Fire Read online

  “Forgive my intrusion, Lady,” he said. “You left unarmed. Are you ill, Lady?”

  She laid her forehead against the boulder, ashamed because he was right; in addition to fleeing like a chicken from a woman’s skirts, she’d left unarmed. “Why is he here?” she asked Tovat, still pressing fiddle and bow and forehead into the boulder. “What does he want?”

  “I left too soon to know,” Tovat said. “Shall we go back? Do you need a hand, Lady? Do you need the healer?”

  She doubted Brigan was the type to make social calls, and he rarely traveled alone. Fire closed her eyes and reached her mind over the hills. She couldn’t sense his army, but she found twenty or so men in a group nearby. Outside her front door, not Archer’s.

  Fire sighed into the rock. She stood, checked her headscarf, and tucked fiddle and bow under her arm. She turned toward her own house. “Come, Tovat. We’ll learn soon enough, for he’s come for me.”

  THE SOLDIERS OUTSIDE her door were not like Roen’s men or Archer’s, who admired her and had reason to trust her. These were ordinary soldiers, and as she and Tovat came into their sight she sensed an assortment of the usual reactions. Desire, astonishment, mistrust. And also guardedness. These men were mentally guarded, more than she would have expected from a random assemblage. Brigan must have selected them for their guardedness; or warned them to remember it.

  She corrected herself. They were not all men. Three among them had long hair tied back and the faces and the feeling of women. She sharpened her mind. Five more again were men whose appraisal of her lacked a particular focus. She wondered, hopefully, if they might be men who did not desire women.

  She stopped before them. Every one of them stared.

  “Well met, soldiers,” she said. “Will you come inside and sit?”

  One of the women, tall, with hazel eyes and a powerful voice, spoke. “Our orders are to wait outside until our commander returns from Lord Archer’s house, Lady.”

  “Very well,” Fire said, somewhat relieved that their orders weren’t to seize her and throw her into a burlap bag. She passed through the soldiers to her door, Tovat behind her. She stopped at a thought and turned again to the woman soldier. “Are you in charge, then?”

  “Yes, Lady, in the commander’s absence.”

  Fire touched again on the minds in the group, looking for some reaction to Brigan’s election of a female officer. Resentment, jealousy, indignation. She found none.

  These were not ordinary soldiers after all. She couldn’t be sure of his motive, but something had gone into Brigan’s choosing.

  She stepped inside with Tovat and closed the door on them.

  ARCHER HAD BEEN in town during the concert on the terrace, but he must have come home shortly thereafter. It was not long before Brigan returned to her door, and this time Brocker and Archer accompanied him.

  Donal showed the three men into her sitting room. In an attempt to cover her embarrassment and also to reassure them that she wasn’t going to make another dash for the hills, Fire spoke quickly. “Lord Prince, if your soldiers wish to sit or take something to drink, they’re welcome in my house.”

  “Thank you, Lady,” he said evenly, “but I don’t expect to stay long.”

  Archer was agitated about something, and Fire didn’t need any mental powers to perceive it. She motioned for Brigan and Archer to sit, but both remained standing.

  “Lady,” Brigan said, “I come on the king’s behalf.”

  He didn’t quite look her in the face as he spoke, his eyes touching on the air around her but avoiding her person. She decided to take it as an invitation to study him with her own eyes, for his mind was so strongly guarded against her that she could glean nothing that way.

  He was armed with bow and sword, but unarmored, dressed in dark riding clothes. Clean-shaven. Shorter than Archer but taller than she remembered. He held himself aloof, dark hair and unfriendly eyebrows and stern face, and aside from his refusal to look at her she could sense nothing of his feelings about this interview. She noticed a small scar cutting into his right eyebrow, thin and curved. It matched the scars on her own neck and shoulders. A raptor monster had nearly taken his eye, then. Another scar on his chin. This one straight, from a knife or a sword.

