Goldenfire

by A. F. E. Smith

  ‘I don’t like anyone much,’ he said honestly. Then, because the situation required it, ‘But I don’t mean to be rude.’

  Caraway nodded. ‘I understand. It just happens, right?’

  That startled a smile out of Penn, but when Caraway smiled back at him he had to look away. Stop it. He’s acting pleasantly enough, but you know the truth.

  ‘You know,’ the captain said, ‘it’s funny how many people come to the fifth ring in search of something.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, when I started this job I assumed the teaching part would be straightforward. I’d been through the training myself, so I thought I should be able to pass it on to other people easily enough. But as it turns out, people are complicated.’ He grinned. ‘More often than not, they’re not here simply because they have an aptitude for the blade and they think they could make a steady career out of it. They’re here because they want something else. Something less tangible. And before I can assess whether any of them would make good Helmsmen, I have to untangle their skills from all that wanting.’ He glanced sideways at Penn, before adding lightly, ‘But don’t worry. I’m not going to ask what you came looking for.’

  And I wouldn’t tell you, even if you did. Penn frowned. ‘What about you? Did you find what you wanted?’

  The question had an edge to it – he couldn’t help it – but Caraway didn’t appear to notice.

  ‘I got it, and I lost it. But I was given a second chance. I try to remember that.’

  ‘You always wanted to be captain of the Helm?’

  ‘I always wanted to be of use to the Nightshade line.’ His smile was bewildered. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be where I am now. But there you have it.’

  Penn’s nails dug into his palms. It was only with considerable effort that he held himself motionless instead of turning the full force of his seething hatred on the man. You’re a murderer, Tomas Caraway. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve any of it.

  Though he was trying his very best not to let the emotion show, something of it must have come through. Caraway took a step closer, gaze intent on Penn’s face. His lips tightened. For a moment, Penn thought he was going to demand the truth – and who knew what would come pouring out, faced with that demand? – but in fact, when he spoke, his voice was surprisingly soft.

  ‘Penn … do you want to talk about it?’

  Penn shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. Caraway waited a little longer, then nodded in resignation.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m here because the watch sent for me, because one of my students had entered the sixth ring unsupervised. It’s not their job to stop you. It’s mine, or Weaponmaster Bryan’s. But I’m not going to.’

  Jolted from his anger, Penn stared at him. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll tell them to let you through,’ Caraway said. ‘You’ll have to leave your weapons at the gate, of course. And resist wearing a Helmsman’s stripes before you’ve earned the right to them.’ His amused glance rested briefly on the coat draped over Penn’s arm. ‘But if you like it here, I see no reason to keep you from it.’

  For the space of a heartbeat, Penn’s world tipped on its axis. Because that was an act of kindness, no more and no less. Under conditions of increased security and with Ayla’s life under threat, Caraway had every reason to send Penn back to the fifth ring with a stern admonishment not to do it again. Allowing him the freedom of the sixth ring could only increase Caraway’s workload. And Penn couldn’t reconcile that with his own opinion of the man.

  Of course you can, the dark part of him retorted. Beneficence suits his inflated sense of self-importance. He’s acting like he owns the whole city – and just like that, his resolve hardened again.

  ‘Right now, you’d better get back to the fifth ring,’ the captain added, oblivious to Penn’s internal debate. ‘Else you’ll be late for practice.’

  They walked in silence back to the Gate of Ice. When they reached it, Caraway turned to Penn with an easy, sympathetic smile, as if he were completely oblivious to Penn’s antipathy.

  ‘I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers. But if you have anything you want to get off your chest, you know where to find me.’

  Penn mumbled something, then watched as the captain walked back up the street in the direction of the Gate of Death and Darkhaven. It was only after he was out of sight that Penn found himself wondering why he hadn’t tried to stab the man. Obviously Penn couldn’t yet hope to beat him in a fair fight, but just now he’d had the chance to catch him off guard. Why hadn’t he taken it?

