Fire skt-2

by Kristin Cashore

  He was too weak and too strong in all the wrong places. The harder she took hold of his consciousness the harder he pulled at her to keep taking, so that her control turned somehow into his control and his taking. And so she fought off his mental suckers, but that was no good either. It was too much like letting him go, and leaving his body to his mind's volatility.

  She could not find the right way to hold him. She sensed him slipping away. And he became more and more agitated, and finally his eyes slid to her face; he stood, and began pacing. And then the prisoner arrived, and her answers to Nash's questions only added to his frustration.

  "I'm sorry if I'm no help to you, Lord King," she said now. "There are limits to my perception, especially with a stranger."

  "We know you've caught trespassers on your own property, Lady," one of the king's men said, "who had a distinct feeling to their minds. Is this man like those men?"

  "No, sir, he isn't. Those men had a kind of mental blankness. This man thinks for himself."

  Nash stopped before her and frowned. "Take control of his mind," he said. "Compel him to tell us the name of his master."

  The prisoner was exhausted, nursing an injured arm, frightened of the lady monster, and Fire knew she could do what the king commanded easily enough. She gripped Nash's consciousness as tightly as she could. "I'm sorry, Lord King. I only take control of people's minds for the sake of self-defence."

  Nash struck her across the face, hard. The blow threw her onto her back. She was scrambling to her feet practically before she'd hit the rug, ready to run, or fight, or do whatever she needed to do to protect herself from him, no matter who he was, but all six of her guards surrounded her now and pulled her out of the king's reach. In the corner of her vision she saw blood on her cheekbone. A tear ran into the blood, and her cheek smarted terribly. He'd cut her with the great square emerald of his ring.

  I hate bullies, she thought at him furiously.

  The king was crouched on the floor, his head in his hands, his men beside him, confused, whispering to each other. He raised his eyes to Fire. She sensed his mind, clear now, and understanding what he'd done. His face was broken with shame.

  Her fury dropped away as quickly as it had come. She was sorry for him.

  She sent him a firm message. This is the last time I'll ever appear before you, until you've learned to guard yourself against me.

  She turned to the door without waiting for a dismissal.

  Fire wondered if a bruise and a square-shaped cut on her cheek might make her ugly. In her bathing room, too curious to stop herself, she held a mirror to her face.

  One glance and Fire shoved the mirror under a stack of towels, her question answered. Mirrors were useless, irritating devices. She should have known better.

  Musa was perched on the edge of the bath, scowling, as she had been since her guard contingent had returned with their bleeding charge. It irked Musa, Fire knew, to be trapped between Brigan's orders and the king's sovereignty.

  "Please don't tell the commander about this," Fire said.

  Musa scowled harder. "I'm sorry, Lady, but he asked specifically to be told if the king tried to hurt you."

  Princess Clara knocked on the door frame. "My brother tells me he's done an inexcusable thing," she said; and then, at the sight of Fire's face, "Oh my. That's the king's ring clear as day, the brute. Has the healer been?"

  "She just left, Lady Princess."

  "And what's your plan for your first day at court, Lady? I hope you won't hide just because he's marked you."

  Fire realised that she had been going to hide, and the cut and bruising were only a part of it. How relieving, the thought of staying in these rooms with her aches and her nerves until Brigan came back and whisked her home.

  "I thought you might like a tour of the palace," Clara said, "and my brother Garan wants to meet you. He's more like Brigan than Nash. He has control of himself."

  The king's palace, and a brother like Brigan. Curiosity got the better of Fire's apprehensions.

  Naturally, everywhere Fire went she was stared at.

  The palace was gigantic, like an indoor city, with gigantic views: the falls, the harbour, white-sailed ships on the sea. The great spans of the city bridges. The city itself, its splendour and its dilapidation, stretching toward golden fields and hills of rocks and flowers. And of course the sky, always a view of the sky from all seven courtyards and all of the upper corridors, where the ceilings were made of glass.

  "They don't see you," Clara told Fire, when a pair of raptor monsters perched on a transparent roof made her jump. "The glass is reflective on the outside. They only see themselves. And incidentally, Lady, every window in the palace that opens is fitted with a screen – even the ceiling windows. That was Cansrel's doing."

  It wasn't Clara's first mention of Cansrel. Every time she said his name Fire flinched, so accustomed was she to people avoiding the word.

  "I suppose it's for the best," Clara continued. "The palace is crawling with monster things – rugs, feathers, jewellery, insect collections. Women wear the furs. Tell me, do you always cover your hair?"

  "Usually," Fire said, "if I'm to be seen by strangers."

  "Interesting," Clara said. "Cansrel never covered his hair."

  Well, and Cansrel had loved attention, Fire thought to herself dryly. More to the point, he had been a man. Cansrel had not had her problems.

  Prince Garan was too thin and didn't share his sister's obvious robustness; despite it, he was quite good-looking. His eyes were dark and burning under a thatch of nearly black hair, and there was something furious and graceful about his manner that made him intriguing to watch. Appealing. He was very like his brother the king.

