Firethorn (4 page)

I don't know how many days and nights the fever burned in me. I was melted, cast, beaten on the anvil of the tree's root, and drawn to a point. Quenched at times, so the chills shook me, and then heated and pounded again. The pounding kept time with my heart. The heat purified instead of scorching, burning away the dross.

I awoke to a daylight world where shadows kept their places. The sheepskin was sodden under me, and the smell of sweat was strong. I'd bled from the nose and the blood had dried in a crust on my face and neck. I was weak as a newborn filly and just as thirsty.

I knew then that I'd been between Ardor's hammer and anvil. The god had come in the avatar of the Smith to temper me. I took a thorn and made a libation of blood to give thanks to Ardor for letting me live. And I took Firethorn as my name.

When one of the gods chooses you for a tool or a weapon, you may go on, heedless; nevertheless, you are marked. So I went on for a time, grateful that Ardor had saved me, and didn't ask why. I suppose I was unwilling to ask, for fear of an answer.

Yet I'd changed under the Smith's hammer. His blows had shaken part of me loose, and I felt weaker for it. What was my shadow, in the dream, if not my shade given form? Now I feared my shade might go wandering before-times, while I still lived, and leave the rest of me to rust. If that was a gift, I was ungrateful for it.

Ardor gave me other things: a song, a handful of berries, and the gift of seeing in the dark. It may be a kind of trickery, this way of seeing, but ever since, I've been able to make my way in darkness when others stumbled, so long as I looked askance.

Even in the day I saw more clearly, both the quick and the subtle: the hawfinch high among the branches, the lynx in the dappled shadows, the hare quivering in the long grass. Often, from the corners of my eyes, I glimpsed the shadows of presences, not quite seen, not quite unseen. The old gods had not fled the Kingswood after all. They were the trees of the forest, and they drew breath in winter and let it out in summer, year upon year, and all the animals of the woods flickered by while the trees stood still. The Blood accused them of malice, but they bore us no ill will unless we came with fire and axes.

And everywhere in the Kingswood I saw signs of Ardor's presence, signs that had gone unmarked before I ate the firethorn berries. The Smith, Hearthkeeper, and Wildfi re were manifest in the distant pounding of the armorers' hammers and the smoke of the huntsman's cook fire in trees riven by lightning.

In such signs I have long since tried to read the god's wishes. But priests study all their lives to divine the will of the gods, and still dispute their omens. Each of the twelve gods has three avatars, by which they show themselves to us, but in truth the gods are so far beyond us they are unknowable. In their wars and alliances, they make and unmake the world. How can I be certain what Ardor made of me in the forge of the Kingswood, and for what purpose? Perhaps I have already done whatever I was meant to do.

watched for the Midsummer's eve bonfire from my lair on Bald Pate. I meant to return to the village a year to the day I'd left for the Kingswood. But why should the day matter? The seasons go round the year and never come back, for, as everyone knows, time moves in a spiral, not a circle. To persist in folly made me no less a fool. Once I'd counted myself brave for venturing into the Kingswood alone; now I wondered if it would not have been braver to stay among people. Solitude had withered around me like a husk. Yet I stayed until the bonfire released me.

On Midsummer morning I walked down through the ripening fields to the croft of Na's sister, Az. I carried my sheepskin cloak under one arm and shaded my eyes with my hand. A great humming and chaffering of insects rose around me as I walked, as if the fields had a voice under the Sun.

When I stepped through the gate into the mud-walled yard, the croft seemed deserted save for the hens scratching around the stone feet of the granary and a sow sleeping in the Sun. But I saw smoke coming from the summer kitchen, a lean-to built against the hut and roofed by the huge leaves of a golden hopvine that clambered up the poles. The yard smelled of dung and dust and meat cooking.

I stooped under the pitched roof of the lean-to and peered inside. Az was squatting by the fire pit in the scattered yellow light that came through the leaves. She was smaller than I remembered, and I wondered if she'd dwindled since I saw her last. I hadn't thought she was so old. Her head grew forward from the rounded hump of her shoulders, and she had to strain to look up at me. I couldn't bear for her not to recognize me, so I called out, “Az, it's me, Luck, that used to come by with Na. Are you in health? How is Na?” After a year in the woods without speaking, the words stuck to my tongue.

Az got to her feet, steadying herself on my arm, and came into the light. “Ah, Luck, did you think I wouldn't know you and your red hair? You look to be on fire with the Sun behind you like that. Come and sit.” She led me to the croft's guardian tree, a rowan, and we sat on the ground in its shade. Az pulled her shawl close around her, though it was a warm day. The pattern was the loveknot; I'd made the shawl myself as a present for Na. I thought of the Dame, how she never could make a weaver of me. My mind would go wandering and leave my fingers to fumble, and mistakes unnoticed had to be picked out later. But Na had treasured the shawl. I wondered why Az wore it.