  But to that, he could return no satisfactory answer.

  Ree wasn’t looking forward to the training session that her hand-copied schedule referred to as Teamwork and Tactics. Her tutor had been a competent swordsman who’d been able to convey enough of the basics in other areas of weaponry that Ree could hold her own now, but one thing he’d never touched on was any form of strategy. It hadn’t been necessary: their sparring had always been one-on-one, with a tactical aim no more lofty than disarming the opposition. But the Helm had to be able to formulate battle plans, and they had to work together to carry them out – and Ree didn’t have the slightest confidence in her ability to do either.

  The recruits were divided into teams of seven or eight, each with an assessor: Captain Caraway, Weaponmaster Bryan or one of the assistant weaponmasters. Ree had hoped to be put with Zander, but instead she found herself on a team with Farleigh, Timo, Penn and Saydi, plus a handful of other boys. Her disappointment surprised her: somewhere along the line, she’d stopped finding Zander’s constant defence of her annoying, and begun to rely on it as reassurance that at least one of her possible future colleagues took her a little bit seriously.

  In which case, she told herself, it’s probably a good thing we’ve been separated.

  She stood in stoic silence, ignoring some of her teammates’ grumblings about being stuck with the girls, until the tutors began to lead the teams away in different directions. Ree’s team was under the supervision of Weaponmaster Bryan himself; he took them to one of the practice floors that made up the interior of the training hall, then unlocked the door and stood back in silence to let them inside. Ree wasn’t sure what she’d expected the room to contain, but it wasn’t this: two high wooden platforms, each with steps leading down to the ground, and between them … it looked similar to the balance beams they trained with during agility classes, only rather than being rectangular in cross-section, this one was round. A long, cylindrical pole, almost like the branch of a tree.

  ‘Bet that bugger rotates, doesn’ it,’ one of the boys muttered.

  ‘Certainly does,’ Bryan said cheerfully. ‘You gotta use your imagination here, lads, assuming you have any. This isn’t a practice floor but a river you need to cross, and with you –’ he reached into the bag at his side and pulled out a floppy cloth doll – ‘is this poor, helpless baby. You start on that bank.’ He gestured at one of the platforms, then across to the other. ‘You finish on that one. You have to use the bridge – no imaginary swimming.’ He glared around at them, and some of the boys laughed.

  ‘Once you’ve come up with a strategy, you can test it as many times as you like, but you only get one shot with the baby. If you drop it or fall with it, that’s the end. Baby dies.’ He grinned, reached out to the large sand-timer by the wall, and swung it until the bulb full of sand was uppermost. ‘Your task is to get the baby, and as many of your team as possible, safely to the other side.’

  They waited, but he didn’t say anything else.

  ‘That’s it?’ Timo asked. His nose was still purple-red and swollen, Ree noted with an inward wince.

  ‘That’s it,’ the weaponmaster agreed. He raised his eyebrows at them. ‘And you’re already losing time.’

  The trainees scrambled into action. About half the boys went straight for the near platform, where they discovered that the ‘bridge’ was even harder to cross than it looke
d. It spun at the slightest touch; anyone who walked too slowly was tipped straight onto the mats below, while anyone who tried running it soon lost their balance and fell off anyway. Ree tried it for herself, but found it impossible to get further than a few steps. Then how …

  One of the boys found a coil of rope in the corner of the platform, and suggested that they tie themselves together – but that only made things worse. A single person with good enough agility might be able to make it across to the other side, but put more than one person on the bridge at a time and they ended up knocking each other off. They’d have to step in perfect unison, Ree thought, and even then it would be a close-run thing. It would take days to get it right, not just however long was left in the top bulb of the timer.

  The three boys who’d roped themselves together began to argue about each other’s mistakes, until Farleigh suggested that it might be possible to cross by clinging to the underside of the bridge with arms and legs. The pole turned out to be so highly polished that he couldn’t pull himself along as easily as he’d hoped, but by hooking his knees and elbows over it, he succeeded in dragging himself all the way to the far platform. Yet there was no way to climb back up from pole to platform. As soon as he tried to do it, he ended up falling just like everyone else.

