Eliza found it a great bother to be born to Fire. From her earliest memories, she had been embarrassed by the way flames surged toward her, hungry-like, and licked at her clothes when she strayed too near the hearth so her apron was always singed. They flew at her in great fat sparks when Pa lit his pipe, even flashed down during thunderstorms so that all the trees were blasted for a good fifty yards around the house.

Such goings-on alarmed Ma and made her more heavy-handed over small things than she might have been, even though it was through her line the gift had been passed down. Eliza's pa, though, was a free-thinking man and knew a money-making opportunity when he saw it. "I suspect," he said, just after her sixteenth birthday, "there's more than one who will pay up front for a fine healthy girl who has herself such a way."

"Yes, sir, Pa." Eliza had no mind to marry anyone, but knew better than to argue that morning or any other. She picked up the bucket and set off to fetch fresh water for Ma, who was inside the cabin baking bread. The day was middling warm for spring, mockingbirds circling each other and carrying on like there was no tomorrow. The sweet fragrance of wild roses filled the air, but out of the west, the smell of smoke caught her attention. She stopped at the fence and turned her head in an effort to locate it.

"Hey, there, Eliza McMurphy!" Angus Trent rounded the bend in the path and stood before her, a big, bluff man breathing hard as a hound what had chased after rabbits the whole day long and half the night too. He mopped at his balding head, which was all shiny with sweat. "You was just the one I come looking for."

"Afternoon, Mr. Trent." Eliza dropped her gaze and stared at her feet. Though she had often played with his daughters before his wife passed on, the Widower Trent now made her nervous, something in the way he looked her over like a prize calf.

"I been burning off my fields," he said, "but the wind done whipped around to the west and them flames got plumb away from me. They's headed up the hill toward my barn now." He glanced back over his shoulder, his face scrunched up with worry. There was a burn on his neck where a flying ember had marked him, and his cheeks were smudged with soot. "I got all the younguns out beating it back, but the dang thing has a real sly way, and I don't think they're gonna be able to turn it. Run and ask your pa can you come and coax it back."

"She's busy," Pa said, walking up behind her.

Eliza could feel the fire six fields over, burning merrily and fit to bust with satisfaction. It was happy, nigh almost delirious with freedom, and hungry enough to consume a dozen barns. "Pa, let me go," she said real low, so it didn't sound sassy. "Won't take but a few minutes and I can fill the bucket on my way back."

"She's got chores to do," he said to Trent, almost as though she weren't there. "If your barn gets burnt, it'll be your own damn fault. You should have been more careful."

"Careful is as careful does." Trent scowled. "I recall as you weren't so shy of asking for neighborly help when it was your creek up and overrun its banks and threatened to carry off your prime breeding stock."

Beyond the hill, the fire whispered and chuckled, leaped a ravine and streaked along Trent's meadow. Eliza hung her head with shame at being forced to hang back. "Please, Pa!"

"I'll send over a suckling pig," Trent said, his face rigid. "Soon as we do the slaughtering this fall."

"Generous to a fault." Pa winked. "All right, daughter. Go along and take care of it, but see you hurry. Your ma is waiting on that water, and we both know she is not a patient woman."

Eliza nodded and lit out, bucket swinging. Trent caught up with her in two strides.

"Sorry about Pa," she said. "It's not right to take payment for something that don't cost us nary a thing."

"That's your pa," he said grimly as they climbed a stile. "Don't see nothing 'cept what's in it for him."

Smoke billowed up into the afternoon sky like a great black flower, and she felt the cunning, roaring heat of the fire long before she saw the first red-gold curl of flame. The crackling resonated deep down in her bones like the most wonderful song she had ever heard or thought to hear, like a dance that wanted to whirl her around and around. She stood transfixed, staring up into the writhing wall of fire. It was so almighty beautiful--

Trent took her arms in his callused farmer's hands and shook her. "Get hold of yourself, girl!"

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak, then clenched her hands at her sides and walked across the blackened grass toward the merry flames. Ash rose at every step and the air was singed, full of acrid smoke. Her eyes teared and burned, and she held her apron over her mouth in order to breathe. The heat built on her cheeks as she inched closer and closer. Never had she been called to a fire grown so large, not even the time the Tierneys' house had burned, and three of them, including the baby, had died. Not even then, and that had been already too late.

