Fire

  Yes, of course, it had been. But Fire had never valued it for that. She had valued it because of a rare and strange kindness that was gone now.

  She studied Neel’s handkerchief. “It’s no matter,” she said, measuring her words. “The commander didn’t hit that man. I asked him not to in his mind, and he didn’t.”

  Musa accepted the apparent change of subject. “I wondered at that. He doesn’t strike his own soldiers, as a rule, you know. But this time I thought we might see the exception. His face was murder.”

  And he had taken the trouble to secure another man’s handkerchief. And he had shared her concern for her horse. Three kindnesses.

  Fire understood then that she had been afraid of Brigan, of her heart being injured by the hatred of a person she couldn’t help but like; and shy, as well, of his roughness, and his impenetrability. And she was still shy. But she was no longer afraid.

  THEY RODE HARD the rest of the day. As night closed in they made camp on a flat mass of rock. Tents and fires cropped up all around her, seeming to stretch on forever. It occurred to Fire that she had never been this far from home. Archer would be missing her, that she knew, and knowing it soothed her own loneliness a bit. His fury if he heard about her fiddle would be a terrible thing. Normally his furies were an aggravation to her, but she would welcome it now; if he were here, she could draw strength from his fire.

  Before too long the eyes of the soldiers nearest her drove her into her tent. She could not stop thinking of the words of the man who’d destroyed the fiddle. Why did hatred so often make men think of rape? And there was the flaw in her monster power. As often as the power of her beauty made one man easy to control, it made another man uncontrollable and mad.

  A monster drew out all that was vile, especially a female monster, because of the desire, and the endless perverted channels for the expression of malice. With all weak men, the sight of her was a drug to their minds. What man could use hate or love well when he was drugged?

  The consciousnesses of five thousand men pressed in on her.

  Mila and Margo had followed her into the tent, of course, and sat nearby, hands on swords. Silent, alert, and bored. Fire was sorry for being such a boring charge. She wished she could go out to Small without being seen. She wished she could bring Small into the tent.

  Musa looked in through the flap. “Pardon me, Lady. A soldier has come from the scout units to lend you his fiddle. The commander vouches for him, but says we’re to ask your impressions before we let him near you. He’s just outside, Lady.”

  “Yes,” Fire said, surprised, finding the strange man among her guard. “I believe he’s harmless.”

  Harmless and huge, Fire saw when she emerged from her tent. His fiddle was like a toy in his hands; this man’s sword must look like a butter knife when he swung it. But the face that sat above his tree trunk of a body was quiet and thoughtful and mild. He lowered his eyes before her and held the fiddle out to her.

  Fire shook her head. “You’re very generous,” she said, “but I don’t like to take it from you.”

  The man’s voice was so deep it sounded like it came from the earth. “We all know the story of what you did at Queen Roen’s fortress months back, Lady. You saved the life of our commander.”

  “Well,” Fire said, because he seemed to expect her to say something. “Nonetheless.”

  “The men cannot stop talking about it,” he continued, bowing, then pushing the fiddle into her small hands with his enormous ones. “And besides, you’re the better fiddler.”

  Fire watched the man lumber away, touched, immensely comforted by his voice, by the huge gentle feeling of him. “Now I understand how our scout units can tear up parties of bandits twice their size,” she said aloud.

  Musa laughed. “He’s a good one to have on our side.”

  Fire plucked the strings of the fiddle. It was in good tune. Its tone was sharp, strident—it was no master’s instrument. But it was a tool with which she could make music.

  And a declaration.

  Fire ducked inside her tent for her bow and came out again. Strode across the plain of soldiers toward a rise of rock that she could see some distance away. Her guard scrambled to follow her and surround her; the eyes of soldiers attached themselves to her as she passed. She reached the mound of boulders and climbed. She sat down and tucked the fiddle under her chin.

  In the hearing of them all she played whatever music it pleased her to play.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IF ONLY FIRE could talk her sleeping self into the same courage.

