Fire - Kristin Cashore [58]
Fire nodded again. Brigan turned and was gone.
SHE HAD A bath, and a massage and warm compress from a healer so skilled that Fire didn’t care if the woman couldn’t keep her hands out of her hair. Dressed in the plainest dress of the many choices a wide-eyed servant girl had brought to her, Fire felt more like herself; as much like herself as she could, in these strange rooms, and not knowing what to expect next from this strange royal family. And deprived of music, for she had returned her borrowed fiddle to its rightful owner.
The First had a week’s leave in King’s City, and then they’d take to the road again under whatever captain Brigan had left in command. Brigan, she discovered when she emerged from her bathing room, had decided to assign her entire guard to her permanently, with the same rules as before: six guards to accompany her wherever she went, and two women in her bedroom when she slept. She was sorry for this, that these soldiers should have to continue such a dull charge, and sorrier still at the thought of them underfoot. It was worse than a bandage that chafed at a wound, her endless lack of solitude.
At dinnertime she claimed a backache, to avoid having to appear so soon before Nash and his court. Nash sent servants to her room pushing carts bearing a feast that could have fed all the residents of her own stone house in the north, and Archer’s house as well. She thought of Archer, and then cast the thought away. Archer brought the tears too near.
Welkley came with four fiddles after dinner, two hanging from the fingers of each hand. Astonishing fiddles, nothing modest about them, smelling wonderfully of wood and varnish and gleaming brown, orange, vermilion. They were the best he’d been able to find in such a short time, Welkley explained. She was to choose one of the four, as a gift from the royal family.
Fire thought she could guess which member of the royal family had spared a minute amidst his preoccupations to order a roundup of the city’s finest fiddles, and again she found herself uncomfortably close to tears. She took the instruments from the steward one by one, each more beautiful than the last. Welkley waited patiently while she played them, testing their feeling against her neck, the sharpness of the strings on her fingertips, the depth of their sound. There was one she kept reaching for, with a copper-red varnish, and a clarity like the point of a star, precise and lonesome, reminding her, somehow, of home. This one, she thought to herself. This is the one. Its only flaw, she told Welkley, was that it was too good for her skill.
That night memories kept her awake, and aches, and anxiety. Shy of the court bustling with people even late into the night, and not knowing the route to any quiet view of the sky, she went with six of her guard to the stables. She leaned on the stall door before her dozing, lopsided horse.
Why have I come here? she asked herself. What have I got myself into? I don’t belong in this place. Oh, Small. Why am I here?
From the warmth of her fondness for her horse she constructed a fragile and changeable thing that almost resembled courage. She hoped it would be enough.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SNOOP WHO’D been captured in the king’s palace was not the same man Fire had sensed in the king’s rooms at Roen’s fortress, but his consciousness did have a similar feeling.
‘What does that mean?’ Nash demanded. ‘Does it mean he was sent by the same man?’
‘Not necessarily, Lord King.’
‘Does it mean he’s of the same family? Are they brothers?’
‘Not necessarily, Lord King. Family members can have broadly different consciousnesses, as can two men under the same employ. At this point I can only determine that their attitudes and their aptitudes are similar.’
‘And what help is that? We didn’t bring you all this distance so you could tell us he’s of average disposition and intelligence, Lady.’
In King Nash’s office, with its stunning views of the city, its bookshelves rising from floor to mezzanine to domed ceiling, its rich green carpet and gold