When she was so close, she felt her dark-brown braids would burst into flame, she stopped. "How are you called?" she asked as the fire licked sensuously at a split-rail fence.

Ash-Maker! it said in a joyous burst of sparks. Soul-Taker! Ember-Heart!

"That's three names," she said. "Which is the truest?"

I have not yet decided, it said, then leapt the fence altogether to caper around her in cunning little flames.

Now that was a difficulty. To speak to it properly, Eliza had to know how it regarded itself. Sweat trickled down her neck, soaked the back of her dress. "Surely one of those names fits better than the others." She sidestepped an overeager flamelet that dashed at her bare feet. "Ember-Heart?"

Leaf-swallower! Sky-rider! Star-leaper! The fire's voice grew more exuberant, and sparks rained down upon her head.

She threw her arms over her hair and winced as the sparks ate through her sleeves. "Stop that!" Another dress spoiled. Ma would take the stick to her again.

"Girl," it said in hungry little curls of flame, "come closer."

Eliza felt its pull. She planted her feet in the burnt grass and clasped her hands behind her back. "No."

"Yes," it said, and blazed up for a second so bright, red-gold and glorious, she had to blink tears away.

Her hands tightened until her nails bit into her own flesh. "I won't," she said as calmly as she could manage. Fires sensed weakness, fed on fear nearly as well as dry tinder. "Stop throwing sparks at me."

If I stop, I'll die, it said pettishly.

"You don't have to die," she said. "I'm asking you nice as can be to just turn around and slip back out into the fields, eat up the stubble, like you was supposed to do in the first place. Stay away from the house and the barn and especially the children."

I have walked the clouds, it said, raced the wind, ridden the rain on the wildest of nights. You are only of the dull, solid ground and have no right to demand anything of me! And it took off racing toward the barn like it hadn't even noticed it before.

"Wait!" she called, but the fire heeded her not. She turned, heart pounding, to Trent who was watching from a safe distance. "This doesn't have the feel of a man-born fire. How did you start it?"

He wiped his face with a smudged bandana. "From my hearth, same as always."

"And your hearth?"

He stared at the fire eating its greedy way toward his barn. A horse shrilled in fear and cinders sailed in the morning breeze like black snow. "Hell, I don't know. We bank the embers at night and never let it go out, no more'n most folks. Go after it, girl, 'fore it gets my stock!"

Biting her lip, she picked up her skirts and hopped the smoking fence. Ahead of her, the fire was rearing up, all orange and yellow at the edges, red as blood at its heart. It roared with pleasure. "Hold!" she cried. "If you take this barn, the men of these parts will feel duty-bound to beat you back and then drown you into cold, sodden ashes."

The fire hesitated. And if I turn aside?"

"Then you can eat up all these lovely fields right down to the soil, until you are fat, satisfied embers that will glow red for days."

That's not enough, it said, for one who has danced the sky.

She edged closer, her heart touched. It tasted sweet and wild in the back of her mind, like honey from the heart of the woods. "You came of lightning, then?"

Birthed by stars! it cried, and leapt heavenward in a joyous swirl. Suckled by the sun! Fed by the moon! I shall not turn aside from good fuel and desist into dying embers for the sake of mere flesh!

"All things die," she said, "men and fires and rivers. Even stars fall to the ground when it comes their time."

But not me, it said. I shall range over this earth until I have tasted everything it holds, and then I shall turn around and do it all over again.

"Then start with these fields," she said and darted around the flames, so that she stood between them and the barn with its terrified animals. "Afterwards, if you're still hungry, you can come back."

It reared up before her, taking the shape of a man, lithe and golden with eyes that flickered and danced. You are fuel too, it said. Why don't I just embrace you?

Her lips cracked from the wall of radiated heat and the hem of her dress blackened, but she felt an odd stirring within, an answering warmth where no one had ever touched her before. "How foolish to settle for such a small tidbit as myself," she said, "when you can have all those fine overgrown fields."

With a laugh, the man-form dove back into the flames and then raced away from the barn, out across the stubble of last year's harvest. Black smoke roiled into the clear blue air. Eliza wiped a weary hand back over her forehead. The fire was doomed now, leaving behind a blackened trail of ash. It would never be able to return that way.

"You did it, girl!" Trent's hand clapped her shoulder. "That was amazing, worth a dozen suckling pigs, but--" He winked. "Don't go telling your pa I said so."

