Firethorn

by Sarah Micklem

  In the village early spring is the leanest season; the grain is half dust from the granary floor, the hams have been scraped to the bone, and there’s not much else but old coleworts and turnips. In the Kingswood deer stripped the buds from low branches. The weakest fell prey to wolves or lay down and suckled scavengers, even as linnflower trees flushed red at the bud and willows burned with a green flame by the riverside. Ferns uncoiled and the shoots of bulbs pushed their way through the dead leaves.

  I felt sorrow uncoiling too, less tainted than the bitter thoughts that had kept me company so long. I missed the Dame, not just the place she’d made for me, but the woman herself. I recalled her face, how she would brown in the summer except under her starched blue coif, how I teased her about her pale forehead when I dressed her hair at night. On her right cheekbone she wore the small blue tattoo of her clan, Crux; her left was marked with the godsign of Lynx.

  Lynx was her husband’s clan. He’d been killed in one of the king’s wars before I’d come to the manor, and Na said his kin had sent the Dame back to her father, claiming she was barren. Her father had settled her in his humblest manor for as long as she should live, or until she married again. But she never married again. “I’d not suffer it twice,” she told me once, and that was all she said about it.

  Two lines appeared between her brows when she was vexed. I was more afraid of that look than I’d ever been of Na’s whippings. The Dame would turn it on me when I was careless in my work, or too haughty with the other drudges.

  I feared her shade might be angry with me, for now I weighed up my ingratitude and it was heavy indeed. The pride was my own, nothing forced upon me. She owed me nothing, and yet she had bequeathed to me what she knew. She’d given me her eyesight, that I might see beauty in the patterns the world makes, and all the colors, named and unnamed, that dye the seasons. Was it any wonder I’d come to love what she had loved?

  I had gotten out of the habit of eating every day. Comfort was another habit I had lost: I no longer expected to be warm when it was cold, or dry when it was wet. In submission to weather and need, I’d learned endurance—or indifference, it may be. But famine carried a goad, and drove me through the forest. Everywhere I found the promise of plenty, and too long to wait.

  So I came to the firethorn, the only tree of its kind in the woods. It stood solitary in a glade where a great oak had fallen, and all underfoot were the blue stars of tread-me-down. The Sun lit translucent orange berries in a cage of gray thorns. Silvery buds on the twigs were just unfurling the first green flags. The tree is sacred to Ardor: wood as hard as iron and fruit like flame. The Dame had told me never to touch those berries. Even the birds avoided them. I had been there before and passed them by, but winter had not shriveled them, and they looked round and ripe. And I was hungry. Maybe I was dying.

  I put a berry on my tongue and the juice burst from under the skin with a savor between tart and sweet: wine on its way to vinegar, fermented on the tree. Yet nothing that tasted of danger. I knew I should wait, but I ate another, and another. I stripped the berries from among the thorns until my hands were pierced and scratched: the blood redder than the berries, the berries tasting of blood. As if I consumed myself.

  I lay where I dropped, and shuddered and shook and slept. I awoke in the deepest night to find I had been divided from myself. There lay my body sleeping and dreaming, and I was outside it, awakening. When we dream we may take shapes other than our own; a man may be his brother, a woman a king, and never question it. So, with the certainty born of a dream, I knew I’d become my own shadow. It was a moonless night, with clouds covering the stars, dark as it could be, but somehow the sky was bright enough to cast shadows, to make me out of a darkness deeper than night. I lay beside my body and under it, and I was tucked into the crook of my knees and elbows and the folds of my garments, and I hid under the hair at the nape of my neck.

  Because it was a dream, I knew what to do. I seeped into my body through the soles of the feet, and as I flowed through the dreamer, I gathered my darkness to me, shrinking and thickening until I was a tiny homunculus. I followed the breath out of one nostril and stood on the upper lip.

  The night had quickened with shadows, nothing but shadows, wantonly joining and parting, flickering, rising. I never knew that darkness had so many colors, all of them black. I strove to make the shadows into trees, but things had escaped their edges and lost their names. The harder I looked, the more baffled I was.

