Fireborn Read online

“Tomorrow,” Slowin agreed.

  Brassbuck took the other chair and they sat in silence watching the flames.

  “Will she do it?” asked Brassbuck.

  “Will she do it? Doesn’t she do everything I tell her?” Slowin jeered.

  Brassbuck nodded. She fell into silence again. While Slowin stared into the fire she stole glances at the wizard.

  How old is a wizard?

  Wizards live for a long time, so it isn’t possible to tell a wizard’s age just by looking and comparing them to an ordinary man or woman. A wizard who looks fifty years old may be three or five times that age. The only way they are like ordinary people is that they grow old in the same order. Small wrinkles around the eyes, grey hairs, and a small stoop perhaps as they walk.

  It wasn’t like that with Slowin. Slowin had grown younger.

  When Brassbuck first came to see him. Slowin looked like an old man. You could have taken him for a farm worker who had toiled too long in the fields. He looked ready to go to bed in the afternoon and not get up. His hands shook. His eyes were glassed over. His voice was dry, crumbling.

  The day the butcher came and chopped his own thumb off, Slowin had gathered all his strength into a ball, to try to resist him. He could do that with a customer, but not for long. He had enough magic left to pass himself off as a fairly active man of sixty. As soon as the fight was over and the butcher had fled, Slowin took himself off to bed. Brassbuck thought he would die. He lay still, curled up, for two days. Brassbuck offered him food. He refused it. She tried to make him sit up and sip some beef broth. He turned his face to the wall and croaked, “Go away.”

  Brassbuck was frightened. She didn’t know what she would do if Slowin died. She had nowhere else to go. She didn’t know anyone else. As the days passed he began to smell of death. He did not move for hours on end. She sat at his bedside, watching him. Then, feeling the twitching in her pocket, she took out a beetle and began to play with it, letting it run across her palms from one hand to another, over and over. The beetle left a nice, damp trail of excrement on her hand. She sniffed it, enjoying the faint stink. Just the small, different movement of raising her hand to her face caused the beetle to fall. It landed on Slowin’s neck and fell under his chin, out of sight. Brassbuck jumped up and scrambled for it.

  “I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry. I really am.”

  The sharp legs roused Slowin. He opened his eyes. His hand darted to his neck, seized the beetle. He held it in front of his face, blind after having his eyes closed for so long. He could feel it, waving its legs, trying to find a place to run. Slowin opened his mouth, dropped the beetle in, clamped his jaws together. He felt the shell crack open, the soft pulp inside spill into his mouth. He swallowed, wiped his lips.

  “More.”

  Brassbuck ran out into the yard. She found three more. Slowin cracked them, sucked them, swallowed them, smiled.

  “More.”

  She ran in and out carrying beetles.

  “More.”

  She managed to persuade him to drink a mug of water, then he slept.

  She gathered beetles into a large jar, ready for him when he woke. The more she caught, the more there were. Slowin slept, crunched beetles, drank, slept, crunched, for a week. Then he got up. He looked, if not sixty again, at least as though he would not die before the week ended.

  “Where did the beetles come from?”

  Brassbuck explained about the drops of blood.

  “You made them?” he said.

  “Not on purpose. They made themselves.”

  Slowin bit the head off a beetle, sucked out the insides then crunched the empty shell.

  “The magic made them,” he said.

  “Whose magic?”

  “Not anyone’s magic. Just the magic.”

  “You do the magic,” Brassbuck said.

  “The magic isn’t me,” said Slowin. “The magic isn’t in any wizard. It’s out there.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t interrupt. It’s out there. It’s everywhere. You just need to be able to use it. That takes a wizard.”

  Brassbuck was frightened that Slowin would snap at her again if she asked how a wizard knows how to use the magic, so she kept quiet.

  “Or,” said Slowin, “the magic can use someone who isn’t a wizard. And the magic used you.”

  “Can I do magic now, then?”