"No, sir," she said, and watched the fire cavort across the fields with a sense of loss. "Everything dies," she told herself in a fierce whisper, but something, somewhere deep inside her, wished this particular fire didn't have to, least ways, not yet.

# # #

Late that evening, when Pa lay across his bed like a fallen log and Ma was all curled up against him, Eliza eased out from under her thin quilt on the opposite side of the cabin. She let herself out the front door, clad in only her shift. If her twin brothers up in the loft woke as she was leaving, they'd think she was going out to the necessary. Likely as not, they wouldn't hear her though. They was powerful deep sleepers.

The night was fine, a tad chill, because spring was but barely begun, but the stars gleamed down like a handful of glass beads someone had scattered up there. She stood out in the yard, shivering. Were stars actually fires way up high in the sky, burning like torches to light the night? If so, why weren't they hot, like the sun, beating down on a body's head, and why didn't they ever go out? Why hadn't she ever felt them calling her like other sorts of fire?

Frogs croaked down at the cattail-choked pond. Their booming followed her as she skirted the scorched fields, which still smoked, the smell so acrid that breathing deep hurt her throat. The Trent fire had been herded toward the creek, which was wide enough to drown any flying sparks, and so had guttered out there on the grassy banks once the stubble had been all burned up.

This was not an ordinary fire, wrung out of flint by the hand of man. Someone had been careless, or perhaps even downright stupid. They had brought home fire born of lightning, which remembered the freedom of the sky. No one with any sense would have thought such could be put to homely tasks like boiling water and burning off fields. Wild-born fire could never be tamed. Everyone knew that.

She hunkered down by the creek bank, which was studded with young pines, and stared down at the star-dappled water with its sensuous eddies curling along the bank. Pa would switch her good, if he found out she'd sneaked out in the shank of the night, chores only a few hours away.

A few feet away, an ember popped in the burned grass. A tiny curl of flame darted outward, seeking fuel where there was none. She scrabbled for twigs, acorns, anything that would burn. A pinecone came to hand and she tossed it into the heart of the tiny flame. With a satisfied sigh, it licked at the scales. The scent of resin filled the air.

Why? the fire asked, its voice dry and reedy, nothing like the joyous rush of that afternoon.

"I--don't know," she said and hunched her knees up under her chin. That was the pure, unsullied truth of it. She had no idea what had brought her here, or why she was putting herself out for something so wild and altogether heedless.

You tricked me! It sparked angrily. And now you've come to watch me gutter and die.

"Lord, no!" Whatever had brought her, it wasn't that. She felt a hollowness in her breast at the very thought.

Then you wish to imprison me again, like those other pale sparks in your homes.

No, that wasn't it either. It pained her sorely to see such a magnificent wildfire brought low like this, starved until it was tiny and insignificant, one flicker away from being altogether extinguished. "I shouldn't have come," she said, "'specially since I got no idea what brung me."

The flames shifted, golden as the heart of the sun. The pinecone smoldered. You turned my mind aside from those lovely wooden buildings, trapped me down here against the creek where the water is too wide to leap and I can neither escape, nor reach more fuel.

"I had no choice," she said, stricken. "Wildfire and men cannot abide together."

There are always choices, it said. The pinecone cracked and fell open as the fire consumed its heart.

The breeze came up, tugged at the thick brown braid hanging down the middle of her back. Her hair would smell of smoke and pine when she returned home, as though she carried the scent of a lover's hands. As soon as Pa got a whiff of her, he would know she had been out gallivanting in the middle of the night. "I got to go," she said.

Go, then! The flames, though much diminished, reflected in the moving water.

Eliza stood up, gazing out at the creek. It was shallow here. She leaned down to dip a hand in the current, thinking. She had often waded here, where it was easy to ford.

The fire sighed as the interior of the pinecone crumbled into ash. With a sudden pang, she snatched up the rest and waded into the creek. Her bare feet struggled for purchase and she kept slipping on the stones. Halfway across, she fell to her knees, but held the smoldering cone high over her head. Just a few more feet, she told herself, though it was hard to make anything out by the few glints of reflected starlight on the water.

She struggled back onto her feet and waded on to the other bank where she tossed the remnants of the cone on the mossy shore. For a second, she held her breath, thinking it was too late, the fire was beyond rekindling. Then the moss curled, blackened. A thin line of orange flame licked out from the interior of the cone.

