Fire

Chapter One

It did not surprise Fire that the man in the forest shot her. What surprised her was that he shot her by accident.

The arrow whacked her square in the arm and threw her sideways against a boulder, which knocked the air out of her. The pain was too great to ignore, but behind it she focused her mind, made it cold and sharp, like a single star in a black winter sky. If he was a cool man, certain in what he was doing, he would be guarded against her, but Fire rarely encountered this type. More often the men who tried to hurt her were angry or arrogant or frightened enough that she could find a crack in the fortress of their thoughts, and ease her way in.

She found this man's mind instantly – so open, so welcoming, even, that she wondered if he could be a simpleton hired by someone else. She fumbled for the knife in her boot. His footfalls, and then his breath, sounded through the trees. She had no time to waste, for he would shoot her again as soon as he found her. You don't want to kill me. You've changed your mind.

Then he rounded a tree and his blue eyes caught hold of her, and widened in astonishment and horror.

"Not a girl!" he cried out.

Fire's thoughts scrambled. Had he not meant to strike her? Did he not know who she was? Had he meant to murder Archer? She forced her voice calm. "Who was your target?"

"Not who," he said. "What. Your cloak is brown pelt. Your dress is brown. Rocks alive, girl," he said in a burst of exasperation. He marched toward her and inspected the arrow embedded in her upper arm, the blood that soaked her cloak, her sleeve, her headscarf. "A fellow would think you were hoping to be shot by a hunter."

More accurately, a poacher, since Archer forebade hunting in these woods at this time of day, just so that Fire could pass through here dressed this way. Besides, she'd never seen this shortish, tawny-haired, light-eyed man before. Well. If he was not only a poacher, but a poacher who'd accidentally shot Fire while hunting illegally, then he would not want to turn himself in to Archer's famous temper; but that was what she was going to have to make him want to do. She was losing blood, and she was beginning to feel light-headed. She would need his assistance to get home.

"Now I'll have to kill you," he said glumly. And then, before she could begin to address that rather bizarre statement: "Wait. Who are you? Tell me you're not her."

"Not who?" she hedged, reaching again for his mind, and finding it still strangely blank, as if his intentions were floating, lost in a fog.

"Your hair is covered," he said. "Your eyes, your face – oh, save me." He backed away from her. "Your eyes are so green. I'm a dead man."

He was an odd one, with his talk of killing her, and himself dying, and his peculiar floating brain; and now he looked ready to bolt, which Fire must not allow. She grasped at his thoughts and slid them into place. You don't find my eyes or my face to be all that remarkable.

The man squinted at her, puzzled.

The more you look at me the more you see I'm just an ordinary girl. You've found an ordinary girl injured in the forest, and now you must rescue me. You must take me to Lord Archer.

Here Fire encountered a small resistance in the form of the man's fear. She pulled harder at his mind, and smiled at him, the most gorgeous smile she could muster while throbbing with pain and dying of blood loss. Lord Archer will reward you and keep you safe, and you will be honoured as a hero.

There was no hesitation. He eased her quiver and her fiddle case from her back and slung them over his shoulder against his own quiver. He took up both of their bows in one hand and wrapped her right arm, her uninjured arm, around his neck. "Come along, miss," he said. He half led her, half carried her, through the trees toward Archer's holding.

He knows the way, she thought tiredly, and then she let the thought go. It didn't matter who he was or where he came from. It only mattered that she stay awake and inside his head until he got her home and Archer's people had seized him. She kept her eyes and ears and her mind alert for monsters, for neither her headscarf nor her own mental guard against them would hide her from them if they smelled her blood.

At least she could count on this poacher to be a decent shot.

Archer brought down a raptor monster as Fire and the poacher stumbled out of the trees. A beautiful, long shot from the upper terrace that Fire was in no state to admire, but that caused the poacher to murmur something under his breath about the appropriateness of the young lord's nickname. The monster plummeted from the sky and crashed onto the pathway to the door. Its colour was the rich orange-gold of a sunflower.

Archer stood tall and graceful on the stone terrace, eyes raised to the sky, longbow lightly in hand. He reached to the quiver on his back, notched another arrow, and swept the treetops. Then he saw them, the man dragging her bleeding from the forest. He turned on his heel and ran into the house, and even down here, even from this distance and stone walls between them, Fire could hear him yelling. She sent words and feeling into his mind, not mind control, only a message. Don't worry. Seize him and disarm him, but don't hurt him. Please, she added, for whatever it was worth with Archer. He's a nice man and I've had to trick him.

Archer burst through the great front door with his captain Palla, his healer, and five of his guard. He leapt over the raptor and ran to Fire. "I found her in the forest," the poacher cried. "I found her. I saved her life."

Once the guards had taken hold of the poacher, Fire released his mind. The relief of it weakened her knees and she slumped against Archer.

"Fire," her friend was saying. "Fire. Are you all right? Where else are you hurt?"

She couldn't stand. Archer grasped her, lowered her to the ground. She shook her head numbly. "Nowhere."

"Let her sit," the healer said. "Let her lie down. I must stop the flow of blood."

Archer was wild. "Will she be all right?"

"Most certainly," the healer said curtly, "if you will get out of my way and let me stop the flow of blood. My Lord."

Archer let out a ragged breath and kissed Fire's forehead. He untangled himself from her body and crouched on his heels, clenching and unclenching his fists. Then he turned to peer at the poacher held by his guards, and Fire thought warningly, Archer, for she knew that with his anxieties unsoothed, Archer was transitioning now to fury.

"A nice man who must nonetheless be seized," he hissed at the poacher, standing. "I can see that the arrow in her arm came from your quiver. Who are you and who sent you?"

The poacher barely noticed Archer. He stared down at Fire, boggle-eyed. "She's beautiful again," he said. "I'm a dead man."

"He won't kill you," Fire told him soothingly. "He doesn't kill poachers, and anyway, you saved me."

"If you shot her I'll kill you with pleasure," Archer said.

"It makes no difference what you do," the poacher said.

Archer glared down at the man. "And if you were so intent on rescuing her, why didn't you remove the arrow yourself and bind the wound before dragging her half across the world?"

"Archer," Fire said, and then stopped, choking back a cry as the healer ripped off her bloody sleeve. "He was under my control, and I didn't think of it. Leave him alone."

Archer swung on her. "And why didn't you think of it? Where is your common sense?"

"Lord Archer," the healer said testily. "There will be no yelling at people who are bleeding themselves to unconsciousness. Make yourself useful. Hold her down, will you, while I remove this arrow; and then you'll do best to look to the skies."

Archer knelt beside her and took hold of her shoulders. His face was wooden but his voice shook with emotion. "Forgive me, Fire." To the healer: "We're mad to be doing this outside. They smell the blood."

And then sudden pain, blinding and brilliant. Fire wrenched her head and fought against the healer, against Archer's heavy strength. Her scarf slipped off and released the shimmering prism of her hair: sunrise, poppy, copper, fuchsia, flame. Red, brighter than the blood soaking the doorpath.

She ate dinner in her own stone house, which was just beyond Archer's and under the protection of his guard. He had sent the dead raptor monster to her kitchen. Archer was one of very few people who made her feel no shame for craving the taste of monster meat.

She ate in bed, and he sat with her. He cut her meat and encouraged her. Eating hurt, everything hurt.

The poacher was gaoled in one of the outdoor monster cages Fire's father, Lord Cansrel, had built into the hill behind the house. "I hope there's a lightning storm," Archer said. "I hope for a flood. I would like the ground under your poacher to crack open and swallow him."

She ignored him. She knew it was only hot air.

"I passed Donal in your hall," he said, "sneaking out with a pile of blankets and pillows. You're building your assassin a bed out there, aren't you? And probably feeding him as well as you feed yourself."

"He's not an assassin, only a poacher with fuzzy eyesight."

"You believe that even less than I do."

"All right, but I do believe that when he shot me, he thought I was a deer."

Archer sat back and crossed his arms. "Perhaps. We'll talk to him again tomorrow. We'll have his story from him."

"I would rather not help."

"I would rather not ask you, darling, but I need to know who this man is and who sent him. He's the second stranger to be seen on my land these two weeks."

Fire lay back, closed her eyes, forced her jaw to chew. Everyone was a stranger. Strangers came out of the rocks, the hills, and it was impossible to know everyone's truth. She didn't want to know – nor did she want to use her powers to find out. It was one thing to take over a man's mind to prevent her own death, and another thing entirely to steal his secrets.

When she turned to Archer again, he was watching her quietly. His white-blond hair and his deep brown eyes, his proud mouth. The familiar features she'd known since she was a toddler and he was a child, always carrying a bow around as long as his own height. It was she who'd first modified his real name, Arklin, to Archer, and he had taught her to shoot. And looking into his face now, the face of a grown man responsible for a northern estate, its money, its farms, its people, she understood his anxiety. It was not a peaceful time in the Dells. In King's City, young King Nash was clinging, with some desperation, to the throne, while rebel lords like Lord Mydogg in the north and Lord Gentian in the south built armies and thought about how to unseat him.

War was coming. And the mountains and forests swarmed with spies and thieves and other lawless men. Strangers were always alarming.

Archer's voice was soft. "You won't be able to go outside alone until you can shoot again. The raptors are out of control. I'm sorry, Fire."

Fire swallowed. She'd been trying not to think about this particular bleakness. "It makes no difference. I can't play fiddle, either, or harp or flute or any of my instruments. I have no need to leave home."

"We'll send word to your students." He sighed and rubbed his neck. "And I'll see whom I can place in their houses in your stead. Until you heal, we'll be forced to trust our neighbours without the help of your insight." For trust was not assumed these days, even among long-standing neighbours, and one of Fire's jobs as she gave music lessons was to keep her eyes and ears open. Occasionally she learned something – information, conversation, the sense of something wrong – that was a help to Archer and his father, Brocker, both loyal allies to the king.

It was also a long time for Fire to live without the comfort of her own music. She closed her eyes again and breathed slowly. These were always the worst injuries, the ones that left her unable to play her fiddle.

She hummed to herself, a song they both knew about the northern Dells, a song that Archer's father always liked her to play when she sat with him.

Archer took the hand of her uninjured arm, and kissed it. He kissed her fingers, her wrist. His lips brushed her forearm.

She stopped humming. She opened her eyes to the sight of his, mischievous and brown, smiling into hers.

You can't be serious, she thought to him.

He touched her hair, shining against the blankets. "You look unhappy."

Archer. It hurts to move.

"You don't have to move. And I can erase your pain."

She smiled, despite herself, and spoke aloud. "No doubt. But so can sleep. Go home, Archer. I'm sure you can find someone else's pain to erase."

"So callous," he said teasingly, "when you know how worried I was for you today."

She did know how worried. She merely doubted that the worry had changed his nature.

Of course, after he'd gone, she did not sleep. She tried, but nightmares brought her awake over and over again. Her nightmares were always worse on days when she'd spent time down among the cages, for that was where her father had died.

Cansrel, her beautiful monster father. Monsters in the Dells came from monsters. A monster could breed with a non-monster of its species – her mother had not been a monster – but the progeny was always monstrous. Cansrel had had glittery silver hair with glints of blue, and deep, dark blue eyes. His body, his face breathtaking, smooth and beautifully cut, like crystal reflecting light, glowing with that intangible something that all monsters have. He had been the most stunning man alive when he'd lived, or at least Fire had found him so. He had been better than she at controlling the minds of humans. He had had a great deal more practice.

Fire lay in her bed and fought off the dream memory. The growling leopard monster, midnight blue with gold spots, astride her father. The smell of her father's blood, his gorgeous eyes on her, disbelieving. Dying.

She wished now that she hadn't sent Archer home. Archer understood the nightmares, and Archer was alive and passionate. She wanted his company, his vitality.

In her bed she grew more and more restless, and finally she did a thing that would have turned Archer livid. She dragged herself to her closets and dressed herself, slowly, painfully, in coat and trousers, dark browns and blacks to match the night. Her attempt to wrap her hair almost sent her back to bed, since she needed both arms to do it and lifting her left arm was an agony. Somehow she managed, capitulating at one point to the use of a mirror to be sure that no hair was showing in back. Generally she avoided mirrors. It embarrassed her to lose her own breath at the sight of herself.

She stuck a knife in her belt and hefted a spear and ignored her own conscience calling, singing, screaming to her that she couldn't even protect herself from a porcupine tonight, let alone a monster raptor or monster wolf.

Next was the hardest part of all, one-armed. She had to sneak out of her own house by way of the tree outside her window, for Archer's guards stood at all her doorways, and they would never allow her to wander the hills injured and alone. Unless she used her power to control them, and that she would not do. Archer's guards trusted her.

Archer had been the one to notice how closely this ancient tree hugged the house and how easily he could climb it in the dark, two years ago, when Cansrel had still been alive, and Archer had been eighteen and Fire had been fifteen and their friendship had evolved in a manner Cansrel's guards hadn't needed to know the particulars of. A manner that had been unexpected to her, and sweet, and boosted her small list of happinesses. What Archer hadn't known was that Fire had begun to use the route herself, almost immediately, first to skirt Cansrel's men and then, after Cansrel was dead, Archer's own. Not to do anything shocking or forbidden; just to walk at night by herself, without everyone knowing.

She pitched her spear out the window. What followed was an ordeal that involved much swearing and tearing of cloth and fingernails. On solid ground, sweating and shaking and appreciating fully now what a foolish idea this had been, she used her spear as a cane and limped away from the house. She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so that she could see the stars. They always eased her lonesomeness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.

To night they were clear and perfect in the sky.

Standing on a rocky patch that rose beyond Cansrel's monster cages, she bathed in the light of the stars and tried to soak up some of their quiet. Breathing deep, she rubbed the place in her hip that still ached sometimes from an arrow scar that was months old. Always one of the trials of a new wound: all the old wounds liked to rise up and start hurting again, too.

She'd never been injured accidentally before. It was hard to know how to categorise this attack in her mind; it almost seemed funny. She had a dagger scar on one forearm, another on her belly. An arrow gouge from years ago in her back. It was a thing that happened now and then. For every peaceful man, there was a man who wanted to hurt her, even kill her, because she was a gorgeous thing he could not have, or because he'd despised her father. And for every attack that had left a scar there were five or six other attacks she'd managed to stop.

Tooth marks on one wrist: a wolf monster. Claw marks at one shoulder: a raptor monster. Other wounds, too, the small, invisible kind. Just this morning, in the town, a man's hot eyes on her body, and the man's wife beside him, burning at Fire with jealousy and hatred. Or the monthly humiliation of needing a guard during her woman's bleedings to protect her from monsters who could smell her blood.

"The attention shouldn't embarrass you," Cansrel would have said. "It should gladden you. Don't you feel it, the joy of having an effect on everyone and everything simply by being?"

Cansrel had never found any of it humiliating. He'd kept predator monsters as pets – a silvery lavender raptor, a blood-purple mountain lion, a grass-coloured bear glinting with gold, the midnight blue leopard with gold spots. He'd underfed them on purpose and walked among their cages, his hair uncovered, scratching his own skin with a knife so that his blood beaded on the surface. It had been one of his favourite things to make his monsters scream and roar and scrape their teeth on the metal bars, wild with their desire for his monster body.

She couldn't begin to imagine feeling that way, without fear, or shame.

The air was turning damp and cold, and peace was too far away for her to reach tonight.

Slowly she headed back to her tree. She tried to grab hold and climb, but it didn't take much scrabbling at the trunk for her to understand that she was not, under any circumstances, going to be able to enter her bedroom the way she'd exited.

Leaning into the tree, sore and weary, Fire cursed her stupidity. She had two options now, and neither was acceptable. Either she must turn herself in to the guards at her doors and tomorrow wage a battle over her freedom with Archer, or she must enter the mind of one of those guards and trick his thoughts.

She reached out tentatively to see who was around. The poacher's mind bobbed against hers, asleep in his cage. Guarding her house were a number of men whose minds she recognised. At her side entrance was an older fellow named Krell who was something of a friend to her – or would have been, did he not have the tendency to admire her too much. He was a musician, easily as talented as she and more experienced, and they played together sometimes, Fire on her fiddle and Krell on flute or whistle. Too convinced of her perfection, Krell, ever to suspect her. An easy mark.

Fire sighed. Archer was a better friend when he did not know every detail of her life and mind. She would have to do this.

She slipped up to the house and into the trees near the side door. The feeling of a monster reaching for the gates of one's mind was subtle. A strong and practiced person could learn to recognise the encroachment and slam the gates shut. Tonight Krell's mind was alert for trespassers but not for this type of invasion; he was open and bored, and she crept her way in. He noticed a change and adjusted his focus, startled, but she worked quickly to distract him. You heard something. There it is, can you hear it again? Shouts, near the front of the house. Step away from the door and turn to look.

Without pause he moved from the entrance and turned his back to her. She crept out of the trees toward the door.

You hear nothing behind you, only before you. The door behind you is closed.

He never swung around to check, never even doubted the thoughts she'd implanted in his mind. She opened the door behind him, slipped through, and shut herself in, then leaned against the wall of her hallway for a moment, oddly depressed at how easy that had been. It seemed to her that it shouldn't be so easy to make a man into a fool.

Rather bleak now with self-disgust, she slumped her way upstairs to her room. A particular song was stuck in her head, dully playing itself over and over, though she couldn't think why. It was the funeral lament sung in the Dells to mourn the waste of a life.

She supposed thoughts of her father had brought the song to mind. She had never sung it for him or played it on her fiddle. She'd been too numb with grief and confusion to play anything after he'd died. A fire had been lit for him, but she had not gone to see it.

It had been a gift from Cansrel, her fiddle. One of his strange kindnesses, for he'd never had patience for her music. And now Fire was alone, the only remaining human monster in the Dells, and her fiddle was one of few happy things she had to remember him by.

Happy.

Well, she supposed there was a kind of gladness in his remembrance, some of the time. But it didn't change reality. In one way or another, all that was wrong in the Dells could be traced back to Cansrel.

It was not a thought to bring peace. But delirious now with fatigue, she slept soundly, the Dellian lament a backdrop to her dreams.

Chapter Two

Fire woke first to pain, and then to the consciousness of an unusual level of agitation in her house. Guards were bustling around downstairs, and Archer was among them.

When a servant passed her bedroom door Fire touched the girl's mind, summoning her. The girl entered the room, not looking at Fire, glaring mutinously instead at the feather duster in her own hand. Still, at least she had come. Some of them scurried away, pretending not to hear.

She said stiffly, "Yes, Lady?"

"Sofie, why are there so many men downstairs?"

"The poacher in the cages was found dead this morning, Lady," Sofie said. "An arrow in his throat."

Sofie turned on her heel, snapping the door shut behind her, leaving Fire lying heartsick in bed.

She couldn't help but feel that this was her fault somehow, for looking like a deer.

She dressed and went downstairs to her steward, Donal, who was grizzled and strong-headed and had served her since she was a baby. Donal raised a grey eyebrow at her and cocked his head in the direction of the back terrace. "I don't think he much cares whom he shoots," he said.

Fire knew he meant Archer, whose exasperation she could sense on the other side of the wall. For all of his hot words, Archer did not like people in his care to die.

"Help me cover my hair, will you, Donal?"

A minute later, hair wrapped in brown, Fire went out to be with Archer in his unhappiness. The air on the terrace was wet like coming rain. Archer wore a long brown coat. Everything about him was sharp – the bow in his hand and the arrows on his back, his frustrated bursts of movement, his expression as he glared over the hills. She leaned on the railing beside him.

"I should have anticipated this," he said, not looking at her. "He as good as told us it would happen."

"There's nothing you could have done. Your guard is already spread too thin."

"I could have imprisoned him inside."

"And how many guards would that have taken? We live in stone houses, Archer, not palaces, and we don't have dungeons."

He swiped at the air with his hand. "We're mad, you know that? Mad to think we can live here, so far from King's City, and protect ourselves from Pikkians and looters and the spies of rebel lords."

"He hadn't the look or the speech of a Pikkian," she said. "He was Dellian, like us. And he was clean and tidy and civilised, not like any looter we've ever seen."

The Pikkians were the boat people from the land above the Dells, and it was true that they crossed the border sometimes to steal timber and even labourers from the Dellian north. But the men of Pikkia, though not all alike, tended to be big, and lighter-skinned than their Dellian neighbours – at any rate, not small and dark like the blue-eyed poacher had been. And Pikkians spoke with a distinctive throaty accent.

"Well," Archer said, determined not to be soothed, "then he was a spy. Lord Mydogg and Lord Gentian have spies crawling all over the kingdom, spying on the king, spying on the prince, spying on each other – spying on you, for all we know," he added grouchily. "Has it never occurred to you that the enemies of King Nash and Prince Brigan might want to steal you and use you as a tool to overthrow the royal family?"

"You think everyone wants to steal me," Fire said mildly. "If your own father had me tied up and sold to a monster zoo for spare change, you'd claim that you'd suspected him all along."

He spluttered at this. "You should suspect your friends, or at least anyone other than me and Brocker. And you should have a guard whenever you walk out your door, and you should be quicker to manipulate the people you meet. Then I'd have less cause to worry."

These were old arguments and he already knew her responses by heart. She ignored him. "Our poacher was a spy of neither Lord Mydogg's nor Lord Gentian's," she said calmly.

"Mydogg has grown quite an army for himself in the northeast. If he decided to 'borrow' our more central land to use as a stronghold in a war against the king, we wouldn't be able to stop him."

"Archer, be reasonable. The King's Army wouldn't leave us alone to defend ourselves. And regardless, the poacher was not sent here by a rebel lord; he was far too vapid. Mydogg would never employ a vapid scout, and if Gentian lacks Mydogg's intelligence, well, still, he's not fool enough to send a man with a floating, empty head to do his spying."

"All right," Archer said, voice rising in exasperation, "then I return to the theory that it's something to do with you. The moment he recognised you he talked about being a dead man, and clearly he was well-informed on that point. Explain it to me, will you? Who was the man, and why the rocks is he dead?"

He was dead because he'd hurt her, Fire thought; or maybe because she'd seen him and talked to him. Little sense in it, but it would make a good joke, if Archer were in the mood for any sort of joke. The poacher's murderer was a man after Archer's own heart, for Archer also didn't like men to hurt Fire or make her acquaintance.

"And a rather good shot," she said out loud.

He was still glowering into the distance, as if he expected the murderer to pop up from behind a boulder and wave. "Hmm?"

"You'd get along well with this murderer, Archer. He would've had to shoot through both the bars of the outer enclosure and the bars of the poacher's cage, wouldn't he? He must be a good shot."

Admiration for another archer seemed to cheer him slightly. "More than that. From the depth of the wound and the angle, I think he fired long-range, from the trees beyond that rise." He pointed to the bald patch Fire had climbed the night before. "Through two sets of bars is impressive enough, and then into the man's throat? At least we can be sure none of our neighbours did it personally. Not one of them could have made that shot."

"Could you?"

The question was a small gift to him to improve his mood, for there was no shot made that Archer couldn't match. He glanced at her, grinning. Looked at her again more closely. His face softened. "I'm a beast for taking this long to ask how you feel this morning."

The muscles of her back were tight knots of rope and her bandaged arm ached; her entire body was paying dearly for last night's abuse. "I'm all right."

"Are you warm enough? Take my coat."

They sat for a while on the steps of the terrace, Fire wrapped in Archer's coat. They talked about Archer's plans for breaking ground in the fields. Soon enough it would be time for the spring planting, and northern soil, rocky and cold, always resisted the start of a new growing season.

Now and then Fire sensed a raptor monster overhead. She kept her own mind hidden from them so they wouldn't recognise her for the monster prey she was; but of course, in the absence of monster prey, they ate any living creature available. One that spotted Fire and Archer dropped down and began to circle, posing shamelessly, intangibly lovely, reaching for their minds, radiating a feeling that was hungry, primitive, and oddly soothing. Archer stood and shot it, then shot another that did the same, the first violet like sunrise, the second so pale a yellow it looked like the moon dropping from the sky.

At least fractured on the ground, Fire thought, the monsters added colour to the landscape. There was little colour in the north of the Dells in early spring – the trees were grey and the grass that tufted between cracks in the rocks was still brown from winter. Truly, even at the height of summer the north of the Dells was not what one would call colourful, but at least in summer, grey with patches of brown turned to grey with patches of green.

"Who found the poacher, anyway?" Fire asked idly.

"Tovat," Archer said. "One of the newer guards. You'll not have met him yet."

"Oh, yes – the young one with the brown-orange hair that people called red. I like him. He's strong-minded and he guards himself."

"You know Tovat? You admire his hair, do you?" Archer said in a sharp and familiar tone.

"Archer, honestly. I said nothing of admiring his hair. And I know the names and faces of all the men you station at my house. It's simple courtesy."

