The Element of Fire

by Martha Wells

  Denzil said, "We were separated from the main troop, and the Queen had to be gotten to safety." His expression reflected angry concern, and Kade thought, He's acting. He's doing it very well, but he's acting. Does Aviler know that? She couldn't tell. Aviler seemed to be mainly worried over what she was going to do. I'm not the danger here, you idiot.

  To Falaise, she said, "Do you want to be here?"

  As the Queen started to answer, Denzil interrupted smoothly, "Of course she doesn't. She would rather be with her king."

  Aviler spared an unreadable glance for him, but kept his attention on Kade. He said, "The Queen must choose for herself whom she wishes to accompany. I offered to let her go with her guards, but--"

  "My lady, please," Gideon begged Falaise, going to his knees beside her chair. "For your honor and your safety, you know we'll protect you."

  Kade looked down at the Queen. "Or come with me."

  Falaise's frightened eyes went to Denzil. She was afraid to accept help from another woman, Kade realized. With that thought came a cold fury, but it was a fury wrapped in cotton wool, like the rest of her reality. Falaise turned back to her and shook her head helplessly. Kade walked out of the room.

  She went out into the maze of salons, seeing servants and a few battered soldiers, but no one she recognized. She could have asked for directions, she supposed, but she was not in the mood for questions. Then she saw Berham disappearing into one of the doorways carrying an armload of firewood. She hurried to catch up with him.

  It was the antechamber to a suite. Inside were Queen's guards she recognized and two men in Cisternan colors. Several were wounded, and all looked up at her in surprise. Berham stopped as he saw her. He said, "Oh, I'm glad to see you. We thought you'd gone off."

  "Where's Thomas?" The words were out before she quite realized it. It crossed her mind that this was the first time she had called him anything but "you bastard."

  Berham eyed her a moment, then he opened the next door and stepped back to let her go in.

  She stopped in the doorway.

  It was a bedchamber, cold and musty despite a new fire in the hearth. Thomas lay unconscious on the bed, still wearing the doublet and bloodstained buff coat from the battle. It took her moments to recognize him. She had never thought to see him so still, so white. A thin elderly man in a velvet doctor's cope sat next to him on the bed. Lucas was standing over him. He was hatless, and looked as if he had been caught too near a pistol blast; his face and the side of his doublet were flecked with powder burns. Martin was standing at the foot of the bed, leaning on the bedpost, and the sleeves of his white shirt were blood soaked. The young servant Phaistus was backed into a corner, trying to stay out of the way.

  Kade took a step into the room, Berham brushing past behind her.

  She asked, "What is it?" Her voice was unsteady and she hated herself for it.

  The doctor glanced back at her, but said nothing.

  Lucas said, "Answer her."

  The lieutenant's tone was even and reasonable but the doctor looked up at him and blanched. He said hastily, "I can't find a wound serious enough to cause this. It has to be elf-shot. There's nothing to be done."

  Sensation returned and hit Kade with the force of a hammer. She stumbled and steadied herself against the wall. "Get him out of here," she said.

  Martin consulted Lucas with a quick glance. He saw something in the other man's expression that constituted agreement, and caught the doctor by the thick collar of his cope and slung him toward the door.

  The doctor had a highly developed sense of self-preservation. He scrambled to his feet and darted out without a threat or protest.

  Kade went to sit on the bed. She touched Thomas's face. His skin was hot but his sweat was freezing. Distractedly she noticed that the striped wool of the bedclothes was faded, but the plumes topping the canopy were still pure white and the headboard had a design of twining laurel leaves. It spoke well for Aviler. She knew Denzil would have been too petty to provide his enemy a decent place in which to die.

  She found the elf-shot by finding the hole it had burnt through his trouser leg. Elf-shot never appeared to leave a mark, and the tiny fragment was lodged just under the skin of his lower thigh. It must have glanced off the heavy leather of his boot top and entered his flesh at an angle. It was why he was still alive. The stone had not had time to work its way further into his body on its eventual track toward his heart.

