Furies of Calderon (22 page)

Bernard quivered again and abruptly gasped in a breath of air that filled his lungs like cold fire. He coughed, and the horrible stillness abruptly fractured and fled as his lungs labored again and again and again.

Isana felt relief flood over her, as his body grew stronger, as the energy of him began to flow again, as the rhythm of his heart began to quicken and become regular, a hammer pulse that coursed throughout her awareness. She felt Rill dimly, as the fury moved through him, and felt her gentle confusion. Once again, Roth attempted to send something to her, through their furies, but she was too tired to understand it, too lost in relief and exhaustion to understand. She let her awareness drift, felt herself sinking down, into a darkness, into warmth that promised her rest from all of her anxiety and pain and weariness.

And then a dull fire pulsed in her. She thought that she remembered the sensation, from some time long before. Her descent slowed for a moment.

Again, the fire came. And again. And again.

Pain. I am feeling pain
.

In a detached, remote, and unconcerned part of her awareness, she understood what was happening. Roth had been right. She had given too much of herself and had been unable to return to her own body. Too tired, too relaxed, too weak. She would die, back there beside the tub, her body simply slumping to the floor and empty of life.

The fire flared again, somewhere back up and away from the darkness.

The dead feel no pain
, she thought.
Pain is for the living
.

She reached out toward it, toward that fire in the night. The delicious descent halted, though part of her screamed out against it. She reached back for the pain, but did not move, did not begin to rise again.

It is too late. I cannot go back
.

She tried, regardless. She struggled against the stillness, the warmth. She struggled to live.

Sudden light flared like a newborn sun above her. Isana reached for it, embraced that distant fire with every part of her that still lived. It washed over her in a flood and became an instant, blazing torment, horrible and bright, an agony more searing than anything she had ever known. She felt a dizzying wrenching sensation and a sudden rush of confusion, of emptiness where Rill had been before, of more and more pain.

She went back into it, and gladly. The light, the agony, became all consuming, her limbs aching, her lungs burning with her ragged breath, her head pounding, and her mind screaming as raw sensation poured into it.

“I know that. Someone get that idiot slave
out
of here before he hurts someone else.”

The general cloud of pain over her began to resolve itself, by slow degrees, to a dull throb in her hand, and a sweet and oddly satisfying ache of exhaustion spread throughout her. She opened her eyes and turned her head to one side to see Bernard looking blearily around him. She fumbled her hand toward him and saw the fingers of it swollen and oddly shaped. She touched him, and the pain swept down on her, blinded her.

Bitte appeared beside Isana and assured her, “We’ll get the Stead-holder back on his feet by morning, child. He’ll take care of everything. Rest now.”

Isana shook her head. She couldn’t rest. Not while the storm raged outside. Not while Tavi remained in it, helpless and fragile and alone. She started to sit up, but simply could not. She did not have the strength to do much more than lift her head. She fell back to the floor and felt a tear of frustration glide from one eye. That tear seemed to trigger others, and then she was weeping, silently, weeping until she could not see, could barely breathe.

She should have been more careful. She should have forbidden him to leave the stead-holt this morning. She should have seen to her brother more swiftly, should have understood the Kord-holders’ plans before it had come to violence. She had fought as hard as she could. She had tried. Furies knew, she had tried. But all of her efforts had been for nothing. Time had swept down on her, swift as a hungry crow.

Tavi was out there in the storm. Alone.

O furies and spirits of the departed. Please. Please let him come home safe
.

Chapter 12

Amara strove to ignore the exhaustion and the cold. Her limbs shook almost too hard to be controlled, and her entire body throbbed with weariness. More than anything, she wanted to collapse upon the floor and sleep—but if she did, it might cost the boy his life.

She had wiped the mud from his face and his throat as best she could, but it clung to him in a thin layer of slimy clay, grey-brown and mottled over paler skin. It made him look almost like a corpse, several days old. Amara slipped a hand beneath the boy’s shirt, feeling for his heartbeat. Even in this weather, he wore only a light tunic and cloak for warmth, evidence of his hardy upbringing here on the savage frontier of the Realm. She shuddered, soaked and half-frozen, and glanced up yearningly toward the nearest of the funeral fires.

