Fire - Kristin Cashore [1]
Larch was happy to see the sour woman go. He constructed a carrier so that the child could hang against his chest while he worked. He refused to ride on cold or rainy days; he refused to gallop his horse. He worked shorter hours and took breaks to feed Immiker, nap him, clean his messes. The baby chattered constantly, asked for the names of plants and animals, made up nonsense poems that Larch strained to hear, for the poems always made Larch laugh.
‘Birdies love treetops to whirl themselves through, for inside of their heads they are birds,’ the boy sang, absent-mindedly, patting his hand on his father’s arm. Then, a minute later: ‘Father?’
‘Yes, son?’
‘You love the things that I love you to do, for inside of your head are my words.’
Larch was utterly happy. He couldn’t remember why his wife’s death had saddened him so. He saw now that it was better this way, he and the boy alone in the world. He began to avoid the people of the estate, for their tiresome company bored him, and he didn’t see why they should deserve to share in the delight of his son’s company.
One morning when Immiker was three years old Larch opened his eyes to find his son lying awake beside him, staring at him. The boy’s right eye was grey. His left eye was red. Larch shot up, terrified and heartbroken. ‘They’ll take you,’ he said to his son. ‘They’ll take you away from me.’
Immiker blinked calmly. ‘They won’t, because you’ll come up with a plan to stop them.’
To withhold a Graceling from the king was royal theft, punishable by imprisonment and fines Larch could never pay, but still Larch was seized by a compulsion to do what the boy said. They would have to ride east, into the rocky border mountains where hardly anyone lived, and find a patch of stone or scrub that could serve as a hiding place. As a game warden, Larch could track, hunt, build fires, and make a home for Immiker that no one would find.
IMMIKER WAS REMARKABLY calm about their flight. He knew what a Graceling was. Larch supposed the nursemaid had told him; or perhaps Larch himself had explained it and then forgotten he’d done so. Larch was growing forgetful. He sensed parts of his memory closing up on him, like dark rooms behind doors he could no longer open. Larch attributed it to his age, for neither he nor his wife had been young when she’d died birthing their son.
‘I’ve wondered sometimes if your Grace has anything to do with speaking,’ Larch said as they rode the hills east, leaving the river and their old home behind.
‘It doesn’t,’ Immiker said.
‘Of course it doesn’t,’ Larch said, unable to fathom why he’d ever thought it did. ‘That’s all right, son, you’re young yet. We’ll watch out for it. We’ll hope it’s something useful.’
Immiker didn’t respond. Larch checked the straps that held the boy before him in the saddle. He bent down to kiss the top of Immiker’s golden head, and urged the horse onward.
A GRACE WAS a particular skill far surpassing the capability of a normal human being. A Grace could take any form. Most of the kings had at least one Graceling in his kitchens, a superhumanly capable bread baker or winemaker. The luckiest kings had soldiers in their armies Graced with sword fighting. A Graceling might have impossibly good hearing, run as fast as a mountain lion, calculate large sums mentally, even sense if food was poisoned. There were useless Graces, too, like the ability to twist all the way around at the waist or eat rocks without sickening. And there were eerie