Fire

  Her work was never the same from day to day. She never knew what kind of folk Garan and Clara’s people would pick up: Pikkian smugglers, common soldiers of Mydogg’s or Gentian’s, messengers of either, servants who had worked for them once. Men suspected of being their spies or the spies of their allies. Fire came to see that in a kingdom balanced delicately atop a pile of changing associations, the most critical commodity was information. The Dells spied on their friends and on their enemies; they spied on their own spies. And indeed, all players in the realm did the same.

  The very first man they brought before her, an old servant of a neighbor of Mydogg’s, opened wide at the sight of her and spilled every thought that bubbled into his head. “Both Lord Mydogg and Lord Gentian are rightly impressed with Prince Brigan,” the man told her, staring, quivering. “Both have been buying horses and mounting their armies for the past few years like the prince did, and recruiting mountain folk and looters as soldiers. They respect the prince as an opponent, Lady. And did you know there are Pikkians in Lord Mydogg’s army? Big, pale men hulking around his land.”

  This is easy, Fire thought to herself. I only have to sit here and they blurt everything out.

  But Garan was unimpressed. “He told us nothing we didn’t already know. Did you plumb him for more—names, places, secrets? How do you know you’ve learned every part of his knowledge?”

  The next couple of fellows were less forthcoming—a pair of convicted spies, resistant to her, and strong. Both bruised around the face, both gaunt, and one of them limping and stoop-shouldered, wincing as he eased back in his chair, as if he had cuts or bruises on his back. “How were you injured?” she asked them, suspicious. “And where?” They sat before her mutely, eyes averted, stony-faced, and answered neither that question nor any other question she put to them.

  When the interrogation was over and the two spies had gone back to the dungeons, she made her excuses to Garan, who’d sat in on the entire thing. “They were too strong for me, Lord Prince. I could get nothing from them.”

  Garan eyed her moodily over a sheaf of papers. “Did you try?”

  “Of course I tried.”

  “Really? How hard did you try?” He stood, lips tight. “I have neither energy nor time to waste, Lady Fire. When you decide that you’re actually going to do this thing, let me know.”

  He shoved his papers under his arm and pushed through the questioning-room door, leaving her with her own indignation. He was right, of course. She hadn’t tried, not really. She’d poked at their minds and, finding them closed, done nothing to force an opening. She hadn’t even tried to get them to look into her face. How could she? Was she honestly expected to sit before men weakened by ill-treatment and abuse them even further?

  She jumped up and ran after Garan, finding him at a desk in his offices, scribbling madly in coded letters.

  “I have rules,” she said to him.

  He stilled his pen, raised expressionless eyes to her face, and waited.

  “When you bring me an old servant who’s come willingly where the king’s men have bidden him, a man who’s never been convicted, or even accused, of a crime,” Fire said, “I will not take his mind. I’ll sit before him and ask questions, and if my presence makes him more talkative, very well. But I will not compel him to say things he would otherwise not have said. Nor,” she added, voice rising, “will I take the mind of a person who’s been fed too little, or denied medicines, or beaten in your jails. I won’t manipulate a prisoner you’ve mistreated.”

  Garan sat back and crossed his arms. “That’s rich, isn’t it? Your own manipulation is mistreatment; you’ve said it yourself.”

  “Yes, but mine is meant to be for good reason. Yours is not.”

  “It’s not my mistreatment. I don’t give the orders down there, I’ve no idea what goes on.”

  “If you want me to question them, you’d best find out.”

  To Garan’s credit, the treatment of Dellian prisoners did change after that. One particularly laconic man, after a session in which Fire learned positively nothing, thanked her for it specifically. “Best dungeons I ever been in,” he said, chewing on a toothpick.

  “Wonderful,” Garan grumbled when he’d gone. “We’ll grow a reputation for our kindness to lawbreakers.”

