Eylbold. The gallows. She would have to go alone. The thought of the mission made her sad. She hugged her knees against her chest. It was true that at moments her grip on the fire felt like trying to squeeze soap underwater, but she knew she had to fight through it anyway, and she knew she would win. The augury had spoken. There had to be a way to make an impact without breaking her promise not to burn people and not to burn big, as Leifer had done.
This gallows felt like the first good target, and she would hit it hard. She promised the desire inside her that she would see the gallows burn. She had to or all was lost. Beyond reason or thought, that certainty held her, soothed her, allowed her to breathe out and wait. At that decision, the heat loosened around her, and she cooled and calmed and felt secure again that though the fate of the war tugged at her like a rope around her neck, she would succeed.
She waited until full night. Her sense of the Tiran sitting in Eylbold just a few hours' ride to the south was so powerful now that it made her dizzy, like being shut indoors with a strong smell. She did not see Razo or Finn on her way to the stables. Everything she needed was in Merry's saddlebag—water, food, a bundle of Tiran clothing. She led the mare to the edge of town, keeping her head down, not wanting to see the boys. She was afraid, and hopeless, and determined. A cool thought slid through her and gave her goose bumps—she could just not go. She could forget the gallows and Eylbold and the augury. She recoiled from the thought as she might from proffered poison. I have to, she reminded herself. For Bayern. For everyone.
Enna passed the east gate and heard a familiar voice call her name. She turned and felt relief briefly lighten her shoulders.
"Isi," she said, "you're back."
They stood just outside the town. The fires of Ostekin camp were behind Isi, but Enna did not need more light to know the long pale hair hanging loose, tall stature, and slight frame. Isi was dressed in her travel clothes, wide riding skirts, thick tunic, and cloak, all dyed dull colors. The Bayern liked things bright and colorful, but wartime seemed to stultify everything.
Isi's tone was frank. "Enna, the wind thinks you're on fire. You smell like smoke."
"I'm not. I'm just . . . Isi, so much has happened. If I could explain it all, you'd understand. I've been afraid to tell you. But really, I'm all right, and I'm doing good . . . good things."
Isi looked down. "Geric received reports of burning. We returned today and heard details from Talone. He doesn't suspect you, of course. He thinks you're my friend and would never sneak around like that. But there's a Tiran scout in the cells whom Razo and Finn captured, and he's babbling about how a fire-witch stopped him. Geric thinks he's just paranoid, but I, I think it was you."
Enna felt her breath get short. "I have to go, Isi."
"I can't let you, Enna."
Enna clenched her fists. Heat swirled around her like chaotic dancers, bumping into her, grazing against her skin. She felt herself sway. "Leifer tried to tell me what it was like, but I didn't understand then, and you don't now."
"Let me try," said Isi. "You read Leifer's vellum, and you meant well. You want to help Bayern with the fire. But things in you have begun to change. All this time in the city I've been thinking on this and reading what I could. The wind's changed me, so it makes sense that fire could change Leifer and you. Nothing it touches can remain unscathed."
Enna shook her head. "It's not an evil thing, Isi. I'm not. Please don't hate me. You don't believe in the augury, so you can't see what I'm seeing. Finn would've died, Isi. He was fighting for all Bayern, and he would've died. I'm so afraid." She felt her chin start to tremble, and she wanted to rush forward and cry on Isi's neck. "Please don't make it harder. I know what I have to do, but I'm so scared, and I just need to keep moving, keep going until it's done. If I stop to think, I might get too scared, and I can't stop now."
Isi took a step closer. "Enna, are you sure you have to? Really sure? Because you seem seized by all this. It's not your fault. It's just that the fire is bigger than any one person."
Enna felt her legs tremble. Not bigger than me.
"Fire must burn." Isi spoke more frantically, as though chasing down each thought before speaking. "That's its only need. It doesn't have a human mind. But I wonder, when it got inside of you, or Leifer, its need must be overpowering you, and the desire you feel to burn might just be your own human mind making up human reasons to see it through. Like Leifer, at first seeing Bayern as an enemy and then switching his need for an enemy to Tira. And now it's using you."