  I saw something from the corner of my eye that vanished when I looked at it straight. I stayed just so, glancing sideways, and saw it again: a tree with berries like sparks. The tree caught fire, growing leaves of black flame, and one of the flames made a bird, and the bird began to sing. I turned toward it again and bird and tree disappeared. They could be seen only askance.

  I saw all this on one in-drawn breath. When the dreamer exhaled the wind went through me and I faltered. I lost the certainty that gave me shape. From breath to breath I hung suspended. I was too tenuous to be called a thing. Without weight, how could I stand? I rose like smoke; another breath and I might smear into the wind, dissolve into the other shadows and become nothing.

  But the bird began to sing again and this time I could see the song itself. It gave off a silver flicker, it was like a string on a dulcet, trembling under the player’s touch, shaking sound into the air. Being thin as air I felt it shiver all through me, and I saw it shining through my darkness.

  It was not so hard then, after all, to relinquish my fear, to drift upward; the song was a tether to my sleeping self, to the body below me, which seemed to be no more than glimmers and streaks. But I’d learned that shadows were mutable; I could make something of them by seeing. From the corner of my left eye, the dreamer became a fallen tree, splotched with lichens and moss. I turned my head and from the corner of my right eye, I saw a fist of cords and sticks clutching a sheepskin cloak, a mouth filled with shadow, hair stiff with mud and twigs and leaves. A puppet of wood, no more a part of me. A song bound me to it, a song spun so fine it could break, and there would be silence.

  I drifted. I almost flew. But the dreamer twitched. Eyes shifted under her eyelids. I began to feel sorry for what I’d done, for I saw how I’d remade my flesh into something wooden and numb; I’d been altogether too willing to die. But there was still a single coal of the body’s fire, an ember under soot and feathers of ash. I breathed on that coal and a flame crept out, and heat with it.

  I don’t know how many days and nights the fever burned in me. I was melted, cast, beaten on the anvil of the tree’s root, and drawn to a point. Quenched at times, so the chills shook me, and then heated and pounded again. The pounding kept time with my heart. The heat purified instead of scorching, burning away the dross.

  I awoke to a daylight world where shadows kept their places. The sheepskin was sodden under me, and the smell of sweat was strong. I’d bled from the nose and the blood had dried in a crust on my face and neck. I was weak as a newborn filly and just as thirsty.

  I knew then that I’d been between Ardor’s hammer and anvil. The god had come in the avatar of the Smith to temper me. I took a thorn and made a libation of blood to give thanks to Ardor for letting me live. And I took Firethorn as my name.

  When one of the gods chooses you for a tool or a weapon, you may go on, heedless; nevertheless, you are marked. So I went on for a time, grateful that Ardor had saved me, and didn’t ask why. I suppose I was unwilling to ask, for fear of an answer.

  Yet I’d changed under the Smith’s hammer. His blows had shaken part of me loose, and I felt weaker for it. What was my shadow, in the dream, if not my shade given form? Now I feared my shade might go wandering before-times, while I still lived, and leave the rest of me to rust. If that was a gift, I was ungrateful for it.

  Ardor gave me other things: a song, a handful of berries, and the gift of seeing in the dark. It may be a kind of trickery, this way of seeing, but ever since, I’ve been able to make my way in darkne
ss when others stumbled, so long as I looked askance.

  Even in the day I saw more clearly, both the quick and the subtle: the hawfinch high among the branches, the lynx in the dappled shadows, the hare quivering in the long grass. Often, from the corners of my eyes, I glimpsed the shadows of presences, not quite seen, not quite unseen. The old gods had not fled the Kingswood after all. They were the trees of the forest, and they drew breath in winter and let it out in summer, year upon year, and all the animals of the woods flickered by while the trees stood still. The Blood accused them of malice, but they bore us no ill will unless we came with fire and axes.

  And everywhere in the Kingswood I saw signs of Ardor’s presence, signs that had gone unmarked before I ate the firethorn berries. The Smith, Hearthkeeper, and Wildfi re were manifest in the distant pounding of the armorers’ hammers and the smoke of the huntsman’s cook fire in trees riven by lightning.

