Wildfire (26 page)

 

  
I built a neat little house of grapevines on the brazier and set a fire inside it, and sat watching it burn. Most nights gazing at a fire was as close to dreaming as I could get. The bark curled away from the wood in long strands, and I wondered how many lifetimes those vines had been tended in the vineyard we’d sacrificed for our fire.

 

  
Spiller poked at the blaze and made the house tumble down. “Sire Galan takes me for a nursemaid. He should have left your sheepdog Rowney to look after you.” He was sulking because Sire Galan was off hunting with the Crux, and he’d taken Sire Edecon and Rowney—and even Fleetfoot, to serve as a messenger—and left Spiller behind. They were searching for a party of outriders from the clan of Eorőe, who had been ambushed, and the Blood taken prisoner; their varlets had been killed, all save one horseboy who’d lived to tell of it.

 

  
“So go,” I said.

 

  
“I would have gone and gladly.”

 

  
“No doubt, Spitter,” I said, though I did doubt it, remembering how Galan had been unhorsed once in a tourney, and Spiller had been too cowardly to do his duty and pull him out from under the hooves of the warhorses.

 

  
“You never call me by my name,” Spiller said, scowling into his cup.

 

  
“I can’t help that it comes out twitted. I meant Spilter, Spiller, you know.”

 

  
“I mean Bloodspiller. That’s my name now, I earned it.”

 

  
I shrugged.

 

  
“Why not call me by my name?”

 

  
“Because it’s ludiculous.”

 

  
“Because you think I’m dirt. Who made you my judge? You were always too proud to take my orders, always high-handed. And now that you’re godstruck you’re even worse.” He threw the lees of his cup into the fire and put it out. “It’s a waste of breath to talk to you. I’m going to sleep. I shan’t sit up and worry till morning.”

 

  
Spiller lay down with his back to me. It was true that I’d judged him long ago, and never thought much about him since, though we lived side by side. Now he’d taken a new name, and it seemed he wanted to live up to it. Hadn’t I done the same once?

 
  

 

  
The camp quieted. I wrapped myself in the feather quilt and lay down outside the tent, with my feet downhill. I couldn’t bear to stay indoors, sleepless, while even now Galan walked and the others rode into the night. The waning Moon was at half, bright enough to light their way. The constellation of Hazard cleared the brow of the hill, arrowing toward the Hub star, and I marveled at how easily I could pick out godsigns again, their patterns bright and clear against the starfield. But that was with my left eye; my right eye saw only the brightest stars, and the rest disappeared into a sparkling mist. From one day to the next, the change in my vision was slight; but after a hand of days, a tennight, there was no doubt it was getting worse.

 

  
I hated that Galan and I had parted on a quarrel, a silent quarrel. He’d not spoken to me above three curt words a day since he caught me lying to him. He said nothing at all at night, but coupled with me nevertheless, and there was rage in his desire. It called the same from me, and we met as on a battlefield to test the temper of our bones, the resilience of our flesh, and the reaches of our endurance.

 

  
A drudge who doesn’t lie to her master is a fool. Did he think I should ask permission for anything and everything? He must grant me leave to shit, even, for I couldn’t go alone to the ditches. Galan no longer let Rowney or Fleetfoot escort me when I gathered remedies in hedge and field or visited the sick, it was Bloodspiller all the time now. Bloodspiller could be bribed, but likely he took my payments—copperheads or chores I did that should have been his—and tattled to Sire Galan anyway.

 

  
I would have groveled to end the quarrel, but Galan wasn’t ready to be mollified. So now I feared he wouldn’t come back, just because we hadn’t said a proper farewell—which was foolish—as if a kiss from me could keep him safe. I had but to close my eyes to see, with the unreliable eye of the mind, the many ways he might come to harm.

 

  
I lacked courage, there was the cause: the courage to wait as I must wait now, for the outcome of Galan’s hazards. I wondered how Mai had endured it, battle after battle, campaign after campaign. No wonder Galan thought I was too soft to be his sheath. He had tried to spare me this.

 

  
I touched the red cord at my waist. The Queen of the Dead was very close tonight; her realm and ours occupied this same hillside, and her poor subjects, the dead, inhabited our camp. Some were bewildered, some angry. We haunted them more than they haunted us. The shades were hungry to be in our thoughts, craving our sorrow or fear, craving to be acknowledged. I couldn’t see or hear them, but I could no longer ignore them, as others did, with the complacency of the living.

