They made camp in a gigantic underground cavern, halfway between Fire's home and Roen's fortress, the likes of which Fire had never seen. Nor could she particularly see it now, for it was dim, light glancing through cracks in the ceiling and seeping from side openings. As the sun set, the cavern turned positively dark, and the First Branch was a composition of moving shadows spread across the sloping floor of the chamber.
Sound in the cavern was thick, musical. When the commander had left the camp with a force of two hundred, two hundred had echoed like two thousand and the footfalls had chimed like bells all around her. He'd taken off just as soon as he'd seen everyone settled – his face as indecipherable as ever. A scout unit of fifty soldiers had not returned at the time and place it was meant to. He'd gone looking for it.
Fire was uneasy. The shifting shadows of her five thousand companions unsettled her. Her guard kept her apart from most of these soldiers, but she could not separate herself from the impressions she collected in her mind. It was exhausting, to keep track of so many. They were most of them aware of her on some level, even those farthest away. Too many of them wanted something from her. Some got too close.
"I like the taste of monster," one with a twice broken nose hissed at her.
"I love you. You're beautiful," another three or four breathed to her, seeking her out, pressing themselves against the barriers of her guard to reach her.
Brigan had given her guard strict orders before he'd ridden away. The lady was to be housed in a tent even though the army was under a cavern's roof, and two of her female guard were to accompany her always inside the tent.
"Am I never to have privacy?" she'd put in, overhearing Brigan's order to Musa.
Brigan had taken a leather gauntlet from a young man Fire supposed was his squire, and pulled it over his hand. "No," he'd said. "Never." And before she'd even been able to take a breath to protest he'd pulled on his other gauntlet and called for his horse. The hoof-beat music had swelled, and then dissipated.
In her tent the smell of roasting monster meat came to her. She crossed her arms and tried not to glare at her two female guard companions, whose names she couldn't remember. She tugged at her headscarf. Surely in the presence of these women she could have some relief from the tight wrapping around her hair. They didn't want anything from her; the strongest emotion she could sense from both of them was boredom.
Of course, once she'd uncovered her hair their boredom lessened. They watched her with curious eyes. She looked back wearily. "I forget your names. I'm sorry."
"Margo, Lady," said the one with a broad, pleasant face.
"Mila, Lady," said the other, delicate boned, light haired, and very young.
Musa, Margo, and Mila. Fire bit off a sigh. She recognised the feel of almost every one of her twenty guards at this point, but the names would take her some time.
She didn't know what else to say, so she fingered the case of her fiddle. She opened the case and inhaled the warm smell of varnish. She plucked a string and the answering acoustics, like the reverberation of a bell struck underwater, focused her disorientation. The flap of the tent was open and the tent itself was set in a niche against the side of the cavern, a low, curving roof curling above it, not unlike the shell of an instrument. She tucked the fiddle under her chin and tuned it, and then, very quietly, she began to play.
A lullaby, soothing, to calm her own nerves. The army faded away.
Sleep didn't come easily that night, but she knew it would be pointless to seek out the stars. Rain seeped through cracks in the ceiling and trickled down the walls to the floor; the sky tonight would be black. Perhaps a midnight storm would batter away her dreams. She threw back her blanket, found her boots, slipped past the sleeping forms of Margo and Mila, and pushed open the tent flap.
Outside she took care not to trip over the other sleeping guards, who were arranged around her tent like some kind of human moat. Four of the guards were awake: Musa and three men whose names she couldn't remember. They played cards in the light of a candle. Candles flickered here and there all across the floor of the cavern. Fire supposed that most units kept some kind of watch throughout the night. She pitied the soldiers currently on guard outside this haven, in the rain. And Brigan's search party, and the scouts for whom they searched, all of whom had yet to return.
The four guards seemed a bit dazed at the sight of her. She touched her hand to her hair, remembering that it was unbound.
Musa recollected herself. "Is anything wrong, Lady?"
"Is there an opening in this cavern to the sky?" Fire asked. "I want to see the rain."
"There is," Musa said.
"Will you show me the way?"
Musa set her cards down and began to wake the guards at the furthest edges of the human moat.
"What are you doing?" Fire whispered. "Musa, it's not necessary. Please. Let them sleep," she said, but Musa continued to shake shoulders until four of the men were awake. She ordered two of the card players to sit and keep watch. She motioned for the others to arm themselves.
Her fatigue compounded now with guilt, Fire ducked back into the tent for a headscarf and her own bow and quiver. She emerged and joined her six armed and sleepy companions. Musa lit candles and passed them around. Quietly, in procession, the line of seven skirted the edge of the cavern.
The narrow, sloping pathway they climbed some minutes later led to a perforation in the side of the mountain. Fire could see little beyond the opening, but instinct told her not to venture too far and not to loose her hold on the edges of rock that formed a kind of doorway to either side of her. She didn't want to fall.
The night was gusty, damp, and cold. She knew it was senseless to get herself wet, but she soaked in the rain and the untamed feeling of the storm anyway, while her guard huddled just inside the opening and tried to protect the candles.
There was a shift in her consciousness: people nearing, riders. Many. Difficult to tell the difference between two hundred and two hundred and fifty at this distance, and knowing so few of them personally. She concentrated, and decided that she was sensing well more than two hundred. And they were tired, but not in any unusual state of distress. The search party must have met with success.
"The search party's returning," she called back to her guard. "They're close. I believe the scout unit's with them."
At their silence she turned to glance at them, and found six pairs of eyes watching her in various states of unease. She stepped out of the rain, into the passageway. "I thought you'd like to know," she said more quietly. "But I can keep my perceptions to myself, if they make you uncomfortable."
"No," Musa said. "It's appropriate for you to tell us, Lady."
"Is the commander well, Lady?" one of the men asked.
Fire had been trying to determine this for herself, finding the man irritatingly difficult to isolate. He was there, of this she was sure. She supposed the continued impenetrability of his mind must indicate some measure of strength. "I can't quite tell, but I think so."
And then the music of hoofbeats echoed through the corridor as somewhere, in some crevice of the mountain below them, the riders entered the tunnels that led to the sleeping cavern.
A short while later, plodding downward, Fire received an abrupt answer to her concern when she sensed the commander walking up the passageway toward them. She stopped in her tracks, causing the guard behind her to whisper something most ungentlemanly as he contorted himself to avoid lighting her headscarf with his flame.
"Is there any other route to the cavern from here?" she blurted out; then knew the answer, then shrivelled in mortification at her own display of cowardice.