Wildfire (91 page)

 

  
The king sat on the tiled rim and took off his boots. “You’re in my bath.”

 

  
“Shall I get out?”

 

  
A curt shake of the head. He’d been riding, I could tell by the smell of horse and the sweat stains on his kidskin leggings.

 

  
“Hunting?” I asked.

 

  
“Hawking. Gods, I wish I could get out of this city and go somewhere I
could gallop. I’m tired of pretending a garden is a forest, I want a true forest, a green one; I want rain sometimes and animals that are not caged.”

 

  
He stripped off his clothes and began to step into the pool, and I shooed him away, saying he had to wash and rinse first, or he’d dirty the water. Had he learned nothing of Lambaneish ways?

 

  
“Too much,” he said, and emptied a basin over his head.

 

  
“Scrub too.” I pointed at the coarse sack filled with sand.

 

  
He threw it at me. What a mood he was in: irked and amused, like someone being tickled who refuses to laugh. He slouched down in the water, facing me. He was tall enough to lean his head on one end of the pool and touch the other with his feet. I moved my hands to set in motion a tiny current. He closed his eyes and I took it as permission to stare. His skin was all over as brown as Galan’s face after he’d been tanned by the Sun. His wet hair had divided into neat points, black feathers.

 

  
I put my hand on his foot and ran my thumb along the ridge of his anklebone. “Did you truly take a vow?” I asked, knowing the answer already.

 

  
He opened his eyes. It was not the look I longed for, but it was plain enough. I moved through the water and knelt beside him. I ran the sharp nail of my mother finger lightly down the dark line of hairs under his navel, and along the length of his prick, which was already rising.

 

  
He stopped my fingers from nibbling at him like a minnow and brought my tharais hand to his mouth, and kissed my wrist where the manacle had scarred it. I clenched my fist and he unfolded it and kissed my palm, and I felt chilled, as if all the heat in my body had rushed to my left hand. He marveled aloud that the hand was so hot to the touch. He said Garrio had told him how I’d thawed the hands and feet of his men—he’d seen it himself in the mountains.

 

  
He traced the zigzag serpent from the tail at my throat to the tongue at my cleft. Each stitch was reddened, raised proud above the surrounding flesh. He asked if the tattoo still hurt, and it did, it was inflamed in the wake of his touch, but there was pleasure in it too. There’d be no need for him to bite and scratch to mark me. He’d already given me a mark, I would bear it always, and though it was dedicated to Katabaton, I wondered if it pleased him to think it all his own.

 

  
I touched the tattoo of his lineage, the godsign above his beard, three stars one above another: Rift. I rose up on my knees to straddle him, and put my palm against his neck so I could feel the life pulsing in his throat. He looked up at me, smiling, and with his hands on my hips he pulled me down. I felt as if I’d eaten moonflower, and emerged from the tough shell of my old skin in some newborn, tender skin that was alive to every sensa
tion, so that I felt again the forgotten imprint of the knots in the red cord around my waist, under the weight of the king’s hands. And when I arched backward, ripples moved away from me and returned as caresses, slipping over me as I slid over him. I bent to lick beads of water from his shoulder, and he tasted of cold mountain streams. I wanted to taste his salt, his sweat.

 

  
I sheathed him slowly. With Galan I often had been too eager, too hasty, and this time I meant to dally. And it was what the king seemed to want. He leaned against the wall of the pool and draped his arms along the rim, and I understood that he wished me to coax and provoke. He eased himself with me—was that all? It made me feel a whore, and like a whore, I was feigning. Because there was so much longing pent up in me that restraint was a most exquisite torment.

 

  
But was there any way he would have taken me but lightly? Never by force, never as a captive; never as a mudwoman or bondwoman who wasn’t free to refuse. I’d done as he asked and become a celebrant, and ease was something a celebrant could give, an honorable gift. I should be honored he’d chosen me for that purpose, when he’d let no other console him since his wife died.

