Wildfire (48 page)

 

  
It began to snow, and the flakes swarmed hither and thither like mayflies. The porter passed me a waterskin—I thought it was a waterskin, until I took a drink. It was strong, fiery doublewine, and I coughed and spewed some out through my nose. The porter laughed to see the look on my face and the tears caught in my eyelashes. We were not halfway down and I thought I couldn’t go much farther. Perhaps I would die on this cliff, having led the king to it. Perhaps the gods required no more of me. Well, hadn’t I lived to see more than ever I’d expected? In my lifetime were very few dull days. A dull day takes longer to pass and leaves fewer memories. If memories were coins, I’d die a rich woman. I smiled back at the porter and took another swallow, and the doublewine warmed me all down into the bowl of my belly.

 

  
There must have been courage in the bottom of that drink, for I found the strength to keep going, down the ladder and along the crack in the wall, and farther still. I saw my grimy hands with skin stretched tight over the knuckles, clasping the rungs of a ladder, and behind the ladder rough granite seamed with white quartz and splotched with lichens. I looked below to see where to put my feet, the next step and two thereafter, but I tried not to see all the way down. I climbed until I forgot everything else, forgot myself even, because I was merely movement, and I no longer felt the
burning in my arms and legs, or the ache of stretched sinews, the tremors in my limbs, the cold.

 

  
The last ladder was the worst. It was made of rope, a sort of net stretched over a bulge in the cliff wall. I crawled halfway over the bulge and there was nothing under my feet. Others had gone before me; it must be possible. Yet I froze there with my belly against the rock and my feet hanging over the valley floor. The porter tired of waiting and clambered past me. Once he was below he put his hand on my ankle and guided my foot to a loop in the net, and so, slowly, I left the solidity of rock and entrusted myself to the quivering rope web.

 

  
I dangled over the ground and climbed into the shadow under the jutting brow of rock. There, nestled in a notch at the base of the cliff, I saw the slate roofs of a village. Hands reached up and lifted me down to a ledge. A steep stair, carved from the living rock of the mountain, led down to the long portico of a stuccoed house the color of an apricot. I sat on the tiled floor of the portico and shook. Catena crawled out of her basket and leaned against me. We looked up at the net stretched over the looming cliff, the mountain blocking half the sky, and I couldn’t believe we’d climbed down safely. Impossible that it could be done. Yet we had done it. I had done it.

 
  

 

  
The smith had hair almost as orange as the flames in his forge. He chiseled the head from the rivet that fastened my manacles, and forced apart the iron band, and some of my skin came with it, leaving a bracelet of raw flesh. When it was Catena’s turn, she cried from the pain.

 

  
The smith said something to me in Lambaneish. His voice was loud and gruff, so that he sounded fierce—all the Lambaneish men seemed to talk that way—but his face was amiable enough. I turned up my palms to show him I didn’t understand. Garrio was no help; he knew only a few words in that tongue. The porter who had taken us to the smith said, “He asks where you come from, what town.”

 

  
“Tell him over the mountains, that way.” I pointed up toward the cliff above the town.

 

  
The smith stopped smiling, and turned his broad back on us to hone his chisel on a grinding stone. I said to the porter, “Ask him if he knows a horse trader, a man with a thin face and a reddish braid, beard. He takes horses to basket in the mountains.”

 

  
The porter translated and the smith turned back and replied. The porter said, “He says many traders.”

 

  
“The man was my fond, my fedan,” I said.
“Fedan,”
I repeated to the smith.

 

  
The smith shrugged and said something. “Many traders, many bastards,” the porter said.

 
  

 

  
I knew now why the king had disbelieved me when I denied being Lambaneish. There were more redheads in this village than copper coins in a peddler’s purse. It wasn’t just the hair, it was the stamp of the faces, wide at the brow, narrow at the jaw, familiar as looking in a mirror. Some of the townsfolk looked like they could be my kin; maybe they were.

 

  
My kin. I always thought I knew what had happened to my parents, because of what had happened to me. My father would not have let soldiers steal me—therefore he must be dead. I hadn’t wanted to wonder who killed him and how. Better that my mind’s eye stay shut than open to such a sight.

