Fire (Graceling Realm #2)(8)
Author: Kristin Cashore

She stretched onto her toes to kiss his cheek, but he intercepted her and began to kiss her mouth, gently.

She let him, for just a moment. Then she extricated herself and left the room.

CHAPTER FOUR

FIRE'S HORSE WAS named Small, and he was another of Cansrel's gifts. She had chosen him over all the other horses because his coat was dun and drab and because of the quiet way he'd followed her back and forth, the pasture fence between them, the day she'd gone to one of Cutter's shows to choose.

The other horses had either ignored her or become jumpy and agitated around her, pushing against each other and snapping. Small had kept on the outside of the bunch of them, where he was safe from their jostling. He'd trotted along beside Fire, stopping when she stopped, blinking at her hopefully; and whenever she'd walked away from the fence he had stood waiting for her until she came back.

'Small, his name is,' Cutter had said, 'because his brain's the size of a pea. Can't teach him anything.

He's no beauty, either.'

Cutter was Cansrel's horse dealer and his favourite monster smuggler. He lived in the western Great Greys and, once a year, carted his merchandise all over the kingdom in large caravans, showing his wares and selling them. Fire did not like him. He was not kind to his animals. And his mouth was wide and loose and his eyes were always settling on her in a way that felt proprietary and disgusting, a way that made her want to curl up into a ball to cover herself.

He was also wrong about Small. Fire knew the look of stupid eyes and the feel of a fatuous mind, in animals and in men, and she had sensed none of this with Small. What she had sensed was the way the gelding trembled and balked whenever Cutter came near, and the way the trembling stopped when Fire touched him, and whispered her greetings. Fire was used to being wanted for her beauty, but she was not used to being needed for her gentleness.

When Cutter and Cansrel had walked away for a moment, Small had strained his neck over the fence and rested his chin on her shoulder. She'd scratched him behind the ears, and he'd made small blissful noises and breathed spit onto her hair. She had laughed, and a door in her heart had opened. Apparently there was such a thing as love at first sight; or love at first spit, anyway.

Cutter had told her she was daft, and Cansrel had tried to talk her into a stunning black mare that suited her own flamboyant beauty. But it was Small she'd wanted, and Small that Cutter had delivered three days later. Shaking, terrified, because Cutter in his inhumanity had stuck the horse into a wagon along with a mountain lion monster Cansrel had purchased, with nothing but what amounted to a shaky arrangement of wooden slats separating them. Small had come out of the wagon rearing and screaming, and Cutter had stung him with his whip and called him a coward.

Fire had run to the horse, choked with indignation, and put all the passionate calm feeling she could into soothing his mind; and she'd told Cutter furiously, in the kind of words she never used, just what she thought of his way with his goods.

Cutter had laughed and told her she was doubly pleasing when she was angry - which had, of course, been a grave mistake on his part, for anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have known better than to treat Lady Fire with disrespect in the very presence of her father. Fire had pulled Small quickly to the side, because she'd known what was coming. First Cansrel had caused Cutter to grovel, and apologise, and weep. Then he'd caused him to believe himself to be in agonising pain from imaginary injuries. Finally he'd switched to the real thing, kicking Cutter calmly in the groin, repeatedly, until Cansrel was satisfied he understood.

Small, in the meantime, had gone quiet at Fire's first touch, and had done everything, from that first moment, that she had ever asked.

Today as she stood at Small's side, dressed warmly against the dawn, Archer came to her and offered his hand. She shook her head and grabbed the pommel one-handed. She pulled herself up, catching her breath against the pain.

She'd had only seven days of rest, and her arm, uncomfortable now, would be aching by the end of this ride. But she was determined not to be treated like an invalid. She sent a swelling of serenity to Small, a gentle plea for him to ride smoothly for her today. It was another reason Small and she were well-suited to each other. He had a warm, receptive mind.

'Give my regards to the lady queen,' Lord Brocker said from his chair in the middle of the footpath.

'Tell her, if the day ever comes when she has a moment of peace, to come visit an old friend.'

'We shall,' Archer said, pulling on his gloves. He reached behind his head to touch the fletchings of the arrows on his back, as he always did before mounting his horse - as if he had ever once in his life forgotten his quiver - and then swung himself into his own saddle. He waved the guards forward, and Fire behind them. He fell into place behind Fire, and they were off.

They rode with eight soldiers. It was more than Archer would have taken had he gone alone, but not many more. No one in the Dells travelled with fewer than six others, unless he was desperate or suicidal or had some perverse reason for wanting to be attacked by footpads. And the disadvantage of Fire's presence, as an injured rider and a popular target, was nearly negated by her ability to sense both the proximity and the attitude of the minds of approaching strangers.

Away from home, Fire did not have the luxury of avoiding the use of her mental power. Generally, minds did not draw her attention equally unless she was looking for them. A mind's palpability depended on its strength, its purpose, its familiarity, nearness, openness, awareness of her presence, and a host of other factors. On this journey she must not allow anyone to slip her notice; she would search the surroundings constantly and, if she could, take hold of every mind she encountered until she was sure of its intentions.