“How does Na fare these days? I don't want to go to the manor, so I hoped you might send one of the boys for her.”

Az shook her head. “Na is gone. Carried off by the shiver-and-shake this winter. Others too: Min and two of his daughters, and some of those Herders who live off by themselves and never get along with anybody. Dame Lyra caught it too and miscarried. It was bad this year, with all the snows and the cold.”

I was silent for a while, and wouldn't look at her. “I should have been here. With the Dame gone you were in need of a healer.”

Az said, “Nothing to be done, it was that quick. I know Na missed you, though. She'd come to visit Peacedays, and we'd talk of you living on white bread and cream at the king's court.”

A year ago, I'd stood beside Na watching the dancers around the bonfire, and told her I was going to the city of Ramus, where the king lived, to find work as a dyer. It was a likely lie, likelier than the truth. I lacked patience as a weaver, but I'd been drawn to the mysteries of dyestuffs and mordants, the transformations in the dyebaths. It was a kind of green lore, and all such lore came easily to me, as if I had only to recollect it rather than to learn it for the first time.

Now my lie came back to shame me. How could I admit I'd been in the Kingswood, so near at hand when Na was dying?

Az cocked her head and looked me over with her shiny black eyes. I'd taken care to wash before leaving the Kingswood, but my hair was a bramble thicket, my dress a rag, and my feet bare and hard as horn. She sighed. “But I see you were never at court. I wouldn't bother to kill a chicken as skinny as you. Wouldn't be worth the coals to cook it.”

She fetched me a slab of unleavened barley bread and a bowl of greens stewed with bacon. I dipped the bread into the stew and crammed it into my mouth. Tears ran down and salted it. I was too full of sensation, I was drowning in it: the taste of meat after long fasting, the smell of burning wood, the flood of words coming up from underground, the sweet welcome and sad news.

Az let me eat and cry in peace until curiosity overmatched her courtesy. “So where did you go, then? You look wild as a bog wight come to scare the children into bed.”

I said, “I've been on a hard road, truth be told, and I gained nothing from it but a new name. I'm called Firethorn now.” I'd never spoken my new name aloud before, and I felt as though I overreached. But for certain Luck did not fit me well anymore, and sometimes one must grow into a name.

“Firethorn suits you,” was all Az said.

She didn't ask again where I had been, and I was grateful for it. She spun a thread of gossip around the manor and the village, saying Sire Pava had sent away the old priest when he grew forgetful, and the new one was a Sun priest and not a priest of the Heavens, and what use was he? He had no notion of how to read the weather or the stars and birds, how to tell by signs which day to plow and which to sow, when to dig a hole or breed the ram to the ewes; he never looked up at all, as far as she could see. The crops and flocks had suffered for it—twenty lambs stillborn and another taken by an eagle, and a blight on the rye too.

And there was talk of war. It was said Sire Pava himself was going on campaign, and refused to wear hand-me-down armor from his father. He and the steward were squeezing the village hard to pay for his new harness and weapons. To be sure, a lot of coin stuck to Steward's fingers. “Rooster thinks he rules the henhouse, but Fox knows better,” Az said.

Thinking of Na, I lost the thread. It was bitter to me that I'd turned my back on her before I left, had found so little to say to her in the way of farewell. Shouldn't I have known her time was short, or felt her need of me, even in the Kingswood? I put my head on my knees and Az fell silent. We sat like that for a time, under the rowan tree, while the chickens pecked for grain and a chiffchaff sang above our heads.

I'd fed on my pride a twelvemonth and it was near eaten up, but I didn't intend to go back to the manor and beg for a place as a scullion. Az let me know that I'd be welcome to stay, and gave me Na's second dress to wear and a rag to wrap around my head. The dress hung loose and left my calves bare. Still, it was more proper than what I wore out of the Kingswood. Soon her youngest son, Fleetfoot, came home to fetch the midday meal for the men in the fields, and I went to help him.

Az had borne ten children, and five boys had lived. The two married sons had built their crofts next to hers. Their huts shared the same wall and the gates were always open between the yards for the children to run in and out. Three sons still lived at home, but all five liked working their shares of the commons together.

It was a long walk to the field where they were haying, across the river ford and the valley to a high and stony meadow. One of the wives, Halm, came with Fleetfoot and me, with her baby slung in a shawl on one hip and a great basket on the other.

“I'm glad there's a rill up there,” she said as we climbed the steep path. “I get so weary carrying the water bucket.”

