Enna Burning by Shannon Hale Read Free Book Online Page B

Four days, he had said. Four days, the Forest boys muttered to one another. Each night they practiced swordplay around the fires, grunting and slicing and laughing. Enna watched, disturbed by their levity. Two years before, when Isi and her friends exposed the false princess before Bayern’s king, her treacherous countrymen had drawn their swords and fought the king’s guards. Enna had stood in the midst of that battle, had heard the rush of a thrown javelin, had seen soldiers cut other men down. She could not now forget that the products of fighting were corpses, as well as the haunted looks and shifting hands of the surviving boys who had learned to kill.
    Mostly she watched Leifer. He lit the fires each night, and soon all the prince’s camp knew of his talent. A boy of fourteen years, eager, always armed, sat beside Leifer and begged to be taught. “I’m a warrior like my grandfather,” he said. “I want to light my enemies on fire and please the king.”
    Leifer glanced up at Enna, who stood by a neighboring fire, frying bread. He shook his head. “I can’t teach you. Go on back to your own camp.”
    The boy left, angry. For a moment, Enna thought she could see a pale corner of vellum peeking from beneath Leifer’s overtunic before he pulled it closed. The hand on his chest thrummed eagerly.
    “You did right,” said Enna, sitting beside him.
    “You see,” he said, “I’m making you proud already. And you thought all I was good for was chopping wood and finding the nastiest bugs to put on your pillow.”
    Enna slapped a too hot piece of bread in his hand and laughed at how gingerly he held and cooled it. “Tell me more about the fire, Leifer. Did the talent just happen? Or did you learn something from that vellum you found?”
    Leifer’s expression hardened. “I don’t think we should talk about this.”
    Enna did not respond, eating her supper and listening to the angry sounds of the campfire biting into a log.
    After a time, Leifer sighed, sounding resigned. “You’re my sister, my whole family, and the smartest person I know. What you said before . . . if you want me to try to teach you, I will.”
    Enna hesitated. “No. I think it’s dangerous, and I wish you hadn’t gotten tangled in it yourself. I mean, think what fire does. It eats things up. It destroys.”
    Leifer considered. “It does so much more than that.”
    “And makes smoke that clouds your brain,” she said.
    “And makes heat and light, and makes the night beautiful and meat taste good, and makes me feel . . . ”
    “Scorched,” said Enna.
    “Alive,” Leifer said with conviction.
    Alive , she thought. His eyes did seem brighter, his skin healthy and pink, not pale from languishing in the Forest shadow. Enna shrugged. Such a gift offered so many opportunities to do good things. Isi had warned her, and she trusted her friend’s instinct in this, but perhaps Leifer knew more than she guessed.
    Enna threw some sticks into the fire’s heart, and they sat in silence and watched them blacken and burn. She had always been drawn to a fire in the night, but she had never considered before that there were things to know about fire, that there was a hidden way it worked, and that holding that knowledge imparted power. And she found herself dwelling on something Isi had said before, how learning animal speech or nature speech was a talent and that some people showed more capacity for it than others.
    Does that mean , she thought, since my brother is one of those, that maybe I am, too?
    The thought felt right. Each time she contemplated fire, she felt surer that she could learn it and felt a place inside her, a place in her chest, yawn eagerly.
    From sunup to sundown, the company marched. They marched on the broad, rocky road, sometimes spilling onto harvested fields. Farming women stood in doorways, their arms around their children, and stared with little hope at the prince’s small Forest army, only three hundred strong.
    Enna and