Chills shook Enna. She started to think about what Isi said, but it was getting hard to see. A yellow haze was thickening before her, and she rubbed her eyes and tried to breathe. The gallows, was her only clear thought. The mission, the gallows. I promised to stop the war.
Enna started to turn.
"Wait, Enna, don't. Just be still a moment and think."
"I can't," said Enna, pleading. The heat was pressing itself against her face, into her mouth when she spoke, into her eyes so they stung. "Please, just let me go. If you knew . . . if you could feel . . . you'd let me go, Isi."
Isi advanced. Her expression was grim and serious. "This isn't you, Enna. I will stop you if I can." She took Enna's wrist.
"No!" said Enna, tearing away. She could not bear it another moment. The heat was pressing, pressing; the enemy sat unchallenged, Finn would be dead, and so would all of Bayern. And Isi was in the way. Enna pulled all that built-up heat inside her, gasping at the burning pain. Isi was in the way. She had to get away. Now. The heat was blazing in her chest. She thrust it out.
The heat poured toward Isi, toward all that lovely, combustible cloth, that long, dead hair yearning to live again in heat and fire. But in that moment before the heat grabbed Isi and blazed into life, the wind came. Enna felt it swoop between them, a flash flood of cold. Enna struggled for breath and found none. The shooting heat was blown away, dissipating into the night before it could become fire. All gone. The air continued to roll over and around Enna, loosening any heat still clinging to her. She gasped and found air at last, her lungs aching with each breath. The wind left her cold, and she felt like a corpse standing.
She looked up. Isi was holding a hand over her mouth.
"Isi," Enna whispered. "I didn't, I . . . "
Enna felt as though all her words and feeling had been blown away with the fire. Isi, her best friend, she had sent the heat, she had tried to set her aflame. The whole world seemed to tilt crazily, and she just wanted to rush forward and fall at her feet and swear it was a mistake. Then the heat began to return to her, and she shuddered at its touch. The heat from Isi's body. The heat from her mare. And with it the persistent reminder of the gallows, begging to be burned. Her head throbbed with her pulse, and it seemed to say, Burn, burn, burn.
Isi dropped the hand from her mouth. Enna opened her mouth to speak but found no words. She turned around to look southeast. Eylbold. She could hear Isi start to run toward town.
"Help!" Isi shouted. "Guards, come quick!"
Enna clambered into the saddle and rode away.
The cold rush of night wind pushed against Enna's face, and she winced under its incessant swipe. She could not forget the exquisite release when she had sent fire at her friend. How easy it was. Enna did not believe she could ever live to forget that feeling, could ever look at Isi again without remembering what she had tried to do. And now, Bayern guards might be riding at her heels, and ahead the invaders waited. All the world was wrong, and the only way she could see to make it right was by burning.
The wind current loosened her headscarf and whipped away the heat. She felt naked and raw. But even the wind and cold could not reach that bit of deep heat inside that was always ready, always waiting to burn again. Her body trembled in the saddle. She fought to hold on.
At last she knew Leifer's mind that night in the Forest. At last she could see herself from his eyes, looking at his sister as an obstacle to what everything inside him insisted he must do. He had
been unable to resist the heat, unbelieving that it was that simple to set someone you love on fire. Unbelievably simple. There seemed no way to ever return, to ever be just Enna again. Razo and Finn had looked at her as at a stranger, and Isi . . . No, nothing could be the same. Why had the augury not even hinted that to fulfill her mission, she would have to give up everything?
Leifer's fate seemed unavoidable to her now. She had broken two of her rules. She had told Razo and Finn of the fire, and she had burned the living, setting fire to that Tiran soldier and trying to burn Isi. So far, she had honored the third rule by keeping her fires small, but perhaps only because she did not know how to burn big.
