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rekindle the dead fires.”
    The torchbearers did as she bid them and soon new flames were burning in the ashes of the old. But they too were small and uncertain. Ratha knew that if the rain fell harder it would quench them as easily as it had the others.
    “Give the creature more wood,” she told the fire-tenders as she paced from one outlying guard-flame to the next. “Make it strong and fierce.”
    She stopped, watching two Firekeepers struggling to comply. One brought more wood while the other fed the flame. He crouched a safe distance away from the fire’s nest, tossing in twigs with a quick turn of his head. The fire flared briefly as it consumed each twig and then died down.
    “No,” Ratha said impatiently. “Use larger pieces and place them; don’t throw them.”
    With an uneasy glance at her, the Firekeeper seized a thick branch in his jaws, approached the flame as close as he dared and flipped the wood in. It crashed into the fire, destroying the nest of carefully laid kindling and sending up a shower of sparks.
    Ratha shouldered the Firekeeper aside and dragged the branch out. Carefully she coaxed the flattened remains of her creature back to life and, once it was burning steadily on fresh kindling, she gave it thicker wood.
    Each time she placed a branch in its nest, the fire-creature’s breath blasted her face and stung her eyes with heat and cinders. It roared its rage in her ears, licked at her jowls and threatened to consume her whiskers. She had to force herself to lay the wood in position, however much her jowls hurt or her instincts screamed at her to leap away.
    When she finished, she backed away thankfully and rubbed her sooty muzzle against her foreleg. The two torchbearers were watching her with mingled awe and resentment. “That is how it must be done,” she said. “If you are quick and sure, you will keep your whiskers.”
    The Firekeeper who had nearly destroyed the Red Tongue’s nest stalked over to the leaping flame with more wood in his jaws. He faced the fire-creature, hesitated and lunged forward. He dropped the branch in and scrambled back, his belly white with wet ash, his eyes frightened and defiant.
    “Feeding your creature is not easy when it grows so large and wild,” he said with a shudder.
    “If you seek to tame the Red Tongue by keeping it small, it will die in the rain,” Ratha said, trying to be patient.
    “When it is fierce, it eats my whiskers,” retorted the Firekeeper. “Look how short they are. I can no longer find my way in the dark.”
    “If you are thinking only of your whiskers and not of your duty, you will burn yourself. Try doing it the way I have showed you.”
    “I will, clan leader,” he said, but Ratha could see in his eyes and his barely controlled trembling that his wish to obey had to fight his terror of the fire. This fear was not an easy thing to put aside as Ratha knew well.  
    “The more you practice, the better you will become and then you need not be afraid,” she said, trying to smooth the harshness from her voice. The Firekeeper looked back at her as if he knew her words were half a lie, but he said only, “Yes, clan leader.”
    Ratha jogged away from his guard-fire and went past others, stopping to see how other torchbearers were faring. What she saw was nothing new, but it still filled her with dismay. Despite their training and experience, many of the fire-tenders were timid, approaching their fire with tightly shut eyes and flattened ears. They poked wood into the flame with tentative thrusts and snatched their paws back. The torchbearers’ smells told Ratha, in a way that their appearance could not, how little they trusted the capricious creature they had to guard.
    The moon shone through a break in the clouds, glimmering on the wet grass in front of Ratha. Ahead, under the oak, the Red Tongue danced and crackled, offering its warmth to several of the Named who had gathered around it. She crept in under the tree, shook herself