Brightly Burning

by Mercedes Lackey

  Lan dug in his heels and tried to resist, but the others were so much stronger and taller, they just hauled him right off his feet altogether. In a nightmarishly short time, they had him down all four flights of stairs, and into an unused classroom on the back of the building, far from the street. No matter how much he screamed and yelled, no one would hear him here.

  “You can fuss all you want, but no one is going to hear you,” Tyron pointed out helpfully, confirming his thought. “I do encourage you to do so, however; it lets me know that I’m doing a good job.”

  Lan gagged, as his stomach surged with nausea. There was a single, straight-backed chair in the middle of the room, and four leather straps on the seat of the chair. It was pretty obvious what they were going to do with that chair.

  “Want us to strap him down, Tyron?” asked one of the two monsters holding his arms.

  Tyron was playing with a willow cane, experimentally bending it and swishing it through the air. “Not yet. Why don’t you just play with him for a little until I’m ready.”

  Lan didn’t get much chance to wonder what that meant. The monsters dropped him; he stumbled, not quite falling, and before he could get his balance, the first one shoved him, hard.

  He hit the wall with bruising force, knocking some of the breath out of his body, and another of the bullies grabbed his arm, wrenched him away from the wall, and shoved him at a third.

  They passed him from one to the other, alternately catching him and knocking him into the walls. And as they did so, that sullen little spark of heat began to grow, driving everything before it, and filling him with a white-hot rage that burned away his thoughts and contended with the panic and fear for supremacy.

  RAIN sheeted down, drenching everything in sight—which wasn’t much, as the rain curtains obscured most objects farther away than ten horse-lengths. Pol pulled his hood a little closer around his face, and kept his eyes fixed on Satiran’s neck.

  Malken was no longer Pol’s pupil; in fact, Malken was no longer anyone’s pupil except Herald Evan’s. The child’s ForeSight was so very powerful that he’d been pulled out of all his classes to concentrate on getting it under control.

  Poor Malken didn’t just see the future, he saw many possible futures, and at the moment, he couldn’t tell which was the more likely. That left the child confused and directionless, alternately afraid to act and afraid to hesitate, afraid to warn and afraid to keep silent. Evan had taken him right away from the Collegium altogether, and out of Haven, to one of the many Crown hunting lodges where there were few people, so that he and Malken could begin to sort things out far from the interference of other peoples’ lives.

  Pol was the only other person allowed to come near them, because Malken had begged Evan not to keep Pol away. So Pol arranged for a holiday, long enough to ride there, stay for a few days to reassure the little boy that he had no intention of taking part in any world-wide conflagrations, and ride back.

  At the moment, a world-wide conflagration was the least of all possible fates for him! Drowning was more like it. It was just his luck that he had scheduled himself to ride straight out into the pouring rain. Not that it hadn’t been raining, off and on, for the past several weeks, but he’d hoped that things might slack off a bit before he started out.

  No such luck.

  :It could be worse,: Satiran said, after four solid candlemarks of riding in such a steady downpour that he was beginning to have the feeling that the offending clouds were actually moving with them.

  “I’d rather not think how,” Pol replied, peering forward between Satiran’s ears, from under the dripping hood of his rain cape. Satiran’s hooves made an unpleasant, squishy splash when he set them down, and an equally unpleasant sucking sound when he picked them up. The ground was completely saturated after all these days of rain. There was nowhere for the water to go, and some people were finding the ground floors of their homes unlivable as water seeped steadily up through the flooring. And there were floods, of course, though most people who lived in areas prone to flooding were encouraged to build houses on stilts, and most did.

  :I can think of any number of ways. For instance, you could have a hole in your cape, right at the nape of your neck.: Satiran was in a teasing mood, and knew how suggestible his Chosen was; for a brief but unpleasant moment, Pol actually felt an icy trickle down his spine, until he convinced himself it was only his overactive imagination.

