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It was an unremarkable afternoon in winter, in the last hour before the pale sky began its slow slide into dusk, when Fire sensed a familiar consciousness within the palace grounds.
She dropped the book she'd been holding and cried out. Brigan, writing letters at his small desk by the window of the green house, looked up in alarm.
“Liddy,” Fire said, stunned. “Liddy is here.”
Liddy was alive. Liddy was here?
Brigan must have seen the distress and confusion in her face, for he set down his pen and came to kneel in front of Fire, where she sat on the settee, and took her hands in his.
“Who is Liddy, love?” he asked, and Fire's heart ached to learn all at once that she had never thought to tell Brigan about Liddy.
The words weren't coming easily. Instead, she opened her feelings to Brigan: How Liddy had been a friend to Fire at a time when she so badly needed one. How much she had cared for Liddy, maybe even loved her, in the short time they'd spent together, in what Fire now understood had been a mixture of affection and attraction, innocent and young but no less real for that. How Cansrel had sent Liddy away—married her off to a laborer on some lord's remote estate—because Cansrel could never bear for Fire to feel strongly for anyone who wasn't him.
All the while, as this tumble of emotion poured from her thoughts to his, Brigan stroked his hands through Fire's hair and watched her face with his steady gray eyes. Fire found her voice at last and finished, “I don't know that she would even want to see me again. My father punished her—sent her away—and I don't know what her life has been like since then. I don't even know why she's here now. Oh, Brigan, she may hate me. I wouldn't blame her if she did.”
“You are not your father,” Brigan said. These were the words he always said when Fire's fears came to the fore. “And Liddy will know that.” His voice was so gentle, his gray eyes fixed on hers. “Just as I know that and you know that.”
“I'm afraid,” Fire whispered.
*
The next day, with a trembling heart, Fire traversed the castle to find this unexpected, long-lost friend. Liddy was in the kitchens; it seemed she'd been hired as a member of the kitchen staff. Fire remembered Liddy's gentle, capable hands as she went about her work, shaking out bedclothes and laying kindling on the hearth. Liddy had been quite young when she'd been a maid of Fire's bedchambers, barely older than Fire herself. Young to be working, and young to be sent away to be married.
Now, Liddy was a decade older, just as Fire was. In the largest room of the kitchens, she stood at a long table, kneading bread. Her back was to the door, but Fire knew her instantly. The curve of her shoulders, the willowy line of her back, these things were unchanged.
Fire went to her, crossing the great expanse of the flagstone floor. Others in the room looked up from their work in surprise, to see their lady monster in the kitchens. And Liddy, perhaps seeing the ripple of reaction in those around her, set the bread dough aside and turned around.
“Liddy,” Fire said. Liddy's face, now that she saw it, was both familiar and strange. There could be no mistaking that she was decade older, and perhaps sadder, with a hint of careworn lines at the corners of her mouth. “I'm—I'm Fire,” Fire said, finding herself at a loss for reasonable words, for if there was one thing that everyone in this kingdom knew, it was who Fire was and what she looked like.
“I know, Lady,” Liddy said.
“And you—I knew you, once. You worked in my house, in the north, until—”
“Yes, Lady, I remember. I worked for you until your lord father sent me away.”
Fire trembled. “I'm sorry.”
“I don't blame you, Lady. I was only sorry to have to leave you.”
Liddy's voice was gentle and her words kind, but her mind was utterly closed. Fire sensed nothing from her except a mild and detached politeness. And Fire herself stood in the middle of the wide kitchen floor, gazing at the face of someone she had once loved, and couldn't think of a single thing to say.
*
“It may take time,” Brigan said. “She doesn't really know you, after such a long time. And by the same token, you don't truly know her.”
They were curled together in Brigan's favorite armchair in the green house, his arms wrapped around Fire and her cheek pressed against his shoulder. Fire let out a shuddering sigh. It broke her heart that someone once so beloved could become a stranger.
“Think of her as though she's someone new, someone you've never met,” Brigan said. He pressed a kiss to Fire's temple. “Give her time, because right now you're both strange and unknown to each other. Do as you've always done in situations like that.”
“You mean like the way it was with Horse?” Fire asked. Despite the terrible events that had surrounded Fire's first encounter with the river mare, she held onto fond memories of the slow and patient way she and the horse had become dear to one another. To this day, the dappled gray mare grazed and made her home on the cliff behind the green house. And it still made Fire smile to have this horse called Horse, although Hanna was now quite a few years past her phase of bestowing the most literal possible names upon every beloved creature in her life.
Brigan laughed, a rich rumble that rolled from his body to hers, since they were pressed so close together. “Yes, I suppose it would be like how it was with Horse, too, but that isn't what I was thinking. I was thinking about how it was in those early days between you and me.”
*
Fire did indeed find herself thinking of those early days, as she cautiously approached Liddy over the next weeks. She remembered how it had been between her and Brigan, the cautious regard they had held for each other, sharing respect but keeping a distance, both of them with good reason to mistrust.
But she couldn't help thinking, too, of the beautiful and dappled wild horse who had shied away any time humans came too near. Fire was no longer even sure if Liddy was the one she was comparing to a wild horse, for Fire herself felt a little wild, afraid she might bolt if anyone made too sudden a movement.