  “A prison with a monster on its staff of interrogators is not likely to grow a reputation for kindness,” Nash responded quietly. Some loved to be brought before her, loved her presence too much to care what she caused them to reveal; but for the most part, Nash was right. She met with tens, gradually hundreds, of different spies and smugglers and soldiers who came into the room sullenly, sometimes even fighting the guards, needing to be dragged. She asked them questions in their minds. When did you last speak to Mydogg? What did he say? Tell me every word. Which of our spies is he trying to turn? Which of our soldiers are traitors? She took a breath and forced herself to plumb and twist and pound—sometimes even to threaten. No, you’re lying again. One more lie and you’ll start to feel pain. You believe that I can make you feel pain, don’t you?

  I’m doing this for the Dells, she told herself over and over when her own capacity for bullying made her numb with shame and panic. I’m doing this to protect the Dells from those who would destroy it.

  “In a three-way war,” said a prisoner who’d been caught smuggling swords and daggers to Gentian, “it seems to me that the king has the advantage of numbers. Doesn’t it seem that way to you, Lady? Does anyone know Mydogg’s numbers for sure?”

  He was a fellow who kept tearing away from her hold, polite and pleasant and cloud-brained one moment, the next moment clearheaded, fighting against the shackles around his wrists and ankles, whimpering at the sight of her.

  She nudged at his mind now, pushing him away from his own empty speculations and centering him on his actual knowledge.

  “Tell me about Mydogg and Gentian,” she said. “Do they intend to mount an attack this summer?”

  “I don’t know, Lady. I’ve heard nothing about it but rumors.”

  “Do you know Gentian’s numbers?”

  “No, but he buys an infinite number of swords.”

  “How many is ‘infinite’? Be more specific.”

  “I don’t know specifics,” he said, still speaking truthfully, but beginning to break free again, the reality of his situation in this room coming back to him. “I have nothing more to say to you,” he announced suddenly, staring at her big-eyed, beginning to shake. “I know what you are. I won’t let you use me.”

  “I don’t enjoy using you,” Fire said tiredly, allowing herself, for a moment at least, to say what she felt. She watched him as he yanked at his wrists and gasped and fell back in his chair, exhausted and sniffling. Then she reached up and tugged at her headscarf so that her hair came tumbling down. The brightness startled him; he gaped at her, astonished; in that instant, she pushed into his mind again and grabbed hold easily. “What are these rumors you’ve heard about the plans of the rebel lords?”

  “Well, Lady,” he said, transformed again, smiling cheerfully. “I hear that Lord Mydogg wants to make himself the king of the Dells and Pikkia. Then he wants to use Pikkian boats to explore the sea and find new lands to conquer. A Pikkian smuggler told me that, Lady.”

  I’m getting better at this, Fire thought to herself. I’m learning all the cheap, disgusting little tricks.

  And the muscles of her mind were stretching; practice was making her quicker, stronger. Control was becoming an easy—even comfortable—position for her to assume.

  But all she ever learned were vague plans for attack someplace sometime soon, random violent intentions against Nash or Brigan, sometimes against herself. Swift changes in alliance that changed back again just as swiftly. Like Garan and Clara and everyone else, she was waiting to discover something solid, something large and treacherous that could serve as a call to action.

  They were all eager for a breakthrough. But sometimes Fire just wished desperately that sh
e were allowed the occasional moment of solitude.

  SHE HAD BEEN a summer baby and in July her birthday passed—with little fanfare, for she kept the fact of it to herself. Archer and Brocker both had flowers sent. Fire smiled at this, for they would have sent something else had they known how many men of the court and the city had been sending her flowers, constantly, endlessly, flowers and more flowers, since her arrival two months ago. Her rooms were always a hothouse. She would have pitched them, the cut orchids and lilies and fine tall roses, for she had no interest in the attentions of these men; except that she loved the flowers, she loved being surrounded by the beauty of them. She found she had a knack for arranging them, color to color.

