Fire (Graceling Realm #2)(12)
Author: Kristin Cashore

Now she had two jobs: to get herself and her horse back to the gates, if she could; and to stop the soldiers from doing something heroic and foolish when they saw what she'd done. She spurred Small forward. She slammed the thought at Brigan as hard as she could, not manipulation, which she knew would be futile - only a message.If you don't continue onward to Grey Haven this instant, I will have done this for nothing.

She knew he hesitated. She couldn't see him or sense his thoughts, but she could feel that his mind was still there, on his horse, not moving. She supposed she could manipulate his horse, if she had to.

Let me do this, she begged him. My life is mine to risk, as yours is yours.

His consciousness disappeared into the tunnel.

And now it was the speed of Fire and Small versus the swarm descending upon her from the north and from above. Under her, Small was desperate and wonderful. He had never flown so fast.

She bent herself low in her saddle. When the first raptor cut into her shoulder with its claws she threw her bow backwards at them; it was useless now, a stick of wood in her way. The quiver on her back might serve as a kind of armour. She took her spear and stuck it behind her, one more thing for the birds to have to work around. She clenched her knife in her hand and stabbed back whenever she felt a claw or a beak jabbing into her shoulder or her scalp. She didn't feel pain anymore. Only noise, that might be her own head screaming, and brightness, that was her hair and her blood, and wind that was Small's headlong speed. And arrows suddenly, flying very close past her head.

A claw caught her neck and yanked, pulled her high in her seat, and it occurred to her that she was about to die. But then an arrow struck the raptor that dragged at her, and more arrows followed it, and she looked ahead and saw the gates very near, cracked open, and Archer in the aperture, shooting faster than she'd known he could shoot.

And then he stepped aside and Small slammed through the crack, and behind her, monster bodies slammed against the closing doors. They screamed, scraped. And she left it to Small to figure out where to go and when to stop. And people were around her, and Roen was reaching for her reins, and Small was limping, she could tell; and she looked to his back and his rump and his legs and they were torn apart, sticky with blood. She cried out in distress at the sight of it. She vomited.

Someone grabbed her under the arms and pulled her out of her saddle. Archer, rigid and shaking, looking and feeling like he wanted to kill her. Then Archer went bright, and turned to black.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHE WOKE TO stinging pain, and to the sense of a hostile mind moving down the corridor outside her room. A stranger's mind. She tried to sit up, and gasped.

'You should rest,' a woman said from a chair along the wall. Roen's healer.

Fire ignored the advice and pushed herself up gingerly. 'My horse?'

'Your horse is in about the same shape you're in,' the healer said. 'He'll live.'

'The soldiers? Did any of them die?'

'Every man made it into the tunnel alive,' she said. 'A good many monsters died.'

Fire sat still, waiting for the pounding of her head to slow, so that she could get up and investigate the suspicious mind in the hallway. 'How badly am I wounded?'

'You'll have scars on your back and your shoulders and under your hair for the rest of your life. But we have all the medicines here that they have in King's City. You'll heal cleanly, without infection.'

'Can I walk?'

'I don't recommend it; but if you must, you can.'

'I just need to check on something,' she said, breathless from the effort of sitting. 'Will you help me into my robe?' And then, noticing the skimpy sheath she wore: 'Did Lord Archer see my wrists?'

The woman came to Fire with a soft, white robe and helped her to hang it over her burning shoulders.

'Lord Archer hasn't been in.'

Fire decided to focus on the agony of putting her arms into her sleeves, rather than trying to calculate how furious Archer must be, if he hadn't even been in.

THEMIND SHE sensed was near, unguarded, and consumed with some underhanded purpose. All good reasons for it to have drawn Fire's attention, though she wasn't certain what she hoped to achieve by limping down this corridor in pursuit of it, willing to absorb whatever emotions it leaked accidentally but unwilling to take hold of it and plumb it for its true intentions.

It was a guilty mind, furtive.

She could not ignore it. I'll just follow, she thought to herself. I'll see where he goes.

She was astonished a moment later when a servant girl observing her progress stopped and offered an arm.

'My husband was at the back of that charge, Lady Fire,' the girl said. 'You saved his life.'

Fire hobbled down the hallway on the arm of the girl, happy to have saved someone's life if it meant that now she had a person to keep her from flopping onto the floor. Every step brought her closer to her strange quarry. 'Wait,' she whispered finally, leaning against the wall. 'Whose rooms are behind this wall?'

'The king's, Lady Fire.'

Fire knew with utter certainty then that a man was in the king's compartments who should not be. Haste, fear of discovery, panic: it all came to her.

A confrontation was beyond her current strength even to consider; and then down the hall, in his own room, she sensed Archer. She grasped the servant girl's arm. 'Run to Queen Roen and tell her a man is in the king's rooms who has no place there,' she said.

'Yes, Lady. Thank you, Lady,' the girl said, and scampered away. Fire continued down the hallway alone.

