Fire - Kristin Cashore [22]
There were tunnels under the mountains that would have taken them faster to Roen, but these also they planned to avoid. At least in the north, the steep paths above ground were safer than the unknown that lurked in the dark.
Of course Fire’s hair was tightly covered, and her riding clothes plain. Still, she hoped they would encounter no one. Predator monsters tended to overlook the charms of a face and a body if they saw no interesting hair, but this was not the way of men. If she was seen, she’d be scrutinised. Once scrutinised, she’d be recognised, and the eyes of strangers were never comfortable.
THE ABOVE-GROUND route to the fortress of Queen Roen was a high and treeless one, for mountains called the Little Greys divided the land of Fire and her neighbours from the land of the lady queen. ‘Little’ because they were passable by foot and because they were more easily inhabitable than the Great Greys that formed the Dells’ western and southern border with the unknown land.
Hamlets balanced on top of cliffs in the Little Greys or crouched in the valleys near tunnel openings - rough-hewn, cold, colourless, and stark. Fire had watched these distant hamlets and wondered about them every time she’d travelled to Roen. Today she saw that one of them was missing.
‘There used to be a village on that cliff,’ she said, pointing. And then she made sense of it. She saw the broken rock foundations of the old buildings sticking out of the snow, and at the foot of the cliff on which the village had stood, a pile of rocks, wood, and rubble. And crawling all over the pile, monster wolves, and circling above it, monster raptors.
A clever new trick for the looters, to throw an entire village off a mountain, stone by stone. Archer swung down from his horse, his jaw hard. ‘Fire. Are there any living human minds in that pile?’
Many living minds, but none of them human. A good many rats, monster and ordinary. Fire shook her head.
Archer did the shooting, because they hadn’t any arrows to waste. First he shot the raptors. Then he wound a rag around an arrow, and set the rag on fire, and shot it into the pile of monsters and decay. He shot flaming arrow after flaming arrow into the pile until it was fully alight.
Flame was the way, in the Dells, to send the bodies of the dead where their souls had gone, into nothingness. To respect that all things ended, except the world.
The party moved on quickly, because on the wind the stench was terrible.
THEY WERE MORE than halfway to their destination when they saw a sight to bolster their spirits: the King’s Army, bursting from a hole in the base of a cliff far below them, and thundering across a plain of flat rock. They stopped on their high path to watch. Archer pointed to the front of the charge.
‘King Nash is with them,’ he said. ‘See him? The tall man, on the roan, near the standard-bearer. And that’s his brother beside him, the commander, Prince Brigan, with the longbow in his hand, on the black mare. In brown, see him? Dells, isn’t it a magnificent sight?’
Fire had never seen Nax’s sons before, and she had certainly never beheld such a large division of the King’s Army. There were thousands of them - five thousand in this branch, Archer said when she asked - some with mail flashing, others in the army’s dark grey uniform, horses strong and fast, flowing across the land like a river. The one with the longbow in his hand, the prince and commander, moved to the right side and fell back; spoke to a man or two in the middle of the column; surged forward again to the front. They were so far away that they were small as mice, but she could hear the thud of the hooves of some five thousand horses, and feel the enormous presence of some ten thousand consciousnesses. And she could see the colours of the flag hoisted by the standard-bearer who stayed close to the prince’s side wherever he went: a wooded valley, grey and green,