Graceling Realm: Fire. Part 28

'And is it the way, in these kingdoms you fell from, for a woman to join forces with an unnatural child who's murdered her friend? Or is that expectation unique to you, and your infinitesimal heart?'

He didn't respond. She opened her eyes to find that he'd shifted his smile, carefully, to something unpleasant that was shaped like a smile but did not have the feel of one. 'There is nothing unnatural in this world,' he said. 'An unnatural thing is a thing that could never happen in nature. I happened. I am natural, and the things I want are natural. The power of your mind, and your beauty, even when you've been drugged in the bottom of a boat for two weeks, covered in grime and your face purple and green - your unnatural beauty is natural. Nature is horrifying.

'And,' he continued, his strange smile gleaming, 'as I see it, our hearts are not so different in size. I murdered my father. You murdered yours. Is that something you did with a large heart?'

Fire was becoming confused, because it was a cruel question, and at least one of the answers to it was yes, which she knew made no sense. She was too wild and too weak for logic. I must defend myself with illogic, she thought to herself, illogically. Archer has always been one for illogic, though he never sees it in himself.

Archer.

She had taught Archer to make his mind strong. And the strong mind she had given him had got him killed.

But he had taught her, too. He had taught her to shoot an arrow fast and with greater precision than she could ever have learned on her own.

She stood, reaching for the quiver and bow she suddenly realised she had on her back, forgetting that she was broadcasting her every intention. Leck grabbed for his own bow, and he was faster than she was - he had an arrow aimed at her knees before her own arrow was notched. She braced herself for an explosion of pain.

And then, beside her, Fire's horse erupted. The animal sprang at the boy, rearing, screaming, kicking him in the face. The boy cried out and fell, dropping his bow, clasping one eye with both hands. He scrambled away, sobbing, the horse fast after him. He seemed unable to see, there was blood in his eyes, and he tripped and sprawled headlong. Fire watched, stunned and fascinated, as he slid across a patch of ice and over the rim of a crevice, slipped through its lips, and disappeared.

Fire stumbled to the crack. She knelt, peering in. She could not see to its bottom, and she could not see the boy.

The mountain had swallowed him.

SHE WAS TOO cold. If only the boy had died in the fire and never come after her - for he'd woken her, and now she perceived things like coldness. And weakness and hunger, and what it meant to be lost in a corner of the western Great Greys.

She ate the rest of the food the children had given her, without much hope of her stomach submitting to it. She drank water from a half-frozen stream. And she tried not to think about the night that would come at the end of this day, because she had no flint, and she had never started a fire without one. She'd never even started a fire that hadn't been in a fireplace. She'd lived a pampered life.

Shaking with cold, she unwrapped her headscarf and wrapped it again so that it covered not just her hair, still slightly damp, but her face and neck as well. She killed a raptor monster before it killed her, a scarlet creature that came screeching suddenly out of the sky, but knew it was no use trying to carry the meat, for the smell of its blood would only attract more monsters.

This reminded her. The gala had taken place in the second half of January. She couldn't be certain how much time had pa.s.sed, but surely it was well into February. Her bleeding was due.

Fire understood, with her new waking logic that was blunt and unsympathetic, that she was going to die soon, from one thing or another. She thought about this on her horse. It was comforting. It gave her permission to give up. I'm sorry, Brigan, she thought to herself. I'm sorry, Small. I tried.

But then a memory, and a realisation, jarred her out of this. People. She might live if she had the help of people, and there were people behind her, in the place where smoke rose from the rocks. There was warmth there, too.

Her horse was still plodding purposefully southwest. Propelled by nothing more than a drab sense of duty not to die if she didn't have to, Fire turned the animal around.

As they started back the way they'd come, snow began to fall.

HER BODY ACHED from her rattling teeth, her rattling joints and muscles. She ran through music in her mind, all the most difficult music she'd studied, forcing herself to remember the intricacies of complicated pa.s.sages. She didn't know why she was doing this. Some part of her mind felt it was necessary and would not let her stop, though her body and the rest of her mind begged to be left alone.

