The following morning she woke to silence, rather than the usual sound of Twy stumping around outside her door. All day long she looked for him on her own grounds and Brocker's, but she couldn't find him. He'd disappeared. Cansrel said, with smooth sympathy, "I suppose he's run away. Dogs do that, you know. Poor darling."
And so Fire learned to lie to her father when he asked if anyone had hurt her.
As the years passed Cansrel's visits became less frequent but lasted longer, for the roads were unsafe. Sometimes, appearing at her door after months away, he brought women with him, or the traders who dealt his animals and drugs, or new monsters for his cages. Sometimes he spent his entire visit strung out on the poison of some plant; or, completely sober, he had strange, arbitrary, gloomy fits of temper, which he took out on everyone but Fire. Other times he was as lucid and lovely as the high notes Fire played on her flute. She dreaded his arrivals, his brassy, gorgeous, dissolute invasions of her quiet life. And after every one of his departures she was so lonesome that music was the only thing to comfort her, and she threw herself headlong into her lessons, never even minding the moments when her teacher was hateful, or resentful of her growing skill.
Brocker never spared her the truth about Cansrel.
I don't want to believe you, she'd think to him after he'd told her another tale of something Cansrel had done. But I know it's true, because Cansrel himself tells me the stories, and he is never ashamed. He means them as lessons to guide my own behaviour. It worries him that I don't use my power as a weapon.
"Does he not understand how different you are from him?" Brocker would ask. "Does he not see that you're built from a different mould entirely?"
Fire couldn't describe the loneliness she felt when Brocker talked that way. How she wished at times that her quiet, plain, and good neighbour had been her true father. She wished to be like Brocker, built from his mould. But she knew what she was and what she was capable of. Even after she'd done away with mirrors, she saw it in other people's eyes, and she knew how easy it would be to make her own miserable life just a little bit more pleasant, the way Cansrel did all the time. She never told anyone, even Archer, how much the temptation of it shamed her.
When she was thirteen the drugs killed Nax, and a twenty-three-year-old Nash became king of a kingdom in shambles. Cansrel's fits of fury became even more frequent. So did his periods of melancholy.
When she was fifteen Cansrel opened the door of the cage that held back his midnight blue leopard monster, and departed from Fire for the last time.
Chapter Three
Fire didn't realise she'd fallen asleep in Lord Brocker's library until she awoke and found herself there. It was Brocker's monster kitten that woke her, swinging from the hem of her dress like a man on the end of a rope. She blinked, adjusting her eyes to the grainy light, absorbing the baby monster's consciousness. It was still raining. No one else was in the room. She massaged the shoulder of her injured arm and stretched in her chair, stiff and achy but feeling better rested.
The kitten climbed his way up her skirts, sank his claws into her knee, and peered at her, hanging. He knew what she was, for her headscarf had slipped back a finger width. The monsters appraised each other. He was bright green with gold feet, this kitten, and his daft little mind was reaching for hers.
Of course, no animal monster could control Fire's mind, but this never stopped some of the more dim varieties from trying. He was too small and silly to think of eating her, but he would want to play, nibble her fingers, lick some blood, and Fire could do without the stings from a monster cat game. She lifted him into her lap and scratched him behind the ears and murmured nonsense about how strong and grand and intelligent he was. For good measure, she sent him a blip of mental sleepiness. He turned a circle in her lap and plopped himself down.
Housecat monsters were prized for keeping down the monster mouse population, and the regular mouse population too. This baby would grow big and fat, live a long, satisfied life, and probably father scores of monster kittens.
Human monsters, on the other hand, tended not to live long. Too many predators, too many enemies. It was for the best that Fire was the only one remaining; and she had decided long ago, even before she'd taken Archer into her bed, that she would be the last. No more Cansrels.
She sensed Archer and Brocker in the hallway outside the library door, and then she heard their voices. Sharp, agitated. One of Archer's moods – or had something new happened while she was sleeping? She touched their minds to let them know she was awake.
A moment later Archer pushed the library door open and held it wide for his father. They came in together, talking, Archer jabbing the air angrily with his bow. "Curse Trilling's guard for trying to take the man alone."
"Perhaps he had no choice," Brocker said.
"Trilling's men are too hasty."
Brocker brightened with amusement. "Interesting accusation, boy, coming from you."
"I'm hasty with my tongue, Father, not my sword." Archer glanced at Fire and her sleeping kitten. "Love. How do you feel?"
"Better."
"Our neighbour Trilling. Do you trust him?"
Trilling was one of the less foolish men Fire dealt with on a regular basis. His wife had employed Fire not only to tutor her boys in music but to teach them how to protect their minds against monster power.
"He's never given me reason to distrust him," she said. "What's happened?"
"He's found two dead men in his forest," Archer said. "One is his own guard, and I regret to say that the other is another stranger. Each with knife wounds and bruises, as if they'd been fighting each other, but what killed them both were arrows. Trilling's guard was shot from a distance in the back. The stranger was shot in the head at close range. Both arrows made of the same white wood as the bolt that killed your poacher."
Fire's mind raced to make sense of it. "The archer came upon them fighting, shot Trilling's guard from far away, then ran up to the stranger and executed him."
Lord Brocker cleared his throat. "Possibly a rather personal execution. Assuming the archer and the stranger were companions, that is, and it does seem likely that all these violent strangers in our woods have something to do with each other, doesn't it? The stranger from today had grievous knife injuries to his legs that might not have killed him, but would certainly have made it difficult for the archer to get him away once Trilling's guard was dead. I wonder if the archer shot Trilling's guard to protect his companion, then realised his companion was too injured to save, and decided to dispose of him, too?"
Fire raised her eyebrows at that, considering, and petted the monster cat absently. If the archer, the poacher, and this new dead stranger had, indeed, been working together, then the archer's responsibility seemed to be clean-up, so that no one was left behind to answer questions about why they were there in the first place. And the archer was good at his job.
Archer stared at the floor, tapping the end of his bow against the hard wood. Thinking. "I'm going to Queen Roen's fortress," he said.