Brightly Burning Read Free

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 needle-woman 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.
    He wanted his horse. He wanted to saddle up and ride until he found a tree that wasn’t pruned, a flower not in a planned planting, even a weed. But that was impossible; his horse had been left back in the country. There was no stable here, and even if there had been, he would not have been allowed his horse. The two carriage horses the family had brought with them were kept in a stable common to the square, and cost (as his father liked to repeat) a small fortune to keep fed and cared for. Only the nobly born could afford to keep a riding horse in the city.
    He could have hired a horse to ride—there was a stable with horses for hire and a bigger park to ride them in—but what was the point of that? You weren’t allowed to take the beast any faster than a trot, you had to stick to the bridle paths, and the riding park was just a bigger version of the tiny park of their square. Riding in the park was nothing more than a way for girls to show themselves off for young men, and young men to assess the competition. It wasn’t even exercise.
    Lan hated Haven; he had since he’d arrived, and he hadn’t seen anything yet to change his mind. But he was in the minority, because the rest of his family had taken to life in the city with the enthusiasm of otters to a water slide.
    His mother was at the Guildhouse every day, her daughter with her at least part of the time. Lan’s younger sister Macy took after her mother in every way, and it looked as if Nelda would be handing the reins of her position in the Guild over to her daughter when the time came that she wished to step down. Macy adored every facet of city life, and so did Lan’s younger brother, Feodor. Feodor tagged after their father the way Macy trailed behind Nelda, absorbing every aspect of the business of a cloth merchant as easily as a towel soaked