Firethorn (2 page)

Poisons come in many guises, not all bitter or foul smelling. All signs given us by the gods are true, no doubt, but our reading is often at fault; so I found I couldn't rely on the signs the Dame had shown me. I made a trial of each new plant by sniffing it and holding a morsel on my tongue. I'd always been able to guess what herbs Cook had used in the pot, and now my senses were honed by need and fear. The more I erred, the more I was tutored. I was often queasy, sometimes feverish. When I got too sick, I ate clay to purge the poisons.

My blood stopped its monthly tides, and I feared that if I lived, I would be barren, a dried-up old woman before my time. Scratches healed slowly and my teeth loosened in my gums. I'd seen this wasting before, when the Dame was dying.

It's a blessing that the pangs of hunger, like the travails of childbirth, are duller in recollection. What comes back to me now, sharp and clear, is the sight of four or five red deer bounding up a snow-covered hill in the pale yellow light of morning. The deer were not pursued; they ran, it may be, for the joy of it. The trees were black against the snow and the long stripes of their shadows were a color between blue and violet.

Short winter days made for endless nights. I envied the bears their long sleep in an earth den, feeding on dreams of fish and berries, and I envied sleepers such as I had once been, behind shutters and doors, safe in their beds; I envied anyone with a lamp, a candle, a hearth. I lay long awake, and sometimes the dark pressed in close and stifling, and sometimes—far worse—the dark grew immense around me, and I was alone in a night that covered the world.

When I slept, I sank into the ocean realm of Sleep, as we all do. Sometimes Sleep lapped me in balm and floated my woes away, but often I encountered nightmares as I went deeper, and had to flee into wakefulness. Sleep is an avatar of the god Lynx, and therefore capricious.

In time I learned to drift in Sleep's shallows. There, just below waking, I could catch soothing dreams the way a boy might tickle a fish into a net. I learned to hold them fast too, for dreams are shapeshifters, likely to turn baleful if they slip your grasp. The Dame visited these dreams and brought me a joint of lamb, bread, a withered apple, and she ate with me, as she never did alive. I'd dream it all so plain, the cream in a glazed bowl, a green fly buzzing in a shaft of light. She'd tell me to make sure the wine casks didn't leak or to gather willawick for yellow dye: many tasks and all left undone.

I fear I shouldn't have dreamed of the Dame so often. The dead are not beyond suffering and want and even curiosity, so we're forbidden to speak their names in the year after they've left us. The priests say that their shades might linger to eavesdrop, distracted from the journey they must make. Perhaps dreams have the same power as speech to hold a shade close, for when I bade the Dame stay awhile in my dream, I felt her near. But I awoke hungrier and more desolate than ever.

In the dark-of-the-Moon before Longest Night, I had a true dream. Some such dreams foretell the future, but this one foretold the past, and I knew it for true even while I slept in its grip, by the scent of it; in ordinary dreams I have no sense of smell. I couldn't recall that I'd ever before breathed this incense of herbs crushed underfoot, this dusty redolence rising from the rocks as if they were bread in an oven. Yet I knew it: the smell of mountains, but not the mountains of the Kingswood.

I followed my father up a trail to a high pass between higher peaks capped with snow. The mountains were rocky and steep, arid and open. I had a small pony because I was small. He was on a big roan gelding, leading a pack mule, singing a bit for me and for his own pleasure. The road was a cobbled track with a wall beside it, and as he reached the top of the pass, he turned in his saddle to watch me and grinned in his ruddy beard. I hunched over the pony's withers, feeling her labor to climb the last stretch. She was eager, knowing as I knew that home was down the other side of the pass. I saw clouds flying below us, and under them cloud shadows moving over the long, narrow lake in the valley, and our town among the other towns along the shore. The lake was a deeper blue than the sky. Where the Sun struck the water, it threw off white sparks. Then my father looked behind me and cried out without words, or in a language I understood only in dreams, and I knew he cried danger. He pointed over my shoulder at a line of men on horseback on the breast of another mountain. Their helmets glinted and their banners were black. Dust smoked around their horses' hooves, coming our way.

