Furies of Calderon (19 page)

With the realization, a wave of dizzying weariness passed over Isana. She lost her balance and stumbled forward, to her knees, lowering one hand to the floor to balance and lifting the other to her face.

“Isana?” Aldo’s voice came to her clearly, and talk in the room dropped away to a near silence as the folk of Bernard-holt turned their attention to her. “Isana, are you all right?”

Isana looked up to find Kord’s sons looking straight at her, their expressions startled, guilty. Bittan hissed something to Aric. Aric’s face hardened.

She looked up to tell Aldo about Bittan’s fire-crafting—and suddenly found that she couldn’t push the air out of her lungs.

Isana lifted her head, eyes sweeping around in a sudden panic. She struggled to speak, but couldn’t, her throat unable to expel a breath—or, she realized a moment later, to draw it in.

People crowded around her, then, Aldo leading the other Stead-holders over to her with quick, fearful steps. The diminutive man picked her up and said, “Help me. Someone help!”

“What’s wrong with her?” asked Roth. “Good furies, she’s terrified.”

Voices mingled and blended around her in a worried buzz. She struggled, reaching out for Rill, but the water fury only clouded around her, pressing close, in nervous reaction to Isana’s own wild fear. As her helplessness increased, her mental defenses eroded, and the fear of those in the room flooded over more and more thickly as they pressed closer. She lost track of who was speaking and reeled in confusion.

Isana struggled to look around, pushing away Otto as he tried to open her mouth, to look down her throat and see if she was choking.

Kord came over through the crowd, but Isana looked past the big Stead-holder—to where his sons still sat by the fire, unnoticed. Bittan had looked up at her, and a cruel smile had twisted his handsome mouth. He clenched his fingers abruptly into a fist, and Isana felt an accompanying spike of blinding panic flash through her, driving away thought for a moment.

Beside Bittan sat Aric. Aric, Isana thought. A wind-crafter. The quiet son of Kord wasn’t looking at her, but he had his fingers bridged together and his expression was set in concentration.

Darkness swam in front of her eyes, and she struggled to mouth words to Aldo, who held her, his eyes wide with panic.

“Isana,” he breathed. “Isana, I can’t understand you.”

Everything wavered, and Isana found herself laying on a table, the world spinning above her. Kord arrived, a sudden odor of stale sweat and roasted meat. He looked down at her and said, “I think she’s panicked. Woman, calm down. Don’t try to talk.” He leaned over her, his eyes narrowing. “Don’t,” he muttered softly, eyes malicious and threatening. “Don’t try to talk. Calm down and don’t talk. Maybe it will go away.”

Isana tried to push Kord away, but he was too big, too heavy, her arms too weak.

“All you have to do is nod,” he whispered. “Just be a good girl and agree to let things go. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

She stared up at him, feeling her own helplessness and fear wash through her, felt herself losing control in the face of that terror. She knew that Bittan was making the fear worse, making her more afraid, but that bit of knowledge seemed to have no particular relevance before the wild, animal panic. If she did not give in to Kord, she was certain, he would stand by and let her die.

Fury flashed through her, then, a sudden fire that evaporated the fear.

Isana raked her nails at Kord’s eyes. He drew back from her before she could do more than leave a set of small, pink weals on his cheek, his eyes sparkling with anger.

There was a general gasp. Confusion spread rapidly through the room, the heightened emotions already present making it flare up like a wildfire through dry grass. Everyone started crying out at once.

“What?” Otto looked back and forth. “Someone’s what?”

Aldo turned and started shoving his way toward the fire. Then he yelped and fell forward, clutching at his foot where the stone floor had suddenly folded up and over it like a heavy cloth. The young Stead-holder whirled and barked a word at the heavy wooden bench beside the table. The wood shuddered and then twisted, snapping with the brittle sound of old bones, sending splinters as long as daggers flying toward Kord.

The big Stead-holder ducked toward Isana, away from the splinters, though one of them had opened his cheek in a sudden spilled sheet of scarlet blood. He lifted his fist and drove it toward her.

Isana rolled off the table and felt the big Stead-holder’s blow shatter the heavy oak like kindling. She crawled away from him on her hands and knees toward the fire and the man whose fury was smothering her.

She saw Fade at the fire, staring at all the confusion with a baffled expression, still half-bent over the pot, a ladle in one hand. He gabbled something and turned to flee, whimpering high in his throat. His feet stumbled over Bittan, as the young Kord-holder stood to his feet, knocking the young man down. Fade let out a screech and fell to one side, steaming stew flying from both bowl and ladle.

It splashed all over Aric’s frowning face, drawing a sudden scream of surprised agony from the slender wind-crafter.

Isana drew in a shocked breath, even as she felt the wild confusion of emotion in the room vanish as suddenly as the shadow of a bird flying by overhead. People looked around for a moment, unbalanced by the sudden release from the fire-crafting, backing toward the walls.

“Stop them!” Isana gasped. “Stop Kord!”

