Firewalk (40 page)

Kayli nodded to Randon and slipped quietly out of her tent; he followed, clutching a blanket-wrapped bundle and dropping the tent flap behind them. They crept out of camp as silently as they could, and Randon followed Kayli into the grass. After they’d been walking for some time, however, he spoke.

“We’re going awfully far, aren’t we?” he asked.

“We must get well beyond the range of my father’s guard patrol as well,” Kayli said, giggling. “And far enough that the glare from the fires will not spoil our view of the stars.”

When she decided they’d gone far enough, Randon opened the bundled blanket and, to Kayli’s surprise, drew out the wonderful cloaks that her father had given them.

“Randon,” Kayli chided gently. “It is far too warm to need such coverings.”

“I know,” he said merrily. “But it’s pleasant to lie on furs and make love, don’t you think?”

He plopped down on the cloaks and pulled Kayli down beside him.

“So tell me,” he murmured into her ear, “just what dangers I’m to face tonight.”

Kayli gasped as his hand slid into the front of her tunic, and whatever answer she made, only the stars heard.

Chapter Fourteen

Kayli woke abruptly at some inner prompting. For a moment she could not understand why she was lying on the ground, wrapped in a blanket in Randon’s arms with the great brilliant sky overhead; then she remembered and smiled. She stretched luxuriantly, enjoying the smells of smoke and plains grass and sweet earth, the bright stars above her—

Smoke?

Kayli jumped to her feet, eliciting a sleepy groan of protest from Randon. Now she could hear a distant sort of roar, not unlike that of approaching rain in Agrond, but as she saw the red-gold line on the northwest horizon, she knew that it was no rain approaching them. A part of Kayli’s mind was shocked to stillness—she knew how fast grass fires could travel.

“What?” Randon stood up leisurely beside her, stretching. “What’s the—” Then he saw it, and he, too, fell silent “It’s between us and the camps, isn’t it? Can we outrun it?” But from the gentleness of his words, Kayli knew that he, too, knew the impossibility of fleeing ahead of that hungry red line.

Randon grabbed Kayli’s shoulders, turning her to face him.

“Can you survive that? Can you walk through that and live, you and the baby? Tell me!”

Once again Kayli was shocked to silence as she realized what he was asking.
Could
she walk unscathed through such an inferno? Possibly. Once she would have been certain. But even if she could, Randon could not. Must she, could she, choose between her death and his?

But there was another possibility.

“The wine,” Kayli said rapidly. “Wet your kerchief with it. Tie it over your nose and mouth, and lie down on the ground. The smoke will rise. And do not dare distract me now.”

“What are you doing?” Randon asked. “You can’t—”

“Perhaps I can turn the fire aside,” Kayli said. “Perhaps I can even extinguish it.” Even as she spoke, she knew her words for a lie, but she took the ritual breaths of calming anyway, focusing her concentration on the fire, and opened the barriers she had erected between herself and her power, reaching to touch the fire.

Immediately Kayli reeled back, overwhelmed completely. Randon was beside her, not daring to touch her, saying something which she ignored. By the Flame, how could she ever hope to influence
that.
Why, she had lost her control to a simple forge fire. But this was the Flame unbound, dancing free across the plains and consuming all it touched, godlike in its magnificence, monstrous in its unseeing hunger, unbound—

Oh, how seductive the call of the roaring flames, much closer now, caressing her soul more exquisitely than Randon had caressed her body. She could surrender to that unimaginable embrace, let her mortal frame become ash and blow on the wind, but her soul would become one with that fire, burning more brightly with every moment—

No!

Kayli dragged herself free of her entrapment with a moan of disappointment. For a moment she wrestled futilely to damp the flames, to turn them, even perhaps to part them, but in vain. How could she rein in those flames when she longed so totally to abandon herself to them?

Kayli sobbed with despair. What was her magic if she could only make fire, not quench it? What good was—

“Yes!” she cried.

She could
make
fire.

Relief cleared her mind more completely than any discipline could. In utter clarity, Kayli extended her hands and let the fire leap form.

