He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 15 (Patreon)

I always enjoy when authors write the PoV of regular people seeng super heroics in action. I am aiming to drop chapter 16 by the 21st,since next week I might not be able to drop any chapter.

XV

The Spinach Boy

The honey wine was ruinous if you let it sit.

Kyra had learned this at her mother's knee-three years dead now, taken by the same sweating fever that had carried half of Lannisport's river district in the long summer's worst year. But the lesson had stuck. Turn the casks on the third day or the honey settled to the bottom and fermented wrong, and instead of the warm, spiced sweetness that the merchants paid good silver for, you got something sour and sharp that burned the throat and made men fighting mad before they'd finished their second cup.

Kyra turned the casks every third morning without fail, working the cellar of the Gilded Cruse alone in the grey pre-dawn while her father slept off the previous night's custom above. The cellar was cool and dark, stone-walled, smelling of oak and honey and the faint persistent tang of spice-crushed cinnamon bark and dried ginger root, steeped in the warming wine and stirred with a wooden ladle that had been her grandmother's.

She was sixteen. She had her mother's hands-broad and strong, the hands of a woman who hauled casks and wiped tables without complaint-and her father's hair, the dark red of old copper, thick and heavy, perpetually escaping whatever braid she tied it in. Her face was ordinary. Not pretty, not plain - the kind of face that disappeared into a crowd, which suited her fine. Pretty girls in Lannisport's river district drew the wrong kind of attention. Ordinary girls drew none, and none was better than the alternative.

She had just finished the last cask-the big one in the corner, the three-year vintage her father was saving for Lord Lannister's name day feast-and was climbing the cellar stairs with the empty ladle in her hand when she heard the shouting.

It was not the shouting of drunks. She knew that sound well-the belligerent, slurred noise of men who had drunk more than their coin warranted. This was different. Voices raised not in anger but in fear, and beneath it, threaded through like a dark wire, a low rushing roar that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

She came up into the common room and found it empty. The hearth fire, banked for the night, cast a dim orange glow across the trestle tables and the rush-strewn floor. Her father was abed -she could hear him snoring from the room behind the bar.

The shouting was outside.

She crossed to the nearest shutter and pushed it open, and the light hit her first-not torchlight, but the bright shifting orange of a fire already too large to be contained. The heat came with it, a wall of warm air that dried her lips in a single breath.

The tallow chandler's shop across the street was burning.

The entire front of the building was a sheet of flame climbing the timber-framed facade, reaching for the thatch with the grasping hunger of a fire that had found good fuel and meant to eat all of it. The windows had blown out-glass and flame together, a cascade of sparkling fragments falling into the street like deadly rain. She could see into the shop itself, what remained of it, and it was a furnace. The tallow vats had caught. Tallow burned hot and stinking and greasy, and the smoke pouring from the building was black and thick and smelled of rendered fat and burning hair.

The building next door-old Wat's cooperage, where he made barrels for the wine merchants- was already catching. She could see flames licking along the eaves, reaching for the thatch, and she knew with the cold practical certainty of someone who had grown up in a city of timber and close-packed streets that this fire was not going to stop on its own.

The wind was off the harbor pushing the fire east. Toward the Gilded Cruse. Toward her.

She dropped the ladle. It clattered on the floor.

"Father!"

She ran for the room behind the bar. He was a lump under a wool blanket, snoring with the conviction of a man who had no intention of waking. She seized his shoulder and shook-hard, both hands, the way her mother used to shake him when the morning deliveries came.

"Father, wake up. There's a fire."

Borros mumbled. His eyes cracked open. The confusion cleared slowly, then he frowned.

"Fire?"

"The chandler's shop. It's spread to the cooperage and the wind's pushing it this way. We need to go."

He sat up. The blanket fell away, and he swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was fifty-three, thick around the middle, with the veined nose and ruddy complexion of a man who tested his own product more than was wise. He was not fast. He had not been fast for years.

"Guests," he said.

"What?"

"Guests. There are guests upstairs." He was pulling on his boots, his fingers clumsy, his face creased with a particular anguish. "The wool merchant from Tyrosh and his servant. The septon traveling to Casterly Rock. The two guardsmen from the Lannister fleet. Get them, Kyra. Wake them. Get them out."

"You go. I'll-"

"Get them, I said."

She went.

The stairs were narrow and steep, the treads worn smooth by decades of feet. She took them two at a time, hand skimming the wall. The upper floor had four rooms, two on either side of a narrow corridor, and the doors were thin pine barely more than planks hung on leather hinges.

She banged on the first. "Fire! Everyone out!"

The Tyroshi merchant opened it in his smallclothes, his blue-dyed beard askew, his eyes wide. Behind him his servant was already stuffing papers into a bag with the frantic efficiency of a man who knew what mattered and what did not.

