Wildfire (76 page)

devastated by the gift of your virginity.
He also returned my shawl, which I’d forgotten.

 

  
“You’re a virgin?” Aghazal said. “You should have told me. These are fine gifts, but you could have gotten even more for your first time.”

 

  
“Of course not. I bleed a little, that’s all. It was the Moonflower.”

 

  
“I bled, you should say.”

 

  
We sat side by side in the dining court breakfasting on boiled eggs, though soon it would be time to go visiting. Sometimes we had two dinners of an evening. I had neglected my study of the Taxonomies and slept until late afternoon.

 

  
“I don’t understand why you chose those callow boys,” Aghazal said, “when you could have had more knowledgeable-pleasurable men.”

 

  
“They were handy.”

 

  
“Suddenly you were in a hurry, ein?”

 

  
“Suddenly I was.”

 

  
“Yet you regret it?”

 

  
It wasn’t hard to guess, I suppose. My eyelids were swollen and I couldn’t hold her gaze for long.

 

  
“Don’t think I’m scolding. On the contrary, I commend you: two grandsons of the arkhon in one night.”

 

  
“Don’t forget Mixin and Perdik,” I said dryly. “What do I do, give a fingercap to Mixin and half the shawl to Perdik?”

 

  
Aghazal laughed. “I’ll invite them to my next party and put them in the way of some wealthy men. Those gifts are yours, you earned them.” She peeled an egg and ate half of it at once, biting through the pale yellow mealy yolk. I sat stiff and upright, remembering how I’d touched Mixin, wondering how it would feel to touch Aghazal.

 

  
“King Corvus tells me to stay away from them,” I said.

 

  
“
Told,
he told you. So of course you did the opposite, ein? It wouldn’t do to heed your benefactor.”

 

  
Benefactor—that’s what they called a patron who kept a whore-celebrant for his personal use. I shrugged. “It was the moonflower in me.”

 

  
“Ah, the moonflower. When did he give you this warning?”

 

  
“Last night. He came upstairs in the garden—following me, maybe, I suppose. No, he would not. Is he there?”

 

  
“Where? When? Now you’ve confused me.”

 

  
“In the garden, on the hill, last night.”

 

  
“I don’t think so,” said Aghazal. “He sat in the same place all evening. What was he wearing?”

 

  
“He wears, he wore a long surcoat with a pomegranate design, and a wreath of juniper and greenthorn and oxtongue.”

 

  
“Oxtongue? Unlikely. I spoke with him last evening—he asked after you, by the way—and he was wearing a surcoat with golden oak leaves, and around the hem leaping gazelles. I noticed it particularly.” Gazelles were the sign of Aghazal’s house; she had two life-size bronze gazelles in the dining court, one poised with head up, as if considering whether to leap away, and the other seeming to drink from the pool.

 

  
“So it was Moonflower,” I said. Was I glad? At first I couldn’t tell, cushioned as I was by a sort of smothering numbness. “Then it’s all a lie, everything he says, ein?”

 

  
“Maybe. Maybe not. What did he say?” she asked, but I wouldn’t tell her.

 
  

 

  
One was never alone in Aghazal’s house, nor did one venture out of it alone, and not only because it was safer in company. It was a companionable place. So when I told Aghazal I wished to go alone to visit a shrine of
Katabaton, she was perplexed. But it was not her way to be a strict mistress with me, so she didn’t forbid it.

 

  
I put on a saffron wrapper and shawl with starting bands of magenta and turquoise stripes, the everyday wear of the women of her house. I threaded beadcoins on the cords of my net cap, including three made of amber and one of carnelian; over the cap I wore a broad-brimmed hat, so Aghazal wouldn’t scold me about being too much in the Sun. I put most of my valuables in a big market basket, hiding them under skeins of indigo thread. On top of the thread, I carried thick stalks of moonflower, bearing both the tightly closed flowers and the fruit called thornapples, spiky green seedcases the size of pursenuts.

 

  
I talked my way into the palace district, past the guards at the eastern entrance, using the argument of a few beadcoins, and climbed the wide paved street by the canal. Soon I hurried through narrow alleys between high-walled palaces. I had never been so rich or so afraid of thieves.

