Lesson of the Fire (20 page)

The next morning, Tyra took the crib where
her children had once slept out of the house. It took longer to
dismantle than the rocking chair had, and soon they had another
little pile of precious wood next to the fireplace. Tyra prepared a
rabbit soup this time, and Katla fell asleep watching the
memory-eating fire on which their lives depended devour the scraps
greedily.

When she woke, the house was full of people
— all of them murmuring, all of them afraid for the hunters and
their families. The cyan-cloaked wizard who lived in the village
had left days ago with promises to bring help, but she hadn’t come
back. Katla heard enough to know many people were dying of cold and
hunger, and nobody knew what to do about the slaver wizards.

Tyra had no answer for that, but she told
them about the chair and offered to share her soup. They accepted
but only took a few polite sips before excusing themselves. The
next day, some of the ones with no children brought food to Tyra’s
house — another duck, a bowl of wild rice, some roots and herbs.
Nobody had much, but they shared it anyway.

“If everyone’s hungry, why’re they givin’ us
food?” Sven asked.

“They’re not givin’ the food to us,” Tyra
explained. “They’re givin’ it to the gods.”

“So we can’t eat it?” Sven asked, sounding a
little petulant.

She smiled at him and brushed his cheek with
one hand. “Don’t worry, darlin’. You can eat it.” She turned her
face to Katla. “Do you un’erstan’?”

“It’s a sac’fice. They go hun’ry to prove
they believe the gods will help us. That’s why you gave them soup,
right?”

Her mother nodded. “An’ I believe the gods
will sen’ the hunters back with enough food an’ wood to last the
winter.”

“What if they don’t?” Katla blurted out.

Tyra looked a little wounded.

“I b’lieve,” Sven announced proudly,
climbing into his mother’s lap. No question in his tone, this time,
and for once Katla missed it. Tyra wrapped Sven in her arms and
held him tight while Katla contented herself feeding pieces of the
broken crib into the fire.

Days passed with no word of the hunters.
Furniture burned first. Extra tools came next. In the end, even the
dearest mementos that could burn fed the Gematsud hearthfire.
Swind, the south wind, carried warmer weather, but they still
needed to feed the fire. People who drank water without boiling it
got sick from Dinah’s Curse and died.

Katla and Sven weren’t allowed out of the
house anymore. Katla worried for her mother because she never
seemed to eat anymore. Almost all Tyra’s food went to her children,
until she looked like sticks held together with mud — like
something that would soon be chopped up outside and fed to the fire
in the hearth.

Tyra stopped inviting neighbors inside for
soup. They had no soup. They had started trying to boil just about
everything in the house to make it into food — leather, reeds, even
spiders and centipedes. They were hungry all the time. No one
brought them any food, either.

Katla secretly stopped eating after two days
like this, sneaking Sven her part of whatever barely edible food
her mother gave her. If starving herself would bring her father
back safely, that’s what she’d do. She knew that soon she wouldn’t
have a choice. They would run out of food, and then they would all
starve like so many of their neighbors were. The gods didn’t reward
Mar who starved because they ran out of food. That wasn’t a
sacrifice. For it to be a sacrifice, you had to have a choice. When
she fainted from hunger, though, her mother forced her to eat —
told her the gods didn’t want children to make sacrifices like
that. Katla was too weak to argue, and she ate the soup made with
two boiled mice.

At last, they had nothing left to offer the
fire. Instead of searching the house for a forgotten scrap of wood,
Tyra put on her warmest cloak and kissed Sven and Katla on the
cheek where they lay by the fire.

“Mom?” Katla murmured. “Where are you
goin’?”

Tyra looked at Katla seriously. “I’m going
out to look for firewood and maybe for some food, too.”

“But the wizards,” Katla whispered in a
panic, hoping not to wake her brother.

Her mother cupped her cheek with one hand,
her green eyes gentle but sad. “I have to. The fire won’t feed
itself.”

“But Dad’ll come back, won’t he?”

Tyra crouched next to her daughter and spoke
in a whisper. “I’ll tell you a secret if you promise not to tell
your brother.”

“I promise.”

