"If Dellians vex you," she whispered, "go back where you came from."
He shrugged, smiling. "I don't know how to go back. There are tunnels, but I've never found them. And even if I did, I don't want to. There's so much potential here – so many advances in medicine, and engineering, and art. And so much gorgeousness – the monsters, the plants – do you appreciate how unusual the plants are here, how marvellous the medicines? My place is here in the Dells. And," he said with a touch of contempt, "don't imagine it contents me to control Cutter's vulgar smuggling operation here at the kingdom's edges. It's King's City I want, with its glass ceilings and its hospitals and its beautiful bridges all lit up at night. It's the king I want, whoever that may be at the other side of the war."
"Are you working with Mydogg? Whose side are you on?"
He waved a dismissive hand. "I don't care which one wins. Why should I get involved when they're doing me a favour by destroying each other? But you, don't you see the place I've made for you in my plans? You must know it was my idea to capture you – I controlled all the spies and masterminded the kidnapping, and I was never going to allow Cutter to sell you, or breed you. I want to be your partner, not your master."
How weary Fire was of everyone, every person in this world who wanted to use her.
"Not use you, work with you to control the king," the boy said, causing her to prickle with confusion, for she had not thought he could read mind's. "And I'm not in your mind," he said impatiently. "I told you before, you're sending your every thought and feeling out to be felt. You're revealing things I doubt you mean to reveal, and you're also hurting my head. Pull yourself together. Come back with me, you've destroyed all my rugs and my hangings, but I'll forgive you for that. There's a corner of the house still left standing. I'll tell you my plans, and you can tell me all about yourself. Like who cut your neck, for starters. Was it your father?"
"You're not normal," Fire whispered.
"I'll send my men away," he continued, "I promise. Cutter and Jod are dead, anyway – I killed them. It'll just be the two of us. No more fighting. We'll be friends."
It was heartbreaking, the realisation that Archer had wasted himself protecting her from such a stupid, mad thing. Heartbreaking beyond endurance. Fire closed her eyes and leaned her face against the steady leg of her horse. "These seven kingdoms," she whispered. "Where are they?"
"I don't know. I fell through the mountains and found myself here."
"And is it the way, in these kingdoms you fell from, for a woman to join forces with an unnatural child who's murdered her friend? Or is that expectation unique to you, and your infinitesimal heart?"
He didn't respond. She opened her eyes to find that he'd shifted his smile, carefully, to something unpleasant that was shaped like a smile but did not have the feel of one. "There is nothing unnatural in this world," he said. "An unnatural thing is a thing that could never happen in nature. I happened. I am natural, and the things I want are natural. The power of your mind, and your beauty, even when you've been drugged in the bottom of a boat for two weeks, covered in grime and your face purple and green – your unnatural beauty is natural. Nature is horrifying.
"And," he continued, his strange smile gleaming, "as I see it, our hearts are not so different in size. I murdered my father. You murdered yours. Is that something you did with a large heart?"
Fire was becoming confused, because it was a cruel question, and at least one of the answers to it was yes, which she knew made no sense. She was too wild and too weak for logic. I must defend myself with illogic, she thought to herself, illogically. Archer has always been one for illogic, though he never sees it in himself.
Archer.
She had taught Archer to make his mind strong. And the strong mind she had given him had got him killed.
But he had taught her, too. He had taught her to shoot an arrow fast and with greater precision than she could ever have learned on her own.
She stood, reaching for the quiver and bow she suddenly realised she had on her back, forgetting that she was broadcasting her every intention. Leck grabbed for his own bow, and he was faster than she was – he had an arrow aimed at her knees before her own arrow was notched. She braced herself for an explosion of pain.
And then, beside her, Fire's horse erupted. The animal sprang at the boy, rearing, screaming, kicking him in the face. The boy cried out and fell, dropping his bow, clasping one eye with both hands. He scrambled away, sobbing, the horse fast after him. He seemed unable to see, there was blood in his eyes, and he tripped and sprawled headlong. Fire watched, stunned and fascinated, as he slid across a patch of ice and over the rim of a crevice, slipped through its lips, and disappeared.
Fire stumbled to the crack. She knelt, peering in. She could not see to its bottom, and she could not see the boy.
The mountain had swallowed him.
She was too cold. If only the boy had died in the fire and never come after her – for he'd woken her, and now she perceived things like coldness. And weakness and hunger, and what it meant to be lost in a corner of the western Great Greys.
She ate the rest of the food the children had given her, without much hope of her stomach submitting to it. She drank water from a half-frozen stream. And she tried not to think about the night that would come at the end of this day, because she had no flint, and she had never started a fire without one. She'd never even started a fire that hadn't been in a fireplace. She'd lived a pampered life.
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.