Fire

by Kristin Cashore

  “Very noble of you,” Garan said, sounding exactly like he didn’t mean it, so that she was perplexed, and looked back at him calmly, and said nothing.

  “It would be self-defense,” Clara put in distractedly, frowning still at the paper before her. “The self-defense of this kingdom. Not that I don’t understand your resistance to humoring Nash when he’s been such a boor, Lady, but we need you.”

  “Do we? I find myself undecided on the matter,” Garan said. He dipped his pen into an inkwell. He blotted carefully, and scribbled a few sentences onto the paper before him. Without looking at Fire he opened a feeling to her, coolly and with perfect control. She felt it keenly. Suspicion. Garan did not trust her, and he wanted her to know it.

  THAT EVENING, WHEN Fire sensed the king’s approach, she locked the entrance to her rooms. He made no objection to this, resigned, seemingly, to holding a conversation with her through the oak of her sitting room door. It was not a very private conversation, on her side at least, for her on-duty guards could recede only so far into her rooms. Before the king spoke, she warned him that he was overheard.

  His mind was open and troubled, but clear. “If you’ll bear with me, Lady, I’ve only two things to say.”

  “Go on, Lord King,” Fire said quietly, her forehead resting against the door.

  “The first is an apology, for my entire self.”

  Fire closed her eyes. “It’s not your entire self that needs to apologize. Only the part that wants to be taken by my power.”

  “I can’t change that part, Lady.”

  “You can. If you’re too strong for me to control, then you’re strong enough to control yourself.”

  “I can’t, Lady, I swear to it.”

  You don’t want to, she corrected him silently. You don’t want to give up the feeling of me, and that is your problem.

  “You’re a very strange monster,” he said, almost whispering. “Monsters are supposed to want to overwhelm men.”

  And what could she respond to that? She made a bad monster and a worse human. “You said it was two things, Lord King.”

  He took a breath, as if to clear his head, and spoke more steadily. “The other is to ask you, Lady, to reconsider the issue of the prisoner. This is a desperate time. No doubt you’ve a low opinion of my ability to reason, but I swear to you, Lady, that on my throne—when you’re not in my thoughts—I see clearly what’s right. The kingdom is on the verge of something important. It might be victory, it might be collapse. Your mental power could help us enormously, and not just with one prisoner.”

  Fire turned her back to the door and crouched low against it. She held her head up by her hair. “I’m not that kind of monster,” she said miserably.

  “Reconsider, Lady. We could make rules, set limits. There are reasonable men among my advisers. They wouldn’t ask too much of you.”

  “Leave me to think about it.”

  “Will you? Will you really think about it?”

  “Leave me,” she said, more forcefully now. She felt his focus shift from business back to his feelings. There was a lengthy silence.

  “I don’t want to leave,” he said.

  Fire bit down on her mounting frustration. “Go.”

  “Marry me, Lady,” he whispered, “I beg you.”

  His mind was his own as he asked it, and he knew how foolish he was. She sensed plain and clear that he simply couldn’t help himself.

  She pretended hardness, though hardness was not what she felt. Go, before you ruin the peace between us.

  ONCE HE’D GONE she sat on the floor, face in hands, wishing herself alone, until Musa brought her a drink, and Mila, shyly, a hot compress for her back. She thanked them, and drank; and because she had no choice, eased into their quiet company.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FIRE’S ABILITY TO rule her father had depended on his trust.

  As an experiment, in the winter after his accident, Fire got Cansrel to stick his hand into his bedroom fire. She did it by making his mind believe that it was flowers in the grate, and not flame. He reached in to pick them and recoiled; Fire took stronger hold and made him more determined. He reached in again, obstinately resolved to pick flowers, and this time believed he was picking them, until pain brought his mind and his reality crashing back to him. He screamed and ran to the window, threw it open, thrust his hand into the snow piled against the windowpane. He turned to her, cursing, almost crying, to demand what in the Dells she thought she was doing.

