Fire held out her hand. The two ladies greeted each other, Sayre exceedingly polite and ever so mildly jealous. Understandable. Fire would have to advise Garan not to cart lady monsters along on his trips to visit his sweetheart. Some of the smartest men had a hard time comprehending the obvious.
Then Sayre took her leave and Garan watched her go, rubbing his head absently and humming.
The son of a king and a woman who's a palace tutor? Fire thought to him, propelled by some strange joy into cheekiness. Shocking.
Garan lowered his eyebrows and tried to look stern. "If you're desperate for something to do, Lady, go to the nurseries and teach guarding against monster animals. Get the children on your side so Brigan's daughter still has some teeth in her mouth next he sees her."
Fire turned to go, a smile playing around her lips. "Thank you for walking with me, Lord Prince. I should tell you I'm difficult to deceive. You may not trust me, but I know you like me."
And she told herself it was Garan's regard that had buoyed her mood, and nothing to do with a woman whose significance had been reassigned.
Chapter Sixteen
Fire was, in fact, in need of something to do, because without an occupation all she could do was think. And thinking brought her back, over and over, to her lack of occupation, and the question of how much help, in fact, she would be capable of offering this kingdom – if her heart and her mind didn't positively forbid it. The matter plagued her at night when she couldn't sleep. She had bad dreams of what it meant to trick people and hurt people, nightmares of Cansrel making Cutter grovel in imagined pain.
Clara took Fire sightseeing. The city folk adorned themselves with even more monster trappings than the court folk, and with much less concern for the aesthetic integration of the whole. Feathers jammed randomly into buttonholes; jewellery, quite stunning really, necklaces and earrings made of monster shells, worn by a baker woman over her mixing bowl and covered in flour dust. A woman wearing a blue-violet wig from the fur of some silky monster beast, a rabbit or a dog, the hair short and uneven and sticking out in spikes. And the woman's face underneath quite plain, the overall effect tending to an odd caricature of Fire herself; but still, there was no denying she had something lovely atop her head.
"Everyone wants a bit of something beautiful," Clara said. "Among the wealthy it's the rare skins and furs sold on the black market. With everyone else it's whatever they find clogging the gutters or killed in the housetraps. It all amounts to the same thing, of course, but the rich people feel better knowing they've paid a fortune."
Which was, of course, silly. This city, Fire saw, was part sober and part silly. She liked the gardens and the old crumbling sculptures, the fountains in the squares, the museums and libraries and bright rows of shops that Clara led her through. She liked the bustling cobbled streets where people were so busy with their noisy living that sometimes they didn't even notice the lady monster's guarded walking tour. Sometimes. She calmed a team of horses once that panicked when some children ran too close to their heels, murmuring to them, petting their necks. Business stopped on that street, and didn't resume until she and Clara had rounded a corner.
She liked the bridges. She liked standing in the middle and looking down, feeling she could fall but knowing she wouldn't. The bridge farthest from the falls was a drawbridge; she liked the bells that rang when it rose and fell, soft, almost melodic, whispering around and through the other city noises. She liked the warehouses and docks along the river, the aqueducts and sewers, and the locks, creaking and slow, that brought supply ships up and down between river and harbour. She especially liked Cellar Harbour, where the falls created a mist of seawater and drowned out all sound and feeling.
She even, hesitatingly, liked the feel of the hospitals. She wondered which one had cured her father of the arrow in his back, and she hoped that the surgeons brought good folk back to life too. There were always people outside the hospitals, waiting and worrying. She glanced at them, touching them with surreptitious wishes that their worry should come to a happy ending.
"There used to be medical schools all over the city," Clara told her. "Do you know of King Arn and his monster adviser, Lady Ella?"
"I remember the names from my history lessons," Fire said, reflecting, but not coming up with much.
"They ruled a good hundred years ago," Clara said. "King Arn was an herbalist and Lady Ella a surgeon, and they became a bit obsessive about it, really – there are stories about them doing bizarre medical experiments on people who probably wouldn't have consented to it if a monster hadn't been the one making the suggestions, if you know what I mean, Lady. And they'd cut up dead bodies and study them, but no one was ever sure where they were getting the dead bodies from. Ah, well," Clara said, with a sardonic lift of the eyebrows. "Be that as it may, they revolutionised our understanding of doctoring and surgery, Lady. It's thanks to them we know the uses for all the strange herbs that grow in the crevices and caves at the edges of the kingdom. Our medicines to stop bleeding and keep wounds from festering and kill tumours and bind bones together and do just about everything else came from their experiments. Of course, they also discovered the drugs that ruin people's minds," she added darkly. "And anyway, the schools are closed now; there's no money for research. Or for art, for that matter, or engineering. Everything goes to policing – to the army, the coming war. I suppose the city will begin to deteriorate."
It already was, Fire thought but didn't say. She saw the seedy, sprawling neighbourhoods that abutted the docks on the south side of the river, and the tumbledown alleyways that popped up in parts of the city centre where it seemed they shouldn't. Many, many sections of the city that were not devoted to knowledge or beauty, or any kind of goodness.
Clara took her to lunch once with the twins' mother, who had a small and pleasant home on a street of florists. She also had a husband, a retired soldier who moonlighted as one of the twins' most reliable spies.
"These days, my focus is smuggling," he told them in confidence over their meal. "Almost every wealthy person in the city dips into the black market now and then, but as often as not, when you find someone who's very deeply involved, you've also found someone who's the king's enemy. Especially if they're smuggling weapons or horses or anything Pikkian. If we're lucky, we're able to trace a buyer to the fellow he's buying for, and if that turns out to be one of the rebel lords, we bring the buyer in for questioning. Can't always trust their answers, of course."
Unsurprisingly, this sort of talk was always fuel for Clara's pressure tactics with Fire. "With your power, it'd be easy for us to learn who's on whose side. You could help us find out if our allies are true," she'd say, or, "You could figure out where Mydogg's planning to attack first." Or, when that didn't work, "You could uncover an assassination plot. Wouldn't you feel terrible if I were assassinated because you weren't helping?" And in a moment of desperation: "What if they're planning to assassinate you? There have to be some who are, especially now that people think you might marry Nash."
Fire never responded to the endless battery, never admitted the doubt – and guilt – she was beginning to feel. She only filed the arguments away to mull over later, along with the ongoing arguments of the king. For occasionally after dinner – often enough that Welkley had installed a chair in the hallway – Nash came to speak to her through the door. He conducted himself decently, talked of the weather and stately visitors to the court; and always, always tried to convince her to reconsider the matter of the prisoner.