Enna Burning (13 page)

The woman clucked and
tsk
ed as she undressed Enna, but her eyes were tender. Though perhaps only ten years Enna’s senior, her face was lined and sun scarred. Eylbold was a farming town, and Enna imagined the years working fields were rough. She stared at the woman, caught up by her eyes, blue as the high, lonely sky. It was good to see someone’s eyes. Enna wanted to tell her with her own eyes to ignore what she might feel inside the skirt hem, to just return it without a word. She shook her head in a silent plea. The woman surely did not understand the warning, but she returned a comforting nod.

Once Enna was stripped down, the woman washed her with a rag and warm water in quick strokes. Enna wanted to protest and say she could do it herself, then realized that she could not. So she just kept the woman’s blue eyes, felt like a kitten washed by its mother’s rough tongue, and thought of what she would do later, when she was free.

The woman wrapped Enna in a large wool blanket that vaguely itched against her bare skin and left the tent with the dirty clothes. The two guards followed her out. Enna could see they kept post just outside the tent door.

It was quiet. The tent got darker. Outside, she could hear campfires pop and hiss. She wanted that sound to feel comforting, like the voice of an old friend, but it seemed so far away. She did not want to be alone to feel how cold and untouchable the world was now, to feel the absence of the heat like heavy grief. Alone, her thoughts would catch and fling her back to the moment with Isi, the unforgivable moment. She winced again and again at the memory, and dark regret rode with her into sleep.

She heard a voice and woke slowly. The air and darkness felt like deeper night. The voice that had awakened her still vibrated inside her head. She listened to it again. A voice she did not know. A man’s. She opened her eyes.

“There you are.” It was one of the guards. He had removed his helmet, and his yellowish hair stuck up in a way that reminded her of Razo. He was in the tent, alone, looking at her.

“All nice and comfortable, are you? For a moment I thought you might be dead. Were you dead?” He smiled.

“No,” said Enna, since he seemed to be waiting for an answer.

“Good, because I’m curious.” He took slow steps toward her. “I wondered what a girl looks like who cooks people alive. A friend of mine, Duris, he was sleeping in a tent just like this one when it caught fire somehow. Do you know how?”

She did not answer this time. In the near darkness, his face was disturbingly shadowed. That empty place inside her that she used to fill with heat was now sick with dread.

“You must be too good to answer to me, yes? Our precious little prisoner. Our resident fire-witch. Deserves death, but instead is washed and fed and guarded like a prized puppy. You took something away from me that night. Do I not get something in return?”

Ah,
she thought,
ah, that.
He came toward her, and she fought rolling pains of disgust and the nauseating realization of her own powerlessness. Her limbs felt like stripped corpses. Her mind swayed like a motion-sick child rolling around in the back of a wagon. She concentrated on the pit of dread inside her and how to change it to anger, and how that anger could free her, wake her skin to awareness of heat again, loose the sleeping fire. He knelt over her, and his hands touched her blanket where she gripped it closed.

His voice was soft and mocking. “I just want to see what a fire-witch looks like.”

She could feel the heat of his wet breath on her face.
Good. Heat. Go ahead,
she thought,
go ahead and touch me and let’s see what happens.
But she held the blanket even tighter, a maddening grip that reminded her just how weak she was. She sobbed once and felt a little heat bubble inside her. His face leered over her, and she could see pale glints of his teeth. With his bony finger he stabbed her a few times in her side as though he were prodding meat or teasing a sibling. Then he grabbed the corners of her blanket and said, “Hush.”

She heard the sound of the tent flap whipping aside.

The guard sprang to his feet. “Captain,” he said with an effort at normalcy.

Sileph looked around wildly, at him, at Enna, back at him. Enna pulled a loosed corner of the blanket tight over her chest. Her hand shook like a baby’s gourd-rattle.

Sileph’s face tightened in rage. He rushed forward and released his fist into the guard’s face. The punch sent the guard spinning to the ground. Sileph swore, looked down, and hit him again. And then again, and again, cursing him and his family and his stench and his greasy heart. The guard covered his head with his arms and whined like a beaten dog. Sileph seemed unwilling to stop, and his fists shook with unspent fury, but he grabbed the man by his neck and the back of his tunic, ran him through the tent, and flung him out the door.

