Fire

by Kristin Cashore

  Welkley walked in then with a summons for Brigan to go to the king. Fire was relieved to see him go.

  ON HER WAY to her own rooms with her guard, that strange and familiar consciousness flitted again across her mind. The archer, the empty-headed archer.

  Fire let out a frustrated breath of air. The archer was in the palace or on the grounds, or nearby in the city, or at least she’d thought so at times today; and he never stayed in her mind long enough for her to catch hold, or to know what to do. It was not normal. It just was not normal, these prowling men and these minds as blank as if they were mesmerized by monsters. The sense of him here after all these months was not welcome.

  Then in her rooms, she found the guards who were stationed there in a peculiar state. “A man came to the door, Lady,” Musa said, “but he made no sense. He said he was from the king and he’d come to examine the view from your windows, but I didn’t recognize him as a king’s man and I didn’t trust what he wanted. I didn’t let him in.”

  Fire was rather astonished. “The view from my windows? Why on earth?”

  “He didn’t feel right, Lady,” Neel said. “There was something funny about him. Nothing he said made any sense.”

  “He felt well enough to me,” another guard said gruffly. “The king will not be pleased that we disobeyed.”

  “No,” Musa said to her soldiers. “Enough of this argument. Neel is right, the man had a bad feeling to him.”

  “He made me dizzy,” Mila said.

  “He was an honorable man,” another said, “and I don’t believe we have the authority to turn the king’s men away.”

  Fire stood in her doorway, her hand on the door frame to steady herself. She was certain as she listened to the disagreement between her guards—her guards, who never argued in front of their lady, and never talked back to their captain—that something was wrong. It wasn’t just that they argued, or that this visitor sounded a suspicious fellow. Neel had said the man hadn’t felt right; well, a number of her guards at this moment didn’t feel right. They were much more open to her than usual, and a fog hovered in their minds. The most affected were the guards who argued now with Musa.

  And she knew through some instinct, monster or human, that if they spoke of this man as honorable, they were reading him wrong. She knew with a certainty that she couldn’t explain that Musa had been right to turn the man away.

  “What did he look like, this fellow?”

  A few of the guard scratched their heads and grumbled that they couldn’t remember; and Fire could almost reach out and touch the fog of their minds. But Musa’s mind was clear. “He was tall, Lady, taller than the king, and thin, wasted. He had white hair and dark eyes and he was not well. His color was off, he was gray-like, and he had marks on his skin. A rash.”

  “A rash?”

  “He wore plain clothing, and he had a positive armament of bows on his back—crossbow, short bow, a truly gorgeous longbow. He had a full quiver and a knife, but no sword.”

  “The arrows in his quiver. What were they made of?”

  Musa pursed her lips. “I didn’t notice.”

  “A white wood,” Neel said.

  And so the foggy-headed archer had come to her rooms to see her views. And had left a number of her guards with puzzled expressions, and foggy heads.

  Fire walked to the foggiest guard, the first who’d raised an argument, a fellow named Edler who was normally quite amiable. She put her hand to his forehead. “Edler. Does your head hurt?”

  It took Edler a moment to process his answer. “It doesn’t exactly hurt, Lady, but I don’t feel quite like myself.”

  Fire considered how to word this. “May I have your permission to try to clear the discomfort?”

  “Certainly, Lady, if you wish.”

  Fire entered Edler’s consciousness easily, as she had the poacher’s. She played around with his fog, touched it and twisted it, trying to decide what exactly it was. It seemed like a balloon that was filling his mind with emptiness, pushing his own intelligence to the edges.

  Fire jabbed the balloon hard and it popped, and fizzled. Edler’s own thoughts rushed forward and fell into place; and he rubbed his head with both hands. “It does feel better, Lady. I can picture that man clearly. I don’t think he was the king’s man.”

  “He wasn’t the king’s man,” Fire said. “The king wouldn’t send a sickly fellow armed with a longbow to my rooms to admire my views.”

