Enna Burning (6 page)

“Ha, ha!” Enna brandished the javelin and smiled. “Go back or die!”

The Tiran closed their eyes and raised their hands against the thrash of dirt and pebbles but still pressed forward. Their helmets flew off, their clothes whipped about their body. Sometimes a finger of wind pushed out of the circle and knocked a soldier off his feet. Two tumbled back down the hill. The others kept on.

“Is it going to be enough?” asked Enna.

Isi shook her head. The leader slowly lifted his sword against the force of wind, getting closer and closer. The mule eyed him and the windstorm uncomfortably, lifting its front hooves and bawling. With great exertion, the soldier slapped the mule’s rump with the flat of his sword.

The wagon rocked, the mule wailed. Enna dropped the javelin, grabbed Isi, and pulled her out of the lurching wagon. As they landed on the hilltop, the wagon tipped, and the mule and its load slid backward down the slope. The wind grew softer.

“Isi, don’t let it go, don’t.”

“It’s getting so hard, so many people . . . ” Isi kept her eyes closed, and her concentration appeared to cause her pain. Enna stood in front of her as the men neared.

“You harm her and—and the entire field goes up in flames! You fools, you kill her and you die with her.”

The Tiran seemed unconvinced. The wind burst again and pushed several men to the ground, but the others still advanced.

“Forest band, to me!”

A beating of hooves, a responding shout, and Geric crested the hill. His sword downed the farthest soldier. The leader turned away from the girls and called his men around him, rallying to take down the prince. But behind him a hundred-band of Forest men ran up the hill, hollering and throwing javelins.

The prince led the charge, and the Forest men fell in beside him. Enna spotted Razo and Finn among those still alive and fighting. The swordplay was quick and bloody. From this close, Enna could hear the men scream when metal ripped open their middles, could hear them whimper when a finishing blow stopped their hearts. In a few moments, Enna and Isi’s attackers lay in heaps at their feet. The protecting wind dispersed into random breezes. Isi slumped on the ground.

Geric dismounted and took Isi in his arms. “Are you hurt? Are you all right?”

Isi put her face against his chest and breathed out. “I am now. Geric, your father . . .”

Geric nodded and cleared his throat, as if trying to dislodge emotion caught there. His eyes were wet.

A new noise from below caught their attention. Enna and Geric, holding his wife, stood and looked out. The Bayern were cheering. The Tiran soldiers retreated, some fighting as they left, most running for the woods south of the field, toward the villages they had captured and their reinforcements and supplies. Enna could not see Leifer, and amid the shouts of victory, she felt her stomach chill.

“We won this battle,” said Geric, his voice disbelieving. “They won’t take Ostekin now. We wouldn’t have . . . but the fire, Leifer, he changed everything.”

“Geric,” said Enna, “shouldn’t you . . . ” She gestured to the fleeing Tiran and the cheering Bayern, who lacked a king to lead them forward to catch and kill their foes before they could regroup.

“I . . . ” Geric hesitated. The Tiran entered the woods. “We’ll finish it another day.”

Enna thought perhaps it was for the best, looking over the field of slain bodies and wounded, the exhausted men of the king’s army who had been fighting since dawn, and the body of the king himself, slumped over his downed mount, the Bayern banner thrown over his body.

Enna saw Geric’s gaze reach the spot on the field where his father lay slain. His face hardened, and he suddenly looked less like a concerned husband and more like a king. Geric asked Razo and Finn to take Isi to the encampment of women, then raised his sword and shouted atop the hill.

“Bayern, you are victorious! This is just the first battle of this war, so stand together and save the injured. I, Geric-Sinath of Gerhard, king of Bayern, declare this day doesn’t end until every acre of our soil is cleared of the Tiran.”

“How long’ll this day last, then?” asked Enna.

“It feels like forever.” He straightened his shoulders and marched down the hill.

Enna left him and ran into the battlefield. The sky growled with thunder, and when rain began to fall it felt only right. Smoke rose as the rain doused the burning corpses. The wounded moaned and wept. A broad-faced Bayern soldier was wading through the bodies and delivering quick deathblows to the gravely injured Tiran. Enna looked away.

“Leifer,” she called, loudly at first, urging herself to believe that he was all right somewhere, that he could answer her call.
Leifer himself is burning
, Isi had said.
Not on fire, exactly, but burning, somehow.

She found him too quickly, before she had prepared herself, before she had allowed herself to actually think,
Leifer died today.

She recognized his long, lanky body, the way he let the laces of his boots dangle, the cut of his tunic, though there was nothing else to identify. He looked as though he had burned from the inside out, for his body was worse than his clothing. His skin was charred black and stiff—not a quick death like the others with burned bodies who suffocated on smoke, their skin patchy red and black or just gone. He must have burned slowly, evenly, like a roasted pig.

