Brightly Burning v(-10 Read online

  Brightly Burning

  ( Valdemar (03) - 10 )

  Mercedes Lackey

  Lavan Chitward and his family just moved to Haven and are fastly becoming part of the highest members of the Guild social circles. Lavan was very unhappy, but his family didnt care, they were. To make matters worse, his parents enrolled him into a private school where bullys quicjly made him a new target among the scapegoats. Whenever the boys picked on him, he'd turn a bright red which often left his skinned feeling burned and gave him a horrible headache which would leave him unable to attend classes. But when he returned the bullys started up again. This time they got a suprise. Lavan's Gift awakened with a vengence. His gift was FireStarting. Untrained and unable to control it, he set fires all around him, engulfing the bullys and killing them. Then to the suprise of many, he was Chosen. Valdemar needs his help in defeating an enemy, but if he isn't careful, his Fire Storms will consume him as well.

  Brightly Burning

  To all the unsung heroes

  who stood by

  on the evening of December 31, 1999

  to ensure that we crossed into the year 2000

  with our safety, security, and peace intact.

  ONE

  LAVAN Chitward hated his mother's parties at the best of times, and this one was no exception. When the Guildmaster of the Cloth Merchants' Guild beckoned to him, he unconsciously hunched his shoulders, assuming he was about to receive yet another homily on hard work, his third for this particular party.

  "Here you go, lad," the Guildmaster said, shoving a parcel at him.

  Lan gaped at the squarish package in the Guildmaster's hands as the babble of partygoers rattled on around him. Words stuck in Lavan's throat, uncomfortable and sharp-edged. Oh, gods. Now what am I supposed to say? He was already nervous enough before this guest of his parents singled him out; this only made him more self-conscious. Lavan flushed, forehead sweating, and could only stare at the so-called "present" that middle-aged, red-faced Guildmaster Howell was holding out to him, and tried to think of a response. Any response. Well, maybe not any response; if he said what he really thought, his father would skin him.

  "Uh—this is—you really shouldn't have gone to so much trouble, Guildmaster," he managed, his stomach churning, as the older man thrust the package at him with hands from which traces of dye would never disappear as long as he lived. The skin was faintly blue, but the nail bed was indigo, giving Lan the unsettling impression he was taking a package from a corpse. The Guildmaster shoved the packet into Lavan's reluctant fingers and let it go, forcing Lan to take it or let it fall. And much as he would have liked to let it fall, he knew that he would never hear the end of it if he did. He fumbled for it and tried not to show how little he wanted it.

  His hands closed around it convulsively, and the cloth package fell open, revealing a set of cloth-merchant's tools. There was a lens for examining fabric closely, a rule to determine thread count, a small pair of scissors, other things—exactly what he'd dreaded seeing.

  "It was no trouble, no trouble at all!" the Guildmaster said heartily, the corners of his eyes wrinkling as he smiled. "I've outfitted six of my own youngsters for the cloth trade, after all, and I can't think how many others I'm not even related to!" He clapped Lavan heartily on the back, and Lan tried not to wince. "I'll be seeing you in and around the Guildhouse before too long, I'll warrant! Just like your big brother!"

  "Ah—" Lavan mumbled something and ducked his head, his hair dampening with nervous perspiration; as he'd hoped, the Guildmaster took his reluctance for shyness, and clapped him on the back again, though a bit gentler this time.

  The Guildmaster moved on then, to socialize with the adults, sparing Lavan the task of trying to thank him for a gift the young man didn't in the least want. A quick glance around the crowd in the drawing room showed him that no one was paying any attention to him at the moment, so he hastily rolled up the bundle of tools and shoved it under the cushions on a settle. With any luck, it wouldn't be found until morning, and the servants would assume it belonged to Lan's older brother. He rubbed his damp palms against the legs of his trews and straightened, looking about him. What would Lavan do with a bundle of cloth-merchant's tools, anyway? He didn't know what half of them were used for!

  Nothing, that's what. And I don't want to either. I don't want to do anything with cloth but wear it.

  In fact, he intended to escape from this gathering as soon as he dared. All of the first-floor rooms of this town house were packed with his parents' guests, all of them important, none of them younger than thirty. It was too hot, too claustrophobic, too loud; the cacophony of voices made his ears ring. The house seemed half its size and it wasn't all that big in the first place, compared with the house Lan thought of as "home," back in Alderscroft. This party wasn't intended to entertain anybody under the age of twenty, anyway, even though the stated reason for it was for the members of the Needleworkers' and Cloth Merchants' Guilds to welcome the whole family to Haven. Lan's mother Nelda and his father Archer were already well known to the members of their Guilds. In spite of living in a village a hundred leagues from Haven, their successes had brought them to the attention of nearly everyone in both Guilds in the capital long before this move. This gathering was supposed to be an opportunity for their children to mix and mingle with the real powers in their parents' Guilds, and hopefully to attract the attention of a potential master to 'prentice to. Samael, Lan's older brother, was already apprenticed to one of their father's colleagues; the other children were of an age to be sent to masters themselves, or so Nelda and Archer kept telling them. No child would be apprenticed to his own parents, of course; a parent couldn't be expected to be objective about teaching him (or her). While an oldest son and heir might eventually join his parents in the parents' business, it wouldn't be until he had achieved Mastery or even Journeyman status on his own.

