Wildfire by Sarah Micklem

flask into the cup of drying ink and stirred it with his brush. “Sit still.”
     
  
     He began at the center of the lightning mark on my left cheek, drawing the wet brush lightly across my skin. I closed my eyes when he painted over my eyelid, and I kept them closed as he followed the branching bolts to every end, pulling aside my headcloth to lay bare the path through the hairs of my scalp, and down my neck to the slope of my shoulder. Ink cooled on my skin in the wake of his brush. He hummed as he painted, breath and hum and breath, and I followed the thin thread of his song inward, to the place where I was snarled and cut. The path was too tangled and I lost my way, but something loosened in me that had been tightly knotted, something opened that had been closed.
     
  
     I returned to the outward reaches of myself and opened my eyes. The priest rested his brush on the lip of the cup. I straightened my headcloth and made a gesture of thanks, hand over my heart. The headache was gone. But I knew, even before I opened my mouth and found words as unbiddable as ever: the priest had soothed me, but he hadn’t cured me.
     
  
     “I am gratiful,” I said. “But…but is there aught…naught you can do to heal my breach?”
     
  
     “You speak as Wildfire wills—the better to speak its will.”
     
  
     “But I speak…gabbledash!”
     
  
     “Would you expect Wildfire to speak so that anyone could understand?”
     
  
     The priestess sat at the table with her own brush, looking at my face and copying the mark into a book of pleated, sized linen. I pointed to the book, saying, “What is the meeting of this skin, this…scare that Illfire faced on me? Can you tell me that?”
     
  
     The old priest said, “You’ve been called to serve Ardor. To serve in the temple.”
     
  
     I stood up, shaking my head. That wasn’t what the sign meant, he couldn’t mean that.
     
  
     “I think you’ll find it painful to refuse the god.”
     
  
     “You can’t…you can’t—I go where I’m found, I’m found to go. You can’t halter…halt me.”
     
  
     The priest said, “Do you think we’re trying to take you captive? Not so. But stay awhile. We have questions.”
     
  
     I sat down again and the priest leaned toward me, his face intent, expectant. His head was in front of the shallow basin of burning oil and there were flames rising behind him; he seemed to wear them like a crown. “What do you see? Have you seen anything?”
     
  
     “I see what anywhom would see. I see you.”
     
  
     “Do you see anything in the fire?”
     
  
     “You mean the crowd, the crown of fire?”
     
  
     Smoke or shadows flickered and rose around the priest’s head, silhouetted against the flames, and I recognized the dark tinge of fear. Surely he was not afraid of me, but there was no doubt he was afraid.
     
  
     “You see a crown? Who wears it? Queenmother Caelum or King Corvus?”
     
  
     “Who is that, King Cravas? Oh, the prize—you must mean the prize, the the…prince.” So that was the queenmother’s son, the name I’d forgotten: Prince Corvus. They called him king here—I hadn’t realized.
     
  
     The priestess wrote something down on a folded page of her book, next to the lightning mark.
     
  
     The Auspex straightened up, moving out of the light, and said, “A crown of fire, yes. But who wears it?”
     
  
     It was laughable that they’d ask me, as if I possessed secret knowledge. Laughable, yet I couldn’t laugh at them. The Auspices and their clan were trapped between warring ambitions, and feared to err by choosing the losing side. I pointed to the flames rollicking around the edge of the bowl. “There is no sanctity for you, no no safety, no matter which sight you choose, the queenmalice or her son. Because the the…thing that burns—no, no, the very burning itself, the…pyre…fire, it glees, it is all gleeful, it lives to burn. It doesn’t mean malefice by it, but neverthenaught it sets all ablame, you see?