Wildfire by Sarah Micklem Page A

Whoever wears it will be spurned.”
     
  
     “Yes, but who wears it? What else did you see?”
     
  
     “I saw a shadow in the crow, the…crown. A dread.”
     
  
     “Crow. She said the crow, King Corvus.” The priest seized on this stray fragment of a word, made it whole. I looked at what the priestess was writing, and the godsigns, upside down, made no more sense than I did.
     
  
     I shook my head in vexation. “No, no! Don’t you hear me muttering, nattering? Utter natter. This is an end.”
     
  
     They asked me other questions, but I refused to say more. I’d misled them already, trying to speak the truth. It made me distrust everything I’d ever heard from Auspices. Why did they need my answers? Didn’t they have their own auguries? Or was I just one portent among the many that begged for interpretation?
     
  
     I was incapable of uttering what the god might say. I knew this, even if the Auspices didn’t, for the knowledge had been impressed upon me when I groveled before the altar. If that was what Ardor required of me, then I had failed. Perhaps the fault was in me, because I was mudborn, without a divine lineage to strengthen my clay. A flawed pot will crack in the kiln—perhaps this remnant of me, aching and twitching, halting and slow, was all that was left after the god had fired me and found me an unfit vessel.
     
  
     Would my speech be fettered to the end of my days? How would Iendure it? I resolved to banish hope; it was too bitter when hope was overthrown.
     
  
     
  
Sire Galan was waiting for me with his friends, standing in the heat of Wildfire’s altar. When he saw the paint on my face he took in a short breath, saying, “Did they hurt you?”
     
  
     I put my hand out to reassure him. “It will wash.”
     
  
     “Don’t, though.”
     
  
     “What don’t?”
     
  
     “Don’t wash it off.”
     
  
     “Why not? It’s just taint. I thought they tainted me to pure me, you know—for a a melody, a meredy. But you can hear how I’m still brangled.”
     
  
     “They wanted something of you—what was it?”
     
  
     “I think a a…orator? Or no—a miracle? No—I mean…oracle. An oracle.”
     
  
     “Ha! Indeed?” Galan took my arm above the elbow, and he set such a pace through the temple that I had to hurry to keep up. Many men stood before the door, and among them Ardor’s clansmen. Surely they didn’t mean to fight on a Peaceday, in a temple sanctuary, but they stared at me, they whispered and hissed. Galan’s grip was painful, but when I looked at him sidelong he grinned. He had a font of joy that bubbled up in him when there was danger. It fizzed through my own body as if I’d drunk of the same perilous waters. He didn’t slow down. Again they moved aside. Just enough.
     
  
     He hadn’t come here to flaunt himself; he’d come for me, to make sure his enemies would know I’d been touched by the god. To keep me from harm. No wonder he was pleased by the paint on my face.
     
  
     Galan said, “And were you?”
     
  
     “What?”
     
  
     “An oracle?”
     
  
     I remembered the priest bending toward me in earnest inquiry, and the priestess writing down nonsense, and I began to laugh. “I was, I am an oracle!” I said loudly so the men of Ardor would hear. “See what is written on my disgrace? In this taint? Ask the Suspiciouses what it said, I can’t say, I have a torn tongue, a thorn tongue, a tongue of fire.” I stopped searching for the right words, I laughed and let them all fly out, and how the onlookers gaped! We passed through the portal into daylight and ran down the steps, and Galan was laughing too, and also Sire Edecon at my left shoulder, Sire Guasca on Galan’s right, and the others behind. As if I were one of them.
     
  
     
  
     
  
     
  
     
  
     
  
     
  
     
  
     
  
      
  
   CHAPTER 4
  
       The Black Drink
  
  
     
  
     
  
     
  
     
   A hand of days we’d been in Lanx, a hand of nights