  It was her father’s dying eyes that never let her sleep.

  The answer to Brocker’s question in her fourteenth year, the question about whether she could alter Cansrel’s mind lastingly, had been simple, once she’d allowed herself to consider it. No. Cansrel’s mind was strong as a bear and hard as the steel of a trap, and every time she left it, it slammed back into place behind her. There were no permanent alterations to Cansrel’s mind. There was no changing who he was. It had relieved her, to know there was nothing she could do, because it meant no one could ever expect it of her.

  Then, in that same year, Nax had drugged himself to death. As the contours of power had shifted and resettled, Fire had seen what Brocker saw, and Archer, and Roen: a kingdom that stood on the verge of several permutations of possibility. A kingdom, suddenly, that could change.

  She had been dazzlingly well informed. On one side she’d received Cansrel’s confidences; on the other she’d known all that Brocker learned from his and Roen’s spies. She knew that Nash was stronger than Nax had been, strong enough sometimes to frustrate Cansrel, but a game to Cansrel still, compared with the younger brother, the prince. At eighteen the boy Brigan, the absurdly young commander, was said to be strong-minded, level, forceful, persuasive, and angry, the only person of influence in all King’s City who was not influenced by Cansrel. Some among the clearheaded talked as if they expected Brigan to be the difference between a continuation of the current lawless and depraved state of things, and change.

  “Prince Brigan is injured,” Brocker had announced one winter day when she came to visit. “I’ve just received word from Roen.”

  “What happened?” Fire asked, startled. “Is he all right?”

  “There’s a gala in the king’s palace every January,” Brocker said. “Hundreds of guests and dancing and a great deal of wine and nonsense, and a thousand dark corridors for people to sneak around in. Apparently Cansrel hired four men to corner Brigan and cut his throat. Brigan heard word of it and was ready for them and killed all four—”

  “All four by himself?” Fire asked, distressed and confused, sitting down hard in an armchair.

  “Young Brigan is good with a sword,” Brocker said grimly.

  “But is he badly hurt?”

  “He’ll live, though the surgeons worried at first. He was stabbed in the leg in a place that bled terribly.” Brocker moved his chair to the fireplace and threw Roen’s letter onto the crackling flames. “It was very nearly the end of the boy, Fire, and I don’t doubt that Cansrel will try again.”

  That summer at Nash’s court, an arrow from the bow of one of Brigan’s most trusted captains had struck Cansrel in the back. At the start of her fifteenth year—on her fourteenth birthday, in fact—Fire had gotten word from King’s City that her father was injured and likely to die. She’d closed herself in her room and sobbed, not even knowing, for sure, what she was sobbing about, but unable to stop. She’d pressed her face against a pillow so that no one could hear.

  Of course, King’s City was known for its healers, for its advances in medicine and surgery. People there survived injuries that people died of elsewhere. Especially people with the power to command an entire hospital’s attention.

  Some weeks later Fire had received the news that Cansrel was going to live. She’d run to her room again. She’d crawled onto her bed, utterly numb. As the numbness had worn off something sour had risen in her stomach and
she’d begun to vomit. A vessel had burst in her eye, a blood bruise forming at the edge of her pupil.

  Her body could be a powerful communicator sometimes, when her mind was trying to ignore a particular truth. Exhausted and sick, Fire had understood her body’s message: It was time to reconsider the question of just how far her power over Cansrel could reach.

  LURCHED INTO WAKEFULNESS again by the same tired dreams, Fire kicked her blankets away. She covered her hair, found boots and weapons, and crept past Margo and Mila. Outside, most of the army slept under canvas roofs, but her guard lay in the open, arranged again around her tent. Under the vast sky, magnificent with stars, Musa and three others played cards in the light of a candle, as they had the night before. Fire held on to the tent opening to counter the vertigo she felt when she looked up at that sky.

  “Lady Fire,” Musa said. “What can we do for you?”

  “Musa,” Fire said. “I’m afraid you have the misfortune of guarding an insomniac.”

