Fire! Wild fire, free fire, mad fire!
Fire, high and bright, sailed through the cold night air. It arched over the kinhold walls trailing sparks and ribbons of white smoke. As flaming arrows it struck the tall inner towers of the main hall and as balls of flung fire it exploded in the courtyard below. Everything but the stone itself burst into columns and mushrooms of fire, consuming all she had ever known in a thrashing roar of light and heat. But it was not the loss of her home--the kitchens, the workshops, the balconies of the main hall--that spun and dazzled her. It was the fire itself, throwing itself across the sky, across the expanse of cobbled stone, pouncing from thatched roof to straw-filled cart like a lioness after its prey. It was the fire itself, striking out, blasting away the cold with great gusts and whirls of flame, bathing everything and everyone in blood gold light.
Everywhere she turned, firelight slapped at her face and filled her eyes with the wide terror. Startling lashes of flame danced around her and knew it recognized her and taunted her with striking tongues of wild, untamed flame as her fear climbed with it across the rooftops and around the wall..
Wild fire, free fire, mad fire! she knew this fire, knew it, though she have never seen it before. Until this moment all she had ever known was the tame fire of hearth and torch, of candle and lantern, yet in her blood, in her body, she knew this fire, as if the memory of ash and suffocating heat and the roar no hearth could hold was locked in the memory of her soul. She knew it and the fear -- the firefear.
It was the oldest fear among her people, from the Long-Ago when the land and the world was thickly covered with pine and spruce, juniper and hawthorn, oak and willow, coating the countryside in waves and swirls of green, orange, yellow, red, brown from the sea across the plains to the mountains and beyond. And it was her personal fear, had always been hers since birth. Her mother had told her she was a rare one for it and closer to the land because of it, a Daughter of the Trees. Her mother told her she should be honored for the memory she brought forward from the past when the deep woods filled what were now vast grassy plains and meadows surrounded by barren rock. But only her mother had honored her fear.
Her father and the rest of her family did not understand her extreme fear and despised her for it. They did not see it as a blessing as her mother did. To them, fire was simply fire. It served and satisfied their needs. It banished evening's chill from the halls and flavored their cooked food. It lit the darkened corridors that daylight rarely touched and filled the kinhold at night. They welcomed the comforting glow of it in an unshielded candle, the ruddy gleam of it in oil lamps, the glorious burn of it in an open hearth, the penetrative glare of it in wind whipped torch. To them it was not a living thing, seeking them out with desire and need, reaching for them with hunger and greed. To them it was a friend and slave. To them, but not to her. To her, fire was a living thing and her enemy, hating her for knowing it for what it was.
While her mother lived she had an ally, an advocate, but when she was gone, her father was not a man to hold anyone dear and near as a comforting friend. He had no time for a girl child with an unreasonable fear that even a little buttery candle flame could reveal. Yet, it was he who gave her the only weapon she would ever have to stand against her fear. He gave her a sword.
Even at ten years old she knew the sword was given to prove his daughter brave and not afraid, but that didn’t matter. She found a sanctuary in the way of the sword, and a powerful dissuader. She could not fight fire with it, but she could fight her siblings and cousin kin when they chided her for her fear. By eighteen, she had mastered the sword as she could not master her firefear, and found that pain and death were lesser fears to her than her fear of the flame.
Yet, now, with her sword useless in hand and the fire raging around her, there was no direction she could turn, no place she could withdraw to where the fire did not lick and lash. There was no way to fight and no where to escape the flame or the fear that dropped her to her knees in the courtyard.
Her bowels gripped her with cramps of terror and her heart clutched itself into a fist in her chest as the flames burned all from roof to wall, rising into the dark glove of night. The blackness of the night intensified the shine of the flames as they glared and gloated and grew around her as her kinsmen frantically formed bucket brigades from the well to save what they could and keep the fire back. But their efforts were nothing compared to the power of the fire billowing black smoke into the night.
“The horses! Save the horses!" A man screamed and rushed past her toward the fire. With a shock she realized it was her lover.
"Brazen! No!" she screamed, but Brazen was the name his mother had given him when he was born and he had lived up to it all of his life. He had no fear, of anyone or anything. This was why she loved him, and why the very nature of him sent him racing across the courtyard to find his death.
“NO!” she screamed and lunged to her feet to catch and stop him as he dashed beneath the fire curling up and over the stable's roof, but he paid her no more heed than the flames snapping and snatching at his clothes. She grabbed at him, but he would not be restrained.
"I will not let my horses die!” He hurled back at her and tore himself out of her grip. He disappeared into the smoke as the terrible screams of his precious horses, trapped beneath the burning loft, reached out and touched her even in her fear. She wanted to grab him back, to drag him away from the dangerous flames, but the shrill screams of his horses twisted something deep inside her, something she had never felt before – fear not for herself, but for another. It swept through her, overwhelming her firefear with a sudden, furious rage. “NO!” she screamed again and cast her sword aside to free her hands to help him. He belonged to her and the horses were part of him and THE FIRE COULD NOT HAVE THEM! she plunged into the fire and smoke after him.
