Fire - Kristin Cashore [100]
Fire’s temper flared. ‘Don’t you call him heartless, Archer. He’s the only person here who believes me.’
‘Oh, I believe you can do it,’ Archer said, his voice filling the corners of the room like a hiss. ‘A woman who can stage the suicide of her own father can certainly kill a few Dellians she’s never met.’
IT WAS AS if time slowed down, and everyone else in the room disappeared. There was only Fire, and Archer before her. Fire gaped at Archer, disbelieving, and then understanding, like coldness that starts in your extremities and seeps to your core, that he truly had just said aloud the words she’d thought she’d heard.
And Archer gaped back, just as stunned. He slumped, blinking back tears. ‘Forgive me, Fire. I wish it unsaid.’
But she thought it through in slow time, and understood that it couldn’t be unsaid. And it was less that he’d exposed the truth, and more the way he’d exposed it. He’d accused her, he who knew all that she felt. He’d taunted her with her own shame.
‘I’m not the only one who’s changed,’ she whispered, staring at him. ‘You’ve changed too. You’ve never been cruel to me before.’
She turned, still with that sense that time had slowed. She glided out of the room.
TIME CAUGHT UP with Fire in the frozen gardens of the green house, where it occurred to her after a single shivering minute that she had a compulsive inability to remember her coat. Musa, Mila, and Neel stood quietly around her.
She sat on a bench under the big tree, great round tears seeping down her cheeks and plopping into her lap. She took the handkerchief Neel offered. She looked into the faces of her guard, one after the other. She was searching their eyes to see if behind the quiet of their minds they were horrified, now that they knew.
Each of them looked calmly back. She saw that they were not horrified. They met her eyes with respect.
It struck her that she was very lucky in her life’s people, that they should not mind the company of a monster so unnatural that she’d murdered her only family.
A thick, wet snow began to fall, and finally the side door of the green house opened. Bundled in a cloak, Brigan’s housekeeper, Tess, marched out to her. ‘I suppose you intend to freeze to death under my nose,’ the woman snapped. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
Fire looked up without much interest. Tess had soft green eyes, deep as two pools of water, and angry. ‘I murdered my father,’ Fire said, ‘and pretended it was a suicide.’
Clearly, Tess was startled. She crossed her arms and made indignant noises, determined, it seemed, to disapprove. And then all at once she softened, like a clump of snow in a thaw that collapses from a roof, and shook her head, bewildered. ‘That does change things. I suppose the young prince’ll be telling me, “I told you so”. Well, look at you, child - soaked right through. Pretty as a sunset, but no brain in your head. You didn’t get that from your mother. You may as well come inside.’
Fire was mildly dumbfounded. The little woman pulled her under the cloak and pushed her into the house.
THE QUEEN’S HOUSE- for Fire reminded herself that this was Roen’s house, not Brigan’s - seemed a good place to soothe an unhappy soul. The rooms were small and cozy, painted soft greens and blues and full of soft furniture, the fireplaces huge, the January fires in them roaring. It was obvious a child lived here, for her school papers and balls and mittens and playthings, and Blotchy’s nondescript chewed-up belongings, had found their way into every corner. It was less obvious Brigan lived here, though there were clues for the discerning observer. The blanket Tess wrapped Fire in looked suspiciously like a saddle blanket.
Tess sat Fire on a sofa before the fireplace, and her guard in armchairs around their lady. She gave all of them cups of hot wine. She sat with them, folding a pile of very small shirts.
Fire shared the sofa with two