Free Firethorn by Sarah Micklem Page A

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    While the troop was readying to go, I made my own preparations. I stitched myself a wide leather girdle, lined with hidden pockets for necessities: childbane, for it might not grow where I was going; simples to soothe pains, bring down a fever, poultice a wound; seasonings for the cook pot; chunks of rock salt. One pocket held a handful of berries from the firethorn tree, wrapped in oiled vellum; the berries were too dangerous to use for healing, but I kept them. They reminded me of the Kingswood and a god’s gift.
    From the belt I hung an iron knife with a bone handle and a copper fire flask lined with clay and firewort to keep a coal from the hearth alive. The flask was stamped with the sign of Ardor Hearthkeeper; I’d never willfully go without her blessing again. I also took my sheepskin cloak with faded ward signs and Na’s threadbare old dress. A bit of cloth was too precious to waste.
    Two days after Equinox I said farewell. This time I’d be farther away than the Kingswood. Az was the hardest to leave, so I left her last, and took care that I found her alone in her dim hut. I knew, like Na, she’d never live to see me again.
    Az fetched a leather sack from a hiding place beside the clay house goddess, who kept watch on us through a tiny hole in the wall, safe from the prying eyes of the priest.
    â€œI’m giving you these because you have no blood family,” she said, spilling small painted bones from the sack onto the table. She held one against her index finger, so I could see it matched the last joint, and dropped it into my palm. The tip of the bone was painted red. “This is from the right hand of my sister, from Na. I’m giving her to you.” She chose another bone, dyed a deep blue all over. “This is the Dame. Na wanted you to have her. They cared for you, and they’ll counsel you well.” She took up the other finger bones, one by one, and kissed them and put them back in the sack. Some were nothing but brown shards.
    It chilled me to think of Na cutting off the top joint of the Dame’s bloodless finger and tucking her hand back under the shroud. She’d dared the wrath of the priest and troubled the Dame’s shade. She’d kept secrets, even from me. I wondered how many other secrets were hidden in the mud walls of the village huts, as these small bones had been hidden. A few months of grinding barley, and I’d been arrogant enough to think I knew the folk who lived here—and Az herself. I was daunted to find she had shades at her beck and call.
    We squatted near the doorway where a patch of sunlight came into the hut. With a stick, Az drew a circle two handspans wide on the hard dirt floor and divided it into twelve equal parts by crossing it with lines for the twelve directions. Starting at the east and going around the circle, she named the god who governed each wedge-shaped domain. Then she scratched two concentric circles inside the greater one, so that the wedges were cut into three parts, one for every avatar of the governing god. She named these too, pointing with her stick as if she expected me to remember.
    I do remember, as clearly as if the compass were before me now, carved in stone. I’d heard tell of the gods and their avatars all my life, though some had always seemed remote and indifferent to me, and others near at hand—too close, at times. Everyone knows the prayers of drudges don’t wing their way to the gods as swiftly or as surely as those of the Blood, but they are still our gods and we belong to them.
    The mudfolk used to live in ignorance, worshiping the numina of trees and boulders and waters instead of the gods, but even in those long-ago days, they knew of Eorõe Artifex, though they called her by another name. It’s a tale everyone knows, how she formed our ancestors of clay—mud and Blood alike, we spring from those first people—and gave us her breath, the breath of life, and