She made a connection then. Surprised, she sat back from him and studied his face, soft with shadows and light. She saw a part of him she hadn't seen before.

"You came to me for lessons to guard your mind," she said, "and you stopped asking me to marry you, both at the same time. You did those things out of love for your brother."

"Well," he said, looking a bit sheepishly at the floor. "I also took a few swings at him, but that's neither here nor there."

"You're good at love," she said simply, because it seemed to her that it was true. "I'm not so good at love. I'm like a barbed creature. I push everyone I love away."

He shrugged. "I don't mind you pushing me away if it means you love me, little sister."

She began to write a letter in her mind to Brigan. It wasn't a very good letter. Dear Brigan, I don't think you should be doing what you're doing. Dear Brigan, people are swirling away from me and I am swirling apart.

The swelling of her hands had gone down, and no places had blackened that hadn't been black before. There would likely be a surgery, the healers said, when more time had passed, to remove the two dead fingers on her left hand.

"With all your medicines," Musa asked one of the healers, "you really have nothing to help her?"

"There are no medicines to bring a dead thing back to life," the healer said crisply. "The best thing right now will be for Lady Fire to start using her hands again regularly. She'll find a person can manage quite well without ten fingers."

It was not like it had been before. But what a relief to have permission to cut her food, button her own buttons, tie back her own hair, and she would do it, even if her movements were clumsy and infantile at first and her living fingers burned, even if she sensed pity in the feeling of her watching friends. The pity only made her more stubborn. She asked permission to help with practical tasks in the healing room – dressing wounds, feeding the soldiers who couldn't feed themselves. They never minded if she dribbled broth onto their clothing.

As her dexterity improved, she even began to assist with some of the simpler aspects of surgery: holding lamps, handing the surgeons their supplies. She found that she had a strong stomach for blood, and infections, and men's insides – even though men's insides were rather more messy than the insides of monster bugs. Some of these soldiers were familiar to her because of the three weeks she'd spent travelling with the First. She supposed that some of them had been her enemies once, but that feeling seemed gone from them, now that they were at war and in pain and in such need of comfort.

A soldier she remembered quite well was brought in one day, an arrow embedded in his thigh. It was the man who had once lent her his fiddle – the enormous, craggy, gentle tree of a man. She smiled to see him. They had quiet conversations now and then, she easing his pain as his wound healed. He saying little about her dead fingers, but an expression on his face, whenever he looked at them, that conveyed the depth of his empathy.

When Brocker arrived he took her hands and held them to his face, and cried into them.

With Brocker came not only Roen but Mila, for Brocker had asked the girl to serve as his military assistant, and Mila had accepted. Brocker and Roen – old friends who had not seen each other since the time of King Nax – now were practically inseparable, and Mila was often with them.

Fire saw Nash only now and then, coming to the fort for information or to strategise with Garan and Clara, Brocker and Roen. Dirty and haggard, his smiles thin.

"I believe King Nash will come back," Mila would say to Fire calmly every time he left again for the caves. Even though Fire knew there was no logic backing Mila's assertion, the words comforted her.

Mila had changed. She worked hard beside Brocker, quiet and intent. "I learned that there's a drug to end a pregnancy when it first announces itself," she told Fire lightly one day. "It's too late for me, of course. Did you know about it, Lady?"

Fire was stunned. "Of course not, or I would have told you, and found it for you."

"Clara told me about it," Mila said. "The king's healers are impressive, but it does seem as if you need to have grown up in certain sections of King's City even to have a hope of knowing all they're capable of. I was angry when I heard," she added. "I was furious. But it's no use, really, to think about it now. I'm no different from anyone else, am I, Lady? We're all walking paths we would never have chosen for ourselves. I suppose I grow tired sometimes of my own complaining."

"That boy of mine," Brocker said, later the same day. He was sitting beside Fire in a chair on the roof, where he'd consented to be carried because he'd wanted to see the grey dappled horse. He shook his head and grunted. "My boy. I expect I have grandchildren I'll never know about. Trust him to die, so instead of my being furious about Mila and Princess Clara, I'm comforted."

They watched the dance taking place on the ground before them: two horses circling each other, one plain and brown who stretched his nose out occasionally in an attempt to plant a wet kiss on the other's elusive grey rump. Fire was trying to make friends of the two horses, for the mare, if she truly intended to follow Fire wherever she went, was going to need a few more souls in the world that she could trust. Today the mare had stopped trying to intimidate Small by rearing at him and kicking. This was progress.

"She's a river mare," Brocker said.

"A what?"

"A river mare. I've seen one or two dappled greys like that before; they come from the mouth of the Winged River. I don't think there's much of a common market for river horses, despite them being so fine – they're absurdly expensive, on account of being hard to catch and even harder to break. They're not as sociable as other horses."

Fire remembered then that Brigan had spoken once, covetously, of river horses. She also remembered that the mare had carried her stubbornly south and west from Cutter's estate, until Fire had turned her around. She had been trying to go home – to take Fire to her home where the river began. Now she was here, where she had not wanted to be, but where she'd chosen to be nonetheless.

Dear Brigan, she thought to herself. People want incongruous, impossible things. Horses do, too.

"Has the commander had a look at her yet?" Brocker asked, sounding amused by his own question. Apparently Brocker was acquainted with Brigan's stance on horses.

"I care nothing of her value," Fire said softly, "and I will not help him break her."

"You're not being fair," Brocker said mildly. "The boy is known for his kindness to horses. He doesn't break animals that show no inclination toward him."

"But what horse wouldn't be inclined?" Fire said, and then stopped, because she was being silly and sentimental, and saying too much.

A moment later Brocker said, in an odd, bewildered voice she didn't entirely know what to think of, "I've made some grievous mistakes, and my mind spins when I try to comprehend all that has come of them. I have not been the man I should have been, not to anyone. Perhaps," he said, staring into his lap, "I have been justly punished. Oh, child, your fingers break my heart. Could you teach yourself to finger the strings with your right hand?"

Fire reached for his hand and gripped it as tightly as she could, but didn't answer. She had thought of playing her fiddle opposite-handed, but it seemed very much like starting from a base of nothing. Eighteen-year-old fingers did not learn how to fly across strings anywhere as easily as five-year-old fingers did, and besides, a bow would be a great deal for a hand with only two fingers and a thumb to manage.