Furies of Calderon (38 page)

From the ground, Amara cried out and slashed her hand at the air. The arrow flicked itself abruptly aside and rattled into the woods behind Tavi.

The man let out a short, frustrated noise and said, “Pointless. Kill them.”

From behind him stepped the man Tavi had seen earlier, sword again in hand, quietly lethal intent in his eyes. The swordsman glided forward, toward Amara and his uncle, the blade catching the scarlet light of the fires raging around.

Kord had regained mobility and hauled himself to one side. He roused Aric with a few kicks and started to fall back into the woods, letting his son scramble after him as he tried to regain his senses. But even as Kord left, there was a rattle in the blazing brush, and Bittan backed out of the middle of a blaze, blinded and choking on the smoke. He waved a hand before his face and found himself standing a few scant feet from the swordsman, between the man and Bernard.

Tavi never even saw the swordsman’s arm move. There was a hissing sound, and Bittan let out a surprised choke, and fell to his knees. The swordsman moved past the boy. Tavi saw scarlet puddling around Bittan’s knees, and the boy fell limply over onto his side.

Tavi felt his gorge rise in his belly. Fade let out a hiss of breath and clutched at Tavi’s arm.

“Bittan,” Aric choked. “No.”

For a moment, that tableau held, the boy on the ground in a pool of his own blood, scarlet firelight all around, the swordsman, blade extended to his side, moving with patient grace toward the people standing between him and Tavi.

Then everything happened at once.

Kord let out a bellow of raw and indiscriminate rage. The earth rippled around him and lashed out toward the swordsman.

Amara came to her feet, her blade in hand. She threw herself forward even as the swordsman’s blade descended toward Bernard, intercepting it. The earth heaved and threw them both to one side, locked together in a close-quarters struggle.

The innocuous looking man extended his hands toward the far side of the river, and the trees groaned in response, the air filling with the twist and crackle of branches, of movement.

And the storm arrived.

One moment, there was relative stillness—and the next, a wall of fury and sound and power thundered down over them, engulfed Tavi’s senses, blinded him, and whipped the surface of the river to icy foam. The flames Bittan had started buckled for a moment beneath the wind’s onslaught, and then, as though the storm had sensed their potential, they blossomed and bloomed, spreading and growing with a speed as terrifying as it was amazing. To Tavi, it almost seemed as though faces gibbered and shrieked in the wind around those flames, calling them, encouraging them.

Fade let out a squeal, cowering down against the winds, and Tavi abruptly remembered his aunt’s commands. He seized the slave by the arm, though still terrified for those behind him at the ford, and dragged him into the twisting woods, along the paths he knew, even in the semidarkness, away from the river.

They struggled forward together, holding one another in the screaming, frigid gale, Tavi filled with a sense of gratitude that there was another living human being there to touch. He was unsure for how long they struggled away, their path winding forward and then slowly uphill, before he heard the flood waters.

They rushed forward, nearly silent, preceded only by a whispering sigh and the groans of a thousand trees stirred in their ancient earthy beds. To the top of a hill, Tavi and Fade struggled, and he turned back to see, dimly through the ferocity of the storm, the dancing of the trees, that some pent-up tide had been loosed from up the stream of the Rillwater. The little river had exceeded itself and flooded its banks, and those cold, silent waters began to swallow Bittan’s fires as swiftly as they had spread. The waters rose, and in that screaming cyclone of the fury-storm, Tavi was uncertain how anyone, even his aunt, could survive such an onslaught of the elements. Terror rushed through him, pounded through his veins with his blood.

Darkness swallowed the land as the silent waters of the flooding river swallowed errant flame, and in moments the were lightning of the fury-storm flashed, green and eerie, to show Tavi which way to go. In silence, he turned back to his path and stumbled forward, leading Fade. Twice, wind-manes swept toward them, but Tavi’s salt crystals, though partly dissolved from their time in the water, drove them away.

They made their way from the twisting wood an endless time later. Fade let out a sudden yelp and threw himself against Tavi with a sob of fear, forcing the boy down, the slave’s heavy body atop him.

Tavi wriggled and struggled to get out from under Fade, but only managed to free his head enough to crane his neck over the man and to see what had frightened him.

Around them stood a silent half-circle of Marat warriors, unmistakable with their pale braids and powerful bodies clad, even in this vicious weather, only in a brief cloth at the hips. Each of them stood very tall and more broad in the shoulders than Tavi could easily believe, with dark, serious eyes the same shade as the chipped stone tipping their broad-hafted spears.

Without expression, the tallest of the Marat stepped closer. He put his foot on Tavi’s shoulder and rested the tip of his spear against the hollow of Tavi’s throat.

