“The man who was killed in your cages,” Roen said. “The one you call the poacher. He gave you no hint of his purpose? Even you, Fire?”
“His mind was blank,” Fire said. “No evil intent, no honorable intent. He had the feel of a simpleton, someone’s tool.”
“And the man in the king’s rooms yesterday,” Roen said. “Did he have that feel?”
“No. He may certainly have been working for someone else, but his mind was consumed with purpose, and with guilt. He thought for himself.”
“Nash said his belongings were disturbed,” Roen said, “but nothing was taken. We wonder if the man was looking for a number of letters that I happened to be carrying on my own person in Nash’s absence—and good thing, too. A spy—but whose? Fire, you would recognize the man if he crossed your path again?”
“I would. I don’t believe he’s in the castle now. Perhaps he left under cover of the Third.”
“We wasted a day,” the spymaster said. “We could have used you yesterday to find him and question him.”
And then Fire was reminded that even when Archer wouldn’t look her in the face he was her friend, for he said crisply, “Lady Fire was in need of rest yesterday, and anyway, she is not a tool for your use.”
Roen tapped her fingernails on the table, not attending, following her own thoughts. “Every man is an enemy,” she said grimly. “Mydogg, Gentian, the black market, Pikkia. They’ve got people sneaking around trying to learn Brigan’s plans for the troops, steal our allies from us, figure out a good place and time to do away with Nash or Brigan or one of the twins, or even me.” She shook her head. “And in the meantime, we’re trying to learn their numbers and their allies and their allies’ numbers. Their plans for attack. We’re trying to steal their spies and convert them to our side. No doubt they’re doing the same with our spies. The rocks only know whom among our own people we should trust. One of these days a messenger will come through my gates to tell me my sons are dead.”
She spoke unemotionally; she wasn’t trying to elicit comfort or contradiction, she was only stating fact. “We do need you, Fire,” she added. “And don’t look all panicked like that. Not to change people’s thoughts. Only to take advantage of the greater sense of people that you have.”
No doubt Roen meant her words. But with the kingdom in this unstable state the lesser expectation would grow to include the greater, sooner rather than later. Fire’s head began to throb harder than she thought she could bear. She glanced at Archer, who responded by avoiding her eyes, frowning at the table, and changing the subject abruptly.
“Can you spare me any more soldiers, Lady Queen?”
“I suppose I can’t deny you my soldiers when yesterday Fire saved their lives,” Roen said. “Brigan has helped by leaving me ten dozen men from the Third. You may take eight of the soldiers from my original guard who went to Gray Haven.”
“I would prefer eight of the ten dozen from the Third,” Archer said.
“They’re all in the King’s Army,” Roen said, “all trained by Brigan’s people, all equally competent, and the men who went to Gray Haven already have a natural allegiance to your lady, Archer.”
Allegiance wasn’t quite the word for it. The soldiers who’d gone to Gray Haven seemed to regard Fire now with something akin to worship; which was, of course, why Archer didn’t want them. A number of them had sought her out today and knelt before her, kissed her hand, and pledged to protect her.
“Very well,” Archer said grumpily, somewhat mollified, Fire suspected, because Roen had referred to Fire as his lady. Fire added immaturity to the things she could accuse him of in the fight they weren’t going to have.
“Let’s go over the encounter one more time,” the spymaster said. “Every one of the encounters, in minute detail. Lady Fire? Please begin again in the forest.”
ARCHER SPOKE TO her finally, an entire week later, when the raptors had gone and so had much of her soreness, and their own departure was imminent. They were at the table in Roen’s sitting room, waiting for Roen to join them for dinner. “I cannot bear your silence any longer,” Archer said.
Fire had to stop herself from laughing at the joke of it. She noted the two servants standing beside the door, their faces carefully blank while their minds spun excitedly—probably with gossip to take back to the kitchen.
“Archer,” she said. “You’re the one’s been pretending I don’t exist.”
