Fire

Chapter Twenty-Six

She woke to the screeching of a raptor monster, and human voices raised in alarm. The floor was lurching and creaking. A carriage, cold and wet.

"It's her blood," yelled a familiar voice. "The raptors smell her blood. Wash her, cover her, I don't care how, just do it – "

Men and raptors still screaming, a struggle above her. Water pouring onto her face, choking her, someone wiping at her nose, the pain so blinding that her mind spun around her and whirled her into darkness. Hanna? Hanna, are you –

She woke again, still crying out to Hanna, as if her mind had suspended itself in mid-cry waiting for her consciousness to return. Are you there, Hanna? Are you there?

No response came to her, no feeling of the child anywhere she could reach.

Her arm was trapped crookedly under her torso, her neck stiff and twisted, her face throbbing, and cold, cold was everywhere.

There were men in this carriage. She scrabbled among their minds for one who might be kind, who might bring her a blanket. Six men, stupid, bubbling with fog, one of them the archer with a habit of killing his friends. And the boy was here, too, the red-eyed, pale boy who made the fog, with the unreachable mind and the voice that hurt her brain. Hadn't Archer gone after this boy and this archer? Archer? Archer? Are you anywhere?

The floor tilted, and she became colder and wetter, and understood that she lay in a puddle of water that shifted and rocked with the floor. Everywhere she could hear the slap of water. And there were large creatures under the carriage. She could feel them.

They were fish.

This carriage was a boat.

I'm being stolen away, she thought wonderingly, in a boat. But I can't be. I need to go back to the palace, I need to watch Lady Murgda. The war. Brigan. Brigan needs me! I've got to get out of this boat!

A man near her gasped something. He was rowing, he was exhausted, he was complaining of blistered hands.

"You're not tired," the boy said tonelessly. "Your hands don't hurt. Rowing is fun." He sounded bored as he said it, and thoroughly unconvincing, but Fire could feel the men experience a collective surge of enthusiasm. The creaking sound, which she recognised now as oars in oarlocks, increased its pace.

He was powerful, and she was weak. She needed to steal his foggy men away from him. But could she, while numb with pain and cold, and confusion?

The fish. She must reach for the fish lumbering enormously beneath her and urge them to the surface to capsize the boat.

A fish threw its back against the boat's underside. The men yelled, pitching sideways, dropping oars. Another hard blow, men falling and cursing, and then the boy's horrible voice.

"Jod," he said. "Shoot her again. She's awake and this is her doing."

Something sharp pricked her thigh. And it was well enough, she thought as she slipped into blackness. It wouldn't solve anything to drown them if she drowned too.

She woke, and groped for the mind of the rower nearest the boy. She stabbed at the fog she found there, and took hold. She compelled the man to stand, drop his oar, and punch the boy in the face.

The boy's scream was terrible, scratching like claws across her brain.

"Shoot her, Jod," he gasped. "No, her. Shoot the monster bitch."

Of course, she thought to herself as the dart pierced her skin. It's the archer I need control of. I'm not thinking. They've muddied my mind so I can't think.

The boy was crying, his breath shaking with fury and pain, as she slid away.

The next time she woke it was to the feeling she was being dragged agonisingly back into life. Her body screamed with pain, hunger, sickness. A long time, she thought. They've been poisoning me for a long time. Too long this time.

Someone was feeding her some kind of meal cake, mushed up and dripping like a porridge. She choked on it.

"She's stirring," the boy said. "Shoot her again."

This time Fire grabbed at the archer, stabbed at his fog, tried to get him to aim his darts at the boy instead of her. The sound of a struggle followed, and then the boy's screaming voice.

"I'm your protector, you fool! I'm the one who takes care of you! She's the one you want to shoot!"

A prick on her arm.

Darkness.

She cried out. The boy was shaking her. Her eyes opened to the sight of him leaning over her, a hand raised as if to strike her. They were on land now. She was lying on rock. It was cold and the sun was too bright.

"Wake up," he snarled, small and ferocious, his unmatching eyes blazing at her. "Wake up and get up and walk. And if you do anything to thwart me or any of my men I swear to you I'll hit you so hard you'll never stop hurting again. Don't trust her," he said sharply and suddenly to his companions. "I'm the only person you can trust. You do what I say."

His nose and cheekbones were blue with bruises. Fire pulled her knees to her chest and kicked him in the face. As he screamed she grasped at the consciousnesses around her and tried to get up, but she was weak, and dizzy, and staggering like a person unconnected to her legs. His voice, thick with sobs, shouted orders to his men. One of them grabbed her, yanked her arms behind her back, and closed a hand around her throat.

The boy came to her, his face a mess of blood and tears. He slapped her hard across the nose and she surfaced from the shattering pain to find herself sobbing.

"Stop," he whispered. "Stop resisting. You will eat, and you will walk, and you will do what I say, and every time one of my men turns on me, and every time a bird pecks at me, and every time a squirrel so much as crosses my path in a way I don't like, I will hurt you. Do you understand?"

It doesn't work on me, she thought to him, gasping and furious. The things you say don't control me.

He spit bloody mucus onto the snow and considered her, sullenly, before turning to the path. "Then I'll find other ways to control you."

The truth was, she didn't want her body to hurt any more than it already hurt. And she didn't want them to put her to sleep again, even though sleep was peaceful darkness and waking meant inhabiting a body shaped and moulded out of pain.

She needed to possess her own mind if she wanted to get out of this. So she did what he said.

Where they were walking it was rocky and steep with such an abundance of waterfalls and streams that she thought it likely the body of water with the great fish had been the Winged River. They'd rowed west on the river, presumably, and now they were climbing north, away from the river, in some part of the kingdom near to the western Great Greys.

Sitting for a meal the first day, she sniffed a corner of her ruined purple skirts, and put it in her mouth. It did not taste clean, of course, but it also didn't taste salty. This supported her theory. The water she'd lain in for so long had been water of the river, not the sea.

Minutes later, vomiting the meal cake she'd offered her poor wrecked stomach, she found herself laughing at her attempts to be scientific. Of course they'd brought her north of the river to a place in the western Great Greys. She should not have needed a test of salinity to determine it. They were most certainly taking her to Cutter, and she'd known all her life that this was where Cansrel's monster smuggler lived.

Cutter made her think of Small, and she wished he were here – and then was glad, in the same moment, that he wasn't. It was better that she was alone, that no one she loved was anywhere near this boy.

They provided her with sturdy boots and coverings for her hair, and an odd stylish coat of white rabbit pelt that was far too beautiful for her filthy state and made for an absurd hiking costume. In their camp in the evenings, one of the men, a fellow named Sammit with gentle hands, a kind voice, and wide, empty eyes, inspected her nose, and told her what she should eat, and how much. After a day or two she began to be able to keep her food down, which went far toward helping her to feel clearer in mind. She gathered, from the way the boy spoke to Sammit, that Sammit was a healer. She also gathered that they had woken her because Sammit had thought it dangerous for her to continue any longer in her drugged stupor.

They wanted her alive then, and relatively healthy. Which was only natural, if she was a monster and they were monster smugglers.

She began to experiment.

She entered the mind of one of the men – Sammit, to start – and popped his fog, and observed as his own thoughts trickled back in. She waited – it wasn't long – for the boy to remind the men that she was not to be trusted, that he was their guardian and friend. The words brought the fog blistering, and then bulging, right back into Sammit's mind – the words, spoken in that voice that didn't seem to hurt Sammit's head the way it hurt hers.

This was strange to Fire at first, that his power should be in his words and his voice, rather than in his mind. But the more she considered it, the more she supposed it wasn't entirely strange. She could control with parts of her body too. She could control some people with her face alone, or with her face and a suggestion made in a certain tone of voice – a voice of pretended promises. Or with her hair. Her power was in all of those things. Perhaps it was not so different from his.

And his power was contagious. If the boy spoke words to the fellow on his left and that fellow repeated the words to Sammit, the fog passed from the fellow to Sammit. It explained why the archer had been able to infect her guards.

The boy never let more than a few minutes pass between reminders to the men that Fire was their enemy and he their friend. Which suggested to Fire that he couldn't see into their minds like she could, and know for himself if he still controlled them. This was her next experiment. She took hold of Sammit again and popped his fog, and moulded his thoughts so that he knew the boy was manipulating him. She made Sammit angry at the boy. She caused him to contemplate revenge, immediate and violent.

And the boy didn't seem to notice. He didn't even glance at Sammit sidelong. Minutes passed before he repeated his litany that erased Sammit's anger and returned Sammit to forgetfulness and fog.

The boy could not read minds. His control was impressive, but it was blind.

Which left Fire with a great deal of choice over what she could do with these men without him knowing. And without her having to worry about them resisting, for the boy's fog emptied the men so nicely of their own inclinations that might otherwise have got in her way.

At night the boy wanted her drugged with something mild to keep her from turning on him while he slept. Fire consented to this. She only made sure to occupy a corner of Sammit's mind, so that whenever Sammit reached for the mixture that the archer was to dip his darts in, he pulled out an antiseptic salve instead of a sleeping potion.

In their winter camps under white, leafless trees, while the others slept or stood watch, she pretended to sleep, and planned. She understood from the talk of the men and from a few quiet, well-placed questions that Hanna had been released unharmed, and that Fire had been drugged for almost two weeks while the boat pushed west against the current of the river. That this slow passage had not been their intention – that they'd had horses when they'd reached King's City, and meant to return the way they'd come, pounding west across the flat land north of the river; but that as they were fleeing the palace grounds with Fire tossed over someone's shoulder, Fire's guard had set upon them and chased them toward the river and away from their mounts. They'd stumbled upon a boat moored under one of the city bridges, and seized it in desperation. Two men with them had been killed.

It was as frustrating to her as it was to them, the crawling pace of their journey across black rock and white snow. It was almost too much to be borne, these days away from the city and the war, and the things she was needed for. But they were almost upon Cutter now, and she supposed it was best to submit herself to being taken to him. Her escape would be faster on a horse she could steal from Cutter. And perhaps she'd be able to find Archer, and convince him to come back with her.

The archer, Jod. The man was haggard, his skin tinged with grey, but underneath his illness he was even-featured, well-boned. He had a deep voice to him and a set to his eyes that made her uneasy. He almost reminded her of Archer.