She would hide her own mind with extra care from the recognition of monster predators. The roads were too dangerous otherwise, for everyone.

Queen Roen's fortress was a long day's ride away. The guards set a brisk pace, skirting the edges of the town, close enough to hear roosters crowing but far enough not to be seen. The best way for a traveller to get himself robbed or murdered was to make the fact of his travel public.

There were tunnels under the mountains that would have taken them faster to Roen, but these also they planned to avoid. At least in the north, the steep paths above ground were safer than the unknown that lurked in the dark.

Of course Fire's hair was tightly covered, and her riding clothes plain. Still, she hoped they would encounter no one. Predator monsters tended to overlook the charms of a face and a body if they saw no interesting hair, but this was not the way of men. If she was seen, she'd be scrutinised. Once scrutinised, she'd be recognised, and the eyes of strangers were never comfortable.

THE ABOVE-GROUND route to the fortress of Queen Roen was a high and treeless one, for mountains called the Little Greys divided the land of Fire and her neighbours from the land of the lady queen. 'Little' because they were passable by foot and because they were more easily inhabitable than the Great Greys that formed the Dells' western and southern border with the unknown land.

Hamlets balanced on top of cliffs in the Little Greys or crouched in the valleys near tunnel openings -

rough-hewn, cold, colourless, and stark. Fire had watched these distant hamlets and wondered about them every time she'd travelled to Roen. Today she saw that one of them was missing.

'There used to be a village on that cliff,' she said, pointing. And then she made sense of it. She saw the broken rock foundations of the old buildings sticking out of the snow, and at the foot of the cliff on which the village had stood, a pile of rocks, wood, and rubble. And crawling all over the pile, monster wolves, and circling above it, monster raptors.

A clever new trick for the looters, to throw an entire village off a mountain, stone by stone. Archer swung down from his horse, his jaw hard. 'Fire. Are there any living human minds in that pile?'

Many living minds, but none of them human. A good many rats, monster and ordinary. Fire shook her head.

Archer did the shooting, because they hadn't any arrows to waste. First he shot the raptors. Then he wound a rag around an arrow, and set the rag on fire, and shot it into the pile of monsters and decay. He shot flaming arrow after flaming arrow into the pile until it was fully alight.

Flame was the way, in the Dells, to send the bodies of the dead where their souls had gone, into nothingness. To respect that all things ended, except the world.

The party moved on quickly, because on the wind the stench was terrible.

THEY WERE MORE than halfway to their destination when they saw a sight to bolster their spirits: the King's Army, bursting from a hole in the base of a cliff far below them, and thundering across a plain of flat rock. They stopped on their high path to watch. Archer pointed to the front of the charge.

'King Nash is with them,' he said. 'See him? The tall man, on the roan, near the standard-bearer. And that's his brother beside him, the commander, Prince Brigan, with the longbow in his hand, on the black mare. In brown, see him? Dells, isn't it a magnificent sight?'

Fire had never seen Nax's sons before, and she had certainly never beheld such a large division of the King's Army. There were thousands of them - five thousand in this branch, Archer said when she asked

- some with mail flashing, others in the army's dark grey uniform, horses strong and fast, flowing across the land like a river. The one with the longbow in his hand, the prince and commander, moved to the right side and fell back; spoke to a man or two in the middle of the column; surged forward again to the front.

They were so far away that they were small as mice, but she could hear the thud of the hooves of some five thousand horses, and feel the enormous presence of some ten thousand consciousnesses. And she could see the colours of the flag hoisted by the standard-bearer who stayed close to the prince's side wherever he went: a wooded valley, grey and green, with a blood red sun in an orange sky.

Prince Brigan turned in his saddle suddenly then, his eyes on some point in the clouds above him, and in that same moment Fire sensed the raptors. Brigan wheeled his black mare around and raised his hand in a signal that caused a number of the party to break off and pull arrows from their backs. Three raptors, two shades of fuchsia and violet and one apple-green, circled high over the river of soldiers, attracted by the vibrations, or by the smell of the horses.

Archer and his guards also readied arrows. Fire gripped her reins tightly with one hand, calmed Small, and tried to decide whether to put her arm through the agony of readying her own bow.

It wasn't necessary. The prince's men were efficient, and used only four arrows to bring down the fuchsia birds. The green was smarter; it circled irregularly, changing height and speed, dropping lower and lower and always closer to the column of riders. The arrow that finally caught it was Archer's, a fast shot soaring downward and over the heads of the galloping army.

The bird monster fell and crashed onto the plain. The prince turned his horse and eyed the mountain paths, looking for the source of the arrow, his own arrow still notched in case he didn't like the archer he found. When he spotted Archer and the guards, he lowered his bow and raised an arm in greeting. Then he pointed to the carcass of the green bird on the plain and pointed back to Archer. Fire understood the gesture: Archer's kill was Archer's meat.