Burning Bright (46 page)

The men did not even have time to scream before she turned them into white fire, pure white with no trace of yellow or orange, and the heat of it battered at Elinor as no heat had done for many weeks now. It felt good, comforting, and she knelt at Stratford’s side and patted his hand. “Forgive me,” she whispered. “I wish my apology mattered at all.”

Then she stood, and contemplated the white fire. It was not beautiful. It was like bone and white ash and it felt like despair, and it seemed to be fueled by something other than the bodies of the men it consumed. She watched it, unable to think, unable to grieve, until it went out as abruptly as if it had never been.

Facing Elinor, beyond the piles of ash and twisted weaponry that had been six pirates, stood a young man, a barefoot adolescent, dressed in too-long trousers held up with rope and a torn, striped shirt missing one sleeve. He wore a scarf wrapped around his head and long dark hair brushed his shoulders. He stood with his thumbs thrust into his waistband, though the gesture looked less like defiant insouciance and more as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands. His eyes were large and very dark, as if he had no irises, and they were fixed on her with a disturbing stillness.

“I like your fire,” Dewdney said.

In which Elinor releases the fire

hy aren’t you on a ship?” Elinor said. It was the only thing that came to mind; standing over Stratford’s body, other questions like
Who are you?
and
Why are you so young?
seemed irrelevant.

“Mr. Evans don’t like me scaring the crew,” Dewdney said. He ran his thumbs along his waistband, around to the front, back to his sides. “Lost track o’ where I was, once, set one o’ his ships afire. You know how it is. They only take me now if he shoots some’un to make ‘em obey.”

Elinor nodded, thinking,
If I agree with him, he will keep talking, and I can determine how to kill him before he kills me
. Too much time was passing. The pirate ships were moving farther away. “How did Mr. Evans know the Navy was coming?” she said.

Dewdney’s black eyes darted to something beyond Elinor’s shoulder, then back to her face. “He had sentries watchin’ the coast o’ Saint-Domingue when them ships disappeared from his Sight. Don’t always need Sight to know what’s happening. You ever burn a man from the inside?” He smiled, pleasantly, as if they were talking about the beauties of nature that did not surround them.

“I have not,” Elinor said.
Ordinary sentries. Such a foolish oversight,
she thought, wishing she could take Durrant by the collar and drag him to where he could watch the destruction his stupid plan had wrought.

Dewdney’s smile wavered. “Why not?” he demanded.

She realized he was mad, and her heart started to beat faster, preparing her to run, not that there was anywhere to run to. “I did not know it was possible,” she said, being completely honest and hoping he believed her.

“I can show you,” he said, his smile broadening. “We could try it on one o’ them Navy captains. Evans lets me have ‘em, when he’s done with ‘em.”

“I would prefer a different target.” At any moment he would turn his fire on her, and she was certain he could find a way to burn her despite her immunity. She prepared to counterattack, letting the fire inside her rise and burn hotter.

“Then a pirate,” Dewdney said with a shrug. “They’re none of ‘em like us. Don’t much matter who.”

Elinor imagined she could feel the ships slipping away, though she could not afford to look and see whether that was true. “Are we so different from them?”

Dewdney’s smile froze. “You don’t see it,” he said, and Elinor lashed out with her fire at the very instant he struck at her.

It was cool, for the moment, flickering blues and blacks she knew to be fire only because her heart recognized it, for it resembled an earthly fire as much as her white pyres had. She could feel it battering at her, looking for a way to break through her defenses. She could feel her own fire doing the same to Dewdney, ruby and lapis and gold and opal trying to consume him. It hurt already, trying to attack and defend both at once, and she tried to take a step toward him and the black fire stabbed at her, enough to make her cry out in pain and waver.

Dewdney’s fire was a pressure that threatened to sink her into the ground like a nail into soft wood, and her spine screamed at her to stop, stop now before it snapped. She stepped backward, involuntarily, to keep her balance, and her foot pressed against something soft. Stratford. Her dear friend, who had given in to her arguments and was dead for it, and her momentary grief turned into anger. If she gave in, if she let Dewdney consume her, he would have died for nothing. She let that anger boil up into fury and let it pour out of her, and now it was Dewdney who staggered under the pressure of her attack.

Then her fire filled him, and she knew his madness and the fear that drove him, knew how he had killed his family when he manifested, not by accident, but by his love for its power and his pleasure in hearing people scream as their flesh bubbled off their bones. She heard him laugh, an uncomplicated, joyous, insane sound, and his fire washed over and around her like an ocean wave that boiled and scalded her. She clenched her teeth on a cry. She could not allow his fire to take her.

She pressed harder, fueling her fire with her pain and sorrow, willing it to burn hotter than had ever been possible for her before, and it scoured away all her emotions until the fire was everything, it was all she was, and for a moment she forgot why it was so important that she destroy this tiny figure before her, because the fire was all that mattered.