When a golden raptor monster dove at her, screaming through falling snow, she fumbled with her bow and couldn't notch the arrow properly. The horse killed the bird, though Fire didn't know how it managed the job. She'd slid off its rearing back and was lying in a heap on the snow when it happened.

Some time later she slid off the horse's back again. She wasn't sure why. She a.s.sumed it must be another raptor monster, and waited patiently, but almost immediately her horse began pushing at her with its nose, which confused Fire, and struck her as deeply unjust. The horse blew angrily in her face and shoved her repeatedly, until, defeated, she dragged herself shaking onto its proffered back. And then she understood why she'd fallen. Her hands had stopped working. She had no grip on the animal's mane.

I'm dying, she thought, disinterestedly. Ah well. I may as well die on the back of this lovely dappled horse.

The next time she fell she was too senseless to realise that she'd fallen onto warm rock.

S HE WAS NOT unconscious. She heard the voices, sharp, urgent, and alarmed, but she could not get up when they asked her to. She heard her name and grasped that they knew who she was. She understood when a man lifted her and carried her underground, and she understood when women undressed her and undressed themselves, and wrapped themselves with her in many blankets.

She had never in her life been so cold. She shook so hard she felt she would shatter. She tried to drink the warm, sweet liquid a woman held to her face but had the impression she sprayed most of it onto her blanket companions.

After an eternity of gasping and shaking she noticed that she was no longer shaking so hard. Embraced by two pairs of arms, enfolded between the bodies of two naked women, a merciful thing happened: she fell asleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

SHE WOKE TO the sight of Musa's face and the feeling that her hands were being crushed by mallets.

'Lady,' Musa said grimly. 'I've never been more relieved in all my life. How do you feel?'

Her voice was a croak. 'My hands hurt.'

'Yes. They're frostbitten, Lady. You're not to worry. The people here have thawed them and bandaged them and taken very good care of you.'

Memory came back to Fire, seeping into the s.p.a.ces around her. She turned her face away from Musa.

'We've been searching for you from the minute you were taken, Lady,' Musa continued. 'We wasted some time following false leads, for Princess Hanna never saw who took her, and the men we killed had no identifying marks, and your grandmother and the green house guards were drugged before they even knew it was happening. We had no idea where to look, Lady, and the king and the prince and princess were sure it was some plot of Lady Murgda's, but the commander's communications were doubtful, and it wasn't until one of the palace guards got hold of a blurry memory in his head of a red-eyed boy lurking on the grounds that we began to suspect what had happened. We reached Cutter's yesterday. I can't tell you how it frightened us, Lady, to find the place burned to the ground, and charred bodies we couldn't recognise.'

Fire spoke hollowly. 'I lit a fire for Archer. He's dead.'

Musa was startled by this. Fire felt it, and understood at once that Musa's allegiance was with Mila, not with the careless lord who'd fathered Mila's baby. This was just a death to Musa, of someone she'd known only by bad behaviour.

Fire pushed Musa's feelings away.

'We'll send word to the commander at Fort Flood about Lord Archer, Lady,' Musa finally said. 'Everyone will be so relieved to hear you're all right. Shall I tell you of the progress the commander has made in the war?'

'No,' Fire said.

A woman appeared at Fire's side then with a bowl of soup and said gently, 'The lady must eat.' Musa rose from her chair so that the woman could sit down. She was old, her face whitish and lined, her eyes a deep yellow-brown. Her expression shifted softly in the light from a fire stoked in the middle of the stone floor, its smoke rising to the ceiling and escaping through a crack above. Fire recognised the feeling of the woman. This grandmother was one of the two who'd saved her life with the gift of her own body's heat.

