Part 4 (1/2)

She'd had only seven days of rest, and her arm, uncomfortable now, would be aching by the end of this ride. But she was determined not to be treated like an invalid. She sent a swelling of serenity to Small, a gentle plea for him to ride smoothly for her today. It was another reason Small and she were well-suited to each other. He had a warm, receptive mind.

'Give my regards to the lady queen,' Lord Brocker said from his chair in the middle of the footpath. 'Tell her, if the day ever comes when she has a moment of peace, to come visit an old friend.'

'We shall,' Archer said, pulling on his gloves. He reached behind his head to touch the fletchings of the arrows on his back, as he always did before mounting his horse - as if he had ever once in his life forgotten his quiver - and then swung himself into his own saddle. He waved the guards forward, and Fire behind them. He fell into place behind Fire, and they were off.

They rode with eight soldiers. It was more than Archer would have taken had he gone alone, but not many more. No one in the Dells travelled with fewer than six others, unless he was desperate or suicidal or had some perverse reason for wanting to be attacked by footpads. And the disadvantage of Fire's presence, as an injured rider and a popular target, was nearly negated by her ability to sense both the proximity and the att.i.tude of the minds of approaching strangers.

Away from home, Fire did not have the luxury of avoiding the use of her mental power. Generally, minds did not draw her attention equally unless she was looking for them. A mind's palpability depended on its strength, its purpose, its familiarity, nearness, openness, awareness of her presence, and a host of other factors. On this journey she must not allow anyone to slip her notice; she would search the surroundings constantly and, if she could, take hold of every mind she encountered until she was sure of its intentions. She would hide her own mind with extra care from the recognition of monster predators. The roads were too dangerous otherwise, for everyone.

Queen Roen's fortress was a long day's ride away. The guards set a brisk pace, skirting the edges of the town, close enough to hear roosters crowing but far enough not to be seen. The best way for a traveller to get himself robbed or murdered was to make the fact of his travel public.

There were tunnels under the mountains that would have taken them faster to Roen, but these also they planned to avoid. At least in the north, the steep paths above ground were safer than the unknown that lurked in the dark.

Of course Fire's hair was tightly covered, and her riding clothes plain. Still, she hoped they would encounter no one. Predator monsters tended to overlook the charms of a face and a body if they saw no interesting hair, but this was not the way of men. If she was seen, she'd be scrutinised. Once scrutinised, she'd be recognised, and the eyes of strangers were never comfortable.

THE ABOVE-GROUND route to the fortress of Queen Roen was a high and treeless one, for mountains called the Little Greys divided the land of Fire and her neighbours from the land of the lady queen. 'Little' because they were pa.s.sable by foot and because they were more easily inhabitable than the Great Greys that formed the Dells' western and southern border with the unknown land.

Hamlets balanced on top of cliffs in the Little Greys or crouched in the valleys near tunnel openings - rough-hewn, cold, colourless, and stark. Fire had watched these distant hamlets and wondered about them every time she'd travelled to Roen. Today she saw that one of them was missing.

'There used to be a village on that cliff,' she said, pointing. And then she made sense of it. She saw the broken rock foundations of the old buildings sticking out of the snow, and at the foot of the cliff on which the village had stood, a pile of rocks, wood, and rubble. And crawling all over the pile, monster wolves, and circling above it, monster raptors.

A clever new trick for the looters, to throw an entire village off a mountain, stone by stone. Archer swung down from his horse, his jaw hard. 'Fire. Are there any living human minds in that pile?'

Many living minds, but none of them human. A good many rats, monster and ordinary. Fire shook her head.

Archer did the shooting, because they hadn't any arrows to waste. First he shot the raptors. Then he wound a rag around an arrow, and set the rag on fire, and shot it into the pile of monsters and decay. He shot flaming arrow after flaming arrow into the pile until it was fully alight.

Flame was the way, in the Dells, to send the bodies of the dead where their souls had gone, into nothingness. To respect that all things ended, except the world.

The party moved on quickly, because on the wind the stench was terrible.

THEY WERE MORE than halfway to their destination when they saw a sight to bolster their spirits: the King's Army, bursting from a hole in the base of a cliff far below them, and thundering across a plain of flat rock. They stopped on their high path to watch. Archer pointed to the front of the charge.

'King Nash is with them,' he said. 'See him? The tall man, on the roan, near the standard-bearer. And that's his brother beside him, the commander, Prince Brigan, with the longbow in his hand, on the black mare. In brown, see him? Dells, isn't it a magnificent sight?'

Fire had never seen Nax's sons before, and she had certainly never beheld such a large division of the King's Army. There were thousands of them - five thousand in this branch, Archer said when she asked - some with mail flas.h.i.+ng, others in the army's dark grey uniform, horses strong and fast, flowing across the land like a river. The one with the longbow in his hand, the prince and commander, moved to the right side and fell back; spoke to a man or two in the middle of the column; surged forward again to the front. They were so far away that they were small as mice, but she could hear the thud of the hooves of some five thousand horses, and feel the enormous presence of some ten thousand consciousnesses. And she could see the colours of the flag hoisted by the standard-bearer who stayed close to the prince's side wherever he went: a wooded valley, grey and green, with a blood red sun in an orange sky.

Prince Brigan turned in his saddle suddenly then, his eyes on some point in the clouds above him, and in that same moment Fire sensed the raptors. Brigan wheeled his black mare around and raised his hand in a signal that caused a number of the party to break off and pull arrows from their backs. Three raptors, two shades of fuchsia and violet and one apple-green, circled high over the river of soldiers, attracted by the vibrations, or by the smell of the horses.

