Firethorn Read online

  In the dark-of-the-Moon before Longest Night, I had a true dream. Some such dreams foretell the future, but this one foretold the past, and I knew it for true even while I slept in its grip, by the scent of it; in ordinary dreams I have no sense of smell. I couldn’t recall that I’d ever before breathed this incense of herbs crushed underfoot, this dusty redolence rising from the rocks as if they were bread in an oven. Yet I knew it: the smell of mountains, but not the mountains of the Kingswood.

  I followed my father up a trail to a high pass between higher peaks capped with snow. The mountains were rocky and steep, arid and open. I had a small pony because I was small. He was on a big roan gelding, leading a pack mule, singing a bit for me and for his own pleasure. The road was a cobbled track with a wall beside it, and as he reached the top of the pass, he turned in his saddle to watch me and grinned in his ruddy beard. I hunched over the pony’s withers, feeling her labor to climb the last stretch. She was eager, knowing as I knew that home was down the other side of the pass. I saw clouds flying below us, and under them cloud shadows moving over the long, narrow lake in the valley, and our town among the other towns along the shore. The lake was a deeper blue than the sky. Where the Sun struck the water, it threw off white sparks. Then my father looked behind me and cried out without words, or in a language I understood only in dreams, and I knew he cried danger. He pointed over my shoulder at a line of men on horseback on the breast of another mountain. Their helmets glinted and their banners were black. Dust smoked around their horses’ hooves, coming our way.

  When I awoke I was so taken with the image of my father that I gave little thought to the soldiers. The Blood can trace their lineages back to the gods, but we mudfolk call a man lucky whose wife is so faithful he sees his own features sketched on his children’s faces—as my father saw himself in me, in my dream.

  It’s no great shame among drudges to be fatherless. Still, I wanted to know mine. I didn’t feel the lack of a mother so much. When I was very small, I was content to think Na was my real mother. Later I wondered if I were the by-blow of some gardener or groom she thought beneath her.

  But she’d told me often enough that I was a foundling. I came to the Dame’s household when I was old enough to run; by the number of my teeth they’d reckoned me to be about four years of age. I understood neither the High tongue nor the Low, and when I spoke, no one could understand me. They called me Luck for my hair, the color of new-forged copper, for redheads are favored by Chance, the female avatar of Hazard. No one in the village had seen such hair before. I don’t recall the time before I came to the manor, and no wonder. We dream our infancy, and forget that dream when we awaken to our selves and our duties.

  They gave me simple tasks: sweeping and scouring, combing the fringe on carpets, emptying slops. I was always running off and leaving things half done, always distracted. Na would make me fetch a willow wand for the beating I was due. Afterward she’d soothe me and call me her own little Luck. That was my childhood until the Dame took me in hand one day. I thought the manor and the village made up the world and all its inhabitants.

  Memory can be a churlish and disobedient servant, out of sight when you bid it come, insolent when you have dismissed it. Perhaps that’s why the memories that insisted upon coming, as I grew weaker, were the ones that harrowed me most: how the Dame looked after five weeks of fever had whittled away her ample flesh, leaving skin on a scaffold of bones, how she lay in the bed closet and threw off the covers. She couldn’t bear the weight of the linen, though it was the finest weave we had. Her fingers kept plucking and twisting invisible threads, pulling the air about her face as if she already felt the shroud.

  Once when I brought a basin to bathe her, the Dame pushed herself up on her elbows and said, “When my nephew takes the manor, he has promised you’ll not be bound. He says he’ll give you a place as his wife’s handmaid if you suit her. And if she doesn’t suit you—well then, you’ll be free to go. I can make no better provision …” She lay back down and I dampened the cloth with cool water and wiped her arms and chest. Even such a short speech and she was short of breath. “It will serve you best to serve them well.” She smiled faintly. “And try to keep a bridle on that tongue, for I’ve heard it run away with you from time to time.” I smiled back, though it was no jest.

  It didn’t seem such a gift to be permitted to leave the manor; each stone in the walls was dear to me, and even the weeds that took root in the mortar. I was a weed too, clinging to what I knew. I gave little thought to what I might do when the Dame was gone.