 

  
Surely they were to be pitied more than feared. Why then did I feel dread? The fear for Galan was my own, but this Dread came from elsewhere; it was the god Rift taking possession of me, making its presence known, so that suddenly I was sweating and short of breath, and my belly was quivering and my heart stuttering. In my throat, a stone that could not be swallowed. And all over my body, a prickling, itching, crawling sensation as if an army of lice marched about on me—or worse, as if the vermin had gotten beneath my skin. I couldn’t get at them no matter how I scratched. They were an insistent creeping torment. Rift Dread manifest in the swarm.

 

  
I wasn’t large enough to encompass this Dread, and yet it found no outlet, so I must enlarge around it until I was monstrously swollen, as vast as the hillside that swallowed me whole: my head the crest, my feet the valley. I seeped into the earth, losing all sense of the edges of my own body, that small leaky sack of skin. Hedges and thickets were my hair, and stones my bones. The earth was a smothering weight, and I couldn’t move except to shudder. In the burning pit of my belly was the large fire before the king’s pavilion. Waning campfires stung me with small lances of heat.

 

  
A dog began to bark.

 

  
There, in the crook of my knee where the horses of our clan were tethered, the horsemasters stirred in their sleep, troubled by dreams. One stallion snorted and another whinnied, restless. The sentries with their dogs were pinpricks of alertness around the camp. They stared into the dark, and strained to hear, but by now too many dogs were barking. I felt vermin creeping amongst the roots of the hair on my scalp. A troubling of the hedges. A horrible itch. I couldn’t tear my arm free to scratch, for my limbs were rooted in the hillside. Nor could I summon voice and breath to cry,
Danger!

 

  
Then Dread released me, and I heard myself panting and the sound was loud as a roar. And I was wrapped in the quilt again, terrified and shrunken
in my own body. I sat up and wailed, and my hands, being freed, began to scratch. I tore at my scalp with my fingernails, and screamed, “Stranglers! Stranglers in the camp!”

 

  
Spiller was up and out of the tent, shouting, “What is it? What?”

 

  
I pointed east, where my head had lain, where a hedge ran over the brow of the hill, and cried out, “They’re cunning!”

 

  
“Who’s cunning?” asked Spiller. He buckled his sword belt and I put on my overdress and my girdle with the knife in the sheath. And the afflictions of fear, ordinary fear—galloping heart, wheezing breath, dry mouth—were familiar and even welcome.

 

  
War dogs howled. They were riled all over the camp, so danger seemed to come from all directions, or none. But I still felt that itch somewhere to the east, somewhere on my forehead and scalp.

 

  
Many men slept through the clamor of the dogs, snug in their exhaustion. There had been alarms before, and nothing had come of them. But most of the warriors of our company roused and some went rushing about with swords drawn. They lacked a commander, for Crux was off leading the party of searchers. Someone kicked the cookfire awake and sent up a fountain of sparks. Sire Guasca, in a shirt so well bleached it served as a beacon, scolded the men for flailing about like chickens after the farmwife has wrung their necks.

 

  
Divine Xyster asked in a stern voice who had raised the alarm. The sentries carried horns to warn of an attack, and no horns had sounded.

 

  
I backed away from the fire and Spiller caught me by the arm. “Go on,” he said. “Tell them what the fuss was about.”

 

  
I shook my head.

 

  
“Afraid to tell?” he said.

 

  
“I don’t know—maybe it’s nothing. But I felt a fidget, a flummox…over there…” I pointed toward the hedges where I’d felt an itch. Perhaps I’d imagined it, but if so, the manhounds had too.

 

  
Then shouting started north-of-east, near where I’d pointed. From the sounds of it you’d think an army had fallen upon us, but I was sure it was no more than a score of men, stealthy men on foot. I’d felt them creeping. What could they do against an army? Steal horses, probably. I tried to tell Spiller so, but it came out “Steal houses.”

 

  
Men thundered past us in the dark, bellowing and brandishing weapons, running toward the sounds of battle. I was more afraid of them than of the enemy. How could they see whom to fight? Spiller dashed after them to find out what was happening.

