Fire - Kristin Cashore [103]
She ate dinner every night in the kitchen of the green house with Tess and Hanna. Hanna’s stream of chatter filled the spaces in the conversation between grandmother and granddaughter, and soothed, somehow, their awkwardness as they tried to find the way to relate to each other.
It helped that Tess was straightforward and honest, and that Fire could sense the sincerity of every mixed-up thing she said. ‘I’m mostly unflappable,’ Tess said over their first dinner of dumplings and raptor monster stew. ‘But you’ve flapped me, monster Lady. I told myself all these years you were Cansrel’s daughter, and not truly Jessa’s. A monster, not a girl, that we were better off without. I tried to tell Jessa, too, though she would never listen, and she was right. Plain as day I can see her in your face.’
‘Where?’ Hanna demanded. ‘What parts of her face?’
‘You have Jessa’s forehead,’ Tess said, brandishing a spoon at Fire helplessly. ‘And the same expression in your eyes, and her lovely, warm skin. You take after her eye and hair colouring, though yours is a hundred times what hers was, of course. The young prince told me he trusted you,’ she finished weakly. ‘But I couldn’t believe him. I thought he was ensnared. I thought you’d marry the king, or worse, him, and it would begin all over.’
‘It’s all right,’ Fire said softly, immune to grudges, because she was newly fallen in love with having a grandmother.
She wished she could thank Brigan, but he was still away from court and unlikely to return before the gala. She wished more than anything that she could tell Archer. Whatever else he might feel, he would share her joy in this - he would laugh in astonishment at the news. But Archer was bumbling around somewhere west with the smallest of guards - according to Clara, he’d only taken four men - getting into who knew what kind of trouble. Fire determined to make a list of all the delights and the confusions of having a grandmother, to tell him when he returned.
She was not the only person worried about Archer. ‘It wasn’t such a terrible thing, really, that he told your secret,’ Clara said - forgetting, Fire thought dryly, that at the time Clara had found it terrible enough to punch him. ‘We’re all more content with you in the plan now we know. And we admire you for it. Truly, Lady, I wonder you never told us before.’
Fire didn’t respond to this, for she couldn’t explain that the admiration was part of the reason she hadn’t told. It was not rewarding to be the hero of other people’s hatred for Cansrel. She had not killed him out of hatred.
‘Archer’s an ass, but still I hope he’ll be careful,’ Clara finished, one hand resting absently on her belly while the other rifled through a pile of floor plans. ‘Does he know the terrain in the west? There are great crevices in the ground. Some of them open to caves, but some of them are bottomless. Trust him to fall into one.’ She stopped rifling for a moment, closed her eyes, and sighed. ‘I’ve decided to be grateful to him for supplying my child with a sibling. Gratitude takes less energy than anger.’
When the truth had come out, Clara had indeed, accepted it with a generous equanimity. It had not been so easy for Mila, though she hadn’t taken to anger either. In her chair now beside the door, more than anything, Mila looked dazed.
‘Ah, well,’ Clara said, still sighing. ‘Have you memorised anything above level six? You’re not afraid of heights, are you?’
‘No more than the next person. Why?’
Clara pulled two enormous, curling pages from the pile of floor plans. ‘Here are the layouts for seven and eight. I’ll have Welkley verify I’ve labelled the guest rooms correctly before you start learning all the names. We’re trying to keep those floors empty for your use, but there