Chapter 4 of

Eyes of Fire

by Lauren Stinton

Little Rose couldn’t have been more than six. The scrap bucket was almost bigger than she was, but she moved it quickly, as if it were an extension of her body. Every piece of bowl and leftover food went into the bucket as fast as Hamal could blink, and he realized he was just about to lose her to the corner again.

“Rosy!” he called.

She froze, her head down, one small hand gripping the bucket’s edge.

“Rosy, my name is Hamal.” He slid off the bench and sat down with her on the floor. That seemed to be the best way. If she skittered back to the corner, he could always follow her, but he didn’t wish to get her in trouble. The innkeeper didn’t seem to like this little girl who had been dropped off by a thiever.

“I’m a healer,” Hamal said in his kindest voice. “Are you sick? Do you not feel well? I would like to put my hand on your shoulder, if that is all right?”

It was not all right. The thin shoulder jerked away from him.

“Wait, Rosy! Don’t go away. I’m not going to hurt you—”

Her head came up. She stared at him with red eyes.

Everything inside Hamal stopped still. His arm was outstretched, his fingers just about to touch her shoulder, but there he stopped. A child with red eyes? The color seemed to sway like fire. For a moment, he thought he could see actual flames in her irises, and his mind snagged on that one point: She has fire in her eyes.

She blinked.

Her eyes were brown.

Hamal nearly reached up to rub his face, but at the last moment he didn’t, suspecting that if he looked away even for an instant, she would vanish back to her corner. He leaned forward slowly, repeating, “I am a healer. I am going to make you feel better. You don’t need to do anything. I’m not going to hurt you. Just sit there, just like that. Good girl. You’re a very good girl. I can tell.”

His fingertips touched her shoulder lightly. One little touch.

Emotion swamped him—so swift and so strong that he almost pulled his hand away. Her bones were weeping. That’s what it seemed like as they told him how all the people she once had known had died or left her without reason. She was alone now, and she was scared. Her bones couldn’t tell him what she feared, but over and over again, they said she was afraid, she had lost everything, and she was alone. Bones were the history keepers of the body, and that was her history—that she had lost everyone and she was all by herself.

And her blood was sick. He tilted his head as his gift examined her blood and the strange thing growing in her chest, near her heart. A tumor, so it seemed, but an unusual one. All her blood knew about the tumor, and all her blood knew it shouldn’t be there, but it was there. Hamal felt like he had stepped into a conversation that had been going on for a long time. Something existed in this little girl’s body, and that thing should not exist.

What an odd thing, he thought. No wonder the innkeeper said she was sickly.

As quickly as he could, he removed the growth. It dissolved at the touch of his gift, and he rebuilt the inside of the child’s chest, so her bones and her heart and all the other pieces of her could operate the way she was made. He washed her blood so it could think and act properly, and he also found an old break in her wrist bones that needed healing. The body had tried to heal by itself, but it had done a poor job. So he fixed the break too.

All in all, healing her small body took about one minute. She sat quietly for him the entire time, staring at him.

“There you are,” he said and pulled his hand away. “Now you will feel better.”

Not a sound. Just dark eyes that studied him.

Perhaps he had only imagined the fire eyes. Yes, he must have imagined them.

Rosy picked up her bucket and scrambled back to her corner, where she situated herself in the shadows and watched him through the table legs. Hamal held her gaze across the room until his eyes began to sting. This wasn’t right, just leaving her here, in this terrible place with an innkeeper who didn’t care about her. All these words started standing up inside him—he wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to be alone anymore. He wanted to say, “You can come with us, Rosy. Come with us, and everything will be all right again. You’ll see.”

He ended up sitting on the floor for twice as long as it had taken to heal her.

Finally, as he slid back onto the bench at their table, he told the others, “She had a growth in her chest. It was trying to kill her and poison her blood against her, but it’s gone now. She was in a lot of pain, and I don’t know for how long.”

