Leaning into the tree, sore and weary, Fire cursed her stupidity. She had two options now, and neither was acceptable. Either she must turn herself in to the guards at her doors and tomorrow wage a battle over her freedom with Archer, or she must enter the mind of one of those guards and trick his thoughts.

She reached out tentatively to see who was around. The poacher's mind bobbed against hers, asleep in his cage. Guarding her house were a number of men whose minds she recognised. At her side entrance was an older fellow named Krell who was something of a friend to her - or would have been, did he not have the tendency to admire her too much. He was a musician, easily as talented as she and more experienced, and they played together sometimes, Fire on her fiddle and Krell on flute or whistle. Too convinced of her perfection, Krell, ever to suspect her. An easy mark.

Fire sighed. Archer was a better friend when he did not know every detail of her life and mind. She would have to do this.

She slipped up to the house and into the trees near the side door. The feeling of a monster reaching for the gates of one's mind was subtle. A strong and practiced person could learn to recognise the encroachment and slam the gates shut. Tonight Krell's mind was alert for trespa.s.sers but not for this type of invasion; he was open and bored, and she crept her way in. He noticed a change and adjusted his focus, startled, but she worked quickly to distract him. You heard something. There it is, can you hear it again? Shouts, near the front of the house. Step away from the door and turn to look. You heard something. There it is, can you hear it again? Shouts, near the front of the house. Step away from the door and turn to look.

Without pause he moved from the entrance and turned his back to her. She crept out of the trees toward the door.

You hear nothing behind you, only before you. The door behind you is closed.

He never swung around to check, never even doubted the thoughts she'd implanted in his mind. She opened the door behind him, slipped through, and shut herself in, then leaned against the wall of her hallway for a moment, oddly depressed at how easy that had been. It seemed to her that it shouldn't be so easy to make a man into a fool.

Rather bleak now with self-disgust, she slumped her way upstairs to her room. A particular song was stuck in her head, dully playing itself over and over, though she couldn't think why. It was the funeral lament sung in the Dells to mourn the waste of a life.

She supposed thoughts of her father had brought the song to mind. She had never sung it for him or played it on her fiddle. She'd been too numb with grief and confusion to play anything after he'd died. A fire had been lit for him, but she had not gone to see it.

It had been a gift from Cansrel, her fiddle. One of his strange kindnesses, for he'd never had patience for her music. And now Fire was alone, the only remaining human monster in the Dells, and her fiddle was one of few happy things she had to remember him by.

Happy.

Well, she supposed there was a kind of gladness in his remembrance, some of the time. But it didn't change reality. In one way or another, all that was wrong in the Dells could be traced back to Cansrel.

It was not a thought to bring peace. But delirious now with fatigue, she slept soundly, the Dellian lament a backdrop to her dreams.

CHAPTER TWO.

FIRE WOKE FIRST to pain, and then to the consciousness of an unusual level of agitation in her house. Guards were bustling around downstairs, and Archer was among them.

When a servant pa.s.sed her bedroom door Fire touched the girl's mind, summoning her. The girl entered the room, not looking at Fire, glaring mutinously instead at the feather duster in her own hand. Still, at least she had come. Some of them scurried away, pretending not to hear.

She said stiffly, 'Yes, Lady?'

'Sofie, why are there so many men downstairs?'

'The poacher in the cages was found dead this morning, Lady,' Sofie said. 'An arrow in his throat.'

Sofie turned on her heel, snapping the door shut behind her, leaving Fire lying heartsick in bed.

She couldn't help but feel that this was her fault somehow, for looking like a deer.

SHE DRESSED AND went downstairs to her steward, Donal, who was grizzled and strong-headed and had served her since she was a baby. Donal raised a grey eyebrow at her and c.o.c.ked his head in the direction of the back terrace. 'I don't think he much cares whom he shoots,' he said.

Fire knew he meant Archer, whose exasperation she could sense on the other side of the wall. For all of his hot words, Archer did not like people in his care to die.

'Help me cover my hair, will you, Donal?'

A minute later, hair wrapped in brown, Fire went out to be with Archer in his unhappiness. The air on the terrace was wet like coming rain. Archer wore a long brown coat. Everything about him was sharp - the bow in his hand and the arrows on his back, his frustrated bursts of movement, his expression as he glared over the hills. She leaned on the railing beside him.

'I should have antic.i.p.ated this,' he said, not looking at her. 'He as good as told us it would happen.'

'There's nothing you could have done. Your guard is already spread too thin.'

'I could have imprisoned him inside.'

