Fire - Kristin Cashore [70]
‘Why are you so fascinated with insects?’ she asked one of her cleverest students one morning, an eleven-year-old boy named Cob who could build a wall in his mind against raptor monsters, and resist the urge to touch Fire’s hair when he saw it, but would not kill a monster bug even if it was camped out on his hand making a dinner of his blood. ‘You have no trouble with the raptors.’
‘Raptors,’ Cob said with high-pitched scorn. ‘They have no intelligence, only a big meaningless surge of feeling they think they can mesmerise me with. They’re completely unsophisticated.’
‘True,’ Fire said. ‘But compared to monster bugs, they’re veritable geniuses.’
‘But monster bugs are so perfect,’ Cob said wistfully, going cross-eyed as a dragonfly monster hovered at the tip of his nose. ‘Look at their wings. Look at their jointed legs and their beady little eyeballs and look how smart they are with their pinchers.’
‘He loves all bugs,’ Cob’s younger sister said, rolling her eyes. ‘Not just monster bugs.’
Perhaps his problem, Fire thought to herself, is that he’s a scientist. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You may allow monster bugs to sting you, in appreciation of their excellent pinchers. But,’ she added sternly, ‘there are one or two bugs that would do you harm if they could, and those you must learn to guard yourself against. Do you understand? ’
‘Must I kill them?’
‘Yes, you must kill them. But once they’re dead, you could always dissect them. Had you thought of that?’
Cob brightened. ‘Really? Will you help me?’
And so Fire found herself borrowing scalpels and clips and trays from a healer in the castle infirmary and engaging in some rather peculiar experimentation, perhaps along the lines of what King Arn and Lady Ella had done one hundred years before. On a smaller scale, of course, and with much less brilliant results.
She crossed paths often with Princess Hanna. From her windows she saw the girl running to and from the little green house. She also saw Sayre, and other tutors, and sometimes Garan, and even Clara’s legendary gardener, who was blond and bronzed and muscular, like something out of a heroic romance. And sometimes an old woman, tiny and bent, who wore an apron and had pale green eyes and was the frequent stopping block to Hanna’s headlong rushes.
She was strong, this little woman, always carrying Hanna around, and it appeared she was the housekeeper of the green house. Her love for the child was obvious, and she had no love for Fire. Fire had encountered her once in the orchard and found her mind as closed as Brigan’s. Her face, at the sight of the monster lady, had gone cold and unhappy.
The palace had outside walkways built into the stone portions of the roof. At night, far from sleep, Fire walked them with her guard. From the heights she could see the glimmer of the great torches on the bridges, kept lit throughout the night so that boats on the fast-running waters below always knew exactly how close they were to the falls. And from the heights she could hear those falls roaring. On clear nights she watched the city spread sleeping around her and the flash of stars on the sea. She felt like a queen. Not like a real queen, not like the wife of King Nash. More like a woman at the top of the world. At the top of a city, in particular, where the people were becoming real to her; a city of which she was growing rather fond.
BRIGAN RETURNED TO court three weeks from the day he’d left. Fire knew the instant he arrived. A consciousness was like a face you saw once and forever recognised. Brigan’s was quiet, impenetrable, and strong, and indubitably his from the instant her mind tripped over it.
She happened to be with Hanna and Blotchy at the time, in the morning sun of a quiet courtyard corner. The little girl was examining the raptor scars on Fire’s neck and trying to wheedle from her, not for the first time, the story of how she’d got those scars and saved Brigan’s soldiers. When Fire declined, the girl wheedled at Musa.
‘You weren’t even there,’ Fire