Fire - Kristin Cashore [104]
Memorising the palace’s floor plans was different for Fire from what it would be for other people, because Fire couldn’t get herself to conceive of the palace as a map, flat on the page. The palace was a three-dimensional space that whirled out from her head, full of moving minds walking down corridors, passing laundry chutes and climbing stairways Fire couldn’t sense but was expected to fill in now from her memory of a map on a page. It wasn’t enough now for Fire to know, for example, that Welkley was on the eastern end of the palace’s second level. Where was he, precisely? What room was he in, and how many doors and windows did it have? How close was it to the nearest servants’ closet, or the nearest stairway? The minds that she sensed near Welkley - were they in the room with him, or were they in the hallway, or the next room over? If Fire needed to give Welkley mental directions to guide him to her own rooms this instant without anyone seeing him, could she do it? Could she keep eight levels, hundreds of hallways, thousands of rooms, doorways, windows, balconies, and her perception of a court-full of consciousnesses all in her mind at once?
The simple answer was that no, she couldn’t. But she was going to have to learn to do it as best she could, because the assassination plan for gala night depended on it. In her rooms, in the stables with Small, on the roofs with her guard, she practised and practised, all day long, constantly - proud of herself, sometimes, for how far she’d moved beyond her early days in this palace. She would certainly never get lost wandering these halls again.
The success of the plan hinged rather nerve-rackingly on Fire’s ability to isolate Gentian, Gunner, and Murgda, separately or together, secretly, somewhere in the palace. It was imperative that she manage to do this, because the backup plans were messy, involved too many soldiers and too many scuffles, and would be next to impossible to keep quiet.
Once alone with them, Fire would learn whatever she could from each and all of them. In the meantime Brigan would find a discreet way to join her and ensure that the information exchange ended with Fire alive and the other three dead. And then news of the entire escapade would have to be contained somehow, for as long as possible. This would also be one of Fire’s jobs: monitoring the palace for people who suspected what had happened, and arranging for those people to be quietly captured before they said anything. Because no one - no one - on the wrong side of the crown could be permitted to know where matters stood or what Fire had learned. Information would only be valuable as long as no one knew they knew it.
Brigan would ride through the night to Ford Flood. The instant he got there, the war would begin.
THE DAY OF the gala, Tess helped Fire into her dress that had been commissioned, fastening hooks, smoothing and straightening bits that were already smooth and straight, and all the time murmuring her pleasure. Next, a team of hairdressers yanked and braided Fire to distraction, exclaiming at the range of reds, oranges, and golds in her hair, its occasional astonishing strands of pink, its impossibly soft texture, its luminosity. It was Fire’s first experience of trying to improve her appearance. Very quickly the process grew tiresome.
Nonetheless, when it finally ended and the hairdressers left and Tess insisted upon pulling her to the mirror, Fire saw, and understood, that everyone had done the job well. The dress, deep shimmering purple and utterly simple in design, was so beautifully-cut and so clingy and well-fitting that Fire felt slightly naked. And her hair. She couldn’t follow what they’d done with her hair, braids thin as threads in some places, looped and wound through the thick sections that fell over her shoulders and down her back, but she saw that the end result was a controlled wildness that was magnificent against her face, her body, and the dress. She turned to measure the effect on her guard - all twenty of them, for all had roles to