Fire - Kristin Cashore [138]
Fire traced a long, thin scar on Small’s back. She thought about her tendency lately to communicate more easily with horses and dying strangers than with the people she had thought she loved.
‘It’s not reasonable to love people who are only going to die,’ she said.
Nash thought about that for a moment, stroking Small’s neck with great deliberation, as if the fate of the Dells depended on that smooth, careful movement.
‘I have two responses to that,’ he said finally. ‘First, everyone’s going to die. Second, love is stupid. It has nothing to do with reason. You love whomever you love. Against all reason I loved my father.’ He looked at her keenly. ‘Did you love yours?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
He stroked Small’s nose. ‘I love you,’ he said, ‘even knowing you’ll never have me. And I love my brother, more than I ever realised before you came along. You can’t help whom you love, Lady. Nor can you know what it’s liable to cause you to do.’
She made a connection then. Surprised, she sat back from him and studied his face, soft with shadows and light. She saw a part of him she hadn’t seen before.
‘You came to me for lessons to guard your mind,’ she said, ‘and you stopped asking me to marry you, both at the same time. You did those things out of love for your brother.’
‘Well,’ he said, looking a bit sheepishly at the floor. ‘I also took a few swings at him, but that’s neither here nor there.’
‘You’re good at love,’ she said simply, because it seemed to her that it was true. ‘I’m not so good at love. I’m like a barbed creature. I push everyone I love away.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t mind you pushing me away if it means you love me, little sister.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
SHE BEGAN TO write a letter in her mind to Brigan. It wasn’t a very good letter. Dear Brigan, I don’t think you should be doing what you’re doing. Dear Brigan, people are swirling away from me and I am swirling apart.
The swelling of her hands had gone down, and no places had blackened that hadn’t been black before. There would likely be a surgery, the healers said, when more time had passed, to remove the two dead fingers on her left hand.
‘With all your medicines,’ Musa asked one of the healers, ‘you really have nothing to help her?’
‘There are no medicines to bring a dead thing back to life,’ the healer said crisply. ‘The best thing right now will be for Lady Fire to start using her hands again regularly. She’ll find a person can manage quite well without ten fingers.’
It was not like it had been before. But what a relief to have permission to cut her food, button her own buttons, tie back her own hair, and she would do it, even if her movements were clumsy and infantile at first and her living fingers burned, even if she sensed pity in the feeling of her watching friends. The pity only made her more stubborn. She asked permission to help with practical tasks in the healing room - dressing wounds, feeding the soldiers who couldn’t feed themselves. They never minded if she dribbled broth onto their clothing.
As her dexterity improved, she even began to assist with some of the simpler aspects of surgery: holding lamps, handing the surgeons their supplies. She found that she had a strong stomach for blood, and infections, and men’s insides - even though men’s insides were rather more messy than the insides of monster bugs. Some of these soldiers were familiar to her because of the three weeks she’d spent travelling with the First. She supposed that some of them had been her enemies once, but that feeling seemed gone from them, now that they were at war and in pain and in such need of comfort.
A soldier she remembered quite well was brought in one day, an arrow embedded in his thigh. It was the man who had once lent her his fiddle - the enormous, craggy, gentle tree of a man. She smiled to see him. They had quiet conversations now and then, she easing his pain as his wound healed. He saying little about her dead fingers, but an expression on his face, whenever he looked at them, that conveyed the depth of his empathy.
When Brocker arrived he took her hands