Fire - Kristin Cashore [126]
The horse folded itself to the ground and nestled its back against her. Warmth, Fire thought. We’ll live through this night.
It was the worst night she’d ever known, skimming hour after hour between wakefulness and sleep, jerking from dream after dream of Archer alive to remember that he was dead.
DAY FINALLY BROKE.
She understood, with dull resentment, that her body and the horse’s body needed food. She didn’t know what to do about it. She sat staring at her own hands.
She was too far beyond surprise and feeling to be startled when children appeared moments later climbing from a crevice in the ground, three of them, paler than Pikkians, black-haired, blurry at the edges from the glow of the rising sun. They were carrying things: a bowl of water, a sack, a small package wrapped in cloth. One bore the sack to the horse, dropped it near the animal, and folded the top down. The horse, which had shied away with frantic noises, now approached cautiously. It sank its nose into the sack and began to chew.
The other two carried the package and bowl to Fire, setting them before her wordlessly, staring at her with amber eyes wide. They are like fish, Fire thought. Strange and colourless and staring, on the bottom of the ocean.
The package contained bread, cheese, and salted meat. At the scent of food her stomach threatened to heave. She wished the staring children would go away so that she could have her battle with breakfast alone.
They turned and went, disappearing into the crevice from which they’d come.
Fire broke a piece of bread and forced herself to eat it. When her stomach seemed to decide it was willing to accept this, she cupped her hands into the water and took a few sips. It was warm. She watched the horse, chomping on the feed in the sack, poking its nose softly into the corners. Smoke seeped from a crack in the ground behind the animal, glowing yellow in the morning sun. Smoke? Or was it steam? This place had a strange smell to it, like wood smoke but also something else. She put her hand to the warm rock floor on which she sat and understood that there were people beneath it. Her floor was someone else’s ceiling.
She was feeling the beginnings of a lustreless sort of curiosity when her stomach decided it did not want her crumbs of bread after all.
After the horse had finished its breakfast and drunk the rest of the water it came to where Fire was lying in a ball on the ground. It nudged her, and knelt. Fire uncurled herself, like a turtle ripping itself from its shell, and climbed onto the horse’s back.
THE HORSE SEEMED to move randomly west and south across the snow. It shuffled through streams that crunched with ice, and crossed wide crevices in the rock that made Fire uneasy because she could not see to the bottoms of them.
In the early morning she felt a person on horseback approaching from behind. She didn’t much care at first. But then she recognised the feel of the person and was dragged against her will into caring. It was the boy.
He was also riding saddleless, awkwardly so, and he kicked his poor frustrated horse until it brought him within shouting range. He called out angrily. ‘Where are you going? And what are you doing, sending your every thought and feeling over these rocks? This is not Cutter’s fortress. There are monsters out here, and wild, unfriendly people. You’re going to get yourself killed.’
Fire didn’t hear him, for at the sight of his mismatched eyes she found herself dropping from her horse and running at him, a knife in her hand, though she hadn’t realised until that moment that she was in possession of one.
His horse chose that instant to throw the boy from its back,