'And how many guards would that have taken? We live in stone houses, Archer, not palaces, and we don't have dungeons.'

He swiped at the air with his hand. 'We're mad, you know that? Mad to think we can live here, so far from King's City, and protect ourselves from Pikkians and looters and the spies of rebel lords.'

'He hadn't the look or the speech of a Pikkian,' she said. 'He was Dellian, like us. And he was clean and tidy and civilised, not like any looter we've ever seen.'

The Pikkians were the boat people from the land above the Dells, and it was true that they crossed the border sometimes to steal timber and even labourers from the Dellian north. But the men of Pikkia, though not all alike, tended to be big, and lighter-skinned than their Dellian neighbours - at any rate, not small and dark like the blue-eyed poacher had been. And Pikkians spoke with a distinctive throaty accent.

'Well,' Archer said, determined not to be soothed, 'then he was a spy. Lord Mydogg and Lord Gentian have spies crawling all over the kingdom, spying on the king, spying on the prince, spying on each other - spying on you, for all we know,' he added grouchily. 'Has it never occurred to you that the enemies of King Nash and Prince Brigan might want to steal you and use you as a tool to overthrow the royal family?'

'You think everyone wants to steal me,' Fire said mildly. 'If your own father had me tied up and sold to a monster zoo for spare change, you'd claim that you'd suspected him all along.'

He spluttered at this. 'You should should suspect your friends, or at least anyone other than me and Brocker. And you should have a guard whenever you walk out your door, and you should be quicker to manipulate the people you meet. Then I'd have less cause to worry.' suspect your friends, or at least anyone other than me and Brocker. And you should have a guard whenever you walk out your door, and you should be quicker to manipulate the people you meet. Then I'd have less cause to worry.'

These were old arguments and he already knew her responses by heart. She ignored him. 'Our poacher was a spy of neither Lord Mydogg's nor Lord Gentian's,' she said calmly.

'Mydogg has grown quite an army for himself in the northeast. If he decided to "borrow" our more central land to use as a stronghold in a war against the king, we wouldn't be able to stop him.'

'Archer, be reasonable. The King's Army wouldn't leave us alone to defend ourselves. And regardless, the poacher was not sent here by a rebel lord; he was far too vapid. Mydogg would never employ a vapid scout, and if Gentian lacks Mydogg's intelligence, well, still, he's not fool enough to send a man with a floating, empty head to do his spying.'

'All right,' Archer said, voice rising in exasperation, 'then I return to the theory that it's something to do with you. The moment he recognised you he talked about being a dead man, and clearly he was well-informed on that point. Explain it to me, will you? Who was the man, and why the rocks is he dead?'

He was dead because he'd hurt her, Fire thought; or maybe because she'd seen him and talked to him. Little sense in it, but it would make a good joke, if Archer were in the mood for any sort of joke. The poacher's murderer was a man after Archer's own heart, for Archer also didn't like men to hurt Fire or make her acquaintance.

'And a rather good shot,' she said out loud.

He was still glowering into the distance, as if he expected the murderer to pop up from behind a boulder and wave. 'Hmm?'

'You'd get along well with this murderer, Archer. He would've had to shoot through both the bars of the outer enclosure and the bars of the poacher's cage, wouldn't he? He must be a good shot.'

Admiration for another archer seemed to cheer him slightly. 'More than that. From the depth of the wound and the angle, I think he fired long-range, from the trees beyond that rise.' He pointed to the bald patch Fire had climbed the night before. 'Through two sets of bars is impressive enough, and then into the man's throat? At least we can be sure none of our neighbours did it personally. Not one of them could have made that shot.'

'Could you?'

The question was a small gift to him to improve his mood, for there was no shot made that Archer couldn't match. He glanced at her, grinning. Looked at her again more closely. His face softened. 'I'm a beast for taking this long to ask how you feel this morning.'

The muscles of her back were tight knots of rope and her bandaged arm ached; her entire body was paying dearly for last night's abuse. 'I'm all right.'

'Are you warm enough? Take my coat.'

They sat for a while on the steps of the terrace, Fire wrapped in Archer's coat. They talked about Archer's plans for breaking ground in the fields. Soon enough it would be time for the spring planting, and northern soil, rocky and cold, always resisted the start of a new growing season.

Now and then Fire sensed a raptor monster overhead. She kept her own mind hidden from them so they wouldn't recognise her for the monster prey she was; but of course, in the absence of monster prey, they ate any living creature available. One that spotted Fire and Archer dropped down and began to circle, posing shamelessly, intangibly lovely, reaching for their minds, radiating a feeling that was hungry, primitive, and oddly soothing. Archer stood and shot it, then shot another that did the same, the first violet like sunrise, the second so pale a yellow it looked like the moon dropping from the sky.