  It was not an easy thing to explain, and she burst into quite authentic tears that came from the confusion of conflicting emotions. Distress at the sight of his blistered skin, his blackened fingernails, and a terrible smell she hadn’t anticipated. Terror of losing his love now that she’d compelled him to hurt himself. Terror of losing his trust, and with it her power to compel him ever to do it again. She threw herself sobbing onto the pillows of his bed. “I wanted to see what it was like to hurt someone,” she spat at him, “like you always tell me to. And now I know, and I’m horrified with both of us, and I’ll never do it again, not to anyone.”

  He came to her then, the anger gone from his face. It was clear that her tears grieved him, so she let the tears come. He sat beside her, his burned hand clutched to his side but his focus clearly on her and her sadness. He stroked her hair with his unhurt hand, trying to soothe her. She took the hand, pressed it to her wet face, and kissed it.

  After a moment of this he shifted, extricating his hand from hers. “You’re too old for that,” he said.

  She didn’t understand him. He cleared his throat. His voice was rough from his own pain.

  “You must remember that you’re a woman now, Fire, and an unnatural beauty. Men will find your touch overwhelming. Even your father.”

  She knew that he meant it plainly, that it contained no threat, no suggestion. He was only being frank, as he was with all matters relating to her monster power, and teaching her something important, for her own safety. But her instincts saw an opportunity. One way to secure Cansrel’s trust was to turn this around: Make Cansrel feel the need to prove his own trustworthiness to her.

  She pushed herself away from him, pretending horror. She ran from the room.

  That evening Cansrel stood outside Fire’s closed door, pleading with her to understand. “Darling child,” he said. “You need never fear me; you know I’d never act on such base instincts with you. It’s only that I worry about the men who would. You must understand the dangers of your power to yourself. If you were a son I would not be so worried.”

  She let him make his explanations for a while, and was stunned, inside her room, with how easy it was to manipulate the master manipulator. Astonished and dismayed. Understanding that she’d learned how to do this from him.

  Finally she came out and stood before him. “I understand,” she said. “I’m sorry, Father.” Tears slid down her face and she pretended they were on account of his bandaged hand, which, in part, they were.

  “I wish you would be more cruel with your power,” he said, touching her hair and kissing her. “Cruelty is strong self-defense.”

  And so, at the end of her experiment, Cansrel still trusted her. And he had reason to, for Fire didn’t think she could go through with anything like that again.

  Then, in the spring, Cansrel began to talk of his need for a new plan, an infallible plan this time, to do away with Brigan.

  WHEN FIRE’S BLEEDING began she felt compelled to explain to her guard why bird monsters had begun to gather outside her screen windows, and why raptor monsters swooped down occasionally, ripped apart the smaller birds, and then perched on the sills to stare inside, screeching. She thought the guards took it rather well. Musa sent the two with the best aim to the grounds below the rooms to do some raptor hunting rather perilously close to the palace walls.

  The Dells was not known for hot summers, but a palace made of black stone with glass ceilings will get warm; on clear days the ceiling windows were levered open.
When Fire passed through courtyard or corridor during her bleeding the birds chirped and the raptors screeched through those screens as well. Sometimes flying monster bugs trailed in her wake. Fire didn’t imagine it did much for her reputation around the court, but then again, very little did. The square mark on her cheek was recognized and much talked of. She could sense the spinning gossip that stopped whenever she entered a room and started up again as she left.

  She had told the king that she would think about the issue of the prisoner, but she didn’t, not really; she didn’t need to. She knew her mind. She spent a certain amount of energy monitoring his whereabouts so she could avoid him. A good bit more deflecting the attention of people of the court. She sensed curiosity from them foremost, and admiration; some hostility, especially from servants. She wondered if the court’s servants had clearer recollections of the particulars of Cansrel’s cruelty. She wondered if he had been crueler to them.

