Fire (2 page)

At night, inside the thorny shelter Larch had built of sticks and scrub, he would pull the boy into the warmth of his coat and listen for the howls, the tumbled stones down the slope, the screeches, that meant an animal had scented them. At the first telltale sound he would strap the sleeping boy into the carrier on his chest. He would light as powerful a torch as he had the fuel for, go out of the shelter, and stand there, holding off the attack with fire and sword. Sometimes he stood there for hours. Larch didn’t get a lot of sleep.

He wasn’t eating much either.

‘You’ll make yourself sick if you keep eating so much,’ Immiker said to Larch over their paltry dinner of stringy wolf meat and water.

Larch stopped chewing immediately, for sickness would make it harder to defend the boy. He handed over the majority of his portion. ‘Thank you for the warning, son.’

They ate quietly for a while, Immiker devouring Larch’s food. ‘What if we went higher into the mountains and crossed to the other side?’ Immiker asked.

Larch looked into the boy’s mismatched eyes. ‘Is that what you think we should do?’

Immiker shrugged his small shoulders. ‘Could we survive the crossing?’

‘Do you think we could?’ Larch asked, and then shook himself as he heard his own question. The child was three years old and knew nothing of crossing mountains. It was a sign of Larch’s fatigue, that he groped so desperately and so often for his son’s opinion.

‘We would not survive,’ Larch said firmly. ‘I’ve heard of no one who has ever made it across the mountains to the east, either here or in Estill or Nander. I know nothing of the land beyond the seven kingdoms, except for tall tales the eastern people tell about rainbow-coloured monsters and underground labyrinths.’

‘Then you’ll have to bring me back down into the hills, Father, and hide me. You must protect me.’

Larch’s mind was foggy, tired, starved, and shot through with one lightning bolt of clarity, which was his determination to do what Immiker said.

SNOW WAS FALLING as Larch picked his way down a sheer slope. The boy was strapped inside his coat. Larch’s sword, his bow and arrows, some blankets and bundled scraps of meat hung on his back. When the great brown raptor appeared over a distant ridge, Larch reached for his bow tiredly. But the bird lunged so fast that all in an instant it was too close to shoot. Larch stumbled away from the creature, fell, and felt himself sliding downward. He braced his arms before him to shield the child, whose screams rose above the screams of the bird: ‘Protect me, Father! You must protect me, Father!’

Suddenly the slope under Larch’s back gave way and they were falling through darkness. An avalanche, Larch thought numbly, every nerve in his body still focused on protecting the child under his coat. His shoulder hit against something sharp and Larch felt tearing flesh, and wetness, warmth. Strange, to be plunging downward like this. The drop was heady, dizzying, as if it were vertical, a free fall; and just before he slipped into unconsciousness Larch wondered if they were falling through the mountain to the floor of the earth.

LARCH JACKKNIFED A WAKE, frantic with one thought: Immiker. The boy’s body wasn’t touching his, and the straps hung from his chest, empty. Larch felt around with his hands, whimpering. It was dark. The surface on which he lay was hard and slick, like slimey ice. He shifted to extend his reach and screamed suddenly, incoherently, at the pain that ripped through his shoulder and head. Nausea surged in his throat. He fought it down and lay still again, weeping helplessly, and moaning the boy’s name.

‘All right, Father,’ Immiker’s voice said, very close beside him. ‘Stop crying and get up.’

Larch’s weeping turned to sobs of relief.

‘Get up, Father. I’ve explored. There’s a tunnel and we must go.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m cold and hungry. Get up.’

Larch tried to lift his head, and cried out, almost blacked out. ‘It’s no use. The pain is too great.’

‘The pain is not so great that you can’t get up,’ Immiker said, and when Larch tried again he found that the boy was right. It was excruciating, and he vomited once or twice, but it was not so bad that he couldn’t prop himself on his knees and his uninjured arm, and crawl across the icy surface behind his son.

‘Where—’ he gasped, and then abandoned his question. It was too much work.