  She supposed the commander of the King’s Army was likely to have as many scars as a human monster.

  “Three weeks ago in the king’s palace,” Brigan was saying, “a stranger was found in the king’s rooms and captured. The king asks you to come to King’s City to meet the prisoner, Lady, and tell whether he’s the same man who was in the king’s rooms at the fortress of my mother.”

  King’s City. Her birthplace. The place where her own mother had lived and died. The gorgeous city above the sea that would be lost or saved in the war that was coming. She’d never seen King’s City, except in her imagination. Certainly, no one had ever suggested before that she go there and see it for real.

  She forced her mind to consider the question seriously even though her heart had already decided. She would have many enemies in King’s City, and too many men who liked her too much. She would be stared at, and assaulted, and she would not ever have the option of resting her mental guard. The king of the kingdom would desire her. And he and his advisers would wish her to use her power against prisoners, enemies, every one of the million people they did not trust.

  And she would have to travel with this rough man who didn’t like her.

  “Does the king request this,” Fire asked, “or is it an order?”

  Brigan considered the floor coolly. “It was stated as an order, Lady, but I won’t force you to go.”

  And so the brother, apparently, was permitted to disobey the king’s orders; or perhaps it was a measure of how little Brigan wanted to deliver her to his weak-headed brother, that he was willing to refuse the command.

  “If the king expects me to use my power to interrogate his prisoners he’ll be disappointed,” Fire said.

  Brigan flexed and clenched his sword hand, once. A flicker of something—impatience, or anger. He looked into her eyes for the briefest of moments, and looked away. “I don’t imagine the king will compel you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  By which Fire understood that the prince considered it within her power and her intention to control the king. Her face burned, but she lifted her chin a notch and said, “I’ll go.”

  Archer spluttered. Before he could speak she swung to him and looked up into his eyes. Don’t quarrel with me in front of the king’s brother, she thought to him. And don’t ruin this two months’ peace.

  He glared back at her. “I’m not the one who ruins it,” he said, his voice low.

  Brocker was accustomed to this; but how must they look to Brigan, staring at each other, having one side of an argument? I won’t do this now. You may embarrass yourself, but you will not embarrass me.

  Archer drew in a breath that sounded like a hiss, turned on his heel, and stormed out of the room. He slammed the door, leaving an uncomfortable silence in his wake.

  Fire touched a hand to her headscarf and turned back to Brigan. “Please forgive our rudeness,” she said.

  Not a flicker in those gray eyes. “Of course.”

  “How will you ensure her safety on the journey, Commander?” Brocker asked quietly. Brigan turned to him, then sat in a chair, resting his elbows on his knees; and his whole manner seemed to change. With Brocker he was suddenly easy and comfortable and respectful, a young military commander addressing a man who could be his mentor.

  “Sir, we’ll ride to King’s City in the company of the entire First Branch. They’re stationed just west of here.”

  Brocker smiled. “You misunderstand me, son. How will you ensure she’ll be safe from the First Branch? In a force of five thousand there’ll be some with the mind to hurt her.”

  Brigan nodded. “I’ve handpicked a guard of twenty soldiers who can be trusted to care for her.”

  Fire crossed her arms and bit down
hard. “I don’t need to be cared for. I can defend myself.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Lady,” Brigan said mildly, looking into his hands, “but if you’re to ride with us you’ll have a guard nonetheless. I can’t transport a civilian female in a party of five thousand men on a journey of nearly three weeks and not provide a guard. I trust you to see the sense in it.”

  He was talking around the fact that she was a monster who provoked all the worst kinds of behavior. And now that her temper was done flaring, she did see the sense in it. Truly, she’d never pitted herself against five thousand men before. She sat down. “Very well.”

  Brocker chuckled. “If only Archer were here to see the powers of rational argument.”

  Fire snorted. Archer wouldn’t consider her allowance of the guard to be evidence of the powers of rational argument. He’d take it as proof that she was in love with whichever of her guards was most handsome.