  Finally, one of the boys managed to cross the bridge, nearly falling off near the end but throwing himself bodily onto the platform instead – and that was when they discovered a new problem. As soon as any weight was put on the far platform, their destination, the end of the pole that rested lightly on it came clattering down, effectively breaking the bridge. At that, Bryan came over to the apparatus and hooked it back into place with a grin.

  ‘Did I forget to mention that? Soon as you make your real attempt, you don’t get to rebuild the bridge once it’s down.’

  As he walked back over to his vantage point beside the sand timer, Timo scowled. ‘S’impossible. There’s no way we can get our whole team over there. We can’t even get one person over there!’

  ‘It must be possible,’ Farleigh retorted. ‘The weaponmasters wouldn’t give us a task that was impossible.’

  ‘Maybe they would. Maybe they wanna see how we crack under pressure …’

  They started arguing again, but Ree ignored them. She was busy studying the setup: the rope, the rotating pole, the platform that released the bridge as soon as anyone stepped on it…

  ‘We’re doing it all wrong,’ she said softly.

  ‘What?’ She hadn’t realised Penn was at her elbow until he spoke. She turned to face him.

  ‘We’re doing it all wrong! As many of your team as possible, Weaponmaster Bryan said. But what if it’s not possible to get more than one of us across there? What if that’s the point?’

  Penn’s eyebrows drew together, but he said nothing. Beyond him, the rest of the team were listening too.

  ‘That’s stupid,’ Farleigh said. ‘This exercise is about us working together. How is it working together if we don’t even get across?’

  A couple of the other boys mumbled agreement, but she cut across them.

  ‘Because that’s what would happen in real life, sometimes. Isn’t it? If this doll was a Nightshade baby, and we had to get it to safety, it wouldn’t matter how many of us were left behind.’

  They looked doubtful. Ree glanced across at the rapidly diminishing sand in the top bulb of the timer, and did her best not to fidget. But then Saydi said, ‘You know, I think she’s right.’

  ‘Conspiracy of women,’ Timo muttered, and Farleigh laughed. Saydi frowned prettily at them.

  ‘I’m not agreeing with her because we’re both female,’ she said, as if explaining something to a pair of children. ‘That would be stupid. I’m agreeing with her because she’s making sense.’

  Ree suppressed a grin, because it wouldn’t have helped, and pressed the point home while she had the chance.

  ‘It’s not as if we’ve found a way to get all of us across, anyway. Our time’s nearly up, so getting one person and the doll to the other side has to be better than nothing at all.’

  Timo rolled his eyes at her. ‘And I suppose now you’re going to say it should be you, because girls are better at looking after babies.’

  It was so obviously an attempt at provocation that Ree didn’t bother to argue with it, simply rolled her eyes back at him. ‘Actually, no. It should be Penn.’

  That shut them all up. Almost as one, they turned to look at Penn, standing to one side in silence. He crossed his arms defensively.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because I’ve seen you in agility training,’ Ree said simply. ‘You get across the narrow beam every time. And we already know that anyone who tries to get across there is going to need a really good sense of balance.’

  No-one argued with that; Penn might be difficult to get on with, but there was no denying his skill. Saydi held out the doll, and Farleigh said, ‘We can tie it onto your back.’

  Penn took it. For once, he didn’t look at all angry, only young and rather bewildered. After a moment, he looked up and gave a quick nod. ‘All right.’

  His acceptance of the task seemed to energise the other boys. They crowded round him, trying to find the best way to secure the doll. Ree hung back, and so did Saydi; they glanced at each other, and Ree found they were sharing a smile.

  When Penn was ready, he climbed the steps to the near platform. The rest of the team followed close on his heels, jostling together in a space that wasn’t really big enough to hold them all, so they could see the result of their gamble. Penn cast them an irritable glance over his shoulder.