Flame jumped to the grass and feasted voraciously, but this was Kayli’s flame, and now it obeyed her. Tongues of fire darted to the right and the left, forming a line that pushed outward even as it spread to the sides. As it consumed the grass, the flames grew in size and speed, urged by Kayli’s power. They crept forward, then rolled more quickly, until at last those bright tongues of fire raced rapidly to meet the red line, leaving a widening band of bare earth and blackened grass in their wake.

Through the corner of her eye, Kayli could see Randon tying the cloth across his mouth and nose as she had instructed him, gathering the bundle of the blanket, the cloaks, and their clothes together and packing it down tightly. Good—no stray spark would set
that
alight. Randon remained silent, and Kayli kept her attention focused tightly on her small backfire, pushing it outward and forward as quickly as she could. Her awareness spread outward with the flames until she felt herself stretched so thinly that her mind spun, reeling almost out of control. She knew immediately that her backfire would not be enough, that the larger fire would simply race around the edges of her smaller blaze—

A sudden boom of thunder directly overhead startled Kayli so that she almost lost the thread of her concentration. Then lightning reached down a glowing finger to stroke the plains, and she felt that tongue of fire whip upward through her bones and straight through to her soul. Somewhere beside her, a thousand leagues away, Randon screamed in agony, and then Kayli was flung aside, her link with her small backfire shattered as rain poured down upon them.

Kayli was too amazed and drained to do anything but sit there in the rain as the clean fresh water, mingling with her own sweat and tears, slowly washed the soot from her face. In the back of her mind she felt the great fire raging against the rain like a cornered beast fighting to stay alive, but its might was slowly sapped. At last, slowly, in small sizzling hisses that sounded like whistling gasps, it died.

“What happened?” Randon asked, loudly over the rain. He ripped the wine-soaked cloth from his face. “I thought it rarely rained here. Did you do that?”

Not quite true; it rained more frequently, of course, near the border of Agrond. And there had been rain near the border not long before; Kairi had moved it into Agrond. And that meant that—

“Kairi must have done it,” Kayli said, a cautious hope growing in her heart. “The sky was clear only a short time ago. Kairi must have brought the rain back from Agrond to stop the fire.” She glanced at Randon; he was rubbing his temples again, his brow furrowed.

Kayli held out her hands.

“Send the fire back to me, as you did before,” she said. This time there was a stronger sensation of power transferred from his fingertips to hers, and Kayli wondered uncomfortably whether Randon had absorbed more fire energy from the lightning, or whether the repetitive exposure to fire energy increased the amount he channeled into his own body, as was true with herself.

“Well, then, let’s go,” Randon said, hurriedly pulling his now wet clothes on over his wet skin. “Enough adventure for one night. I’ll be glad to get out of the rain, even if it
did
save our lives.”

They walked back over scorched and blackened earth, the ashes of plains grass and brambles. Rain and mud and ash formed a thick black paste that quickly coated their boots, and the plains earth, stripped of grass, became slick and treacherous. They slid and stumbled as they walked, each bearing the other up when they slipped, forced to keep their eyes on their footing; thus it was that they were almost upon the torn and scattered Bregondish tents before they saw them. Then Kayli saw the first of the bodies, and her elation and conscious thought deserted her in one raw scream of horrified denial.

Randon forgotten, grass fire forgotten, Kayli found herself on her knees in the mud, frantically turning bodies over, flinging aside scorched tent hides and broken poles, weeping with relief when she failed to recognize the bloody faces—

Until she turned over a charred and mutilated corpse and stared into her mother’s unseeing eyes.

Kayli did not know how long she sat there, stunned and numb, the world unreal around her, before Randon gently lifted her to her feet.

“Kayli?” When she did not answer, he shook her gently. “Kayli. I didn’t find your father, or Kairi, or Danine. Maybe they got away. But—”

Kayli started to turn in the direction Randon had been searching, but he seized her shoulders again.

“No“ he said. “Better not look, Kayli.” He turned her away, but not before she had seen the two small bodies, smeared with soot and blood, flung heedlessly aside.

