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 fatigue, 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.