  In such signs I have long since tried to read the god’s wishes. But priests study all their lives to divine the will of the gods, and still dispute their omens. Each of the twelve gods has three avatars, by which they show themselves to us, but in truth the gods are so far beyond us they are unknowable. In their wars and alliances, they make and unmake the world. How can I be certain what Ardor made of me in the forge of the Kingswood, and for what purpose? Perhaps I have already done whatever I was meant to do.

  CHAPTER 1

  UpsideDown Days

  watched for the Midsummer’s eve bonfire from my lair on Bald Pate. I meant to return to the village a year to the day I’d left for the Kingswood. But why should the day matter? The seasons go round the year and never come back, for, as everyone knows, time moves in a spiral, not a circle. To persist in folly made me no less a fool. Once I’d counted myself brave for venturing into the Kingswood alone; now I wondered if it would not have been braver to stay among people. Solitude had withered around me like a husk. Yet I stayed until the bonfire released me.

  On Midsummer morning I walked down through the ripening fields to the croft of Na’s sister, Az. I carried my sheepskin cloak under one arm and shaded my eyes with my hand. A great humming and chaffering of insects rose around me as I walked, as if the fields had a voice under the Sun.

  When I stepped through the gate into the mud-walled yard, the croft seemed deserted save for the hens scratching around the stone feet of the granary and a sow sleeping in the Sun. But I saw smoke coming from the summer kitchen, a lean-to built against the hut and roofed by the huge leaves of a golden hopvine that clambered up the poles. The yard smelled of dung and dust and meat cooking.

  I stooped under the pitched roof of the lean-to and peered inside. Az was squatting by the fire pit in the scattered yellow light that came through the leaves. She was smaller than I remembered, and I wondered if she’d dwindled since I saw her last. I hadn’t thought she was so old. Her head grew forward from the rounded hump of her shoulders, and she had to strain to look up at me. I couldn’t bear for her not to recognize me, so I called out, “Az, it’s me, Luck, that used to come by with Na. Are you in health? How is Na?” After a year in the woods without speaking, the words stuck to my tongue.

  Az got to her feet, steadying herself on my arm, and came into the light. “Ah, Luck, did you think I wouldn’t know you and your red hair? You look to be on fire with the Sun behind you like that. Come and sit.” She led me to the croft’s guardian tree, a rowan, and we sat on the ground in its shade. Az pulled her shawl close around her, though it was a warm day. The pattern was the loveknot; I’d made the shawl myself as a present for Na. I thought of the Dame, how she never could make a weaver of me. My mind would go wandering and leave my fingers to fumble, and mistakes unnoticed had to be picked out later. But Na had treasured the shawl. I wondered why Az wore it.

  “How does Na fare these days? I don’t want to go to the manor, so I hoped you might send one of the boys for her.”

  Az shook her head. “Na is gone. Carried off by the shiver-and-shake this winter. Others too: Min and two of his daughters, and some of those Herders who live off by themselves and never get along with anybody. Dame Lyra caught it too and miscarried. It was bad this year, with all the snows and the cold.”

  I was silent for a while, and wouldn’t look at her. “I should have been here. With the Dame gone you were in need of a healer.”

  Az said, “Nothing to be done, it was that quick. I know Na missed you, though. She’d come to visit Peacedays, and we’d talk of you living on white bread and cream at the king’s court.”

  A year ago, I’d stood beside Na watching the dancers around the bonfire, and told her I was going to the city of Ramus, where the king lived, to find work as a dyer. It was a likely lie, likelier than the truth. I lacked patience as a weaver, but I’d been drawn to the mysteries of dyestuffs and mordants, the transformations in the dyebaths. It was a kind of green lore, and all such lore came easily to me, as if I had only to recollect it rather than to learn it for the first time.

  Now my lie came back to shame me. How could I admit I’d been in the Kingswood, so near at hand when Na was dying?

  Az cocked her head and looked me over with her shiny black eyes. I’d taken care to wash before leaving the Kingswood, but my hair was a bramble thicket, my dress a rag, and my feet bare and hard as horn. She sighed. “But I see you were never at court. I wouldn’t bother to kill a chicken as skinny as you. Wouldn’t be worth the coals to cook it.”