"I won't be stationing Tovat at your house any longer," he said, an unpleasant edge to his voice that drove her to silence for a moment, so that she wouldn't say anything unpleasant back about Archer's dubious – and rather hypocritical – right to jealousy. He opened a feeling to her that she didn't particularly care to feel just now. Biting back a sigh, she chose words that would protect Tovat.

"I hope you'll change your mind. He's one of the few guards who respects me both with his body and in his mind."

"Marry me," Archer said, "and live in my house, and I will be your guard."

She could not bite back this sigh. "You know that I won't. I wish you would stop asking me." A fat raindrop plopped onto her sleeve. "I think I'll go and visit your father."

She stood, creaking with pain, and let his coat slide off into his lap. She touched his shoulder once, gently. Even when she did not like Archer, she loved him.

As she went into the house, rain began to fall.

Archer's father lived in Archer's house. Fire asked a guard who was not Tovat to accompany her along the path through the rain. She carried a spear, but still, without her longbow and quiver she felt naked.

Lord Brocker was in his son's armoury, thundering instructions at a large man Fire recognised as the assistant to the blacksmith in town. At the sight of her Lord Brocker did not let off his thundering, but momentarily he lost the attention of his listener. The blacksmith turned to stare at Fire, some base thing in his eyes and in his silly, stupid smile.

He'd known Fire for long enough, this man, to have learned how to guard himself against the power of her strange monster beauty, so if he was not guarding himself, then he must not want to. His prerogative, to give up his mind in return for the pleasure of succumbing to her, but not something she cared to encourage. She kept her headscarf on. She pushed his mind away and walked past him into a side room so that she couldn't be seen. A closet really, dark, and with shelves full of oils and polish and ancient, rusted equipment no one ever used.

It was humiliating to have to retreat to a smelly old closet. The blacksmith should be the one to feel humiliated, for he was the dunce who chose to give up his self-control. What if while he gaped at her and imagined whatever his small mind cared to imagine, she convinced him to draw his knife and take out his own eye? It was the sort of thing Cansrel would have liked to do. Cansrel had never retreated.

The men's voices stopped and the blacksmith's mind receded from the armoury. The big wheels of Lord Brocker's chair squeaked as he rolled himself toward her. He stopped in the doorway of the closet. "Come out of there, child; he's gone. The moron. If a mouse monster stole that one's meal from under his nose, he'd scratch his head and wonder why he couldn't remember eating his food. Let's go to my rooms. You look like you should sit down."

Archer's house had been Brocker's house before Brocker had turned the running of the estate over to his son, and Brocker had used a wheeled chair before Archer had ever been born. The house was organised such that everything but Archer's rooms and servant rooms were on the first floor, where Brocker could reach them.

Fire walked beside him down a stone hallway that was dim in the grey light seeping through tall windows. They passed the kitchen, the dining room, the stairway, and the guard room. The house was full of people, servants and guards coming in from outside, coming down from upstairs. The servant girls who passed them greeted Brocker but carefully ignored Fire, their minds guarded and cool. As always. If Archer's servants did not resent her because she was a monster and Cansrel's daughter, they resented her because they were in love with Archer.

Fire was happy to sink into a soft chair in Lord Brocker's library and drink the cup of wine an unfriendly servant clapped into her hand. Brocker positioned his chair across from hers and settled his grey eyes on her face. "I'll leave you alone, dear," he said, "if you wish to nap."

"Perhaps later."

"When's the last time you had a good night's sleep?"

Brocker was one person she felt comfortable admitting pain to, and fatigue. "I can't remember. It's not a thing that happens very often."

"You know there are drugs that will put you to sleep."

"They make me groggy, and stupid."

"I've just finished writing a history of military strategy in the Dells. You're welcome to take it with you. It'll put you to sleep while making you clever and unbeatable."

Fire smiled and sipped the bitter Dellian wine. She doubted that Brocker's history would put her to sleep. All she knew about armies and war came from Brocker, and he was never boring. Twenty-some years ago, in the heyday of old King Nax, Brocker had been the most brilliant military commander the Dells had ever seen. Until the day King Nax had seized him and shattered his legs – not broken them, but shattered them, eight men taking turns with a mallet – and then sent him home, half-dead, to his wife, Aliss, in the northern Dells.

Fire didn't know what terrible thing Brocker had done to justify such treatment from his king. Neither did Archer. The entire episode had taken place before they were born, and Brocker never spoke of it. And the injuries were only the beginning of it, for a year or two later, when Brocker had recovered as well as he ever would, Nax had still been angry with his commander. He'd hand-picked a brute from his prisons, a dirty, savage man, and sent him north to punish Brocker by punishing Brocker's wife. This was why Archer was brown-eyed, light-haired, handsome, and tall, while Brocker was grey-eyed and dark-haired and plain in appearance. Lord Brocker was not Archer's true father.

In some places and times Brocker's would have been a mind-boggling story, but not in King's City and not in the days when King Nax had ruled at the pleasure of his closest adviser. Cansrel.

Brocker spoke, interrupting her gruesome thoughts. "I understand you've had the rare pleasure of being shot by a man who was not trying to kill you," he said. "Did it feel any different?"

Fire laughed. "I've never been shot more pleasantly."

He chuckled, studying her with his mild grey eyes. "It's rewarding to make you smile. The pain in your face drops away."

He had always been able to make her smile. It was a relief to her, his dependable light mood, especially on days when Archer's mood was heavy. And it was remarkable, since every moment he was in pain.

"Brocker," she said. "Do you think it could have been different?"

He tilted his head, puzzled.

"I mean Cansrel," she said, "and King Nax. Do you think their partnership could ever have been different? Could the Dells have survived them?"

Brocker considered her, his face gone quiet and grave at the very mention of Cansrel's name. "Nax's father was a decent king," he said. "And Cansrel's father was a valuable monster adviser to him. But, darling, Nax and Cansrel were two other creatures entirely. Nax didn't inherit his father's strength, and you know as well as anyone that Cansrel didn't inherit even a touch of his father's empathy. And they grew up together as boys, so when Nax took the throne, he'd already had Cansrel living inside his head his whole life. Oh, Nax had a good heart, I'm sure of it – sometimes I saw it – but it didn't matter, because he was also just the smallest bit lazy, the smallest bit too willing to let someone else do his thinking – and that was all the opening Cansrel ever needed. Nax never had a chance," Brocker said, shaking his head, squinting at memories. "From the start, Cansrel used Nax to get everything he wanted, and all Cansrel ever wanted was his own pleasure. It was inevitable, sweetheart," he said, bringing his attention back to her face. "As long as they lived, Cansrel and Nax were always going to lead the kingdom to ruin."

Ruin. Fire knew, for Brocker had told her, the progressive steps that had led to ruin once young Nax had taken the throne. It had started with women and parties, and that hadn't been so bad, for Nax had fallen in love with a black-haired lady from the northern Dells named Roen and married her. King Nax and Queen Roen had produced a son, a handsome, dark boy named Nash, and even with a somewhat neglectful king at its helm the kingdom had had an aura of stability.

Except that Cansrel had been bored. His gratification had always required excess, and now he began to need more women and more parties, and wine, and children from the court to alleviate the monotony of the women. And drugs. Nax had agreed to it all; Nax had been like a shell to hold Cansrel's mind and nod its head yes to whatever Cansrel said was best.

"Yet, you've told me that ultimately it was the drugs that destroyed Nax," Fire said. "Could Nax have held on if it hadn't been for the drugs?"

"Perhaps," Brocker said lightly. "Cansrel could always keep hold of himself with poison in his veins, blast him, but Nax couldn't; it made him high-strung, and paranoid, and uncontrolled, and more vindictive than he'd ever been before."

He stopped at that, staring bleakly at his own useless legs. Fire kept her feeling tight within herself so that he would not be flooded with her curiosity. Or her pity; her pity must never touch him.

A moment later he looked up and held her eyes again. He smiled very slightly. "Perhaps it would be fair to say that Nax mightn't have turned into a madman if it weren't for the drugs. But I believe the drugs were as inevitable as the rest. And Cansrel himself was the truest drug to Nax's mind. People saw what was happening – they saw Nax punishing law-abiding men and making alliances with criminals and wasting all the money in the king's coffers. Allies of Nax's father began to withdraw their support for Nax, as they were bound to do. And ambitious fellows like Mydogg and Gentian began to think and plot, and train squadrons of soldiers, under the guise of self-defence. And who could blame a mountain lord for that, with things so unstable? There was no law anymore, not outside the city, for Nax couldn't be troubled to attend to it. The roads were no longer safe, you had to be mad or desperate to travel the underground routes, looters and raiders and black market thugs were cropping up everywhere. Even the Pikkians. For ages, they'd been content to squabble among themselves. Now, suddenly, even they couldn't resist taking advantage of our lawlessness."

Fire knew all of this; she knew her own history. In the end, a kingdom connected by underground tunnels and riddled with caves and hidden mountain holdings could not bear so much volatility. There were too many places for bad things to hide.

Wars had broken out in the Dells; not proper wars with well-defined political adversaries, but bungling mountain turf wars, one neighbour against another, one party of cave raiders against some poor lord's holding, one alliance of Dellian lords against the king. Brocker had been in charge of quelling all uprisings, all across the Dells. He'd been a far better military leader than Nax had deserved, and for several years, Brocker had done an impressive job of it. But he and the army had been on their own; in King's City, Cansrel and Nax had been busy, plowing their way through women and drugs.

King Nax had fathered a set of twins with a palace laundry girl. Then Brocker had committed his mysterious offense, and Nax had retaliated. And on the day that Nax had destroyed his own military commander, he'd dealt a fatal blow to any hope of rule in his kingdom. The fighting had burgeoned out of control. Roen had borne Nax another dark-haired son named Brigan. The Dells had entered a desperate time.

Cansrel had quite enjoyed being surrounded by desperation. It had entertained him to smash things apart with his power, and for entertainment he'd been insatiate.

The few women Cansrel couldn't seduce with the power of his beauty or his mind, he raped. The few women Cansrel impregnated he killed. He didn't want monster babies growing into monster children and adults who might undermine his power.

Brocker had never been able to tell Fire why Cansrel hadn't killed Fire's mother. It was a mystery; but she knew better than to hope for a romantic explanation. Fire had been conceived in a time of depraved pandemonium. Cansrel had probably forgotten he'd taken Jessa to his bed, or never noticed the pregnancy – she was only a palace servant, after all. He'd probably not realised the pregnancy was his, until the child had been born with hair so astonishing that Jessa had named her Fire.

Why had Cansrel allowed Fire to live? Fire didn't know the answer to that, either. Curious, he'd gone to see her, probably intending to smother her. But then, looking into her face, listening to the noises she made, touching her skin – absorbing her tiny, intangible, perfect monsterness – he'd decided, for some reason, that here was a thing he didn't want to smash.

While she was still a baby, Cansrel took her away from her mother. A human monster had too many enemies, and he wanted her to grow up in a secluded place far from King's City where she would be safe. He brought her to his own estate in the northern Dells, a holding he rarely inhabited. He left her with his dumbfounded steward, Donal, and a scattering of cooks and maids. "Raise her," he said.

The rest Fire remembered. Her neighbour Brocker took an interest in the orphan monster and saw to her education in history and writing and mathematics. When she showed interest in music, he found her a teacher. Archer became Fire's playmate, eventually her trusted friend. Aliss died of a lingering sickness that had set in after Archer's birth. Fire learned from the reports Brocker received that Jessa had died as well. Cansrel visited often.

His visits were confusing, because they reminded her that she had two fathers, two who never entered each other's presence if they could help it, never conversed beyond what civility demanded, and never agreed.

One was quiet and gruff and plain in a chair with big wheels. "Child," he'd say to her gently, "just as we respect you by guarding our minds from you and behaving decently to you, so must you respect your friends by never using your powers deliberately against us. Does that make sense to you? Do you understand? I don't want you to do a thing unless you understand it."

Her other father was luminous and brilliant and, in those earlier years, happy almost all of the time. He kissed her and swirled her around and carried her upstairs to bed, his body hot and electric, his hair like warm satin when she touched it. "What has Brocker been teaching you?" he'd ask in a voice smooth as chocolate. "Have you been practicing using the power of your mind against the servants? The neighbours? The horses and the dogs? It's right that you should do so, Fire. It's right and it's your right, because you're my beautiful child, and beauty has rights that plainness never will."

Fire knew which one of the two was her true father. He was the one she called 'Father' instead of 'Brocker', and he was the one she loved the more desperately, because he was always either just arriving or just leaving, and because in their pockets of time together she stopped feeling like nature's freak. The people who despised her or loved her to excess had precisely the same feelings for Cansrel, though their behaviour towards him was different. The food her own cooks laughed at her for craving was the same food Cansrel craved, and when Cansrel was home, the cooks stopped laughing. Cansrel could sit with Fire and do something no one else could: give her lessons to improve the skill of her mind. They could communicate without saying a word, they could touch each other from opposite ends of the house. Fire's true father was like her – was, in fact, the only person in the world like her.

He always asked the same question when he first arrived: "My darling monster girl! Was anyone mean to you while I was gone?"

Mean? Children threw stones at her in the road. She was tripped sometimes, slapped, taunted. People who liked her hugged her, but they hugged her too hard and were too free with their hands.

And still, Fire learned very young to answer no to his question – to lie, and to guard her mind from him so he wouldn't know she was lying. This was the beginning of another of her confusions, that she would want his visits so much but fall immediately to lying once he came.

When she was four she had a dog she'd chosen from a litter born in Brocker's stables. She chose him, and Brocker let her have him, because the dog had three functional legs and one that dragged, and would never be any use as a worker. He was inky grey and had bright eyes. Fire called him Twy, which was short for Twilight.

Twy was a happy, slightly brainless fellow with no idea he was missing something other dogs had. He was excitable, he jumped around a lot, and had a tendency on occasion to nip his favourite people. And nothing worked him into a greater frenzy of excitement, anxiety, joy, and terror than the presence of Cansrel.

One day in the garden Cansrel burst upon Fire and Twy unexpectedly. In confusion, Twy leapt against Fire and bit her more than nipped her, so hard that she cried out.

Cansrel ran to her, dropped to his knees, and took her into his arms, letting her fingers bleed all over his shirt. "Fire! Are you all right?" She clung to him, because for just a moment Twy had scared her. But then, as her own mind cleared, she saw and felt Twy throwing himself against a pitch of sharp stone, over and over.

"Stop, Father! Stop it!"

Cansrel pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on the dog. Fire shrieked and grabbed at him. "Don't hurt him, Father, please! Can't you feel that he didn't mean it?"

She scrabbled at Cansrel's mind but he was too strong for her. Hanging onto his trousers, punching him with her small fists, she burst into tears.

At that Cansrel stopped, shoved his knife back into his belt, and stood there, hands on hips, seething. Twy limped away, whimpering, his tail between his legs. And then Cansrel seemed to change, dropping down to Fire again, hugging her and kissing her and murmuring until she stopped crying. He cleaned her fingers and bandaged them. He sat her down for a lesson on the control of animal minds. When finally he let her go she ran to find Twy, who'd made his way to her room and was huddled, bewildered and ashamed, in a corner. She took him into her lap. She practiced soothing his mind, so that next time she'd be able to protect him.

The following morning she woke to silence, rather than the usual sound of Twy stumping around outside her door. All day long she looked for him on her own grounds and Brocker's, but she couldn't find him. He'd disappeared. Cansrel said, with smooth sympathy, "I suppose he's run away. Dogs do that, you know. Poor darling."

And so Fire learned to lie to her father when he asked if anyone had hurt her.

As the years passed Cansrel's visits became less frequent but lasted longer, for the roads were unsafe. Sometimes, appearing at her door after months away, he brought women with him, or the traders who dealt his animals and drugs, or new monsters for his cages. Sometimes he spent his entire visit strung out on the poison of some plant; or, completely sober, he had strange, arbitrary, gloomy fits of temper, which he took out on everyone but Fire. Other times he was as lucid and lovely as the high notes Fire played on her flute. She dreaded his arrivals, his brassy, gorgeous, dissolute invasions of her quiet life. And after every one of his departures she was so lonesome that music was the only thing to comfort her, and she threw herself headlong into her lessons, never even minding the moments when her teacher was hateful, or resentful of her growing skill.

Brocker never spared her the truth about Cansrel.

I don't want to believe you, she'd think to him after he'd told her another tale of something Cansrel had done. But I know it's true, because Cansrel himself tells me the stories, and he is never ashamed. He means them as lessons to guide my own behaviour. It worries him that I don't use my power as a weapon.

"Does he not understand how different you are from him?" Brocker would ask. "Does he not see that you're built from a different mould entirely?"

Fire couldn't describe the loneliness she felt when Brocker talked that way. How she wished at times that her quiet, plain, and good neighbour had been her true father. She wished to be like Brocker, built from his mould. But she knew what she was and what she was capable of. Even after she'd done away with mirrors, she saw it in other people's eyes, and she knew how easy it would be to make her own miserable life just a little bit more pleasant, the way Cansrel did all the time. She never told anyone, even Archer, how much the temptation of it shamed her.

When she was thirteen the drugs killed Nax, and a twenty-three-year-old Nash became king of a kingdom in shambles. Cansrel's fits of fury became even more frequent. So did his periods of melancholy.

When she was fifteen Cansrel opened the door of the cage that held back his midnight blue leopard monster, and departed from Fire for the last time.

Chapter Three

Fire didn't realise she'd fallen asleep in Lord Brocker's library until she awoke and found herself there. It was Brocker's monster kitten that woke her, swinging from the hem of her dress like a man on the end of a rope. She blinked, adjusting her eyes to the grainy light, absorbing the baby monster's consciousness. It was still raining. No one else was in the room. She massaged the shoulder of her injured arm and stretched in her chair, stiff and achy but feeling better rested.

The kitten climbed his way up her skirts, sank his claws into her knee, and peered at her, hanging. He knew what she was, for her headscarf had slipped back a finger width. The monsters appraised each other. He was bright green with gold feet, this kitten, and his daft little mind was reaching for hers.

Of course, no animal monster could control Fire's mind, but this never stopped some of the more dim varieties from trying. He was too small and silly to think of eating her, but he would want to play, nibble her fingers, lick some blood, and Fire could do without the stings from a monster cat game. She lifted him into her lap and scratched him behind the ears and murmured nonsense about how strong and grand and intelligent he was. For good measure, she sent him a blip of mental sleepiness. He turned a circle in her lap and plopped himself down.

Housecat monsters were prized for keeping down the monster mouse population, and the regular mouse population too. This baby would grow big and fat, live a long, satisfied life, and probably father scores of monster kittens.

Human monsters, on the other hand, tended not to live long. Too many predators, too many enemies. It was for the best that Fire was the only one remaining; and she had decided long ago, even before she'd taken Archer into her bed, that she would be the last. No more Cansrels.

She sensed Archer and Brocker in the hallway outside the library door, and then she heard their voices. Sharp, agitated. One of Archer's moods – or had something new happened while she was sleeping? She touched their minds to let them know she was awake.

A moment later Archer pushed the library door open and held it wide for his father. They came in together, talking, Archer jabbing the air angrily with his bow. "Curse Trilling's guard for trying to take the man alone."

"Perhaps he had no choice," Brocker said.

"Trilling's men are too hasty."

Brocker brightened with amusement. "Interesting accusation, boy, coming from you."

"I'm hasty with my tongue, Father, not my sword." Archer glanced at Fire and her sleeping kitten. "Love. How do you feel?"

"Better."

"Our neighbour Trilling. Do you trust him?"

Trilling was one of the less foolish men Fire dealt with on a regular basis. His wife had employed Fire not only to tutor her boys in music but to teach them how to protect their minds against monster power.

"He's never given me reason to distrust him," she said. "What's happened?"

"He's found two dead men in his forest," Archer said. "One is his own guard, and I regret to say that the other is another stranger. Each with knife wounds and bruises, as if they'd been fighting each other, but what killed them both were arrows. Trilling's guard was shot from a distance in the back. The stranger was shot in the head at close range. Both arrows made of the same white wood as the bolt that killed your poacher."

Fire's mind raced to make sense of it. "The archer came upon them fighting, shot Trilling's guard from far away, then ran up to the stranger and executed him."

Lord Brocker cleared his throat. "Possibly a rather personal execution. Assuming the archer and the stranger were companions, that is, and it does seem likely that all these violent strangers in our woods have something to do with each other, doesn't it? The stranger from today had grievous knife injuries to his legs that might not have killed him, but would certainly have made it difficult for the archer to get him away once Trilling's guard was dead. I wonder if the archer shot Trilling's guard to protect his companion, then realised his companion was too injured to save, and decided to dispose of him, too?"

Fire raised her eyebrows at that, considering, and petted the monster cat absently. If the archer, the poacher, and this new dead stranger had, indeed, been working together, then the archer's responsibility seemed to be clean-up, so that no one was left behind to answer questions about why they were there in the first place. And the archer was good at his job.

Archer stared at the floor, tapping the end of his bow against the hard wood. Thinking. "I'm going to Queen Roen's fortress," he said.

Fire glanced at him sharply. "Why?"

"I need to beg more soldiers of her, and I want the information of her spies. She might have thoughts about whether any of these strangers have anything to do with Mydogg or Gentian. I want to know what's going on in my forest, Fire, and I want this archer."

"I'm going with you," Fire said.

"No," Archer said flatly.

"I am."

"No. You can't defend yourself. You can't even ride."

"It's only a day's journey. Wait a week. Let me rest, and then I'll go with you."

Archer held up a hand and turned away from her. "You're wasting your breath. Why would I ever allow such a thing?"

Because Roen is always unaccountably kind to me when I visit her northern fortress, Fire wanted to say. Because Roen knew my mother. Because Roen is a strong-minded woman, and there's something consoling in the regard of a woman. Roen never desires me, or if she ever does, it's not the same.

"Because," she said out loud, "Roen and her spies will have questions for me about what happened when the poacher shot me, and what little I managed to sense from his mind. And because," she added, as Archer moved to object, "you are neither my husband nor my father; I am a woman of seventeen, I have my own horses and my own money, and I decide for myself where I go and when. This is not yours to forbid."

Archer slammed the end of his bow against the floor, but Lord Brocker was chuckling. "Don't argue with her, boy. If it's information you're after, you're a fool not to take the monster at your disposal."

"The roads are dangerous," Archer said, practically spitting.

"It's dangerous here," Brocker retorted. "Isn't she safest with your bow to defend her?"

"She's safest inside, in a room with the door closed and locked."

Brocker turned his chair toward the exit. "She has precious few friends, Archer. It would be cruel for you to rush off to Roen and leave her behind."

Fire found that she was holding the kitten close, cradling him against her breast, as if she were shielding him from something. From the way it felt to have her movements, her feelings, even, debated by two prickly men. She had the sudden mad wish that this little green-haired creature in her arms were her own baby, to hold and adore and to deliver her from people who did not understand her. Foolish, she thought to herself furiously. Don't even think it. What does the world need with another mind-stealing baby?

Lord Brocker grasped Archer's hand and looked into his eyes, steadying his son, calming him. Then Brocker rolled to the exit and closed the door on their quarrel.

Archer watched Fire, his face uncertain. And Fire sighed, finally forgiving her stubborn friend and the stubborn father who'd adopted him. Their arguments, however they squashed her, were drawn from the wells of two very large hearts.

She dropped the kitten to the floor and stood, taking Archer's hand as his father had done. Archer looked down at their joined hands soberly. He brought her fingers to his mouth, kissed her knuckles, and made a show of inspecting her hand, as if he'd never seen it before.

"I'll pack my things," Fire said. "Just tell me when we're leaving."

She stretched onto her toes to kiss his cheek, but he intercepted her and began to kiss her mouth, gently. She let him, for just a moment. Then she extricated herself and left the room.

Chapter Four

Fire's horse was named Small, and he was another of Cansrel's gifts. She had chosen him over all the other horses because his coat was dun and drab and because of the quiet way he'd followed her back and forth, the pasture fence between them, the day she'd gone to one of Cutter's shows to choose.

The other horses had either ignored her or become jumpy and agitated around her, pushing against each other and snapping. Small had kept on the outside of the bunch of them, where he was safe from their jostling. He'd trotted along beside Fire, stopping when she stopped, blinking at her hopefully; and whenever she'd walked away from the fence he had stood waiting for her until she came back.

"Small, his name is," Cutter had said, "because his brain's the size of a pea. Can't teach him anything. He's no beauty, either."

Cutter was Cansrel's horse dealer and his favourite monster smuggler. He lived in the western Great Greys and, once a year, carted his merchandise all over the kingdom in large caravans, showing his wares and selling them. Fire did not like him. He was not kind to his animals. And his mouth was wide and loose and his eyes were always settling on her in a way that felt proprietary and disgusting, a way that made her want to curl up into a ball to cover herself.

He was also wrong about Small. Fire knew the look of stupid eyes and the feel of a fatuous mind, in animals and in men, and she had sensed none of this with Small. What she had sensed was the way the gelding trembled and balked whenever Cutter came near, and the way the trembling stopped when Fire touched him, and whispered her greetings. Fire was used to being wanted for her beauty, but she was not used to being needed for her gentleness.

