Flesh and Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  The Vineart placed the second message on top of the first, and gestured Jerzy toward his usual stool. “To that, young one, I think it is time you knew the full nature of what we have discovered, and what we may face.”

  Jerzy sat, the wines untouched and forgotten.

  “This concern of mine does not arise out of mist, nor have I been listening to rumors out of idleness. A year ago I received word from an old acquaintance, a Washer named Ishal who had visited the vineyards of a Vineart named Sionio during his wanderings. Sionio was young, only a few years of his own plantings, but well trained, and his plantings were old-vine foretells, a rare offshoot of growvine. These vines grow slow and yield little of their rich fruit, but crafted properly, the spellwines are potent and true—and expensive.

  “This Washer arrived at the vineyard, and found only blasted root and abandoned buildings. No slaves, no beasts. . .and no Sionio. It was as though they had been scraped off the face of the land entirely.”

  Jerzy’s mouth felt dry, and his throat was tight, although he was not sure if his horror was more for the fate of the men or the blasted vines.

  “What—”

  “What could do such a thing? Ishal could find no answers that he understood, and so he sent me a sample of the soil, and the vines. At the time, I could find nothing. No trace of magic, no sign of disease or infestation. Merely death and abandonment.

  “There are things in this world even we do not know, and things we were not meant to know. I long ago made my peace with what I am, and who I am, in the scale of the greater world, and the loss of one Vineart and his vines to whatever tragedy did not concern me overlong. Not until word came of other misfortunes, other disasters beyond the normal scope of a failed harvest or ruined bottling, and we ourselves were attacked—and now word has come that the island of Atakus has disappeared from the sight of man and magic.

  “Even now, it should be none of our interest. We are Commanded to keep to our own vines, and not meddle in the greater affairs of the world.”

  Jerzy took a deep breath, refilling his lungs with needed air. “And yet, Master?”

  “And yet. . .my curiosity is aroused, and my fear as well.”

  The thought of Malech being afraid made Jerzy blink, and the confidence that his master would always protect them felt a sudden chill.

  Unaware of his student’s inner turmoil, Malech continued thinking out loud. “The appearance of this sea creature here, similar to an attack reported in the oceans near now-missing Atakus, suggests that these malfortunes are more than random. There is little doubt now in my mind that there is something new in the world, Jerzy, a source of power we do not know, and it seems to mean us harm.

  “We may not meddle—yet we need to know who our enemy is, and why. And, most important: how. How is he casting spells we do not know, cannot recognize, nor defend against?”

  He tapped his fingers on the sheets of paper in front of him and smiled, a grim line not of happiness or satisfaction, but decision.

  “And that, young one, may you forgive me, is where I plan to throw you to the wolves.”

  Chapter 14

  Despite Malech’s ominous words, as the days grew warmer, Jerzy had little time to think about sea beasts or malevolent Vinearts or strange magics, or what role in all that his master expected him to play, caught up as he was in his first growing season as a Vineart.

  The days were not as crazed as Harvest, but they were busy, starting well before dawn and ending, typically, with more lessons after evening meal. He barely saw Malech, the older Vineart traveling north to some of the smaller, younger fields, while Jerzy oversaw the main growth on the House lands proper. They passed at meals, which for Jerzy were often a small loaf of bread crammed full of whatever meat had been roasting on the spit, while Lil yelled at him to sit down long enough to eat, rather than cramming it into his mouth as he went, then turning her ire at Malech when he did the same thing.

  The workroom lessons continued as well, Jerzy doing more and more of the actual work rather than observing, until he felt confident in his ability to incant the spell-structure into the vin magica, and to use it properly. But most of his days were spent walking through the yards until even in his sleep he could not rest, dreaming of endless rows of gnarled brown vines alternately reaching for the sun and dropping down into the soil, some filling with tiny green leaf buds, and others covered with shiny black beetles, or gray rot, or any of the countless other things that could go wrong every spring. After several weeks, he trained himself to wake before the dream became a true nightmare, just to save himself the shakes that would follow.