Archer shrugged. He sat back and regarded her, a challenge in his eyes. “Can I ever trust you now? Or must I always be prepared for this brand of heroic madness?”
She had an answer to that, but she couldn’t say it aloud. She leaned forward and held his eyes. It was not the first mad thing I’ve ever done for this kingdom. Perhaps you who know the truth of things should not have been surprised. Brocker won’t be, when we tell him what I did here.
After a moment his eyes dropped from hers. His fingers realigned the forks on the table. “I wish you were not so brave.”
She had no response to that. She was desperate sometimes, and a little crazy, but she was not brave.
“Are you determined to leave me in this world to live without my heart?” Archer asked. “Because that’s what you very nearly did.”
She watched her friend play with the fringe of the tablecloth, his eyes avoiding hers, his voice carefully light, trying to look as if he were speaking of something small, like an appointment she’d forgotten that had inconvenienced him.
She reached across the table and held her hand open to him. “Make peace with me, Archer.”
At that moment Roen swept through the door and slid into a chair between them. She turned on Archer, eyes narrow and unamused. “Archer, is there a servant girl in my fortress you haven’t taken to bed? I announce you’re leaving and within minutes two of them are at each other’s throats, and another is crying her eyes out in the scullery. Honestly. You’ve been here all of nine days.” She glanced at Fire’s open hand. “I’ve interrupted something.”
Archer considered the table for a moment, his fingers caressing the edge of his glass, his mind clearly elsewhere. He sighed in the direction of his plate.
“Peace, Archer,” Fire said again.
Archer’s eyes settled on Fire’s face. “All right,” he said reluctantly, taking her hand. “Peace, because war is unbearable.”
Roen snorted. “You two have the strangest relationship in the Dells.”
Archer smiled slightly. “She won’t consent to make it a marriage.”
“I can’t imagine what’s stopping her. I don’t suppose you’ve considered being less munificent with your love?”
“Would you marry me, Fire, if I slept in no one’s bed but yours?”
He knew the answer to that, but it didn’t hurt to remind him. “No, and I should find my bed quite cramped.”
Archer laughed and kissed her hand, then released it ceremoniously; and Fire picked up her knife and fork, smiling. Shaking her head in disbelief, Roen turned aside to take a note from an approaching servant. “Ah,” she said, reading the note and frowning. “It’s good that you’re going. Lord Mydogg and Lady Murgda are on their way.”
“On their way?” Fire said. “You mean they’re coming here?”
“Just for a visit.”
“A visit! Surely you don’t visit each other?”
“Oh, it’s all a farce, of course,” Roen said, waving her hand tiredly. “Their way of showing that the royal family doesn’t intimidate them, and our way of pretending that we’re open to dialogue. They come and I have to let them in, because if I refuse them, it’ll be taken as a hostile gesture and they’ll have an excuse to come back with their army. We sit across from each other, we drink wine, they ask me nosy questions that I don’t answer about Nash and Brigan and the royal twins, they tell me secrets their own spies have supposedly learned about Gentian, information that either I already know or they’ve fabricated. They pretend that the king’s real enemy is Gentian, and that Nash
should ally with Mydogg against Gentian. I pretend it’s a good idea and suggest that Mydogg pass his army over to Brigan’s use as a show of faith. Mydogg refuses; we agree we’ve reached an impasse; Mydogg and Murgda take their leave, poking their noses into as many rooms as they can on the way out.”
Archer’s eyebrows were looking skeptical. “Isn’t this sort of thing a bit more risky than it’s worth? For everyone?”
“They’re coming at a good time—Brigan just left me all those soldiers. And when they’re here, we’re all so heavily guarded every minute that I don’t suppose either side would ever try anything, for fear of all of us getting killed. I’m as safe as I ever am. But,” she added, studying both of them gravely, “I want you to depart tomorrow at first light. I won’t have you meeting them—there’s no reason to get you and Brocker tangled up in Mydogg’s nonsense, Archer. And I don’t want them to see Fire.”
