"Fire," he said. "Will you do something for me? Will you send me word on the northern front, so I know how you're faring?"
"I don't love you."
"Does that mean you won't send word?"
"No," she said confusedly. "Yes. I'll send word. But – "
"Fire," he said gently, beginning to untangle himself from her. "You must feel what you feel. I – "
Another voice, sharp with impatience, interrupted from the doorway. "Commander! The horses are standing."
Brigan spun around to face the man, swearing with as much exasperation and fury as Fire had ever heard anyone swear. The man scuttled away in alarm.
"I love you," Brigan said very calmly to Fire's back. "I hope in the coming days it may comfort you to know that. And all I ask of you is that you try to eat, Fire, and sleep, no matter how you feel. Eat and sleep. And send me word, so I know how you are. Tell me if there's anyone, or anything, I can send to you."
Go safely. Go safely, she thought to him as he left the building and his convoy pounded through the gates.
What a silly, empty thing it was to say to anyone, anywhere.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Fire guessed that there was little for a person with no hands to do at Fort Flood. Clara was busy with Brigan's captains and a constant stream of messengers, and Garan rarely even showed his face, scowling in his customary manner when he did. Fire avoided them, as she avoided the room where endless rows of soldiers lay suffering.
She was not permitted to step outside the walls of the fortress. She divided her time between two places: the bedroom she shared with Clara, Musa, and Margo, feigning sleep whenever Clara entered, for Clara asked too many questions about Archer. And the heavily guarded roof of the fort, where she stood in a warm hooded cloak, hands enclosed safely in her armpits, and communed with the grey dappled horse.
The mare – for Fire was clear-minded enough now to know she was a mare – was living on the rocks north of the building. She had broken away from Fire's group as they'd approached the fort and, despite the attempts of the horsemaster, would not consent to being stabled along with the other horses. Fire refused to allow anyone to subdue her with drugs, nor would Fire herself compel the horse into confinement. The horsemaster had thrown his arms in the air in disgust. This horse was obviously an uncommonly fine animal, but he was up to his elbows in injured horses and cast shoes and broken field harnesses, and had no time to waste on a recalcitrant.
And so the mare lived free on the rocks, eating food if it was left for her, finding food if it wasn't, and coming to visit Fire whenever Fire called to her. Her feeling was strange and wild, her mind a marvellous unbroken thing that Fire could touch and influence, but never truly comprehend. She belonged alone on the rocks, unconstrained, and vicious when she needed to be.
And yet there was love in the feeling of her too – constraining, in its way. This horse had no intention of leaving Fire.
They spent time within view of each other, their feelings connected by the tether of Fire's power. She was beautiful to look at, her coat soft patches and circles of grey, her mane and her tail thick and long, and tangled, and deep grey like slate. Her eyes were blue.
Fire wished she were allowed out of the fort. She would like to join the horse on the rocks, and climb onto her back, and be carried away wherever the horse wanted to go.
Garan came stalking into her bedroom one morning while she was curled under her covers, trying to numb herself to the burning of her hands and pretending to sleep. He stood over her and said without preliminary, "Get up, Fire. We need you."
It was not said with anger, but it didn't have the feeling of a request, either. Fire blinked up at him. "My hands are useless," she said.
"What we need you for does not require hands."
Fire closed her eyes. "You want me to question someone. I'm sorry, Garan. I don't feel well enough."
"You'd feel better if you got up and stopped moping," he said bluntly, "and anyway, it's not an interrogation we need you for."
Fire was furious. "You never took Archer into your heart. You care nothing for what happened."
Garan spoke hotly. "You can't see into my heart, or you wouldn't say such a stupid thing. I'm not leaving this room until you get up. There's a war going on not a stone's throw from here, and I've enough that's heavy on my mind without you wasting yourself away like a self-absorbed brat. Do you want me to have to send a message to Brigan and Nash and Brocker one day, telling them you died, of nothing in particular? You're making me ill, Fire, and I beg you, if you won't get up for yourself, do it for me. I'm not keen on dying."
Fire had pushed herself to a seated position somewhere in the middle of this remarkable speech, and now her eyes were open and seeing. Garan's skin was sweaty and he was breathing rapidly. He was, if possible, thinner than he had been before, and pain flickered in his face. Fire reached up to him, distressed now, and gestured for him to sit. When he did, she smoothed his hair with her own bandaged knob of a hand. She helped him to calm his breath.
"You've lost weight," he said to her finally, his unhappy eyes on her face. "And you have this horrible empty look in your eyes that makes me want to shake you."
Fire smoothed his hair again, and chose her words carefully, finding ones that would not make her cry. "I don't think I'm moping, exactly," she said. "I don't feel entirely connected to myself, Garan."
"Your power is strong," he said. "I can feel it. You soothed me right away."
She wondered if a person could be powerful, but inside be broken into pieces, and shaking, all the time.
She studied him again. He really didn't look well. He was carrying too much.
"What is the work you need me to do?" she asked.
He said, "Would you be willing to ease the pain of the soldiers in this fort who are dying?"
The healing work of the fort took place in the enormous downstairs ward that was the residence of five hundred soldiers during peacetime. There was no glass in the windows and the shutters were drawn now to conserve heat, which came from fireplaces along the walls and from a fire in the middle of the floor, its smoke billowing haphazardly toward an open flue in the ceiling that led all the way to the roof and the sky.
The room was dim, and soldiers were moaning and crying out, and the place had a smell of blood and smoke and something else cloying that stopped Fire at the entrance. It was too much like stepping into one of her nightmares. She couldn't do it.
But then she saw a man lying on his back in a bed, his nose and ears black like her fingers, and only one hand resting on his chest, for the other was gone completely, a stump wrapped with gauze. He was gritting his teeth, hot and shaking, and Fire went to him, because she could not stop her compassion.
At the very sight of her, some panic inside him seemed to still. She sat at the edge of the bed and looked into his eyes. She understood that he was exhausted, but too distracted with pain and fear to rest. She took away his sense of his pain and soothed his fear. She helped him to fall asleep.
This was how Fire became a fixture in the healing room; for she was even better than the surgeons' drugs at taking pain away, and every kind of pain was present in that room. Sometimes it was enough to sit with a soldier to calm him, and sometimes, as when he was having an arrow pulled, or a waking surgery, it took more. There were days when her mind was in several parts of the room at once, soothing pain where it was worst, while her body walked up and down the rows of patients, her hair loose and her eyes seeking the eyes of the men and women in the beds who felt less frightened for having seen her.