She compelled Sammit one night, while he was on guard duty, to bring her a tiny vial of the poison they'd drugged her with for so long, and a dart. She tucked the vial into the bosom of her dress and carried the dart in her sleeve.

Cutter had forged his small kingdom straight out of the wilderness. His land was so thick with boulders that his house seemed almost as if it were balanced upon a pile of rubble. It had a strange look, the building, constructed of enormous stacked tree trunks in some places and rock in others, all covered thickly with moss, a bright green house with blinking window eyes, icicle eyelashes, a gaping door mouth, and soft fur. It was a monster, perched precariously on a studded hill of stone.

A rock wall, high and long and incongruously neat, surrounded his property. Pens and cages dotted the grounds. Spots of colour, monsters behind bars, raptors, bears, and leopards screeching at each other. In all the strangeness of the place, this was familiar to Fire, and brought memories crowding too close.

She half expected the boy to try to force her into one of those cages. One more monster for the black market, one more catch.

She didn't really care what intentions Cutter had for her here. Cutter was nothing, he was an annoyance, a gnat, and she would disabuse him quickly of the notion that his intentions were relevant. She would leave this place and go home.

They did not lock her in a cage. They brought her into the house and drew her a hot bath in an upstairs room with a roaring fire that quite overcame the drafts from the windows. It was a small bedroom, the walls hung with tapestries that stunned her, though she hid her surprise and pleasure. They were woven with green fields, flowers, and blue sky, and they were beautiful, and very realistic. She had thought to refuse the bath, because she sensed, and resented, that its purpose was to prettify her. But standing in a place of fields and flowers made her want to be clean.

The men left. She set her vial of poison and her dart on a table and peeled her filthy dress away from her skin. She braced herself against the painful exhilaration of scalding bathwater, finally relaxing, closing her eyes, surrendering herself to the bliss of soap that lifted sweat, old blood, and river grime from her body and hair. Every few minutes she could hear the boy shouting messages up the stairs to the guards outside her room, and just as regularly to the guards on the rocks below her window. The monster was not to be trusted or helped to escape, he yelled. The boy knew what was best. The men would avoid mistakes if they followed the boy's advice, always. It must be nerve-racking, Fire thought, to be able to manipulate minds but not sense the state of them. His shouts were unnecessary, for she was not altering any of their minds. Not yet.

She played her mind through the building and the grounds, as she'd been doing since she'd come in range of the place. She recognised Cutter, downstairs with the boy and a number of men. As foggy as everyone else, and as condescending and insincere as he'd always been. Whatever the boy's words could do, it seemed they did not alter temperament.

When she stretched to her limits she could sense possibly thirty men in the house and grounds, and a spattering of women, too. All were muddle-minded. Archer was not there.

She pushed herself further. Archer? Archer!

There was no response.

And she wouldn't have minded not finding him here, she would have hoped it meant he'd come to his senses and abandoned his heroic pursuit – except for an unpleasant perception she wished she were cowardly enough to ignore. One or two of the foggy men on these grounds had the feeling of people she recognised. She thought they might have been guards recently in Nash's palace. And the simplest explanation for their presence here was that they'd come with Archer as part of his guard. Which begged the question of what had happened since, and who was left guarding Archer, and where Archer was.

The bath was still the purest, hottest ecstasy but she stood, and climbed out, suddenly impatient to be done with this place. She scrubbed herself dry and dressed in the flimsy long-sleeved gown they'd left for her. It had enough the look of bedroom clothing to make her uncomfortable, in addition to which, they'd taken her boots and coat away and given her nothing for her hair. She went to a wardrobe in the corner and dug through its random assortment of items until she'd found socks, a sturdy pair of boy's boots, a man's heavy robe that was far too big, and a brown woolen scarf that would do for a head wrapping. She hoped, a bit grimly, that the ensemble looked as peculiar as it felt. She didn't need beauty to control the boy's empty-headed puppets, and she wasn't in the mood to gratify Cutter by presenting the appearance of a doe-eyed monster woman ready to be ravished by one of his disgusting male customers.

She ran her mind through the hundreds of creatures held on this estate, monster predators, horses and hunting dogs, even an odd collection of rodents she couldn't imagine the purpose of. The choice of horses satisfied her. They were none of them as sympathetic as Small, but several would suit her purposes.

She soaked the tip of her dart in the vial of sleeping poison and tucked the vial back into her gown. She held the dart in her hand, where it was hidden by the length of her heavy sleeve.

Taking a deep breath for courage, she went downstairs.

Cutter's sitting room was small and as warm as the bedroom had been, the walls similarly dressed, in tapestries showing fields of flowers rising to cliffs overhanging the sea. The rug here was colourful too, and it occurred to Fire that at least some of this beauty had been woven from monster fur. And the books on the bookcases, and the golden clock on the mantelpiece – Fire wondered how much of this house's richness had been stolen.

Cutter sat at the head of the room, clearly believing himself to be the room's master. The room's true master leaned against the wall to the side, small, bored, blinking unmatched eyes, and surrounded by a woven field of flowers. Jod the archer stood beside Cutter. A man was positioned at each of the room's entrances.

Cutter barely glanced at Fire's attire. His eyes were glued to her face, his mouth stretched into a jubilant and proprietary simper. He looked just as he always had, except for a new vacantness of expression that must have to do with the fog.

"It's been no easy task stealing you, girl, especially since you've taken up residence in the king's palace," he said in the self-satisfied voice she remembered. "It's taken a great deal of time and considerable spying. Not to mention that we had to kill a number of our own spies who were careless enough to be captured in your woods by you and your people. We seem to have the stupidest spies in the kingdom. What a lot of trouble. But it was all worth it, boy, wasn't it? Look at her."

"She is lovely," the boy said disinterestedly. "You shouldn't sell her. You should keep her here with us."

Cutter's forehead creased with puzzlement. "The rumour among my colleagues is that Lord Mydogg is prepared to pay a fortune for her. In fact, a number of my buyers have shown particular interest. But perhaps I should keep her here with us." His expression brightened. "I could breed her! What a price her babies would fetch."

"What we do with her remains to be seen," the boy said.

"Precisely," Cutter said. "Remains to be seen."

"If she would only behave herself," the boy continued, "then we wouldn't have to punish her, and she might understand that we want to be friends. She might find she likes it here. Speaking of which, she's a bit too quiet for my tastes at the moment. Jod, draw an arrow. If I command it, shoot her someplace painful that won't kill her. Shoot her in the knee. It might be to our advantage to hobble her."

This was not the job for a small dart bow. Jod swung his longbow from his back, pulled a white arrow from his quiver, and drew smoothly on a string most men wouldn't even have the strength to draw. He held the notched arrow, waiting, calm and easy. And Fire was slightly sick, and it was not because she knew that an arrow of that size shot with that bow at this range would shatter her knee. She was sick because Jod moved with his bow as if it were a limb of his body, so natural and graceful, and too much like Archer.

She spoke to placate the boy, but also because there were beginning to be questions to which she wanted answers. "An archer shot a man imprisoned in my father's cages last spring," she said to Jod. "It was an uncommonly difficult shot. Were you that archer?"

Jod had no idea what she was talking about, that was plain. He shook his head, wincing, as if he were trying to remember all the things he'd ever done and could go back no further than yesterday.

"He's your man," the boy said blandly. "Jod does all our shooting. Far too talented to be wasted. And so delightfully malleable," he said, tapping a fingertip to his own head, "if you know what I mean. One of my luckiest finds, Jod."

"And what is Jod's history?" Fire asked the boy, trying to match his bland tone.

The boy seemed delighted all out of proportion with this question. He smiled a very pleased, and unpleasant, smile. "Interesting you should ask. Only weeks ago we had a visitor wondering the very same thing. Who knew, when we hired ourselves an archer, that he would come to be the subject of so much mystery and speculation? And I wish we could satisfy your curiosity, but it seems Jod's memory is not what it used to be. We've no idea what he was up to, what would it be, twenty-one years ago?"

Fire had taken a step toward the boy as he spoke, unable to prevent herself, clutching the dart hard in her hand. "Where is Archer?"

At this the boy smirked, more and more happy with this turn of conversation. "He left us. He didn't care for the company. He's gone back to his estate in the north."

He was a terrible liar, too used to people believing him. "Where is he?" Fire said again, her voice cracking now with a panic that made the boy smile wider.

"He left a couple of his guards behind," the boy said. "Kind of him, really. They were able to tell us a bit about your life at court, and your weaknesses. Puppies. Helpless children."

Several things happened in quick succession. Fire rushed toward the boy. The boy gestured to Jod, calling, "Shoot!" Fire smashed through Jod's fog, causing him to swing his bow wildly and release his arrow into the ceiling. The boy yelled, "Shoot her but don't kill her!" and hurtled himself away, trying to sidestep Fire, but Fire lunged at him, reached, just barely jabbed his flailing arm with her dart. He jumped away from her, swinging fists at her, still yelling; and then his face slackened. He tipped and slumped.

Fire had clamped hold of every mind in the room before the boy even hit the floor. She bent over him, yanked a knife from his belt, walked to Cutter, and pointed the shaking blade at Cutter's throat. Where is Archer? she thought, because speech had become impossible.

Cutter stared back at her, entranced and stupid. "He didn't care for the company. He's gone back to his estate in the north."

No, Fire thought, wanting to hit him in her frustration. Think. You know this. Where –

Cutter interrupted, squinting at her with puzzlement, as if he couldn't remember who she was, or why he was talking to her. He said, "Archer is with the horses."

Fire turned and left the room and the house. She glided past men who watched her progress with vacant eyes. Cutter is wrong, she told herself, preparing herself with denial. Archer is not with the horses. Cutter is wrong.

And, of course, this was true, for it was not Archer she found on the rocks behind the stable. It was only his body.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

What happened next passed in a blur of numbness and anguish.

It was a thing about being a monster. She couldn't look at a body and pretend she was looking at Archer. She knew, she could feel, that the fires of Archer's heart and mind were nowhere near. This body was a horrible thing, almost unrecognisable, lying there, mocking her, mocking Archer with its emptiness.

Nonetheless, this did not stop her dropping to her knees and stroking the cold arm of this body, over and over, breathing shallowly, not entirely sure what she was doing. Taking hold of the arm, clutching it, while confused tears ran down her face.

