Garan came in at the last minute, sat down, and, through the whole bloody thing, talked to Mila and Nash and Hanna about the plans for his wedding. Fire knew that it was an attempt to distract her. She thanked them for this kindness by trying very hard to be distracted.
It was not a pleasant surgery. The drugs were good, but they took away the pain alone, not the sensation of her fingers being stolen from her hand; and later, when the drugs wore off, the pain was terrible.
And then, over days and weeks, the pain began to fade. When no one but her guard was around to hear, she fought with her fiddle, and was astonished with how quickly the fighting turned into something more hopeful. Her changed hand couldn’t do all that it had formerly done. But it could still make music.
HER DAYS WERE full. An end to the war had not put an end to treachery and lawlessness, particularly in the kingdom’s far reaches, where so much went unseen. Clara and Garan often had spy-room work for her. She talked to the people they set her to, but the work she preferred was in the palace infirmary, or even better, in the city hospitals, where all kinds of folk came with all kinds of needs. It was true that some of them wanted nothing to do with her, and in the usual way, even more of them wanted her far too much, and they all made too big a fuss over the role she had played in saving the king’s life. They talked about it as if it had been all her doing, and none of Nash’s, and none of the kingdom’s best surgeons’, and when she tried to deflect their praise, they began on the subject of how she had tricked Lord Mydogg’s war plans out of Lord Gentian and assured the victory of the Dells. How such rumors had gotten started, she didn’t know, but it seemed there was no stopping them. So she moved among their moods calmly, building barriers against their admiration, helping where she could, and learning practicalities of surgery that astonished her.
“Today,” she announced triumphantly to Garan and Clara, “a woman came in who’d dropped a cleaver on her foot and cut off her own toe. The surgeons reattached it. Can you believe it? With their tools and their drugs I almost believe they could reattach a leg. We must give more money to the hospitals, you know. We must train more surgeons and build hospitals all over the kingdom. We must build schools!”
“I wish I could take my legs off,” Clara groaned, “until this baby is born, and then have them reattached afterwards. And my back, too. And my shoulders.”
Fire went to Clara to rub her shoulders, and to ease into Clara’s mind and take away what she could of Clara’s haggard feeling. Garan, who was not attending to either of them, scowled at the papers on his desk. “All the mines in the south that were closed before the war have been reopened,” he said. “And now Brigan believes the miners are not paid enough. Nash agrees, the vexing rockhead.”
Fire slid her knuckles against the knots of muscle in Clara’s neck. The metalsmith of the palace had made two fingers for her that attached to her hand with straps and helped her with picking things up and carrying. They didn’t help with massage, so she pulled them off, and pulled her headscarf off too, releasing the tension of her own scalp. “Mining is hard work,” she said, “and dangerous.”
Garan slapped his pen onto the table beside her metal fingers. “We are not made of money.”
“Isn’t it the kingdom’s gold they’re mining?”
He frowned at this. “Clara, where do you stand?”
“I don’t care,” Clara moaned. “No, don’t leave that spot. It’s exactly right.”
Garan watched Fire massaging his extremely pregnant sister. When Clara moaned again, his grimace began to turn up at the corners. “Have you heard what people are calling you, Fire?” he asked.
“What is it now?”
“The monster life-giver. And I’ve also heard the term ‘monster protector of the Dells’ bandied about.”
“Rocks,” Fire said under her breath.
“And there are ships in the harbor that have put up new sails in red, orange, pink, and green. Have you seen them?”
“Those are all colors of the Dellian standard,” Fire said—other than pink, she added quietly to herself, ignoring a streak of pink in her peripheral vision.
“Of course,” Garan said. “And I suppose that’s your explanation for what they’re doing to the new bridge.”
Fire took a small breath, braced herself, and rested eyes on Garan. “What are they doing to the bridge?”
“The builders have decided to paint the towers green,” he said, “and line the cross-ribs with mirrors.”
Fire blinked. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“Imagine,” Garan said, “how it will look at sunrise and sunset.”
A strange thing happened inside Fire: Quite suddenly, she lost her fight. She stood back from the feeling this city bore for her and saw it plainly. It was undeserved. It was based not on her, but on stories, on an idea of her, an exaggeration. This is what I am to people, she thought to herself. I don’t know what it means, but it’s what I am to people.
I’m going to have to accept it.
SHE HAD SMALL things that Archer had given her that she had used every day without thinking. Her quiver and her arm guard, soft and comfortable with the wear of years—these had been gifts, ages ago, from Archer. A part of her wanted to put them aside now, because every time she saw them her heart shrank around a private pain. But she couldn’t do it. Replacing them with some other quiver and arm guard was impossible.
She was touching the soft leather of her arm guard one day in a sunny corner of the main courtyard, and thinking, when she fell asleep in her chair. She woke abruptly to Hanna slapping her and yelling, which confused her entirely and alarmed her, until she understood that Hanna had found a trio of monster bugs flitting across Fire’s neck and arms, eating her to pieces, and was trying to rescue her.
“Your blood must taste awfully good,” the child said doubtfully, running her fingertips over the angry welts that rose on Fire’s skin, and counting.
