Wildfire (90 page)

  
He grinned and poured a libation on the tiled floor of the colonnade. “To Hazard Peril, protector of travelers.”

 

  
“But I’m not going,” I said.

 

  
“To Ardor Hearthkeeper then, patroness of staying home.” He poured again and passed the doublewine to me. “Not that this is home,” he said after a pause.

 
  

 

  
I crept into the king’s bed and curled up with my back to him, but he was already awake. “Do you have to get drunk every night?” he said. “I told you to stay away from my men.”

 

  
“It’s only Garrio. I asked him for doublewine, because it hurts.”

 

  
“The tattoo?”

 

  
“Everywhere.”

 

  
“What were you whispering about for so long?”

 

  
“Nothing. He’s homesick.” Garrio put me to shame. He had a lodestone in him, always pointing toward home. He’d been telling me about his woman in Malleus and their children, and how he worried, knowing his city had fallen to the queenmother and her Wolves and her foreign allies.

 

  
“Aren’t you homesick?” the king asked.

 

  
I didn’t answer.

 

  
“Aren’t you?”

 

  
I rolled toward him. He lay on his back with a corner of the thin linen coverlet over his hips, and the rest of him bare. After the shaven men of Lambanein, it was almost shocking to see the dark line of hair below his
navel. His eyes were closed. He opened them a crack and closed them again.

 

  
I hadn’t bothered to unwind my wrapper. I wished I had, so there’d be less between us. “No,” I said.

 

  
He was quiet.

 

  
“It’s unkind of you not to help me sleep,” I said.

 

  
“If I’d known you were so restless, I would not have invited you to stay.”

 

  
“I’ll go back to my room.” I sat up, and he put a hand around my wrist.

 

  
“Stay here. It will look odd.”

 

  
I lay down with my back to him again. “Did you truly make a vow?” I asked.

 

  
No answer. I smiled, knowing he couldn’t see my face. I had made a sort of vow myself, not to be so forward as to frighten the king into rebuffing me. I rubbed one foot over the other as if my ankle itched, so my silk wrapper would rustle. The friction of skin against skin was enough to start the quivering sensation in my cleft, and the heat unfurling in me. I lifted my hair to cool the nape of my neck. To go this slowly was harrowing—and yet there was pleasure in it too, I was even now discovering. Pleasure to linger near the cusp and prolong the waiting.

 

  
I wondered about his wife, and how I would compare, and how he would compare to Galan and the other men I’d ceased to count; I wondered whether a consummation so long desired would prove inferior to anticipation.

 

  
I felt a pang of longing for Galan then, missing the way we’d greeted each other at night with desire, finding each in the other what we sought and all we wanted. I was artless then, though I fancied myself bold because whores had taught me a few pleasing tricks. But I had learned him. We’d learned each other, there in his bed that moved from camp to camp and yet was always home. The narrow cot in the Marchfield, the wider camp bed in Incus, and yet always we slept touching, and when one turned so did the other.

 

  
I remembered we were not always in accord; but better I remembered the way Galan had looked at me sometimes. I was bold enough now to call what he felt, what we felt, by its rightful name: to call it love.

 

  
I was still amazed that Galan loved me. What qualities, what particulars had he prized in me that he could see even after Wildfire had struck its blow and made me a stranger to myself? Would he recognize what he loved still, when I came to him in the guise of a Lambaneish princess, bearing on my body the tattoo of a serpent? I might lie about what had happened—the things I’d done—but I would not be able to conceal that I had changed.

 

  
Often I had imagined setting forth to return to Galan, but I’d shied from imagining the end of my journey. Even in my Moonflower dreams I’d failed to foresee the moment when we would meet again, though Moonflower had
shown me he lived. Did that mean there were too many hazards between us, and I would never arrive? Of all the perils on that perilous road, the one I feared most was that Galan would not love what I’d become. That it would all be for naught.

 

  
I could decide later whether to cross the mountains. Step by step, I could choose while I had choice. The gods send us good fortune and bad, and put us to the question of how we will meet our fortune, and what we will make of it.

 

  
Nonsense.

