by Shannon Hale
The air began rippling, so dense Rin could actually see the deadly columns of heat shooting from the hearth-watchers toward Isi. But Isi’s wind thickened, pouring past Rin in great syrupy gusts. The wind ravaged through the waves of heat, breaking them apart and sending them swirling away. Sometimes the heat crashed against a wall and found a tapestry, and fires burst to life. But just as suddenly the fires died as if the wind had sucked the air out of them.
Rin spotted a soldier coming up the stairs, not caught in the corner with the others. He was making his way around the room, behind Isi’s back.
“Isi!” Rin yelled, just as the soldier hurled a heavy metal box. Wind gushed between them and the box was knocked aside, missing Isi’s head but thumping against her leg. She faltered, and the wind died for just a moment, but it was enough. The hearth-watchers jumped to their feet and split apart, and the soldiers ran forward with swords. Heat and steel were coming at Isi from every direction, seven fire-speakers and three warriors, all looking at Isi, all set on her death.
And Selia was still speaking, now in a high, piercing noise that barely cut through the wind. “Stop fighting, Crown Princess. It’s useless! You’ll get your little friend killed!”
Rin’s guard still gripped her wrist. She wished she was in the dungeon, locked away in darkness where she would not have to see the queen of Bayern die. If only Enna were here instead of Rin—Enna would wipe out the entire room instead of cowering on the floor.
Isi kept pushing back the hearth-watchers and soldiers with her wind, occasionally letting small fires ignite a sword handle or scorch someone’s boots. But they were gaining ground, and the closer they stood to Isi, the harder it was for her to blow away their shooting heat in time. The hem of Isi’s skirt was smoking, her face was strained, her eyes sad. Rin believed Isi was holding back somehow—for fear of hurting them, or from the heavy strain of Selia’s voice. Or perhaps knowing that Tusken was safe took the will to fight out of her. She defended herself with wind but she did not attack back with fire, and she left Selia alone.
Rin’s hands tightened into fists. It was not right. Selia should not win. She had not been playing fair. Anyone who had ever so much as met Ma knew that you play fair or you do not play at all. People-speaking was no excuse for being a bully.
Rage crackled inside her, at Selia, at Isi. At herself. Why did she have to be so weak? The anger roiling through her limbs did not feel weak just then. And she thought of that tree, hacked away and assumed dead, yet still growing through stones, taking a chunk out of a fortress wall. Wind tears down trees, and new ones sprout again. Fire destroys forests, and they grow back. People chop them down to build their walls, and the trees reclaim the land. The thought made her feel wild—dangerous. If Isi could not take care of Selia, then she would.
Rin stood, meeting eyes with her guard. She had failed completely with the guard in the cell. She had asked too much—she could not wield such power as Selia, to make others believe the impossible. She did not have the will to speak lies or commands—it reminded her of what she’d done to Wilem, made her feel dark and greasy and used up. She could only tell what truth she had. What did this soldier want more than anything? To please his mistress. Rin could see that yearning in the faces of all her followers.
“Your mistress is very powerful, but so is the queen of Bayern. I’m holding you back. You could show Selia your devotion better if you didn’t have to guard me. Why don’t you join the fight?”
He blinked.
“I’m not going to run, I promise. I’ve nowhere to run. You can’t help your mistress holding me. Let me go and I won’t leave this room. Besides, I’m still shackled. What harm could I do?”
Her words seemed to make sense to him. He released her, drew his sword, and moved toward Isi.
Rin covered her mouth with her hands. It worked. It worked. She wanted to shout out in relief and weep in shame. Both would have to wait. She sat, grabbed the cooled knife off the floor, and holding it with both hands, sawed at the metal link. It was thin and a little misshapen from Isi’s heat, but still intact. She twisted and bent, the effort making her sweat. Isi was at the center of a maelstrom, soldiers and hearth-watchers pressing in from all sides, Selia bellowing threats.
Come on, Rin thought. That’s your queen out there. Show Selia that Isi’s subjects are stronger of their own will than her pack of fire-singed babies.
