It’s enough to make a person stuff her in a baggage wagon, thought Daja gloomily as she cleaned her teeth on their seventh morning out. Today they were to reach the river Erynwhit, which marked the border of Emelan and Gansar. Daja was wondering how she was going to put up with Tris’s behavior all the way to Namorn. She agreed with Briar, particularly since last night Tris had been sleeping, or moving, near Daja’s bedroll.
“Why don’t you see if you can ride in a wagon?” she demanded when Tris twitched one time too many over breakfast. “So you won’t have to keep the rest of us awake all night while you look for a soft spot, or worry about the wicked breeze drying your cheeks all day.”
Tris replied with a cold look that, in earlier years, made Daja want to put her in a keg and nail the top on. It was a look that froze the person who had dared to speak to Tris. We shamed it out of her when she lived with us, thought Daja, glaring back at her sister. I guess she fell into her old, bad ways after we weren’t around. “In the civilized world, people answer other people back,” she told the redhead.
“Daja, it’s too early,” moaned Sandry. She had stayed up late, working on her Namornese with the Traders. For once, Daja saw, Sandry wasn’t her bouncy morning self.
“Certainly too early for those of us who couldn’t get a whole night’s sleep in the first place,” growled Briar as the Traders began to pack the wagons up.
The caravan, even the sleepy four, pulled together and took the slowly descending road before the sun cleared the eastern mountains. Soon they descended to the flat canyon floor the Erynwhit had carved between towering cliff walls. The river spread before them. It was a lazy flat expanse no more than a hundred yards wide and barely three feet deep even at this time of year, when snowmelt should have swollen it enough to cover the whole canyon floor. The ride leader told Daja that, twenty years earlier, this road had been impassable in springtime, until some lord or other built a dam far upstream.
Thanks, whoever you were, she told the unnamed noble silently. Without your dam and this crossing we’d have to ride a hundred miles to the bridge at Lake Bostidan.
On moved the caravan, herd animals, riders, and the first of the wagon groups. Daja was about to enter the water when she saw that Tris had halted her mare in midstream. The mare turned and twisted, fighting Tris’s too-tight grip on the reins.
Daja ground her teeth, then rode over. “Ease up on your horse’s mouth,” Daja growled. “You’re hurting her, you’ll make her hard-mouthed, wrenching her about that way—”
Tris pulled the horse’s head around in an abrupt turn, kicking the mare into a gallop while still in the water. Daja stood in the stirrups to yell, “We taught you how to ride, Oti log it, Trader tax you! A hard-mouthed horse earns less on resale!”
Tris didn’t seem to hear. She galloped her little mare onto a hillock where the road entered the water and drew her to a halt. There, she rose in her stirrups, facing upriver.
Why is she taking her spectacles off? wondered Daja, as vexed with Tris as she had been in years. She looks completely demented, and she’s blind without them—now what?!
Tris ripped off the net that confined her braids, and turned the mare. Setting the horse galloping straight for the river, she grabbed a handful of air and placed it in front of her mouth. “Get ’em across!” she yelled. She had done some trick: Her voice boomed in the canyon. “For your lives, get them across! Move!”
The caravan leaders and the head mimander started to ride back to Tris.
“There is no storm, no flood,” cried the mimander. “You frighten our people—”
Tris stood in her saddle, her gray eyes wild. The ties flew from the thin braids that framed her face. They came undone, laddered with lightning bolts that crawled to her forehead and back over her head. “Are you deaf?” she bellowed. “I didn’t ask for a vote! Move them!” She thrust an arm out. Lightning ran down to fill her palm. It dripped to the ground. Wagon drivers whipped their beasts, wanting to put the river between them and Tris. Herds fled, splashing among the wagons and the riders.
Chime shot into the air. Lightning rose to cling to the dragon, outlining her graceful figure. Down she swooped, harrying the Traders’ dogs and sheep, driving them into the river and keeping them from fleeing downstream. Briar and Sandry charged back into the water, followed by Traders, making sure people rode across instead of fleeing along the river’s length.
I’ll kill Tris when everyone’s safely out, thought Daja, keeping the column tight on the upriver side. For causing such a fuss, for frightening everyone, and why? The mimander said there’s no flash flood coming. His specialty is weather with water—the ride leader told me so when we left Summersea!
She glanced at Tris. The redhead screeched, “Not fast enough!” at the mimander and the caravan leaders. Two long, heavy braids popped free of their ties. These did not crawl with lightning, like the rest of Tris’s braids. They were lightning.
She dragged fistfuls of blazing power from each and squeezed them through the gaps between her fingers, creating about seven strips of lightning in each hand. “Move!” she screamed, and hurled them in the caravan’s wake. Lightning cracked like whips over the heads of horses and mules. It lashed close enough to one herd of sheep to singe wool and to leave scorch marks on the side of a nearby wagon. Daja saw Tris drag on it to keep it from touching the water. Thank the gods for that, she realized. One strike in the water and we all might cook.
Three lightning strips flew at the mimander, the caravan leaders, even Daja herself, nipping at the rumps of their horses. Thunder boomed in the canyon, startling the herds into a run. Animals, Traders, and non-Traders alike decided they’d had enough. They, Sandry, and Briar fled across the river with Tris behind them, just in back of the last wagons.
“Keep going!” Tris screamed, her voice hoarse. Now she used her lightning to goad the caravan’s rear and its front, scaring the horses and the oxen who pulled the wagons until they rushed up the inclining road. The end of the caravan was a scant twenty feet above the canyon floor when a rumbling sound made the cooler-headed riders stop.
Rocks pattered down the cliffs that overlooked the road. Bits of the ledge that overlooked the canyon floor crumbled away from its edge. In the distance they could hear a dull roar.
This time, Tris, clinging to her horse’s mane, didn’t need to speak. Everyone scrambled to move higher on the steep road. They were sixty feet above the riverbed when a wall of tree- and stone-studded water snarled down the canyon to swamp the river flats. It ripped boulders from the ford, ground the road away, and plowed on down into the canyon again. Had they been just a little slower, the savage torrent would have swept them up and carried the remains far downstream.
“But there was no rain, no snowfall, higher in the mountains.” That lone voice belonged to the mimander. Daja did not look at his veiled eyes, out of consideration for his shame. Trader mimanders studied one aspect of magic all their lives. They chose their specialty when they were young, and risked their lives to learn all they could about winds, or the fall of water from the skies, or avalanches, or storms at sea.
How humiliating, she thought. It must look like he missed this coming, even after years of study. He knows this caravan puts its life in his hands.
And how humiliating, to yell at your sister because she doesn’t have time to save over two hundred people and explain herself, too.
Briar looked at the swirling mess below. He blinked. For a moment the trees were bodies: gaudily dressed men, women and children who were missing limbs or heads, their wounds streaking the brown water red. They were joined by the bloated corpses of yaks, goats, even birds, and by the corpses of soldiers. The stench of the rotting dead swamped him.