Fireborn Page 10

  “No more little spells,” she said to her reflected face. “Not unless I keep them.”

  She wouldn’t tell him she knew that he had been selling them. That would make him suspicious and he might find out about Mattie.

  “Well,” she said to herself. “Twelve years old today. Do you feel any different?”

  She knew the answer before she asked the question, which was why she asked it.

  “In a way,” she answered. “But I don’t know which way.”

  Growing up without any children to play with or talk to, and not liking to talk to Slowin or Brassbuck, this was a sort of conversation she had grown used to. She took both parts.

  “Do you feel older?” she asked herself.

  “No,” she answered herself.

  “Then how are you different?”

  She paused.

  “I swallowed the fire,” she said.

  “Does it burn?”

  “No.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not now.”

  “Do you look any different?”

  She looked as thoroughly as she was able with the small mirror.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She hesitated before she asked the next question. It was frightening.

  “Has it taken away your magic?”

  This was what had been folded away in her mind ever since she had opened her eyes, but she hadn’t known it was there until she asked herself.

  “I don’t think so?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No.”

  “How will you find out?”

  Bee put down the hairbrush. She closed her eyes. Opened them again. Looked herself straight in the eye. Holding her breath she let go of the mirror and lowered her hands to her sides. The mirror hung in the air in front of her. Bee smiled. She pursed her lips and blew gently at it. A halo of fire spread out, surrounding the glass. Her image was enclosed in the sun. She blinked. The flames turned into sunflower petals. She took the mirror back into her hand and the petals withered, died and disappeared. Her face smiled back at her.

  “No,” she said. “It hasn’t taken away my magic.”

  “Has it changed your magic?”

  Bee put the mirror down and walked away.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know how to test that.”

  “Perhaps nothing’s different then, except the way you feel.”

  “You’re probably right,” she agreed. “Nothing’s different.”

  She went through for her breakfast and everything was different.

  There was a beetle on her writing table.

  Bee quickly checked that the spell to keep them out of her rooms was still in place. Another beetle scratched its way over the threshold. Bee watched it struggle against the magic, legs waving as though in pain, then recover and disappear into the rushes and herbs on the floor.

  She looked around. They were everywhere. Not many. Not like outside where they swarmed. But there was hardly a part of the room where there wasn’t a beetle.

  Caught between anger and disgust Bee sent swift spells hurling at them. Usually, she hated killing the beetles and took great care not to step on them if she could when she crossed the yard. Today she didn’t care. She loosed her magic and sent them spinning and popping and flaring up and sizzling. They burst and died. They skittered and oozed. Each one, as it died, left a wisp of smoke and a nasty smell and a slimy, sticky mark.

  She breathed heavily as though she had run a long way. She scratched at her hair, feeling the sharp legs of the creatures against her scalp, though she knew it was in her imagination. She scratched her body, feeling them under her shirt against her skin. She shuddered and she stamped her foot.

  “Ugh,” she said.

  “What’s this?”

  Brassbuck appeared in the doorway.

  “Get out!”

  Bee sent a shock spell across the room. It hit Brassbuck between the eyes and she staggered back. The beetles kept on clambering in. For every one that Bee killed two, three, more followed. Brassbuck shook her head and righted herself.

  “Happy birthday,” she said.

  “Are you bringing these in here?” Bee demanded.

  Brassbuck hesitated then came right in. Beetles swarmed over her boots.

  “I followed them,” said Brassbuck.

  Bee drew in a deep breath. Instead of directing her spells at beetles one at a time she made a picture of them all in her head and made the strongest spell she knew. The air stood still. There was a short, sharp silence, so complete that it made her ears hurt. She saw a puzzled look cover Brassbuck’s face. The rushes and herbs on the floor glowed. Brassbuck put a leather-clad arm in front of her eyes to shield them from the light. Bee blinked. Every beetle in the room exploded. They split their shells. The soft insides sprayed out, snot-green and pus-yellow, vomit-grey, stinking.

  The silence gave way to their popping and a high, whining screech. The glow faded. Brassbuck lowered her arm and looked at the ruin of the invading swarm.

  Bee had beaten them. And they had beaten her. In killing them she had destroyed her home. The tidy room, with its sweet-scented rushes, was a sticky, stinking mess. She could still feel them crawling on her skin. The thought of them lived on after their bodies had burst.

  “Get out,” she said to Brassbuck. She was tired. Her head ached. Her hands were shaking again. The buzzing and crackling of the loose magic was stronger than ever. It made her hair lift a little from her head. “Go on.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Get out. This is my room. I don’t want you in here. Ever.”

  “But I brought you a birthday present.”

  “I don’t want it. Get out.”

  Bee looked at her desk. Her books and pens were covered in a film of slime. Shattered wing-cases and broken legs littered the surface.

  “You’ve got it already,” said Brassbuck. She had recovered. “I brought you the beetles.”

  “Just get out.” Bee was so tired she could hardly say the words.

  “You’ll be glad I did,” said Brassbuck. “After you’ve seen Slowin, this afternoon.”