 

  
Now I questioned that certainty; now I dared to hope.

 
  

 

  
We walked from the village under the precipice to another village by the lakeshore. When the fishermen came back with their catch in the afternoon, the king ordered them to take us south in their small blue boats. The mountains were so steep along the north end of the lake that one had to go by boat to get from town to town. The rowers labored against a strong wind that kicked up froth on the waters. It had been snowing up on the precipice, but in the valley it was raining. Even the chill winter rain felt warm to me, and the south wind balmy. There was no ice on the lake, no ice anywhere in sight. We had arrived in a milder kind of winter.

 

  
The towns along the shore glimmered in the gray light, against the dun brown mountains. The houses were clustered on steep streets, with facades stuccoed in ivory or ochre. Stone watchtowers stood on the heights above.

 

  
Catena sat on my right, which seemed unnatural, for when we’d been chained together she was on my left. We shared my wool cloak, and I put my arm around her and hugged her tightly. “I’m so glad,” I said, and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

 

  
She said, “Is there any cheese left?” which made me laugh. I gave her cheese, flat bread, and wizened black olives, food I’d saved when the villagers fed us, for I did not yet trust our hungry days were over.

 

  
It was dusk when we disembarked on a rocky promontory halfway down the western shore of the lake, and climbed stairs to a palace built upon the steep outcropping. We had arrived in winter at King Corvus’s summer palace, in the only part of his kingdom his mother had not yet taken from him. The king had outpaced the news of his defeat, and arrived unannounced, and his steward rousted the servants out of their winter sloth
and made them bustle. And soon there were fires and more food and drink, and best of all pallets and blankets, and the best sleep I’d had for a long long time.

 

  
But by the dawn twilight I was up and wandering unfettered and alone in the terraced gardens. I marveled to see green again, and unfamiliar kinds of trees with foliage like ferns, or topknots that reminded me of plumes on a cataphract’s helmet. The myrtle shrubs were full of noisy birds.

 

  
I walked along a colonnade that encircled three sides of the outcropping, first looking north to the snow-capped Ferinus, then south toward the plains at the end of the lake. There I stayed, leaning on a balustrade as the Sun rose above the mountains, and mists smoked from the still surface of the water. I could see why the king’s father had stolen this jewel of a sapphire lake from the kingdom of Lambanein. Why men had died for it.

 

  
But that war was long over, and the other war, the new one, far behind us. We had reached a haven, yet I found its beauty disquieting. It filled me with a sweet wintry melancholy.

 

  
I missed Galan, of course. That thought was sharp, it made longing well up in me like fresh sap. I wondered at how swiftly and easily the pain could be provoked, because in truth there had been days, many days in the mountains, I hadn’t thought of him at all. I’d thought of the next step and the next, for every step had been a mortal choice between another moment of life or a long fall. Now I was glad of the painful assurance that I was still bound to Galan despite the distance. I hoped, selfishly, he was pained by it too.

 

  
I heard someone approaching, and when I saw it was the king, I ducked my head and sidled past him, for fear I’d trespassed. He made a gesture that said I might stay. And he too leaned on the balustrade, gazing south.

 

  
“I see you’re without your shadow,” he said, and for a moment I didn’t understand he meant Catena, and I looked down to see if my shadow lay at my feet.

 

  
“My shadow is sleeping,” I said.

 

  
“But you rose early. Were you troubled by dreams?”

 

  
“No deeps.”

 

  
I watched him from the corner of my eye. His beard was neatly trimmed, his hair was glossy, and he wore a surcoat of red wool covered with arabesques of golden cord. I wondered why he wasn’t glad, why worry showed on his brow and melancholy on his mouth, even now that we’d attained the refuge so long desired, so costly to reach.

 

  
“So you leave again?” I said.

 

  
A sharp glance at me. “Soon. We head south as soon as we can get horses.”

 

  
But we’re tired, your men are tired, I wanted to say. “It’s beautiful here,” I said instead.

 

  
King Corvus propped his hip on the balustrade and leaned against a column. “Do you recognize it?”

 

  
“I never dreamed this. I only saw the lake from above, from the past. I don’t think I was ever here in this parlous, this palace.”