  Both he and Satiran had waxed-canvas rain capes, though Pol also had his woolen winter cape beneath the rain cape, for the rain was one short step above the temperature of ice.

  “I wonder what’s going to happen with Malken when his Gift stabilizes?” he wondered aloud, hoping both to tease some information out of Satiran and to distract him from any more tricks. Of all the Gifts, ForeSight was the least amenable to control. It tended to come when it felt like, and show you what it wanted to. Pol had the feeling that the Companions were taking a very close interest in Malken’s progress.

  :Actually, I think little Malken will be able to invoke it at will, but it’s always going to show a multiplicity of futures, and there won’t be much of a way to tell us how to get to any of them.: Satiran sounded thoughtful, as if he had been working on that very question for some time. :Still—the worst possibilities can always be guarded against, or planned for.:

  “That’s better than having no warning,” Pol agreed. “I take it you and the others have been talking about this?”

  :Off and on. Malken probably has the strongest single Gift in the entire Heraldic Circle, poor thing. That’s a heavy burden to bear at any age, much less such a young one.: There was no doubt that Satiran felt very sorry for the youngster; well, if that was the case, so did Pol. The strong Gifts were sometimes as much of a curse as a blessing to the one saddled with them.

  :And right now,: Satiran continued, :What he’s Seeing is a confused jumble of the worst possible events that anyone could imagine. That’s what Hayka and Jolene say, anyway. There’s no way of telling even where in time those possibilities lie.:

  “Not really useful,” Pol remarked.

  :Not really, no,: Satiran, replied. :For instance, if he were able to ForeSee things like a tree falling on you—:

  Afterward, Pol remembered those words with a sense of heavy irony; at the time, though, all he noticed was an odd, creaking sound off to his right—

  Which was quickly followed by Satiran’s startled neigh and shy to the left, the confused impression of something very large rushing at him—

  And then, nothing at all.

  LAN had stopped thinking some time ago; now all he was doing was feeling. It was pure fear, and barely contained rage that consumed him, the ice of panic, the heat of anger, contending for his mind. There wasn’t much room left over for thought.

  He struggled to hold in the rage; somehow he felt dimly that if he couldn’t keep control over it, something terrible and irrevocable would happen. But the part of him that tried to hang onto a little rational thought was also the part that hurt. The blinding pain of the worst headache he had ever felt without passing out entirely was slowly eroding his ability to hang onto his anger.

  Abruptly, with a final shove, Tyron’s bullies sent him sprawling at the ringleader’s feet. He panted, both with exertion and the flush of heat that consumed him, on his hands and knees.

  The pain was excruciating, the fear held him paralyzed still, and the anger raged against the bonds containing it.

  His ears filled with roaring, very like the thunder of a river in full flood. He barely heard Tyron say, “Strip his shirt off, and strap him down.”

  A haze of red clouded his eyes. When two of Tyron’s henchmen grabbed him and pulled his shirt off over his head, they exclaimed as they grabbed his bare arms. “Tyron—he’s as hot as a branding iron!” said the one on his right. “If he’s got a fever, maybe you should leave him alone for now—”

  “I’ve left him alone for long enough,” Tyron replied with irritation, and
to punctuate his intentions, he took his first stroke on Lan’s bare back while he was still held between the two bullies, the cane whistling through the air with the savage force that Tyron put behind it.

  The pain of the lash was worse than anything Lan had ever felt. It cut right through the headache, broke his paralyzing fear, and left him with only instinct.

  He had to get away! He had to get away, and now!

  The fear joined the anger, and together they destroyed the last of his rapidly eroding control over that overpowering rage—and the terrible thing that his rage had summoned.

  A moment of utter silence as Tyron pulled back for a second blow.

  It fell.

  The entire room erupted in flames.

  The three who were the closest, Tyron and the two bullies, Loman and Derwit, who were holding his arms, went up like oil-soaked torches, screaming with agony. Tyron blundered backward and into the wall, hitting it, and dropping to the floor. The boy to Lan’s right howled and whirled in circles aimlessly. The one to his left ran straight into the fireplace.

