Firethorn

by Sarah Micklem

  Maybe, might, maybe. I’m no canny and you know it.”

  “Aren’t you? What do you suppose a canny is, then?”

  “You are, for one.” But it had been easier to deny when the Crux had said it. Uncanny—that I could own. Ardor had given me strange gifts: I could see by shadows, travel by shade, I could draw fire and give warmth. But shouldn’t a canny be knowing, be shrewd? I blundered my way forward; what use to see in the dark if I didn’t know where to go?

  Mai only grinned. But soon the grin turned sour. “So he means to send you home.”

  “Yes—with his horses. He’s putting us all out to pasture until he comes back.”

  She gestured around her, as if to compass the whole Marchfield. “How many of us will come back? Not above half, I’d say. Take his gift and thank him for saving your life—that’s what I’d do.”

  “Would you truly leave Sire Torosus?”

  “I would. This time I would.” She shifted on her buttocks and sighed. “Every day I feel my travails coming closer, and I’m worn out dreading it. You’d think having birthed nine living children, praise the gods, it would come easier. But this boy has a lot of Mischief in him.”

  “Now the envy was on her part, and pity on mine. I’d seen fear in her eyes before, but never so bare.

  She said, “I’ll miss you when the time comes.”

  “I mean to make Sire Galan change his mind,” I said.

  “By Hazard, you have all the luck! Why do you kick against it? I shook my head. I couldn’t say why. Now I saw myself going to a place I’d never seen but that already sounded like home. And on the way we’d stop by the river to camp, and I’d leave the fire to go threading through the bogs in the dark to find that place where I’d buried the womandrake root—if it could be found, I’d find it, for I always knew where I was, even when the Sun was down. I’d build a pyre for her and light it with a coal from my fire pouch. I’d burn it all up, that tangled, knotted snarl that trammeled us both. And when—if—Sire Galan rode up to the house on the mountain, he’d be surprised to find me cooler than was my wont.

  I felt then as if I were burning, blood ablaze in my veins like oil in a lamp, shining through my skin. I clasped my knees and bent my head and rocked, and when tears fell the drops seared my cheeks and arms.

  “It’s hard,” Mai said. “I know it’s hard, my dear. If you must leave, godspeed. And if you come with the army—whether Sire Galan forbids you or no—you can always stay with us. We’ll make you welcome.”

  Sunup, who’d been listening as she always did, without appearing to, came over and leaned on me, saying, “Yes, stay with us! Please!”

  And at that I cried some more.

  I’d let a day pass, and if it was the last day, I’d wasted it. There was not such a bustle among our tents as in the tents of Delve, but rather stealthy preparations. Tomorrow they’d leave the tents standing, the baggage half packed, the horses in the corral, and go unheralded. They were taking only arms, armor, and scant provisions. Jacks wrapped the armor tightly against the sea spray and salt air. They’d be three or four days crossing if the wind held. They’d all fight afoot in the coming battle, cataphracts, armigers, and jacks, even the Crux himself, for they’d fight within walls.

  If it was the last day … I stood on a narrow knife edge and never before had I seen the world divided so starkly between one side of a blade and another. For when I’d left with Galan to be his sheath, I’d known less than I knew now.

  Az had read the bones for me then, and the Dame and Na had been cryptic, or so I’d thought. But the Dame had warned of aimless wandering, that I might be swept away in flood—which was war, surely—and yet told me I might discover in that flood a wellspring, if I had the resolution for it; and Na, hadn’t she warned me of a prison, which might be that stone house on the mountain, and of the shackles with which I’d bound myself and Galan?—unless I made of that prison a shelter, unless the binding rooted us, one in the other, gave us the strength to withstand flood and all.