The sight of the arrow embedded in the body's stomach began to bring her a little too close to sensibility. An arrow shot into a man's stomach was cruel, its damage painful and slow. Archer had told her that long ago. He had taught her never to aim there.

She stood and turned away from this thinking, stumbled away, but it seemed to follow her across the yard. A great outdoor bonfire was alight between the stable and the house. She found herself standing before it, staring into the flames, fighting her mind, which seemed insistent that she contemplate the notion of Archer, dying, slowly, in pain. All alone.

At least her last words to him had been words of love. But she wished she'd told him just how much she loved him. How much she had to thank him for, how many good things he had done. She hadn't told him nearly enough.

She reached into the fire and took hold of a branch.

She was not entirely aware of carrying flaming branches to Cutter's green house. She wasn't aware of the men she commandeered to help her, or the trips back and forth stumbling from bonfire to house, house to bonfire. People ran frantically from the burning building. She might have spotted Cutter among them; she might have spotted Jod; she wasn't sure and she didn't care; she instructed them not to interfere. When she could no longer see the house from the black smoke billowing around it, she stopped carrying fire to it. She looked around for more of Cutter's buildings to burn.

She had mind enough to release the dogs and rodents before torching the sheds they lived in. She found the bodies of two of Archer's guards on the rocks near the predator monster cages. She took one of their bows and shot the monsters with it. She burned the men's bodies.

By the time she got to the stable the horses were panicking from the smoke and from the sounds of roaring flame, and shouting voices, and buildings falling apart. But they stilled as she entered – even the most frantic among them, even those who couldn't see her – and left their stalls when she told them to. Finally empty of horses, but full as it was of wood and hay, the stable blazed up like a mighty monster made of fire.

She bumbled around the perimeter to Archer's body. She watched, lungs hacking, until the flames reached him. Even when she could no longer see him she kept watching. When the smoke became so thick that she was choking on it, her throat burning from it, she turned her back on the fire she'd made, and walked away.

She walked without knowing where she was going and without thinking of anyone or anything. It was cold and the terrain was hard and treeless. When she crossed paths with one of the horses, dappled and grey, it came to her.

No saddle, she thought numbly to herself as it stood before her, breathing steam and stamping its hooves against the snow. No stirrups. Hard to get on.

The horse knelt awkwardly on its forelegs before her. She hitched her gown and her robe around her knees and climbed onto its back. Balancing precariously as the horse stood, she found that a horse without a saddle was slippery and warm. And better than walking. She could wind her hands in the mane and lean her body and face forward against the aliveness of its neck, and sink into a stupor of no feeling, and let the horse decide where to go.

Her robe had not been made to serve as a winter coat and she had no gloves. Under her headscarf her hair was wet. When in darkness they came upon a plateau of stone that was oddly hot and dry, its edges running with streams of melted snow water and smoke rising from cracks in the ground, Fire didn't question it. She only slid from the horse's back and found a warm flat place to lie. Sleep, she told the horse. It's time to sleep.

The horse folded itself to the ground and nestled its back against her. Warmth, Fire thought. We'll live through this night.

It was the worst night she'd ever known, skimming hour after hour between wakefulness and sleep, jerking from dream after dream of Archer alive to remember that he was dead.

Day finally broke.

She understood, with dull resentment, that her body and the horse's body needed food. She didn't know what to do about it. She sat staring at her own hands.

She was too far beyond surprise and feeling to be startled when children appeared moments later climbing from a crevice in the ground, three of them, paler than Pikkians, black-haired, blurry at the edges from the glow of the rising sun. They were carrying things: a bowl of water, a sack, a small package wrapped in cloth. One bore the sack to the horse, dropped it near the animal, and folded the top down. The horse, which had shied away with frantic noises, now approached cautiously. It sank its nose into the sack and began to chew.

The other two carried the package and bowl to Fire, setting them before her wordlessly, staring at her with amber eyes wide. They are like fish, Fire thought. Strange and colourless and staring, on the bottom of the ocean.

The package contained bread, cheese, and salted meat. At the scent of food her stomach threatened to heave. She wished the staring children would go away so that she could have her battle with breakfast alone.

They turned and went, disappearing into the crevice from which they'd come.

Fire broke a piece of bread and forced herself to eat it. When her stomach seemed to decide it was willing to accept this, she cupped her hands into the water and took a few sips. It was warm. She watched the horse, chomping on the feed in the sack, poking its nose softly into the corners. Smoke seeped from a crack in the ground behind the animal, glowing yellow in the morning sun. Smoke? Or was it steam? This place had a strange smell to it, like wood smoke but also something else. She put her hand to the warm rock floor on which she sat and understood that there were people beneath it. Her floor was someone else's ceiling.

She was feeling the beginnings of a lustreless sort of curiosity when her stomach decided it did not want her crumbs of bread after all.

After the horse had finished its breakfast and drunk the rest of the water it came to where Fire was lying in a ball on the ground. It nudged her, and knelt. Fire uncurled herself, like a turtle ripping itself from its shell, and climbed onto the horse's back.

The horse seemed to move randomly west and south across the snow. It shuffled through streams that crunched with ice, and crossed wide crevices in the rock that made Fire uneasy because she could not see to the bottoms of them.

In the early morning she felt a person on horseback approaching from behind. She didn't much care at first. But then she recognised the feel of the person and was dragged against her will into caring. It was the boy.

He was also riding saddleless, awkwardly so, and he kicked his poor frustrated horse until it brought him within shouting range. He called out angrily. "Where are you going? And what are you doing, sending your every thought and feeling over these rocks? This is not Cutter's fortress. There are monsters out here, and wild, unfriendly people. You're going to get yourself killed."

Fire didn't hear him, for at the sight of his mismatched eyes she found herself dropping from her horse and running at him, a knife in her hand, though she hadn't realised until that moment that she was in possession of one.

His horse chose that instant to throw the boy from its back, toward her. He fell in a bundle on the ground, clambered to his feet, and ran to escape her. There was a blundering chase across the crevices, and then an ugly scuffle that she couldn't sustain because she grew exhausted too quickly. The knife slipped from her fingers and slid into a wide crack in the earth. He pushed himself away, scrambled to his feet, choking over his words.

"You've lost your mind," he said, touching his hand to a cut on his neck, staring incredulously at the blood that came off on his fingers. "Take hold of yourself! I didn't come after you all this way to fight you. I'm trying to rescue you!"

"Your lies don't work on me," she cried, her throat coarse and painful from smoke and dehydration. "You killed Archer."

"Jod killed Archer."

"Jod is your tool!"

"Oh, be reasonable," he said, his voice rising with impatience. "You of all people should understand it. Archer was too strong-minded. It's quite a kingdom for the strong-minded you've got here, isn't it, the very toddlers taught to guard their minds against monsters?"

"You're not a monster."

"It amounts to the same thing. You know perfectly well how many people I've had to kill."

"I don't," she said. "I don't. I'm not like you."

"Perhaps you're not, but you do understand it. Your father was like me."

Fire stared at this boy, his sooty face, his thatch of filthy hair, his torn and bloodstained coat, oversized, as if he'd taken it from one of his own victims, from a body he'd found unburned on Cutter's grounds. The feeling of his mind bumped against hers, simmering with strangeness, taunting her with its unreachability.

Whatever he was, he was not a monster. But it amounted to the same thing. Was this what she had killed Cansrel for, so that a creature like this could rise to power in his place?

"What are you?" she whispered.

He smiled. Even in his dirty face it was a disarming smile, the delighted smile of a little boy who is proud of himself.

"I'm what is known as a Graceling," he said. "My name used to be Immiker. Now it is Leck. I come from a kingdom you've not heard of. There are no monsters there, but there are people with eyes of two colours who have powers, all different kinds of powers, everything you could think of, weaving, dancing, swordplay, and mental powers too. And none of the Gracelings are as powerful as I."

"Your lies don't work on me," Fire said automatically, feeling around for her horse, who appeared at her side for her to lean against.

"I'm not making it up," he said. "This kingdom does exist. Seven kingdoms, actually, and not a single monster to trouble the people. Which, of course, means that few of them have learned to strengthen their minds as people must here in the Dells. Dellians are far more strong-minded as a people, and far more vexing."

"If Dellians vex you," she whispered, "go back where you came from."

He shrugged, smiling. "I don't know how to go back. There are tunnels, but I've never found them. And even if I did, I don't want to. There's so much potential here – so many advances in medicine, and engineering, and art. And so much gorgeousness – the monsters, the plants – do you appreciate how unusual the plants are here, how marvellous the medicines? My place is here in the Dells. And," he said with a touch of contempt, "don't imagine it contents me to control Cutter's vulgar smuggling operation here at the kingdom's edges. It's King's City I want, with its glass ceilings and its hospitals and its beautiful bridges all lit up at night. It's the king I want, whoever that may be at the other side of the war."

"Are you working with Mydogg? Whose side are you on?"

He waved a dismissive hand. "I don't care which one wins. Why should I get involved when they're doing me a favour by destroying each other? But you, don't you see the place I've made for you in my plans? You must know it was my idea to capture you – I controlled all the spies and masterminded the kidnapping, and I was never going to allow Cutter to sell you, or breed you. I want to be your partner, not your master."

How weary Fire was of everyone, every person in this world who wanted to use her.

"Not use you, work with you to control the king," the boy said, causing her to prickle with confusion, for she had not thought he could read mind's. "And I'm not in your mind," he said impatiently. "I told you before, you're sending your every thought and feeling out to be felt. You're revealing things I doubt you mean to reveal, and you're also hurting my head. Pull yourself together. Come back with me, you've destroyed all my rugs and my hangings, but I'll forgive you for that. There's a corner of the house still left standing. I'll tell you my plans, and you can tell me all about yourself. Like who cut your neck, for starters. Was it your father?"

"You're not normal," Fire whispered.

"I'll send my men away," he continued, "I promise. Cutter and Jod are dead, anyway – I killed them. It'll just be the two of us. No more fighting. We'll be friends."

It was heartbreaking, the realisation that Archer had wasted himself protecting her from such a stupid, mad thing. Heartbreaking beyond endurance. Fire closed her eyes and leaned her face against the steady leg of her horse. "These seven kingdoms," she whispered. "Where are they?"

