Fire - Kristin Cashore [44]
Unusual. Fire’s eyes had flicked curiously to Brigan. His expression had been cool, his mind unreadable. He’d spoken to the fighters quietly, hadn’t looked at her once.
Back onto their horses, and shortly thereafter word had come around from the command units that any soldier brawling over any matter relating to the Lady Fire would find himself out of the army and the army’s favour, disarmed, discharged, and sent home. Fire gathered from the low whistles and high eyebrows among her guard that it was a harsh punishment for brawling.
She didn’t know enough about armies to extrapolate. Did a harsh punishment make Brigan a harsh commander? Was harshness the same as cruelty? Was cruelty the source of Brigan’s power over his soldiers?
And where was the hardship in discharge from a fighting force in a time of impending war? To Fire it sounded more like a reprieve.
Fire pictured Archer riding through his fields at day’s end, stopping to talk with the farmers, laughing, cursing the stubborn rocky ground of the north, as he always did. Archer and Brocker sitting down to dinner without her.
When the army finally stopped for the night she insisted on currying her own horse. She leaned into Small and whispered to him, comforted herself with the feel of him, the only familiar heart in a sea of strangers.
They made camp in a gigantic underground cavern, halfway between Fire’s home and Roen’s fortress, the likes of which Fire had never seen. Nor could she particularly see it now, for it was dim, light glancing through cracks in the ceiling and seeping from side openings. As the sun set, the cavern turned positively dark, and the First Branch was a composition of moving shadows spread across the sloping floor of the chamber.
Sound in the cavern was thick, musical. When the commander had left the camp with a force of two hundred, two hundred had echoed like two thousand and the footfalls had chimed like bells all around her. He’d taken off just as soon as he’d seen everyone settled - his face as indecipherable as ever. A scout unit of fifty soldiers had not returned at the time and place it was meant to. He’d gone looking for it.
Fire was uneasy. The shifting shadows of her five thousand companions unsettled her. Her guard kept her apart from most of these soldiers, but she could not separate herself from the impressions she collected in her mind. It was exhausting, to keep track of so many. They were most of them aware of her on some level, even those farthest away. Too many of them wanted something from her. Some got too close.
‘I like the taste of monster,’ one with a twice broken nose hissed at her.
‘I love you. You’re beautiful,’ another three or four breathed to her, seeking her out, pressing themselves against the barriers of her guard to reach her.
Brigan had given her guard strict orders before he’d ridden away. The lady was to be housed in a tent even though the army was under a cavern’s roof, and two of her female guard were to accompany her always inside the tent.
‘Am I never to have privacy?’ she’d put in, overhearing Brigan’s order to Musa.
Brigan had taken a leather gauntlet from a young man Fire supposed was his squire, and pulled it over his hand. ‘No,’ he’d said. ‘Never.’ And before she’d even been able to take a breath to protest he’d pulled on his other gauntlet and called for his horse. The hoof-beat music had swelled, and then dissipated.
I N HER TENT the smell of roasting monster meat came to her. She crossed her arms and tried not to glare at her two female guard companions, whose names she couldn’t remember. She tugged at her headscarf. Surely in the presence of these women she could have