Fire

  “Well,” Nash said, somewhat bemused, “they send their love, of course. And their heartbreak over Archer, and their relief that you’re alive. And Hanna specifically asked me to tell you that Blotchy is recovering. Lady—” He stopped. “Fire,” he said. “Why will you talk to my sister and my brothers but not to me?”

  She snapped at him. If Brigan said we talked he was being disingenuous.

  Nash paused. “He didn’t. I suppose I assumed. But surely you’ve been talking to Clara and Garan.”

  Clara and Garan aren’t soldiers. They aren’t going to die, she thought to him, realizing as she conveyed it that this reasoning was flawed, for Garan could die of his illness, and Clara of childbirth. And Tess of old age, and Brocker and Roen of an attack on their traveling party, and Hanna could be thrown from a horse.

  “Fire—”

  Please, Nash, please. Don’t make me talk about reasons, please, just let me be alone. Please!

  He was stung by this. He turned to go. Then he stopped and turned back. “Just one more thing. Your horse is in the stables.”

  Fire looked across the rocks at the gray horse stamping her hooves at the snow, and didn’t understand. She sent her confusion to Nash.

  “Didn’t you tell Brigan you wanted your horse?” he asked.

  Fire spun around, looking straight at him for the first time. He struck a handsome figure and fierce, a tiny new scar running into his lip, his cloak hanging over armor of mail and leather. She said, “You don’t mean Small?”

  “Of course,” he said, “Small. Anyway, Brigan thought you wanted him. He’s downstairs.”

  Fire ran.

  SHE HAD CRIED so often and so much since she’d found Archer’s body, cried at the slightest thing, always silent tears rolling down her face. The way she began to cry when she saw Small, plain and quiet with his hair in his eyes, pressing against his stall door to reach her, was different. She thought she might choke from the violence of these sobs, or rip something inside her.

  Musa was alarmed, and came into the stall with her, rubbing her back as she clung to Small’s neck and gasped. Neel produced handkerchiefs. It was no use. She couldn’t stop crying.

  It’s my fault, she said to Small over and over. Oh Small, it’s my fault. I was supposed to be the one to die, not Archer. Archer was never supposed to die.

  After a long time, she cried herself to a place where she understood that it was not her fault. And then she cried more, from the simple grief of knowing that he was gone.

  SHE WOKE, NOT from a nightmare, but to something—something comforting. The sensation of being wrapped in warm blankets and sleeping against a warm breathing back that belonged to Small.

  Musa and several other guards were having a murmured conversation with someone outside the stall. Fire’s bleary mind groped its way toward them. The someone was the king.

  Her panic was gone, replaced by an odd, peaceful emptiness. She pushed herself up and ran her bandaged hand lightly along Small’s wonderful barrel body, swerving to touch the places where his fur grew crooked around raptor monster scars. His mind snoozed gently, and the hay near his face moved with his breath. He was a dark lump in the torchlight. He was perfect.

  She touched Nash’s mind. He came to the stall door and leaned over it, looking at her. Hesitation, and love, obvious on his face and in his feeling.

  “You’re smiling,” he said.

  Naturally, tears were the response to these words. Angry with herself, she tried to stop them, but they squeezed out nonetheless.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He came into the stall and crouched down in the space between Small’s head and chest. He stroked Small’s neck, considering her.

  “I understand you’ve been crying a great deal,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, defeated.

  “You must be tired and sore from it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your hands. Are they still very painful?”

  There was something comforting about this calm interrogation. “They’re a bit better than they were.”

  He nodded gravely and continued to stroke Small’s neck. He was dressed as before, except now he carried his helmet under one arm. He seemed older in the darkness and the orange light. He was older, ten years older, than herself. Almost all her friends were older; even Brigan, the youngest sibling, was almost five years her senior. But she didn’t think it was the difference in years that made her feel like such a child, surrounded by adults.

  “Why are you still here?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be in a cave somewhere inspiring people?”

  “I should,” he said, shouldering her sarcasm lightly, “and I came here for my horse so that I might ride out to the camps. But now I’m talking to you instead.”

  Fire traced a long, thin scar on Small’s back. She thought about her tendency lately to communicate more easily with horses and dying strangers than with the people she had thought she loved.

  “It’s not reasonable to love people who are only going to die,” she said.

  Nash thought about that for a moment, stroking Small’s neck with great deliberation, as if the fate of the Dells depended on that smooth, careful movement.

  “I have two responses to that,” he said finally. “First, everyone’s going to die. Second, love is stupid. It has nothing to do with reason. You love whomever you love. Against all reason I loved my father.” He looked at her keenly. “Did you love yours?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He stroked Small’s nose. “I love you,” he said, “even knowing you’ll never have me. And I love my brother, more than I ever realized before you came along. You can’t help whom you love, Lady. Nor can you know what it’s liable to cause you to do.”

  She made a connection then. Surprised, she sat back from him and studied his face, soft with shadows and light. She saw a part of him she hadn’t seen before.

  “You came to me for lessons to guard your mind,” she said, “and you stopped asking me to marry you, both at the same time. You did those things out of love for your brother.”

