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.
"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.