IT WAS ALMOST achieved. In fact, Fire, Archer, and their guards had traveled some distance from Roen’s fortress and were just about to turn off onto a different path when the party from the north approached. Twenty rather fearsome soldiers—chosen because they had the aspects of pirates, with broken teeth and scars? Big and pale-ish, some of them. Pikkian? And a tough-looking man and woman who had the aura of a winter wind. Easily brother and sister, both squat and thin-lipped and icy in their expressions, until their eyes combed Fire’s party and settled, with genuine and uncalculated amazement, on Fire herself.
The siblings glanced at each other. Some silent understanding passed between them.
“Come,” Archer muttered, motioning to his guards and Fire to move on. The parties clattered past each other without even a greeting.
Oddly rattled, Fire touched Small’s mane, stroking his rough hair. The lord and lady had been only names before, a dot on the Dellian map and a certain unknown quantity of soldiers. Now they were real, and solid, and cold.
She had not liked the glance they’d shared at the sight of her. Nor did she care for the feeling of their hard eyes on her back as Small carried her away.
CHAPTER NINE
IT HAPPENED AGAIN: Only days after Fire and Archer returned home, another man was found trespassing in Archer’s forest, a stranger. When the soldiers brought him in, Fire sensed the same mental fog she’d sensed with the poacher. And then before Fire could even begin to consider whether and how to use her power to wangle information from him, an arrow came through the open window, straight into the middle of Archer’s guard room, and struck the trespasser between the shoulder blades. Archer threw himself on top of Fire, dragging her down. The trespasser toppled and fell beside her, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. His empty mind fizzled into no mind at all, and from her crushed position on the floor, soldiers’ feet yanking at her hair and Archer yelling orders above her, she reached for the archer who’d made the shot.
He was faint, a good distance away, but she found him. She tried to grasp hold of him but a boot trod on her finger and the explosion of pain distracted her. When she reached for him again he was gone.
He’s run west into Trilling’s woods, she thought to Archer, because she had no breath to speak. And his mind is as blank as the others.
HER FINGER WAS not broken, only beastly sore when she moved it. It was the second finger on her left hand so she put off playing harp and flute for a day or two, but she refused to spare herself when it came to her fiddle. She’d been without the instrument for too long. She simply tried not to think of the pain, because every stab of pain was accompanied now by a stab of vexation. Fire was tired of being injured.
She sat in her bedroom one day, playing a cheerful tune, a song for dancing, but something in her mood slowed the tempo and discovered sad parts in it. Eventually she found herself switching to a different song altogether, one that was manifestly sorrowful, and her fiddle cried out its feeling.
Fire stopped and lowered the instrument to her lap. She stared at it, then hugged it against her chest like a baby, wondering what was wrong with her.
She had an image in her head of Cansrel in the moment he had given her this fiddle. “I’m told this has a nice sound, darling,” he’d said, holding it out to her almost carelessly, as if it were an inconsequential bit of rubbish that had not cost him a small fortune. She’d taken it, appreciative of its hand someness but knowing that its real value would depend on its tone and feeling, neither of which Cansrel could be any judge of. She’d drawn her bow across its strings as an experiment. The fiddle had responded instantly, wanting her touch, speaking to her in a gentle voice that she’d understood and recognized.
A new friend in her life.
She’d been unable to hide her pleasure from Cansrel. His own gladness had swelled.
“You’re astonishing, Fire,” he’d said. “You’re a constant source of wonder to me. I’m never more happy than when I’ve made you happy. Isn’t it peculiar?” he’d said, laughing. “Do you really like it, darling?”
In her chair in her room, Fire forced herself to look around at the windows and walls and take stock of the present. The light was fading. Archer would be coming back soon from the fields, where he was helping with the plowing. He might have some news about the ongoing search for the archer. Or Brocker might have a letter from Roen with updates about Mydogg and Murgda, or Gentian, or Brigan, or Nash.
