Winter Be My Shield (25 page)

Rasten saw Sierra ahead, her black hair fanned out around her as the current dragged her along. He saw her go limp, her body unfold from its tuck against the cold, and he cursed, kicking after her with all his strength. She had passed out and if he didn't get to her within the next few seconds she would begin to drown. In that moment, Rasten decided that if he couldn't save her he would join her in the indifferent cold. With her gone, there would be no other escape from Kell.

The current threw her limp body against the ice overhead; each time, it slowed her momentum and let him get just a little closer. Rasten's chest was burning and his head pounding with the need for air, but he braced himself against it. Kell's training had given him practice at withstanding pain, at focussing his mind even as it was failing and exhausted. Reaching out and kicking hard with feet made thick and clumsy with the heavy bulk of his boots, Rasten's fingers grazed the felt sole of her boot. He grabbed her, boot, foot and all, and yanked her towards him. Her limp body bucked in the water like a fish caught on a line, and he clawed his way along her, burying his hand in her tangled hair before she could
float away again. She felt like a dead weight, her body as stiff and heavy as water-logged wood as he wrapped an arm across her chest, holding her to him. Her head turned towards him, her midnight-blue eyes wide open and her gaze as vacant as the night sky.

Rasten twisted around and dug his feet into the rocks on the floor of the channel. Withstanding the cold had been steadily eating into his power, but he had enough left to get them both to safety. He raised his free hand, summoned his power, and shattered the ice overhead.

 

Cam swore softly as ruddy light bloomed beneath the ice, illuminating the course of the river with an unearthly glow. ‘He's going after her,' Cam said softly, and he glanced at Isidro. ‘Stay here. I'm going to get closer.'

 

Hurling chunks of ice away from them, Rasten broke the surface with a desperate gulp of air. Black spots danced before his eyes and his limbs felt boneless and weak. His legs trembled violently as he half carried, half dragged Sierra to the edge of the channel, stumbling over rocks and boulders and jagged slabs of ice. She was stiff and still in his arms — all the water soaked into her gear seemed to double her weight. It took all his strength to haul her out of the water.

As soon as they hit the air the water began to freeze. By the time Rasten dumped Sierra face down on the snow her hair was a mass of glittering crystals and hoarfrost bristled on her sodden clothes. Panting, Rasten dropped to his knees beside her and cast a globe of flame into the air. Beneath its ruddy glow he pressed down on her back to squeeze the water from her narrow chest. It poured from her mouth, clear and sparkling, utterly unlike the black and oily face the river showed to the night sky.

When no more water came, he turned her onto her back. Her eyes gazed up at him, wide open and sightless, and her eyelashes glittered with frost. Rasten ripped layers of tunics and shirts aside to press an ear to her chest. For a long moment, he heard nothing, and his heart began to sink, but at last it came — a faint, tentative beat, irregular and faltering.

Rasten tore off his gloves, sodden and stiff with ice, and pressed his palms to her chest. Her skin was blue, and cold beneath his hands. He remembered how he'd felt when she was naked and bound, pale and
trembling in anticipation of Kell's punishment — how badly he'd wanted her then. She was so cold now and so still.

Rasten flooded her with power, warming her from the inside out. He was shivering himself but his condition was irrelevant compared with hers. He knew the adage as well as any Ricalani —
no one's dead until they're warm and dead
. As long moments passed, he felt her heartbeat strengthen, until at last she took one rattling breath and began to cough as her body rejected the water still in her lungs. Rasten rolled her onto her side and kept channelling the heat. She couldn't move yet — the flow of blood to her limbs had ceased in the extreme cold and it would be a few moments yet before she had either the strength or the awareness to struggle. With a pulse of power, he dried her clothes, driving off the water and ice in a burst of steam, and then did the same to his own. After a few moments more, the flow to her limbs opened up again — when the cold blood in her arms and legs flooded back into her torso, Rasten was ready. The shock when that cold blood hit the heart was enough to kill a strong man, but with a steady pulse of power Rasten kept her heart beating evenly as she gasped and bucked beneath his hands. She blinked and her pupils suddenly shrunk to pinpoints in the flare of his witch-lights. Rasten brushed her hair back from her face and wept with relief. She was alive.