Enna knelt before him and cursed herself for not stopping him. He had won the battle, she reminded herself, but she felt no consolation. She did not understand what bade him start the fires and make them ever bigger even while the action gutted him of life. But she knew he would never lace his boots again or shell walnuts or push his hair out of his eyes. He would never marry a Forest girl. He would never breathe again. She put a hand on his chest. It was still warm, but not with life.

Enna shouted at the sky. She had done this. She had not talked him out of using the fire on the battlefield, and she had pretended to be the fire-witch to distract the Tiran instead of rushing out to stop him. When she pulled her hand away from his chest, she brushed across something round and long. The vellum.

She jerked the thing free from his tunic. The oiled cloth wrapped around it was blackened and warm, and it smelled greasy and dirty like a garbage fire. Her throat constricted against a sob, and her fist tightened around the cloth. The parchment inside crackled a little, the noise of a secret.

None of it made sense, why he would burn his sister, and suddenly hate the city dwellers, and just as suddenly join with the king to fight Tira. And then to burn with such abandon, even to his death. The cloth trembled in her hand. Would it explain why Leifer had changed? Whatever intelligence was inside had helped turn back the invaders today, but did it also demand the wielder’s life? Did Leifer really have to die?

Enna peeled back the cloth. The vellum was white as bone, rolled tightly, and tied with a string. She lifted it out carefully, but the string had burned, and it dropped away in pieces. The vellum unrolled before her eyes.

She jerked back, afraid to have such a thing open to her. Then she took a breath and nodded to herself. She had to know what had happened to Leifer, why he had ended this way. She read carefully at first, trying to make out the many unfamiliar words and understand the tight, sloping script and bleeding ink. Then she read fast, too fast to understand it all at once.

I, a woman of the River, keep brief record of the greatest power our people have seen—how to shape fire from the heat of the living, how to pull heat from the air and give it life inside fuel. How to hear the heat, how to bring it inside myself, form it into flame, and set it free . . .

Enna closed her eyes, and she could see the black ink strokes of the text flaming orange against her lids, as though the letters were branded behind her eyes. The idea of the knowledge burned impatiently against the strikes of raindrops on her neck and hands. She opened her eyes and the world seemed different, the colors brighter, everything pulsing with heat and life.

“Fire,” she said.

The tip of her tongue warmed. Beside her, a stalk of downed wheat smoked in the rain.

.

Warrior

.

That night the rain stopped suddenly, leaving behind low, sluggish clouds to mix with the smoke. After the sun fell, the sky was black.

Enna sat on the ground beside Leifer’s body far into the evening. Men patrolled the field, searching for wounded to take to nearby Ostekin. They glanced at Leifer’s scorched remains and quickly passed on. Enna wrapped the vellum back in its cloth and slipped it inside her tunic. Her thoughts hunted after the words she had read, sought to catch them, cut them open, and understand.

Every living thing gives off heat,
the vellum had said
. That is the key. I believe I was born with the ability to be a fire- speaker, though I did not know it until I was taught to feel that heat. Now it is so real, I wonder if I can see the pale yellow heat that trails from animals, people, plants, I wonder if I can hear the heat find me, tap against my skin, beg to be made into fire. Before it is pulled apart in the cruel, cold air, heat remembers that it was once a part of something living, and it seeks to be so again.

After nightfall, men began to place the bodies of the slain into piles. Dumbly, Enna still sat on the ground and watched, her hand on Leifer’s chest. When men tried to take Leifer, Enna roused.

“He’s my brother,” she said. “I will.”

She grabbed his ankles and dragged him to the nearest heap of corpses. He was so blackened, Enna was afraid at first that he might break apart like a burned-out log and collapse into ash. But he was still strong.

“Enna.” Isi stood by, her face barely recognizable in the night. “Leifer should be buried in honor. He was a hero today.”

Behind her, Geric and three captains lifted the king’s body into the back of the wagon, to be taken to the royal tombs in the capital. She could hear Isi’s uneven breath, torn from sobbing for the king and the day. Enna felt the vellum scratch under her tunic, and she put a self-conscious hand to her chest. Standing before Isi, the words of the vellum churning in her mind, reminded her she had acted rashly. Perhaps Isi would not approve. Now was not the time to tell her. She looked at her brother’s body sprawled on the ground.

“Leifer wouldn’t want to be in cold earth,” said Enna. “He should be burned.”

Isi squeezed her shoulder and returned to Geric.

Once you are aware of the heat loose in the air,
the vellum had said,
it becomes aware of you. Take it, form it into flame, send the flame into something dead so that it, too, can live again. Trees grow in the heat of life. Deadwood remembers that life. Make heat flame, send it into the deadwood, let what once was tree live again as fire.

