Chapter 14: The Archive Fire

Demelza went through the Hall's front doors at a run, and Rafe went in beside her.

The great room was clear.

Smoke rolled along the ceiling from the east corridor, thick and brown, with sparks in it.

"Wet your sleeve," Rafe said, and she pressed her face into his coat.

The archive was a stone room at the end of the corridor, with an iron door that someone had propped open with a chair.

Flames ran along the lowest shelves.

Whoever had lit them had poured oil on the floor, because the fire was spreading in a neat line toward the back wall.

"Which shelf?" Rafe said.

"MacShane. L." Demelza coughed. "Second bay."

The second bay was already burning.

She put her hand into it anyway.

The flame licked up her wrist and went out.

Rafe stared at her.

"I didn't do that," she said.

"I know."

Silver ran under her skin from her elbow to her fingertips, and the fire in the bay leaned away from her.

She pulled out an armful of folders and thrust them at him.

Behind the folders there was an iron strongbox, black at the corners, with a brass lock that had already gone soft.

She dragged it out by the handles.

It burned her palms and did not blister them.

"Out," Rafe said. "Now."

The ceiling beam above the door groaned.

They ran with the strongbox between them and the folders clamped under his arm, and a wall of pack wolves with buckets met them in the corridor.

Brocklehurst wolves and Ridge wolves stood shoulder to shoulder, passing water from the kitchen along the line, and nobody had asked who was whose.

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