In the walled garden she grew vegetables and herbs and kept two espaliered fruit trees, apricot and cherry. Her aunt Aesca had tended the garden while she was alive, and she had believed that it was no use growing anything you couldn’t eat or use for medicine. There were no flowers, except the few plants she let grow to seed for next years’ planting. Nothing there just for the beauty of it.
“A rose,” Lig thought one day, on her knees by the carrots. “A white rose. That’s what I’d like. A white rose.”
It was only a small tradition she was breaking, but it felt satisfying all the same. She traded a blue bowl for a cutting of a white rose from Vine the thatcher’s garden, and planted it and some cornflower seeds, for good measure.
She tended that baby rose all through spring and all through summer, mulching and watering it, soaping off the aphids and using dark brown ale on the thrips. She left the kitchen to Brond, before and after the baby’s birth. They called her Blaise and she was as red-headed as Lig.
Lig couldn’t help but love her, but this time she left the tending of her to Brond, along with tending the fire.
The fire didn’t like it.
That was what they told me, when I was old enough to hear the story, when my chestnut hair was down past my shoulders and I could climb Aunty Gledda’s legs like climbing up a tree, her strong hands helping me. They said that Lig had made a mistake, thinking that the Fire God only cared about the ones he’d blessed with children, when he cared more, maybe, about the other two, the ones he had all to himself.
Lig decided, they said, that if she couldn’t leave a child in the world, she’d leave a rose. A perfect white rose, more beautiful than any anyone had ever seen. So she begged cuttings from anyone who had a rosebush, and she went out searching the hillsides for wild roses, and she moved the carrots and the spinach and the onions out to the edge of the orchard, and took over the walled garden for her roses.
Some had small, tender buds. Others were wide, blowsy things with few petals but a rich, heady scent. I can just remember the smell, dizzying in the walled summer garden. Years it took her, to match and cross the blooms.
With each year of neglect for the vegetable garden, the fire grew angrier.
Not that it wasn’t tended. No, all of them tended it. Brond and Gledda, both, and Mim, too, when she was old enough. And then Blaise. Even me. And Lig, when she felt like it, when she was passing.
But she didn’t sit staring into the flames anymore, and she didn’t sing softly to it as she went about the cooking and the cleaning, for she was thinking about her roses. She smelt of rose, now, not of charcoal and warm wool. Even in winter. She made rose-petal jam, rose-leaf pillows and rosehip tea. After much trial and error, she learnt to make an unguent of roses, and the merchants who came to buy glazeware began to buy her vials of perfume and unguent as well.
It soothed an old hurt, I suspect, to be able to bring silver into the house as well as food from her garden.
The fire smouldered.
Then came the year when Lig achieved her goal. The perfect white rose. She ran into the house one spring morning and dragged us all out to the garden. My feet were cold in the dew, I remember, and I couldn’t understand why Aunty Lig was so excited about a tiny rosebush, no bigger than I was, with only one rose on it.
We went into breakfast, Lig floating.
“If I never do anything else in my life,” she said. “I’ve done this. The perfect rose.”
The fire blazed up in a roar.
I remember it. The terror of it, the sound, the fierce heat. I remember Mam Brond grabbing me and running, calling for Blaise and Mim, screaming to Lig to run, run, run!
For Lig was standing there, staring at the fire as if bespelled. As if in love.
“For me?” she said. “You’ve come just for me?”
I looked back from the door and I saw him. I saw him reach out for her, and I saw her smile and walk straight into his arms.
He consumed the house and everything in it. Only the stone walls were left. But he left the orchard and the pottery alone.
We huddled in the street, watching, and Mam Brond and Aunt Gledda stopped anyone going too close or trying to put it out. The heat drove us back fifty paces. The thatch flamed so bright we couldn’t look at it. Then it was gone. Just gone in a moment, as if it had never been.