When she reached Archer's room she leaned in his doorway. He stood at the window and stared into the covered courtyard, his back to her. She tapped on his mind.

His shoulders stiffened. He spun around and stalked toward her, not once looking at her. He brushed past her and stormed on down the hall. The surprise of it made her dizzy.

It was for the best. She was not in a state to face him, if he was as angry as that.

She went into his room and sat on a chair, just for a moment, to still her throbbing head.

IT TOOK HER ages to get to the stables, despite a number of helping hands; and when she saw Small she couldn't stop herself. She began to cry.

'Now, don't fret, Lady Fire,' Roen's animal healer said. 'It's all superficial wounds. He'll be right as a rainbow in a week's time.'

Right as a rainbow, with his entire back half stitched together and bandaged and his head hanging low.

He was happy to see her, even though it was her doing. He pressed himself against the stall door, and when she went inside he pressed himself against her.

'I reckon he's been worrying about you,' the healer said. 'He's perked up now you're here.'

I'm sorry, Fire thought to him, her arms around his neck as best she could.I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

She guessed that the fifty men would remain in the Little Greys until the Third Branch arrived and drove the raptor monsters high again. The stables would be quiet until then.

And so Fire stayed with Small, leaning against him, collecting his spit in her hair and using her mind to ease his own sense of his stinging pain.

SHEWAS CURLED up on a fresh bed of hay in the corner of Small's stall when Roen arrived.

'Lady,' Roen said, standing outside the stall door, her eyes soft. 'Don't move,' she said as Fire tried to sit up. 'The healer told me you should rest, and I suppose resting in here is the best we can hope for. Can I bring you anything?'

'Food?'

Roen nodded. 'Anything else?'

'Archer?'

Roen cleared her throat. 'I'll send Archer to you once I'm convinced he won't say something insufferable.'

Fire swallowed. 'He's never been this angry with me before.'

Roen bent her face and considered her hands on the stall door. Then she came in and crouched before Fire. Just once she reached out and smoothed Fire's hair. She held a bit of it in her fingers, contemplating it carefully, very still on her knees in the hay, as if she were trying to work out the meaning of something.

'Beautiful girl,' she said. 'You did a good thing today, whatever Archer thinks. Next time, mention it to someone beforehand so we're better prepared.'

'Archer never would have let me do it.'

'No. But I would have.'

For a moment their eyes met. Fire understood that Roen meant what she said. She swallowed. 'Any word from Grey Haven?'

'No, but the Third has been spotted from the lookout, so we may see our fifty men back as soon as this evening.' Roen brushed off her lap and rose to her feet, all business again. 'Incidentally, we found no one in the king's rooms. And if you insist on doting on your horse in this manner I suppose the least we can do is bring you pillows and blankets. Get some sleep in here, will you? Both of you, girl and horse. And I hope you'll tell me someday, Fire, why you did it.'

With a swirl of skirts and a click of the latch, Roen was gone. Fire closed her eyes and considered the question.

She'd done it because she'd had to. An apology for the life of her father, who'd created a world of lawlessness where towns like Grey Haven fell under the attack of looters. And she'd done it to show Roen's son that she was on his side. And also to keep him alive.

FIRE WAS ASLEEP in her room that night when all fifty men clattered back from Grey Haven. The prince and the king wasted no time, departing south immediately with the Third. When Fire woke the next morning they were gone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CANSREL HAD ALWAYS let Fire into his mind to practise changing his thoughts. He'd encouraged it, as part of her training. She went, but every time it was like a waking nightmare.

She'd heard tales of fishermen who grappled for their lives with water monsters in the Winter Sea.

Cansrel's mind was like an eel monster, cold, slick, and voracious. Whenever she reached for it she felt clammy coils wrapping around her and pulling her under. She struggled madly, first simply to take hold of it; then to transform it into something soft and warm. A kitten. A baby.

The warming of Cansrel's mind took enormous burning energy. Then calm, to soothe the bottomless appetite, and then she would begin to push at its nature with all her strength, to shape thoughts there that Cansrel would never have on his own. Pity for a trapped animal. Respect for a woman. Contentment. It required all her strength. A mind slippery and cruel resists change.

Cansrel never said so, but Fire believed his favourite drug was to have her in his mind, manhandling him into contentment. He was used to thrills, but contentment was a novelty, a state Cansrel seemed never to achieve except by her help. Warmth and softness two things that rarely touched him. He never, ever refused Fire when she asked permission to enter. He trusted her, for he knew that she used her power for good and never to harm.

He only forgot to take into consideration the broken line separating good from harm.

TODAY THERE WAS no entering Archer's mind. He was shutting Fire out. Not that it particularly mattered, for she never entered Archer's mind to alter it, only to test the waters, and she had no interest in the nature of his waters today. She was not going to apologise and she was not going to capitulate to the fight he wanted to have. Not that she would have to stretch far to find something to accuse him of.