No one said anything. Hamal realized how quiet the table was, and he looked up and found his companions watching him. Cale, Masly, Gregory, and Rhyan all stared at him.

“What is it?” he asked.

Masly spoke first. “Did you not see what we saw?”

“What? With Rosy?” Then he straightened up excitedly. “You mean the fire eyes? Yes, I saw the fire eyes!”

Gregory reached into one of his many pockets and removed a book, thumbing through the pages.

Lord Rhyan cleared his throat. “Why would a little child have fire in her eyes? That can happen with a flamemaker, but this child is not, in fact, a flamemaker. I would have been able to feel her gift, and I did not. A child without fire, who can somehow cause fire in her eyes?” He grimaced. “I have never heard of such a thing, and I would like to think, considering my gift, that I’ve heard of most things involving fire—”

“Here we are,” Gregory announced and slapped his book down on the table, spreading out the pages with his fingers. “The child is an oracle.”

Everyone leaned forward.

Gregory’s book didn’t have any words. It had pictures instead. Staring back at them was a sketch of a beautiful lady with long hair and red eyes. The entire picture was black and white, except for the eyes. The artist had carefully filled them with crimson paint. They looked as if they were made of fire.

Many years had passed since Hamal had seen this face, and just the sight of it made him smile. “I say, Cale—” he began, but Gregory apparently didn’t hear him because the man kept speaking.

“This is Hellan,” Gregory stated. “She was the last oracle. Two hundred years ago, she helped bring an end to the Barrow Wars.”

“An oracle,” Masly repeated. His silver eyes narrowed. “Is that…a gift?”

“Yes, sir. An incredibly rare gift that does not follow the bloodline. It appears at random, a quality it shares with the seer gift, but the oracle does not require a previous family member with the same gift. It appears at will.”

“You’re certain?”

A flicker of annoyance went across Gregory’s face, but in the very next moment, his expression had returned to one of calm. “Yes, sir. With the exception of the flamemaker gift, the oracle is the only gift that produces color saturation in the eyes to the extent that the irises appear to be made of fire. It is not actual fire, as it would be with flamemakers, but it has the appearance of fire. The oracle is related to the seer gift. It is a type of seer, but its realm is vastly different. With only one exception, all Court Gifts are marked by their eyes. The seer has silver. The prophet has gold.” He paused. “And the oracle has fire—but only when the gift is in operation.”

“What’s the possibility we would walk into an inn in a miserable town in the North Territory and find one of the Court Gifts?” Rhyan murmured.

Gregory, who knew many things, replied, “None. The gift is not easily found. Every historian who has studied the gifts in depth has an opinion on oracles, but upon that one detail they all agree.”

“Meaning what?” Rhyan asked. His brows rose. “That it’s so rare, in fact, that I’ve never even heard of it?”

“Not simply rare, my lord.” Gregory bowed his head in a polite fashion. “Impossible to find, unless one is meant to find it. That is, if an oracle stumbles across your path, it is purposefully done. It is the will of the gods.”

“Lovely,” Masly muttered and sat back on the bench. “Just what we need on this venture. An interfering god.”

Gregory’s lips twitched. The light of joy filled his eyes. “An interfering god is not always a detriment.” He flipped to the next page in his book of pictures.

When he saw another familiar face staring back at him, Hamal started laughing. “You brought my grandfather on the trip with us! I didn’t realize you were going to bring him—who else do you have hidden in the folds of your cloak?”

Though his eyes still twinkled, Gregory did not laugh. “Your grandfather acted as a guide for Hellan, the last oracle. He took her to the city of King’s Barrow, where she played a significant role in stopping the Barrow Wars. Oracles require wisdom. They require it, because their gift enables them to see what a specific god is doing. They are then able to mirror that god’s actions. It is vital for the oracle to mirror a god who is interested in the welfare of men. Hamal.” Gregory’s look grew pointed. “What do you know about the oracle gift?”

