Fireborn

by Toby Forward

  “Look,” she said. “Everywhere. Now give me the mirror.”

  “Leave it till tomorrow.”

  Bee just stared and waited. Dorwin moved the lantern to the table and fetched the small mirror, keeping the glass pressed against her side. Bee held out her hand. Dorwin handed her the mirror.

  “Light,” said Bee. “Bring more light.”

  Dorwin held the lantern and Bee lifted the mirror.

  She looked directly at her reflection, holding her gaze steady.

  “My hair,” she said at last. “Even my hair’s burned away.”

  Dorwin took the lantern back to the table. Bee let her take the mirror and replace it. She lay down with her back to Dorwin.

  “I’m going to sleep now,” she said.

  “Can I come and see you again?”

  “Yes.”

  Dorwin leaned down and kissed Bee’s cheek.

  “Good night.”

  She drew the sheet up and tucked her in. She opened the door quietly.

  “Dorwin?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell Flaxfold I’m staying here. I’m not going home now. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Don’t you want to see your parents?”

  “Slowin first,” said Bee. “I need to deal with him first.” |

  When Perry saw the boy

  walking towards him from the trees he thought it was Cabbage. He sprang up and ran towards him, only to realize that it was a completely different boy. He stopped and waited.

  The boy stopped as well.

  It was difficult, in the moonlight, to see what he was like. Perry stepped back.

  The boy stepped forward. He was picking up his feet in an odd way.

  Perry stood his ground.

  The boy came nearer again, bending his knees too much, lifting his feet too high.

  “Who are you?” asked Perry.

  The boy growled.

  Perry put out his hands.

  “Stop.”

  The boy kept coming.

  “Stop now, or I’ll stop you.”

  The boy stopped.

  “What do you want?” said Perry. “Who are you?”

  The boy smiled. Perry had never seen anything quite so frightening as the shape of the smiling lips.

  He backed away.

  “Answer me,” he shouted.

  The boy growled again.

  “I’ll fight you,” said Perry. He picked up a stone the size of his fist, tossed it from hand to hand. “Come on.”

  The boy moved forward. Perry threw the stone and quickly stooped and picked up another.

  The boy dodged. The stone glanced off his head instead of hitting him in the face. He growled again and bared teeth that belonged to a weasel. Sharp, yellow teeth, all pointed.

  Perry threw another stone and replaced it immediately. This one hit the boy on the neck. He roared in pain and lunged forward, head down. The third stone hit him on the top of the head. He fell and Perry ran, dodging round him, away from Boolat and skirting the woods. He kept in the open just enough to see, not to get lost in the trees, near enough to take cover if he needed to.

  The boy half-rose, stumbled, got up and looked after Perry. He was about to follow when the sound of screaming from the palace caught his attention. He turned and listened. Still with his odd movements he walked down the hill and towards the noise. It was as though Perry had disappeared, or never been thought of.

  Perry watched him, all the way to the palace gate. He watched him go into the palace. He listened to the screams. He saw the beetles swarm through the gate. He saw soldiers rush for safety, only to be thrown back by some invisible barrier. He wanted to shut his eyes. He wanted to stop his ears. He wanted to run and leave the slaughter behind him. He stayed, and watched and listened. He would need to tell someone about this, and he would need to tell them everything he could.

  What he couldn’t imagine was how he would find words to describe the two figures who appeared and walked through the army of beetles into the palace. One was like a huge, hunched beetle. The other shimmered like a ghost.

  Cabbage hadn’t expected to be excited about going to the library. As far as he knew it was just a room with a lot of books it in. He liked books, but you can only read one at a time so a room with a lot of books was no better than a room with one book.

  Melwood held the door open for him and he went in.

  It was love at first sight.

  As soon as he saw it he knew he wanted to able to go into it always.

  Flaxfield was there already, of course, sitting at a table with another man. They didn’t look up.

  “That’s Jackbones,” whispered Melwood. “He’s the librarian.”

  Jackbones had his index finger on an open book. He was explaining something to Flaxfield. The wizard listened, then shook his head, turned the pages and put his own finger on the book and explained something else. Jackbones shook his head and leaned back and took another book and opened it.

  “We’re not interrupting, are we?” said Melwood.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” said Jackbones, jumping to his feet and holding out his hand. “Hello, Cabbage. Welcome to the library.”

  “Don’t believe him, whatever you do,” said Flaxfield. “No one has come into this library for two hundred years without Jackbones knowing it, even when he’s asleep.”

  “Does he sleep?” asked Melwood with wide eyes. “They didn’t tell me.”

  Jackbones pulled up a chair for Cabbage and gestured for him to sit down.

  “See how they make fun of librarians?” he said. “It’s jealousy, of course.”

  Cabbage ignored the chair. He stood gaping around.

  “Do you like it?” asked Jackbones.

  “It goes on for ever,” said Cabbage.

  “Clever boy,” said Jackbones.

  Cabbage glared at him.

  “No, I mean it. I wasn’t making fun. Most people, nearly all people in fact, ask how high it goes, how many floors it has, that sort of thing. You didn’t.”

