered. But first he summoned Divine Xyster, who took Sire Rodela away to the priests' tent, and then he waited until I' d fed Consort Vulpeja what little she could eat—a mash of white bread and milk—and it was nigh on suppertime by then.

Sire Galan gave me no more licks than anyone else, nor any fewer: exactly fifteen. I was the last to get my share. When he finished he said we should be grateful he didn't have his strength back, or he'd have peeled the skin from our ribs, which he would do if we ever did such a thing again. Sire Rodela might order us about and it was our duty to obey him, but not if it meant crossing him—Sire Galan—who was, he should not need to remind us, master of us all and Sire Rodela's master too.

Sire Galan stalked out and we could hear the cataphracts outside whistle and cheer him. They were just back from the training field and had been diverted from their own aches and pains by the sounds of the strap against flesh and the groans Galan had wrested from us.

Spiller put on his shirt, wincing, saying we'd gotten off lightly—but wait till Sire Rodela was better, we' d wish we were never born. We'd wish he was dead, anyway.

I eased the bodice of my dress over my back and shoulders and pulled the laces, but not very tight. Galan could have chosen to hit us harder. As it was we were striped with wide welts and just a few thin lines of red where the skin had broken. The dress was new and now it would be bloodstained, but I'd nothing else to wear, for my old dress was still filthy from the dwale sickness. Rowney made the avert sign with his fingers and I realized I was cursing, steadily cursing. I made my way to Consort Vulpeja's chamber, for I'd had enough of Sire Galan and his drudges.

She was no better. She greeted me with a false sweet smile and said, “You have a lenient master, I think. Too lenient. He should have given you a hundred strokes.”

I glanced at her and went to pick up my soiled dress from the corner where Galan had tossed it. I filled a pot from the cask we'd put in her room and built up a fire in the brazier to heat it. It hurt to move: not just from the strap, but from the horseback journey and some last touch of the dwale smoke, which left me stiff and aching everywhere.

“Are you disregarding me? Because if you are I'll make sure you get another thrashing.” She lay on her cot with her hands folded at her waist and turned her head to watch me.

“No, Consort Vulpeja. What is it you need?”

“You must answer when I speak to you.”

“Yes, Consort.”

Sunup was sitting in the corner by the tent pole sucking on a hank of hair and watching us talk.

“Poor girl,” I said to her. “You shall go home soon. Would you like that?”

She took the hair from her mouth and said, “My mother said I should stay as long as I' m needed.”

“I want her,” said Consort Vulpeja. “She minds me well and I need a new handmaid. Sire Galan will give her to me.”

“She's not his to give,” I said.

“So you are to be my handmaid, I suppose,” she said.

I dunked my dress into the pot, though the water wasn't hot yet—would it never boil?—and I began to scrub the cloth with a scour stone and wood ash.

“
My
laundry needs doing,” she said.

“I'll get you well, Consort, if I can. The rest I'll not undertake.”

“That's up to Sire Galan, surely.”

I shook my head and sat back on my heels and stared at her. “No, it's not,” I said. “For true, it's not.”

he next day was Peaceday and, as it happened, a neap tide. And when the sea went out and out, farther out than we' d seen it go before, leaving the strand bare and sparkling with pebbles and shells and rivulets of water, and uncovering great rocks with hides of salt hay and barnacles, why then there was one rock that did not belong there. Someone saw it from the cliff and there was no mistaking the shape of a man sprawled on his back, legs akimbo.

Soon everyone knew it was Sire Bizco, and knew his clothes had been stuffed with stones. There was sand in his nostrils and mouth and salt frosting his eyelashes. His body was bloated and his skin was puffy and strangely mottled, and a piece of his scalp was missing.

The Ardor himself clambered down the cliff path to see the body. His clan fetched Sire Bizco and burned him with due ceremony. It was said his face was too misshapen to make a good death mask, so they sent his helm to take its place in the clan's Council of the Dead. The rest of his armor was burned with him, for he had no son, but his arms went to the clan. A warrior who dies as a warrior should—on the battlefield instead of in his bed—leaves much of himself behind in his arms and armor; his sons and clan can claim that strength, though it makes the shade's journey harder. Just so, a man will try to take his enemy's equipage for a prize, to be a victor twice—once over the living man and again over the dead. If the battle has been bitter, he'll hang the trophies in his hall for daily mockery and take no ransom for them. This keeps memory long and wars hot.

Sire Rodela had hidden the body and taken for his prize something closer than armor—the man's own skin. The Ardor didn't know who had killed Sire Bizco, but he had no doubt which clan to blame for both the death and the desecration.