  The king never sent flowers. His feelings had not changed, but he had stopped begging her to marry him. In fact, he’d asked her to teach him guarding against monsters. So over a series of days and weeks, each on either side of her door, she had taught him what he already knew but needed a push to remember. Intention, focus, and self-control. With practice, and with his new gloomy commitment to discipline, his mind became stronger and they moved the lessons to his office. He could be trusted now not to touch her, except when he’d had too much wine, which he did on occasion. They were irritating, his drunken tears, but at least drunk he was easy to control.

  Of course, everyone in the palace noticed every time they were together, and thoughtless talk was easy. It was a solid spoke in the rumor wheel that the monster would eventually marry the king.

  Brigan was away most of July. He came and went constantly, and now Fire understood where he was always going. Aside from the considerable time he spent with the army, he met with people: lords, ladies, businessmen of the black market, friends, enemies, talking this one or that one into an alliance, testing the loyalty of another. In some cases, spying was the only word for what he was doing. And sometimes fighting himself out of traps he wittingly or unwittingly walked into, coming back with bandages on his hand, black eyes, a cracked rib one time that would have stopped any sane person from riding. It was horrendous, Fire thought, some of the situations Brigan bounded off to throw himself into. Surely someone else should handle negotiations with a weapons dealer who was known to perform favors for Mydogg on occasion. Surely someone else should go to the well-guarded and isolated manor of Gentian’s son, Gunner, in the southern peaks, to make clear the consequences if Gunner remained loyal to his father.

  “He’s too good at it,” Clara told her, when Fire questioned the wisdom of these meetings. “He has this way of convincing people they want what he wants. And where he can’t persuade with his words he often can with his sword.”

  Fire remembered the two soldiers who’d brawled at the sight of her on the day she’d joined the First Branch. She remembered how their viciousness had turned to shame and regret after Brigan had spoken to them for only a few moments.

  Not all people who inspired devotion were monsters.

  And apparently he was renowned for his skill with a blade. Hanna, of course, talked as if he were unbeatable. “I get my fighting skill from Papa,” she said, and clearly she had gotten it from somewhere. It seemed to Fire that most five-year-olds in a skirmish against a mob of children would have emerged with more than a broken nose, if they emerged at all.

  On the last day of July, Hanna came to her with a bright fistful of wildflowers, collected, Fire guessed, from the grasses of the cliff above Cellar Harbor, at the back of the green house. “Grandmother said in a letter she thought your birthday was in July. Did I miss it? Why does no one know your birthday? Uncle Garan said ladies like flowers.” She scrunched her nose doubtfully at this last, and stuck the flowers in Fire’s face, as if she thought flowers were for eating and expected Fire to lean in and munch, like Small would have done.

  With Archer’s and Brocker’s, they were her favorite flowers in all her rooms.

  ONE TROUBLING DAY at the end of August, Fire was in the stables, brushing Small to clear her head. Her guard receded as Brigan ambled over, a collection of bridles slung on his shoulder. He leaned on the stall door and scratched Small’s nose. “Lady, well met.”

  He had only just returned that morning from his latest excursion. “Prince Brigan. And where’s your lady?”

  “In her history lesson. She went without complaint and I’ve been trying to prepare myself for what it might mean. Either she’s planning to bribe me about something or she’s ill.”

  Fire had a question to ask Brigan, and the question was awkward. There was nothing to do but imitate dignity and fling it at him. She lifted her chin. “Hanna’s asked me several times now why the monsters go crazy for me every month, and why I can’t step outside for four or five days at a time unless I bring extra guards. I’d like to explain it to her. I’d like your permission.”

  It was impressive, his reaction—the command he had over his expression, emotionless as he stood on the other side of the door. He stroked Small’s neck. “She’s five years old.”

  Fire said nothing to this, only waited.

  He scratched his head then, and squinted at her, uncertain. “What do you think? Is five too young to understand? I don’t want her to be frightened.”

  “They don’t frighten her, Lord Prince. She talks of guarding me from them with her bow.”