  Through her feelings of sickness and pain Bee was glad to see that the beetles outside that tried to cross the threshold tested the air with their feelers and then turned away. No more were coming in. She had repelled them, at least for now.

  “I’m not going to see him,” she said. “I’m too tired.”

  “Oh, you’ll see him,” said Brassbuck. “You have to. It’s your birthday.”

  Mattie had never felt better.

  He covered the distance faster than he had expected. He didn’t need to stop and rest. He hardly needed to drink. Didn’t need to eat at all. His legs never grew tired. He didn’t know what he had swallowed, what magic Bee had put into the stone, or found in the stone, but he knew it made him stronger than he had ever been.

  Always in front of his eyes, the Palace of Boolat. High towers and thick walls. Flags flapping, the clouds rushing past making it look as though the castle was a ship in motion, slicing through the waves, speeding to new lands.

  He thought often of Bee. Kitchen boys don’t have an easy life. He thought his mother had been a servant at the Palace but he wasn’t sure. He remembered her a little. She had died, he thought. Or gone away and left him there. No one seemed to want to tell him about her. And no one seemed to know anything they could tell him about his father. He didn’t even know how old he was. He thought he might be the same age as Bee, perhaps a year older. Not younger, anyway.

  There’d be a new boy turning the spit when he got back. That was all right. He didn’t want to do that any more. There was no shortage of work. He’d try the stables. He liked the idea of horses. He forded a stream, enjoying the chill of the water after the heat of the sun. He drank a little, for the pleasure of drinking more than for the relief of any thirst.

  After the stream he climbed to the top of the hill and looked down at the silver curve of its pa
th.

  “Thank you,” said Mattie, looking back the way he had come. Turning to face the Palace he paused, not knowing what to say. In the distance figures moved across a field, harvesting. It was that time of year.

  “Well,” he said at last. “I’ve nowhere else to go. So I’m coming back. But I want more this time.”

  As soon as her head was clear of the ache Bee left her room. She hated it now. She was too tired to clean it up, too sick at heart to want to. She wanted to be away from the beetles, away from leather-and-booted Brassbuck, away from Slowin, away from the yard. She wanted to get rid of the buzzing in her ears, the crackling and hissing of the magic, like the charged air before a thunderstorm. She wanted grass and breeze, the smooth coolness of a pebble, the whisper of leaves overhead, the scent of hay and the damp soft earth. She wanted to talk to someone her own age. She wanted to hug her mother. She wanted to cry. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to run downhill and splash in water. She wanted to see Mattie. She wanted to chase after him and bring him back and say she was sorry for sending him away.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’ll leave here and never do magic again.”

  She ran out of the yard and up the hill, hoping he had come back.

  The Palace of Boolat shimmered in the haze of the late morning sun. A lost opportunity. A picture locked in a book. She sat and looked at it until her eyes could no longer focus and her head swam. And she cried. And she was twelve years old that day.

  For years afterwards stories were told about that day. Mothers told their children to behave or Slowin would come and get them and take them away to his tower. Then the memory faded. They forgot about the tower. They forgot about the fire. They forgot about Bee. All they remembered was the storm. On wild nights, when the thunder was rolling in across the hills and the lightning was scaring the dogs, when the rain threw itself against the windows in an agony of exile, the people safe in their houses would smile and pour themselves another drink and say, “It’s a real Slowin tonight.”

  When the rain had stopped and they went back out and saw a blasted tree, its trunk split from the shaft of lightning they would nod and say, “Old Slowin’s climbed that tree.” When a house was struck and the timber caught fire and the roof blazed and the building was destroyed the neighbours shook their heads and said, “Slowin slept there last night.” But no one knew why. No one remembered who Slowin was or why he was the company of lightning storms.

  Wizards remembered him. Wizards remember more than other people. Sometimes, wizards remember things that never happened, but that’s a different thing altogether.

  But even wizards didn’t always tell the story the way it really happened. Their stories became entangled with the memories of the storm. Sometimes they said that Slowin was hiding in the cellar when it happened. But there were no cellars in Slowin’s Yard. Just the towers and the cobbled floors and the beetles and the experiments and the fires. And Brassbuck. And Slowin. And Bee. |

  Slowin moved from tower to tower,

  crackling and sizzling. He couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t work. He couldn’t read. His hands were all the time moving, touching the apparatus for his experiments, picking up a tripod, adjusting a flask, running a finger along the mortar between the black bricks of the walls, snapping a beetle and tossing it onto the fire. His eyes darted fearfully from side to side, up and round, checking. Always not quite seeing someone or something that seemed to be there, just in the corner of his sight, until he turned to look, and there was nothing.

  The crackling magic was beginning to irritate him. It irritated his mind, making him want to slap out and hurt something. It irritated his skin. The hairs on his arms were standing up. He scratched his sides to rid himself of the feeling of something crawling over him. His throat was dry. Drinking made it worse. He snapped the head off a beetle, put the body into his mouth, crunched the case and let the soft pulp ooze on to his tongue. He sucked at it and let it trickle into his throat. For a while it soothed the soreness then he needed another, and another.