  He was in the midst of just such a dream when a dry, silent voice broke into his mind. Up, it ordered him.

  He opened his eyes immediately, noting first light filling the sky through his window.

  Up, the voice repeated.

  “I am up,” he grumbled, splashing water on his face from the basin Roan had filled the night before. His connection was strong enough now that the Guardian did not bother to come to his window, but merely tapped him awake from his post over the workroom’s door, three floors below. He could hear a clatter coming from the kitchen below where Lil was preparing the morning meal. Across the road, he knew, the slaves were being rousted as well. Three more slaves had died during Fallowtime, two from illness and one of injury, so they were shorthanded until Malech could arrange for more to be bought. Five, to replace all those lost.

  Six, Jerzy thought suddenly. Six, to replace those who’d died, and himself.

  He shivered, although the morning air was comfortable, and got dressed quickly and ran down to the kitchens for a quick meal before joining the slaves out in the yard.

  The rough twisted vines were just beginning to set leaf, tiny green buds full of promise—and prone to disaster. The slaves were there to aerate the soil around the roots and make sure the soil was moist but not too wet, but it was Jerzy’s responsibility to check each and every vine, to make sure that there had been no permanent harm from the root-glow or a previously unsighted bug or rot—in short, that his nightmares remained simply that, and not truth. It was slow, tedious work, checking every vine for soundness, but as he moved slowly down each row that morning, Jerzy could almost swear that he heard the vines whispering his name in greeting.

  A fancy, of course. For all the magic in the fruit, they were merely plants. They could not speak, or recognize their growers. Could they? The thought unnerved him as much as the nightmares, and he quickly put it away.

  He was trying to wash the dirt from under his nails before going in to lessons with Cai when Roan came out to the pump, two of the hammered metal kitchen ewers in her hands.

  “Master was looking for you,” she said, starting the pump up easily and aiming the stream of water into the first of the ewers.

  Jerzy gave one last hopeless dig at his nails, and then nodded his thanks. He and Lil were old friends now, but Roan kept herself more distant, not indulging in jokes or teasing with him. “Do you know where he was heading?”

  “Do I look like a Vineart?” Roan asked, splashing a little of the water onto her sweat-shined face, and wiped it down with her kerchief. “He just stuck his head in the kitchen and asked if you’d been through.”

  Jerzy made a logical guess, and went directly to Malech’s ground-floor study, barely pausing to knock before he pushed the door open and went inside.

  “Master Malech?”

  The study was empty, but a map was spread out on Malech’s desk, the colors brilliant enough to catch the eye from across the room. Jerzy let his curiosity get the better of him, placing the food down on the worktable and moving around the desk to see what Master Malech had been working on.

  It was a map of the Lands Vin, not the tapestry map that Jerzy had studied, but a smaller drawing, creased and worn with use, and next to the red triangles that marked Houses, there were names inked in and then scratched off, over and over again, as Vinearts died and were replaced. Two of the name
s had black-stone markers next to them, and Jerzy lifted them up carefully, trying to read the notes jotted down in Malech’s careful labeling.

  “Paerden of Leiur, and Giordan of Corguruth.”

  Jerzy jumped guiltily, but Malech kept talking as though he had been there all along, and invited Jerzy to look at the map himself.

  “Paerden is a good man, very talented. A little too prone to trying to be everything to everyone, though, and that always hurts his wines. Giordan. . .difficult man. Stubborn. Crazy. Most Corguruthians are. Talented though. Weathervines, the ones you tasted. He’s agreed to take you on.”

  The transition made no sense. “Master?”

  “Giordan. He and I have agreed that you will go spend time with him, work with him for the rest of the growing season.”

  “You are . . . sending me away?” It was the Master’s prerogative to do with slaves as he chose. But this. . .this was something he had not expected. “Have I displeased you, Master? Did I do something wrong yesterday—did I miss something?” Had he failed a test, just when he had stopped anticipating them?