  Fire knew he was ill – that as a child he'd been taken by the same fever that had killed her mother, and had come out alive but with ruined health. She also knew, from Cansrel's muttered suspicions and Brocker's certainties, that Garan and his twin Clara were the nerve centre of the kingdom's system of spies. She had found it hard to believe of Clara, following the princess around the palace. But now in Garan's presence Clara's bearing changed to something shrewd and serious, and Fire understood that a woman who gabbed about satin umbrellas and her latest love affair might know quite well how to keep a secret.

  Garan was sitting at a long table piled high with documents, in a heavily guarded room full of harassed-looking secretaries. The only noise, other than the rustling of paper, came, rather incongruously, from a child who seemed to be playing shoe tug-of-war with a puppy in the corner. The child stared at Fire momentarily when Fire entered, then politely avoided staring again.

  Fire sensed that Garan's mind was guarded against her. She realised suddenly, with surprise, that so was Clara's, and so had Clara's been all along. Clara's personality was so open that Fire had not appreciated the degree to which her mind was closed. The child, too, was carefully shielded.

  Garan, in addition to being guarded, was rather unfriendly. He seemed to make a point of not asking Fire the usual civil questions, such as how her trip had been, if she liked her rooms, and whether her face was in much pain from being punched by his brother. He appraised the damage to her cheek blandly. "Brigan can't hear about this until he's done with what he's doing," he said, his voice low enough that Fire's guard, hovering in the background, could not hear.

  "Agreed," Clara said. "We can't have him rushing back to spank the king."

  "Musa will report it to him," Fire said.

  "Her reports go through me," Clara said. "I'll handle it."

  With ink-stained fingers Garan shuffled through some papers and slid a single page across the table to Clara. While Clara read it he reached into a pocket and glanced at a watch. He spoke over his shoulder to the child.

  "Sweetheart," he said, "don't pretend to me that you don't know the time."

  The child gave a great gloomy sigh, wrestled the shoe from the piebald puppy, put the shoe on, and moped out the door. The puppy waited a moment, and then
trotted after its – lady? Yes, Fire decided that at the king's court, long dark hair probably trumped boyish clothes, and made her a lady. Five years old, possibly, or six, and presumably Garan's. Garan was not married, but that did not make him childless. Fire tried to ignore her own involuntary flash of resentment at the majority of humanity who had children as a matter of course.

  "Hmm," Clara said, frowning at the document before her. "I don't know what to make of this."

  "We'll discuss it later," Garan said. His eyes slid to Fire's face and she met his gaze curiously. His eyebrows snapped down, making him fierce, and oddly like Brigan.

  "So, Lady Fire," he said, addressing her directly for the first time. "Are you going to do what the king's asked, and use your mental power to question our prisoners?"

  "No, Lord Prince. I only use my mental power in self-defence."

  "Very noble of you," Garan said, sounding exactly like he didn't mean it, so that she was perplexed, and looked back at him calmly, and said nothing.

  "It would be self-defence," Clara put in distractedly, frowning still at the paper before her. "The self-defence of this kingdom. Not that I don't understand your resistance to humouring Nash when he's been such a boor, Lady, but we need you."

  "Do we? I find myself undecided on the matter," Garan said. He dipped his pen into an inkwell. He blotted carefully, and scribbled a few sentences onto the paper before him. Without looking at Fire he opened a feeling to her, coolly and with perfect control. She felt it keenly. Suspicion. Garan did not trust her, and he wanted her to know it.

  * * * *

  That evening, when Fire sensed the king's approach, she locked the entrance to her rooms. He made no objection to this, resigned, seemingly, to holding a conversation with her through the oak of her sitting room door. It was not a very private conversation, on her side at least, for her on-duty guards could recede only so far into her rooms. Before the king spoke, she warned him that he was overheard.

  His mind was open and troubled, but clear. "If you'll bear with me, Lady, I've only two things to say."

  "Go on, Lord King," Fire said quietly, her forehead resting against the door.

  "The first is an apology, for my entire self."

  Fire closed her eyes. "It's not your entire self that needs to apologise. Only the part that wants to be taken by my power."

  "I can't change that part, Lady."

  "You can. If you're too strong for me to control, then you're strong enough to control yourself."

  "I can't, Lady, I swear to it."

  You don't want to, she corrected him silently. You don't want to give up the feeling of me, and that is your problem.

  "You're a very strange monster," he said, almost whispering. "Monsters are supposed to want to overwhelm men."

  And what could she respond to that? She made a bad monster and a worse human. "You said it was two things, Lord King."

  He took a breath, as if to clear his head, and spoke more steadily. "The other is to ask you, Lady, to reconsider the issue of the prisoner. This is a desperate time. No doubt you've a low opinion of my ability to reason, but I swear to you, Lady, that on my throne – when you're not in my thoughts – I see clearly what's right. The kingdom is on the verge of something important. It might be victory, it might be collapse. Your mental power could help us enormously, and not just with one prisoner."

  Fire turned her back to the door and crouched low against it. She held her head up by her hair. "I'm not that kind of monster," she said miserably.

  "Reconsider, Lady. We could make rules, set limits. There are reasonable men among my advisers. They wouldn't ask too much of you."