 

  
My thoughts skittered about as if they had something to do with what I might choose. Ardor Hearthkeeper told me once,
Burn bright, burn fast,
and oh I did burn. I couldn’t govern my desires, let alone my fate, which had led me by way of chances and mischances to a foreign city, to lie beside an exiled king. I turned to look at him and found him asleep with his mouth slightly ajar. I didn’t mind seeing him that way, so unguarded.

 

  
I was truly Lambaneish to desire two beloveds at once. They even had a name for it, the Twinned Heart. Not a heart divided, but doubled. And so it felt: but sometimes one had to choose.

 
  

 

  
My goat Ruddy had gotten into the kitchen garden again and trampled the hazel sticks that held up the peas and eaten the plants roots and all. The withy fence wasn’t sturdy enough to keep her out. I hit her with a stick and threatened to make her into goat stew. She shied away and I chased her out of the garden, and set to work weaving the fence again. She was such a glutton, I was amazed she had enough sense not to eat the moonflowers.

 

  
I wondered if the goat was worth the trouble she caused. I asked my cat Gowdylakin what she thought. I had so been looking forward to the first peas.

 

  
I could make a fence of stout palings. It would take a long time to cut them and drive them into the ground, but it would serve for years. But there was too much to be done to undertake such a task now. Always too much to do for one person alone.

 

  
I went down to the herbary, and picked cockeburr and black lovage to seethe with wine to cleanse my blood of the venom, and borage to make a poultice to soothe the stitches. I did a bit of weeding and straightened up to see storm clouds coming over the Needle Cliffs, trailing the long ribbons of rain. Fork-tailed swallows danced over the meadow and invisible winds trod down the grasses. Thunder resounded like avalanches. Likely the storm would have battered down the peas anyway.

 

  
Storms were commonplace here on Mount Sair; I lived in the sky, not below it. Yet I feared the lightning, and woke up.

 
  

 

  
“What did you dream?” King Corvus asked. He was dressed and sitting on the side of the bed. It was well past dawn, to judge by the light through the shutters.

 

  
“Nothing of use,” I said, and sat up slowly. I rubbed my sore legs.

 

  
“An invitation came for you this morning. The messenger went to Aghazal’s house first, then came here, so all of Allaxios will know where you are by this afternoon.”

 

  
“Is this invitation from a patron?”

 

  
The king dropped a golden bracelet in my lap, shaped like a coiled serpent with chevrons engraved down its back, and red jasper eyes. “Arthygater Katharos wishes you to dine with her tomorrow evening—no doubt she will ask you many questions, which of course you won’t answer. Maybe you can find out when Keros is leaving.”

 

  
“To dine with her—not entertain her guests?” I put the bracelet on my right wrist and admired it.

 

  
“Precisely. This came with the invitation as well.” The king crowned me with a wreath. I took it off and found it was made of dwale, like the wreaths the adepts had worn for the rites. I truly was an initiate, accepted as such even by royalty. I put the wreath back on my head and grinned at the king, and belatedly covered my mouth.

 

  
He laughed, which seemed to surprise him as much as it did me. “Can you believe it? Five thousand beadcoins to buy a mudwoman, a whore, the privilege of mingling with princesses. Everything is for sale in this city.”

 

  
“You’re wrong,” I said. “The gold bought me the right to try. But I, I myself, won this honor by braving the initiation. So don’t say I don’t deserve it.”

 

  
He was too pleased to mind being contradicted. He stood up, restless. “Of course you deserve it, I didn’t mean to say otherwise. You have courage, I’ve seen it. In the mountains I used to say to myself that I would endure as long as you did, or die ashamed.” He leaned over me and clasped my shoulders. “I know you’re afraid of this journey, and with good cause, and you have no reason to be loyal to me. But you have your own reasons to undertake it, don’t you? Don’t you still?”

 

  
I nodded yes. But I let my eyes deny it. I looked at him through a glaze of tears. It would have been coarse, overdone, to blink and let them fall.

 

  
The king sat on the bed again. “You told me you dreamed this—dreamed you were standing before Merle with Ebanakan guards. So why do you hesitate now? What do you fear?”

 

  
“I had a dream, but not that one.”

 

  
“Then how did you know our plans?”

 

  
“I dreamed you told me. You said it would comfort you to know Merle was dead. But I never had a dream in which I met the Starling.”