It is forbidden to fight on Peacedays, but on the morrow the dormant feud awoke. One of Ardor's cataphracts was leaving a harlot's tent just as one of ours—Sire Ocio—came to call on her, and the brawl that followed yielded a few sword cuts and a cracked pate. Sire Ocio was slashed across his cheek, which would improve his looks, everyone agreed; but the Crux scowled and set men to stand watch every night.

So Sire Galan's sacrifice of his pride went for naught. He'd gained only Consort Vulpeja, who had one face for Galan and another for me. Toward Galan she kept her voice high and her eyes low, as if she were still a maid. Perhaps she didn't realize how unbecoming this was to a starveling. Perhaps she thought she'd fascinated him once and would again. It showed how little she knew him. She'd had a brief acquaintance with his charm and his prick and knew his reputation for wielding both, and also the renown he 'd won for his somewhat insolent bravery on the tourney field. But how could she know him?

He would have respected her courage, if he'd seen it.

She set out to make herself well. She'd been slender before, but smooth and clean limbed. Now there wasn't enough flesh to fill a pinch, and her skin was papery and loose on her frame. She forced herself to eat, though food disgusted her. Half of what she ate came up in retching and much of the rest was purged by the squirts. She was so weak that sometimes she fainted from the exertion of vomiting. But she took some small nourishment despite this: enough to live, enough to gain ground.

The concubine had no more command over herself than an infant. We had to borrow linens. When she soiled herself I washed her with water steeped with sweet-smelling herbs and orris root to chase away the stench and bedsores. Sunup helped. We'd turn her this way and that, and Consort Vulpeja would submit in silence, keeping her eyes closed, as if she pretended we were not there.

All this put me in mind of the Dame, my own dame, wasting away before she died, and how I'd washed her and cared for her, how her slow dying was a torment to us both. I could muster no fondness for Consort Vulpeja. The best I could offer was pity—which she scorned—and patience, and a touch as gentle as I could make it.

She was afflicted by strange moods, one moment lethargic, the next raging or laughing or crying at nothing. But most often she was possessed by a peevish restless will. Oh, how she irked me then, pouring vinegar on my sores. Without the strength to stir from her bed, she could only speak, and speak she did. She wanted what she couldn't have and if by some great exertion I got it for her, it no longer suited.

She asked after Galan's wife: Was she beautiful? Was she of good temper, sweet, docile? How big was her dowry? I couldn't answer her questions, knowing nothing of his wife; she called my silence impudent. Yet when I spoke she also took offense. Either way she swore she'd have Galan thrash me again.

She asked what Galan had paid for her. The prestige of a wife is the dowry she brings to her husband, but that of a concubine is the price she fetches. This I could answer. It was all over the Marchfield how Galan had beggared himself for her. The news put flesh on her bones. What else could she suppose except that Galan was besotted with her?

He came once an evening. She prepared herself for his visits like a man donning armor. I plucked her forehead as she asked me to do, and she squeezed out some tears from the pain without making a sound. She'd dismiss me when he came, but the wall of her chamber was merely a sheet. I heard. We all heard. Galan would inquire after her health and she'd say she was mending. She'd ask after his health and he'd answer he did very well. (Neither would mention her father, who had caused both their injuries.) He might say that the weather continued to be foul, but the priests claimed it would change for the better soon. This was the substance, along with the silences. You'd think he had his tongue lashed to his teeth.

After such a conversation Galan would leave the tent without a glance at any of us, and I'd go to Consort Vulpeja and find her exhilarated, to judge by the flush on her cheeks and the pulse at her neck. If I spoke I might be cruel, so I reined myself in and chewed the sour metal of the bit. Galan's visits were a better elixir than anything I could have made for her.

We were, the concubine and I, still tormented by the dwale. Rift Dread visited her in her sleep and followed her into daylight. She'd shriek that ants were crawling all over her. She cowered away from thieves and packs of black dogs. Her dead father visited her in a rage and called down curses on her head. She begged me to unbind her, thinking her ankles were tied. She swore I was poisoning her. I learned to wait until these confusions passed and she mastered her fear. She took food from my hands despite her mistrust—watching askance all the while. I could hardly begrudge her these suspicions, for she had indeed been poisoned by those who should have cared for her. And she knew that I, as Galan's sheath, had no cause to cherish and much to spite her.

It was Rift Warrior who visited me. I dreamed of death. Not so much of dying but of killing. I'd wake from dreams of fire and a knife in my hands and blood on the blade, wake because I was shouting in my sleep, wake to find I hadn't made a sound.

And Galan, who once would have gathered me up and lulled me into a gentler sleep, was no longer by my side. I was unwelcome in his bed. I slept on the floor by his concubine and suffered her to preen herself about it.