  “What?” Malech looked at him, startled. “Sin Washer, no, no. Jerzy. No. Sit, boy. Sit, and I will explain.”

  Jerzy sat, mainly because his knees were threatening to give way underneath him.

  “These are strange times, Jerzy. Strange times. My entire life, I have followed the Command to mind my vines, craft my spellwines, and share them with the world for betterment, not war.” Malech walked back and forth behind his desk as he spoke, his voice softer than normal, his head down, rather than up and alert.

  “And yet. . .now we are faced with a situation that cannot be answered by the Command, cannot be dealt with directly, or by time-honored methods. The others I have spoken to, they tell me the same things: that there is a dangerous magic in the air, directed toward mischief, toward harm. This flies in the face of all we know, all we have been taught. So perhaps it is also time to let go of other things we have been taught.”

  Malech looked up at the doorway, as though looking for the Guardian. The dragon was not there.

  “Sin Washer gave us the Second Growth, and commanded us abjure power, but only tradition keeps us isolated, never sharing the things we learn, and so never passing on knowledge that might be built upon, rather than standing endlessly upon the same ground. In these days, I begin to think that this tradition is dangerous, that it may cause harm rather than prevent it.

  “Not all I have corresponded with agree. They claim that our specialization is the natural order of things, that each grape is likewise distinct and separate, and the magic in them likewise. They claim that sharing would bring back the dangers of the First Growth, of chaos and destruction through arrogance, and that is a greater threat than an unknown magic, an undiscovered spellwine.”

  His master’s words had the sound of something well rehearsed. That did not make Jerzy any less upset; if Malech felt the need to rehearse his reasons before speaking to him. . .His master’s next words caught him completely by surprise.

  “You are a fast learner. A smart learner, with an instinctive understanding of spellwines that allowed you to improvise even before you knew it was possible. Traditionally, you would spend your entire study here with me, learning only what I know, crafting wines similar to what I craft. I think you can be more than that. I think—and Giordan agrees—that you would benefit from a wider training. That your spell-wines someday will benefit from knowing more than I alone can teach you.”

  There was a silence after those words, Malech waiting expectantly, Jerzy feeling as though he had been kicked in the chest by one of the wagon-horses.

  “I am. . .to study with another Vineart.” Jerzy heard what his master said, but his awareness kept returning to that one simple fact. His master was sending him away.

  Malech paused at the desk, pushing the black-stone markers across the map in a seemingly random pattern. “Yes. That is the story we are telling, anyway. In truth, I have a deeper mission for you, one I can trust to no other.”

  That managed to cut through Jerzy’s focus, and he bit his lip, confused all over again. Malech sat down next to him, forcing Jerzy to focus on his words.

  “Giordan is. . .a bit of a rebel already,” his master explained. “He has no House of his own, but rather lives within the city of Aleppan, his arrangement with the maiar of that city a matter of old debate and not a few raised eyebrows. It suits them, however, and it suits our need as well. Aleppan is a hub of commerce and gossip, and Giordan’s situation allows him access to many sources I do not have. While you are there, you will have an unprecedented opportunity to look around you, to see if this stain of danger extends beyond what has been reported, if it is being talked about openly, in the marketplace.

  “Jerzy, listen to me. This is important. You must keep your own counsel, not tell anyone of this trust I have placed in you. If I am correct, and I pray I am not, then something great and terrible moves against us, and it is best it thinks us unaware, for now.

  “And while you look and listen, there is much you can learn of the vine-arts. Giordan is not a Master, but his vinification techniques are impressive. More to the point, he is not bound so tightly by tradition that he will refuse a good idea simply for it being new, and not so wild that he would take a bad idea simply because it is new.” Malech allowed a smile to crack through. “I trust him with you, and I trust you not to become too much a rebel in his training.”

  “Master, I . . .” His head was spinning, and the room seemed too warm, suddenly. What was he supposed to say?

  “Are you willing to take this risk, Jerzy? Are you willing to do what has not been done in generations, to challenge traditions, to risk much in order to gain more?”