Chapter 22

Fidelias twisted himself up and out of the chilling waters of the angry river, frozen fingers clutching hard against the branch of the tree he had crafted within his reach. He felt numb, and his heart labored painfully against the shock of the cold water. The cold beckoned him with a slow, seductive caress, encouraging him to simply sink into the waters, relax, let his troubles slip away into the darkness.

Instead, he secured a hold on the next higher branch and hauled his body up out of the water. He huddled there for a few moments, shaking, struggling to gather his wits about him again, while the fury-storm raged around him, winds hauling at his sodden clothes.

The one good thing about the flood, he decided, about the freezing water, was that he could no longer feel the cuts on his feet. He’d done his best to ignore them while recovering the horses, but the rocks and brush had been merciless to his skin. The woman, the water-crafter, had been onto them from the beginning, he decided. Clever, getting his shoes like that. She’d been planning on the boy running, and on hampering pursuit.

Fidelias leaned against the trunk and waited for the waters to subside.

They did, in rapid order, proving more than anything else that the flood had been a deliberate crafting rather than a natural event. He shook his head. Odiana should have given them warning—but perhaps she had been overmatched. The locals were no amateurs at their fury-crafting and had lived with the local furies for years. They would know them, be able to use them more effectively than even a crafter of Fidelias’s own level of skill. The Stead-holder, for example—he had been formidable. In a direct, fair confrontation, Fidelias was uncertain whether or not he could simply overcome the man. Best then, to ensure that any future contact with the fellow discounted the possibility of a fair fight.

But then, that was in general Fidelias’s policy.

Once the waters had receded back down into the river’s original bed, Fidelias slipped down from the tree, grimacing as he got back to the ground. The pitch of the winds had only increased since the storm had rolled over them, and surviving in it had to be his first priority. He knelt by the trunk of the tree, resting a hand lightly on the sodden ground, reaching out for Vamma.

The fury responded to him at once, vanishing into the deep earth for several moments before rising back up toward him. Fidelias cupped his hands, and Vamma returned, providing what it had been sent to retrieve—a handful of salt crystals and a flint.

Fidelias pocketed the flint and swept the salt into a pouch, keeping a few pieces in hand. Then he rose, noting how slowly his body responded, and shook his head, shivering. The cold could kill him, if he didn’t get warmed up, and quickly. Rising, he dispatched Etan to look for signs of his companions, and Vamma to search through the surrounding earth, for signs of movement. If the locals, either the Bernard-holters or those they had been fighting, were still at hand, they might feel few compunctions about finishing the job the water-crafter had started.

Fidelias had to hurl salt at a swooping wind-mane, while he waited for his furies to return to him. It didn’t take long. Etan appeared within a few moments and led him forward, through the blinding storm, down along the path of the river.

Several hundred yards downstream, Fidelias found Aldrick. The swordsman lay on the ground, unmoving, his fingers still locked around the hilt of his sword, buried to its hilts in the trunk of a tree. He had apparently managed to keep the flood from sweeping him away entirely, but had not taken into account the threat the elements represented. Fidelias checked the pulse at the man’s throat and found it there, still strong, if slow. His lips were blue. The cold. If the swordsman was not warmed, and quickly, he would die.

Fidelias debated allowing it to happen for a moment. Odiana remained an unknown quantity, and as long as she had Aldrick with her, she would be difficult to move against. Without the swordsman, Fidelias could remove her at leisure, and if Fidelias was fortunate, perhaps Aldrick’s death would unhinge her entirely.

Fidelias grimaced and shook his head. Aldrick could be arrogant, insubordinate, but his loyalty to Aquitaine was unquestioned, and he was a valuable resource. Besides which, Fidelias liked working with the man. He was a professional and understood the priorities of operating in the field. Fidelias, as his commander, owed him a certain amount of loyalty, protection. Convenient as it might be to him, in the long term, he could not allow the swordsman to come to grief.

Fidelias took a moment to draw strength from the earth, pouring into him in a sudden flood. He jerked the sword from the tree’s trunk, and peeled Aldrick’s hand from its hilt. Then he picked up the man and slung him over one shoulder. His balance wavered dangerously, and he took a moment to breathe, to steady himself, before taking up the naked sword and turning, with Aldrick, to march away from the river, up out of the flood-saturated ground of the river’s course.

Vamma shaped out a shelter from a rocky hillside, and Fidelias ducked into it and out of the storm. Etan provided ample kindling and wood, and Fidelias managed to coax a pile of shavings into flame using the flint and Aldrick’s sword. By slow degrees, he built up the fire, until the inside of the fury-crafted shelter began to grow warm, even cozy.

He leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed, and dispatched Vamma and Etan again. As tired as he was, there was still a job to do. Fidelias remained silent for a moment, letting his furies gather information about those who still moved in the wild storm outside.