  Musa laughed. “Is it another climb tonight, Lady?”

  “Yes, with my apologies.”

  “We’re glad for it, Lady.”

  “I expect you’re saying that to ease my guilt.”

  “No, truly, Lady. The commander wanders at night too, and he won’t consent to a guard, even when the king orders it. If we’re out with you we have an excuse to keep an eye on him.”

  “I see,” Fire said, perhaps a bit sardonically. “Fewer guards tonight,” she added, but Musa ignored this and woke as many as she’d woken the night before.

  “It’s orders,” Musa said as the men sat up blearily and strapped on their weapons.

  “And if the commander doesn’t follow the king’s orders, why should you follow the commander’s?”

  Her question generated more than one set of raised eyebrows. “Lady,” Musa said, “the soldiers in this army would follow the commander off a cliff if he asked it.”

  Fire was beginning to feel irritable. “How old are you, Musa?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Then the commander should be a child to you.”

  “And you an infant, Lady,” Musa said dryly, surprising a smile onto Fire’s face. “We’re ready. You lead the way.”

  SHE HEADED TOWARD the same mound of rock she’d climbed earlier, because it would bring her closer to the sky and because she sensed it would also bring her guard closer to the insomniac they weren’t supposed to be guarding. He was among those boulders somewhere, and the rise was broad enough that they could share it without meeting.

  She found a high, flat rock to sit on. Her guard scattered themselves around her. She closed her eyes and let the night wash over her, hoping that after this she’d be weary enough for sleep.

  She didn’t move at the sense of Brigan’s approach, but at the retreat of her guard she opened her eyes. He’d propped himself against a rock several paces from her. He was looking at the stars.

  “Lady,” he said in greeting.

  “Lord Prince,” she said quietly.

  He leaned there for a moment, gaze tilted upward, and Fire wondered if this was to be the extent of their conversation. “Your horse is named Small,” he said finally, startling her with the randomness of it.

  “Yes.”

  “Mine is named Big.”

  And now Fire was smiling. “The black mare? Is she very big?”

  “Not to my eyes,” Brigan said, “but I did not name her.”

  Fire remembered the source of Small’s name. Indeed, she could never forget the man Cansrel had abused for her sake. “An animal smuggler gave Small his name. A brutish man called Cutter. He thought any horse that didn’t respond well to flogging was small-minded.”

  “Ah. Cutter,” Brigan said, as if he knew the man; which, after all, should not be surprising, as Cansrel and Nax had probably shared suppliers. “Well, I’ve seen what your horse is capable of. Obviously he’s not small-minded.”

  It was a dirty trick, his continued kindness to her horse. Fire took a moment to swallow her gratitude, all out of proportion, she knew, because she was lonesome. She decided to change the subject. “You can’t sleep?”

  He turned his face away from her, laughed shortly. “Sometimes at night my head spins.”

  “Dreams?”

  “I don’t get close enough to sleep for that. Worries.”

  Cansrel used to lull her to sleep sometimes, on sleepless nights. If Brigan would ever let her, if he would ever in a million years, she could ease his worries for him; she could help the commander of the King’s Army fall asleep. It would be an honorable use of her power, a practical one. But she knew better than to suggest it.

  “And you?” Brigan said. “You seem to do a lot of nighttime rambling.”

  “I have bad dreams.”

  “Dreams of pretend terrors? Or things that are true?”

  “True,” she said, “always. I’ve always had dreams of horrible things that are true.”

  He was quiet. He rubbed the back of his head. “It’s hard to wake from a nightmare when the nightmare is real,” he said, his mind giving her nothing, still, of what he was feeling; but in his voice and his words she heard a thing that felt like sympathy.

  “Good night to you, Lady,” he said a moment later. He turned and retreated to the lower ground of the camp.

  Her guard trickled into place around her. She raised her face to the stars again and closed her eyes.

  AFTER ABOUT A week of riding with the First Branch, Fire fell into a routine—if a continuum of unsettling experiences could be called a routine.