When Cutter and Cansrel had walked away for a moment, Small had strained his neck over the fence and rested his chin on her shoulder. She'd scratched him behind the ears, and he'd made small blissful noises and breathed spit onto her hair. She had laughed, and a door in her heart had opened. Apparently there was such a thing as love at first sight; or love at first spit, anyway.

Cutter had told her she was daft, and Cansrel had tried to talk her into a stunning black mare that suited her own flamboyant beauty. But it was Small she'd wanted, and Small that Cutter had delivered three days later. Shaking, terrified, because Cutter in his inhumanity had stuck the horse into a wagon along with a mountain lion monster Cansrel had purchased, with nothing but what amounted to a shaky arrangement of wooden slats separating them. Small had come out of the wagon rearing and screaming, and Cutter had stung him with his whip and called him a coward.

Fire had run to the horse, choked with indignation, and put all the passionate calm feeling she could into soothing his mind; and she'd told Cutter furiously, in the kind of words she never used, just what she thought of his way with his goods.

Cutter had laughed and told her she was doubly pleasing when she was angry – which had, of course, been a grave mistake on his part, for anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have known better than to treat Lady Fire with disrespect in the very presence of her father. Fire had pulled Small quickly to the side, because she'd known what was coming. First Cansrel had caused Cutter to grovel, and apologise, and weep. Then he'd caused him to believe himself to be in agonising pain from imaginary injuries. Finally he'd switched to the real thing, kicking Cutter calmly in the groin, repeatedly, until Cansrel was satisfied he understood.

Small, in the meantime, had gone quiet at Fire's first touch, and had done everything, from that first moment, that she had ever asked.

Today as she stood at Small's side, dressed warmly against the dawn, Archer came to her and offered his hand. She shook her head and grabbed the pommel one-handed. She pulled herself up, catching her breath against the pain.

She'd had only seven days of rest, and her arm, uncomfortable now, would be aching by the end of this ride. But she was determined not to be treated like an invalid. She sent a swelling of serenity to Small, a gentle plea for him to ride smoothly for her today. It was another reason Small and she were well-suited to each other. He had a warm, receptive mind.

"Give my regards to the lady queen," Lord Brocker said from his chair in the middle of the footpath. "Tell her, if the day ever comes when she has a moment of peace, to come visit an old friend."

"We shall," Archer said, pulling on his gloves. He reached behind his head to touch the fletchings of the arrows on his back, as he always did before mounting his horse – as if he had ever once in his life forgotten his quiver – and then swung himself into his own saddle. He waved the guards forward, and Fire behind them. He fell into place behind Fire, and they were off.

They rode with eight soldiers. It was more than Archer would have taken had he gone alone, but not many more. No one in the Dells travelled with fewer than six others, unless he was desperate or suicidal or had some perverse reason for wanting to be attacked by footpads. And the disadvantage of Fire's presence, as an injured rider and a popular target, was nearly negated by her ability to sense both the proximity and the attitude of the minds of approaching strangers.

Away from home, Fire did not have the luxury of avoiding the use of her mental power. Generally, minds did not draw her attention equally unless she was looking for them. A mind's palpability depended on its strength, its purpose, its familiarity, nearness, openness, awareness of her presence, and a host of other factors. On this journey she must not allow anyone to slip her notice; she would search the surroundings constantly and, if she could, take hold of every mind she encountered until she was sure of its intentions. She would hide her own mind with extra care from the recognition of monster predators. The roads were too dangerous otherwise, for everyone.

Queen Roen's fortress was a long day's ride away. The guards set a brisk pace, skirting the edges of the town, close enough to hear roosters crowing but far enough not to be seen. The best way for a traveller to get himself robbed or murdered was to make the fact of his travel public.

There were tunnels under the mountains that would have taken them faster to Roen, but these also they planned to avoid. At least in the north, the steep paths above ground were safer than the unknown that lurked in the dark.

Of course Fire's hair was tightly covered, and her riding clothes plain. Still, she hoped they would encounter no one. Predator monsters tended to overlook the charms of a face and a body if they saw no interesting hair, but this was not the way of men. If she was seen, she'd be scrutinised. Once scrutinised, she'd be recognised, and the eyes of strangers were never comfortable.

The above-ground route to the fortress of Queen Roen was a high and treeless one, for mountains called the Little Greys divided the land of Fire and her neighbours from the land of the lady queen. 'Little' because they were passable by foot and because they were more easily inhabitable than the Great Greys that formed the Dells' western and southern border with the unknown land.

Hamlets balanced on top of cliffs in the Little Greys or crouched in the valleys near tunnel openings – rough-hewn, cold, colourless, and stark. Fire had watched these distant hamlets and wondered about them every time she'd travelled to Roen. Today she saw that one of them was missing.

"There used to be a village on that cliff," she said, pointing. And then she made sense of it. She saw the broken rock foundations of the old buildings sticking out of the snow, and at the foot of the cliff on which the village had stood, a pile of rocks, wood, and rubble. And crawling all over the pile, monster wolves, and circling above it, monster raptors.

A clever new trick for the looters, to throw an entire village off a mountain, stone by stone. Archer swung down from his horse, his jaw hard. "Fire. Are there any living human minds in that pile?"

Many living minds, but none of them human. A good many rats, monster and ordinary. Fire shook her head.

Archer did the shooting, because they hadn't any arrows to waste. First he shot the raptors. Then he wound a rag around an arrow, and set the rag on fire, and shot it into the pile of monsters and decay. He shot flaming arrow after flaming arrow into the pile until it was fully alight.

Flame was the way, in the Dells, to send the bodies of the dead where their souls had gone, into nothingness. To respect that all things ended, except the world.

The party moved on quickly, because on the wind the stench was terrible.

They were more than halfway to their destination when they saw a sight to bolster their spirits: the King's Army, bursting from a hole in the base of a cliff far below them, and thundering across a plain of flat rock. They stopped on their high path to watch. Archer pointed to the front of the charge.

"King Nash is with them," he said. "See him? The tall man, on the roan, near the standard-bearer. And that's his brother beside him, the commander, Prince Brigan, with the longbow in his hand, on the black mare. In brown, see him? Dells, isn't it a magnificent sight?"

Fire had never seen Nax's sons before, and she had certainly never beheld such a large division of the King's Army. There were thousands of them – five thousand in this branch, Archer said when she asked – some with mail flashing, others in the army's dark grey uniform, horses strong and fast, flowing across the land like a river. The one with the longbow in his hand, the prince and commander, moved to the right side and fell back; spoke to a man or two in the middle of the column; surged forward again to the front. They were so far away that they were small as mice, but she could hear the thud of the hooves of some five thousand horses, and feel the enormous presence of some ten thousand consciousnesses. And she could see the colours of the flag hoisted by the standard-bearer who stayed close to the prince's side wherever he went: a wooded valley, grey and green, with a blood red sun in an orange sky.

Prince Brigan turned in his saddle suddenly then, his eyes on some point in the clouds above him, and in that same moment Fire sensed the raptors. Brigan wheeled his black mare around and raised his hand in a signal that caused a number of the party to break off and pull arrows from their backs. Three raptors, two shades of fuchsia and violet and one apple-green, circled high over the river of soldiers, attracted by the vibrations, or by the smell of the horses.

Archer and his guards also readied arrows. Fire gripped her reins tightly with one hand, calmed Small, and tried to decide whether to put her arm through the agony of readying her own bow.

It wasn't necessary. The prince's men were efficient, and used only four arrows to bring down the fuchsia birds. The green was smarter; it circled irregularly, changing height and speed, dropping lower and lower and always closer to the column of riders. The arrow that finally caught it was Archer's, a fast shot soaring downward and over the heads of the galloping army.

The bird monster fell and crashed onto the plain. The prince turned his horse and eyed the mountain paths, looking for the source of the arrow, his own arrow still notched in case he didn't like the archer he found. When he spotted Archer and the guards, he lowered his bow and raised an arm in greeting. Then he pointed to the carcass of the green bird on the plain and pointed back to Archer. Fire understood the gesture: Archer's kill was Archer's meat.

Archer gestured back: you take it. Brigan raised both arms in thanks, and his soldiers slung the body of the monster onto the back of a riderless horse. She saw a number of riderless horses, now that she was looking for them, carrying bags and supplies and the bodies of other game, some of it monstrous. She knew that outside King's City the King's Army housed itself and fed itself. She supposed it must take a bounty to feed so many hungry men.

She corrected herself. So many hungry men and women. Any person who could ride, fight, and hunt was welcome to join today's protectorate of the kingdom, and King Nash didn't require that person to be a man. Or, more particularly, Prince Brigan didn't. It was called the King's Army, but really it was Brigan's. People said that at twenty-seven Nash was kingly, but that when it came to bashing heads the younger brother was the one with the touch.

Far in the distance, the river of riders began to disappear into a crack at the base of another cliff. "The tunnels would have made for safe passage today, after all," Archer said, "in the wake of that lot. I wish I'd known they were so near. Last I heard, the king was in his palace in King's City and the prince was in the far north, looking for Pikkian trouble."

On the plain below, the prince turned his mare around to join the tail end of his fighting force; but first his eyes rested on Fire's form. He could not have appreciated her features from that distance, and with the light of the sun glaring into his face. He could not have ascertained much more than that she was Archer's friend, dressed like a boy for riding but female, with covered hair. Still, Fire's face burned. He knew who she was, she was sure of it. His backward glare as he swung away was evidence, and so was his ferocity as he spurred his horse forward. So was his mind, closed to her, and cold.

This was why she had avoided meeting Nash and Brigan before this. It was only natural that the sons of King Nax should despise her. She burned hot with the shame of her father's legacy.

Chapter Five

Fire supposed it was too much to hope that the king and the warrior would pass so close to their mother's holding without stopping. The final portion of their journey took them across rocky hills crowded with the king's resting soldiers.

The soldiers had not made camp, but they were napping, cooking meat before fires, playing cards. The sun was low. She couldn't remember in her tired mind whether armies ever travelled through darkness. She hoped this army was not staying the night on these hills.

Archer and his guards formed a wall around her as they passed the soldiers, Archer so close on her injured side that her left leg brushed against his right. Fire kept her face down, but still she felt the eyes of soldiers on her body. She was so exhausted, so impossibly sore, but she held her consciousness alert, flicking through the minds around her, looking for trouble. Looking also for the king and his brother, and wishing desperately not to find them.

There were women among the soldiers, but not many. She heard the occasional low whistle, the occasional grunt. Epithets, too, and more than one fight broke out between men as she passed, but no one threatened her.

And then as they neared the ramp to Roen's drawbridge she stirred and looked up, and was thankful, suddenly, for the presence of the soldiers. She knew that south of the Little Greys raptor monsters moved sometimes in swarms, found areas of dense population and circled there, waiting, but she had never seen anything like it before. There must have been two hundred raptors, flashing bright colours against an orange and pink sky, high up where only the luckiest of arrows could reach them. Their screeches made her cold. Her hand flew to the edges of her headscarf to check for stray hairs, for she knew that if the raptors discovered what she was, they'd cease even to notice the human army. All two hundred would turn on her.

"You're all right, love," Archer muttered beside her. "Quickly now. We're almost inside."

Inside the roofed courtyard of Queen Roen's fortress, Archer helped her as she fell more than stepped from Small's back. She balanced herself between her horse and her friend, and caught her breath. "You're safe now," Archer said, his arm around her, bracing her, "and there'll be time to rest before dinner."

Fire nodded vaguely. "He needs a gentle hand," she managed to say to the man who took Small's reins.

She barely noticed the girl who showed her to her room. Archer was there; he stationed his men at her doorway, and before he took his leave he warned the girl to take care with her arm.

Then Archer was gone. The girl sat Fire on the bed. She helped her out of her clothes and untied her headscarf, and Fire collapsed onto the pillows. And if the girl stared wide-eyed at Fire, touching her bright hair wonderingly, Fire didn't care. Already she was asleep.

When she woke her room flickered with candles. A small woman in a brown dress was lighting them. Fire recognised Roen's mind, quick and warm. Then the woman turned to face her, and Fire recognised Roen's dark eyes, and her beautifully cut mouth, and the white streak that grew at the front and centre of her long black hair.

Roen set her candle down and sat on the edge of Fire's bed. She smiled at Fire's groggy expression. "Well met, Lady Fire."

"Well met, Lady Queen."

"I spoke with Archer," Roen said. "How is your arm? Are you hungry? Let's have dinner now, before my sons arrive."

Her sons. "Haven't they already arrived?"

"They're still outside with the Fourth Branch. Brigan's passing command of the Fourth to one of his captains and sending them east tonight, and I understand it involves endless preparations. The Third comes here in a day or two. Brigan will ride with them to King's City and leave Nash in his palace, and then he'll take them south."

King's City. It was on the green land where the Winged River met the Winter Sea. Above the waters rose the king's palace, made of brilliant black stone. People said the city was beautiful, a place of art, and medicine, and science, but Fire hadn't seen it since her infancy. She had no memory of it.

She shook herself. She was daydreaming. "Ride with them," she said, her mind still fuzzy with sleep. "Them?"

"Brigan spends equal time with each division of the army," Roen said. She patted Fire's lap. "Come, dear. Have dinner with me. I want to hear about life on the other side of the Little Greys and our chance is now." She stood and whisked her candle off the table. "I'll send someone in to help you."

Roen swept through the door, slapping it shut behind her. Fire swung her legs out from under the covers and groaned. She fantasised about a day when she would open her eyes from sleep to find that she could move her arm without this never-ending pain.

Fire and Archer ate dinner with Roen at a small table in her sitting room. Roen's fortress had been her home years ago, before she'd ever married the king of the kingdom, and was her home again now that Nax was dead. It was a modest castle with high walls surrounding it, enormous stables, lookout towers, and courtyards connecting the business quarters with the living quarters and the sleeping quarters. The castle was large enough that in the case of a siege, people from the surrounding towns for quite some distance could fit inside its walls. Roen ran the place with a steady hand, and from it dispatched assistance to those northern lords and ladies who had demonstrated a desire for peace. Guards, food, weapons, spies; whatever was needed, Roen supplied it.

"While you were resting I climbed the outer wall," Archer told Fire, "and waited for raptor monsters to drop low enough to shoot. I only killed two. Do you feel them? I can feel their hunger for us from this very room."

"Vicious brutes," Roen said. "They'll stay up high until the army moves out. Then they'll drop down again and wait for people to emerge from the gatehouse. They're smarter in swarms, the raptors, and more beautiful, of course, and their mental draw is stronger. They're not having a beneficial effect on the moods of my people, I'll tell you that. I've two or three servants who need to be watched or they'll walk right out and offer themselves to be eaten. It's been two days now. I was so relieved when the Fourth showed up today; it's the first time in two days I've been able to send anyone outside the walls. We mustn't let the beasts spot you, my dear. Have some soup."

Fire was grateful for the soup the servant girl spooned into her bowl, because it was food she didn't have to cut. She rested her left hand in her lap and calculated in her mind. A swarm of raptor monsters was impatient. This one would hang around for a week at most, and then it would move on; but while it lingered, she and Archer would be stuck in place. Unless they rode out in a day or two, when the next river of soldiers arrived to pick up their commander and their king.

She momentarily lost her appetite.

"On top of the hassle of being stuck inside," Roen said, "I hate closing the roofs. Our skies are dark enough without them. With them it's plain depressing."

Most of the year Roen's courtyards and her passage to the stables were open to the sky; but torrential rains fell most autumns, and the raptor swarms arrived unpredictably. And so the fortress had retractable canvas roofs on hinged wooden frames that folded down across the open spaces and clicked, one frame at a time, into place, providing protection, but cutting off light from all but the outside windows.

"My father always speaks of the glass roofs of the king's palace as an extravagance," Archer said, "but I've spent enough time under roofs like yours to appreciate them."

Roen smiled into her soup. "Once about every three years, Nax did have a good idea." She changed the subject abruptly. "This visit will be a bit of a balancing act. Perhaps tomorrow we can sit down with my people to discuss the events on your lands. After the Third comes and goes, we'll have more time."

She was avoiding specific mention of the thing that was on all their minds. Archer spoke plainly. "Will the king or the prince be a danger to Fire?"

Roen didn't pretend not to understand. "I will speak to Nash and Brigan, and I'll introduce her to them myself."

Archer was not soothed. "Will they be a danger to her?"

Roen regarded him for a moment in silence, and then turned her eyes to Fire. Fire saw sympathy there, possibly even apology. "I know my sons," she said, "and I know Fire. Brigan will not like her, and Nash will like her overly. But neither of them will be too much for her to handle."

Archer caught his breath and clapped his fork onto the table. He sat back, his mouth tight. Fire knew that the presence of a lady queen was the only reason he wasn't saying what she could read in his eyes: she should not have come.

A small determination flamed inside her breast. She decided to adopt Roen's attitude.

Neither the king nor the commander would be too much for her.

Of course, circumstances don't always align themselves with human intention, and Roen could not be everywhere at once. Fire was crossing the main courtyard with Archer after dinner, on her way to the sleeping quarters, when it happened. In the same instant that she sensed minds approaching, the gates flew open. Two men on horses clattered inside, overwhelming the space with their noise and their presence, backlit by a bonfire blazing outside the gates. Archer and everyone else in the courtyard dropped to one knee, except for Fire, who stood paralysed, shocked. The man on the first horse looked like every painting she'd ever seen of King Nax, and the man on the second horse was her father.

Her mind was on fire. Cansrel. In the light of the flames his hair flashed silver and blue, his eyes blue and beautiful. She stared into those eyes and saw them staring back at her with hatred, anger, because it was Cansrel come back from death and there was no hiding herself from him.

"Kneel," Archer said beside her, but it was unnecessary, for she fell to both knees.

And then the gates swung shut. The white blaze of the bonfire receded, and all was yellow in the light of the courtyard torches. And still the man on the horse stared at her with hatred, but as the shadows settled it was no longer Cansrel's hatred. His hair was dark, his eyes were pale, and she saw that this was nothing but an ordinary man.

She was shaking, cold on the ground. And now of course she recognised his black mare, and his handsome brother, and his handsome brother's roan. Not Nax and Cansrel, but Nash and Brigan. They swung down from their saddles and stood arguing beside their horses. Shaking as she was, their words came to her slowly. Brigan said something about throwing someone to the raptors. Nash said that he was king, and it was his decision, and he wasn't throwing a woman who looked like that to any raptors.

Archer was crouched over Fire, repeating her name, his hand gripping her face. He said something firmly to the arguing brothers. He lifted Fire into his arms and carried her out of the courtyard.

This was something fire knew about herself: her mind made mistakes sometimes, but the real traitor was her body.

Archer lowered her onto her bed and sat beside her. He took her cold hands and rubbed them. Slowly, her shivering subsided.

She heard the echo of his voice in her mind. Gradually she pieced together the thing Archer had said to the king and the prince before picking her up and carrying her away: "If you're going to throw her to the raptors you'll have to throw me as well."

She caught his hands, and held them.

"What happened to you out there?" he asked quietly.

What had happened to her?

She looked into his eyes, which were taut with worry.

She would explain it to him, later. Right now she was stuck on something she wanted to express to him, something she wanted urgently from her living friend. She pulled on his hands.

Archer always caught on fast. He bent his face to hers and kissed her. When Fire reached to unfasten his shirt, he stopped her fingers. He told her to rest her arm, and let him do the work.

She surrendered to his generosity.

Afterwards they had a whispered conversation.

"When he came into the courtyard," she told him, lying on her side, facing him, "I thought he was my father come back to life."

Shock broke across his face, and then understanding. He brushed her hair with his fingers. "Oh, Fire. No wonder. But Nash is nothing like Cansrel."

"Not Nash. Brigan."

"Brigan even less."

"It was the light," she said. "And the hatred in his eyes."

He touched her face and her shoulder gently, careful always of her bandaged arm. He kissed her. "Cansrel is dead. He can't hurt you."

She choked on the words; she couldn't say them out loud. She said them into his mind. He was my own father.

His arm came around her and held her tight. She closed her eyes and buried her thoughts so that all there was was the smell and the touch of Archer against her face and her breasts, her stomach, her body. Archer pushed her memories away.

"Stay here with me," he said sometime later, still holding her, sleepily. "You're not safe on your own."

And how odd that his body could understand her so well; that his heart could understand her so well when it came to the truth about Cansrel, but still the simplest concepts never penetrated. There was nothing he could have said more guaranteed to make her leave.

To be fair, she probably would have gone anyway.

Out of love for her friend she waited until he was asleep.

She didn't want trouble; she only wanted the stars, to tire her so that later she could sleep without dreams. She knew she would have to find her way to an outer window to see them. She decided to try the stables, because she was unlikely to run into any kings or princes there at this time of night. And at least if she found no sky-facing windows there, she would be with Small.

She covered her hair before she left, and wore dark clothing. She passed guards and servants, and of course some of them stared, but as always in this holding, no one bothered her. Roen saw to it that the people under her roofs learned how to guard their minds as best they could. Roen knew the value of it.

The roofed passageway to the stables was empty, and smelled comfortably of clean hay and horses. The stables were dark, lit by a single lantern at the near end. They were asleep, the horses, most of them, including her Small. He stood as he dozed, plain and quiet, leaning sideways, like a building about to topple. It might have worried her, except that he often slept like that, leaning one way or the other.

There was a window to the sky at the far end of the building, but when she went to it, she saw no stars. A cloudy night. She turned back down the long row of horses and stopped again before Small, smiling at his sleeping posture.

She eased the door open and sidled her way into his stall. She would sit with him for a while as he slept, and hum herself to tiredness. Even Archer couldn't object. No one would find her; curled up as she was against Small's doorway, no one who came into the stables would even see her. And if Small awoke, it would not surprise him to find his lady crooning at his feet. Small was accustomed to her night-time behaviour.

She settled herself down and breathed a song about a leaning horse.

Small nudged her awake, and she knew instantly that she was not alone. She heard a male voice, baritone, very quiet, very near.

"I fight these looters and smugglers because they oppose the king's rule. But what right to rule do we have, really?"

"You frighten me when you talk like this." Roen. Fire pushed herself against Small's door.

"What has the king done in thirty years to deserve allegiance?"

"Brigan – "

"I understand the motivations of some of my enemies better than I understand my own."

"Brigan, this is your fatigue speaking. Your brother is fair-minded, you know that, and with your influence he does good."

"He has some of Father's tendencies."

"Well, what will you do? Let the raiders and smugglers have their way? Leave the kingdom to Lord Mydogg and his thug of a sister? Or Lord Gentian? Preserving Nash's kingship is the best hope for the Dells. And if you break with him you'll start a civil war four ways. You, Nash, Mydogg, Gentian. I fear to think who would come out on top. Not you, with the allegiance of the King's Army split between yourself and your brother."

This was a conversation Fire should not be hearing, not under any circumstances, not in any world. She understood this now; but there was no helping it, for to reveal her presence would be disastrous. She didn't move, barely breathed. And listened hard despite herself, because doubt in the heart of the king's commander was an astonishing thing.

Mildly now, and with a tone of concession: "Mother, you go too far. I could never break with my brother, you know that. And you know I don't want the kingship."

"This again, and it's no comfort to me. If Nash is killed, you'll have to be king."

"The twins are older than I."

"You're being deliberately obtuse tonight. Garan is ill, Clara is female, and both of them are illegitimate. The Dells will not get through this time without a king who is kingly."

"I'm not kingly."

"Twenty-two years old, commanding the King's Army as well as Brocker did? Your soldiers would fall on their own swords for you. You are kingly."

"All right. But rocks, Mother, I hope I'll never be called king."

"You once hoped you'd never be a soldier."

"Don't remind me." His voice was tired. "My life is an apology for the life of my father."

A long silence. Fire sat unbreathing. A life that was an apology for the life of his father: it was a notion she could understand, beyond words and thought. She understood it the way she understood music.

Small stirred and poked his head out of his stall to examine the low-voiced visitors. "Just tell me you'll do your duty, Brigandell," Roen said, her use of Brigan's royal name deliberate.

A shift in his voice. He was laughing under his breath. "I've become such an impressive warrior that you think I run around the mountains sticking swords into people because I enjoy it."

"When you talk like this, you can't blame me for worrying."

"I'll do my duty, Mother, as I have done every day."

"You and Nash will make the Dells into something worth defending. You'll re-establish the order and the justice that Nax and Cansrel destroyed with their carelessness."

Suddenly, and with no humour in his voice: "I don't like this monster."

Roen's voice softened. "Nashdell is not Naxdell, and Fire is not her father."

"No, she's worse; she's female. She's a thing I can't see Nash resisting."

Firmly: "Brigan. Fire has no interest in Nash. She does not seduce men and ensnare them."

"I hope you're right, Mother, because I don't care how highly you think of her. If she's like Cansrel I'll snap her neck."

