Page 17 of Cold Fire (The Circle Opens 3)

Daja heard screams inside the roar of fire; her belly clenched. People were dying. She and Frostpine handed their dry throws and quilts to someone, then snatched up water-soaked blankets from a heap on the ground. Ben gave them wet cloth masks from a bucket. Frostpine hesitated, then shrugged. He and Daja suffered less from smoke than most, but they weren’t immune. He let Ben tie the mask over his nose and mouth; a woman performed the same service for Daja. Then Frostpine ran through the smoking door with his load of dripping blankets.

11

Ben looked at Daja. He shouted, “The nursery. We haven’t brought any children out.” He pointed to a second-story window where the other extension met the main house. A woman in a white nightdress leaned over the ledge, a child in her arms. Their mouths were dark Os in their faces; they were screaming. A handful of firefighters maneuvered under the window with an outstretched blanket, yelling for her to jump. The woman tossed the child down instead, then disappeared from the window.

Ben grabbed a huge axe and ran down the courtyard between the extensions, Daja behind him with her load of soaked wraps. He swerved around the firefighters as they tipped the wailing child off the blanket and approached a door on the ground floor near the nursery. First Ben put his palm against it, making sure no fire waited behind the door to burn anyone who opened it. He then tried the latch: the door was locked. Swinging the axe, Ben chopped until the door fell apart, releasing a billow of smoke.

“Try to come back alive!” he shouted over the roar of wind and fire.

Daja grinned at him and ran into the building, stretching her senses out. Her power was of more use than her eyes; she could see, barely, but the smoke made her eyes stream with tears.

The fire was still deep inside the main house, greedily devouring cheap pine and costly teak columns alike. She heard metal scream as it lost the shapes it had held for years. She had some time, but not much, before the blaze reached this extension.

To her right was a stair: someone lay crumpled on it. Daja hesitated, then dumped her blankets, grabbed the victim — a boy — and dragged him to the open door, tossing him outside. Ben was still there: he gathered the boy up with a nod to Daja. She went back inside with relief. Ben had him. Now the boy had a chance to live.

She raced to the stair, grabbed her blankets, and climbed to the next floor, wondering how all this had started. Not in the kitchen, or the back part of the house would burn first. Not in the extensions. In the front of the house, perhaps? A branch of candles knocked over, a hearth fire that popped burning embers onto a silk rug? They might never know.

Perhaps it was set, whispered a thought. Daja shook her head. Who would be cruel enough to stage such a disaster?

She heard screams as she lunged into a hallway from the stair. Running toward them, she searched for doors on either side of the smoky corridor. Here was the source of the screams, a door on her left.

She felt the press of the oncoming fire; its power flooded her veins. At the end of the hall she saw wisps of smoke curl through a closed pair of double doors that must lead to the rest of the house. How long did she have before the doors blew off their hinges?

No time to think of that. Daja checked the nursery door for heat as Ben had, then thrust it open. Women in nursemaid clothes or nightdresses spun to face her, all but one. She stood at the window across the room, gripping a child by the nightshirt with each hand. She stopped, changed her hold to grab one shrieking youngster by the waist, and hoisted the captive to the open window. A quick shove and he was falling out. The woman seized the next child.

Daja counted heads. There were more than a dozen people here, five servants, the rest children. She thrust blankets at the three nearest women. “Carry one pig-aback, have the other walk right behind you!” she shouted, grabbing a small child and lifting it onto one maid’s back. The woman stared. The child — a boy, Daja thought — wrapped arms and legs around her. Taking an older child, Daja thrust her against the maid’s legs and made her grab the woman’s nightdress. Then Daja took the wet blanket she’d handed the maid and draped it over her and the children like a cloak, wrapping one of the woman’s hands around the blanket’s edges so it wouldn’t fall off. She put another edge in the woman’s free hand and tugged until the servant held a wet fold over her own nose and mouth.

Daja looked at the other women: they copied what she had done as Daja helped. Seeing the children might slide off, she yanked sheets from the cots strewn around the room and used them to tie each child to a woman’s back.