“I don’t know if your dad’s comin’ back. You
an’ Sven have t’eat, so I’m doin’ ev’rythin’ I can to get you food.
If dad gets back first, good, but if the wizards took him, someone
has to feed you, an’ I’m the only one left. Do you un’erstan’?”

Katla shook her head and started to cry.

“You know how fire works, right? If fire
doesn’t have something’ to burn, it goes out.”

“Yes.”

“People are a lot like fire. They have to
eat or they die. Rem’emer how the fire burned Grandpa’s chair, the
spoons, your old doll?”

Katla nodded.

“Did it burn them any less because they were
important t’us? No, because fire isn’t picky. It isn’t patient. It
knows it’ll die if it doesn’t eat, so it burns ev’rythin’ it can.
That’s what fire does — it burns for as long as it can.”

Katla still didn’t understand. She was
crying too much.

Tyra sat on her heels and kissed Katla’s
forehead. “Take care of your brother, and keep the fire burning
until I get back. You’ve watched me, right? Gentle breaths, first,
an’ then bigger ones. Little sticks and then bigger ones, but never
too many at once.”

“But there’s nothin’ left to burn,” Katla
objected softly, wiping her cheeks.

“You have to be like fire, Katla. You have
to fin’ somethin’ to burn. But you have to be smarter than fire,
too. Don’t burn anythin’ you don’t have to. There’s wood i’the
walls, but if you burn it, you’ll let i’the cold. Your blanket will
burn, but if you burn it, it can’t keep you warm at night. Fire
will burn anything it can. That’s what fire does. You have to tell
it what it can burn an’ how fast without lettin’ it go out.”

Katla nodded her understanding. Then Tyra
kissed her again and left the house for the last time. The fire
went out a few hours later, and only Pitt’s arrival that night with
food and firewood kept both children from dying of starvation or
Dinah’s Curse.

* * *

I have to control the fire. I have to tell
it what it can burn without letting it go out. It can’t stop itself
from burning. That’s what fire does — like the Mar, like the Mass,
like Sven.

Katla woke to blistering pain, though the
fires were no more. A ravit looked down at her. She opened her
mouth to speak, but it hissed at her for silence.

“Yee Ka Lah, your wounds aren’t healed. You
need rest.”

She squinted painfully against the sun and
tried to summon Vitality. There were few burns magic could not
heal. Her eyes widened in shock when nothing happened. The ravit
shook his head.

“We have been feeding you morutsen to keep
you from hurting yourself.”

A hundred questions blurred through Katla’s
mind, some sincerely curious, others desperately worrying.

“One of the insero brought you out of the
fire before it consumed you, but Yee Roh Yeh was gone. He did not
complete his mission, so now the First Wave will march.” The ravit
seemed disappointed. “I will not be in it, but I will be in the
Twentieth Wave. Will the Yee hold out for that long?”

And they would not find Brack. Morutmanon
made certain of that, too.

One in a million wizards had the knowledge,
discipline and magical strength to wield morutmanon. Sven made
wand-like gloves that could mimic it, so in that respect, Katla was
stronger than her brother.

Even the most militant reds largely scoffed
at it as senseless overkill. It took too long to master, left the
wizard exhausted and barely capable of any further magic and it was
no deadlier than a hundred other attack spells that only used one
or two magicks.

Katla knew the truth, though. Weards
universally feared anyone who could wield morutmanon — not just
because it required incredible skill and dedication, but because of
the spell’s legendary ability to recognize spies, traitors and even
those who could easily be swayed. Legends claimed it sometimes
spared an obvious enemy it knew could be turned or killed a close
ally it knew would one day become an enemy.

And so, proof that I could never convince
him to my cause. If it had spared him, instead, I would have gotten
a different sort of message.

Coughing, she asked, “How soon ... ?”

“No questions now,” another ravit said,
gesturing to her guard to leave. This one was older. She crouched
down near Katla.

“Once you have healed yourself, you will
accompany the guer in the First Wave when they cross the Fens of
Reur. If you kill Yee Seh Tah where Yee Roh Yeh failed, there will
be no Twentieth Wave. Does Yee Ka Lah understand?”