  Two o’clock.

  Twelve years old.

  He had the papers all ready for Bee to sign. As soon as she put her name to them under his signature she would be his apprentice. Bound to him for six years.

  His name.

  Her name.

  But not Slowin.

  Not Bee.

  Slowin’s name as a wizard was Ember.

  He had always hated it.

  The day his old master had told him his name and told him to sign it on his indentures Slowin had argued.

  “It’s not a proper name,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  The master was puzzled. He was a gentle man. Soft-spoken, slow to answer, waiting always to see how the other person felt.

  “It’s weak,” said Slowin. “I want a better name.”

  The master smiled at him. Slowin had not been the easiest boy he had ever had to teach. He had often thought of suggesting that perhaps it would be better if Slowin went away, if he perhaps went to the College at Canterstock instead. There he would learn to use his magic but never become one of the wizards of the Old Craft. But the master didn’t like to turn anyone away.

  “You can’t choose your name,” he said. “Come. Sign. You will grow to like it.”

  “You chose it,” said Slowin. He kicked the leg of the table and scowled at the man. “You chose a bad name on purpose.”

  “The name chooses you,” said his master. “All I do is find out for you what it is.”

  Slowin picked up the pen and jabbed the nib on the paper of the indenture. He didn’t write.

  “What’s wrong with Ember?”

  “It’s a dead name. It’s what’s left of a fire when all the heat has gone. It’s an old name. I’m not old. I’m young. I want a young name. I want a strong name. I want a name that will let me do things. Things people will always remember. It’s a weak name.”

  The master waited for the anger to shout itself out.

  “Ember is your name,” he said. “And it will be weak or strong as you use it. Nothing is weak or strong of itself. Embers are the soul of the fire. Embers are what remain when the flash of the flames has gone. Put your hand into a flame for a moment and no harm will come to you. You can pass your hand through the blue fire of a candle unhurt. But wait until the flames have died. Wait until all that is left is grey ash covering red embers. Then put your hand in the fire and grasp the embers. You will burn yourself.”

  He looked at Slowin.

  “Do you understand?”

  Slowin scowled.

  “Lay some kindling on the embers and blow gently. The wood will catch. Add a few small lumps of coal, the blue flames will reappear. Put on a log and watch the flames rise up. Feed the fire, add more fuel. It will grow and live and burn down a whole town if you let it. Because of the power of the embers. Do you understand?”

  Slowin scratched the nib on the paper, spattering ink.

  “And when that fire has burned itself out and no flames remain, turn over the ashes with your boot, let them fall and see the embers reveal themselves gold-vermillion. That is where the fire lives. Ember is a great name.”

  “I want a better one,” said Slowin.

  But he signed.

  He knew better now. He knew that the name was, indeed, not the master’s to choose. The apprentice brought the name with her. It was only for the master to discover it. But that had not stopped him from hating his name all his life.

  And now he knew Bee’s name. Today her wizard’s name would be used for the first time.

  Her name was Flame. |

  Sleep had come easily

  and passed pleasantly for Cabbage, which was not always the way.

  When he woke Perry was already up and dressed, sitting in a window seat eating toast and drinking milk.

  “What happened to the cat?” he asked as soon as Cabbage’s eyes were open.

  “Eh?”

  “The cat. What ha
ppened to it?”

  Cabbage stretched, feeling more than a little like a cat himself.

  “It just goes away,” he said.

  “Where to?”

  “Is there any more toast?”

  “I can get you some.”

  “Please.”

  “And then you’ll tell me where the cat went?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.”

  Perry finished his toast and carried his plate to the door.

  “And some bacon, please,” said Cabbage. “And a fried egg if there is one. And some mushrooms.”

  Cabbage sort of washed his face while Perry fetched the food. He didn’t bother with his hair.

  It was hot again. And the air crackled and fizzed more than ever. He wondered what time it was. The sun was well over the horizon but not too high. Still fairly early.

  “There’s a big conference downstairs,” said Perry, appearing with the food. “They want you down there.”

  “I’ll eat this first. Are they in a state?”

  “Does a pig make mud wagons and take monkeys to market?” said Perry.

  “I thought you’d given up roffle talk,” said Cabbage.

  “More or less.” Perry grinned. “Can a tablecloth fix a farm cart with a feather?”

  Cabbage was halfway through the food and regretting he had eaten all the bacon while there was still toast and egg left.

  “Where does the cat go?”

  Cabbage swallowed his toast.

  “Nowhere,” he said. “There isn’t a cat.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “No. But it’s the answer.”

  Perry sat in the window seat again, weaving the sunlight through his hair.

  “If we all saw a cat. And if the cat ate the fire, then there was a cat, of sorts,” he said. “Otherwise it couldn’t have eaten the fire.”

  “Only if there was any fire to eat,” said Cabbage.

  “It was hot,” said Perry. “The grass is all scorched and gone where it was. And there are black smoke streaks on the wall where we were sitting when it started.”