Sileph put a hand over his face and breathed hard through his nose, his entire body clenched up in a reluctant effort to calm. His forehead shone with perspiration.

Enna pushed herself up a little on her elbow. “You should’ve let him try.” Her voice shook more than she thought it would. “He would’ve . . . I would’ve found a way . . . to burn . . . ” She stopped, angry and humiliated, aware that even in anger the fire was a stranger to her drugged mind.

Sileph tightened his fists and looked around as though wishing for something new to hit. He pointed at her, and his voice trembled with rage.

“Nobody touches you.” He paced a moment, put a fist to his mouth, discovered a trickle of blood from where he had bitten his own lip, and wiped it away angrily. “Nobody.”

After a moment, when his breathing slowed, he sat beside her. Enna watched his face, amazed that this was the same man from the war council in Ostekin. She thought unexpectedly,
He’s nothing like Finn.

He sat for a few moments just looking at her, then said, “I am sorry, Enna,” and stood to go.

“Wait,” she said.

He turned back to her, his expression almost hopeful. She realized that she was going to ask him to stay and that was ridiculous, so she curled back up on the ground and said no more. Sileph waited a moment and then left.

Enna tried to keep her eyes open for as long as possible. Under her blanket, she rubbed her bare arms and tried to still her shivering muscles. She had never felt so empty.

.

Prisoner

.

Early, when the tent walls began to brighten with shaded light, the tent flap moved again. Enna jumped, but it was only the blue-eyed woman with her clothes. The skinny man with his hard finger and hot breath and sneer was not among the guards who accompanied her. The woman dressed Enna tenderly. Her clothes smelled of beef soap and wood smoke. Enna ran her weak hand along the hem—the vellum was still there.

Sileph waited outside the tent until the woman departed, then entered quietly, a small water skin in his hand. Enna nearly sobbed.

“Please,” she said, pride combating the pleading tone in her voice. “I want to be able to think and move again.”

“I wish I did not have to. Tiedan spoke with me this morning. His orders are that you remain drugged.” He uncapped a flask and held it to her lips. With his other hand he smoothed her brow. “Just a little. Just enough to hold the fire back. It won’t be forever, not if they can find another way to protect themselves from you.”

He began to pour and she gagged on the bitter water, her hands gripping his wrist. She coughed, gulped one, two, three swallows; then he allowed her to push his hand away. He wiped the dribbled water from her cheek with a corner of his shirt.

“You are very brave, Enna.”

That one word was too much. Brave. She choked on it, clutched his wrist tighter, and started to cry. The fear and powerlessness were so overwhelming, Enna could scarcely remember who she had been. Sileph held her against his chest, smoothing her hair and rocking her slightly. His voice changed again, softer, lighter.

“You are, Enna. You are amazing. This is temporary. You will shine again, I promise. I will see you burn again.”

“Why?” she asked.

He did not speak, just held her while the king’s-tongue spread through her body, pressed down her hands and feet, and cooled her skin so that it felt dead. The pit inside her was empty and cold, and it weighed down her chest. Soon she was aware of Sileph but could not feel him. Only her sense of smell remained completely keen. She pondered the smell of his leather vest—dust, smoke, oil, animal.

She looked at the dark hairs on the back of his hand and thought of him last night in his rage. What had he done to the hard-fingered guard? Was that guard now dead? Finn would not have killed him, but Sileph might. She wanted to ask him these questions, as well as others that would start with “Why?” But she was comfortable against him in her nearly numb body. And she liked his smell.

Smell was her only strong sense for days, as Sileph and the king’s-tongue became her only companions. When the drug began to wear itself out, Sileph was there. She leaned against him and told him of home, of the Forest and being a worker in the city, of Leifer’s death and how the queen tried to stop Enna from burning. She told him because she wanted his trust, sure that he was the best hope she had of someday escaping. And she told him because she wanted to. Those moments with Sileph, the grip of the king’s-tongue loosening, were the times she felt a little like Enna.

She left the tent only to go to the privy. Sileph picked her up, one arm under her knees, one supporting her back, and carried her into the winter sun. She closed her eyes, leaned back her head, and let the light touch her entire face. The warmth and light made her feel pretty. Her skin tingled and her heart swelled, and she breathed deeply of the cool air that brought the tang of pine trees and warming earth. She had spent most of her life out of doors, and just leaving the confines of the tent felt like going home.