  She stood up again. “I’ll ready myself,” she said, “and ask Donal to ready Small.”

  Brigan stood with her, his face closed again, impassive. “Very good, Lady.”

  “Will you wait here with me, Commander?” Brocker said. “I’ve a thing or two to tell you.”

  Fire scrutinized Brocker. Oh? What do you need to tell him?

  Brocker had too much class for a one-sided argument. He also possessed a mind so clear and strong that he could open a feeling to her with perfect precision, so that it came to her practically as a sentence. I want to give him military advice, Brocker thought to her.

  Mildly reassured, Fire left them.

  WHEN SHE GOT to her bedroom Archer was sitting in a chair against the wall. Taking a liberty with his presence, for it wasn’t his room to enter without invitation. But she forgave him. Archer couldn’t abandon the responsibilities of his house and farms so suddenly in order to travel with her. He would stay behind, and they would be a long time apart—almost six weeks to get there and back, and longer if she stayed any time in King’s City.

  When Brocker had asked her, in her fourteenth year, just how much power she had over Cansrel’s mind when she was inside it, Archer had been the one to defend her. “Where’s your heart, Father? The man is her father. Don’t make her relationship with him more difficult than it already is.”

  “I’m only asking questions,” Brocker had responded. “Does she have the power to shift his attitudes? Could she change his ambitions permanently?”

  “Anyone can see these are not idle questions.”

  “They’re necessary questions,” Brocker had said, “though I wish they were not.”

  “I don’t care. Leave her be,” Archer had said, so passionately that Brocker had let her be, at least for the moment.

  Fire supposed she would miss Archer defending her on this trip. Not because she wanted his defense, but simply because it was what Archer did when he was near.

  She unearthed her saddlebags from a pile at the bottom of her closet and began to fold underclothing and riding gear into them. There was no point in bothering with dresses. No one ever noticed what she wore, and after three weeks in her bags they would be unwearable anyway.

  “You’ll desert your students?” Archer said finally, leaning over his knees, watching her pack. “Just like that?”

  She turned her back to him on the pretense of searching for her fiddle, and smiled. He had never been quite so concerned for her students before.

  “You didn’t take long to decide,” he added.

  She spoke simply; to her it was obvious. “I’ve never seen King’s City.”

  “It’s not so wonderful as all that.”

  It was a thing she’d like to determine for herself. She dug through the piles on her bed and said nothing.

  “It’ll be more dangerous than any place you’ve ever been,” he said. “Your father took you away from that place because you weren’t safe there.”

  She set her fiddle case beside her saddlebags. “Shall I choose a life of bleakness, then, Archer, just to stay alive? I won’t hide in a room with the doors and windows shut. That is not a life.”

  He ran his finger against the ridge of a feather in the quiver beside him. He glowered at the floor, chin on fist. “You’ll fall in love with the king.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed facing him, and grinned. “I couldn’t fall in love with the king. He’s weak-minded and he drinks too much wine.”

  He caught her eye. “And? I’m jealous-minded and I sleep with too many women.”

  Fire’s smile grew. “Luckily for you, I loved you long before either of those things.”

  “But you don’t love me as much as I love you,” he said. “Which is what’s made me this way.”

  This was harsh, coming from a friend she would lose her life for. And harsh that he would say such a thing right when she was about to leave for so long. She stood and turned her back to him. Love doesn’t measure that way, she thought to him. And you may blame me for your feelings, but it isn’t fair to blame me for how you’ve chosen to behave.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. Forgive me, Fire.”

  And she forgave him again, easily, because she knew that his anger usually fizzled as quickly as it came, and behind it his heart was full to bursting. But she stopped at forgiveness. She could guess what Archer wanted, here in her bedroom before she departed, and she wasn’t going to give it to him.