The woman spoon-fed the soup to Fire, murmuring quietly, catching the bits that ran down Fire's chin. Fire consented to this kindness, and to the soup, because they came from a person who didn't want to talk about the war, and had never known Archer, and could receive her grief easily, with uncomplicated acceptance.

HER BLEEDING CAME, delaying their journey. She slept, and tried not to think, and spoke very little. She watched the lives of the people who lived in the darkness of these underground caves, poor and scrabbling through winter, but warm from their fires and from what they called the furnace of the earth, which sat very close to the surface here and heated their floors and walls. They explained the science of it to Fire's guard. They gave Fire medicinal concoctions to drink.

'As soon as you're able,' Musa said, 'we'll move you to the army healers at Fort Flood, Lady. The southern war is not going badly. The commander was hopeful, and terribly determined, when we saw him last. Princess Clara and Prince Garan are with him there. And the war is raging on the northern front as well. King Nash rode north in the days after the gala, and the Third and Fourth and most of the auxiliaries and Queen Roen and Lord Brocker met him there. Lady Murgda escaped the palace the day after the gala, Lady. There was a fire, and a terrible battle in the corridors, and in the confusion she got away. It's thought she tried to ride to the beacons at Marble Rise, but the King's Army had already taken control of the roads.'

Fire closed her eyes, trying to bear the pressure of all of this meaningless, horrible news. She did not want to go to Fort Flood. But she understood that she couldn't stay here indefinitely, imposing on these people's hospitality. And she supposed the army healers might as well look at her hands, which she herself had not yet seen, but which were obviously swollen, and useless, and ached beneath their bandages as if pain hung at the ends of her arms instead of hands.

She tried not to dwell on what it would mean if the healers told her she was going to lose them.

There was another thing she tried, and usually failed, not to dwell on - a memory of an occurrence that had taken place oh, months ago - before the gala planning, before Archer had ever found Mydogg's wine in Captain Hart's cellar. Fire had been questioning prisoners, all day, every day, and Archer had watched sometimes. And they'd talked to that foul-mouthed fellow who'd spoken of a tall archer with spot-on aim, a rapist who'd been held in Nax's dungeons some twenty years ago. Jod. And Fire had been happy, because finally she'd known the name and the nature of her foggy-minded archer.

On that day, she hadn't remembered that some twenty years ago Nax had hand-picked a brute from his dungeons and sent him north to rape Brocker's wife, the only happy consequence of which had been the birth of Archer.

The interrogation had ended with Archer punching the informant in the face. On that day, Fire had thought it was because of the man's language.

And perhaps it had been. Fire would never know now at what point Archer had begun to suspect Jod's ident.i.ty. Archer had kept his thoughts and fears to himself. For Fire had just broken his heart.

WHEN THE DAY came, her guards - nineteen of them now, for Mila was not here - wrapped her in many blankets for the journey, and strapped her arms carefully to her body so that her hands would be near her body's heat. They lifted her into Neel's saddle, and when Neel climbed up behind her they strapped her loosely to him. The party rode slowly, and Neel was strong and attentive, but still it was frightening to trust oneself entirely to someone else's balance.

And then, in time, the motion became soothing. She leaned back against him, relinquished responsibility, and slept.

The dappled grey horse, when separated from Fire and faced with the rock people, Fire's guard, and nineteen military mounts, had proven to be completely wild. It had clopped around on the rocks above ground during her illness, bolting every time a person emerged, refusing to be bridled, or stabled underground, or even approached. But nor did it seem willing to be left behind when it saw Fire being borne away. As the party picked its way east, the horse followed, tentatively, always at a safe distance.

THE BATTLES OF the southern front were waged on the land and in the caves bounded by Gentian's holding, Fort Flood, and the Winged River. Whatever ground the commander had managed to win or lose, the fort itself was still under royal control. Rising high on an outcrop of rock, surrounded by walls almost as tall as its roofs, it functioned as the army's headquarters and hospital.

