Fire

  It occurred to her then that perhaps these had been Cansrel’s rooms, or Cansrel’s screens. Just as quickly she dismissed the possibility. Cansrel would have had more rooms, and larger, closer to the king, overlooking one of the white inner courtyards, with a balcony outside each tall window, as she’d seen when she first entered the courtyard.

  And then her thoughts were interrupted by the consciousness of the king. She looked to the door of her bedchamber, puzzled, and then startled, as Nash burst in.

  “Brother King,” Clara said, much surprised. “Couldn’t wait for her to wash the road dust from her hands?”

  Fire’s guard of twenty dropped to their knees. Nash didn’t even see them, didn’t hear Clara, strode across the room to the window where Fire stood. He clamped his hand around her neck and tried to kiss her.

  She’d sensed it coming, but his mind was quick and slippery, and she hadn’t moved fast enough to take hold. And during their previous encounter he’d been drunk. He was not drunk now, and the difference was marked. To avoid his kiss she dropped to her knee in an imitation of subservience. He held on to her, struggling to make her rise.

  “You’re choking her,” Clara said. “Nash. Nash, stop!”

  She grabbed wildly at Nash’s mind, caught hold of it, lost it again; and decided in a fit of temper that she would fall unconscious before she kissed this man. Then, quite suddenly, Nash’s hand was wrenched from her throat by a new person she recognized. She took a great, relieved breath and pulled herself up by the windowpane.

  Brigan’s voice was dangerously calm. “Musa, give us the room.”

  The guard vanished. Brigan took a handful of Nash’s shirtfront and shoved him hard against the wall. “Look at what you’re doing,” Brigan spat. “Clear your mind!”

  “Forgive me,” Nash said, sounding genuinely aghast. “I lost my head. Forgive me, Lady.”

  Nash tried to turn his face to Fire, but Brigan’s fist tightened around his collar and pressed against his throat to stop him. “If she’s going to be unsafe here I’ll take her away this instant. She’ll come south with me, do you understand?”

  “All right,” Nash said. “All right.”

  “It’s not all right. This is her bedchamber. Rocks, Nash! Why are you even here?”

  “All right,” Nash said, pushing at Brigan’s fist with his hands. “Enough. I see I was wrong. When I look at her, I lose my head.”

  Brigan dropped his fist from his brother’s neck. Took a step back and rubbed his face with his hands. “Then don’t look at her,” he said tiredly. “I have business with you before I go.”

  “Come to my office.”

  Brigan cocked his head at the doorway. “I’ll meet you in five minutes’ time.”

  Nash turned and slumped out of the room, banished. A puzzle of inconsistencies, this eldest of Nax’s sons, and the king in name; but which of these brothers was the king in practice?

  “Are you all right, Lady?” Brigan asked, frowning after Nash.

  Fire was not all right. She clutched her aching back. “Yes, Lord Prince.”

  “You can trust Clara, Lady,” Brigan said, “and my brother Garan. And Welkley, and one or two of the king’s men that Clara can point you to. In the absence of Lord Archer I’d like to escort you home myself next time I pass north through the city. It’s a route I travel often. It shouldn’t be more than a few weeks. Is this acceptable to you?”

  It was not acceptable; it was too long by far. But Fire nodded, swallowing painfully.

  “I must go,” he said. “Clara knows how to get messages to me.”

  Fire nodded again. Brigan turned and was gone.

  SHE HAD A bath, and a massage and warm compress from a healer so skilled that Fire didn’t care if the woman couldn’t keep her hands out of her hair. Dressed in the plainest dress of the many choices a wide-eyed servant girl had brought to her, Fire felt more like herself; as much like herself as she could, in these strange rooms, and not knowing what to expect next from this strange royal family. And deprived of music, for she had returned her borrowed fiddle to its rightful owner.