  The pouch Az had given me had burned with the tent, but I still had the bones, which I’d stitched into a seam in my kirtle. I rubbed them through the cloth. I could prick out those stitches, cast the bones on the ground, ask again. But what more would they say than what they’d already said? They’d been freer with their advice when they were alive, those two. And I was smitten with grief for a moment, missing them as they were when their bones had been girded about with flesh, missing their dear faces, their hands always busying about, and how they spoke their minds, their minds full of twists and turns and hidden places, so that even knowing them both so well, they surprised me daily. Our shades are but a revenant of all that; even if they are the better part of us, they are only part, and it doesn’t suffice the living to know they go on when the rest is ash.

  And what did Ardor have to say to me, that god who’d singled me out? Ardor, like all gods, was triple, and spoke contradictions. But I had only two hands, there were two sides to the blade: on the one was a stone hearth holding the Hearthkeeper’s fire, and me burning beside it, consumed with unquenchable longing. On the other, war: war as a furnace in which Sire Galan, an army, a kingdom, would be melted down and reforged, and I might be alloyed in that crucible, and between the Smith’s hammer and anvil made part of something new, or I might be dross, burned away as ash or spilled as dull slag on the furnace floor; or war as Wildfire born in lightning or careless spark, free of any man’s control, devouring keeps and cities, man, woman, child, and Galan and me, insatiable, until there was nothing left to gnaw but coals. Ardor said all these things, and as to what the god would have me do, said nothing.

  The priests tell us—when we are beset by calamities—that everything happens by the will of the gods. They mean to comfort us, but it was no comfort to me. Why then do the gods keep us ignorant of their purposes? Why must we stumble, err, go astray? That too is their purpose, the priests say. But they don’t say why.

  They’d go tomorrow with the changing tide. Every day the tides rose and fell and yet I’d failed to mark the time of their passage. I’d learned the land: the dun folds of the hills, the sloughs and hummocks, the crumbling cliffs, the running and standing waters, even the tide pools and the pebbled shore; I knew where jillybells flourished and a lonesome beech had rooted in a cranny. But I when the tide went out. I’d turned my back on the sea, not wanting to think of what lay on the other side.

  He should have shunned me for my tides that night but the blood was slick between us. Even as I strove against Galan and toward him, when I closed my eyes I saw the sea and a ship skimming over it, a fleet of ships. They had oars as well as sails and their holds were full of men. Silver scales of armor glimmered in the dark.

  I blinked and Galan’s eyes were on me and his face was shining with sweat. I closed my eyes again and saw the ship, the sea, and balked at following farther. I’d never seen a city, didn’t know what it might look like or the nature of water gates, didn’t want to see Galan running up stone stairs two at a time with his short sword in one hand and his dagger in the other. Nor who met him coming down. When I opened my eyes, his were closed. His head was tilted back and the cords stood out on his neck. I lifted my head and tasted him.

  Such was our hurry he was quickly done. He lay on me with his mouth against my ear. I could feel his breath stir my hair.

  “Galan, when does the tide go out? When do you sail?”

  “Dawn.”

  I put my hand over my mouth, but Galan pulled it away. I was sorry he saw my weakness, the tremor on my lips. I clasped him tight and hid my face against his shoulder, and we were silent awhile. I thought if we could stay this close, peace between us for once, peace from all the world, if we were granted the small span left of the night, if we could go drowsing into some dream together, I’d thank the gods for it; I’d not complain anymore of their cruelty.

  But Galan stirred and sat up with his shirt twisted around him, his hose gaping. He tightened the laces and got up,
and fetched the oil lamp and his baldric. When he sat down cross—legged, flame wobbled on the clay spout of the lamp and a little smoke drifted by his head. He drew his mercy dagger from its gilded sheath.

  “I would have something more of you before I go,” he said. “Something for luck.”

  “I never brought you luck. You must see that by now.”

  “Still, I want it,” he said. The knife lay quiet on his lap, one hand on the hilt, the other resting on the blade. His eyes were intent.

  “Do you mean to skin me like Rodela did?”

  He smiled at that. “Nothing so painful. A lock of your hair is all.”

  “Take it,” I said. It was not after all such a small thing he wanted; I knew what could be done with hair or fingernail parings.

