Fire (42 page)

A soldier she remembered quite well was brought in one day, an arrow embedded in his thigh. It was the man who had once lent her his fiddle - the enormous, craggy, gentle tree of a man. She smiled to see him. They had quiet conversations now and then, she easing his pain as his wound healed. He saying little about her dead fingers, but an expression on his face, whenever he looked at them, that conveyed the depth of his empathy.

When Brocker arrived he took her hands and held them to his face, and cried into them.

WITH BROCKER CAME not only Roen but Mila, for Brocker had asked the girl to serve as his military assistant, and Mila had accepted. Brocker and Roen - old friends who had not seen each other since the time of King Nax - now were practically inseparable, and Mila was often with them.

Fire saw Nash only now and then, coming to the fort for information or to strategise with Garan and Clara, Brocker and Roen. Dirty and haggard, his smiles thin.

‘I believe King Nash will come back,’ Mila would say to Fire calmly every time he left again for the caves. Even though Fire knew there was no logic backing Mila’s assertion, the words comforted her.

Mila had changed. She worked hard beside Brocker, quiet and intent. ‘I learned that there’s a drug to end a pregnancy when it first announces itself,’ she told Fire lightly one day. ‘It’s too late for me, of course. Did you know about it, Lady?’

Fire was stunned. ‘Of course not, or I would have told you, and found it for you.’

‘Clara told me about it,’ Mila said. ‘The king’s healers are impressive, but it does seem as if you need to have grown up in certain sections of King’s City even to have a hope of knowing all they’re capable of. I was angry when I heard,’ she added. ‘I was furious. But it’s no use, really, to think about it now. I’m no different from anyone else, am I, Lady? We’re all walking paths we would never have chosen for ourselves. I suppose I grow tired sometimes of my own complaining.’

‘That boy of mine,’ Brocker said, later the same day. He was sitting beside Fire in a chair on the roof, where he’d consented to be carried because he’d wanted to see the grey dappled horse. He shook his head and grunted. ‘My boy. I expect I have grandchildren I’ll never know about. Trust him to die, so instead of my being furious about Mila and Princess Clara, I’m comforted.’

They watched the dance taking place on the ground before them: two horses circling each other, one plain and brown who stretched his nose out occasionally in an attempt to plant a wet kiss on the other’s elusive grey rump. Fire was trying to make friends of the two horses, for the mare, if she truly intended to follow Fire wherever she went, was going to need a few more souls in the world that she could trust. Today the mare had stopped trying to intimidate Small by rearing at him and kicking. This was progress.

‘She’s a river mare,’ Brocker said.

‘A what?’

‘A river mare. I’ve seen one or two dappled greys like that before; they come from the mouth of the Winged River. I don’t think there’s much of a common market for river horses, despite them being so fine - they’re absurdly expensive, on account of being hard to catch and even harder to break. They’re not as sociable as other horses.’

Fire remembered then that Brigan had spoken once, covetously, of river horses. She also remembered that the mare had carried her stubbornly south and west from Cutter’s estate, until Fire had turned her around. She had been trying to go home - to take Fire to her home where the river began. Now she was here, where she had not wanted to be, but where she’d chosen to be nonetheless.

Dear Brigan, she thought to herself. People want incongruous, impossible things. Horses do, too.

‘Has the commander had a look at her yet?’ Brocker asked, sounding amused by his own question. Apparently Brocker was acquainted with Brigan’s stance on horses.

‘I care nothing of her value,’ Fire said softly, ‘and I will not help him break her.’

‘You’re not being fair,’ Brocker said mildly. ‘The boy is known for his kindness to horses. He doesn’t break animals that show no inclination toward him.’

‘But what horse wouldn’t be inclined?’ Fire said, and then stopped, because she was being silly and sentimental, and saying too much.

A moment later Brocker said, in an odd, bewildered voice she didn’t entirely know what to think of, ‘I’ve made some grievous mistakes, and my mind spins when I try to comprehend all that has come of them. I have not been the man I should have been, not to anyone. Perhaps,’ he said, staring into his lap, ‘I have been justly punished. Oh, child, your fingers break my heart. Could you teach yourself to finger the strings with your right hand?’

