Part 20 (1/2)

'I'm a thousand years old,' Fire said, 'just like you.'

'Hmm,' Brigan said. He didn't ask her what she meant, which was for the best, because she wasn't exactly sure. If she was suggesting she was too wise with the weight of her experience to fall prey to infatuation - well, the disproof was sitting before her in the form of a grey-eyed prince with a thoughtful set to his mouth that she found quite distracting.

Fire sighed, trying to s.h.i.+ft her attention. Her senses were overloaded. This courtyard was one of the palace's busiest, and, of course, the palace as a whole swarmed with minds. And just outside the palace grounds was stationed the entire First Branch, with which Brigan had arrived yesterday and would depart the day after tomorrow. She sensed minds more easily now than she had used to. She recognised a good many members of the First Branch, despite their distance.

She tried to push the feeling of them away. It was tiring, holding everything at once, and she couldn't decide where to rest her focus. She settled on a consciousness that was bothering her. She leaned forward and spoke low to Brigan.

'Behind you,' she said, 'a boy with very odd eyes is talking with some of the court children. Who is he?'

Brigan nodded. 'I know the boy you mean. He came with Cutter. You remember the animal trader, Cutter? I want nothing to do with the man, he's a monster smuggler and a brute - except that he happens to be selling a very fine stallion that almost has the markings of a river horse. I'd buy him in a breath if the money didn't go to Cutter. It's a bit tacky, you know, me buying a horse that's likely to have been stolen. I may buy him anyway; in which case Garan will have a conniption at the expense. I suppose he's right. I'm not in need of another horse. Though I wouldn't hesitate if he really were a river horse - do you know the dappled grey horses, Lady, that run wild at the source of the river? Splendid creatures. I've always wanted one, but they're no easy thing to catch.'

Horses were as distracting to the man as to his child. 'The boy,' Fire prompted dryly.

'Right. The boy's a strange one, and it isn't just that red eye. He was lurking around when I went to look at the stallion, and I tell you, Lady, he gave me a funny feeling.'

'What do you mean, a funny feeling?'

Brigan squinted at her in perplexity. 'I can't exactly say. There was something . . . disquieting . . . about his manner. The way he spoke. I did not like his voice.' He stopped, somewhat exasperated, and rubbed his hair so it stood on end. 'As I say it, I hear it makes no sense. There was nothing solid about him to fix on as troublesome. But still I told Hanna to stay away from him, and she said she already met him and didn't like him. She said he lies. What do you think of him?'

Fire applied herself to the question with concerted effort. His mind was unusual, unfamiliar, and she wasn't sure how to connect to it. She wasn't even sure how to comprehend the borders of it. She couldn't see see it. it.

His mind gave her a very funny feeling indeed. And it was not a good good funny feeling. funny feeling.

'I don't know,' she said. 'I don't know.' And a moment later, not quite knowing why: 'Buy the stallion, Lord Prince, if it will get them out of this court.'

Brigan left, presumably to do what Fire said; and Fire sat alone, puzzling over the boy. His right eye was grey and his left eye was red, which was strange enough in itself. His hair was blond like wheat, his skin light, and he had the appearance of being ten or eleven. Could he be some kind of Pikkian? He was sitting facing her, a rodent monster in his lap, a mouse with glimmering gold fur. He was tying a string around its neck. Fire knew somehow that the creature was not his pet.

He pulled the string, too tight. The mouse's legs began to jerk. Stop it Stop it, Fire thought furiously, aiming her message at the strange presence that was his mind.

He loosened the string immediately. The mouse lay in his lap, heaving with tiny breaths. Then the boy smiled at Fire, and stood up, and came to stand before her. 'It doesn't hurt him,' he said. 'It's only a choking game, for fun.'

His very words grated against her ears; grated, it seemed, against her brain, so horribly, like raptor monsters screeching, that she had to resist the impulse to cover her ears. Yet when she recalled the timbre of his voice, the voice itself was neither unusual nor unpleasant.

She stared at him coolly, so he would not see her bewilderment. 'A choking game? All the fun of it is on your side, and it's a sick kind of fun.'

