"Today," she announced triumphantly to Garan and Clara, "a woman came in who'd dropped a cleaver on her foot and cut off her own toe. The surgeons reattached it. Can you believe it? With their tools and their drugs I almost believe they could reattach a leg. We must give more money to the hospitals, you know. We must train more surgeons and build hospitals all over the kingdom. We must build schools!"
"I wish I could take my legs off," Clara groaned, "until this baby is born, and then have them reattached afterwards. And my back, too. And my shoulders."
Fire went to Clara to rub her shoulders, and to ease into Clara's mind and take away what she could of Clara's haggard feeling. Garan, who was not attending to either of them, scowled at the papers on his desk. "All the mines in the south that were closed before the war have been reopened," he said. "And now Brigan believes the miners are not paid enough. Nash agrees, the vexing rockhead."
Fire slid her knuckles against the knots of muscle in Clara's neck. The metalsmith of the palace had made two fingers for her that attached to her hand with straps and helped her with picking things up and carrying. They didn't help with massage, so she pulled them off, and pulled her headscarf off too, releasing the tension of her own scalp. "Mining is hard work," she said, "and dangerous."
Garan slapped his pen onto the table beside her metal fingers. "We are not made of money."
"Isn't it the kingdom's gold they're mining?"
He frowned at this. "Clara, where do you stand?"
"I don't care," Clara moaned. "No, don't leave that spot. It's exactly right."
Garan watched Fire massaging his extremely pregnant sister. When Clara moaned again, his grimace began to turn up at the corners. "Have you heard what people are calling you, Fire?" he asked.
"What is it now?"
" 'The monster life-giver'. And I've also heard the term 'monster protector of the Dells' bandied about."
"Rocks," Fire said under her breath.
"And there are ships in the harbour that have put up new sails in red, orange, pink, and green. Have you seen them?"
"Those are all colours of the Dellian standard," Fire said – other than pink, she added quietly to herself, ignoring a streak of pink in her peripheral vision.
"Of course," Garan said. "And I suppose that's your explanation for what they're doing to the new bridge."
Fire took a small breath, braced herself, and rested eyes on Garan. "What are they doing to the bridge?"
"The builders have decided to paint the towers green," he said, "and line the cross-ribs with mirrors."
Fire blinked. "What's that got to do with me?"
"Imagine," Garan said, "how it will look at sunrise and sunset."
A strange thing happened inside Fire: quite suddenly, she lost her fight. She stood back from the feeling this city bore for her and saw it plainly. It was undeserved. It was based not on her, but on stories, on an idea of her, an exaggeration. This is what I am to people, she thought to herself. I don't know what it means, but it's what I am to people.
I'm going to have to accept it.
She had small things that Archer had given her that she had used every day without thinking. Her quiver and her arm guard, soft and comfortable with the wear of years – these had been gifts, ages ago, from Archer. A part of her wanted to put them aside now, because every time she saw them her heart shrank around a private pain. But she couldn't do it. Replacing them with some other quiver and arm guard was impossible.
She was touching the soft leather of her arm guard one day in a sunny corner of the main courtyard, and thinking, when she fell asleep in her chair. She woke abruptly to Hanna slapping her and yelling, which confused her entirely and alarmed her, until she understood that Hanna had found a trio of monster bugs flitting across Fire's neck and arms, eating her to pieces, and was trying to rescue her.
"Your blood must taste awfully good," the child said doubtfully, running her fingertips over the angry welts that rose on Fire's skin, and counting.
"Only to monsters," Fire said dismally. "Here, give them to me. Are they utterly smashed? I have a student who'd probably like to dissect them."
"They've bitten you one hundred and sixty-two times," Hanna announced. "Does it itch?"
It did itch, agonisingly, and when she came upon Brigan in his bedroom – only recently returned from his long trip north – she was more combative than usual.
"I'll always be attracting bugs," she said to him belligerently.
He looked up, pleased to see her, if a bit surprised at her tone. "So you will," he said, coming to touch the bites on her throat. "Poor thing. Is it uncomfortable?"
"Brigan," she said, annoyed that he had not understood. "I'll always be beautiful. Look at me. I have one hundred and sixty-two bug bites, and has it made me any less beautiful? I'm missing two fingers and I have scars all over, but does anyone care? No! It just makes me more interesting! I'll always be like this, stuck in this beautiful form, and you'll have to deal with it."
He seemed to sense that she expected a grave response, but for the moment, he was incapable. "I suppose it's a burden I must bear," he said, grinning.
"Brigan."
"Fire, what is it? What's wrong?"
"I'm not how I look," she said, bursting suddenly into tears. "I look beautiful and placid and delightful, but it's not how I feel."
"I know that," he said quietly.
"I will be sad," she said defiantly. "I will be sad, and confused, and irritable, very often."
He held up a finger and went into the hallway, where he tripped over Blotchy, and then over the two monster cats madly pursuing Blotchy. Swearing, he leaned over the landing and called to the guard that unless the kingdom fell to war or his daughter was dying, he had better not be interrupted until further notice. He came back in, shut the door, and said, "Fire. I know that."
"I don't know why terrible things happen," she said, crying harder now. "I don't know why people are cruel. I miss Archer, and my father too, no matter what he was. I hate that Murgda will be killed once she's had her baby. I won't allow it, Brigan, I'll sneak her out, I don't care if I end up in prison in her place. And I'm so unbearably itchy!"
Brigan was hugging her now. He was no longer smiling, and his voice was sober. "Fire. Do you imagine I want you to be thoughtless and chipper, and without all those feelings?"
"Well, I can't imagine that this is what you want!"
He said, "The moment I began to love you was the moment when you saw your fiddle smashed on the ground, and you turned away from me and cried against your horse. Your sadness is one of the things that makes you beautiful to me. Don't you see that? I understand it. It makes my own sadness less frightening."
"Oh," she said, not following every word, but comprehending the feeling, and knowing all at once the difference between Brigan and the people who built her a bridge. She rested her face against his shirt. "I understand your sadness, too."