Fire pushed herself into the corner. She was accustomed to hatred. But still it was a thing that made her cold and tired every time. She was tired thinking of the defences she would have to build against this man.

And then above her, an incongruous thing. Brigan reached a hand to the muzzle of her horse. "Poor fellow," he said, stroking Small's nose. "We woke you. Go back to sleep."

"It's her horse," Roen said. "The horse of the monster you threaten."

"Ah well. You're a beauty," Brigan said to Small, his voice light. "And your owner is not your fault."

Small nuzzled the hand of his new friend. And when Roen and Brigan left, Fire was gripping her skirts in both fists, swallowing an infuriating fondness that she could not reconcile.

At least if he decided to hurt her, she could trust him not to hurt her horse.

Chapter Six

This long night was not over, for apparently no one in the royal family slept. Fire had just crossed the courtyard again and slipped into the corridors of the sleeping quarters when she met the prowling king, handsome and fierce in the light of the torches. His eyes glazed over when he saw her. She thought she smelled wine on his breath. When he came at her suddenly, flattened her against the wall, and tried to kiss her, she no longer had any doubt.

He had surprised her, but the wine addling his brains made her work easy. You don't want to kiss me.

Nash stopped trying to kiss her but continued to press himself against her, groping her breasts and her back. Hurting her arm. "I'm in love with you," he said, breathing sour air into her face. "I want to marry you."

You don't want to marry me. You don't even want to touch me. You want to release me.

Nash stepped back from her and she pushed herself away, gulping fresh air, smoothing her clothing. She turned to make her escape.

Then she swung back at him and did a thing she never did. Apologise to me, she thought to him fiercely. I've had enough of this. Apologise.

Instantly the king kneeled at her feet, gracious, gentlemanly, black eyes swimming with penitence. "Forgive me, Lady, for my insult to your person. Go safely to your bed."

She hurried away before anyone saw the absurd spectacle of the king on his knees before her. She was ashamed of herself. And newly anxious for the state of the Dells, now that she'd made the acquaintance of its king.

She was almost to her room when Brigan loomed out of the shadows, and this time Fire was at her wit's end.

She didn't even need to reach for his mind to know that it was closed to her control, a walled fortress with not a single crack. Against Brigan she had nothing but her small strength, and words.

He pushed her against the wall as Nash had done. He took both her wrists in one hand and yanked her arms above her head, so roughly that water sprang to her eyes from the pain of her injured arm. He crushed her with his body so she could not move. His face was a snarling mask of hatred.

"Show the slightest interest in befriending the king," he said, "and I will kill you."

His superior display of strength was humiliating, and he was hurting her more even than he knew. She had no breath for speech. How like your brother you are, she thought hotly into his face. Only less romantic.

His grip on her wrists tightened. "Lying monster-eater."

She gasped at the pain. You're a bit of a disappointment, aren't you? People talk about you as if you're something special, but there's nothing special about a man who pushes a defenceless woman around and calls her names. It's plain ordinary.

He bared his teeth. "I'm to believe that you're defenceless?"

I am against you.

"But not against this kingdom."

I don't stand in opposition to this kingdom. At least, she added, no more so than you, Brigandell.

He looked as if she'd slapped him. The snarl left his face and his eyes were weary suddenly, and confused. He dropped her wrists and stepped back a hair, enough that she could push herself away from him and from the wall, turn her back to him, and cradle her left arm with her right hand. She was shaking. The shoulder of her dress was sticky; he'd made her wound bleed. And he'd hurt her, and she was angry, more than ever before.

She didn't know where her breath came from, but she let her words loose as they came. "I can see that you studied the example of your father before deciding the man you wanted to become," she hissed at him. "The Dells are in fine hands, aren't they? You and your brother both – you can go to the raptors."

"Your father was the ruin of my father and of the Dells," he spat back. "My only regret is that your father didn't die on my sword. I despise him for killing himself and denying me the pleasure. I envy the monster that ripped out his throat."

At that she turned to face him. For the first time she looked at him, really looked at him. He breathed quickly, clenching and unclenching his fists. His eyes were clear and very light grey and flashed with something that went beyond anger, something desperate. He was little more than average in height and build. He had his mother's fine mouth, but besides that and those pale crystal eyes, he was not handsome. He stared at her, strung so tight he looked like he might snap, and suddenly to her he seemed young, and overburdened, and at the furthest edge of exhaustion.

"I didn't know you were wounded," he added, eyeing the blood on her dress; and confusing her, because he actually sounded sorry about it. She didn't want his apologies. She wanted to hate him, because he was hateful.

"You're inhuman. You do nothing but hurt people," she said, because it was the worst thing she could think of to say. "You're the monster, not I."

She turned and left him.

She went to Archer's room first, to clean the seeping blood and re-bandage her arm. Then she crept into her own room, where Archer still slept. She undressed and pulled on his shirt, which she found lying on the floor. He would like that she chose to wear it, and it would never occur to him that she only wanted to hide her wrists, blue with bruises that he must not see. She didn't have the energy for Archer's questions and his vengeful anger.

She rifled through her bags and found the herbs that prevented pregnancy. She swallowed them dry, tucked herself in beside Archer, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, coming awake was like drowning. She heard Archer making a great clatter in the room. She fought her way to consciousness and pushed herself up, and stopped herself from groaning at the old pain in her arm and the new pain in her wrists.

"You're beautiful in the morning," Archer said, stopping before her, kissing her nose. "You're impossibly sweet in my shirt."

That might be, but she felt like death. She would gladly make the trade; how blissful it would be to feel impossibly sweet, and look like death.

He was dressed, aside from his shirt, and clearly on his way out the door.

"What's the hurry?"

"A beacon fire is lit," he said.

Towns in the mountains lit beacon fires when they were under attack, to call on the aid of their neighbours. "Which town?"

"Grey Haven, to the north. Nash and Brigan ride out immediately, but they're sure to lose men to the raptor monsters before they get to the tunnels. I'll shoot from the wall, along with anyone else who can."

Like a dive into cold water, she was awake. "The Fourth has gone, then? How many soldiers do Nash and Brigan have?"

"My eight, and Roen has another forty to offer from the fortress. "

"Only forty!"

"She sent a good portion of her guard away with the Fourth," Archer said. "Soldiers from the Third are to replace them, but of course they're not here yet."

"But fifty men total to two hundred raptors? Are they mad?"

"The only other option is to ignore the call for help."

"You don't ride with them?"

"The commander believes my bow can do more damage from the wall."

The commander. She froze. "Was he here?"

Archer glanced at her sidelong. "Of course not. When his men couldn't find me, Roen came herself."

It didn't matter; already she'd forgotten it. Her mind spun with the other particular, the insanity of fifty men trying to pass through a swarm of two hundred raptor monsters. She climbed out of bed and searched for her clothes, went into her bathing room so that Archer wouldn't see her wrists as she changed. When she came out he was gone.

She covered her hair and attached her arm guard. She grabbed her bow and quiver and ran after him.

In desperate moments Archer was not above threats. In the stables, with men shouting around them and horses fidgeting, he told her that he would tie her to Small's door if he had to, to keep her off the wall.

It was bluster, and she ignored him and thought this through, step by step. She was a decent shot with a bow. Her arm was well enough to shoot as long as she could bear the pain. In the time it took the soldiers to thunder away into the tunnels she could kill two, maybe three of the monsters, and that was two or three fewer to tear into the men.

It only took one raptor to kill a man.

Some of these fifty men were going to die before they even reached whatever battle they faced at Grey Haven.

This was where panic set in and her mental reckoning fell apart. She wished they wouldn't go. She wished they wouldn't put themselves at this risk to save one mountain town. She hadn't understood before what people meant when they'd said the prince and the king were brave. Why did they have to be so brave?

She whirled around looking for the brothers. Nash was on his horse, fired up, impatient to get started, transformed from the drunken no-head of last night into a figure that at least gave the impression of kingliness. Brigan was on his feet, moving among the soldiers, encouraging them, exchanging a word with his mother. Calm, reassuring, even laughing at a joke from one of Archer's guards.

And then across the sea of clamouring armour and saddle leather he saw her, and the gladness dropped from him. His eyes went cold, his mouth hard, and he looked the way she remembered him.

The sight of her killed his joy.

Well. He was not the only person with the right to risk his life, and he was not the only person who was brave.

It all seemed to make sense in her mind as she turned to Archer, to assure him she didn't want to shoot raptors from the wall after all; and then she swung away to Small's stall to do something that had no logic whatsoever, except, perhaps hidden very deep.

She knew the entire enterprise would only take a few minutes. The raptors would dive as soon as they'd comprehended their own superior number. The greatest danger was to the men at the back of the line who would have to slow their pace as the horses entered the bottleneck of the nearest tunnel's entrance. The soldiers who made it into the tunnel would be safe. Raptors didn't like dark, cramped spaces, and they did not follow men into caves.

She understood from the talk she heard in the stables that Brigan had ordered the king to the front of the column and the best spear-men and swordsmen to the back, because in the moment of greatest crisis the raptors would be too close for bows. Brigan himself would bring up the rear.

The horses were filing out and gathering near the gates when she prepared Small, hooking her bow and a spear to the leather of his saddle. As she led him into the courtyard no one paid her much attention, partly because she monitored the minds around her and nudged them aside when they touched her. She led Small to the back of the courtyard, as far as she could get from the gates. She tried to express to Small how important this was, and how sorry she was, and how much she loved him. He dribbled against her neck.

Then Brigan gave the order. Servants swung the gates in and pulled the portcullis up, and the men burst into daylight. Fire pulled herself into her saddle and spurred Small forward behind them. The gates were closing again when she and Small galloped through, and rode alone, away from the soldiers, toward the empty rockiness east of Roen's holding.

The soldiers' focus was northward and up; they didn't see her. Some of the raptors did, and, curious, broke off from the surge dropping down onto the soldiers, few enough that she shot them from her saddle, clenching her teeth through the pain. The archers on the wall most certainly saw her. She knew it from the shock and panic Archer was sending at her. I'll be most likely to survive this if you stay on that wall and keep shooting, she thought to him fiercely, hoping it would be enough to keep him from coming out after her.

And now she was a good distance from the gates and the first soldiers had reached the tunnel, and she saw that a skirmish of monsters and men had begun at the back of the line. This was the time. She drew her brave horse up and turned him around. She yanked her scarf from her head. Her hair billowed down over her shoulders like a river of flame.

For an instant nothing happened, and she began to panic because it wasn't working. She dropped her mind's guard against their recognition. Still nothing. She reached out to grab at their attention.

Then one raptor high in the sky felt her, and then sighted her, and screamed a horrible sound, like metal screeching against metal. Fire knew what that sound meant, and so did the other raptors. Like a cloud of gnats they lifted from the soldiers. They shot into the sky, twirling desperately, searching for monster prey, finding it. The soldiers were forgotten. Every last raptor monster dove for her.

Now she had two jobs: to get herself and her horse back to the gates, if she could; and to stop the soldiers from doing something heroic and foolish when they saw what she'd done. She spurred Small forward. She slammed the thought at Brigan as hard as she could, not manipulation, which she knew would be futile – only a message. If you don't continue onward to Grey Haven this instant, I will have done this for nothing.

She knew he hesitated. She couldn't see him or sense his thoughts, but she could feel that his mind was still there, on his horse, not moving. She supposed she could manipulate his horse, if she had to.

Let me do this, she begged him. My life is mine to risk, as yours is yours.

His consciousness disappeared into the tunnel.

And now it was the speed of Fire and Small versus the swarm descending upon her from the north and from above. Under her, Small was desperate and wonderful. He had never flown so fast.

She bent herself low in her saddle. When the first raptor cut into her shoulder with its claws she threw her bow backwards at them; it was useless now, a stick of wood in her way. The quiver on her back might serve as a kind of armour. She took her spear and stuck it behind her, one more thing for the birds to have to work around. She clenched her knife in her hand and stabbed back whenever she felt a claw or a beak jabbing into her shoulder or her scalp. She didn't feel pain anymore. Only noise, that might be her own head screaming, and brightness, that was her hair and her blood, and wind that was Small's headlong speed. And arrows suddenly, flying very close past her head.

A claw caught her neck and yanked, pulled her high in her seat, and it occurred to her that she was about to die. But then an arrow struck the raptor that dragged at her, and more arrows followed it, and she looked ahead and saw the gates very near, cracked open, and Archer in the aperture, shooting faster than she'd known he could shoot.

And then he stepped aside and Small slammed through the crack, and behind her, monster bodies slammed against the closing doors. They screamed, scraped. And she left it to Small to figure out where to go and when to stop. And people were around her, and Roen was reaching for her reins, and Small was limping, she could tell; and she looked to his back and his rump and his legs and they were torn apart, sticky with blood. She cried out in distress at the sight of it. She vomited.

Someone grabbed her under the arms and pulled her out of her saddle. Archer, rigid and shaking, looking and feeling like he wanted to kill her. Then Archer went bright, and turned to black.

Chapter Seven

She woke to stinging pain, and to the sense of a hostile mind moving down the corridor outside her room. A stranger's mind. She tried to sit up, and gasped.

"You should rest," a woman said from a chair along the wall. Roen's healer.

Fire ignored the advice and pushed herself up gingerly. "My horse?"

"Your horse is in about the same shape you're in," the healer said. "He'll live."

"The soldiers? Did any of them die?"

"Every man made it into the tunnel alive," she said. "A good many monsters died."

Fire sat still, waiting for the pounding of her head to slow, so that she could get up and investigate the suspicious mind in the hallway. "How badly am I wounded?"

"You'll have scars on your back and your shoulders and under your hair for the rest of your life. But we have all the medicines here that they have in King's City. You'll heal cleanly, without infection."

"Can I walk?"

"I don't recommend it; but if you must, you can."

"I just need to check on something," she said, breathless from the effort of sitting. "Will you help me into my robe?" And then, noticing the skimpy sheath she wore: "Did Lord Archer see my wrists?"

The woman came to Fire with a soft, white robe and helped her to hang it over her burning shoulders. "Lord Archer hasn't been in."

Fire decided to focus on the agony of putting her arms into her sleeves, rather than trying to calculate how furious Archer must be, if he hadn't even been in.

The mind she sensed was near, unguarded, and consumed with some underhanded purpose. All good reasons for it to have drawn Fire's attention, though she wasn't certain what she hoped to achieve by limping down this corridor in pursuit of it, willing to absorb whatever emotions it leaked accidentally but unwilling to take hold of it and plumb it for its true intentions.

It was a guilty mind, furtive.

She could not ignore it. I'll just follow, she thought to herself. I'll see where he goes.

She was astonished a moment later when a servant girl observing her progress stopped and offered an arm.

"My husband was at the back of that charge, Lady Fire," the girl said. "You saved his life."

Fire hobbled down the hallway on the arm of the girl, happy to have saved someone's life if it meant that now she had a person to keep her from flopping onto the floor. Every step brought her closer to her strange quarry. "Wait," she whispered finally, leaning against the wall. "Whose rooms are behind this wall?"

"The king's, Lady Fire."

Fire knew with utter certainty then that a man was in the king's compartments who should not be. Haste, fear of discovery, panic: it all came to her.

A confrontation was beyond her current strength even to consider; and then down the hall, in his own room, she sensed Archer. She grasped the servant girl's arm. "Run to Queen Roen and tell her a man is in the king's rooms who has no place there," she said.

"Yes, Lady. Thank you, Lady," the girl said, and scampered away. Fire continued down the hallway alone.

When she reached Archer's room she leaned in his doorway. He stood at the window and stared into the covered courtyard, his back to her. She tapped on his mind.

His shoulders stiffened. He spun around and stalked toward her, not once looking at her. He brushed past her and stormed on down the hall. The surprise of it made her dizzy.

It was for the best. She was not in a state to face him, if he was as angry as that.

She went into his room and sat on a chair, just for a moment, to still her throbbing head.

It took her ages to get to the stables, despite a number of helping hands; and when she saw Small she couldn't stop herself. She began to cry.

"Now, don't fret, Lady Fire," Roen's animal healer said. "It's all superficial wounds. He'll be right as a rainbow in a week's time."

Right as a rainbow, with his entire back half stitched together and bandaged and his head hanging low. He was happy to see her, even though it was her doing. He pressed himself against the stall door, and when she went inside he pressed himself against her.

"I reckon he's been worrying about you," the healer said. "He's perked up now you're here."

I'm sorry, Fire thought to him, her arms around his neck as best she could. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

She guessed that the fifty men would remain in the Little Greys until the Third Branch arrived and drove the raptor monsters high again. The stables would be quiet until then.

And so Fire stayed with Small, leaning against him, collecting his spit in her hair and using her mind to ease his own sense of his stinging pain.

She was curled up on a fresh bed of hay in the corner of Small's stall when Roen arrived.

"Lady," Roen said, standing outside the stall door, her eyes soft. "Don't move," she said as Fire tried to sit up. "The healer told me you should rest, and I suppose resting in here is the best we can hope for. Can I bring you anything?"

"Food?"

Roen nodded. "Anything else?"

"Archer?"

Roen cleared her throat. "I'll send Archer to you once I'm convinced he won't say something insufferable."

Fire swallowed. "He's never been this angry with me before."

Roen bent her face and considered her hands on the stall door. Then she came in and crouched before Fire. Just once she reached out and smoothed Fire's hair. She held a bit of it in her fingers, contemplating it carefully, very still on her knees in the hay, as if she were trying to work out the meaning of something. "Beautiful girl," she said. "You did a good thing today, whatever Archer thinks. Next time, mention it to someone beforehand so we're better prepared."

"Archer never would have let me do it."

"No. But I would have."

For a moment their eyes met. Fire understood that Roen meant what she said. She swallowed. "Any word from Grey Haven?"

"No, but the Third has been spotted from the lookout, so we may see our fifty men back as soon as this evening." Roen brushed off her lap and rose to her feet, all business again. "Incidentally, we found no one in the king's rooms. And if you insist on doting on your horse in this manner I suppose the least we can do is bring you pillows and blankets. Get some sleep in here, will you? Both of you, girl and horse. And I hope you'll tell me someday, Fire, why you did it."

With a swirl of skirts and a click of the latch, Roen was gone. Fire closed her eyes and considered the question.

She'd done it because she'd had to. An apology for the life of her father, who'd created a world of lawlessness where towns like Grey Haven fell under the attack of looters. And she'd done it to show Roen's son that she was on his side. And also to keep him alive.

Fire was asleep in her room that night when all fifty men clattered back from Grey Haven. The prince and the king wasted no time, departing south immediately with the Third. When Fire woke the next morning they were gone.

Chapter Eight

Cansrel had always let Fire into his mind to practise changing his thoughts. He'd encouraged it, as part of her training. She went, but every time it was like a waking nightmare.

She'd heard tales of fishermen who grappled for their lives with water monsters in the Winter Sea. Cansrel's mind was like an eel monster, cold, slick, and voracious. Whenever she reached for it she felt clammy coils wrapping around her and pulling her under. She struggled madly, first simply to take hold of it; then to transform it into something soft and warm. A kitten. A baby.

The warming of Cansrel's mind took enormous burning energy. Then calm, to soothe the bottomless appetite, and then she would begin to push at its nature with all her strength, to shape thoughts there that Cansrel would never have on his own. Pity for a trapped animal. Respect for a woman. Contentment. It required all her strength. A mind slippery and cruel resists change.

Cansrel never said so, but Fire believed his favourite drug was to have her in his mind, manhandling him into contentment. He was used to thrills, but contentment was a novelty, a state Cansrel seemed never to achieve except by her help. Warmth and softness two things that rarely touched him. He never, ever refused Fire when she asked permission to enter. He trusted her, for he knew that she used her power for good and never to harm.

He only forgot to take into consideration the broken line separating good from harm.

Today there was no entering Archer's mind. He was shutting Fire out. Not that it particularly mattered, for she never entered Archer's mind to alter it, only to test the waters, and she had no interest in the nature of his waters today. She was not going to apologise and she was not going to capitulate to the fight he wanted to have. Not that she would have to stretch far to find something to accuse him of. Condescension. Imperiousness. Obstinacy.

They sat at a square table with Roen and a number of Roen's spies discussing Fire's trespassing archer, the men the archer had shot, and the fellow Fire had sensed in the king's rooms yesterday.

"There are plenty of spies out there and plenty of archers," Roen's spymaster said, "though perhaps few as skilled as your mysterious archer seems to be. Lord Gentian and Lord Mydogg have built up whole squadrons of archers. And some of the kingdom's finest archers are in the employ of animal smugglers."

Yes, Fire remembered that. The smuggler Cutter had bragged of his archers. It was how he caught his merchandise, with darts tipped with sleeping poison.

"The Pikkians also have decent archers," another of Roen's men said. "And I know we like to think of them as clannish and simple, interested in nothing but boat-building, deep sea fishing, and the occasional sack of our border towns – but they follow our politics. They're not stupid, and they're not on the king's side. It's our taxes and our trade regulations that have kept them poor these thirty years."

"Mydogg's sister Murgda has just married a Pikkian," Roen said, "a naval explorer of the eastern seas. And we have reason to believe that lately Mydogg has been recruiting Pikkians into his Dellian army. And having some success at it."

Fire was startled; this was news, and not of the happy variety. "How big has Mydogg's army grown?"

"It's still not as big as the King's Army," Roen said firmly. "Mydogg has said to my face that he has twenty-five thousand soldiers at the underside, but our spies to his holding in the northeast put the count at only twenty thousand or so. Brigan has twenty thousand patrolling in the four branches alone, and an additional five thousand in the auxiliaries."

"And Gentian?"

"We're not certain. Our best guess is ten thousand or so, all living in caves below the Winged River near his estate."

"Numbers aside," the spymaster said, "everyone has archers and spies. Your archer could be working for anyone. If you'll leave the arrow and bolt with us we may be able to eliminate some possibilities or at least determine where his gear comes from. But I'll be honest with you: I wouldn't hold out too much hope. You haven't given us much to go on."

"The man who was killed in your cages," Roen said. "The one you call the poacher. He gave you no hint of his purpose? Even you, Fire?"

"His mind was blank," Fire said. "No evil intent, no honourable intent. He had the feel of a simpleton, someone's tool."

"And the man in the king's rooms yesterday," Roen said. "Did he have that feel?"

"No. He may certainly have been working for someone else, but his mind was consumed with purpose, and with guilt. He thought for himself."

"Nash said his belongings were disturbed," Roen said, "but nothing was taken. We wonder if the man was looking for a number of letters that I happened to be carrying on my own person in Nash's absence – and good thing, too. A spy – but whose? Fire, you would recognise the man if he crossed your path again?"

"I would. I don't believe he's in the castle now. Perhaps he left under cover of the Third."

"We wasted a day," the spymaster said. "We could have used you yesterday to find him and question him."

And then Fire was reminded that even when Archer wouldn't look her in the face he was her friend, for he said crisply, "Lady Fire was in need of rest yesterday, and anyway, she is not a tool for your use."

Roen tapped her fingernails on the table, not attending, following her own thoughts. "Every man is an enemy," she said grimly. "Mydogg, Gentian, the black market, Pikkia. They've got people sneaking around trying to learn Brigan's plans for the troops, steal our allies from us, figure out a good place and time to do away with Nash or Brigan or one of the twins, or even me." She shook her head. "And in the meantime, we're trying to learn their numbers and their allies and their allies' numbers. Their plans for attack. We're trying to steal their spies and convert them to our side. No doubt they're doing the same with our spies. The rocks only know whom among our own people we should trust. One of these days a messenger will come through my gates to tell me my sons are dead."

She spoke unemotionally; she wasn't trying to elicit comfort or contradiction, she was only stating fact. "We do need you, Fire," she added. "And don't look all panicked like that. Not to change people's thoughts. Only to take advantage of the greater sense of people that you have."

No doubt Roen meant her words. But with the kingdom in this unstable state the lesser expectation would grow to include the greater, sooner rather than later. Fire's head began to throb harder than she thought she could bear. She glanced at Archer, who responded by avoiding her eyes, frowning at the table, and changing the subject abruptly.

"Can you spare me any more soldiers, Lady Queen?"

"I suppose I can't deny you my soldiers when yesterday Fire saved their lives," Roen said. "Brigan has helped by leaving me ten dozen men from the Third. You may take eight of the soldiers from my original guard who went to Grey Haven."

"I would prefer eight of the ten dozen from the Third," Archer said.

"They're all in the King's Army," Roen said, "all trained by Brigan's people, all equally competent, and the men who went to Grey Haven already have a natural allegiance to your lady, Archer."

Allegiance wasn't quite the word for it. The soldiers who'd gone to Grey Haven seemed to regard Fire now with something akin to worship; which was, of course, why Archer didn't want them. A number of them had sought her out today and knelt before her, kissed her hand and pledged to protect her.

"Very well," Archer said grumpily, somewhat mollified, Fire suspected, because Roen had referred to Fire as his lady. Fire added immaturity to the things she could accuse him of in the fight they weren't going to have.