  “Well,” he said, looking a bit sheepishly at the floor. “I also took a few swings at him, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  “You’re good at love,” she said simply, because it seemed to her that it was true. “I’m not so good at love. I’m like a barbed creature. I push everyone I love away.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t mind you pushing me away if it means you love me, little sister.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  SHE BEGAN TO write a letter in her mind to Brigan. It wasn’t a very good letter. Dear Brigan, I don’t think you should be doing what you’re doing. Dear Brigan, people are swirling away from me and I am swirling apart.

  The swelling of her hands had gone down, and no places had blackened that hadn’t been black before. There would likely be a surgery, the healers said, when more time had passed, to remove the two dead fingers on her left hand.

  “With all your medicines,” Musa asked one of the healers, “you really have nothing to help her?”

  “There are no medicines to bring a dead thing back to life,” the healer said crisply. “The best thing right now will be for Lady Fire to start using her hands again regularly. She’ll find a person can manage quite well without ten fingers.”

  It was not like it had been before. But what a relief to have permission to cut her food, button her own buttons, tie back her own hair, and she would do it, even if her movements were clumsy and infantile at first and her living fingers burned, even if she sensed pity in the feeling of her watching friends. The pity only made her more stubborn. She asked permission to help with practical tasks in the healing room—dressing wounds, feeding the soldiers who couldn’t feed themselves. They never minded if she dribbled broth onto their clothing.

  As her dexterity improved, she even began to assist with some of the simpler aspects of surgery: holding lamps, handing the surgeons their supplies. She found that sh
e had a strong stomach for blood, and infections, and men’s insides—even though men’s insides were rather more messy than the insides of monster bugs. Some of these soldiers were familiar to her because of the three weeks she’d spent traveling with the First. She supposed that some of them had been her enemies once, but that feeling seemed gone from them, now that they were at war and in pain and in such need of comfort.

  A soldier she remembered quite well was brought in one day, an arrow embedded in his thigh. It was the man who had once lent her his fiddle—the enormous, craggy, gentle tree of a man. She smiled to see him. They had quiet conversations now and then, she easing his pain as his wound healed. He saying little about her dead fingers, but an expression on his face, whenever he looked at them, that conveyed the depth of his empathy.

  When Brocker arrived he took her hands and held them to his face, and cried into them.

  WITH BROCKER CAME not only Roen but Mila, for Brocker had asked the girl to serve as his military assistant, and Mila had accepted. Brocker and Roen—old friends who had not seen each other since the time of King Nax—now were practically inseparable, and Mila was often with them.

  Fire saw Nash only now and then, coming to the fort for information or to strategize with Garan and Clara, Brocker and Roen. Dirty and haggard, his smiles thin.

  “I believe King Nash will come back,” Mila would say to Fire calmly every time he left again for the caves. Even though Fire knew there was no logic backing Mila’s assertion, the words comforted her.

  Mila had changed. She worked hard beside Brocker, quiet and intent. “I learned that there’s a drug to end a pregnancy when it first announces itself,” she told Fire lightly one day. “It’s too late for me, of course. Did you know about it, Lady?”

  Fire was stunned. “Of course not, or I would have told you, and found it for you.”

  “Clara told me about it,” Mila said. “The king’s healers are impressive, but it does seem as if you need to have grown up in certain sections of King’s City even to have a hope of knowing all they’re capable of. I was angry when I heard,” she added. “I was furious. But it’s no use, really, to think about it now. I’m no different from anyone else, am I, Lady? We’re all walking paths we would never have chosen for ourselves. I suppose I grow tired sometimes of my own complaining.”

  “That boy of mine,” Brocker said, later the same day. He was sitting beside Fire in a chair on the roof, where he’d consented to be carried because he’d wanted to see the gray dappled horse. He shook his head and grunted. “My boy. I expect I have grandchildren I’ll never know about. Trust him to die, so instead of my being furious about Mila and Princess Clara, I’m comforted.”

  They watched the dance taking place on the ground before them: two horses circling each other, one plain and brown who stretched his nose out occasionally in an attempt to plant a wet kiss on the other’s elusive gray rump. Fire was trying to make friends of the two horses, for the mare, if she truly intended to follow Fire wherever she went, was going to need a few more souls in the world that she could trust. Today the mare had stopped trying to intimidate Small by rearing at him and kicking. This was progress.

  “She’s a river mare,” Brocker said.

  “A what?”

  “A river mare. I’ve seen one or two dappled grays like that before; they come from the mouth of the Winged River. I don’t think there’s much of a common market for river horses, despite them being so fine—they’re absurdly expensive, on account of being hard to catch and even harder to break. They’re not as sociable as other horses.”

  Fire remembered then that Brigan had spoken once, covetously, of river horses. She also remembered that the mare had carried her stubbornly south and west from Cutter’s estate, until Fire had turned her around. She had been trying to go home—to take Fire to her home where the river began. Now she was here, where she had not wanted to be, but where she’d chosen to be nonetheless.

  Dear Brigan, she thought to herself. People want incongruous, impossible things. Horses do, too.

