"No, sir, he isn't. Those men had a kind of mental blankness. This man thinks for himself."
Nash stopped before her and frowned. "Take control of his mind," he said. "Compel him to tell us the name of his master."
The prisoner was exhausted, nursing an injured arm, frightened of the lady monster, and Fire knew she could do what the king commanded easily enough. She gripped Nash's consciousness as tightly as she could. "I'm sorry, Lord King. I only take control of people's minds for the sake of self-defence."
Nash struck her across the face, hard. The blow threw her onto her back. She was scrambling to her feet practically before she'd hit the rug, ready to run, or fight, or do whatever she needed to do to protect herself from him, no matter who he was, but all six of her guards surrounded her now and pulled her out of the king's reach. In the corner of her vision she saw blood on her cheekbone. A tear ran into the blood, and her cheek smarted terribly. He'd cut her with the great square emerald of his ring.
I hate bullies, she thought at him furiously.
The king was crouched on the floor, his head in his hands, his men beside him, confused, whispering to each other. He raised his eyes to Fire. She sensed his mind, clear now, and understanding what he'd done. His face was broken with shame.
Her fury dropped away as quickly as it had come. She was sorry for him.
She sent him a firm message. This is the last time I'll ever appear before you, until you've learned to guard yourself against me.
She turned to the door without waiting for a dismissal.
Fire wondered if a bruise and a square-shaped cut on her cheek might make her ugly. In her bathing room, too curious to stop herself, she held a mirror to her face.
One glance and Fire shoved the mirror under a stack of towels, her question answered. Mirrors were useless, irritating devices. She should have known better.
Musa was perched on the edge of the bath, scowling, as she had been since her guard contingent had returned with their bleeding charge. It irked Musa, Fire knew, to be trapped between Brigan's orders and the king's sovereignty.
"Please don't tell the commander about this," Fire said.
Musa scowled harder. "I'm sorry, Lady, but he asked specifically to be told if the king tried to hurt you."
Princess Clara knocked on the door frame. "My brother tells me he's done an inexcusable thing," she said; and then, at the sight of Fire's face, "Oh my. That's the king's ring clear as day, the brute. Has the healer been?"
"She just left, Lady Princess."
"And what's your plan for your first day at court, Lady? I hope you won't hide just because he's marked you."
Fire realised that she had been going to hide, and the cut and bruising were only a part of it. How relieving, the thought of staying in these rooms with her aches and her nerves until Brigan came back and whisked her home.
"I thought you might like a tour of the palace," Clara said, "and my brother Garan wants to meet you. He's more like Brigan than Nash. He has control of himself."
The king's palace, and a brother like Brigan. Curiosity got the better of Fire's apprehensions.
Naturally, everywhere Fire went she was stared at.
The palace was gigantic, like an indoor city, with gigantic views: the falls, the harbour, white-sailed ships on the sea. The great spans of the city bridges. The city itself, its splendour and its dilapidation, stretching toward golden fields and hills of rocks and flowers. And of course the sky, always a view of the sky from all seven courtyards and all of the upper corridors, where the ceilings were made of glass.
"They don't see you," Clara told Fire, when a pair of raptor monsters perched on a transparent roof made her jump. "The glass is reflective on the outside. They only see themselves. And incidentally, Lady, every window in the palace that opens is fitted with a screen – even the ceiling windows. That was Cansrel's doing."
It wasn't Clara's first mention of Cansrel. Every time she said his name Fire flinched, so accustomed was she to people avoiding the word.
"I suppose it's for the best," Clara continued. "The palace is crawling with monster things – rugs, feathers, jewellery, insect collections. Women wear the furs. Tell me, do you always cover your hair?"
"Usually," Fire said, "if I'm to be seen by strangers."
"Interesting," Clara said. "Cansrel never covered his hair."
Well, and Cansrel had loved attention, Fire thought to herself dryly. More to the point, he had been a man. Cansrel had not had her problems.
Prince Garan was too thin and didn't share his sister's obvious robustness; despite it, he was quite good-looking. His eyes were dark and burning under a thatch of nearly black hair, and there was something furious and graceful about his manner that made him intriguing to watch. Appealing. He was very like his brother the king.
Fire knew he was ill – that as a child he'd been taken by the same fever that had killed her mother, and had come out alive but with ruined health. She also knew, from Cansrel's muttered suspicions and Brocker's certainties, that Garan and his twin Clara were the nerve centre of the kingdom's system of spies. She had found it hard to believe of Clara, following the princess around the palace. But now in Garan's presence Clara's bearing changed to something shrewd and serious, and Fire understood that a woman who gabbed about satin umbrellas and her latest love affair might know quite well how to keep a secret.
Garan was sitting at a long table piled high with documents, in a heavily guarded room full of harassed-looking secretaries. The only noise, other than the rustling of paper, came, rather incongruously, from a child who seemed to be playing shoe tug-of-war with a puppy in the corner. The child stared at Fire momentarily when Fire entered, then politely avoided staring again.
Fire sensed that Garan's mind was guarded against her. She realised suddenly, with surprise, that so was Clara's, and so had Clara's been all along. Clara's personality was so open that Fire had not appreciated the degree to which her mind was closed. The child, too, was carefully shielded.
Garan, in addition to being guarded, was rather unfriendly. He seemed to make a point of not asking Fire the usual civil questions, such as how her trip had been, if she liked her rooms, and whether her face was in much pain from being punched by his brother. He appraised the damage to her cheek blandly. "Brigan can't hear about this until he's done with what he's doing," he said, his voice low enough that Fire's guard, hovering in the background, could not hear.
"Agreed," Clara said. "We can't have him rushing back to spank the king."
"Musa will report it to him," Fire said.
"Her reports go through me," Clara said. "I'll handle it."
With ink-stained fingers Garan shuffled through some papers and slid a single page across the table to Clara. While Clara read it he reached into a pocket and glanced at a watch. He spoke over his shoulder to the child.
"Sweetheart," he said, "don't pretend to me that you don't know the time."
The child gave a great gloomy sigh, wrestled the shoe from the piebald puppy, put the shoe on, and moped out the door. The puppy waited a moment, and then trotted after its – lady? Yes, Fire decided that at the king's court, long dark hair probably trumped boyish clothes, and made her a lady. Five years old, possibly, or six, and presumably Garan's. Garan was not married, but that did not make him childless. Fire tried to ignore her own involuntary flash of resentment at the majority of humanity who had children as a matter of course.
"Hmm," Clara said, frowning at the document before her. "I don't know what to make of this."