When I awoke I was so taken with the image of my father that I gave little thought to the soldiers. The Blood can trace their lineages back to the gods, but we mudfolk call a man lucky whose wife is so faithful he sees his own features sketched on his children's faces—as my father saw himself in me, in my dream.

It's no great shame among drudges to be fatherless. Still, I wanted to know mine. I didn't feel the lack of a mother so much. When I was very small, I was content to think Na was my real mother. Later I wondered if I were the by-blow of some gardener or groom she thought beneath her.

But she'd told me often enough that I was a foundling. I came to the Dame's household when I was old enough to run; by the number of my teeth they'd reckoned me to be about four years of age. I understood neither the High tongue nor the Low, and when I spoke, no one could understand me. They called me Luck for my hair, the color of new-forged copper, for redheads are favored by Chance, the female avatar of Hazard. No one in the village had seen such hair before. I don't recall the time before I came to the manor, and no wonder. We dream our infancy, and forget that dream when we awaken to our selves and our duties.

They gave me simple tasks: sweeping and scouring, combing the fringe on carpets, emptying slops. I was always running off and leaving things half done, always distracted. Na would make me fetch a willow wand for the beating I was due. Afterward she'd soothe me and call me her own little Luck. That was my childhood until the Dame took me in hand one day. I thought the manor and the village made up the world and all its inhabitants.

Memory can be a churlish and disobedient servant, out of sight when you bid it come, insolent when you have dismissed it. Perhaps that's why the memories that insisted upon coming, as I grew weaker, were the ones that harrowed me most: how the Dame looked after five weeks of fever had whittled away her ample flesh, leaving skin on a scaffold of bones, how she lay in the bed closet and threw off the covers. She couldn't bear the weight of the linen, though it was the finest weave we had. Her fingers kept plucking and twisting invisible threads, pulling the air about her face as if she already felt the shroud.

Once when I brought a basin to bathe her, the Dame pushed herself up on her elbows and said, “When my nephew takes the manor, he has promised you'll not be bound. He says he'll give you a place as his wife's handmaid if you suit her. And if she doesn't suit you—well then, you'll be free to go. I can make no better provision …” She lay back down and I dampened the cloth with cool water and wiped her arms and chest. Even such a short speech and she was short of breath. “It will serve you best to serve them well.” She smiled faintly. “And try to keep a bridle on that tongue, for I've heard it run away with you from time to time.” I smiled back, though it was no jest.

It didn't seem such a gift to be permitted to leave the manor; each stone in the walls was dear to me, and even the weeds that took root in the mortar. I was a weed too, clinging to what I knew. I gave little thought to what I might do when the Dame was gone.

She didn't die then, and she didn't die easily. She'd taught me many remedies, but all failed. She never moaned or cried out until the last days, when she forgot herself, already on her way down the long road. In the end I gave her fare-thee-well to dull the pain. It has no healing in it.

We had a scant tennight after the funeral rites to ready the manor for her nephew. The priest made the Dame's clay death mask to send to the clan's temple to join the Council of the Dead. We gathered the belongings that might call to her if they were left behind: shuttles and bobbins, comb and hairpins of shell, her plate and cup, her knife with the amber hilt, the small clippers she wore on a chain, undergarments, shoes, and hats. We laid them on her pyre and watched the smoke fly up. The priest ground the fragments of her bones and scattered her ashes in the stream and plowed the black stain under. It was all done as it should have been done, to free her spirit. Afterward we were careful not to utter her name. We called her the Dame, and so I call her still.

That winter in the Kingswood I grieved more for myself than for her, crying blame on her that she'd left me nothing but pride, and that a poor inheritance. Better if she hadn't noticed me, when I was just a child, making a palace for ants behind a shrub in the garden when I should have been weeding. Better if she hadn't knelt next to me and pointed to an ant dragging a leaf and said, “See, they esteem the feverfew for their nests, for its sweetness. We crush it into a paste when someone is sick, because it has a healing smell.” Better if I hadn't been quick to learn and eager to ask another question.

