Fire - Kristin Cashore [128]
‘Not use you, work with you to control the king,’ the boy said, causing her to prickle with confusion, for she had not thought he could read mind’s. ‘And I’m not in your mind,’ he said impatiently. ‘I told you before, you’re sending your every thought and feeling out to be felt. You’re revealing things I doubt you mean to reveal, and you’re also hurting my head. Pull yourself together. Come back with me, you’ve destroyed all my rugs and my hangings, but I’ll forgive you for that. There’s a corner of the house still left standing. I’ll tell you my plans, and you can tell me all about yourself. Like who cut your neck, for starters. Was it your father?’
‘You’re not normal,’ Fire whispered.
‘I’ll send my men away,’ he continued, ‘I promise. Cutter and Jod are dead, anyway - I killed them. It’ll just be the two of us. No more fighting. We’ll be friends.’
It was heartbreaking, the realisation that Archer had wasted himself protecting her from such a stupid, mad thing. Heartbreaking beyond endurance. Fire closed her eyes and leaned her face against the steady leg of her horse. ‘These seven kingdoms,’ she whispered. ‘Where are they?’
‘I don’t know. I fell through the mountains and found myself here.’
‘And is it the way, in these kingdoms you fell from, for a woman to join forces with an unnatural child who’s murdered her friend? Or is that expectation unique to you, and your infinitesimal heart?’
He didn’t respond. She opened her eyes to find that he’d shifted his smile, carefully, to something unpleasant that was shaped like a smile but did not have the feel of one. ‘There is nothing unnatural in this world,’ he said. ‘An unnatural thing is a thing that could never happen in nature. I happened. I am natural, and the things I want are natural. The power of your mind, and your beauty, even when you’ve been drugged in the bottom of a boat for two weeks, covered in grime and your face purple and green - your unnatural beauty is natural. Nature is horrifying.
‘And,’ he continued, his strange smile gleaming, ‘as I see it, our hearts are not so different in size. I murdered my father. You murdered yours. Is that something you did with a large heart?’
Fire was becoming confused, because it was a cruel question, and at least one of the answers to it was yes, which she knew made no sense. She was too wild and too weak for logic. I must defend myself with illogic, she thought to herself, illogically. Archer has always been one for illogic, though he never sees it in himself.
Archer.
She had taught Archer to make his mind strong. And the strong mind she had given him had got him killed.
But he had taught her, too. He had taught her to shoot an arrow fast and with greater precision than she could ever have learned on her own.
She stood, reaching for the quiver and bow she suddenly realised she had on her back, forgetting that she was broadcasting her every intention. Leck grabbed for his own bow, and he was faster than she was - he had an arrow aimed at her knees before her own arrow was notched. She braced herself for an explosion of pain.
And then, beside her, Fire’s horse erupted. The animal sprang at the boy, rearing, screaming, kicking him in the face. The boy cried out and fell, dropping his bow, clasping one eye with both hands. He scrambled away, sobbing, the horse fast after him. He seemed unable to see, there was blood in his eyes, and he tripped and sprawled headlong. Fire watched, stunned and fascinated, as he slid across a patch of ice and over the rim of a crevice, slipped through its lips, and disappeared.
Fire stumbled to the crack. She knelt, peering in. She could not see to its bottom, and she could not see the boy.
The mountain had swallowed him.
SHE WAS TOO cold. If only the boy had died in the fire and never come after her - for he’d woken her, and now she perceived things like coldness. And weakness and hunger, and what it meant to be lost in a corner of the western Great Greys.
She ate the rest of the food the children had given her, without