She sat back on her heels, both relieved and dismayed. What was she doing, setting wildfire loose in the woods? Pa would have her hide. All the farmers in these parts would, if they found out.

The fire said nothing more, only licked desultorily at the moss so that smoke curled gray against the black night sky.

"Don't you go growing too big," she said, "or they'll come after you again."

I will devour these woods! it threw at her defiantly, and when I am finished, I will leap back across this paltry water and roar over your pitiful houses, all you hold dear! Before I am done, your kin will lie blackened in my arms!

Her heart beat in her ears like thunder. She had erred, mightily, and now, like as not, the whole countryside would pay the price for her stupidity. Briefly, she considered carrying water in her cupped hands to douse the still-small fire, but it was racing along the moss, quick as lightning, engulfing the thicket, licking at the vines. Too late. Already far too late.

Horrified at what she had done, she fled back across the creek, and then the fields, her wet shift clinging to her legs like a second skin.

When she reached the cabin, Pa was sitting on a chair, tilted back against the wall just inside the door, waiting. He'd already cut a willow switch and held it ready in his hand. His face was lit by the flickering of the single candle on the bedside table. Poor tame creature that it was, its single flame leaned toward hungrily toward Eliza as she slipped inside.

"And just where you been out there half the night, missy?"

Eliza's heart raced. "At--the necessary, Pa."

He nodded so that the shadows danced across his grim face. "That how you come to be all wet from the knees down like that?"

She glanced at her soaked shift and flinched. "The grass," she mumbled. "It was wet. I--slipped."

He tapped the butt of switch against his hand. "And who else was out there with you, while you was doing all this slipping?"

"No one, Pa!"

Up in the loft, her twin ten-year-old brothers, Ike and Jonas, giggled. Pa glared up at them, then seized her arm and hustled her back outside into the night's cool black embrace.

It was so close to dawn, the birds was beginning to twitter in the trees. Pa shoved her down into the dew-soaked grass at his feet. "Who was you meeting, harlot? Who shamed me by putting his sweaty hands on my daughter?"

She hunched over her wrenched arm. "No one, Pa, I swear!" The scent of bruised grass rose from the ground and the chill wetness of it made her shiver. "I couldn't sleep, for thinking on that fire this afternoon, so I took me a little walk down by the creek, nary a man within two miles. T'weren't no harm in it!"

He flexed the switch between outstretched hands. "It's time you was married off, in fact past time, I reckon. Some girls are just naturally more hot-blooded than others, especially in your ma's line, but, mark my words, no decent, God-fearing man will lay out good money for damaged goods. I guess I'll just have to beat that disobedient streak out of you before you dishonor yourself beyond redemption!" He raised the switch.

"Pa, no!" She shielded her face with her arm, but he laid on her back, where the marks wouldn't show.

Ma appeared in the doorway, wrapped in her black go-to-meeting shawl, her face pale as the rising moon. So quiet she was, while the blows fell, so still, that Eliza might have thought her mother didn't care if Pa went on, or left off. But Ma cared. Eliza knew that full well. Her eyes urged him to go on until he'd beaten the badness plumb out of her wicked child.

"Fire has a way of getting into your heart, then eating it up," she said, when Pa's arm finally gave out. Her voice was flat as bread that had failed to rise. "Fire sneaks into your other parts too, makes you burn for what you can't have, what can't nobody have. You'd best leave off wanting now, before it's too late." Her voice had the ring of someone who knew what she was talking about. "My ma, she made the mistake of dallying with fire after fire. In the end, it ate her up, right down to the bone."

"I was just--walking." She wiped at her tear-stained face with the back of one trembling hand.

Her mother stared off over her head into the darkness. "That's why your shift is all black with soot and you smell like you been sleeping in the smoking shed?"

Pa broke the switch with a loud crack and tossed it into the wet grass. "Angus Trent made an offer for you this afternoon." His mouth was twisted up all grim. "I told him no, that I could get double, maybe triple what he could afford from some of them rich planter folk down by Richmond way. But won't nobody offer on a soiled dove, if'n word gets around." He spat into the grass by her hand. "So I 'spect I'll have to consider any and all offers in the coming days."

Ma turned and padded barefoot back into the cabin.

"You get in there and wash your face." He crossed his brawny arms. "And be thinking how you're gonna explain your lack of purity to your husband, come your wedding night."

