Furies of Calderon (5 page)

“And you have cast yourself in the role of… what, Fidelias? The slive that rushes in to poison the wounded buck? The crow that soars down to peck at the eyes of helpless men not yet dead?”

He looked at her, eyes flat, and gave her a smile empty of mirth or joy or meaning. “It’s easy to be righteous when you are young. I could continue to serve the Crown. Perhaps prolong the inevitable. But how many more would die? How many more would suffer? And it would change nothing but the timing. Children, like you, would come in my place—and have to make the decisions I am making.”

Amara let her voice resonate with contempt. “Thank you, so much, for
protecting
me.”

Fidelias’s eyes flashed. “Make this easy on yourself, Amara. Tell us what we want to know.”

“Go to the crows.”

Fidelias said, without anger, “I’ve broken men and women stronger than you. Don’t think that because you’re my student, I won’t do it to you.” He knelt down to look her in the eyes. “Amara. I’m the same man you’ve known. We’ve shared so much together. Please.” His hand reached for her grime-covered one. She didn’t fight his grasp. “Think about this. You could throw in with us. We could help make Alera bright and peaceful again.”

She returned his gaze, steady. Then said, very quietly, “I’m already doing that,
patriserus
. I thought you were, too.”

His eyes hardened like ice, brittle, distant, and he stood up. Amara lurched forward, clutching at his boot. “Fidelias,” she said, pleading. “Please. It isn’t too late. We could escape, now. Bring word back to the Crown and end this threat. You don’t have to turn away. Not from Gaius. And…” She swallowed and blinked back tears. “And not from me.”

There was a pained silence.

“The die is cast,” Fidelias said, finally. “I’m sorry you couldn’t be shown reason.” He turned, jerking his leg from her grasp, and walked out of the tent.

Amara stared after him for a moment, then looked down, to where she had palmed the knife Fidelias always kept in his boot, the one he didn’t think she knew about. She shot a glance up to the tent, and as soon as the flap fell, she started attacking the dirt that pinned her. She heard voices talking outside, too quietly to be understood, and she dug furiously.

Dirt flew. She broke it up with the knife and then frantically dug it away with her hands, shoving it away, making as little noise as she possibly could—but even so, her gasps for breath grew louder, bit by bit, as she dug.

Finally, she was able to move, just a little, to shove enough loose earth forward to wriggle. She reached out an arm and dug the knife into the ground as hard as she could and used it as a piton to pull herself forward, up. A sense of elation rushed through her as she strained and wriggled and finally started snaking her way free of the confining earth. Her ears sang with a rush of blood and excitement.

“Aldrick,” snapped the water witch, from outside the tent. “The
girl
!”

Amara stumbled to her feet and looked around wildly. She lurched across the tent to grasp the hilt of a sword laying across a table, a light gladius little longer than her own forearm, and spun, her body still clumsy from its imprisonment, just as a dark shape filled the entry flap to the tent. She lunged out at it, muscles snapping together to drive the point of the sword in a vicious stroke at the heart of the figure in the doorway—Aldrick.

Steel glittered. Her blade met another and was swept aside. She felt her point bite flesh, but not much or deeply. She knew she had missed.

Amara threw herself to one side, as Aldrick’s blade rose in a swift counter, and was unable to escape a cut that flashed a sudden, hot agony across her upper left arm. The girl rolled beneath a table and came up on the far side from Aldrick.

The big man came into the tent and stalked her, pausing across the table. “Nice lunge,” he commented. “You pinked me. No one’s done that since Araris Valerian.” He smiled then, that wolfish show of teeth. “But you aren’t Araris Valerian.”

Amara never even saw Aldrick’s blade move. There was a hissing hum, and then the table fell into two separate pieces. The man started toward her, through them.

Amara threw the gladius at him and saw his sword rise up to parry it aside. She dove for the back of the tent, now holding only the little knife, and with a quick move slashed a hole in the canvas. She slipped through it and heard herself whimpering in fear as she began to run.

She flashed a glance behind her as Aldrick’s sword opened the back side of the tent in a pair of strokes and he came through after her. “Guards!” the swordsman bellowed. “Close the gate!”

Amara saw the gate start to swing shut, and she slipped to one side, ran down a row of white tents, gathering up her skirts in one hand, cursing that she hadn’t seen fit to disguise herself as a boy so that she could have worn breeches. She looked behind her. Aldrick still pursued, but she had left him behind, like a doe outstripping a big slive, and she flashed a fierce smile at him.

Caked dirt fell off of her as she ran for the nearest wall, and she prayed that she could get enough of it off of her to call to Cirrus. A stepladder rose up to the wall’s defensive platform in front of her, and she took it in three long strides, barely touching it with her hand.

One of the
legionares
, a guard on the wall, turned toward her and blinked in shock at her. Amara made a ridge of her hand, let out a shout, and drove her hand into the man’s throat, never slowing. He tumbled over backward, gagging and choking, and she ran past him, to the wall, and looked over.

