Shaking with cold, she unwrapped her headscarf and wrapped it again so that it covered not just her hair, still slightly damp, but her face and neck as well. She killed a raptor monster before it killed her, a scarlet creature that came screeching suddenly out of the sky, but knew it was no use trying to carry the meat, for the smell of its blood would only attract more monsters.
This reminded her. The gala had taken place in the second half of January. She couldn't be certain how much time had passed, but surely it was well into February. Her bleeding was due.
Fire understood, with her new waking logic that was blunt and unsympathetic, that she was going to die soon, from one thing or another. She thought about this on her horse. It was comforting. It gave her permission to give up. I'm sorry, Brigan, she thought to herself. I'm sorry, Small. I tried.
But then a memory, and a realisation, jarred her out of this. People. She might live if she had the help of people, and there were people behind her, in the place where smoke rose from the rocks. There was warmth there, too.
Her horse was still plodding purposefully southwest. Propelled by nothing more than a drab sense of duty not to die if she didn't have to, Fire turned the animal around.
As they started back the way they'd come, snow began to fall.
Her body ached from her rattling teeth, her rattling joints and muscles. She ran through music in her mind, all the most difficult music she'd studied, forcing herself to remember the intricacies of complicated passages. She didn't know why she was doing this. Some part of her mind felt it was necessary and would not let her stop, though her body and the rest of her mind begged to be left alone.
When a golden raptor monster dove at her, screaming through falling snow, she fumbled with her bow and couldn't notch the arrow properly. The horse killed the bird, though Fire didn't know how it managed the job. She'd slid off its rearing back and was lying in a heap on the snow when it happened.
Some time later she slid off the horse's back again. She wasn't sure why. She assumed it must be another raptor monster, and waited patiently, but almost immediately her horse began pushing at her with its nose, which confused Fire, and struck her as deeply unjust. The horse blew angrily in her face and shoved her repeatedly, until, defeated, she dragged herself shaking onto its proffered back. And then she understood why she'd fallen. Her hands had stopped working. She had no grip on the animal's mane.
I'm dying, she thought, disinterestedly. Ah well. I may as well die on the back of this lovely dappled horse.
The next time she fell she was too senseless to realise that she'd fallen onto warm rock.
She was not unconscious. She heard the voices, sharp, urgent, and alarmed, but she could not get up when they asked her to. She heard her name and grasped that they knew who she was. She understood when a man lifted her and carried her underground, and she understood when women undressed her and undressed themselves, and wrapped themselves with her in many blankets.
She had never in her life been so cold. She shook so hard she felt she would shatter. She tried to drink the warm, sweet liquid a woman held to her face but had the impression she sprayed most of it onto her blanket companions.
After an eternity of gasping and shaking she noticed that she was no longer shaking so hard. Embraced by two pairs of arms, enfolded between the bodies of two naked women, a merciful thing happened: she fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
She woke to the sight of Musa's face and the feeling that her hands were being crushed by mallets.
"Lady," Musa said grimly. "I've never been more relieved in all my life. How do you feel?"
Her voice was a croak. "My hands hurt."
"Yes. They're frostbitten, Lady. You're not to worry. The people here have thawed them and bandaged them and taken very good care of you."
Memory came back to Fire, seeping into the spaces around her. She turned her face away from Musa.
"We've been searching for you from the minute you were taken, Lady," Musa continued. "We wasted some time following false leads, for Princess Hanna never saw who took her, and the men we killed had no identifying marks, and your grandmother and the green house guards were drugged before they even knew it was happening. We had no idea where to look, Lady, and the king and the prince and princess were sure it was some plot of Lady Murgda's, but the commander's communications were doubtful, and it wasn't until one of the palace guards got hold of a blurry memory in his head of a red-eyed boy lurking on the grounds that we began to suspect what had happened. We reached Cutter's yesterday. I can't tell you how it frightened us, Lady, to find the place burned to the ground, and charred bodies we couldn't recognise."
Fire spoke hollowly. "I lit a fire for Archer. He's dead."
Musa was startled by this. Fire felt it, and understood at once that Musa's allegiance was with Mila, not with the careless lord who'd fathered Mila's baby. This was just a death to Musa, of someone she'd known only by bad behaviour.
Fire pushed Musa's feelings away.
"We'll send word to the commander at Fort Flood about Lord Archer, Lady," Musa finally said. "Everyone will be so relieved to hear you're all right. Shall I tell you of the progress the commander has made in the war?"
"No," Fire said.
A woman appeared at Fire's side then with a bowl of soup and said gently, "The lady must eat." Musa rose from her chair so that the woman could sit down. She was old, her face whitish and lined, her eyes a deep yellow-brown. Her expression shifted softly in the light from a fire stoked in the middle of the stone floor, its smoke rising to the ceiling and escaping through a crack above. Fire recognised the feeling of the woman. This grandmother was one of the two who'd saved her life with the gift of her own body's heat.
The woman spoon-fed the soup to Fire, murmuring quietly, catching the bits that ran down Fire's chin. Fire consented to this kindness, and to the soup, because they came from a person who didn't want to talk about the war, and had never known Archer, and could receive her grief easily, with uncomplicated acceptance.
Her bleeding came, delaying their journey. She slept, and tried not to think, and spoke very little. She watched the lives of the people who lived in the darkness of these underground caves, poor and scrabbling through winter, but warm from their fires and from what they called the furnace of the earth, which sat very close to the surface here and heated their floors and walls. They explained the science of it to Fire's guard. They gave Fire medicinal concoctions to drink.
"As soon as you're able," Musa said, "we'll move you to the army healers at Fort Flood, Lady. The southern war is not going badly. The commander was hopeful, and terribly determined, when we saw him last. Princess Clara and Prince Garan are with him there. And the war is raging on the northern front as well. King Nash rode north in the days after the gala, and the Third and Fourth and most of the auxiliaries and Queen Roen and Lord Brocker met him there. Lady Murgda escaped the palace the day after the gala, Lady. There was a fire, and a terrible battle in the corridors, and in the confusion she got away. It's thought she tried to ride to the beacons at Marble Rise, but the King's Army had already taken control of the roads."
Fire closed her eyes, trying to bear the pressure of all of this meaningless, horrible news. She did not want to go to Fort Flood. But she understood that she couldn't stay here indefinitely, imposing on these people's hospitality. And she supposed the army healers might as well look at her hands, which she herself had not yet seen, but which were obviously swollen, and useless, and ached beneath their bandages as if pain hung at the ends of her arms instead of hands.