  She didn’t die then, and she didn’t die easily. She’d taught me many remedies, but all failed. She never moaned or cried out until the last days, when she forgot herself, already on her way down the long road. In the end I gave her fare-thee-well to dull the pain. It has no healing in it.

  We had a scant tennight after the funeral rites to ready the manor for her nephew. The priest made the Dame’s clay death mask to send to the clan’s temple to join the Council of the Dead. We gathered the belongings that might call to her if they were left behind: shuttles and bobbins, comb and hairpins of shell, her plate and cup, her knife with the amber hilt, the small clippers she wore on a chain, undergarments, shoes, and hats. We laid them on her pyre and watched the smoke fly up. The priest ground the fragments of her bones and scattered her ashes in the stream and plowed the black stain under. It was all done as it should have been done, to free her spirit. Afterward we were careful not to utter her name. We called her the Dame, and so I call her still.

  That winter in the Kingswood I grieved more for myself than for her, crying blame on her that she’d left me nothing but pride, and that a poor inheritance. Better if she hadn’t noticed me, when I was just a child, making a palace for ants behind a shrub in the garden when I should have been weeding. Better if she hadn’t knelt next to me and pointed to an ant dragging a leaf and said, “See, they esteem the feverfew for their nests, for its sweetness. We crush it into a paste when someone is sick, because it has a healing smell.” Better if I hadn’t been quick to learn and eager to ask another question.

  Then I would not be so proud, as if the blood of gods ran in my veins, as if I wasn’t formed from dirt and spit like other mudfolk. I could have endured our new master and mistress the way the other servants endured them: with sullenness and grumbling and spite, but nevertheless as something to be borne.

  Na wouldn’t take the keys after the Dame died, saying she was too old and her backbone would crack under such a burden. When the keys came to me, and the duties with them, I marveled at how the Dame had kept the threads of a hundred tasks in hand, weaving them all together. I was glad of this tangle of worries, too busy to mourn.

  I made the inventory in preparation for our new master. I knew how to read and write godsigns and how to tally; the Dame never held with the saying that a drudge who reads is a greater oddity than a pig that flies, and less use. I found a plan for her next tapestry rolled up in the locked cabinet in her workshop. The warp was on the loom, but she had not begun to weave before she was taken ill. She’d drawn a maiden in a meadow amidst an impossible profusion of flowers. The frostwort of late winter bloomed beside the corona of high summer, and garden gillyflower mingled with dragon’s hood from the deep woods. Switches of yarn were pinned to the sketch, and for the maiden’s unbound hair she’d picked copper-colored wool dyed with a rare pigment made from crushed beetle wings. I burned the drawing but took the thread for remembrance. I kept it with me in the Kingswood, sewn into my coat.

  The nephew and his new bride arrived in springtime with a crowd of brothers and cousins, friends and servants to see them to their new bed. The only person of Blood in the manor was the Dame’s old priest, so he greeted them at the gate and led them into the outer courtyard. The guardian tree, a red-leafed plum, dropped pink blossoms on their velvets and furs and the shining hides of their horses. The groom wore a crown of supple twigs with leaves of the newest green; the bride was wreathed in
flowers.

  That evening I served at table. My new master and mistress shared a plate in the place of honor. Sire Pava dam Capella by Alcyon of Crux, to give him his full name, was so young his beard was still thin on his cheek. His bride, Dame Lyra by Ophirus of Crux, had a face as pale and plump as the well-kneaded dough of white bread. She was younger than I was, having no more than thirteen years.

  After the faces of the guests grew red and their jokes coarse, after the bones were picked clean and drink spilled on the cloth, after the last song and libation, the couple were sent to bed in the Dame’s own cabinet with her best tapestry hung in front. We drudges worked late in the dim light of the tallow lamps, while the new steward had us move everything in the storeroom from here to there. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him piss in the corners, like a dog making his mark. We gave up our pallets in the hall to the guests and slept in the outer courtyard. Not that I slept. When the Sun came up over the wall, I heard the doves sing, What will you do? Oh, what will you do?

