ON THE SECOND night of the vigil, Cael and Safred stayed up talking around the fire until late. Zel was sitting with Bramble for a while. She and Martine had fallen into shifts. Cael was ruled out from that duty because they had been successful at getting Bramble to drink, which meant that occasionally she pissed and had to be cleaned up, and they all knew she wouldn’t want Cael involved with that. Or Safred, though it was trickier to justify her exclusion. They let her sit with Bramble every so often, in broad daylight, when one or the other of them was near, so it wasn’t so obvious, but they both knew Safred realized what they were doing, and she didn’t like it.
She retaliated by questioning them about their involvement with the gods. She wanted to know everything about Martine’s journey from Turvite, every detail she could remember about the ghosts, what the gods had said through Elva, and then everything about Elva and her relationship with the gods. To Martine it seemed that Safred was both reassured and piqued to learn that another woman had so close a tie to them. She questioned Martine closely about how the gods possessed Elva, how they spoke through her, what their voice was like when they did.
Martine called a halt. If they didn’t go to bed now, the others wouldn’t be asleep by midnight. “When you meet her, you can ask her yourself — or see for yourself. But I’m going to bed.”
“I just want to know —”
Martine lost patience. “Safred, I know it bothers you that other people have dealings with your gods, but they were our gods first. Lots of us have special dealings with them. It’s part of our lives. Every stone-caster in the Domains hears the gods talk at some point. If you try to know everything about every person who deals with the gods, you’ll be dead of old age before you get halfway through.”
Safred went very still, a look in her eyes that balanced between hurt and revelation. She opened her mouth to ask another question, but Cael shook his head at her. He nodded to her tent. “Bed, niece.”
She did what she was told.
Martine liked Cael, and right now she was thankful for his presence, but every now and then she looked at him and saw one of Acton’s men: the big, fair-haired invaders who had dispossessed her people. She could imagine him laughing as he killed. The image made her voice sharper than she intended. “Good night, Cael.”
He looked at her with surprise, but silently went to his bedroll, while she turned her back and walked over to Zel and Bramble. Bramble was crying, silently, tears rolling down her cheeks, her face set. It was a terrible sight, and Zel had hunched over so she didn’t have to look at her, fighting her own tears.
Martine was struck again with the sense that what Bramble was undergoing was profoundly unnatural; that only grief would come of it. Saker, she thought, falcon, predator — you have hurt more people than you realize.
She stayed with Bramble while Zel went to the privy and then went herself, gathering dead pine needles for tinder as she walked back. Midnight wasn’t far off, by the stars. Telling midnight by the stars at Spring Equinox was a trick every Traveler woman was taught by her mam. Martine wondered, not for the first time, what happened at the Autumn Equinox. The ritual then was reserved for older women, women who had gone through the change, the climacteric, and were past child-bearing age.
I’ll find out soon enough, she thought wryly. Another ten, maybe fifteen years, and I’ll be there. Excluded from the spring rituals, included in the autumn. Part of her found that depressing; part comforting. Somewhere to go to, somewhere where age had a purpose. Old women returned from the Autumn Equinox chuckling and grinning, but they didn’t seek out men afterward.
Martine and Zel walked out to the altar as they had done the night before, becoming a little more confident in finding their footing. Martine had no sense that the lake resented the ritual, but she did, again, have the feeling that it was watching. Tonight, it was Zel’s turn to provide the flint and Martine’s to hold the striking stone.
The small pile of birch fungus caught alight immediately, and the ritual went on as it had done the previous night, except that, as always on the second night, the kindling burned more slowly and Martine’s arousal was greater, her need more intense. She surrendered to the fire more easily, closing her eyes and releasing her body, if not her whole mind, to feel whatever he wanted it to feel. Desired, that was what she felt. His great gift. No matter what she looked like, every Traveler woman knew, deep inside, that she was desirable, because he desired her. Often, the plainest women were the fire’s most ardent followers.
As the fire died and she returned to herself, shivering, Martine wondered, as she often had, what it was they were doing. The ritual wasn’t worship. The contact between fire and woman was too intimate for that. They didn’t ever talk of the fire as a god, just as “him” or “he.” But — he gave and they took; they gave and he took. Was it simply a bargain, made and kept? Or was it something deeper? The old women said that it kept the Domains in balance. Woman to fire, man to water, they said in whispers. Sometimes they had whispered it to their stone-caster so that Martine had learned things young women did not normally know, and the stones had said the same thing, in whispers to her, many times over the years.
There was healing in the ritual, too. Women who had been raped were placed closest to the fire, and he healed them, burned away any disgust or hatred of men or self-recrimination. Set them free to feel and love again. That was a great gift. The one time that Traveler women had tried to introduce a woman of Acton’s blood to the fire, it had been out of compassion for her, because she had been raped by a raiding party from the next Domain, in the time when all the warlords raided each other.
The fire had burnt cleanly away and the altar was untouched. That was always a good sign — a sign that he was pleased with them. Martine flushed with gratification at the thought, then smiled at herself. Like a young girl with her first love. Well, the fire was everyone’s first love. Some women’s only love. Some never got over their first Spring Equinox. Never found satisfaction with a human male. Would rather have the intensity without the fulfillment than the flesh and blood encounter, which never quite matched up for them. Others went the opposite way; clung to flesh and blood and rejected the fire; stayed away from the ritual, especially those who secretly preferred women to men. Zel had said her mother had been like that — so obsessed with her husband that she had no interest in the ritual and only took Zel the one time, because it was her duty to introduce her to the fire. Martine’s mother had steered the middle course that Martine tried for: to perform the ritual but not be consumed by it.
“The fire will never die,” they said in unison, and sighed.
Martine took Zel’s hand and they went back to the camp, banked down the fire which was now leaping high, gave Bramble some water and lay down either side of her.
Zel sighed in the darkness. “It’s a shame he don’t like us pleasuring our own selves after,” she said wistfully.
Martine laughed softly. “He won’t come tomorrow night if you do,” she warned, as her own mother had warned her.
“I know,” Zel sighed. “Dung and pissmire. By the day after tomorrow, even Cael’s going to start looking good to me!”
Bramble was shivering as though she, too, were feeling the effects of the Equinox, arousal without release. Martine reached out and patted her hand soothingly.
“Shh,” she said. “It’s all right. Shhh.”
Bramble quieted a little, and Martine let her hand fall away. She looked up into the star-blazing sky and wondered what they would do if they couldn’t find a flint tomorrow. There was only one solution she could see, and it terrified her.