Fire - Kristin Cashore [120]
‘She’s stirring,’ the boy said. ‘Shoot her again.’
This time Fire grabbed at the archer, stabbed at his fog, tried to get him to aim his darts at the boy instead of her. The sound of a struggle followed, and then the boy’s screaming voice.
‘I’m your protector, you fool! I’m the one who takes care of you! She’s the one you want to shoot!’
A prick on her arm.
Darkness.
SHE CRIED OUT. The boy was shaking her. Her eyes opened to the sight of him leaning over her, a hand raised as if to strike her. They were on land now. She was lying on rock. It was cold and the sun was too bright.
‘Wake up,’ he snarled, small and ferocious, his unmatching eyes blazing at her. ‘Wake up and get up and walk. And if you do anything to thwart me or any of my men I swear to you I’ll hit you so hard you’ll never stop hurting again. Don’t trust her,’ he said sharply and suddenly to his companions. ‘I’m the only person you can trust. You do what I say.’
His nose and cheekbones were blue with bruises. Fire pulled her knees to her chest and kicked him in the face. As he screamed she grasped at the consciousnesses around her and tried to get up, but she was weak, and dizzy, and staggering like a person unconnected to her legs. His voice, thick with sobs, shouted orders to his men. One of them grabbed her, yanked her arms behind her back, and closed a hand around her throat.
The boy came to her, his face a mess of blood and tears. He slapped her hard across the nose and she surfaced from the shattering pain to find herself sobbing.
‘Stop,’ he whispered. ‘Stop resisting. You will eat, and you will walk, and you will do what I say, and every time one of my men turns on me, and every time a bird pecks at me, and every time a squirrel so much as crosses my path in a way I don’t like, I will hurt you. Do you understand?’
It doesn’t work on me, she thought to him, gasping and furious. The things you say don’t control me.
He spit bloody mucus onto the snow and considered her, sullenly, before turning to the path. ‘Then I’ll find other ways to control you.’
THE TRUTH WAS, she didn’t want her body to hurt any more than it already hurt. And she didn’t want them to put her to sleep again, even though sleep was peaceful darkness and waking meant inhabiting a body shaped and moulded out of pain.
She needed to possess her own mind if she wanted to get out of this. So she did what he said.
Where they were walking it was rocky and steep with such an abundance of waterfalls and streams that she thought it likely the body of water with the great fish had been the Winged River. They’d rowed west on the river, presumably, and now they were climbing north, away from the river, in some part of the kingdom near to the western Great Greys.
Sitting for a meal the first day, she sniffed a corner of her ruined purple skirts, and put it in her mouth. It did not taste clean, of course, but it also didn’t taste salty. This supported her theory. The water she’d lain in for so long had been water of the river, not the sea.
Minutes later, vomiting the meal cake she’d offered her poor wrecked stomach, she found herself laughing at her attempts to be scientific. Of course they’d brought her north of the river to a place in the western Great Greys. She should not have needed a test of salinity to determine it. They were most certainly taking her to Cutter, and she’d known all her life that this was where Cansrel’s monster smuggler lived.
Cutter made her think of Small, and she wished he were here - and then was glad, in the same moment, that he wasn’t. It was better that she was alone, that no one she loved was anywhere near this boy.
They provided her with sturdy boots and coverings for her hair, and an odd stylish coat of white rabbit pelt that was far too beautiful for her filthy state and made for an absurd hiking costume. In their camp in the evenings, one of the men, a fellow named Sammit with gentle hands, a kind voice, and wide, empty eyes, inspected her nose, and told her what she should eat, and how much. After a day or two she began to be able to keep