"Let's go over the encounter one more time," the spymaster said. "Every one of the encounters, in minute detail. Lady Fire? Please begin again in the forest."

Archer spoke to her finally, an entire week later, when the raptors had gone and so had much of her soreness, and their own departure was imminent. They were at the table in Roen's sitting room, waiting for Roen to join them for dinner. "I cannot bear your silence any longer," Archer said.

Fire had to stop herself from laughing at the joke of it. She noted the two servants standing beside the door, their faces carefully blank while their minds spun excitedly – probably with gossip to bring back to the kitchen.

"Archer," she said. "You're the one who's been pretending I don't exist."

Archer shrugged. He sat back and regarded her, a challenge in his eyes. "Can I ever trust you now? Or must I always be prepared for this brand of heroic madness?"

She had an answer to that, but she couldn't say it aloud. She leaned forward and held his eyes. It was not the first mad thing I've ever done for this kingdom. Perhaps you who know the truth of things should not have been surprised. Brocker won't be, when we tell him what I did here.

After a moment his eyes dropped from hers. His fingers realigned the forks on the table. "I wish you were not so brave."

She had no response to that. She was desperate sometimes, and a little crazy, but she was not brave.

"Are you determined to leave me in this world to live without my heart?" Archer asked. "Because that's what you very nearly did."

She watched her friend play with the fringe of the tablecloth, his eyes avoiding hers, his voice carefully light, trying to look as if he were speaking of something small, like an appointment she'd forgotten that had inconvenienced him.

She reached across the table and held her hand open to him. "Make peace with me, Archer."

At that moment Roen swept through the door and slid into a chair between them. She turned on Archer, eyes narrow and unamused. "Archer, is there a servant girl in my fortress you haven't taken to bed? I announce you're leaving and within minutes two of them are at each other's throats, and another is crying her eyes out in the scullery. Honestly. You've been here all of nine days." She glanced at Fire's open hand. "I've interrupted something."

Archer considered the table for a moment, his fingers caressing the edge of his glass, his mind clearly elsewhere. He sighed in the direction of his plate.

"Peace, Archer," Fire said again.

Archer's eyes settled on Fire's face. "All right," he said reluctantly, taking her hand. "Peace, because war is unbearable."

Roen snorted. "You two have the strangest relationship in the Dells."

Archer smiled slightly. "She won't consent to make it a marriage."

"I can't imagine what's stopping her. I don't suppose you've considered being less munificent with your love?"

"Would you marry me, Fire, if I slept in no one's bed but yours?"

He knew the answer to that, but it didn't hurt to remind him. "No, and I should find my bed quite cramped."

Archer laughed and kissed her hand, then released it ceremoniously; and Fire picked up her knife and fork, smiling. Shaking her head in disbelief, Roen turned aside to take a note from an approaching servant. "Ah," she said, reading the note and frowning. "It's good that you're going. Lord Mydogg and Lady Murgda are on their way."

"On their way?" Fire said. "You mean they're coming here?"

"Just for a visit."

"A visit! Surely you don't visit each other?"

"Oh, it's all a farce, of course," Roen said, waving her hand tiredly.

"Their way of showing that the royal family doesn't intimidate them, and our way of pretending that we're open to dialogue. They come and I have to let them in, because if I refuse them, it'll be taken as a hostile gesture and they'll have an excuse to come back with their army. We sit across from each other, we drink wine, they ask me nosy questions that I don't answer about Nash and Brigan and the royal twins, they tell me secrets their own spies have supposedly learned about Gentian, information that either I already know or they've fabricated. They pretend that the king's real enemy is Gentian, and that Nash should ally with Mydogg against Gentian. I pretend it's a good idea and suggest that Mydogg pass his army over to Brigan's use as a show of faith. Mydogg refuses; we agree we've reached an impasse; Mydogg and Murgda take their leave, poking their noses into as many rooms as they can on the way out."

Archer's eyebrows were looking skeptical. "Isn't this sort of thing a bit more risky than it's worth? For everyone?"

"They're coming at a good time – Brigan just left me all those soldiers. And when they're here, we're all so heavily guarded every minute that I don't suppose either side would ever try anything, for fear of all of us getting killed. I'm as safe as I ever am. But," she added, studying both of them gravely, "I want you to depart tomorrow at first light. I won't have you meeting them – there's no reason to get you and Brocker tangled up in Mydogg's nonsense, Archer. And I don't want them to see Fire."

It was almost achieved. In fact, Fire, Archer, and their guards had travelled some distance from Roen's fortress and were just about to turn off onto a different path when the party from the north approached. Twenty rather fearsome soldiers – chosen because they had the aspects of pirates, with broken teeth and scars? Big and paleish, some of them. Pikkian? And a tough-looking man and woman who had the aura of a winter wind. Easily brother and sister, both squat and thin-lipped and icy in their expressions, until their eyes combed Fire's party and settled, with genuine and uncalculated amazement, on Fire herself.

The siblings glanced at each other. Some silent understanding passed between them.

"Come," Archer muttered, motioning to his guards and Fire to move on. The parties clattered past each other without even a greeting.

Oddly rattled, Fire touched Small's mane, stroking his rough hair. The lord and lady had been only names before, a dot on the Dellian map and a certain unknown quantity of soldiers. Now they were real, and solid, and cold.

She had not liked the glance they'd shared at the sight of her. Nor did she care for the feeling of their hard eyes on her back as Small carried her away.

Chapter Nine

It happened again: only days after Fire and Archer returned home, another man was found trespassing in Archer's forest, a stranger. When the soldiers brought him in, Fire sensed the same mental fog she'd sensed with the poacher. And then before Fire could even begin to consider whether and how to use her power to wangle information from him, an arrow came through the open window, straight into the middle of Archer's guard room, and struck the trespasser between the shoulder blades. Archer threw himself on top of Fire, dragging her down. The trespasser toppled and fell beside her, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. His empty mind fizzled into no mind at all, and from her crushed position on the floor, soldiers' feet yanking at her hair and Archer yelling orders above her, she reached for the archer who'd made the shot.

He was faint, a good distance away, but she found him. She tried to grasp hold of him but a boot trod on her finger and the explosion of pain distracted her. When she reached for him again he was gone.

He's run west into Trilling's woods, she thought to Archer, because she had no breath to speak. And his mind is as blank as the others.

Her finger was not broken, only beastly sore when she moved it. It was the second finger on her left hand so she put off playing harp and flute for a day or two, but she refused to spare herself when it came to her fiddle. She'd been without the instrument for too long. She simply tried not to think of the pain, because every stab of pain was accompanied now by a stab of vexation. Fire was tired of being injured.

She sat in her bedroom one day, playing a cheerful tune, a song for dancing, but something in her mood slowed the tempo and discovered sad parts in it. Eventually she found herself switching to a different song altogether, one that was manifestly sorrowful, and her fiddle cried out its feeling.

Fire stopped and lowered the instrument to her lap. She stared at it, then hugged it against her chest like a baby, wondering what was wrong with her.

She had an image in her head of Cansrel in the moment he had given her this fiddle. "I'm told this has a nice sound, darling," he'd said, holding it out to her almost carelessly, as if it were an inconsequential bit of rubbish that had not cost him a small fortune. She'd taken it, appreciative of its handsomeness but knowing that its real value would depend upon its tone and feeling, neither of which Cansrel could be any judge of. She'd drawn her bow across its strings as an experiment. The fiddle had responded instantly, wanting her touch, speaking to her in a gentle voice that she'd understood and recognised.

A new friend in her life.

She'd been unable to hide her pleasure from Cansrel. His own gladness had swelled.

"You're astonishing, Fire," he'd said. "You're a constant source of wonder to me. I'm never more happy than when I've made you happy. Isn't it peculiar?" he'd said, laughing. "Do you really like it, darling?"

In her chair in her room, Fire forced herself to look around at the windows and walls and take stock of the present. The light was fading. Archer would be coming back soon from the fields, where he was helping with the plowing. He might have some news about the ongoing search for the archer. Or Brocker might have a letter from Roen with updates about Mydogg and Murgda, or Gentian, or Brigan, or Nash.

She found her longbow and quiver and, shaking off memories like loose hairs, left her house in search of Archer and Brocker.

There was no news. There were no letters.

One monthly bleeding passed for Fire, with all its attendant aches and embarrassments. Everyone in her house, in Archer's house, and in the town knew what it signified whenever she stepped outside with an entourage of guards. Eventually another passed like the first. Summer was near. The farmers were willing potatoes and carrots to take hold in the rocky ground.

Her lessons progressed much as usual.

"Stop, I implore you," she said one day at Trilling's, interrupting an earsplitting clamour of flutes and horns. "Let's begin again at the top of the page, shall we? And, Trotter," she begged the eldest boy, "try not to blow so hard; I guarantee you, that shrieking noise is from blowing too hard. All right? Ready?"

The enthusiastic massacre began once more. She did love the children. Children were one of her small joys, even when they were fiends to each other; even when they imagined they were hiding things from her, like their own idleness or, in some cases, their talent. Children were smart and malleable. Time and patience made them strong and stopped them fearing her or adoring her too much. And their frustrations were familiar to her, and dear.

But, she thought, at the end of the day I must give them back. They're not my children – someone else feeds them and tells them stories. I'll never have children. I'm stuck in this town where nothing ever happens and nothing ever will happen and there's never any news. I'm so restless I could take Renner's horrible flute and break it over his head.

She touched her own head, took a breath, and made very sure that Trilling's second son knew nothing of her feeling.

I must find my even temper, she thought. What is it I'm hoping for, anyway? Another murder in the woods? A visit from Mydogg and Murgda and their pirates? An ambush of wolf monsters?

I must stop wishing for things to happen. Because something will happen eventually, and when it does, I'll be bound to wish it hadn't.

The next day, she was walking the path from her house to Archer's, quiver on back and bow in hand, when one of the guards called down to her from Archer's back terrace. "Fancy a reel, Lady Fire?"

It was Krell, the guard she'd tricked the night she'd been unable to climb up to her bedroom window. A man who knew how a flute should be played; and here he was, offering to save her from her own desperate fidgets. "Goodness, yes," she said. "Just let me get my fiddle."

A reel with Krell was always a game. They took turns, each inventing a passage that was a challenge to the other to pick up and join; always keeping in time but raising tempo gradually, so that eventually it took all of their concentration and skill to keep up with each other. They were worthy of an audience, and today Brocker and a number of guards wandered out to the back terrace for the show.

Fire was in the mood for technical gymnastics, which was fortunate, because Krell played as if he were determined to make her break a string. Her fingers flew, her fiddle was an entire orchestra, and every note beautifully brought into being struck a chord of satisfaction within her. She wondered at the unfamiliar lightness in her chest and realised she was laughing.

So great was her focus, it took her a while to register the strange expression that crept to Brocker's face as he listened, finger tapping the armrest of his chair. His eyes were fixed behind Fire and to the right, in the direction of Archer's back doorway. Fire comprehended that someone must be standing in Archer's entrance, someone Brocker watched with startled eyes.

And then everything happened at once. Fire recognised the mind in the doorway; she spun around, fiddle and bow screeching apart; she stared at Prince Brigan leaning against the door frame.

Behind her Krell's quick piping stopped. The soldiers on the terrace cleared throats and turned, falling to attention as they recognised their commander. Brigan's eyes were expressionless. He shifted and stood up straight, and she knew that he was going to speak.

Fire turned and ran down the terrace steps to the path.

Once out of sight Fire slowed and stopped. She leaned over a boulder, gasping for air, her fiddle clunking against the stone with a sharp, dissonant cry of protest. The guard Tovat, the one with the orangish hair and the strong mind, came running up behind her. He stopped beside her.

"Forgive my intrusion, Lady," he said. "You left unarmed. Are you ill, Lady?"

She laid her forehead against the boulder, ashamed because he was right; in addition to fleeing like a chicken from a woman's skirts, she'd left unarmed. "Why is he here?" she asked Tovat, still pressing fiddle and bow and forehead into the boulder. "What does he want?"

"I left too soon to know," Tovat said. "Shall we go back? Do you need a hand, Lady? Do you need the healer?"

She doubted Brigan was the type to make social calls, and he rarely travelled alone. Fire closed her eyes and reached her mind over the hills. She couldn't sense his army, but she found twenty or so men in a group nearby. Outside her front door, not Archer's.

Fire sighed into the rock. She stood, checked her headscarf, and tucked fiddle and bow under her arm. She turned toward her own house. "Come, Tovat. We'll learn soon enough, for he's come for me."

The soldiers outside her door were not like Roen's men or Archer's, who admired her and had reason to trust her. These were ordinary soldiers, and as she and Tovat came into their sight she sensed an assortment of the usual reactions. Desire, astonishment, mistrust. And also guardedness. These men were mentally guarded, more than she would have expected from a random assemblage. Brigan must have selected them for their guardedness; or warned them to remember it.

She corrected herself. They were not all men. Three among them had long hair tied back and the faces and the feeling of women. She sharpened her mind. Five more again were men whose appraisal of her lacked a particular focus. She wondered, hopefully, if they might be men who did not desire women.

She stopped before them. Every one of them stared.

"Well met, soldiers," she said. "Will you come inside and sit?"

One of the women, tall, with hazel eyes and a powerful voice, spoke. "Our orders are to wait outside until our commander returns from Lord Archer's house, Lady."

"Very well," Fire said, somewhat relieved that their orders weren't to seize her and throw her into a burlap bag. She passed through the soldiers to her door, Tovat behind her. She stopped at a thought and turned again to the woman soldier. "Are you in charge, then?"

"Yes, Lady, in the commander's absence."

Fire touched again on the minds in the group, looking for some reaction to Brigan's election of a female officer. Resentment, jealousy, indignation. She found none.

These were not ordinary soldiers after all. She couldn't be sure of his motive, but something had gone into Brigan's choosing.

She stepped inside with Tovat and closed the door on them.

Archer had been in town during the concert on the terrace, but he must have come home shortly thereafter. It was not long before Brigan returned to her door, and this time Brocker and Archer accompanied him.

Donal showed the three men into her sitting room. In an attempt to cover her embarrassment and also to reassure them that she wasn't going to make another dash for the hills, Fire spoke quickly. "Lord Prince, if your soldiers wish to sit or take something to drink, they're welcome in my house."

"Thank you, Lady," he said evenly, "but I don't expect to stay long."

Archer was agitated about something, and Fire didn't need any mental powers to perceive it. She motioned for Brigan and Archer to sit, but both remained standing.

"Lady," Brigan said, "I come on the king's behalf."

He didn't quite look her in the face as he spoke, his eyes touching on the air around her but avoiding her person. She decided to take it as an invitation to study him with her own eyes, for his mind was so strongly guarded against her that she could glean nothing that way.

He was armed with bow and sword, but unarmoured, dressed in dark riding clothes. Clean-shaven. Shorter than Archer but taller than she remembered. He held himself aloof, dark hair and unfriendly eyebrows and stern face, and aside from his refusal to look at her she could sense nothing of his feelings about this interview. She noticed a small scar cutting into his right eyebrow, thin and curved. It matched the scars on her own neck and shoulders. A raptor monster had nearly taken his eye, then. Another scar on his chin. This one straight, a knife or a sword.

She supposed the commander of the King's Army was likely to have as many scars as a human monster.

"Three weeks ago in the king's palace," Brigan was saying, "a stranger was found in the king's rooms and captured. The king asks you to come to King's City to meet the prisoner, Lady, and tell whether he's the same man who was in the king's rooms at the fortress of my mother."

King's City. Her birthplace. The place where her own mother had lived and died. The gorgeous city above the sea that would be lost or saved in the war that was coming. She'd never seen King's City, except in her imagination. Certainly, no one had ever suggested before that she go there and see it for real.

She forced her mind to consider the question seriously even though her heart had already decided. She would have many enemies in King's City, and too many men who liked her too much. She would be stared at, and assaulted, and she would not ever have the option of resting her mental guard. The king of the kingdom would desire her. And he and his advisers would wish her to use her power against prisoners, enemies, every one of the million people they did not trust.

And she would have to travel with this rough man who didn't like her.

"Does the king request this," Fire asked, "or is it an order?"

Brigan considered the floor coolly. "It was stated as an order, Lady, but I won't force you to go."

And so the brother, apparently, was permitted to disobey the king's orders; or perhaps it was a measure of how little Brigan wanted to deliver her to his weak-headed brother, that he was willing to refuse the command.

"If the king expects me to use my power to interrogate his prisoners he'll be disappointed," Fire said.

Brigan flexed and clenched his sword hand, once. A flicker of something – impatience, or anger. He looked into her eyes for the briefest of moments, and looked away. "I don't imagine the king will compel you to do anything you don't want to do."

By which Fire understood that the prince considered it within her power and her intention to control the king. Her face burned, but she lifted her chin a notch and said, "I'll go."

Archer spluttered. Before he could speak she swung to him and looked up into his eyes. Don't quarrel with me in front of the king's brother, she thought to him. And don't ruin this two months' peace.

He glared back at her. "I'm not the one who ruins it," he said, his voice low.

Brocker was accustomed to this; but how must they look to Brigan, staring at each other, having one side of an argument? I won't do this now. You may embarrass yourself, but you will not embarrass me.

Archer drew in a breath that sounded like a hiss, turned on his heel, and stormed out of the room. He slammed the door, leaving an uncomfortable silence in his wake.

Fire touched a hand to her headscarf and turned back to Brigan. "Please forgive our rudeness," she said.

Not a flicker in those grey eyes. "Of course."

"How will you ensure her safety on the journey, Commander?" Brocker asked quietly. Brigan turned to him, then sat in a chair, resting his elbows on his knees; and his whole manner seemed to change. With Brocker he was suddenly easy and comfortable and respectful, a young military commander addressing a man who could be his mentor.

"Sir, we'll ride to King's City in the company of the entire First Branch. They're stationed just west of here."

Brocker smiled. "You misunderstand me, son. How will you ensure she'll be safe from the First Branch? In a force of five thousand there'll be some with the mind to hurt her."

Brigan nodded. "I've hand-picked a guard of twenty soldiers who can be trusted to care for her."

Fire crossed her arms and bit down hard. "I don't need to be cared for. I can defend myself."

"I don't doubt it, Lady," Brigan said mildly, looking into his hands, "but if you're to ride with us you'll have a guard nonetheless. I can't transport a civilian female in a party of five thousand men on a journey of nearly three weeks and not provide a guard. I trust you to see the sense in it."

He was talking around the fact that she was a monster who provoked all the worst kinds of behaviour. And now that her temper was done flaring, she did see the sense in it. Truly, she'd never pitted herself against five thousand men before. She sat down. "Very well."

Brocker chuckled. "If only Archer were here to see the powers of rational argument."

Fire snorted. Archer wouldn't consider her allowance of the guard to be evidence of the powers of rational argument. He'd take it as proof that she was in love with whichever of her guards was most handsome.

She stood up again. "I'll ready myself," she said, "and ask Donal to ready Small."

Brigan stood with her, his face closed again, impassive. "Very good, Lady."

"Will you wait here with me, Commander?" Brocker said. "I've a thing or two to tell you."

Fire scrutinised Brocker. Oh? What do you need to tell him?

Brocker had too much class for a one-sided argument. He also possessed a mind so clear and strong that he could open a feeling to her with perfect precision, so that it came to her practically as a sentence. I want to give him military advice, Brocker thought to her.

Mildly reassured, Fire left them.

When she got to her bedroom Archer was sitting in a chair against the wall. Taking a liberty with his presence, for it wasn't his room to enter without invitation. But she forgave him. Archer couldn't abandon the responsibilities of his house and farms so suddenly in order to travel with her. He would stay behind, and they would be a long time apart – almost six weeks to get there and back, and longer if she stayed any time in King's City.

When Brocker had asked her, in her fourteenth year, just how much power she had over Cansrel's mind when she was inside it, Archer had been the one to defend her. "Where's your heart, Father? The man is her father. Don't make her relationship with him more difficult than it already is."

"I'm only asking questions," Brocker had responded. "Does she have the power to shift his attitudes? Could she change his ambitions permanently?"

"Anyone can see these are not idle questions."

"They're necessary questions," Brocker had said, "though I wish they were not."

"I don't care. Leave her be," Archer had said, so passionately that Brocker had let her be, at least for the moment.

Fire supposed she would miss Archer defending her on this trip. Not because she wanted his defence, but simply because it was what Archer did when he was near.

She unearthed her saddlebags from a pile at the bottom of her closet and began to fold underclothing and riding gear into them. There was no point in bothering with dresses. No one ever noticed what she wore, and after three weeks in her bags they would be unwearable anyway.

"You'll desert your students?" Archer said finally, leaning over his knees, watching her pack. "Just like that?"

She turned her back to him on the pretense of searching for her fiddle, and smiled. He had never been quite so concerned for her students before.

"You didn't take long to decide," he added.

She spoke simply; to her it was obvious. "I've never seen King's City."

"It's not so wonderful as all that."

It was a thing she'd like to determine for herself. She dug through the piles on her bed and said nothing.

"It'll be more dangerous than any place you've ever been," he said.

"Your father took you away from that place because you weren't safe there."

She set her fiddle case beside her saddlebags. "Shall I choose a life of bleakness, then, Archer, just to stay alive? I won't hide in a room with the doors and windows shut. That is not a life."

He ran his finger against the ridge of a feather in the quiver beside him. He glowered at the floor, chin on fist. "You'll fall in love with the king."

She sat on the edge of the bed facing him, and grinned. "I couldn't fall in love with the king. He's weak-minded and he drinks too much wine."

He caught her eye. "And? I'm jealous-minded and I sleep with too many women."

Fire's smile grew. "Luckily for you, I loved you long before you became either of those things."

"But you don't love me as much as I love you," he said. "Which is what's made me this way."

This was harsh, coming from a friend she would lose her life for. And harsh that he would say such a thing right when she was about to leave for so long. She stood and turned her back to him. Love doesn't measure that way, she thought to him. And you may blame me for your feelings, but it isn't fair to blame me for how you've chosen to behave.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You're right. Forgive me, Fire."

And she forgave him again, easily, because she knew that his anger usually fizzled as quickly as it came, and behind it his heart was full to bursting. But she stopped at forgiveness. She could guess what Archer wanted, here in her bedroom before she departed, and she wasn't going to give it to him.

It had been easy once, taking Archer into her bed; not so long ago it had been simple. And then, somehow, the balance had tipped between them. The marriage proposals, the lovesickness. More and more, the simplest thing was to say no.

She would answer him gently. She turned to him and held out her hand. He stood and came to her.

"I must change into riding clothes and pull a few more things together," she said. "We'll say our goodbyes now. You must go down and tell the prince I'm coming."

He stared at his shoes and then into her face, understanding her. He tugged at her headscarf until it slid away and her hair fell around her shoulders. He collected her hair in one hand, bent his face to it, kissed it. He pulled Fire to him and kissed her neck and her mouth, so that her body was left wishing that her mind were not so stingy. Then he broke away and turned to the door, his face the picture of unhappiness.

Chapter Ten

She had been afraid the army would move too fast for her or that every one of the five thousand soldiers would have to slow down for her sake. And the army did ride fast above ground, when the land underfoot was smooth enough to allow it, but most of the time the pace was more moderate. It was partly the restrictions of tunnels and terrain and partly the objectives of an armed force, which by nature seeks out the very troubles that other travelling parties hope to avoid.

The First Branch was a wonder of organisation: a moving base divided into sections, divided again into small units that broke off periodically, sped to a gallop, disappeared into caves or up mountain paths, and reappeared some time later. Scout units rode fast ahead of them and patrol units to every side, and they sent subunits racing back sometimes to make reports, or in the case of trouble found, request support. Sometimes, the soldiers who returned were bloody and bruised, and Fire came to recognise the green tunics of the healer units that rushed to their aid.

Then there were the hunting units which moved in rotation, circling back now and then with their game. There were the supply units, which handled the pack horses and figured the inventories. The command units delivered messages from Brigan to the rest of the force. The archery units kept eyes open for animal and monster predators foolish enough to prey on the main column of riders. Fire's own guard was a unit, too. It created a barrier between her and the thousands as she rode, and assisted her with everything she needed, which at first consisted mainly of answers to her questions about why half the army seemed always to be coming or going.

"Is there a unit to keep track of all the other units?" she asked the leader of her guards, the hazel-eyed woman, whose name was Musa.

Musa laughed. Most of Fire's questions seemed to make Musa laugh. "The commander doesn't use one, Lady. He keeps track in his head. Watch the traffic around the standard-bearer – every unit that comes or goes reports first to the commander."

Fire had been watching the standard-bearer – and his horse – with considerable sympathy, actually, because he seemed to ride twice as far as most of the rest of the army. The standard-bearer's sole charge was to stay near the commander so that the commander could always be found; and the commander was forever doubling back, breaking off, bursting forward, depending, Fire assumed, on matters of great military import, whatever in the Dells that meant. The standard-bearer always turning circles with him, chosen for that duty, Fire supposed, because he was a fine horseman.

