“Da! Look!” Severn pointed back towards the open portal behind them.
Cann looked in time to see a great, tawny cat leap from the well, a brightly garbed and veiled Feraz warrior on its back. The warrior carried a strange urn on a chain that he spun in circles over his head. Some sort of liquid sprayed forth, the fine droplets settling on the fleeing Celierians. The Celierians cried out, some slapping themselves where the droplets had landed on their skin. They slowed, stumbled a bit as if they were disoriented. Several of them shook their heads and rubbed at their eyes. But then, one by one, they straightened and drew their swords.
“The king! Save the king!” they cried.
And they fell upon their fellow countrymen, hacking and slashing their own people.
“Krekk,”Cann swore. They were in trouble. If the Eld took the castle from the inside, all the allies encamped around Kreppes would be geese plump for the plucking. “Sev, Parsi—to the gate!” he cried to his sons. “We’ve got to open the gate! We can’t let them take the castle.”
They raced up towards the outer courtyard and the main fortress gates, but before they could reach it, a mob of magiccrazed Celierians blocked their way.
Blades flashed and whirled. Cann and his sons were all gifted swordsmen, trained from birth by thedahl’reisenwho guarded Barrial land. Blood spewed—none of it theirs—but as the droplets splattered on Cann’s face, his eyes and skin began to burn and a strange, disorienting fog came over him.
“Da?” Parsis grabbed his arm.
Parsis’s face went in and out of focus. He blinked, rubbing at his eyes with bloody hands. A strange scent filled his nostrils, warm and exotic, intoxicating. On the heels of the scent came fervor. Bloodlust. Courage and determination.
The face hovering before him changed. Shadows played across the features, twisting and reshaping them into the face of the enemy. Pale, skin untouched by sunlight, hellish black pits for eyes, evil oozing from its pores.
“The king!” he cried. “Save the king!” And he thrust his sword into the monster.
In Kreppes’s west wing, outside the suite occupied by Ellysetta and Rain, the door and half of the corridor-facing wall dissolved into nothingness as a portal to the Well of Souls appeared where the brass hall sconce had been.
Twenty Primages, led by Primage Soros, leaped out of the Well, globes of blue-white Mage Fire spinning in their hands, ready for launch. But the sight of the empty room drew them up short.
“Check the bedchamber!” Soros commanded.
Mages and Black Guard flung open the connecting doors to the adjoining bedchamber and flooded inside, arrows nocked, swords drawn, Mage Fire blazing. Soros rushed in behind them to claim the High Mage’s prize. But instead of gloating with victory, his expression darkened to thunderous rage.
The room was empty. The bed still neatly made. “Sebourne!” he cried. “You worthlessjaffing rultshart!”Ellysetta Baristani and the Tairen Soul were gone.
Outside the castle, in the tairen’s makeshift lair, Ellysetta came awake with a gasp. Her body was ice-cold and shivering uncontrollably. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
She reached for Rain. Her fingers closed around his bare arm, gripped tight, shook him hard.
“Rain, wake up. I think it’s begun.” She left her hand on his arm so he could sense what she found as she reached out in search of the trouble that had roused her. Her empathic senses soared on wafts of lavender Spirit gleaming with goldenshei’dalin’slove.
Suddenly, she grabbed her throat, feeling the barbs of an arrow pierce her throat. She tried to breathe, but her lungs filled instead with bubbles of blood.The king. Save the king!Then pain eased, and her body went limp.
Rain grabbed her shoulders and shook her with sudden fear.“Shei’tani!”
She blinked. Stared up at him. Feeling returned to her limbs. She pulled back her senses, locking them tight inside herself. “Kreppes. They’re inside the fortress. They’ve taken the castle! They’re attacking our camp!”
“Krekk.”Rain leapt to his feet. Green Earth swirled as he summoned his golden war armor and steel.«Fey! Ti’Kreppes! Ti’Dorian! The enemy is upon us!»He grabbed Ellysetta’s arm, and together they raced for the lair’s entrance.
The tairen erupted from their makeshift lair with roars and jets of flame, springing from hill to sky, soaring up on widespread wings before wheeling back around to dive towards Kreppes.
The Eld had taken the ramparts and were firing the trebuchets and bowcannon filled with shrapnel bolts on the allied camps. Massive hunks of stone, balls of burning pitch, and bolts that separated into hundreds of razor-sharp shards rained down upon the allies. Chaos ruled. Tents were aflame. Burning men shrieked and ran in mindless terror while around them soldiers raced in every direction.
«Kaiven chakor, ti’Feyreisa! Ti’Feyreisa!»Rain cried on her quintet’s path. He swooped low over the Fey tents, and Ellysetta leapt from his back and rode a shaft of Air to the ground.
She landed on her feet in the center of the Fey encampment and was immediately surrounded by hundred-fold weaves and scores upon scores of grim-eyed warriors.
“I need cots and tables,” she told Bel when he, Gaelen, and the others reached her side. “Tell thelu’tanto start bringing me the wounded.”
“Nei,Ellysetta,” Bel said, “we need to get you to safety, away from the battlefield. Rain’s orders,” he added, when her eyes flashed. “It’s too dangerous for you here.”
“I know what he wants, and I know why he wants it, and I’m not going anywhere. There are wounded men who need my help.”