"I don't know. I fell through the mountains and found myself here."

"And is it the way, in these kingdoms you fell from, for a woman to join forces with an unnatural child who's murdered her friend? Or is that expectation unique to you, and your infinitesimal heart?"

He didn't respond. She opened her eyes to find that he'd shifted his smile, carefully, to something unpleasant that was shaped like a smile but did not have the feel of one. "There is nothing unnatural in this world," he said. "An unnatural thing is a thing that could never happen in nature. I happened. I am natural, and the things I want are natural. The power of your mind, and your beauty, even when you've been drugged in the bottom of a boat for two weeks, covered in grime and your face purple and green – your unnatural beauty is natural. Nature is horrifying.

"And," he continued, his strange smile gleaming, "as I see it, our hearts are not so different in size. I murdered my father. You murdered yours. Is that something you did with a large heart?"

Fire was becoming confused, because it was a cruel question, and at least one of the answers to it was yes, which she knew made no sense. She was too wild and too weak for logic. I must defend myself with illogic, she thought to herself, illogically. Archer has always been one for illogic, though he never sees it in himself.

Archer.

She had taught Archer to make his mind strong. And the strong mind she had given him had got him killed.

But he had taught her, too. He had taught her to shoot an arrow fast and with greater precision than she could ever have learned on her own.

She stood, reaching for the quiver and bow she suddenly realised she had on her back, forgetting that she was broadcasting her every intention. Leck grabbed for his own bow, and he was faster than she was – he had an arrow aimed at her knees before her own arrow was notched. She braced herself for an explosion of pain.

And then, beside her, Fire's horse erupted. The animal sprang at the boy, rearing, screaming, kicking him in the face. The boy cried out and fell, dropping his bow, clasping one eye with both hands. He scrambled away, sobbing, the horse fast after him. He seemed unable to see, there was blood in his eyes, and he tripped and sprawled headlong. Fire watched, stunned and fascinated, as he slid across a patch of ice and over the rim of a crevice, slipped through its lips, and disappeared.

Fire stumbled to the crack. She knelt, peering in. She could not see to its bottom, and she could not see the boy.

The mountain had swallowed him.

She was too cold. If only the boy had died in the fire and never come after her – for he'd woken her, and now she perceived things like coldness. And weakness and hunger, and what it meant to be lost in a corner of the western Great Greys.

She ate the rest of the food the children had given her, without much hope of her stomach submitting to it. She drank water from a half-frozen stream. And she tried not to think about the night that would come at the end of this day, because she had no flint, and she had never started a fire without one. She'd never even started a fire that hadn't been in a fireplace. She'd lived a pampered life.

Shaking with cold, she unwrapped her headscarf and wrapped it again so that it covered not just her hair, still slightly damp, but her face and neck as well. She killed a raptor monster before it killed her, a scarlet creature that came screeching suddenly out of the sky, but knew it was no use trying to carry the meat, for the smell of its blood would only attract more monsters.

This reminded her. The gala had taken place in the second half of January. She couldn't be certain how much time had passed, but surely it was well into February. Her bleeding was due.

Fire understood, with her new waking logic that was blunt and unsympathetic, that she was going to die soon, from one thing or another. She thought about this on her horse. It was comforting. It gave her permission to give up. I'm sorry, Brigan, she thought to herself. I'm sorry, Small. I tried.

But then a memory, and a realisation, jarred her out of this. People. She might live if she had the help of people, and there were people behind her, in the place where smoke rose from the rocks. There was warmth there, too.

Her horse was still plodding purposefully southwest. Propelled by nothing more than a drab sense of duty not to die if she didn't have to, Fire turned the animal around.

As they started back the way they'd come, snow began to fall.

Her body ached from her rattling teeth, her rattling joints and muscles. She ran through music in her mind, all the most difficult music she'd studied, forcing herself to remember the intricacies of complicated passages. She didn't know why she was doing this. Some part of her mind felt it was necessary and would not let her stop, though her body and the rest of her mind begged to be left alone.

When a golden raptor monster dove at her, screaming through falling snow, she fumbled with her bow and couldn't notch the arrow properly. The horse killed the bird, though Fire didn't know how it managed the job. She'd slid off its rearing back and was lying in a heap on the snow when it happened.

Some time later she slid off the horse's back again. She wasn't sure why. She assumed it must be another raptor monster, and waited patiently, but almost immediately her horse began pushing at her with its nose, which confused Fire, and struck her as deeply unjust. The horse blew angrily in her face and shoved her repeatedly, until, defeated, she dragged herself shaking onto its proffered back. And then she understood why she'd fallen. Her hands had stopped working. She had no grip on the animal's mane.

I'm dying, she thought, disinterestedly. Ah well. I may as well die on the back of this lovely dappled horse.

The next time she fell she was too senseless to realise that she'd fallen onto warm rock.

She was not unconscious. She heard the voices, sharp, urgent, and alarmed, but she could not get up when they asked her to. She heard her name and grasped that they knew who she was. She understood when a man lifted her and carried her underground, and she understood when women undressed her and undressed themselves, and wrapped themselves with her in many blankets.

She had never in her life been so cold. She shook so hard she felt she would shatter. She tried to drink the warm, sweet liquid a woman held to her face but had the impression she sprayed most of it onto her blanket companions.

After an eternity of gasping and shaking she noticed that she was no longer shaking so hard. Embraced by two pairs of arms, enfolded between the bodies of two naked women, a merciful thing happened: she fell asleep.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

She woke to the sight of Musa's face and the feeling that her hands were being crushed by mallets.

"Lady," Musa said grimly. "I've never been more relieved in all my life. How do you feel?"

Her voice was a croak. "My hands hurt."

"Yes. They're frostbitten, Lady. You're not to worry. The people here have thawed them and bandaged them and taken very good care of you."

Memory came back to Fire, seeping into the spaces around her. She turned her face away from Musa.

"We've been searching for you from the minute you were taken, Lady," Musa continued. "We wasted some time following false leads, for Princess Hanna never saw who took her, and the men we killed had no identifying marks, and your grandmother and the green house guards were drugged before they even knew it was happening. We had no idea where to look, Lady, and the king and the prince and princess were sure it was some plot of Lady Murgda's, but the commander's communications were doubtful, and it wasn't until one of the palace guards got hold of a blurry memory in his head of a red-eyed boy lurking on the grounds that we began to suspect what had happened. We reached Cutter's yesterday. I can't tell you how it frightened us, Lady, to find the place burned to the ground, and charred bodies we couldn't recognise."

Fire spoke hollowly. "I lit a fire for Archer. He's dead."

Musa was startled by this. Fire felt it, and understood at once that Musa's allegiance was with Mila, not with the careless lord who'd fathered Mila's baby. This was just a death to Musa, of someone she'd known only by bad behaviour.

Fire pushed Musa's feelings away.

"We'll send word to the commander at Fort Flood about Lord Archer, Lady," Musa finally said. "Everyone will be so relieved to hear you're all right. Shall I tell you of the progress the commander has made in the war?"

"No," Fire said.

A woman appeared at Fire's side then with a bowl of soup and said gently, "The lady must eat." Musa rose from her chair so that the woman could sit down. She was old, her face whitish and lined, her eyes a deep yellow-brown. Her expression shifted softly in the light from a fire stoked in the middle of the stone floor, its smoke rising to the ceiling and escaping through a crack above. Fire recognised the feeling of the woman. This grandmother was one of the two who'd saved her life with the gift of her own body's heat.

The woman spoon-fed the soup to Fire, murmuring quietly, catching the bits that ran down Fire's chin. Fire consented to this kindness, and to the soup, because they came from a person who didn't want to talk about the war, and had never known Archer, and could receive her grief easily, with uncomplicated acceptance.

Her bleeding came, delaying their journey. She slept, and tried not to think, and spoke very little. She watched the lives of the people who lived in the darkness of these underground caves, poor and scrabbling through winter, but warm from their fires and from what they called the furnace of the earth, which sat very close to the surface here and heated their floors and walls. They explained the science of it to Fire's guard. They gave Fire medicinal concoctions to drink.

"As soon as you're able," Musa said, "we'll move you to the army healers at Fort Flood, Lady. The southern war is not going badly. The commander was hopeful, and terribly determined, when we saw him last. Princess Clara and Prince Garan are with him there. And the war is raging on the northern front as well. King Nash rode north in the days after the gala, and the Third and Fourth and most of the auxiliaries and Queen Roen and Lord Brocker met him there. Lady Murgda escaped the palace the day after the gala, Lady. There was a fire, and a terrible battle in the corridors, and in the confusion she got away. It's thought she tried to ride to the beacons at Marble Rise, but the King's Army had already taken control of the roads."

Fire closed her eyes, trying to bear the pressure of all of this meaningless, horrible news. She did not want to go to Fort Flood. But she understood that she couldn't stay here indefinitely, imposing on these people's hospitality. And she supposed the army healers might as well look at her hands, which she herself had not yet seen, but which were obviously swollen, and useless, and ached beneath their bandages as if pain hung at the ends of her arms instead of hands.

She tried not to dwell on what it would mean if the healers told her she was going to lose them.

There was another thing she tried, and usually failed, not to dwell on – a memory of an occurrence that had taken place oh, months ago – before the gala planning, before Archer had ever found Mydogg's wine in Captain Hart's cellar. Fire had been questioning prisoners, all day, every day, and Archer had watched sometimes. And they'd talked to that foul-mouthed fellow who'd spoken of a tall archer with spot-on aim, a rapist who'd been held in Nax's dungeons some twenty years ago. Jod. And Fire had been happy, because finally she'd known the name and the nature of her foggy-minded archer.

On that day, she hadn't remembered that some twenty years ago Nax had hand-picked a brute from his dungeons and sent him north to rape Brocker's wife, the only happy consequence of which had been the birth of Archer.

The interrogation had ended with Archer punching the informant in the face. On that day, Fire had thought it was because of the man's language.

And perhaps it had been. Fire would never know now at what point Archer had begun to suspect Jod's identity. Archer had kept his thoughts and fears to himself. For Fire had just broken his heart.