Choking and blinded by cinder sting and merciless tears, she dashed through the flaming bits of straw and found him amidst the searing lick and ravenous leaps of fire, yanking stall doors open. Mad with terror, the horses inside reared and bolted through the openings. She scrambled aside as hurtling bodies slammed past her one after another and launched herself for the door of another closed stall. The panic-stricken horse within jarred the door with a mighty kick that exploded it like rotten timber, driving slivers of smoldering wood into her arm as she threw the latch and pulled the door open. She twisted away from the pain and the horse as it barreled through with a mighty leap that took it past her to escape through the main door.
She staggered through the smoke and floating fire to reach the next stall’s latch and snapped it back. Choking on smoke and the scorch of the fire's breath on her exposed skin, she hauled the door open and heard a crack above her. She looked up into the deadly heart of the fire and saw the timbers above Brazen aglow and giving way to the consuming flame.
NO! She screamed without voice. You will not! And overwhelmed with the power of need, she commanded the fire with her soul and her will and it responded. It whirled away as if blasted back by a wind and hurled itself from the sagging rafter just as the charred beam broke and crashed to the floor, trailing a shower of smoldering fodder instead of the maelstrom of hell it was a moment before. Amazed, she saw Brazen dash through the debris and vault the blackened beam, oblivious to his near fiery death as he struggled with the foal in his arms. Regaining herself, she threw open the stall door beside her, dodged the terrified animal within as it hurtled for freedom, and rushed to help Brazen. She grabbed the foal's front legs and together they dodged through the falling fire into the night air.
She let go of the fighting foal as they hit open air and grabbed for Brazen, her stinging eyes blurring everything to hot red and bright gold. they brushed and patted out smoldering wisps in each other’s clothes and embraced.
"We got out alive," she gasped. "I don't believe we got out alive."
Brazen hugged her tight, and released her to draw his sword. “"It's not over yet," he said “They're breaking through."
She realized then that the thunderous pound she have heard for so long was not her heart. It was the sound of a battering ram on the kinhold's main gate. As she turned to look, the doors heaved inward with irresistible force and the log bars set abeam to the gate splintered like old bones. The doors toppled in on the defenders who were not quick or lucky enough to fall back.
She snatched up her sword from where she had cast it and stand beside Brazen. This time she was not afraid. Sword fire was fire she could weld and quench.
Within moments she lost Brazen in the confusion of flashing swords, shrill screams and splashing blood as the raiders flooded through the breached gate with fire bright swords. She struck into the heart of the battle like flame finding its fondest tinder and her sword blazed red with firelight and blood. In this moment there was madness and power and she fought with everything in her – everything -- the chaos of combat and death immediately around her, the fire raging out of control beyond her. There was no fear, no feeling in it at all but the tight focus of the fight. She was the fight, the fighter, the sword, the moment, and nothing could stop her but the death she would probably never see coming.
Together she and Brazen and their kinsmen fought with speed born of training, natural ability, and madness, yet for all their skill, all the strength in their bodies and hearts, and all the power of rage and desperation in their souls, they could not stop the raiders pouring through the broken gate on foot and horseback. There were too many of them, in ragged bits of armor and bright leather shirts, and too few kinsmen, soot-covered and pale. She found herself pushed back with them, deeper into the courtyard, their backs to the burning hall, fighting in a pattern that became a shield of protection between the raiders and the women and children.
From the sky, a fresh volley of fire arrows fell, raining down like dragon stars and they flared and sizzled around her, igniting the loose ends of her hair. Suddenly, she and others were fire, burning.
She screamed in fury and flung the fire from her, out of her hair and down her arm, literally igniting the blade of her sword. Everything came to the focus point of knowing the tip of her sword was fire, the edge of her blade was flame, and it extended from her and she knew it belonged to her, had always belonged to her, was hers. It was hers and she was the master of it.
By the power of her emotion, will, and soul, she lashed the fire out from her blade and it snapped the man in front of her into a raging torch. Those around him felt the whip of her fireblade and her fire will, and they scrambled back to be free of the sudden living inferno in front of her. Beside her, she felt Brazen and her kinsmen fall back behind her, shielding their faces and eyes from her flame, and she knew no flame of hers would touch him, touch them, in harm. She stepped out and away from them, toward the raiders, and draw the fire to her, all of it from around her. She sucked it to her from the rooftops and the haystacks, the walls and windows. Like a hot breath into deep lungs, she drew it to her, surrounding herself in a pillar of whirling flame that reached up and up into the night sky.
