"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.
It 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?"
Fire understood, in painful fits and starts, why this hurt so much. It was not the war, or Archer or Brigan. It was not the punishments the perpetrators hadn't foreseen. It was still Brocker's wife, Aliss; it was the very small matter of what Brocker had done to Aliss. Fire had thought she had two fathers who sat on opposite poles. Yet even understanding that her bad father had been capable of kindness, she had never allowed for the possibility that her good father might be capable of cruelty or dishonour.