Fire

by Kristin Cashore

  “Then why—”

  “The child was born the third heir to the throne,” Garan said, very low, “and she was born to Brigan. Not Nash, not Clara, not I. Brigan. Think of the time, Lady, six years ago. If, as you claim, you’ve been educated by Brocker, you’ll know the danger Brigan faced as he grew into adulthood. He was the only one of the court who was Cansrel’s open enemy.”

  This silenced Fire. She listened, shamed, as Garan unfolded the story.

  “She was the girl who cared for his horses. He was sixteen, barely, and she was, too, a pretty thing; goodness knew there was little joy in his life. Her name was Rose.”

  “Rose,” Fire repeated woodenly.

  “No one knew of them but four in the family: Nash, Clara, Roen, and I. Brigan kept her quiet to keep her safe. He wanted to marry her.” Garan laughed shortly. “He was an impossible romantic rockhead. Luckily he couldn’t, and keep her secret.”

  “And why was that lucky?”

  “The son of a king and a girl who slept with the horses?”

  It seemed to Fire it was rarely enough one knew a person one wished to marry. How unjust then to meet that person, and be kept from it because one’s bed was made of hay and not feathers.

  “Anyway,” Garan continued. “Around that time Cansrel convinced Nax to throw Brigan into the army and send him off to the borders, where presumably Cansrel hoped he’d get himself killed. Brigan was angry as a hornet, but he had no choice but to go. Shortly thereafter it became clear to those of us who knew Rose that he’d left part of himself behind.”

  “She was pregnant.”

  “Precisely. Roen arranged for her needs, everything secret of course. And Brigan didn’t get himself killed after all, but Rose died giving birth to the child; and Brigan came home, all of seventeen years old, to learn in one day that Rose was dead, he had a child, and Nax had named him commander of the King’s Army.”

  Fire remembered this part. Cansrel had convinced Nax to promote Brigan far beyond his capability, in the hopes that Brigan would destroy his own reputation with a show of military incompetence. Fire recalled Brocker’s pleasure and his pride when Brigan, through some impossible feat of determination, had turned himself first into a credible leader and then into an uncommon one. He’d mounted the entire King’s Army, not just the cavalry but the infantry and bowmen. He’d raised the standards of their training and raised their pay. He’d increased their ranks, invited women to join, built signal stations in the mountains and all across the kingdom so that distant places could communicate with each other. He’d planned new forts with vast grain farms and enormous stables to care for the army’s greatest asset, the horses that made it mobile and swift. All to the effect of creating new challenges indeed for the smugglers, looters, Pikkian invaders—and for rebel lords like Mydogg and Gentian who were forced now to take pause and reassess their own small armies and dubious ambitions.

  Poor Brigan. Fire almost couldn’t fathom it. Poor heartbroken boy.

  “Cansrel was after everything of Brigan’s,” Garan said, “especially as Brigan’s power increased. He poisoned Brigan’s horses, out of spite. He tortured one of Brigan’s squires and killed him. Obviously we who knew the truth of Hanna knew not to breathe a word.”

  “Yes,” Fire whispered. “Of course.”

  “Then Nax died,” Garan said, “and Brigan and Cansrel spent the next two years trying to kill each other. And then Cansrel killed himself. Finally Brigan was able to name the child his heir, and the second heir now to the throne. But he did so only among the family. It’s no official secret—much of the court knows she’s his—but it’s continued to remain quiet. Partly out of habit, and partly to divert attention from her. Not all of Brigan’s enemies died with Cansrel.”

  “But how can she be an heir to the throne,” Fire asked, “if you’re not? Nax was your father, and you’re no more illegitimate than she is. Plus, she’s female, and a child.”

  Garan pursed his lips and looked away from her. When he spoke, it wasn’t to answer her question. “Roen trusts you,” he said, “and Brocker trusts you, so you needn’t worry your monster heart. If Roen never told you about her grandchild, it’s because she’s in the habit of never telling anyone. And if Brocker never told you, it’s probably because Roen never told him. And Clara trusts you too, because Brigan trusts you. And I’ll admit Brigan’s trust is a strong recommendation, but of course, no man is infallible.”

