Fire - Kristin Cashore [19]
A moment later Archer pushed the library door open and held it wide for his father. They came in together, talking, Archer jabbing the air angrily with his bow. ‘Curse Trilling’s guard for trying to take the man alone.’
‘Perhaps he had no choice,’ Brocker said.
‘Trilling’s men are too hasty.’
Brocker brightened with amusement. ‘Interesting accusation, boy, coming from you.’
‘I’m hasty with my tongue, Father, not my sword.’ Archer glanced at Fire and her sleeping kitten. ‘Love. How do you feel?’
‘Better.’
‘Our neighbour Trilling. Do you trust him?’
Trilling was one of the less foolish men Fire dealt with on a regular basis. His wife had employed Fire not only to tutor her boys in music but to teach them how to protect their minds against monster power.
‘He’s never given me reason to distrust him,’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s found two dead men in his forest,’ Archer said. ‘One is his own guard, and I regret to say that the other is another stranger. Each with knife wounds and bruises, as if they’d been fighting each other, but what killed them both were arrows. Trilling’s guard was shot from a distance in the back. The stranger was shot in the head at close range. Both arrows made of the same white wood as the bolt that killed your poacher.’
Fire’s mind raced to make sense of it. ‘The archer came upon them fighting, shot Trilling’s guard from far away, then ran up to the stranger and executed him.’
Lord Brocker cleared his throat. ‘Possibly a rather personal execution. Assuming the archer and the stranger were companions, that is, and it does seem likely that all these violent strangers in our woods have something to do with each other, doesn’t it? The stranger from today had grievous knife injuries to his legs that might not have killed him, but would certainly have made it difficult for the archer to get him away once Trilling’s guard was dead. I wonder if the archer shot Trilling’s guard to protect his companion, then realised his companion was too injured to save, and decided to dispose of him, too?’
Fire raised her eyebrows at that, considering, and petted the monster cat absently. If the archer, the poacher, and this new dead stranger had, indeed, been working together, then the archer’s responsibility seemed to be clean-up, so that no one was left behind to answer questions about why they were there in the first place. And the archer was good at his job.
Archer stared at the floor, tapping the end of his bow against the hard wood. Thinking. ‘I’m going to Queen Roen’s fortress,’ he said.
Fire glanced at him sharply. ‘Why?’
‘I need to beg more soldiers of her, and I want the information of her spies. She might have thoughts about whether any of these strangers have anything to do with Mydogg or Gentian. I want to know what’s going on in my forest, Fire, and I want this archer.’
‘I’m going with you,’ Fire said.
‘No,’ Archer said flatly.
‘I am.’
‘No. You can’t defend yourself. You can’t even ride.’
‘It’s only a day’s journey. Wait a week. Let me rest, and then I’ll go with you.’
Archer held up a hand and turned away from her. ‘You’re wasting your breath. Why would I ever allow such a thing?’
Because Roen is always unaccountably kind to me when I visit her northern fortress, Fire wanted to say. Because Roen knew my mother. Because Roen is a strong-minded woman, and there’s something consoling in the regard of a woman. Roen never desires me, or if she ever does, it’s not the same.
‘Because,’ she said out loud, ‘Roen and her spies will have questions for me about what happened when the poacher shot me, and what little I managed to sense from his mind. And because,’ she added, as Archer moved to object, ‘you are neither my husband nor my father; I am a woman of seventeen, I have my own horses and my own money, and I decide for myself where I go and when. This is not yours