"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."
"We'll discuss it later," Garan said. His eyes slid to Fire's face and she met his gaze curiously. His eyebrows snapped down, making him fierce, and oddly like Brigan.
"So, Lady Fire," he said, addressing her directly for the first time. "Are you going to do what the king's asked, and use your mental power to question our prisoners?"
"No, Lord Prince. I only use my mental power in self-defence."
"Very noble of you," Garan said, sounding exactly like he didn't mean it, so that she was perplexed, and looked back at him calmly, and said nothing.
"It would be self-defence," Clara put in distractedly, frowning still at the paper before her. "The self-defence of this kingdom. Not that I don't understand your resistance to humouring Nash when he's been such a boor, Lady, but we need you."
"Do we? I find myself undecided on the matter," Garan said. He dipped his pen into an inkwell. He blotted carefully, and scribbled a few sentences onto the paper before him. Without looking at Fire he opened a feeling to her, coolly and with perfect control. She felt it keenly. Suspicion. Garan did not trust her, and he wanted her to know it.
That evening, when Fire sensed the king's approach, she locked the entrance to her rooms. He made no objection to this, resigned, seemingly, to holding a conversation with her through the oak of her sitting room door. It was not a very private conversation, on her side at least, for her on-duty guards could recede only so far into her rooms. Before the king spoke, she warned him that he was overheard.
His mind was open and troubled, but clear. "If you'll bear with me, Lady, I've only two things to say."
"Go on, Lord King," Fire said quietly, her forehead resting against the door.
"The first is an apology, for my entire self."
Fire closed her eyes. "It's not your entire self that needs to apologise. Only the part that wants to be taken by my power."
"I can't change that part, Lady."
"You can. If you're too strong for me to control, then you're strong enough to control yourself."
"I can't, Lady, I swear to it."