Pull The Pin

— Fwooooosh!

The flames had faltered for a moment, then burned on as stubbornly as ever, and the longer it went on the more the people wore themselves out.

— Thud! Thud!

Here and there, more and more of them sank down where they stood, sobbing, and a red shadow lay across their despairing faces.

That was when it happened. Carriages and carts came up the road at speed, and people came pouring out of them.

“Make way!”

The people who had appeared out of nowhere snatched up lumps of red iron and ran without a moment’s hesitation straight for the place where the flames were shooting up. The lord of Grace was among them.

“My lady! It is dangerous!”

Red Bear caught sight of Chloe too late and shouted until his throat was fit to burst, but the lord never so much as looked back.

Chloe, seen from behind, looked as perilous as a moth flying into a flame. A dread he could not name drove Red Bear after her at a run.

“My lady!”

Behind Chloe came the household staff of Grace Castle and the people of Kondal village, crowding after her. Red Bear spotted Scrooge mixed in among them and caught hold of him in haste, but Scrooge said he was busy and shook the knight commander’s hand off. The whole lot of them, he thought, must have gone mad at the sight of the fire.

“Form a line! Pull the pin the way I taught you!”

The lord shouted, and the people pulled the glittering needles free of the lumps of iron.

“Fire!”

— Hisssssss!

— Shhwaaaaaa!

At that second shout, smoke white as a cloud came blasting out toward the black smoke. How long it went on there was no telling, but the flames that had not so much as flinched under the enormous quantities of sand poured over them dwindled little by little, and then were gone, leaving nothing behind but the black smoke, like a shadow.

“Waaaah!”
“The fire’s out!”
“Hurrah! Long live my lady!”

A cheer went up loud enough to leave the ears ringing, and it filled the whole field. Some of them, giddy with relief that the fire was out, threw their arms around one another and wept.

“Thank goodness.”

Dong-hui, who had kept her grip tight on the fire extinguisher hose to the very last, felt the strength go out of her legs and dropped down hard where she stood. Soot smeared her fair face all over, but the look on it was brighter than it had ever been.

A little while earlier, inside the convenience store.

The moment Red Bear told her a fire had broken out, the first thing into Dong-hui’s head was 119¹. There would be no fire station in this place, of course, let alone a fire hose.

“A fire extinguisher!”

The fire extinguisher standing inside the convenience store came to her almost in the same instant. She called up the status window as she ran up to her room.

“An assistant! I need an assistant!”

The status window was starting in on the very same speech, word for word, like a recorded phone menu, and Dong-hui cut it off in a hurry.

“Shut up, I’ll pay whatever it is, just be quick!”

Gasping for breath, she did not stop until she reached the room; she went straight through the front door and ran for the convenience store.

“Fire extinguishers! Fill the whole Inventory with them, no matter what!”

The convenience store held two fire extinguishers and no more, sad to say. Two would cut the time down a great deal against having only one, of course, but with every second precious, filling the slots two at a time was the best that could be done.

Taechang had been hauled out of the status window this time too with no say of his own in the matter, but one look at Dong-hui’s face, on the very edge of tears, and he did as he was told without a word.

The Inventory filled far faster than it did with her doing it alone. The moment all eight hundred slots were packed solid with fire extinguishers, Dong-hui came running outside and showed the servants how they were to be used. Everyone who had heard her explanation passed it to the next in turn, and all the way to Morta they went on passing the working of a fire extinguisher down the line.

A few of them nodded along without knowing exactly what the red lumps of iron were for. A good many took them for magic tools that put out fire.

Seeing the flames shoot up in front of them, they had thought that running over there without so much as water was the same as suicide. But with the lord running at the head of them all, there was no staying where they were.

“What in the world is this thing?”

Delma, who had sunk down beside Dong-hui once the fire was out, turned the fire extinguisher over in her hands and asked in something like wonder. That the world held a thing that put out fire faster than water was past believing. Stranger still, what came out of the red lump of iron was not water at all but smoke.

“A fire extinguisher.”

Dong-hui was lying flat out on her back on the grass.

Any other day a bomb of scolding would have come down on her already for lying on the ground, but just now Delma had no strength left to scold with. She had lived her whole life with a wall between herself and exercise, and even the short way up the hill from the carriage had been more than she could manage.

“A fire extinguisher…, is it. But where did you get hold of this?”

Nowhere in all Grace Castle had she ever seen anything like it. Anything as remarkable as this could not have sat in the castle all this while without her knowing of it. She turned it this way and that, marveling, as though she could not believe it even now; seen properly, the thing had a sleek shape and rather a lovely color to it.