Fire reached for his hand and gripped it as tightly as she could, but didn’t answer. She had thought of playing her fiddle opposite-handed, but it seemed very much like starting from a base of nothing. Eighteen-year-old fingers did not learn how to fly across strings anywhere as easily as five-year-old fingers did, and besides, a bow would be a great deal for a hand with only two fingers and a thumb to manage.

Her fiddler patient had offered another suggestion. What if she kept her fiddle in her left hand and her bow in her right, as usual, but refingered her music so that it was playable with only two fingers? How fast could she reach the strings, and how accurately? At night once, when it was dark and her guard couldn’t see, she’d pretended to hold her fiddle and push her two fingers against imaginary strings. It had seemed a bumbling, useless, depressing exercise at the time. Brocker’s question made her wonder if she mightn’t try again.

A WEEK LATER she came to understand the rest of Brocker’s words.

She had stayed late in the healing room, saving a man’s life. It was a thing she was able to do very occasionally: a matter of will-power in the soldiers closest to death, some in agonies of pain and some not even conscious. In their moment of giving up she could give them mettle, if they wanted it. She could help them hold on to their disappearing selves. It didn’t always work. A man who couldn’t stop bleeding would never live, no matter how adamantly he fought death back. But sometimes, what she gave them was just enough.

Of course, it left her exhausted.

On this day she was hungry, and knew there would be food in the offices where Garan and Clara, Brocker and Roen spent their days waiting anxiously for messages and arguing. Except that today they weren’t arguing, and as she entered with her guard she sensed an unusual lightness. Nash was there, sitting beside Mila, chatting, a truer smile on his face than Fire had seen there in some time. Garan and Clara ate peacefully from bowls, and Brocker and Roen sat together at a table, drawing lines across a topographical map of what appeared to be the bottom half of the kingdom. Roen muttered something that caused Brocker to chuckle.

‘What is it?’ Fire said. ‘What’s happened?’

Roen looked up from her map and gestured at a tureen of stew on the table. ‘Ah, Fire. Sit down. Eat something, and we’ll tell you why the war isn’t hopeless. What about you, Musa? Neel? Are you hungry? Nash,’ she said, twisting around to regard her son critically. ‘Come and get more stew for Mila.’

Nash pushed himself up from his chair. ‘I see that everyone is to have stew but me.’

‘I’ve watched you eat three bowls of stew,’ Roen said severely, and Fire sat down rather hard, for the teasing in this room made her weak with a relief she wasn’t sure yet it was safe to be feeling.

And then Roen explained that a pair of their scouts on the southern front had made two rather cheerful discoveries back to back. First they’d identified the labyrinthine path of the enemy’s food supply route through the tunnels, and second, they’d located a series of caves east of the fighting where the enemy was stabling the majority of its horses. Commandeering both supply route and caves had been merely a matter of a couple of well-placed attacks by the king’s forces. And now it would only be a matter of days before Gentian’s men ran out of food; and without horses to escape on, they would be left with no option but to surrender, allowing the majority of the First and Second to race north to reinforce Brigan’s troops.

Or at least, this was what the smiling faces in this office supposed would happen. And Fire had to own that it did seem likely, as long as Gentian’s army didn’t block the King’s Army’s own supply route in turn, and as long as anyone was left in the Third and Fourth to be reinforced by the First and Second by the time the First and Second reached the north.

‘This is his doing,’ Fire heard Roen murmur to Brocker. ‘Brigan mapped these tunnels, and before he left here, he and his scouts worked out all the most likely locations for the supply routes and the horses specifically. He got it right.’

‘Of course he did,’ Brocker said. ‘He surpassed me a long time ago.’

Something in his tone caused Fire to stop her spoon halfway to her mouth and scrutinise him, listening to his words again in her mind. It was the pride in his voice that rang strange. And of course, Brocker had always spoken proudly of the boy commander who’d followed his own path so magnificently. But today he sounded as if he were crossing over into indulgence.

He looked up at her to see why she was staring. His eyes, pale and clear, caught hers, and held.

She understood for the first time what Brocker had done twenty-some years ago to set Nax into a rage.

As she pushed away from the table Brocker’s voice carried after her, tired, and oddly defeated. ‘Fire, wait. Fire, love, let me talk to you.’