We called the men from the pool of shade cast by a great beech, and they came laughing and shouting. They'd stripped to loincloths, and the sweat shone on their brown shoulders and legs. Their bodies gave off heat, like horses. They ate and drank, tossing a few japes back and forth. One asked me where I'd been and I couldn't think how to answer. Another said, “Looks like her tongue swam away,” and they laughed. I sat with my head averted, pretending not to watch. They drowsed until the shade moved away. The smell of sweat and cut hay and earth baking under the Sun went to my head like hard cider and made me dizzy.

And so I went to live among the villagers. Their houses were of mud mixed with dung and straw, daubed on a frame of poles and withies and thatched with reeds. They slept in one room and their animals in the next. Dirt was ground into their skin. Their clothes were as drab as peat and stone, fir and straw; the Blood reserved the most vivid dyes for their clan colors. Drudges spoke the Low among themselves, but they knew enough of the High to placate their masters. Now I saw that the villagers had another face than the one they turned to the manor. They never forgot that they were there first, before the Blood, born from the earth of those very mountains.

A cock belonging to the old alewife, Anile, was always the first to crow in the village, long before dawn. I rose at his summons to grind barley, oats, and rye for bread and porridge. Wheat went for taxes, so we never had the fine, leavened bread of the manor. The brothers complained until I learned to grind fine enough. We hid the mortar and pestle in a hole in the wall, because Sire Pava enforced his monopoly on milling. We'd take the miller a scant measure to make him think it was all we had, and he'd be sure to cheat us in turn.

Sometimes in the dark I heard the rhythmic scraping sound of other women grinding, and I wondered if in time I'd be worn smooth enough to fit in, smooth as an old mortar. A mudwoman's toil never ends and never lasts: clean clothes are dirtied, meals are swallowed, and there are always new weeds in the garden. I remembered the Kingswood, how I'd risen when I pleased—forgetting how restless my sleep had been, and how I'd longed for even the humblest porridge. The tedious chores wore away at me, but I was glad to spare Az the worst of them. She was not as frail as she looked, but there was so much that needed doing. She said we pulled well in the same yoke, and whatever had she done before I came?

I learned to tell her sons apart. The youngest was called Fleetfoot because he won all the village races. He was still a smooth-cheeked boy, with a deep chest and lean flanks like a gazehound. The second youngest was Ot; he was proud of his new blond beard, roaming out of the house at night to show it to the village girls. I started calling him Wheatbeard and the name was apt, so he kept it. Maken was the eldest still at home and in no hurry to be wed, for girls and widows (and wives, Halm said) were fond of his merry hazel eyes and his wide shoulders, and many had found him a sweet nut come cracking time. I found him unsettling, myself, and it made me shy of him.

On Peacedays, the one idle day in every tennight, I'd watch the green youth of the village go courting, with their banter and raillery, forthright stares and sly glances. No one looked my way. I'd been fair enough before the Kingswood, I suppose, fair enough for Sire Pava. Now my ribs showed plain as those on a stray dog; my hips had hollows instead of dimpled flesh. When I looked at my face in a basin of water, my cheekbones and chin were too sharp, my eyes too deep and too dark.

I found I couldn't sleep under a roof and within walls, next to Az and her boys when they unrolled the pallets at night. I slept under the rowan tree, and even there I rested uneasy. Carnal's female avatar, that fat voluptuary Desire, sent me dreams, and with them her itch and tickle. Better if she'd come when Sire Pava wanted me; now she was too late. I ate as much as I could, but Az's sons were hungry, and I never had my fill.

I saw old friends from the manor on market days and on Peacedays, before the village shrine. Cook was shocked that I was so gaunt, and brought me savories from the manor table. She said Dame Lyra could curdle milk with a look since her miscarriage, and no wonder: Sire Pava had brought his mudwoman right into the manor, and she'd started another bastard with a daughter just off the tit. I dreaded seeing Sire Pava about the village, but he heeded me no more than the dirt he trod underfoot. I didn't want his notice, but it angered me to know I didn't trouble his mind in the least, while he troubled mine.

When I lived in the manor, I thought the villagers dull witted, with their lazy way of talking. They lopped off the end of every word, as if they couldn't be bothered to pronounce it plainly, and yet they used so many: they dawdled all around a tale when a straight path would have been quicker. But when Az and I would go visiting, words went galloping past and I'd stumble after.

They said they were living like toads under a harrow since Sire Pava had claimed an extra day of labor every tennight, leaving them only five for their own fields. They said Steward was always watching, prying. Nothing was beneath his notice; he'd skin a flea for its hide and tallow.