Fire - Kristin Cashore [40]
‘Well met, soldiers,’ she said. ‘Will you come inside and sit?’
One of the women, tall, with hazel eyes and a powerful voice, spoke. ‘Our orders are to wait outside until our commander returns from Lord Archer’s house, Lady.’
‘Very well,’ Fire said, somewhat relieved that their orders weren’t to seize her and throw her into a burlap bag. She passed through the soldiers to her door, Tovat behind her. She stopped at a thought and turned again to the woman soldier. ‘Are you in charge, then?’
‘Yes, Lady, in the commander’s absence.’
Fire touched again on the minds in the group, looking for some reaction to Brigan’s election of a female officer. Resentment, jealousy, indignation. She found none.
These were not ordinary soldiers after all. She couldn’t be sure of his motive, but something had gone into Brigan’s choosing.
She stepped inside with Tovat and closed the door on them.
ARCHER HAD BEEN in town during the concert on the terrace, but he must have come home shortly thereafter. It was not long before Brigan returned to her door, and this time Brocker and Archer accompanied him.
Donal showed the three men into her sitting room. In an attempt to cover her embarrassment and also to reassure them that she wasn’t going to make another dash for the hills, Fire spoke quickly. ‘Lord Prince, if your soldiers wish to sit or take something to drink, they’re welcome in my house.’
‘Thank you, Lady,’ he said evenly, ‘but I don’t expect to stay long.’
Archer was agitated about something, and Fire didn’t need any mental powers to perceive it. She motioned for Brigan and Archer to sit, but both remained standing.
‘Lady,’ Brigan said, ‘I come on the king’s behalf.’
He didn’t quite look her in the face as he spoke, his eyes touching on the air around her but avoiding her person. She decided to take it as an invitation to study him with her own eyes, for his mind was so strongly guarded against her that she could glean nothing that way.
He was armed with bow and sword, but unarmoured, dressed in dark riding clothes. Clean-shaven. Shorter than Archer but taller than she remembered. He held himself aloof, dark hair and unfriendly eyebrows and stern face, and aside from his refusal to look at her she could sense nothing of his feelings about this interview. She noticed a small scar cutting into his right eyebrow, thin and curved. It matched the scars on her own neck and shoulders. A raptor monster had nearly taken his eye, then. Another scar on his chin. This one straight, a knife or a sword.
She supposed the commander of the King’s Army was likely to have as many scars as a human monster.
‘Three weeks ago in the king’s palace,’ Brigan was saying, ‘a stranger was found in the king’s rooms and captured. The king asks you to come to King’s City to meet the prisoner, Lady, and tell whether he’s the same man who was in the king’s rooms at the fortress of my mother.’
King’s City. Her birthplace. The place where her own mother had lived and died. The gorgeous city above the sea that would be lost or saved in the war that was coming. She’d never seen King’s City, except in her imagination. Certainly, no one had ever suggested before that she go there and see it for real.
She forced her mind to consider the question seriously even though her heart had already decided. She would have many enemies in King’s City, and too many men who liked her too much. She would be stared at, and assaulted, and she would not ever have the option of resting her mental guard. The king of the kingdom would desire her. And he and his advisers would wish her to use her power against prisoners, enemies, every one of the million people they did not trust.
And she would have to travel with this rough man who didn’t like her.
‘Does the king request this,’ Fire asked, ‘or is it an order?’
Brigan considered the floor coolly. ‘It was stated as an order, Lady, but I won’t force you to go.’
And so the brother, apparently, was permitted to disobey the king’s orders; or perhaps it was a measure of how little Brigan wanted to