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  Fire lay in her bed and fought off the dream memory. The growling leopard monster, midnight blue with gold spots, astride her father. The smell of her father's blood, his gorgeous eyes on her, disbelieving. Dying.

  She wished now that she hadn't sent Archer home. Archer understood the nightmares, and Archer was alive and passionate. She wanted his company, his vitality.

  In her bed she grew more and more restless, and finally she did a thing that would have turned Archer livid. She dragged herself to her closets and dressed herself, slowly, painfully, in coat and trousers, dark browns and blacks to match the night. Her attempt to wrap her hair almost sent her back to bed, since she needed both arms to do it and lifting her left arm was an agony. Somehow she managed, capitulating at one point to the use of a mirror to be sure that no hair was showing in back. Generally she avoided mirrors. It embarrassed her to lose her own breath at the sight of herself.

  She stuck a knife in her belt and hefted a spear and ignored her own conscience calling, singing, screaming to her that she couldn't even protect herself from a porcupine tonight, let alone a monster raptor or monster wolf.

  Next was the hardest part of all, one-armed. She had to sneak out of her own house by way of the tree outside her window, for Archer's guards stood at all her doorways, and they would never allow her to wander the hills injured and alone. Unless she used her power to control them, and that she would not do. Archer's guards trusted her.

  Archer had been the one to notice how closely this ancient tree hugged the house and how easily he could climb it in the dark, two years ago, when Cansrel had still been alive, and Archer had been eighteen and Fire had been fifteen and their friendship had evolved in a manner Cansrel's guards hadn't needed to know the particulars of. A manner that had been unexpected to her, and sweet, and boosted her small list of happinesses. What Archer hadn't known was that Fire had begun to use the route herself, almost immediately, first to skirt Cansrel's men and then, after Cansrel was dead, Archer's own. Not to do anything shocking or forbidden; just to walk at night by herself, without everyone knowing.

  She pitched her spear out the window. What followed was an ordeal that involved much swearing and tearing of cloth and fingernails. On solid ground, sweating and shaking and appreciating fully now what a foolish idea this had been, she used her spear as a cane and limped away from the house. She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so that she could see the stars. They always eased her lonesomeness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.

  To night they were clear and perfect in the sky.

  Standing on a rocky patch that rose beyond Cansrel's monster cages, she bathed in the light of the stars and tried to soak up some of their quiet. Breathing deep, she rubbed the place in her hip that still ached sometimes from an arrow scar that was months old. Always one of the trials of a new wound: all the old wounds liked to rise up and start hurting again, too.

  She'd never been injured accidentally before. It was hard to know how to categorise this attack in her mind; it almost seemed funny. She had a dagger scar on one forearm, another on her belly. An arrow gouge from years ago in her back. It was a thing that happened now and then. For every peaceful man, there was a man who wanted to hurt her, even kill her, because she was a gorgeous thing he could not have, or because he'd despised her father. And for every attack that had left a scar there were five or six other attacks she'd managed to stop.

  Tooth marks on one wrist: a wolf monster. Claw marks at one shoulder: a raptor monster. Other wounds, too, the small, invisible kind. Just this morning, in the town, a man's hot eyes on her body, and the man's wife beside him, burning at Fire with jealousy and hatred. Or the monthly humiliation of needing a guard during her woman's bleedings to protect her from monsters who could smell her blood.

  "The attention shouldn't embarrass you," Cansrel would have said. "It should gladden you. Don't you feel it, the joy of having an effect on everyone and everything simply by being?"

  Cansrel had never found any of it humiliating. He'd kept predator monsters as pets – a silvery lavender raptor, a blood-purple mountain lion, a grass-coloured bear glinting with gold, the midnight blue leopard with gold spots. He'd underfed them on purpose and walked among their cages, his hair uncovered, scratching his own skin with a knife so that his blood beaded on the surface. It had been one of his favourite things to make his monsters scream and roar and scrape their teeth on the metal bars, wild with their desire for his monster body.