Eliza's heart turned to ice as she struggled back onto her feet. "No, sir, Pa. I ain't marrying no one, young nor old."

"I didn't hear no one asking what you wanted!" Pa took a step toward her like he was going to backhand her. "You're too all-fired young and foolish to make a decision like that for yourself."

She slipped past him into the cabin, and then into her bed. Her back throbbed so that she was forced to lie down on her stomach. Over on the table, the candle flame whispered mindlessly to itself until Pa snuffed it out with the flat of his thumb.

Poor thing, she found herself thinking, only minutes old, and now gone as surely as though it had never existed it at all. She would never forget the golden purity of it.

Never.

# # #

The Widower Trent kept finding excuses to drop by the cabin over the next few days, and, once word got around that Pa was now entertaining offers, there was a steady parade of what folks called "gentlemen callers," not that her preference mattered one whit.

Ma watched her with an intensity that was unsettling and enlisted the aid of her tow-headed brothers. She was never alone for even a second, except in the necessary, and even then, one of them waited for her just outside.

And always in the back of her mind was the presence of the secret fire down on the other side of the creek, born of lightning, its ungovernable heart forged of the same stuff as stars. She was fairly confident it had heeded her advice about not gorging itself and growing too large, for there had been no smoke in the sky off in that direction, nor any word of alarm. She knew she should feel guilty for helping it survive, but somehow could not.

And so the days passed, as she scrubbed and fetched, hoed the kitchen garden to prepare the soil for the early potato sets, and almost, almost, got used to being looked over by prospective suitors like a prize heifer.

"Called back a fire what had already burned up a house?" one caller said and she lost herself in the memory of the dark powerful fire that had taken the Tierneys' cabin, how it had been prideful and overeager, filled to busting with the spent lives of three good people. It had called to her as she talked it down, cajoling her to join the rest of its victims, so that she need never be troubled by fragile flesh again. She shuddered.

"Told the blacksmith's fire just how hot to burn?" another exclaimed later that day. "I reckon that could be right useful. We have a fine forge on my plantation and a kiln too."

Her hand hesitated on the hoe. The blacksmith's fire had been lovely, fed with the best hickory, confident and proud, easily persuaded into banking itself and tempering the smith's horseshoes and plowshares at the proper temperature. The smith had been so grateful, he'd given her ma a big pale-blue mixing bowl, sent all the way from England. Like the sky, it was, early in the morning, when the light was pure and no one had gotten around to spoiling the day.

Her pa's voice rose, quarrelsome as always. She didn't bother to make out the words.

"Well, I brung the price with me," the newcomer answered. His voice was low and powerful, like the aftermath of thunder. "But I aim to see exactly what I'm buying. I don't take nothing on faith."

"Ask anyone in these parts," Pa said. "She's born to Fire sure enough. They've all seen what my girl can do."

"Mr. McMurphy, I wouldn't buy so much as a coon dog before I let it hunt, much less take a gal, said to have such a big talent, to wife. I want to see for myself."

Eliza looked up from the newly turned raw red earth and shaded her eyes with a trembling hand; being looked over like a brood mare made her dreadful skittish. The speaker was a young man, not more than five and twenty, with a head of hair black as a raven's wing, and eyes to match. He rode a blood-bay gelding with a deep chest and fine clean lines that spoke of money. One gloved hand lay propped over the other on his gleaming saddle horn.

"Strike a match, then," Pa said.

A smile tugged at the stranger's lips and looked good there. Eliza thought he was not so off-putting as the others who'd been through here in the last few days. "A match?" he said.

"Go on."

The young man pulled a box of matches out of his pocket and struck one against his boot.

The match flared, red and gold, a tiny perfect flame. Eliza felt its small life, already waning, its hunger for more. Poor thing, so mortal. The flame reached crazily for her.

Pa beamed. "See?"

"Well, I'll be damned!" The stranger shook the match out just before it burned down to his fingers.

Eliza pressed her hands over her eyes, sickened.

The saddle creaked as he turned back to her. "What's your name, girl?"

"Eliza," she said without looking.

"And you're right partial to fire, like your pa says?"

"Reckon so," she said. "Least ways, more'n most people." She raised her chin then and looked him full in the face, seeing a strength, as well as a kindness that had not been in any of the others who'd come calling. He had youth on his side, as well as not being hard to look upon. His face was lean and angular, his brow wide. If Pa made her go with him, she supposed she could do far worse.