Then I would not be so proud, as if the blood of gods ran in my veins, as if I wasn't formed from dirt and spit like other mudfolk. I could have endured our new master and mistress the way the other servants endured them: with sullenness and grumbling and spite, but nevertheless as something to be borne.

Na wouldn't take the keys after the Dame died, saying she was too old and her backbone would crack under such a burden. When the keys came to me, and the duties with them, I marveled at how the Dame had kept the threads of a hundred tasks in hand, weaving them all together. I was glad of this tangle of worries, too busy to mourn.

I made the inventory in preparation for our new master. I knew how to read and write godsigns and how to tally; the Dame never held with the saying that a drudge who reads is a greater oddity than a pig that flies, and less use. I found a plan for her next tapestry rolled up in the locked cabinet in her workshop. The warp was on the loom, but she had not begun to weave before she was taken ill. She'd drawn a maiden in a meadow amidst an impossible profusion of flowers. The frostwort of late winter bloomed beside the corona of high summer, and garden gillyflower mingled with dragon's hood from the deep woods. Switches of yarn were pinned to the sketch, and for the maiden's unbound hair she'd picked copper-colored wool dyed with a rare pigment made from crushed beetle wings. I burned the drawing but took the thread for remembrance. I kept it with me in the Kingswood, sewn into my coat.

The nephew and his new bride arrived in springtime with a crowd of brothers and cousins, friends and servants to see them to their new bed. The only person of Blood in the manor was the Dame's old priest, so he greeted them at the gate and led them into the outer courtyard. The guardian tree, a red-leafed plum, dropped pink blossoms on their velvets and furs and the shining hides of their horses. The groom wore a crown of supple twigs with leaves of the newest green; the bride was wreathed in flowers.

That evening I served at table. My new master and mistress shared a plate in the place of honor. Sire Pava dam Capella by Alcyon of Crux, to give him his full name, was so young his beard was still thin on his cheek. His bride, Dame Lyra by Ophirus of Crux, had a face as pale and plump as the well-kneaded dough of white bread. She was younger than I was, having no more than thirteen years.

After the faces of the guests grew red and their jokes coarse, after the bones were picked clean and drink spilled on the cloth, after the last song and libation, the couple were sent to bed in the Dame's own cabinet with her best tapestry hung in front. We drudges worked late in the dim light of the tallow lamps, while the new steward had us move everything in the storeroom from here to there. I wouldn't have been surprised to see him piss in the corners, like a dog making his mark. We gave up our pallets in the hall to the guests and slept in the outer courtyard. Not that I slept. When the Sun came up over the wall, I heard the doves sing,
What will you do? Oh, what will you do?

That morning when I helped Dame Lyra wash and tightened the laces on her dress, I saw her wince, and asked if she felt pain, for I knew an ointment to soothe chafing. She had such a child's shape, slender hips and small breasts, and she was round where a child might be round, cheeks and wrists and knees and belly. But she had borne a man's weight, and I supposed it was too heavy for her.

She slapped my face and told me never to wag my tongue without permission. I learned to serve her in silence. I came to know her well, from her tricks to make her skin pale and her lips red, to her pisspot and the rags for her monthly tides, but she seemed not to see me.

I often wished I were as invisible to the steward. From the day I handed him the keys, he found fault with me and the way the manor and its holdings had been run. He was a lesser kinsman of the clan, sent by Sire Pava's father to keep a tight grip on the household. I got more than my share of his blows. I was uppish and my manners abominable, so he said. If I looked him in the eye, he'd give me a bruise, and the same if I mumbled his name, or failed to keep a smile stitched to my face when I served at table.

Pride in my work drizzled away. I was not the only one who found hands had turned clumsy and tasks that used to take an hour lasted a whole day. The warp threads tangled on the loom of their own accord. When things went wrong, Na would say, “A rotten egg hatches no chick.” In the Low, on the back stairs, we discussed the weather: the clouds on Steward's brow, Dame Lyra's storms, Sire Pava's droughts of silence. Hate was our bread. Daily I saw Na treated like a laggard and put to tasks too heavy for her years. I had the right to go, but what household would welcome a drudge who dared seek a new place?