Rin angled the knife again, scratching the link between blade and floor. The knife blade bent, slipping into a groove in the metal, a brittle spot that gave. Rin twisted her hands and her cuffed wrists separated.
Selia was screaming commands, and the anger in Rin bunched and quivered, eager to scream back. No, not like Selia, Rin told herself, pushing her anger to merge with her quiet places. Her thoughts twisted into ideas of aspens at the end of winter, done with resting and ready to move again. The burst of spring in a previously sleeping tree was as dramatic to Rin as the explosion of fire. She felt ready to spring.
With her thoughts stilled, her core strong, she was able to think clearly. She had to keep moving. Go forward. Stop Selia. There was a roomful of soldiers and hearth-watchers who would try to stop her. She could not let them.
Rin faced Selia and took a step. Isi’s wind tangled in her skirt and whipped her dangling sleeves. Rin thought of how trees move in the wind, making small circles, bending. Roots moved too, so slowly that a root never bruised itself on a rock or scraped another root.
Warm, dark, wet soil, she thought. Open sky above.
Rin took another step.
No tree nearby to cling to, so instead she sank into herself as if into a tree’s thoughts. But her eyes were open, she was still Rin, still aware. As she had done on her walk to the cage, Rin felt as if she existed in two places at once—safe inside the green world of a tree’s thoughts, but still aware and moving in the human world. And this time panic did not eat at her. She felt perfectly balanced, half in, half out, and alive in both.
Everything seemed slowed, like a drip of sap fixed by cold weather. She had the time to see what was happening—the wind about to sweep back a lock of Isi’s hair, a bead of sweat dripping down a soldier’s cheek, Selia’s mouth opening to cry out.
She was aware of Selia speaking to her, the words rising in pitch. Orders to stop, to obey. They slid off her like rain off a leaf. At Selia’s command, the four soldiers turned to Rin. The sounds of their boots seemed loud and distant at once. Rin took another step. One soldier aimed an arrow at her and released. The arrow was zipping toward her chest. In the time it took to lower her foot midstride, she watched the arrow, saw the gleaming point growing in size as it came nearer. She began to lean to one side, as those tall pines lean with the wind to keep from breaking. Rin would not break. On her chest she could feel the narrow push of air coming at her before the arrow. She kept leaning. The cold spot of air moved along her collar bone, her shoulder. Her body tipped just a little farther, and then the arrow itself whisked past. With a crack it lodged into the wall. Rin righted herself, faced Selia, and took another step.
Now she could feel new movements coming at her, the cool breath of air changing into heat. She could see the air ripple with bursts of fire-making heat from two hearth-watchers. This time she crouched, bringing her head against her chest, until she felt the tops of her hairs sizzle and heard the heat whoosh away into nothing, having found no fuel to turn into fire. Another blaze, and she leaned, just enough, rolling to her side and back onto her feet. Outside herself, she could feel the sting of pain across her leg. But such a little thing did not matter—a tree is not disturbed by the loss of a few leaves, the snap of a twig.
She took another step. Selia was yelling, but Rin did not hear a word. Another arrow came. She could see at a glance that the angle was wrong and would only scratch her shoulder, so she ignored it, the sliver of pain feeling as distant as home. Another column of heat and she bowed beneath it, and then the opposite of the heat—a cold tug as one of the hearth-watchers tri
ed to pull her own heat out of her. But the tug could not find her or hold her, perhaps unsure if she were girl or tree, and she slid out of its pull. Now she was at the table, the false queen close enough to touch.
Selia’s mouth was wet with rage, her eyes wide, surprised that her voice and her followers were failing. Her lips formed the word stop, but Rin had chosen not to hear.
I’m Forest born, she thought.
She pulled back her arm and punched Selia in the nose.
Rin meant to jab her in her throat to stop the talking, but Selia jerked away, and Rin’s fist hit her nose instead. All the same, it had been a nice, firm strike, just as Razo had taught her. She had never punched a person before, and was surprised at the give beneath her knuckles as Selia’s head moved back from the force. There was a tiny crunch under Rin’s fist, a burst of pain in her knuckles. Selia bent over.
