Fire - Kristin Cashore [45]
Of course, once she’d uncovered her hair their boredom lessened. They watched her with curious eyes. She looked back wearily. ‘I forget your names. I’m sorry.’
‘Margo, Lady,’ said the one with a broad, pleasant face.
‘Mila, Lady,’ said the other, delicate boned, light haired, and very young.
Musa, Margo, and Mila. Fire bit off a sigh. She recognised the feel of almost every one of her twenty guards at this point, but the names would take her some time.
She didn’t know what else to say, so she fingered the case of her fiddle. She opened the case and inhaled the warm smell of varnish. She plucked a string and the answering acoustics, like the reverberation of a bell struck underwater, focused her disorientation. The flap of the tent was open and the tent itself was set in a niche against the side of the cavern, a low, curving roof curling above it, not unlike the shell of an instrument. She tucked the fiddle under her chin and tuned it, and then, very quietly, she began to play.
A lullaby, soothing, to calm her own nerves. The army faded away.
SLEEP DIDN’T COME easily that night, but she knew it would be pointless to seek out the stars. Rain seeped through cracks in the ceiling and trickled down the walls to the floor; the sky tonight would be black. Perhaps a midnight storm would batter away her dreams. She threw back her blanket, found her boots, slipped past the sleeping forms of Margo and Mila, and pushed open the tent flap.
Outside she took care not to trip over the other sleeping guards, who were arranged around her tent like some kind of human moat. Four of the guards were awake: Musa and three men whose names she couldn’t remember. They played cards in the light of a candle. Candles flickered here and there all across the floor of the cavern. Fire supposed that most units kept some kind of watch throughout the night. She pitied the soldiers currently on guard outside this haven, in the rain. And Brigan’s search party, and the scouts for whom they searched, all of whom had yet to return.
The four guards seemed a bit dazed at the sight of her. She touched her hand to her hair, remembering that it was unbound.
Musa recollected herself. ‘Is anything wrong, Lady?’
‘Is there an opening in this cavern to the sky?’ Fire asked. ‘I want to see the rain.’
‘There is,’ Musa said.
‘Will you show me the way?’
Musa set her cards down and began to wake the guards at the furthest edges of the human moat.
‘What are you doing?’ Fire whispered. ‘Musa, it’s not necessary. Please. Let them sleep,’ she said, but Musa continued to shake shoulders until four of the men were awake. She ordered two of the card players to sit and keep watch. She motioned for the others to arm themselves.
Her fatigue compounded now with guilt, Fire ducked back into the tent for a headscarf and her own bow and quiver. She emerged and joined her six armed and sleepy companions. Musa lit candles and passed them around. Quietly, in procession, the line of seven skirted the edge of the cavern.
THE NARROW, SLOPING pathway they climbed some minutes later led to a perforation in the side of the mountain. Fire could see little beyond the opening, but instinct told her not to venture too far and not to loose her hold on the edges of rock that formed a kind of doorway to either side of her. She didn’t want to fall.
The night was gusty, damp, and cold. She knew it was senseless to get herself wet, but she soaked in the rain and the untamed feeling of the storm anyway, while her guard huddled just inside the opening and tried to protect the candles.
There was a shift in her consciousness: people nearing, riders. Many. Difficult to tell the difference between two hundred and two hundred and fifty at this distance, and knowing so few of them personally. She concentrated, and decided that she was sensing well more than two hundred. And they were tired, but not in any unusual state of distress. The search