 

  
I expected him to be incensed that I’d misled him, but he appeared stricken. “I took it as a promise, a true foretelling,” he said. “A gift from Lynx Foresight, just as you were.”

 

  
“True dreams are not promises—they prove false if we do something to avert them. I warned you of the Hunt, and you were not harmed.”

 

  
“Prove the false dream true,” he said to me.

 
  

 

  
Had I time enough, I might convince him he could not part with me for a hundred brothers. There was no time. The next New Moon was in a hand of days.

 

  
A hand of days, a hand of nights. I could hope.

 

  
I dressed in saffron linen and filled my market basket with things I had taken with me from Aghazal’s house: cloth, embroidered and plainweave, lamps, oil, spices, scents, and beadcoins. I carried them to my hiding place in Katabaton’s Cleft.

 

  
I gave blood and milk and moonflower seeds to Katabaton, in thanks for sparing and welcoming me. I promised her another candle like the one that had burned for five days, and my serpentine bracelet, as soon as I had worn it to the arthygater’s banquet. Katharos would expect to see it.

 

  
On the wall beside Katabaton’s painted image, I scratched a zigzag serpent striking downward like a lightning bolt, in honor of the serpent form she takes when she visits us in the underworld.

 

  
I had to sit and rest several times as I climbed the stairs to the wooden door in the cliff. Sweat gathered under my hat and along my spine. I wheezed. No one had said how long these venom pains would last, or if they would ever go away. I wondered who would dress my hair and depilate me tomorrow: what should I wear? I’d failed to send a gift with the messenger—had the king remembered? I snorted and began to laugh and couldn’t stop. By Katabaton’s soles, I’d rather face the Ferinus again than disgrace myself by appearing ill clad and ill coiffed before the arthygater and the foremost women of Allaxios.

 
  

 

  
Garrio saw me crossing the courtyard. “Where have you been?” he said. “We were looking for you.”

 

  
“Errands.” I showed him my basket, full of wax, honey, combs, cords, a wicker coil for my hair, obsidian blades, serpent hairpins, salves, plums, and apricots.

 

  
“Your servants are here, waiting in your room.” He seemed to think this amusing—I suppose I did too.

 

  
It was true my new handmaids were young; at a guess, neither above fourteen. One was Lambaneish, and her name was Pousin. Her husband had accused her of adultery and sold her. The second had a shaven head with a fuzz of black hair, which meant she had but lately arrived at the city gate. She was splayfooted, knock-kneed, and skinny. She had pale skin and terrible old eyes, and understood only a few words of Lambaneish, and none in any other language I knew. She stank of fear. They had no shawls, and their wrappers were rags, the saffron so faded it could be mistaken for tharais onionskin dye.

 

  
“Who chose them?” I asked Garrio. “I can see they spared no expense.”

 

  
He shrugged and left me with them.

 

  
The bondwomen looked hungry. I gave them my gold and purple plums, and sent them off to get something to eat from the king’s cook.

 

  
I took a brazier with embers to the bathing room near the king’s bedchamber, and melted wax in a borrowed pot, and mixed it with honey and lemon juice to depilate myself. The tiled pool was empty and needed scrubbing. I cleaned it, too impatient to wait for the handmaids. It was furnished with a pair of spouts in the shape of leaping pards, with tongues as stoppers. As water gushed into the pool, I removed the hair of my body, and scrubbed and rinsed myself.

 

  
I sat down gingerly in the pool. The water came up to the middle of my chest. It was mountain water from the Kerastes, and it had warmed somewhat on the long journey over the plains in the stone causeway, but it was cool enough to be refreshing on such a hot day. The bathing room was two stories high, and it had been grand once, but now its painted walls were smudged and stained and some of its marble basins shattered. I wondered if a battle had been fought here, or if the court had been abandoned because of ill omens.

 

  
Strange to be alone in a bath; it was a place for being sociable. I floated on my back, looking up at the charming dome in the ceiling, inset with globes of colored glass. The water rocked me gently, like Sleep, and I felt as if I could let go and sink without drowning. A dream fish slid along my arm and flicked its tail, and I opened my eyes and settled on the floor of the pool with a thump and a splash.