  Melwood took the chair that Cabbage had ignored. She smiled at Flaxfield and looked at the book they had been arguing about.

  “Jackbones loves his library more than anything in the world,” she said. “And he’s pleased you like it.”

  “It really does, doesn’t it?” said Cabbage. “It goes on for ever.”

  Jackbones nodded.

  “How does it do that? How can anything do that.”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Because you spotted it straight away. But you must never tell anyone else. Promise?”

  Cabbage looked at Flaxfield and Melwood.

  “Oh, they know,” said Jackbones. “Not many do, but these two are very special people.”

  “I promise,” said Cabbage.

  “It goes on for ever,” said the librarian, “because it contains every book that has ever been written about magic, and every book that might be useful to magic, and every book that ever will be written about magic, but hasn’t been yet.”

  Cabbage looked up. The library itself was circular and had galleries all around the sides going on and on out of sight.

  “There are books in here that haven’t been written yet?” he said.

  “Yes. They’re quite difficult to get to, but it can be done, if you know how.”

  Cabbage studied Jackbones. He looked more like a shopkeeper than someone who looked after a place like this. He was tall and slim, with short hair that stood straight up on the top and was cut close on the sides. He had the look on his face of someone who can sell you something. Again, the age was impossible to guess, but he’d been here over two hundred years and wasn’t old.

  “Tell me,” said Jackbones, waving a hand at the rows and rows of books. “I can get you anything you want. Tell me what it is.”

  Cabbage didn’t even need to think of an answer, he knew immediately.

  “I want my dinner,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  Flaxfield sighed. Melwo
od laughed. Jackbones clapped his hands together.

  “Quite right,” he said. “The perfect answer. Can’t work while you’re hungry.”

  He looked at the principal.

  “I’ll get them to send some up,” she said. “I don’t think Cabbage is ready for the dining hall.”

  “Then,” said Flaxfield, “we need to work.”

  Mattie had managed to put a lot of crumbs on the bed and didn’t mind because he wasn’t going to stay around to clear it up. Then he found that crumbs, if there are enough of them from crusty bread, will wake you up in the night. If it was the crumbs. They were hard against his skin, pressing into him. Was it enough to wake him? Or was that someone shouting? He lay for a while, brushing away crumbs and listening.

  If there was a disturbance in the palace he didn’t want to be caught in a bed. He hopped out and made a not very bothered attempt to straighten the covers.

  The shouting was clear now. Many voices. And screams.

  Mattie moved to the window. His choice of a high bedroom gave him a wide view of the courtyard and the thick walls and the outbuildings. The palace was a village really, with everything contained within its walls. It was a village in panic.

  There were three barriers against attack. They were all in place. The gates were locked. The portcullis had been dropped, the drawbridge raised. No one could get through that. No person. No human being. Even a wizard would find it difficult because magic had been woven into the defences when the palace was built.

  No one had bothered to defend the palace against beetles. Why would they?

  The beetles swarmed under the gates, through the holes in the portcullis, round the raised drawbridge. Gaps the size of a fist, the size of a man’s head didn’t matter against an invading army. Against an army of beetles they were as wide as highways.

  The beetles crawled over everything. They were a carpet on the stone-flagged floors. They were a living jerkin against the body of a soldier. They were a moving mask on the face of a lord. They stung and sucked. They nibbled and tore. They smothered and strangled. They ate their way through wood around the locks on the gate and it swung open. They chewed the ropes and the drawbridge came clattering down. Seeing an opportunity for escape some of the men raised the portcullis and tried to run through. Mattie saw them stop as though they had run into a stone wall. They fell, dazed, and were at once covered with a cloak of beetles.

  A taller figure drifted across the drawbridge, followed by another, squat and thick. They stopped in the gateway and watched the killing. The squat one ran forward and joined in. It leaped on a soldier, stabbed and sucked, head lowered. The taller one shimmered like smoke.

  Mattie moved away from the window and opened his bedroom door. The screams in the corridor told him that the beetles were inside as well.

  He couldn’t fight them. He might be able to run later, when the gate was clear. Now, all he could do was hide. Well, he knew every passageway, every secret walk and hidden room, every arcane path. He would wait it out and hope.

  The worse thing was not the screams.

  The worst thing was how soon the screams stopped and all that was left to hear was the scratching of hard, black, spiky legs. |

  Morning,

  and sunshine, and sleep. Bee slept through the night without disturbance. No dreams that she could remember, which was good. She woke to find last night’s dinner still on the table. The mirror was face down on the mantelpiece. Before she could change her mind and just roll over, before anyone could come in, Bee jumped out of bed and hurried herself into the clothes. Despite herself she couldn’t help feeling pleasure at putting them on. Cleaner, softer and more graceful than anything she had worn at Slowin’s. The wizard had not dressed her in leather and fustian like Brassbuck but her clothes had been practical and plain and hard-wearingly coarse.

  There was a scarf which she tied around her neck before she remembered her reflection and moved it so that it was over her head. She pushed the few straggles of hair that were left inside it and draped the end round her neck.

