Enna Burning (3 page)

“I just wanted to congratulate you, miss, on your remarkable find.”

She turned her face, and Enna stopped midstride to laugh, at once understanding that Isi had sent the guards. And even the pigeons, no doubt prodded by Isi’s gift with bird speech, had been part of the ploy.

“Oh, Isi, that was brilliant!”

“Razo will never recover, I think,” said Isi, smiling broadly.

“Nor will I, you rascal. You should feel my heart thumping. When the birds landed on me, what a fright! And I saw myself before the king trying to explain. . . . I’m so glad it’s you.”

They flung their arms around each other and laughed and hugged. Enna held her friend at arm’s length and looked her over.

“But what are you doing out here, and in . . . ?”

“In the old goose girl disguise? I like to go out occasionally without the fanfare, you know, just walk around and feel like a normal person. If I don’t hide my hair, I can’t go two steps from the palace without being recognized as the princess.”

Enna nodded. Isi’s hair was yellow, a novelty in a land of black and brown hair, and when uncovered it hung to her hips. Even though Isi was from another kingdom, her accent sounded truly Bayern, one word bleeding into the next, with short vowels and deep consonants. Enna noted that today the princess sounded like a city woman, though she often slipped into the rougher tones of a Forest dweller. Enna smiled, remembering that if there was one thing her friend did well, it was imitating sounds.

But something seemed different in Isi, in her expression, as though she were pained and trying to hide it. Enna tried to guess what might be amiss. “So, any news? I’ve been hoping to hear that you’re expecting a, you know . . .”

Isi sighed. “Yes, you and half the court. Everyone wants an heir to the throne. It’s been two years, and a touch of desperation has crept into the ministers’ eyes. Look at you. Whenever I see you again after some time apart, I have to remember how pretty you are. And how about me?” Isi turned sideways with a serious face, as though she posed for a portrait.

“You still look like the goose girl to me.”

“Good,” said Isi.

They continued to stroll through the market. Enna glanced at the guards to see if they looked confused by their talk. She did not know how much the people of the palace knew, as she and Razo and Finn knew, of the way this foreigner came to marry their prince Geric. She was certain they knew pieces of the story—how a princess of the neighboring western kingdom had been betrothed to the prince, but the treacherous lady-in-waiting rode into the city instead, bearing the name Princess Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee. And how the true princess, aided by a group of animal workers, confronted the false bride in front of the king and prince before the marriage took place.

But did they know of the months when their princess hid her yellow hair in a Forest woman’s headscarf, donned a Forest accent, called herself Isi, and tended the king’s geese? Did they know that she was largely responsible for the Forest dwellers gaining citizenship? And did they believe the rumors of her power with wind and birds?

“I like to see what friends the Forest lets loose on marketday, but I didn’t expect to be so lucky as to have my Enna back,” said Isi. She purchased small bags of roasted nuts and gave them to the guards and Enna. “This outing is often my only time away from the palace. Seems like I don’t leave much lately.”

“Why not?”

Isi shrugged, and Enna could read in her manner that she would rather talk about it when they were alone.

“I’m glad I made it here today,” said Enna, “if only for the Razo trick.”

“Whenever you come back—”

“It’s like I never left.” Then Enna remembered. “Leifer,” she said heavily. “Isi, I’ve got to talk to you privately.”

Isi nodded and without any questions gestured her guards toward the palace.

.

They did not speak of Leifer as they left the market-square and climbed the narrow, cobbled streets. Enna had not seen Isi since her mother took sick. She was shocked to hear now that the young prince, Geric’s brother, had passed away from a fever in early summer.

“I would’ve come see you,” said Isi, “but Geric was stricken, and things here were . . . ” She paused and looked around distractedly. “Watch that cartwheel.”

“What?” said Enna.

“Oh, nothing.” Isi seemed embarrassed and did not explain.

The farther they walked, the more distant Isi seemed, and sometimes she did not respond at all to what Enna said. Enna watched her silently, worry creeping over her like a chill.

When at last they reached the hilltop and the palace courtyard, Isi dismissed the guards and took Enna to a side entrance. The door was partly ajar, but before Enna could push it open, a breeze did so for her. Isi tugged at her headscarf to loosen it, then another breeze unwound it from her head and laid it in Isi’s hands. Her long yellow hair fell free.

“Isi, your skill with the wind is much better than I remember,” said Enna.

Isi tilted her head and whispered something about a palace page in a hurry.

“What was that?” said Enna.

Isi scrunched her eyes closed and batted the air before her face. “Being out in the crowd, it affects me so much faster than it used to. Let’s go somewhere—quieter.”

Isi took Enna’s hand and led her deeper into the palace, farther in and farther down. Isi nodded to a sentry standing beside a stone door, and he grunted as he pulled it open. There were no windows. The guard lit a rush torch on the wall, and thin smoke crept along the ceiling. Enna could make out a small room, shelves loaded with armor, lances, javelins, axes, golden boxes, ivory statuettes.