At least fractured on the ground, Fire thought, the monsters added colour to the landscape. There was little colour in the north of the Dells in early spring - the trees were grey and the gra.s.s that tufted between cracks in the rocks was still brown from winter. Truly, even at the height of summer the north of the Dells was not what one would call colourful, but at least in summer, grey with patches of brown turned to grey with patches of green.

'Who found the poacher, anyway?' Fire asked idly.

'Tovat,' Archer said. 'One of the newer guards. You'll not have met him yet.'

'Oh, yes - the young one with the brown-orange hair that people called red. I like him. He's strong-minded and he guards himself.'

'You know Tovat? You admire his hair, do you?' Archer said in a sharp and familiar tone.

'Archer, honestly. I said nothing of admiring his hair. And I know the names and faces of all the men you station at my house. It's simple courtesy.'

'I won't be stationing Tovat at your house any longer,' he said, an unpleasant edge to his voice that drove her to silence for a moment, so that she wouldn't say anything unpleasant back about Archer's dubious - and rather hypocritical - right to jealousy. He opened a feeling to her that she didn't particularly care to feel just now. Biting back a sigh, she chose words that would protect Tovat.

'I hope you'll change your mind. He's one of the few guards who respects me both with his body and in his mind.'

'Marry me,' Archer said, 'and live in my house, and I will be your guard.'

She could not bite back this sigh. 'You know that I won't. I wish you would stop asking me.' A fat raindrop plopped onto her sleeve. 'I think I'll go and visit your father.'

She stood, creaking with pain, and let his coat slide off into his lap. She touched his shoulder once, gently. Even when she did not like Archer, she loved him.

As she went into the house, rain began to fall.

ARCHER'S FATHER LIVED in Archer's house. Fire asked a guard who was not Tovat to accompany her along the path through the rain. She carried a spear, but still, without her longbow and quiver she felt naked.

Lord Brocker was in his son's armoury, thundering instructions at a large man Fire recognised as the a.s.sistant to the blacksmith in town. At the sight of her Lord Brocker did not let off his thundering, but momentarily he lost the attention of his listener. The blacksmith turned to stare at Fire, some base thing in his eyes and in his silly, stupid smile.

He'd known Fire for long enough, this man, to have learned how to guard himself against the power of her strange monster beauty, so if he was not guarding himself, then he must not want to. His prerogative, to give up his mind in return for the pleasure of succ.u.mbing to her, but not something she cared to encourage. She kept her headscarf on. She pushed his mind away and walked past him into a side room so that she couldn't be seen. A closet really, dark, and with shelves full of oils and polish and ancient, rusted equipment no one ever used.

It was humiliating to have to retreat to a smelly old closet. The blacksmith should be the one to feel humiliated, for he was the dunce who chose to give up his self-control. What if while he gaped at her and imagined whatever his small mind cared to imagine, she convinced him to draw his knife and take out his own eye? It was the sort of thing Cansrel would have liked to do. Cansrel had never retreated.

The men's voices stopped and the blacksmith's mind receded from the armoury. The big wheels of Lord Brocker's chair squeaked as he rolled himself toward her. He stopped in the doorway of the closet. 'Come out of there, child; he's gone. The moron. If a mouse monster stole that one's meal from under his nose, he'd scratch his head and wonder why he couldn't remember eating his food. Let's go to my rooms. You look like you should sit down.'

Archer's house had been Brocker's house before Brocker had turned the running of the estate over to his son, and Brocker had used a wheeled chair before Archer had ever been born. The house was organised such that everything but Archer's rooms and servant rooms were on the first floor, where Brocker could reach them.

Fire walked beside him down a stone hallway that was dim in the grey light seeping through tall windows. They pa.s.sed the kitchen, the dining room, the stairway, and the guard room. The house was full of people, servants and guards coming in from outside, coming down from upstairs. The servant girls who pa.s.sed them greeted Brocker but carefully ignored Fire, their minds guarded and cool. As always. If Archer's servants did not resent her because she was a monster and Cansrel's daughter, they resented her because they were in love with Archer.

Fire was happy to sink into a soft chair in Lord Brocker's library and drink the cup of wine an unfriendly servant clapped into her hand. Brocker positioned his chair across from hers and settled his grey eyes on her face. 'I'll leave you alone, dear,' he said, 'if you wish to nap.'

'Perhaps later.'

'When's the last time you had a good night's sleep?'

