Fire - Kristin Cashore [91]
After some time the thing happened she’d been waiting for: Mila fell asleep. And none too soon, for it was late now, and Brigan was climbing wearily to the roofs. She mustn’t meet Brigan tonight. She would not be able to stop herself from telling him everything, and Archer might deserve to have his laundry aired, but Mila did not.
She marched down by a stairway that Brigan was not taking up. She traced the maze again to Archer’s rooms and stood outside his door. Archer, she thought to him. Get out here, now.
He emerged quickly, if barefoot and confused and a bit hastily thrown together; and Fire for the first time exercised her privilege of being alone with him, sending her guards to either end of the long corridor. She could not quite force herself to appear calm, and when she spoke, her voice was scathing. ‘Must you prey on my guard?’
The puzzlement left his face and he spoke hotly. ‘I’m not a predator, you know. Women come to me quite willingly. And why should you care what I do?’
‘It hurts people. You’re careless with people, Archer. Mila, why Mila? She’s fifteen years old!’
‘She’s sleeping now, happy as a kitten in a patch of sun. You’re stirring up trouble over nothing.’
Fire took a breath, and spoke low. ‘And in a week’s time, when you grow tired of her, Archer, because someone else has captured your fancy; when she becomes despondent or depressed, or pathetic, or furious, because you’ve snatched the thing away that makes her so happy - I suppose then she’ll be stirring up trouble over nothing?’
‘You talk as if she’s in love with me.’
He was maddening; she would like to kick him. ‘They always fall in love with you, Archer, always. Once they’ve known the warmth of you, they always fall in love with you, and you never do with them, and when you drop them it breaks their hearts.’
He bit the words off. ‘A curious accusation, coming from you.’
She understood him, but she would not let him turn this into that. ‘We’re talking about my friends, Archer. I beg you - if you must have the entire palace in your bed, leave the women who are my friends out of it.’
‘And I don’t see why this should matter to you now, when it never did before.’
‘I never had friends before!’
‘You keep using that word,’ he said bitterly. ‘She’s not your friend, she’s your guard. Would your friend do what she’s done, knowing your history with me?’
‘She knows little about it, except that it is history. And you forget I’m in a position to know how she regards me.’
‘But there must be plenty she hides from you - as she’s been hiding her meetings with me all this time. A person may have many feelings about you that you don’t know.’
She watched him, crestfallen. He was so physical in his arguments. He loomed and gestured, his face went dark or burned with light. His eyes blazed. And he was just as physical with his love and his joy, and this was why they all fell in love with him, for in a world that was dismal he was alive and passionate, and his attentions, while they lasted, were intoxicating.
And she hadn’t missed the meaning in his words: this thing with Mila had been going on for some time. She turned away from him, held a hand up against him. She couldn’t fight with the appeal of Lord Archer to a fifteen-year-old soldier girl from the impoverished southern mountains. And she couldn’t quite forgive herself for not realising this might happen, for not paying closer attention in her mind to Archer’s whereabouts and his company.
She dropped her hand, turned back, and spoke with weariness. ‘Of course she has feelings about me I don’t know. But whatever those feelings are, they don’t negate the feeling she does show me, or the friendship in her behaviour that goes beyond the loyalty of a guard. You will not turn my anger away from you and onto her.’
Archer seemed to deflate then. He slumped against his door and stared at his bare toes in the manner of a man accepting that he has lost. ‘I wish you would come home,’ he said weakly; and for a panicked moment Fire thought he was going to cry.
But then he seemed