She pulled the mare short near the woods outside Eylbold and dismounted. The woods seemed unfriendly to her—the living trees unburnable and selfish with their slow heat locked inside bark, closed and dark, relishing the sunless hours. She wrapped her arms around the mare's neck and tried to soak in her warmth. Gently. Without drawing it. Just feeling it. The mare held still and received the affection. She felt an impulse to do something recklessly noble.
"I won't let you get hurt," she said, removed Merry's bridle, stuffed it in the emptied saddlebag, and slapped the mare's rump. It felt like a good, clean sacrifice to let the horse go, make sure the mare was out of danger and not think about herself. She slapped Merry again, and the mare hesitated, then began a halting trot north. Enna watched her horse go and felt small and alone. She would have to walk back to Ostekin, or perhaps to the Forest, when this was done. But she could not think clearly just then, and she turned her back to the north to face Eylbold.
Enna tied her blue headscarf around her waist. It was nearly the color of the sashes she had seen the taken Bayern women wear in the Tiran camps, and she thought it would serve. She clutched an armload of Tiran clothing as though it were laundry and set off toward town. Her hair brushed the tops of her shoulders as she walked and kept the cold off her neck, though the top of her head felt too exposed. She thought of pulling heat in to warm herself and resisted.
She slipped between two tents and was in the camp. The paths were deserted, only an occasional sentry at his post. The sentries ignored her, a Bayern girl wearing the blue sash of a taken woman, carrying a bundle of Tiran laundry. She drew on their escaping heat and carried it around her. Her muscles had stopped shaking, and the calm of her resolve felt heavier than wearing wet clothes, heavier than mud. She imagined Leifer had felt this way burning the battlefield. Perhaps he knew that he must be near the end, but conviction of his purpose propelled him on.
Enna made her way to the center of the town. There, indeed, stood a gallows. In the moonlight the pale wood looked blue, as though it were underwater. From its massive lintel swung three bodies, their necks roped. No, as she got closer she could see they were not bodies, but scarecrows. One wore a Bayern skirt and tunic, long, blackened straws for hair, and a clumsy crown. Isi. Enna realized that Isi had worn a Forest head wrap at the initial battle and the war councils, and the Tiran likely did not know that she was a foreigner with yellow hair. The other two wore Bayern uniforms. One was crowned—Geric. The other had strips of orange cloth hanging from his mouth. A breeze stirred the cloth, and Enna understood. Fire. The third was the fire-witch.
She could feel the camp's heat—sleeping bodies of men, sleeping horses, sleeping prisoners. She did not need to call to it. Heat seemed to know her now, and it wrapped around her, ready for use. In a bound, the heat pulled inside her, formed into flame, and tore out again. The scarecrows popped and fried.
"Ah," she sighed aloud. The burden was gone, and she felt joy.
She gathered more heat and sent it again. The lintel blazed. She repeated it again and again, gulping bits of heat, sending the fire in rapid succession like an archer going through a quiver of arrows. Soon the entire structure was a brilliant bonfire. Under the flames, the wood cracked and moaned and coughed. The scarecrows fell from their blackened ropes and sizzled on the ground. The place felt radiant with life.
She tried to pull in heat one more time, one more blow, but choked on the effort. She could feel the scorching fire in front of her, but the pocket in her chest was cold and tight. The attempt made her gag and shiver, and she took two steps back.
She was conscious of herself standing alone in that square, dark, quiet, cold, and started to back away from the fire into the shadow of a tent. No one appeared. Surely others saw the fire, and those near would even smell and feel it. But there was no one. Silence.
Then, across the square, someone stepped forward into the light of the blaze. Sileph, the captain from the war council who had spoken to her. He was staring right at her.
"What?" she said with a breath, dropping her bundle of clothes and stumbling backward. Inside her burned-out, cold chest she could feel the prickling of fear.
On either side of the square, two archers arranged themselves, their bows cocked, one eye closed, arrows aiming at her heart. She fumbled to muster heat and send it flying quicker than their arrows. Then a new source of heat emerged right behind her. She tugged at it and gasped. It was a person. She started to turn when pain struck the back of her head, and then blackness.