  With long sleeves, a skirt that reached her ankles and the scarf, only her hands and face were visible. It would have to do. She had stared at her own face last night and survived. Other people would have to stare at it too. They might as well get used to it.

  She looked out of the window. The sun was low and dew still on the grass. The fields were all harvested, save one. The red flames of the poppies in the wheat, the gold of the grain, the green of the hedgerow, the blue of the sky. Bee realized for the first time that Slowin’s Yard had been a world without colour, a world of black shadows and blue-grey brick.

  She had been expecting the knock on the door so she was disappointed but not surprised when it came. She wondered if Flaxfold had some spy hole or other way of seeing into the room. She always seemed to know when Bee was awake or moving.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “Can you open the door for me, please?” said Flaxfold.

  “You always have food when you come here,” said Bee.

  “And you never eat it.”

  She laid the tray on the table, took off the plate and cup and a small posy of flowers in a yellow pottery vase, replacing them with the plate from last night. She put the tray on the floor of the corridor outside and came back in and closed the door.

  “You’re staying, then,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She hated Dorwin with a sudden rush of anger. Flaxfold noticed the change in her and said, “That’s all she said. Just that you’re staying.”

  “I don’t care what she said.”

  Bee picked up the cup and drank it all down in one go.

  “Well, whether you do or not, that’s what happened. I don’t know what the two of you talked about, but she said that you would be staying after all.”

  Bee had a mouthful of sausage and spoke anyway, not caring what Flaxfold thought of her manners.

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” she said. “You could make anything up and I wouldn’t know.”

  Flaxfold smiled, disappointingly not offended.

  “Because I will always tell you the truth,” she said. “I will never lie to you.”

  Bee deliberately put more food into her mouth before she spoke again. She enjoyed the rudeness of talking to Flaxfold with her mouth full. Served her right.

  “Never?” she said.

  “No.”

  Bee swallowed. She took a big bite of bread and pushed the scarf from her head. She stared at Flaxfold.

  “Look at me.”

  Pieces of damp bread sprayed out of her mouth, dusting Flaxfold’s front.

  Flaxfold held the girl’s stare.

  “I’m ugly,” said Bee.

  Flaxfold said nothing.

  Bee shouted at her. “See? You’re lying to me. You won’t say I’m ugly.”

  “I haven’t said anything,” Flaxfold answered. “How can that be a lie?”

  “All right then, say I’m ugly.”

  Again, Flaxfold didn’t answer.

  “Liar,” said Bee. “Your silence is a lie.”

  “I haven’t answered because you haven’t asked me a question yet.”

  Bee was used to these word games. She had been learning magic since she was six years old.

  “All right,” she admitted. “I haven’t. I will now. Am I ugly?”

  She found that although she knew the answer was yes she was all at once afraid of what the woman would say. She waited.

  “I don’t know,” said Flaxfold.

  Bee put her finger under the rim of the plate and sent it spinning across the room. It landed in the fireplace and shattered. The eggs smeared the white wallpaper round the grate.

  “Liar. I looked at myself. Anyone can see I’m the ugliest thing there ever was.”

  “Oh,” said Flaxfold. “You mean your face?”

  Bee looked at Flaxfold for a long time. The woman’s eyes were such a pale grey. She had lines around them,
creases from the years.

  “I’ve just met you,” said Flaxfold. “I’m just getting to know you. I don’t know if you’re ugly or not. You have lovely parents, so you should be lovely, too. But you have lived for as long with Slowin as you did with them, and he is as ugly as anger, so there is a good chance you will be ugly as well. I don’t know yet. I hope you are not ugly. I’m going to act that way until I know differently. Now, shall I bring you some more breakfast? The last one is ruined.”

  Bee looked away. “You know what I meant?” she said.

  “Yes, I know what you meant. And I know what I said. If you want to talk about your face we’ll talk about that instead.”

  Through the window Bee could see the harvesters begin work on the last field. The stalks were toppling, sliced at the base. The poppies fell with the wheat. No distinction.

  “Is my face ugly?”

  “Your face is scarred,” said Flaxfold. “It isn’t like the face you were given. Now it’s up to you. You have a choice. You can let the way your face looks make you look like that inside, or you can let the person you are inside show itself on your face. I’ll get you some more breakfast.”

  It took the woman a while to clear up the broken plate and wipe up the mess before she left the room. She didn’t look back at Bee. She could hear her draw the scarf back around her head and shoulders. And she could hear her quietly crying.

  Morning, and darkness, and silence.

  Mattie’s sleep had been full of noises and alarms, broken and fearful.

  There was nowhere the beetles couldn’t go. But they needed to know how to get there first. The palace had a maze of hidden tunnels and passageways and niches that Mattie knew all about. Mostly they were the service alleyways that the builders had used when the palace was first put up. Walls that looked solid often had hollow centres to save materials. Roof voids and narrow stairs and ladders were set into the design so that out of the way places could be reached for cleaning and repair.

  As a toddler Mattie had explored these and even he didn’t know all of them.

  The beetles swarmed everywhere on the surface. They cleared out nearly every living thing that belonged to the palace, even the cats and dogs. The mice and rats they left alone. There seemed to be some sort of vermin confederacy between them.