Men in a wagon brought wood from Ostekin. Everything under the sky was soaked and miserable. They stacked the wood around the mound of bodies and, hunching over flint and kindling, began to try to coax a flame.

Enna closed her eyes. The air was damp and clung to her lungs as she drew it in. On the skin of her face and hands, she thought she felt the air a little heavier, a little more profound. A little warmer. Focusing on the touch of that air, she followed it back to its source—the men. She opened her eyes. Yes, there, she had known the men were there by the heat that had left them, slithered through the air, and found her skin. The more she focused on the heat, the more sensitive her skin was to its touch. And the strands of heat that found her stayed near.

To make heat into fire, you must draw it inside you. I was never aware of that small, hollow place inside my chest until I was taught to feel it, expand it, fill it with heat. If you are one who might have the ability, you can feel that place, too. Gather the heat touching your skin, then draw it in. Inside a living person, heat can become flame. Do not let it stay and burn you. Send it out into something dead, and the heat becomes live fire.

Enna felt the warmth on her skin and listened to all around her. She heard a man curse. The rustling of shaved wood. The snap of rubbing flint. A hiss, a flash, a sigh. She could almost feel the first word of fire sitting inside her, behind her eyes, on her tongue, while the man struggled to ignite even a tiny flame. She knew she could help the men light their fires, she could bestow all the dead piled there with the brief life of fire. This last gift for Leifer. The heat near her began to move as if in anticipation.

“Just this once,” she whispered, “for Leifer.”

With a thought, she gathered in the heat she had been feeling, the lost heat from the frustrated men crouched over their kindling, the drifting heat from the wet, green grasses and the roots of wheat stalks. She was afraid the next part would prove too difficult, but as soon as she willed it to enter, the heat came into her, into a place in her chest. She felt the place expand. Her eyes lifted open with the rush of life and the sting of heat.
Get it out
, was the immediate need. Quickly, she sent the transformed heat tearing through the air and into the nearest fuel.

A little heap of wood shavings burst into flame. The soldier working at it wiped his brow, relieved. Others left their own piles and went to him, patting him on the back, saying, “Well done, you got it. Didn’t think we’d get anything going in this damp.”

Enna looked over all the stacked wood, at the clothes of the dead soldiers, at all the fuel that she could inject with heat and bring back into a brief, blazing life. But she did not have to look far for reasons not to. There on the mound, one arm flung over his face, lay Leifer.

Enna whispered, “That’s all, Leifer. I’ll never burn again.”

Soldiers gathered, lighting sticks in the fire Enna had begun, distributing the flames to the stacked wood around that mound and other mounds. The fires grew taller, and the men stepped back. No one wanted to smell the burning-meat odor of their dead. Someone started to sing, and the living men gathered in to one another and joined with dissonant voices. As the fire bit into the rough wood and ate up the clothing, it growled and crackled and breathed, so that Enna imagined it sang harmony to the men’s voices.

“Up, up, up with your glass,” they sang, “the man has fallen down. Lift up, up, up your last glass, lift up for the downed, downed man.”

It was a rough tavern song, but one they all knew. Enna liked it more the more they sang. The rhythm clipped, the words rolled over each sound, and some men pumped their arms as though they toasted the dead. It reminded her that there was still living to be done.

She watched the flames, but her focus slipped past them to the dead bodies, an arm tucked there, a face blackened in smoke, a tunic eaten through. The last of Leifer in this world, made brilliantly hot and bright and alive. She walked away before the fire burned out, before all that was left was ash.

Two weeks after the battle of Ostekin Fields, Enna walked back to the Forest. She felt uneasy, as though Leifer were at home waiting for her, hungry, unable to make a stew without her help. She knew it was not true, but she told Isi, “I just have to go see that he’s not there, and make sure the chickens are all right.”

She traveled in the company of a dozen Forest boys, most of whom were needed more at home than on the battlefront and some of whom now stared about with wide eyes and wizened brows, unready as they were to have seen what a war really was. Enna had thought Finn would be one of the returning, but he surprised her.

“Send a message to my ma, if you can—I’m staying with the prince,” and he walked swiftly back to his hundred-band camp.

Enna thought how Finn was changing, how everything was.

Faintly, she could feel the heat of her traveling companions as they walked beside her and the living plants beneath her feet. A few days into the journey, her sense of their heat was unmistakable. At night she felt uncomfortable around the fires, instead sleeping several paces beyond the others on the edge of the firelight. Even from there, she could sense its delicate heat weave through air to touch her skin.