We spent the night at Vine’s, sitting close together, not talking. Blaise cried, they say, and I just sucked my thumb and clung to Mam. In the morning we went back.
The main room was still uncomfortably warm. There was nothing left, not even the shapes of things. Everything was consumed except the glazeware, which was all cracked and broken, crazed and dull, but there. The floor was slate, and it had cracked as well, but it was so well packed down on the earth below it that we could walk on it safely. The ashes crunched beneath our feet. Gledda cried as she walked.
The crock where the silver was kept had cracked open and the silver had melted into a sharp-edged puddle.
The kitchen was just a shell. Here, even the glazeware hadn’t survived. All that remained was the chimney and the hearth. There were no bones, no sign of Lig at all. In the hearth, burning cheerfully as though this were any ordinary morning, was the fire.
Gledda went out straightaway to get it some kindling. Mam went into the garden.
He had swept through the garden so fast that he just sucked the moisture out of everything and left it charcoal. Each rosebush was a ghostly black image of itself. On Lig’s special bush, her perfect bud was still there, every petal intact, black and crisp and dead as Lig itself.
“It was a warning,” said Mam Brond.
“It was a punishment,” said Gledda, tending the fire frantically.
“It was a bloody temper tantrum,” Mim said, years later, but only outside, in the market, away from the fire.
Blaise, whose daughters grew up to tend the Fire God in their turn, said, “It was love abandoned.”
But I saw it, over Mam’s shoulder, and it was murder and love fulfilled, both at once. I saw it, and I wondered, all through the years of my girlhood: Does he love all of us, or only Lig? Was it simple jealousy of her time and care, or a deeper jealousy of living things?
After Blaise had her first daughter, and I knew there would be no children for me, I wondered: Would he come for me if I planted a rose?
I knew the answer, knew it certain in my bones, and that was how I found I had the Sight, and I had to combine his service with service to newer gods, and they extended my life after my sister’s daughter bore her first girl. But still, even as I cast the stones and listened to them whisper the black rock gods’ answers, still and always I tended the fire.
Ash
HARD COUNTRY BY daylight was a nightmare in the dark, and soon they were leading the horses as much by feel as by their sight, the strengthening starlight interrupted by cloud and trees and towering rocks. Irrationally, Ash felt safer on the ground, although he would be far safer on Mud if the dogs ever caught up to them. He had to hope that the first brother wouldn’t risk his hounds in the wilderness, but if he did, they could be caught between two sets of claws and teeth. He distracted himself from that thought by trying to remember the sequence of notes Doronit had whistled to send the wind wraiths away. He had stood on the cliffs above Turvite with her and she had whistled two tunes: one to control them, so they could parley, and one to send them away. He had tried to forget that night . . .
As they made their way upward, the slope grew steeper, the trees fewer, and the rocks slid beneath them. The horses didn’t like it when the trail shifted under their hooves, especially Cam. She shied and slid again, pulling on the reins so often that Flax had to swap over with Ash to give his arms a rest.
The last stretch was the steepest, the horses scrabbling for purchase, Flax and Ash on hands and knees. At the top they paused for a moment, and Ash was sure he could hear the scrabbling sounds continue. An echo? Or… Surely the men wouldn’t follow them up here? They’
d be insane to do so.
The top of the bluff was a plateau, dangerous even in daylight, and crowned with whirling winds which ripped between boulders and down crevices moaning unendingly. The horses didn’t like it at all. A little way forward, Mud stuck his hooves in the thin soil and refused to go any further.
“We have to find shelter until daylight,” Ash shouted above the wind. There was a sudden silence. The wind just stopped, as though it had heard him.
“That’s not good,” Flax said.
Wind wraiths, Ash thought in terror, just before they came. He and Flax were outside the old compact between the wind wraiths and humans: they could not take humans unless the humans were delivered to them by an act of treachery. The agreement was so old that some believed it had been arranged by the gods themselves, long, long before Acton’s forces had come over the mountains. But it had force only in settled lands. He and Flax were in the wilderness, and they were fair game.