  “Of course,” Fire said dryly.

  One of Fire’s guards brought down a raptor monster then. It fell from the sky, golden green, and landed in a patch of trees out of their sight. Fire became aware suddenly of their surroundings. They stood in the orchard behind the palace, and beyond the orchard sat the little green house.

  Fire stared in astonishment then at the tree beside the house, wondering how she’d failed to notice it from her window. She realized it was because she’d assumed from above that it was a grove of trees and never a single organism. Its mammoth trunk split off in six directions, the limbs so many and so massive that some of them bent with their weight down to the ground, burrowed into the grass, and rose up again to the sky. Supports had been built for some of the heaviest limbs to hold them up and prevent them from breaking.

  Beside her, Garan watched the amazement on her face. Sighing, he walked to a bench beside the pathway to the house, where he sat with his eyes closed. Fire noticed his drawn face and his slumped posture. He looked washed out. She went and sat next to him.

  “Yes, it’s extraordinary,” he said, opening his eyes. “It’s grown so big it’ll kill itself. Every father names his heirs. Surely you know that.”

  Fire turned from the tree to glance at him, startled. Garan looked back at her coolly.

  “My father never named me,” he said. “He named Nash, and Brigan. Brigan did differently. Hanna will be his first heir even after he marries and has an army of sons. Of course I never minded. I’ve never once wanted to be king.”

  “And of course,” Fire said smoothly, “none of it will matter once the king and I marry and produce a jungle of monster heirs.”

  He hadn’t been expecting that. He sat still for a moment, measuring, and then half smiled, despite himself, understanding that it was a joke. He changed the subject again. “And what have you been doing with yourself, Lady? You’ve been ten days at court with little but a fiddle to occupy you.”

  “And why should you care? Is there something you want me to do?”

  “I’ve no employment for you until you decide to help us.”

  Help them—help this strange royal family. She found herself wishing that it weren’t so impossible. “You said you didn’t want me to help you.”

  “No, Lady, I said I was undecided. I remain undecided.”

  The door of the green house swung open then and the lady with the chestnut hair walked down the path toward them. And suddenly the feeling of Garan’s mind changed to something lighter. He jumped up and went to the woman and reached for her hand. He walked her back to Fire, his face alight; and Fire understood that of course he’d steered their walk in this direction intentionally. She’d been too wrapped up in their conversation to notice.

  “Lady Fire,” Garan said, “this is Sayre. Sayre has the misfortune of being Hanna’s history tutor.”

  Sayre smiled up at Garan, a smile that had everything in the world to do with Garan, so that Fire couldn’t fail to understand what she was seeing. “It’s not so bad as all that,” Sayre said. “She’s more than capable. It’s just she gets restless.”

  Fire held out her hand. The two ladies greeted each other, Sayre exceedingly polite and ever so mildly jealous. Understandable. Fire would have to advise Garan not to cart lady monsters along on his trips to visit his sweetheart. Some of the smartest men had a hard time comprehending the obvious.

  Then Sayre took her leave and Garan watched her go, rubbing his head absently and humming.

  The son of a king and a woman who’s a palace tutor? Fire th
ought to him, propelled by some strange joy into cheekiness. Shocking.

  Garan lowered his eyebrows and tried to look stern. “If you’re desperate for something to do, Lady, go to the nurseries and teach guarding against monster animals. Get the children on your side so Brigan’s daughter still has some teeth in her mouth next he sees her.”

  Fire turned to go, a smile playing around her lips. “Thank you for walking with me, Lord Prince. I should tell you I’m difficult to deceive. You may not trust me, but I know you like me.”

  And she told herself it was Garan’s regard that had buoyed her mood, and nothing to do with a woman whose significance had been reassigned.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FIRE WAS, IN fact, in need of something to do, because without an occupation all she could do was think. And thinking brought her back, over and over, to her lack of occupation, and the question of how much help, in fact, she would be capable of offering this kingdom—if her heart and her mind didn’t positively forbid it. The matter plagued her at night when she couldn’t sleep. She had bad dreams of what it meant to trick people and hurt people, nightmares of Cansrel making Cutter grovel in imagined pain.

