Lan himself only noticed this with a tiny part of his mind that was numb and frozen with horror, unable to act or think, only able to observe. The rest of him was consumed with flame, was the flame, and existed only to feed itself.
It reached for the nearest source of fuel; the chair, the three bodies already afire and silent now, the other boys, who were trapped. He was between them and the door, and the fire was hungry... and very, very, angry.
Flames blossomed all around him, sending his hair rising upward, propelled by tiny flames that licked the air savagely, a nimbus of fury that nevertheless did not touch him. One of the boys tried to dash past him, making for the door.
The fury inside him recognized the attempt at escape, and intercepted him before Lan realized what was happening. The boy exploded into flame like the other three and dropped like a shot bird to the floor.
The others shrieked in uncomprehending terror.
Their reaction only fed the fire further; it pulsed out to fill the room, as the boys backed up in a pathetic attempt to evade it. One of them shouted the first actual word that any of them had spoken until that moment, staring past the flames to Lan.
"Please!" he screamed, as the fires touched his flesh. "Please!"
Something snapped inside him again. With an agonizing wrench that sent him to his knees, Lan wrested back some control from the thing that was consuming them.
The flames receded, pulling back just enough so that the burned and blistered boys could stumble past him and out the door to freedom.
Lan wrestled with a force that didn't want to be controlled, that resisted him with his own strength. The flames flared again, and the walls of the room began to smoke.
Outside, someone had caught sight of the flames and sounded an alarm. There was shouting, screams, a confusion of noise. Lan ignored all of that, battling with the rage inside himself, grappling with a thing that had taken on an evil life all its own.
Now it was even turning its fury on its host; it was Lan's turn to scream in agony as the flames licked his flesh. But that was the power's undoing.
Lan simply could not bear anymore. He slumped over as darkness, a cool, welcoming darkness, beckoned to him to fall into it. His eyes cleared once before that final dark, and saw without comprehension, the flames around him flickering, and dying out, leaving only a few spots of sullenly burning fire in the room itself.
He did not want to think what fueled those fires, for there were four of them.
But the hold that the anger, fear, and fire had over him was gone. Obedient at last, his mind gave itself up to darkness and his body toppled to the floor of the burned-out room.
EIGHT
WHEN Pol first opened his eyes, he found, much to his bemusement, that he was in an unfamiliar room. That was not necessarily an unusual circumstance, but this wasn't a waystation or an inn, which would have made sense; it was a pleasant, but rather bare chamber with pale green walls, and that didn't ring any notes of familiarity.
Then the Healer came in, and he remembered, with unnatural clarity, the rain, the wind, Satiran's neigh of surprise, and something rushing at him. He didn't know this Healer, a lean, hard stick of a man, with his hair going sparse around the temples, but any Healer at the Collegium would be a good one. As always, the Healer wore garments in the standard color of deepest green, but he chose a long tunic and trews rather than floor-length robes.
"A tree fell on me?" he said aloud, incredulously. "A tree fell on me?"
"That's what your Companion tells us," the Healer replied, with a dry chuckle. "Evidently the soil was too water-soaked to hold it anymore; from what the rescuers had to tell me it was a giant. They took a while cutting you loose." The Healer raised Pol's head and tucked another pillow behind him to get him propped up. "Your Companion couldn't get out of the way fast enough, but you were the one that got a solid blow to the head. He was just battered and bruised; pinned, but conscious, and able to summon help."
Pol groaned. If that just wasn't his luck! It seemed that anytime he was involved in anything that produced injuries, he was the one that got the worst of it.
On the other hand, I'm not dead yet, so maybe I am lucky.
"You're really quite lucky," the Healer echoed his thoughts, taking his chin in one hand and turning his head to both sides, examining his eyes, then the bruises around his face and head. "From the look of things they tell me, a little more or less to one side or the other, and you'd both have been hit by a main trunk piece and not just a branch."
"Have I missed anything?" he asked. "Anything important happen? How long have I been unconscious? Is my skull cracked?"
"Yes, but nothing to worry about, four days, nothing in Collegium or Court, but there was some excitement down in town." The Healer left off prodding at Pol's bruises; apparently he'd taken a solid hit, but his scalp hadn't split open, since his head wasn't bandaged. Or else it did, but they mended it quickly and washed the blood out of my hair. Or the rain did. He didn't have much of a headache either, so the Healers must have put in some serious work on his skull.
The Healer frowned a bit, though not at Pol. "The Merchants' and Crafts' Guilds had set up a sort of Collegium of their own to educate their brighter children, the ones who weren't falling right into their parents' Guilds. There was a fire there three days ago; four boys were killed, and several burned badly."
That made him sit right up straight, which did start his head pounding. "Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "How did that happen?"
"That's the strange thing; nobody seems to know," the Healer replied, pushing him back down in the bed and putting a soothing hand on his forehead that erased the pain. "The boys have a peculiar story about the fire coming from out of nowhere." His frown deepened. "They also have no explanation for being in the building, in an unused classroom, at that time of the late afternoon. Classes were long over, and they should have been home. If they were staying after hours, studying, they should have been in their own classrooms."
Pol pursed his lips, thoughtfully. "You think they started the fire?" It wouldn't be the first time that adolescents started a fire as a prank or to vandalize and had it get away from them.
"I think the Guard thinks they did," the Healer replied. "They're questioning all the boys that are fit to talk to. I'm not so sure. I'm treating one of the injured, the youngest of the lot."
Pol looked inquiring and attentive, and the Healer continued. "The thing that bothers me is that all but one were in the same age group, the same clique. The odd one was a new student, and was in one of the much lower classes. They shouldn't have had anything to do with him, so what was he doing with them at that time of the day?"
Something had roused the Healer's suspicions, that was certain. "Where's that particular boy?" he asked, sensing that this Healer, at least, wanted someone with authority to get to the bottom of this.