  She said, "I need a silver knife. It doesn't have to be pure, but it should have as little base metal as possible."

  Martin said, "That's an alchemy tool. Where would--"

  "Or a piece of family plate," Lucas interrupted. "Berham."

  "No sooner said." Berham dropped the wood and hurried for the door. He was limping, Kade noticed. It's not too bad; he's walking. Worry about him later.

  "Have you done this before?" Lucas asked her.

  He didn't ask her if she thought she could do it, and she was so grateful she answered honestly. "No, but I've seen it done." Or at least attempted. Other doctors or sorcerer-healers had tried to cut out a fragment of elf-shot on the rare occasions when it was close enough to the surface of the skin to find, but most made the mistake of using iron rather than silver. And elf-shot didn't lose its power once it was embedded in a human body; if a sorcerer did manage to remove it he was just as likely to have it seek his own heart instead. The fay who cast the shot sometimes removed it for reasons of their own, but those instances were few and far between.

  Victims of elf-shot were usually killed to keep them from suffering further, if they didn't die immediately. It was a perfect opportunity for Denzil, or High Minister Aviler. And Thomas Boniface was a disliked favorite whose patron and troop were out of the city by now, if they lived. The doctor might talk. Maybe we should have killed him. It was too late for that now. And why do I care?

  Because from the moment you set foot in the palace, he did not treat you as a child, a fool, or worse, a court lady. He treated you as exactly what you are, whatever that is, and he knew what Galen's death did to you.

  She paced the room with rabid impatience until Berham returned. He shut the door hastily behind him and brought a small delicate paring knife out of his doublet. "Will this do?"

  Kade took it from him and felt the nearly pure silver resonate through her. "Perfect," she said. "Now all of you get the hell out of the way."

  If she had spared enough notice, she would have been surprised to see that they did just that.

  She passed the knife through a candle quickly, and that would have to do. It was a little too dull but Thomas would be in no position to notice.

  She sat down on the bed and gently probed for the fragment. It wasn't there anymore. It had worked its way deeper already. She cursed, fighting a foolish surge of panic, and thought, Why can't anything ever be easy? She knew where it had to be. It hadn't had time to move more than an inch or so down into the muscle. She saw her hand was trembling, and she was glad Thomas was deeply unconscious because he would otherwise have surely said something infuriating at this point. Now, she thought, and carefully inserted the knife.

  A little blood welled up, and after a long heartbeat she felt the knife vibrate as the elf-shot adhered to it. My God, it worked. Gently she withdrew the blade. As soon as the tiny fragment was free she closed her fist around it to keep it from flying at someone, stood, and started toward the fireplace. Then she felt it pushing at the skin of her palm.

  She froze, staring at her closed hands. If she let it go, God knew who it would head for. But I'm fay, she thought against the rising dread. It can't hurt me.

  There's no such thing as half human, Galen Dubell had told her once long ago, and she had typically ignored his words. One drop of red blood is enough. She whispered a fay charm of warding danger, and felt the elf-shot press at her hand, pushing through the skin. Fighting panic, she hoped the planet of influence was close enough and shouted the Lodun formula for the destruction of dangerous objects.


  The sorcery worked where the fay magic had not. She felt the fragment catch fire and hastily scraped it off her hands onto the hearthstone. It burned bright blue for an instant, then disappeared.

  She sank down and sat on the floor. All those years that elf-shot could have put her out of their misery and the Unseelie Court had never thought to make the experiment, to test to see if she had the same immunity to it as the other fay did.

  Idiots, she thought. Her palm hurt like hell.

  She turned back to the bed and saw Thomas move his head on the pillow. Feverishly, but he had moved.

  She had forgotten anyone else was still in the room, and was startled to find Lucas standing next to her. He took her hand and turned it over. "God damn," he muttered when he saw the burn. "Hey, Ber--"

  Berham appeared with a handful of snow scraped from a window ledge. He slapped it into her palm.

