Fire (Graceling Realm #2)(43)
Author: Kristin Cashore

The floor tilted, and she became colder and wetter, and understood that she lay in a puddle of water that shifted and rocked with the floor. Everywhere she could hear the slap of water. And there were large creatures under the carriage. She could feel them.

They were fish.

This carriage was a boat.

I'm being stolen away, she thought wonderingly, in a boat. But I can't be. I need to go back to the palace, I need to watch Lady Murgda. The war. Brigan. Brigan needs me! I've got to get out of this boat!

A man near her gasped something. He was rowing, he was exhausted, he was complaining of blistered hands.

'You're not tired,' the boy said tonelessly. 'Your hands don't hurt. Rowing is fun.' He sounded bored as he said it, and thoroughly unconvincing, but Fire could feel the men experience a collective surge of enthusiasm. The creaking sound, which she recognised now as oars in oarlocks, increased its pace.

He was powerful, and she was weak. She needed to steal his foggy men away from him. But could she, while numb with pain and cold, and confusion?

The fish. She must reach for the fish lumbering enormously beneath her and urge them to the surface to capsize the boat.

A fish threw its back against the boat's underside. The men yelled, pitching sideways, dropping oars.

Another hard blow, men falling and cursing, and then the boy's horrible voice.

'Jod,' he said. 'Shoot her again. She's awake and this is her doing.'

Something sharp pricked her thigh. And it was well enough, she thought as she slipped into blackness. It wouldn't solve anything to drown them if she drowned too.

SHE WOKE, AND groped for the mind of the rower nearest the boy. She stabbed at the fog she found there, and took hold. She compelled the man to stand, drop his oar, and punch the boy in the face.

The boy's scream was terrible, scratching like claws across her brain.

'Shoot her, Jod,' he gasped. 'No,her . Shoot the monster bitch.'

Of course, she thought to herself as the dart pierced her skin. It's the archer I need control of. I'm not thinking. They've muddied my mind so I can't think.

The boy was crying, his breath shaking with fury and pain, as she slid away.

THE NEXTTIME she woke it was to the feeling she was being dragged agonisingly back into life. Her body screamed with pain, hunger, sickness. A long time, she thought. They've been poisoning me for a long time. Too long this time.

Someone was feeding her some kind of meal cake, mushed up and dripping like a porridge. She choked on it.

'She's stirring,' the boy said. 'Shoot her again.'

This time Fire grabbed at the archer, stabbed at his fog, tried to get him to aim his darts at the boy instead of her. The sound of a struggle followed, and then the boy's screaming voice.

'I'm your protector, you fool! I'm the one who takes care of you! She's the one you want to shoot!'

A prick on her arm.

Darkness.

SHE CRIED OUT. The boy was shaking her. Her eyes opened to the sight of him leaning over her, a hand raised as if to strike her. They were on land now. She was lying on rock. It was cold and the sun was too bright.

'Wake up,' he snarled, small and ferocious, his unmatching eyes blazing at her. 'Wake up and get up and walk. And if you do anything to thwart me or any of my men I swear to you I'll hit you so hard you'll never stop hurting again. Don't trust her,' he said sharply and suddenly to his companions. 'I'm the only person you can trust. You do what I say.'

His nose and cheekbones were blue with bruises. Fire pulled her knees to her chest and kicked him in the face. As he screamed she grasped at the consciousnesses around her and tried to get up, but she was weak, and dizzy, and staggering like a person unconnected to her legs. His voice, thick with sobs, shouted orders to his men. One of them grabbed her, yanked her arms behind her back, and closed a hand around her throat.

The boy came to her, his face a mess of blood and tears. He slapped her hard across the nose and she surfaced from the shattering pain to find herself sobbing.

'Stop,' he whispered. 'Stop resisting. You will eat, and you will walk, and you will do what I say, and every time one of my men turns on me, and every time a bird pecks at me, and every time a squirrel so much as crosses my path in a way I don't like, I will hurt you. Do you understand?'

It doesn't work on me, she thought to him, gasping and furious.The things you say don't control me .

He spit bloody mucus onto the snow and considered her, sullenly, before turning to the path. 'Then I'll find other ways to control you.'

THE TRUTH WAS, she didn't want her body to hurt any more than it already hurt. And she didn't want them to put her to sleep again, even though sleep was peaceful darkness and waking meant inhabiting a body shaped and moulded out of pain.

She needed to possess her own mind if she wanted to get out of this. So she did what he said.

Where they were walking it was rocky and steep with such an abundance of waterfalls and streams that she thought it likely the body of water with the great fish had been the Winged River. They'd rowed west on the river, presumably, and now they were climbing north, away from the river, in some part of the kingdom near to the western Great Greys.

Sitting for a meal the first day, she sniffed a corner of her ruined purple skirts, and put it in her mouth. It did not taste clean, of course, but it also didn't taste salty. This supported her theory. The water she'd lain in for so long had been water of the river, not the sea.

