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  Archer considered the table for a moment, his fingers caressing the edge of his glass, his mind clearly elsewhere. He sighed in the direction of his plate.

  "Peace, Archer," Fire said again.

  Archer's eyes settled on Fire's face. "All right," he said reluctantly, taking her hand. "Peace, because war is unbearable."

  Roen snorted. "You two have the strangest relationship in the Dells."

  Archer smiled slightly. "She won't consent to make it a marriage."

  "I can't imagine what's stopping her. I don't suppose you've considered being less munificent with your love?"

  "Would you marry me, Fire, if I slept in no one's bed but yours?"

  He knew the answer to that, but it didn't hurt to remind him. "No, and I should find my bed quite cramped."

  Archer laughed and kissed her hand, then released it ceremoniously; and Fire picked up her knife and fork, smiling. Shaking her head in disbelief, Roen turned aside to take a note from an approaching servant. "Ah," she said, reading the note and frowning. "It's good that you're going. Lord Mydogg and Lady Murgda are on their way."

  "On their way?" Fire said. "You mean they're coming here?"

  "Just for a visit."

  "A visit! Surely you don't visit each other?"

  "Oh, it's all a farce, of course," Roen said, waving her hand tiredly.

  "Their way of showing that the royal family doesn't intimidate them, and our way of pretending that we're open to dialogue. They come and I have to let them in, because if I refuse them, it'll be taken as a hostile gesture and they'll have an excuse to come back with their army. We sit across from each other, we drink wine, they ask me nosy questions that I don't answer about Nash and Brigan and the royal twins, they tell me secrets their own spies have supposedly learned about Gentian, information that either I already know or they've fabricated. They pretend that the king's real enemy is Gentian, and that Nash should ally with Mydogg against Gentian. I pretend it's a good idea and suggest that Mydogg pass his army over to Brigan's use as a show of faith. Mydogg refuses; we agree we've reached an impasse; Mydogg and Murgda take their leave, poking their noses into as many rooms as they can on the way out."

  Archer's eyebrows were looking skeptical. "Isn't this sort of thing a bit more risky than it's worth? For everyone?"

  "They're coming at a good time – Brigan just left me all those soldiers. And when they're here, we're all so heavily guarded every minute that I don't suppose either side would ever try anything, for fear of all of us getting killed. I'm as safe as I ever am. But," she added, studying both of them gravely, "I want you to depart tomorrow at first light. I won't have you meeting them – there's no reason to get you and Brocker tangled up in Mydogg's nonsense, Archer. And I don't want them to see Fire."

  It was almost achieved. In fact, Fire, Archer, and their guards had travelled some distance from Roen's fortress and were just about to turn off onto a different path when the party from the north approached. Twenty rather fearsome soldiers – chosen because they had the aspects of pirates, with broken teeth and scars? Big and paleish, some of them. Pikkian? And a tough-looking man and woman who had the aura of a winter wind. Easily brother and sister, both squat and thin-lipped and icy in their expressions, until their eyes combed Fire's party and settled, with genuine and uncalculated amazement, on Fire herself.

  The siblings glanced at each other. Some silent understanding passed between them.

  "Come," Archer muttered, motioning to his guards and Fire to move on. The parties clattered past each other without even a greeting.

  Oddly rattled, Fire touched Small's mane, stroking his rough hair. The lord and lady had been only names before, a dot on the Dellian map and a certain unknown quantity of soldiers. Now they were real, and solid, and cold.

  She had not liked the glance they'd shared at the sight of her. Nor did she care for the feeling of their hard eyes on her back as Small carried her away.

  Chapter Nine

  It happened again: only days after Fire and Archer returned home, another man was found trespassing in Archer's forest, a stranger. When the soldiers brought him in, Fire sensed the same mental fog she'd sensed with the poacher. And then before Fire could even begin to consider whether and how to use her power to wangle information from him, an arrow came through the open window, straight into the middle of Archer's guard room, and struck the trespasser between the shoulder blades. Archer threw himself on top of Fire, dragging her down. The trespasser toppled and fell beside her, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. His empty mind fizzled into no mind at all, and from her crushed position on the floor, soldiers' feet yanking at her hair and Archer yelling orders above her, she reached for the archer who'd made the shot.

  He was faint, a good distance away, but she found him. She tried to grasp hold of him but a boot trod on her finger and the explosion of pain distracted her. When she reached for him again he was gone.

  He's run west into Trilling's woods, she thought to Archer, because she had no breath to speak. And his mind is as blank as the others.

  Her finger was not broken, only beastly sore when she moved it. It was the second finger on her left hand so she put off playing harp and flute for a day or two, but she refused to spare herself when it came to her fiddle. She'd been without the instrument for too long. She simply tried not to think of the pain, because every stab of pain was accompanied now by a stab of vexation. Fire was tired of being injured.

  She sat in her bedroom one day, playing a cheerful tune, a song for dancing, but something in her mood slowed the tempo and discovered sad parts in it. Eventually she found herself switching to a different song altogether, one that was manifestly sorrowful, and her fiddle cried out its feeling.