 

  
I found the door in the wall and descended the steep dark stairs until I came out into daylight again in the narrow canyon above the shrine of Katabaton. Katabaton had a grand temple on a high terrace just outside the palace district, with a statue as high as a cypress tree, covered in gold. But she was too high, too grand. She didn’t look me in the eye like the Katabaton painted in milky white on the fissured wall of the cave.

 

  
I bound the moonflower stalks into a garland for her. The aroma of the blossoms, even closed, was ripe and strong. No one had made an offering since I visited on the last day of the Quickening. I swept the floor with a bundle of gorse, and laid before Katabaton the skeins of indigo thread that Aghazal’s grandmother had been generous enough to give to me. It was Katabaton who taught the art of dyeing to tharais, they say in Lambanein. I gave her also a golden bracelet, the one I used to cover the scar on my left hand, and prayed for her to smile on Aghazal and her household.

 

  
I found a good hiding place in the cliff wall for my treasures, behind the curtain of bluebind vines. I pulled out crumbling sheets of shale until I made a niche big enough for a glazed pot with a lid, which held my treasures: two golden fingercaps, a golden needle and spindle, a pair of silver dice, an enameled goblet, an alabaster container holding a bag of yellow powder for my arms, the laburnum shawl, and some beadcoins. I hoped it wouldn’t be too damp. I closed up the niche with shale. It would be easy to find if you were looking, but who would look?

 

  
I was determined to pay more attention to money. Coins had never stuck to my fingers, but no longer. Money was the house Aghazal was building by a lake in Ebanaka; money was food and clothing and shelter;
money was saying yes when you felt like yes, no when you felt like no. Without owning money I didn’t even own myself, I could be bought and sold as a bondwoman, or given away as the king had given me away. At least as a whore-celebrant, I was merely rented.

 

  
Should I despise myself because I’d exacted pleasure as well as these treasures from my patrons? All those months of longing for Galan’s touch, and now the king’s, and both denied me, when everywhere else I looked, the gods—Desire or the Moon or Katabaton—held out that gift. That I despised myself for enjoying—and that I had enjoyed—both were undeniable. Enjoyment without joy, hunger that devoured without tasting: I had savored only the first bite, and taken the rest in haste. Even now, thinking about it, I felt the craving. I had subdued that craving by gluttony until I was crammed full, until I sprawled with Kyanos rooting between my legs and my head on Mixin’s belly, and the platform became a boat drifting down a canal under trees full of caged birds, toward the oblivion of Sleep.

 

  
The Dame was just a memory to me now that I no longer possessed her finger bone, but even as a memory she had the power to reproach. She grew cold, disapproving of my wanton ways. She didn’t understand what I’d done, as I hadn’t understood why, when Sire Galan already had me, he’d wagered on a maidenhead. Why wasn’t I enough?

 

  
He’d desired the seduction, not the maid, and once he had her, he no longer wanted her. I’d always thought that was a man’s sport, until now. Just that morning Arkhyios Kydos had sent me an invitation with a gift. I’d accepted the gift and declined the invitation. I was done with him.

 

  
Gods—I blushed and burned when I thought of what Galan would have done if he’d seen me with those princelings and whores. He might toy all he liked, but he’d spurn me for doing the same. He must never know. But what was one more secret to keep from him, when I’d kept so many?

 

  
He would suspect, he would guess something. A captive of the king, riding with the king’s men, and never a man touching me? Who would believe that?

 

  
I suppose I’d thought if I were blameless, I would not be blamed. But Galan was a jealous man; how well I knew it, though I’d never before given him cause.

 

  
I sat on the stairs outside the shrine and pressed the brittle spikes of a thornapple into my palm. Moonflower had to be interrogated; she dodged the truth otherwise. Was it true my portrait had been painted to send to Merle? The limner had made me appear beautiful, modest, prideful, with ardency in one eye. The better to fool a traitor. Unlikely as it was, it was more likely than the explanation I’d been vain enough to imagine, that King Corvus desired to look upon me when I wasn’t there. And if that part of my dream was true,
then so was the rest of it, and someday soon the king would offer me a way back across the mountains to Galan. How could I think of refusing?

 

  
Perhaps we tested each other, Moonflower and I. She was looking for an acolyte and I was looking for dreams I could believe. But I was afraid of her. Two days after eating the paste my eyes still smarted from too much daylight, and my heart wobbled in my chest like a spinning top about to fall. I split open the dried thornapple and offered the brown seeds to a breeze that whistled down the gorge, so Moonflower might take root where it suited her, in the muck by the river or the cracks between boulders.