Minutes later, vomiting the meal cake she'd offered her poor wrecked stomach, she found herself laughing at her attempts to be scientific. Of course they'd brought her north of the river to a place in the western Great Greys. She should not have needed a test of salinity to determine it. They were most certainly taking her to Cutter, and she'd known all her life that this was where Cansrel's monster smuggler lived.

Cutter made her think of Small, and she wished he were here - and then was glad, in the same moment, that he wasn't. It was better that she was alone, that no one she loved was anywhere near this boy.

They provided her with sturdy boots and coverings for her hair, and an odd stylish coat of white rabbit pelt that was far too beautiful for her filthy state and made for an absurd hiking costume. In their camp in the evenings, one of the men, a fellow named Sammit with gentle hands, a kind voice, and wide, empty eyes, inspected her nose, and told her what she should eat, and how much. After a day or two she began to be able to keep her food down, which went far toward helping her to feel clearer in mind. She gathered, from the way the boy spoke to Sammit, that Sammit was a healer. She also gathered that they had woken her because Sammit had thought it dangerous for her to continue any longer in her drugged stupor.

They wanted her alive then, and relatively healthy. Which was only natural, if she was a monster and they were monster smugglers.

She began to experiment.

She entered the mind of one of the men - Sammit, to start - and popped his fog, and observed as his own thoughts trickled back in. She waited - it wasn't long - for the boy to remind the men that she was not to be trusted, that he was their guardian and friend. The words brought the fog blistering, and then bulging, right back into Sammit's mind - thewords , spoken in that voice that didn't seem to hurt Sammit's head the way it hurt hers.

This was strange to Fire at first, that his power should be in his words and his voice, rather than in his mind. But the more she considered it, the more she supposed it wasn't entirely strange. She could control with parts of her body too. She could control some people with her face alone, or with her face and a suggestion made in a certain tone of voice - a voice of pretended promises. Or with her hair. Her power was in all of those things. Perhaps it was not so different from his.

And his power was contagious. If the boy spoke words to the fellow on his left and that fellow repeated the words to Sammit, the fog passed from the fellow to Sammit. It explained why the archer had been able to infect her guards.

The boy never let more than a few minutes pass between reminders to the men that Fire was their enemy and he their friend. Which suggested to Fire that he couldn't see into their minds like she could, and know for himself if he still controlled them. This was her next experiment. She took hold of Sammit again and popped his fog, and moulded his thoughts so that he knew the boy was manipulating him. She made Sammit angry at the boy. She caused him to contemplate revenge, immediate and violent.

And the boy didn't seem to notice. He didn't even glance at Sammit sidelong. Minutes passed before he repeated his litany that erased Sammit's anger and returned Sammit to forgetfulness and fog.

The boy could not read minds. His control was impressive, but it was blind.

Which left Fire with a great deal of choice over what she could do with these men without him knowing.

And without her having to worry about them resisting, for the boy's fog emptied the men so nicely of their own inclinations that might otherwise have got in her way.

AT NIGHT THE boy wanted her drugged with something mild to keep her from turning on him while he slept. Fire consented to this. She only made sure to occupy a corner of Sammit's mind, so that whenever Sammit reached for the mixture that the archer was to dip his darts in, he pulled out an antiseptic salve instead of a sleeping potion.

In their winter camps under white, leafless trees, while the others slept or stood watch, she pretended to sleep, and planned. She understood from the talk of the men and from a few quiet, well-placed questions that Hanna had been released unharmed, and that Fire had been drugged for almost two weeks while the boat pushed west against the current of the river. That this slow passage had not been their intention -

that they'd had horses when they'd reached King's City, and meant to return the way they'd come, pounding west across the flat land north of the river; but that as they were fleeing the palace grounds with Fire tossed over someone's shoulder, Fire's guard had set upon them and chased them toward the river and away from their mounts. They'd stumbled upon a boat moored under one of the city bridges, and seized it in desperation. Two men with them had been killed.

It was as frustrating to her as it was to them, the crawling pace of their journey across black rock and white snow. It was almost too much to be borne, these days away from the city and the war, and the things she was needed for. But they were almost upon Cutter now, and she supposed it was best to submit herself to being taken to him. Her escape would be faster on a horse she could steal from Cutter.

And perhaps she'd be able to find Archer, and convince him to come back with her.

The archer, Jod. The man was haggard, his skin tinged with grey, but underneath his illness he was even-featured, well-boned. He had a deep voice to him and a set to his eyes that made her uneasy. He almost reminded her of Archer.

She compelled Sammit one night, while he was on guard duty, to bring her a tiny vial of the poison they'd drugged her with for so long, and a dart. She tucked the vial into the bosom of her dress and carried the dart in her sleeve.

CUTTER HAD FORGED his small kingdom straight out of the wilderness. His land was so thick with boulders that his house seemed almost as if it were balanced upon a pile of rubble. It had a strange look, the building, constructed of enormous stacked tree trunks in some places and rock in others, all covered thickly with moss, a bright green house with blinking window eyes, icicle eyelashes, a gaping door mouth, and soft fur. It was a monster, perched precariously on a studded hill of stone.