Fire - Kristin Cashore [6]
She found this man’s mind instantly - so open, so welcoming, even, that she wondered if he could be a simpleton hired by someone else. She fumbled for the knife in her boot. His footfalls, and then his breath, sounded through the trees. She had no time to waste, for he would shoot her again as soon as he found her. You don’t want to kill me. You’ve changed your mind.
Then he rounded a tree and his blue eyes caught hold of her, and widened in astonishment and horror.
‘Not a girl!’ he cried out.
Fire’s thoughts scrambled. Had he not meant to strike her? Did he not know who she was? Had he meant to murder Archer? She forced her voice calm. ‘Who was your target?’
‘Not who,’ he said. ‘What. Your cloak is brown pelt. Your dress is brown. Rocks alive, girl,’ he said in a burst of exasperation. He marched toward her and inspected the arrow embedded in her upper arm, the blood that soaked her cloak, her sleeve, her headscarf. ‘A fellow would think you were hoping to be shot by a hunter.’
More accurately, a poacher, since Archer forebade hunting in these woods at this time of day, just so that Fire could pass through here dressed this way. Besides, she’d never seen this shortish, tawny-haired, light-eyed man before. Well. If he was not only a poacher, but a poacher who’d accidentally shot Fire while hunting illegally, then he would not want to turn himself in to Archer’s famous temper; but that was what she was going to have to make him want to do. She was losing blood, and she was beginning to feel light-headed. She would need his assistance to get home.
‘Now I’ll have to kill you,’ he said glumly. And then, before she could begin to address that rather bizarre statement: ‘Wait. Who are you? Tell me you’re not her.’
‘Not who?’ she hedged, reaching again for his mind, and finding it still strangely blank, as if his intentions were floating, lost in a fog.
‘Your hair is covered,’ he said. ‘Your eyes, your face - oh, save me.’ He backed away from her. ‘Your eyes are so green. I’m a dead man.’
He was an odd one, with his talk of killing her, and himself dying, and his peculiar floating brain; and now he looked ready to bolt, which Fire must not allow. She grasped at his thoughts and slid them into place. You don’t find my eyes or my face to be all that remarkable.
The man squinted at her, puzzled.
The more you look at me the more you see I’m just an ordinary girl. You’ve found an ordinary girl injured in the forest, and now you must rescue me. You must take me to Lord Archer.
Here Fire encountered a small resistance in the form of the man’s fear. She pulled harder at his mind, and smiled at him, the most gorgeous smile she could muster while throbbing with pain and dying of blood loss. Lord Archer will reward you and keep you safe, and you will be honoured as a hero.
There was no hesitation. He eased her quiver and her fiddle case from her back and slung them over his shoulder against his own quiver. He took up both of their bows in one hand and wrapped her right arm, her uninjured arm, around his neck. ‘Come along, miss,’ he said. He half led her, half carried her, through the trees toward Archer’s holding.
He knows the way, she thought tiredly, and then she let the thought go. It didn’t matter who he was or where he came from. It only mattered that she stay awake and inside his head until he got her home and Archer’s people had seized him. She kept her eyes and ears and her mind alert for monsters, for neither her headscarf nor her own mental guard against them would hide her from them if they smelled her blood.
At least she could count on this poacher to be a decent shot.
ARCHER BROUGHT DOWN a raptor monster as Fire and the poacher stumbled out of the trees. A beautiful, long shot from the upper terrace that Fire was in no state to admire, but that caused the poacher to murmur something under his breath about the appropriateness