Fire

by Kristin Cashore

  It only took one raptor to kill a man.

  Some of these fifty men were going to die before they even reached whatever battle they faced at Gray Haven.

  This was where panic set in and her mental reckoning fell apart. She wished they wouldn’t go. She wished they wouldn’t put themselves at this risk to save one mountain town. She hadn’t understood before what people meant when they’d said the prince and the king were brave. Why did they have to be so brave?

  She whirled around looking for the brothers. Nash was on his horse, fired up, impatient to get started, transformed from the drunken no-head of last night into a figure that at least gave the impression of kingliness. Brigan was on his feet, moving among the soldiers, encouraging them, exchanging a word with his mother. Calm, reassuring, even laughing at a joke from one of Archer’s guards.

  And then across the sea of clamoring armor and saddle leather he saw her, and the gladness dropped from him. His eyes went cold, his mouth hard, and he looked the way she remembered him.

  The sight of her killed his joy.

  Well. He was not the only person with the right to risk his life, and he was not the only person who was brave.

  It all seemed to make sense in her mind as she turned to Archer, to assure him she didn’t want to shoot raptors from the wall after all; and then she swung away to Small’s stall to do something that had no logic whatsoever, except, perhaps hidden very deep.

  SHE KNEW THE entire enterprise would only take a few minutes. The raptors would dive as soon as they comprehended their own superior number. The greatest danger was to the men at the back of the line who would have to slow their pace as the horses entered the bottleneck of the nearest tunnel’s entrance. The soldiers who made it into the tunnel would be safe. Raptors didn’t like dark, cramped spaces, and they did not follow men into caves.

  She understood from the talk she heard in the stables that Brigan had ordered the king to the front of the column and the best spearmen and swordsmen to the back, because in the moment of greatest crisis the raptors would be too close for bows. Brigan himself would bring up the rear.

  The horses were filing out and gathering near the gates when she prepared Small, hooking her bow and a spear to the leather of his saddle. As she led him into the courtyard no one paid her much attention, partly because she monitored the minds around her and nudged them aside when they touched her. She led Small to the back of the courtyard, as far as she could get from the gates. She tried to express to Small how important this was, and how sorry she was, and how much she loved him. He dribbled against her neck.

  Then Brigan gave the order. Servants swung the gates in and pulled the portcullis up, and the men burst into daylight. Fire pulled herself into her saddle and spurred Small forward behind them. The gates were closing again when she and Small galloped through, and rode alone, away from the soldiers, toward the empty rockiness east of Roen’s holding.

  The soldiers’ focus was northward and up; they didn’t see her. Some of the raptors did, and, curious, broke off from the surge dropping down onto the soldiers, few enough that she shot them from her saddle, clenching her teeth through the pain. The archers on the wall most certainly saw her. She knew it from the shock and panic Archer was sending at her. I’ll be most likely to survive this if you stay on that wall and keep shooting, she thought to him fiercely, hoping it would be enough to keep him from coming out after her.

  And now she was a good distance from the gates and the first soldiers had reached the tunnel, and she saw that a skirmish of monsters and men had begun at the back of the line. This was the time. She drew her brave horse up and turned him around. She yanked her scarf from her head. Her hair billowed down over her shoulders like a river of flame.

  For an instant nothing happened, and she began to panic because it wasn’t working. She dropped her mind’s guard against their recognition. Still nothing. She reached out to grab at their attention.

  Then one raptor high in the sky felt her, and then sighted her, and screamed a horrible sound, like metal screeching against metal. Fire knew what that sound meant, and so did the other raptors. Like a cloud of gnats they lifted from the soldiers. They shot into the sky, twirling desperately, searching for monster prey, finding it. The soldiers were forgotten. Every last raptor monster dove for her.

  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 Gray 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 backward at them; it was useless now, a stick of wood in her way. The quiver on her back might serve as a kind of armor. 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. “Wil
l 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.

  THE MIND 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 Grays 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.

  SHE WAS 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 Gray 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 Gray 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 Gray Haven. The prince and the king wasted no time, departing for the south immediately with the Third. When Fire woke the next morning they were gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CANSREL HAD ALWAYS let Fire into his mind so she could practice 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 favorite 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 apologize 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. Condescension. Imperiousness. Obstinacy.

  They sat at a square table with Roen and a number of Roen’s spies discussing Fire’s trespassing archer, the men the archer had shot, and the fellow Fire had sensed in the king’s rooms yesterday. />
  “There are plenty of spies out there and plenty of archers,” Roen’s spymaster said, “though perhaps few as skilled as your mysterious archer seems to be. Lord Gentian and Lord Mydogg have built up whole squadrons of archers. And some of the kingdom’s finest archers are in the employ of animal smugglers.”

  Yes, Fire remembered that. The smuggler Cutter had bragged of his archers. It was how he caught his merchandise, with darts tipped with sleeping poison.

  “The Pikkians also have decent archers,” another of Roen’s men said. “And I know we like to think of them as clannish and simple, interested in nothing but boat building, deep-sea fishing, and the occasional sack of our border towns—but they follow our politics. They’re not stupid, and they’re not on the king’s side. It’s our taxes and our trade regulations that have kept them poor these thirty years.”

  “Mydogg’s sister Murgda has just married a Pikkian,” Roen said, “a naval explorer of the eastern seas. And we have reason to believe that lately Mydogg has been recruiting Pikkians into his Dellian army. And having some success at it.”

  Fire was startled; this was news, and not of the happy variety. “How big has Mydogg’s army grown?”

  “It’s still not as big as the King’s Army,” Roen said firmly. “Mydogg has said to my face that he has twenty-five thousand soldiers at the underside, but our spies to his holding in the northeast put the count at only twenty thousand or so. Brigan has twenty thousand patrolling in the four branches alone, and an additional five thousand in the auxiliaries.”

  “And Gentian?”

  “We’re not certain. Our best guess is ten thousand or so, all living in caves below the Winged River near his estate.”

  “Numbers aside,” the spymaster said, “everyone has archers and spies. Your archer could be working for anyone. If you’ll leave the arrow and bolt with us we may be able to eliminate some possibilities or at least determine where his gear comes from. But I’ll be honest with you: I wouldn’t hold out too much hope. You haven’t given us much to go on.”