  The First had a week’s leave in King’s City, and then they’d take to the road again under whatever captain Brigan had left in command. Brigan, she discovered when she emerged from her bathing room, had decided to assign her entire guard to her permanently, with the same rules as before: six guards to accompany her wherever she went, and two women in her bedroom when she slept. She was sorry for this, that these soldiers should have to continue such a dull charge, and sor rier still at the thought of them underfoot. It was worse than a bandage that chafed at a wound, her endless lack of solitude.

  At dinnertime she claimed a backache, to avoid having to appear so soon before Nash and his court. Nash sent servants to her room pushing carts bearing a feast that could have fed all the residents of her own stone house in the north, and Archer’s house as well. She thought of Archer, and then cast the thought away. Archer brought the tears too near.

  Welkley came with four fiddles after dinner, two hanging from the fingers of each hand. Astonishing fiddles, nothing modest about them, smelling wonderfully of wood and varnish and gleaming brown, orange, vermilion. They were the best he’d been able to find in such a short time, Welkley explained. She was to choose one of the four, as a gift from the royal family.

  Fire thought she could guess which member of the royal family had spared a minute amidst his preoccupations to order a roundup of the city’s finest fiddles, and again she found herself uncomfortably close to tears. She took the instruments from the steward one by one, each more beautiful than the last. Welkley waited patiently while she played them, testing their feeling against her neck, the sharpness of the strings on her fingertips, the depth of their sound. There was one she kept reaching for, with a copper-red varnish, and a clarity like the point of a star, precise and lonesome, reminding her, somehow, of home. This one, she thought to herself. This is the one. Its only flaw, she told Welkley, was that it was too good for her skill.

  That night memories kept her awake, and aches, and anxiety. Shy of the court bustling with people even late into the night, and not knowing the route to any quiet view of the sky, she went with six of her guard to the stables. She leaned on the stall door before her dozing, lopsided horse.

  Why have I come here? she asked herself. What have I gotten myself into? I don’t belong in this place. Oh, Small. Why am I here?

  From the warmth of her fondness for her horse she constructed a fragile and changeable thing that almost resembled courage. She hoped it would be enough.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE SNOOP WHO’D been captured in the king’s palace was not the same man Fire had sensed in the king’s rooms at Roen’s fortress, but his consciousness did have a similar feeling.

  “What does that mean?” Nash demanded. “Does it mean he was sent by the same man?”

  “Not necessarily, Lord King.”

  “Does it mean he’s of the same family? Are they brothers?”

  “Not necessarily, Lord King. Family members can have broadly different consciousnesses, as can two men in the same employ. At this point I can only determine that their attitudes and their aptitudes are similar.”

  “And what help is that? We didn’t bring you all this distance so you could tell us he’s of average disposition and intelligence, Lady.”

  In King Nash’s office, with its stunning views of the city, its bookshelves rising from floor to mezzanine to domed ceiling, its rich green carpet and gold lamps, and most especially its handsome and high-strung monarch, Fire was in a state of mental stimulation that made it difficult for her to focus on the prisoner, or care about his claims to intelligence. The king was intelligent, and fatuous and powerful and flighty. This was what impressed Fire, that this man with the dark good looks was all things at once, open as the sky, and desperately difficult to subdue.

  When she’d first come through the door of this office with six of her guard the king had gree
ted her glumly. “You entered my mind before you entered this room, Lady.”

  “Yes, Lord King,” she said, startled into honesty before him and his men.

  “I’m glad of it,” Nash said, “and I give you leave. Around you I cannot bear my behavior.”

  He sat at his desk, staring at the emerald ring on his finger. While they waited for the prisoner to be brought before them, the room turned to a mental battlefield. Nash was keenly aware of her physical presence; he struggled not to look at her. He was just as keenly aware of her presence inside his mind, and here was the problem, for he clung to her there, perversely, to savor the excitement of her where he could. And it did not work both ways. He could not ignore her and cling to her simultaneously.

  He was too weak and too strong in all the wrong places. The harder she took hold of his consciousness the harder he pulled at her to keep taking, so that her control turned somehow into his control and his taking. And so she fought off his mental suckers, but that was no good either. It was too much like letting him go, and leaving his body to his mind’s volatility.

