Fire - Kristin Cashore [90]
His very words grated against her ears; grated, it seemed, against her brain, so horribly, like raptor monsters screeching, that she had to resist the impulse to cover her ears. Yet when she recalled the timbre of his voice, the voice itself was neither unusual nor unpleasant.
She stared at him coolly, so he would not see her bewilderment. ‘A choking game? All the fun of it is on your side, and it’s a sick kind of fun.’
He smiled again. His lopsided, red-eyed smile was somehow distressing. ‘Is it sick? To want to be in control?’
‘Of a helpless, frightened creature? Let it go.’
‘The others believed me when I said it didn’t hurt him,’ he said, ‘but you know not to. Plus, you’re awfully pretty. So I’ll give you what you want.’
He bent to the ground and opened his hand. The monster mouse fled, a streak of gold, disappearing into an opening in the roots of a tree.
‘You have interesting scars on your neck,’ he said, straightening. ‘What cut you?’
‘It’s none of your affair,’ Fire said, shifting her headscarf so that it covered her scars, very much disliking his gaze.
‘I’m glad I got to talk to you,’ he said. ‘I’ve wanted to for some time. You’re even better than I hoped.’ He turned around, and left the courtyard.
WHATAN UNPLEASANT child.
It had never happened before, that Fire should not be able to form a conception of a consciousness. Even Brigan’s mind, which she couldn’t enter, offered the shape and feeling of its barricades to her perception. Even the foggy archer, the foggy guards; she couldn’t explain their minds, but she could perceive them.
Reaching for this boy’s mind was like walking through a collection of twisted mirrors facing other twisted mirrors, so that all was distorted and misleading, and befuddling to the senses, and nothing could be known or understood. She couldn’t get a straight look at him, not even his outline.
And this was what she stewed over for some time after the boy left; and this stewing was why it took her so long to attend to the condition of the children he’d been talking to. The children in the courtyard who’d believed what he’d said. Their minds were blank, and bubbling with fog.
Fire could not fathom this fog. But she was certain she’d found its source.
By the time she realised she mustn’t let him go, the sun was setting, the stallion was bought, and the boy was already gone from the court.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THAT SAME NIGHT brought information that distracted everyone from the matter of Cutter’s boy.
It was late evening and Fire was in the stables when she sensed Archer returning from the city to the palace. It was not a thing she would have sensed so forcefully, not searching for it particularly; except that he was eager to talk to her, and open as an infant, and also slightly drunk.
Fire had only just begun to brush Small, who was standing with eyes closed from the bliss of it and drooling onto his stall door. And she wasn’t anxious to see Archer if he was both eager and drunk. She sent him a message. We’ll talk when you’re sober.
Some hours later with her regular guard of six, Fire followed the maze from her rooms to Archer’s. But then outside his door she was perplexed, for she sensed that her Mila, who was off-duty, was inside Archer’s chamber.
Fire’s thoughts groped for an explanation, any explanation other than the obvious. But Mila’s mind was open, as even strong minds tended to be when they were experiencing what Mila was experiencing just now on the other side of this door; and Fire remembered how sweet and pretty her guard was, and how many opportunities Archer had had to notice her.
Fire stood staring at Archer’s door, silent and shaking. She was quite certain he had never done anything to make her this angry before.
She turned on her heel and marched down the hallway. She found the stairs and marched up them, and up, and up, until she burst onto the roof, where she set to marching back and forth. It was cold and damp, and she had no coat, and it smelled like coming snow. Fire didn’t notice, didn’t care. Her baffled guard stood out of her