I force a breath out. One exhale.
A queen knows it is not the case.
I step into it.
Light answers before I can stop it, rising through me fast and clean, pushing outward without being called. They recoil, not from the strike but from the sound that tears out of me, something deeper than fear, forcing its way into them until they break, their hands lifting to their heads.
Colsar reaches us in the same instant, tearing the first one away before it can tighten its grip, his body already shifting as he drives through them.
Power surges beneath my ribs, racing up through my arms in threads that burn at the edges, and I shove it outward hard enough that both of them reel back. The Avanki push forward into the gap. Steel and light moving together.
More come. From the trees. From the shadows between the rocks where something standing very still could look like nothing at all for a very long time. They move with a coordination that has no desperation in it, only instruction, and that is the most frightening thing about them.
A grey mist spills from one of them, spreading too fast, catching one of the firebirds mid-flight. The bird drops hard. The sound of it carries.
Colsar sees it. I see it. Our eyes meet for a single second.
The children.
A roar tears through the air behind me. The transport door bursts open and Cambra comes through it in a shape I have never seen her wear, massive and low and already moving before she lands, slamming into the nearest cluster with a force that scatters them. I had not known she was kyvarin. There is no time to hold that thought.
More deathmages press in. Too many. The Avanki cut through the first ranks but the things are stubborn in the way that only constructed things can be, built to absorb and continue.
I pull the staff free. The glamour falls away as its full weight comes into my hand and the feel of it changes everything, theway it always does, the power in it resonating against the power in me, old Alarnan magic against old Alarnan blood. I think of Petunis with her staff and the lesson beneath every cruel word she ever said to me. I think of what I was in my father's house, small and veiled and waiting to be used.
I am done with that. I am done hiding. I am done being a victim. I will not be chained and I will not let my children be touched and I have had enough, I have had enough, I have had enough of things coming for what is mine.
"Enough."
The word tears out of me and the lightcraft follows it. It gathers under my ribs first, hot and fast, driving up through my arms and into the staff and then outward through every deathmage in range at once. Force and frequency together, old royal Alarnan power finding the wielder's binding that holds these things upright and shaking it apart from the inside. They cover their ears, all of them, their carefully constructed composure fracturing for the first time, their bodies jerking as it cuts deeper than any blade can reach.
Syle's voice breaks through in my head, distant and straining.Forty paces ahead there is a cluster of deathmages coming your way, Enovar tried to hold them but they keep?—
His voice cuts out.
My eyes find Colsar's across the chaos. "Now," I say.
He lifts his head and the sky answers. The firebirds come down in a single coordinated strike, fire sweeping low across the outer edge of them as they surge forward in a mass of gray. The Avanki follow. Steel and light and fire hit at once, and for a moment the mountain is louder than anything I have ever heard.
Then silence.
The deathmages dissolve where they stand, leaving torn ground and broken snow and a quiet that arrives too fast and presses in too completely.
It takes me a moment to understand why the silence feels wrong.
The transport door hangs open.
I am off my horse before I have decided to move.
"Saurin."
Nothing answers.
I reach the transport and look inside and what moves through me has no clean name. The furs are there. The blankets are there. The small hollows where they had been lying are still pressed into the fabric.
They are gone.
"Saurin." Too loud. I do not care. "Cambra."