The thin, pale wraiths swerved in from all directions, around large boulders and small, screaming and moaning, sounding like all the storms, all the evil, in the world. Close enough, Ash thought, as he tried frantically to remember the sequence of notes that Doronit had used to send them away.
Like all the air spirits, wind wraiths liked to play with their prey. They streamed past, thin claws flicking out at the last moment to scratch a cheek, a hand, to cut through a shirt. Although they ignored the horses, Cam and Mud had their hooves firmly planted, shaking with frozen terror. The wind wraiths licked their claws and rounded back again, six of them, swirling like a cloud with needles hidden in its center. Ash couldn’t remember the notes that would send them away. In desperation, he worked his dry mouth to make saliva and began to whistle. Five notes, notes that had been burned into his brain in the dark wind above Turvite. Five notes which controlled them.
They shrieked with displeasure, but their wild flight slowed and they came to hover in front of Ash. Flax looked from side to side, as though he couldn’t quite see them, just hear them.
“Who calls us?”
Flax, getting the idea, was picking up the tune and whistling too. Ash waited until he was perfect in rhythm, perfectly in pitch, and then stopped, and spoke.
“We do.”
The leading wraith spat on the ground and snarled at Ash, arms stretched toward his face, claws curling. He forced himself to remain still. “Name, ignorance.”
“Ash.” Flax flicked him a look, as though to say “What about me?” but Ash didn’t know what the consequences would be of giving your name to a wind wraith, and he didn’t want Flax to suffer if the results were bad.
“What would you have us do, Ash, little tree? Remember, trees can be uprooted if the wind is strong enough.” It laughed.
“Leave us alone.”
Flax gestured strongly to the horses.
“Leave us and our horses alone,” Ash amended. “Let us pass safely through this place.”
“What do you offer in exchange?” the wraith hissed. It looked consideringly at Flax.
Ash thought fast. He was certainly not going to make the kind of bargain that Doronit had. She had traded lives for information, had told them where to find whole ships for killing so she could collect the insurance silver. He would not trade Flax’s life for his. But he had to give them something . . .
Behind them, stones shifted and scraped each other. The wind wraiths whirled up and shrieked and Ash risked a glance behind them. He began to whistle again, in case this was a trick to distract them. No trick. Behind them was a man, wrapping one arm around his head to protect his face from the wind wraiths’ claws and swiping the air with his sword uselessly. The man was hard to see in the starlight, but Ash had no doubt about who it was. He made sure Flax was still keeping time, keeping pitch, and then he stopped whistling.
“Horst!” he called. “Come this way.”
Horst stumbled toward them, the wind wraiths following and slicing at him viciously. They plucked away the sword in his hand and let it drop.
“You have brought us a sacrifice, friend!” the leading wraith said with satisfaction. “It is a good bargain!”
The wraith reached long claws toward Horst’s face. He stepped back, screaming, “No!”
“No!” Ash shouted at the same moment, and batted the wraith’s hands away.
The wraiths shrieked and spurted upward again, coming down a little further away. Ash had a moment to think. Should he sacrifice Horst?
He glanced at Flax and saw that he was just plain terrified — that he’d accept any bargain to get them out safely. Ash saw himself on the cliffs above Turvite, whistling frantically to keep himself and Doronit safe. If someone had said to him then, “Sacrifice someone who wants you dead and you’ll be safe,” what would he have answered?
Tactically, he knew what he should do. Probably no one, not even Martine, would blame him. But he had made this decision when he hadn’t killed the carter, and besides that, he couldn’t, he just couldn’t, hand another person over to the wraiths.
“No,” he said. “This is not a sacrifice. The bargain includes his safety.”
Horst looked at him in astonishment.
“What do you offer, then,” the wraith hissed, “that is worth three lives?”
