"You're from the north, Lady," he'd say to her, or something like it. "You've seen the loose hold the law has outside this city. One misstep, Lady, and the entire kingdom could fall through our fingers."
And then he'd grow quiet, and she would know the marriage proposal was coming. She would send him away with her refusal and take what comfort she could in the company of her guard; and consider very seriously the state of the city, and the kingdom, and the king. And what her own place should be.
To busy herself and ease her sense of uselessness, she took Garan's advice in the nurseries. Entering cautiously at first, sitting quietly on a chair and watching the children as they played, read, squabbled, for this was where her mother had worked, and she wanted to take in its feeling slowly. She tried to picture a young, orange-haired woman in these rooms, counselling children with her even temper. Jessa had had a place in these noisy, sunlit rooms. Somehow the very thought made Fire feel like less of a stranger here. Even if it also made her more lonely.
Teaching guarding against animal monsters was delicate work, and Fire came up against some parents who wanted nothing of her association with their children. But a mix of royal and servant children did become her pupils.
"Why are you so fascinated with insects?" she asked one of her cleverest students one morning, an eleven-year-old boy named Cob who could build a wall in his mind against raptor monsters, and resist the urge to touch Fire's hair when he saw it, but would not kill a monster bug even if it was camped out on his hand making a dinner of his blood. "You have no trouble with the raptors."
"Raptors," Cob said with high-pitched scorn. "They have no intelligence, only a big meaningless surge of feeling they think they can mesmerise me with. They're completely unsophisticated."
"True," Fire said. "But compared to monster bugs, they're veritable geniuses."
"But monster bugs are so perfect," Cob said wistfully, going cross-eyed as a dragonfly monster hovered at the tip of his nose. "Look at their wings. Look at their jointed legs and their beady little eyeballs and look how smart they are with their pinchers."
"He loves all bugs," Cob's younger sister said, rolling her eyes. "Not just monster bugs."
Perhaps his problem, Fire thought to herself, is that he's a scientist. "Very well," she said. "You may allow monster bugs to sting you, in appreciation of their excellent pinchers. But," she added sternly, "there are one or two bugs that would do you harm if they could, and those you must learn to guard yourself against. Do you understand? "
"Must I kill them?"
"Yes, you must kill them. But once they're dead, you could always dissect them. Had you thought of that?"
Cob brightened. "Really? Will you help me?"
And so Fire found herself borrowing scalpels and clips and trays from a healer in the castle infirmary and engaging in some rather peculiar experimentation, perhaps along the lines of what King Arn and Lady Ella had done one hundred years before. On a smaller scale, of course, and with much less brilliant results.
She crossed paths often with Princess Hanna. From her windows she saw the girl running to and from the little green house. She also saw Sayre, and other tutors, and sometimes Garan, and even Clara's legendary gardener, who was blond and bronzed and muscular, like something out of a heroic romance. And sometimes an old woman, tiny and bent, who wore an apron and had pale green eyes and was the frequent stopping block to Hanna's headlong rushes.
She was strong, this little woman, always carrying Hanna around, and it appeared she was the housekeeper of the green house. Her love for the child was obvious, and she had no love for Fire. Fire had encountered her once in the orchard and found her mind as closed as Brigan's. Her face, at the sight of the monster lady, had gone cold and unhappy.
The palace had outside walkways built into the stone portions of the roof. At night, far from sleep, Fire walked them with her guard. From the heights she could see the glimmer of the great torches on the bridges, kept lit throughout the night so that boats on the fast-running waters below always knew exactly how close they were to the falls. And from the heights she could hear those falls roaring. On clear nights she watched the city spread sleeping around her and the flash of stars on the sea. She felt like a queen. Not like a real queen, not like the wife of King Nash. More like a woman at the top of the world. At the top of a city, in particular, where the people were becoming real to her; a city of which she was growing rather fond.
Brigan returned to court three weeks from the day he'd left. Fire knew the instant he arrived. A consciousness was like a face you saw once and forever recognised. Brigan's was quiet, impenetrable, and strong, and indubitably his from the instant her mind tripped over it.
She happened to be with Hanna and Blotchy at the time, in the morning sun of a quiet courtyard corner. The little girl was examining the raptor scars on Fire's neck and trying to wheedle from her, not for the first time, the story of how she'd got those scars and saved Brigan's soldiers. When Fire declined, the girl wheedled at Musa.
"You weren't even there," Fire objected, laughing, when Musa began the tale.
"Well," Musa said, "if no one who was there will tell it – "
"Someone's coming who knows it to tell it," Fire said mysteriously, causing Hanna to freeze, and stand bolt upright.
"Papa?" she said, turning in circles now, spinning to look at each of the entrances. "Do you mean Papa? Where?"
He came through an archway on the other side of the courtyard. Hanna shrieked and bolted across the marble floor. He caught her up and carried her back the way she'd come, nodding to Fire and the guard, smiling through Hanna's stream of chatter.
And what was it with Brigan every time he reappeared? Why this instinct to bolt? They were friends now, and Fire should be beyond this fear of him. She forbade herself to move and focused on Blotchy, who offered his ears to be petted.
Brigan put Hanna down and crouched before the child. He touched his fingers to her chin and moved her face one way and the other, surveying her still-bruised and bandaged nose. He interrupted her quietly. "And tell me what happened here?"
"But Papa," she said, changing subject in mid-sentence. "They were saying bad things about Lady Fire."
"Who were?"
"Selin and Midan and the others."
"And what? Then one of them punched you in the nose?"
Hanna scuffed her shoes at the ground. "No."
"Tell me what happened."
Another scuff at the ground, and then Hanna spoke dismally. "I hit Selin. He was wrong, Papa! Someone had to show him."
Brigan was silent for a moment. Hanna rested one hand on either of his bent knees and dropped her eyes to the floor. She sighed dramatically behind her curtain of hair.
"Look at me, Hanna."
The girl obeyed.
"Was hitting Selin a reasonable way to show him he was wrong?"
"No, Papa. I did badly. Are you going to punish me?"
"I'm going to take away your fighting lessons for now. I didn't agree to them so that you might misuse them."
Hanna sighed again. "For how long?"
"Until I'm convinced you understand what they're for."
"And will you take away my riding lessons?"
"Have you ridden over anyone you shouldn't?"
A small giggle. "Of course not, Papa!"
"Then you'll keep your riding lessons."
"Will you let me ride your horses?"
"You know the answer to that. You must grow bigger before you ride warhorses."
Hanna reached her hand out and rubbed her palm on the stubble of his face with an ease and affection Fire found hard to bear, so that she had to look away and stare fiercely at Blotchy, who was shedding silky hairs all over her skirt. "How long do you stay, Papa?"