  It had been easy once, taking Archer into her bed; not so long ago it had been simple. And then, somehow, the balance had tipped between them. The marriage proposals, the love-sickness. More and more, the simplest thing was to say no.

  She would answer him gently. She turned to him and held out her hand. He stood and came to her.

  “I must change into riding clothes and pull a few more things together,” she said. “We’ll say our goodbyes now. You must go down and tell the prince I’m coming.”

  He stared at his shoes and then into her face, understanding her. He tugged at her headscarf until it slid away and her hair fell around her shoulders. He collected her hair in one hand, bent his face to it, kissed it. He pulled Fire to him and kissed her neck and her mouth, so that her body was left wishing that her mind were not so stingy. Then he broke away and turned to the door, his face the picture of unhappiness.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHE HAD BEEN afraid the army would move too fast for her or that every one of the five thousand soldiers would have to slow down for her sake. And the army did ride fast aboveground, when the land underfoot was smooth enough to allow it, but most of the time the pace was more moderate. It was partly the restrictions of tunnels and terrain and partly the objectives of an armed force, which by nature seeks out the very troubles that other traveling parties hope to avoid.

  The First Branch was a wonder of organization: a moving base divided into sections, divided again into small units that broke off periodically, sped to a gallop, disappeared into caves or up mountain paths, and reappeared some time later. Scout units rode fast ahead of them and patrol units to every side, and they sent subunits racing back sometimes to make reports, or in the case of trouble found, request support. Sometimes, the soldiers who returned were bloody and bruised, and Fire came to recognize the green tunics of the healer units that rushed to their aid.

  Then there were the hunting units, which moved in rotation, circling back now and then with their game. There were the supply units, which handled the pack horses and figured the inventories. The command units delivered messages from Brigan to the rest of the force. The archery units kept eyes open for animal and monster predators foolish enough to prey on the main column of riders. Fire’s own guard was a unit, too. It created a barrier between her and the thousands as she rode, and assisted her with everything she needed, which at first consisted mainly of answers to her questions about why half the army seemed always to be coming or going.

  “Is there a unit to keep track of all the other units?” she asked the leader of her guards, the hazel-eyed woman, whose name wa
s Musa.

  Musa laughed. Most of Fire’s questions seemed to make Musa laugh. “The commander doesn’t use one, Lady. He keeps track in his head. Watch the traffic around the standard-bearer—every unit that comes or goes reports first to the commander.”

  Fire had been watching the standard-bearer—and his horse—with considerable sympathy, actually, because he seemed to ride twice as far as most of the rest of the army. The standard-bearer’s sole charge was to stay near the commander so that the commander could always be found; and the commander was forever doubling back, breaking off, bursting forward, depending, Fire assumed, on matters of great military import, whatever in the Dells that meant. The standard-bearer always turning circles with him, chosen for that duty, Fire supposed, because he was a fine horseman.

  Then the prince and the standard-bearer came closer, and once again Fire corrected herself. A fine horsewoman.

  “Musa, how many women are in the First Branch?”

  “Some five hundred, Lady. Perhaps twenty-five hundred in all four branches and the auxiliaries together.”

  “Where are the auxiliaries when the rest of the army is patrolling?”

  “In the forts and signal stations spread throughout the kingdom, Lady. Some of the soldiers manning those posts are women.”

  Twenty-five hundred women who had volunteered to live on a horse’s back, and fight, and eat, dress, sleep in a mob of males. Why would a woman choose such a life? Were their natures wild and violent, as some of the men had already proven theirs to be?

  When she and her entourage had first passed out of Trilling’s woods onto the rocky flats where the army was stationed, there had been a single fight over Fire, short and brutal. Two men out of their minds at the sight of her and disagreeing on some point (her honor, their respective chances), enough for shoves, fists to the face, broken noses, blood. Brigan was down from his horse with three of Fire’s guard before Fire had fully comprehended what was happening. And one crisp word from Brigan’s mouth had ended it: “Enough.”