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.
She ran her mind through the hundreds of creatures held on this estate, monster predators, horses and hunting dogs, even an odd collection of rodents she couldn't imagine the purpose of. The choice of horses satisfied her. They were none of them as sympathetic as Small, but several would suit her purposes.
She soaked the tip of her dart in the vial of sleeping poison and tucked the vial back into her gown. She held the dart in her hand, where it was hidden by the length of her heavy sleeve.
Taking a deep breath for courage, she went downstairs.
Cutter's sitting room was small and as warm as the bedroom had been, the walls similarly dressed, in tapestries showing fields of flowers rising to cliffs overhanging the sea. The rug here was colourful too, and it occurred to Fire that at least some of this beauty had been woven from monster fur. And the books on the bookcases, and the golden clock on the mantelpiece – Fire wondered how much of this house's richness had been stolen.
Cutter sat at the head of the room, clearly believing himself to be the room's master. The room's true master leaned against the wall to the side, small, bored, blinking unmatched eyes, and surrounded by a woven field of flowers. Jod the archer stood beside Cutter. A man was positioned at each of the room's entrances.
Cutter barely glanced at Fire's attire. His eyes were glued to her face, his mouth stretched into a jubilant and proprietary simper. He looked just as he always had, except for a new vacantness of expression that must have to do with the fog.
"It's been no easy task stealing you, girl, especially since you've taken up residence in the king's palace," he said in the self-satisfied voice she remembered. "It's taken a great deal of time and considerable spying. Not to mention that we had to kill a number of our own spies who were careless enough to be captured in your woods by you and your people. We seem to have the stupidest spies in the kingdom. What a lot of trouble. But it was all worth it, boy, wasn't it? Look at her."