As she watched, the flames punctured the leather binding, leaving blackened curls in their wake. The smell of charred leather rose in her nostrils. She looked up, and saw that her mother was watching the book too. Her eyes widened, and the color drained from her lovely face.
Icelin, hampered by her younger body, could not get to her mother. She tripped over a pile of wood and fell. Her face caught the sunlight coming from a gaping hole in the towet ceiling. The light beating down was too intense. The ground had been cold only a breath ago, yet everywhere around her she felt heat. It was like she'd stepped into the middle of the campfire.
"Icelin."
She heard her mother's voice. It had nevet sounded like that before. With a child's cettainty and an adult's memoty, Icelin knew this was the end.
The spellplague pocket, awakened by her mother's simple magic, swirled to life from the tafters of the ruined towet ceiling. A cerulean cloud that looked like a tiny, confined thunderstorm, it crawled along the walls, finding cracks in the stone and exploding them, spraying shards of rock on the helpless people below.
Someone was at her side, hauling her roughly under a cloak.
"Get her out!" she heard her mother scream. Then her voice faded. Icelin was running, running on legs that didn't belong to her. Elgreth had picked her up. The blue fire was everywhere- in her eyes, her mouth. She was blind. She couldn't see either of her parents.
They broke free into daylight, but the blue fire wasn't done with them. It stretched out hungry tendrils and snared her hair and her arms. Elgreth dropped her to the grass.
She statted to cry. The heat was too intense. It was the wotst sunburn she'd ever had. Her flesh should be melting from her bones. She heard Elgreth next to her, screaming. She reached for him, but she couldn't touch him. The blue light was everywhere. There were other screams, shouts her young mind couldn't comprehend but that the adult Icelin recognized as the Elvish language.
Cerest was nearby, crying out in agony. His beautiful face was melting and being reforged into something new, a visage that more closely matched his soul. Icelin curled up in a ball on the grass and waited for it to be over. She didn't care if she died, as long as the pain stopped.
Oblivion came, sweeping its cool hand across her body. She was resting in a dark place. She wanted to sleep there forever. To wake was to re-enter that world of horrid pain.
When she opened her eyes again, she was still on the ground. She could see the tip of the tower, weirdly, in her peripheral vision, as she stared up at the sky. Star and moonlight illuminated the scene now, and somewhere, far off, she smelled another campfire burning.
Elgreth leaned over her, adding another blanket to a growing pile on her small body. Her nose was cold. Elgreth's breath fogged in the night ait.
"Is she awake?" It was Cerest's voice. He spoke in the human tongue. He sounded weak.
Elgreth didn't reply. He stroked her cheek, and threaded his fingers in her hair to push it away from her face.
He looked broken, the adult Icelin remembered. Gone were the light-hearted smile and the fringes of youth that she'd seen by the campfire. They had been replaced by a tremendous weight and sadness.
She reached up to touch him. His skin was warm, his moustache hair brittle. He smelled like smoke. It was no campfire that burned, only the remnants of the Rikraw Tower-the funeral pyre for her parents.
When Elgreth left her at last, she crawled out from under the blankets and walked to the tower. Elgreth called to her, screamed for her to stop. But she couldn't. Her parents were somewhere in the wreck of stones.
The tower's collapsed wall was a black blemish on the landscape. Scorch marks sprayed out from it in jagged, oily streaks. Viewed from above, the tower might have been a stygian sun.
Elgreth was still screaming. He's injured, Icelin thought, or he'd be running after me. I am wrong for leaving him. But she couldn't make her feet stop walking.
She caught her foot on a rock. When she looked down, she realized the rock was a hand, clutching her ankle. The fingernails were black, the palms blistered and oozing white pus.
Frightened, Icelin jerked away. She followed the arm attached to the hand and found Cerest, cuded on the ground. He had one arm thrown across his face. The appendage'was out of its socket. His other arm stretched toward her, tiying to stop her.
Icelin looked at that blistered, trembling hand for a long time before she turned and resumed her long journey to the tower.
The stones vibrated with a power beyond sun-warmth. Everything was cold now, but she could feel where the energy had been. When her eyes adjusted to the dimness inside the tower, Icelin could see there was nothing left. Her mother's hair, her father's spectacles-the spellplague had burned them to ash.
She touched the blackened stones, caught the ash-falls drifting through the air. Illuminated in moonlight, they might have been dust or the remains of flesh. She caught as many as she could in her small hands and clutched them against her chest. She started to cry and found she was too dehydrated for the tears to form.
Carefully, she got down on her hands and knees and placed her cheek against the ground. The ash stirred and warmed her skin. She stayed there, imagining her mother's arms around her, while Elgreth screamed for her outside the tower.
Daerovus Tallmantle was a patient man, and his office demanded discipline, but, as he surveyed the wraiths circling the distant Ferryman's "Waltz, he concluded that he'd been patient long enough.
"That's the place," he said.
"Can we trust him?" Tesleena asked.
The Warden thought of Tarvin, his head crushed by a plank. His body had been borne away to the Watch barracks and then to his family.
He surveyed the group of men and women that stood before him in homespun disguises. Their eyes flitted between the Ferryman's Waltz and his face.
"You know what's expected of you," he said. "If any man or woman among you feels he cannot perform his duty, you may accompany Tarvin's body back to the barracks. I look you in the eyes and ask this plainly: will you see justice done?"
A chorus of "ayes" answered him. As promised, he stared each of them in the eyes, hunting deceit. He found none, and was satisfied.
"On the boats," he said. " 'Ware the wraiths, but Icelin is the one you want. Bring her in."
"You have to untangle yourself from this," said a voice Icelin did not, at first, recognize.
She looked up, and for some reason was unsurprised to find Aldren standing in the shadows of the tower.
"I didn't think you could weave yourself into memories," Icelin said.
"Only yours, it would seem," Aldren replied. "But I would rather not be here. This is a foul place, and you're needed elsewhere."
"I don't know how to leave," she said. "What if the plague won't let me?"
Aldren made a motion with his gnarled hand, and his staff appeared in the clawed grip, as if it had always been there, invisible.
"To weave magic requires discipline," he said. "At the best of times, anything can go wrong, because the Art runs unchecked. We are its only shepherds now." He held out his staff to her. "To be a weaver requires a focus," he said, "a tool to channel your energy. You should never rely on such a thing completely, but in the worst of times it can help you endure the wildness of the raw Art."
Icelin touched the staff and felt a pulsing energy. The Art ran through the staff like blood in wooden veins. She. could feel the contained power, frightening and pure.
"What if it gets away from me again?"
"It surely will," Aldren said. "Such things are inevitable. The only thing you can do is focus on what is most important to you-what's worth saving."