  The bare idea of working with his father, even as an equal partner, depressed Lan beyond telling. And this party was just as depressing. He could hardly wait to get out of there. Every passing moment made him feel as if he was smothering.

  Sam, Macy, and Feoden could and would more than make up for Lavan's absence. They wanted to be here, hovering around the edges of conversations, respectfully adding their own observations when one or another of the adults spoke to them. He only needed to look as if he was circulating long enough for the party to get well underway and the ale to loosen tongues and fog memories—then he could escape.

  So to speak. He couldn't get out of the house, but at least he could go somewhere he wouldn't be interrogated by people he didn't know and didn't want to know.

  He pretended to busy himself arranging and rearranging the platters of food on the tall buffet near the windows, watching the reflections in the window. His hair clung unpleasantly to his forehead—it really was horribly warm in the room, but it didn't seem to bother anyone else. The many, tiny diamond-shaped panes broke up the reflection into an odd little portrait gallery of the notables of the merchant community of Haven. Lavan didn't know most of their names, and couldn't care less who they were; his attention was on their reactions, their expressions. He was waiting for the time when things were relaxed, and people weren't paying any real attention to anything but having a good time.

  As the party continued and mulled wine and ale flowed freely, faces grew flushed and less guarded, voices became a trifle louder, and conversations more animated. At that point, Lavan figured it was safe for him to leave.

  Just to be certain no one would stop him, he picked up an almost-empty platter of pastry-wrapped sausages and took it with him, heading in the direction of the kitchen. If anyone who knew him saw him, they'd assume he was being helpful.


  The kitchen was overly full with all the extra servers that his parents had hired for the occasion. They barely had room to move about, edging past each other with loaded platters held high overhead, and he simply slipped a long arm just inside the door, left the platter on a bit of empty counter space, and made a quick exit up the servants' stair just off the hall that led to the kitchen. This was quite a "modern" house, unlike their home in the country, one that wasted space on hallways rather than having rooms that led into one another. There was one between the kitchen, the pantries, the closets, and the rest of the first-floor rooms. The hallway delineated the boundaries of "masters' territory" and "servants' territory" and for some reason that fact brought a tiny smile of satisfaction to his mother's face every time she looked at the hall.

  Lavan was grateful for the hall; it allowed him to get into the upper stories without anyone at the party spotting him. He didn't go to his room on the second floor, though—he'd be far too easy to find there. Instead, he headed for the attics up above the servants' third-floor rooms.

  It wasn't likely that anyone would look for him here. The previous occupant of this town manor had taken all of his rubbish with him (or sold it off to rag pickers), and the current occupants didn't have much to encumber the space. Lan's mother had seen to it that the attics had been scrubbed out as thoroughly as the rest of the house before the family moved in, so dust was at a minimum. All that was up here was the stuff that had been too good to leave behind, but wasn't immediately useful. Here were the few articles of valuable furniture—as opposed to the country-built stuff they'd left behind—that didn't (yet) fit anywhere in the house or which needed repairs that hadn't been done. The rest was bales and boxes; the heavy woolen blankets, featherbeds, furs, coats, and clothing packed in lavender and cedar chips awaiting the cold of winter, and the oddments that had been given to the family by important friends or relatives that were too hideous to display on a daily basis but no one dared get rid of.

  Lan opened the attic door and stepped softly in; it was very dark, and he took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. At last, he had come to a place where the air was comfortably cool, and the sweat quickly dried on his forehead and the back of his neck. The scent of strong soap mixed with herbs still lingered in the air, and the gable windows glowed with the light from the party lanterns in the rear and the streetlamp in the front. The sound of the party was a dull drone up here, but the hired musicians in the garden were actually easier to hear than they'd been in the drawing room.

  Avoiding the dim bulk of the stored furnishings, Lan reached the nearest window without mishap. Once he opened the window and flung himself down on a pile of featherbeds and comforters, it was rather pleasant up in the attic. Or, at least, it wasn't as bad as it was downstairs.

  He could hide out here for as long as it took for the party to end. Although once the noise began to ebb, he knew he'd better sneak back downstairs again, and pretend he'd been there all night.

  I wish I could hide out here forever.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the music. It wasn't what he would have chosen himself, of course; it was rather old-fashioned and played in a manner that suggested the musicians themselves were well aware that they were only there to provide a kind of pleasant background to conversation. Innocuous, that was the best word for it. Lan didn't much care for innocuous music, but he wasn't the one paying the minstrels' fee.

  As his father so often repeated, the one who paid the musician had the right to call the rune. However, that old saw was repeated with a sidelong, meaningful glance at his middle son.

  Lan's stomach knotted up again. As if I would ever forget....