She found her longbow and quiver and, shaking off memories like loose hairs, left her house in search of Archer and Brocker.
THERE WAS NO news. There were no letters.
One monthly bleeding passed for Fire, with all its attendant aches and embarrassments. Everyone in her house, in Archer’s house, and in the town knew what it signified whenever she stepped outside with an entourage of guards. Eventually another passed like the first. Summer was near. The farmers were willing potatoes and carrots to take hold in the rocky ground.
Her lessons progressed much as usual.
“Stop, I implore you,” she said one day at Trilling’s, interrupting an earsplitting clamor of flutes and horns. “Let’s begin again at the top of the page, shall we? And, Trotter,” she begged the eldest boy, “try not to blow so hard; I guarantee you, that shrieking noise is from blowing too hard. All right? Ready?”
The enthusiastic massacre began once more. She did love the children. Children were one of her small joys, even when they were fiends to each other; even when they imagined they were hiding things from her, like their own idleness or, in some cases, their talent. Children were smart and malleable. Time and patience made them strong and stopped them fearing her or adoring her too much. And their frustrations were familiar to her, and dear.
But, she thought, at the end of the day I must give them back. They’re not my children—someone else feeds them and tells them stories. I’ll never have children. I’m stuck in this town where nothing ever happens and nothing ever will happen and there’s never any news. I’m so restless I could take Renner’s horrible flute and break it over his head.
She touched her own head, took a breath, and made very sure that Trilling’s second son knew nothing of her feeling.
I must find my even temper, she thought. What is it I’m hoping for, anyway? Another murder in the woods? A visit from Mydogg and Murgda and their pirates? An ambush of wolf monsters?
I must stop wishing for things to happen. Because something will happen eventually, and when it does, I’ll be bound to wish it hadn’t.
THE NEXT DAY, she was walking the path from her house to Archer’s, quiver on back and bow in hand, when one of the guards called down to her from Archer’s back terrace. “Fancy a reel, Lady Fire?”
It was Krell, the guard she’d tricked the night she’d been unable to climb up to her bedroom window. A man who knew how a flute should be played; and here he was, offering to save her from her own desperate fidgets. “Goodness, yes,” she said. “Just let me get my fiddle.”
A reel with Krell was always a game. They took turns, each inventing a passage that was a challenge to
the other to pick up and join; always keeping in time but increasing tempo gradually, so that eventually it took all their concentration and skill to keep up with each other. They were worthy of an audience, and today Brocker and a number of guards wandered out to the back terrace for the show.
Fire was in the mood for technical gymnastics, which was fortunate, because Krell played as if he were determined to make her break a string. Her fingers flew, her fiddle was an entire orchestra, and every note beautifully brought into being struck a chord of satisfaction within her. She wondered at the unfamiliar lightness in her chest and realized she was laughing.
So great was her focus, it took her a while to register the strange expression that crept to Brocker’s face as he listened, finger tapping the armrest of his chair. His eyes were fixed behind Fire and to the right, in the direction of Archer’s back doorway. Fire comprehended that someone must be standing in Archer’s entrance, someone Brocker watched with startled eyes.
And then everything happened at once. Fire recognized the mind in the doorway; she spun around, fiddle and bow screeching apart; she stared at Prince Brigan leaning against the door frame.
Behind her Krell’s quick piping stopped. The soldiers on the terrace cleared throats and turned, falling to attention as they recognized their commander. Brigan’s eyes were expressionless. He shifted and stood up straight, and she knew that he was going to speak.
Fire turned and ran down the terrace steps to the path.
ONCE OUT OF sight Fire slowed and stopped. She leaned over a boulder, gasping for air, her fiddle clunking against the stone with a sharp, dissonant cry of protest. The guard Tovat, the one with the orangish hair and the strong mind, came running up behind her. He stopped beside her.
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