  Lan himself only noticed this with a tiny part of his mind that was numb and frozen with horror, unable to act or think, only able to observe. The rest of him was consumed with flame, was the flame, and existed only to feed itself.

  It reached for the nearest source of fuel; the chair, the three bodies already afire and silent now, the other boys, who were trapped. He was between them and the door, and the fire was hungry . . . and very, very, angry.

  Flames blossomed all around him, sending his hair rising upward, propelled by tiny flames that licked the air savagely, a nimbus of fury that nevertheless did not touch him. One of the boys tried to dash past him, making for the door.

  The fury inside him recognized the attempt at escape, and intercepted him before Lan realized what was happening. The boy exploded into flame like the other three and dropped like a shot bird to the floor.

  The others shrieked in uncomprehending terror.

  Their reaction only fed the fire further; it pulsed out to fill the room, as the boys backed up in a pathetic attempt to evade it. One of them shouted the first actual word that any of them had spoken until that moment, staring past the flames to Lan.

  “Please!” he screamed, as the fires touched his flesh. “Please!”

  Something snapped inside him again. With an agonizing wrench that sent him to his knees, Lan wrested back some control from the thing that was consuming them.

  The flames receded, pulling back just enough so that the burned and blistered boys could stumble past him and out the door to freedom.

  Lan wrestled with a force that didn’t want to be controlled, that resisted him with his own strength. The flames flared again, and the walls of the room began to smoke.

  Outside, someone had caught sight of the flames and sounded an alarm. There was shouting, screams, a confusion of noise. Lan ignored all of that, battling with the rage inside himself, grappling with a thing that had taken on an evil life all its own.

  Now it was even turning its fury on its host; it was Lan’s turn to scream in agony as the flames licked his flesh. But that was the power’s undoing.

  Lan simply could not bear anymore. He slumped over as darkness, a cool, welcoming darkness, beckoned to him to fall into it. His eyes cleared once before that final dark, and saw without comprehension, the flames around him flickering, and dying out, leaving only a few spots of sullenly burning fire in the room itself.

  He did not want to think what fueled those fires, for there were four of them.

  But the hold that the anger, fear, and fire had over him was gone. Obedient at last, his mind gave itself up to darkness and his body toppled to the floor of the burned-out room.

  EIGHT

  WHEN Pol first opened his eyes, he found, much to his bemusement, that he was in an unfamiliar room. That was not necessarily an unusual circumstance, but this wasn’t a waystation or an inn, which would have made sense; it was a pleasant, but rather bare chamber with pale green walls, and that didn’t ring any notes of familiarity.

  Then the Healer came in, and he remembered, with unnatural clarity, the rain, the wind, Satiran’s neigh of surprise, and something rushing at him. He didn’t know this Healer, a lean, hard stick of a man, with his hair going sparse around the temples, but any Healer at the Collegium would be a good one. As always, the Healer wore garments in the standard color of deepest green, but he chose a long tunic and trews rather than floor-length robes.

  “A tree fell on me?” he said aloud, incredulously. “A tree fell on me?”

  “That’s what your Companion tells us,” the Healer replied, with a dry chuckle. “Evidently the soil was too water-soaked to hold it anymore; from what the rescuers had to tell me it was a giant. They took a while cutting you loose.” The Healer raised Pol’s head and tucked another pillow behind him to get him propped up. “Your Companion couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, but you were the one that got a solid blow to the head. He was just battered and bruised; pinned, but conscious, and able to summon help.”

  Pol groaned. If that just wasn’t his luck! It seemed that anytime he was involved in anything that produced injuries, he was the one that got the worst of it.

  On the other hand, I’m not dead yet, so maybe I am lucky.