Part Three
Prisoner
Chapter 12
Enna began to ache. She did not know where it came from. Everywhere. The entire world was ache and thirst and darkness. She heard herself moan. It scraped against her throat, a grounding sensation that roused her. Her eyelids felt sticky and hard, as though glued down with pine sap.
There was the sound of someone approaching, and then a cup was held to her lips. She gulped down the water and had time to notice that it had a sour, dry taste like green cherries before she again succumbed to the dreams.
And more dreams. Villages burned as she walked through them. Cornstalks sprouted ears of fire, and the fields caught it and burned green. A flock of white geese flew out of the ashes toward a silver sky. Their hard wings beat against the sky and it broke like a mirror, raining glass shards onto Enna's head. She ducked, then woke groggily. Someone nearby shoved a cup against her mouth. She pinched her lips together and tried to push it away, but her hands would not move. Water dripped down her chin. The cup withdrew.
"Who?" she said, trying to look around. It was either very dark or she still could not force open her lids. Hands held her face and pinched her nose. She struggled, then gasped, and the sour water poured down her throat.
She slept fitfully, and even inside the dreams she could feel herself shaking. Sometime later, she felt a blanket wrapped over her body. The warmth was so welcome that she struggled to say, "Thank you," but only managed a groan. Her tongue felt bigger than her mouth. She thought if she could just clear her head, she could will her tongue to shrink.
A hand stroked her cheek. Or was she already inside another dream?
When she began to discern the waking world again, she was force-fed another cup of water. The flavor was lighter than the others, and she slowly, painfully, awoke. At once she noticed a terrible pain in her stomach. As she focused on it, the pain shrank to a tight, sore realization of hunger. How long had she been dreaming?
She stilled her mind and tried to reason out where she was. She was lying on her side. Beneath her was rough cloth over cold ground. It must still be winter. No wind or sun—she was in some kind of enclosure. She could barely move with her ankles bound and her hands tied behind her back. She tried to move her head and winced. The gallows, the square, the person who came up from behind. So, she had been hit on the head. She gagged and tasted again the unripe-fruit tang of the unnatural water. First hit and then drugged.
Something else was very wrong. With a start she realized what it was—she could not feel heat. It was as though she had set the world on fire and there was nothing left living. Or just, she realized with alarm, that the drugs brought an artificial numbness. A world without heat felt cruel and empty, and she found she wanted to weep as though someone had died. Carefully she probed about her, trying to se
nse any traces of heat. Through the ground, around her body, farther away. Something was there. She felt it faintly, and her abused and woozy body assured her she could not drag any of the heat into her.
Her powerlessness angered her, and she focused all her strength on opening her eyes. She saw white. She was inside a tent. Daylight seeped through the cloth walls. A gray wool blanket was tucked around her body. She blinked, worked those tiny muscles, and tried to send her gaze farther than a few feet.
A person. A face. The lines became sharper. Sileph sat on the ground and watched her calmly. She was not surprised.
"Hello," she said with a dry croak.
He nodded. "Do you see me, then? The watcher is watched at last." He lifted a gourd cup from a pail. "Would you like some water?"
"I don't want to sleep." Her voice sounded as though it came from far away.
"This is just water. See?" He drank fully from the cup and wiped his chin. When she did not protest again, Sileph dipped the gourd and brought it to her side. He placed a hand under her neck and helped raise her to drink. She gulped the cold water and felt her body take it like parched earth takes in rain.
He lowered her head to the ground and left the tent. Her eyes open now and her consciousness sullenly returning, Enna felt every strand of her body throb and complain. She tried to heave herself onto her back, but the effort sent ribbons of pain into her bound wrists and ankles, and her head spun. She lay still and concentrated on the crossing threads of the ground cloth before her, wishing the dizziness to abate. A tear spilled from the corner of her eye and wobbled on the surface of the oiled cloth.
She heard someone enter and looked up. Sileph held a wooden bowl and spoon.
"There is food," he said. "Will you eat?"
"Untie me."
He frowned, as though the suggestion wounded him. "I think I will assist you first. You can stretch after."