“Well,” Hamal said, thinking about it, “I know that she can pick the god she wants to follow. And you’re right—it is very important for an oracle to choose the right god. If you do what the wrong one is doing, it’s bad. Wars and plagues and death—it’s possible for bad gods to do very bad things that hurt people, and the oracle might help them. But if the oracle follows the right god, she can do what the right god is doing, and she can bring life instead of death. If you’re an oracle, you have to know who the right god is.”

“Which is why your grandfather supported Hellan and participated with her in her gift,” Gregory said, nodding once in affirmation. “He gave her wisdom. He was her wisdom, in a sense.”

The only born nobleman among them, Rhyan leaned back on the bench and gave the girl in the corner another brief look. He didn’t sound pleased as he said, “We can’t overlook the presence of an oracle, not when we’re on a mission for the king. We’ll have to turn around and take her back to the city.”

No one answered him. Hamal looked at the others’ faces and decided they all thought Rhyan was right, but they didn’t want to.

Masly glanced through the room and said quietly, “A lot of learning a little girl would get in a place like this. And none of it good. If this place teaches this child about a god, it surely would not be a god we desire in King’s Barrow.”

“She’s afraid,” Hamal said, and everyone at the table turned to look at him. Lifting his shoulders, he said, “I’ve never seen the movements of gods, but I imagine it would be scary. Especially if you were all alone and needed wisdom and didn’t have any. She’s terrified. Her bones are marked with her fears.”

“We have to take her to the king,” Rhyan repeated.

“We are on a specific timeline,” Cale answered. “Oracle or not, I don’t believe Cedrick would have us turn around and go home.”

“We could take her with us,” Hamal suggested.

All four heads swung toward him.

“Hamal,” Cale began. “You know where we’re going. You know what we are likely to confront when we get there. It is no place for a little girl, even if she is an oracle.”

Rhyan agreed. “We can’t leave her here, but neither can we take her forward. I have no desire to give the king bad news about an oracle. Yes, Sire, we found one, but we accidentally dropped her down a hole in the ground.”

“Well, we don’t have to take her all the way into the mine,” Hamal said.

“Lower your voice,” Masly ordered, voice sharp.

Hamal did as he was told, whispering, “We don’t have to take her all the way into that one place. We could just take her to a better place, and she could wait for us there. This is a bad place. We can’t leave a god’s oracle in a place like this, so maybe we can just leave her at a different place instead.”

Cale studied Hamal in silence for a long time. Hamal began to twitch on the bench.

Eventually Cale sighed and said, “Very well,” which caused him to receive quick looks from the other three men; he ignored the looks. “If that is wisdom. But I foresee that our gracious host will smell the scent of gold and not part with the girl without a price.”

A moment passed as Hamal tried to figure out what Cale meant.

Rhyan muttered something and spat a word—a description—that Hamal had never said in his life. The lord glared at the innkeeper, who stood laughing with a table of patrons on the other side of the room.

The innkeeper wanted money? Why did he want money for Rosy? When Hamal understood, he gasped. “But slavery is illegal here.”

“He won’t call it slavery,” Cale replied. “He will call it compensation due to a lack of coin and being forced to care for her himself.” Cale looked at Hamal steadily. “The king gave you a purse for this journey. How much will wisdom offer a cruel man to compensate for the care—the obviously poor care—he has given this child?”

Hamal nodded slowly as he thought. He considered the situation with care, thinking of gods and his grandfather and Hellan, who had once knitted him a sweater and told him how handsome he looked. He wore the sweater every winter for seventy years (he wasn’t certain, but he thought it was that long) and only gave it up when the elbows were gone and a mouse used it for a nest.

But more than any of these things, Hamal thought of how oracles only appeared in times of war. How was this a time of war? King’s Barrow was at peace.

I don’t understand, he thought, looking over at Rosy.

She stared at him.

Fire flickered in her eyes.

– H –

Comment below or click here to find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2020 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.