Had I imagined the tenderness in the way Galan had cared for me after the dwale? The welts on my back said I'd dreamed it. I couldn't trust my memory, for it was shiftless and a liar besides, every day a different tale since I breathed the smoke. I was still unsure what realm I'd visited, and what god ruled there. I hoped I'd never journey in those lands again, awake and alive. It seemed a fever dream now, and no more to be trusted.

I hardly saw Galan. He was away from the tent as much as he could be. He was sometimes in the Auspices' tent to see Sire Rodela—who'd mend, the carnifex said—and sometimes in the Crux's tent for various councils. But mostly he was off with his jacks and his horsemaster, beyond the March field in some secluded place, making trials of his strength, what was left to him, and trying to win it back. He'd spent much of his life training to fight from horseback; he'd mastered vaulting on and off in all his armor and other such accomplishments. Without a horse he'd lost the better part of his weaponry. Now he gave up his mail hauberk and leggings, and most of his plate as well, and went lightly armored after the fashion of the priests of Rift. The better to dodge, Spiller said. Galan must learn new tricks, or invent them.

At nightfall Galan would come back to the tent on foot with his men on horseback beside him: an odd sight, and he got some chaff for it from the other cataphracts. He kept his helmet on with the visor down until he was inside the tent, and when he took it off, his face was pale and hard as ivory and shiny with sweat. When he stripped I could see his wound was healing, leaving a thick ridge of scar that twisted under his rib and past his navel. I worried that the sinews of his abdomen, so newly knit together again, would pull apart from his exertions. And every day he took new blows, new bruises, new cuts, which must have come from his men. I thought he was reckless, though I didn't say so; my advice hadn't served him well and I 'd lost the taste for giving it. And for him to go alone and afoot through the Marchfield—alone but for his horse soldiers, and one of them a liverless coward—was to dare the clan of Ardor to take him.

Galan had won back his men. Spiller and Rowney were his again, as if they hadn't been creeping about the tent for days like curs looking to be kicked, as if they'd never wronged him and been whipped for it, as if he 'd never taught them constraint.

All the constraint was between us.

Mai came the third morning after Peaceday. She carried her boy Tobe on her hip and was flanked by her usual escorts. They were armed with longswords and Pinch had a manhound on a choke chain with the little piebald cur trotting free beside. Mai took a risk visiting our camp, since the clan of Ardor made note of our friends and took them for enemies.

Sunup saw her first and called me out of the tent. Tobe crowed to see his sister and held out his arms to her, and Mai let him go and we stood watching as the boy tottered across the common yard on his stubby legs and Sunup chased after him, pouncing. They giggled until they shrieked. The dogs started to bark at the goat tied outside our tent and the goat replied, and Pinch cursed and dragged the manhound away, and I laughed at all this commotion until I marked that Mai was watching her daughter with a frown.

Sunup darted about, her bare shins flashing under the ragged hem of a skirt that suddenly seemed too short for her. I saw how quickly she'd brightened and shed her grave and watchful air. It made me think I'd done wrong to keep her by me, so long away from home.

I said to Mai, “She's a dear one, your daughter.”

“What have you given her to eat?” said Mai. “She's grown too much.”

I took it for a jest, but when I saw she was still frowning, I said, “Daughters grow. Is that so sorrowful?”

“They grow foolish. They grow disobedient.”

“Not Sunup, surely.”

Mai shrugged and put aside her frown. “Sire Torosus is vexed with me for lending her. Says the Sun doesn't rise properly without her in our tent.”

I was taken aback by this. I'd seen Sire Torosus and he was not so sober-sided as Mai had painted him, but rather lean where she was fat, hard as ironwood, and quick in deed and speech—altogether a man. Yet somehow I'd never imagined him or any man of the Blood taking notice of his mud-children, much less missing one of them. I told Mai, “Consort Vulpeja is fond of her too, wants her for a handmaid.”

“I need Sunup, or I'd gladly give her in service,” Mai said. “She'd be well out of it, for Consort Vulpeja will not be coming to war with us, will she?”

I shook my head.

“Does she know this?”

“Not yet.”

“Does she want to, do you think?”

“She expects to. Didn't you give her a charm for forgetting Sire Galan?

I can't say it worked. She lives on hope, from one of his smiles to the next.”

Mai snorted. “And I suppose you don 't.”

She had a barbed wit sometimes.

“Well, has she a hope?” Mai asked.

I forced a smile. “None. False hope in plenty, though. I'm sure she thinks there will be ballads written about the two of them.”

“Oh, there are. You're not about the Marchfield much anymore, or you 'd have heard them. The first made Sire Galan out to be a dupe for the price he paid for a bag of bones. But now there's a new song that couldn't have been bettered if Sire Galan had written it himself—and perhaps he did, at that, or paid a rumormonger to write it. Shall I sing it for you?”