Flesh and Fire (34 page)

The others hooted with laughter, while Jerzy stared at his friend in disbelief, amused despite himself. “How, in Sin Washer’s name, do you make a living, the amount of trouble you’re constantly in?”

“Ah, that’s not trouble,” Ao said with an airy wave, “that’s trading. Give and take, bicker and barter; it’s all a game, Jerzy. It’s how you determine a man’s limits, and learn what he respects, by pushing and pulling a little here and a little there. At the end of the day we all know that the goods are the important thing; they trust us to carry them safely back and forth, and we trust them to give us quality, and a fair price so we make our own profit on the transaction. It’s all deadly serious but that doesn’t mean it has to be
dull
.”

He lifted his mug—his fourth now, to Jerzy’s two and a half, and used it to point at his friend, leaning forward to exclude the others from his conversation. “Like you. You’re deadly serious like the Red Plague”—Ao spat on the floor to ward off bad fortune—“and yet there’s a tension in you, an air of secrecy and urgency that I can’t resist, no more than a dog cannot not chase a hare.”

“I. . .” Jerzy looked at his fingertips. Normally they would be stained red working with the Berengian grapes, but weathergrapes were paler, and the juice left no mark. He could smell it, though. His vinery’s mark ached lightly. “I don’t know what you mean.”

The merchants, sensing the stories were over, went back to their own conversation, and the serving boy slipped back into the kitchen, unnoticed.

“Cut loss, Jer. Just because I never met a Vineart before you doesn’t mean I don’t know about them. First off is that they don’t share students. You’re more guildish than any guild, secretive and standoffish and never ever ever getting involved. But here you are, studying with another Vineart, and sniffing around trying—oh so badly—to hear what’s going on beyond your reach, like your next deal depended on it.”

Ao looked up at him, his round face woeful. “And yet you won’t share what you’re trying to learn. Don’t you trust me?”

“As far as I could throw this barrel,” Jerzy said, thumping the side of a nearby cask with his heel.

His friend gaped at him. “Now that’s the way to do it!” he said in delight. “Jer, I’ll make a trader of you yet!”

“I’d sooner drown in my own wines,” Jerzy grumbled.

Ao just laughed and ordered another round.

Chapter 21

You had a
good time last night, hrmmm?” Giordan said, looking at Jerzy from across the worktable. A pot of something that smelled delicious waited on the table, but no food, for which Jerzy was thankful. He wasn’t sure he could handle the smell of anything even slightly greasy.

“I guess.” He lifted the lid of the pot and sniffed cautiously. Not tai, nor—thank the silent gods—ale.

“You guess? You do not remember too much?”

“Not much, no,” Jerzy admitted. He did, actually; every painful, off-tune, staggering moment of it, right to the moment he threw up in the courtyard and staggered into his room, to fall facedown onto his bed with barely enough awareness left to take his shoes off before he collapsed. Master Malech had warned him against drunkenness, but he had only considered wine, had not known of the thick, bitter brew that made his head feel like stone. “Ao bought me ale.”

“Quite a lot of ale, one presumes. Ah, to be young and stupid once again.” Giordan chuckled, then clapped Jerzy on the shoulder. “Drink your potion and feel well again. Enough time, and the quiet-magics will make sure you are never so again.”

“It will keep me from getting drunk?” That was the best news Jerzy had heard in weeks.

“No. It will take away your taste for ale. Drink; I need your thoughts clear today. Today, yes. We have only a week or so left, and the most important is yet to come. Today I teach you how to refine!”

Jerzy looked at Giordan blankly. In all the steps he had gone through with Master Malech, from Harvest through to incantation, he had never heard of refining. Fining, yes. . .but refining?

“Weathervines only,” Giordan said, enjoying his student’s confusion. “A thing no others know.”

Considering he had shown a complete and utter lack of ability to handle them, there was no reason for him to learn that process, and yet the thought of learning something new, something that even Master Malech did not know, proved impossible to resist. Despite his aching head and sour stomach, Jerzy poured a cup of the odd-smelling brew and drank it willingly, only gagging a little at the hot, grassy taste. “What is this,” he asked when he could breathe again.

“Potion,” was all Giordan would say. “Very strong potion. Now that you can think, follow me, and pay attention.”

Jerzy obediently got up and followed the Vineart through a heavy wooden door that closed silently behind them. They were now standing in a small room bare of any furnishings but a low slab made of the same whitish-gray stone as the statue the day before. The surface was smooth, save for two narrow ridges that ran parallel down the length, a fingertip deep; Jerzy assumed they were to keep the half cask on top of the slab from rolling off.

Giordan changed, somehow, when they entered that room. He was still the same. . .but there was a stillness in him, a seriousness, that once again reminded Jerzy that this was a Vineart, one who would likely someday earn Master status for his skills.

“This I tell you: from teacher to student it is shared, and no others.”