  “You’re really quite lucky,” the Healer echoed his thoughts, taking his chin in one hand and turning his head to both sides, examining his eyes, then the bruises around his face and head. “From the look of things they tell me, a little more or less to one side or the other, and you’d both have been hit by a main trunk piece and not just a branch.”

  “Have I missed anything?” he asked. “Anything important happen? How long have I been unconscious? Is my skull cracked?”

  “Yes, but nothing to worry about, four days, nothing in Collegium or Court, but there was some excitement down in town.” The Healer left off prodding at Pol’s bruises; apparently he’d taken a solid hit, but his scalp hadn’t split open, since his head wasn’t bandaged. Or else it did, but they mended it quickly and washed the blood out of my hair. Or the rain did. He didn’t have much of a headache either, so the Healers must have put in some serious work on his skull.

  The Healer frowned a bit, though not at Pol. “The Merchants’ and Crafts’ Guilds had set up a sort of Collegium of their own to educate their brighter children, the ones who weren’t falling right into their parents’ Guilds. There was a fire there three days ago; four boys were killed, and several burned badly.”

  That made him sit right up straight, which did start his head pounding. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “How did that happen?”

  “That’s the strange thing; nobody seems to know,” the Healer replied, pushing him back down in the bed and putting a soothing hand on his forehead that erased the pain. “The boys have a peculiar story about the fire coming from out of nowhere.” His frown deepened. “They also have no explanation for being in the building, in an unused classroom, at that time of the late afternoon. Classes were long over, and they should have been home. If they were staying after hours, studying, they should have been in their own classrooms.”

  Pol pursed his lips, thoughtfully. “You think they started the fire?” It wouldn’t be the first time that adolescents started a fire as a prank or to vandalize and had it get away from them.

  “I think the Guard thinks they did,” the Healer replied. “They’re questioning all the boys that are fit to talk to. I’m not so sure. I’m treating one of the injured, the youngest of the lot.”

  Pol looked inquiring and attentive, and the Healer continued. “The thing that bothers me is that all but one were in the same age group, the same clique. The odd one was a new student, and was in one of the much lower classes. They shouldn’t have had anything to do with him, so what was he doing with them at that time of the day?”

  Something had roused the Healer’s suspicions, that was certain. “Where’s that particular boy?” he asked, sensing that this Heal
er, at least, wanted someone with authority to get to the bottom of this.

  “Here. He’s been unconscious since they were dragged out,” the Healer replied, mouth set in a hard line. “Look, Herald Pol, I’m not trying to cause trouble, but I don’t like some of the things we’ve uncovered, or the way those other boys are acting; it seems to me that they want desperately to hide something, and it has to do with that younger boy. It’s hard to tell, under the burns, but we think there’s a lot of bruising all over him that doesn’t look accidental, and it definitely looks as if he’s been caned.”

  Pol hadn’t been around the Court as long as he had without gathering a fair understanding of how “ordinary” children sometimes acted. “You think he’s being bullied, knocked around—”

  “I think he was being tortured,” the Healer interrupted, icily. “That’s what we’d call it in an adult, and I see no reason to call it by a lesser name in children. I’ve been trying to get the Guard to call in some of the other, younger children of the school to find out what those older boys could have been up to, but they haven’t paid any attention to me. They keep saying that the younger children couldn’t possibly know anything about it.”

  Pol eyed his physician with a lifted eyebrow. “You’ve had some . . . personal experience with bullies, I take it?”

  The Healer’s mouth twisted into a thin smile as ironic as Pol’s own. “I was an incipient Healer—which means empathic and sensitive—in a Holderkin family. What do you think?”

  Pol winced. He had taken one circuit in Holderkin lands; male children were raised to be manly men, autocratic rulers of their children and (multiple) wives, rough, taciturn, and without emotion, as warmhearted as granite. Females were expected to be subservient in all things, bowing to the will of any male older than ten. No child growing up with the Healer’s Gifts could survive long in such an environment without becoming the target of attempts to “toughen him up,” and “make a proper man of him.”