Firethorn by Sarah Micklem Read Free Book Online Page A

starchroot and berries on the way. She shook her head and we went on, unspeaking.
    Darkness comes early deep in the mountains. By the time we reached our destination, the bright blue ribbon of sky overhead had turned cobalt. Az had led me to the headwater of the stream. Where the two long ridges joined, the waters of a spring tumbled out of a fissure in the cliff face into a pool littered with great boulders. One side of the ravine was a wall of pure gray clay. It had been mined over the years, and the diggers had left a wide shelf of clay next to the pool. We piled up leaves in a hollow, and Az and I curled up to sleep.
    I spoke in a dream, and woke myself, though both word and dream escaped me. I saw three lights moving near us and shook Az in a panic. “No fear,” Az said. “They’re here to keep us from harm,” and she went back to sleep.
    In the morning she was more forthcoming. “Our dead are all through these woods,” she told me. “We buried them here to keep them close, so they’d look after us, each one under a sapling according to their nature. Many of these trees are our people. Then the Blood came along and made us burn the dead. We’ve lost six generations since they came from Oversea, six generations wandering who knows where. But those who are left here still come at need, if they are not forgotten. I think soon they may be forgotten.”
    She pointed at the ridges. “In the beginning our people were fashioned from this clay, right here between the Thighs. You’ll not come into your strength till you know what clay made you. This isn’t your place.”
    Tears started to my eyes as if she’d struck me.
    She leaned over and took my hand. “Don’t take it hard. I’m only saying I don’t need an omen bird to tell me you’ll fly away again.”
    I went to find food while Az worked all morning, digging and shaping clay. By the time I came back, she’d made a clay woman about knee high, forming it around the oak branch so that a topknot of leaves sprouted from the head. She smoothed the clay until it was like skin, and incised spirals over the round breasts and belly. Last of all she scratched eyes in the featureless oval of the face. I was amazed and afraid to see how the clay woman looked back at us from her new eyes, and I wondered if Eorõe Artifex had been surprised, when she shaped our forebears, the first people, to feel the clay come to life in her hands.
    We left the woman behind rubble in a dry niche in the rock. Az said Maken would come to fetch her when he was ready to build his house, and hide her in the wall to bring blessings.
    Az was in good spirits on the way home, for she’d heard under the great oak that Fleetfoot would not be dying just yet. She knew he’d be leaving, but not where he’d go or whether he would return. She’d made him a clay man the size of two fingers, with an acorn for a heart. She wanted him to keep a bit of the earth he came from, to keep Mischief from crossing his path. But some fates are beyond our power to avert; the more Az fussed over Fleet-foot, knowing she’d lose him, the more surely she sent him away.

    When harvest came we reaped daylong in the fields and went to sleep with straw in our hair and grit under our lids. The work hardened me, until I could keep up with the fastest reapers. Everything smelled dusty. The stone granary within the manor walls filled up while Steward and the priest, Divine Narigon, stood at the door making the tallies, watching each other like two cats.
    I pinched my arms and legs to feel the fat under the skin. Az made me a new dress from cloth Na had left her, dyed a dark blue with woad. My tongue got quicker, and keener too. Laughter came hard to me, but Fleetfoot liked to tease me and make me smile. Life with the Dame was like a tapestry locked in a chest; I stopped taking it out to look at the colors. Nor did I think of my year in the