“A treasury,” said Isi. She sat on a blanket that lay on the floor, and Enna followed. The sentry shut the door, and there was a hollow thunk as it sealed. The light in the room was low and yellow. Trembling shadows moved over Isi’s face.

Isi sighed. Her face smoothed as she relaxed. “Geric found this place for me a few months ago, just after it started to get worse. He says he can’t talk to me anywhere else. He says it sadly.”

“What is it?”

“The wind.”

“Oh,” said Enna, beginning to understand.

“You know, when I first learned to understand its language, I could feel only the bigger winds. I’d sit in the goose pasture, and when a breeze rose off the stream I could hear, or rather sense, where it had been, what else it had recently touched—wet stones, a sparrow, a lost goose. And when I was indoors, I rarely felt anything, just a draft from the hall, a slip of air from an open window. Now, Enna, it’s everywhere. I’ve come to realize that air is made up of tiny parts, and wind is a lot of them moving fast. Right now, even in a still room, I can feel the air. I hear it constantly.

“That’s why Geric likes to trap us in here like a couple of worms in the earth. We can shut out most of the movements. And I can have a few moments of . . . quiet.” Isi smiled. “So now that I can hear you, tell me about Leifer.”

Enna took a breath. “I was wondering if there’s such a thing as fire speech, like how you know bird and wind speech. Leifer, I think he’s learned to control fire somehow, but he . . . can’t seem to control it very well.”

“Oh,” said Isi, a soft, birdlike sound, and gently lifted the edge of Enna’s skirt from her ankles. “You’re hurt. I wonder why I didn’t hear the wind whisper of it before. There was so much going on outside, I guess, and that bit got lost. I can have a physician look at it later. Enna, did Leifer do that?”

Enna shrugged off the concern and jumped into the story of Leifer’s trip to the deep wood, the vellum, and his behavior up to the night when he set her on fire. “You see why I need to know what I can, now, before he does something else, something worse.”

Isi looked at her a long moment, still and unblinking, as though she were a robin waiting for a predator to pass. When she spoke, it was in her softer voice that Enna remembered from evenings around the hearth when Isi would tell stories to the animal workers. “Fire. It must have a language, though I never learned it. According to the old tales, most everything has a language.

“The story I know says that the Creator first spoke the word to make the world, and then all things could speak to one another, but each thing multiplied and withdrew into its own kind and forgot the languages of the others. Once snail and stone spoke, wind and tree, frog and water.” She took Enna’s hand and looked at her fingers as though for comfort. “Once, people could speak to all things, and that means to me that it’s possible for us to learn all those languages again.”

“Anyone can?” asked Enna.

“Some people have more of a knack for it than others, it seems, just like a good wheelwright can burn bread and a good baker might miss a nail. Once, before knowing wind speech gave me any trouble, I tried to teach Geric, but he just couldn’t learn it. Fortunately.

“There are three different gifts—people-speaking, animal-speaking, and nature-speaking. Some people are born with the ability to learn one. I knew others from my home kingdom who had people-speaking from birth, and all their lives they knew how to talk to people just so, to encourage love and loyalty. I wasn’t born with wind speech—I was sixteen when I first understood its words, so who knows when and how a person can learn?

“Even for people with the knack, I think most languages are too difficult for us to figure out on our own. When I was little, my aunt taught me how to hear birds speaking to one another, and I had a skill for imitating the sounds back. Even with natural talent, I needed her help to understand in the beginning.”

“But no one taught you to hear the wind,” said Enna.

“No,” said Isi, “that was different. I was ready to hear it, I guess, and seeking it. With the wind, all it took was one word to get the sense of it. After wind gave me a first word, I began to hear many more, and then I began to be able to suggest a breeze go this way or that.”

“Well, I don’t know who would’ve taught Leifer to understand fire speech, unless that vellum gives him power,” said Enna.

“I doubt it,” said Isi. Enna smiled and remembered that for someone with such uncanny abilities, Isi was remarkably unbelieving when it came to superstitions or reports of magic. “Maybe the vellum contains writing about fire- speaking, and he’s learned it on his own.”

“That blasted vellum. You know, it makes me mighty uneasy, Isi, that my brother is chest-deep in something sticky and I can’t haul him out.”

“Fire.” Isi’s eyes looked unfocused, as though she were seeing something far away. “It must be extraordinary and . . . and terrible. I don’t know what it would feel like to understand it.”

“Well, it’s bound to be something like wind, right?”

“I wonder.” Isi rubbed her forehead and looked down. “Wind is unique. Its very existence is a language, and it can’t help but carry the images of where it’s been. Every air movement that touches my skin tells me of what else it’s touched. But fire doesn’t move like wind, and it’s so much more intense. I don’t know what to do for him.”

“So, you don’t know of a way to, I don’t know, erase it? Maybe if I could learn the fire tongue myself, I could figure out how it works and help him.”

Isi blinked. “Erase it? I read once, somewhere in that old library, accounts of a desert kingdom called Yasid, to the south. Travelers from there reported of a people who had some kind of relationship with fire. Maybe they would have an answer to that, but I don’t.”