“Only to monsters,” Fire said dismally. “Here, give them to me. Are they utterly smashed? I have a student who’d probably like to dissect them.”
“They’ve bitten you one hundred and sixty-two times,” Hanna announced. “Does it itch?”
It did itch, agonizingly, and when she came upon Brigan in his bedroom—only recently returned from his long trip north—she was more combative than usual.
“I’ll always be attracting bugs,” she said to him belliger ently.
He looked up, pleased to see her, if a bit surprised at her tone. “So you will,” he said, coming to touch the bites on her throat. “Poor thing. Is it uncomfortable?”
“Brigan,” she said, annoyed that he had not understood. “I’ll always be beautiful. Look at me. I have one hundred and sixty-two bug bites, and has it made me any less beautiful? I’m missing two fingers and I have scars all over, but does anyone care? No! It just makes me more interesting! I’ll always be like this, stuck in this beautiful form, and you’ll have to deal with it.”
He seemed to sense that she expected a grave response, but for the moment, he was incapable. “I suppose it’s a burden I must bear,” he said, grinning.
“Brigan.”
“Fire, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“I’m not how I look,” she said, bursting suddenly into tears. “I look beautiful and placid and delightful, but it’s not how I feel.”
“I know that,” he said quietly.
“I will be sad,” she said defiantly. “I will be sad, and confused, and irritable, very often.”
He held up a finger and went into the hallway, where he tripped over Blotchy, and then over the two monster cats madly pursuing Blotchy. Swearing, he leaned over the landing and called to the guard that unless the kingdom fell to war or his daughter was dying, he had better not be interrupted until further notice. He came back in, shut the door, and said, “Fire. I know that.”
“I don’t know why terrible things happen,” she said, crying harder now. “I don’t know why people are cruel. I m
iss Archer, and my father too, no matter what he was. I hate that Murgda will be killed once she’s had her baby. I won’t allow it, Brigan, I’ll sneak her out, I don’t care if I end up in prison in her place. And I’m so unbearably itchy!”
Brigan was hugging her now. He was no longer smiling, and his voice was sober. “Fire. Do you imagine I want you to be thoughtless and chipper, and without all those feelings?”
“Well, I can’t imagine that this is what you want!”
He said, “The moment I began to love you was the moment when you saw your fiddle smashed on the ground, and you turned away from me and cried against your horse. Your sadness is one of the things that makes you beautiful to me. Don’t you see that? I understand it. It makes my own sadness less frightening.”
“Oh,” she said, not following every word, but comprehending the feeling, and knowing all at once the difference between Brigan and the people who built her a bridge. She rested her face against his shirt. “I understand your sadness too.”
“I know you do,” he said. “I thank you for it.”
“Sometimes,” she whispered, “there’s too much sadness. It crushes me.”
“Is it crushing you now?”
She paused, unable to speak, feeling the press of Archer against her heart. Yes.
“Then come here,” he said, a bit redundantly, as he had already pulled her with him into an armchair and curled her up in his arms. “Tell me what I can do to help you feel better.”
Fire looked into his quiet eyes, touched his dear, familiar face, and considered the question. Well. I always like when you kiss me.
“Do you?”
You’re good at it.
“Well,” he said. “That’s lucky, because I’ll always be kissing you.”
EPILOGUE
FLAME WAS THE way in the Dells to send the bodies of the dead where their souls had gone, and to remember that all things came to nothingness, except the world.
They traveled north to Brocker’s estate for the ceremony, because it was appropriate that it take place there and because to hold it anywhere else would be an inconvenience to Brocker, who must, of course, be present. They scheduled it for the end of summer, before the fall rains, so that Mila could attend with her newborn daughter, Liv, and Clara with her son, Aran.
Not everyone could make the journey, though practically everyone did, even Hanna, and Garan and Sayre, and quite a colossal royal guard. Nash stayed behind in the city, for someone needed to run things. Brigan promised to make every reasonable effort to attend and came tearing onto Fire’s land the night before with a contingent of the army. It was all of fifteen minutes before he and Garan were quarreling over the plausibility of devoting some of the kingdom’s resources to westward exploration. If through the mountains existed a land with people called Gracelings who were like that boy, Brigan said, then it would only be sensible to take a peaceful, unobtrusive interest in them—namely, to spy—before the Gracelings decided to take an unpeaceful interest in the Dells. Garan didn’t want to spend the money.
Brocker, who took Brigan’s side of the argument, was utterly pleased with the growing family that had descended upon him, and he talked, and so did Roen, of moving back to King’s City, and leaving his estate—of which Brigan was now heir—to be handled by Donal, who had always handled Fire’s capably. The siblings had been told, quietly, of Brigan’s true parentage. Hanna spent time shyly with the grandfather she had only just heard of. She liked the big wheels of his chair.
Clara teased Brigan that on the one hand, he was no technical relation to her at all, but that on the other, he was doubly the uncle of her son, for, in the loosest sense, Clara was Brigan’s sister and the baby’s father had been Brigan’s brother. “That’s how I prefer to think of it, anyway,” Clara said.
Fire smiled at all of this, and held the babies whenever anyone would let her, which turned out to be fairly often. She had a monster knack with babies. When they cried, she usually knew what was ailing them.