It also made her ache. Inside the plain, windowless white tent, her numb state seemed almost natural. Outside, with the sun and wind and colors and people and fires, she remembered dimly how much she used to feel.

Sileph always arranged to have a woman help Enna at the privy and then returned to take her back to her tent. Once he let her try to walk, holding her arm over his shoulders and steadying her with his other arm around her waist. It was almost fun for the first few steps to feel the rough ground under her thin boots and feel her ankles and knees move. But soon her legs crumpled, the drugged and unused muscles cramped and useless. In that moment Sileph swept an arm under her legs, held her again in his arms, and kept walking as though that had been their intention. Enna wrapped her arms around his neck and held his head close to hers.

Returning to the tent, the washed-out light and smell of close quarters, caused Enna a physical pain. Sileph said nothing as he settled her onto her blanket. She did not let go of his neck, so he knelt beside her.

“I walked,” she said.

“Yes, you did.” He contemplated her face. “Someday, when this is over, we will walk together in Ingridan. It is a beautiful city. Not as harsh and cold as Bayern. It lies by the sea on a river delta. Seven small rivers weave through the city, and there are white stone bridges and white houses and palaces and squares, and when the fruit trees are in bloom all the air is sweet.”

She gasped with a sudden sob. The image was beautiful, and she felt so ugly. “King’s-tongue. I feel sorry for that king. I know how he felt. It’s cruel what his daughter did to get power.”

Sileph’s brow was lined. “People do cruel things when they are afraid. They need leverage against you, Enna. They need a way to be sure you won’t burn the tents around them. That’s why, I thought, if you could teach me how . . . ”

“If you’ll let me go, I’ll take an oath never to . . . to never . . . ”

Sileph’s grip on her arms was tighter, and there was a touch of desperation in his voice. “I can’t let you go, Enna. You have to try. If you can teach me the fire, I can protect you. Once I can wield the power as well, Tiedan will feel safer around you and revoke the order to keep you on king’s-tongue.”

“But there’s the war . . . ” Enna rubbed her eyes irritably, unsure what she should say. When she looked up again, Sileph was watching her shrewdly.

“The war.” He shook his head. “Do you really think I’m your enemy?”

Enna studied his face.
Sileph. Enemy.
No, she could not reconcile the two.

He straightened, and his manner spoke of the soldier he was. “You deserve to know something, Enna. This war will not last long. We have been allowing the Bayern spies to count our numbers this winter because they cannot see the armies yet to march from Tira. Soon, very soon, Tira will overwhelm Bayern. Don’t resist teaching me the fire because you believe you are saving Bayern. Bayern is already lost. Save yourself.”

He drew closer and smoothed her hair away from her brow. “You are not a traitor, Enna. You are a survivor. All I am asking is for you to show me what you do.”

A way out
, she thought.

“Just you,” she said.

“Yes, just me.”

Sileph stayed with her during those hours when the king’s-tongue began to loosen its grip on her mind and before her next dose was due. For Enna, they became the most delicious and grueling hours she had known. The first time she could gather heat to her, she nearly cried out. And then resisting, not lighting the fire for fear of revealing too much, made her sweat and shake. Never had the gift brought her so much joy or forced such a struggle for control.

“Tell me how it works,” he said.

“There’s a place in here”—she put a hand on her chest—“that I fill with heat. Just bringing it inside changes it, then I direct it into some fuel, and it becomes fire.”

“Where do you get the heat?”

“I don’t know. It’s all around. I can’t remember anymore.”

She did remember. Living things give off heat. But she would not reveal all willingly. She tried not to think about that place in her skirt that felt a little heavier against her ankle.

Just as Enna had wished, because Sileph became more hopeful of learning, he put off the drug until later and later. They would sit together in the dark. Through a rift in the tent roof, a little moonlight slipped in and pooled on the surface of the king’s-tongue water. It trembled in its cup like a threat.

Sileph would hold up a stick or piece of straw and say, “Concentrate.”