  Brigan spoke quietly. “I meant the changes that will happen to her own body. I wondered if the knowledge of it might frighten her.”

  “Ah.” Fire’s own voice was soft. “But then, perhaps I’m the right person to explain it, for she’s not so guarded that I can’t tell if it upsets her. I can suit my explanation to her reaction.”

  “Yes,” Brigan said, still hesitant and squinting. “But you don’t think five is very young?”

  How odd it was, how dangerously dear, to find him so out of his element, so much a man, and wanting her advice on this thing. Fire spoke her opinion frankly. “I don’t think Hanna is too young to understand. And I think she should have an honest answer to a thing that puzzles her.”

  He nodded. “I wonder she hasn’t asked me. She’s not shy with questions.”

  “Maybe she senses the nature of it.”

  “Can she be so sensitive?”

  “Children are geniuses,” Fire said firmly.

  “Yes,” Brigan said. “Well. You have my permission. Tell me afterward how it goes.”

  But suddenly Fire wasn’t listening, because she was unsettled, as she had been several times that day, by the sense of a presence that was strange, familiar, and out of place. A person who should not be here. She gripped Small’s mane and shook her head. Small took his nose away from Brigan’s chest and peered back at her.

  “Lady,” Brigan said. “What is it?”

  “It almost seems—no, now it’s gone again. Never mind. It’s nothing.”

  Brigan looked at her, puzzled. She smiled, and explained. “Sometimes I have to let a perception sit for a while before it makes sense to me.”

  “Ah.” He considered the span of Small’s long nose. “Was it something to do with my mind?”

  “What?” Fire said. “Are you joking?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Do you think I sense anything at all of your mind?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Brigan,” she said, startled out of her manners. “Your consciousness is a wall with no cracks in it. Never once have I had the slightest hint of anything from your mind.”

  “Oh,” he said eloquently. “Hmm.” He rearranged the straps of leather on his shoulder, looking rather pleased with himself.

  “I’d assumed you were doing it on purpose,” Fire said.

  “I was. Only it’s hard to know how successful one is at such things.”

  “Your success is complete.”

  “How about now?”

  Fire stared. “What you mean? Are you asking if I sense your feelings now? Of course I don’t.”

  “And now?”

  It came to her like the gentlest wave from the deep ocean of his cons
ciousness. She stood quiet, and absorbed it, and took hold of her own feelings; for the fact of Brigan releasing a feeling to her, the first feeling he’d ever given her, made her inordinately happy. She said, “I sense that you’re amused by this conversation.”

  “Interesting,” he said, smiling. “Fascinating. And now that my mind is open, could you take it over?”

  “Never. You’ve let a single feeling out, but that doesn’t mean I could march in and take control.”

  “Try,” he said; and even though his tone was friendly and his face open, Fire was frightened.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “It’s only as an experiment.”

  The word made her breathless with panic. “No. I don’t want to. Don’t ask me to.”

  And now he was leaning close against the stall door, and speaking low. “Lady, forgive me. I’ve distressed you. I won’t ask it again, I promise.”

  “You don’t understand. I would never.”

  “I know. I know you wouldn’t. Please, Lady—I wish it unsaid.”

  Fire found that she was gripping Small’s mane harder than she meant to be. She released the poor horse’s hair, and smoothed it, and fought against the tears pushing their way to her surface. She rested her face against Small’s neck and breathed his warm horsy smell.

  And now she was laughing, a breathy laugh that sounded like a sob. “I’d thought once, actually, of taking your mind, if you asked. I’d thought I could help you fall asleep at night.”

  He opened his mouth to say something. Shut it again. His face closed for a moment, his unreadable mask falling into place. He spoke softly. “But that wouldn’t be fair; for after I slept you’d be left awake, with no one to help you sleep.”

  Fire wasn’t certain what they were talking about anymore. And she was desperately unhappy, for it was not a conversation to distract her from how she felt about this man.