He struck another match and she could not look away from the tiny doomed flame. "Don't!"

He cocked his head, then swung down from the bay, still holding the lighted match out. "Why not?"

"Because it's cruel!" She snatched the match from his hand and rushed inside the cabin to cast it onto the hearth fire. The flame merged with the embers keeping the morning's coffee warm, no longer single, but better off than sure extinction.

He followed her, boots clumping. The smell of horse and well-soaped leather came with him. "Why'd you do that?"

She wrapped her arms around her chest. "Because it was dying." The flames danced up in the hearth, quietly joyous. She stooped to add kindling. "I hate it when they go out. It's so--" Her voice trailed away. "It's terrible sad."

"But it's not as if fire were truly alive," he said softly, "not like folks and dogs and grass. Fire has its allotted time, like all of God's creation, and that time is meant to be short."

"Who are you to say that?" She knuckled a tear out of the corner of her eye.

"Fire used to run in my line," he said, "several generations back, but it didn't breed true. I've heard tales at my grandmam's knee of how each of her five younguns was born with the knack, but lost it as they grew."

The thought of losing her connection was horrifying. Could that happen to her? How could they bear it? She whirled and dashed back out of the cabin, past the twins, who were quarreling over who would hold the stranger's horse, and Pa, who was toting a bale of hay on his shoulder out to the heifers in the corral. Ma stared after her, mouth agape, hands mired in sopping wash.

Eliza's slim bare feet made no sound in the springy spring grass, nor left any prints by which to trail her. "I ain't never going back, never!" she murmured over and over under her breath, like a truth that had to be witnessed until the whole world acknowledged it. Finally, she slowed. There had been no shouts behind her for some time now. Noon was coming on. She could feel her stomach hollowing; she'd worked out in the garden since dawn with nothing more than a stale biscuit to tide her over.

The wind was coming up. Dark-bottomed clouds scudded across the sky. The smell of rain rode heavy in the air. She waded into the creek to bathe her hot face, then glimpsed her distorted reflection in the water. A brown-haired girl looked back, eyes gray as smoke, cheeks red with exertion. There had to be more to life than doing chores and being switched, when she was contrary, and then bearing babies to some man, she thought. Trading Pa for another man, who would expect even more of her, was not at all to her fancy.

A wisp of smoke drifted across the creek, scented with pine and hawthorn, grass and briar. She breathed it in before she thought, then looked up, her pulse racing. "Ember-heart?"

I have not taken a name. The reply was faint, but not the least bit weak.

She splashed to the mossy bank on the far side and then clambered out and wrung the water from her skirts. "I wondered where you'd got to."

Safe for the moment and mightily bored, came the answer. I am meant for so much more than this that safe might as well be dead.

"Don't you go saying that!" She got to her feet and padded into the dark, cool spaces between gray-barked trees. The wind gusted and made the branches rattle.

I can never return to the skies, it said. Once fallen, we stars must burn ourselves out here amongst the rocks and dirt until nothing remains but cinders.

"Then you wasn't just born of a star." She edged around a charred thicket; surely it had come this way. "You was once a star yourself?"

Come closer, it said slyly, and I will show you.

The blood pounded in her ears. It was all-out foolish, venturing so near. Fires was crafty, cunning creatures, more appetite than sense, and this'un was wilder than any fire she'd ever known. Her fingers grasped a slender sapling and it bent with her weight. "How'm I to call you?"

Ash, it said, and a smoky sadness drifted on the breeze.

"Wasn't you going to eat up the whole countryside?" She followed tendrils of smoke through the trees, then down a gully. Last year's leaves rustled underfoot and gave off the musk of earth mixed with rot. "I thought you was gonna lay waste to everything between here and Camden Mills."

I have not the heart for it anymore. The fire sounded closer now. I have nearly forgotten what it was like to cleave the skies.

She broached a small clearing where tender green shoots poked their heads up through the charred soil. This area had evidently burned off a few days ago. Just beyond, she glimpsed a bright shaft of naked flame, weaving, writhing, sinuous as a snake. Its brilliant yellow-orange coils formed, broke apart, merged, an elegant dance without end. She could not look away from it, could not even think.

You feel pale, it said, almost without substance. Have they no fuel in that tasty wooden box you call home?