She did. The later it was, the more she could feel him. Sileph. His heat leaving his skin, brushing by hers, rising against the shaft of moonlight and dispersing into the night sky. The nearness of the heat was intoxicating, and she would close her eyes and just feel it, play at drawing it near, imagine pulling it inside that dead space in her chest and feel the transformation to flame. Resistance sometimes took the little strength she had. Something about Sileph made her believe he was one who could be taught, and he might just be cunning enough to figure it out without reading the vellum.

“I’m sorry,” she would say, and with a sigh he would nod and hand her the cup of drugged water. He always watched her drink it and stayed with her until the king’s-tongue took effect.
So that I can’t retch it up
, she thought.
Or perhaps he just wants to stay.
He would hold her until she slept, and his smell and the faraway feel of his hands on her hair made losing herself to the king’s-tongue just a little more bearable.

In those last moments before her hands and feet began to feel like leaded fishnets, Enna thought of escape. One night perhaps something would happen to take Sileph away, an emergency, a call from Tiedan. When that happened, she would be prepared to act.

The chance came several days later. Enna was feeling alert enough to sit up cross-legged. Sileph was unaware that this also meant she was able to feel not only his heat, but also the quiet hibernating heat of the grass roots beneath her legs and snakes of heat that came from the guards outside, slithering through the tent flap and up against her skin.

Enna wiped her brow as if she were exhausted from trying to light a fire, though she was in fact tired out from trying not to. It was as though the ghosts of all that had lived pressed against her body and begged for life. She found the sensation a thousand times more pleasant than the numbness of the king’s-tongue.

“You long to do it,” he said. “I know you do. I remember your face when you used to run in this wood sending tents and wagons into flames. Remember that feeling. It could help you. What does it feel like to burn?”

“Relief.”

Sileph nodded as if he understood. “And what about burning as your brother did on the battlefield, a great deal all at once. Is that different?”

“I can’t do more than little fires, a little at a time. Maybe his talent was different.”

Sileph considered, then shook his head once. “No. If he could, then I have no doubt you could as well. You seem to grasp at the fire, trying to control it and still protect yourself. I wonder what may happen if you surrender instead.”

Surrender.
The word frightened her.

“He died, you know,” she said. “He died from burning, perhaps from surrendering.”

“If there is a way of mastering it, you will find it.” He smiled briefly.

“Why do you take such an interest, Sileph?” she asked.

“The sooner we can show Tiedan progress, the sooner you won’t have to take the king’s-tongue.”

“And that’s the only reason? For me?”

He leaned back, resting his arm on the ground, and looked at her unblinking, as though anticipating in advance what her reaction might be. “My father was a soldier in the king’s army. As was his father. I was born a soldier, and if I have sons, they will be born soldiers, unless I can change that.”

He cleared his throat and looked at his hands. Enna enjoyed the rare times when he seemed uncomfortable. One of the things she hated most about her king’s-tongue state was that he could not see her as she was, that he might not know that in will and strength she surely was his match.

“These times,” he said, “they allow for opportunities. I lead a fifty company; that is good for one my age. But I need to win more. You are so powerful, Enna. What you are, what you know, is an opportunity for me. But I also believe it is an opportunity for you, if you are willing to grab it.”

“So, what’ll you get if you become a burning man, Sileph? They’ll give you a spot of land? Or maybe more—a title, a statue in some square, or just the satisfaction that people in the streets will nod to you and give your wife the fatter cut at the butcher’s?”

“I expect military promotion and only that. The Tiran citizens would not know what to make of me, I imagine. We have no fire-witches in Tira, except in tales. And besides, I have no wife.”

Enna raised her eyebrows. “No? And you must be past twenty.” She sighed. “Well, I guess it’s no surprise you couldn’t catch a wife, a boy like yourself who goes around kidnapping poor girls and suffers such a sad lack of charm and good looks.”

“And you, my lady? A husband awaits you at home, or at least a betrothed?”

She gave him a glare that had won her many arguments in the past.

He leaned back a little as if in surprise. “No? But you must be near seventeen. Well, I guess that cannot be helped. It is a shame your mother couldn’t bear a girl with a witty tongue, or at the very least a pretty face.”

“You’re a rogue,” she said with some pleasure.

“Am I now?” He sat up on his knees, his hands full of straw.