  "Leave me to think about it."

  "Will you? Will you really think about it?"

  "Leave me," she said, more forcefully now. She felt his focus shift from business back to his feelings. There was a lengthy silence.

  "I don't want to leave," he said.

  Fire bit down on her mounting frustration. "Go."

  "Marry me, Lady," he whispered, "I beg you."

  His mind was his own as he asked it, and he knew how foolish he was. She sensed plain and clear that he simply couldn't help himself.

  She pretended hardness, though hardness was not what she felt. Go, before you ruin the peace between us.

  Once he'd gone she sat on the floor, face in hands, wishing herself alone, until Musa brought her a drink, and Mila, shyly, a hot compress for her back. She thanked them, and drank; and because she had no choice, eased into their quiet company.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fire's ability to rule her father had depended upon his trust.

  As an experiment, in the winter after his accident, Fire got Cansrel to stick his hand into his bedroom fire. She did it by making his mind believe that it was flowers in the grate, and not flame. He reached in to pick them and recoiled; Fire took stronger hold and made him more determined. He reached in again, obstinately resolved to pick flowers, and this time believed he was picking them, until pain brought his mind and his reality crashing back to him. He screamed and ran to the window, threw it open, thrust his hand into the snow piled against the windowpane. He turned to her, cursing, almost crying, to demand what in the Dells she thought she was doing.

  It was not an easy thing to explain, and she burst into quite authentic tears that came from the confusion of conflicting emotions. Distress at the sight of his blistered skin, his blackened fingernails, and a terrible smell she hadn't anticipated. Terror of losing his love now that she'd compelled him to hurt himself. Terror of losing his trust, and with it her power to compel him ever to do it again. She threw herself sobbing onto the pillows of his bed. "I wanted to see what it was like to hurt someone," she spat at him, "like you always tell me to. And now I know, and I'm horrified with both of us, and I'll never do it again, not to anyone."

  He came to her then, the anger gone from his face. It was clear that her tears grieved him, so she let the tears come. He sat beside her, his burned hand clutched to his side but his focus clearly on her and her sadness. He stroked her hair with his unhurt hand, trying to soothe her. She took the hand, pressed it to her wet face, and kissed it.

  After a moment of this he shifted, extricating his hand from hers. "You're too old for that," he said.

  She didn't understand him. He cleared his throat. His voice was rough from his own pain.

  "You must remember that you're a woman now, Fire, and an unnatural beauty. Men will find your touch overwhelming. Even your father."

  She knew that he meant it plainly, that it contained no threat, no suggestion. He was only being frank, as he was with all matters relating to her monster power, and teaching her something important, for her own safety. But her instincts saw an opportunity. One way to secure Cansrel's trust was to turn this around: make Cansrel feel the need to prove his own trustworthiness to her.

  She pushed herself away from him, pretending horror. She ran from the room.

  That evening Cansrel stood outside Fire's closed door, pleading with her to understand. "Darling child," he said. "You need never fear me; you know I'd never act on such base instincts with you. It's only that I worry about the men who would. You must understand the dangers of your power to yourself. If you were a son I would not be so worried."

  She let him make his explanations for a while, and was stunned, inside her room, with how easy it was to manipulate the master manipulator. Astonished and dismayed. Understanding that she'd learned how to do this from him.

  Finally she came out and stood before him. "I understand," she said. "I'm sorry, Father." Tears slid down her face and she pretended they were on account of his bandaged hand, which, in part, they were.

  "I wish you would be more cruel with your power," he said, touching her hair and kissing her. "Cruelty is strong self-defence."

  And so, at the end of her experiment, Cansrel still trusted her. And he had reason to, for Fire didn't think she could go through with anything like that again.

  Then, i
n the spring, Cansrel began to talk of his need for a new plan, an infallible plan this time, to do away with Brigan.

  * * * *

  When Fire's bleeding began she felt compelled to explain to her guard why bird monsters had begun to gather outside her screen windows, and why raptor monsters swooped down occasionally, ripped apart the smaller birds, and then perched on the sills to stare inside, screeching. She thought the guards took it rather well. Musa sent the two with the best aim to the grounds below the rooms to do some raptor hunting rather perilously close to the palace walls.

  The Dells was not known for hot summers, but a palace made of black stone with glass ceilings will get warm; on clear days the ceiling windows were levered open. When Fire passed through a courtyard or corridor during her bleeding the birds chirped and the raptors screeched through those screens as well. Sometimes flying monster bugs trailed in her wake. Fire didn't imagine it did much for her reputation around the court, but then again, very little did. The square mark on her cheek was recognised and much talked of. She could sense the spinning gossip that stopped whenever she entered a room and started up again as she left.

  She had told the king that she would think about the issue of the prisoner, but she didn't, not really; she didn't need to. She knew her mind. She spent a certain amount of energy monitoring his whereabouts so she could avoid him. A good bit more deflecting the attention of people of the court. She sensed curiosity from them foremost, and admiration; some hostility, especially from servants. She wondered if the court's servants had clearer recollections of the particulars of Cansrel's cruelty. She wondered if he had been crueller to them.