Fire - Kristin Cashore [149]
At night Fire rubbed Tess’s feet and brushed out the silver-white hair that reached almost to her knees. Her grandmother insisted on being her servant, and Fire understood that. When she could, she insisted on the same thing back.
ONE PERSON FIRE spent time with had nothing to give. Lady Murgda, traitor and attempted murderer, had been kept in the dungeons since the final battle of the war. Her husband was dead. So was her brother. She was well into her pregnancy, which was the only reason she had been left alive. She lashed at Fire with bitter and hateful words when Fire visited, but still Fire continued to visit, not always certain why she did. Sympathy for a strong person who’d been brought low? Respect for a pregnant woman? At any rate, she was not afraid of Murgda’s vitriol.
One day as she stepped out of Murgda’s cell she met Nash being helped in by Welkley and one of the healers. Grasping his hand, looking at the message in his eyes, she understood that she was not the only person with sympathy for Murgda’s miserable situation.
They didn’t have a lot of words for each other these days, Fire and Nash. Something unbreakable had formed between them. A bond of memory and experience, and a desperate fondness that seemed not to require words.
How wonderful to see him on his feet.
‘ I ’ L L ALWAYS BE leaving,’ Brigan said.
‘Yes,’ Fire said. ‘I know.’
Early morning, and they were tangled together in her bed in the green house. Fire was memorising every scar on his face and his body. She was memorising the pale clear grey of his eyes, because he was leaving today with the First to the north, escorting his mother and father to their respective homes. ‘Brigan,’ she said, so that he would talk, and she could hear his voice and memorise it.
‘Yes?’
‘Tell me again where you’re going.’
‘HANNA HAS ACCEPTED you completely,’ he said a few minutes later.
‘She’s not jealous, or confused.’
‘She has accepted me,’ Fire said. ‘But she is a little jealous.’
‘Is she?’ he said, startled. ‘Should I talk to her?’
‘It’s a small thing,’ Fire said. ‘She does allow for you loving me.’
‘She loves you, too.’
‘She does love me. Really, I don’t think any child could see her father beginning to love someone else and not feel jealousy. At least, that’s what I imagine. It never happened to me.’ She lost her voice. She continued in thoughts. I was, wholly and truly, the only person I ever knew my father to love.
‘Fire,’ he whispered, kissing her face. ‘You did the thing you had to do.’
He never tried to own me, Brigan. Roen said that Cansrel could never see a beautiful thing without wanting to possess it. But he did not try to possess me. He let me be my own.
ON THE DAY the surgeons removed Fire’s fingers, Brigan was in the north. In the infirmary Hanna held Fire’s good hand tightly, chattering her almost to dizziness, and Nash held Hanna’s hand, and reached his other hand, a bit cheekily, out to Mila, who gave him a look like acid. Mila, big-eyed, big-bellied, and glowing like a person with a wonderful secret, seemed to have a curious talent for attracting the fondness of men who far outranked her. But she had learned something from the last one. She had learned propriety, which was the same as saying she had learned to trust only herself. So much so that she was not afraid to be rude to the king, when he asked for it.
Garan came in at the last minute, sat down, and, through the whole bloody thing, talked to Mila and Nash and