When the day came, her guards – nineteen of them now, for Mila was not here – wrapped her in many blankets for the journey, and strapped her arms carefully to her body so that her hands would be near her body's heat. They lifted her into Neel's saddle, and when Neel climbed up behind her they strapped her loosely to him. The party rode slowly, and Neel was strong and attentive, but still it was frightening to trust oneself entirely to someone else's balance.

And then, in time, the motion became soothing. She leaned back against him, relinquished responsibility, and slept.

The dappled grey horse, when separated from Fire and faced with the rock people, Fire's guard, and nineteen military mounts, had proven to be completely wild. It had clopped around on the rocks above ground during her illness, bolting every time a person emerged, refusing to be bridled, or stabled underground, or even approached. But nor did it seem willing to be left behind when it saw Fire being borne away. As the party picked its way east, the horse followed, tentatively, always at a safe distance.

The battles of the southern front were waged on the land and in the caves bounded by Gentian's holding, Fort Flood, and the Winged River. Whatever ground the commander had managed to win or lose, the fort itself was still under royal control. Rising high on an outcrop of rock, surrounded by walls almost as tall as its roofs, it functioned as the army's headquarters and hospital.

Clara came running to them as they entered the gates. She stood beside Neel's horse as the guards unstrapped Fire, lowered her to the ground, and unwrapped her from her blankets. Clara was crying, and when she embraced Fire and kissed her face, taking care not to jar Fire's hands, which were still tied to her body, Fire sank numbly against her. She wished she could wrap her arms around this woman who cried for Archer and whose belly was round with Archer's baby. She wished she could melt into her.

"Oh, Fire," Clara finally said, "we've been out of our minds with worry. Brigan leaves tonight for the northern front. It'll relieve him greatly to see you alive before he goes."

"No," Fire said, pulling suddenly away from Clara, and startled by her own feeling. "Clara, I don't want to see him. Tell him I wish him well, but I don't want to see him."

"Oh," Clara said, taken aback. "Well. Are you certain? Because I can't think how we're going to stop him, once he returns from the tunnels and learns you're here."

The tunnels. Fire sensed her own rising panic. "My hands," she said, focusing on a more isolated pain. "Is there a healer with the time to attend to them?"

The fingers of her right hand were pinkish and puffy and blistered, like hunks of raw poultry. Fire stared at them, tired and sick, until she sensed that the healer was cheered by their appearance. "It's too soon to know for sure," the woman said, "but we have grounds for hope."

She smoothed a salve into the hand very, very gently, wrapped it in loose bandages, and unwrapped the other hand, humming.

The outer two fingers on Fire's left hand were black and dead-looking from the tips all the way down to the second knuckles.

The healer, no longer humming, asked if it was true what she'd heard, that Fire was an accomplished fiddler. "Well," the woman said. "All we can do now is watch them, and wait."

She gave Fire a pill and a liquid to swallow, applied the salve, and wrapped bandages around the hand. "Stay here," she said. She bustled out of the small, dark room, which had a smoky fire in the grate and shutters over the windows to hold in the heat.

Fire had a vague memory of a time when she had been better at ignoring things it was no use to consider. She had been in control once, and had not sat dismal and wretched on examination tables while the entirety of her guard stood watching her with a sympathetic sort of bleakness.

And then she felt Brigan coming, an enormous moving force of emotion: concern, relief, reassurance, too intense for Fire to bear. She began to gasp; she was drowning. As he came into the room she slid off the table and ran into a corner.

No, she thought to him. I don't want you here. No.

"Fire," he said. "What is it? Please tell me."

Please, you must go away. Please, Brigan, I beg you.

"Leave us," Brigan said quietly to the guard.

No! I need them!

"Stay," Brigan said in the same tone of voice, and her guard, which by now had developed a high threshold for bewilderment, turned around and filed back into the room.

Fire, Brigan thought to her. Have I done something to make you angry?

No. Yes, yes, you have, she thought wildly. You never liked Archer. You don't care that he's dead.

That is untrue, he thought to her with utter certainty. I had my own regard for Archer, and besides, it hardly matters, because you love him, and I love you, and your grief brings me grief. There is nothing in Archer's death but sadness.

That's why you must go, she thought to him. There's nothing in this but sadness.

There was a noise in the doorway and a man's harsh voice. "Commander, we're ready."

"I'm coming," Brigan said over his shoulder. "Wait for me outside. "

The man left.

Go, Fire thought to Brigan. Don't keep them waiting.

I will not leave you like this, he thought.

I won't look at you, she thought, pressing at the wall clumsily with her bandaged hands. I don't want to see your new battle scars.

He came to her in her corner, the stubborn, steady feeling of him unchanged. He touched his hand to her right shoulder and bent his face to her left ear, his stubble rough and his face cold against hers and the feel of him achingly familiar, and suddenly she was leaning back against him, her arms awkwardly embracing his left arm, stiff with leathered armour, and pulling it around her.

"You're the one with new scars," he said very quietly, so that only she could hear.

"Don't go," she said. "Please don't go."

"I desperately want not to go. But you know that I must."

"I don't want to love you if you're only going to die," she cried, burying her face in his arm. "I don't love you."

"Fire," he said. "Will you do something for me? Will you send me word on the northern front, so I know how you're faring?"

"I don't love you."

"Does that mean you won't send word?"

"No," she said confusedly. "Yes. I'll send word. But – "

"Fire," he said gently, beginning to untangle himself from her. "You must feel what you feel. I – "

Another voice, sharp with impatience, interrupted from the doorway. "Commander! The horses are standing."

Brigan spun around to face the man, swearing with as much exasperation and fury as Fire had ever heard anyone swear. The man scuttled away in alarm.

"I love you," Brigan said very calmly to Fire's back. "I hope in the coming days it may comfort you to know that. And all I ask of you is that you try to eat, Fire, and sleep, no matter how you feel. Eat and sleep. And send me word, so I know how you are. Tell me if there's anyone, or anything, I can send to you."

Go safely. Go safely, she thought to him as he left the building and his convoy pounded through the gates.

What a silly, empty thing it was to say to anyone, anywhere.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Fire guessed that there was little for a person with no hands to do at Fort Flood. Clara was busy with Brigan's captains and a constant stream of messengers, and Garan rarely even showed his face, scowling in his customary manner when he did. Fire avoided them, as she avoided the room where endless rows of soldiers lay suffering.

She was not permitted to step outside the walls of the fortress. She divided her time between two places: the bedroom she shared with Clara, Musa, and Margo, feigning sleep whenever Clara entered, for Clara asked too many questions about Archer. And the heavily guarded roof of the fort, where she stood in a warm hooded cloak, hands enclosed safely in her armpits, and communed with the grey dappled horse.

The mare – for Fire was clear-minded enough now to know she was a mare – was living on the rocks north of the building. She had broken away from Fire's group as they'd approached the fort and, despite the attempts of the horsemaster, would not consent to being stabled along with the other horses. Fire refused to allow anyone to subdue her with drugs, nor would Fire herself compel the horse into confinement. The horsemaster had thrown his arms in the air in disgust. This horse was obviously an uncommonly fine animal, but he was up to his elbows in injured horses and cast shoes and broken field harnesses, and had no time to waste on a recalcitrant.

And so the mare lived free on the rocks, eating food if it was left for her, finding food if it wasn't, and coming to visit Fire whenever Fire called to her. Her feeling was strange and wild, her mind a marvellous unbroken thing that Fire could touch and influence, but never truly comprehend. She belonged alone on the rocks, unconstrained, and vicious when she needed to be.

And yet there was love in the feeling of her too – constraining, in its way. This horse had no intention of leaving Fire.

They spent time within view of each other, their feelings connected by the tether of Fire's power. She was beautiful to look at, her coat soft patches and circles of grey, her mane and her tail thick and long, and tangled, and deep grey like slate. Her eyes were blue.

Fire wished she were allowed out of the fort. She would like to join the horse on the rocks, and climb onto her back, and be carried away wherever the horse wanted to go.

Garan came stalking into her bedroom one morning while she was curled under her covers, trying to numb herself to the burning of her hands and pretending to sleep. He stood over her and said without preliminary, "Get up, Fire. We need you."

It was not said with anger, but it didn't have the feeling of a request, either. Fire blinked up at him. "My hands are useless," she said.

"What we need you for does not require hands."

Fire closed her eyes. "You want me to question someone. I'm sorry, Garan. I don't feel well enough."

"You'd feel better if you got up and stopped moping," he said bluntly, "and anyway, it's not an interrogation we need you for."

Fire was furious. "You never took Archer into your heart. You care nothing for what happened."

Garan spoke hotly. "You can't see into my heart, or you wouldn't say such a stupid thing. I'm not leaving this room until you get up. There's a war going on not a stone's throw from here, and I've enough that's heavy on my mind without you wasting yourself away like a self-absorbed brat. Do you want me to have to send a message to Brigan and Nash and Brocker one day, telling them you died, of nothing in particular? You're making me ill, Fire, and I beg you, if you won't get up for yourself, do it for me. I'm not keen on dying."

Fire had pushed herself to a seated position somewhere in the middle of this remarkable speech, and now her eyes were open and seeing. Garan's skin was sweaty and he was breathing rapidly. He was, if possible, thinner than he had been before, and pain flickered in his face. Fire reached up to him, distressed now, and gestured for him to sit. When he did, she smoothed his hair with her own bandaged knob of a hand. She helped him to calm his breath.

"You've lost weight," he said to her finally, his unhappy eyes on her face. "And you have this horrible empty look in your eyes that makes me want to shake you."

Fire smoothed his hair again, and chose her words carefully, finding ones that would not make her cry. "I don't think I'm moping, exactly," she said. "I don't feel entirely connected to myself, Garan."

"Your power is strong," he said. "I can feel it. You soothed me right away."

She wondered if a person could be powerful, but inside be broken into pieces, and shaking, all the time.

She studied him again. He really didn't look well. He was carrying too much.

"What is the work you need me to do?" she asked.

He said, "Would you be willing to ease the pain of the soldiers in this fort who are dying?"

The healing work of the fort took place in the enormous downstairs ward that was the residence of five hundred soldiers during peacetime. There was no glass in the windows and the shutters were drawn now to conserve heat, which came from fireplaces along the walls and from a fire in the middle of the floor, its smoke billowing haphazardly toward an open flue in the ceiling that led all the way to the roof and the sky.

