He'd known Fire for long enough, this man, to have learned how to guard himself against the power of her strange monster beauty, so if he was not guarding himself, then he must not want to. His prerogative, to give up his mind in return for the pleasure of succumbing to her, but not something she cared to encourage. She kept her headscarf on. She pushed his mind away and walked past him into a side room so that she couldn't be seen. A closet really, dark, and with shelves full of oils and polish and ancient, rusted equipment no one ever used.

It was humiliating to have to retreat to a smelly old closet. The blacksmith should be the one to feel humiliated, for he was the dunce who chose to give up his self-control. What if while he gaped at her and imagined whatever his small mind cared to imagine, she convinced him to draw his knife and take out his own eye? It was the sort of thing Cansrel would have liked to do. Cansrel had never retreated.

The men's voices stopped and the blacksmith's mind receded from the armoury. The big wheels of Lord Brocker's chair squeaked as he rolled himself toward her. He stopped in the doorway of the closet. "Come out of there, child; he's gone. The moron. If a mouse monster stole that one's meal from under his nose, he'd scratch his head and wonder why he couldn't remember eating his food. Let's go to my rooms. You look like you should sit down."

Archer's house had been Brocker's house before Brocker had turned the running of the estate over to his son, and Brocker had used a wheeled chair before Archer had ever been born. The house was organised such that everything but Archer's rooms and servant rooms were on the first floor, where Brocker could reach them.

Fire walked beside him down a stone hallway that was dim in the grey light seeping through tall windows. They passed the kitchen, the dining room, the stairway, and the guard room. The house was full of people, servants and guards coming in from outside, coming down from upstairs. The servant girls who passed them greeted Brocker but carefully ignored Fire, their minds guarded and cool. As always. If Archer's servants did not resent her because she was a monster and Cansrel's daughter, they resented her because they were in love with Archer.

Fire was happy to sink into a soft chair in Lord Brocker's library and drink the cup of wine an unfriendly servant clapped into her hand. Brocker positioned his chair across from hers and settled his grey eyes on her face. "I'll leave you alone, dear," he said, "if you wish to nap."

"Perhaps later."

"When's the last time you had a good night's sleep?"

Brocker was one person she felt comfortable admitting pain to, and fatigue. "I can't remember. It's not a thing that happens very often."

"You know there are drugs that will put you to sleep."

"They make me groggy, and stupid."

"I've just finished writing a history of military strategy in the Dells. You're welcome to take it with you. It'll put you to sleep while making you clever and unbeatable."

Fire smiled and sipped the bitter Dellian wine. She doubted that Brocker's history would put her to sleep. All she knew about armies and war came from Brocker, and he was never boring. Twenty-some years ago, in the heyday of old King Nax, Brocker had been the most brilliant military commander the Dells had ever seen. Until the day King Nax had seized him and shattered his legs – not broken them, but shattered them, eight men taking turns with a mallet – and then sent him home, half-dead, to his wife, Aliss, in the northern Dells.

Fire didn't know what terrible thing Brocker had done to justify such treatment from his king. Neither did Archer. The entire episode had taken place before they were born, and Brocker never spoke of it. And the injuries were only the beginning of it, for a year or two later, when Brocker had recovered as well as he ever would, Nax had still been angry with his commander. He'd hand-picked a brute from his prisons, a dirty, savage man, and sent him north to punish Brocker by punishing Brocker's wife. This was why Archer was brown-eyed, light-haired, handsome, and tall, while Brocker was grey-eyed and dark-haired and plain in appearance. Lord Brocker was not Archer's true father.

In some places and times Brocker's would have been a mind-boggling story, but not in King's City and not in the days when King Nax had ruled at the pleasure of his closest adviser. Cansrel.

Brocker spoke, interrupting her gruesome thoughts. "I understand you've had the rare pleasure of being shot by a man who was not trying to kill you," he said. "Did it feel any different?"

Fire laughed. "I've never been shot more pleasantly."

He chuckled, studying her with his mild grey eyes. "It's rewarding to make you smile. The pain in your face drops away."

He had always been able to make her smile. It was a relief to her, his dependable light mood, especially on days when Archer's mood was heavy. And it was remarkable, since every moment he was in pain.

"Brocker," she said. "Do you think it could have been different?"

He tilted his head, puzzled.

"I mean Cansrel," she said, "and King Nax. Do you think their partnership could ever have been different? Could the Dells have survived them?"

Brocker considered her, his face gone quiet and grave at the very mention of Cansrel's name. "Nax's father was a decent king," he said. "And Cansrel's father was a valuable monster adviser to him. But, darling, Nax and Cansrel were two other creatures entirely. Nax didn't inherit his father's strength, and you know as well as anyone that Cansrel didn't inherit even a touch of his father's empathy. And they grew up together as boys, so when Nax took the throne, he'd already had Cansrel living inside his head his whole life. Oh, Nax had a good heart, I'm sure of it – sometimes I saw it – but it didn't matter, because he was also just the smallest bit lazy, the smallest bit too willing to let someone else do his thinking – and that was all the opening Cansrel ever needed. Nax never had a chance," Brocker said, shaking his head, squinting at memories. "From the start, Cansrel used Nax to get everything he wanted, and all Cansrel ever wanted was his own pleasure. It was inevitable, sweetheart," he said, bringing his attention back to her face. "As long as they lived, Cansrel and Nax were always going to lead the kingdom to ruin."

Ruin. Fire knew, for Brocker had told her, the progressive steps that had led to ruin once young Nax had taken the throne. It had started with women and parties, and that hadn't been so bad, for Nax had fallen in love with a black-haired lady from the northern Dells named Roen and married her. King Nax and Queen Roen had produced a son, a handsome, dark boy named Nash, and even with a somewhat neglectful king at its helm the kingdom had had an aura of stability.

Except that Cansrel had been bored. His gratification had always required excess, and now he began to need more women and more parties, and wine, and children from the court to alleviate the monotony of the women. And drugs. Nax had agreed to it all; Nax had been like a shell to hold Cansrel's mind and nod its head yes to whatever Cansrel said was best.

"Yet, you've told me that ultimately it was the drugs that destroyed Nax," Fire said. "Could Nax have held on if it hadn't been for the drugs?"

"Perhaps," Brocker said lightly. "Cansrel could always keep hold of himself with poison in his veins, blast him, but Nax couldn't; it made him high-strung, and paranoid, and uncontrolled, and more vindictive than he'd ever been before."

He stopped at that, staring bleakly at his own useless legs. Fire kept her feeling tight within herself so that he would not be flooded with her curiosity. Or her pity; her pity must never touch him.

A moment later he looked up and held her eyes again. He smiled very slightly. "Perhaps it would be fair to say that Nax mightn't have turned into a madman if it weren't for the drugs. But I believe the drugs were as inevitable as the rest. And Cansrel himself was the truest drug to Nax's mind. People saw what was happening – they saw Nax punishing law-abiding men and making alliances with criminals and wasting all the money in the king's coffers. Allies of Nax's father began to withdraw their support for Nax, as they were bound to do. And ambitious fellows like Mydogg and Gentian began to think and plot, and train squadrons of soldiers, under the guise of self-defence. And who could blame a mountain lord for that, with things so unstable? There was no law anymore, not outside the city, for Nax couldn't be troubled to attend to it. The roads were no longer safe, you had to be mad or desperate to travel the underground routes, looters and raiders and black market thugs were cropping up everywhere. Even the Pikkians. For ages, they'd been content to squabble among themselves. Now, suddenly, even they couldn't resist taking advantage of our lawlessness."