Then the prince and the standard-bearer came closer, and once again Fire corrected herself. A fine horsewoman.

"Musa, how many women are in the First Branch?"

"Some five hundred, Lady. Perhaps twenty-five hundred in all four branches and the auxiliaries together."

"Where are the auxiliaries when the rest of the army is patrolling? "

"In the forts and signal stations spread throughout the kingdom, Lady. Some of the soldiers manning those posts are women."

Twenty-five hundred women who had volunteered to live on a horse's back, and fight, and eat, dress, sleep in a mob of males. Why would a woman choose such a life? Were their natures wild and violent, as some of the men had already proven theirs to be?

When she and her entourage had first passed out of Trilling's woods onto the rocky flats where the army was stationed, there had been a single fight over Fire, short and brutal. Two men out of their minds at the sight of her and disagreeing on some point (her honour, their respective chances), enough for shoves, fists to the face, broken noses, blood. Brigan was down from his horse with three of Fire's guard before Fire had fully comprehended what was happening. And one crisp word from Brigan's mouth had ended it: "Enough."

Fire had kept her eyes on Small's shoulders, combing his mane with her fingers until a sense of remorse had trickled to her from the minds of both fighters. Then she'd allowed herself a surprised peek at their hanging heads, their doleful glances at Brigan, blood plopping from broken lips and noses onto the ground. They'd forgotten her. She'd sensed that clearly. In their shame before their commander, they'd forgotten all about her.

Unusual. Fire's eyes had flicked curiously to Brigan. His expression had been cool, his mind unreadable. He'd spoken to the fighters quietly, hadn't looked at her once.

Back onto their horses, and shortly thereafter word had come around from the command units that any soldier brawling over any matter relating to the Lady Fire would find himself out of the army and the army's favour, disarmed, discharged, and sent home. Fire gathered from the low whistles and high eyebrows among her guard that it was a harsh punishment for brawling.

She didn't know enough about armies to extrapolate. Did a harsh punishment make Brigan a harsh commander? Was harshness the same as cruelty? Was cruelty the source of Brigan's power over his soldiers?

And where was the hardship in discharge from a fighting force in a time of impending war? To Fire it sounded more like a reprieve.

Fire pictured Archer riding through his fields at day's end, stopping to talk with the farmers, laughing, cursing the stubborn rocky ground of the north, as he always did. Archer and Brocker sitting down to dinner without her.

When the army finally stopped for the night she insisted on currying her own horse. She leaned into Small and whispered to him, comforted herself with the feel of him, the only familiar heart in a sea of strangers.

They made camp in a gigantic underground cavern, halfway between Fire's home and Roen's fortress, the likes of which Fire had never seen. Nor could she particularly see it now, for it was dim, light glancing through cracks in the ceiling and seeping from side openings. As the sun set, the cavern turned positively dark, and the First Branch was a composition of moving shadows spread across the sloping floor of the chamber.

Sound in the cavern was thick, musical. When the commander had left the camp with a force of two hundred, two hundred had echoed like two thousand and the footfalls had chimed like bells all around her. He'd taken off just as soon as he'd seen everyone settled – his face as indecipherable as ever. A scout unit of fifty soldiers had not returned at the time and place it was meant to. He'd gone looking for it.

Fire was uneasy. The shifting shadows of her five thousand companions unsettled her. Her guard kept her apart from most of these soldiers, but she could not separate herself from the impressions she collected in her mind. It was exhausting, to keep track of so many. They were most of them aware of her on some level, even those farthest away. Too many of them wanted something from her. Some got too close.

"I like the taste of monster," one with a twice broken nose hissed at her.

"I love you. You're beautiful," another three or four breathed to her, seeking her out, pressing themselves against the barriers of her guard to reach her.

Brigan had given her guard strict orders before he'd ridden away. The lady was to be housed in a tent even though the army was under a cavern's roof, and two of her female guard were to accompany her always inside the tent.

"Am I never to have privacy?" she'd put in, overhearing Brigan's order to Musa.

Brigan had taken a leather gauntlet from a young man Fire supposed was his squire, and pulled it over his hand. "No," he'd said. "Never." And before she'd even been able to take a breath to protest he'd pulled on his other gauntlet and called for his horse. The hoof-beat music had swelled, and then dissipated.

In her tent the smell of roasting monster meat came to her. She crossed her arms and tried not to glare at her two female guard companions, whose names she couldn't remember. She tugged at her headscarf. Surely in the presence of these women she could have some relief from the tight wrapping around her hair. They didn't want anything from her; the strongest emotion she could sense from both of them was boredom.

Of course, once she'd uncovered her hair their boredom lessened. They watched her with curious eyes. She looked back wearily. "I forget your names. I'm sorry."

"Margo, Lady," said the one with a broad, pleasant face.

"Mila, Lady," said the other, delicate boned, light haired, and very young.

Musa, Margo, and Mila. Fire bit off a sigh. She recognised the feel of almost every one of her twenty guards at this point, but the names would take her some time.

She didn't know what else to say, so she fingered the case of her fiddle. She opened the case and inhaled the warm smell of varnish. She plucked a string and the answering acoustics, like the reverberation of a bell struck underwater, focused her disorientation. The flap of the tent was open and the tent itself was set in a niche against the side of the cavern, a low, curving roof curling above it, not unlike the shell of an instrument. She tucked the fiddle under her chin and tuned it, and then, very quietly, she began to play.

A lullaby, soothing, to calm her own nerves. The army faded away.

Sleep didn't come easily that night, but she knew it would be pointless to seek out the stars. Rain seeped through cracks in the ceiling and trickled down the walls to the floor; the sky tonight would be black. Perhaps a midnight storm would batter away her dreams. She threw back her blanket, found her boots, slipped past the sleeping forms of Margo and Mila, and pushed open the tent flap.

Outside she took care not to trip over the other sleeping guards, who were arranged around her tent like some kind of human moat. Four of the guards were awake: Musa and three men whose names she couldn't remember. They played cards in the light of a candle. Candles flickered here and there all across the floor of the cavern. Fire supposed that most units kept some kind of watch throughout the night. She pitied the soldiers currently on guard outside this haven, in the rain. And Brigan's search party, and the scouts for whom they searched, all of whom had yet to return.

The four guards seemed a bit dazed at the sight of her. She touched her hand to her hair, remembering that it was unbound.

Musa recollected herself. "Is anything wrong, Lady?"

"Is there an opening in this cavern to the sky?" Fire asked. "I want to see the rain."

"There is," Musa said.

"Will you show me the way?"

Musa set her cards down and began to wake the guards at the furthest edges of the human moat.

"What are you doing?" Fire whispered. "Musa, it's not necessary. Please. Let them sleep," she said, but Musa continued to shake shoulders until four of the men were awake. She ordered two of the card players to sit and keep watch. She motioned for the others to arm themselves.

Her fatigue compounded now with guilt, Fire ducked back into the tent for a headscarf and her own bow and quiver. She emerged and joined her six armed and sleepy companions. Musa lit candles and passed them around. Quietly, in procession, the line of seven skirted the edge of the cavern.

The narrow, sloping pathway they climbed some minutes later led to a perforation in the side of the mountain. Fire could see little beyond the opening, but instinct told her not to venture too far and not to loose her hold on the edges of rock that formed a kind of doorway to either side of her. She didn't want to fall.

The night was gusty, damp, and cold. She knew it was senseless to get herself wet, but she soaked in the rain and the untamed feeling of the storm anyway, while her guard huddled just inside the opening and tried to protect the candles.

There was a shift in her consciousness: people nearing, riders. Many. Difficult to tell the difference between two hundred and two hundred and fifty at this distance, and knowing so few of them personally. She concentrated, and decided that she was sensing well more than two hundred. And they were tired, but not in any unusual state of distress. The search party must have met with success.

"The search party's returning," she called back to her guard. "They're close. I believe the scout unit's with them."

At their silence she turned to glance at them, and found six pairs of eyes watching her in various states of unease. She stepped out of the rain, into the passageway. "I thought you'd like to know," she said more quietly. "But I can keep my perceptions to myself, if they make you uncomfortable."

"No," Musa said. "It's appropriate for you to tell us, Lady."

"Is the commander well, Lady?" one of the men asked.

Fire had been trying to determine this for herself, finding the man irritatingly difficult to isolate. He was there, of this she was sure. She supposed the continued impenetrability of his mind must indicate some measure of strength. "I can't quite tell, but I think so."

And then the music of hoofbeats echoed through the corridor as somewhere, in some crevice of the mountain below them, the riders entered the tunnels that led to the sleeping cavern.

A short while later, plodding downward, Fire received an abrupt answer to her concern when she sensed the commander walking up the passageway toward them. She stopped in her tracks, causing the guard behind her to whisper something most ungentlemanly as he contorted himself to avoid lighting her headscarf with his flame.

"Is there any other route to the cavern from here?" she blurted out; then knew the answer, then shrivelled in mortification at her own display of cowardice.

"No, Lady," Musa said, hand to her sword. "Do you sense something ahead?"

"No," Fire said miserably. "Only the commander." Come to fetch the wandering monster, who'd proven herself wild and irresponsible. He'd keep her on a chain from now on.

He came into view a few minutes later, climbing with a candle in his hand. When he reached them he stopped, nodded at the soldiers' formal greetings, spoke quietly to Musa. The scout unit had been recovered unharmed. They'd run into a nasty party of cave bandits twice their size, and after tearing up the bandits they'd got themselves turned around in the dark. Their injuries were minor. In ten minutes' time they would all be asleep.

"I hope you'll get some sleep as well, sir," Musa said. Suddenly Brigan smiled. He stepped aside to let them by and momentarily met Fire's glance. His eyes were exhausted. He had a day-old beard and he was drenched.

And apparently he had not come to fetch her after all. Once she and her attendants had passed him he turned away, and continued up the sloping corridor.

Chapter Eleven

She woke the next morning stiff and achy from yesterday's riding. Margo handed her bread and cheese, and a basin of water to wash her face. After this, Fire reached for her fiddle and played a single reel, slowly and then with increasing speed, to wake herself up. The effort of it crystallised her mind.

"The commander didn't mention this advantage of our guard duty," Mila said, smiling shyly. Musa stuck her head through the flap of the tent.

"Lady," Musa said, "the commander bade me tell you we'll be passing near Queen Roen's fortress around midday. He has business with the horsemaster. There'll be time for you to take a short meal with the lady queen, if you like."

"You've been on your horse since yesterday," Roen said, taking her hands, "so I'm guessing you don't feel as lovely as you look. There, that smile tells me I'm right."

"I'm tight as a bowstring," Fire admitted.

"Sit down, dear. Make yourself comfortable. Take off that scarf, I won't let any gaping no-heads in here for the next half-hour."

Such a relief to release her hair. The weight of it was great, and after a morning of riding, the scarf was sticky, and itchy. Fire sank gratefully into a chair, rubbed her scalp, and allowed Nax's queen to shovel vegetables and casserole onto her plate. "Haven't you ever considered cutting it short?" Roen asked.

Oh, cutting it short. Hacking it all off, throwing it once and for all on the fire. Dyeing it black, if only monster hair would take colour. When she and Archer had been very young, they'd gone so far as to shave it off once as an experiment. It had shown again on her scalp within the hour. "It grows extremely fast," Fire said wearily, "and I've found it's easier to control if it's long. Short pieces break loose and escape from my scarf."

"I suppose they would," Roen said. "Well. I'm glad to see you. How are Brocker and Archer?"

Fire told her that Brocker was splendid and Archer, as usual, was angry.

"Yes, I suppose it's what he would be," Roen said robustly, "but don't mind him. It's right for you to be doing this, going to King's City to help Nash. I believe you can handle his court. You're not a child anymore. How is your casserole?"

Fire took a bite, which was very nice, actually, and fought the disbelieving expression trying to rise to her face. Not a child anymore? Fire had not been a child for quite some time.

And then, of course, Brigan appeared in the doorway to say hello to his mother and to bring Fire back to her horse, and immediately Fire felt herself revert to a child. Some part of her brain went missing whenever this soldier came near. It froze from his coldness.

"Brigandell," Roen said, rising from her chair to embrace him. "You've come to steal my guest from me."

"In exchange for forty soldiers," Brigan said. "Twelve injured, so I've also left you a healer."

"We can manage without the healer, if you need him, Brigan."

"His family's in the Little Greys," Brigan said, "and I promised him a stay here when I could. We'll manage with our numbers until Fort Middle."

"Well then," Roen said briskly. "Are you sleeping?"

"Yes."

"Come now. A mother can tell when her son lies. Are you eating? "

"No," Brigan said gravely. "I've not eaten in two months. It's a hunger strike to protest the spring flooding in the south."

"Gracious," Roen said, reaching for the fruit bowl. "Have an apple, dear."

Fire and Brigan didn't speak as they exited the fortress together to continue the journey to King's City. But Brigan ate an apple, and Fire wound up her hair, and found herself a little more comfortable beside him.

Somehow it helped to know he could make a joke.

And then, three kindnesses.

Fire's guard waited with Small near the back of the column of troops. As Fire and Brigan moved toward the spot, Fire began to know that something was wrong. She tried to focus, which was difficult with so many people milling around. She waited for Brigan to stop speaking to a captain who'd appeared alongside them with a question about the day's schedule.

"I think my guards are holding a man," she told Brigan quietly, when the captain had gone.

His voice dropped. "Why? What man?"

She had only the basics, and the most important assurances. "I don't know anything except that he hates me, and he hasn't hurt my horse."

He nodded. "I hadn't thought of that. I'll have to do something to stop people targeting your horse."

They had picked up their pace at Fire's warning. Now, finally, they came upon a nasty scene: Fire's guards, two of them, holding back a soldier who shouted curses and spit out blood and teeth, while a third guard cracked him across the mouth again and again to shut him up. Horrified, Fire reached for the mind of the guard to stop his fist.

And then she absorbed the details that turned the scene into a story. Her fiddle case fallen open on the ground, smeared with mud. The remains of her fiddle beside it. The instrument was smashed, splintered almost beyond recognition, the bridge rammed into the belly as if by a cruel and hateful boot.

It was worse, somehow, than being hit by an arrow. Fire stumbled to Small and buried her face in his shoulder; she had no control over the tears running down her face, and she did not want Brigan to see them.

Behind her, Brigan swore sharply. Someone – Musa – laid a handkerchief on Fire's shoulder. The captive was still cursing, screaming now that he could see Fire, horrible things about her body, what he would do to her, intelligible even through his broken, swollen mouth. Brigan strode to him.

Don't hit him again, Fire thought desperately, Brigan, please; for the sound of bone scraping bone was not aiding her attempts to stop crying. Brigan uttered another oath, then a sharp command, and Fire understood from the sudden formlessness of the soldier's words that the man was being gagged. And then dragged away, back toward the fortress, Brigan and a number of Fire's guard accompanying him.

The scene was suddenly quiet. Fire became conscious of her own gasping breath and forced herself calm. Horrible man, she thought into Small's mane. Horrible, horrible man. Oh, Small. That man was horrible.

Small made a snorting noise and deposited some very comforting drool on her shoulder.

"I'm so sorry, Lady," Musa said behind her. "He took us in completely. From now on we'll let no one near us who wasn't sent by the commander."

Fire wiped her face with the handkerchief and turned sideways toward the captain of her guard. She couldn't quite look at the pile of tinder on the ground. "I don't blame you for it."

"The commander will," Musa said. "As he should."

Fire took a steadying breath. "I should have known playing it would be provoking."

"Lady, I forbid you to blame yourself. Truly, I won't allow it."

At this Fire smiled, and held the handkerchief out to Musa. "Thank you."

"It's not mine, Lady. It's Neel's."

Fire recognised the name of one of her male guards. "Neel's?"

"The commander took it from Neel and gave it to me to give to you, Lady. Keep it. Neel won't miss it, he has a thousand. Was it a very expensive fiddle, Lady?"

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 clear-headed 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 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 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 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 onto 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 honourable 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 defences 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 gaoled, and gaol 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 the 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 Grey 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.

Fire was coming to know her guard now, and she understood better than she had before the women who chose to ride with this army. Mila was from the southern mountains, where every child, boy or girl, learned to fight and every girl had ample opportunity to practise what she'd learned. She was all of fifteen, but as a guard she was bold and quick. She had an older sister with two babies and no husband, and her wages provided for them. The King's Army was well-paid.

The First Branch continued its journey southeast to King's City. Almost two weeks in and with about one week left to ride, they reached Fort Middle, a rough stone fortress rising out of rock with high walls and iron bars in narrow, glassless windows: the home of some five hundred auxiliary soldiers. A mean-looking, stark place, but everyone, including Fire, was happy to reach it. For one night she had a bed to sleep in and a stone roof above her head, which meant that so did her guard.

The next day the landscape changed. Very suddenly, the ground was made of rounded rock instead of jagged: smooth rock rolling almost like hills. Sometimes the rock was bright green with moss, or with veritable stretches of grass, and even a field of tall grass once, soft to their feet. Fire had never seen so much green and she thought it the most beautiful, most astonishing landscape in the world. The grass was like brilliant hair; as if the Dells itself were a monster. It was a foolish thought, she knew, but when her kingdom turned dazzling with colour she felt suddenly that she belonged to this place.

She didn't share that thought with Brigan, of course, but she did express her shock at the world's sudden greenness. To which he smiled quietly at the night sky, a gesture she was beginning to associate with him.

"It'll keep getting greener as we approach King's City, and softer," he said. "You'll see there's a reason this kingdom is called the Dells."

"I asked my father once – " she started; and then stopped tongue-tied, horrified that she had begun to speak kindly of Cansrel before him.

When he finally broke their silence, his voice was mild. "I knew your mother, Lady. Did you realise that?"

Fire hadn't realised it, but she supposed she should have, for Jessa had worked in the royal nurseries at a time when Brigan must have been very young. "I didn't know, Lord Prince."

"Jessa was the person I went to whenever I'd been bad," he said, adding wryly, "after my mother was through with me, that is."

Fire couldn't help smiling. "And were you often bad?"

"At least once a day, Lady, as I remember."

Her smile growing, Fire watched him as he watched the sky. "Perhaps you weren't very good at following orders?"

"Worse than that. I used to set traps for Nash."

"Traps!"

"He was five years older than I. The perfect challenge – stealth and cunning, you see, to compensate for my lack of size. I rigged nets to land on him. Closed him inside closets." Brigan chuckled. "He was a good-natured brother. But whenever our mother learned of it she'd be furious, and when she was done with me I'd go to Jessa, because Jessa's anger was so much easier to take than Roen's."

"How do you mean?" Fire asked, feeling a drop of rain, and wishing it away.

He thought for a moment. "She'd tell me she was angry, but it didn't sit like anger. She'd never raise her voice. She'd sit there sewing, or whatever she was doing, and we'd analyse my crimes, and invariably I'd fall asleep in my chair. When I woke it'd be too late to go to dinner and she'd feed me in the nurseries. A bit of a treat for a small boy who usually had to dress for dinner and be serious and quiet around a lot of boring people."

"A wicked boy, from the sound of it."

His face flickered with a smile. Water splashed onto his forehead. "When I was six Nash fell over a tripline and broke his hand. My father learned of it. That put an end to my antics for a while."

"You gave in so easily?"

He didn't answer her teasing tone. She looked at him, his eyebrows furrowed at the sky, his face sombre, and was frightened, suddenly, of what they were talking about; for again, suddenly, it seemed they might be talking about Cansrel.

"I think I understand now why Roen lost her mind whenever I misbehaved," he said. "She was afraid of Nax finding out and taking it into his head to punish me. He was not... a reasonable man, in the time I knew him. His punishments were not reasonable."

Then they were talking about Cansrel, and Fire was ashamed. She sat, head bowed, and wondered what Nax had done, what Cansrel had told Nax to do to punish a six-year-old who probably even then had been clever enough to see Cansrel for what he was.

Drops of rain pattered onto her scarf and her shoulders.

"Your mother had red hair," Brigan said, lightly, as if they didn't both feel the presence of two dead men among these rocks. "Nothing like yours, of course. And she was musical, Lady, like you. I remember when you were born. And I remember that she cried when you were taken away."

"Did she?"

"Hasn't my mother told you anything about Jessa?"

Fire swallowed a lump in her throat. "Yes, Lord Prince, but I always like hearing it again."

Brigan wiped rain from his face. "Then I'm sorry I don't remember more. If we knew a person was going to die, we'd hold harder to the memories."

Fire corrected him, in a whisper. "The good memories." She stood. This conversation was a mix of too many sadnesses. And she didn't mind the rain, but it seemed unfair to inflict it upon her guard.

Chapter Thirteen

The morning of her final day of riding Fire woke to an aching back, aching breasts, knotted muscles in her neck and shoulders. There was never any predicting how the time before her monthly bleeding would manifest itself. Sometimes it passed with hardly a symptom. Other times she was an unhappy captive in her own body.

And at least she'd be under Nash's roofs by the time the bleeding began; she wouldn't have to embarrass herself with an explanation for the increase in monster attacks.

On Small's back she was bleary-minded, anxious, nervous. She wished for her own bed; she wished she hadn't come. She was in no mood for beauty, and when they passed a great rocky hill with wildflowers springing from every crack she had to give herself a talking to to keep the mist out of her eyes.

The land grew greener, and finally they came upon a gorge that stretched to left and right before them, teeming with trees that reached up from the bottom, and thundering with the waters of the Winged River. A road ran east to west above the river, and a grass track, clearly much travelled, ran parallel to the road. The army turned eastward and moved fast along the grass track. The road was full of people, carts, carriages, headed in both directions. Many stopped to watch the First Branch go by, and raised arms in greeting.

Fire decided to imagine that she was out for a gallop with her guard, and none of these other thousands existed. No river or road to her right, no King's City before her. To think this way was a comfort, and her body screamed for comfort.

When the first stopped for its midday meal, Fire had no appetite. She sat in the grass, elbows on knees, holding her throbbing head in place.

"Lady," the commander's voice said above her.

Fire assumed a placid expression and looked up. "Yes, Lord Prince?"

"Are you in need of a healer, Lady?"

"No, Lord Prince. I was only thinking about something."

He didn't believe her, she could see it in the sceptical set of his mouth; but he let it go. "I've received an urgent summons from the south," he said. "I'll be on my way as soon as we've reached the king's court. I wondered if there was anything you wanted, Lady, that I could provide before I go."

Fire tugged at a patch of grass and swallowed this disappointment. She could think of nothing she wanted, not that anyone could provide, except for the answer to a question. She asked it very quietly. "Why are you kind to me?"

He paused, watching her hands that pulled at the grass. He crouched down to her eye level. "Because I trust you."

The world went very still around her, and she stared hard at the grass. The green of it was radiant in the sun's light.

"Why should you trust me?"

He glanced at the soldiers around them and shook his head. "A conversation for another time."

"I've thought of a thing you can do for me," she said. "I've thought of it in this very moment."

"Go on."

"You can take a guard when you go wandering at night." And then, when his eyebrows shot up and she saw him formulating his refusal: "Please, Lord Prince. There are people who'd like to kill you, and many others who'd die to prevent it. Show some respect to those who value your life so highly."

He turned his face away from her, frowning. His voice was not pleased. "Very well."

That point settled, and sorry now, most likely, that he'd ever started the conversation, Brigan went back to his horse.

In the saddle again, Fire mulled over the commander's trust, prodding and pushing it around, like a candy in her mouth, trying to decide whether she believed it. It wasn't that she thought him likely to lie. It was only that she thought him unlikely to trust – not completely, anyway, not the way Brocker or Donal did, or Archer, on the days Archer decided to trust her.

The problem with Brigan was that he was so closed. When had she ever had to judge a person by words alone? She had no formula for understanding a person like him, for he was the only one she'd ever met.

The winged river was so named because before its waters reached their journey's end, they took flight. At the place where the river leapt off a great green cliff and plunged into the Winter Sea, King's City had grown, starting on the north bank and spreading outward and south across the river. Joining the older city with the younger were bridges, the building of which had sent more than one unfortunate engineer over the falls to his death. A canal of steep locks on the northern side connected the city with Cellar Harbour far below.

Passing through the city's outer walls with her escort of five thousand, Fire felt herself a gawkish country girl. So many people in this city, smells and noises, buildings painted bright colours, steeply roofed, crammed together, red wooden houses with green trim, purple and yellow, blue and orange. Fire had never seen a building before that was not made of stone. It hadn't occurred to her that houses could be any colour but grey.

People hung out of windows to watch the First Branch pass. Women in the street flirted with the soldiers, and threw flowers, so many flowers Fire couldn't believe the extravagance. These people tossed more flowers over Fire's head than she had seen in a lifetime.

