Fire

by Kristin Cashore

  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 savior 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 dishonor.

  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 armorers and other staff persons—and, at a distance, the dappled gray 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 cit
y. 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 went 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 gray 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 rumor 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 color 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 y
ou’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 recognized 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.”