When they passed under the Forest canopy, she was surprised by how thick the air was with the warm emanations of plants and animals. Enna had never realized before just how much was growing around her, how much life filled up every inch. She entered her empty little house, sat on her cot, and stared at the wood grain of the floor. She refused to look at the door, fighting a ridiculous hope that any moment her brother could come through it. Her old restlessness was so profound now that it was almost audible, a discontented buzzing that could compete with the crickets.

Enna spent much of that night with open eyes, wondering how Leifer had slept so soundly. How could he not lie awake, constantly marveling at the ribbons of heat that seeped out of trees and animals and through the cracks in the walls? Her awareness of it felt like a last link to Leifer. As she paid closer attention, her sense of the heat became more distinct. She thought she could tell the difference between heat from an animal, a tree, a fern. Everywhere, things were alive, awake, and growing. The heat tickled her skin and felt as pleasant as baking bread smells.

The hearth was cold. She stubbornly refused to light a fire, even with flint.

In the morning she shut the house up tight and made Doda a present of half of her egg layers in exchange for looking after the hens and the goat indefinitely. By the next week’s end, Enna was back in Ostekin. She greeted the west gate sentries and headed to the councilman’s house where Geric had set up headquarters.

Up the main road a bit, she thought she saw Isi dressed plainly with her hair in a scarf as though out for a walk. Two young soldiers, clearly agitated about something, stopped her and began speaking with energy. Enna picked up her pace.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s a very fair request,” Enna heard Isi say. “You should speak to your captain. . . .”

“No, I’m telling you,” one of the soldiers said. “My brother died out on that field, and I’m not going to just sit here and wait until my captain says I can fight again.”

“That’s right.” The other soldier stepped in closer, pointing his finger at Isi. “And if you don’t . . . ”

“What do you mean, threatening the yellow lady?” Enna reached the group and stepped between Isi and the soldiers, shoving their chests until they backed up. “What, are you some Tiran pig dressed Bayern?”

The soldiers stiffened. “We’re just saying what’s true.”

“Oh, you’re just humming to hear the pretty noise. Get out of here, go on. If I hear you disrespecting our princess again, I’ll whip your hide so you’d think I was your own ma.”

The soldiers hesitated.

“Did you hear me, little boys?” said Enna. “Go on!”

They turned and walked swiftly away.

Isi sighed. “Those poor boys are grieving and don’t know what to do about it.”

“I do. Give the word and I’ll flog them for you.”

Isi laughed briefly and bowed her head. “I know you will, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary. This time.” She met her eyes. “You make me feel safe, Enna. I’m so glad you’re back.”

Enna inhaled against an uncomfortable feeling, as though she had dreamed she had hurt Isi and was only now remembering.
The fire. I haven’t told her.
She realized now that part of the reason she left Ostekin so soon after the battle was to avoid telling her friend that she had read the vellum. She did not want Isi to look at her as Enna had looked at Leifer, wondering how much of what he did was really Leifer, how much was fire, and always feeling on edge, waiting for him to break and flames to rise.
You make me feel safe
, Isi had said. How could Enna betray that?

“What’s wrong?” asked Isi.

“I, nothing. I’m glad I’m back, too. How can I help you, Isi? I’d like to be useful, if I can.”

“You’re still my maiden.”

“Yes, that’s something,” said Enna. “Well then, I’ll be the most valiant queen’s maiden in Bayern history.”

Isi shook her head. “Queen. For my first sixteen years, my mother was the queen, and when I came to Bayern there had been no queen for a decade. Now suddenly I’m the queen. I’m still not used to it.”

“I don’t think most people are. Just now when I arrived, I said to the sentries, ‘Where’s the princess, or the queen, rather?’ and they said, ‘You mean the yellow lady?’”

“I’m not surprised.” Isi patted the scarf that hid her hair. “I know I stand out too much with my hair so long and yellow as well, but I just can’t bring myself to cut it.”

“Cut it?” said Enna. “No, you can’t. It’s part of who you are.”

Isi smiled and entered the councilman’s house, but Enna paused at the door. She turned to face southeast, the direction of the kingdom of Tira and the direction of Eylbold, the closest Bayern town Tira had taken. She felt the hairs on her arms rise. They were so close. So close that she imagined she could close her eyes and feel her way southeast just by the heat of their bodies. The feeling twisted her stomach.

Enna turned her back on the south and followed Isi inside to prepare for a war council, one of many that autumn. The leaves turned and pinecones fell, and there were councils and meetings and strategies, unexpected clashes with Tiran troops and dozens of Tiran prisoners. And then the weather turned decisively toward winter. The skirmishes between Bayern and Tira slowed and then stopped like tree sap in the cold. Tira had taken two more border towns but had launched no great battles, and now both sides seemed content to wait out the winter and strike again in the thaw of spring.