  People followed her sometimes, at a distance, both men and women, servants and nobles, usually without any definite antagonism. Some of them tried to talk to her, called out to her. A gray-haired woman walked right up to her once, said, “Lady Fire, you are like a delicate blossom,” and would have embraced her if Mila hadn’t held out a restraining hand. Fire, her abdomen heavy and aching with cramps and her skin tender and burning, felt the furthest thing from a delicate blossom. She couldn’t decide whether to slap the woman or fall into her embrace, weeping. And then a raptor monster scratched on a window screen above and the woman looked up and raised her arms to it, just as entranced with the predator as she had been with Fire.

  From other ladies of the court Fire sensed envy and resentment, and jealousy for the heart of the king, who fretted over her from a distance like a stallion behind a fence and did little to hide his frustrated regard. When she met the eyes of these women, some of them with monster feathers in their hair or shoes of lizard monster skins, she lowered her eyes and moved on. She took her meals in her rooms. She was shy of the severe city fashion of the court, sure of the impossibility of herself ever blending in, and besides, it was a way to avoid the king.

  CROSSING A BRIGHT white courtyard one day, Fire witnessed a spectacular fight between a pack of small children on one side and Prince Garan’s daughter, passionately assisted by her puppy, on the other. Garan’s daughter was the instigator of the swinging fists, this Fire saw plainly; and from the broiling emotions in the bunch Fire sensed that she herself might be the matter of dispute. Stop, she thought to the children from across the courtyard, now; at which every one of them save Garan’s girl froze, turned to stare, and then ran shrieking into the palace.

  Fire sent Neel for a healer and rushed with the rest of her guard to the girl, whose face was swelling and whose nose ran with blood. “Child,” Fire said, “are you all right?”

  The girl was engaged in an argument with her puppy, who jumped and yapped and strained against her hand on his collar. “Blotchy,” she said, crouching to his level, her voice congested with blood, “down. Down, I say! Stop it! Monster rocks!” This last as Blotchy jumped and banged against her bloody face.

  Fire took hold of the puppy’s mind and soothed him to calmness.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” the child said woefully, plopping down on the marble floor beside Blotchy. She ran searching fingers over her cheeks and nose. She winced and pushed her sticky hair out of her face. “Papa will be disappointed.”

  As before, this child was quite closed to Fire mentally, impressively so, but Fire had understood enough of the other children’s feelings to interpret what she meant. “Because you came to my defense, you mean.”

  “No, because I forgot to guard my left side. He reminds me all the time. I think my nose is broken. He’ll punish me.”

  It was true Garan was not the personification of kindness, but still, Fire couldn’t imagine him punishing a child for not winning a fight against approximately eight adversaries. “Because someone else broke your nose? Surely not.”

  The child gave a mournful sigh. “No, because I threw the first punch. He said I mustn’t do that. And because I’m not in my lessons. I’m supposed to be in my lessons.”

  “Well, child,” Fire said, trying not to be amused. “We’ve fetched you a healer.”

  “It’s just there are so many lessons,” the girl went on, not much interested in the healer. “If Papa were not a prince I wouldn’t have all these lessons. I love my riding lessons but I could die from my history lessons. And now he won’t let me ride his horses, ever. He lets me name his horses but he never lets me ride them, and Uncle Garan will tell him I missed my lessons, and Papa’ll say I can’t ride them ever. Does Papa ever let you ride his horses?” the girl asked Fire tragically, as if she knew she was bound to receive the most calamitous of responses.

  But Fire could not answer, for her mouth was hanging open, her mind scrambling to make sense of the thing she’d thought she understood. This child with dark eyes and hair and a mashed-up face, and an uncle Garan and a princely father, and an unusual propensity for mental closedness. “I’ve only ridden my own horse,” she managed to say.

  “Have you met his horses? He has many. He’s crazy for horses.”

  “I think I’ve only met one,” Fire said, still disbelieving. Sluggishly she began to strain through some mental arithmetic.