A hush of silence. Rin could feel everyone staring, the whole room twanging with tension.
“Ow,” Selia said with a pathetic whine. She cradled her bleeding nose, stomping her foot for the pain.
Rin looked at the soldiers and hearth-watchers—they gaped, frozen by this action, surprise and confusion on their faces, as if they had believed Selia was untouchable, as if they had not known her body contained any blood at all.
Rin twisted to see Isi, who was a few paces behind, her stare as bewildered as the others. Why wasn’t anyone doing anything? Rin had not thought through her actions farther than the strike, but clearly that was not going to be enough.
The stunned pause lasted only a moment before Selia began to screech so loudly it made the insides of Rin’s ears stretch.
“Dem,” Selia sputtered through her bloodied hands, gesticulating madly at Isi and Rin. “Kih dem!” And the hearth-watchers and soldiers sprang for Isi again.
“You need to stop talking!” Rin shoved Selia, knocking her down. She kneed her in the lower back, grabbed a fistful of hair, and yanked with all her strength. Selia shrieked wordlessly. This was dirty grappling that would earn a paddle with Ma’s wooden spoon back home but Rin was enjoying it. When Selia tried to squirm out of her hold, Rin kicked the back of her knees and kept hold of her hair.
Rin looked up at the scene. All seven hearth-watchers and four soldiers had their eyes on Rin, straining to get to their mistress. The soldiers no longer held weapons, the bows burned to ash and the swords too hot to hold, but they were bullying their way through Isi’s windstorm while the hearth-watchers attacked the wind with heat and tried to set fire to Isi herself. The hearth-watchers fought as if especially crazed, their expressions grotesque in their delirium to protect Selia. The attack pushed Isi back until she was standing directly in front of Rin and Selia.
Selia bawled as Rin pressed her shackled wrist against the back of Selia’s neck, shoving the woman’s face to the ground. Rin could not let Isi lose. She stared at the door, wishing Enna and Dasha would come bursting through.
The reminder of her own uselessness struck her like a blow, and Rin’s grip on Selia loosened for just a moment. Selia lurched out of her hold and sprang to her feet. Rin reached to tackle her again but hesitated, her attention straying to Isi. Selia was insignificant beside the true queen. Letting Selia flee to her hearth-watchers, Rin put her hands on Isi instead.
Tell her the truth.
“Isi, you’re stronger than the lot of them. Isi, you’re the queen. Selia’s nothing. Her lies can’t shackle you. Tusken needs his ma, and so does Bayern. You have a right to live.”
Isi’s eyes widened.
Rin nodded. “You can end this.”
Selia positioned herself behind Nuala and the others. “Kih hah!” she yelled thickly, her hands over her nose and mouth.
But Isi shook her head once. Outside, a sizzle of lightning, a gush of rain. And in the chamber, everyone fell, clutching their throats and chests as if desperate for air. Then the wind struck.
This was a storm that could uproot trees and tear houses from the ground, and it ravaged inside that one small room. It pushed at the people on the ground, rolling them over and over, sending them sprawling back into the corner. The furniture followed, tables and chairs and sofas banging against them, trapping them against the wall. As the small ornate table took flight toward the others, the document Isi had not signed rose into the wind, its corners flapping as if it were a white bird on the wing. It dissolved into flame and ash.
Rin should have fallen over too. But she felt the wind weave around her, pass through her fingers, arch over her as if she were made of leaves. She bent and flowed and did not fall.
The soldiers and hearth-watchers were packed into the corner, chairs and tables pinning them down and back. But Selia had slipped away. She sprang for the stairs.
Isi’s wind slammed the door to the stairs shut, then fire poured into it, burning any escape. Selia fled to one of the four inner chamber doors, screaming hysterically, but then that door was blazing too.
The fire in the door to the stairs extinguished, and someone from the stair side kicked through, shattering the charred wood like glass. Through the rising smoke rushed Enna and Dasha, looking for a place to attack. From behind them soldiers clambered up the stairs, shouting a battle cry in Kelish, the high lilt bringing goose bumps to Rin’s arms. Before the soldiers reached the landing, they dropped their flaming weapons and tripped over their now-sodden clothes. That was Enna and Dasha’s doing, Rin thought, but as the soldiers stumbled into the chamber, it was Isi’s wind that shoved them into the others.