  Clara took Fire sightseeing. The city folk adorned themselves with even more monster trappings than the court folk, and with much less concern for the aesthetic integration of the whole. Feathers jammed randomly into buttonholes; jewelry, quite stunning really, necklaces and earrings made of monster shells, worn by a baker woman over her mixing bowl and covered in flour dust. A woman wearing a blue-violet wig from the fur of some silky monster beast, a rabbit or a dog, the hair short and uneven and sticking out in spikes. And the woman’s face underneath quite plain, the overall effect tending to an odd caricature of Fire herself; but still, there was no denying she had something lovely atop her head.

  “Everyone wants a bit of something beautiful,” Clara said. “Among the wealthy it’s the rare skins and furs sold on the black market. With everyone else it’s whatever they find clogging the gutters or killed in the housetraps. It all amounts to the same thing, of course, but the rich people feel better knowing they’ve paid a fortune.”

  Which was, of course, silly. This city, Fire saw, was part sober and part silly. She liked the gardens and the old crumbling sculptures, the fountains in the squares, the museums and libraries and bright rows of shops that Clara led her through. She liked the bustling cobbled streets where people were so busy with their noisy living that sometimes they didn’t even notice the lady monster’s guarded walking tour. Sometimes. She calmed a team of horses once that panicked when some children ran too close to their heels, murmuring to them, petting their necks. Business stopped on that street, and didn’t resume until she and Clara had rounded a corner.

  She liked the bridges. She liked standing in the middle and looking down, feeling she could fall but knowing she wouldn’t. The bridge farthest from the falls was a drawbridge; she liked the bells that rang when it rose and fell, soft, almost melodic, whispering around and through the other city noises. She liked the warehouses and docks along the river, the aqueducts and sewers, and the locks, creaking and slow, that brought supply ships up and down between river and harbor. She especially liked Cellar Harbor, where the falls created a mist of seawater and drowned out all sound and feeling.

  She even, hesitatingly, liked the feel of the hospitals. She wondered which one had cured her father of the arrow in his back, and she hoped that the surgeons brought good folk back to life too. There were always people outside the hospitals, waiting and worrying. She glanced at them, touching them with surreptitious wishes that their worry should come to a happy ending.

  “There used to be medical schools all over the city,” Clara told her. “Do you know of King Arn and his monster adviser, Lady Ella?”

  “I remember the names from my history lessons,” Fire said, reflecting, but not coming up with much.

  “They ruled a good hundred years ago,” Clara said. “King Arn was an herbalist and Lady Ella a surgeon, and they became a bit obsessive about it, really—there are stories about them doing bizarre medical experiments on people who probably wouldn’t have consented to it if a monster hadn’t been the one making the suggestions, if you know what I mean, Lady. And they’d cut up dead bodies and study them, but no one was ever sure where they were getting the dead bodies from. Ah, well,” Clara said with a sardonic lift of the eyebrows. “Be that as it may, they revolutionized our understanding of doctoring and surgery, Lady. It’s thanks to them we know the uses for all the strange herbs that grow in the crevices and caves at the edges of the kingdom. Our medicines to stop bleeding and keep wounds from festering and kill tumors and bind bones together and do just about everything else came from their experiments. Of course, they also discovered the drugs that ruin people’s minds,” she added darkly. “And anyway, the schools are closed now; there’s no money for research. Or for art, for that matter, or engineering. Everything goes to policing—to the army, the coming war. I suppose the city will begin to deteriorate.”

  It already was, Fire thought but didn’t say. She saw the seedy, sprawling neighborhoods that abutted the docks on the south side of the river, and the tumbledown alleyways that popped up in parts of the city center where it seemed they shouldn’t. Many, many sections of the city that were not devoted to knowledge or beauty, or any kind of goodness.

