Fire - Kristin Cashore [119]
A sense of the foggy-minded archer flashed across her consciousness. Something sharp stung her chest.
Her mind went black.
PART THREE
A Graceling
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SHE WOKE TO the screeching of a raptor monster, and human voices raised in alarm. The floor was lurching and creaking. A carriage, cold and wet.
‘It’s her blood,’ yelled a familiar voice. ‘The raptors smell her blood. Wash her, cover her, I don’t care how, just do it—’
Men and raptors still screaming, a struggle above her. Water pouring onto her face, choking her, someone wiping at her nose, the pain so blinding that her mind spun around her and whirled her into darkness. Hanna? Hanna, are you—
SHE WOKE AGAIN, still crying out to Hanna, as if her mind had suspended itself in mid-cry waiting for her consciousness to return. Are you there, Hanna? Are you there?
No response came to her, no feeling of the child anywhere she could reach.
Her arm was trapped crookedly under her torso, her neck stiff and twisted, her face throbbing, and cold, cold was everywhere.
There were men in this carriage. She scrabbled among their minds for one who might be kind, who might bring her a blanket. Six men, stupid, bubbling with fog, one of them the archer with a habit of killing his friends. And the boy was here, too, the red-eyed, pale boy who made the fog, with the unreachable mind and the voice that hurt her brain. Hadn’t Archer gone after this boy and this archer? Archer? Archer? Are you anywhere?
The floor tilted, and she became colder and wetter, and understood that she lay in a puddle of water that shifted and rocked with the floor. Everywhere she could hear the slap of water. And there were large creatures under the carriage. She could feel them.
They were fish.
This carriage was a boat.
I’m being stolen away, she thought wonderingly, in a boat. But I can’t be. I need to go back to the palace, I need to watch Lady Murgda. The war. Brigan. Brigan needs me! I’ve got to get out of this boat!
A man near her gasped something. He was rowing, he was exhausted, he was complaining of blistered hands.
‘You’re not tired,’ the boy said tonelessly. ‘Your hands don’t hurt. Rowing is fun.’ He sounded bored as he said it, and thoroughly unconvincing, but Fire could feel the men experience a collective surge of enthusiasm. The creaking sound, which she recognised now as oars in oarlocks, increased its pace.
He was powerful, and she was weak. She needed to steal his foggy men away from him. But could she, while numb with pain and cold, and confusion?
The fish. She must reach for the fish lumbering enormously beneath her and urge them to the surface to capsize the boat.
A fish threw its back against the boat’s underside. The men yelled, pitching sideways, dropping oars. Another hard blow, men falling and cursing, and then the boy’s horrible voice.
‘Jod,’ he said. ‘Shoot her again. She’s awake and this is her doing.’
Something sharp pricked her thigh. And it was well enough, she thought as she slipped into blackness. It wouldn’t solve anything to drown them if she drowned too.
SHE WOKE, AND groped for the mind of the rower nearest the boy. She stabbed at the fog she found there, and took hold. She compelled the man to stand, drop his oar, and punch the boy in the face.
The boy’s scream was terrible, scratching like claws across her brain.
‘Shoot her, Jod,’ he gasped. ‘No, her. Shoot the monster bitch.’
Of course, she thought to herself as the dart pierced her skin. It’s the archer I need control of. I’m not thinking. They’ve muddied my mind so I can’t think.
The boy was crying, his breath shaking with fury and pain, as she slid away.
THE NEXTTIME she woke it was to the feeling she was being dragged agonisingly back into life. Her body screamed with pain, hunger, sickness. A long time, she thought. They’ve been poisoning me for a long time. Too long this time.
Someone was feeding her some kind of meal cake, mushed up and dripping like a porridge. She choked