  She fetched me a slab of unleavened barley bread and a bowl of greens stewed with bacon. I dipped the bread into the stew and crammed it into my mouth. Tears ran down and salted it. I was too full of sensation, I was drowning in it: the taste of meat after long fasting, the smell of burning wood, the flood of words coming up from underground, the sweet welcome and sad news.

  Az let me eat and cry in peace until curiosity overmatched her courtesy. “So where did you go, then? You look wild as a bog wight come to scare the children into bed.”

  I said, “I’ve been on a hard road, truth be told, and I gained nothing from it but a new name. I’m called Firethorn now.” I’d never spoken my new name aloud before, and I felt as though I overreached. But for certain Luck did not fit me well anymore, and sometimes one must grow into a name.

  “Firethorn suits you,” was all Az said.

  She didn’t ask again where I had been, and I was grateful for it. She spun a thread of gossip around the manor and the village, saying Sire Pava had sent away the old priest when he grew forgetful, and the new one was a Sun priest and not a priest of the Heavens, and what use was he? He had no notion of how to read the weather or the stars and birds, how to tell by signs which day to plow and which to sow, when to dig a hole or breed the ram to the ewes; he never looked up at all, as far as she could see. The crops and flocks had suffered for it—twenty lambs stillborn and another taken by an eagle, and a blight on the rye too.

  And there was talk of war. It was said Sire Pava himself was going on campaign, and refused to wear hand-me-down armor from his father. He and the steward were squeezing the village hard to pay for his new harness and weapons. To be sure, a lot of coin stuck to Steward’s fingers. “Rooster thinks he rules the henhouse, but Fox knows better,” Az said.

  Thinking of Na, I lost the thread. It was bitter to me that I’d turned my back on her before I left, had found so little to say to her in the way of farewell. Shouldn’t I have known her time was short, or felt her need of me, even in the Kingswood? I put my head on my knees and Az fell silent. We sat like that for a time, under the rowan tree, while the chickens pecked for grain and a chiffchaff sang above our heads.

  I’d fed on my pride a twelvemonth and it was near eaten up, but I didn’t intend to go back to the manor and beg for a place as a scullion. Az let me know that I’d be welcome to stay, and gave me Na’s second dress to wear and a rag to wrap around my head. The dress hung loose and left my calves bare. Still, it was more proper than what I wore out of the Kingswood. Soon her youngest son, Fleetfoot, came h
ome to fetch the midday meal for the men in the fields, and I went to help him.

  Az had borne ten children, and five boys had lived. The two married sons had built their crofts next to hers. Their huts shared the same wall and the gates were always open between the yards for the children to run in and out. Three sons still lived at home, but all five liked working their shares of the commons together.

  It was a long walk to the field where they were haying, across the river ford and the valley to a high and stony meadow. One of the wives, Halm, came with Fleetfoot and me, with her baby slung in a shawl on one hip and a great basket on the other.

  “I’m glad there’s a rill up there,” she said as we climbed the steep path. “I get so weary carrying the water bucket.”

  We called the men from the pool of shade cast by a great beech, and they came laughing and shouting. They’d stripped to loincloths, and the sweat shone on their brown shoulders and legs. Their bodies gave off heat, like horses. They ate and drank, tossing a few japes back and forth. One asked me where I’d been and I couldn’t think how to answer. Another said, “Looks like her tongue swam away,” and they laughed. I sat with my head averted, pretending not to watch. They drowsed until the shade moved away. The smell of sweat and cut hay and earth baking under the Sun went to my head like hard cider and made me dizzy.

  And so I went to live among the villagers. Their houses were of mud mixed with dung and straw, daubed on a frame of poles and withies and thatched with reeds. They slept in one room and their animals in the next. Dirt was ground into their skin. Their clothes were as drab as peat and stone, fir and straw; the Blood reserved the most vivid dyes for their clan colors. Drudges spoke the Low among themselves, but they knew enough of the High to placate their masters. Now I saw that the villagers had another face than the one they turned to the manor. They never forgot that they were there first, before the Blood, born from the earth of those very mountains.