“A magic pouch.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve got one. A magic pouch that anything at all comes out of.”

Dong-hui had been casting about for something to put her off with and tossed it out half in joke, half in earnest. She had expected to be scolded on the spot for playing games; instead Delma was unexpectedly quiet.

Something in the silence chilled her, and Dong-hui raised herself quietly to look at Delma. Delma was still going over the fire extinguisher with wonder on her face.

“So it was a magic tool. I did think somehow that it was no ordinary thing. But that magic pouch…”

Dong-hui had never for a moment supposed Delma would swallow it whole, and the earnestness in the question brought her up sharp. Telling her the truth was out of the question. And in fact there was no particular way of describing the thing other than a magic pouch.

“Who knows. A present from my dad, maybe.”

The first day she opened her eyes in this place, back when she still thought it a dream, what filled her most was resentment. Why should a trial like this come down on her all over again? But the longer the time went on, the more Dong-hui had come to think that this, this moment right now, might be a special present. A present her dad had given her, at that, because the sight of his daughter flailing along on her own hurt him so, and he was so sorry for her.

“The Marquess left it behind for you?”

Delma, who had believed she knew everything there was to know about Chloe, tilted her head at a story she was hearing for the first time.

“I don’t know. One day it was suddenly there in front of my eyes. That’s all there is to it.”

This was as far as anything Dong-hui could tell her went. She had worried what she would do if Delma pressed for more detail, but happily the questions got no further, because the villagers came crowding in around her.

“Long live my lady!”
“Our lady has kept Morta safe!”
“May the blessings of God be full upon our lady!”

Leaving the villagers’ cheers and their thanks behind her, Dong-hui got to her feet to take a closer look at the warding-grass hill.

“My lady, it is dangerous. If a monster should come leaping out—”
“The knight commander Red Bear will keep me safe, won’t he.”

She said it with a wink and a smile, but Red Bear could not hide the worry in his face. He urged her several times more to go back to the castle, but there was no breaking the lord’s obstinacy. Nothing for it, then, but to strengthen the guard over and over and go with her to look over the ground near the Black Forest.

“Still, it’s a mercy the warding grass didn’t all burn away.”

Dong-hui looked at the warding grass, about a third of it still standing, and felt the weight come off her chest. The hill it spread over ran wider in some places than in others, so that in some spots only half of it had burned and in others it was gone altogether.

“All the same, I’m uneasy leaving it like this. I’ll have to tell Builder to stop all the work and start with a wall to protect the village.”
“A wall made of wood will not be able to hold off everything the monsters throw at it.”
“I know. It will still buy the people time to run, though.”

However much warding grass was left, whether this much of it would hold the monsters back was anybody’s guess. Fear wavered in Dong-hui’s eyes as she looked at the hill turned black.

“Tell them to clear away the burned warding grass tomorrow and spread fertilizer. So that what’s left of it can spread out again.”
“Yes!”
“And another thing — we must find out without fail why the fire started. There is no possible way it started of its own accord.”

Her eyes were troubled as she went on, fixed on the hill gone black as pitch. Anger had settled into a voice unlike any she had used until now.

Batyr and his men, who had lain hidden in the forest watching until the business was finished, could not hide their bewilderment.

“What in the world is that? Where did a cloud come leaping out from all of a sudden!”
“Sit.”

Uno had forgotten they were in hiding and sprang to their feet; one order from Batyr and Uno dropped back down. Not that Batyr was any less bewildered himself, at a strange thing he was seeing for the first time.

With the drought running on for years now, he had thought that once a fire started there would be nothing anybody could do about it. Of all the ways of laying the village waste, fire cost the least effort of any, and now a turn of events nobody had looked for had brought it to nothing.

“Was the lord of Grace a mage?”

Nothing but magic would explain it.

“There’s no chance of that. The talk everywhere is that she’s the biggest fool alive.”

Batyr had heard that rumor himself, of course. But the woman who had come running so bravely at the sight of the flames a little while ago could not by any stretch be called a fool. Nobody with eyes like that was a simpleton.

She had worked some mysterious magic and had the flames under control in an instant, and more than that, she had not hung back on the strength of being a noble, nor pretended not to see the trouble the estate’s residents were in. The sight of the young lord smiling so brightly, her face all covered in soot, would not leave him.

“Get hold of one of the things they had. I must know what it is.”
“Yes, Captain.”

Uno was every bit as curious about what that red thing really was, and answered without hesitation.

“Anyhow, the first operation’s gone and failed — so what will you do now?”