 

  
He closed his eyes and the smile was still on his lips, but there were creases between his brows and at the corners of his eyelids, signs of melancholy, and I feared he was thinking of her, of his wife. Whether he strove to forget or remember her, I couldn’t tell. Whereas I thought of Galan and tried not to. I felt I betrayed him now as I had not done before, with those others—as if betrayal could happen by degrees.

 

  
And now the king was all the way home inside me, yet we were not joined, and I couldn’t bear the distance between us. I clasped my arms around him, feeling the ladder of his ribs, his sinewy back and the long furrow of his spine, and I pressed against him, chest to chest and belly to belly, until I felt the sting of the serpent tattoo. I sipped water caught in the curve of his ear, and he took my head between his hands and scraped the bedraggled wet hair away from my face and kissed me on the mouth for the first time.

 

  
And there at last was what I sought, urgency, and his strong hearthfire blazing up in answer to mine.

 

  
Of course the Lambaneish have a name for the first Posture we took, the woman kneeling over the seated man, and for the next, the woman seated on the man’s lap, and for other Postures that flowed one into the other in the coupling. But even the Lambaneish have not named everything in their Taxonomies, every posture, every embrace, every utterance, every kind of love.

 
  

 

  
That night I went to the king’s bedchamber without being asked, and he stayed away talking to his men until late at night. When he came to bed, he stripped and lay beside me, but not touching. I stirred to let him know I was awake. He said nothing. I turned on my side and faced him.

 

  
“Are you sorry?” I said.

 

  
He turned his head my way. “For what?”

 

  
“For what we did.”

 

  
A short laugh. “I have many regrets. That’s not one of them.”

 

  
“But you aren’t glad. You think of your wife perhaps. You are sorrowful.”

 

  
“I’m thinking of you.”

 

  
“But here I am.”

 

  
“Yes.”

 

  
He made a gesture I took as permission, and I moved over to lay my head on his shoulder. He gathered me to him, and his hand clenched my upper arm in a painful grip. I said, “But I thought…”

 

  
“I know you did. And that I very much regret.”

 

  
I sat up and reached for the wrapper draped over the scrolled backrest of the bed.

 

  
“Come here,” he said. “Firethorn, come here.” He touched my back. It snared me. Gods, had he ever said my name before?

 

  
I’d learned to speak of love with Lambaneish eloquence—easier to speak so when love is not felt. Now I was as wordless as when I was first thunderstruck. I lay under him and he looked down with pity in his eyes, but his mouth was bleak, his kisses unsparing. I was ashamed of the mewling whimpering sounds I made; ashamed to be seen so undone. But even as I grieved I took everything he would give.

 

  
Nothing had changed. He still wanted me to go.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 35
  

  
Katabaton’s Cleft
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
entered the palace of Arthygater Katharos by the foregate, which I had never done before. In the pavilion next to the dining court, a tharais napkin washed and dried my feet and slipped on silk shoe-stockings, guest gifts from the arthygater. I looked at the napkin’s bowed head, hidden under the onionskin-dyed shawl with the brown stripe, and wondered if she was someone I knew, Nephelais perhaps.

 

  
I doubted even Nephelais would recognize me. Being without a tharais servant, I’d arranged my own hair on a wicker form shaped like a coiled serpent with its head tucked in. I left curls free around my forehead and down my neck, in a fashion I’d been obliged to use since my hair was too short; it had been copied by others. Over that I wore a net cap with golden beadcoins inset with garnets; over the net cap, a moonflower wreath. On my face, a glittering mask, mica for my cheeks and malachite for my eyelids. My lips were dyed the color of the darkest cherries.

 

  
Arthygater Katharos offered the banquet in honor of the new initiates of the Serpent Cult, and the four of us shared a platform near the arthygater’s, under the entrance tower. It was cause for celebration that Katabaton had accepted four of the five postulants, all but the coward who had refused to enter the water. Most years only two or three made the endeavor; some years none succeeded.