A flower splatted against the chest of one of Brigan's top sword-fighters, riding to Fire's right. When Fire laughed at him, he beamed, and handed the flower to her. On this journey through the city streets Fire was surrounded not just by her guard but by Brigan's most proficient fighters, Brigan himself on her left. The commander wore the grey of his troops, and he'd positioned the standard-bearer some distance behind. It was all in an attempt to reduce the attention Fire drew, and Fire knew she wasn't playing her part in the charade. She should have been sitting gravely, her face bent to her hands, catching no one's eye. Instead she was laughing – laughing, and smiling, and numb to her aches and pains, and sparkling with the strangeness and the bustle of this place.

And then before too long – she couldn't have said if she sensed it or heard it first, but there was a change in their audience. A whisper seemed to work its way in among the cheers, and then a strange silence; a lull. She felt it: wonder, and admiration. And Fire understood that even with her hair covered, and even in her drab, dirty riding clothes, and even though this town hadn't seen her, possibly hadn't thought of her in seventeen years, her face and her eyes and her body had told them who she was. And her headscarf had confirmed it, for why else would she cover her hair? She became mindful of her animation that was only making her glow more brightly. She erased her smile and dropped her eyes.

Brigan signalled to his standard-bearer to come forward and ride beside them.

Fire spoke low. "I sense no danger."

"Nonetheless," Brigan said grimly, "if an archer leans out one of these windows, I want him to notice both of us. A man revenging himself on Cansrel isn't going to shoot you if he risks hitting me."

She thought of joking about it. If her enemies were Brigan's friends and her friends were Brigan's enemies, the two of them could walk through the world arm in arm and never be hit by arrows again.

But an eerie sound rose now from the silence. "Fire," a woman called from an upstairs window. A cluster of barefoot children in a doorway echoed the call. "Fire. Fire!" And other voices joined in, and the cry swelled, until suddenly the people were singing out the word, chanting it, some in veneration, some almost in accusation – some with no reason at all except that they were caught up in the captive and mindless fervour of a crowd. Fire rode toward the walls of Nash's palace, stunned, confounded, by the music of her own name.

The façade of the king's palace was black, this Fire had heard. But the knowledge didn't prepare her for the beauty or the luminosity of the stone. It was a black that shifted depending on the angle from which it was viewed, and that shimmered, and reflected the light of other things, so that Fire's first impression was of changing panels of black and grey and silver, and blue reflected from the eastern sky, and orange and red from the setting sun.

Fire's eyes had been starved for the colours of King's City, and she hadn't even known it. How her father must have shone in this place.

The five thousand soldiers veered off as Fire, her guard, and Brigan approached the ramp to the gates. Spears were raised and the doors swung in. The horses passed through a black stone gatehouse and emerged into a white courtyard dazzling with the reflection of the sunset on quartz walls, and the sky pink behind flashing glass roofs. Fire craned her neck and gaped at the walls and roofs. A steward approached them and gaped at Fire.

"Eyes on me, Welkley," Brigan said, swinging down from his horse.

Welkley, short, thin, impeccably dressed and groomed, cleared his throat and turned to Brigan. "Forgive me, Lord Prince. I've sent someone to the offices to alert Princess Clara of your arrival."

"And Hanna?"

"In the green house, Lord Prince."

Brigan nodded and held a hand up to Fire. "Lady Fire, this is the king's first steward, Welkley."

Fire knew this was her cue to dismount and give her hand to Welkley, but when she moved, a spasm of pain radiated outward from the small of her back. She caught her breath, gritted her teeth, pulled her leg over her saddle and tipped, leaving it to Brigan's instincts to keep her from landing on her backside before the king's first steward. He caught her coolly and propped her on her feet, his face impassive, as if it were routine for her to launch herself at him every time she dismounted; and scowled at the white marble floor while she presented her hand to Welkley.

A woman entered the courtyard then that Fire could not fail to sense, a force of nature. Fire turned to locate her and saw a head of bouncy brown hair, sparkling eyes, a sparkling smile, and a handsome and ample figure. She was tall, nearly as tall as Brigan. She threw her arms around him, laughing, and kissed his nose. "This is a treat," she said. And then, to Fire, "I'm Clara. And now I understand Nash; you're more stunning even than Cansrel."

Fire couldn't find words to respond to this, and Brigan's eyes, suddenly, were pained. But Clara simply laughed again and patted Brigan's face. "So serious," she said. "Go on, little brother. I'll take care of the lady."

Brigan nodded. "Lady Fire, I'll find you before I take my leave. Musa," he said, turning to Fire's guard, who stood quietly with the horses. "Go with the lady, all of you, wherever Princess Clara takes her. Clara, see that a healer visits her, today. A woman." He kissed Clara's cheek hurriedly. "In case I don't see you again." He spun away and practically ran through one of the arched doorways leading into the palace.

"He always has a fire under his tail, Brigan," Clara said. "Come, Lady, I'll show you your rooms. You'll like them, they overlook the green house. The fellow who tends the green house gardens? Trust me, Lady, you'd let him stake your tomatoes."

Fire was speechless with astonishment. The princess grabbed the lady's arm and pulled her toward the palace.

Fire's sitting room did indeed overlook a curious wooden house tucked into the back grounds of the palace. The house was small, painted a deep green, and surrounded by lush gardens and trees so that it seemed to blend in, as if it had sprouted from the ground like the growing things around it.

The famous gardener was nowhere in sight, but as Fire watched from her window, the door to the house opened. A young, chestnut-haired woman in a pale yellow dress stepped outside and passed through the orchard to the palace.

"It's Roen's house, technically," Clara said, standing at Fire's shoulder. "She had it built because she believed the king's queen should have a place to retreat to. She lived there fully after she broke with Nax. She's given it to Brigan's use, for the moment, until Nash chooses a queen."

And so that young woman must be associated with Brigan. Interesting, indeed, and a very pretty view, until Fire moved to her bedchamber windows and encountered a sight she appreciated even more: the stables. She stretched her mind and found Small, and was immensely comforted to know he would be near enough for her to feel.

Her rooms were too large, but comfortable, the windows open and fitted with wire screens; a consideration someone had taken for her specially, she suspected, so she could pass her window with her hair uncovered and not have to worry about raptor monsters or an invasion of monster bugs.

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 recognised. 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 sorrier 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 got 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 under 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 greeted 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 behaviour."

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 savour 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-defence."

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 realised 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 harbour, white-sailed ships on the sea. The great spans of the city bridges. The city itself, its splendour 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 of 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 only see 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, jewellery, 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 centre 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 realised 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, 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-defence."

"Very noble of you," Garan said, sounding exactly like he didn't mean it, so that she was perplexed, and looked back at him calmly, and said nothing.

"It would be self-defence," Clara put in distractedly, frowning still at the paper before her. "The self-defence of this kingdom. Not that I don't understand your resistance to humouring Nash when he's been such a boor, Lady, but we need you."

"Do we? I find myself undecided on the matter," Garan said. He dipped his pen into an inkwell. He blotted carefully, and scribbled a few sentences onto the paper before him. Without looking at Fire he opened a feeling to her, coolly and with perfect control. She felt it keenly. Suspicion. Garan did not trust her, and he wanted her to know it.

That evening, when Fire sensed the king's approach, she locked the entrance to her rooms. He made no objection to this, resigned, seemingly, to holding a conversation with her through the oak of her sitting room door. It was not a very private conversation, on her side at least, for her on-duty guards could recede only so far into her rooms. Before the king spoke, she warned him that he was overheard.

His mind was open and troubled, but clear. "If you'll bear with me, Lady, I've only two things to say."

"Go on, Lord King," Fire said quietly, her forehead resting against the door.

"The first is an apology, for my entire self."

Fire closed her eyes. "It's not your entire self that needs to apologise. Only the part that wants to be taken by my power."

"I can't change that part, Lady."

"You can. If you're too strong for me to control, then you're strong enough to control yourself."

"I can't, Lady, I swear to it."

You don't want to, she corrected him silently. You don't want to give up the feeling of me, and that is your problem.

"You're a very strange monster," he said, almost whispering. "Monsters are supposed to want to overwhelm men."

And what could she respond to that? She made a bad monster and a worse human. "You said it was two things, Lord King."

He took a breath, as if to clear his head, and spoke more steadily. "The other is to ask you, Lady, to reconsider the issue of the prisoner. This is a desperate time. No doubt you've a low opinion of my ability to reason, but I swear to you, Lady, that on my throne – when you're not in my thoughts – I see clearly what's right. The kingdom is on the verge of something important. It might be victory, it might be collapse. Your mental power could help us enormously, and not just with one prisoner."

Fire turned her back to the door and crouched low against it. She held her head up by her hair. "I'm not that kind of monster," she said miserably.

"Reconsider, Lady. We could make rules, set limits. There are reasonable men among my advisers. They wouldn't ask too much of you."

"Leave me to think about it."

"Will you? Will you really think about it?"

"Leave me," she said, more forcefully now. She felt his focus shift from business back to his feelings. There was a lengthy silence.

"I don't want to leave," he said.

Fire bit down on her mounting frustration. "Go."

"Marry me, Lady," he whispered, "I beg you."

His mind was his own as he asked it, and he knew how foolish he was. She sensed plain and clear that he simply couldn't help himself.

She pretended hardness, though hardness was not what she felt. Go, before you ruin the peace between us.

Once he'd gone she sat on the floor, face in hands, wishing herself alone, until Musa brought her a drink, and Mila, shyly, a hot compress for her back. She thanked them, and drank; and because she had no choice, eased into their quiet company.

Chapter Fifteen

Fire's ability to rule her father had depended upon his trust.

As an experiment, in the winter after his accident, Fire got Cansrel to stick his hand into his bedroom fire. She did it by making his mind believe that it was flowers in the grate, and not flame. He reached in to pick them and recoiled; Fire took stronger hold and made him more determined. He reached in again, obstinately resolved to pick flowers, and this time believed he was picking them, until pain brought his mind and his reality crashing back to him. He screamed and ran to the window, threw it open, thrust his hand into the snow piled against the windowpane. He turned to her, cursing, almost crying, to demand what in the Dells she thought she was doing.

It was not an easy thing to explain, and she burst into quite authentic tears that came from the confusion of conflicting emotions. Distress at the sight of his blistered skin, his blackened fingernails, and a terrible smell she hadn't anticipated. Terror of losing his love now that she'd compelled him to hurt himself. Terror of losing his trust, and with it her power to compel him ever to do it again. She threw herself sobbing onto the pillows of his bed. "I wanted to see what it was like to hurt someone," she spat at him, "like you always tell me to. And now I know, and I'm horrified with both of us, and I'll never do it again, not to anyone."

He came to her then, the anger gone from his face. It was clear that her tears grieved him, so she let the tears come. He sat beside her, his burned hand clutched to his side but his focus clearly on her and her sadness. He stroked her hair with his unhurt hand, trying to soothe her. She took the hand, pressed it to her wet face, and kissed it.

After a moment of this he shifted, extricating his hand from hers. "You're too old for that," he said.

She didn't understand him. He cleared his throat. His voice was rough from his own pain.

"You must remember that you're a woman now, Fire, and an unnatural beauty. Men will find your touch overwhelming. Even your father."

She knew that he meant it plainly, that it contained no threat, no suggestion. He was only being frank, as he was with all matters relating to her monster power, and teaching her something important, for her own safety. But her instincts saw an opportunity. One way to secure Cansrel's trust was to turn this around: make Cansrel feel the need to prove his own trustworthiness to her.

She pushed herself away from him, pretending horror. She ran from the room.

That evening Cansrel stood outside Fire's closed door, pleading with her to understand. "Darling child," he said. "You need never fear me; you know I'd never act on such base instincts with you. It's only that I worry about the men who would. You must understand the dangers of your power to yourself. If you were a son I would not be so worried."

She let him make his explanations for a while, and was stunned, inside her room, with how easy it was to manipulate the master manipulator. Astonished and dismayed. Understanding that she'd learned how to do this from him.

Finally she came out and stood before him. "I understand," she said. "I'm sorry, Father." Tears slid down her face and she pretended they were on account of his bandaged hand, which, in part, they were.

"I wish you would be more cruel with your power," he said, touching her hair and kissing her. "Cruelty is strong self-defence."

And so, at the end of her experiment, Cansrel still trusted her. And he had reason to, for Fire didn't think she could go through with anything like that again.

Then, in the spring, Cansrel began to talk of his need for a new plan, an infallible plan this time, to do away with Brigan.

When Fire's bleeding began she felt compelled to explain to her guard why bird monsters had begun to gather outside her screen windows, and why raptor monsters swooped down occasionally, ripped apart the smaller birds, and then perched on the sills to stare inside, screeching. She thought the guards took it rather well. Musa sent the two with the best aim to the grounds below the rooms to do some raptor hunting rather perilously close to the palace walls.

The Dells was not known for hot summers, but a palace made of black stone with glass ceilings will get warm; on clear days the ceiling windows were levered open. When Fire passed through a courtyard or corridor during her bleeding the birds chirped and the raptors screeched through those screens as well. Sometimes flying monster bugs trailed in her wake. Fire didn't imagine it did much for her reputation around the court, but then again, very little did. The square mark on her cheek was recognised and much talked of. She could sense the spinning gossip that stopped whenever she entered a room and started up again as she left.

She had told the king that she would think about the issue of the prisoner, but she didn't, not really; she didn't need to. She knew her mind. She spent a certain amount of energy monitoring his whereabouts so she could avoid him. A good bit more deflecting the attention of people of the court. She sensed curiosity from them foremost, and admiration; some hostility, especially from servants. She wondered if the court's servants had clearer recollections of the particulars of Cansrel's cruelty. She wondered if he had been crueller to them.

People followed her sometimes, at a distance, both men and women, servants and nobles, usually without any definite antagonism. Some of them tried to talk to her, called out to her. A grey-haired woman walked right up to her once, said, "Lady Fire, you are like a delicate blossom," and would have embraced her if Mila hadn't held out a restraining hand. Fire, her abdomen heavy and aching with cramps and her skin tender and burning, felt the furthest thing from a delicate blossom. She couldn't decide whether to slap the woman or fall into her embrace, weeping. And then a raptor monster scratched on a window screen above and the woman looked up and raised her arms to it, just as entranced with the predator as she had been with Fire.

From other ladies of the court Fire sensed envy and resentment, and jealousy for the heart of the king, who fretted over her from a distance like a stallion behind a fence and did little to hide his frustrated regard. When she met the eyes of these women, some of them with monster feathers in their hair or shoes of lizard monster skins, she lowered her eyes and moved on. She took her meals in her rooms. She was shy of the severe city fashion of the court, sure of the impossibility of herself ever blending in, and besides, it was a way to avoid the king.

Crossing a bright white courtyard one day, Fire witnessed a spectacular fight between a pack of small children on one side and Prince Garan's daughter, passionately assisted by her puppy, on the other. Garan's daughter was the instigator of the swinging fists, this Fire saw plainly; and from the broiling emotions in the bunch Fire sensed that she herself might be the matter of dispute. Stop, she thought to the children from across the courtyard, now; at which every one of them save Garan's girl froze, turned to stare, and then ran shrieking into the palace.

Fire sent Neel for a healer and rushed with the rest of her guard to the girl, whose face was swelling and whose nose ran with blood. "Child," Fire said, "are you all right?"

The girl was engaged in an argument with her puppy, who jumped and yapped and strained against her hand on his collar. "Blotchy," she said, crouching to his level, her voice congested with blood, "down. Down, I say! Stop it! Monster rocks!" This last as Blotchy jumped and banged against her bloody face.

Fire took hold of the puppy's mind and soothed him to calmness.

"Oh, thank goodness," the child said woefully, plopping down on the marble floor beside Blotchy. She ran searching fingers over her cheeks and nose. She winced and pushed her sticky hair out of her face. "Papa will be disappointed."

As before, this child was quite closed to Fire mentally, impressively so, but Fire had understood enough of the other children's feelings to interpret what she meant. "Because you came to my defence, you mean."

"No, because I forgot to guard my left side. He reminds me all the time. I think my nose is broken. He'll punish me."

It was true Garan was not the personification of kindness, but still, Fire couldn't imagine him punishing a child for not winning a fight against approximately eight adversaries. "Because someone else broke your nose? Surely not."

The child gave a mournful sigh. "No, because I threw the first punch. He said I mustn't do that. And because I'm not in my lessons. I'm supposed to be in my lessons."

"Well, child," Fire said, trying not to be amused. "We've fetched you a healer."

"It's just there are so many lessons," the girl went on, not much interested in the healer. "If Papa were not a prince I wouldn't have all these lessons. I love my riding lessons but I could die from my history lessons. And now he won't let me ride his horses, ever. He lets me name his horses but he never lets me ride them, and Uncle Garan will tell him I missed my lessons, and Papa'll say I can't ride them ever. Does Papa ever let you ride his horses?" the girl asked Fire tragically, as if she knew she was bound to receive the most calamitous of responses.

But Fire could not answer, for her mouth was hanging open, her mind scrambling to make sense of the thing she'd thought she understood. This child with dark eyes and hair and a mashed-up face, and an Uncle Garan and a princely father, and an unusual propensity for mental closedness. "I've only ridden my own horse," she managed to say.

"Have you met his horses? He has many. He's crazy for horses."

"I think I've only met one," Fire said, still disbelieving. Sluggishly she began to strain through some mental arithmetic.

"Was it Big? Big's a mare. Papa says most soldiers favour stallions, but Big is fearless and he wouldn't trade her for any stallion. He says you're fearless, too. He says you saved his life. That's why I defended you," she said dismally, her current dilemma rounding back to her again. She touched the vicinity of her nose. "Perhaps it's not broken. Perhaps it's only sprained. Do you think he'll be less angry if my nose is only sprained?"

Fire had begun to clutch her forehead. "How old are you, child?"

"Six come winter."

Neel came trotting across the courtyard then with a healer, a smiling man in green. "Lady Fire," the healer said, nodding. He crouched before the child. "Princess Hanna, I think you'd best come with me to the infirmary."

The two of them shuffled away, the child still chattering in her stuffed-nose voice. Blotchy waited a moment, then trailed after them.

Fire was still gaping. She turned to her guard. "Why did no one tell me the commander had a daughter?"

Mila shrugged. "Apparently he keeps it quiet, Lady. All we've ever heard is rumours."

Fire thought of the woman at the green house with the chestnut hair. "The child's mother?"

"Word is she's dead, Lady."

"How long?"

"I don't know. Musa might know, or Princess Clara could tell you."

"Well," Fire said, trying to remember what she'd been doing before all of this had happened. "We may as well go someplace where the raptors aren't screeching."

"We were on our way to the stables, Lady."

Ah, yes, to the stables, to visit Small. And his many horsey friends – a number of which, presumably, had short, descriptive names.

Fire could have gone to Clara immediately to hear the story of how a prince of twenty-two had ended up with a secret daughter nearing six. Instead she waited until her bleeding was over, and then she went to Garan.

"Your sister tells me you work too much," she said to the spymaster.

He looked up from his long table of documents and narrowed his eyes. "Indeed."

"Will you come for a walk with me, Lord Prince?"

"Why should you want to walk with me?"

"Because I'm trying to decide what I think of you."

His eyebrows shot up. "Oh, a test, is it? Do you expect me to perform for you, then?"

"I don't care what you do, but I'm going regardless. I haven't been outside in five days."

She turned and left the room; and was pleased, as she moved through the corridor, to feel him weaving through her guard and falling into place beside her.

"My reason is the same as yours," he said in a patently unfriendly voice.

"Fair enough. I could perform for you if you like. We could stop for my fiddle."

He snorted. "Your fiddle. Yes, I've heard all about it. Brigan thinks we're made of money."

"You hear about everything, I suppose."

"It's my job."

"Then perhaps you can explain why no one's ever told me about Princess Hanna."

Garan glanced at her sideways. "Why should you care about Princess Hanna?"

It was a reasonable question, and it pricked at a hurt Fire hadn't quite acknowledged yet. "Only to wonder why people like Queen Roen and Lord Brocker have never made mention of her."

"Why should they mention her?"

Fire rubbed her neck under her headscarf and sighed, understanding now why her heart had wanted to have this conversation with Garan of all people.

"The lady queen and I speak freely with each other," she said, "and Brocker shares all he learns with me. The question isn't why they should have mentioned her. It's why they've taken care not to."

"Ah," Garan said. "This is a conversation about trust."

Fire took a breath. "And why should the child be kept secret? She's only a child."

Garan was silent for a moment, thinking, now and then glancing at her. He steered her across the palace's central courtyard. She was happy to let him choose the route. Fire still got lost in the labyrinths of this place, and only this morning had found herself in the laundry when she'd been aiming for the blacksmith's shop.

"She is just a child," Garan said finally, "but her identity has been kept quiet since before she was born. Brigan himself didn't know about her until she'd been alive four months."

"Why? Who was the mother, an enemy's wife? A friend's wife?"

"No one's wife. A stable girl."

"Then why – "

"The child was born the third heir to the throne," Garan said, very low, "and she was born to Brigan. Not Nash, not Clara, not I. Brigan. Think of the time, Lady, six years ago. If, as you claim, you've been educated by Brocker, you'll know the danger Brigan faced as he grew into adulthood. He was the only one of the court who was Cansrel's open enemy."

This silenced Fire. She listened, shamed, as Garan unfolded the story.

"She was the girl who cared for his horses. He was sixteen, barely, and she was, too, a pretty thing; goodness knew there was little joy in his life. Her name was Rose."

"Rose," Fire repeated, woodenly.

"No one knew of them but four in the family: Nash, Clara, Roen, and I. Brigan kept her quiet to keep her safe. He wanted to marry her." Garan laughed shortly. "He was an impossible romantic rockhead. Luckily he couldn't, and keep her secret."

"And why was that lucky?"

"The son of a king and a girl who slept with the horses?"

It seemed to Fire it was rarely enough one knew a person one wished to marry. How unjust then to meet that person, and be kept from it because one's bed was made of hay and not feathers.

"Anyway," Garan continued. "Around that time Cansrel convinced Nax to throw Brigan into the army and send him off to the borders, where presumably Cansrel hoped he'd get himself killed. Brigan was angry as a hornet, but he had no choice but to go. Shortly thereafter it became clear to those of us who knew Rose that he'd left part of himself behind."

"She was pregnant."

"Precisely. Roen arranged for her needs, everything secret of course. And Brigan didn't get himself killed after all, but Rose died giving birth to the child; and Brigan came home, all of seventeen years old, to learn in one day that Rose was dead, he had a child, and Nax had named him Commander of the King's Army."

Fire remembered this part. Cansrel had convinced Nax to promote Brigan far beyond his capability, in the hopes that Brigan would destroy his own reputation with a show of military incompetence. Fire recalled Brocker's pleasure and his pride when Brigan, through some impossible feat of determination, had turned himself first into a credible leader and then into an uncommon one. He'd mounted the entire King's Army, not just the cavalry but the infantry and bowmen. He'd raised the standards of their training and raised their pay. He'd increased their ranks, invited women to join, built signal stations in the mountains and all across the kingdom so that distant places could communicate with each other. He'd planned new forts with vast grain farms and enormous stables to care for the army's greatest asset, the horses that made it mobile and swift. All to the effect of creating new challenges indeed for the smugglers, looters, Pikkian invaders – and for rebel lords like Mydogg and Gentian who were forced now to take pause and reassess their own small armies and dubious ambitions.

Poor Brigan. Fire almost couldn't fathom it. Poor heartbroken boy.

"Cansrel was after everything of Brigan's," Garan said, "especially as Brigan's power increased. He poisoned Brigan's horses, out of spite. He tortured one of Brigan's squires and killed him. Obviously we who knew the truth of Hanna knew not to breathe a word."

"Yes," Fire whispered. "Of course."

"Then Nax died," Garan said, "and Brigan and Cansrel spent the next two years trying to kill each other. And then Cansrel killed himself. Finally Brigan was able to name the child his heir, and the second heir now to the throne. But he did so only among the family. It's no official secret – much of the court knows she's his – but it's continued to remain quiet. Partly out of habit, and partly to divert attention from her. Not all of Brigan's enemies died with Cansrel."

"But how can she be an heir to the throne," Fire asked, "if you're not? Nax was your father, and you're no more illegitimate than she is. Plus, she's female, and a child."

Garan pursed his lips and looked away from her. When he spoke, it wasn't to answer her question. "Roen trusts you," he said, "and Brocker trusts you, so you needn't worry your monster heart. If Roen never told you about her grandchild, it's because she's in the habit of never telling anyone. And if Brocker never told you, it's probably because Roen never told him. And Clara trusts you too, because Brigan trusts you. And I'll admit Brigan's trust is a strong recommendation, but of course, no man is infallible."

"Of course," Fire said, dryly.

One of Fire's guards brought down a raptor monster then. It fell from the sky, golden green, and landed in a patch of trees out of their sight. Fire became aware suddenly of their surroundings. They stood in the orchard behind the palace, and beyond the orchard sat the little green house.