There were two more adults, but she was out of blankets. Looking around frantically, Daja saw water pitchers beside two beds. She dumped them on several covers, giving one to a servant woman and wrapping two small boys in another.

“The babies!” cried the woman at the window. “They sleep together and I can’t drop them!” She pointed to a small side chamber near her.

Daja shoved the first woman that she had wrapped in blankets at the door. “Go!” she ordered, pointing. “Get them out of here!”

She grabbed a third pitcher of water, dumped it onto a tumble of sheets, and carried the wet linens to the nursery door. She could feel the blaze in the main house advance. She had to slow it down. Freezing for a moment, Daja closed her eyes and threw up the biggest shield she had ever created in her life, a solid barrier the width of the nursery, stretching from the ground floor to the roof overhead, to prevent the fire from going under or jumping over her floor. She placed her shield ten yards into the main house and made it as hard as she could, knowing her real fight would come when the fire reached it.

The cool-headed servant was already in the babies’ nursery, bundling up three infants there. Daja followed her inside. “Why so many children here? So many babies?” she shouted as she folded a sheet into a sling.

“Two of us are nursing our own — we’ve permission to keep them with the Ravvi’s newest,” the woman yelled over the roar of the burning house. She was streaked with soot: working in the open window, she had been in the path of any smoke that entered the room and passed outside. She coughed for a moment desperately, gasping for air as she clutched a small gilt figure of Yorgiry that hung on a ribbon around her throat. “And Ravvikki Lisyl had her tenth name-day, with her friends to stay the night.”

Using sheet slings, Daja hung one baby off each of the young woman’s shoulders. The fire approached her barrier. Once it touched her defenses, Daja’s war would begin. She would have to hold it in place or no one would get out alive. If it reached the nursery, the open windows and the corridor leading to the door outside would act as chimneys, pulling fire and smoke down the only exit.

She draped the young woman in wet sheets. “Cover your nose and mouth; keep the babies covered,” she ordered, picking up the last child. They went into the main nursery. The women Daja had ordered to get out still waited by the door, too frightened to move.

There was no time to waste breath on curses. Daja gripped her companion’s arm. “You’re the only one with sense. Lead them out of here — down the hall to the first stair, and outside. Hurry them. Go!”

“But you —” The woman reached for Daja. “You must lead!”

Daja shook her head. “I’ve got to hold the fire. Get them moving!”

She shoved the woman toward the rest. The servant hesitated, then ran to her fellows, yelling. When they balked she thrust them and the children around them through the open door, harrying them like an overworked sheepdog.

Daja slung the infant she carried on her back, draped a final wet sheet over her as a cloak, then stood at the center of the main nursery as the others left. She faced the wall between her and the main house, listening to her power. The topmost part of it was weak. There wasn’t enough to keep the third floor blaze from its hungry advance. She retracted her power there before the fire ate it. A moment after she did so, she heard the third floor shutters overhead smash open under the fire’s pressure. Now the roof on that part of the building would burn. On the other side of

the wall before her the huge blaze pressed her barrier, leaning on her. She felt her power forced back, inch by inch, until the wall started to smoke. Tiny gray threads worked through cracks in the plaster.

She had kept back some of her strength in case she needed it. That time was now. Daja fell deep into her power and freed it of all boundaries. She dragged her shield to her side of the wall and filled it with everything she had, on that floor and the ground floor. If she held the blaze on the other side of her barrier, the women and children had a chance to reach the outside door below.

Some would die. The air was very hot: water-soaked blankets and sheets would dry fast. As protection against suffocation they were half-measures at best. All she could do was pray to the Bookkeeper that their accounts weren’t due. Her task was to pit her strength against that of a blaze that was dining well on a wooden house rich with paints and oils, whipped to white heat by a hard wind streaming off miles of icy lake. She needed her friends for this; she needed Tris, who could help her shove the fire into the icy canals and the cold water death of the Syth. She needed Sandry to weave the blaze into a net that would imprison it. All she had was herself. It would have to do.

