Fire - Kristin Cashore [142]
‘And so for Nax’s pride,’ Fire said desperately, ‘Brigan has taken on the role of saviour of the kingdom. It’s not fair. It’s not fair,’ she cried, knowing it was a child’s argument but not caring, because being childish did not make it untrue.
‘Oh, Fire,’ Roen said. ‘You can see as well as any of us that the kingdom needs Brigan exactly where he is now, just as it needs you, and every other one of us, whether or not our lots are fair.’
Roen’s voice contained terrible grief. Fire looked into her face, trying to imagine the woman she had been twenty-some years ago. Intelligent, and fiercely capable, and finding herself married to a king who was puppet to a maniacal puppeteer. Roen had watched her marriage - and her kingdom - fall to ruin.
Fire’s gaze moved to Brocker then, who held her eyes unhappily.
It was Brocker she could not forgive.
‘Brocker, my father,’ she said. ‘You did such an unkind thing to your wife.’
‘Would you wish it had never happened,’ Roen cut in, ‘and Archer and Brigan never born?’
‘That is a cheater’s argument!’
‘But you’re not the one who’s been cheated, Fire,’ Roen said. ‘Why should it hurt you so much?’
‘Would we be at war now, if you two hadn’t provoked Nax into ruining his own military commander? Haven’t we all been cheated?’
‘Do you imagine,’ Roen said with rising frustration, ‘that the kingdom was headed down a path to peace?’
Fire understood, in painful fits and starts, why this hurt so much. It was not the war, or Archer or Brigan. It was not the punishments the perpetrators hadn’t foreseen. It was still Brocker’s wife, Aliss; it was the very small matter of what Brocker had done to Aliss. Fire had thought she had two fathers who sat on opposite poles. Yet even understanding that her bad father had been capable of kindness, she had never allowed for the possibility that her good father might be capable of cruelty or dishonour.
She understood suddenly what a useless, day-and-night way of thinking that was. There wasn’t a simple person anywhere in this world.
‘I’m tired of learning the truth of things,’ she said.
‘Fire,’ Brocker said, his voice rough with a shame she had never heard there before. ‘I don’t question your right to be angry.’
She looked into Brocker’s eyes, which were so like Brigan’s. ‘I find I’m not angry anymore,’ she said quietly, tying her hair back, out of her face. ‘Did Brigan send you away because he was angry?’
‘He was angry. But no, that’s not why he sent us away.’
‘It was too dangerous there,’ Roen said, ‘for a middle-aged woman and a man in a chair, and a pregnant assistant.’
It was dangerous. And he was there all alone, fighting a war, absorbing the truth of his parentage and the truth of history, with no one to talk to. And she’d pushed him away with words of unlove she hadn’t meant. In return he’d sent her Small, knowing somehow that she needed him.
She was thoroughly ashamed of herself.
And she supposed that if she were going to be in love with a man who was always where she was not, then her poor recovering fingers had better grow accustomed to holding a pen. Which was the first thing she wrote in the letter she sent to him that night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE SPRING MELT came early. On the day the First and Second left Fort Flood for the northern front the snow was shrinking in uneven crusty clumps, and the sound of trickling water was everywhere. The river roared.
Gentian’s army at Fort Flood, still led by one of Mydogg’s now bedraggled Pikkians, had not surrendered. Hungry and horseless, they’d done something far more desperate and foolish: they’d tried to escape on foot. It was not pleasant for Nash giving the command, but he did it, because he had to, for if they were allowed to go, they would find their way to Mydogg and his army at Marble Rise. It was a massacre. By the time the enemy laid its weapons down, they numbered only hundreds, in a force that had begun, months ago, as fifteen thousand.
Nash stopped to arrange