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.
A rock wall, high and long and incongruously neat, surrounded his property. Pens and cages dotted the grounds. Spots of colour, monsters behind bars, raptors, bears, and leopards screeching at each other. In all the strangeness of the place, this was familiar to Fire, and brought memories crowding too close.
She half expected the boy to try to force her into one of those cages. One more monster for the black market, one more catch.
She didn't really care what intentions Cutter had for her here. Cutter was nothing, he was an annoyance, a gnat, and she would disabuse him quickly of the notion that his intentions were relevant. She would leave this place and go home.
They did not lock her in a cage. They brought her into the house and drew her a hot bath in an upstairs room with a roaring fire that quite overcame the drafts from the windows. It was a small bedroom, the walls hung with tapestries that stunned her, though she hid her surprise and pleasure. They were woven with green fields, flowers, and blue sky, and they were beautiful, and very realistic. She had thought to refuse the bath, because she sensed, and resented, that its purpose was to prettify her. But standing in a place of fields and flowers made her want to be clean.
The men left. She set her vial of poison and her dart on a table and peeled her filthy dress away from her skin. She braced herself against the painful exhilaration of scalding bathwater, finally relaxing, closing her eyes, surrendering herself to the bliss of soap that lifted sweat, old blood, and river grime from her body and hair. Every few minutes she could hear the boy shouting messages up the stairs to the guards outside her room, and just as regularly to the guards on the rocks below her window. The monster was not to be trusted or helped to escape, he yelled. The boy knew what was best. The men would avoid mistakes if they followed the boy's advice, always. It must be nerve-racking, Fire thought, to be able to manipulate minds but not sense the state of them. His shouts were unnecessary, for she was not altering any of their minds. Not yet.
She played her mind through the building and the grounds, as she'd been doing since she'd come in range of the place. She recognised Cutter, downstairs with the boy and a number of men. As foggy as everyone else, and as condescending and insincere as he'd always been. Whatever the boy's words could do, it seemed they did not alter temperament.
When she stretched to her limits she could sense possibly thirty men in the house and grounds, and a spattering of women, too. All were muddle-minded. Archer was not there.
She pushed herself further. Archer? Archer!
There was no response.
And she wouldn't have minded not finding him here, she would have hoped it meant he'd come to his senses and abandoned his heroic pursuit – except for an unpleasant perception she wished she were cowardly enough to ignore. One or two of the foggy men on these grounds had the feeling of people she recognised. She thought they might have been guards recently in Nash's palace. And the simplest explanation for their presence here was that they'd come with Archer as part of his guard. Which begged the question of what had happened since, and who was left guarding Archer, and where Archer was.
The bath was still the purest, hottest ecstasy but she stood, and climbed out, suddenly impatient to be done with this place. She scrubbed herself dry and dressed in the flimsy long-sleeved gown they'd left for her. It had enough the look of bedroom clothing to make her uncomfortable, in addition to which, they'd taken her boots and coat away and given her nothing for her hair. She went to a wardrobe in the corner and dug through its random assortment of items until she'd found socks, a sturdy pair of boy's boots, a man's heavy robe that was far too big, and a brown woolen scarf that would do for a head wrapping. She hoped, a bit grimly, that the ensemble looked as peculiar as it felt. She didn't need beauty to control the boy's empty-headed puppets, and she wasn't in the mood to gratify Cutter by presenting the appearance of a doe-eyed monster woman ready to be ravished by one of his disgusting male customers.