  She couldn't begin to imagine feeling that way, without fear, or shame.

  The air was turning damp and cold, and peace was too far away for her to reach tonight.

  Slowly she headed back to her tree. She tried to grab hold and climb, but it didn't take much scrabbling at the trunk for her to understand that she was not, under any circumstances, going to be able to enter her bedroom the way she'd exited.

  Leaning into the tree, sore and weary, Fire cursed her stupidity. She had two options now, and neither was acceptable. Either she must turn herself in to the guards at her doors and tomorrow wage a battle over her freedom with Archer, or she must enter the mind of one of those guards and trick his thoughts.

  She reached out tentatively to see who was around. The poacher's mind bobbed against hers, asleep in his cage. Guarding her house were a number of men whose minds she recognised. At her side entrance was an older fellow named Krell who was something of a friend to her – or would have been, did he not have the tendency to admire her too much. He was a musician, easily as talented as she and more experienced, and they played together sometimes, Fire on her fiddle and Krell on flute or whistle. Too convinced of her perfection, Krell, ever to suspect her. An easy mark.

  Fire sighed. Archer was a better friend when he did not know every detail of her life and mind. She would have to do this.

  She slipped up to the house and into the trees near the side door. The feeling of a monster reaching for the gates of one's mind was subtle. A strong and practiced person could learn to recognise the encroachment and slam the gates shut. Tonight Krell's mind was alert for trespassers but not for this type of invasion; he was open and bored, and she crept her way in. He noticed a change and adjusted his focus, startled, but she worked quickly to distract him. You heard something. There it is, can you hear it again? Shouts, near the front of the house. Step away from the door and turn to look.

  Without pause he moved from the entrance and turned his back to her. She crept out of the trees toward the door.

  You hear nothing behind you, only before you. The door behind you is closed.

  He never swung around to check, never even doubted the thoughts she'd implanted in his mind. She opened the door behind him, slipped through, and shut herself in, then leaned against the wall of her hallway for a moment, oddly depressed at how easy that had been. It seemed to her that it shouldn't be so easy to make a man into a fool.

  Rather bleak now with self-disgust, she slumped her way upstairs to her room. A particular song was stuck in her head, dully playing itself over and over, though she couldn't think why. It was the funeral lament sung in the Dells to mourn the waste of a life.

  She supposed thoughts of her father had brought the song to mind. She had never sung it for him or played it on her fiddle. She'd been too numb with grief and confusion to play anything after he'd died. A fire had been lit for him, but she had not gone to see it.

  It had been a gift from Cansrel, her fiddle. One of his strange kindnesses, for he'd never had patience for her music. And now Fire was alone, the only remaining human monster in the Dells, and her fiddle was one of few happy things she had to remember him by.

  Happy.

  Well, she supposed there was a kind of gladness in his remembrance, some of the time. But it didn't change reality. In one way or another, all that was wrong in the Dells could be traced back to Cansrel.

  It was not a thought to bring peace. But delirious now with fa
tigue, she slept soundly, the Dellian lament a backdrop to her dreams.

  Chapter Two

  Fire woke first to pain, and then to the consciousness of an unusual level of agitation in her house. Guards were bustling around downstairs, and Archer was among them.

  When a servant passed her bedroom door Fire touched the girl's mind, summoning her. The girl entered the room, not looking at Fire, glaring mutinously instead at the feather duster in her own hand. Still, at least she had come. Some of them scurried away, pretending not to hear.

  She said stiffly, "Yes, Lady?"

  "Sofie, why are there so many men downstairs?"

  "The poacher in the cages was found dead this morning, Lady," Sofie said. "An arrow in his throat."

  Sofie turned on her heel, snapping the door shut behind her, leaving Fire lying heartsick in bed.

  She couldn't help but feel that this was her fault somehow, for looking like a deer.

  She dressed and went downstairs to her steward, Donal, who was grizzled and strong-headed and had served her since she was a baby. Donal raised a grey eyebrow at her and cocked his head in the direction of the back terrace. "I don't think he much cares whom he shoots," he said.