 

Cam left his snowshoes behind, moving cautiously over the packed snow with his sword in his hand. Perhaps it was foolish to come so close instead of hanging back to use his bow, but the sight of Sierra stopping a crossbow bolt was still vivid in his mind. Perhaps he would get lucky — perhaps Rasten wouldn't sense the arrow's flight — but if it did fly true, at the range at which he was sure of getting a fatal shot, the arrow would go right through Rasten and kill Sierra as well. Despite his words to Isidro, Cam couldn't bring himself to do it — not after the comfort she had given to his brother, not while Isidro watched …

Sierra moaned, arching her back off the snow and dragging one heel towards her as though she was preparing to sit up. She looked straight at Cam, but her eyes drifted over him without recognition — awake, but not conscious. There was a chance that the long minutes she had spent under the ice had robbed her of her wits. It happened sometimes: a body pulled out of the ice and snow could be revived after the soul had flown, leaving a shell of a person with no more wit than a newborn babe.

As Sierra pulled away from him Rasten grabbed her wrist in one hand, rolled her onto her belly again and twisted her arm up behind her back. ‘Be still,' he said to her, his voice a soft growl meant to carry no further than her ears.

Cam inched another step closer and raised his sword.

Sierra clawed at the packed snow with her free hand and cried out in pain as Rasten twisted her arm in an effort to make her stop struggling. He reached into his sash for a length of cord, preparing to bind her wrists.

Cam swung his sword, aiming for the base of Rasten's skull. Later, he was never sure if Rasten caught the movement in the corner of his eye or if some other sense alerted him — either way, Rasten glanced over his shoulder and ducked with a curse, throwing himself down across Sierra's body. He was not quite fast enough — the blow didn't fall squarely, but neither did it miss. The very tip cut a gash across his scalp. Cam pressed before he could lose his advantage, lunging forward to strike again but Rasten threw up a hand blazing with ruddy light and caught him with a lash of power that struck Cam full across the chest and flung him into the air.

The sword flew from his hand and Cam landed hard on the river ice, winded by the impact. He could feel something warm and wet against his skin, and when he raised his head to look Cam saw that Rasten's lash of power had cut his clothes to shreds and blood was seeping through from wounds beneath. His head spinning, Cam pressed a hand to his chest, forgetting for a moment that he wore gloves, and felt a sting as the coarse fibres brushed against raw and ragged flesh.

Rasten staggered to his feet, exploring the wound on the back of his head with one hand. He scowled at the blood on his fingers and took a step towards Cam.

On the ground at his feet, Sierra pushed herself up, and Rasten hesitated. Cam vaguely remembered what Isidro had told him  — she drew power from those in pain. Gritting his teeth, he shoved his gloved fingers into the wound again. At the same time he heard Sierra gasp and saw her blue-white light spill out and cover her with a second skin composed of minute threads of lightning.

With a curse Rasten dropped to his knees at Sierra's side. He shoved her to the ground again and put his knee between her shoulders to keep
her there. He grasped her hair and wrenched her head back hard enough to make her cry out. The light died as quickly as it had come and Rasten turned away from her, twisting around to fix his gaze on Cam. He held out one hand and Cam felt Rasten's power settle around him, pinning him to the ice with a heatless blanket of flame.

Then the pressure against him turned cold and, too late, Cam realised the danger he was in. He kicked and struggled, but couldn't move so much as a hair's breadth against that shroud of power. Within seconds, Cam began to shiver violently: as panic gripped he struggled harder and his body fought to curl up and conserve its heat. Rasten was stealing his warmth, chilling him to the temperature of the ice. Of course, Rasten couldn't kill him outright, Cam realised as his hands grew numb. Even a swift death — breaking his neck, cutting his throat — would give Sierra a boost of power and they must both be nearly spent by now. Cam was feeding her and so must be disposed of, but without sending her any more power. The creeping numbness of hypothermia would do just that.

As his shivering grew weaker, Cam felt a calmness sweep over him. The ice, hard and unyielding a few moments before, seemed to grow soft and paradoxically warm. He was so very tired and the soft gurgle of the running water was a soothing, drowsy sound.

