ONE PERSON FIRE spent time with had nothing to give. Lady Murgda, traitor and attempted murderer, had been kept in the dungeons since the final battle of the war. Her husband was dead. So was her brother. She was well into her pregnancy, which was the only reason she had been left alive. She lashed at Fire with bitter and hateful words when Fire visited, but still Fire continued to visit, not always certain why she did. Sympathy for a strong person who'd been brought low? Respect for a pregnant woman? At any rate, she was not afraid of Murgda's vitriol.

One day as she stepped out of Murgda's cell she met Nash being helped in by Welkley and one of the healers. Grasping his hand, looking at the message in his eyes, she understood that she was not the only person with sympathy for Murgda's miserable situation.

They didn't have a lot of words for each other these days, Fire and Nash. Something unbreakable had formed between them. A bond of memory and experience, and a desperate fondness that seemed not to require words.

How wonderful to see him on his feet.

' I ' L L ALWAYS BE leaving,' Brigan said.

'Yes,' Fire said. 'I know.'

Early morning, and they were tangled together in her bed in the green house. Fire was memorising every scar on his face and his body. She was memorising the pale clear grey of his eyes, because he was leaving today with the First to the north, escorting his mother and father to their respective homes. 'Brigan,' she said, so that he would talk, and she could hear his voice and memorise it.

'Yes?'

'Tell me again where you're going.'

'HANNA HAS ACCEPTED you completely,' he said a few minutes later.

'She's not jealous, or confused.'

'She has accepted me,' Fire said. 'But she is a little jealous.'

'Is she?' he said, startled. 'Should I talk to her?'

'It's a small thing,' Fire said. 'She does allow for you loving me.'

'She loves you, too.'

'She does love me. Really, I don't think any child could see her father beginning to love someone else and not feel jealousy. At least, that's what I imagine. It never happened to me.' She lost her voice. She continued in thoughts. I was, wholly and truly, the only person I ever knew my father to love. I was, wholly and truly, the only person I ever knew my father to love.

'Fire,' he whispered, kissing her face. 'You did the thing you had to do.'

He never tried to own me, Brigan. Roen said that Cansrel could never see a beautiful thing without wanting to possess it. But he did not try to possess me. He let me be my own.

ON THE DAY the surgeons removed Fire's fingers, Brigan was in the north. In the infirmary Hanna held Fire's good hand tightly, chattering her almost to dizziness, and Nash held Hanna's hand, and reached his other hand, a bit cheekily, out to Mila, who gave him a look like acid. Mila, big-eyed, big-bellied, and glowing like a person with a wonderful secret, seemed to have a curious talent for attracting the fondness of men who far outranked her. But she had learned something from the last one. She had learned propriety, which was the same as saying she had learned to trust only herself. So much so that she was not afraid to be rude to the king, when he asked for it.

Garan came in at the last minute, sat down, and, through the whole b.l.o.o.d.y thing, talked to Mila and Nash and Hanna about the plans for his wedding. Fire knew that it was an attempt to distract her. She thanked them for this kindness by trying very hard to be distracted.

It was not a pleasant surgery. The drugs were good, but they took away the pain alone, not the sensation of her fingers being stolen from her hand; and later, when the drugs wore off, the pain was terrible.

And then, over days and weeks, the pain began to fade. When no one but her guard was around to hear, she fought with her fiddle, and was astonished with how quickly the fighting turned into something more hopeful. Her changed hand couldn't do all that it had formerly done. But it could still make music.

HER DAYS WERE full. An end to the war had not put an end to treachery and lawlessness, particularly in the kingdom's far reaches, where so much went unseen. Clara and Garan often had spy-room work for her. She talked to the people they set her to, but the work she preferred was in the palace infirmary, or even better, in the city hospitals, where all kinds of folk came with all kinds of needs. It was true that some of them wanted nothing to do with her, and in the usual way, even more of them wanted her far too much, and they all made too big a fuss over the role she had played in saving the king's life. They talked about it as if it had been all her doing, and none of Nash's, and none of the kingdom's best surgeons', and when she tried to deflect their praise, they began on the subject of how she had tricked Lord Mydogg's war plans out of Lord Gentian and a.s.sured the victory of the Dells. How such rumours had been started, she didn't know, but it seemed there was no stopping them. So she moved among their moods calmly, building barriers against their admiration, helping where she could, and learning practicalities of surgery that astonished her.

'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 ma.s.sage, 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 ma.s.saging 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 this is what you want!' 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.'

'I know you do,' he said. 'I thank you for it.'

'Sometimes,' she whispered, 'there's too much sadness. It crushes me.'

'Is it crushing you now?'

She paused, unable to speak, feeling the press of Archer against her heart. Yes. Yes.

'Then come here,' he said, a bit redundantly, as he had already pulled her with him into an armchair and curled her up in his arms. 'Tell me what I can do to help you feel better.'

Fire looked into his quiet eyes, touched his dear, familiar face, and considered the question. Well. I always like it when you kiss me. Well. I always like it when you kiss me.

'Do you?'

You're good at it.

'Well,' he said. 'That's lucky, because I'll always be kissing you.'

EPILOGUE.

FLAME WAS THE way in the Dells to send the bodies of the dead where their souls had gone, and to remember that all things came to nothingness, except the world.

They travelled north to Brocker's estate for the ceremony, because it was appropriate that it take place there and because to hold it anywhere else would be an inconvenience to Brocker, who must, of course, be present. They scheduled it for the end of summer, before the fall rains, so that Mila could attend with her newborn daughter, Liv, and Clara with her son, Aran.

Not everyone could make the journey, though practically everyone did, even Hanna, and Garan and Sayre, and quite a colossal royal guard. Nash stayed behind in the city, for someone needed to run things. Brigan promised to make every reasonable effort to attend and came tearing onto Fire's land the night before with a contingent of the army. It was all of fifteen minutes before he and Garan were quarreling over the plausibility of devoting some of the kingdom's resources to westward exploration. If through the mountains existed a land with people called Gracelings who were like that boy, Brigan said, then it would only be sensible to take a peaceful, un.o.btrusive interest in them - namely, to spy - before the Gracelings decided to take an unpeaceful interest in the Dells. Garan didn't want to spend the money.

Brocker, who took Brigan's side of the argument, was utterly pleased with the growing family that had descended upon him, and he talked, and so did Roen, of moving back to King's City, and leaving his estate - of which Brigan was now heir - to be handled by Donal, who had always handled Fire's capably. The siblings had been told, quietly, of Brigan's true parentage. Hanna spent time shyly with the grandfather she had only just heard of. She liked the big wheels of his chair.

Clara teased Brigan that on the one hand, he was no technical relation to her at all, but on the other, he was doubly the uncle of her son, for, in the loosest sense, Clara was Brigan's sister and the baby's father had been Brigan's brother. 'That's how I prefer to think of it, anyway,' Clara said.

Fire smiled at all of this, and held the babies whenever anyone would let her, which turned out to be fairly often. She had a monster knack with babies. When they cried, she usually knew what was ailing them.

FIRE WAS SITTING in the bedroom of her stone house, thinking of all the things that had happened in that room.

From the doorway, Mila broke into her reverie. 'Lady? May I come in?'