Enna Burning (18 page)

“Still, I think, just in case—”

“You aim to stop ’em,” said Finn. “We’re your guards, Enna. We’re staying with you till the end.”

“All right.” Her voice squeaked as she spoke. Tired, cold, thirsty, she did not think she was capable of much emotion, but Finn’s words pulled some out of her as easily as a showman tugs a scarf from his sleeve. The entire world seemed to be rushing down an icy slope, but she felt resolved. It was the price of victory, and the price of her crimes. But the unsinged part of her wished differently for Razo and Finn.

“It’s not over, Enna,” said Finn. His expression was concerned, and something more, afraid maybe, though she knew he was not fearing the fight.

“I don’t want it to be,” said Enna. “I wish . . . ”

She left her wish hanging and urged her mount forward.

They rode east of the trampled earth, close enough to Ostekin that they could have ridden there in an hour’s time, but they did not spare it. Enna could feel the constant pressure of heat to her left, where the army marched just out of sight. She ached with it. Her chest arched and trembled, anxious for the fire. She found she could resist for now, though it cost her some pain.

Once they passed two scouts heading east. Razo tore after them when they began to flee, hollering that despite the Tiran garb it was he, Razo.

“Unbelievable,” said one of the young scouts. “Razo, you are alive. Talone said no chance the Tiran could kill you.”

Razo puffed up visibly. “Indeed. What’s happening, Temo?”

“We haven’t known much these weeks. They razed a lot of our scout network.”

Enna swallowed, remembering the houses and wagons she had burned and the Bayern scout with an arrow in his chest.

“A couple of days ago,” Temo continued, “the king sent a force to stop an invasion of Fedorthal. Then the queen came back from somewhere saying she’d heard on the wind of a greater army marching north.”

“To the capital,” said Finn.

“That’s right. The king had time to pull his army back. They’ll meet before the city by tomorrow, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re off with messages for reinforcements.”

The other scout grimaced. “Looks bloody. Lots of Tiran.”

They saluted and gave rein to their restless mounts, hurrying off to the east.

Enna, Razo, and Finn had to stop past midday to rest the horses by a partly frozen stream. The three lay down on the banks close together for warmth, Enna snug in the middle, and slept for a few hours. Near sundown they rode again and through the night, stopping once again for an hour’s huddled rest. Finn lay against her back, his arm over hers. She tried to feel hope at his touch, but instead of warming her, his heat reminded her that there was burning to do.

They rose and rode again. Only a couple of hours later, in the murky light of winter dawn, they heard battle.

Enna led them a little farther north and up a gentle slope. The noise became deafening. In the valley just a few hours’ ride from the capital, two armies collided. This battle was two or three times the size of the battle of Ostekin where Leifer had died, and it seemed to Enna that the blue-clothed Tiran soldiers outnumbered the Bayern by at least three to one. She felt her mount shiver.

“What do we do?” said Razo.

Enna rode farther until they were a hundred paces to the side of the Tiran central force. Finn pulled out his sword and readied his shield. Razo followed. The sun crested the horizon behind them and touched their backs like a push from a warm hand. Despite the heat that hung about her like a poisonous vapor, Enna felt clammy and chilled. She knew she could not turn back now, but she trembled to begin.

“I miss you, Leifer,” she said softly. Without further hesitation, she looked at the nearest grouping of Tiran soldiers, pulled in heat, and set them on fire.

At first she tried to go slowly, wait for the heat to gather again, not give up control too quickly, but the deeper she swam, the more desire she felt to just be pulled by the current. The fire begged, the lake of soldiers moved and shimmered, seemingly restless for their deaths.
Surrender
. So before the hollowness in her chest could turn cold and hard, before her skin numbed to the heat, she let go. It felt like dropping the reins on a wild mount, like pushing away from shore. She had been prepared for the horror, but she had not anticipated the joy.

Her horse began to prance and whine. She slipped from his back and onto her knees and continued to burn. It seemed a great while before men broke from their ranks to come after her. Perhaps Enna’s Tiran dress and the boys’ Tiran armor had fooled them for a time. Enna was conscious of the closer sounds of swordplay, but she did not move her eyes from the battlefield.

Then something new. Enna sent fire not into a man’s hair or clothes, the dead parts of him, but right inside him, into his bones. She stopped for the first time, stumbled away, and emptied her stomach. She had not realized before that the living could also be fuel, and she felt betrayed by the fire, its whispers justifying its existence because it burned only dead things. Lies. But to quit would be like stopping the water after swallowing. She turned back to the battle.