The fire roared, a massive tide of heat and destruction. It wanted her to know it was no tame forge fire.

“And you’re no forest fire,” she informed it, her teeth chattering with fear. “I handled one of those that would make you yelp like a puppy.” She did not admit that her friends had lent her their strength, that Sandry managed one woven strip, and Frostpine another. This fire didn’t have to know that.

Frostpine — was he all right? Was he putting his will against this thing in the servants’ dormitory?

Her barrier wavered: she couldn’t think about Frostpine. NO, she thought grimly, leaning forward against the blaze’s force as she might lean into a high wind. NO.

It pressed. Her skin felt taut, as if she were a cooking sausage about to pop. The fire stuck a finger through one gap in the wall, then another, widening them. Daja backed toward the door. She would have to give the fire the nursery to keep it from breaking through in the hall and on the ground floor. She couldn’t hold this room, not now.

She eased through the door, still fighting to hold the barrier upstairs and down. Her magic was burning to feed her shield, burning, and running out of fuel.

The barrier on the ground floor swayed. Daja released the nursery barrier and slammed its power into the ground floor protections. The nursery wall splintered as unobstructed flames blasted through.

In the hall, behind her last upstairs barrier, smoke poured around the edges of the double doors that opened into the main house. Their hinges and latches glowed a dull cherry red. Daja retreated from them, one hand on the wall. It was hot. That would be the fire on the roof. She refused to look up. If it broke through over her head, there was nothing she could do.

She found a door-chimney pouring smoke: the stair. She backed into it, then reclaimed her last piece of magic on this story, freeing the blaze. The double doors exploded off their hinges. A column of flame spat down the hall she’d just abandoned. Daja turned, blinded by smoke, descended three steps, and tripped over something soft. She seized the rail, dragging it loose from two sets of bolts to stop her fall and save the quiet child on her back. Her ground floor barrier wavered. Gasping, Daja clung to the rail until her fingers cramped, fighting the blaze’s surge against her power. She thrust, scraping all she could from the wellspring of her magic, that had once seemed so deep. Sweating, she jammed hungry flames back, past the limits she had set for them. Only then did she open her eyes, take a hand from the rail, and shake the woman she had fallen over. It was the brave maidservant, the two infants wriggling against her in their slings. Her Yorgiry figure gleamed against her sooty throat. She coughed without opening her eyes.

Daja’s ears rang; she trembled from head to toe. Her knees wobbled until she finally sat next to the young woman.

Her choices were bad. She could move, or she could hold her barrier. If she lost the barrier, there would be no place to move to: the big fire would roar up the stairwell like a tidal wave. She clung to her barrier, coughing. Perhaps this was a dream. All would be well if she had a proper, dreamless sleep.

She might have closed her eyes then and there, but for the flames’ defiance. They thrashed against her grip, fighting her. They were being bad. This blaze had to remember she was in control here, not it. Fire could not just run where it liked, she knew that much. And so she gripped it with fading strength, with a smith’s iron will.

“Just hold that barrier, sweetheart,” a familiar voice croaked in her ear. “I’ll do the rest. Don’t falter, or there’ll be roast mage on Alakut tonight.” One powerful brown arm passed around Daja’s waist and raised her until she could stand. Frostpine leaned her against the wall. “Stay,” he commanded.

He dragged the unconscious maid to her feet. Cursing as he found the babies in their slings, Frostpine moved them until he could drape the woman and her burden over one shoulder. He slipped his free arm around Daja’s waist. She knew enough to sling her arm over his shoulders, gripping the maid’s clothes with that hand.

“Hang on,” Frostpine ordered. Daja heard and obeyed, though nearly all of her attention was now in her battle with the fire. It was very hungry. It sensed wood and flesh beyond her barrier and demanded them in a voice that thundered in her skull. She barely noticed as Frostpine half-dragged her down the rest of the stair, along a smoke-filled hall and outside. They stumbled into the cold. Instantly both mages began to hack smoke from their lungs as the stuff they were supposed to breathe fought its way into soot-filled chests.