The room was dim, and soldiers were moaning and crying out, and the place had a smell of blood and smoke and something else cloying that stopped Fire at the entrance. It was too much like stepping into one of her nightmares. She couldn't do it.

But then she saw a man lying on his back in a bed, his nose and ears black like her fingers, and only one hand resting on his chest, for the other was gone completely, a stump wrapped with gauze. He was gritting his teeth, hot and shaking, and Fire went to him, because she could not stop her compassion.

At the very sight of her, some panic inside him seemed to still. She sat at the edge of the bed and looked into his eyes. She understood that he was exhausted, but too distracted with pain and fear to rest. She took away his sense of his pain and soothed his fear. She helped him to fall asleep.

This was how Fire became a fixture in the healing room; for she was even better than the surgeons' drugs at taking pain away, and every kind of pain was present in that room. Sometimes it was enough to sit with a soldier to calm him, and sometimes, as when he was having an arrow pulled, or a waking surgery, it took more. There were days when her mind was in several parts of the room at once, soothing pain where it was worst, while her body walked up and down the rows of patients, her hair loose and her eyes seeking the eyes of the men and women in the beds who felt less frightened for having seen her.

It surprised her how easy it was to talk to soldiers who were dying, or soldiers who would never be well again, or who had lost their friends, and were afraid for their families. She had thought she'd already reached her capacity for pain and had no room inside her for more. But she remembered having told Archer once that you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now she understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upward and, just when you thought you'd reached your limit, begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain. And grow larger, but somehow less oppressive. She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of people; she had not noticed how many other people were trapped in that place with her.

She finally began to let Clara into that place. She told Clara what Clara's own grief had been yearning for: the facts of what had happened.

"He died alone," she said to Clara quietly.

"And," Clara said, just as quietly back, "he died believing he'd failed you. For by then he must have known their plans to kidnap you, don't you think?"

"He certainly at least suspected it," Fire said, realising as the story opened in words between them, just how many parts of it she didn't know. It both hurt and soothed her, like the salve the healers spread on her raw hands, to try to fill in the missing parts. She would never know how it had felt for him to be shot by his own father. Whether things would have gone differently if she'd paid more attention, if she'd fought harder to keep him from going. If years ago she'd found a way to stop him loving her so much; if Archer, no matter the strength of his mind or the depth of his affection, had ever been entirely immune to her monster beauty.

"I suppose we'll also never know what Jod was truly like," Clara said, when Fire, quietly, had conveyed all of these thoughts. "We know he was a criminal, of course," she continued robustly, "and a vicious lowlife, fit to die, even if he is my child's grandfather." She snorted, saying as an aside, "What a pair of grandfathers this child has. But what I mean is, we'll never know if Jod would've killed his own son if he'd been in control of his own mind instead of under the power of that horrible boy you dropped into the mountain, and good riddance. I hope that one died in terrible agony impaled upon a jagged bit of rock."

Clara was an oddly comforting person for Fire to be with in these days. Pregnant, she was even more stunning than she had been before. Almost five months in, her hair was thicker and glossier, her skin glowing; an extra vitality fueled her usual determination. She was completely alive, which was painful sometimes for Fire to stand beside. But Clara was also angry at all the right things and fiercely honest. And she was carrying Archer's child in her body.

"Lord Brocker is also your child's grandfather," Fire said mildly. "And there are two grandmothers you needn't be ashamed of."

"And anyway," Clara said, "if we're to be judged by our parents and grandparents, then we all may as well impale ourselves upon jagged bits of rock."

Yes, Fire thought to herself grimly. That wasn't far from true.

When she was alone she couldn't avoid thoughts of home, memories. On the roof, visiting the mare, she fought off thinking of Small, who was far away in King's City, most certainly wondering why she had gone away and if she was ever coming back.

At night, when she struggled with sleep, Cansrel and Archer kept changing places in her nightmares. Cansrel, his throat torn apart, was suddenly Archer, staring at her just as balefully as Cansrel always had. Or sometimes she was luring Archer, rather than Cansrel, to his death, or luring them together, or sometimes Cansrel was killing Archer, or raping Archer's mother, and maybe Archer found him and killed him. Whatever happened, whichever dead man died again in her dreams, she woke to the same pitiless grief.

News came from the northern front that Brigan was sending Nash down to Fort Flood and Brocker and Roen would follow him.

Garan was indignant.

"I can understand sending Nash here to take his place," he said. "But why is he having done with his entire strategising team? He'll be sending us the Third and Fourth next, and taking Mydogg's army on all by himself."

"It must be becoming too dangerous there for anyone who isn't a soldier," Clara said.

"If it's dangerous, he should tell us."

"He has told us, Garan. What do you think he means when he says even in camp a night's rest is rare? Do you imagine Mydogg's soldiers are keeping ours out late with drinking games and dancing? And did you read the latest report? A soldier of the Third attacked his own company the other day, killed three of his fellow soldiers before he himself was killed. Mydogg had promised to pay a fortune to his family if he turned traitor."

Working in the healing room, Fire could not fail to learn the things that happened in battle and in war. And she understood that despite the torn-up bodies the medics brought in from the tunnels every day, despite the difficulty of supplying food to the southern camps and carrying the injured away and repairing weapons and armour, and despite the bonfires lit every night to burn the dead, the southern war was thought to be going well. Here at Fort Flood it was a matter of skirmishes on horseback and on foot, one group of soldiers trapping another in a cave, quick strikes and retreats. Gentian's soldiers, who were led by one of Mydogg's Pikkian captains, were disorganised. Brigan's, on the other hand, were finely trained to know their responsibilities in any given situation, even in the chaos of the tunnels. Brigan had left predicting it would be only a matter of weeks before they made some kind of significant breakthrough.

But on the northern front, the fighting took place on the open, flat terrain north of the city, where there was little advantage to cleverness of strategy. The ground and the visibility warranted full-out battle, all day until dark fell. Almost every battle ended with the royal side in retreat. They were fierce, Mydogg's men, and both Mydogg and Murgda were there with them; and the snow and ice were proving to be no friends to the horses. Too often the soldiers fought on their feet, and then it began to show that the King's Army was vastly outnumbered. Very slowly, Mydogg was advancing on the city.

And of course, the north was where Brigan had gone, because Brigan always went wherever things were going most badly. Fire supposed he needed to be there in order to give rousing speeches and lead the charge into the fray, or whatever it was commanders did in wartime. She resented his competence at something so tragic and senseless. She wished he, or somebody, would throw down his sword and say, "Enough! This is a silly way to decide who's in charge!" And it seemed to her, as the beds in the healing room filled and emptied and filled, that these battles didn't leave much to be in charge of. The kingdom was already broken, and this war was tearing the broken pieces smaller.

Cansrel would have liked it. Meaningless destruction was to his taste. The boy probably would've liked it too.

Archer would have reserved his judgment – reserved it from her, at least, knowing her scathing opinion. And whatever his opinion, he would have gone out and fought bravely for the Dells.

As Brigan and Nash were doing.

When Nash's front guard clattered through the gate, Fire was ashamed to find herself running up to the roof, stumbling, uncontrolled.

Beautiful horse, she cried out to her companion. Beautiful horse, I can't bear this. I can bear Archer and Cansrel if I must, but I cannot bear this too. Make him go away. Why must my friends be soldiers?

Some time later, when Nash came to the roof to find her, she didn't kneel, like her own guard and the roof guard did. She kept her back turned to Nash and her eyes on the horse, her shoulders hunched as if to protect herself from his presence.

"Lady Fire," he said.

Lord King. I mean no disrespect, but I beg you to go away.

"Certainly, Lady, if you wish it," he said mildly. "But first I've promised to deliver about a hundred messages from the northern front and the city – from my mother, your grandmother, Hanna, Brocker, and Mila, for starters."

Fire imagined a message from Brocker: I blame you for the death of my son. A message from Tess: You've ruined your beautiful hands with your carelessness, haven't you, Lady Granddaughter? A message from Hanna: You left me here alone.

Very well, she thought to Nash. Tell me your messages, if you must.

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

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

Nash paused. "He didn't. I suppose I assumed. But surely you've been talking to Clara and Garan."

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

"Fire – "

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

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

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

"Didn't you tell Brigan you wanted your horse?" he asked.

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

"Of course," he said, "Small. Anyway, Brigan thought you wanted him. He's downstairs."

Fire ran.

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

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

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

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

She woke, not from a nightmare, but to something – something comforting. The sensation of being wrapped in warm blankets and sleeping against a warm breathing back that belonged to Small.

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

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

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

"You're smiling," he said.

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

"I'm sorry," she said.

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

"I understand you've been crying a great deal," he said.

"Yes," she said, defeated.

"You must be tired and sore from it."

"Yes."

"And your hands. Are they still very painful?"

There was something comforting about this calm interrogation. "They're a bit better than they were."

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

"Why are you still here?" she asked. "Shouldn't you be in a cave somewhere inspiring people?"

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

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

"It's not reasonable to love people who are only going to die," she said.

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

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

"Yes," she whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

He shrugged. "I don't mind you pushing me away if it means you love me, little sister."

Chapter Thirty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She's a river mare," Brocker said.

"A what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A week later she came to understand the rest of Brocker's words.

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

Of course, it left her exhausted.

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

"What is it?" Fire said. "What's happened?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Roen who came to her on the roof.

"Fire," she said. "We'd like to talk to you, and it would be much easier for Lord Brocker if you would come down."

Fire was amenable to this, because she had questions, and rather explosive things she found herself wanting to say. She folded her arms at Musa and looked into Musa's hazel eyes. "Musa, you may complain to the commander all you like, but I insist on speaking to the queen and Lord Brocker alone. Do you understand me?"

Musa cleared her throat uncomfortably. "We'll station ourselves outside the door, Lady."

Downstairs in Brocker's living quarters with the door closed and locked, Fire stood against a wall and stared not at Brocker but at the great wheels of his chair. Every once in a while she glanced into his face, and then into Roen's, because she couldn't help herself. It seemed to her that this was happening too often lately, that she should look into a face and see someone else there, and understand pieces of the past that she had not understood before.