  Edler sighed. “Rocks, but I’m tired.”

  Fire moved on to her next foggy guard, and thought to herself that here was a thing more ominous than anything she’d uncovered yet in the questioning rooms.

  On her bed later she found a letter from Archer. Once the summer harvest was through, he intended to visit. It was a happiness, but it did not lighten the state of things.

  She had thought herself the only person in the Dells capable of altering minds.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE YEAR FIRE had spent training her father to experience things that didn’t exist was also, thankfully, the year her relationship with Archer found a new happiness.

  Cansrel hadn’t minded experiencing nonexistent things, for it was a time when existing things depressed him. Nax had been his conduit to all pleasures, and Nax was gone. Brigan grew more influential and had escaped another attack uninjured. It was some relief for Cansrel to feel sun on his skin in the midst of weeks of drizzle, or taste monster meat when it was not being served. There was solace in the touch of his daughter’s mind—now that she knew better than to turn flames into flowers.

  On her side of things, Fire’s body suffered; she lost her appetite, grew thin, had attacks of dizziness, got cramps in her neck and shoulders that made playing music painful and brought on splitting headaches. She avoided contemplation of the thing she was thinking of doing. She was certain that if she looked at it straight on she’d lose control of herself.

  Archer was not, in fact, the only person that year to bring her comfort. A young woman named Liddy, sweet and hazel-eyed, was the maid of Fire’s bedrooms. She came upon Fire one spring day curled on the bed, fighting off a whirling panic. Liddy liked her mild young lady, and was sorry at her distress. She sat beside Fire and stroked her hair, at Fire’s forehead and behind her ears, against her neck, and down to the small of her back. The touch was kindly meant, and the deepest and tenderest comfort in the world. Fire found herself resting her head in Liddy’s lap while Liddy continued stroking. It was a gift, offered unjealously, and Fire accepted it.

  That day, from that moment, something quiet grew between them. An alliance. They brushed each other’s hair sometimes, helped each other dress and undress. They stole time together, whispering, like little girls who’ve discovered a soul mate.

  Some things could not happen in Cansrel’s proximity without Cansrel knowing; monsters knew things. Cansrel began to complain about Liddy. He did not like her, he did not like the time they spent together. Finally he lost patience and arranged a marriage for Liddy, sending her away to an estate beyond the town.

  Fire was breathless, astounded, and heartbroken. Certainly she was glad that he’d merely sent Liddy away, not killed her or taken her into his own bed to teach her a lesson. But still, it was a bitter and selfish cruelty. It did not make her merciful.

  Perhaps her lonesomeness after Liddy prepared her for Archer, though Liddy and Archer were manifestly different.

  During that spring and into the summer when she turned fifteen, Archer knew what mad thing Fire was contemplating. He knew why she couldn’t eat and why her body suffered. It tormented him, took him out of his mind with fear for her. He fought with her about it; he fought with Brocker, who was also worried but who nonetheless refused to interfere. Over and over Archer begged Fire to release herself from the entire endeavor. Over and over Fire refused.

  One August night during a frantic whispered battle under a tree outside her house, he kissed her. She stiffened, startled, and then knew, as his hands reached
for her and he kissed her again, that she wanted this, she needed Archer, her body needed this wildness that was also comfort. She burrowed herself against him; she brought him inside and upstairs. And that was that; child companions became lovers. They found a place where they could agree, a release from the anxiety and unhappiness that threatened to overwhelm them. After making love with her friend, Fire often found herself wanting to eat. Kissing her and laughing, Archer would feed her in her own bed with food he carried in through the window.

  Cansrel knew, of course, but where her gentle love of Liddy had been intolerable to him, her need for Archer roused nothing stronger than an amused acceptance of the inevitable. He didn’t care, as long as she took the herbs when she needed to. “Two of us is enough, Fire,” he’d say smoothly. She heard the threat in his words toward the baby she wasn’t going to have. She took the herbs.

  Archer did not act jealous in those days, or domineering. That came later.

