Fire - Kristin Cashore [37]
Archer’s eyebrows were looking skeptical. ‘Isn’t this sort of thing a bit more risky than it’s worth? For everyone?’
‘They’re coming at a good time - Brigan just left me all those soldiers. And when they’re here, we’re all so heavily guarded every minute that I don’t suppose either side would ever try anything, for fear of all of us getting killed. I’m as safe as I ever am. But,’ she added, studying both of them gravely, ‘I want you to depart tomorrow at first light. I won’t have you meeting them - there’s no reason to get you and Brocker tangled up in Mydogg’s nonsense, Archer. And I don’t want them to see Fire.’
IT WAS ALMOST achieved. In fact, Fire, Archer, and their guards had travelled some distance from Roen’s fortress and were just about to turn off onto a different path when the party from the north approached. Twenty rather fearsome soldiers - chosen because they had the aspects of pirates, with broken teeth and scars? Big and paleish, some of them. Pikkian? And a tough-looking man and woman who had the aura of a winter wind. Easily brother and sister, both squat and thin-lipped and icy in their expressions, until their eyes combed Fire’s party and settled, with genuine and uncalculated amazement, on Fire herself.
The siblings glanced at each other. Some silent understanding passed between them.
‘Come,’ Archer muttered, motioning to his guards and Fire to move on. The parties clattered past each other without even a greeting.
Oddly rattled, Fire touched Small’s mane, stroking his rough hair. The lord and lady had been only names before, a dot on the Dellian map and a certain unknown quantity of soldiers. Now they were real, and solid, and cold.
She had not liked the glance they’d shared at the sight of her. Nor did she care for the feeling of their hard eyes on her back as Small carried her away.
CHAPTER NINE
IT HAPPENED AGAIN: only days after Fire and Archer returned home, another man was found trespassing in Archer’s forest, a stranger. When the soldiers brought him in, Fire sensed the same mental fog she’d sensed with the poacher. And then before Fire could even begin to consider whether and how to use her power to wangle information from him, an arrow came through the open window, straight into the middle of Archer’s guard room, and struck the trespasser between the shoulder blades. Archer threw himself on top of Fire, dragging her down. The trespasser toppled and fell beside her, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. His empty mind fizzled into no mind at all, and from her crushed position on the floor, soldiers’ feet yanking at her hair and Archer yelling orders above her, she reached for the archer who’d made the shot.
He was faint, a good distance away, but she found him. She tried to grasp hold of him but a boot trod on her finger and the explosion of pain distracted her. When she reached for him again he was gone.
He’s run west into Trilling’s woods, she thought to Archer, because she had no breath to speak. And his mind is as blank as the others.
HER FINGER WAS not broken, only beastly sore when she moved it. It was the second finger on her left hand so she put off playing harp and flute for a day or two, but she refused to spare herself when it came to her fiddle. She’d been without the instrument