  He cut a hank from my forelock about the thickness of a finger. Then he unwrapped the leather braid that formed the grip around his dagger hilt. Spiller had replaced it only that day, for the old one had been clotted with blood. He started to unbraid the fine thongs. “Help me,” he said, for his hands were stiff. I saw what he meant to do. I twisted each thong with a lock of hair and braided the three back together, holding the end in my teeth. The leather was stronger and less slippery than the hair and kept it from unraveling. One end of the braid went through a hole in the tang that slid into the hilt. The cord was wound crisscross around the hilt again—this he did, for he knew the trick of it—and the other end cunningly tucked under. When he was done the hilt glinted with fine coppery thread, copper that would never turn to verdigris.

  Galan turned the dagger in his hand and felt the edge with his thumb. He took out the whetstone he carried in a wallet on his baldric and began to draw the blade over it. The sound scraped at me.

  “Will you not come to sleep now? Come and sleep.”

  He shook his head.

  “Spiller and Rowney spent all day on your blades and armor. There’s no need.

  “Some things a man does for himself.” He went about his task with patience, coaxing the blade to yield its finest edge. He spat on the stone and pulled the dagger toward himself with smooth strokes, again and again, bent to his work, his hair falling over his brow and hiding his eyes.

  I think he said, “The king says there will be knife work,” or maybe I dreamed it, for when next I looked he was sharpening his lesser sword. One edge caught the light and winked at me. This sword was made to pierce armor, with a narrow, triangular blade to stiffen it for the thrust. It tapered to a point that could fit in any chink. His great sword had a nick in it. He’d ordered a new one; his scorpion was with the armorer to be fitted for a new shaft. All his forethought and still he was behindhand. Nothing would be ready in time.

  Through the linen shirt I could see spots of blood on his arm, soaked through the bandages. Not a man left alive of the clan who wasn’t sore hurt, and some worse than Galan, and yet the king chose them to fight his battle. He must mean to be rid of them all; they’d go to their deaths thanking him for the privilege.

  And if Galan lived through this, there’d be another battle and another, and if he lived through this war, another and another. How could I wish to be a sheath and watch him sharpen his blades as a man sharpens his sickle daily during harvest before going to the fields?

  There is no man or woman who is not beset by dangers. A plowman might step on a viper one morning, or a woman die giving birth; a child might fall into a well. There is sickness in every season. The Queen of the Dead rules all of us, sooner or later—but to go courting her was another matter: to worship Rift, to feed the god’s appetite.

  Metal slid over stone. The wind had risen again, it swelled the canvas and tugged the ropes, and I felt we were in motion, sailing over the hills. There were others still awake in the tent. I saw their shadows on the walls and ceiling. Someone threw candlebark on a fire. I think it was Divine Hamus, for soon I heard the low drone of a chant. It was deepest night, and dawn was as far ahead as dusk was behind, and I thought how strange it was that I was there and not lying on my pallet of sweetfern in the manor, by the Dame’s bed closet, dreaming.

  I lay on my side with my head resting on my bent arm. There was no way to turn that didn’t hurt. We hadn’t been careful, not at all.

  Galan ran an oily rag down the blade of his sword. He pulled a strand of dried sea hay from our little store of kindling and threw it in the air and his sword flicked out and cut it in two. The pieces fell on me. I brushed them off. He knew I was watching.

  He should have been afraid, but he seemed content, as if the rasp of the whetstone had soothed him as much as it had riled me. He looked at me and lay down his sword. There was the quirk of a smile.

  I’d followed him for that look and that smile. And surely more than one god had meddled to put me in Galan’s path and him in mine. The gods have a hand in anything that makes us foolish. They give and snatch their gifts away and leave us knowing we are bereft, when before we were ignorant. But not yet, not now.