  Fire knew too well that things didn’t ever stay the same. Natural beginnings came to natural or unnatural ends. She was eager to see Archer, more than eager, but she knew what he would come to King’s City hoping for. She wasn’t looking forward to putting this end into words for him.

  FIRE HAD TAKEN to describing the foggy archer to everyone she questioned, very briefly at the end of each interview. So far it was to no avail.

  “Lady,” Brigan said to her today in Garan’s bedroom. “Have you learned anything yet about that archer?”

  “No, Lord Prince. No one seems to recognize his description.”

  “Well,” he said, “I hope you’ll keep asking.”

  Garan’s health had had a setback, but he refused to go into the infirmary or stop working, which meant that in recent days his bedchamber had become quite a hub of activity. Breathing was a difficulty and he had no strength to sit up. Despite this, he remained more than capable of holding his side of an argument.

  “Forget the archer,” he said now. “We have more important matters to discuss, such as the exorbitant cost of your army.” He glared at Brigan, who’d propped himself against the wardrobe, too directly in Fire’s line of vision to ignore, tossing a ball back and forth in his hands that she recognized as a toy she’d seen Blotchy and Hanna fighting over on occasion. “It’s far too expensive,” Garan continued, still glaring from his bed. “You pay them too much, and then when they’re injured or dead and no use to us you continue to pay them.”

  Brigan shrugged. “And?”

  “You think we’re made of money.”

  “I will not cut their pay.”

  “Brigan,” Garan said wearily. “We cannot afford it.”

  “We must afford it. The eve of a war is not the time to start cutting an army’s pay. How do you think I’ve managed to recruit so many? Do you really think them so shot through with loyalty for the bloodline of Nax that they wouldn’t turn to Mydogg if he offered more?”

  “As I understood it,” Garan said, “the lot of them would pay for the privilege of dying in defense of none other than you.”

  Nash spoke from his seat in the window, where he was a dark shape outlined in the light of a blue sky. He’d been sitting there for some time. Fire knew he was watching her. “And that’s because he always sticks up for them, Garan, when brutes like you try to take their money away. I wish you would rest. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Garan said; and then dissolved into a fit of coughing that had the sound of a saw blade tearing through wood.

  Fire leaned forward in her chair and touched Garan’s damp face. She’d come to an understanding with him regarding this bout of illness. He insisted on working, and so she agreed to bring him her reports from the questioning rooms; but only if he allowed her into his mind, to ease his sense of his throbbing head and burning lungs.

  “Thank you,” he said to her softly, taking her hand and holding it to his chest. “This conversation rots. Lady, give me some good news from the questioning rooms.”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t any, Lord Prince.”

  “Still coming up with contradiction?”

  “Most certainly. A messenger told me yesterday that Mydogg has definite plans to make an attack against both the king and Lord Gentian in November. Then today a new fellow told me Mydogg has definite plans to move his entire army north into Pikkia and wait for a war between Gentian and the king to play out before he so much as raises a sword. Plus, I spoke to a spy of Gentian’s who says Gentian killed Lady Murgda in an ambush in August.”

  Brigan was spinning the ball now on the end of his finger, absentmindedly. “I met with Lady Murgda on the fifteenth of September,” he said. “She wasn’t particularly friendly, but she was plainly not dead.”

  It was a tendency in the questioning rooms that had arisen suddenly in recent weeks, contradiction and misinformation, coming from all sides and making it very difficult to know which sources to trust. The messengers and spies Fire questioned were clearheaded and truthful with their knowledge. It was simply that their knowledge was wrong.

  All at the Dellian court knew what it meant. Both Mydogg and Gentian were aware that Fire had joined the ranks of the enemy. To lessen the advantage she gave the Dellian throne, both rebel lords had begun misinforming some among their own people, and then sending them out to get caught.

  “There are people close to both men,” Garan said, “people who know the truth of their plans. We need those people—a close ally of Mydogg’s, and one of Gentian’s. And they have to be people we’d never suspect normally, for neither Mydogg nor Gentian must ever suspect us of questioning them.”

