Cursor's Fury (75 page)

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“I did it to him,” Isana said quietly. “When he was still a baby. Whenever I bathed him, I would think about what it would mean if he showed his father’s talents. How it would draw attention to him. How it would mark him as Gaius’s heir. As a target for the power-hungry maniacs of the Realm intent on seizing the throne. At first, I didn’t realize what I was doing to him.” She met his eyes steadily. “But when I did . . . I didn’t stop, Fade. I pushed harder. I stunted his growth so that he would look younger than his age, so that it would seem to be impossible that he was Septimus’s child. And in doing it, I stunted his mind, somehow. I prevented his talents from ever emerging, until the water furies around the Steadholt were so used to it that I hardly needed to think about it at all.

“Unlike you,” she said, “I knew precisely what I was doing. And so in that, I am as much to blame for this war as you are.”

“No, Isana,” Fade said.

“I
am
” Isana replied quietly. “Which is why I’m staying here. With you. When you go, I will go with you.”

Fade’s eyes widened. “No. Isana, no, please. Just leave me.”

She took both her hands in his. “Never. I will not allow you to fade away, Araris. And by crows and thunder, your
duty
is not complete. You swore yourself to Septimus.” She squeezed his hands, staring hard into his eyes. “He was your friend. You
promised
him.”

Araris stared back at her, trembling and silent.

“I know how badly your soul has been wounded—but you can’t surrender. You can’t abandon your duty now, Araris. You do not have that right. I need you.” She lifted her chin. “Octavian needs you. You
will
return to duty. Or you will make your treachery true by allowing yourself to die—and taking me with you.”

He began to weep.

“Araris,” Isana said in a low, compassionate voice. She touched his chin and lifted it until his eyes met her. Then, very gently, she said, “Choose.”

Chapter 48

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Amara tried to smile at the little girl and held out her arms to her.

Masha beamed at her mother and didn’t object as Rook lifted her to Amara’s back. The little girl wrapped her legs around Amara’s waist and her arms around Amara’s throat. “All right, Masha,” she said, tensing her throat muscles against the child’s grip. “Hold on tight.”

Rook turned to the great bed and tore off a quilted silk sheet large enough to serve as a pavilion. She hurried to one of the large wardrobes, flicked a corner of the sheet around one of its legs, and tied it with brisk, efficient motions. “Ready.”

“Your Grace?” Amara asked. “Are you ready?”

Lady Placida looked up, her face blank and remote with concentration. She knelt on the floor facing the opposite wall, her hands folded calmly into her lap. At Amara’s words, she shifted her stance into something resembling a sprinter’s crouch, and said, “I am.”

Amara’s heart began to race, and she felt her legs trembling with incipient panic. She looked up at the four gargoyles on their perches, then walked across
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the room to stand beside Rook against one wall. She focused her eyes on the center of the ceiling, where she would be able to see any of the gargoyles when they began to move. “Very well,” she said quietly. “Begin.”

And at that, the floor of the chamber heaved and bucked, and the stone formed into the shape of a horse, head and shoulders rising from the ground as it rushed at the opposite wall.

Simultaneously, Amara called out to Cirrus. Locked in the stone room as they were, she was far from the open air the fury loved, and Cirrus responded to her call sluggishly, weakly. She had expected nothing more—for the moment—and simply drew upon the fury’s native swiftness to quicken her own movements.

So when the four gargoyles simultaneously exploded into abrupt life, she saw the sudden reaction abruptly slow, as her own senses became distorted through her communion with her fury.

The gargoyles opened their eyes, revealing glittering green emeralds that glinted with their own faint light. Shaped into the rough form of lions, their heads were a monstrous mix of a man, a lion, and a bear. Sharp horns curled out from the sides of their broad heads, pointing directly forward from their eyes in deadly prongs, and their forefeet bore oversized talons like those of a bird of prey.

As Kalarus had warned Lady Placida, the gargoyles focused immediately upon the child.

Amara saw the gargoyle nearest her as it leapt from its perch, drifting down toward her like a falling leaf. She pushed off from the wall, dancing away from its pounce, and felt the floor shudder at the impact, then heard an enormous booming sound from somewhere behind her.

Masha wailed as her grip on Amara’s neck began to slip. As tightly as the little girl clung, Amara’s speed of reaction had nearly pulled her clear of the child entirely. She seized one of Masha’s arms with one hand, a leg with the other, and had to reverse her momentum as the second gargoyle slammed to the floor across the chamber and flung itself at her.

She only just evaded it, dived, and fell to the floor rolling as the third earth fury leapt at her and passed through the space her head had occupied an instant before. She came to her feet a beat more slowly than she should have. The child on her back had altered her center of gravity, forcing her to struggle to keep her
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movements balanced and fluid. She leapt up onto the bed, bounced once to cross it, and ripped down the bed’s canopy, dropping the heavy drapes over the head of the fourth gargoyle as she leapt away from its pursuit.

But her opponents seemed to be moving more and more quickly, and pure terror rolled through Amara as she realized that Cirrus, enclosed in stone as he was, had begun to falter. She only had seconds.

Then Lady Placida cried out again, and Amara whipped her head around in time to see the High Lady’s earth fury smash into the outer wall of the tower. Stone shattered and screamed its torment, and the earth fury ripped a hole the size of a legionare’s shield in the hardened siege-stone of the citadel’s outer wall.

Panic gave way to exaltation as Amara felt Cirrus abruptly strengthen again, and she bounded forward, planted a sandaled foot on the head of one of the lunging gargoyles, and leapt for the opening. She flung herself through it just as Lady Placida seized her heavy chain in one hand, and pulled it from the wall with a single contemptuous jerk, taking a block of stone the size of a man’s head with it.

Amara fell.

Masha screamed again as they plummeted, and Amara called desperately to Cirrus. It was a race against gravity. Though the fury could support her and Masha without difficulty, it took precious time to establish a windstream, and the fall from the tower was not a long one.

Unless, of course, she should fail to arrest their descent, in which case it would be more than long enough.

The wind suddenly howled around her, eerily like the defiant scream of a warhorse, and the cloudy, nebulous equine shape became visible around her as Cirrus turned the fall into a forward-rushing glide no more than two feet above the ground. Amara altered course, using her momentum to slingshot herself into a vertical climb.

As she did, the little girl’s scream of terror became one of excitement and exhilaration, which Amara could hardly fault her for feeling. But she also knew that it was a near certainty that Kalarus’s citadel was protected by a miniature legion of wind furies whose only purpose would be to interfere with the flight of unwelcome windcrafters. Cirrus could probably bull through them, at least for the moment, but Amara knew that it was only a matter of time before she would be driven from the air.

She turned anxious eyes up at the tower, and saw Rook come sliding feet-first out of the hole in the wall. She shot off the edge. For a second, Amara
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thought she would fall. Instead, the former bloodcrow held a double handful of the silk sheets she’d tied to the wardrobe. Rook turned as she fell and swung toward the wall, absorbing the shock with her feet and legs with the skill of an experienced mountain climber.

Now that Rook was out of the chamber, Lady Placida was free to deal with the gargoyles without harming her allies. Horrible crashing sounds and billows of dust came from Kalarus’s upper chamber. More alarm bells began to ring. Amara heard screams from within the tower, terrible, terrible sounds of men and women in mortal agony, and she realized with horror that the tower must have held many more gargoyles than the four in the bedchamber. She heard someone blowing a signal horn, the notes crisply precise—the Immortals, she supposed, immediately reacting to the alarm and organizing their efforts.