“No man makes a fool of me in my own house!” boomed the fury-enhanced voice.
Then a woman’s voice answered, every bit as loud, nowhere near so melodramatic, and drily amused. “While the rest of us hardly need try. Tell me, Brencis,” Lady Placida taunted. “Do you still have that little problem bedding women, the way you did in the Academy?”
Kalarus’s answer was a roar of pure rage that shook the tower, raising dust in a choking cloud.
“Move, move!” Lady Aquitaine shouted from below, then Odiana appeared, shoving frantically at Aldrick’s back. The big swordsman stumbled onto the roof, while Odiana and Lady Aquitaine hurried frantically up the stairs, diving to either side of the opening.
Less than a second later, a titanic roar shook the tower again, and a column of white-hot fire exploded from the tower below, roaring up from the stones and rising for hundreds of feet into the sky above Kalare. The air turned hot and dry in an instant, and Amara had to throw her arms across her face to shield her eyes from the blinding light of the flame Kalarus had crafted into being.
The fire passed swiftly, though the bloom of heat from so much flame had parched the air and left several of the bars in the domed cage glowing with sullen fire. Amara looked up at Odiana, Aldrick, and Lady Aquitaine. “Bernard?” she cried, hearing her own voice shaking with panic. “Where is he? Bernard?”
“No time!” Odiana spat.
Lady Aquitaine pointed at the cage. “Aldrick.”
The big swordsman crossed to the cage, set his feet, and swung his blade in three swift strokes. Sparks rose from the steel bars, and Aldrick stepped back. A beat later, a dozen sections of iron bar fell to the stones with a metallic clatter, their ends glowing with the heat of parting, leaving an entire triangular section of the dome-shaped cage missing.
Aldrick extended his hand politely to Atticus Elania, and said, “This way, lady, if you please.”
Lady Aquitaine gave the girl a narrow look, then turned to Odiana, and said, voice sharp, “Fire crystals.”
Odiana’s hand dipped into the low neckline of her slave’s tunic and she tore at the lining, one hand cupped. She caught something as it tumbled from the neckline and passed it to Lady Aquitaine-three small crystals, two scarlet and one black, glittered in the palm of her hand. “Here, Your Grace,” Odiana said. “They are ready.”
Lady Aquitaine snatched them from Odiana’s hand, muttered something under her breath, and cast them down onto the far side of the tower’s roof, where they promptly began to billow with smoke-two plumes of brilliant scarlet and one of deepest black, the colors of Aquitaine.
“Wh-what’s happening?” Elania asked, her voice shaking.
“The smoke is a signal,” Aldrick told the girl, his tone briskly polite. “Our coach should be here in a moment.”
“Lady Aquitaine!” Amara snapped. After pausing a deliberate beat, the High Lady turned to Amara, one eyebrow raised. “Yes, Countess?”
“Where is Bernard?”
Lady Aquitaine gave an elegant shrug. “I’ve no idea, dear. Aldrick?”
“He was holding the stairs below us,” Aldrick said, his tone short. “I didn’t see what happened to him.”
“He couldn’t possibly have survived that firestorm,” Lady Aquitaine said, her voice practical and dismissive.
The words drew a spike of anger such as Amara had never felt before, and she found herself standing with her hands clenched into fists, her jaws clenched while tiny spangles of light danced in her vision. Her first instinct was to hurl herself bodily at Lady Aquitaine, but at the last instant, she remembered the child still clinging to her back, and she forced herself to stand in place. Amara took a second to control her voice, so that it would not come out as an incoherent snarl. “You don’t know that.”
“You saw it,” Lady Aquitaine said. “You were there, just as I was.”
“My lady,” Odiana said, her voice hesitant, even cringing.
“Here they come,” Aldrick called, and Amara looked up to see their Knights Aeris arrowing swiftly for the top of the tower, bearing the coach between them.
Lady Aquitaine glared back at Amara. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, lips pressed together, shook her head tightly, and said, “It doesn’t matter at this point, Countess. With the alarm raised, we must leave immediately if we are to leave at all.” She glanced at Amara, and added, in a quieter tone, “I’m sorry, Countess. Anyone left behind is on his own.”
“It’s so nice to feel cared for,” called Lady Placida. She padded up the stairs, still holding her chain and stone in one hand. Her white muslin undergown showed half a dozen rips and any number of scorch marks. Her right hand was raised, bent at the elbow and wrist, and a small falcon of pure fire rested upon her wrist like a tiny, winged sun.
“Given how fashionably late you generally are, Invidia,” she said, “I would expect you to have more tolerance for others.”
She hurried onto the roof, turning immediately to offer a hand down to Rook. The young spy looked disoriented, her balance unsteady, and if Lady Placida hadn’t been helping her when her balance wavered, Rook would have fallen.
Amara felt her heart stop for a single, terrible, seemingly eternal moment, then Bernard came up behind Rook, his bow in hand, his face pale and nauseated. He had one hand on the small of the spy’s back and was pushing her up more or less by main strength. Relief flooded through her, and she clasped her hands tightly together and bowed her head until she could blink sudden tears from her eyes. “What happened?”
“Kalarus tried to burn us out,” Bernard said, his voice hoarse. “Lady Placida countered him. Sheltered us from the flame, then sealed the stairway in stone. ‘
“He meant to say, ‘Lady Placida and I’ sealed the stairway in stone,” Lady Placida said firmly. “Though your friend there was struck on the head by some debris. I’ve exhausted myself, and it won’t take Kalarus long to open a passage through the stone we put in his way. Best we hurry.”
No sooner had she spoken than the wind rose to the familiar roar of a shared windstream, and Lady Aquitaines mercenary Knights Aeris swept down and landed heavily, clumsily on the roof, the coach slamming down onto the stone.
Amara reached out to Cirrus, preparing to raise a windstream of her own, and found that her connection to the fury had grown fainter, more tenuous. She swore and shouted, “Hurry! I think Kalarus has his wind furies interfering with ours to prevent our escape!”
“Just be thankful that doing it is keeping him downstairs,” Lady Aquitaine said. “I’ll try to counter him until we can get farther away. Into the coach!” She flung herself inside, followed by Odiana, Aldrick, and Atticus Elania.
While Bernard covered the doorway with his bow, Amara shrugged the bewildered child from her shoulders and into Lady Placida’s arms. She helped the dazed Rook into the coach, which was rapidly growing quite crowded. Then another tremble in the stone beneath her feet made her look up and around in time to see two gargoyles, much like those Lady Placida had dispatched, as they clawed their way up the outside of the tower, talons sinking into stone as if it was mud, and over its battlements.
“Bernard!” Amara screamed, pointing.
Her husband spun, drawing the bowstring to his cheek as he did, and let an arrow fly at the nearest gargoyle out of sheer reflex.
Amara thought the shot would be utterly ineffective, given that the gargoyles were made of stone and that the wind the Knights Aeris were summoning would have made such things impossible for all but the best of archers.
But Bernard was one of the best, and Amara had reckoned without the deadly combination of an earthcrafter’s superhuman strength working together with the sheer, deadly expertise of a woodcrafting archer. Bernard was fully powerful and skilled enough to have qualified as a Knight Terra or Flora in any Legion in the Realm, and his war bow was one of the weapons borne by the hunters and holders of Alera’s northernmost reaches-a weapon designed to put down predators that outweighed the holders by hundreds of pounds and powerful enough to punch through breastplates of Aleran steel. Too, Bernard was using a heavy, stiletto-headed arrow, one designed for piercing armor, and the experienced earthcrafter knew stone as few other Alerans could ever understand it.