Free Enna Burning by Shannon Hale Page B

storm pushed on the shutters, thrumming the wood against the house, noises that made Enna feel as though she were inside a drum. She pricked her finger with the needle and angrily sucked away the drop of blood.
    “Lovely girls you have here.”
    The careful, dry accent put ice in her stomach even before she knew who had spoken. Through the room three soldiers escorted a bound Tiran prisoner. He caught her eyes and sneered. “Glad to see there will be something lovely for Tira in this dismal country.”
    A soldier shoved him roughly, and they left through the back of the house.
    Enna sat glaring at the still swinging door, wishing she had had something burning and clever to say back. Her anger at the prisoner and her lack of response and her own uselessness lately while all of Tira sat snuggly on Bayern land heated her face and sped up her breath. The heat pouring from the hearth fire wrapped around her ankles and rose to her neck. The heat those soldiers had left behind shoved against her skin. It swathed her like hot hands over her face. The room seemed to dim, and she rubbed her eyes and wondered if she was seeing clearly.
    Inside her chest, that place she had filled with heat the day Leifer died began to pulse expectantly, and Enna felt a pleasant, slippery desire to comply. Get rid of all the clinging heat, draw it tight into that space, and make just one tiny fire. . . .
    Enna bolted upright, grabbed her cloak from its peg, and walked out of the house and into a cold burst of wind. Immediately the heat left her, and she sighed. So strong an impulse to make another fire had never taunted her before. She felt her limbs shiver, and she imagined it was not just the sudden cold.
    The wind pushed against her back, so she walked with it, feeling its pressure move her toward the edge of camp. She felt better, but she did not want to go back into that house just yet to wait while loose scraps of heat from people and from fires stuck to her again.
    Suddenly she remembered what Leifer had said when she had asked him if he could stop. You don’t understand if you ask me that question. I have to use it.
    Had he tried to resist and discovered that eventually the fire would have its way? Enna felt her muscles tighten at the prospect of a challenge. She had not anticipated that the fire could be so forceful, but now that she knew, she was even more determined to overcome.
    The town was mildly busy with the activity of an early winter evening. Every building was occupied with captains and ministers and blacksmiths and tanners. On both sides of the town wall, brown tents pooled in groups under individual hundred-band banners. There was no place for her to be alone.
    She stopped at the stables near the east gates and had a stable-hand saddle for her a sweet gray mare named Merry. Being a queen’s maiden did have some advantages.
    She had nowhere in particular to go, so she gave Merry free rein and let the wind whip at her skin. The sky kept to itself, cloudy and dim. The low hills were nearly colorless and clenched with a hard crust of snow. The absence of life was exhilarating, and Enna squeezed Merry’s middle a little tighter and rode on.
    The sun lowered faster than she had expected, and the land filled with that ghostly gray light that could slip into black without warning. She turned the mare back northwest, fairly sure that was where she had left Ostekin, and started a trot back.
    Minutes later, the breeze was pushed aside by a wind from the north, and this one brought snow.
    Gusts of wet wind pushed her around and washed the horizon in streaks of gray. Enna tied the ends of her headscarf under her chin for warmth. The sun had left completely now, and the snow seemed endless. She could see no farther than a few paces in any direction. Enna shook her head at the bewildering, pale landscape and banged her fist on the saddle.
    “Curse you, Enna,” she said with chattering teeth. “I curse you up and down, stupid girl.”
    There