  *

  NO one noticed his defection, or he would have heard about it over breakfast. He kept quiet as Sam bolted his food and headed off to his work with Master Iresh, and as his younger sibs chattered excitedly about the important people who'd taken notice of them. Lavan muttered something about the Guildmaster in response to a direct question, but let Macy and Feodor take center stage. They chattered with animation about all the important people who had spoken with them, and Nelda nodded approvingly.

  Lan's food was as tasteless as bark and loam. He ate without speaking and left the table almost as quickly as Sam had, retreating to a window seat just off the lesser sitting room where he hoped he would be sufficiently out of the way to be ignored or forgotten. In a few moments after he had settled in, the door to the street opened and closed—that would be Feo, going to join their father. Macy's footsteps faded off in the direction of the workroom, where she would toil diligently and happily on embroidery or lacemaking for the rest of the morning. Though she was only fourteen, her work was good enough that she won praise from everyone who saw it.

  Now if Mother is just thinking about them and not about me as she gets ready to leave....

  No such luck. He heard his mother's, footsteps, but didn't turn to look at her, hoping she still might ignore him. "Lan?" she said, and when he didn't respond to her call, she repeated "Lan?" in a sharper tone that warned him not to pretend he hadn't heard.

  Lavan looked away from the window toward his mother, a dull apprehension making him clench his jaw—not that he'd been really looking outside. There wasn't that much to look at; just the tiny little kitchen garden of their town house, surrounded by a high, stuccoed wall to separate their minuscule yard from the neighbor's equally minuscule yard. But it was better than staring out the window in his room, which opened out to a charming view of the blank wall of the neighbor's town house. And anyway, the servants would be in his room cleaning for another candlemark. He couldn't take refuge up there until they'd gone because they'd just chase him out again with their dusting and sweeping.

  "Shouldn't you be doing something?" Lavan's mother asked, her brows knitted with irritation. Her frown deepened when he shrugged, unable to think of an acceptable answer.

  Nelda had kept the splendid figure of her youth, and either through luck or artifice her auburn hair showed not a strand of gray. She was dressed for a meeting of the Needleworkers' Guild, in her fine, russet-brown lambswool gown trimmed with intricate bobbin lace of her own making and design, the sash of her office as Guild Representative of five counties so covered with embroidery that there was not a single thread of the original fabric showing. Lavan had taken very little care with his own clothing, in no small part as a kind of act of defiance. Trews and tunic claimed from his older and taller brother had once been black, but had faded to a washed-out gray, and he wouldn't let his mother redye them. He was afraid if she got her hands on them, or any of his clothing, she'd make them... cheerful. And cheerful was very far from the way he felt since the move to Haven.

  His mother was clearly torn between what she saw as her duty to her son and her duties to her Guild. She hesitated, then solved her dilemma by snapping, "Well, find something!" as she hurried out the door, the heels of her scarlet leather boots clicking on the wooden floor.

  Lan turned back to his contemplation of the garden, but he pulled his thin legs up onto the window seat and pulled the curtain shut behind him, cutting him off from the rest of the second-best sitting room.

  Find something? She wants me to find something? And what is there for me to do around here? Since moving to the town house in Haven, there was nothing to occupy Lan's days. Back home—for no matter what his parents said, this place would never be home to him—he'd had friends, places to go, things to do. Riding, hunting, and fishing mostly, or shooting at targets. Just hanging about together and talking was entertaining enough, certainly more entertaining than listening to Sam natter about the exciting doings in the dye vats. Back when he was younger, that same gang of boys had played at being Heralds or Guards, at fighting the Karsites or capturing bandits. The last couple of years they'd abandoned the games, but not each other. Now there were races to be run, game to chase, rivers to swim, and that was enough for them.

  Then Mother got made Guild Representative, and Father couldn't
get us out of the country fast enough. Lan's lip curled at the recollection. No matter how his children felt about it. Archer Chitward had ambition to be more than a simple country cloth merchant. At least in part that was why he had negotiated the marriage with Nelda Hardcrider, the most skillful needlewoman anyone in their area had ever seen. With her skill, and his materials, he reckoned she could make herself into a walking advertisement for his goods.

  Lan knew that was what he'd thought, since he'd said so often enough. His mother didn't seem to resent being thought of as a sort of commodity, in fact he sometimes wondered if the negotiation and speculation had been as one-sided as his father thought.

  He stared out the glass window at the sorry substitute for a forest—a stand of six dwarf fruit trees, an arbor covered with brambles and roses, which would later yield fruit and rose hips, and gooseberry bushes, all neatly confined in wooden boxes with gravel-covered paths between, for a minimum of work. The rest of the garden was equally utilitarian; vegetables in boxes, herbs in boxes, grapevines trained against the wall. The only flowers growing there were those that were also edible.

  With an intensity that left a dry, bitter edge around his thoughts, Lan longed for his wild, unconfined woods. In all of Haven he had yet to see a spot of earth that had been left to grow wild; every garden of every house around here was just the same as this one. The only variations were in whether or not the gardens were strictly utilitarian or ornamental. The parks around which each "square" of town houses were built were carefully manicured, with close-cropped lawns, precise ponds or fountains, pruned trees, and mathematically planned flowerbeds.