  That morning when I helped Dame Lyra wash and tightened the laces on her dress, I saw her wince, and asked if she felt pain, for I knew an ointment to soothe chafing. She had such a child’s shape, slender hips and small breasts, and she was round where a child might be round, cheeks and wrists and knees and belly. But she had borne a man’s weight, and I supposed it was too heavy for her.

  She slapped my face and told me never to wag my tongue without permission. I learned to serve her in silence. I came to know her well, from her tricks to make her skin pale and her lips red, to her pisspot and the rags for her monthly tides, but she seemed not to see me.

  I often wished I were as invisible to the steward. From the day I handed him the keys, he found fault with me and the way the manor and its holdings had been run. He was a lesser kinsman of the clan, sent by Sire Pava’s father to keep a tight grip on the household. I got more than my share of his blows. I was uppish and my manners abominable, so he said. If I looked him in the eye, he’d give me a bruise, and the same if I mumbled his name, or failed to keep a smile stitched to my face when I served at table.

  Pride in my work drizzled away. I was not the only one who found hands had turned clumsy and tasks that used to take an hour lasted a whole day. The warp threads tangled on the loom of their own accord. When things went wrong, Na would say, “A rotten egg hatches no chick.” In the Low, on the back stairs, we discussed the weather: the clouds on Steward’s brow, Dame Lyra’s storms, Sire Pava’s droughts of silence. Hate was our bread. Daily I saw Na treated like a laggard and put to tasks too heavy for her years. I had the right to go, but what household would welcome a drudge who dared seek a new place?

  I could hardly draw breath indoors, when I knew that pintle shoots were green by the river and maiden’s kiss in bloom in the high meadow, and it was past time to collect the seeds of prickly comfort. So I learned to lie my way past the gates, telling Steward one thing and Dame Lyra another; I learned the barefaced lie, the lie of omission, and all the other ways a drudge can tie the truth in knots.

  In those first tennights I prayed to any god I thought might hear me, but most of all to Wend. I offered twists of dyed lamb’s wool to one of the god’s avatars, the Weaver, whose little statue stood in a niche in the Dame’s workshop—for though the Dame was descended from the god Crux, Wend had favored her. I prayed to know my place, to be woven in, smoothed down. The smell of burning wool brought the Dame to mind more than the god, and gave me no peace. My heart grew as hard and swollen as a gall around a worm.

  Now I think that Wend Weaver did answer me, in her way, for her right hand carries the shuttle, but her left holds the shears.

  The first time Sire Pava came to my pallet at night, I did not expect it. Besides his wife, just two months in his bed, he had brought from his father’s house a mudwoman no better than the rest of us, except she already had a five-month belly and no duties to mention. He put her in a mud hut stuck to the outside of the manor wall like a swallow’s nest, and he’d visit her when he pleased, no matter that Dame Lyra threw slippers and wailed.

  I thought Sire Pava must be well occupied between these two. But what did I know of the appetites of men? Most of us in the Dame’s house had been women, growing old with her; I was by far the youngest. The men who’d served her had been very old or very young, from the ancient priest to the boys who worked as scullions in the kitchen. Then Sire Pava came with his steward, jack, varlets, huntsman, forester, gardeners, and a toady of a horsemaster.

  At night the hall was crowded with the pallets of those drudges who had a right to sleep there. If not for the sweetfern in the mattresses, the close air would have been too rank to breathe. I slept beside the master’s bed closet, so Dame Lyra could wake me to fetch water or wine or empty her pisspot or kill a fly buzzing by her head.

  I’m taking a roundabout road to this part of my tale, and what is it, anyway, but a tale so worn it hardly needs telling? Sire Pava came to my pallet one night. I put him off, told him my tides were flowing. A woman’s blood—especially the unclean blood from her womb—can make a man fall sick. Unless it’s blood from a broken maidenhead, which makes a man potent and is a cure for the canker besides. He went away, but I knew he’d be back.