  “We need an ally of Mydogg’s or Gentian’s pretending to be among the most loyal allies of the king,” Brigan said. “Shouldn’t be so hard, really. If I shot an arrow out the window I’d probably hit one.”

  “It seems to me,” Fire said carefully, “that if I take a less direct approach, if I question every person we’re holding about things I haven’t bothered to investigate before—every party they’ve ever been to, every conversation they’ve ever overheard but perhaps not understood the significance of, every horse they’ve ever seen heading south when it should’ve been heading north—”

  “Yes,” Brigan said. “It might yield something.”

  “And where are the women?” Fire asked. “Enough men. Give me the women Mydogg and Gentian’ve taken to bed, and the barmaids who’ve had to serve them their wine. Men are daft around women, incautious and boastful. There must be a hundred women out there carrying information we could use.”

  Nash spoke soberly. “That seems good advice.”

  “I don’t know,” Garan said. “I’m offended.” He stopped, choked by a spasm of coughing. Nash moved to his brother’s bed, sat beside him, and held his shoulder to steady him. Garan reached a shaky hand to Nash. Nash clasped it in his.

  It always struck Fire, the physical affection between these siblings, who as often as not were at each other’s throats over one thing or another. She liked the way the four of them shifted and changed shape, bumping and clanging against one another, sharpening each other’s edges and then smoothing them down again, and somehow always finding the way to fit together.

  “And,” Brigan said, returning quietly to his previous topic, “don’t give up on the archer, Lady.”

  “I won’t, for he troubles me much,” Fire said, and then sensed the approach of an altogether different archer. She looked into her lap to hide her flush of joy. “Lord Archer has just arrived at court,” she said. “Welkley is bringing him here now.”

  “Ah,” Brigan said. “And here’s the man we should recruit to shoot arrows out the window.”

  “Yes,” Garan said wickedly, “I hear his arrow is always finding new targets.”

  “I’d hit you if you weren’t flat on your back,” Brigan said, suddenly angry.

  “Behave yourself, Garan,” Nash hissed. Before Fire could even begin to react to the argument, which struck her as rather
funny, Welkley and Archer were through the door, and everyone but Garan was standing.

  “Lord King,” Archer said immediately, dropping to his knee before Nash. “Lord Princes,” he said next, standing to take Brigan’s hand and stooping to take Garan’s.

  He turned to Fire. With great propriety he took her hands in his. And the instant their eyes met he was laughing and glinting with mischief, his face so happy and Archer-like that she began to laugh as well.

  He lifted her up to give her a proper hug. He smelled like home, like the northern autumn rains.

  SHE WENT FOR a walk with Archer around the palace grounds. The trees were blazing with autumn color. Fire was astonished now, and thrilled, with the tree beside the green house, because in recent days it had transformed into the closest natural thing she’d ever seen to her hair.

  Archer told her how bleak the north was in comparison. He told her about Brocker’s activities, and the year’s good harvest, and his passage south with ten soldiers through the rain. “I’ve brought your favorite musician,” Archer said, “and he’s brought his whistle.”

  “Krell,” Fire said, smiling. “Thank you, Archer.”

  “This guard on our heels is all very well,” Archer said, “but when can we be alone?”

  “I’m never alone. I always have a guard, even in my bedchamber.”

  “Surely that can change now I’m here. Why don’t you tell them to go away?”

  “They’re under Brigan’s orders, not mine,” Fire said lightly. “And as it turns out, he’s quite stubborn. I haven’t been able to change his mind about it.”

  “Well,” Archer said, smirking, “I will change his mind. I daresay he understands our need of privacy. And his authority over you must lessen now that I’m here.”

  Of course, Fire thought, and Archer’s own authority must rise up to replace it. Her temper flared out; she caught at the ends of it and hauled it back in. “There’s something I must tell you, Archer, and you’re not going to like it.”