Fire - Kristin Cashore [13]
At least fractured on the ground, Fire thought, the monsters added colour to the landscape. There was little colour in the north of the Dells in early spring - the trees were grey and the grass that tufted between cracks in the rocks was still brown from winter. Truly, even at the height of summer the north of the Dells was not what one would call colourful, but at least in summer, grey with patches of brown turned to grey with patches of green.
‘Who found the poacher, anyway?’ Fire asked idly.
‘Tovat,’ Archer said. ‘One of the newer guards. You’ll not have met him yet.’
‘Oh, yes - the young one with the brown-orange hair that people called red. I like him. He’s strong-minded and he guards himself.’
‘You know Tovat? You admire his hair, do you?’ Archer said in a sharp and familiar tone.
‘Archer, honestly. I said nothing of admiring his hair. And I know the names and faces of all the men you station at my house. It’s simple courtesy.’
‘I won’t be stationing Tovat at your house any longer,’ he said, an unpleasant edge to his voice that drove her to silence for a moment, so that she wouldn’t say anything unpleasant back about Archer’s dubious - and rather hypocritical - right to jealousy. He opened a feeling to her that she didn’t particularly care to feel just now. Biting back a sigh, she chose words that would protect Tovat.
‘I hope you’ll change your mind. He’s one of the few guards who respects me both with his body and in his mind.’
‘Marry me,’ Archer said, ‘and live in my house, and I will be your guard.’
She could not bite back this sigh. ‘You know that I won’t. I wish you would stop asking me.’ A fat raindrop plopped onto her sleeve. ‘I think I’ll go and visit your father.’
She stood, creaking with pain, and let his coat slide off into his lap. She touched his shoulder once, gently. Even when she did not like Archer, she loved him.
As she went into the house, rain began to fall.
ARCHER’S FATHER LIVED in Archer’s house. Fire asked a guard who was not Tovat to accompany her along the path through the rain. She carried a spear, but still, without her longbow and quiver she felt naked.
Lord Brocker was in his son’s armoury, thundering instructions at a large man Fire recognised as the assistant to the blacksmith in town. At the sight of her Lord Brocker did not let off his thundering, but momentarily he lost the attention of his listener. The blacksmith turned to stare at Fire, some base thing in his eyes and in his silly, stupid smile.
He’d known Fire for long enough, this man, to have learned how to guard himself against the power of her strange monster beauty, so if he was not guarding himself, then he must not want to. His prerogative, to give up his mind in return for the pleasure of succumbing to her, but not something she cared to encourage. She kept her headscarf on. She pushed his mind away and walked past him into a side room so that she couldn’t be seen. A closet really, dark, and with shelves full of oils and polish and ancient, rusted equipment no one ever used.
It was humiliating to have to retreat to a smelly old closet. The blacksmith should be the one to feel humiliated, for he was the dunce who chose to give up his self-control. What if while he gaped at her and imagined whatever his small mind cared to imagine, she convinced him to draw his knife and take out his own eye? It was the sort of thing Cansrel would have liked to do. Cansrel had never retreated.
The men’s voices stopped and the blacksmith’s mind receded from the armoury. The big wheels of Lord Brocker’s chair squeaked as he rolled himself toward her. He stopped in the doorway of the closet. ‘Come out of there, child; he’s gone. The moron. If a mouse monster stole that one’s meal