Enna looked at the orange heart of the smoky torch on the wall and was surprised to feel hopeful. “So, maybe the best thing after all would be for me to—”

“No,” said Isi. “No, don’t, Enna. Please don’t try to learn fire.”

“Why, Isi? I thought, being who you are, you’d be at least curious to try.”

“There are consequences to learning to speak with any part of creation. I’m learning that at last.”

Enna pressed her lips together. “Consequences, like your distraction.”

“Yes, for the wind it’s the constant howling. It took time for that to affect me, but the nature of fire is so severe, maybe what’s happening to me with the wind is happening to Leifer with the fire, but much more rapidly.”

Isi stood and walked to a shelf, fingering some small ornament there. “And the distraction isn’t the only change. You know my horse, Avlado? I had one before I met you—Falada. My aunt taught me to attend a horse’s birth and, when he emerged, to listen for him to say his first word—his name—and repeat it back. That was the beginning of our communication, and we grew to be able to speak together silently. He’s dead now. We were . . . separated, and he went mad. I missed him so much, I made the same connection later with Avlado, but now I think I was reckless. Maybe Falada never would’ve gone mad if it hadn’t been for me. Maybe speech between us was . . . unbalanced. As much as I love Avlado, I’ll never be so careless again.”

“Isi, you can’t blame yourself for Falada.”

“Can’t I?” said Isi. “Are you sure? Look at me with the wind. It used to be a peaceful thing. But now it presses on me with its language, overcoming me. Is that what happened to Falada?” Her chin quivered. “And will I go mad, too?”

Enna stood to comfort her, but Isi shook her off.

“At first, the wind was difficult for me to hear and harder for me to control. No longer. Not just its voice has grown stronger.”

Enna sensed a finger of wind brush her cheek and flinched.

“When I first learned to ask wind to change its course,” said Isi, “I could only take an existing breeze and suggest a new path, and it didn’t always respond. Not now.”

The breeze licked Enna’s cheek again and then began to spin around her, growing larger and stronger, whipping her hair so that Enna had to close her eyes.

“I can always feel the air vibrating around me, Enna,” she said in a strangely calm voice. “I can make a wind from nothing, and it always obeys.”

The wind blew sharp around Enna’s head, gusting into her ears, tugging on her clothes. She hugged herself against its force. This was not what she was expecting from Isi, once so quiet and careful, now making a delirious windstorm in the belly of the palace. The weapons and armor rattled on the shelves like chattering teeth, and the torchlight sputtered madly. In the center of the wind, Enna felt pushed and pulled, barely able to keep her feet. The loss of control was frustrating, then alarming.

Isi gripped Enna’s hand. “Frightening, isn’t it?”

“Enough!” Enna shouted.

Abruptly the wind died. The room was still. Enna heard the stone door scrape open.

“Is everything all right, Princess?” said the sentry.

“Yes.” Enna could see Isi’s face more clearly now. Her cheeks were pink, and she bit her lip and look ashamed.

He shut the door, and Isi looked away. She seemed a bit shaken, blinking more than usual, her breath quick. “I’m sorry. I meant to just show you how things’ve changed since you’ve been gone. And maybe to show you what might be going on in Leifer’s mind. But you see now, right? You see how easy it is to lose control, and why it’s better that you leave the fire alone.”

Enna blinked and found her legs felt weak. She sat down, and Isi sat beside her.

“I see,” said Enna.

“I’ve gone through three waiting women in two years. It’s trying for me and disturbing to others, but in the end it’s only wind. But Leifer . . .”

“Yes,” said Enna, her thoughts as dark and dancing as the treasure room shadows, “fire’s another matter altogether.”

Isi looked up. “The old tales say once a person could speak all the languages. Maybe it’s just because I know so few, just some bird, and wind, and the bond with my horse. But if I could speak everything, then I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by wind. The knowledge would be balanced.

“If that’s so, can you imagine what it’s like for Leifer to just know fire? A thing that can’t exist without destroying something else? Leifer must be so lost in fire speech that he can’t see the light for the flame. I think it must be too much for any person to balance being human and hearing fire. Flame and flesh can’t live together.”

The stone door rasped against the ground, and a broad, handsome man could be seen calming a sentry. Enna could hear the sentry whispering, “ . . . noise . . . rattling and howling . . . said she was all right.” The young man nodded to the sentry and then stepped into the torch-lit gloom.

“Drat these internal windstorms,” he said with a smile. “I can’t imagine what might be the cause.”

Isi smiled and heaved a blissful sigh. “Oh, hello there.”

He stooped and kissed Isi on the forehead. “I thought you might be here when I heard tell of a certain visitor. Good summer to you, Enna. Found this little room a bit drafty, have you?” Enna laughed. “If the road conditions are what keep you away so long, I’ll attack my father with the improvement issue today.”

“It has been a time. I was sorry, Geric, to hear of your little brother.”

Geric bowed his head and nodded.

“Enna’s brother has made an unnerving discovery,” said Isi, changing the subject.

Enna explained Leifer’s fire-speaking, his attack, and his sudden antagonism against Bayern.