‘We fell through a crack in the mountain,’ Immiker said. ‘We slid. There’s a tunnel.’

Larch didn’t understand, and forward progress took so much concentration that he stopped trying to. The way was slippery and downhill. The place they went toward was slightly darker than the place they came from. His son’s small form scuttled down the slope ahead of him.

‘There’s a drop,’ Immiker said, but comprehension came so slowly to Larch that before he understood, he fell, tumbling knees over neck off a short ledge. He landed on his injured shoulder and momentarily lost consciousness. He woke to a cold breeze and a musty smell that hurt his head. He was in a narrow space, crammed between close walls. He tried to ask whether his fall had injured the boy, but only managed a moan.

‘Which way?’ Immiker’s voice asked.

Larch didn’t know what he meant, and moaned again.

Immiker’s voice was tired, and impatient. ‘I’ve told you, it’s a tunnel. I’ve felt along the wall in both directions. Choose which way, Father. Take me out of this place.’

The ways were identically dim, identically musty, but Larch needed to choose, if it was what the boy thought best. He shifted himself carefully. His head hurt less when he faced the breeze than when he turned his back to it. This decided him. They would walk toward the source of the breeze.

And that is why, after four days of bleeding, stumbling and starving, after four days of Immiker reminding him repeatedly that he was well enough to keep walking, Larch and Immiker stepped out of the tunnel not into the light of the Monsean foothills, but into that of a strange land on the other side of the Monsean peaks. An eastern land neither of them had heard of except for foolish tales told over Monsean dinners - tales of rainbow-coloured monsters and underground labyrinths.

LARCH WONDERED SOMETIMES if the blow to his head on the day he’d fallen through the mountain had caused some hurt to his brain. The more time he spent in this new land, the more he struggled against a fog hovering on the edge of his mind. The people here spoke differently and Larch struggled with the strange words, the strange sounds. He depended on Immiker to translate. As time passed he depended on Immiker to explain a great many things.

This land was mountainous, stormy and rough. It was called the Dells. Variations of the animals Larch had known in Monsea lived in the Dells - normal animals, with appearances and behaviour Larch understood and recognised. But also in the Dells lived colourful, astonishing creatures that the Dellian people called monsters. It was their unusual colouration that identified them as monsters, because in every other physical particular they were like normal Dellian animals. They had the shape of Dellian horses, Dellian turtles, mountain lions, raptors, dragonflies, bears; but they were ranges of fuchsia, turquoise, bronze, iridescent green. A dappled grey horse in the Dells was a horse. A sunset orange horse was a monster.

Larch didn’t understand these monsters. The mouse monsters, the fly and squirrel and fish and sparrow monsters, were harmless; but the bigger monsters, the man-eating monsters, were terribly dangerous, more so than their animal counterparts. They craved human flesh, and for the flesh of other monsters they were positively frantic. For Immiker’s flesh they seemed frantic as well, and as soon as he was big enough to pull back the string of a bow, Immiker learned to shoot. Larch wasn’t sure who taught him. Immiker always seemed to have someone, a man or a boy, who guarded him and helped him with this and that. Never the same person. The old ones always disappeared by the time Larch had learned their names, and new ones always took their places.

Larch wasn’t even certain where the people came from. He and Immiker lived in a small house, and then a bigger house, then even bigger, in a rocky clearing on the outskirts of a town, and some of Immiker’s people came from the town. But others seemed to come out of crevices in the mountains and in the ground. These strange, pallid, underground people brought medicines to Larch. They healed his shoulder.

He heard there were one or two monsters of a human shape in the Dells, with brightly coloured hair, but he never saw them. It was for the best, because Larch could never remember if the human monsters were friendly or not, and against monsters in general he had no defence. They were too beautiful. Their beauty was so extreme that whenever Larch came face to face with one of them, his mind emptied and his body froze, and Immiker and his friends had to defend him.

