At the same moment, Ashenford and Shinthala scrambled off their stone chairs, pivoted to face Cindermoon, and started chanting. The half-elf held out his hand, a sickle appeared in it, and he spun it over his head. Like a ghost plant growing in midair, the suggestion of holly, with toothy leaves and little red berries, formed around the white-haired druidess. Stedd could even smell it.
Because Stedd didn’t know how to subdue people without hurting them, he had to leave it to his two new druid friends to overcome Cindermoon. They should be able to. They had her outnumbered, and they’d caught her by surprise.
But then, with a roar, Cindermoon’s bear rounded the line of thrones. The illusory demons had scared the animal off, but apparently not far and not for long, and the sight of mere human beings working magic wasn’t frightening enough to keep it from trying to protect its mistress.
A swipe of its claws jerked Shinthala’s leg out from under her and dropped her on her back. The phantom holly vanished, scent and all. The bear reared over her.
Stedd threw out his hand and cast brightness into the beast’s beady eyes. The light was harmless, but, startled, the bear flinched from it.
That gave Shinthala time to cast more magic. She spoke, and her voice came out as a high, inhuman throbbing. Her manner reminded Stedd of someone ordering a naughty dog off a bed.
The bear shuddered as though struggling to resist the druidess’s power to command it. Then it wheeled and lumbered back the way it had come.
Stedd spun back around. Without support from Shinthala, Ashenford had failed to render Cindermoon helpless; instead, he himself strained against vines that had burst from the ground to wrap around him. Now on her feet like her peers, her delicate face with its slanted eyes and pointed chin furious, the elf turned toward Shinthala and swept out a hand that was suddenly covered with insects. As her arm snapped out straight, the conjured hornets took flight.
A fan-shaped blast of yellow flame engulfed the wasps halfway to their intended victim. When the blaze guttered out a heartbeat later, there was nothing left of them. Her fingers smoking, Umara shifted to face Cindermoon dead on.
Cindermoon twirled an upraised hand. Visible chiefly by virtue of the raindrops it caught and spun, a cyclone twice as tall as a man howled up from the ground. It charged Umara like a bull, snatched her up into the air, and flung her into one of the menhirs. Something cracked, and the Red Wizard collapsed like a rag doll at the base of the stone.
Stedd stared for a heartbeat, then remembered that here was something he did know how to do. He scurried in Umara’s direction.
As he bent over her, he glanced back at the fight. Kneeling, the blood from her clawed leg pooling around her, Shinthala conjured a huge boar halfway into being.
Then Cindermoon shouted, “No!” and shook her fist. The blurry, misty semblance of a hog vanished.
Stedd reached out to Lathander and drew down his light. Setting his glowing hands on Umara’s shoulders, he poured the power into her.
Ashenford flailed his arms, and his bonds, now dry and brittle, started to break apart from the top down. That freed his hands to start a different spell, but his legs were still immobilized when the whirlwind roared at him and engulfed him. His chanting ended in a cry of pain.
Cindermoon snapped her fingers, and the cyclone vanished, dropping the half-elf to the ground. Stedd just had time to wonder why she’d thrown away such an effective weapon, and then she made a beckoning gesture. Thick gray fog billowed out from the spot where she was standing, a cloud the whirlwind would have blown apart.
In a heartbeat, the fog spread far enough to swallow Ashenford and Shinthala. Only Umara and Stedd were beyond its reach, and he was sure that only he saw when a huge owl flew up from the middle of it.
Without a doubt, the bird was Cindermoon. She’d been holding her own against her assailants, but had apparently decided even so that it was foolish to go on fighting them all by herself when she had a little army of supporters within easy reach.
Umara’s eyes fluttered open. Stedd pointed at the owl. “Please!” he said.
The wizard jumped to her feet so fast, she knocked him aside. She rattled off words that felt like needles jabbing him.
A shadow tentacle like the one that had grabbed Nobanion shot up from the ground to snatch at the owl. It flicked harmlessly past just under the bird’s talons.
With a noise that was half grunt and half snarl, Umara rose onto her toes with one arm straight above her head. She looked like someone straining to reach something on a high shelf. The tentacle stretched just a little more and whipped around Cindermoon’s avian body.
Umara lashed her arm down. The length of shadow jerked the shapeshifter to the ground with a violence that made Stedd wince. He hoped the Red Wizard remembered the idea was to help the hierophant, not smash her to bits.
The fog vanished as either Shinthala or Ashenford made it go away. Then the two of them, Stedd, and Umara hurried toward the spot where Cindermoon lay bound. She was mostly an elf again, although she still had some feathers here and there, and her legs were too short for the rest of her.
Stedd was relieved to see that although unconscious, the hierophant was breathing and not visibly mangled. Still, Shinthala frowned at Umara and said, “That spell you just cast was true black magic.”
“Like Anton said,” the Red Wizard snapped, “get past it. How’s your leg?”
“I’ll worry about it after we tend to Cindermoon.”
“Fair enough. You healers do that. I’ll stand guard and keep the tentacle tight.”
Stedd, Shinthala, and Ashenford knelt around the elf. Stedd placed his fingertips against her temple and drew light and warmth into them. Shinthala murmured under her breath, and Ashenford crooned a song as gentle as a lullaby. Druidic magic suffused the air with the scent of verdure.
Then denial as sudden and vicious as a punch in the throat rocked Stedd backward. His head rang, and for a moment, he couldn’t catch his breath. When he finally did, he saw that Shinthala and Ashenford looked just as shaken as he.
“What happened?” Umara asked.
“What we expected,” Shinthala replied. Her voice was thick, like she’d bitten her tongue. “Cindermoon’s not awake in a physical sense. But she does know when someone tries to touch her psyche. Or her madness knows. And it’s fighting back.”
“Then overcome the resistance.”
“Thank you, we remember the plan,” Ashenford said drily. He looked at his fellow healers. “We need to do a better job of coordinating. Shinthala, you and I will sing the Hymn of Still Waters. Stedd, you invoke Lathander’s light when we reach the word ‘peace.’ ”
Anton took a hasty retreat. No combat maneuver was more basic, but it felt chancy when he was blindly backing down a string of wet steppingstones and not a continuous surface.
Still, he managed to set his feet where he’d intended to, and the water spirit’s blow fell short. Fingerless like a mitten, its enormous hand slapped down in the space he’d just vacated and splashed apart. But when the guardian raised its arm back up from the surface of the pool, the hand was intact again.
Anton had his doubts that even an enchanted saber could hurt a being capable of reforming itself like that, but he reckoned he had to try. He lunged and cut before the hand could swing up out of range.
The blade splashed through its target, which seethed, rippled, and dropped some of its liquid substance back down into the pool. The agitation spread up the spirit’s arm in diminishing convulsions.