Fire - Kristin Cashore [140]
Fire reached for his hand and gripped it as tightly as she could, but didn’t answer. She had thought of playing her fiddle opposite-handed, but it seemed very much like starting from a base of nothing. Eighteen-year-old fingers did not learn how to fly across strings anywhere as easily as five-year-old fingers did, and besides, a bow would be a great deal for a hand with only two fingers and a thumb to manage.
Her fiddler patient had offered another suggestion. What if she kept her fiddle in her left hand and her bow in her right, as usual, but refingered her music so that it was playable with only two fingers? How fast could she reach the strings, and how accurately? At night once, when it was dark and her guard couldn’t see, she’d pretended to hold her fiddle and push her two fingers against imaginary strings. It had seemed a bumbling, useless, depressing exercise at the time. Brocker’s question made her wonder if she mightn’t try again.
A WEEK LATER she came to understand the rest of Brocker’s words.
She had stayed late in the healing room, saving a man’s life. It was a thing she was able to do very occasionally: a matter of will-power in the soldiers closest to death, some in agonies of pain and some not even conscious. In their moment of giving up she could give them mettle, if they wanted it. She could help them hold on to their disappearing selves. It didn’t always work. A man who couldn’t stop bleeding would never live, no matter how adamantly he fought death back. But sometimes, what she gave them was just enough.
Of course, it left her exhausted.
On this day she was hungry, and knew there would be food in the offices where Garan and Clara, Brocker and Roen spent their days waiting anxiously for messages and arguing. Except that today they weren’t arguing, and as she entered with her guard she sensed an unusual lightness. Nash was there, sitting beside Mila, chatting, a truer smile on his face than Fire had seen there in some time. Garan and Clara ate peacefully from bowls, and Brocker and Roen sat together at a table, drawing lines across a topographical map of what appeared to be the bottom half of the kingdom. Roen muttered something that caused Brocker to chuckle.
‘What is it?’ Fire said. ‘What’s happened?’
Roen looked up from her map and gestured at a tureen of stew on the table. ‘Ah, Fire. Sit down. Eat something, and we’ll tell you why the war isn’t hopeless. What about you, Musa? Neel? Are you hungry? Nash,’ she said, twisting around to regard her son critically. ‘Come and get more stew for Mila.’
Nash pushed himself up from his chair. ‘I see that everyone is to have stew but me.’
‘I’ve watched you eat three bowls of stew,’ Roen said severely, and Fire sat down rather hard, for the teasing in this room made her weak with a relief she wasn’t sure yet it was safe to be feeling.
And then Roen explained that a pair of their scouts on the southern front had made two rather cheerful discoveries back to back. First they’d identified the labyrinthine path of the enemy’s food supply route through the tunnels, and second, they’d located a series of caves east of the fighting where the enemy was stabling the majority of its horses. Commandeering both supply route and caves had been merely a matter of a couple of well-placed attacks by the king’s forces. And now it would only be a matter of days before Gentian’s men ran out of food; and without horses to escape on, they would be left with no option but to surrender, allowing the majority of the First and Second to race north to reinforce Brigan’s troops.
Or at least, this was what the smiling faces in this office supposed would happen. And Fire had to own that it did seem likely, as long as Gentian’s army didn’t block the King’s Army’s own supply route in turn, and as long as anyone was left in the Third and Fourth to be reinforced by the First and Second by the time the First and Second