 
  

 

  
I asked Aghazal if she could have us invited to a banquet attended by some of King Corvus’s cataphracts. She said, “You wish to annoy your benefactor, ein?”

 

  
I said, “He doesn’t want me for himself. Why does he care what I do?”

 

  
“I see,” she said. By the next day we had an invitation to dine at the house of a nobleman who had cultivated acquaintances among the king’s men. Sire Vafra was one of his guests, and also Sire Quislibet and his armiger, Sire Stria. I was afraid when I saw Sire Vafra. Suppose he made some jest about seeing me as a napkin? He could endanger me with a heedless word, without knowing or caring what he’d done. It was fortunate we were not seated together. I hid behind my painted face, and kept my voice high and lilting, and he didn’t appear to know me.

 

  
Sire Quislibet had never spoken to me when I was with the king’s army—when I was Firethorn, a captive mudwoman. For that alone I chose him: because I could. I culled him from the others with simple Flirtations. We sat on different platforms, and I stared at him until he caught me looking. I quickly looked away, and hid a smile behind my hand. And I turned to the man next to me and touched his arm and laughed in such a way that Sire Quislibet knew I was thinking of him instead. I used to watch the girls in our village when the lads came courting—they seemed to know how to simper and flirt, when I had no notion, and no one seemed to want me. But it proved easy to be coy, after all. Not much sport in it. I discovered I could even blush at will, by sending a wave of heat to my face.

 

  
I got up to stroll in the garden, and he followed. I led him a chase, quickening my steps, and running and glancing backward, until I let him catch me in a wisteria arbor. It was furnished with a marble bed, which had a mattress of earth under a smooth coverlet of moss. The nobleman must have had diligent gardeners, to keep moss flourishing in the rainless summers of Allaxios.

 

  
While we coupled I uttered Broken Coos and put rows of scratches down his back. I did this with the help of doublewine, not Moonflower.

 

  
Later Sire Quislibet reclined against the backrest with his arms behind his head, and I measured his thighs, which I couldn’t encompass with my hands. I told him he was strong as an oak, hard as ironwood. I was drunk enough to think myself witty, and he was drunk enough for cheap flattery to be pleasing.

 

  
“Ah, you speak my language!” he said.

 

  
“You don’t recognize me?” I straddled him and leaned close, with my hands on the buttresses of muscle at the base of his thick neck. I smeared him with dirt; I’d scuffed and torn the moss, pushing up against him, and my palms and heels were soiled. I was naked except for the red cord around my waist. He slipped his fingers between the cord and my skin.

 

  
“Have we met? I can’t even see you,” Sire Quislibet said in a complaining tone.

 

  
I could see him perfectly well with my left eye. I put my mother finger against the bare patch under his jaw and dug in my sharpened nail to tilt his head back. “Tell your king you met a whore named Alopexin, hmm? Tell him she was good. Wasn’t I good?” I moved over his dangle until he began to stiffen again.

 

  
He leaned his head on the backrest and closed his eyes. “You won’t get anywhere with him. He’s made a vow to Rift Warrior not to ease himself with a woman until he retakes Incus.”

 

  
“That’s a pity,” I said. “But I won’t perturb his vow. Tell him I can sing to him, I know many Lambaneish songs. Surely the god wouldn’t object if he enjoyed the memory, the melody of a thrush.”

 

  
Sire Quislibet was knocking at my door again and I let him in. He wasn’t the sort of man who thought it proper for a woman to be on top, and before long he turned me over.

 
  

 

  
I’d sent the king a message, and I could only hope it had been delivered. I feared Sire Quislibet was too full of his own importance to serve as anyone’s go-between.

 

  
He failed to send me a gift the next morning. “I could tell he was a boor,” Aghazal said. “People will think you’re not discriminating. Let them come to you, ein? Make them wait and suffer. So much of desire is anticipation.”

 

  
Sometimes I thought there was nothing left of me but wanting what I did not have, and I was weary of it. Wasn’t it better than useless longing to dizzy myself against someone real and solid and heavy and greasy with sweat? But I had rocked on my round heels and driven myself against the man without getting my fill. I hadn’t even managed to forget the gardeners, and the destruction of their perfect moss.