Fire stared in astonishment then at the tree beside the house, wondering how she'd failed to notice it from her window. She realised it was because she'd assumed from above that it was a grove of trees and never a single organism. Its mammoth trunk split off in six directions, the limbs so many and so massive that some of them bent with their weight down to the ground, burrowed into the grass, and rose up again to the sky. Supports had been built for some of the heaviest limbs to hold them up and prevent them from breaking.

Beside her, Garan watched the amazement on her face. Sighing, he walked to a bench beside the pathway to the house, where he sat with his eyes closed. Fire noticed his drawn face and his slumped posture. He looked washed out. She went and sat next to him.

"Yes, it's extraordinary," he said, opening his eyes. "It's grown so big it'll kill itself. Every father names his heirs. Surely you know that."

Fire turned from the tree to glance at him, startled. Garan looked back at her coolly.

"My father never named me," he said. "He named Nash, and Brigan. Brigan did differently. Hanna will be his first heir even after he marries and has an army of sons. Of course I never minded. I've never once wanted to be king."

"And of course," Fire said smoothly, "none of it will matter once the king and I marry and produce a jungle of monster heirs."

He hadn't been expecting that. He sat still for a moment, measuring, and then half smiled, despite himself, understanding that it was a joke. He changed the subject again. "And what have you been doing with yourself, Lady? You've been ten days at court with little but a fiddle to occupy you."

"And why should you care? Is there something you want me to do?"

"I've no employment for you until you decide to help us."

Help them – help this strange royal family. She found herself wishing that it weren't so impossible. "You said you didn't want me to help you."

"No, Lady, I said I was undecided. I remain undecided."

The door of the green house swung open then and the lady with the chestnut hair walked down the path toward them. And suddenly the feeling of Garan's mind changed to something lighter. He jumped up and went to the woman and reached for her hand. He walked her back to Fire, his face alight; and Fire understood that of course he'd steered their walk in this direction intentionally. She'd been too wrapped up in their conversation to notice.

"Lady Fire," Garan said, "this is Sayre. Sayre has the misfortune of being Hanna's history tutor."

Sayre smiled up at Garan, a smile that had everything in the world to do with Garan, so that Fire couldn't fail to understand what she was seeing. "It's not so bad as all that," Sayre said. "She's more than capable. It's just she gets restless."

Fire held out her hand. The two ladies greeted each other, Sayre exceedingly polite and ever so mildly jealous. Understandable. Fire would have to advise Garan not to cart lady monsters along on his trips to visit his sweetheart. Some of the smartest men had a hard time comprehending the obvious.

Then Sayre took her leave and Garan watched her go, rubbing his head absently and humming.

The son of a king and a woman who's a palace tutor? Fire thought to him, propelled by some strange joy into cheekiness. Shocking.

Garan lowered his eyebrows and tried to look stern. "If you're desperate for something to do, Lady, go to the nurseries and teach guarding against monster animals. Get the children on your side so Brigan's daughter still has some teeth in her mouth next he sees her."

Fire turned to go, a smile playing around her lips. "Thank you for walking with me, Lord Prince. I should tell you I'm difficult to deceive. You may not trust me, but I know you like me."

And she told herself it was Garan's regard that had buoyed her mood, and nothing to do with a woman whose significance had been reassigned.

Chapter Sixteen

Fire was, in fact, in need of something to do, because without an occupation all she could do was think. And thinking brought her back, over and over, to her lack of occupation, and the question of how much help, in fact, she would be capable of offering this kingdom – if her heart and her mind didn't positively forbid it. The matter plagued her at night when she couldn't sleep. She had bad dreams of what it meant to trick people and hurt people, nightmares of Cansrel making Cutter grovel in imagined pain.

Clara took Fire sightseeing. The city folk adorned themselves with even more monster trappings than the court folk, and with much less concern for the aesthetic integration of the whole. Feathers jammed randomly into buttonholes; jewellery, quite stunning really, necklaces and earrings made of monster shells, worn by a baker woman over her mixing bowl and covered in flour dust. A woman wearing a blue-violet wig from the fur of some silky monster beast, a rabbit or a dog, the hair short and uneven and sticking out in spikes. And the woman's face underneath quite plain, the overall effect tending to an odd caricature of Fire herself; but still, there was no denying she had something lovely atop her head.

"Everyone wants a bit of something beautiful," Clara said. "Among the wealthy it's the rare skins and furs sold on the black market. With everyone else it's whatever they find clogging the gutters or killed in the housetraps. It all amounts to the same thing, of course, but the rich people feel better knowing they've paid a fortune."

Which was, of course, silly. This city, Fire saw, was part sober and part silly. She liked the gardens and the old crumbling sculptures, the fountains in the squares, the museums and libraries and bright rows of shops that Clara led her through. She liked the bustling cobbled streets where people were so busy with their noisy living that sometimes they didn't even notice the lady monster's guarded walking tour. Sometimes. She calmed a team of horses once that panicked when some children ran too close to their heels, murmuring to them, petting their necks. Business stopped on that street, and didn't resume until she and Clara had rounded a corner.

She liked the bridges. She liked standing in the middle and looking down, feeling she could fall but knowing she wouldn't. The bridge farthest from the falls was a drawbridge; she liked the bells that rang when it rose and fell, soft, almost melodic, whispering around and through the other city noises. She liked the warehouses and docks along the river, the aqueducts and sewers, and the locks, creaking and slow, that brought supply ships up and down between river and harbour. She especially liked Cellar Harbour, where the falls created a mist of seawater and drowned out all sound and feeling.

She even, hesitatingly, liked the feel of the hospitals. She wondered which one had cured her father of the arrow in his back, and she hoped that the surgeons brought good folk back to life too. There were always people outside the hospitals, waiting and worrying. She glanced at them, touching them with surreptitious wishes that their worry should come to a happy ending.

"There used to be medical schools all over the city," Clara told her. "Do you know of King Arn and his monster adviser, Lady Ella?"

"I remember the names from my history lessons," Fire said, reflecting, but not coming up with much.

"They ruled a good hundred years ago," Clara said. "King Arn was an herbalist and Lady Ella a surgeon, and they became a bit obsessive about it, really – there are stories about them doing bizarre medical experiments on people who probably wouldn't have consented to it if a monster hadn't been the one making the suggestions, if you know what I mean, Lady. And they'd cut up dead bodies and study them, but no one was ever sure where they were getting the dead bodies from. Ah, well," Clara said, with a sardonic lift of the eyebrows. "Be that as it may, they revolutionised our understanding of doctoring and surgery, Lady. It's thanks to them we know the uses for all the strange herbs that grow in the crevices and caves at the edges of the kingdom. Our medicines to stop bleeding and keep wounds from festering and kill tumours and bind bones together and do just about everything else came from their experiments. Of course, they also discovered the drugs that ruin people's minds," she added darkly. "And anyway, the schools are closed now; there's no money for research. Or for art, for that matter, or engineering. Everything goes to policing – to the army, the coming war. I suppose the city will begin to deteriorate."

It already was, Fire thought but didn't say. She saw the seedy, sprawling neighbourhoods that abutted the docks on the south side of the river, and the tumbledown alleyways that popped up in parts of the city centre where it seemed they shouldn't. Many, many sections of the city that were not devoted to knowledge or beauty, or any kind of goodness.

Clara took her to lunch once with the twins' mother, who had a small and pleasant home on a street of florists. She also had a husband, a retired soldier who moonlighted as one of the twins' most reliable spies.

"These days, my focus is smuggling," he told them in confidence over their meal. "Almost every wealthy person in the city dips into the black market now and then, but as often as not, when you find someone who's very deeply involved, you've also found someone who's the king's enemy. Especially if they're smuggling weapons or horses or anything Pikkian. If we're lucky, we're able to trace a buyer to the fellow he's buying for, and if that turns out to be one of the rebel lords, we bring the buyer in for questioning. Can't always trust their answers, of course."

Unsurprisingly, this sort of talk was always fuel for Clara's pressure tactics with Fire. "With your power, it'd be easy for us to learn who's on whose side. You could help us find out if our allies are true," she'd say, or, "You could figure out where Mydogg's planning to attack first." Or, when that didn't work, "You could uncover an assassination plot. Wouldn't you feel terrible if I were assassinated because you weren't helping?" And in a moment of desperation: "What if they're planning to assassinate you? There have to be some who are, especially now that people think you might marry Nash."

Fire never responded to the endless battery, never admitted the doubt – and guilt – she was beginning to feel. She only filed the arguments away to mull over later, along with the ongoing arguments of the king. For occasionally after dinner – often enough that Welkley had installed a chair in the hallway – Nash came to speak to her through the door. He conducted himself decently, talked of the weather and stately visitors to the court; and always, always tried to convince her to reconsider the matter of the prisoner.

"You're from the north, Lady," he'd say to her, or something like it. "You've seen the loose hold the law has outside this city. One misstep, Lady, and the entire kingdom could fall through our fingers."

And then he'd grow quiet, and she would know the marriage proposal was coming. She would send him away with her refusal and take what comfort she could in the company of her guard; and consider very seriously the state of the city, and the kingdom, and the king. And what her own place should be.

To busy herself and ease her sense of uselessness, she took Garan's advice in the nurseries. Entering cautiously at first, sitting quietly on a chair and watching the children as they played, read, squabbled, for this was where her mother had worked, and she wanted to take in its feeling slowly. She tried to picture a young, orange-haired woman in these rooms, counselling children with her even temper. Jessa had had a place in these noisy, sunlit rooms. Somehow the very thought made Fire feel like less of a stranger here. Even if it also made her more lonely.

Teaching guarding against animal monsters was delicate work, and Fire came up against some parents who wanted nothing of her association with their children. But a mix of royal and servant children did become her pupils.

"Why are you so fascinated with insects?" she asked one of her cleverest students one morning, an eleven-year-old boy named Cob who could build a wall in his mind against raptor monsters, and resist the urge to touch Fire's hair when he saw it, but would not kill a monster bug even if it was camped out on his hand making a dinner of his blood. "You have no trouble with the raptors."

"Raptors," Cob said with high-pitched scorn. "They have no intelligence, only a big meaningless surge of feeling they think they can mesmerise me with. They're completely unsophisticated."

"True," Fire said. "But compared to monster bugs, they're veritable geniuses."

"But monster bugs are so perfect," Cob said wistfully, going cross-eyed as a dragonfly monster hovered at the tip of his nose. "Look at their wings. Look at their jointed legs and their beady little eyeballs and look how smart they are with their pinchers."

"He loves all bugs," Cob's younger sister said, rolling her eyes. "Not just monster bugs."

Perhaps his problem, Fire thought to herself, is that he's a scientist. "Very well," she said. "You may allow monster bugs to sting you, in appreciation of their excellent pinchers. But," she added sternly, "there are one or two bugs that would do you harm if they could, and those you must learn to guard yourself against. Do you understand? "

"Must I kill them?"

"Yes, you must kill them. But once they're dead, you could always dissect them. Had you thought of that?"

Cob brightened. "Really? Will you help me?"

And so Fire found herself borrowing scalpels and clips and trays from a healer in the castle infirmary and engaging in some rather peculiar experimentation, perhaps along the lines of what King Arn and Lady Ella had done one hundred years before. On a smaller scale, of course, and with much less brilliant results.

She crossed paths often with Princess Hanna. From her windows she saw the girl running to and from the little green house. She also saw Sayre, and other tutors, and sometimes Garan, and even Clara's legendary gardener, who was blond and bronzed and muscular, like something out of a heroic romance. And sometimes an old woman, tiny and bent, who wore an apron and had pale green eyes and was the frequent stopping block to Hanna's headlong rushes.

She was strong, this little woman, always carrying Hanna around, and it appeared she was the housekeeper of the green house. Her love for the child was obvious, and she had no love for Fire. Fire had encountered her once in the orchard and found her mind as closed as Brigan's. Her face, at the sight of the monster lady, had gone cold and unhappy.

The palace had outside walkways built into the stone portions of the roof. At night, far from sleep, Fire walked them with her guard. From the heights she could see the glimmer of the great torches on the bridges, kept lit throughout the night so that boats on the fast-running waters below always knew exactly how close they were to the falls. And from the heights she could hear those falls roaring. On clear nights she watched the city spread sleeping around her and the flash of stars on the sea. She felt like a queen. Not like a real queen, not like the wife of King Nash. More like a woman at the top of the world. At the top of a city, in particular, where the people were becoming real to her; a city of which she was growing rather fond.

Brigan returned to court three weeks from the day he'd left. Fire knew the instant he arrived. A consciousness was like a face you saw once and forever recognised. Brigan's was quiet, impenetrable, and strong, and indubitably his from the instant her mind tripped over it.

She happened to be with Hanna and Blotchy at the time, in the morning sun of a quiet courtyard corner. The little girl was examining the raptor scars on Fire's neck and trying to wheedle from her, not for the first time, the story of how she'd got those scars and saved Brigan's soldiers. When Fire declined, the girl wheedled at Musa.

"You weren't even there," Fire objected, laughing, when Musa began the tale.

"Well," Musa said, "if no one who was there will tell it – "

"Someone's coming who knows it to tell it," Fire said mysteriously, causing Hanna to freeze, and stand bolt upright.

"Papa?" she said, turning in circles now, spinning to look at each of the entrances. "Do you mean Papa? Where?"

He came through an archway on the other side of the courtyard. Hanna shrieked and bolted across the marble floor. He caught her up and carried her back the way she'd come, nodding to Fire and the guard, smiling through Hanna's stream of chatter.

And what was it with Brigan every time he reappeared? Why this instinct to bolt? They were friends now, and Fire should be beyond this fear of him. She forbade herself to move and focused on Blotchy, who offered his ears to be petted.

Brigan put Hanna down and crouched before the child. He touched his fingers to her chin and moved her face one way and the other, surveying her still-bruised and bandaged nose. He interrupted her quietly. "And tell me what happened here?"

"But Papa," she said, changing subject in mid-sentence. "They were saying bad things about Lady Fire."

"Who were?"

"Selin and Midan and the others."

"And what? Then one of them punched you in the nose?"

Hanna scuffed her shoes at the ground. "No."

"Tell me what happened."

Another scuff at the ground, and then Hanna spoke dismally. "I hit Selin. He was wrong, Papa! Someone had to show him."

Brigan was silent for a moment. Hanna rested one hand on either of his bent knees and dropped her eyes to the floor. She sighed dramatically behind her curtain of hair.

"Look at me, Hanna."

The girl obeyed.

"Was hitting Selin a reasonable way to show him he was wrong?"

"No, Papa. I did badly. Are you going to punish me?"

"I'm going to take away your fighting lessons for now. I didn't agree to them so that you might misuse them."

Hanna sighed again. "For how long?"

"Until I'm convinced you understand what they're for."

"And will you take away my riding lessons?"

"Have you ridden over anyone you shouldn't?"

A small giggle. "Of course not, Papa!"

"Then you'll keep your riding lessons."

"Will you let me ride your horses?"

"You know the answer to that. You must grow bigger before you ride warhorses."

Hanna reached her hand out and rubbed her palm on the stubble of his face with an ease and affection Fire found hard to bear, so that she had to look away and stare fiercely at Blotchy, who was shedding silky hairs all over her skirt. "How long do you stay, Papa?"

"I don't know, love. I'm needed in the north."

"You have a wound, too, Papa." Hanna took Brigan's left hand, which was wrapped in a bandage, and inspected it. "Did you throw the first punch?"

Brigan twitched a smile at Fire. Focused on the lady more closely. And then his eyes went cold and his mouth formed a hard line; and Fire was frightened, and hurt by his disregard.

And then reason returned, and she understood what he saw. It was the lingering square mark of Nash's ring on her cheek.

It was weeks ago, Fire thought to him. He's behaved himself since.

Brigan stood, lifting Hanna with him. He spoke to the girl quietly. "I did not throw the first punch. And right now I must have a chat with your uncle the king."

"I want to come," Hanna said, wrapping arms around him.

"You may come as far as the hall, but there I must leave you."

"But why? I want to come."

"It's a private chat."

"But – "

Firmly: "Hanna. You heard me."

There was a sullen silence. "I can walk for myself."

Brigan lowered Hanna to the floor. Another sullen silence as they regarded each other, the taller side much more calmly than the shorter.

Then a small voice. "Will you carry me, Papa?"

Another flicker of smile. "I suppose you're not too big yet."

Brigan carried Hanna back across the courtyard and Fire listened to the receding music of Hanna's voice. Blotchy was doing as he always did – sitting, and considering, before following his lady. Knowing it was unethical, Fire reached out to his mind and convinced him to stay. She couldn't help it; she needed him. His ears were soft.

Brigan had been unshaven, in black clothing, his boots spattered with mud. His light eyes standing out in a weary face.

She'd very much come to like his face.

And of course she understood now why her body wanted to run whenever he appeared. It was a correct instinct, for there was nothing to be got from this but sadness.

She wished she hadn't seen his gentle way with his child.

Fire was spectacularly good at not thinking about a thing when she chose, if the thing was hurtful, or just plain stupid. She manhandled, pummelled, packed this thing away. His own brother in love with her, and she Cansrel's daughter?

It was not to be thought of.

What she did think of, more urgently now, was the question of her purpose at this court. For if Brigan's next responsibility took him north, then surely he meant to deposit her home. And she was not ready to go.

She had grown up between Brocker and Cansrel and she was not naïve. She'd seen the parts of the city with the abandoned buildings and the smell of filth; she understood the look and feel of city people who were hungry, or lost to drugs. She understood what it meant that even with a military force in four large pieces, Brigan couldn't stop looters from knocking a town off a cliff. And these were only the small things, these were mere policing. War was coming, and if Mydogg and Gentian overran this city and this kingdom with their armies, if one of them made himself king, how much lower would that push those already at the bottom?

Fire couldn't imagine leaving, going all the way back to her stone house where the reports came slowly and the only variance in her routine was the occasional empty-headed trespasser whom no one knew the significance of. How could she refuse to help when there was so much at stake here? How could she go away?

"You're wasting something you have," Clara had said to her once, almost with resentment. "Something the rest of us could only imagine possessing. Waste is criminal."

Fire hadn't responded. But she'd heard, more deeply than Clara had realised.

Tonight, while she was fighting with herself on the roof, Brigan appeared beside her and leaned on the railing. Fire took a steadying breath and watched the glimmer of torches in the city, trying not to look at him, or be pleased of his company.

"I hear you're crazy for horses," she said lightly.

He broke into a smile. "Something's come up and I'm leaving tomorrow night, following the river west. I'll be back two days later, but Hanna won't forgive me. I'm in disgrace."

Fire remembered her own experience of being five. "I expect she misses you terribly when you go."

"Yes," he said, "and I'm always going. I wish it weren't the way of things. But I wanted to check with you before I left, Lady. I travel north soon, this time without the army. It'll be faster, and safer, if you'd like to return home."

Fire closed her eyes. "I suppose I should say yes."

He hesitated. "Would you prefer me to arrange for a different escort?"

"Goodness, no," she said, "it's not that. It's only that every one of your siblings is pressuring me to stay at court and use my mental power to help with the spy work. Even Prince Garan, who hasn't decided yet if he trusts me."

"Ah," he said, understanding. "Garan doesn't trust anyone, you know. It's his nature, and his job. Does he give you a hard time?"

"No. He's kind enough. Everyone is, really. I mean, it's no harder for me here than it's been anywhere else. Just different."

He thought about that for a moment. "Well. You mustn't let them bully you; they see only their side of it. They're so embroiled in the matters of the kingdom that they can't imagine any other way of living."

Fire wondered what other way of living Brigan imagined; what life he dreamed of, if he hadn't been born to this one. She spoke carefully. "Do you think I should stay and help them as they ask?"

"Lady, I can't say what you should do. You must do whatever you think is right."

She caught something defensive in his tone, but she wasn't certain which one of them he was defending. She pressed him again. "And do you have an opinion as to what is right?"

He was flustered. He looked away from her. "I don't wish to influence you. If you stay, I'll be terribly pleased. You'll be such invaluable help. But I'll also be sorry for what we would ask of you, truly sorry."

It was a rare outburst – rare because he wasn't one for outbursts, and rare because it wasn't likely to occur to anyone else to be sorry. Rather at a loss, Fire gripped her bow tightly and said, "Taking someone's mind and changing it is a trespass. A violence. Can I ever use such a thing without overstepping my right? How will I know if I'm going too far? I'm capable of so many horrors."

Brigan took a minute to think, staring intently into his hands. He tugged at the edge of his bandage. "I understand you," he said, speaking quietly. "I know what it's like to be capable of horrors. I'm training twenty-five thousand soldiers for a bloodbath. And there are things I've done I wish I'd never had to do. There are things I'll do in future." He glanced at her, then looked back into his hands. "No doubt this is presumptuous, Lady. But for whatever it's worth, if you'd like, I could promise to tell you if I ever believed you to be overstepping the rights of your power. And whether or not you choose to accept that promise, I'd very much like to ask you to do the same for me."

Fire swallowed, hardly believing that he was entrusting her with so much. She whispered, "You honour me. I accept your promise, and I give you my own in return."

The lights in the city houses were dimming one by one. And part of avoiding thoughts about something was not encouraging opportunities for that something to make itself felt.

"Thank you for the fiddle," she said. "I play it every day."

And she left him, and walked with her guard back to her rooms.

It was in the great hall the next morning that she came to understand what had to be done.

The walls of this cavernous room were made of mirrors. Passing through, on sudden impulse, Fire looked at herself.

She caught her breath and kept looking, until she was beyond that first staggering moment of disbelief. She crossed her arms and squared her feet, and looked, and looked. She remembered a thing that made her angry. She'd told Clara her intention never to have children; and Clara had told her of a medicine that would make her very sick, but only for two or three days. After she recovered, she'd never have to worry again about the chance of becoming pregnant, no matter how many men she took to her bed. The medicine would make her permanently unable to bear children. One of the most useful discoveries of King Arn and Lady Ella.

It made Fire so angry, the thought of such a medicine, a violence done to herself to stop her from creating anything like herself. And what was the purpose of these eyes, this impossible face, the softness and the curves of this body, the strength of this mind; what was the point, if none of the men who desired her were to give her any babies, and all it ever brought her was grief ? What was the purpose of a woman monster?

It came out in a whisper. "What am I for?"

"Excuse me, Lady?" Musa said.

Fire shook her head. "Nothing." She took a step closer and pulled off her headscarf. Her hair slid down, shimmering. One of her guards gasped.

She was fully as beautiful as Cansrel. Indeed, she was very like him.

Behind her Brigan entered the great hall suddenly and stopped. In the mirror their eyes met, and held. It was clear he was in the middle of a thought or a conversation – one that her appearance had interrupted completely.

It was so rarely he held her eyes. All the feeling she'd been trying to batter away threatened to trickle back.

And then Garan caught up with Brigan, speaking sharply. Nash's voice behind Garan, and then Nash himself appeared, saw her, and stopped cold beside his brothers. In a panic Fire grabbed at her hair to collect it, steeling herself against whatever stupid way the king intended to behave.

But it was all right, they were safe, for Nash was trying very hard to close himself. "Well met, Lady," he said with considerable effort. He threw his arms around both of his brothers' shoulders and moved with them out of the hall, out of her sight.

Fire was impressed, and relieved. She pushed her feelings back into their cell. And then, just before the brothers disappeared, her eyes caught the flash of something at Brigan's hip.

It was the hilt of his sword. The sword of the commander of the King's Army. And all at once, Fire understood.

Brigan did terrible things. He stuck swords into men in the mountains. He trained soldiers for war. He had enormous destructive power, just as his father had had – but he didn't use that power the way his father had done. Truly, he would rather not use it at all. But he chose to, so that he might stop other people from using power in even worse ways.

His power was his burden. He accepted it.

And he was nothing like his father. Neither were Garan or Clara; neither, really, was Nash. Not all sons were like their fathers. A son chose the man he would be.

Not all daughters were like their fathers. A daughter monster chose the monster she would be.

Fire looked into her face. The beautiful vision blurred suddenly behind her own tears. She blinked the tears away. "I've been afraid of being Cansrel," she said aloud to her reflection. "But I'm not Cansrel."

At her elbow, Musa said blandly, "Any one of us could have told you that, Lady."

Fire looked at the captain of her guard and laughed, because she wasn't Cansrel – she wasn't anyone but herself. She had no one's path to follow; her path was her own to choose. And then she stopped laughing, because she was terrified of the path she suddenly knew herself to be choosing. I can't do this, she thought. I'm too dangerous. I'll only make things worse.

No, she said back to herself. Already I'm forgetting. I'm not Cansrel; at every step on this path I create myself. And maybe I'll always find my own power horrifying, and maybe I can't ever be what I'd most like to be.

But I can stay here, and I can make myself into what I should be. Waste is criminal. I'll use the power I have to undo what Cansrel did. I'll use it to fight for the Dells.