A baker's apprentice invokes the fire demon hidden in her hearth to find her parents after she destroys her village.

I witnessed my first burning when I was seven. There’s always one in a village: a person who is too. Too ugly or pretty, too rich or poor, too manly or girlish, too wise or stupid. It doesn’t really matter, what they are. It doesn’t even matter who they are. What matters is that they are different. 

In Weir, it was Gregor. He was well liked, once. I’d even heard he was handsome, with his bright green eyes and copper skin. But then his wife died, and his daughter married a man from a village beyond the Greenshield. And then, Gregor was different, in maybe the worst sort of way: he was too alone. 

He tended his crops like the rest of us. He always had a sweet for me, clutched in gnarled fingers with knuckles so thick they looked more like the knobs on his cane than hands. It got worse as he grew older. He stopped drinking with the men at night. Instead, he doddered around the village, squeaking at shadows and squawking nonsense, until one day he squeaked and squawked himself right onto a funeral pyre. 

We always use wood in the Greenshield. There’s so much of it about, and no one wants the trouble of gathering rocks for a stoning or fishing out the body after a drowning. 

What I remember most was the smell: horrible and oily,  with the sound of screams over the pop and sizzle as the fat ran down and hit the embers. What I remembered second wasn’t the look – Mama wouldn’t let me look – but how my mother’s shaking hands were threaded through my hair so tight it hurt. I wouldn’t understand until later what my parents knew at Gregor’s burning: it wasn’t a matter of if our neighbors would turn on me, it was a matter of when.