“As it is breathing, I like it very much,” Amris replied, but rather spoiled his point by wincing when he talked.
“If you can make jokes, then—Ah, Silver Wind,no.”
Wreathed in sickly fire, Thyran rose into the air from behind the pile of corpses that had been his creation. He glanced at Olvir as he hovered there and grimaced, but a jewel in his crown flared and he seemed to take no more hurt from that moment of contact. “You,” he said, with a wave of his hand, “are a problem for later. But you, var Faina—”
He turned his attention to Amris. “Mongrel filth.” Thyran’s lips drew back too far, exposing dark-gray teeth as long and pointed as those of his creatures. “I hope you think your insolence was worth its price.”
He lifted both flaming hands.
* * *
Darya was too far away.
The twistedmen had started retreating. Her path to Amris was clear, and she was pretty sure no son of a bitch would stand in her way, not just then. Simple distance was the problem—there was too much for even her reforged body to cover.
Given that, it was damned mean of chance to give her a clear view of Amris, leaning helpless against Olvir, who was wavering on his feet and had blood pouring from his eyes, and Thyran rising up in front of them with awful power crackling around him. Olvir feebly raised his sword, a well-crafted sharp bit of metal with no magic about it at all, and Thyran’s hideous smile twitched. Katrine had turned from the twistedmen, but, like Darya, she was too far from Thyran.
Darya ran toward them, knowing she’d be too late, eating up the ground in half-leaping strides that left her thighs burning and a sharp pain down her side. As she passed over the blood-slick dirt, she had time enough to find reasons. The first blow might not kill them both; maybe she could stab Thyran while he was distracted. He might run amok with Amris and Olvir down, instead of retreating like a reasonable person, and somebody needed to try and stop that.
None of them were the real reason. If she’d had breath to scream, she would have been shrieking denial at the top of her lungs.
Gray-orange flame flowed like water from both of Thyran’s outstretched hands, right toward Amris and Olvir.
A summer cloudburst of magic washed through Darya and outward. It took her strength with it, and she stumbled over the uneven ground on suddenly liquid-feeling bones, but she saw green radiance flicker around the two men and was glad and sorry at the same time—sorry, because she saw how faint it was, and knew it would make very little difference.
Then, as Gizath’s power met Gerant’s shield and began to tear through it as though it were wet paper, strands of violet-blue wove themselves into the green radiance. Lighter blue joined that in the blink of an eye, and Darya’s skin tingled with the heat of a smith’s forge, then the red of hearts’ blood and the smooth feel of worked wood, and finally a pale silver and a cool spring breeze. Each wove itself into the rest, bolstering the places where Thyran’s twisted flame had done damage.
When all were there, Darya felt the combined power rise. It surrounded the corrupting force coming from Thyran—even at a distance, and not a mage, she felt the hunger and the hate within the flame, squirming like maggots in a corpse—and, as a child might have done with a ball, threw it back at its source.
* * *
Surprise that he wasn’t yet dead, and wonder at the magic he dimly sensed around him, quickly took lower priority for Amris. When Thyran’s spell rebounded upon him, deserving as he was, nobody could have viewed the results with anything but horror.
The former Lord of Heliodar had flung up a ringed hand to guard himself, and he managed to shield one side of his face, but the hand itself rippled and changed. Fingers melded, grew, and blended with his bone rings, so he ended with a spatulate mass, raw flesh grown around three concentric circles of bone and blackened gems.
On the side he didn’t shield, the bone crown likewise became part of his face, melting and growing so it covered the eye entirely. The cheek below that eye sunk in, forming a ragged hole through which all of his teeth and a large part of his jawbone could be seen, and his lips sheared away, leaving everything below his nose a spiked maw.
He screamed, and went on screaming, but he didn’t die.
Above the screams, Amris heard, from outside Oakford’s walls, the sound of horns and horses: the army of Criwath, come at last.
“Takehim,” he croaked at Olvir. “Now. Leave me—”
With a pained look, Olvir obeyed. Amris slumped to the ground, and Olvir rushed across the short distance, sword raised. Katrine came from the other side, glowing even more brightly.
Around Amris’s pain, dulling the worst of it, he felt love wash over his consciousness. Darya, nowhere close enough to reach Thyran, fell to her knees beside him instead. She reached out with infinite gentleness to lift Amris’s head into her lap—bloody and burnt, but hers—and together the two of them watched the others charge forward.
Thyran’s single eye narrowed and his malformed mouth shaped a single, unpronounceable word. As the last syllable hit the air, a pillar of rancid smoke rose up. Olvir and Katrine drew back, coughing—and Thyran had vanished.
Chapter 42
Ninnian, Arcanist-General of Criwath, was one of the rare people significantly taller than Darya. She was still sore after two days of rest, and the difference was beginning to matter.
“Etiquette be damned, sir,” she said, pointing to the other chair in Hallis’s study. “If I have to look up at you for another minute, my head’s going to fall off. Don’t even think about it,” she added to Amris and Olvir. “You’re both in worse shape than I am, and neither of you heal like a Sentinel. Sit or I’ll put you through a wall.”
Sleep and victoryimprovesome people’s temper, said Gerant.
“Nothing wrong with my temper. Now hush and let the nice man do mage things at you.”
