Fire - Kristin Cashore [39]
It was Krell, the guard she’d tricked the night she’d been unable to climb up to her bedroom window. A man who knew how a flute should be played; and here he was, offering to save her from her own desperate fidgets. ‘Goodness, yes,’ she said. ‘Just let me get my fiddle.’
A reel with Krell was always a game. They took turns, each inventing a passage that was a challenge to the other to pick up and join; always keeping in time but raising tempo gradually, so that eventually it took all of their concentration and skill to keep up with each other. They were worthy of an audience, and today Brocker and a number of guards wandered out to the back terrace for the show.
Fire was in the mood for technical gymnastics, which was fortunate, because Krell played as if he were determined to make her break a string. Her fingers flew, her fiddle was an entire orchestra, and every note beautifully brought into being struck a chord of satisfaction within her. She wondered at the unfamiliar lightness in her chest and realised she was laughing.
So great was her focus, it took her a while to register the strange expression that crept to Brocker’s face as he listened, finger tapping the armrest of his chair. His eyes were fixed behind Fire and to the right, in the direction of Archer’s back doorway. Fire comprehended that someone must be standing in Archer’s entrance, someone Brocker watched with startled eyes.
And then everything happened at once. Fire recognised the mind in the doorway; she spun around, fiddle and bow screeching apart; she stared at Prince Brigan leaning against the door frame.
Behind her Krell’s quick piping stopped. The soldiers on the terrace cleared throats and turned, falling to attention as they recognised their commander. Brigan’s eyes were expressionless. He shifted and stood up straight, and she knew that he was going to speak.
Fire turned and ran down the terrace steps to the path.
ONCE OUT OF sight Fire slowed and stopped. She leaned over a boulder, gasping for air, her fiddle clunking against the stone with a sharp, dissonant cry of protest. The guard Tovat, the one with the orangish hair and the strong mind, came running up behind her. He stopped beside her.
‘Forgive my intrusion, Lady,’ he said. ‘You left unarmed. Are you ill, Lady?’
She laid her forehead against the boulder, ashamed because he was right; in addition to fleeing like a chicken from a woman’s skirts, she’d left unarmed. ‘Why is he here?’ she asked Tovat, still pressing fiddle and bow and forehead into the boulder. ‘What does he want?’
‘I left too soon to know,’ Tovat said. ‘Shall we go back? Do you need a hand, Lady? Do you need the healer?’
She doubted Brigan was the type to make social calls, and he rarely travelled alone. Fire closed her eyes and reached her mind over the hills. She couldn’t sense his army, but she found twenty or so men in a group nearby. Outside her front door, not Archer’s.
Fire sighed into the rock. She stood, checked her headscarf, and tucked fiddle and bow under her arm. She turned toward her own house. ‘Come, Tovat. We’ll learn soon enough, for he’s come for me.’
THE SOLDIERS OUTSIDE her door were not like Roen’s men or Archer’s, who admired her and had reason to trust her. These were ordinary soldiers, and as she and Tovat came into their sight she sensed an assortment of the usual reactions. Desire, astonishment, mistrust. And also guardedness. These men were mentally guarded, more than she would have expected from a random assemblage. Brigan must have selected them for their guardedness; or warned them to remember it.
She corrected herself. They were not all men. Three among them had long hair tied back and the faces and the feeling of women. She sharpened her mind. Five more again were men whose appraisal of her lacked a particular focus. She wondered, hopefully, if they might be men who did not desire women.
She stopped