Roen's black hair with its white streak was pulled back tightly, and her face was also tight, with concern. She came and stood beside Brocker, gently putting a hand on his shoulder. Brocker reached up and touched Roen's hand. Even knowing what she now knew, the unfamiliarity of the gesture startled Fire.

"I have never seen the two of you together before this war," she said.

"Yes," Brocker said. "You've never known me to travel, child. The queen and I haven't once been in each other's company since – "

Roen finished for him quietly. "Since the day Nax set those brutes on you in my green house, I do believe."

Fire glanced at her sharply. "You saw it happen?"

Roen gave a grim nod. "I was made to watch. I believe he hoped I would miscarry my bastard baby."

And so Nax had been inhuman, and Fire felt the force of it; but still, she could not get around the fact of her anger.

"Archer is your son," she said to Brocker, choking on her own indignation.

"Of course Archer is my son," Brocker said heavily. "He has always been my son."

"Did he even know he had any kind of brother? He could've benefited from a steady brother like Brigan. And Brigan, does he know? I won't keep it from him."

"Brigan knows, child," Brocker said, "though Archer never did, to my regret. When Archer died, I understood that Brigan must know. We told him, just weeks ago, when he came to the northern front."

"And what of him? Brigan could have stood to call you father, Brocker, rather than a mad king who hated him because he was cleverer and stronger than his own true son. He could have grown up in the north away from Nax and Cansrel and never had to become – " She stopped and turned her face away, trying to calm her frantic voice. "Brigan should have been a northern lord, with a farm and a holding and a stable full of horses. Not a prince."

"But Brigandell is a prince," Roen said quietly. "He is my son. And Nax was the only one with the power to disinherit him and send him away, and Nax would never have done that. He would never have admitted publicly that he was a cuckold."

"And so for Nax's pride," Fire said desperately, "Brigan has taken on the role of saviour of the kingdom. It's not fair. It's not fair," she cried, knowing it was a child's argument but not caring, because being childish did not make it untrue.

"Oh, Fire," Roen said. "You can see as well as any of us that the kingdom needs Brigan exactly where he is now, just as it needs you, and every other one of us, whether or not our lots are fair."

Roen's voice contained terrible grief. Fire looked into her face, trying to imagine the woman she had been twenty-some years ago. Intelligent, and fiercely capable, and finding herself married to a king who was puppet to a maniacal puppeteer. Roen had watched her marriage – and her kingdom – fall to ruin.

Fire's gaze moved to Brocker then, who held her eyes unhappily.

It was Brocker she could not forgive.

"Brocker, my father," she said. "You did such an unkind thing to your wife."

"Would you wish it had never happened," Roen cut in, "and Archer and Brigan never born?"

"That is a cheater's argument!"

"But you're not the one who's been cheated, Fire," Roen said. "Why should it hurt you so much?"

"Would we be at war now, if you two hadn't provoked Nax into ruining his own military commander? Haven't we all been cheated?"

"Do you imagine," Roen said with rising frustration, "that the kingdom was headed down a path to peace?"

Fire understood, in painful fits and starts, why this hurt so much. It was not the war, or Archer or Brigan. It was not the punishments the perpetrators hadn't foreseen. It was still Brocker's wife, Aliss; it was the very small matter of what Brocker had done to Aliss. Fire had thought she had two fathers who sat on opposite poles. Yet even understanding that her bad father had been capable of kindness, she had never allowed for the possibility that her good father might be capable of cruelty or dishonour.

She understood suddenly what a useless, day-and-night way of thinking that was. There wasn't a simple person anywhere in this world.

"I'm tired of learning the truth of things," she said.

"Fire," Brocker said, his voice rough with a shame she had never heard there before. "I don't question your right to be angry."

She looked into Brocker's eyes, which were so like Brigan's. "I find I'm not angry anymore," she said quietly, tying her hair back, out of her face. "Did Brigan send you away because he was angry?"

"He was angry. But no, that's not why he sent us away."

"It was too dangerous there," Roen said, "for a middle-aged woman and a man in a chair, and a pregnant assistant."

It was dangerous. And he was there all alone, fighting a war, absorbing the truth of his parentage and the truth of history, with no one to talk to. And she'd pushed him away with words of unlove she hadn't meant. In return he'd sent her Small, knowing somehow that she needed him.

She was thoroughly ashamed of herself.

And she supposed that if she were going to be in love with a man who was always where she was not, then her poor recovering fingers had better grow accustomed to holding a pen. Which was the first thing she wrote in the letter she sent to him that night.

Chapter Thirty-One

The spring melt came early. On the day the First and Second left Fort Flood for the northern front the snow was shrinking in uneven crusty clumps, and the sound of trickling water was everywhere. The river roared.

Gentian's army at Fort Flood, still led by one of Mydogg's now bedraggled Pikkians, had not surrendered. Hungry and horseless, they'd done something far more desperate and foolish: they'd tried to escape on foot. It was not pleasant for Nash giving the command, but he did it, because he had to, for if they were allowed to go, they would find their way to Mydogg and his army at Marble Rise. It was a massacre. By the time the enemy laid its weapons down, they numbered only hundreds, in a force that had begun, months ago, as fifteen thousand.

Nash stopped to arrange the conveyance of prisoners and wounded back to Fort Flood. Fire helped Gentian's medics. Their need for her was overwhelming. She knelt in a sheen of water that slid across the rocks to the hungry river, and held a man's hand while he died.

Fire, her guard, several other healers, the armourers and other staff persons – and, at a distance, the dappled grey horse – rode north on the tails of the First and Second.

They passed very near the city, near enough that they could see the river swollen almost as high as the bridges. Fire stretched as hard as she could for Hanna and Tess, but though she could just make out the black turrets of the palace rising above indistinguishable buildings, she could not reach them. They were out of her range.

Soon after, they approached the vast northern camps, startlingly close to the city. The sight was not cheering – the rise was desolate, crowded with musty and soaked tents, some sitting smack in the middle of newly formed streams. Mute, exhausted-looking soldiers from the Third and Fourth wandered among the tents. At the appearance of the First and Second, their faces lit up slowly, hesitantly, as if they didn't dare to believe in the mirage of mounted reinforcements kicking up such a spray that they seemed to be emerging from a lake. Then there followed a sort of quiet and tired jubilation. Friends and strangers hugged each other. Some in the Third and Fourth wept involuntary, depleted tears.

Fire asked a soldier of the Third to take her to the army hospital. She got to work.

The healing rooms of the northern front were situated at the south and back of the camp in hastily constructed wooden barracks with the stone plain of Marble Rise for a floor. Which meant that at the moment, the floor was slippery with seeping water, and in some places slick with blood.

She saw quickly that the work here would be no different and no more desperate than what she was used to. She uncovered her hair and moved down the rows of patients, stopping at those who were in need of more than her presence. Hope and lightness came to the rooms like a clean breeze, as it had in the camp with the arrival of reinforcements, except that here the change was her doing, and hers alone. How strange it was to understand that. How strange to have the power to cause others to feel something she herself did not feel; and then catch the hint of it in their collective minds, and begin to feel it herself.

Through an arrow loop in the wall she saw a familiar horse and rider tearing across the camp toward the healing rooms. Brigan pulled up at Nash's feet and dropped from the saddle. The two brothers threw their arms around each other and embraced hard.

Shortly thereafter he stepped into the healing rooms and leaned in the doorway, looking across at her quietly. Brocker's son with gentle grey eyes.

She abandoned all pretense of decorum and ran at him.

After some time, a cheeky fellow in a cot nearby said aloud that he was inclined to disbelieve the rumour that the lady monster was marrying the king.

"What tipped you off ?" asked another fellow, one cot over.

Fire and Brigan didn't let go of each other, but Fire laughed. "You're thin," she said to him between kisses, "and your colour is off. You're sick."

"It's just a bit of dirt," he said, kissing tears away on both of her cheeks.

"Don't joke. I can feel that you're sick."

"It's only exhaustion," he said. "Oh, Fire, I'm glad you're here, but I'm not sure you should be. This isn't a fortress. They attack arbitrarily."

"Well, if there are to be attacks, then I need to be here. I can do too much good not to be."

His arms around her tightened. "Tonight when you're done with your work, will you come find me?"

I will.

A voice outside the healing rooms called for the commander. Brigan sighed. "Come straight into my office," he said dryly, "even if there's a queue outside the door. We'll never see each other if you wait until no one else is looking for me."

As he left to answer the call, she heard him exclaiming in wonderment on the rise. "Rocks, Nash. Is that a river mare out there? Do you see her? Have you ever laid eyes on a more gorgeous creature?"

The King's Army's numbers at the northern front were now practically doubled. Their plan was to launch a massive attack against Mydogg in the morning. Everyone knew that it would be the battle to determine the war. That evening, an anxious pall settled over the camp.

Fire took a break from the healing rooms and walked among the tents, through clammy patches of fog that rose from the melting water, her guard making a loose circle around her. The soldiers were untalkative, their eyes latching on to her, wide and tired, wherever she went. "No," she said, when her guard made a move to stop a man who reached for her arm. "He doesn't want to hurt me." She looked around and said with conviction, "No one here wants to hurt me." They only wanted a bit of reassurance on the night before a battle. Perhaps it was a thing she could give.

It was fully dark by the time she came upon Nash sitting alone in a chair outside the command tents. The stars were pricking into place in the sky, one at a time, but his head was bent into his hands, where he could not see them. Fire came to stand with him. She put her good hand on the back of his chair to steady her balance as she turned her face to the universe.

He heard her, or felt her, beside him. He reached rather absently for her other hand, stared into it, tracing the living skin at the base of her dead fingers. "You have a reputation among the soldiers," he said. "Not just the injured soldiers – you've developed a reputation that's spread through the entire army. Did you know? They're saying the beauty of you is so powerful, and the mind of you so warm and insistent and strong, that you can call people back from death."

Fire spoke quietly. "There are many people who've died. I've tried to hold on, but still they let go."

Nash sighed and gave her back her hand. He tilted his face up to the stars. "We're going to win this war, you know," he said, "now that our army's together. But the world doesn't care who wins. It'll go on spinning, no matter how many people are slaughtered tomorrow. No matter if you and I are slaughtered." After a moment, he added, "I almost wish it wouldn't, if we aren't allowed to go on spinning with it."