The boy’s heartbeat thudded against her own mud-stained palm, quick and strong, but when she drew her hand out, she saw the mud dappled with bright scarlet. The boy was wounded, though it couldn’t have been anything major—he’d have been dead already. Amara cursed under her breath and felt for his limbs. They were dangerously cold. While she struggled to force her weary mind to decide on a course of action, she began rubbing briskly, at once scraping more of the frigid mud off of him and attempting to restore warmth and circulation to his limbs. She called his name, several times, but though his eyelashes flickered, his eyes did not open, nor did he speak.

She took a quick look around the chamber. Amara shuddered to think of what the mud of the Field of Tears, where so many had fallen, might do to him if it got into his blood. She had to clean it off, and quickly.

She undressed him roughly. He was too limp and heavy, for all his slender appearance, to allow her weakened hands to be any more precise. His clothes tore in a few places before she got them off of him, and by the time she had, his lips had tinged with blue. Amara half-carried, half-dragged him over to the water and then down into it.

The water’s warmth came as a pleasant shock to her senses. The pool’s floor sloped down sharply until it was about hip deep, and even as she kept the boy’s face out of the water, she sank gratefully into it and simply huddled there for a moment, until the rattle of her teeth chattering had begun to slow down.

Then she dragged him a few feet to one side, out of the mud-clouded water, and began to rub roughly over his skin, brushing the clay away until the boy was clean.

He had a shocking collection of bruises, scrapes, abraded skin, and minor cuts. The bruises were fairly fresh, only a few hours old, she judged. His knees had several layers of skin peeled off, apparently a match to the ragged holes in his discarded trousers. His arms, legs, and flanks all showed patches of purple, slowly forming, as though he had been recently beaten, and a lattice of long, tiny cuts covered his skin. He had to have been running through thickets and thorns.

She cleared the mud from his face as best she could, using her already-torn skirts to clean him, and then dragged him back up, out of the water, and over to one of the fires.

As soon as she felt the air on her, she began to shiver again and realized that the water had not been nearly so warm as it had felt—she had simply been too cold, relatively, to feel the difference. She settled the boy in a heap on the floor, as near to the fire as she could manage, and huddled there for a moment, on her heels, her arms wrapped tight around her.

Her head nodded, and Amara let out a startled sound as she fell to her side. She wanted to simply surrender to the exhaustion, but she could not. Neither of them might wake up again. She felt her throat tighten on a whimper of protest, but she drove herself to her feet again, shivering nearly too hard to move, to think.

Her fingers felt like lead as she struggled from her own soaked clothing, thick and nerveless and unresponsive. She let the lighter clothing fall in a sopping heap to the marble floor and staggered to one of the stone sentries facing the bier. She clawed the red cape from its shoulders and wrapped it around her. Amara allowed herself a brief respite, leaning against the wall and shivering into the cape—but then drove herself along the wall to the next statue, and the one after, claiming both of those capes as well, then returning to the boy’s side. With the last of her strength, she wrapped him in the scarlet cloaks, securing their warmth around him, near the fire.

Then, huddled into a ball beneath the scarlet fabric of the Royal Guard, she leaned her head back against the wall. It took nothing more than that for her to sleep.

She woke, warm and aching. The storm raged steadily, all howling winds and frozen rain. Amara pushed herself to her feet, her body weary, stiff from sleeping crouched down on her heels, and blessedly warm beneath the heavy fabric of the cape. She moved to look out of the doorway of the chamber. Night still reigned outside. Lightning flashed and danced without, but it and the accompanying thunder seemed more distant now, sound rumbling along well after the light. The forces of the furies of the air still battled, but the winter winds had pushed their rivals to the south, away from the valley, and much of the rain that fell outside now rattled and bounced against the cooling earth as true hailstones.

Gaius had to have known, Amara thought. He had to have been aware of the repercussions of calling the southern winds to bear her north to the valley. He had been crafting too long, and knew the forces that affected his realm too well for it to have been an accident. Thus, clearly, the First Lord had intended the storm. But why?

Amara stared out at the bleak night, frowning. She would be trapped until the storm relented.
And so will be anyone else in the Valley, fool
, she thought. Her eyes widened. Gaius, with this act, had effectively called a halt to any activity within the Calderon Valley until the storm had relented.

But why? If speed had truly been of the essence, why rush her here, only to fence her off from acting? Unless Gaius felt that the opposition was already in motion. In that case, her arrival would put an effective freeze on their activities, perhaps giving her a chance to rest, regain her balance, before acting.