Fire - Kristin Cashore [11]
Rather bleak now with self-disgust, she slumped her way upstairs to her room. A particular song was stuck in her head, dully playing itself over and over, though she couldn’t think why. It was the funeral lament sung in the Dells to mourn the waste of a life.
She supposed thoughts of her father had brought the song to mind. She had never sung it for him or played it on her fiddle. She’d been too numb with grief and confusion to play anything after he’d died. A fire had been lit for him, but she had not gone to see it.
It had been a gift from Cansrel, her fiddle. One of his strange kindnesses, for he’d never had patience for her music. And now Fire was alone, the only remaining human monster in the Dells, and her fiddle was one of few happy things she had to remember him by.
Happy.
Well, she supposed there was a kind of gladness in his remembrance, some of the time. But it didn’t change reality. In one way or another, all that was wrong in the Dells could be traced back to Cansrel.
It was not a thought to bring peace. But delirious now with fatigue, she slept soundly, the Dellian lament a backdrop to her dreams.
CHAPTER TWO
FIRE WOKE FIRST to pain, and then to the consciousness of an unusual level of agitation in her house. Guards were bustling around downstairs, and Archer was among them.
When a servant passed her bedroom door Fire touched the girl’s mind, summoning her. The girl entered the room, not looking at Fire, glaring mutinously instead at the feather duster in her own hand. Still, at least she had come. Some of them scurried away, pretending not to hear.
She said stiffly, ‘Yes, Lady?’
‘Sofie, why are there so many men downstairs?’
‘The poacher in the cages was found dead this morning, Lady,’ Sofie said. ‘An arrow in his throat.’
Sofie turned on her heel, snapping the door shut behind her, leaving Fire lying heartsick in bed.
She couldn’t help but feel that this was her fault somehow, for looking like a deer.
SHE DRESSED AND went downstairs to her steward, Donal, who was grizzled and strong-headed and had served her since she was a baby. Donal raised a grey eyebrow at her and cocked his head in the direction of the back terrace. ‘I don’t think he much cares whom he shoots,’ he said.
Fire knew he meant Archer, whose exasperation she could sense on the other side of the wall. For all of his hot words, Archer did not like people in his care to die.
‘Help me cover my hair, will you, Donal?’
A minute later, hair wrapped in brown, Fire went out to be with Archer in his unhappiness. The air on the terrace was wet like coming rain. Archer wore a long brown coat. Everything about him was sharp - the bow in his hand and the arrows on his back, his frustrated bursts of movement, his expression as he glared over the hills. She leaned on the railing beside him.
‘I should have anticipated this,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘He as good as told us it would happen.’
‘There’s nothing you could have done. Your guard is already spread too thin.’
‘I could have imprisoned him inside.’
‘And how many guards would that have taken? We live in stone houses, Archer, not palaces, and we don’t have dungeons.’
He swiped at the air with his hand. ‘We’re mad, you know that? Mad to think we can live here, so far from King’s City, and protect ourselves from Pikkians and looters and the spies of rebel lords.’
‘He hadn’t the look or the speech of a Pikkian,’ she said. ‘He was Dellian, like us. And he was clean and tidy and civilised, not like any looter we’ve ever seen.’
The Pikkians were the boat people from the land above the Dells, and it was true that they crossed the border sometimes to steal timber and even labourers from the Dellian north. But the men of Pikkia, though not all alike, tended to be big, and lighter-skinned than their Dellian neighbours - at any rate, not small and dark like the blue-eyed poacher had been.