  She snatched her hand away, then realized the cold had cut the intensity of the pain nearly in half. She watched Thomas while Berham fussily bandaged the burn, and was rewarded by seeing him move twice more.

  * * *

  Much later Kade sat on a stool by the fire and looked at the deep red mark on her hand. It didn't seem inclined to blister, so she supposed it couldn't be too bad. Unlike pure fay magic, the craft of mortal sorcery was a messy business and she was used to hurting herself occasionally. Messy, but more certain, she thought.

  She had helped the other wounded as best she could, but without the philtres and salves that were so necessary to healing-sorcery, or the ingredients with which to mix them, there wasn't much she could do. She could have made a healing stone, but that only worked for disease, not torn flesh. A well-stocked apothecary box would have saved lives tonight. The charms to give strength and to hold the soul to the body had little efficacy without the herbal preparations that soothed the wounds. The effort had left her cold and dreadfully tired, and she would have traded all her fay ancestry for half of Galen Dubell's skill at healing-sorcery. And she knew that if she had devoted all her attention to study, she would have had that skill by now.

  Kade was worried about the wound in Thomas's leg. The spell she had used to knit the flesh together had seemed to work, but the wound was deep and there was no telling how the elf-shot had affected it. By the firelight, his hair and beard were inky black against his fever-pale skin. She resisted the

  urge to get up and walk over to the bed again. You thought the world ended when you found out Galen was dead, but when you heard that fool of a doctor say elf-shot...

  She took a deep breath and faced herself. It was idiocy to deny it. How could she not know? But looking back, she couldn't see when it had happened. She was not sure how her childhood passion figured into it, or when her carefully preserved distant appreciation of him had been intensified by intimacy. She was even less certain when the thought I want this man for a friend had become I want this man.

  Simply because she had never felt it before didn't mean she couldn't recognize it, even though it wasn't very much like the poets and books had described it. Some had implied that the depth of the emotion would hurt; they had not said it would be like the blunt end of a poleax in the pit of the stomach.

  She had wondered if being fay would make her unable to love; it had certainly made her unable to feel even the slightest fondness for any of her relations. She had thought she loved Roland once, but then had decided that if she really had, she would not have been able to leave him. She had thought herself as cold as her mother Moire and the rest of the fay, who put on a great show of grand passion but who, underneath their shallow surfaces, had hearts as empty as broken wine barrels. To find that she was capable of love, that it was happening now and under less than ideal circumstances, was more than a shock. It was horrific. And worse, like every other bubbleheaded court lady, she had fallen in love with the Captain of the Queen's Guard. When she was a child at court, someone had proclaimed undying passion for him every other week. Trying to guess who he was going to show interest in and who he was going to brush off had been a game with Ravenna's gentlewomen. Kade felt herself a fool, and she had seen too much bloodshed and horror in the last few days to seek the comfort of childishly wishing herself dead.

  She would have to think about what to do at some point. Not right now, she told herself. Just not right now.

  * * *

  Thomas turned his head toward the light. It resolved into a glowing orange fire in an unfamiliar hearth. The room was dark, except for one candle that he could see as a dim glow through the curtain at the foot of the bed. He felt the sweat-drenched heat of a receding fever, and everything ached. Except the wound in his thigh that felt like a hot coal had been buried beneath the skin.

  He sat up on one elbow and parted the bloody and burned (Burned? he wondered) fabric to examine what looked like an especially clean sword thrust. It was closed over with a new pink scab, a sign of sorcerous healing.

  Then he saw Kade sitting on a footstool by the fire, where she had blended into the light and its reflection on the polished stone hearth, a creature of amber, rose,and old gold. One could never tire of looking at her, he decided. There was always something new to see, an effect made even more interesting because she produced it unintentionally and entirely without artifice. They stared at one another for a time, until Kade blinked and shook herself.

  "Where are we?" he asked her.