  Fire knew he meant Archer, whose exasperation she could sense on the other side of the wall. For all of his hot words, Archer did not like people in his care to die.

  "Help me cover my hair, will you, Donal?"

  A minute later, hair wrapped in brown, Fire went out to be with Archer in his unhappiness. The air on the terrace was wet like coming rain. Archer wore a long brown coat. Everything about him was sharp – the bow in his hand and the arrows on his back, his frustrated bursts of movement, his expression as he glared over the hills. She leaned on the railing beside him.

  "I should have anticipated this," he said, not looking at her. "He as good as told us it would happen."

  "There's nothing you could have done. Your guard is already spread too thin."

  "I could have imprisoned him inside."

  "And how many guards would that have taken? We live in stone houses, Archer, not palaces, and we don't have dungeons."

  He swiped at the air with his hand. "We're mad, you know that? Mad to think we can live here, so far from King's City, and protect ourselves from Pikkians and looters and the spies of rebel lords."

  "He hadn't the look or the speech of a Pikkian," she said. "He was Dellian, like us. And he was clean and tidy and civilised, not like any looter we've ever seen."

  The Pikkians were the boat people from the land above the Dells, and it was true that they crossed the border sometimes to steal timber and even labourers from the Dellian north. But the men of Pikkia, though not all alike, tended to be big, and lighter-skinned than their Dellian neighbours – at any rate, not small and dark like the blue-eyed poacher had been. And Pikkians spoke with a distinctive throaty accent.

  "Well," Archer said, determined not to be soothed, "then he was a spy. Lord Mydogg and Lord Gentian have spies crawling all over the kingdom, spying on the king, spying on the prince, spying on each other – spying on you, for all we know," he added grouchily. "Has it never occurred to you that the enemies of King Nash and Prince Brigan might want to steal you and use you as a tool to overthrow the royal family?"

  "You think everyone wants to steal me," Fire said mildly. "If your own father had me tied up and sold to a monster zoo for spare change, you'd claim that you'd suspected him all along."

  He spluttered at this. "You should suspect your friends, or at least anyone other than me and Brocker. And you should have a guard whenever you walk out your door, and you should be quicker to manipulate the people you meet. Then I'd have less cause to worry."

  These were old arguments and he already knew her responses by heart. She ignored him. "Our poacher was a spy of neither Lord Mydogg's nor Lord Gentian's," she said calmly.

  "Mydogg has grown quite an army for himself in the northeast. If he decided to 'borrow' our more central land to use as a stronghold in a war against the king, we wouldn't be able to stop him."

  "Archer, be reasonable. The King's Army wouldn't leave us alone to defend ourselves. And regardless, the poacher was not sent here by a rebel lord; he was far too vapid. Mydogg would never employ a vapid scout, and if Gentian lacks Mydogg's intelligence, well, still, he's not fool enough to send a man with a floating, empty head to do his spying."

  "All right," Archer said, voice rising in exasperation, "then I return to the theory that it's something to do with you. The moment he recognised you he talked about being a dead man, and clearly he was well-informed on that point. Explain it to me, will you? Who was the man, and why the rocks is he dead?"

  He was dead because he'd hurt her, Fire thought; or maybe because she'd seen him and talked to him. Little sense in it, but it would make a good joke, if Archer were in the mood for any sort of joke. The poacher's murderer was a man after Archer's own heart, for Archer also didn't like men to hurt Fire or make her acquaintance.

  "And a rather good shot," she said out loud.

  He was still glowering into the distance, as if he expected the murderer to pop up from behind a boulder and wave. "Hmm?"

  "You'd get along well with this murderer, Archer. He would've had to shoot through both the bars of the outer enclosure and the bars of the poacher's cage, wouldn't he? He must be a good shot."