"The fire's spreading," Kyra said. "You need to leave. Now. Through the common room and out the front."

The merchant said something in Tyroshi-short, sharp, a curse or a prayer-and pushed past her. His servant followed, clutching the bag to his chest.

The septon came out of the second room fully dressed-the habit of a man accustomed to roads that required departure at any hour-holding his seven-pointed star, his face not frightened but resigned.

"Through the common room," she said.

The two Lannister guardsmen opened the third door before she finished knocking. They'd been sleeping in their mail, and they came out with their belts on, hands on daggers, eyes already scanning.

"Fire," Kyra said. "The street's burning. We need to go."

The first guardsman looked past her to the window at the corridor's end, where the orange glow had already grown too bright, too steady, too close. His face hardened. "Move," he said to his companion, and they went.

Kyra turned for the stairs.

Halfway down, the heat hit her.

Not the warmth of a hearth-a living thing, a wall that pressed against her face and chest, that dried the moisture from her eyes in a single breath. The common room below was lit by the terrible shifting orange that came through the shutters and the gaps in the walls. Dancing shadows climbed the ceiling like living things.

The shutters were burning.

She could see it-flames licking through the gaps in the boards, the wood blackening and curling, the pitch in the seams bubbling and catching. The front wall was old timber and daub, and the fire from the cooperage next door had found it.

"The back," she said. "Kitchen entrance. Through the yard."

The Tyroshi merchant was already at the front door. He pulled it open, and the fire was there- waiting, a curtain of flame across the entrance. It breathed in through the open door, surged into the common room with a sound like a gasp. The merchant stumbled back, his sleeve smoking. His servant seized him and hauled him away.

"The kitchen!" Kyra shouted.

They ran-the merchant, the servant, the septon, the two guardsmen, and Kyra, with her father behind her, his face red and sweating, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Through the narrow passage to the kitchen, past the cold hearth and the prep table, toward the door that led to the small yard where the well was and the herb garden her mother had planted and the gate onto the alley behind the row.

The kitchen doorframe was burning. The old oak lintel, pitch-sealed, forty years in place-the fire had found the seams and was working its way inward with patient, inexorable progress.

The first guardsman grabbed the door handle through his gauntlet and wrenched it open. The yard beyond was dark and clear, the alley visible, the street beyond that-

The lintel came down.

A cascade of sparks and burning timber, the beam falling across the threshold like a bar across a cage, and fire followed it-pouring through the gap in a sheet of flame that sealed the kitchen entrance as surely as a slammed door.

They stopped.

The heat was unbearable now. The kitchen walls were smoking, the thatch above beginning to catch. The air was thick with smoke that stung their eyes and seared their throats, every breath a battle. The Tyroshi merchant was doubled over coughing, his servant holding him upright. The septon had his star pressed to his lips, murmuring something too low to follow. The two guardsmen stood with hands on daggers-useless, the instinct of men whose training had no answer for this and whose bodies defaulted to the only posture they knew.

Borros had his arm around Kyra's shoulders. She could feel him shaking.

"The well," he said. "The yard-"

"The yard's cut off," the first guardsman said.

"Upper floor windows-"

"The thatch is already gone."

Kyra looked at the burning kitchen entrance. She looked at the ceiling, where the thatch was curling. She looked at her father's face-red, terrified-and at the guests, strangers who had trusted her father's beds and were going to burn in them.

She did the only thing she had left.

She knelt.

On the rush-strewn kitchen floor, in the smoke and heat and terrible orange light, she pressed her hands together and prayed. Not to the Warrior or the Father or the Smith - to the Mother. The one her own mother had prayed to every evening, kneeling at the small wooden shrine in the corner of the common room. The shrine that was probably burning now.

"Mother, have mercy," she whispered. "We are your children. Do not let us burn."

She felt the air move - a rush of cool and clean that came from nowhere, so sudden it was like standing before an open window in winter. The smoke parted. She felt something and the floor vanished beneath her, and the kitchen vanished, and the fire vanished, and the world became a blur of color and wind and speed.

The floor vanished. The kitchen vanished. The fire vanished. The world became a blur of color and wind and speed that had no direction she could name and then: stone. Cool, damp cobblestones under her knees. Morning air, grey and soft and tasting of salt.

She was outside.

She knelt in the open street fifty feet from the Gilded Cruse, surrounded by a crowd of dozens lit by the terrible orange glow of the burning row. They were staring at her. A moment ago she had been in the burning kitchen. She had no memory of crossing the distance-no door, no passage, no yard, no alley. Just the prayer, and then here.

She looked up.

The Tyroshi merchant was nearby-she could see his blue beard, his white face, his hands pressed over his mouth. He was staring at something to her left.

She turned.

Kallen was standing in the street.