Abruptly, the pressure of his attack disappeared, the black fire vanished, and to her shock he opened himself to her fire and let it burn through him. He laughed again, and she felt his profound relief and joy at being set free from the madness that had burned inside him as surely as the fire had. Then he was gone, and her fire burned only an empty shell until it was ash and splintered bone.

With her target vanished, Elinor came back to herself, swaying with exhaustion. She was unable to maintain her fire, which dwindled and dissipated in the wind that stirred the ash of Dewdney’s remains. She looked down and saw that most of Stratford’s left arm had been burned away. Well, he no longer needed it. She realized she was naked and was too tired to care.

She looked out across the harbor and saw the pirate ships moving away. The largest ship—it had to be Evans’ ship, did it not?—was still closest to her. Tears ran down her cheeks; she was so tired, too tired to do what she had come for, and Stratford’s sacrifice was for nothing.

Use your initiative, Miss Pembroke
, Ramsay said in her memory. He would be furious if he knew she had given up so quickly. No, worse—he would be
disappointed
, and she could not bear that, even if he did think she was a weapon. She reached inside herself and drew on resources she did not realize she had until Dewdney had revealed them, and let the fire build up again until it burned hot and bright. Then she released it on the ships.

All seven pirate ships erupted in flame, sails, rigging, hulls, decks, from Evans’ ship to the one farthest away, the one whose crew she could see boarding one of the Navy ships through her fiery second self. She drew that fire back enough that it would not burn whichever of the Navy’s ships that was, putting an imaginary wall between the two that let not even heat pass.

Men tried to extinguish her, and she slapped at them contemptuously, because she was the fire and they could not touch her. She knew her human body was once again burning with all those gemlike colors that flashed before her eyes, blinding her, but she could feel every inch of her extended fiery body and laughed, because sight was irrelevant, hearing was unimportant, all that mattered was the fire.

A ship creaked under the tremendous pressure with which she bore down on it, and felt the planking bend and snap and cry out before she devoured it utterly, casting tiny bodies into the waves that she chose not to pursue. Somewhere in the fire that had been her mind she remembered it was the ships that were important, the ships and the guns they carried.

She focused on another ship and made the iron of the cannons go red and gold and melt into puddles that burned whatever they touched, felt another ship’s sails disintegrate, and laughed again because she had never felt such intense pleasure, such joy in her talent, and she wanted more of it. She drew on those reserves again and found a ship’s powder store and made it explode like a thousand cannons going off at once. The smoke of its explosion caressed her distant body, and with the heat pouring off her, she created drafts that made that smoke curl and flow in the darkness.

The ships were vanishing, one by one, and she looked around for more targets and saw other ships dancing on the waves, and reached out to touch one—but no, that was wrong, she could not remember why but she knew it was wrong, and she cried out in disappointment because there was only one left, the nearest one, and it was burning rapidly and would soon sink beneath the water where even she could not burn it.

Her body was diminishing to a single, small form on a rocky shore, and she cried out again because the fire was fading and she could not bear to lose it. She had so little to feed it, just that body, and she let the fire rise up inside her because it was beauty and power and it was hers and she knew it loved her and would kill her if she did not subdue it. And she did not want to subdue it.

Someone spoke to her. The fire roared in her ears so she could barely hear it, but there it was, a voice she knew but could not recognize:

elinor. come back.

come back. you are not a weapon. you are not the fire. come back.

your work is finished. come back. come back to me.

please

Then there was a hand, clasping hers, and she remembered she had a body, and terror filled her because her body was falling apart, carried away by the fire. She desperately clung to the hand as it gripped hers, bringing the fire back to her heart, feeling bone and muscle reform in a way she hoped would leave her recognizably human. She clutched at that hand like a lifeline, pulling her through the waves to solid ground, and then the fire was gone, and she fell hard on the rocks, blind, unable to catch herself.

Her back hurt so badly she was sure it must be broken. She curled in on herself, keening with her need to crawl away from the pain, to leave her body behind until it was not one spike of burning agony—but she had already tried to leave her body once, and she would endure any amount of pain to keep herself solidly anchored in it now.

Someone was making her move, lifting her arms and bending them to force them through sleeves of a rough, heavy fabric. She could feel the night air now, the wind picking up and blowing hair into her face and flowing across her bare legs. She shivered once, then could not stop shivering, and the same someone put an arm around her waist and held her tight. “Hold on,” the man said, and made her put her arms around his neck, and he jumped and did not come down again.

She screamed, and clutched the man’s neck, and the wind was stronger against her legs and arms because they were Flying, and she realized that Ramsay had come for her. He had one arm around her waist and was holding her tight against his body, muttering words she could not make out, but he didn’t seem to be speaking to her, so she held on tighter and blinked to clear her vision, which was going from dark grey to a paler grey that might be Ramsay’s shirt.