 

  
I’d earned my place here by braving the serpents; we had all been brave, and we postulants shared a bond as partakers in the same secret rites, and I was proud of it. Yet I was cozening them, my fellow initiates. I sat across from Keros, and as we compared our aches from the venom and pains from the tattoo, I was thinking of how the king meant me to steal her place and dowry, and remembering the last time I was in Arthygater Katharos’s dining court, serving as a napkin. A day ago I might have felt a secret glee to have such secrets, and taken delight in my daring. But today I enacted a joyless spectacle for the other guests.

 

  
I could refuse to go, when the time came. As long as I was here, in Lam
banein, I might have a chance. I was not entirely mistaken about what the king felt, I couldn’t be.

 

  
If I refused, no doubt he’d be furious. He’d turn me out. Aghazal would take me in, but there was no need for her to incur King Corvus’s enmity openly, not if I could fend for myself. I’d hoarded enough to rent a lodging, perhaps even to buy a small house in the lower city.

 

  
It wouldn’t damage my reputation much if the king repudiated me. Some might even say I’d gotten the better of him, persuading him to sponsor me for the cult and then jilting him. Gossips would relish the fact that he’d paid the tithe for my initiation by borrowing against the dowry of his betrothed. The tattoo would raise my reputation and my price, and soon I’d have patrons again and the gossips would have gone on to other rumors.

 

  
I could live this way, accepted like Aeidin among the most powerful women of the kingdom; I could rise in the cult, learn its mysteries, perhaps even become a priestess.

 

  
Or I could become Arthygater Keros, enough like her to fool a strange-ignorant prince. Wasn’t I speaking to her now in the accents of Lambanein, and covering my mouth when I laughed, and winkling snails from their shells exactly as she did? And when she quoted the Epic of Balanos, didn’t I find an apt reply from the Commentary of Historian Mnasthan? No matter that the food had no more savor to me than stale bread crumbs, and I could hardly swallow.

 

  
I didn’t know I would be called upon to speak, but I was. Between the sucked course and the bitten, we new initiates had to stand up before the other adepts and recount what we’d seen during the rite of envenomation. Arthygater Keros went first, describing her vision of Katabaton Milk-giver in the overworld. Katabaton sat in a garden, the most beautiful garden Keros had ever seen, of which the gardens of Allaxios were poor counterfeits; the goddess sat on a throne of shell, suckling the infant Peranon, and her raiment was woven of rays of moonlight, so dazzling it hurt Keros’s eyes. Katabaton didn’t speak, but she bestowed on Keros the gift of her smile. Keros described garden, throne, raiment, and smile eloquently in verses of six, six, eight, so I was sure she’d been warned of what to expect.

 

  
Arthygater Kyma spoke second, recounting a vision like that of Keros, and using some of the same phrases. I didn’t believe Kyma at all, for according to the adept who examined her she hadn’t even been bitten. She’d swooned from fright, not venom. Which proved to be the worse for her, as she had to suffer the pricking of the needle when the serpent was stitched on her skin without being numbed by the poison. She had screamed and screamed. I’d heard her, but she’d seemed so far away.

 

  
Then Gnosin, the devout postulant, spoke in verses of five, six, and
seven. She had seen darkness rather than light, for she was swallowed by a giant python, and inside the snake she was bathed in liquid fire that burned and burned without devouring her. She suffered such agony she thought she couldn’t endure it, but she was not permitted to die. Winds spoke to her inside the snake, warning her that the arkhon had a wound festering in his entrails, and he was rotting from the inside out. If the wound broke open and allowed wastes to enter his belly cavity, he would surely die. His physicians must see to it that he fasted and was purged and purified, or woe betide the kingdom, for the one who should inherit it was still too young.

 

  
It was my turn and I was unprepared, and ashamed of my vision. The place I saw could not have been the overworld, for it was nothing like the garden Keros described. Nor had I been granted a vision of Katabaton herself. But when I stood to speak, I told the truth and told it unadorned. To lie would have dishonored the rite, and I’d suffered too much for it. I spoke loudly and heard my voice echo back to me from the arcades around the court.

 

  

 

  
“I thought I was dying,

 

  
sinking, plunging, drowning.

 

  
I descended deep and deeper

 

  
Until I was climbing.

 

  
Up not down, ascending