Most soldiers in the camp were sleeping by the time Fire and her guard left the healing rooms and crossed again to the command tents. She stepped through the flap of Brigan's office to find him standing at a table covered with diagrams, rubbing his head while five men and three women argued a point about archers and arrows and wind patterns on Marble Rise.

If Brigan's captains did not notice her unobtrusive entry at first, they came to notice, for the tent, though large, was not so mammoth that seven newcomers could hang back in the corners. The argument dissipated and turned to stares.

"Captains," Brigan said with obvious fatigue. "Let this be the only time I ever have to remind you of your manners."

Eight sets of eyes spun back to the table.

"Lady Fire," Brigan said. He sent her a question. How are you?

Exhausted.

Enough for sleep?

I think so.

I'll be at this for a while yet. Perhaps you should sleep while you can.

No, I'll wait for you.

You could sleep here.

Would you wake me when you're through?

Yes.

Promise?

Yes.

Fire paused. I don't suppose there's any way for me to walk into your sleeping quarters without everyone watching?

A quick smile came and went across Brigan's face. "Captains," he said, cutting his attention back to his officers, who had been trying their hardest to bore their eyes into the diagrams on the table despite their suspicions that the commander and the monster were engaged in some outlandish manner of silent conversation. "Kindly step outside for three minutes."

First Brigan dismissed the majority of Fire's guard. Then he escorted Musa, Margo, and Fire through the flap that led to his sleeping tent, and lit the braziers so they wouldn't be cold.

She woke to the light of a candle and the feel of Brigan near. Musa and Margo were gone. She turned under her blankets and saw him sitting on a chest, watching her, his features plain and dear, and soft in the candlelight. She couldn't help the tears that sprang to her eyes from the feeling of him alive.

"Did you say my name?" she whispered, remembering what had woken her.

"Yes."

"Will you come to bed?"

"Fire," he said. "Will you forgive me if your beauty is a comfort?"

She propped herself on an elbow, looking back at him, astonished. "Will you forgive me if I take my strength from yours?"

"You may always have whatever strength I have. But you're the strong one, Fire. Right now I don't feel strong."

"I think," she said, "that sometimes we don't feel the things that we are. But others can feel them. I feel your strength." And then she saw that his cheeks were wet.

She had been sleeping in a shirt of his she had found, and her own thick socks. She crawled from his bed and padded across the damp floor to him. Barelegged and wet-footed, she climbed into his lap. He took her up, cold and shaking, clinging to her. His breath was ragged. "I'm sorry, Fire. I'm sorry about Archer."

She could feel that it was more. She could feel how much in the world he was sorry for, and how much anguish, grief, and exhaustion he was carrying. "Brigan," she whispered. "None of this is your fault. Do you understand me? It's not your fault."

She held him tightly, pulled him into the softness of her body so that he could feel the comfort of her while he cried. She repeated it in whispers, kisses, and feeling. Not your fault. This is not your fault. I love you. I love you, Brigan.

After some time, he seemed to cry himself out. Holding her numbly, he came aware of her kisses, and began to return them. The pain in his feeling turned into a need that she also felt. He consented to be led to bed.

She woke, blinking her eyes against a torch's violent light, held over her by a man she recognised as one of Brigan's squires. Behind her Brigan stirred. "Eyes on me, Ander," he snarled in a voice very awake and very unambiguous about its expectations of being obeyed.

"I'm sorry, sir," the man said. "I have a letter, sir."

"From whom?"

"Lord Mydogg, sir. The messenger said it's urgent."

"What time is it?"

"Half past four."

"Wake the king and my four first captains, take them into my office, and wait for me there. Light the lamps."

"What is it?" Fire whispered as the soldier named Ander lit a candle for them and left. "Does Mydogg always send letters in the middle of the night?"

"This is the first," Brigan said, searching for his clothes. "I expect I know the occasion."

Fire reached for her own clothing and pulled it under the blankets so she could dress without exposing her skin to freezing air. "What's the occasion?"

He stood and fastened his trousers. "Love, you don't have to get up for this. I can come back and tell you what it's about."

"Do you think Mydogg's asking for some kind of meeting?"

In the glow of the candle he glanced at her keenly, mouth tight. "I do."

"Then I should be involved."

He sighed shortly. He slapped his sword belt around his waist and reached for his shirt. "Yes, you should."

A meeting was, indeed, what Mydogg wanted; a meeting to discuss terms of compromise with Brigan and Nash, so that all might avoid a battle that promised to be the most devastating the war had yet seen. Or at least, this was what it said in his letter.

Their breath turned to fog in the cold air of Brigan's office. "It's a trick," Brigan said, "or a trap. I don't believe Mydogg would ever agree to a compromise. Nor do I believe he cares how many people die."

"He knows that we match him in numbers now," Nash said. "And far exceed him in horses, which finally matters, now that it's water on the rocks instead of ice and snow."

One of the captains, small and terse and trying not to shiver, crossed his arms. "And he knows the mental advantage our soldiers will have with their commander and their king leading them into battle together."

Brigan rubbed his hair frustratedly. "For the first time, he sees that he's going to lose. So he's setting some sort of trap, and calling it compromise."

"Yes," Nash said. "The meeting is a trap. But what are we to do, Brigan? You know what the cost of this battle will be, and our enemy claims to put forth an alternative. Are we to refuse to consider it?"

The meeting took place on the plain of rock that stretched between both camps. The sun rose on Lord Mydogg, Lady Murgda's Pikkian husband, Brigan, and Nash, making long shadows that shifted in a gloss of water. Some distance behind Mydogg and his brother-in-law a small guard of bowmen stood at attention, arrows drawn and notched. Behind Brigan and Nash a guard of bowmen did the same, the symmetry disturbed by Fire's presence, with six of her own guard, in a group behind Brigan's. Mydogg, the brother-in-law, Brigan, and Nash stood close together. This was intentional. Each was protected from his enemy's bowmen by his enemy.

Fire reached an arm to Musa on one side and Neel on the other, for she was concentrating so fiercely that she didn't trust the balance of her feet. She didn't know what Mydogg was planning; she couldn't find it in Mydogg or any of his men. But she could feel, as certain as fingers wound tight around her throat, that things on this plain of rock were not as they should be.

She was too far back to hear Brigan's quiet voice, but Brigan sent her every word. "All right," he said. "You've got us out here. What do you want?"

Behind Fire, too far for Mydogg to see but not too far for Fire to feel, the King's Army stood mounted in position, ready to strike at the slightest message from Fire. The horses of the commander and the king were with them.

"I'd like to make a deal," Mydogg said, his voice high and clear. His mind tough and impenetrable. He shifted slightly, intentionally, catching sight of Fire through the barrier of guards. His eyes narrowed on her shrewdly. Impressed and unimpressed together, and in those hard eyes, Fire could read nothing of why they were here.

Behind Lord Mydogg, too distant for Brigan to see, but definitely not too distant for Fire to feel and communicate to Brigan, Mydogg's army also stood ready. Lady Murgda at the head of it, which was to Fire's quiet astonishment. Fire didn't know how pregnant Murgda had been on the day of the January gala, but assuredly she was three more months pregnant now.

"Well then," Brigan said, "what deal? Out with it."

Mydogg's steel eyes cut again to Fire. "Give us the monster," he said, "and we'll surrender our position."

It's a lie, Fire thought to Brigan. He's made it up this moment. He wants me – certainly he'd take me if you offered – but it's not why we're here.

Then why are we here? Can you sense anything unusual in the position of his army? What about the guard standing behind him?

Fire gripped Musa harder with her half-dead hand and leaned more heavily on Neel. I don't know. His army seems prepared for a straightforward attack. But I can't get into Murgda's head, so I can't know for sure. His guard has no intention to strike unless you or Nash make a move. I can't find what's wrong here, Brigan, but, oh, something is wrong. I feel it. Put an end to this before we learn what it is.

"No deal," Brigan said. "The lady is not a bargaining piece. Tell your archers to stand down. This meeting is over."

Mydogg raised his eyebrows sleekly and nodded. "Stand down," he called to his guard of archers, and as Mydogg's archers disengaged, Fire's body clamoured with panic to find all of them so accommodating. Something was so terribly wrong here. Brigan put his hand out sideways, the signal for his own archers to disengage; and suddenly, Fire screamed with an anguish that tore through her but that she didn't know the reason for. Her cry rang out, eerie and solitary, and one of Brigan's archers shot an arrow into Nash's back.

Pandemonium. The traitorous archer was struck down by his companions, and his second arrow, surely meant for Brigan, flew wide, striking one of Mydogg's guards. Brigan spun fiercely between Mydogg and the brother-in-law, the blade of his sword on fire with morning light. Arrows soared in all directions. Mydogg and his brother-in-law lay dead on the ground. And then the King's Army came roaring onto the scene, for without meaning to, Fire had called them.

In the bedlam everything finally became clear, focused on a single pinprick of purpose. Fire dropped and crawled across rock to the place where Nash lay on his side, dying, it seemed, for the arrow was lodged deep and true. She lay next to him. She touched his face with her broken hand. Nash. You will not die. I won't allow it. Do you hear me? Do you see me?

His black eyes stared, conscious, but barely, and only barely did he see her. Brigan tumbled down beside them, clutching Nash's hair, kissing Nash's forehead, gasping with tears. Healers in green appeared and knelt at Nash's back.

Fire grasped Brigan's shoulder and looked into his face, his eyes blank with shock and grief. She shook him, until he saw her. Go now and fight this battle. Brigan. Go now. We need to win the war.

He surged up wildly. She heard him yelling for Big. Horses thundered on all sides of the sad little tableau, parting around Fire, Nash, and the healers like a river around a rise of rock. The sound was deafening and Fire was soaked, drowning in hoofbeats and water and blood, gripping Nash's face and clinging harder to his mind than she had ever clung to anything before. Look at me, Nash. Look at me. Nash, I love you. I love you so much.

He blinked, staring into her face, a string of blood growing at the corner of his mouth. His shoulders and neck convulsed in pain.

Living is too hard right now, he whispered into her mind. Dying is easy. Let me die.

She felt the very moment when the two armies met, an explosion taking place within her own being. So much fear and pain, and so many minds fading away.

No, Nash. I won't let you. My brother, don't die. Hold on. My brother, hold onto me.