Graceling Realm: Fire. Part 6

That might be, but she felt like death. She would gladly make the trade; how blissful it would be to feel impossibly sweet, and look like death.

He was dressed, aside from his shirt, and clearly on his way out the door.

'What's the hurry?'

'A beacon fire is lit,' he said.

Towns in the mountains lit beacon fires when they were under attack, to call on the aid of their neighbours. 'Which town?'

'Grey Haven, to the north. Nash and Brigan ride out immediately, but they're sure to lose men to the raptor monsters before they get to the tunnels. I'll shoot from the wall, along with anyone else who can.'

Like a dive into cold water, she was awake. 'The Fourth has gone, then? How many soldiers do Nash and Brigan have?'

'My eight, and Roen has another forty to offer from the fortress. '

'Only forty!'

'She sent a good portion of her guard away with the Fourth,' Archer said. 'Soldiers from the Third are to replace them, but of course they're not here yet.'

'But fifty men total to two hundred raptors? Are they mad?'

'The only other option is to ignore the call for help.'

'You don't ride with them?'

'The commander believes my bow can do more damage from the wall.'

The commander. She froze. 'Was he here?'

Archer glanced at her sidelong. 'Of course not. When his men couldn't find me, Roen came herself.'

It didn't matter; already she'd forgotten it. Her mind spun with the other particular, the insanity of fifty men trying to pa.s.s through a swarm of two hundred raptor monsters. She climbed out of bed and searched for her clothes, went into her bathing room so that Archer wouldn't see her wrists as she changed. When she came out he was gone.

She covered her hair and attached her arm guard. She grabbed her bow and quiver and ran after him.

INDESPERAT E MOMENTS Archer was not above threats. In the stables, with men shouting around them and horses fidgeting, he told her that he would tie her to Small's door if he had to, to keep her off the wall.

It was bl.u.s.ter, and she ignored him and thought this through, step by step. She was a decent shot with a bow. Her arm was well enough to shoot as long as she could bear the pain. In the time it took the soldiers to thunder away into the tunnels she could kill two, maybe three of the monsters, and that was two or three fewer to tear into the men.

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 Grey 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, rea.s.suring, even laughing at a joke from one of Archer's guards.

And then across the sea of clamouring armour 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 a.s.sure 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.

SHEKNEWTHEentire enterprise would only take a few minutes. The raptors would dive as soon as they'd 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 spear-men 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 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 Grey Haven this instant, I will have done this for nothing. 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, sc.r.a.ped. 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 st.i.tched 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. 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.'