Fire - Kristin Cashore [68]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FIRE WAS, IN fact, in need of something to do, because without an occupation all she could do was think. And thinking brought her back, over and over, to her lack of occupation, and the question of how much help, in fact, she would be capable of offering this kingdom - if her heart and her mind didn’t positively forbid it. The matter plagued her at night when she couldn’t sleep. She had bad dreams of what it meant to trick people and hurt people, nightmares of Cansrel making Cutter grovel in imagined pain.
Clara took Fire sightseeing. The city folk adorned themselves with even more monster trappings than the court folk, and with much less concern for the aesthetic integration of the whole. Feathers jammed randomly into buttonholes; jewellery, quite stunning really, necklaces and earrings made of monster shells, worn by a baker woman over her mixing bowl and covered in flour dust. A woman wearing a blue-violet wig from the fur of some silky monster beast, a rabbit or a dog, the hair short and uneven and sticking out in spikes. And the woman’s face underneath quite plain, the overall effect tending to an odd caricature of Fire herself; but still, there was no denying she had something lovely atop her head.
‘Everyone wants a bit of something beautiful,’ Clara said. ‘Among the wealthy it’s the rare skins and furs sold on the black market. With everyone else it’s whatever they find clogging the gutters or killed in the housetraps. It all amounts to the same thing, of course, but the rich people feel better knowing they’ve paid a fortune.’
Which was, of course, silly. This city, Fire saw, was part sober and part silly. She liked the gardens and the old crumbling sculptures, the fountains in the squares, the museums and libraries and bright rows of shops that Clara led her through. She liked the bustling cobbled streets where people were so busy with their noisy living that sometimes they didn’t even notice the lady monster’s guarded walking tour. Sometimes. She calmed a team of horses once that panicked when some children ran too close to their heels, murmuring to them, petting their necks. Business stopped on that street, and didn’t resume until she and Clara had rounded a corner.
She liked the bridges. She liked standing in the middle and looking down, feeling she could fall but knowing she wouldn’t. The bridge farthest from the falls was a drawbridge; she liked the bells that rang when it rose and fell, soft, almost melodic, whispering around and through the other city noises. She liked the warehouses and docks along the river, the aqueducts and sewers, and the locks, creaking and slow, that brought supply ships up and down between river and harbour. She especially liked Cellar Harbour, where the falls created a mist of seawater and drowned out all sound and feeling.
She even, hesitatingly, liked the feel of the hospitals. She wondered which one had cured her father of the arrow in his back, and she hoped that the surgeons brought good folk back to life too. There were always people outside the hospitals, waiting and worrying. She glanced at them, touching them with surreptitious wishes that their worry should come to a happy ending.
‘There used to be medical schools all over the city,’ Clara told her. ‘Do you know of King Arn and his monster adviser, Lady Ella?’
‘I remember the names from my history lessons,’ Fire said, reflecting, but not coming up with much.
‘They ruled a good hundred years ago,’ Clara said. ‘King Arn was an herbalist and Lady Ella a surgeon, and they became a bit obsessive about it, really - there are stories about them doing bizarre medical experiments on people who probably wouldn’t have consented to it if a monster hadn’t been the one making the suggestions, if you know what I mean, Lady. And they’d cut up dead bodies and study them, but no one was ever sure where they were getting the dead bodies from. Ah, well,’ Clara said, with a sardonic lift of the eyebrows. ‘Be that as it may, they revolutionised our understanding of doctoring and surgery, Lady.