She knew him immediately, the way you know a face that surprised you once and lodged in your memory without asking permission. He had stayed at the Gilded Cruse four days past-a boy of ten, dark-haired, blue-eyed, traveling with a knight called Ser Tomlyn and a woman in red whose name she'd never learned. He had been quiet and polite and had helped her carry casks up from the cellar without being asked, and she had watched him hoist a full honey-wine cask-one that took both her arms and all her strength to lift-onto his shoulder as easily as a loaf of bread. She had stared at him with her mouth open, and he had looked at her with those blue eyes and said, with the complete seriousness of a child who believed every word:

"I eat a lot of spinach."

She had laughed before she could stop herself-a sudden sharp hiccup of a laugh-and he had frowned, offended, and carried the cask upstairs without another word.

The woman in red had come down behind him. Kyra, still wiping her eyes, had said, "Your son is very strong for his age."

The woman had looked at her. Two heartbeats, no more-a flat, measuring weight, a sense of being assessed by something not quite human. The red eyes-hair, dress, eyes, all of it the color of arterial blood-had settled on her face long enough to make a point, and then moved on, and Kyra had not called the woman anyone's mother again.

He was blurring.

One moment he stood in the street, face set, blue eyes fixed on the burning buildings with the expression of someone assessing a problem. The next he was gone-a displacement of air, a rush of wind that stirred the hair of people nearest him-and the space where he'd been was empty.

Then he was back.

He appeared twenty feet from where he'd stood, a grey-haired woman in his arms, her nightclothes smoking. He set her down gently and someone from the crowd rushed to catch her. Then gone again and back with a big man over his shoulder, the blacksmith from two streets over, face black with soot. Then a small girl clutching a singed cloth doll, tears cutting clean lines through the ash on her cheeks.

He knelt as he placed her-not setting her down and rising again in one motion but actually stopping, one knee on the frosted cobblestones, bringing his face level with hers. The girl's fingers found his sleeve and held. She did not grip it hard; she was too tired for that, her small hand simply closing on the fabric with the blind instinct of someone reaching for anything solid in a world that had gone dangerous and hot. Kallen did not pull away. He said something to her-too quiet to carry across the crowd, a few words, the shape of them calm-and she looked at him with those ash-streaked eyes and after a moment her fingers loosened. He waited until they did. Only then did he stand, and place her in the arms of a woman in the crowd who seized her and screamed into her hair.

Ten seconds. Perhaps twelve. There were still people in the burning buildings. He had spent them anyway.

He worked methodically. Each time he reappeared, he scanned the burning row with those blue eyes, assessing, and vanished again. The flames did not touch him. She could see that clearly: he emerged from burning doorways without a mark, his clothes unsigned, his skin unblemished. The fire reached for him and found nothing it could grip.

He appeared one last time holding a babe barely a year old, wrapped in a blanket smoking at the edges. Kallen's face was very still as he stepped out of the nearest burning doorway, and in his expression Kyra saw something rawer than the controlled calm he'd worn throughout- something that looked, in the orange firelight, like grief.

A woman screamed and ran forward, arms reaching. Kallen placed the child in her arms with a deliberate, almost ceremonial gentleness-the careful tenderness of someone who understood what had nearly been lost. The woman fell to her knees, the child pressed to her chest, sobbing.

Kallen straightened. He looked at the row of buildings.

"That's everyone," he said.

His voice was quiet, but it carried. The crowd heard. The words fell into the silence like stones into still water, and every face turned toward him.

He was ten years old, standing in plain doublet and breeches, none of it burned, none of it marked, as though the fire had recognized him and declined to touch him. His dark hair was damp with sweat and smoke. His blue eyes were steady, fixed on the buildings with an expression that was not triumph but something quieter. He looked like someone who had done what needed doing and was already thinking about what came next.

Then he looked at the fire itself. Still burning-it had consumed the chandler's shop, the cooperage, the Gilded Cruse, and three buildings beyond, and was reaching for the cordwainer's at the end of the row. The City Watch was arriving, men in red cloaks with buckets and axes, too few and too late.

Kallen breathed in.His chest expanded, his shoulders rose, his chin lifted slightly. His eyes half-closed, focused on something internal, some reservoir Kyra couldn't see.

He breathed out.

Frost came out of his mouth,a stream of white-blue cold that poured from his lips like breath from a winter gale, dense and impossibly bright. It hit the air and the temperature dropped so fast that the hair on Kyra's arms stood up, the sweat on her face went cold, the cobblestones beneath her knees frosted white. He turned his head slowly-left, then right-sweeping the cold across the face of the burning buildings the way a man sweeps a cloth across a table.

Where it touched, the fire died.

The flames froze mid-reach, mid-leap, then crumbled into fragments of ice and ash that fell to the street like dirty snow. Burning timbers went dark. Smoking thatch went white. The roaring living fire that had been eating the street for the better part of an hour was smothered in ten heartbeats-silenced by a boy breathing winter into summer.