She ignored him. She shouldered her way through the door.

I T WAS ROEN who came to her on the roof.

‘Fire,’ she said. ‘We’d like to talk to you, and it would be much easier for Lord Brocker if you would come down.’

Fire was amenable to this, because she had questions, and rather explosive things she found herself wanting to say. She folded her arms at Musa and looked into Musa’s hazel eyes. ‘Musa, you may complain to the commander all you like, but I insist on speaking to the queen and Lord Brocker alone. Do you understand me?’

Musa cleared her throat uncomfortably. ‘We’ll station ourselves outside the door, Lady.’

Downstairs in Brocker’s living quarters with the door closed and locked, Fire stood against a wall and stared not at Brocker but at the great wheels of his chair. Every once in a while she glanced into his face, and then into Roen’s, because she couldn’t help herself. It seemed to her that this was happening too often lately, that she should look into a face and see someone else there, and understand pieces of the past that she had not understood before.

Roen’s black hair with its white streak was pulled back tightly, and her face was also tight, with concern. She came and stood beside Brocker, gently putting a hand on his shoulder. Brocker reached up and touched Roen’s hand. Even knowing what she now knew, the unfamiliarity of the gesture startled Fire.

‘I have never seen the two of you together before this war,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Brocker said. ‘You’ve never known me to travel, child. The queen and I haven’t once been in each other’s company since—’

Roen finished for him quietly. ‘Since the day Nax set those brutes on you in my green house, I do believe.’

Fire glanced at her sharply. ‘You saw it happen?’

Roen gave a grim nod. ‘I was made to watch. I believe he hoped I would miscarry my bastard baby.’

And so Nax had been inhuman, and Fire felt the force of it; but still, she could not get around the fact of her anger.

‘
Archer
is your son,’ she said to Brocker, choking on her own indignation.

‘Of course Archer is my son,’ Brocker said heavily. ‘He has always been my son.’

‘Did he even know he had any kind of brother? He could’ve benefited from a steady brother like Brigan. And Brigan, does he know? I won’t keep it from him.’

‘Brigan knows, child,’ Brocker said, ‘though Archer never did, to my regret. When Archer died, I understood that Brigan must know. We told him, just weeks ago, when he came to the northern front.’

‘And what of him? Brigan could have stood to call
you
father, Brocker, rather than a mad king who hated him because he was cleverer and stronger than his own true son. He could have grown up in the north away from Nax and Cansrel and never had to become—’ She stopped and turned her face away, trying to calm her frantic voice. ‘Brigan should have been a northern lord, with a farm and a holding and a stable full of horses. Not a prince.’

‘But Brigandell
is
a prince,’ Roen said quietly. ‘He is my son. And Nax was the only one with the power to disinherit him and send him away, and Nax would never have done that. He would never have admitted publicly that he was a cuckold.’

‘And so for Nax’s pride,’ Fire said desperately, ‘Brigan has taken on the role of saviour of the kingdom. It’s not fair. It’s not fair,’ she cried, knowing it was a child’s argument but not caring, because being childish did not make it untrue.

‘Oh, Fire,’ Roen said. ‘You can see as well as any of us that the kingdom needs Brigan exactly where he is now, just as it needs you, and every other one of us, whether or not our lots are fair.’

Roen’s voice contained terrible grief. Fire looked into her face, trying to imagine the woman she had been twenty-some years ago. Intelligent, and fiercely capable, and finding herself married to a king who was puppet to a maniacal puppeteer. Roen had watched her marriage - and her kingdom - fall to ruin.

Fire’s gaze moved to Brocker then, who held her eyes unhappily.

It was Brocker she could not forgive.

‘Brocker, my father,’ she said. ‘You did such an unkind thing to your wife.’

‘Would you wish it had never happened,’ Roen cut in, ‘and Archer and Brigan never born?’

‘That is a cheater’s argument!’

‘But you’re not the one who’s been cheated, Fire,’ Roen said. ‘Why should it hurt you so much?’

‘Would we be at war now, if you two hadn’t provoked Nax into ruining his own military commander? Haven’t we all been cheated?’

‘Do you imagine,’ Roen said with rising frustration, ‘that the kingdom was headed down a path to peace?’