  Watch out! She thought to her guards one morning at breakfast as they wrestled a man to the ground who’d come running at her with a sword. Here comes another fellow with the same idea. Oh, dear, she added. I also sense a pack of wolf monsters at our western side.

  “Inform one of the hunting captains of the wolves, if you please, Lady,” Musa gasped, yanking at her quarry’s feet and yelling at three or four guards to go punch the new attacker in the nose.

  It was hard on Fire never to be allowed to be alone. Even on nights when sleep felt near, she continued her late walks with her guard, because it was the closest she could get to solitude. Most nights she crossed paths with the commander and they exchanged a few quiet lines of conversation. He was surprisingly easy to talk to.

  “You let some men through your mental defenses intentionally, Lady,” Brigan said to her one night. “Don’t you?”

  “Some of them take me by surprise,” she said, her back resting against rock and her eyes on the sky.

  “Yes, all right,” he said. “But when a soldier marches across the entire camp with his hand on his knife and his mind wide open, you know he’s coming, and in most cases you could change his intentions and turn him around if you wanted to. If that man tries to attack you, it’s because you’ve allowed it.”

  The rock on which Fire sat fit the curve of her body; she could fall asleep here. She closed her eyes and considered how to admit to him that he was right. “I do turn a lot of men around, just as you say, and the occasional woman. My guard never even knows about them. But those are the ones who only want to look or touch or tell me things—the ones who are simply overcome, or think they love me, and are gentle in their feelings.” She hesitated. “The ones who hate me and truly want to hurt me—yes, you’re right. Sometimes I let the most malevolent men attack me. If they attack me they’ll end up jailed, and jail is the only place other than death where they’ll no longer be a danger to me. Your army’s too big, Lord Prince,” she said, glancing at him. “Too many people for me to manage all at once. I need to protect myself however I can.”

  Brigan humphed. “I don’t disagree. Your guard is more than competent. As long as you can stomach the danger of it.”

  “I suppose I should be more used to the feeling of danger by now,” she said. “But it is unnerving sometimes.”

  “I understand you crossed paths with Mydogg and Murgda as you left my mother’s fortress in t
he spring,” he said. “Did they feel dangerous to you?”

  Fire remembered that unsettling double gaze. “Obscurely. I couldn’t quantify it if you asked me to, but yes, they felt dangerous.”

  He paused. “There’s going to be a war,” he said quietly, “and at the end of it I don’t know who’ll be king. Mydogg’s a cold and greedy man and a tyrant. Gentian’s worse than a tyrant, because he’s also a fool. Nash is the best of the three, no contest. He can be thoughtless; he’s impulsive. But he’s fair and he’s not motivated by self-interest, and he has a mind for peace, and flashes of wisdom sometimes—” He broke off, and when he spoke again, he sounded rather hopeless. “There’s going to be a war, Lady, and the waste of life will be terrible.”

  Fire sat in silence. She hadn’t expected the conversation to take such a serious turn, but it didn’t surprise her. In this kingdom no one was many steps removed from grave thoughts, and this man fewer than most. This boy, she thought, as Brigan yawned and rumpled his own hair. “We should try to get some sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow I hope to take us as far as Gray Lake.”

  “Good,” Fire said, “because I want a bath.”

  Brigan threw his head back and smiled at the sky. “Well said, Lady. The world may be falling to pieces, but at least the lot of us can have a bath.”

  BATHING IN A cold lake posed some unforeseen challenges—like the little monster fish, for example, that swarmed around her when she dunked her hair, and the monster bugs that tried to eat her alive, and the need for a special guard of archers just in case of predators. But despite the production of it all, it was good to be clean. Fire wrapped cloths around her wet hair and sat as close to the fire as she could without setting herself aflame. She called Mila to her and rebandaged the shallow cut that ran along the girl’s elbow, from a man Mila had subdued three days ago, a man with a talent for knife fighting.