He smiled again. His lopsided, red-eyed smile was somehow distressing. 'Is it sick? To want to be in control?'

'Of a helpless, frightened creature? Let it go.'

'The others believed me when I said it didn't hurt him,' he said, 'but you know not to. Plus, you're awfully pretty. So I'll give you what you want.'

He bent to the ground and opened his hand. The monster mouse fled, a streak of gold, disappearing into an opening in the roots of a tree.

'You have interesting scars on your neck,' he said, straightening. 'What cut you?'

'It's none of your affair,' Fire said, s.h.i.+fting her headscarf so that it covered her scars, very much disliking his gaze.

'I'm glad I got to talk to you,' he said. 'I've wanted to for some time. You're even better than I hoped.' He turned around, and left the courtyard.

WHATAN UNPLEASANT child.

It had never happened before, that Fire should not be able to form a conception of a consciousness. Even Brigan's mind, which she couldn't enter, offered the shape and feeling of its barricades to her perception. Even the foggy archer, the foggy guards; she couldn't explain their minds, but she could perceive them.

Reaching for this boy's mind was like walking through a collection of twisted mirrors facing other twisted mirrors, so that all was distorted and misleading, and befuddling to the senses, and nothing could be known or understood. She couldn't get a straight look at him, not even his outline.

And this was what she stewed over for some time after the boy left; and this stewing was why it took her so long to attend to the condition of the children he'd been talking to. The children in the courtyard who'd believed what he'd said. Their minds were blank, and bubbling with fog.

Fire could not fathom this fog. But she was certain she'd found its source.

By the time she realised she mustn't let him go, the sun was setting, the stallion was bought, and the boy was already gone from the court.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

THAT SAME NIGHT brought information that distracted everyone from the matter of Cutter's boy.

It was late evening and Fire was in the stables when she sensed Archer returning from the city to the palace. It was not a thing she would have sensed so forcefully, not searching for it particularly; except that he was eager to talk to her, and open as an infant, and also slightly drunk.

Fire had only just begun to brush Small, who was standing with eyes closed from the bliss of it and drooling onto his stall door. And she wasn't anxious to see Archer if he was both eager and drunk. She sent him a message. We'll talk when you're sober We'll talk when you're sober.

Some hours later with her regular guard of six, Fire followed the maze from her rooms to Archer's. But then outside his door she was perplexed, for she sensed that her Mila, who was off-duty, was inside Archer's chamber.

Fire's thoughts groped for an explanation, any explanation other than the obvious. But Mila's mind was open, as even strong minds tended to be when they were experiencing what Mila was experiencing just now on the other side of this door; and Fire remembered how sweet and pretty her guard was, and how many opportunities Archer had had to notice her.

Fire stood staring at Archer's door, silent and shaking. She was quite certain he had never done anything to make her this angry before.

She turned on her heel and marched down the hallway. She found the stairs and marched up them, and up, and up, until she burst onto the roof, where she set to marching back and forth. It was cold and damp, and she had no coat, and it smelled like coming snow. Fire didn't notice, didn't care. Her baffled guard stood out of her way so she wouldn't trample them.

After some time the thing happened she'd been waiting for: Mila fell asleep. And none too soon, for it was late now, and Brigan was climbing wearily to the roofs. She mustn't meet Brigan tonight. She would not be able to stop herself from telling him everything, and Archer might deserve to have his laundry aired, but Mila did not.

She marched down by a stairway that Brigan was not taking up. She traced the maze again to Archer's rooms and stood outside his door. Archer Archer, she thought to him. Get out here, now Get out here, now.

He emerged quickly, if barefoot and confused and a bit hastily thrown together; and Fire for the first time exercised her privilege of being alone with him, sending her guards to either end of the long corridor. She could not quite force herself to appear calm, and when she spoke, her voice was scathing. 'Must you prey on my guard?'

The puzzlement left his face and he spoke hotly. 'I'm not a predator, you know. Women come to me quite willingly. And why should you care what I do?'

'It hurts people. You're careless with people, Archer. Mila, why Mila? She's fifteen years old!'

'She's sleeping now, happy as a kitten in a patch of sun. You're stirring up trouble over nothing.'