  “Shut up, and hand me that jar.” |

  Slowin’s Yard was a scab on a smooth cheek,

  hunched round and black, surrounded by a high wall. Around it, fields and woods, a clear stream with trout and carp and chub, a line of hills, a dry stone wall, lovely with lichen, and the red level of a road. Bee ignored the road, climbed over the wall, crossed the field and made her way to the top of the first hill.

  Looking back, she could see the yard. Looking ahead, the fields like folds in bedclothes, a farm, far off, even further off a farm cart on the disappearing road, and further almost than she could see, the Palace of Boolat, high on a hill, small as her fingernail, yet big enough to house over a hundred men and their horses and servants.

  The strangest thing about the Palace of Boolat was that the first time she had seen it was in a book. It was a picture. Not long after she had come to learn from Slowin, when she was about seven, they had been working together from a book, about magic in deep cellars and high towers.

  “The magic gets damp when you’re underground,” he explained. “So you need to understand earth spells. And when you are very high up,” he put his finger on the picture, showing her the very top of the tallest tower, “when you are high up the air will carry the magic. So make sure you learn your lessons well when we look at air magic.”

  Bee wrinkled her nose, something she always did when she was getting bored.

  “That’s a big house,” she said, pointing to the picture.

  “It’s a palace,” Slowin corrected her. “Now your own magic is fire, like mine. Remember? But even fire magic needs to know about earth and air and water magic.”

  “What’s a palace?”

  Slowin sighed.

  “You can see it if you want.”

  Bee kicked her feet against the table leg. She put a small hand on the book.

  “Of course I can see it.”

  “No. You can see it from the hill outside.”

  And she could. And she did. For years she made her way up the hill, to escape from the miasma of Slowin’s Yard, feel the breeze on her face and look across to the Palace of Boolat. She made up stories in her head about the big rooms and halls, the banquets, the important men and women, the horses and hounds. She had never been any nearer to it than she was now, but it was as though she had walked the long passageways, seen the prisoners in the dungeons, written her name with her finger in the dust on the wine bottles in the cellars, tasted the special food in the kitchens, looked down from the highest tower out over the forest and fields, right across to where she was sitting now. She imagined a girl in the tower, looking out towards her.

  “Are you watching me?” she said. “Can you see me now?”

  “Sorry.”

  Bee stood up and stared around.

  “Who’s there?”

  The sun was halfway down in the west, low in her eyes, not yet evening. She squinted.

  “I can see you,” she said. “I know where you are.”

  She made a turn all the way around. There was no one in sight. She wasn’t sure now that anyone had spoken. She looked at the tower. It wasn’t from there?

  “I’m going back down the hill now,” she said. “Don’t follow me.”

  “Sorry.”

  It was a small voice, broken. It came from just over to her left. She stepped back, keeping her face to where she thought it had come from.

  “Who are you?”

  The grass and bracken crackled silently with unused magic. For weeks now it had been building up, as the air grew heavy before a thunder storm. Bee felt her hair prickle. The voice hardly
stood out from all the activity around her. It spoke again, and she worked out exactly where it was coming from, deep in a mound of ferns. The words were not clear.

  “Are you a person or are you magic in the air?” she asked.

  The laugh frightened her. It sounded like pain. She pulled the ferns aside and looked in.

  “Don’t hurt me,” it said.

  It was too late to say that. Something had already hurt it terribly. Bee drew back.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  She moved the ferns aside again.

  “What happened to you?”

  She thought it was a person. The eyes looked human. The face was like a toad, lumpy and brown and shining with slime.

  It was dressed in dirty clothes, torn and not really enough of them. Bee thought she might be sick. It had legs and arms like a person. And it wore clothes, so it must be a person. It spoke like a person. It just didn’t look like a person.

  It stared at her.

  She stared back.