  Galan said farewell without words, in every last kiss, farewell to eyelids, earlobes, brow and nape, the hollow of the throat, the tender skin in the crook of the arms, hard knuckles and rough palms. He suckled me like a child and called the milk to rise until my breasts felt heavy with it and milk flowed between my thighs. Farewell to the hard rib ridges, the haunches, the hollows, farewell the long legs and their runs of sinew, rises of bone; farewell the furze and the enfolded quim, the anus rose, the buttocks’cleft, the small of the back, the knobbed spine, even the raw underfl esh laid bare by fire and Sire Rodela’s knife, farewell even to the quick of me. I felt as if my shadow had slipped its bounds again to mingle with his, and I was seeing myself through his eyes; that was my taste on his tongue, and his desire was mine, until I had to say no more and come here. Then farewell in the way he sheathed himself in me all at once, farewell again, again, and were we born to fit so tight or had I taken his impress, had I whetted him smooth? He laid claim to my every last reserve only to say farewell. And I wouldn’t say it, I refused.

  A while, a little while of lying close and still before Galan looked up and the Crux said above my head, “Time to be moving,” and Galan sighed and took himself away.

  Everyone was now awake and bustling, but all in a strange hush. The horses and dogs were restless and made more noise than the men. Galan and I stood outside, between the tents. The black sky had a blue hem and the east wind smelled of snow. He let me under his cloak and told me not to cry. He said he’d come back to me. It was not a thing he could know, that he’d come back. I still had a quarrel with him; I kept it hidden.

  I also quarreled with myself, being so divided in two that one would go where he bade me, and the other meant to follow against his will and rely on his welcome, and dare the Crux to stop me. The two would not be reconciled. Silence fell between us and the tight grip of his arms slackened. There was nothing more to do but say, “May the gods keep you,” and let go. I stepped back into the cold outside his cloak. Now I wished he’d leave if leave he must, so he wouldn’t stand there looking at me so straight. I feared I might give way under that look. He said farewell and turned away, and as soon as he did, I regretted my wishing. I hid between the tents and bent around the pain in my belly, which was like a sickness.

  The troop set off on the north road and I roused myself to follow. They were so few: the cataphracts and armigers, and after them the jacks and some five hands of foot soldiers who were deemed worth the trouble of their passage. Even fewer than I’d supposed, for Sires Ocio and Fan—farron were too badly hurt to go, though their wounds weren’t mortal. They were left in the care of their men and to Cook’s rough medicine; the carnifex was going where he’d be needed most.

  There was no pomp in this creeping out of the Marchfield. Dogs started barking and the drudges up early about their chores stood and stared, and so much for secrecy. A pack of the queenmother’s men, her gray Wolves, joined our clan on the way. When they reached the open ground past the tents, King Thyrse was waiting on h
is horse with his men about him. Now there were more, but still not many. Not enough, surely, for what they were asked to do.

  Flints in the road jabbed my bare feet; the men moved ahead like a mist, dim in the dim light, Galan among them. I couldn’t find him in his cloak and hood. No one turned to see if I followed. When the Sun’s light breached the horizon, the men began to talk, to laugh, and to hasten.

  The king saw them off and so did I, standing on the cliff above the cove. The ships were as I’d dreamed them, with rows of oars and square sails, long and nimble in the water. Their prows were sea serpents. The sails were dyed a color between the sea and the sky, and they vanished long before the darker hulls disappeared.

  Soon the Marchfield too would vanish, the city would be folded up and stowed away, and we’d leave behind desolation. But they say flowers come up after a battle, and surely the tourney ground and the cliffs and the hills thereabouts were churned and harrowed as if under a plow, and surely the seeds were pressed down deep and nourished by a rich rain. Maybe next spring the wasteland would bloom and the pink and white dog roses clambering over the hills would be tinged with red. None of us would be there to see it.

  What need, after all, to decide? I’d decided when I chose not to run on Carnal Night, when I stayed with Galan after the fickle UpsideDown Days were over. I’d decided on the road, in the Marchfield, even when he was careless, even when he was cruel—by the river, where I’d buried the womandrake, beside the tent as he lay wounded, in his shadow. He’d chosen me and I’d chosen him, from the first. And he’d been the first to see our fate, to chafe against it, to admit it, always the quicker one and the braver. But this time he was mistaken.