Free Wildfire by Sarah Micklem Page A

in torment now from the headache and the high ceaseless whine in my ear. “A water spite, wife, is a a…Blood strife, a Flood strike.”
     
  
     Spiller raised his hands and said, “Enough of this stuttering and muttering. I can’t be bothered.” He turned his back on me and stalked away. He pulled a side of bacon from a sack, and began to slice it for Sire Galan’s breakfast, holding the slab against his chest and pulling his knife toward him so the bacon curled.
     
  
     Penna asked Rowney, “What is she saying?”
     
  
     I hardly knew. My mind had snagged on the thread of a notion, and I couldn’t let it go, I must follow where it led: Galan entering a room such as this one with his sword drawn, with Sire Edecon at his back, maybe Spiller and Rowney too—and a naked man starting from his sleep in the lattice-walled bed—a round-shouldered woman with bedclothes clutched about her, choking on a scream—Galan striking quickly, once, twice.
     
  
     I saw this bright as a memory, but it couldn’t have happened that way, because in a time of feud no one sleeps without arms at hand. So I imaginedit again, another way, with the man reaching for a sword that hung on two pegs attached to the lattice. He wouldn’t have died without drawing the blade from its jeweled sheath. And where were his servants? Lying outside the door, where they’d been cut down. Spiller stooped over one, fingering the hem of his tunic, looking for coins.
     
  
     Shouts and cries should have awakened the couple. Why then was the man so startled? Why did the woman stare in disbelief as her husband was struck down, as Galan turned her way? Surely he wouldn’t have killed her.
     
  
     This much I was sure of: blood on Galan’s blade and gauntlet. Blood spattering his silvered visor, a mask made to match Galan’s face, but with a blank serenity of countenance most unlike Galan—the visor held in the gaping beak of his helmet, shaped like the head of a gyrfalcon.
     
  
     In a room like this one he’d picked up a coral box from a table, a round box decorated with a silver boat and net. He’d raised his visor and opened the lid to smell the unguent inside. He’d given it to Rowney to carry in a sack slung over his shoulder. He’d gone on to the next room and the next. I saw him running up the winding stairs of a tower, nearly out of breath. Sweating. He’d left his visor up. On his cheek he had a cut shaped like the sickle Moon.
     
  
     
  
Sire Galan rose late, and blamed us all for letting him sleep too long, as if we should have known his mind. Before he put on a stitch of clothing, he ate a frycake standing up and washed it down with a swallow of ale. Spiller scraped his jaw with a sharp blade and rubbed his face with a pumice to smooth away the stubble, and then Galan stood on the balcony and splashed himself with water from a basin. He called for Sire Edecon to get out of bed and stripped the covers from him. Sire Edecon groaned and turned over on his stomach. He was a burly man, and the heavy muscles of his back and buttocks were smoothed over by a bit of fat. Sire Galan was lean, with broad shoulders and narrow haunches; the cords of his sinews and threads of his veins stood out under the skin.
     
  
     Galan demanded a clean shirt and hose, and where were those new boots of his, and the surcoat with the foxtail tippets at the shoulders? Spiller and Rowney rooted about in the baggage, which had arrived by ship the day before, and Spiller cursed the misbegotten sod who’d packed it in his absence. He found a boot here, a prickguard there, one of Galan’s leggings missing and the other boot amongst the tent fittings. Rowney found a pair of my slippers in a sack with his saddle, and I smiled to think of Galan’s horsemaster tucking them away for me.
     
  
     The jacks helped Galan dress. They put on his new hauberk, plundered from Torrent, no doubt, for each of its fine steel links had a small crescentof colored enamel, so that the