Free Fire by Kristin Cashore Page A

south.’
    King’s City. It was on the green land where the Winged River met the Winter Sea. Above the waters rose the king’s palace, made of brilliant black stone. People said the city was beautiful, a place of art, and medicine, and science, but Fire hadn’t seen it since her infancy. She had no memory of it.
    She shook herself. She was daydreaming. ‘Ride with them,’ she said, her mind still fuzzy with sleep. ‘Them?’
    ‘Brigan spends equal time with each division of the army,’ Roen said. She patted Fire’s lap. ‘Come, dear. Have dinner with me. I want to hear about life on the other side of the Little Greys and our chance is now.’ She stood and whisked her candle off the table. ‘I’ll send someone in to help you.’
    Roen swept through the door, slapping it shut behind her. Fire swung her legs out from under the covers and groaned. She fantasised about a day when she would open her eyes from sleep to find that she could move her arm without this never-ending pain.
     
    FIRE AND ARCHER ate dinner with Roen at a small table in her sitting room. Roen’s fortress had been her home years ago, before she’d ever married the king of the kingdom, and was her home again now that Nax was dead. It was a modest castle with high walls surrounding it, enormous stables, lookout towers, and courtyards connecting the business quarters with the living quarters and the sleeping quarters. The castle was large enough that in the case of a siege, people from the surrounding towns for quite some distance could fit inside its walls. Roen ran the place with a steady hand, and from it dispatched assistance to those northern lords and ladies who had demonstrated a desire for peace. Guards, food, weapons, spies; whatever was needed, Roen supplied it.
    ‘While you were resting I climbed the outer wall,’ Archer told Fire, ‘and waited for raptor monsters to drop low enough to shoot. I only killed two. Do you feel them? I can feel their hunger for us from this very room.’
    ‘Vicious brutes,’ Roen said. ‘They’ll stay up high until the army moves out. Then they’ll drop down again and wait for people to emerge from the gatehouse. They’re smarter in swarms, the raptors, and more beautiful, of course, and their mental draw is stronger. They’re not having a beneficial effect on the moods of my people, I’ll tell you that. I’ve two or three servants who need to be watched or they’ll walk right out and offer themselves to be eaten. It’s been two days now. I was so relieved when the Fourth showed up today; it’s the first time in two days I’ve been able to send anyone outside the walls. We mustn’t let the beasts spot you, my dear. Have some soup.’
    Fire was grateful for the soup the servant girl spooned into her bowl, because it was food she didn’t have to cut. She rested her left hand in her lap and calculated in her mind. A swarm of raptor monsters was impatient. This one would hang around for a week at most, and then it would move on; but while it lingered, she and Archer would be stuck in place. Unless they rode out in a day or two, when the next river of soldiers arrived to pick up their commander and their king.
    She momentarily lost her appetite.
    ‘On top of the hassle of being stuck inside,’ Roen said, ‘I hate closing the roofs. Our skies are dark enough without them. With them it’s plain depressing.’
    Most of the year Roen’s courtyards and her passage to the stables were open to the sky; but torrential rains fell most autumns, and the raptor swarms arrived unpredictably. And so the fortress had retractable canvas roofs on hinged wooden frames that folded down across the open spaces and clicked, one frame at a time, into place, providing protection, but cutting off light from all but the outside windows.
    ‘My father always speaks of the glass roofs of the king’s palace as an extravagance,’ Archer said, ‘but I’ve spent enough time under roofs like yours to appreciate