Brocker was one person she felt comfortable admitting pain to, and fatigue. 'I can't remember. It's not a thing that happens very often.'

'You know there are drugs that will put you to sleep.'

'They make me groggy, and stupid.'

'I've just finished writing a history of military strategy in the Dells. You're welcome to take it with you. It'll put you to sleep while making you clever and unbeatable.'

Fire smiled and sipped the bitter Dellian wine. She doubted that Brocker's history would put her to sleep. All she knew about armies and war came from Brocker, and he was never boring. Twenty-some years ago, in the heyday of old King Nax, Brocker had been the most brilliant military commander the Dells had ever seen. Until the day King Nax had seized him and shattered his legs - not broken them, but shattered them, eight men taking turns with a mallet - and then sent him home, half-dead, to his wife, Aliss, in the northern Dells.

Fire didn't know what terrible thing Brocker had done to justify such treatment from his king. Neither did Archer. The entire episode had taken place before they were born, and Brocker never spoke of it. And the injuries were only the beginning of it, for a year or two later, when Brocker had recovered as well as he ever would, Nax had still been angry with his commander. He'd hand-picked a brute from his prisons, a dirty, savage man, and sent him north to punish Brocker by punishing Brocker's wife. This was why Archer was brown-eyed, light-haired, handsome, and tall, while Brocker was grey-eyed and dark-haired and plain in appearance. Lord Brocker was not Archer's true father.

In some places and times Brocker's would have been a mind-boggling story, but not in King's City and not in the days when King Nax had ruled at the pleasure of his closest adviser. Cansrel.

Brocker spoke, interrupting her gruesome thoughts. 'I understand you've had the rare pleasure of being shot by a man who was not trying to kill you,' he said. 'Did it feel any different?'

Fire laughed. 'I've never been shot more pleasantly.'

He chuckled, studying her with his mild grey eyes. 'It's rewarding to make you smile. The pain in your face drops away.'

He had always been able to make her smile. It was a relief to her, his dependable light mood, especially on days when Archer's mood was heavy. And it was remarkable, since every moment he was in pain.

'Brocker,' she said. 'Do you think it could have been different?'

He tilted his head, puzzled.

'I mean Cansrel,' she said, 'and King Nax. Do you think their partnership could ever have been different? Could the Dells have survived them?'

Brocker considered her, his face gone quiet and grave at the very mention of Cansrel's name. 'Nax's father was a decent king,' he said. 'And Cansrel's father was a valuable monster adviser to him. But, darling, Nax and Cansrel were two other creatures entirely. Nax didn't inherit his father's strength, and you know as well as anyone that Cansrel didn't inherit even a touch of his father's empathy. And they grew up together as boys, so when Nax took the throne, he'd already had Cansrel living inside his head his whole life. Oh, Nax had a good heart, I'm sure of it - sometimes I saw it - but it didn't matter, because he was also just the smallest bit lazy, the smallest bit too willing to let someone else do his thinking - and that was all the opening Cansrel ever needed. Nax never had a chance,' Brocker said, shaking his head, squinting at memories. 'From the start, Cansrel used Nax to get everything he wanted, and all Cansrel ever wanted was his own pleasure. It was inevitable, sweetheart,' he said, bringing his attention back to her face. 'As long as they lived, Cansrel and Nax were always going to lead the kingdom to ruin.'

Ruin. Fire knew, for Brocker had told her, the progressive steps that had led to ruin once young Nax had taken the throne. It had started with women and parties, and that hadn't been so bad, for Nax had fallen in love with a black-haired lady from the northern Dells named Roen and married her. King Nax and Queen Roen had produced a son, a handsome, dark boy named Nash, and even with a somewhat neglectful king at its helm the kingdom had had an aura of stability.

Except that Cansrel had been bored. His gratification had always required excess, and now he began to need more women and more parties, and wine, and children from the court to alleviate the monotony of the women. And drugs. Nax had agreed to it all; Nax had been like a sh.e.l.l to hold Cansrel's mind and nod its head yes to whatever Cansrel said was best.

'Yet, you've told me that ultimately it was the drugs that destroyed Nax,' Fire said. 'Could Nax have held on if it hadn't been for the drugs?'

'Perhaps,' Brocker said lightly. 'Cansrel could always keep hold of himself with poison in his veins, blast him, but Nax couldn't; it made him high-strung, and paranoid, and uncontrolled, and more vindictive than he'd ever been before.'

He stopped at that, staring bleakly at his own useless legs. Fire kept her feeling tight within herself so that he would not be flooded with her curiosity. Or her pity; her pity must never touch him.