Tavi touched the stone with one hand and stretched the other up to the motionless sky. The principal furycraft used in the binding was watercrafting. It formed the foundation of the effort, while the appropriate craft related to the fury was added atop it: earth for earth, air for air, and so on. But water was the foundation. He had to cancel the watercrafting with its opposite.
Tavi bowed his head, focused his will, and sent fire, fire spread so fine that it never came to life as flame, coursing down deep into the rock of Garados and up in a broad, slewing cone into Thana Lilvia’s misty presence. There was a flash of pain as the two forces collided, a kind of cognitive acid that felt like it was chewing clean the inner surface of his skull.
The Queen’s head snapped toward him as she backpedaled lightly from Kitai.
The reaction from Garados and Thana was immediate.
The ground shook and swayed, and the Queen and Kitai both staggered several steps in the same direction, their bodies slamming against a rock shelf as the mountain tipped back its head and let out a bone-shuddering roar. An instant later, the darkness grew until it was nearly as black as night, and a storm blew up that made the worst weather Tavi had ever seen feel like a gentle shower. The wind screamed through the rocks, howling in mindless rage. Sleet fell from the sky in half-frozen, stinging sheets. Lightning writhed everywhere, a dozen bolts coming down around them in the space of a few seconds.
Worst of all, Tavi’s watercrafting senses were abruptly overloaded with a single mindless, boundless, endless emotion—rage. It was an anger more vast than the sea, and it made the very air in his lungs heavy, hard to move in and out. And, he thought, it wasn’t even being directed at him. There was a bladed point to that spear of anger, and he had only been grazed by it.
“Are you mad?” cried the vord Queen, staggering before the onslaught of the great furies’ wrath. “What have you done? They will destroy us all!”
“Then we will have chosen our deaths!” Tavi screamed back, struggling through the horrible pain and confusion in his thoughts, through the unbearable rage of the great furies. “Not you!”
The Queen let out a shriek of frustration and terror and flung herself into the air. For a second, the wind of the storm seemed to rise to oppose her, only to relent. She hurtled forward, and in a flash of lightning, Tavi saw her pass into what looked like a great, fanged maw made of clouds of rain and sleet. The jaws of Thana Lilvia closed with a roar of wind, and Tavi saw the Queen spinning, spinning out of control, whirling down miles and miles of cloudy gullet lined with rings and rings of windmanes, their claws flashing and slashing.
Kitai struggled to reach him in the rocking fury of the storm and the mountain’s anger, finally throwing herself down next to him as a bolt of lightning hit a rocky ridge not twenty feet away. He gathered her in close, and said, “I’m going after her.”
Her head snapped up, and her green eyes were wide. “What?”
“We must be sure,” he said. “Alera is here. There must be a way to soothe the great furies, or at least to direct them somewhere else. Talk with her.”
“Chala,” Kitai cried. “You will be killed in this!”
He caught her hand in his, squeezing tight. “If she is not finished, there will never be a better time. And too much is at stake. It must be done. And I am the First Lord.” He drew her hand to his chest and kissed her mouth, swift and heatedly. Then he rested his forehead against hers, and said, “I love you.”
“Idiot,” she sobbed, her hands trembling as they framed his face. “Of course you do. And I love you.”
There was nothing else he needed to say. Nothing else he needed to hear.
Gaius Octavian rose and flung himself up and into the teeth of the storm.
Later, he would never remember that final flight as more than bits of frozen imagery, painted onto his eyes by flashes of lightning. The vord Queen as a tiny and distant dot, spinning in the fury of the storm. Windmanes, their eyes burning with unspent lightning, slashing at his armor, their claws like thunderbolts. Pain as the wind and water of the storm cut at him like knives. The great and terrible face of the fury, its anger lashing out at the Queen, hardly brushing him—and all but killing him even so.
Tavi found himself grasping at watercrafting to close cuts and soothe burns, even as he continued to fly on. The air around him seemed more water than not, in any case, and it was easier than he had thought it would be. He wondered idly, as he flew onward, pursuing the distant form of the Queen, if he could somehow watercraft the portion of his brain that had advised this idiotic course of action. Clearly, it was defective.
And then a great blackness came rushing up at him—the ground. He slowed enough to land with a great shock of impact to his legs, as opposed to his spine, and rose, fighting the blinding wind and sleet. Though he knew it was full morning now, the storm had left it as black as night.
There was a hole gouged in the ground nearby, where the Queen had been flung to earth. She had climbed out of it, clearly. Windmanes in Legion strength scoured the land nearby. Lightning raked at the ground, each bolt lasting several seconds, carving great, long trenches into the soil. When the strike would fade, the land would be almost as dark as a moonless night.
And in that darkness, Tavi saw a flash of light.
He struggled toward it, noting signs of passage on the ground being swiftly obliterated by the rain. The markings, then, were fresh. Only the Queen could have made them. Tavi followed the trail, turning aside dozens of windmanes with windcraftings of his own, finally resorting to the use of a vortex that he set spinning about the blade of his sword, substituting windcrafting for the usual firecrafting that would ignite his blade. Once that was done, a single stroke was enough to send the deadly furies wailing away from him into the night, and he plodded forward, sinking ankle deep into the cold, muddy earth, struggling up a slight incline.
The warm light of furylamps spilled out onto the ground in front of him, abruptly, and Tavi sensed the presence of a structure, a great dome of marble the height of three men. Its open entryway glowed with a soft golden light, and above it, writ into the marble in gold, was the seven-pointed star of the First Lord of Alera.
His father’s grave, the Princeps’ Memorium.
Tavi staggered inside. Though outside the storm still raged behind him, within the Memorium, those sounds came only as something very distant and wholly irrelevant. The vast scream of the storm was broken here to near silence. Here in the dome there was only the slight ripple of water, the crackle of flame, and the sleepy chirp of a bird.
The interior of the dome was made not of marble, but of crystal, the walls of it rising high and smooth to the ceiling twenty feet above. Once, the scale and grandeur of the place had instilled in Tavi a sense of awe. Now, he saw it differently. He knew the scale and difficulty of furycraft it had taken to raise this place from the ground, and his awe was based not upon the beauty or richness of the structure but upon the elegance of the crafting that had created it.
Light came from the seven fires that burned without apparent fuel around the outside of the room, simulated flames that were far more difficult to create than the steady glow of any furylamp. That irregular, warm light rose through the crystal, bending, refracting, splitting into rainbows that swirled and danced with a slow grace and beauty within the crystal walls—crystal that would have long since cracked and fractured had it been wrought with anything less than perfection of furycraft.
The floor in the center of the dome was covered by a pool of water, perfectly still and as smooth as Amaranth glass. All around the pool grew rich foliage, bushes, grass, flowers, even small trees, still arranged as neatly as though kept by a gardener—though Tavi hadn’t seen the place since he was fifteen. The woodcrafting needed to establish such a self-tending garden was astonishing. Gaius Sextus, it seemed, had known more about the growth of living things than Tavi did, despite the differences in their backgrounds.