So many questions! How soon will the Mass
reach Domus Palus? How much time has passed? Will they ever let me
meet with the Delegates?

The ravit watched her until she nodded, then
left. The young guard remained, jabbering in his excitement. He
seemed to think the Twentieth Wave would mobilize tomorrow, or in a
span. Katla lay there, dredging up patience to cover her anger.
Killing this guard would not help her, not now.

I cannot stop the invasion, but I can deny
it surprise, at least.

When the morutsen finally wore off, she
eliminated all signs that she had been burned badly enough to put
her life in danger. Then she gathered the myst and fell into the
Tempest, ignoring the young ravit’s pleas to take him with her.

I must get the fire under control.

Chapter 16

“
Lavender is for Presence. Presence deals
with the manipulation of emotions. It is perhaps the most difficult
magic for a Mar to use, but the farl enchantresses of Flecterra
excel with it. In its simplest form, Presence can attract or repel
the attention of those nearby. More advanced applications can
generate intense emotions such as fear, love and rage.”

— Nightfire Tradition,

Nightfire’s Magical Primer

Einar checked the spells protecting Zerst,
the last stop on his survey. Weard Takraf’s defenses were intact.
His twenty representatives in the Protectorates — an amber and some
blues, auburns and greens recruited from Nightfire’s Academy and
the Academy of Domus Palus — had maintained them dutifully. Einar
also noted those wizards were making progress toward educating the
people of Zerst, Leiben and six of the other large villages.
Hundreds could read and write Mar and Middling Gien relatively
well, and soon a few of those would be able to teach others. In
Zerst, a tiny handful of students were already beginning to learn
the rules and Laws of magic.

This is Weard Takraf’s
real goal,
Einar realized.
First the Protectorates, and then all of
Marrishland.

He smiled, the creases in his aged face
deepening. In two years, maybe three, the Protectorates would
graduate more wizards than the Domus Palus Academy, and those
wizards had been groomed to teach others.

Working within the Law, the magocrats cannot
touch him. Why has no other Mardux done this before?

The Mass.

But the Mass was just a legend — an excuse
made by the magocrats like Dux Feiglin to protect their own
precious knowledge. It was a religious myth invented by
superstitious Mar after the fall of the Gien Empire. It explained
why the Drakes had attacked the Giens and why they would never raze
Marrishland again.

According to Asfrid Staute, the amber in
charge of Sven’s operations in the Protectorates, Drake attacks
were increasing — mostly gobbel raiders with a few spiny-tailed
guer. She mentioned it in passing, as if it were no more
interesting than another raindrop in the river. The defenses held
firm, after all. The Protectorates were the northernmost
collective, even farther north than the Duxy of Domus, and yet
Drakes had not come within eight miles of one of its villages in at
least three years.

But it is only a matter of
perception,
Einar thought as he turned his
attention to the town’s reconnaissance stone.
The Fens of Reur have safe and dangerous times, too. My
children learned that at a high price.

The living things marked on the large, round
slab moved in stop-time. Every four minutes, the spell connected to
the device scanned the area in a nine-mile radius for all signs of
life, especially noting those signatures belonging to Mar and
Drakes. And every hour, the device exchanged its reconnaissance
with all the other villages, making the Takraf Protectorates so
well scouted that Asfrid’s overconfidence seemed
understandable.

From here, I could cast a spell on every Mar
on the Morden Moors, if I wanted to.

Einar suddenly wanted to return to the Fens
of Reur and implement these defenses there. His magocrats would
have to become as comfortable working with Knowledge and Elements
as they were with Energy, but with what he had learned from the
Protectorates, the Mar could put an end to all the Drake attacks
along Marrishland’s northern border. The damnens could still leave
the Dead Swamps whenever they wished, but the gobbels? The ravits?
The guer? Those threats would end forever.

Why did the Mardux send me? These defenses
could indefinitely hold anything less than a massed invasion of
Drakes. Even if the Mass were real, the defenses would slow them
down a month or more. Did he hope I would learn enough to retake
the Fens of Reur?

He frowned at the stone in concentration,
looking for the answer. The information updated, and Mar went about
their daily business.