Wildfire (43 page)

 

  
“Look at me,” he said. “Look at me and be an honest oracle, and without fear tell me what you see.”

 

  
Unwillingly I looked him in the face. “Nothing.”

 

  
“Nothing? That’s honest enough.”

 

  
“No—I meant—I mean I see with plain slight, no divisions. I see a king.”

 

  
I saw what I had seen before, a face made of bone and flesh and shadow. I saw a man who had lost his wife and unborn son and been betrayed by his mother and brother. A man whose great dominion had dwindled to rule over rabble. He sought guidance from the same counselors who had misled him to defeat, and from signs and omens easily misread. He looked for wisdom even from me and I told him lies. He had no claim to my loyalty, therefore I couldn’t betray him. I looked away and rubbed my wrist above and below the shackle. The flesh was hardening under the cuff, and the itch was terrible, worse than the pain of the raw sores. I refused to pity him.

 

  
“I see a man,” I said.

 
  

 

  
The Wolves trailed King Corvus the way a pack trails a wounded stag. They thought they had him at bay before the wall of mountains. They captured one of his outriders and returned him with a message asking for a parley, and the king agreed to hear them out. He arrayed his men around an outcropping with a long view, and sat himself down on a boulder and ate a dinner of cold sausage and journey bread. Garrio heard the parley, which meant we heard about it later.

 

  
The leader in the wolfskin cloak rode up with another man in attendance. He said to the king that Queenmother Caelum sent him fond greetings; that she abhorred their estrangement and the necessity for war, and had the most fervent desire to bring reconciliation and peace now that the war was won. The prince (he called him prince) should have his throne back; it was his, after all. She wished for the good of the kingdom to be queen regent until Prince Corvus attained the wisdom to govern. She would grant him the northern keep as the seat of his throne, and he would no doubt find it as comfortable as she herself had found it during her years of exile. And with an elaborate bow (Garrio said, demonstrating), the Wolf offered King Corvus a glove of crimson velvet for his right hand.

 

  
Then he drew from his belt a mailed gauntlet, made for the left hand. If the prince refused the most generous offer of the right-hand glove, he must accept the gauntlet. The Wolves were ordered to take the prince alive so he could be executed in a manner befitting a coward. His corpse would be left unburned so his shade would have a long time to regret the folly of refusal.

 

  
The king seemed to be thinking it over, said Garrio. He said to the Wolf, “What of my men? Does she offer clemency?” And the Wolf just flapped his hand as if to say it was no great matter. So the king brushed a few crumbs from his beard and leaned back, propping himself on one hand and holding out the other, like so.

 

  
“Which hand?”

 

  
“If you can’t guess,” Garrio said to Mox, “you’re more of a foolhead than I took you for.”

 

  
Garrio made Mox and the other drudges laugh, and it surprised me how they were cheered by the king’s refusal to surrender. They’d rather follow a reckless king than a craven one.

 
  

 

  
King Corvus chose his ground and turned on his pursuers. He set his warriors and mud soldiers on foot along the sharp spine of a ridge with their backs to the south and the low winter Sun. For the first time since the retreat began, the men bore the king’s indigo banners on poles strapped to their backs. The Wolves would have to dismount and climb the ridge to
fight them, on a narrow trail with treacherous footing of loose rock and brittle slate.

 

  
The king offered Rift Warrior a gelding in sacrifice, and his Auspices pulled the entrails through a slit in the hide and pronounced the omens favorable for battle. A vulture descended in a spiral and landed on the dead horse, and burrowed its head into the belly. It was an ugly, ungainly thing on the ground, bald as a priest of Rift; all its grace was in flight. King Corvus pointed to the bird and called out to his men, “See how my father is with us today, and our sacrifice is accepted.” The men raised a cheer, and some cataphracts hammered the hilts of their swords against their bucklers.

 

  
Catena and I sat on the ground, waiting for the battle on the curving backside of the ridge. Winds pushed heavy clouds toward us, and jacks wagered on whether the rain or the Wolves would get here first.

 

  
King Corvus stood not far uphill, speaking in private with his strategos. He didn’t seem to mind that we might overhear, no more than he minded the horses grazing nearby. Yet I felt watched: two eyes stared at us from the back of his helmet, inlaid in lapis and mother-of-pearl.