Ten feet down to the ground level, and then another seven or eight feet of ditch lay beneath her. A crippling fall, if she didn’t land correctly.

“Shoot!” someone shouted, and an arrow hissed toward her. Amara threw herself to the side, grasped the top of the wall with one hand, and vaulted it, throwing herself out into empty space.

“Cirrus!” she called—and felt the stirring of wind around her, finally. Her fury pressed up against her, turned her body to a proper angle, and rushed down beneath her, so that she landed on a cloud of wind and blowing dust rather than on the hard ground of the ditch.

Amara gained her feet again and ran without looking back, stretching, covering the ground in leaps and bounds. She ran to the north and the east, away from the practice fields, away from the stream, away from where they had left the gargant and its supplies. The trees had been cut to make the walls of the encampment, and she had to run across nearly two hundred strides of broken stumps. Arrows fell around her, and one struck through a hanging fold of her skirts, nearly tripping her. She ran on, with the wind always at her back, Cirrus an invisible presence there.

Amara reached the shelter of the trees and paused, breathing hard, looking back over her shoulder.

The gates of the camp swung open, and two dozen men on horses, long spears gleaming, rode out and turned as a column, straight toward her. Aldrick rode at their head, dwarfing the riders nearest him.

Amara turned and ran on through the trees as fast as she could. The branches sighed and moaned around her, leaves whispering, shadows moving and changing ominously around her. The furies of this forest were not friendly to her—which made sense, given the presence of at least one powerful wood-crafter. She would never be able to hide from them in this forest, when the trees themselves would report her position.

“Cirrus,” Amara gasped. “Up!”

The wind gathered beneath her and pushed her up off the ground—but branches wove together above her, moving as swiftly as human hands joining together and presented her with a solid screen. Amara let out a cry and crashed against that living ceiling, then tumbled back to the ground. Cirrus softened her fall with an apologetic whisper against her ear.

Amara looked left and right, but the trees were joining branches everywhere—and the forest was growing darker as the roof of leaf and bough closed overhead. The beating of hooves came through the trees.

Amara struggled back to her feet, the cut on her arm pounding painfully. Then she started running again, as the horsemen closed in, behind her.

She couldn’t have guessed how far she ran. Later, she only remembered the threatening shadows of the trees and a burning fire in her lungs and her limbs that even Cirrus’s aid couldn’t ease. Terror changed to simple excitement, and that transformed, by degrees, to a sort of exhausted lack of concern.

She ran until she suddenly found herself looking back—and into the eyes of a mounted
legionare
, not twenty feet away. The man shouted and cast his spear at her. She stumbled out of the path of the weapon and away from the horseman, into a sudden flood of sunshine. She looked ahead of her and found the ground sloping down for no more than three or four strides, and then ending in a sheer cliff that dropped off so abruptly that she could not see how far down it went or what was at the bottom.

The
legionare
drew his sword in a rasp of steel and called to his horse. The animal responded as an extension of the man’s body and pounded toward her.

Amara turned without hesitation and threw herself off of the cliff.

She spread her arms and screamed, “Cirrus! Up!” The wind gathered beneath her in a rush, as her fury flew to obey, and she felt a sudden, fierce exultation as, with a screaming whistle of gale winds, she shot up, up into the autumn skies, her wake kicking up dust devils along the ridge that cast dirt up in the face of the unfortunate
legionare
and set his horse to rearing and kicking in confusion.

She flew on, up and away from the camp and paused after a time to look behind her. The cliff she’d leapt from looked like a toy from there, several miles behind her and one below. “Cirrus,” she murmured, and held her hands before her. The fury gusted and swirled a part of itself into that space, quivering like the waves rising from a hot stone.

Amara shaped that air with her hands, bending the light, until she was peering back at the cliff through her spread hands as though she stood no more than a hundred yards away. She saw the hunting party emerge and Aldrick dismount. The
legionare
who had seen her described her escape, and Aldrick squinted up at the sky, sweeping his eyes left to right. Amara felt a chill as the man’s gaze paused, directly upon her. He tilted his head to the man beside him, the wood-crafter Knight from before, and the man simply touched one of the trees.

Amara swallowed and swept her hands back toward the rebel Legion’s camp.

Half a dozen forms rose up over the treetops, which swayed and danced beneath the winds, as though they had been the bushes in a holt-wife’s herb garden. They turned, and as one, they sped toward her. Sun glinted off of steel—armor and weapons, she knew.

“Knights Aeris,” muttered Amara. She swallowed and let her hands fall. Normally, she would have been confident of her ability to outrun them. But now, wounded, and already exhausted in body and spirit, she was not so sure.

Amara turned and bade Cirrus to bear her north and east—and prayed that the sun would set before her foes caught up to her.

Chapter 3