Archer and his guards also readied arrows. Fire gripped her reins tightly with one hand, calmed Small, and tried to decide whether to put her arm through the agony of readying her own bow.

It wasn't necessary. The prince's men were efficient, and used only four arrows to bring down the fuchsia birds. The green was smarter; it circled irregularly, changing height and speed, dropping lower and lower and always closer to the column of riders. The arrow that finally caught it was Archer's, a fast shot soaring downward and over the heads of the galloping army.

The bird monster fell and crashed onto the plain. The prince turned his horse and eyed the mountain paths, looking for the source of the arrow, his own arrow still notched in case he didn't like the archer he found. When he spotted Archer and the guards, he lowered his bow and raised an arm in greeting. Then he pointed to the carca.s.s of the green bird on the plain and pointed back to Archer. Fire understood the gesture: Archer's kill was Archer's meat.

Archer gestured back: you take it. Brigan raised both arms in thanks, and his soldiers slung the body of the monster onto the back of a riderless horse. She saw a number of riderless horses, now that she was looking for them, carrying bags and supplies and the bodies of other game, some of it monstrous. She knew that outside King's City the King's Army housed itself and fed itself. She supposed it must take a bounty to feed so many hungry men.

She corrected herself. So many hungry men and women. Any person who could ride, fight, and hunt was welcome to join today's protectorate of the kingdom, and King Nash didn't require that person to be a man. Or, more particularly, Prince Brigan didn't. It was called the King's Army, but really it was Brigan's. People said that at twenty-seven Nash was kingly, but that when it came to bas.h.i.+ng heads the younger brother was the one with the touch.

Far in the distance, the river of riders began to disappear into a crack at the base of another cliff. 'The tunnels would have made for safe pa.s.sage today, after all,' Archer said, 'in the wake of that lot. I wish I'd known they were so near. Last I heard, the king was in his palace in King's City and the prince was in the far north, looking for Pikkian trouble.'

On the plain below, the prince turned his mare around to join the tail end of his fighting force; but first his eyes rested on Fire's form. He could not have appreciated her features from that distance, and with the light of the sun glaring into his face. He could not have ascertained much more than that she was Archer's friend, dressed like a boy for riding but female, with covered hair. Still, Fire's face burned. He knew who she was, she was sure of it. His backward glare as he swung away was evidence, and so was his ferocity as he spurred his horse forward. So was his mind, closed to her, and cold.

This was why she had avoided meeting Nash and Brigan before this. It was only natural that the sons of King Nax should despise her. She burned hot with the shame of her father's legacy.

CHAPTER FIVE.

FIRE SUPPOSED IT was too much to hope that the king and the warrior would pa.s.s so close to their mother's holding without stopping. The final portion of their journey took them across rocky hills crowded with the king's resting soldiers.

The soldiers had not made camp, but they were napping, cooking meat before fires, playing cards. The sun was low. She couldn't remember in her tired mind whether armies ever travelled through darkness. She hoped this army was not staying the night on these hills.

Archer and his guards formed a wall around her as they pa.s.sed the soldiers, Archer so close on her injured side that her left leg brushed against his right. Fire kept her face down, but still she felt the eyes of soldiers on her body. She was so exhausted, so impossibly sore, but she held her consciousness alert, flicking through the minds around her, looking for trouble. Looking also for the king and his brother, and wis.h.i.+ng desperately not to find them.

There were women among the soldiers, but not many. She heard the occasional low whistle, the occasional grunt. Epithets, too, and more than one fight broke out between men as she pa.s.sed, but no one threatened her.

And then as they neared the ramp to Roen's drawbridge she stirred and looked up, and was thankful, suddenly, for the presence of the soldiers. She knew that south of the Little Greys raptor monsters moved sometimes in swarms, found areas of dense population and circled there, waiting, but she had never seen anything like it before. There must have been two hundred raptors, flas.h.i.+ng bright colours against an orange and pink sky, high up where only the luckiest of arrows could reach them. Their screeches made her cold. Her hand flew to the edges of her headscarf to check for stray hairs, for she knew that if the raptors discovered what she was, they'd cease even to notice the human army. All two hundred would turn on her.

'You're all right, love,' Archer muttered beside her. 'Quickly now. We're almost inside.'

INSIDE THE ROOFED courtyard of Queen Roen's fortress, Archer helped her as she fell more than stepped from Small's back. She balanced herself between her horse and her friend, and caught her breath. 'You're safe now,' Archer said, his arm around her, bracing her, 'and there'll be time to rest before dinner.'

Fire nodded vaguely. 'He needs a gentle hand,' she managed to say to the man who took Small's reins.

She barely noticed the girl who showed her to her room. Archer was there; he stationed his men at her doorway, and before he took his leave he warned the girl to take care with her arm.

Then Archer was gone. The girl sat Fire on the bed. She helped her out of her clothes and untied her headscarf, and Fire collapsed onto the pillows. And if the girl stared wide-eyed at Fire, touching her bright hair wonderingly, Fire didn't care. Already she was asleep.

WHEN SHE WOKE her room flickered with candles. A small woman in a brown dress was lighting them. Fire recognised Roen's mind, quick and warm. Then the woman turned to face her, and Fire recognised Roen's dark eyes, and her beautifully cut mouth, and the white streak that grew at the front and centre of her long black hair.

Roen set her candle down and sat on the edge of Fire's bed. She smiled at Fire's groggy expression. 'Well met, Lady Fire.'