 

Pinned as she was, Sierra struggled while Rasten fought to get hold of her other wrist. He twisted her arm so far that Isidro expected it to break at any moment and yet she would not give in. He could hear Rasten panting and cursing in frustration and at last he wrapped his free hand around her throat and slowly strangled her into submission while Sierra clawed and scratched at his fingers.

Isidro wouldn't let himself look at Cam. There was nothing he could do for him now. His eyes were on Sierra and Rasten and his left hand was clamped around the hilt of his knife while the palm of his glove grew damp with sweat.

 

Sierra sobbed for breath, feeling herself grow weaker with every moment. Rasten had given up on grabbing her second wrist for now — he just kept squeezing her throat, indifferent to her fingers plucking and clawing at his hand. She had lost her mittens somewhere in the water and wore only her thin inner gloves. They made her fingers slick, so she couldn't
get a grip that would allow her to bend his fingers back and loosen his grasp. He would strangle her unconscious and then secure her before she regained her senses. He would have done it already if Cam hadn't interrupted him. She could no longer feel Cam lying on the ice. The small trickle of power he had given her was still there but she couldn't focus enough to use it while her lungs screamed for air. Even as she struggled for breath, Sierra felt despair clawing at her heart. She should have died twice over, once in the avalanche and then in the water but she had been cheated each time. Why had she fought so hard to stay alive when this was all that awaited her? A life of pain and degradation as Rasten's plaything and a weapon of pure destruction in Kell's hands. It seemed utterly futile to keep fighting when the darkness was rising up to swallow her. She could see it now, creeping in at the edge of her vision.

And then she felt a trickle of power flowing in to her, a little thread of light that reached through the creeping blackness. It grew steadily stronger and at once the burning in her lungs and muscles began to ease — or perhaps it just became unimportant next to the fire that awakened within her. Her right arm burned with a voluptuous heat, a rising tide of light and warmth that nearly swept her away. For a moment she stopped fighting and felt Rasten's hands tighten with anticipation of triumph. But then the knowledge of what she felt struggled up through her sluggish mind.
Isidro!

She felt him clenching his right hand into a fist, the torn and battered muscles contracting around the jagged shards of bone.

Rasten dug his fingers harder into her throat. ‘Where's it coming from?' he snarled in her ear. ‘Don't tell me that wretch is still alive?' She felt him twist around to glance at Cam, but it had been some minutes now since she had felt anything from him. ‘Well, he won't last long,' Rasten growled. ‘Give it up, Sirri. You're only making things worse for yourself.'

With Isidro's pain sending a river of fire through her Sierra twisted and squirmed, kicking at him until he gave her arm a vicious twist to make her stop. She cried out and for a moment lost control of the power gathering within her so that it burst out in a brilliant flare of light that made Rasten wince and curse aloud. Sierra writhed hopelessly, trying to ease the strain in her arm and for a moment she saw a flash of vision — the two of them struggling while another man loomed above them with a shaft of silver in his hand.

Sierra raised her head and saw Isidro standing behind Rasten with a knife in his hand. His eyes were wide and blank and she knew in an instant the flare of light had blinded him, but he had one chance to strike.

He took it before Rasten had time to notice the shift in her attention and drove the blade into Rasten's unprotected back.

With a shout of rage and pain Rasten threw himself forward, crushing Sierra beneath him and pinning her right arm between their bodies. She barely noticed it. All her thoughts were on the searing touch of the blade as it parted skin and flesh and grated against bone. Momentarily blinded, Isidro's aim had been off and the blow had fallen more to the shoulder than the back, but the knife had cut deep. While Rasten clenched his teeth against the pain it sent a flood of power pouring into Sierra.

Rasten rolled off her, every movement twisting the blade within him. The pain didn't slow him down. He was conditioned to ignore it. Attacking a Blood-Mage was suicide unless one was sure of killing him quickly and Isidro knew enough to understand that. As soon as his weight was off her Sierra tried to push herself up but her muscles, still cold and starved of air, were too weak to obey. Her throat was burning and her right arm throbbed with a deep, tearing ache that told her Rasten had done some damage in his effort to pin her, but all of that was made remote and distant by the power that pulsed within her.