  “Has the commander had a look at her yet?” Brocker asked, sounding amused by his own question. Apparently Brocker was acquainted with Brigan’s stance on horses.

  “I care nothing of her value,” Fire said softly, “and I will not help him break her.”

  “You’re not being fair,” Brocker said mildly. “The boy is known for his kindness to horses. He doesn’t break animals that show no inclination toward him.”

  “But what horse wouldn’t be inclined?” Fire said, and then stopped, because she was being silly and sentimental, and saying too much.

  A moment later Brocker said, in an odd, bewildered voice she didn’t entirely know what to think of, “I’ve made some grievous mistakes, and my mind spins when I try to comprehend all that has come of them. I have not been the man I should have been, not to anyone. Perhaps,” he said, staring into his lap, “I have been justly punished. Oh, child, your fingers break my heart. Could you teach yourself to finger the strings with your right hand?”

  Fire reached for his hand and gripped it as tightly as she could, but didn’t answer. She had thought of playing her fiddle opposite-handed, but it seemed very much like starting from a base of nothing. Eighteen-year-old fingers did not learn how to fly across strings anywhere as easily as five-year-old fingers did, and besides, a bow would be a great deal for a hand with only two fingers and a thumb to manage.

  Her fiddler patient had offered another suggestion. What if she kept her fiddle in her left hand and her bow in her right, as usual, but refingered her music so that it was playable with only two fingers? How fast could she reach the strings, and how accurately? At night once, when it was dark and her guard couldn’t see, she’d pretended to hold her fiddle and push her two fingers against imaginary strings. It had seemed a bumbling, useless, depressing exercise at the time. Brocker’s question made her wonder if she mightn’t try again.

  A WEEK LATER she came to understand the rest of Brocker’s words.

  She had stayed late in the healing room, saving a man’s life. It was a thing she was able to do very occasionally: a matter of willpower in the soldiers closest to death, some in agonies of pain and some not even conscious. In their moment of giving up she could give them mettle, if they wanted it. She could help them hold on to their disappearing selves. It didn’t always work. A man who couldn’t stop bleeding would never live, no matter how adamantly he fought death back. But sometimes, what she gave them was just enough.

  Of course, it left her exhausted.

  On this day she was hungry, and knew there would be food in the offices where Garan and Clara, Brocker, and Roen spent their days waiting anxiously for messages and arguing. Except that today they weren’t arguing, and as she entered with her guard she sensed an unusual lightness. Nash was there, sitting beside Mila, chatting, a truer smile on his face than Fire had seen there in some time. Garan and Clara ate peacefully from bowls, and Brocker and Roen sat together at a table, drawing lines across a topographical map of what appeared to be the bottom half of the kingdom. Roen muttered something that caused Brocker to chuckle.

  “What is it?” Fire said. “What’s happened?”

  Roen looked up from her map and gestured at a tureen of stew on the table. “Ah, Fire. Sit down. Eat something, and we’ll tell you why the war isn’t hopeless. What about you, Musa? Neel? Are you hungry? Nash,” she said, twisting around to regard her son critically. “Come get more stew for Mila.”

  Nash pushed himself up from his chair. “I see that everyone is to have stew but me.”

  “I’ve watched you eat three bowls of stew,” Roen said severely, and Fire sat down rather hard, for the teasing in this room made her weak with a relief she wasn’t sure yet it was safe to be feeling.

  And then Roen explained that a pair of their scouts on the southern front had made two rather cheerful discoveries back to back. First they’d identified the labyrinthine path of the enemy’s food supply route through the tun
nels, and second, they’d located a series of caves east of the fighting where the enemy was stabling the majority of its horses. Commandeering both supply route and caves had been merely a matter of a couple of well-placed attacks by the king’s forces. And now it would only be a matter of days before Gentian’s men ran out of food; and without horses to escape on, they would be left with no option but to surrender, allowing the majority of the First and Second to race north to reinforce Brigan’s troops.

  Or at least, this was what the smiling faces in this office supposed would happen. And Fire had to own that it did seem likely, as long as Gentian’s army didn’t block the King’s Army’s own supply route in turn, and as long as anyone was left in the Third and Fourth to be reinforced by the First and Second by the time the First and Second reached the north.

  “This is his doing,” Fire heard Roen murmur to Brocker. “Brigan mapped these tunnels, and before he left here, he and his scouts worked out all the most likely locations for the supply routes and the horses specifically. He got it right.”

  “Of course he did,” Brocker said. “He surpassed me a long time ago.”

  Something in his tone caused Fire to stop her spoon halfway to her mouth and scrutinize him, listening to his words again in her mind. It was the pride in his voice that rang strange. And of course, Brocker had always spoken proudly of the boy commander who’d followed his own path so magnificently. But today he sounded as if he were crossing over into indulgence.

  He looked up at her to see why she was staring. His eyes, pale and clear, caught hers, and held.

  She understood for the first time what Brocker had done twenty-some years ago to set Nax into a rage.

  As she pushed away from the table Brocker’s voice carried after her, tired, and oddly defeated. “Fire, wait. Fire, love, let me talk to you.”

  She ignored him. She shouldered her way through the door.