The burning field was mesmerizing. The heat from the sun, from the fires, the horses and living men, from Razo and Finn, it all met in her and became power. It was strange and beautiful how destruction and life were bound together in fire, and she marveled that she had never thought of it before. Her eyes stung, tears for the beauty of it scalded away before they could drop. Was that why she cried? For the beauty? And something else. Pain. She remembered that people cry for beauty and pain, and seeing both together was almost unbearable. She found she was on her stomach now, propped up by her shaking arms, straining her eyes at the field. She ripped apart her sleeves so that her bared arms could better feel the touch of heat.

Nearly a tenth of the field was on fire now, and the untouched pools of blue-coated Tiran seemed to be moving wrong, like a dammed stream. They were gushing out of the way of the fires. They were fleeing.
Burn them
, she thought,
before they’re gone.
Again and again she filled up her chest with heat.

Then a noise like a twig underfoot. Something inside her cracked, and she felt the heat bleed into her, inside her chest, through her blood.

Now it’s over
, she thought, and she saw in her mind the hard, blackened body of Leifer crumpled on the battlefield. At last, here was burning pain without beauty, and it felt just. The world dimmed, the sounds of battle were muffled and far away. She felt herself fall forward, heard as from a distance her own cry. Everything seemed to be slipping away.

But before she was completely gone, a new sensation—wind. Cool, late-winter wind rolled over her skin, on her face, over her arms, into her lungs, touching her like a fall of water to wash away the grime. It was cool like a tree shade and carried with it the scents of snow, fox, pine, and hay. Wind reminded her of Isi, and Enna wondered if she were near. She thought she heard Finn say, “Hold on, Enna.”

She breathed in as deep as her own roots, and when she breathed out again there was no pain, just sleep.

.

Friend

.

The sleep now was different from that of the king’s-tongue days. Then the drug had smothered her in numbness and loss of will. Now, even
unconscious, Enna found herself fighting. The struggle
with the fire became a struggle to survive.

She idly thought that she was still lying on the rise over the battlefield because the sun was so very hot, burning her right through her clothing. It seemed to always be high noon. Sometimes she thought that she awoke, opened her eyes, and saw her body was a charred clump of hard ash.
Nightmare
. She recoiled into deeper, imageless sleep.

After a time, the struggle included a fight not just to live, but not to wake. In that faraway place where she could think, she feared that if she woke, she would die. She did not want to open her eyes and see the valley and the remnants of her burning. But awareness came closer and closer. She was cognizant of people touching her, speaking around her, placing a cup to her lips.

King’s-tongue
, she thought intuitively, and spat out the water. She creaked open an eye and saw that she lay in her old room in the palace. A physician stood over her, said something soothing, and brought the water back to her mouth. She drank.

She was conscious at first for only a scattering of moments. Sometimes she opened her eyes and saw that the room was dark and the windows full of night, and she admitted to herself that the heat came from inside her and not the sun after all. Often Isi was there, asleep on a sofa or reading by candlelight.

Slowly, painfully, Enna at last allowed herself to fully wake. The room was quiet. Only Isi was present, sitting in her chair with a book, twirling one short lock around a finger. Enna took a deep, shuddering breath.

Isi looked up.

“I’m still alive,” said Enna, her voice raspy and without melody.

“Barely,” said Isi. Her smile was friendly, but there were dark patches under her eyes.

Enna thought of the animal worker days in the city when Isi wore a hat all the time to hide her hair and identity and only Enna in all of Bayern knew that Isi was the foreign princess. She remembered Isi by Eylbold firelight, her hair chopped short, telling the Tiran guards the story of the prince and the dragon. She remembered Isi standing outside Ostekin, her hair long and loose, and her expression of horror—no, of sadness—when Enna unleashed a torrent of flaming heat.

Enna took another deep breath, wanting to say something, to explain. Her breath caught in her lungs, tightened, and turned into a sob. She covered her face and let the tears come, then cried out in pain when the sob shook a cracked place inside her chest. She remembered that injury on the battlefield, taking in more heat, feeling the hollow place get so hot, too hot, and snap. A flood of heat followed and even now continued to leak into her blood. She was changed. The fire was not gone—it would never leave. Neither would the images of that last battle, seemingly burned into the underside of her eyelids, always there when she closed her eyes.

Isi moved her chair closer and turned the wet cloth on Enna’s forehead over to the cooler side. Enna held her breath until she could control the desire to cry, then spoke with a stunned, sleepy calm.