Kord let out a furious roar. “You barren bitch! I’ll kill you!” The big man turned, and Isana could all but feel the stirring in the earth as he drew upon his fury for strength, lifted the broken trestle board of the table as though it did not weigh as much as a grown man, and swung it toward her. Aldo, his foot twisted and dragging, hauled himself to his feet and threw himself at Kord’s legs. The smaller Stead-holder hit the larger man low, dragging him off balance and sending the trestle plank sailing wide of Isana, cracking into the wall. Kord kicked Aldo away, as though he weighed no more than a puppy, and turned toward Isana once more.

Isana struggled to crawl away, calling Rill to her with desperate intensity. She heard a confusion of sounds around her, men cursing, a door banging open. The air suddenly shrieked, and a gale flung itself down the chimney and hurled a cloud of red-hot embers at Isana. She cried out, falling flat onto the earth, waiting for the pain to begin.

Instead, she felt them swirl up and past her, and Kord let out a sudden howl of dismay.

“There, Kord, you lying slive!” cackled Stead-holder Warner, from atop the stairs. He stood naked and dripping with water, a towel wrapped around his waist, soap in his wispy hair and running down his skinny legs. His sons stood behind him, swords in hand. “It’s about time someone taught you to respect a lady! Take them, boys!”

“Father,” Aric called, through the confusion. Warner’s sons leapt down the stairs. “Father, the door!”

“Wait!” Isana cried. She started to stand. “Wait, no! No bloodshed in my house!” A weight hit her from behind and pressed her ungently to the ground. She struggled and squirmed, to find Fade on top of her, firmly pressing her down.

“Fade!” she gasped. “Get off me!”

“Hurt Fade!” the slave gabbled, and hid his face against her back, sobbing, clinging to her like an overlarge child. “No hurt, no more hurt!”

Kord let out a bellow and caught the first of Warner’s sons, as he threw himself at the big Stead-holder. Kord grasped the young man by the wrist and belt and threw him across the room to crash hard into the wall. Kord rushed toward the doors to the hall, Aric and Bittan hard on his heels, and the folk of Bernard-holt scattered from the Stead-holder’s path. He slammed into one of the doors and tore it from its hinges, letting in a howl of cold wind and half-frozen rain. He vanished into the night, his sons following.

“Let them go!” shouted Isana. So sharply did her voice ring out that Warner’s other two sons drew up short, staring at her.

“Let them go,” Isana repeated. She wriggled out from beneath Fade and looked around at the hall. Aldo lay gasping and hurt, and Warner’s son slumped unmoving against the wall. At the other end of the hall, Old Bitte crouched over Bernard’s pale and motionless form, an iron poker from the fire gripped determinedly in her withered fingers.

“Isana,” protested Warner, coming down the stairs, still clasping his towel with one hand. “We can’t just let them leave! We can’t let animals like that go unstopped!”

Weariness and the pounding in her head met with the backwash of Isana’s terror, of the panic at the sudden and vicious violence, and she began to shake. She bowed her head for a moment and willed Rill to keep the tears from her eyes.

“Let them go,” she repeated. “We have our own wounded to attend to. The storm will kill them.”

“But—”

“No,” Isana said, firmly. She looked around at the other Stead-holders. Roth was standing to his feet, slowly, and looked dazed. Otto was supporting the older man, and sweat shone on his mostly bald pate. “We have wounded to see to,” Isana told the two men.

“What happened?” Otto stammered. “Why did they do that?”

Roth put a hand on Otto’s shoulder. “They were fire-crafting us. Isn’t that it, Isana? Making us all more afraid, more worried than we needed to be.”

Isana nodded, silently grateful to Roth, and aware that as a water-crafter, he would sense it. He smiled at her, briefly.

“But how,” Otto said, his tone baffled. “How did they do it without one of us sensing it?”

“My guess is that Bittan built it up slowly,” Isana said. “A little at a time. The way you can heat bathwater a little at a time, so that anyone inside doesn’t notice.”

Otto blinked. “I knew you could project emotions, but I didn’t know you could do it that way.”

“Most of the Citizenry who know fire-crafting will do it to one degree or another, during their speeches,” Isana said. “Nearly any Senator can do it without really thinking about it. Gram does it without knowing all the time.”

“And while his son did it to us,” Roth mused, “Kord fed us that nonsense about a possible flood—and we were worried enough to think that it sounded reasonable.”

“Oh,” Otto said. He coughed and flushed pink. “I see. You came down late, Isana, so you were able to notice it. But why didn’t you just say something?”

“Because the other one was smothering her, dolt,” growled Aldo, from where he lay. His voice carried the stress of the pain from his injured foot. “And you saw what Kord tried to do to her.”

“I told you all,” Warner said with a certain vicious satisfaction in his voice from his position on the stairs. “They’re a bad lot all around.”

“Warner,” Isana said wearily. “Go get dressed.”

The spare Stead-holder looked down at himself and seemed to become aware of his nakedness for the first time. He flushed, then muttered something to excuse himself and hurried from the room.

Otto shook his head again. “I just can’t believe someone would
do
that.”

“Otto,” muttered Aldo. “Use your head for something besides a dressing mirror. Bernard is hurt, and so is Warner’s son. Get them into a tub and craft them better.”

Roth nodded decisively, visibly gathering himself together. “Of course. Stead-holder Aldo,” he inclined his head a bit, to the younger man, “was right all along. Isana, I offer you my full support in your crafting, as does Otto, here.”

Chapter 10