  ‘Give me some room, will you?’

  They backed up. Ree saw his shoulders rise and fall as he took a deep breath. Then, as if he’d been doing it his whole life, he ran lightly across the rotating pole. When he reached the far platform, he tugged the doll from his back and – ignoring the clatter of the falling bridge – turned to flash a grin across the gap. Ree had so rarely seen Penn smile that she found it oddly touching.

  ‘Baby’s safe!’ he called, rocking it in his arms, and the boys began cheering and clapping. Ree looked over at Saydi, wanting to convey tacit thanks for her support, but the other girl was gazing at Penn with an arrested expression on her face, as though she’d suddenly thought of something important. Yet then she blinked and shook her head, turning away, leaving Ree to wonder if she’d imagined it.

  ‘Time’s up!’ Bryan called. ‘And I see you’re all so fond of Penn Avens that you’ve made him your sole survivor.’

  The boys clattered back down the steps to the floor, clamouring to know if they’d got it right. Ree herself was longing to find out how they’d done compared to the other teams. Yet Bryan only shook his head.

  ‘We’ll give you the results tomorrow,’ he said. But when Ree caught his eye, he gave her the ghost of a smile – and suddenly, she was certain that she’d done the right thing.

  By the time Miles next visited the tower, Caraway had managed to infuriate Ayla into breaking a wooden practice sword, but she still couldn’t access the elusive power without using some kind of emotional response to drive it. Since he was as anxious as she was to solve the problem, he went along to her meeting with the alchemist, and the two of them together explained what had happened.

  ‘Interesting,’ Miles said. ‘I am not sure, but if I had to guess …’ He frowned. ‘Do you remember I said that the power might come to you once you were aware of the possibility of its existence? And that alchemy is at the intersection between knowledge and belief?’

  Ayla nodded. ‘I don’t remember the exact wording of everything you say, Miles, but yes.’

  ‘Well, I think what is happening here is that you know the power is within you, but you do not really believe it. Anger allows you to break down that barrier temporarily. But if you want to break it down for good …’ He gave her an abashed smile, as though he knew he was about to ask the impossible. ‘You need to believe.’

  ‘And how do
you propose I do that?’

  ‘Again, this is guesswork, but I would say you need to start thinking of yourself as a real Changer. For years, you were told that the form you take is impure. You have come to terms with that by convincing yourself that purity is not a goal worth pursuing. But the fact is, Lady Ayla –’ he leaned forward earnestly – ‘in alchemical terms, a combination of elements is no more or less pure than a single element alone. That is not how alchemy operates. If we were to work only with single elements, we would never achieve anything! Your hybrid nature is a strength, not a weakness.’ He shook his head. ‘Really, your ancestors have a lot to answer for.’

  That was uncomfortably perspicacious, Caraway thought, and Ayla’s widening eyes showed that the observation had hit home. Still, she recovered quickly.

  ‘That’s all very well, Miles, but you’re asking me to believe something to order. Surely you know it’s not that easy.’

  ‘All the same, will you do something for me? Will you try it again, now?’ He held out a glass of water similar to the one she’d tried and failed with before. She pinned him with her fierce gaze, clearly trying to decide whether to reject the suggestion, then – reluctantly – took it.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ Miles said, and she obeyed. ‘Breathe slowly. Empty your mind. And then gently … ever so gently … reach out to the water, and tell it to become ice.’ He smiled, though she couldn’t see him. ‘Alchemy is as much spiritual as it is physical; you have been forcing it, but really it is a matter of coaxing.’

  Ayla’s shoulders lifted, then fell, as she released a long breath. Caraway watched in love and fascination as she visibly battled with her own need for control. But then her face softened, her white-knuckled grip on the glass easing –

  With a small crackling sound, the water froze.

  Ayla yelped and nearly dropped the glass, her eyes flying open again. She examined the ice carefully, as though making sure it was real, before raising her gaze to Miles.