Part of Jerzy didn’t want to hear more: he was not Giordan’s student, he had been bought by the House of Malech, those were his vines, not these. . .but he could feel the touch of the weathervines brush against his senses, and the desire to know more overwhelmed the warnings in his head.

“Weathervines are old, very old, and were very far away from Sin Washer when he changed the vines. That is why they are so green, even when ripe, not completely red. They do not grow well here, take longer to incant. This you know. Now you learn that they are not to be commanded. They do not like being told what to do.” Giordan patted the quarter cask on the table in front of him the way he might a dog who had done good work. “And now that you know why we must refine them, you will learn
how
we refine them, so they accept incantation.” He looked at Jerzy, and for a moment there was an uncanny resemblance between Malech and Giordan, although neither man looked anything like the other. “The telling characteristic of weathervines, what is it?”

“Delicacy,” Jerzy responded instantly, sure of his answer.

“No, no. Delicate, yes. Delicate as you know, but what else do you know of them? You who have walked in their soil, handled their leaves, tasted their fruit, in all its stages: what is the telling characteristic? Not what your teachings tell you—what does the
vine
tell you?”

The answer came, this time, not from his head but that awareness Malech had first identified, the Vineart’s Sense. “Stubborn. Weathervines are stubborn.”

“Ahhh. Yes. And how do you coax a stubborn vine to give what you want? How does a Vineart bring a vine into agreement with its purpose, with its noble destiny?”

Jerzy stared at the wooden slats of the cask, trying to imagine that he could look through them, into the wine stored within, tracing its path from flowering to fruit, from juice to mustus to
vina
. What would bring a stubborn wine to the next step, into
vin magica
?

There was silence in the little room, just him and Giordan and the cask of wine, all waiting for his answer. Jerzy could feel his heart speed up, his stomach tighten, the skin on his arms prickle as though cold air had touched them, his entire body reacting to. . .

His entire body. That was it. House of Malech was Malech—and so he, Jerzy, was House of Malech, and part of the vineyard itself, connected to the rootstock of every vine that felt his touch. Giordan was no less part of his yard, and the yard was part of him, so. . .He could feel the vineyard, even at a distance, like the faintest brush of leaf against his skin. And, if he opened himself to it, another, fainter brush: the weathervines, closer physically, not his, but not unwelcoming, either.

How did that awareness translate into convincing a stubborn wine? What did his senses tell him? How could he know?

Once he looked, the answer appeared.

“You have to believe it’s necessary,” he said slowly, thinking it through. “You have to incant your own certainty into the wine, so that it has no choice but to accept. Or that it wants to accept. But, Master. . .” The first time he had ever given Giordan that title, and it slipped out without fuss. “Master, vines are not aware. They are not alive. So how can a wine be stubborn, or coaxed, or. . .?”

Giordan shook his head and raised his arms in an enthusiastic shrug. “Nobody knows. It is magic.”

A surprised snort escaped Jerzy at that happy admission of ignorance. He supposed, reluctantly, that it was as useful a response as “because it is traditional.”

“So,” Giordan said. “Thanks to the studies of my master and my master’s master, I know what this wine must do, to release its magic. And so I share that knowing. . .thus.”

The ridges weren’t to keep the cask steady. They were to collect the blood that dripped from the cuts Giordan made in his left arm, slicing with his knife a line from palm toward elbow. Jerzy bit back an exclamation, his attention caught by the slow, steady drip of crimson blood falling onto the white stone, enclosing the cask with two narrow lines of blood. It took forever, it seemed to Jerzy, watching the drops fall and collect, but Giordan never wavered, and his expression of concentration never changed.

“So Sin Washer bled to change the First Growth, so do we bleed to craft our spellwines. There is no magic without sacrifice. There is no growth without change. There is no gain without price.”

Jerzy thought at first that Giordan was explaining it to him, but the words had a rhythmic feel to them that came only from constant repetition, and even as he realized that, he felt the pressure in the room increase, pushing against his chest and filling his mouth and nose. This was a magic unlike any he had learned from Malech; neither greater nor less, merely unlike. The pressure built, and held, until he thought his chest might break and his heart stop, then the spilled blood steamed in the cool air, and then evaporated, leaving the channel dry and unstained.

“Only so much blood, no more,” Giordan said, wrapping a cloth pad over the cut and raising his arm in the air to stop the flow. “Only enough to share your conviction, to renew the bond.”

“The blood. . .it’s in the wine? You have to do that for every cask?” Jerzy tried not to be horrified, but the thought of Giordan’ arms after an entire bottling made him shudder.

The Vineart laughed. “Ai, no, no. Not all my mustus becomes spell-wine—only the very best, the most potent. These wines are rare not because I do not make enough but because there is not so much that can be made. And, as you rightly said earlier, delicate, yes. Very delicate and subtle. And so this medi, this half cask, we will bring to the vats and add a little in, each to each, so the purification is shared among it all. Only a little bit, a little bit and it is done. Subtle and simple, when you are working weathervine and weatherwine. Subtle and simple, or as you learn, a big rain comes down on your head!”

