Fire - Kristin Cashore [130]
Her voice was a croak. ‘My hands hurt.’
‘Yes. They’re frostbitten, Lady. You’re not to worry. The people here have thawed them and bandaged them and taken very good care of you.’
Memory came back to Fire, seeping into the spaces around her. She turned her face away from Musa.
‘We’ve been searching for you from the minute you were taken, Lady,’ Musa continued. ‘We wasted some time following false leads, for Princess Hanna never saw who took her, and the men we killed had no identifying marks, and your grandmother and the green house guards were drugged before they even knew it was happening. We had no idea where to look, Lady, and the king and the prince and princess were sure it was some plot of Lady Murgda’s, but the commander’s communications were doubtful, and it wasn’t until one of the palace guards got hold of a blurry memory in his head of a red-eyed boy lurking on the grounds that we began to suspect what had happened. We reached Cutter’s yesterday. I can’t tell you how it frightened us, Lady, to find the place burned to the ground, and charred bodies we couldn’t recognise.’
Fire spoke hollowly. ‘I lit a fire for Archer. He’s dead.’
Musa was startled by this. Fire felt it, and understood at once that Musa’s allegiance was with Mila, not with the careless lord who’d fathered Mila’s baby. This was just a death to Musa, of someone she’d known only by bad behaviour.
Fire pushed Musa’s feelings away.
‘We’ll send word to the commander at Fort Flood about Lord Archer, Lady,’ Musa finally said. ‘Everyone will be so relieved to hear you’re all right. Shall I tell you of the progress the commander has made in the war?’
‘No,’ Fire said.
A woman appeared at Fire’s side then with a bowl of soup and said gently, ‘The lady must eat.’ Musa rose from her chair so that the woman could sit down. She was old, her face whitish and lined, her eyes a deep yellow-brown. Her expression shifted softly in the light from a fire stoked in the middle of the stone floor, its smoke rising to the ceiling and escaping through a crack above. Fire recognised the feeling of the woman. This grandmother was one of the two who’d saved her life with the gift of her own body’s heat.
The woman spoon-fed the soup to Fire, murmuring quietly, catching the bits that ran down Fire’s chin. Fire consented to this kindness, and to the soup, because they came from a person who didn’t want to talk about the war, and had never known Archer, and could receive her grief easily, with uncomplicated acceptance.
HER BLEEDING CAME, delaying their journey. She slept, and tried not to think, and spoke very little. She watched the lives of the people who lived in the darkness of these underground caves, poor and scrabbling through winter, but warm from their fires and from what they called the furnace of the earth, which sat very close to the surface here and heated their floors and walls. They explained the science of it to Fire’s guard. They gave Fire medicinal concoctions to drink.
‘As soon as you’re able,’ Musa said, ‘we’ll move you to the army healers at Fort Flood, Lady. The southern war is not going badly. The commander was hopeful, and terribly determined, when we saw him last. Princess Clara and Prince Garan are with him there. And the war is raging on the northern front as well. King Nash rode north in the days after the gala, and the Third and Fourth and most of the auxiliaries and Queen Roen and Lord Brocker met him there. Lady Murgda escaped the palace the day after the gala, Lady. There was a fire, and a terrible battle in the corridors, and in the confusion she got away. It’s thought she tried to ride to the beacons at Marble Rise, but the King’s Army had already taken control of the roads.’
Fire closed her eyes, trying to bear the pressure of all of this meaningless, horrible news. She did not want to go to Fort Flood. But she understood that she couldn’t stay here indefinitely, imposing on these people’s hospitality. And she supposed the army healers might as well look at her hands, which she herself had not yet seen, but which