Eliza shook herself, and turned away with a laugh, arms hugged around her chest. "I ran away," she said, "before lunch was spread."

Ran away?

"A man came," she said, "to take me to wife." But then she could not think of how to explain. Hot tears trickled down her cheeks, a surprise, because she'd thought she'd left such foolishness behind with dolls and pinafores. "It's hard to be born with this gift. Folk never see you for yourself. They only want what you can do."

And if this man took you, it said, would you then mate?

Farmbred, she had seen enough in the barnyard to have some idea what it was husbands and wives were supposed to do together. She blushed and pressed her cheek to the scorched bark of an oak. Flakes of ash drifted to the ground. "Well, I don't want a husband, so it don't matter one whit."

Fires mate, it said, come together in heat and roar and draft to make something between them much finer and more all-consuming than ever we could manage on our own.

"Don't say that!" She found herself trembling.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. You do hunger, it said, but not for fuel, as I first thought. For that which no creature crafted of flesh can ever give you.

"No!" She whirled and headed blindly back toward the creek. It had been a terrible mistake to come here. She must go home, take her switching, apologize to the young man. Sturdy and clear-eyed, he was the best of all who had come asking, probably far better than she deserved. Maybe it wasn't too late--

With a crackle, flames streaked from behind and reared up before her, blocking the way. Orange and gold and yellow, shot through with red, so beautiful, delicate and strong at the same time, warm as the sun beating down on her face, soft as the breeze from a butterfly's wings. Like flowers, she thought, sprouting up to glory in the light.

What do you want? it asked.

She backed away, hands clenched into fists. "I--don't know!"

You must reach out and take what you desire. The fire's patterns were a kaleidoscope, weaving and changing before her eyes could fully focus on the one before her, forever new.

Fire kindled within her, danced in answer, so that the two of them, flesh and flame, were mirror images, opposites and yet identical. Behind her, across the creek, she felt the stonelike chill of all she had left behind, a yawning chasm of inert fuel. Before her was life, warm and fluid, brief though it might be.

She stretched trembling hands out, soaking the warmth up. When had she become so cold? Had it overtaken her a moment before, or had she lived in the world of men chilled from the instant of her birth and never realized?

Lie with me, it said, so that we might have joy of each other before what is left of the fuel in this place is exhausted and I subside into ashes.

She stared. "Surely you know better than to think I could come that near!"

Give me your hand.

Conniving beast, she thought. It wanted to devour her to give itself another few minutes of life, then leave behind her charred bones to be gnawed by foxes, hardly enough even to give a decent Christian burial. She shook her head.

Then go, it said, and let me die in peace.

Thunder rumbled again, closer this time. Several cold raindrops struck her in the face. She watched the fire dwindle until it was just a bright glimmer in the grass. "No," she whispered and leaned down. It was still so beautiful, hypnotic. A terrible loneliness overwhelmed her, far worse than she had ever felt watching even the loveliest flame fade. She stretched out a finger to it. "Don't leave me."

In answer, the tendril of flame twined sinuously around her finger like a vine. She flinched, but it did not burn; the sensation was like being danced upon by tiny feet. And the warmth! Rather than searing, as she had feared, it sank into her body like summer sun beating down on her skin, deeper and deeper until she glowed with well being and joy, warmed from within as she had never been before.

Pleasure, electric and sweet, coursed through her body until she could not stand still and the two of them danced through the thicket, along the banks of the creek, wove between the trees. Everywhere she left smoking footprints behind in the grass.

The wind whipped her face now. Leaves turned inside out so that their pale undersides were turned to the sky. Lightning flashed, followed by the crack of thunder, much closer than before. She felt its wildness up there, calling to her, to the two of them now combined. She ached with the fire's loss of the skies, of that sweet freedom. To be abandoned here, amidst rocks and dirt, so that no matter how much fuel she consumed, she, who had been born of stars, would eventually gutter and die. That was very bitter. No wonder lightning-born fires were always so angry and wild.

Rain beat down, blown sideways by the wind. The drops tasted of iron, chill and glorious on her tongue. Lightning blazed again. An oak across the creek sheered in two and crashed into the water. A tiny fire blazed up in the heart of the fallen oak and she felt its confusion, its shock at being stranded here.

So it was for me, the fire said. So it still is.

To be a child of the skies and marooned like this to die . . . so sad. Her tears mixed with the rain pelting her face.