Jerzy had a flash of comprehension, the touch of the vines and the scent of the blood mingling into something he could grab at: he had not failed to bring the rain because he could not work the vinespell, but rather because it had responded
too well.
But why? What had he done, to pull so much power out of a basic decantation? The thought faded back into faint smoke, and was gone, even as Giordan sluiced water across the stone, washing away the last traces of blood.

* * *

THEY CAME OUT of the room to find that the cup and pot of potion had been removed, and the sun’s rays now slanted across the single window in Giordan’s workroom, rather than streaming in. More time had passed than Jerzy had realized, in that small room. Giordan sent Jerzy off for the rest of the afternoon, claiming that both he and the half cask needed to rest before they moved on to the next and final step.

Feeling better—and suddenly hungry—Jerzy decided to stop by the main kitchen, and see if a pitiful expression could get him a few slices of meat he could take with him into the city.

The palazzo’s kitchen was three times the size of the kitchen back home, with a great stone fireplace at one end and an iron stove at the other, both in use. Jerzy had become accustomed to the noise and bustle, and avoided both ends of the room—tempers were always inflamed by the heat there—and instead edged toward the huge table in the middle, where three women were busy cutting piles of white vegetables into smaller chunks of vegetable with frightening efficiency.

The first woman looked up without missing a chop of the cleaver. Her eyes were startlingly blue, so like Malech’s that Jerzy had a sudden and unexpected burst of homesickness. “You. What do you want?”

“Something to eat,” he ventured, trying his best to look helpless and hungry.

“Hmmmph.” The second woman looked up as well, her eyes narrowing in a dark brown face as she surveyed Jerzy. “Doesn’t look like a starveling.”

“Magician’s boy,” the third said without even looking up. Her slender hands gathered a handful of chopped vegetables and scraped them off the table into a bowl at her feet, and the bowl was taken away by a kitchen child. “They didn’t take a meal this morning. Young men shouldn’t miss meals. Give him something before he falls over and dies on our floor.”

All three went back to work, dismissing Jerzy entirely. He stood there feeling stupid, when he felt something being pushed into his hand. Looking down, the kitchen child smiled up at him and then scampered off under the table to whatever chore it was supposed to be doing. The “something” turned out to be a large oddly shaped fruit the size of his palm, stuffed with cheese. Deciding that was the best he would get, Jerzy ducked his head in thanks to the three women, and retreated out of the overheated chaos.

Looking for a place to sit and eat his meal, Jerzy headed for the nearest courtyard. There were three within the palazzo itself, two large ones inside each wing, and this smaller one behind the main hall. The shape was the same, however: a square of garden and grasses, surrounded on all sides by covered pathway. On each side there was a small alcove, about shoulder high, with a bench set inside for gossip or—conveniently—eating a quick meal. One of the alcoves was empty, and Jerzy claimed it, sitting with his back against the side wall so that he could look out and see the deep blue sky overhead. The dark-fleshed fruit was surprisingly delicious, sweet and meaty, while the cheese added a sharpness that reminded Jerzy of ale. The thought wasn’t entirely pleasant, but he was hungry, so he ate the entire thing, letting his mind rest on what he had learned that morning, not trying to consider any one aspect, but instead letting it seep into him like water into soil.

As he wiped the crumbs off his hands, he realized that someone— two someones—were walking through the garden, their voices coming closer, on the other side of the alcove.

“An entire land, gone? Hah! I would pay half my worth to be able to disappear thus. Leave it all behind, these voices constantly muttering in my ear. . .”

“My lord-maiar, you must not be fanciful. These are dangerous times, dangerous days, and you must be alert to danger, within and without.”

“Trade-lands, and the actions thereof, are my concern, not yours, Washer.”

“Indeed, my lord-maiar. And yet such an action speaks of magics, and perhaps not well-used or well-disposed ones, and that is very much our concern. It is why I have come here, to warn you, to be alert—”

“Alert, alert. Bah. I am forever alert for these dangers you warn me of. What are they, my lord Washer? Where are these dangers you whisper so sweetly of, this stranger and that trusted friend and ally. . .would you have me advised by none but yourself? I think not.”

The two kept walking, passing beyond the alcove. Jerzy, frozen between the desire to hear more, and fear of being caught, hesitated just an instant, then moved off the bench as quietly as he could, planning to keep low, below the half wall, and follow the conversation.

That was until he left the alcove itself, and came nose to nose with an equally surprised Mahault.

The maiar’s daughter stared at him, her brown eyes wide. Before he could make a sound, her hand came up and clamped over his mouth, and she was dragging him back into the alcove.