Then Brigan gave the order. Servants swung the gates in and pulled the portcullis up, and the men burst into daylight. Fire pulled herself into her saddle and spurred Small forward behind them. The gates were closing again when she and Small galloped through, and rode alone, away from the soldiers, toward the empty rockiness east of Roen's holding.
The soldiers' focus was northward and up; they didn't see her. Some of the raptors did, and, curious, broke off from the surge dropping down onto the soldiers, few enough that she shot them from her saddle, clenching her teeth through the pain. The archers on the wall most certainly saw her. She knew it from the shock and panic Archer was sending at her. I'll be most likely to survive this if you stay on that wall and keep shooting, she thought to him fiercely, hoping it would be enough to keep him from coming out after her.
And now she was a good distance from the gates and the first soldiers had reached the tunnel, and she saw that a skirmish of monsters and men had begun at the back of the line. This was the time. She drew her brave horse up and turned him around. She yanked her scarf from her head. Her hair billowed down over her shoulders like a river of flame.
For an instant nothing happened, and she began to panic because it wasn't working. She dropped her mind's guard against their recognition. Still nothing. She reached out to grab at their attention.
Then one raptor high in the sky felt her, and then sighted her, and screamed a horrible sound, like metal screeching against metal. Fire knew what that sound meant, and so did the other raptors. Like a cloud of gnats they lifted from the soldiers. They shot into the sky, twirling desperately, searching for monster prey, finding it. The soldiers were forgotten. Every last raptor monster dove for her.
Now she had two jobs: to get herself and her horse back to the gates, if she could; and to stop the soldiers from doing something heroic and foolish when they saw what she'd done. She spurred Small forward. She slammed the thought at Brigan as hard as she could, not manipulation, which she knew would be futile – only a message. If you don't continue onward to Grey Haven this instant, I will have done this for nothing.
She knew he hesitated. She couldn't see him or sense his thoughts, but she could feel that his mind was still there, on his horse, not moving. She supposed she could manipulate his horse, if she had to.
Let me do this, she begged him. My life is mine to risk, as yours is yours.
His consciousness disappeared into the tunnel.
And now it was the speed of Fire and Small versus the swarm descending upon her from the north and from above. Under her, Small was desperate and wonderful. He had never flown so fast.
She bent herself low in her saddle. When the first raptor cut into her shoulder with its claws she threw her bow backwards at them; it was useless now, a stick of wood in her way. The quiver on her back might serve as a kind of armour. She took her spear and stuck it behind her, one more thing for the birds to have to work around. She clenched her knife in her hand and stabbed back whenever she felt a claw or a beak jabbing into her shoulder or her scalp. She didn't feel pain anymore. Only noise, that might be her own head screaming, and brightness, that was her hair and her blood, and wind that was Small's headlong speed. And arrows suddenly, flying very close past her head.
A claw caught her neck and yanked, pulled her high in her seat, and it occurred to her that she was about to die. But then an arrow struck the raptor that dragged at her, and more arrows followed it, and she looked ahead and saw the gates very near, cracked open, and Archer in the aperture, shooting faster than she'd known he could shoot.
And then he stepped aside and Small slammed through the crack, and behind her, monster bodies slammed against the closing doors. They screamed, scraped. And she left it to Small to figure out where to go and when to stop. And people were around her, and Roen was reaching for her reins, and Small was limping, she could tell; and she looked to his back and his rump and his legs and they were torn apart, sticky with blood. She cried out in distress at the sight of it. She vomited.
Someone grabbed her under the arms and pulled her out of her saddle. Archer, rigid and shaking, looking and feeling like he wanted to kill her. Then Archer went bright, and turned to black.
Chapter Seven
She woke to stinging pain, and to the sense of a hostile mind moving down the corridor outside her room. A stranger's mind. She tried to sit up, and gasped.
"You should rest," a woman said from a chair along the wall. Roen's healer.
Fire ignored the advice and pushed herself up gingerly. "My horse?"
"Your horse is in about the same shape you're in," the healer said. "He'll live."
"The soldiers? Did any of them die?"
"Every man made it into the tunnel alive," she said. "A good many monsters died."
Fire sat still, waiting for the pounding of her head to slow, so that she could get up and investigate the suspicious mind in the hallway. "How badly am I wounded?"
"You'll have scars on your back and your shoulders and under your hair for the rest of your life. But we have all the medicines here that they have in King's City. You'll heal cleanly, without infection."
"Can I walk?"
"I don't recommend it; but if you must, you can."
"I just need to check on something," she said, breathless from the effort of sitting. "Will you help me into my robe?" And then, noticing the skimpy sheath she wore: "Did Lord Archer see my wrists?"
The woman came to Fire with a soft, white robe and helped her to hang it over her burning shoulders. "Lord Archer hasn't been in."
Fire decided to focus on the agony of putting her arms into her sleeves, rather than trying to calculate how furious Archer must be, if he hadn't even been in.
The mind she sensed was near, unguarded, and consumed with some underhanded purpose. All good reasons for it to have drawn Fire's attention, though she wasn't certain what she hoped to achieve by limping down this corridor in pursuit of it, willing to absorb whatever emotions it leaked accidentally but unwilling to take hold of it and plumb it for its true intentions.
It was a guilty mind, furtive.
She could not ignore it. I'll just follow, she thought to herself. I'll see where he goes.
She was astonished a moment later when a servant girl observing her progress stopped and offered an arm.
"My husband was at the back of that charge, Lady Fire," the girl said. "You saved his life."
Fire hobbled down the hallway on the arm of the girl, happy to have saved someone's life if it meant that now she had a person to keep her from flopping onto the floor. Every step brought her closer to her strange quarry. "Wait," she whispered finally, leaning against the wall. "Whose rooms are behind this wall?"
"The king's, Lady Fire."
Fire knew with utter certainty then that a man was in the king's compartments who should not be. Haste, fear of discovery, panic: it all came to her.
A confrontation was beyond her current strength even to consider; and then down the hall, in his own room, she sensed Archer. She grasped the servant girl's arm. "Run to Queen Roen and tell her a man is in the king's rooms who has no place there," she said.
"Yes, Lady. Thank you, Lady," the girl said, and scampered away. Fire continued down the hallway alone.