  She could not find the right way to hold him. She sensed him slipping away. And he became more and more agitated, and finally his eyes slid to her face; he stood, and began pacing. And then the prisoner arrived, and her answers to Nash’s questions only added to his frustration.

  “I’m sorry if I’m no help to you, Lord King,” she said now. “There are limits to my perception, especially with a stranger.”

  “We know you’ve caught trespassers on your own property, Lady,” one of the king’s men said, “who had a distinct feeling to their minds. Is this man like those men?”

  “No, sir, he isn’t. Those men had a kind of mental blankness. This man thinks for himself.”

  Nash stopped before her and frowned. “Take control of his mind,” he said. “Compel him to tell us the name of his master.”

  The prisoner was exhausted, nursing an injured arm, frightened of the lady monster, and Fire knew she could do what the king commanded easily enough. She gripped Nash’s consciousness as tightly as she could. “I’m sorry, Lord King. I only take control of people’s minds for the sake of self-defense.”

  Nash struck her across the face, hard. The blow threw her onto her back. She was scrambling to her feet practically before she’d hit the rug, ready to run, or fight, or do whatever she needed to do to protect herself from him, no matter who he was, but all six of her guards surrounded her now and pulled her out of the king’s reach. In the corner of her vision she saw blood on her cheekbone. A tear ran into the blood, and her cheek smarted terribly. He’d cut her with the great square emerald of his ring.

  I hate bullies, she thought at him furiously.

  The king was crouched on the floor, his head in his hands, his men beside him, confused, whispering to each other. He raised his eyes to Fire. She sensed his mind, clear now, and understanding what he’d done. His face was broken with shame.

  Her fury dropped away as quickly as it had come. She was sorry for him.

  She sent him a firm message. This is the last time I’ll ever appear before you, until you’ve learned to guard yourself against me.

  She turned to the door without waiting for a dismissal.

  FIRE WONDERED IF a bruise and a square-shaped cut on her cheek might make her ugly. In her bathing room, too curious to stop herself, she held a mirror to her face.

  One glance and Fire shoved the mirror under a stack of towels, her question answered. Mirrors were useless, irritating devices. She should have known better.

  Musa was perched on the edge of the bath, scowling, as she had been since her guard contingent had returned with their bleeding charge. It irked Musa, Fire knew, to be trapped between Brigan’s orders and the king’s sovereignty.

  “Please don’t tell the commander about this,” Fire said.

  Musa scowled harder. “I’m sorry, Lady, but he asked specifically to be told if the king tried to hurt you.”

  Princess Clara knocked on the door frame. “My brother tells me he’s done an inexcusable thing,” she said; and then, at the sight of Fire’s face, “Oh my. That’s the king’s ring clear as day, the brute. Has the healer been?”

  “She just left, Lady Princess.”

  “And what’s your plan for your first day at court, Lady? I hope you won’t hide just because he’s marked you.”

  Fire realized that she had been going to hide, and the cut and bruising were only a part of it. How relieving, the thought of staying in these rooms with her aches and her nerves until Brigan came back and whisked her home.

  “I thought you might like a tour of the palace,” Clara said, “and my brother Garan wants to meet you. He’s more like Brigan than Nash. He has control of himself.”

  The king’s palace, and a brother like Brigan. Curiosity got the better of Fire’s apprehensions.

  NATURALLY EVERYWHERE FIRE went she was stared at.

  The palace was gigantic, like an indoor city, with gigantic views: the falls, the harbor, white-sailed ships on the sea. The great spans of the city bridges. The city itself, its splendor and its dilapidation, stretching toward golden fields and hills of rocks and flowers. And of course the sky, always a view of the sky from all seven courtyards and all the upper corridors, where the ceilings were made of glass.

