For an instant Winterseine’s fears caused him to freeze. In that moment Rialla pounced. With a move she had practiced countless times, she gripped his wrist and twisted, locking his elbow. Stepping to the side, she placed her free hand on his shoulder blade, pushing him forward and down. When she knocked his feet away, she held him pinned face down in the mud with her foot on his shoulder and his arm twisted painfully behind him.
Wearily, she turned her face into her shoulder to wipe away the sweat and rain so she could see.
Tris, she said, you’ll have to break the connection that binds us together. If you don’t, you’ll get caught up in the backlash. I can’t protect both of us.
Rialla! he said urgently, but she pushed him away.
Assuming Tris would heed her warning, Rialla turned to Winterseine. He’d quit struggling as soon as it became obvious that the only thing he could accomplish was dislocating his shoulder. Rialla’s hand was on his bare wrist.
She began with his fears, the ones that were readily apparent. Winterseine would know what she was trying; his mind was disciplined, orderly. Only the touch of insanity—the rage fueled by the fear that his son was controlling him—gave her the means to defeat him.
She tried to ignore the stray thoughts that crept in; emotions were her weapons. She found his first fears: his son emerging from his room, white and shaken, glowing with power… the first time Terran stood up to his father and Winterseine backed down, knowing without a doubt that in a power struggle the son was stronger … and presented those feelings to Winterseine. Her own heartbeat picked up in time with his. These were the fears spawned by his memories; because she used his own emotions, Rialla couldn’t step away from them as she had managed to when she’d killed the empathic feeder the night Karsten died.
Rialla took his reaction to the old thoughts and reinforced them, driving him deeper into his own nightmare. She reached further, for older hurts and uncertainties. She reached the boy he had been, vulnerable to taunts and shame, and presented those voices to him again.
Only when she heard him cry out did she fan the flames of his rage. Earlier his anger had been a focused flame, protecting him from the fear; with Rialla’s intervention it became an overwhelming wave, drowning out coherent thought.
It wasn’t enough.
She added her own terror, the memory of the battle with the swamp creature, the horror of becoming a slave again. She reached deeper and found the terror of being helpless at the mercy of ruthless captors, the sick fear of being beaten, knowing just how much it was going to hurt… deep, soul-eating sorrow of living alone among strangers with no family bonds, and no chance of it changing … Some part of Rialla knew that the last thought wasn’t hers or Winterseine’s, but she was too preoccupied with what she was doing to search out where it came from. Even as she worked to project her emotions, she felt Winterseine fighting for control.
If she didn’t take Winterseine out now, he would kill her, but it wouldn’t stop there. Tris would hunt Winterseine down, and she was afraid that the healer wouldn’t stand a chance against Winterseine’s magic.
Shuddering, she reached into herself for the small place she kept hidden for fear of her sanity. It was here that the emotions and last thoughts of her family dwelt with the death of Jarroh’s child-slave and a hundred others. She drew the veil of shadow aside, pulling a thread of the tangled horror and thrusting it at him viciously. She struggled to keep aloof; knowing what was to come allowed her to deal with the pain and fear faster than Winterseine could.
She fed her horrors to him one by one, and slowly she could feel Winterseine weakening. She had to break him and get away from the campsite before Terran woke up.
Momentarily distracted by her fears, she reached for one last memory, searching deep.
This time she lost the small thread of calm that allowed her to maintain the distance from the pain, and became tangled in the morass of emotion. It wasn’t until she fought her way through that she realized why it had been so hard to maintain her distance.
Alone, even among his own kind. Set apart both by his refusal to let fear dominate his actions and by the kind of ability that had been dying from his race for a long time. Another man might not have been banished for saving the human child, but he was different, with no one to speak for him.
Rialla was caught up in Tris’s memory.
Frantically, she fought to free herself of it and the others that were beginning to seep in through the breach of her defenses; she needed to be detached or she would be swallowed in the tempest she’d created in Winterseine’s mind. To do that she had to find Tris and get him out.
At that instant, when the last of her bastions against pain and fear were failing, Winterseine lost his battle. The growing miasma of terror and anguish that he’d been holding back hit Rialla with the force of a blow.
Almost without thought, she abandoned her efforts to rebuild her shields and tried to protect Tris long enough so that he could leave her. Apparently he knew what she was doing, because just before she lost herself in the storm of emotion, his words echoed to her.
Sorry, love. His mental voice was ragged with the same pain that was ripping through her. / tried to tell you earlier; I can’t leave you anymore.
On the edge of the forest, Tris fell quietly to rest on time-faded leaves from autumns past. The gelding, too well trained to leave its rider, nudged gently at Tris’s cheek, then began to graze as the rains poured down and lightning flashed in the sky.
Rialla cried out as she lost herself in the storm of emotion. Something hit her hard on the shoulder, throwing her away from Winterseine’s jerking body. She hit the ground and collapsed into a fetal curl, whimpering with the pain in her head. She was too close to unconsciousness to appreciate the difference between a bad headache and the much more harmful torment that had been tearing her apart.
Lying on the ground, Rialla listened to Winterseine’s hoarse moans and started to shake as her body responded to the stress of the battle. Some part of her recognized what must have happened: Terran had knocked her away from Winterseine in the moment before she would have joined him in perpetual madness.
The emotional torment she’d just been through precluded any sort of emotion at all. She couldn’t even manage to be worried about Tris. There would be time enough for that, she supposed, if Terran allowed her to live long enough to discover how Tris had fared.
She could hear Terran mutter over his father, but she didn’t think that even the power of the gods could restore Winterseine’s reason. It would have been kinder to kill him, but she’d failed.
Winterseine’s noises quieted, and Rialla heard Terran get up and move to the supply packs. He came back and picked her up with a grunt. If it had been anyone else touching her, he would have fallen to the ground screaming; she hadn’t even begun to restructure the shields to keep her emotions from others—but she still couldn’t touch Terran with her mind.
Air hissed involuntarily between her teeth from the pain in her head when Terran set her down on one of the blankets. He wrapped it securely around her and braced her in a sitting position. With one arm around her chest, he pressed a cup against her lips and half-forced several swallows of spicy alcohol down her throat.
She choked and gasped, but the alcohol did its job, and her tremors slowly subsided.
“Better?” asked Terran in a neutral tone, giving her the half-full cup.
Rialla nodded warily, and he backed away until she was supporting herself. He got to his feet and fed the dying camp fire until it was dancing merrily. She couldn’t read anything on his face.