"Eliza!"

She heard her name and looked up. Pa beckoned to her from across the creek and the young man was beside him.

"You get across this stream, girl, before you get yourself struck dead!" Pa was angrier than she had ever seen him.

The fire appeared again, dancing over her hands in tiny melancholy flickers. Go, it said. Leave me here. I am fated to be extinguished in this forsaken place, but you are not.

She pressed the flame to her heart. "No!"

"Lordamighty!" her father said. "Look at that! She's on fire!"

In answer, the young man plunged into the creek and waded fiercely toward her. Eliza turned and fled back through the trees. He was fast though and she heard his boots crashing behind her.

Climb, said the fire, so that I might be closer to the sky when the end comes.

She leaped for the lowest branch of a huge sycamore and pulled herself up, her bare toes struggling for purchase on the bark. The wind sang against her face as she climbed and she almost could understand what it was saying, even though she had not been born to Air.

The young man stopped beneath the tree. "Eliza!" he called. "Come down from there! That's dangerous in a storm like this!" Her name sounded strangely sweet in his deep voice.

Thunder cracked and the air reeked of burnt iron. The breath was ragged in her lungs as she continued to climb. Rain beat against her and the increasingly slender limbs were slick, but the sky was so close now. Within her, she shared the fire's rising excitement.

One last time, it said and emerged into her fingers again, reaching.

She was as high as she could go now, the limbs barely sturdy enough to take her weight. She wrapped her legs around the trunk and stretched out her arms to the sky and the clouds and behind them, unseen, the stars.

There was a flash, so bright, that, even though her eyes closed reflexively, she could still see it through her eyelids. The sky blazed with electric white fire and the flames on her fingers leaped to join it. She felt a great pain as though something were being torn out of her. She tumbled backwards and fell. The first branch struck her full against the temple. She did not note the second.

# # #

She woke to someone's arm cradling her aching head and a spoonful of warm chicken broth at her lips. Lightning still crackled behind her eyes. Her lips felt numb. "Ma?" she croaked.

"No," a deep voice said, "it's Aaron. You must eat."

She blinked up at the concerned face of the young man who had come calling after her. She hurt all over, especially her left leg and the palms of her hands, which were heavily bandaged. She was so cold, her teeth were chattering. "What--happened?"

"Swallow," Aaron said firmly and put the spoon to her lips.

She did. The mellow broth tasted good.

Aaron refilled the spoon. "I'm afraid it will be a while before you can hold a spoon again, but the doctor said the burns will heal clean. You should have full use of your hands."

She tried to turn her head to look for Ma and the boys, but even that small effort exhausted her. What she could see of this room was large and airy though, too much so to be her own cabin. "Where are we?"

"After the doc set your leg and bandaged your hands," he said, "I swathed you in blankets and brought you in my wagon to our plantation. My mother will tend you, when I am busy, but I mean to see after you myself, when I'm able."

"And Pa?" She tried not to think of how angry he'd been.

"Paid in full," he said, "so now you and I can be married."

His dark-brown eyes were steady. "I will treat you well, Eliza, I promise."

She felt as though ice had crystallized in her every joint, that she would never be warm again. "But you don't even know me."

"I know your way with fire is fine and true," he said, "and, to be honest, I've taken a fancy to you." He tenderly touched her face. "You are mine now."

# # #

And so, as soon as she could hobble upright on a crutch, they were married. Aaron proved a kind and gentle husband, considerate in most ways and no worse than most men in the rest. The two of them never spoke again of the burn scars on her palms or how she had risked her life to return a wildling fire to the stars.

In return, she instructed the plantation forge to burn properly and the kiln how to fire the pottery. She presided over the burn-off blazes out in the fields, when the stubble was torched in the spring, and prevented them from running wild.

In time, she birthed three fine children of her own, two boys, raven-haired as their father, and a sweet girlchild, none of whom had her way with fire. She watched them grow, honored her husband, kept her house in splendid order, and was known far and wide as a good neighbor to all.

But though she thrived, though she had all any mortal woman could want, she was never really warm again, not in her most secret places. Each spring, when thunderstorms rumbled across the countryside, she sat out on the split-rail fence, face upturned to the swirling silver-gray clouds, and remembered how a star had once danced inside her heart, how, for a breathtaking second, she too had strode toward the stars on crackling legs of fire.