“My father,” Kayli murmured numbly. “Kairi, Danine—”

“I said I didn’t find them.” Randon shook her gently again.
“Kayli, listen to me. My camp is gone, too. I can’t see any
of the tents. But the bodies are hardly cool. It must’ve been
raiders, and they can’t be long gone. Maybe they’re still
searching for us. We’ve got to get out of here before they
come back, but first I want to see if any of my people are
alive.”

Kayli moved as if in a dream, letting Randon lead her east to the Agrondish camp. There was little difference here, except the scorched remnants of the tents were gay-colored cloth instead of plain hide. Kayli was too numb and bemused even to react when Randon found Endra’s body, her own dagger still thrust into her heart, and Anida and Devra similarly dead beside her. She reached dreamily for the midwife’s hand, startled slightly from her fog when Randon pulled her abruptly to her feet.

“I hear horses!” he said, dragging Kayli across the scorched earth to the place where the grass began again. “Get down and stay down. Don’t move.” She lay where he pushed her on the ground. Something heavy fell over her, and when she smelled the odor of burned flesh, she realized with a dull horror that Randon had flung one of the corpses over her. But somehow even that knowledge could not move her, and she lay quietly where she was, the tall grass closing around her like a warm and comforting womb, the ground wonderfully solid and firm beneath her. She did not know where Randon had gone, nor did she care.

Hoofbeats now, louder and closer. A tiny, sharp thought of Kairi made Kayli raise her head slightly, peering through the grass and the fringe of her hair. She could see little from her vantage point, but the brief glimpse of the gray horse that flashed past her hiding place and its high-backed saddle identified it as a Bregondish steed in Bregondish tack.

The recognition somehow shook Kayli slightly out of her fog of shock, and she would have risen, but before she could push the corpse off her, the sound of the shouting reached her ears. And the language was
not
Bregondish. Kayli froze where she was, stilling even her breath, until the sounds of hoofbeats and shouting faded away to the east. Then she waited even longer, her heart pounding, until she was certain she heard nothing more.

Kayli’s stomach lurched as she heaved the bloody corpse off her, but she forced herself to stumble away from her hiding place before she bent to vomit. The mere act of purging her stomach helped, as if she purged herself at the same time of her fear and mind-numbing grief. More resolutely she stood and looked around for Randon, praying that the shouting she had heard did not mean that the raiders had found him. No—there he was, crawling out from under a pile of half-burned tent cloth. He ran to her, and for a moment they could do nothing but hold each other.

“Are you all right?” Randon asked breathlessly. “When I saw Bregondish horses, I almost thought—”

“We were meant to think that,” Kayli said with sudden realization. “I, too, thought they were Bregondish—until I heard them speaking Sarkondish. Oh, Randon, what has happened here?”

“I don’t know.” He glanced around. “I didn’t find the bodies of several of my guards, or Seba, and all the horses are gone. Maybe some of them got away. The raiders rode east, maybe to follow them.”

“Then we must go west.” Kayli took a deep breath. “But not until we have given the rites of death to our people.”

“No.” When Kayli turned to him in shock, Randon shook his head again firmly.

“Kayli, the only hope we have, our only advantage, is that the raiders likely think we’re dead. They must have lit the grass fire to be sure. If we bury or burn the corpses, they’ll suspect we survived, and they’ll hunt us down—and they’ve got the speed of horses, while we’re on foot. Our only chance is to leave this place as we found it and flee in the direction they’re
not
looking for us—into Bregond.”

For a moment Kayli’s mind utterly rebelled, refusing even to consider the idea of leaving her mother and sisters’ bodies to rot under the sun without the rites of death. Then she breathed deeply, forcing her mind to silence.

“Yes,” she said, forcing out the words. “You are right, of course.”

“Just stay here and hide in the grass,” Randon told her. “I’m going to see if I can salvage anything, anything at all.”

When he returned, seemingly hours later, he carried a cloth-wrapped bundle.

“I found a little meat in the ashes of the firepit,” he said, “and some dried fruit in the wreckage of one of the tents. There’s a dagger, too, that someone must’ve dropped, and another blanket that isn’t in too terrible a shape. But there’s not much water. And we’d best leave soon, before the raiders might take it into their minds to check the place one last time.”