Clara came running to them as they entered the gates. She stood beside Neel's horse as the guards unstrapped Fire, lowered her to the ground, and unwrapped her from her blankets. Clara was crying, and when she embraced Fire and kissed her face, taking care not to jar Fire's hands, which were still tied to her body, Fire sank numbly against her. She wished she could wrap her arms around this woman who cried for Archer and whose belly was round with Archer's baby. She wished she could melt into her.

'Oh, Fire,' Clara finally said, 'we've been out of our minds with worry. Brigan leaves tonight for the northern front. It'll relieve him greatly to see you alive before he goes.'

'No,' Fire said, pulling suddenly away from Clara, and startled by her own feeling. 'Clara, I don't want to see him. Tell him I wish him well, but I don't want to see him.'

'Oh,' Clara said, taken aback. 'Well. Are you certain? Because I can't think how we're going to stop him, once he returns from the tunnels and learns you're here.'

The tunnels. Fire sensed her own rising panic. 'My hands,' she said, focusing on a more isolated pain. 'Is there a healer with the time to attend to them?'

THE FINGERS OF her right hand were pinkish and puffy and blistered, like hunks of raw poultry. Fire stared at them, tired and sick, until she sensed that the healer was cheered by their appearance. 'It's too soon to know for sure,' the woman said, 'but we have grounds for hope.'

She smoothed a salve into the hand very, very gently, wrapped it in loose bandages, and unwrapped the other hand, humming.

The outer two fingers on Fire's left hand were black and dead-looking from the tips all the way down to the second knuckles.

The healer, no longer humming, asked if it was true what she'd heard, that Fire was an accomplished fiddler. 'Well,' the woman said. 'All we can do now is watch them, and wait.'

She gave Fire a pill and a liquid to swallow, applied the salve, and wrapped bandages around the hand. 'Stay here,' she said. She bustled out of the small, dark room, which had a smoky fire in the grate and shutters over the windows to hold in the heat.

Fire had a vague memory of a time when she had been better at ignoring things it was no use to consider. She had been in control once, and had not sat dismal and wretched on examination tables while the entirety of her guard stood watching her with a sympathetic sort of bleakness.

And then she felt Brigan coming, an enormous moving force of emotion: concern, relief, rea.s.surance, too intense for Fire to bear. She began to gasp; she was drowning. As he came into the room she slid off the table and ran into a corner.

No, she thought to him. I don't want you here. No. I don't want you here. No.

'Fire,' he said. 'What is it? Please tell me.'

Please, you must go away. Please, Brigan, I beg you.

'Leave us,' Brigan said quietly to the guard.

No! I need them!

'Stay,' Brigan said in the same tone of voice, and her guard, which by now had developed a high threshold for bewilderment, turned around and filed back into the room.

Fire, Brigan thought to her. Have I done something to make you angry?

No. Yes, yes, you have, she thought wildly. You never liked Archer. You don't care that he's dead You never liked Archer. You don't care that he's dead.

That is untrue, he thought to her with utter certainty. I had my own regard for Archer, and besides, it hardly matters, because you love him, and I love you, and your grief brings me grief. There is nothing in Archer's death but sadness.

That's why you must go, she thought to him. There's nothing in this but sadness There's nothing in this but sadness.

There was a noise in the doorway and a man's harsh voice. 'Commander, we're ready.'

'I'm coming,' Brigan said over his shoulder. 'Wait for me outside. '

The man left.

Go, Fire thought to Brigan. Don't keep them waiting Don't keep them waiting.

I will not leave you like this, he thought.

I won't look at you, she thought, pressing at the wall clumsily with her bandaged hands. I don't want to see your new battle scars I don't want to see your new battle scars.

He came to her in her corner, the stubborn, steady feeling of him unchanged. He touched his hand to her right shoulder and bent his face to her left ear, his stubble rough and his face cold against hers and the feel of him achingly familiar, and suddenly she was leaning back against him, her arms awkwardly embracing his left arm, stiff with leathered armour, and pulling it around her.