Free Wildfire by Sarah Micklem

my part, I don’t know about you,” Spiller said. “I was after them like a ferret into every little hidey-hole.”
     
  
     Rowney looked at him with disgust. “We did some killing. They did the murdering.”
     
  
     “You should’ve seen Sire Galan,” Spiller said. “He’s like a fire when he gets going. They couldn’t douse him!”
     
  
     I rubbed my temples, for there was a circlet of pain around my head. “Aren’t you afaird? She said spill them all, so there’d be none left to fardle a a grutch, a grouch. But what of…Current?” I wasn’t sure what to call the god, but the names of its avatars—the Sailor, Wellspring, and the Waters—came to me unexpectedly, like coins found in the street. “Don’t you fear revenys?”
     
  
     I spoke in the High this time, so Penna too could understand, but it might as well have been a foreign tongue. Spiller twiddled his lower lip, making mock of me. Rowney looked uneasy. He was a brave man in a fight, but wary of me. He’d decided I was a cannywoman after he found out I could see in the dark; what must he think of me now?
     
  
     Penna stared, her black brows drawn together. I tried again. “I don’t see how they darst, our kind, our king and queenmocker…Careless…Callous—ah, you know her fame, I can’t say it. How dared they send our flight across the flat, the wet flat, the Wasters, even as they attacked Torment’s clay? No wonder the god sent a, a a…snowbone…and then it was not flat, the wet—the rivers, the wavers, the deep steep—they highed up,” and I showed them with my hands how the waves had risen up all around, tall as hills, and fallen upon us, “and and swept the men who man the…soars, swept them underboard, and fathomed many sheep.”
     
  
     Spiller said, “What are you fretting about? I heard there were but five ships lost in the storm. And the battle is won. The gods smile on a victor, they say. Besides, we have Blood of Torrent in our army too, as pure as any here in Incus. Why shouldn’t Torrent favor us?”
     
  
     I couldn’t think of how to answer him, for I was puzzled by what I used to take for granted. It was long, long ago that avatars of the twelve gods had walked in human form among the mudfolk of Incus and chosen mates;from those unions had sprung the twelve clans of the Blood. It was not so long ago, but still a long time as men count it—six generations—that an army of the Blood left Incus to conquer Corymb, the land where I was raised. Now the descendants of that army returned to Incus as invaders. Queenmother Caelum had invited our trespass so she might take back the rule of Incus from her own son, whose name I couldn’t at present remember. Prince Craven, was that it? Surely not.
     
  
     I found it bewildering that one branch of the Blood would fight another, no matter that they were cousins six generations apart. But I was more confounded to learn that the clans of Incus were already at war among themselves, fighting old feuds and contending over whether Queenmother Caelum or her son should rule the kingdom. I daresay I should have known this; had I known it before the lightning, and forgotten?
     
  
     It struck me now, and perhaps for the first time, that a war between mother and son was unnatural. Surely the gods found it abhorrent. Or were they drawn by this contention—mother against son, kin against kin, neighbor against neighbor—to contend against each other, or even within themselves, avatar against avatar? Perhaps Wellspring would aid one branch of the clan of Torrent, and the Sailor another.
     
  
     No—the gods didn’t fight our battles; we fought theirs. Wasn’t that the way of it?
     
  
     I said to Spiller, “That was no batter, what was done over there, in that burning terror. It was a slatter, a a…slayer. Slaughter. Ill begun is ill done, and I don’t belie that it, the god—that Portent, I mean—will be appleased by a few bodes, boats. You mark, you mark…” I bent over in my chair, gripping my head,