FIRE WAS SITTING in the bedroom of her stone house, thinking of all the things that had happened in that room.
From the doorway, Mila broke into her reverie. “Lady? May I come in?”
“Of course, Mila, please.”
In her arms Mila carried Liv, who was asleep, smelling like lavender, and making soft breathing noises. “Lady,” Mila said. “You once told me I may ask you for anything.”
“Yes,” Fire said, looking at the girl, surprised.
“I’d like to ask your advice.”
“Well, you shall have it, for whatever it’s worth.”
Mila dropped her face to Liv’s pale, fuzzy hair for a moment. She almost seemed afraid to speak. “Lady,” she said. “Do you think that in his treatment of women, the king is a man like Lord Archer?”
“Goodness,” Fire said, “no. I can’t see the king being careless with a woman’s feelings. It seems fairer to compare him to his brothers.”
“Do you think,” Mila began, and then sat suddenly on the bed, trembling. “Do you think a soldier girl from the southern Great Grays, sixteen years old with a baby, would be mad to consider—”
Mila stopped, her face buried against her child. And Fire felt the rise of her own clamoring happiness, like warm music ringing in the spaces inside her. “The two of you seem very fond of each other’s company,” she said carefully, trying not to give her feelings away.
“Yes,” Mila said. “We were together during the war, Lady, on the northern front, when I was assisting Lord Brocker. And I found myself going to him a very great deal, when he was recovering from his injury and I was preparing for my own laying in. And when Liv was born, he visited me just as faithfully, despite all his duties. He helped me to name her.”
“And has he said anything to you?”
Mila focused on the fringe of the blanket in her arms, from which suddenly protruded a fat little foot that flexed itself. “He’s said that he’d like to spend more time in my company, Lady. As much time as I’m willing to allow him.”
Still holding back on her smile, Fire spoke gently. “I do think it’s a very large question, Mila, and one you needn’t rush to answer. You might do as he asks, and simply spend more time with him, and see how that feels. Ask him a million questions, if you have them. But no, I don’t think it’s mad. The royal family is . . . very flexible.”
Mila nodded, her face drawn in thought, seeming to consider Fire’s words quite seriously. After a moment, she passed Liv into Fire’s arms. “Would you like to visit with her for a bit, Lady?”
Scrunched against the pillows of her old bed, Archer’s baby sighing and yawning against her, for a short span of time Fire was shatteringly happy.
THE LANDSCAPE BEHIND what had been Archer’s house was a vastness of gray rock. They waited until sunset streaked the sky with red.
They had no body to burn. But Archer had had longbows tall as he, and crossbows, short bows, bows from his childhood that he had grown out of, but kept. Brocker was not wasteful, nor did he want to destroy all of Archer’s things. But he came out of the house with a bow that Archer had strongly favored and another that had been a childhood gift of Aliss’s, and asked Fire to lay them on top of the kindling.
Fire did as she was asked, and then lay something of her own beside the bows. It was a thing she had kept in the bottom of her bags for well over a year now: the bridge of her ruined fiddle. For she had lit a blazing fire for Archer once before, but she had never even lit a candle for Cansrel.
She understood now that while it had been wrong to kill Cansrel, it had also been right. The boy with the strange eyes had helped her to see the rightness of it. The boy who’d killed Archer. Some people had too much power and too much cruelty to live. Some people were too terrible, no matter if you loved them; no matter that you had to make yourself terrible too, in order to stop them. Some things just had to be done.
I forgive myself, thought Fire. Today, I forgive myself.
Brigan and Roen set the
pyre alight and all in the party came to stand before it. There was a song played in the Dells to mourn the loss of a life. Fire took her fiddle and bow from Musa’s waiting hands.
It was a haunting tune, unresigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire’s fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind and say goodbye.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SO MANY PEOPLE to thank!
My sister Catherine (assisted by the guys) was my Courageous First Reader. Later on, my Intrepid Reading Team included my sister Dac, Deborah Kaplan, Rebecca Rabinowitz, and Joan Leonard. Nothing is as invaluable as a team of intelligent readers willing to give you the brutal truth about your book. Smooches to you all.
If the e-mails I receive are any indication, my cover designer, Kelly Eismann, is responsible for drawing in a lot of my readers! My copy editor, Lara Stelmaszyk, is the personification of patience. Lora Fountain deserves thanks for finding European homes for my books. Gillian Redfearn helped me work through a sticky part of my first revision. Sandra McDonald gave me a quiet space to revise, and my parents gave me a place to come home to whenever I needed it. Daniel Burbach rescued me every time I needed an author photo, which only ever seemed to happen when he was in the middle of finals. Emelie Carter, violinist, taught me about playing the violin when injured; Aunt Mary Willihnganz, flautist, did the same, but with flutes. Uncle Walter Willihnganz, surgeon and wound specialist, always answered with great equanimity questions such as: “Uncle Walter, if a person were kicked in the eyeball and had no medical facilities to go to, could the entire eyeball turn reddish purple, and stay that way for the rest of his life?” (The answer to that question, incidentally, is yes.)