“I killed. Hundreds of people. I burned them alive.”

“It was war,” said Isi.

“It was me,” Enna said bitterly. “You were right about the fire, about its power being too much for one person. But you should know, nothing forced me to do it. I chose to . . . to . . .” She lifted up her hands and saw the smooth, natural skin. “Why aren’t I burnt up?”

“You nearly were. I heard rumor of you on the wind, and then I cooled you. The wind had to keep at you, like putting out a hay fire that keeps relighting.”

“Ah,” said Enna, remembering.

They were quiet a moment. Enna studied the way strips of light from behind the curtains painted the wall.

“It’s over?” she asked at last.

“It’s over,” said Isi.

“And?”

“We won, more or less. Our land is ours again. It will be. There’s still some . . . reconstruction needed.”

Enna nodded. “Razo and Finn?”

“Razo’s going to live, but he took a sword in the ribs, on the hill beside you. He’s still in bed. I believe Finn’s fine. To tell the truth, I’ve been here with you for days and haven’t let anyone else in. I can go find him. He’s probably hovering somewhere nearby.”

“Don’t,” said Enna.

“All right.”

Enna thought of Finn sneaking into a Tiran camp ready to kill an army to get her free; of Finn bound, gagged, beaten by a jealous Sileph because of a look that passed between them; of Finn asleep beside her, his arm over hers. She had loved Sileph while he and Razo rotted, she had attacked Bayern, and she had slaughtered hundreds of people, and still Finn would forgive her. That knowledge felt like a needle pressed into her heart.

She watched Isi’s hand straighten a creased page of her book.

“I know now why Leifer died,” said Enna. “Part of it was just what happens when you use that much fire, but part of it was choice. He surrendered to it and burned big, but then knew he couldn’t live to see what he’d done, so he let himself burn out. It hurts, but not as much as seeing what you’ve made. I would’ve done the same as Leifer.” Her chin trembled and her face tightened to stop the tears.

Isi sighed and took Enna’s hand. “I want you to understand something, Enna, so listen to me. Are you listening? It’s what I was trying to tell you that night . . . before you left Ostekin the last time. I’ve talked with Razo about you and I’ve read a bit, and I think no one could’ve come out of this as well as you. Between Sileph’s power with words and the fire inside you aching for a reason to blaze, how could you resist? And yet you did for so long. Only Enna, stubborn, unyielding Enna. I know you’ve only done what you thought best.”

Enna nodded. She would love a reason to give up the guilt. But she remembered the nascent flame leaving her body and shooting into a soldier, and before it fully became fire and left her awareness, she felt it enter his flesh, enter the soft center of his bones, the speed of his blood, and there burst into fire. She shivered from deep inside.

When Enna did not speak for a time, Isi said, “You didn’t expect to live until now, did you?”

Enna shook her head.

“You still might not.” Isi leaned forward, meeting Enna’s eyes. “You’re on fire, En. You’ve been living inside a fever now for over two weeks. The physicians don’t know what to do. Is it just that you want to . . . burn out? Can you decide not to?”

Enna breathed in and winced at the tearing pain it made in her chest. “I don’t know, Isi. I don’t know how. It used to be that I had to find bits of heat and pull them to me, but near the end, the heat began to find me. It was like it recognized me, sought me out. It took all my concentration to keep it at bay. But on the battlefield, something in me . . . broke. I can’t hold it back anymore. It’s leaking inside me, all into me.”

“Yes,” Isi said thoughtfully.

“Is that how it is with you? Did the wind start to find you, stick to you, and you couldn’t push it back?”

Isi looked about to respond, but they were interrupted by a physician bringing Enna food and a fresh cool cloth for her head. While he ministered to Enna, Isi stared at her book, though her eyes did not move across the lines. Enna slumbered, and when she woke again, she opened her eyes to a man standing over her. Instinctively she hunched deeper into the pillows.

Isi stood up. “Enna, it’s Geric.”

Enna’s bleary eyes resolved the images before her, and she saw Geric standing by her bed, his brow furrowed.

“Should I go?” he asked.

“No, no,” said Enna, trying to sit up. Isi put a hand on her shoulder that told her to relax. “You’re fine, Geric.”

“I think you must’ve had a rough time,” he said, frowning.

She smiled weakly. “So’ve you, I guess.”

“Geric,” said Isi, “I was just coming to tell you. I think I know what Enna needs to heal. I’m taking her back to her house in the Forest. There’s nothing more the physicians can do. I’ve asked a packhorse be prepared with food supplies for us, and Avlado and Enna’s Merry are saddled and waiting.”