  I woke Na, who slept on the pallet next to me, to tell her what had happened. “What shall I do, Na, next time he comes?” I was so roiled that my voice rose above a whisper.

  “Hush,” Na said. “It would be well if Sire Pava took a liking to you. Get you out from under Steward’s eye and Dame Lyra’s heel.”

  This was not the advice I expected to hear. “I don’t want him or anyone else,” I said.

  “Are you dead below the waist, then?” she asked me. “More’s the pity. You’re fifteen years old and still wear your hair down. You must be bred or wed; there’s no hiding under the Dame’s skirts anymore. If you don’t please Sire Pava, you’ll be sport for his men. So you’d best be thinking how to keep him, not send him away.”

  At these words I began to cry. Na came to my pallet and lay beside me, stroking my hair. I could see the waxy glimmer of her face near mine. “Now, now, hush now, Luck,” she whispered, close to my ear. “I know a thing or two the Dame never taught you, to keep Sire Pava tied to your thumb. We’ll find some kindlecandle and Cook will put it in his dish—but you must take it to him with your own hands. It will stiffen him up for an hour, and he’ll think it’s owing to your charms, for that’s more than his wife can do. Haven’t you heard them at night? Pava is quicker than a dog. No wonder Lyra is cross as two sticks.”

  I was angry with Na, not liking her counsel, and kept silent around her as if she were to blame for Sire Pava’s wandering eye. Cook had better advice; she said dampwick would make his prick limp, and showed me where to find it, and she never said a word when I used it to season the dishes I served to Sire Pava. I also gathered the white berries of childbane, which the women in our mountains take against conception. If one didn’t work, I would need the other. I knotted the hair between my legs to barricade the entrance to my womb. Many nights I lay awake, but he did not come to my pallet again.

  When he ran me to ground, he was on horseback and I was on foot, gathering fiddleheads down the hill by the ravine. He said I’d led him a fine chase, as if the fox runs for the hounds’ amusement. I’d planned to yield if I was cornered, but when the moment came, I scrambled down the bank toward the river stones. Before I could get a rock in my hand, he caught me by my skirt. I acquitted myself about as well as a stray cat, marking him with bites and scratches.

  Shortly he was done. He got up and I pulled down my skirts. Everywhere I was seeping: tears, sweat, snot, bile.

  He looked down at his prick as he tucked it into his leather prickguard. He straightened his hose and tightened the laces. “Where’s the blood?” he said. “You had me fooled, going with your hair unbound as if you were a maiden. Did some horseboy have you first?”

  I spat at him and jeered, “A horseboy rides better than
you, Sire. It’s just as your wife says: you can’t stay in the saddle long.” Dame Lyra had never confided so much in me, but I wanted to poison his mind as he’d poisoned mine.

  I saw this taunt go home, but his smile didn’t change. “I won’t be in a hurry next time we meet,” he said. “I’ll clap on my spurs and teach you not to balk.”

  By then I was crying and couldn’t speak. I’ve thought on it many times, what I should have done, what I failed to do, and I’ve dreamed about it too, bloody dreams; but unlike dreams, the past can’t be altered.

  When he got up on his horse, he tossed a scarf at me—a rag he’d tied to the pommel of his saddle—saying, “I brought you a headcloth. Put it on and stop wailing. Why all the fuss if you already gave it away? In all my life I never heard such an uproar.”

  I went down to the river and sat in the water to wash away the stains of mud and grass and white blood. And it was true; there was no red blood, though I’d never lain with a man before. The hairs I’d tied together over my quim had prevented easy entrance, like a hymen. Where they had pulled I was swollen and sore.

  I wrapped the headcloth around my head with shaking fingers and went down the hill. It was a sign anyone could read.

  Sire Pava didn’t bother me again, despite his bluster. I think he preferred his women willing. And Na was right: it would have been better if I had pleased him. The spite of Dame Lyra, half-moon scars on my arm from her pinches, the japes and hands of Sire Pava’s men, now that I was no longer his quarry, the steward’s whispers in a dark corner, the coldness between me and Na, for we no longer understood each other—Wend Weaver cut the threads that held me, one by one.