 

  
A mob surged back toward us, broke into individuals who scurried this way and that. Mole went running by me in her thin dress, with a blanket
over one shoulder. She didn’t see me, she wasn’t looking. Just running. She stumbled over something, and got up and ran on, leaving her blanket behind, and that stung me into motion. I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of helping her, for she was still recovering from the kick of that mule, her master. I hadn’t thought at all, I was standing there like a loaf.

 

  
I hurried after her and picked up her blanket. She’d tripped over a billhook that some foot soldier had abandoned, so I picked that up too. It was a poor cousin to a scorpion, with a shaft tall as a man and a hooked blade with a spiked tip, and I’d never used one save to prune trees, but it comforted me nevertheless to have it in my hand. I caught up with Mole easily. We went downhill, away from camp, both of us instinctively seeking safety in dark and quiet rather than crowds, and the slope spilled us down across a fallow field. We thrashed through high weeds, and broke the frozen crust of the soil and slid on mud beneath. Both of us were barefoot. Mole stumbled often in the dark. At first she didn’t dare look to see who ran beside her. When at last she saw that it was me, she slowed, clutching her side, and I slowed with her.

 

  
We crouched by a boulder so she could catch her breath, and I wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. She coughed once, twice, three times. I hoped any listener might mistake it for the coughing bark of a fox. I could tell her injury pained her by the way she gripped my hand. The run downhill had been a blur, but now I had time to notice, and everything was sharp and clear. Three pollarded plane trees rose above us, each with a pair of limbs ending in malformed knobs that looked like many-knuckled fists against the sky. The blade of the billhook was rusty.

 

  
Mole looked at me askance, and I realized my face was twisted in a grin. Galan was so eager for battle, he went searching for it with his sword Peril in hand. Had he stayed, he’d have found it without the least effort.

 

  
There seemed to be less uproar coming from the camp. Mole whispered, “Let’s go back,” and I almost agreed. But I saw something uphill from us, a dark splotch. It could have been mistaken for a shrub or a log, but it seemed to undulate. I put one hand over Mole’s mouth and pointed with the other one.

 

  
I looked from the corner of my eye, the better to see in the dark, and the splotch changed shape and I saw it was a man raising his head. He was on his belly, pushing himself down the hill feet first, and his dark cloak had distorted his shape. He glanced over his shoulder and the sharp wedge of his nose jutted from the shadow of his hood.

 

  
I feared he was headed toward the same small shelter we claimed. Was he wounded? Was he one of our men, or an attacker?

 

  
“Get up and run!” I said, pulling at Mole. I took the billhook, and we
ran down toward the woods and thickets that marked the path of the stream where we got our drinking water. Mole fell and I tugged at her arm. Dread was crawling all over my back and I glanced behind and saw the man was closer than I’d thought possible, only a few strides away and coming fast. I turned and dropped on one knee, as I’d seen Galan do once in the mortal tourney, and I braced the butt of the billhook against the ground and shouted, “Stop! A fend, a friend!” in the High, still in hopes he might be a man of our army.

 

  
But when I saw his face under the shadow of the hood, I knew him for an enemy. His skin was smeared with charcoal to hide him in the night.

 

  
He was no boar to run onto a blade, even one too rusted to shine by moonlight. He stopped short, going abruptly from headlong motion to stillness, and his long cloak settled about him. His thin lips were pale between a close-cropped black mustache and beard, and I could just see the rim of his bottom teeth, paler still. His expression was strangely bland and untroubled, but I heard him breathing hard.

 

  
The cloak was of glossy fur, nearly black, fastened in front by way of two golden brooches linked by four golden chains. Where it hung open, I could see he wore a quilted red tunic and leggings. No hauberk or plate, no weapons in his hands, but I knew by the way he controlled his movements that he was dangerous. He’d judged to a nicety where to stop. If I jabbed at him with the billhook, I might just touch him. There was contempt in that.

 

  
“What trumpery are you?” I asked. I heard Mole behind me, crawling away. I willed her to go faster.

 

  
He pushed back his hood and his pate was shaven. He hadn’t covered it with ashes and patches of his scalp gleamed in the moonlight. I knew then by all the signs—bald head, cloak of bear fur, and linen armor—he was a priest of Rift Warrior. And I knew that if he wanted to kill me, I couldn’t stop him. I almost assented to death at that moment. It seemed easier to go assenting, and I thought of Penna with her neck outstretched and understood her better.