  Something had happened to the crackling magic in the air and in the undergrowth. There was a sort of pool of nothing all around the person. No magic at all. The loose magic formed a circle all around it. Bee stepped forward into the calm circle. As soon as she was there she realized how much on edge she had been before. She understood why her shaking hands had been so bad recently. A faint, dull ache behind her eyes that she had forgotten was there disappeared.

  Just as the nights grow shorter at the end of summer, a little at a time, the change so small that you hardly notice it until suddenly it is winter, so the magic had been gathering for months now. A little at a time so that Bee had not realized how much there was until she stepped into this pool of quiet. The absence of magic. She smiled and relaxed.

  “What are you?” she asked.

  “Mattie,” it said.

  “Are you a person?”

  “A boy.”

  Bee hesitated, then put her hand on the boy, just where his shoulder would be if it didn’t look like a toad’s skin.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What happened to you?”

  The boy lowered his head and Bee could feel his shoulder shake as he began to cry.

  “Can you feel it?” asked Slowin.

  He grinned at Brassbuck and picked up a beetle from the floor, cracking it open for sheer joy and tossing it onto the fire, where it sizzled and flared.

  Brassbuck couldn’t keep still either. She sat down and stood up again. She bit into a beetle and spat it out again. She couldn’t keep her feet still and sent sparks shooting from her boot-nails.

  Slowin prodded the fire with a long poker. The flames raced along it to his hand. He dropped the poker and held up his hand, brandishing it in victory, turning it to admire the blue flames. It blazed like a beacon, neither hurting nor burning him.

  “I am fire,” said Slowin. “I am become fire.”

  He lowered his head. The flames died. Slowin pointed at Brassbuck. His finger flared up and a stream of fire rushed out, then fell to the floor in drops of flame, which ran around like beetles.

  “It’s everywhere,” said Brassbuck. “Everywhere.” She was still now. The excitement was there, mingled with awe.

  “I did this,” said Slowin. “I brought this here. I. Alone.”

  Brassbuck watched the fire beetles run along the top of the poker and throw themselves into the fire and disappear, joined to it, one element.

  “What about Bee?” she asked, and wished she hadn’t. She remembered how Bee had come to be here.

  After the fight with the butcher and the coming of the beetles, Slowin gradually got better. He didn’t sleep all day. He ate proper food, not just beetles. He could leave the yard, and even go on small journeys. Then he could work a little magic again. Not much. But it worked, usually. The spells didn’t often go wrong. He made a little money from simple spells and charms. And that was it. He was a local wizard. People bought his spells. Sometimes they paid in food because they hadn’t any money. Brassbuck was happy. She had somewhere to live and someone to look after her again. It was enough for her.

  It was not enough for Slowin.

  Slowin wanted more magic. He was old, though not as old as many another wizard. He wanted to be younger again. He wanted to be strong in magic.

  He experimented with the beetles, because he knew they had a strange power. They were created by magic, out of blood. They had saved his life.

  He tried eating nothing else but beetles. That made him sick. He tried grinding them to a paste. He tried boiling them in water to make a tincture. But they could not die in water. They bobbed around and scurried away when it was tipped out. They were made of blood and fire and anger. Water could not kill them.

  Slowin noted this about them with special care. It would be useful.

  Nothing worked. He was just a tired, old wizard, weak and empty.

  He was making a setting spell for a farmer’s wife. Their milk kept curdling because they couldn’t be bothered to store it in a sensible, cool place. Their dairy needed repairing and they were too mean to spend the money on it. Slowin was bodging up a charm to stop it tasting sour. The woman was all gossip and Slowin was hurrying to get rid of her, not really listening to her when she said, “and there she was. Not more than four years old. Five at most, sitting in the snow. And as it fell around her she was turning it into candles.”

  Slowin paused.

  “Oh, it’s just a story,” he said. “I suppose you heard it from a tinker. Never believe a tinker.”

  “I told you I saw it myself.”

  “Yourself?”

  “I told you that.”

