“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 Steadholder. 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 Bernardholt scattered from the Steadholder’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 Steadholders. 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 firecrafting 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 watercrafter, 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 firecrafting 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 Steadholder 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 besidesa 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. Steadholder 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.”
“I do?” Otto said. “Oh, I mean. Yes, of course. Isana, how could we have been so stupid. Of course we’ll help.”
“Child,” Bitte called from beside Bernard’s still form, her voice high, sharp. “Isana, there’s no more time.”
Isana turned to look at Bitte. The old woman’s face had gone pale.
“Your brother. He’s gone.”
CHAPTER 10
Tavi stumbled beneath the force of a sudden gust of wind. The girl caught his arm in one hand, keeping him upright, and with the other, she hurled a few scanty remnants of the salt crystals he’d given her a few hours before. There was a shriek from the faintly luminous form of the windmane behind the gust, and it withdrew.
“That’s it,” she called over the wind. “I’m out of salt!”
“Me, too!” Tavi answered her.
“Are we close?”
He squinted through the darkness and the rain, shivering and almost too cold to think. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see anything. We should be almost there.”
She shielded her eyes from the stinging half-sleet with her hand. “Almost won’t be good enough. They’re coming back.”
Tavi nodded and said, “Keep your eyes out for firelight.” He gripped her hand tightly in his, before stumbling forward,through the darkness. Her fingers tightened on his own. The slave was stronger than she looked, and even though his hand had long since gone mostly numb from the cold and the sleet, her grip was painful, frightened. The wind and the deadly manes within it yowled, driving and cold and furious.
“They’re coming,” she hissed. “If we’re going to get out of this, it has to be right now.”
“It’s close. It’s got to be.” Tavi squinted against the blinding rain, peering ahead of them as best he could. Then he saw it, a faint golden radiance flickering at the edge of his vision. In the storm, he had gotten turned around somehow, and he swerved abruptly to one side, hauling on the girl’s wrist. “There! The fire! It’s right there! We have to run for it.”
Tavi drove his exhausted body forward, toward the distant light, and the ground began to slope upward, rising steadily toward it. The curtains of sleet and rain blinded him and veiled the light, so that it flickered like a guttering candle, but Tavi kept his eyes doggedly locked on his destination. Lightning snarled among the clouds in treacherous, blinding flashes, while the windmanes howled out their wrath overhead.