‘It’s what they do, Father,’ Immiker explained to him, over and over. ‘It’s part of their monstrous power. They stun you with their beauty, and then they overwhelm your mind and make you stupid. You must learn to guard your mind against them, as I have.’

Larch had no doubt Immiker was right, but still he didn’t understand. ‘What a horrifying notion,’ he said, ‘a creature with the power to take over one’s mind.’

Immiker burst into delighted laughter, and threw his arm around his father. And still Larch didn’t understand; but Immiker’s displays of affection were rare, and always overwhelmed Larch with a dumb happiness that numbed the discomfort of his confusion.

IN HIS INFREQUENT moments of mental lucidity, Larch was sure that as Immiker had grown older, Larch himself had grown stupider and more forgetful. Immiker explained to him over and over the unstable politics of this land, the military factions that divided it, the black market that flourished in the underground passages that connected it. Two different Dellian lords, Lord Mydogg in the north and Lord Gentian in the south, were trying to carve their own empires into the landscape and wrest power from the Dellian king. In the far north was a second nation of lakes and mountain peaks called Pikkia.

Larch couldn’t keep it straight in his head. He knew only that there were no Gracelings here. No one would take from Larch his son whose eyes were two different colours.

Eyes of two different colours. Immiker was a Graceling. Larch thought about this sometimes, when his mind was clear enough for thought. He wondered when his son’s Grace would appear.

In his clearest moments, which only came to him when Immiker left him alone for a while, Larch wondered if it already had.

IMMIKER HAD HOBBIES. He liked to play with little monsters. He liked to tie them down and peel away their claws, or their vividly coloured scales, or clumps of their hair and feathers. One day in the boy’s tenth year, Larch came upon Immiker slicing stripes down the stomach of a rabbit that was coloured like the sky.

Even bleeding, even shaking and wild-eyed, the rabbit was beautiful to Larch. He stared at the creature and forgot why he’d come looking for Immiker. How sad it was, to see something so small and helpless, something so beautiful, damaged in fun. The rabbit began to make noises, horrible, panicked squeaks, and Larch heard himself whimpering.

Immiker glanced at Larch. ‘It doesn’t hurt her, Father.’

Instantly Larch felt better, knowing that the monster wasn’t in pain. But then the rabbit let out a very small, very desperate whine, and Larch was confused. He looked at his son. The boy held a dagger dripping with blood before the eyes of the shaking creature, and smiled at his father.

Somewhere in the depths of Larch’s mind a prick of suspicion made itself felt. Larch remembered why he’d come looking for Immiker.

‘I have an idea,’ Larch said slowly, ‘about the nature of your Grace.’

Immiker’s eyes flicked calmly, carefully, to Larch’s. ‘Do you?’

‘You’ve said that the monsters take over my mind with their beauty.’

Immiker lowered his knife, and tilted his head at his father. There was something odd in the boy’s face. Disbelief, Larch thought, and a strange, amused smile. As if the boy were playing a game he was used to winning, and this time he’d lost.

‘Sometimes I think you take over my mind,’ Larch said, ‘with your words.’

Immiker’s smile widened, and then he began to laugh. The laughter made Larch so happy that he began to laugh as well. How much he loved this child. The love and the laughter bubbled out of him, and when Immiker walked toward him Larch held his arms open wide. Immiker thrust his dagger into Larch’s stomach. Larch dropped like a stone to the floor.

Immiker leaned over his father. ‘You’ve been delightful,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss your devotion. If only it were as easy to control everyone as it is to control you. If only everyone were as stupid as you are, Father.’

IT WAS STRANGE, to be dying. Cold and dizzying, like his fall through the Monsean mountains. But Larch knew he wasn’t falling through the Monsean mountains; in death he knew clearly, for the first time in years, where he was and what was happening. His last thought was that it hadn’t been stupidity that had allowed his son to enchant him so easily with words. It had been love. Larch’s love had kept him from recognising Immiker’s Grace, because even before the boy’s birth, when Immiker had been no more than a promise inside Mikra’s body, Larch had already been enchanted.