  “Tell me again,” he said. “I was concentrating on the charm.”

  So she told him about the man who worked for her husband, laying hedges, driving the cows in for milking, repairing the barn, all the jobs that never go away on a farm. She told Slowin she was on her way home when the snow started and she saw the little girl, Bee, working magic like a real wizard.

  “She’s a natural, that one,” she said. “She’ll either turn wizard or she’ll be put to death before she’s twelve.”

  Slowin finished the charm and gave it to her.

  “Lots of small children do a bit of magic,” he said. “It clings to them after they’re born. Then it goes with their baby teeth. She’ll grow out of it.”

  The woman looked at him with contempt.

  “I’ve seen more babies than you ever will,” she said. “I’ve had five myself, and two of them did baby magic. But not like this. This wasn’t baby magic. This is the gift.”

  “When was this?” he asked.

  “Near a year ago. It’ll be worse now.”

  She gave him a dusty good day and left.

  It was easy enough to find Bee. But it was a wizard’s work to get her parents to let her come to him as his pupil. Not altogether honest work, either. They needed to be frightened before they let her go. Slowin saw to that. He was old and weak. That was the bad thing. The good thing was, the older he grew and the weaker he became, the more cunning he was. It was clever to make them afraid of Bee. But that would never be enough to make them let her go. No, the cunning work was to make them afraid for Bee, afraid she would hurt herself if she didn’t go with him. That was how he worked it.

  And so, Bee came to be his pupil, and new, young magic poured into the yard. So strong that it took him by surprise.

  “By the blazing fire,” he said, “she’s got a gift like I’ve never seen before.”

  Brassbuck was glad to see Slowin excited. The old wizard grinned at her.

  “Enough for two of us,” he said. “More than enough.”

  From that day, the yard had seemed to have a hum in it, too soft to hear, too low to catch, yet always there. Until about a year ago, when the hum became a buzz and a crackle and spark. Silent, invisible, but growing. |

  Bee could see that it hurt the boy to sit,
/>   hurt the boy to stand. Terrible pain, whichever way he tried to settle himself. Even talking made his face hurt when he moved his mouth. So she wouldn’t ask him too much. She wouldn’t make the pain more.

  Slowin had told her that she should never work magic outside the yard. It was his strictest rule. He didn’t like her to use any magic unless he gave her permission, but that was like telling a bird not to fly, so he accepted things like the way she put fire spells on her belongings to protect them. But outside, it was forbidden.

  Bee didn’t care. Not today. Not with this boy.

  She put her hand back on to his shoulder and she could feel the fire there. So she took a deep breath and she dragged the fire from his skin and rolled it up into a ball in her hand. It was heavy and it was hot. She had to make strong magic to hold it there. She took her hand form the boy, made a fist, and clenched it over the ball of fire. It glowed so bright she could see her blood and bones through her fingers.

  The magic outside the circle hurled itself at them. The walls of the circle held firm. The magic snarled at her.

  The boy fell back and lay on the ground, panting.

  “What did you do?”

  “I took the hurt away.”

  “He tried to get his breath back.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I was burned.”

  Bee knew that already.

  “How?”

  Mattie touched his face with his fingers. He still looked surprised that it didn’t hurt. He looked at his blistered arms, his weeping hands. It was hard to find a patch of skin that wasn’t burned.

  “I work in the kitchens,” he said. “Turning the spit, washing dishes, sweeping floors, cleaning out the ashes from the ovens. All the dirty jobs. All the hot jobs.”

  Bee kept a tight grip on the pain in her hand. The effort was clear on her face.

  “We’d been having a lot of trouble with the meat, burning on the spit. So they sent for a charm to stop it happening.”

  “Who did you go to?”

  “I don’t know. They just said not to bother getting the wizard to come, but to send something that would do the job. To save money.”

  “That wouldn’t work,” said Bee. “You need a wizard to come there himself for that sort of job.”