Fire - Kristin Cashore [51]
‘Lady,’ he said in greeting.
‘Lord Prince,’ she said, quietly.
He leaned there for a moment, gaze tilted upward, and Fire wondered if this was to be the extent of their conversation. ‘Your horse is named Small,’ he said finally, startling her with the randomness of it.
‘Yes.’
‘Mine is named Big.’
And now Fire was smiling. ‘The black mare? Is she very big?’
‘Not to my eyes,’ Brigan said, ‘but I did not name her.’
Fire remembered the source of Small’s name. Indeed, she could never forget the man Cansrel had abused for her sake. ‘An animal smuggler gave Small his name. A brutish man called Cutter. He thought any horse that didn’t respond well to flogging was small-minded. ’
‘Ah. Cutter,’ Brigan said, as if he knew the man; which, after all, should not be surprising, as Cansrel and Nax had probably shared suppliers. ‘Well, I’ve seen what your horse is capable of. Obviously he’s not small-minded.’
It was a dirty trick, his continued kindness to her horse. Fire took a moment to swallow her gratitude, all out of proportion, she knew, because she was lonesome. She decided to change the subject. ‘You can’t sleep?’
He turned his face away from her, laughed shortly. ‘Sometimes at night my head spins.’
‘Dreams?’
‘I don’t get close enough to sleep for that. Worries.’
Cansrel used to lull her to sleep sometimes, on sleepless nights. If Brigan would ever let her, if he would ever in a million years, she could ease his worries for him; she could help the commander of the King’s Army fall asleep. It would be an honourable use of her power, a practical one. But she knew better than to suggest it.
‘And you?’ Brigan said. ‘You seem to do a lot of nighttime rambling.’
‘I have bad dreams.’
‘Dreams of pretend terrors? Or things that are true?’
‘True,’ she said, ‘always. I’ve always had dreams of horrible things that are true.’
He was quiet. He rubbed the back of his head. ‘It’s hard to wake from a nightmare when the nightmare is real,’ he said, his mind giving her nothing, still, of what he was feeling; but in his voice and his words she heard a thing that felt like sympathy.
‘Good night to you, Lady,’ he said a moment later. He turned and retreated to the lower ground of the camp.
Her guard trickled into place around her. She raised her face to the stars again and closed her eyes.
AFTER ABOUT A week of riding with the First Branch, Fire fell into a routine - if a continuum of unsettling experiences could be called a routine.
Watch out! She thought to her guards one morning at breakfast as they wrestled a man to the ground who’d come running at her with a sword. Here comes another fellow with the same idea. Oh, dear, she added. I also sense a pack of wolf monsters at our western side.
‘Inform one of the hunting captains of the wolves, if you please, Lady,’ Musa gasped, yanking at her quarry’s feet and yelling at three or four guards to go punch the new attacker in the nose.
It was hard on Fire never to be allowed to be alone. Even on nights when sleep felt near, she continued her late walks with her guard, because it was the closest she could get to solitude. Most nights she crossed paths with the commander and they exchanged a few quiet lines of conversation. He was surprisingly easy to talk to.
‘You let some men through your mental defences intentionally, Lady,’ Brigan said to her one night. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Some of them take me by surprise,’ she said, her back resting against rock and her eyes on the sky.
‘Yes, all right,’ he said. ‘But when a soldier marches across the entire camp with his hand on his knife and his mind wide open, you know he’s coming, and in most cases you could change his intentions and turn him around if you wanted to. If that man tries to attack you, it’s because you’ve allowed it.’
The rock on which Fire sat fit the curve of her body; she could fall asleep here. She closed her eyes and considered how to admit to him that he was right. ‘I do turn a lot of men