Fire - Kristin Cashore [8]
She ignored him. She knew it was only hot air.
‘I passed Donal in your hall,’ he said, ‘sneaking out with a pile of blankets and pillows. You’re building your assassin a bed out there, aren’t you? And probably feeding him as well as you feed yourself.’
‘He’s not an assassin, only a poacher with fuzzy eyesight.’
‘You believe that even less than I do.’
‘All right, but I do believe that when he shot me, he thought I was a deer.’
Archer sat back and crossed his arms. ‘Perhaps. We’ll talk to him again tomorrow. We’ll have his story from him.’
‘I would rather not help.’
‘I would rather not ask you, darling, but I need to know who this man is and who sent him. He’s the second stranger to be seen on my land these two weeks.’
Fire lay back, closed her eyes, forced her jaw to chew. Everyone was a stranger. Strangers came out of the rocks, the hills, and it was impossible to know everyone’s truth. She didn’t want to know - nor did she want to use her powers to find out. It was one thing to take over a man’s mind to prevent her own death, and another thing entirely to steal his secrets.
When she turned to Archer again, he was watching her quietly. His white-blond hair and his deep brown eyes, his proud mouth. The familiar features she’d known since she was a toddler and he was a child, always carrying a bow around as long as his own height. It was she who’d first modified his real name, Arklin, to Archer, and he had taught her to shoot. And looking into his face now, the face of a grown man responsible for a northern estate, its money, its farms, its people, she understood his anxiety. It was not a peaceful time in the Dells. In King’s City, young King Nash was clinging, with some desperation, to the throne, while rebel lords like Lord Mydogg in the north and Lord Gentian in the south built armies and thought about how to unseat him.
War was coming. And the mountains and forests swarmed with spies and thieves and other lawless men. Strangers were always alarming.
Archer’s voice was soft. ‘You won’t be able to go outside alone until you can shoot again. The raptors are out of control. I’m sorry, Fire.’
Fire swallowed. She’d been trying not to think about this particular bleakness. ‘It makes no difference. I can’t play fiddle, either, or harp or flute or any of my instruments. I have no need to leave home.’
‘We’ll send word to your students.’ He sighed and rubbed his neck. ‘And I’ll see whom I can place in their houses in your stead. Until you heal, we’ll be forced to trust our neighbours without the help of your insight.’ For trust was not assumed these days, even among long-standing neighbours, and one of Fire’s jobs as she gave music lessons was to keep her eyes and ears open. Occasionally she learned something - information, conversation, the sense of something wrong - that was a help to Archer and his father, Brocker, both loyal allies to the king.
It was also a long time for Fire to live without the comfort of her own music. She closed her eyes again and breathed slowly. These were always the worst injuries, the ones that left her unable to play her fiddle.
She hummed to herself, a song they both knew about the northern Dells, a song that Archer’s father always liked her to play when she sat with him.
Archer took the hand of her uninjured arm, and kissed it. He kissed her fingers, her wrist. His lips brushed her forearm.
She stopped humming. She opened her eyes to the sight of his, mischievous and brown, smiling into hers.
You can’t be serious, she thought to him.
He touched her hair, shining against the blankets. ‘You look unhappy.’
Archer. It hurts to move.
‘You don’t have to move. And I can erase your pain.’
She smiled, despite herself, and spoke aloud. ‘No doubt. But so can sleep. Go home, Archer. I’m sure you can find someone else’s pain to erase.’
‘So callous,’ he said teasingly, ‘when you know how worried I was for you