  Admiration for another archer seemed to cheer him slightly. "More than that. From the depth of the wound and the angle, I think he fired long-range, from the trees beyond that rise." He pointed to the bald patch Fire had climbed the night before. "Through two sets of bars is impressive enough, and then into the man's throat? At least we can be sure none of our neighbours did it personally. Not one of them could have made that shot."

  "Could you?"

  The question was a small gift to him to improve his mood, for there was no shot made that Archer couldn't match. He glanced at her, grinning. Looked at her again more closely. His face softened. "I'm a beast for taking this long to ask how you feel this morning."

  The muscles of her back were tight knots of rope and her bandaged arm ached; her entire body was paying dearly for last night's abuse. "I'm all right."

  "Are you warm enough? Take my coat."

  They sat for a while on the steps of the terrace, Fire wrapped in Archer's coat. They talked about Archer's plans for breaking ground in the fields. Soon enough it would be time for the spring planting, and northern soil, rocky and cold, always resisted the start of a new growing season.

  Now and then Fire sensed a raptor monster overhead. She kept her own mind hidden from them so they wouldn't recognise her for the monster prey she was; but of course, in the absence of monster prey, they ate any living creature available. One that spotted Fire and Archer dropped down and began to circle, posing shamelessly, intangibly lovely, reaching for their minds, radiating a feeling that was hungry, primitive, and oddly soothing. Archer stood and shot it, then shot another that did the same, the first violet like sunrise, the second so pale a yellow it looked like the moon dropping from the sky.

  At least fractured on the ground, Fire thought, the monsters added colour to the landscape. There was little colour in the north of the Dells in early spring – the trees were grey and the grass that tufted between cracks in the rocks was still brown from winter. Truly, even at the height of summer the north of the Dells was not what one would call colourful, but at least in summer, grey with patches of brown turned to grey with patches of green.

  "Who found the poacher, anyway?" Fire asked idly.

  "Tovat," Archer said. "One of the newer guards. You'll not have met him yet."

  "Oh, yes – the young one with the brown-orange hair that people called red. I like him. He's strong-minded and he guards himself."

  "You know Tovat? You admire his hair, do you?" Archer said in a sharp and familiar tone.

  "Archer, honestly. I said nothing of admiring his hair. And I know the names and faces of all the men you station at my house. It'
s simple courtesy."

  "I won't be stationing Tovat at your house any longer," he said, an unpleasant edge to his voice that drove her to silence for a moment, so that she wouldn't say anything unpleasant back about Archer's dubious – and rather hypocritical – right to jealousy. He opened a feeling to her that she didn't particularly care to feel just now. Biting back a sigh, she chose words that would protect Tovat.

  "I hope you'll change your mind. He's one of the few guards who respects me both with his body and in his mind."

  "Marry me," Archer said, "and live in my house, and I will be your guard."

  She could not bite back this sigh. "You know that I won't. I wish you would stop asking me." A fat raindrop plopped onto her sleeve. "I think I'll go and visit your father."

  She stood, creaking with pain, and let his coat slide off into his lap. She touched his shoulder once, gently. Even when she did not like Archer, she loved him.

  As she went into the house, rain began to fall.

  Archer's father lived in Archer's house. Fire asked a guard who was not Tovat to accompany her along the path through the rain. She carried a spear, but still, without her longbow and quiver she felt naked.

  Lord Brocker was in his son's armoury, thundering instructions at a large man Fire recognised as the assistant to the blacksmith in town. At the sight of her Lord Brocker did not let off his thundering, but momentarily he lost the attention of his listener. The blacksmith turned to stare at Fire, some base thing in his eyes and in his silly, stupid smile.

  He'd known Fire for long enough, this man, to have learned how to guard himself against the power of her strange monster beauty, so if he was not guarding himself, then he must not want to. His prerogative, to give up his mind in return for the pleasure of succumbing to her, but not something she cared to encourage. She kept her headscarf on. She pushed his mind away and walked past him into a side room so that she couldn't be seen. A closet really, dark, and with shelves full of oils and polish and ancient, rusted equipment no one ever used.