Then silence. No fire. No screaming. No crackling timber, no crash of collapsing roof. Just the harbor wind, and the distant cry of gulls, and the breathing of sixty-odd people standing in a street that had been an inferno minutes ago and was now a frosted, steaming ruin.

Then the babe's mother-still kneeling on the cobblestones, her child pressed to her chest- lowered her head to the ground. Not looking at Kallen. Looking down, at the frost-slicked stones. She bent forward until her forehead touched them, and the gesture was so old and instinctive it preceded thought.

Others followed. One by one, then in groups-the rescued, the witnesses, the parents of the children he'd pulled from the fire. They pressed their heads down and did not speak, and the silence of their kneeling was louder than the fire had been.

"Sorcery," a man's voice said, low and urgent, from the back of the crowd. "The boy's a warlock-"

"He saved my daughter," a woman said. Her voice was raw. "My daughter was in that building."

"He froze the fire. With his breath. Men don't-"

"He saved my daughter."

The word sorcery came once more, quieter now, retreating-no longer an accusation, more an excuse, the sound of a man trying to fit something impossible into a framework that couldn't hold it.

Kallen stood in the middle of the street and his face held no triumph. No pride. He looked tired. He looked like a boy who had done something necessary and was already wishing he hadn't had to. And Kyra-still on her knees, her hands black with soot and frost-looked at his face and felt her heart break for him. Just a little. Just enough.

She stood up.

Her knees ached. Her hair had escaped its braid entirely and hung around her face in damp, tangled ropes. She crossed the ten feet of frosted cobblestones and stopped in front of him.

He was shorter than she remembered. He had helped with the casks four days ago and she had thought him tall for his age, but standing before him now he was just - a boy.

"Thank you," she said.

The words were inadequate and she knew it. She had a hundred words inside her-thank you for saving me, thank you for saving my father, what are you, how is this possible-and none of them were right, and so she said the only ones that mattered.

He looked at her. In those blue eyes she saw not the fire or the frost or the impossible blur of his movement, but the boy who had carried her casks and said he ate spinach and frowned when she laughed.

He nodded. Not the curt nod of a lord, not ceremonial acknowledgment. Just a nod. The nod of a boy who had done what needed doing and was glad she was safe and didn't need to say so because the doing had said it for him.

Then he was gone.

The blur. The rush of displaced air. The empty space where he had been, marked only by the faint smell of-not smoke, not frost-something cleaner. Something that made her think of high places and open air.

The crowd stared at the empty space. The kneeling stayed kneeling. The man who had said sorcery was standing at the back of the crowd with his arms folded over his chest, a stout man in a leather apron-a craftsman of some kind, a neighbor, a face she half-recognized from mornings when she went to the market. He was looking at the babe's mother where she knelt, at the child in her arms, at the way the woman's hands moved over the small back as if counting ribs, confirming solidity, making sure the child was still there and warm and breathing. The man in the apron watched this for a long moment. His jaw was set. His arms tightened across his chest.

Then something shifted in his face and he looked away. Looked at the ruined buildings, then at the frost on the cobblestones, then at the grey sky where the gulls still wheeled. His arms did not unfold. But the set of his jaw changed.

He would call it sorcery again, she thought. In the tavern, in a week's time, to men he trusted. He would tell it with that word at the center because the word was a container that let him carry the experience without being changed by it. But he had watched the mother and the child, and there was a splinter in him now that the word would never quite cover. He would carry both things-what he'd seen, and what he'd called it-for the rest of his life, and they would never entirely fit together, and perhaps that was the most honest way to carry something true..

Kyra stood where Kallen had been and looked at the frosted steaming ruins, and the faces around her, and the grey morning sky where the gulls still wheeled as though nothing had changed.

The spinach boy, she thought. The laugh came-small and shaky, wet with the smoke still in her lungs-and she pressed her hand to her mouth and let it out, because it was either laugh or cry and she had done enough crying for one morning.

Behind her, her father was calling her name. The City Watch was pushing through the crowd, demanding answers. The septon was praying louder, his star raised high. Somewhere a child was crying, and somewhere a dog was barking.

Kyra turned toward her father's voice. Her knees ached and her lungs burned and her father's inn was a smoking ruin and she didn't know what tomorrow would look like or how they would rebuild or where the money would come from.

But she was alive. They were all alive.

She let her father gather her in. He held her and rocked her the way he had when she was small, the way her mother had before she died, the way parents hold children when the world has shown its teeth and the holding is the only answer they have. She buried her face in his shoulder and breathed in the smell of him-smoke and sweat and the honey wine that lived in his skin-and she thought of a boy who ate spinach and breathed frost and carried people out of fires.

She knew only that she was grateful.

And that gratitude, she would find, lasted longer than wonder.