 

  
The king said, “It’s true I feel my father close—he sometimes speaks to me, saying fire begets ashes. Or he wonders if his son is his son. Did you know even a shade cannot be sure if his wife cuckolded him? I ask him for counsel and he reminds me he won his first battle at the age of fifteen. I tell him I lost my first at twenty. I fear he comes to mock, not to help.”

 

  
Divine Aboleo’s bald scalp was bare, displaying his red rooster tattoo. He turned toward the king. “I hope he mocks you out of your melancholy, for I tire of it.”

 
  

 

  
Our chance was coming, I was sure of it, and oh, I was impatient. But the hillside was naked, and we were as easy to spot as a mole on Mai’s broad back. No cover until we got to the bottom of the ridge, among the trees and boulders. And we’d have to go on foot. The saddled horses were well guarded by horseboys.

 

  
So we waited. Catena yawned and leaned against my shoulder and in time she fell asleep, which much amazed me. The clouds moved toward us, letting down their long hanks of rain. And soon we were inside the storm and it was twilight gray and cold and pitiless. The horses hung their heads and turned their rumps to the wind.

 

  
Someone caught sight of Wolves on the next hill over and a cheer went up that woke Catena. We stood and held hands, the same hands already linked by a chain. The Wolves carried the queenmother’s banners of crimson edged with white, the colors darkened by the rain. The sight awakened the memory of the first true dream I’d ever had, of riding with my father
when I was a small child through bare and rocky mountains. In the dream we had turned to see a line of soldiers with black banners on a mountain behind us.

 

  
I shivered and knew that gods were gathering here. Nothing interests them so much as war.

 

  
The king and his men stood outlined against the sky, offering battle. The Wolves howled as they approached, and the king’s warriors hammered on their shields. Catena and I began to creep down the ridge without a word said between us. I was afraid if we ran, a horseboy would take notice.

 

  
Some Wolves reached the top of the hill, and the king’s men crowded around the head of the trail until priests of Rift, bellowing and pushing, made them get back in line along the crest and await their turns. I saw men fighting, caught in a net of rain. The ground was so stony that the water ran over it in small rivulets. Some of the rivulets turned red. A man screamed for his mother until someone silenced him.

 

  
A Wolf broke through the line and came hurtling down the hill toward us so fast it seemed he might outrun his own legs. He carried an ax and his banner swayed above his head. A horseboy shouted “Hoy!” and ran after him with sword drawn, and I saw the horseboy was Mox, in a boiled leather cuirass molded in the shape of a man’s muscular torso, which made his thin arms and legs look like spindles.

 

  
Mox and the Wolf collided and horses whinnied and shied away from them. Mox sat down abruptly with his feet straight out in front of him, and clutched his groin; the Wolf fell in a heap as if his garments had just been emptied.

 

  
Catena tugged at the chain, hurrying downhill.

 

  
I tugged back. “We must see if Mock needs help.”

 

  
“But the Wolf might be alive!”

 

  
I made Catena follow. Mox had a slash in his groin, along the crease between his right leg and abdomen. He held his hand over the cut and blood oozed between his fingers. I pulled the queenmother’s banner from the pole on the Wolf’s back and told Mox to press it hard over his wound. I cursed the chain, the king, and even Catena, who gawked and hindered me.

 

  
The Wolf—who was not a warrior of the Blood, but a mere varlet—had a hole in his chest. Pink foam bubbled from the wound and air whistled in and out. His lips were turning purple and his chest heaved. He was awake and aware, and helpless to do anything but try to breathe. I took his dagger and cut a small strip of cloth from my hem, and wadded it up and tamped it into his wound. The whistling and bubbling stopped. His eyes rolled in his head. His mouth was wide open, but no air went in or out,
only a spill of frothy blood. He began to thrash. Mox was shouting, “Let him alone!” I ought not to have touched the varlet, I knew that, but I acted in desperation. I treated him as I would have treated a woman, and it seemed I’d done it all wrong.

 

  
I pulled out the cloth and the man gasped and foam gushed from the hole. The next time I waited until he had exhaled before covering the wound, and he kept breathing. Then I stole his leather wallet, cutting the straps that fastened it to his belt.

