Fire - Kristin Cashore [125]
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT passed in a blur of numbness and anguish.
It was a thing about being a monster. She couldn’t look at a body and pretend she was looking at Archer. She knew, she could feel, that the fires of Archer’s heart and mind were nowhere near. This body was a horrible thing, almost unrecognisable, lying there, mocking her, mocking Archer with its emptiness.
Nonetheless, this did not stop her dropping to her knees and stroking the cold arm of this body, over and over, breathing shallowly, not entirely sure what she was doing. Taking hold of the arm, clutching it, while confused tears ran down her face.
The sight of the arrow embedded in the body’s stomach began to bring her a little too close to sensibility. An arrow shot into a man’s stomach was cruel, its damage painful and slow. Archer had told her that long ago. He had taught her never to aim there.
She stood and turned away from this thinking, stumbled away, but it seemed to follow her across the yard. A great outdoor bonfire was alight between the stable and the house. She found herself standing before it, staring into the flames, fighting her mind, which seemed insistent that she contemplate the notion of Archer, dying, slowly, in pain. All alone.
At least her last words to him had been words of love. But she wished she’d told him just how much she loved him. How much she had to thank him for, how many good things he had done. She hadn’t told him nearly enough.
She reached into the fire and took hold of a branch.
SHE WAS NOT entirely aware of carrying flaming branches to Cutter’s green house. She wasn’t aware of the men she commandeered to help her, or the trips back and forth stumbling from bonfire to house, house to bonfire. People ran frantically from the burning building. She might have spotted Cutter among them; she might have spotted Jod; she wasn’t sure and she didn’t care; she instructed them not to interfere. When she could no longer see the house from the black smoke billowing around it, she stopped carrying fire to it. She looked around for more of Cutter’s buildings to burn.
She had mind enough to release the dogs and rodents before torching the sheds they lived in. She found the bodies of two of Archer’s guards on the rocks near the predator monster cages. She took one of their bows and shot the monsters with it. She burned the men’s bodies.
By the time she got to the stable the horses were panicking from the smoke and from the sounds of roaring flame, and shouting voices, and buildings falling apart. But they stilled as she entered - even the most frantic among them, even those who couldn’t see her - and left their stalls when she told them to. Finally empty of horses, but full as it was of wood and hay, the stable blazed up like a mighty monster made of fire.
She bumbled around the perimeter to Archer’s body. She watched, lungs hacking, until the flames reached him. Even when she could no longer see him she kept watching. When the smoke became so thick that she was choking on it, her throat burning from it, she turned her back on the fire she’d made, and walked away.
SHE WALKED WITHOUT knowing where she was going and without thinking of anyone or anything. It was cold and the terrain was hard and treeless. When she crossed paths with one of the horses, dappled and grey, it came to her.
No saddle, she thought numbly to herself as it stood before her, breathing steam and stamping its hooves against the snow. No stirrups. Hard to get on.
The horse knelt awkwardly on its forelegs before her. She hitched her gown and her robe around her knees and climbed onto its back. Balancing precariously as the horse stood, she found that a horse without a saddle was slippery and warm. And better than walking. She could wind her hands in the mane and lean her body and face forward against the aliveness of its neck, and sink into a stupor of no feeling, and let the horse decide where to go.
Her robe had not been