  "Lord Aviler's town house. You've been near dead most of the day, because you were hit by elf-shot."

  It took a moment for the words to sink in. He said, "I couldn't have been."

  "Very well, argue about it as if you weren't unconscious when it happened."

  Thomas looked at the wound again. "Did you cut it out?"

  "Yes."

  "It couldn't have been easy." It was supposed to be impossible.

  "I have had a hard day," she admitted with dignity, lifting a handful of sweat-soaked hair away from her forehead.

  He saw the bandage wrapped around her hand and asked, "What happened there?"

  "Nothing." After a moment of hesitation, she said, "Denzil's here, with Falaise."

  Thomas closed his eyes. "No."

  "Yes. He got her away from Gideon and the others when they were attacked. They followed him here, but she's too terrified of Denzil to take their help and Aviler stands about like a great idiot saying the Queen must decide who escorts her."

  Thomas fell back on the bed and contemplated the underside of the tester for a moment. "You realize that a short while ago I was as good as dead and this was all someone else's problem."

  "You're welcome. I think I know why Denzil's here."

  He sat up again, taking a deep breath to steady himself as dizziness threatened. "I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me."

  "Aviler. If he's in this plot with Denzil and Grandier, that's one thing, but if he's not...he isn't just going to stand there and watch."

  The High Minister. A man who would support Roland despite personal differences, knowing he could increase the political power of the Ministry and it would never occur to the young King to stop him. A man with no patience for royal favorites. A man with nothing but suspicion for royal favorites. "You're right." With the help of the bedpost, Thomas hauled himself up and stood carefully, wincing at the tight pain of the wound. Limping around on it wasn't going to do it any good but he hardly had a choice.

  Kade was fiddling with her hair again. She said, "Falaise knows something."

  Thomas looked down at her. She was obviously reluctant. "Why do you think so?"

  "She's afraid of Denzil."

  "She should be." He limped to the foot of the bed and found his dueling rapier and main gauche. He drew the sword to check the blade and saw it was nicked and dented but still unbent.

  "I know that," Kade said with asperity. "But she doesn't know that, not unless she knows more than she should."

  Thomas hesitated, thinking it through. "How much do you think she knows?"

  "She wo
n't tell me. She doesn't think I can protect her. But I think she'll tell you."

  "She may have tried to already, and I thought she was after something else. I should have listened to her but the woman never gave any sign she could think before." If they somehow escaped the current situation, that might save Falaise's neck. He could say she had confided to him early suspicions of Denzil but had been unable to give him anything definite. That would keep Roland or some ambitious courtier from charging her with treason along with Denzil. If they got out of this. Damned optimist. Then he realized the full implication of what Kade had said and looked down at her in surprise. "Doesn't think you could protect her? That's ridiculous. You're not a supporter of Ravenna, Roland, or Denzil; you're the only one who could protect her with impunity."

  Kade considered that. "Maybe she just can't trust anyone anymore."

  Slipping his baldric over his head, Thomas thought, That's an idea we could all have sympathy with.

  The door opened and Lucas entered, then stopped abruptly as he saw Thomas. "You're alive," he said, smiling. "And I thought I was about to be promoted."

  "Careful, I might take you up on that." Thomas gritted his teeth as he put his weight on his bad leg.

  "Oh, I'd have to decline under these circumstances."

  "Typical of you. How many are we?"

  "Eighteen. Not as bad as I thought it would be for a moment there, but bad. Commander Vivan's dead, and Baserat..."

  As he listed the familiar names Thomas shook his head. He would have to deal with it later. Worse that he didn't know if their sacrifice had accomplished anything, if Ravenna and Roland had been able to get out of the city. Lucas finished with, "...and hard as it is to believe, Denzil's here with..."

  "I know. I'm about to go and give him the good news about my premature survival. Do you know where Falaise is?"

  "Yes, Martin found where they're keeping her. Gideon and some of the others are hanging about outside her rooms, making sure no one makes off with her."