 

  
Mox must have thought I was trying to kill the man. He said, “I’ll finish him. I thought I’d done for him already.”

 

  
I was amazed to see the man struggle to sit up and speak. His voice was hoarse and wheezy. “A pox on you, you sowpricking pizzle. Come and get me, if you think you can.”

 

  
“I will too,” Mox said. He got up and swung his sword at the varlet seated on the ground, and the man parried with the haft of his ax, and there was a dull thunk when steel met ironwood. Mox was just a horseboy, he’d never been trained like the warriors of the Blood to guard and attack and counter. Nor had Rift Warrior blessed him with a killing frenzy. He seemed as frightened by the blows he struck as the ones aimed at him. He had a look of disgust on his face. But he went on striking at the man. He warmed to it.

 
  

 

  
Catena needed no urging to run for it. The shackle forced us to match strides, though my legs were much longer than hers. She tripped once and pulled me down after her. Her wooden pattens were ill suited to running or climbing or winter. We put two steep hills between us and the battle, resting when we had to, while somewhere behind the clouds, behind the mountains, the Sun descended to her rest. The cold rain turned to sleet, and Catena said she could go no farther. We sought shelter under an outcropping, but the wind that came blustering down the narrow valley flung sleet in our faces. Soon the trees were sheathed in ice. All around us in the dark, tree limbs cracked and came crashing down.

 

  
We didn’t dare light a fire, but my hearthfire blazed up when I called on it, so I no longer felt the cold. I burned fever hot, and I poured this heat lavishly into Catena as she lay shivering in my arms.

 

  
The clouds moved away and took the sleet with them, and the sky lightened. The Sun climbed over the mountains and showed us a white and shiny world. Needles and twigs sparkled. Branches of fir and pine hung low, weighed down by ice, and the trunks had pale gashes where limbs had been torn away. The ground was strewn with storm wrack. Uprooted trees leaned on neighbors, or lay on the ground in a welter of broken branches.
I shook Catena awake, saying we should be going.

 

  
“Let’s go back,” she said. “Please, the battle must be over by now.”

 

  
“Go back? What if the Worms won, what then?”

 

  
“They didn’t win.”

 

  
“How do you know?”

 

  
Catena pinched her lips together and wouldn’t explain.

 

  
We’d never spoken of escape. I thought there was no need. Surely she hated the shackle and chain as much as I did. Was she loyal to the king? His cruelty toward her was more terrible because it sprang from indifference to whether she suffered or no, lived or no.

 

  
“Come on, we’ve got to scurry. We’ll freeze otherwise.” I stood and Catena remained sitting.

 

  
“Can’t we build a fire? I’m cold.”

 

  
Stupid, stubborn girl. I sat down again and emptied out the wallet I’d stolen from Mox’s opponent. The varlet had carried four dice, eleven copperheads, half a loaf of bread, a shred of dried beef, and a flint. I gave Catena the bread and meat and tucked the flint into the pouch I hid under my skirts. “Eat a bittle,” I said. “Then we must be going.”

 

  
“Going back?”

 

  
I had the varlet’s dagger. The head of the rivet that fastened my manacle had been hammered flat, and I tried to get the blade under it to see if I could pry it out.

 

  
Catena held the bread in her lap and stared. “What are you doing?”

 

  
“What do you think? Once these mankles are off, you can do as you like, go back or sit here and roast your tots by a fire, I don’t care. We left a trial a plowboy could follow, let alone a Howl or a pride of Rift, and I’m not about to wait for anyone to come and catch us.”

 

  
I sawed at the shank of the rivet, enraged by the thousand petty annoyances of the shackle, how it baffled and balked me at every move, how it chafed our thin skins and left us raw. I succeeded in dulling the blade, nothing more. It was a poor man’s dagger, of poor steel.

 

  
Catena clutched her knees and watched me sideways. She shivered and a tear ran down her cheek. I bit my lower lip and turned my attention to the chain. I found a link with a large gap and tried to lever the ends apart with the dagger. The link bit the blade and spat out the point, which struck me above the eye. I turned to Catena and shouted, “What’s the natter with you? Don’t you want to be free?”