Fire - Kristin Cashore [137]
‘Fire—’
Please, Nash, please. Don’t make me talk about reasons, please, just let me be alone. Please!
He was stung by this. He turned to go. Then he stopped and turned back. ‘Just one more thing. Your horse is in the stables.’
Fire looked across the rocks at the grey horse stamping her hooves at the snow, and didn’t understand. She sent her confusion to Nash.
‘Didn’t you tell Brigan you wanted your horse?’ he asked.
Fire spun around, looking straight at him for the first time. He struck a handsome figure and fierce, a tiny new scar running into his lip, his cloak hanging over armour of mail and leather. She said, ‘You don’t mean Small?’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Small. Anyway, Brigan thought you wanted him. He’s downstairs.’
Fire ran.
SHE HAD CRIED so often and so much since she’d found Archer’s body, cried at the slightest thing, always silent tears rolling down her face. The way she began to cry when she saw Small, plain and quiet with his hair in his eyes, pressing against his stall door to reach her, was different. She thought she might choke from the violence of these sobs, or rip something inside her.
Musa was alarmed, and came into the stall with her, rubbing her back as she clung to Small’s neck and gasped. Neel produced handkerchiefs. It was no use. She couldn’t stop crying.
It’s my fault, she said to Small over and over. Oh Small, it’s my fault. I was supposed to be the one to die, not Archer. Archer was never supposed to die.
After a long time, she cried herself to a place where she understood that it was not her fault. And then she cried more, from the simple grief of knowing that he was gone.
SHE WOKE, NOT from a nightmare, but to something - something comforting. The sensation of being wrapped in warm blankets and sleeping against a warm breathing back that belonged to Small.
Musa and several other guards were having a murmured conversation with someone outside the stall. Fire’s bleary mind groped its way toward them. The someone was the king.
Her panic was gone, replaced with an odd, peaceful emptiness. She pushed herself up and ran her bandaged hand lightly along Small’s wonderful barrel body, swerving to touch the places where his fur grew crooked around raptor monster scars. His mind snoozed gently, and the hay near his face moved with his breath. He was a dark lump in the torchlight. He was perfect.
She touched Nash’s mind. He came to the stall door and leaned over it, looking at her. Hesitation, and love, obvious on his face and in his feeling.
‘You’re smiling,’ he said.
Naturally, tears were the response to these words. Angry with herself, she tried to stop them, but they squeezed out nonetheless.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
He came into the stall and crouched down in the space between Small’s head and chest. He stroked Small’s neck, considering her.
‘I understand you’ve been crying a great deal,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, defeated.
‘You must be tired and sore from it.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your hands. Are they still very painful?’
There was something comforting about this calm interrogation. ‘They’re a bit better than they were.’
He nodded gravely and continued to stroke Small’s neck. He was dressed as before, except now he carried his helmet under one arm. He seemed older in the darkness and the orange light. He was older, ten years older, than herself. Almost all of her friends were older; even Brigan, the youngest sibling, was almost five years her senior. But she didn’t think it was the difference in years that made her feel like such a child, surrounded by adults.
‘Why are you still here?’ she asked. ‘Shouldn’t you be in a cave somewhere inspiring people?’
‘I should,’ he said, shouldering her sarcasm lightly, ‘and I came here for my horse so that I might ride out to the camps. But now I’m talking to you instead.