  “They don’t see you,” Clara told Fire, when a pair of raptor monsters perched on a transparent roof made her jump. “The glass is reflective on the outside. They see only themselves. And incidentally, Lady, every window in the palace that opens is fitted with a screen—even the ceiling windows. That was Cansrel’s doing.”

  It wasn’t Clara’s first mention of Cansrel. Every time she said his name Fire flinched, so accustomed was she to people avoiding the word.

  “I suppose it’s for the best,” Clara continued. “The palace is crawling with monster things—rugs, feathers, jewelry, insect collections. Women wear the furs. Tell me, do you always cover your hair?”

  “Usually,” Fire said, “if I’m to be seen by strangers.”

  “Interesting,” Clara said. “Cansrel never covered his hair.”

  Well, and Cansrel had loved attention, Fire thought to herself dryly. More to the point, he had been a man. Cansrel had not had her problems.

  PRINCE GARAN WAS too thin and didn’t share his sister’s obvious robustness; despite it, he was quite good-looking. His eyes were dark and burning under a thatch of nearly black hair, and there was something furious and graceful about his manner that made him intriguing to watch. Appealing. He was very like his brother the king.

  Fire knew he was ill—that as a child he’d been taken by the same fever that had killed her mother, and had come out alive but with ruined health. She also knew, from Cansrel’s muttered suspicions and Brocker’s certainties, that Garan and his twin Clara were the nerve center of the kingdom’s system of spies. She had found it hard to believe of Clara, following the princess around the palace. But now in Garan’s presence Clara’s bearing changed to something shrewd and serious, and Fire understood that a woman who gabbed about satin umbrellas and her latest love affair might know quite well how to keep a secret.

  Garan was sitting at a long table piled high with documents, in a heavily guarded room full of harassed-looking secretaries. The only noise, other than the rustling of paper, came, rather incongruously, from a child who seemed to be playing shoe tug-of-war with a puppy in the corner. The child stared at Fire momentarily when Fire entered, then politely avoided staring again.

  Fire sensed that Garan’s mind was guarded against her. She realized suddenly, with surprise, that so was Clara’s, and so had Clara’s been all along. Clara’s personality was so open that Fire had not appreciated the degree to which her mind was closed. The child’s, too, was carefully shielded.

  Garan, in addition to being guarded, was rather unfriendly. He seemed to make a point of not asking Fire the usual civil questions, such as how her trip had been, if she liked her rooms, and whether her
face was in much pain from being punched by his brother. He appraised the damage to her cheek blandly. “Brigan can’t hear about this until he’s done with what he’s doing,” he said, his voice low enough that Fire’s guard, hovering in the background, could not hear.

  “Agreed,” Clara said. “We can’t have him rushing back to spank the king.”

  “Musa will report it to him,” Fire said.

  “Her reports go through me,” Clara said. “I’ll handle it.”

  With ink-stained fingers Garan shuffled through some papers and slid a single page across the table to Clara. While Clara read it he reached into a pocket and glanced at a watch. He spoke over his shoulder to the child.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “don’t pretend to me that you don’t know the time.”

  The child gave a great gloomy sigh, wrestled the shoe from the piebald puppy, put the shoe on, and moped out the door. The puppy waited a moment, and then trotted after its—lady? Yes, Fire decided that at the king’s court, long dark hair probably trumped boyish clothes, and made her a lady. Five years old, possibly, or six, and presumably Garan’s. Garan was not married, but that did not make him childless. Fire tried to ignore her own involuntary flash of resentment at the majority of humanity who had children as a matter of course.

  “Hmm,” Clara said, frowning at the document before her. “I don’t know what to make of this.”

  “We’ll discuss it later,” Garan said. His eyes slid to Fire’s face and she met his gaze curiously. His eyebrows snapped down, making him fierce, and oddly like Brigan.

  “So, Lady Fire,” he said, addressing her directly for the first time. “Are you going to do what the king’s asked, and use your mental power to question our prisoners?”

  “No, Lord Prince. I only use my mental power in self-defense.”