  “Was it Big? Big’s a mare. Papa says most soldiers favor stallions, but Big is fearless and he wouldn’t trade her for any stallion. He says you’re fearless, too. He says you saved his life. That’s why I defended you,” she said dismally, her current dilemma rounding back to her again. She touched the vicinity of her nose. “Perhaps it’s not broken. Perhaps it’s only sprained. Do you think he’ll be less angry if my nose is only sprained?”

  Fire had begun to clutch her forehead. “How old are you, child?”

  “Six come winter.”

  Neel came trotting across the courtyard then with a healer, a smiling man in green. “Lady Fire,” the healer said, nodding. He crouched before the child. “Princess Hanna, I think you’d best come with me to the infirmary.”

  The two of them shuffled away, the child still chattering in her stuffed-nose voice. Blotchy waited a moment, then trailed after them.

  Fire was still gaping. She turned to her guard. “Why did no one tell me the commander had a daughter?”

  Mila shrugged. “Apparently he keeps it quiet, Lady. All we’ve ever heard is rumors.”

  Fire thought of the woman at the green house with the chestnut hair. “The child’s mother?”

  “Word is she’s dead, Lady.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. Musa might know, or Princess Clara could tell you.”

  “Well,” Fire said, trying to remember what she’d been doing before all this had happened. “We may as well go someplace where the raptors aren’t screeching.”

  “We were on our way to the stables, Lady.”

  Ah, yes, to the stables, to visit Small. And his many horsy friends—a number of which, presumably, had short, descriptive names.

  FIRE COULD HAVE gone to Clara immediately to hear the story of how a prince of twenty-two had ended up with a secret daughter nearing six. Instead she waited until her bleeding was over, and then she went to Garan.

  “Your sister tells me you work too much,” she said to the spymaster.

  He looked up from his long table of documents and narrowed his eyes. “Indeed.”

  “Will you come for a walk with me, Lord Prince?”

  “Why should you want to walk with me?”

  “Because I’m trying to decide what I think of you.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Oh, a test, is it? Do you expect me to perform for you, then?”

  “I don’t care what you do, but I’m going regardless. I haven’t been outside in five days.”

  She turned and left the room; and was pleased, as she moved through the corridor, to feel him weaving through her guard and falling into place beside her.
/>   “My reason is the same as yours,” he said in a patently unfriendly voice.

  “Fair enough. I could perform for you if you like. We could stop for my fiddle.”

  He snorted. “Your fiddle. Yes, I’ve heard all about it. Brigan thinks we’re made of money.”

  “You hear about everything, I suppose.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Then perhaps you can explain why no one’s ever told me about Princess Hanna.”

  Garan glanced at her sideways. “Why should you care about Princess Hanna?”

  It was a reasonable question, and it pricked at a hurt Fire hadn’t quite acknowledged yet. “Only to wonder why people like Queen Roen and Lord Brocker have never made mention of her.”

  “Why should they mention her?”

  Fire rubbed her neck under her headscarf and sighed, understanding now why her heart had wanted to have this conversation with Garan of all people.

  “The lady queen and I speak freely with each other,” she said, “and Brocker shares all he learns with me. The question isn’t why they should have mentioned her. It’s why they’ve taken care not to.”

  “Ah,” Garan said. “This is a conversation about trust.”

  Fire took a breath. “And why should the child be kept secret? She’s only a child.”

  Garan was silent for a moment, thinking, now and then glancing at her. He steered her across the palace’s central courtyard. She was happy to let him choose the route. Fire still got lost in the labyrinths of this place, and only this morning had found herself in the laundry when she’d been aiming for the blacksmith’s shop.

  “She is just a child,” Garan said finally, “but her identity has been kept quiet since before she was born. Brigan himself didn’t know about her until she’d been alive four months.”

  “Why? Who was the mother, an enemy’s wife? A friend’s wife?”

  “No one’s wife. A stable girl.”