Coughing broke Daja’s hold on the fire. Frostpine knew the moment it ripped free. “Move!” he shouted hoarsely as others ran in to grab the maid and the infants. “Move, move, move!” His grip on Daja still firm, he slammed into the others from behind, knocking them out of the direct path to the open door.

A column of fire, blasting with pent-up strength, roared through the opening and out over the snow. If Frostpine hadn’t knocked everyone to the side, they would be dead.

Ben and others ran in to help, taking everyone back to the gate. There they turned. The extensions to the house were burning. Smoke rolled from beneath shuttered windows. A moment later the shutters blew off; gouts of fire reached for the open sky.

Frostpine and Daja sat heavily on cold and slushy ground. Ben lifted the baby’s sling from Daja’s back. With its weight removed, she could lie down. The cold, wet stuff under her felt wonderful on her hot skin. All of her hot skin. She opened a smoke-teared eye and looked down. She could see brown arms, a brown side, brown legs. She giggled. Sandry had never expected that Daja might wear her best clothes into a fire, so she hadn’t protected them.

Daja glanced at Frostpine. He sat, knees drawn up, resting his head on them. Like her he was naked, his clothes burned off.

“Frostpine?” she whispered, her voice cracking.

For answer he let the arm nearest her fall, until his hand lay over one of hers. Don’t you ever scare me like that again, he told her through their magic. Especially not for crazy people who build fancy houses all of wood.

She knew what he meant, but that wasn’t what she needed to say. I want to go home, she told him. Her eyes hurt; she wanted to cry, but she was so dried out she couldn’t produce tears. To Summersea. To our family.

On the first caravan out of here in the spring, he promised.

She slept, or passed out, and woke in her bed in Bancanor House. It was dark; a pair of lamps burned at a table near the bed where Matazi and Nia sat. Matazi worked on a tapestry frame as Nia read softly to her mother.

“Cedar is for the protection of the home,” the girl said, “to ward against lightning or the entry of evil from without. It —”

“Babies?” Daja croaked, and coughed. Matazi came to help her to sit. Jory, who Daja hadn’t seen on a stool beside the fire, poured something into a clay cup and brought it over

. Nia stood at the foot of the bed, wide-eyed.

Daja sipped from Jory’s cup. Onion and garlic exploded in her mouth and Daja began to cough in earnest, hacking and fighting for breath. A clump of some dreadful mess blew from her chest into her mouth.

Matazi put a bowl under Daja’s chin. “Spit,” she ordered.

Daja spat. Three mouthfuls later, she could breathe without pain. “Your first spell?” she asked Jory.

The girl nodded. “Olennika told me to make her a copy, after I used it on Frostpine,” she said. “Only it’s not all mine. It was in a family book of cures that Aunt Morrachane gave me. I have to tell her how good it works.”

Daja nodded. “Thanks, I think,” she told Jory, onion and garlic still burning her tongue and throat. To Matazi she said, “The babies? The maid Frostpine brought out with …?” Her voice trailed off as she read the answer in the woman’s dark eyes.

Matazi sat beside Daja in a drift of jasmine scent. “They saved the babies the girl carried,” she told Daja gently. “But she died in the courtyard.”

“And the baby I had?” Daja whispered. She felt tears rise; her mouth trembled. She wouldn’t cry in front of them, she refused to cry.

Matazi shook her head.

“It would’ve lived if I sent it with someone else,” Daja whispered. Tears overflowed for all her refusal to shed them. “I had to stay, to — to hold —” She couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear the thought of that baby suffocating on her back, couldn’t bear the thought of that brave maid, who had saved all those children only to die herself. Daja turned facedown into her pillow, and cried herself to sleep.

When she woke again, she saw that she still had company: Frostpine and Nia meditated in a protective circle on the floor. Daja blinked, her eyes stinging in the brilliance of Frostpine’s power. Beyond him she saw that Nia’s magic was now a steady silver glaze on her skin, still and unmoving.

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