  Clara took her to lunch once with the twins’ mother, who had a small and pleasant home on a street of florists. She also had a husband, a retired soldier who moonlighted as one of the twins’ most reliable spies.

  “These days, my focus is smuggling,” he told them in confidence over their meal. “Almost every wealthy person in the city dips into the black market now and then, but as often as not, when you find someone who’s very deeply involved, you’ve also found someone who’s the king’s enemy. Especially if they’re smuggling weapons or horses or anything Pikkian. If we’re lucky, we’re able to trace a buyer to the fellow he’s buying for, and if that turns out to be one of the rebel lords, we bring the buyer in for questioning. Can’t always trust their answers, of course.”

  Unsurprisingly, this sort of talk was always fuel for Clara’s pressure tactics with Fire. “With your power, it’d be easy for us to learn who’s on whose side. You could help us find out if our allies are true,” she’d say, or, “You could figure out where Mydogg’s planning to attack first.” Or, when that didn’t work, “You could uncover an assassination plot. Wouldn’t you feel terrible if I were assassinated because you weren’t helping?” And in a moment of desperation: “What if they’re planning to assassinate you? There have to be some who are, especially now that people think you might marry Nash.”

  Fire never responded to the endless battery, never admitted the doubt—and guilt—she was beginning to feel. She only filed the arguments away to mull over later, along with the ongoing arguments of the king. For occasionally after dinner—often enough that Welkley had installed a chair in the hallway—Nash came to speak to her through the door. He conducted himself decently, talked of the weather and stately visitors to the court; and always, always tried to convince her to reconsider the matter of the prisoner.

  “You’re from the north, Lady,” he’d say to her, or something like it. “You’ve seen the loose hold the law has outside this city. One misstep, Lady, and the entire kingdom could fall through our fingers.”

  And then he’d grow quiet, and she would know the marriage proposal was coming. She would send him away with her refusal and take what comfort she could in the company of her guard; and consider very seriously the state of the city, and the kingdom, and the king. And what her own place should be.

  To busy herself and ease her sense of uselessness, she took Garan’s advice and visited the nurseries. Entering cautiously at first, sitting quietly on a chair and watching the children as they played, read, squabbled, for this was where her mother had worked, and she wanted to take in its feeling slowly. She tried to picture a young, orange-hair
ed woman in these rooms, counseling children with her even temper. Jessa had had a place in these noisy, sunlit rooms. Somehow the very thought made Fire feel like less of a stranger here. Even if it also made her more lonely.

  Teaching guarding against animal monsters was delicate work, and Fire came up against some parents who wanted nothing of her association with their children. But a mix of royal and servant children did become her pupils.

  “Why are you so fascinated with insects?” she asked one of her cleverest students one morning, an eleven-year-old boy named Cob who could build a wall in his mind against raptor monsters, and resist the urge to touch Fire’s hair when he saw it, but would not kill a monster bug even if it was camped out on his hand making a dinner of his blood. “You have no trouble with the raptors.”

  “Raptors,” Cob said with high-pitched scorn. “They have no intelligence, only a big meaningless surge of feeling they think they can mesmerize me with. They’re completely unsophisticated.”

  “True,” Fire said. “But compared with monster bugs, they’re veritable geniuses.”

  “But monster bugs are so perfect,” Cob said wistfully, going cross-eyed as a dragonfly monster hovered at the tip of his nose. “Look at their wings. Look at their jointed legs and their beady little eyeballs and look how smart they are with their pinchers.”

  “He loves all bugs,” Cob’s younger sister said, rolling her eyes. “Not just monster bugs.”

  Perhaps his problem, Fire thought to herself, is that he’s a scientist. “Very well,” she said. “You may allow monster bugs to sting you, in appreciation of their excellent pinchers. But,” she added sternly, “there are one or two bugs that would do you harm if they could, and those you must learn to guard yourself against. Do you understand?”

  “Must I kill them?”

  “Yes, you must kill them. But once they’re dead, you could always dissect them. Had you thought of that?”

  Cob brightened. “Really? Will you help me?”