Isi waited, smiling a little as though fearing his reaction.

“I’ll go, too,” he said.

Isi shook her head. “There’s too much for you to do right now. The king can’t leave. I’ll be back as soon as she’s better.”

Geric pressed his lips together. “You’re right, but I’m sending an escort at least.”

Isi hesitated, then said, “Fine.” She kissed his cheek, his lips, and then they embraced. At their affection, Enna felt her heart reach and long for something.
Sileph
, came the unbidden thought.

“Oh,” said Geric, squeezing her tighter, “I’ll miss you, my yellow lady. Don’t be long.”

Isi pulled away and nodded. Her eyes were wet. It made Enna wonder how long Isi intended to be gone.

“Don’t worry about me.” Isi smiled and kissed him again.

Enna thought she was well enough to ride upright, and they left the city in the brightness of an early-spring morning, so unlike the last times she had ridden Merry over frozen midnight fields. She was happy to see the mare again and relieved she had made it home safely, but Enna could not enjoy the ride. A sensation like an empty walnut shell bounced in her chest. Heat clawed like rough fingernails on her skin.

Entering the Forest again was a skin-shuddering relief. The green buds and needles and creaking sounds were as familiar as the smell of her own bed, yet she felt like a stranger. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand. Everything seemed flammable, even her.

A day later, when they reached Enna’s little house, Isi released the escort from their duty. “We’re safe here. Tell the king we’ll send word when we’re ready to return, but not to bother checking for at least three weeks. I’m certain it will take longer than that.”

“Three weeks is long, my queen,” said the head guard.

“Two, then,” said Isi. “Go on.”

Enna frowned. The guards might be oblivious, but Enna could always tell when Isi was lying. Whatever Isi intended, it most likely would take much longer than two weeks.

Isi put Enna in her bed. The familiar smells of pinewood and chicken feathers reminded her so suddenly and profoundly of Leifer, she sat up coughing at the tightness in her chest. She breathed deeply and waved off Isi’s concerned look.

Isi set up some split wood in the hearth. When she turned away to look for flint, Enna set it blazing.

Isi looked at her with creases around her eyes. “Should you . . . ?”

Enna shrugged. “The heat is constantly on me and inside me now. It can’t hurt to expel a little.”

“But not too much,” said Isi.

Enna watched the tame little fire in the hearth, the pleasant ripples of orange and gold. The sound of heat-snapping wood was homey, like the click of knitting needles. She felt like that fire—it seemed lively enough, but eventually the fire would burn through the logs and go out completely. She already felt worn down to embers.

“I brought you here with an idea,” said Isi. “I’ve done more reading while you were sick. Yasid.”

“That kingdom to the south,” said Enna.

Isi nodded. “More than one book mentions a people there called the
tata-rook
, the fire worshippers. Some claim that the
tata-rook
have a relationship with fire. If it’s common in Yasid, they must have a secret for using it and not letting it destroy them.”

Enna watched the flames rise suddenly higher, and she thought how the hotter and brighter a fire burns, the faster it burns out. “We’re going there.”

“Yes,” said Isi. “Soon. Tomorrow. Before Geric . . . before anyone knows we’ve gone. We can’t go riding down there with an escort of fifty soldiers. There are roving bands of Tiran still, and with numbers we’d attract attention. If we want to avoid notice and have speed, our best chance is just the two of us alone. And if trouble finds us, I believe we can handle ourselves.”

Enna pulled her gaze away from the fire. “That could take three months. Or four.”

Isi nodded. “Or more.”

“So, you’ll sneak away, leave Geric, travel for months, just on the chance that the fire worshippers might have a cure?”

Isi blinked and said simply, “Yes.”

“No,” said Enna. She did not believe that getting rid of the heat, the fever, the desire, could be so simple. Even the thought of trying caused her legs to shake. “You don’t even know if it will work, and I could die on the way, and you’d be alone and months away from home and you could get hurt—”

“Look at me, queen’s maiden,” said Isi. Enna stopped and looked. Isi was intent, even a little angry. “There’s no debate here. You owe me. This is what I want—I want you to live. I order you to live. Do you understand?”

Enna nodded. Isi had never ordered her in anything. Her instinct was to fight back, but she found she did not want to this time.

They departed in the dewy morning. Isi had risen early to saddle the mounts and prepare the packhorse. She had managed to bring many bulging bags of food from the palace and a small tent like the one Enna had slept in with Razo and Finn.