  He did not want to, no. He did not want to be the focus of such a solemn question, so much weight, so much responsibility. Yet there was only one possible answer. This was to be the role he had to play, as Malech had told him, weeks before, and he could not question his master’s decision. “Master, I am.”

  “Good, good.” Malech seemed both relieved and concerned. “Now, there are some things I will need to teach you, before you go. Important things, and very little time to learn them in, so you needs pay close attention.”

  “Master?” He didn’t think that Malech would cuff him for the question he was about to ask, but his head was already spinning so hard, Jerzy didn’t think he would feel it even if he did. “You will still take me back, after?”

  If he failed, if he did not please, if he made a mistake, or if Vineart Giordan threw him out—he didn’t know which he meant, or if he meant all of them.

  Malech stared at him, then let out a short bark of laughter.

  “Yes, Jerzy. I will still take you back.”

  PART 3

  Spy

  Chapter 15

  The weeks before Jerzy’s departure passed in a rush of activity, allowing him little time to worry. Even as the leaves grew larger and darker, and flowers bloomed on the vines, more correspondence flew back and forth between Malech and Giordan, until the bird boy almost seemed to anticipate Jerzy’s requests with a ready and rested pigeon the moment he appeared. Detta, seemingly resigned to the turn of events, fussed over his clothing, so he would, in her words, “look a proper scion of the House of Malech, not some gangling road-wanderer.” Meanwhile, Cai was assigned to cram a few words of Corguruth into his skull, although Malech assured Jerzy that Giordan spoke fluent Ettonian and decent enough Berengian for them to understand each other.

  By the end of the second week Jerzy felt as though he were one of the spent firestones they used to keep frost away on cool spring nights, flickering wanly, with no fuel left to burn. “Stress makes the Vineart,” Malech would say when Jerzy flagged, and sigh; and the sound of that sigh made Jerzy get up and do one task more. It was no longer fear that drove him, but the desire—the need—to be perfect. He would not, could not, disappoint his master.

  Curiously, as the language lessons p
rogressed, Jerzy found other words coming back to him as well. They were harsher sounding than Berengian or Corguruth, as though he were speaking with a rock in his throat, but it felt perfectly natural at the same time.

  “Ah,” Cai said, the third or fourth time it happened. “So that’s where you got that natural horseman’s build, and the slant to your eyes. You were born in the Seven Unions.” Cai shivered dramatically. “Cold nasty place, that. How in Sin Washer’s name did a Vineart come out of Seven Unions?”

  Jerzy could only shrug. The map showed little about the lands behind the Pariip mountain range save that it was, as Cai said, a place of cold, windy plains and snow-capped mountains, and his only memories were of faces and voices, and therefore of little use here and now.

  It all seemed unreal to him; he had barely learned the patterns and expectations of the House, after the harsh security of the sleep house, and now he was being sent off to a strange place where he would know no one, with orders he didn’t fully understand. Even with the serpent’s stench still in his nostrils, the threat Master Malech spoke of seemed unreal, the thought that something could threaten his master enough to make him look so worried, impossible.

  It was beyond him, and so he let events move him, learning what he was taught and doing as he was told, and letting others decide what was to be done.

  Despite the additional work, Jerzy’s other studies were not abandoned. In fact, it seemed to Jerzy that Malech now dragged him along on every small chore, and talked faster than he thought the older man could, trying to cram everything into the space in Jerzy’s head that wasn’t taken up with languages. The vines were well in hand and growing well, with nothing to do but watch and wait and hope for continued good rains and sunshine, but there seemed to be an endless number of things Malech needed him to learn that very instant, from ordering the right sort of barrels from the Cooper’s Guild to arranging the acquisition and release of bud-bugs at just the right time to eat any grape-borers. Finally Jerzy just folded his legs underneath him and sat down on the vintnery shed floor, crossing his arms and staring at the wooden beams in the ceiling until Malech relented. The Vineart sat down next to him, his legs creaking awkwardly as he did so, and stared up at the beams as well.