Ash cast around frantically for something, anything, he could offer them. “Information,” he said at last.
“What?”
Ash swallowed. He just hoped this news would be astonishing enough. “The barrier between life and death has been breached. Ghosts walk the land, killing the living.”
“Sooooo.” The wraith shot up into the sky like a fountain of white and returned to hover again in front of him. “Broken by a human?”
Ash nodded.
“Where?”
“South,” Ash said. “In Carlion.”
“Come, then, brothers,” it shrieked. “Come to feast.”
Laughing, cackling, screaming, the wraiths sped into the sky and headed south, a cloud traveling as no cloud could or ever should, against the wind.
Horst sank to the ground, shivering, blood running down his face and arms from hundreds of tiny wounds. The wraiths had done much more damage to him, thinking he was theirs.
Ash and Flax remained stock still for a long moment, until they were sure the wraiths weren’t coming back, and then checked the horses, patting their sweating flanks and murmuring comfort, taking reassurance from their warmth and solid flesh, trying to keep an eye on Horst at the same time.
“What have you done?” Flax asked.
Ash wondered that himself. It hadn’t occurred to him that the wraiths would react like that — he had just hoped that the information would be enough to make a bargain. He licked his lips nervously. He knew he was going to get into trouble over this, but he didn’t know from whom.
“I… I don’t know. But at least we’re alive. Let’s get going before they come back.”
That got through to Horst. He clambered to his feet and faced Ash. “You could have fed me to them. You’d have been safe, then.”
Ash shrugged. What could he say? In the darkness Horst’s face was hard to see, but his voice was full of emotion: confusion, gratitude, anger. Ash would feel like that, too, if an enemy had saved him.
“I can’t let you go,” Horst said reluctantly. “It’s my duty to my lord to take you back. Or kill you.”
Ash felt very tired. “Kill me if you want, but you’re still in Golden Valley and that makes it murder, not warlord’s justice.”
Horst hestitated. Ash wished he could see better, but the starlight was faint and interrupted by high clouds.
“I have to take you back,” Horst said eventually.
“You can’t,” Ash said. “There are two of us, and we’re both armed. We have horses, you don’t. You’re wounded. There’s no chance you could take us both and drag us down the side of this shagging mountain without one of us clouting you on the head with a rock. And your lord should know the news we gave to the wraiths
. There is an enchanter raising ghosts and giving them body. Your lord should be told.”
The next pause seemed very long as Horst considered. Flax moved quietly around the side of the horses, trying, Ash could see, to get behind Horst in case it came to a fight. But then the wind wuthered through a gap in the rocks, sounding just like a wind wraith, and they all flinched. Horst let out a long sigh.
“You’ll still be a wanted man,” he said. “I can’t let you off Sully’s murder.”
Ash nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.
Horst turned back the way he had come, then paused. Speaking with difficulty, he said, “Thanks.” Then he started walking, head down.
Flax came up beside Ash and clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
It was easier said than done. The moon was on its downward slide and its light was interrupted by clouds building from the south. Ash and Flax took it in turns to go in front of the one leading the horses, poking at the ground with a stick to make sure it was solid, to make sure they wouldn’t tumble headlong into a crevasse or have one of the horses break a leg in a pothole. All the time the wind was building, sounding more and more like the wind wraiths returning, until they were soaked with sweat from the tension and the concentration. When the moon was about to set, Ash decided they had to find somewhere to spend the rest of the night.
They found a nest of large boulders which had a sheltered spot in the center and a small overhang where they could sit, glad to have their backs against something solid, glad to be out of the wind, but not willing to sleep. Just in case. The horses, however, settled down as soon as they came within the circle of rocks, and Ash decided to take that as a sign they were safe. As they unsaddled and groomed the horses, the dusty scent of their hides and the routine way Mud shifted to let Ash move from one side to the other created a sense of normalcy that settled him, too.
Deep Water Page 26