 

  
“I have been here twice,” he said. “On the way to Allaxios to meet my betrothed, and on the way back home with her.”

 

  
He turned toward the water again, and I bowed and slipped away. I clasped my right hand around my left wrist, and the pain of my sores banished all pity.

 
  

 

  
The king was generous to the Blood who had followed him over the mountains, promising that each would receive a horse befitting his rank; less generous to his subjects in Sapheiros, from whom the horses were to be taken. He sent out a party of men to collect mounts, escorted by four priests of Rift, one bearing a sword and the others, more dangerous, armed only with daggers. A fellow named Pasco was horsemaster at the palace, and he was in charge of the requisitioning with the help of Lame and Chunner and some other horseboys.

 

  
I asked Garrio if Catena and I could go along on the expedition to get horses. I didn’t expect him to say yes, but he shrugged and said he didn’t see any harm in it. Catena didn’t want to go; she was tired of going places, she said. And truly she was tired, she couldn’t sleep enough.

 

  
We took a flat-bottomed ferry across the lake. Pasco was one of King Voltur’s soldiers who’d settled in the valley after the conquest a dozen years ago. He got to gossiping on the boat with Lame and Chunner, saying, “We’d best hurry or all we’ll see will be the backsides of horses on their way up the mountain. Once they get up in those ravines and woods, we’ll never find them. You have to watch these Lambaneish bastards, they’re naught but cozeners and thieves—they can steal your shirt without taking off your coat.”

 

  
He had a pair of Lambaneish horseboys with him who heard every word, but he didn’t seem bothered by it.

 

  
I said, “Beg pardon, but have you ever come across a sharp-feigned man with a ruddish-brown beard, a man who sells horses?”

 

  
Pasco looked astonished that I could speak at all, let alone in the High. He answered to Lame, as if he’d asked the question. “Could be anyone—there are more redbeards here than not.”

 

  
“He had a roam, a roan named Ganos,” I said.

 

  
“Huh. A horse named Ganos. Does she think I know every useless jade hereabouts?”

 

  
“She’s looking for her father,” Lame said, having heard the gossip.

 

  
“Don’t know him,” Pasco said, and spat over the side of the ferry.

 

  
We landed below the Town of One Hundred Mares, and went past a fish market along the quay crowded with several sorts of customers, to judge by the clothing: women wearing short vests over their dresses, and felt caps stitched with bright embroidery—mountain folk such as we’d seen even in the villages on the other side of the Ferinus; other women were clad in yellow or orange dresses and shawls; still others in fur-trimmed cloaks in the fashion of Incus. There were also men and women with shawls covering their faces, which I thought peculiar. I wondered if they were disfigured, and ashamed of it.

 

  
We climbed cobbled stairs and streets between three-story buildings. The town looked prosperous, save for a few rubble-strewn gaps in the rows of houses. We met a herd of sheep coming down, and I stood in a doorway to let them go by. Above me I saw a woman in a saffron shawl reach out to close the shutters of a painted balcony against the Sun. Her face was turned away from me, but the curve of her arm, bared to the elbow, was redolent of a memory I couldn’t quite recall. And I had the same sensation when I saw a woman turn to chide a dawdling child, a little girl in a green felt cap; the woman had a high reedy voice, and she spoke with such a lilt and so many rising notes that she seemed always to be asking questions, even as she scolded the girl. The sound was naggingly familiar, like a lullaby with a remembered melody and forgotten words.

 

  
We started above the town and worked our way down. Pasco had the king’s warrant and a list from the steward, and he bullied his way into one stable or farmyard or pasture after another, taking one horse from a smallholder who had only two, and five horses from a landowner who had thirty. We were unwelcome everywhere. Unwelcome also the tidings we carried of King Corvus’s defeat—his disgrace, for losing his kingdom to his own mother. Most were amazed, even disbelieving, that he’d crossed the Ferinus unseasonably. Amazed, uneasy—what would it mean for Sapheiros, this war in Incus, the king’s exile? Maybe some of the Lambaneish felt a secret glee at the news; if so it was well hidden under sullen resentment.