“My husband wasn't unkind,” Liddy said one day. Fire and Liddy were walking, a little distance apart, through the snow-covered herb garden behind the kitchens. It was the first time they had arranged to meet, instead of only encountering each other by chance in the corridors of the castle. “But he never really tried to talk with me or understand me. I suppose I shouldn't have expected that from him. He was so much older than I.”
The winter sun reflected up at them from the snow, a blinding light, and Fire felt similarly ablaze. There was so much of each other's lives that they didn't know.
“Was it...was your life with him...” Fire couldn't figure out how to put it into words. “Was it...all right? Were you able to be happy?”
Liddy frowned thoughtfully down at a ragged patch of withered thyme, just visible between swaths of snow. Finally she said, “It would have been hard to be truly happy there. The estate was so far from anywhere else and I didn't have any friends. There was no one I could talk to. But I wouldn't say that I suffered. It was a life. Some people have it worse.”
Fire felt tears prickling at her eyes. She wanted so much more than that for Liddy, gentle Liddy who had brought Fire comfort during the darkest year of her life. Fire wished for her much more than a life that could have been worse.
“I wish Cansrel hadn't sent you away,” Fire whispered.
Liddy finally lifted her gaze and met Fire's eyes. “I wish that too.”
*
“I'm going to tell you something that you may already know,” Fire said to Liddy. “But I would like for you to hear it from me.”
They were sitting on the bench outside the green house, a blanket draped across both of their laps to keep away the chill. Liddy had been gazing up into the tree that stretched above the house, its branches still winter-bare, but now she turned her attention to Fire. “Yes? Please tell me, Lady.”
Fire drew breath and strength into herself. The telling of this truth didn't get any easier with time. “I was the one who killed Cansrel. Killed my father.” She let out her breath, then added softly, “I did love him. But I did it because I knew I had to.”
Liddy's eyes were wide. “Oh, Lady Fire,” she breathed. For a moment, Fire thought Liddy was horrified, as Fire herself was, at the brutality of a girl who could murder her own father. But then Liddy said, her eyes welling with tears, “No wonder you suffered so, back then. You must have known already that you would have to do this terrible thing.”
“You gave me comfort,” Fire whispered. “I was trapped inside my own mind, but you reminded me that it was possible to feel.”
“I'm so sorry, Lady,” Liddy said softly. “Sorry for everything you had to live through.” Her hand reached out and clasped Fire's atop the blanket they shared.
*
“When my husband died, I didn't know what I would do,” Liddy said. They were on the clifftop behind the green house, where Horse, with cautious dignity, was allowing Liddy to feed her a handful of early clover. “Barely twenty-five years old and already a widow. And there was no use for me on the lord's estate.”
Above them, a pale sun struggled through a bank of clouds, a few rays slipping out to illuminate the newly muddy ground.
“But then,” Liddy said, her voice growing stronger, “I decided that if I already had nothing to lose, I might as well use my small savings to travel to King's City, and perhaps I could find work here.”
Fire reached out her hand to stroke a finger down Horse's soft nose. “I'm glad you did.”
*
Carefully, Brigan asked, “Do you love her?”
“Of course,” Fire said, “I've always—” And then, in confusion: “Oh! Brigan, not like—no, I mean—”
He pressed his lips into her hair. And the thick mass of Fire's hair muffled Brigan's voice almost entirely when he said, “I wouldn't fault you if you did.”
Fire sat up straight in their bed and struggled to corral her thoughts, which were fleeing from her like panicked horses. “No,” she said. “Brigan, no, I don't think it's the same.”
Fire took a moment to steady her breath. Then she reached out to cup a hand against Brigan's stubbled jaw. He leaned gratefully into her touch.
More slowly she said, “I did love Liddy then, I think. And in a way I love her now, as well, for the comfort she gave me at a time when I needed it so much. But all of that I have with you now, Brigan. That and so much more. I'm not looking for anything to change.”
Brigan reached up his hand to cover hers, his strong fingers cradling Fire's own. Then he brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her palm. Fire leaned in close and kissed him, first his mouth, then his eyes and his cheeks and every part of his dear, beloved face. And then for a while they didn't think about anything else but that.
*
In the spring sunshine, through a cliffside meadow newly bursting with wildflowers, Fire and Liddy walked side by side, a small distance apart.
“I was so sad when you were gone,” Fire said. “I think I grieved you for a long time, but I didn't have the words yet to understand it.”
“I felt the same,” Liddy said. She gazed out over the river, then looked again at Fire. “But I'm glad we've found each other again, Lady Fire.”
“Please,” Fire said, “please. Won't you call me Fire, without any title? I hope you can consider me a friend.”
Liddy took a breath, long and slow. Then she said softly, “Yes, I think I could try.”
Just as quietly, with her words lifted lightly by the breeze, Fire gave voice to the unspoken second half of her thought: “I certainly consider you my friend.”
Liddy smiled, a gentle smile that was so familiar from long ago. Then, quite carefully, she opened a feeling to Fire: a simple feeling of contentment.
Across the space between them, Liddy's hand found Fire's, or perhaps it was Fire's hand that found Liddy's. And the two old friends walked on together through the sunshine and blossoming greenness of the Dells in springtime.