But, she thought, at the end of the day I must give them back. They're not my children – someone else feeds them and tells them stories. I'll never have children. I'm stuck in this town where nothing ever happens and nothing ever will happen and there's never any news. I'm so restless I could take Renner's horrible flute and break it over his head.
She touched her own head, took a breath, and made very sure that Trilling's second son knew nothing of her feeling.
I must find my even temper, she thought. What is it I'm hoping for, anyway? Another murder in the woods? A visit from Mydogg and Murgda and their pirates? An ambush of wolf monsters?
I must stop wishing for things to happen. Because something will happen eventually, and when it does, I'll be bound to wish it hadn't.
The next day, she was walking the path from her house to Archer's, quiver on back and bow in hand, when one of the guards called down to her from Archer's back terrace. "Fancy a reel, Lady Fire?"
It was Krell, the guard she'd tricked the night she'd been unable to climb up to her bedroom window. A man who knew how a flute should be played; and here he was, offering to save her from her own desperate fidgets. "Goodness, yes," she said. "Just let me get my fiddle."
A reel with Krell was always a game. They took turns, each inventing a passage that was a challenge to the other to pick up and join; always keeping in time but raising tempo gradually, so that eventually it took all of their concentration and skill to keep up with each other. They were worthy of an audience, and today Brocker and a number of guards wandered out to the back terrace for the show.
Fire was in the mood for technical gymnastics, which was fortunate, because Krell played as if he were determined to make her break a string. Her fingers flew, her fiddle was an entire orchestra, and every note beautifully brought into being struck a chord of satisfaction within her. She wondered at the unfamiliar lightness in her chest and realised she was laughing.
So great was her focus, it took her a while to register the strange expression that crept to Brocker's face as he listened, finger tapping the armrest of his chair. His eyes were fixed behind Fire and to the right, in the direction of Archer's back doorway. Fire comprehended that someone must be standing in Archer's entrance, someone Brocker watched with startled eyes.
And then everything happened at once. Fire recognised the mind in the doorway; she spun around, fiddle and bow screeching apart; she stared at Prince Brigan leaning against the door frame.
Behind her Krell's quick piping stopped. The soldiers on the terrace cleared throats and turned, falling to attention as they recognised their commander. Brigan's eyes were expressionless. He shifted and stood up straight, and she knew that he was going to speak.
Fire turned and ran down the terrace steps to the path.
Once out of sight Fire slowed and stopped. She leaned over a boulder, gasping for air, her fiddle clunking against the stone with a sharp, dissonant cry of protest. The guard Tovat, the one with the orangish hair and the strong mind, came running up behind her. He stopped beside her.
"Forgive my intrusion, Lady," he said. "You left unarmed. Are you ill, Lady?"
She laid her forehead against the boulder, ashamed because he was right; in addition to fleeing like a chicken from a woman's skirts, she'd left unarmed. "Why is he here?" she asked Tovat, still pressing fiddle and bow and forehead into the boulder. "What does he want?"
"I left too soon to know," Tovat said. "Shall we go back? Do you need a hand, Lady? Do you need the healer?"
She doubted Brigan was the type to make social calls, and he rarely travelled alone. Fire closed her eyes and reached her mind over the hills. She couldn't sense his army, but she found twenty or so men in a group nearby. Outside her front door, not Archer's.
Fire sighed into the rock. She stood, checked her headscarf, and tucked fiddle and bow under her arm. She turned toward her own house. "Come, Tovat. We'll learn soon enough, for he's come for me."
The soldiers outside her door were not like Roen's men or Archer's, who admired her and had reason to trust her. These were ordinary soldiers, and as she and Tovat came into their sight she sensed an assortment of the usual reactions. Desire, astonishment, mistrust. And also guardedness. These men were mentally guarded, more than she would have expected from a random assemblage. Brigan must have selected them for their guardedness; or warned them to remember it.
She corrected herself. They were not all men. Three among them had long hair tied back and the faces and the feeling of women. She sharpened her mind. Five more again were men whose appraisal of her lacked a particular focus. She wondered, hopefully, if they might be men who did not desire women.
She stopped before them. Every one of them stared.
"Well met, soldiers," she said. "Will you come inside and sit?"
One of the women, tall, with hazel eyes and a powerful voice, spoke. "Our orders are to wait outside until our commander returns from Lord Archer's house, Lady."
"Very well," Fire said, somewhat relieved that their orders weren't to seize her and throw her into a burlap bag. She passed through the soldiers to her door, Tovat behind her. She stopped at a thought and turned again to the woman soldier. "Are you in charge, then?"
"Yes, Lady, in the commander's absence."
Fire touched again on the minds in the group, looking for some reaction to Brigan's election of a female officer. Resentment, jealousy, indignation. She found none.
These were not ordinary soldiers after all. She couldn't be sure of his motive, but something had gone into Brigan's choosing.
She stepped inside with Tovat and closed the door on them.
Archer had been in town during the concert on the terrace, but he must have come home shortly thereafter. It was not long before Brigan returned to her door, and this time Brocker and Archer accompanied him.
Donal showed the three men into her sitting room. In an attempt to cover her embarrassment and also to reassure them that she wasn't going to make another dash for the hills, Fire spoke quickly. "Lord Prince, if your soldiers wish to sit or take something to drink, they're welcome in my house."
"Thank you, Lady," he said evenly, "but I don't expect to stay long."
Archer was agitated about something, and Fire didn't need any mental powers to perceive it. She motioned for Brigan and Archer to sit, but both remained standing.
"Lady," Brigan said, "I come on the king's behalf."
He didn't quite look her in the face as he spoke, his eyes touching on the air around her but avoiding her person. She decided to take it as an invitation to study him with her own eyes, for his mind was so strongly guarded against her that she could glean nothing that way.
He was armed with bow and sword, but unarmoured, dressed in dark riding clothes. Clean-shaven. Shorter than Archer but taller than she remembered. He held himself aloof, dark hair and unfriendly eyebrows and stern face, and aside from his refusal to look at her she could sense nothing of his feelings about this interview. She noticed a small scar cutting into his right eyebrow, thin and curved. It matched the scars on her own neck and shoulders. A raptor monster had nearly taken his eye, then. Another scar on his chin. This one straight, a knife or a sword.
She supposed the commander of the King's Army was likely to have as many scars as a human monster.