  Fire stopped and lowered the instrument to her lap. She stared at it, then hugged it against her chest like a baby, wondering what was wrong with her.

  She had an image in her head of Cansrel in the moment he had given her this fiddle. "I'm told this has a nice sound, darling," he'd said, holding it out to her almost carelessly, as if it were an inconsequential bit of rubbish that had not cost him a small fortune. She'd taken it, appreciative of its handsomeness but knowing that its real value would depend upon its tone and feeling, neither of which Cansrel could be any judge of. She'd drawn her bow across its strings as an experiment. The fiddle had responded instantly, wanting her touch, speaking to her in a gentle voice that she'd understood and recognised.

  A new friend in her life.

  She'd been unable to hide her pleasure from Cansrel. His own gladness had swelled.

  "You're astonishing, Fire," he'd said. "You're a constant source of wonder to me. I'm never more happy than when I've made you happy. Isn't it peculiar?" he'd said, laughing. "Do you really like it, darling?"

  In her chair in her room, Fire forced herself to look around at the windows and walls and take stock of the present. The light was fading. Archer would be coming back soon from the fields, where he was helping with the plowing. He might have some news about the ongoing search for the archer. Or Brocker might have a letter from Roen with updates about Mydogg and Murgda, or Gentian, or Brigan, or Nash.

  She found her longbow and quiver and, shaking off memories like loose hairs, left her house in search of Archer and Brocker.

  There was no news. There were no letters.

  One monthly bleeding passed for Fire, with all its attendant aches and embarrassments. Everyone in her house, in Archer's house, and in the town knew what it signified whenever she stepped outside with an entourage of guards. Eventually another passed like the first. Summer was near. The farmers were willing potatoes and carrots to take hold in the rocky ground.

  Her lessons progressed much as usual.

  "Stop, I implore you," she said one day at Trilling's, interrupting an earsplitting clamour of flutes and horns. "Let's begin again at the top of the page, shall we? And, Trotter," she begged the eldest boy, "try not to blow so hard; I guarantee you, that shrieking noise is from
blowing too hard. All right? Ready?"

  The enthusiastic massacre began once more. She did love the children. Children were one of her small joys, even when they were fiends to each other; even when they imagined they were hiding things from her, like their own idleness or, in some cases, their talent. Children were smart and malleable. Time and patience made them strong and stopped them fearing her or adoring her too much. And their frustrations were familiar to her, and dear.

  But, she thought, at the end of the day I must give them back. They're not my children – someone else feeds them and tells them stories. I'll never have children. I'm stuck in this town where nothing ever happens and nothing ever will happen and there's never any news. I'm so restless I could take Renner's horrible flute and break it over his head.

  She touched her own head, took a breath, and made very sure that Trilling's second son knew nothing of her feeling.

  I must find my even temper, she thought. What is it I'm hoping for, anyway? Another murder in the woods? A visit from Mydogg and Murgda and their pirates? An ambush of wolf monsters?

  I must stop wishing for things to happen. Because something will happen eventually, and when it does, I'll be bound to wish it hadn't.

  The next day, she was walking the path from her house to Archer's, quiver on back and bow in hand, when one of the guards called down to her from Archer's back terrace. "Fancy a reel, Lady Fire?"

  It was Krell, the guard she'd tricked the night she'd been unable to climb up to her bedroom window. A man who knew how a flute should be played; and here he was, offering to save her from her own desperate fidgets. "Goodness, yes," she said. "Just let me get my fiddle."

  A reel with Krell was always a game. They took turns, each inventing a passage that was a challenge to the other to pick up and join; always keeping in time but raising tempo gradually, so that eventually it took all of their concentration and skill to keep up with each other. They were worthy of an audience, and today Brocker and a number of guards wandered out to the back terrace for the show.

  Fire was in the mood for technical gymnastics, which was fortunate, because Krell played as if he were determined to make her break a string. Her fingers flew, her fiddle was an entire orchestra, and every note beautifully brought into being struck a chord of satisfaction within her. She wondered at the unfamiliar lightness in her chest and realised she was laughing.

  So great was her focus, it took her a while to register the strange expression that crept to Brocker's face as he listened, finger tapping the armrest of his chair. His eyes were fixed behind Fire and to the right, in the direction of Archer's back doorway. Fire comprehended that someone must be standing in Archer's entrance, someone Brocker watched with startled eyes.

  And then everything happened at once. Fire recognised the mind in the doorway; she spun around, fiddle and bow screeching apart; she stared at Prince Brigan leaning against the door frame.

  Behind her Krell's quick piping stopped. The soldiers on the terrace cleared throats and turned, falling to attention as they recognised their commander. Brigan's eyes were expressionless. He shifted and stood up straight, and she knew that he was going to speak.

  Fire turned and ran down the terrace steps to the path.

  Once out of sight Fire slowed and stopped. She leaned over a boulder, gasping for air, her fiddle clunking against the stone with a sharp, dissonant cry of protest. The guard Tovat, the one with the orangish hair and the strong mind, came running up behind her. He stopped beside her.

  "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 travelled 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 unarmoured, 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, 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."