“Watch them,” Isi said, pointing to the heap of people and furniture in the corner.
Enna and Dasha nodded, and water began to flow over the hearth-watchers, down their heads, soaking their clothes, making a pool on the ground around them. Enna stood on one side of the cage of furniture and Dasha on the other, hands twitching as if ready to attack at any provocation, eyes roving over Isi and Selia, trying to determine if things were settled yet.
One of the soldier’s hands strayed to a dagger in his boot. Enna kicked him in the ribs. “Try it and this fire-haired Tiran fiend will drown you where you sit.”
The hearth-watchers recoiled, wiping at the water oozing down their faces, blubbering anxiously, some reaching for their mistress.
Rin jumped to her feet and put herself between Selia and the now-open entrance to the stairs, her hands in fists. The look of terror on Selia’s face almost made Rin laugh. Half-hysterical, Selia began circling, frantic for an escape. Selia’s clothes and hair were whipping around her body, and if she was yelling commands to her trapped followers, the wind circling her face swallowed the sounds.
“You are never going to touch my family again,” Isi said, her voice cold and firm. She still had not moved from the center of the room. “You will let me bind your hands and mouth and you’ll come quietly with me back to a cozy Bayern prison, or . . .” Wind nudged a barrel that had been pushed aside in the windstorm and rolled it to rest at Selia’s feet. “Or I’ll fetch some nails and a couple of horses, and we can take care of this right now.”
Selia kicked the barrel away and swatted at the wind as if at bees. Her lips were moving, chanting something, and she flung herself about. Her running seemed frantic and without thought until suddenly she was at the narrow window, just wide enough for one person to fit through. Selia clawed her way onto the sill.
Rin heard Isi gasp with surprise, and wind swept through the window, trying to push Selia back into the room. But she did not pause before flinging herself out.
The wind hushed. With hurried bursts of steam, water gathered over the fires and fell in puffs, so in moments the room that had been filled with burning and whipping chaos was calmed to silence.
Enna and Rin ran to the window while Isi turned a glare at the soldiers and hearth-watchers buried under furniture. Rin doubted that through the clutter and wind they’d seen what had just happened.
“I am not feeling jovial at this precise moment,” Isi said. “So let me make this clear. You mov
e to attack any one of us, and you’re a bonfire. Nod your heads if you understand me.”
There was some general head nodding. The hearth-watchers were searching the room with their eyes, looking for Selia. Some began to wail in Kelish.
“Dasha, if they so much as twitch . . .”
Dasha nodded. Her eyes never left her captives. “I am in such a mood. I feel positively unhinged. Did you know I could fill your lungs with water? It’s a trick I long to show the first of you who twitches aggressively.”
Enna was leaning out the window, craning to get a view. “Um, Isi . . .”
Isi waited until she was near Enna, her back to the captives, before asking quietly, “The serpent got away, didn’t she?”
“Actually, no. She . . . no. Her life heat . . . it’s gone. There’s no chance she lived through this one.”
Rin put a hand on Enna’s shoulder and stood on her toes. She could just see Selia’s pink skirt fanned out above her bare feet. The fall had knocked off her slippers.
“I have to see,” said Isi, “or I won’t sleep again for worrying that she’s sneaking into Tusken’s room.”
Still, she hesitated a moment before getting close enough to lean out the window. While she’d been attacking, she’d seemed regal, impervious. Now she looked very human again, slight even, and sorry.
Isi’s voice dipped low. “Do you think she died quickly?”
“I’d been rooting for an excruciatingly slow and terrifically painful end for our fair queen of Kel, but yes, I’d say she hit those stones headfirst and was gone before her feet caught up.”
Dasha, too far from the window to hear the exchange, looked inquiringly at Rin. Rin nodded her head, yes, Selia was dead. Dasha’s shoulders relaxed.