The roar of the inferno changed to a deadly whoosh as she gathered it in and held it around her, ready to exhale from herself to blast the raiders from her kinhold in a cleansing wind of pure hell. She looked through the curtain of fire, looked down at the burning man no longer thrashing on the ground before her. Her eyes locked there and she stared at the charred cinder of him as the last hungry licks of lingering flames left him to join the holocaust whirling around her. She saw him, his agony, his death, his blackened body, and felt the fire ready to obey her command, eager to engulf her enemies in thrown flame, and she remembered.
She remembered the day the world had burned, a thousand years ago. She remembered the lush forests turned into torrents of fire, the searing of the land by her kind, their kind, humankind. She remembered the screams of the masses, men, women, children, and the laughter and deadly silence of the mad men and women who had mastered the flame that created the inferno. She remembered it out of her bones as the fire she mastered surrounded her and burned in obedience to her command, and she knew, burning within her, was the bloodfire of their legacy and the shame of their dreadful vengeance upon their own kind. In their mad hatred of their own kind, they destroyed the world.
And here she was, standing in this courtyard, a thousand years from that deadly day of ash and fire, standing in the memory and the fire, as men, women, and children, kinsmen and raiders, stared at her in horror and amazement. They didn’t know what she knew. They didn’t remember that day and what happened there. They didn’t know the madness of rage and hate and self-destruction that was its source. They didn’t know, but she did, and she let the living flame that she alone controlled lift and rise above her as a great, billowing fireball, filling the night above the kinhold. And she held it there and flowed the memory into it, forming images and death, showing that day in the sky. She watched them as they stared up at the horror, and continued to show them what she knew, what she felt, what had happened in grisly detail until she saw in their faces that they knew it for what it was, for the threat it had been, and the unexpected reality it had become again. They saw it, knew it, and remembered, too.
And then she put the fire out.
In the sudden darkness, spotted only by the red glow of smoldering wood and a faint line of dawn on the horizon beyond the shattered gate, and the sudden silence, broken only by the weeping of children, she faced the raiders and her kinsmen and waited. She waited for the breath to be drawn in that would unfreeze the moment, unfreeze their minds from the memory. Someone coughed. A baby stilled. A horse whinnied in the distance. Someone moved, and another, and the raiders in front of her edged back, their hands gripping their swords as if deciding if they should lift them or drop them. No one came forward to claim leadership from either side. No threats were made. The raiders uneasily moved back beyond the gate, and waited, watching, to see what she would do.
Brazen stepped forward and put his hand on her shoulder, but she wasn’t prepared to release the moment. She continued to stare at the raiders, waiting them out. Her kinsmen remained hushed, and waited, as the raiders did, to see what would happen. There wasn’t much left of the kinhold doors, not enough to close. Not much left of the kinhold itself.
“We can be family,” she said suddenly, into the stillness. “We can rebuild this together. You don’t have to go.”
She knew she said it aloud, but she felt as if her heart said it directly into every heart around her, and she felt as if her heart would break from the hold of this thought in herself and what it meant. “We can be family,” she said again. “This can be home for us all.”
Could they do it? She wondered. Could they let go of the patterns of fear and hate and madness that created that past? They knew what she knew. Nothing was hidden any more. But could they do it?
Brazen moved into position beside her. “We could be family,” he said. “We’ve got a common place from which to start. We can be family.”
Someone else from behind her stepped forward. “My wife is dead,” he said to the raiders, and was the first to throw down his sword between them. “But we can be family.”
She threw her sword down, as Brazen did, and as each of her kinsman came forward, he threw his sword, and looked at the raiders and repeated the words, “We can be family.”
All the kinholder swords were cast into the heap before the raiders and the words were spoken, but it wasn’t enough. She was still here with the power of fire and could destroy them at any moment, and this was their fear. She knew it, and didn’t know what to do. She stepped forward, past the swords, through the gate, and as close to the raiders as they would allow her to come. She went down to her knees and sat back on her heels, lowered her head, and closed her eyes.
“We can’t do any more to bring you to us,” she said. “You have to do whatever you have to do to clear the rest of the way for yourselves. We can be family. Can you?”
And she waited, her eyes closed, accepting that they would have to kill her to clear the way.
Footsteps sounded behind her. “Do what you have to do,” Brazen said, and knelt down beside her. “But do it to us both,” he said. “We’re family.”
She wept then. She couldn’t help herself. The tears streamed down her face as she gasped to breath, feeling for the first time that she was family, that there was no separation, no barrier between them, and her heart ached and threatened to break under the pain of its own fullness. She heard someone say, “Do what you have to do. But do it to us all. We’re family.” And the words were repeated by many voices, overlapping, joining, gathering, and she opened her eyes to see swords fall to the ground, to see the faces around her, soot-stained, blood-splattered, tear-streaked, and she couldn’t tell the faces of the raiders from her own kinsmen. She put out her hand to the nearest face and touched it, and drew him to her and embraced and let herself cry into their shoulders, against their necks as she took each one of them into herself, into her family. She was no longer the only one to understand the truth behind firefear.
