Fire - Kristin Cashore [55]
THE WINGED RIVER was so named because before its waters reached their journey’s end, they took flight. At the place where the river leapt off a great green cliff and plunged into the Winter Sea, King’s City had grown, starting on the north bank and spreading outward and south across the river. Joining the older city with the younger were bridges, the building of which had sent more than one unfortunate engineer over the falls to his death. A canal of steep locks on the northern side connected the city with Cellar Harbour far below.
Passing through the city’s outer walls with her escort of five thousand, Fire felt herself a gawkish country girl. So many people in this city, smells and noises, buildings painted bright colours, steeply roofed, crammed together, red wooden houses with green trim, purple and yellow, blue and orange. Fire had never seen a building before that was not made of stone. It hadn’t occurred to her that houses could be any colour but grey.
People hung out of windows to watch the First Branch pass. Women in the street flirted with the soldiers, and threw flowers, so many flowers Fire couldn’t believe the extravagance. These people tossed more flowers over Fire’s head than she had seen in a lifetime.
A flower splatted against the chest of one of Brigan’s top sword-fighters, riding to Fire’s right. When Fire laughed at him, he beamed, and handed the flower to her. On this journey through the city streets Fire was surrounded not just by her guard but by Brigan’s most proficient fighters, Brigan himself on her left. The commander wore the grey of his troops, and he’d positioned the standard-bearer some distance behind. It was all in an attempt to reduce the attention Fire drew, and Fire knew she wasn’t playing her part in the charade. She should have been sitting gravely, her face bent to her hands, catching no one’s eye. Instead she was laughing - laughing, and smiling, and numb to her aches and pains, and sparkling with the strangeness and the bustle of this place.
And then before too long - she couldn’t have said if she sensed it or heard it first, but there was a change in their audience. A whisper seemed to work its way in among the cheers, and then a strange silence; a lull. She felt it: wonder, and admiration. And Fire understood that even with her hair covered, and even in her drab, dirty riding clothes, and even though this town hadn’t seen her, possibly hadn’t thought of her in seventeen years, her face and her eyes and her body had told them who she was. And her headscarf had confirmed it, for why else would she cover her hair? She became mindful of her animation that was only making her glow more brightly. She erased her smile and dropped her eyes.
Brigan signalled to his standard-bearer to come forward and ride beside them.
Fire spoke low. ‘I sense no danger.’
‘Nonetheless,’ Brigan said grimly, ‘if an archer leans out one of these windows, I want him to notice both of us. A man revenging himself on Cansrel isn’t going to shoot you if he risks hitting me.’
She thought of joking about it. If her enemies were Brigan’s friends and her friends were Brigan’s enemies, the two of them could walk through the world arm in arm and never be hit by arrows again.
But an eerie sound rose now from the silence. ‘Fire,’ a woman called from an upstairs window. A cluster of barefoot children in a doorway echoed the call. ‘Fire. Fire!’ And other voices joined in, and the cry swelled, until suddenly the people were singing out the word, chanting it, some in veneration, some almost in accusation - some with no reason at all except that they were caught up in the captive and mindless fervour of a crowd. Fire rode toward the walls of Nash’s palace, stunned, confounded, by the music of her own name.
THE FAÇADE OF the king’s palace was black, this Fire had heard. But the knowledge didn’t prepare her for the beauty or the luminosity of the