“What fool is that who challenges us?” hissed Goezenou.
Though it was not possible from this distance to see her face, Dyonas’s memory was long. “At a guess, it is the girl Thaga was supposed to dispose of at Saer.” As he spoke, he sent a spell to divert one of her more accurate casts.
“And she has followed us all this way? So much the worse for her! A mere fledgling, with no name or reputation.”
Dyonas gave him a contemptuous glance. “Do you claim to know all the wizards on Leal, their names and abilities? Whoever she is, she appears to be no mere dabbler.”
“She is calling up power from the leys,” Goezenou said with a sneer. “Otherwise—” A tree burst into flames behind them, and they broke in opposite directions.
Moments later, Dyonas met Camhóinhann behind an overgrown pile of stones. “The Princess?” said the younger priest.
“I have shielded her,” answered Camhóinhann. “Naturally, that was my first thought.”
A bolt of energy went sizzling past, only inches from Dyonas’s head. “Whoever she is, she must feel she has some chance of defeating us—or else she has been sent to distract us while others approach us from behind.”
“More likely,” said Camhóinhann, “she is one who has just enough inherent power to think she can win by losing. Have a care,” he added as the other hurled an answering bolt in the girl’s direction, narrowly missing her. “If you had hit her…!”
“I am not quite a fool. I understand that much.” There was a loud crash when a wall fell, followed by a curse as Goezenou crashed through some bushes to the left and joined them behind their rampart of stone. “While we draw her fire, what will you do?” Dyonas asked Camhóinhann.
“I will weave a net of spells to hold her,” said the High Priest. “Once we have her fast, we can decide what to do with her.”
Stone erupted at Sindérian’s feet as Dyonas’s searing bolt of energy crashed into the staircase, sending flying shards of rock in all directions. One grazed her temple, another passed through the palm of her hand and out the other side. Reflexively, she closed both wounds; with so much power surging through her, it took but a thought to heal them. A fiery axe spun through the air, barely missing her head. By now, all the trees on the hill were burning—but she gathered light and heat out of the air, shaped them into balls of flame, and threw them, one after the other, into the camp below.
Then the Furiádhin changed their tactics. The first spell nearly took her by surprise. She felt her bones begin to melt, her body fraying, growing thin and insubstantial. Struggling to remain solid, she slashed runes on the air, forced out their names in a dry whisper—for she courted death, not transformation.
Spell after spell they threw at her, trying to warp her out of human form: she was furred; she was feathered; her skin turned warty and amphibious; she had the slick, scaly body of a fish. Each spell she countered, returning to her own shape. Then came a blast of magic more devastating than any that came before. The breath in her lungs turned to smoke, her blood to sand; something drove her out of her body and into the wind.
Blinded, disoriented, she lost all sense of self and nearly dissipated. Then someone down below shouted her name and it pulled her back into her body as a lodestone draws iron. The next spell that came her way she snatched out of the air and sent hurtling back again.
A mile from Ceir Eldig, Prince Ruan spotted Sindérian’s mare grazing under a tree. This he took as a very bad sign—one that she had no intention of leaving the ruined city alive.
“It seems that she was less willing to risk the animal’s life than her own,” he muttered under his breath.
The sky was rosy with dawn before he finally found the track she had made for herself on the edge of the city. “Perhaps we aren’t so very far behind her,” he heard Kivik say behind him. “Perhaps we woke before she meant us to. Surely her spell was meant to last until morning.”
But Ruan was not to be deceived by any such false hope. “We slept exactly as long as she intended we should. We are meant to arrive too late to interfere, but not so late we’re unable to take advantage of any opportunity she makes for us.”
When they came out on the road, they made better progress, though still so slow that Ruan was cursing his horse in impatience long before they came within sight of the palace on the hill. The trees on the eminence were all aflame, like a fiery crown; had the wind not been in the wrong direction he would have smelled the smoke long before.
Between the smoke and the flame, he could barely make out Sindérian atop the tower. “We will never reach her from this direction, not through the fire. May the Fates grant us a way to the top on the other side!”
He tried to keep her in sight as they circled the hill, but coming around on the other side it was hard to see through the turmoil of magic roaring around her. Only now and then could he catch a glimpse of her face, very white and strained. For a terrible moment she disappeared, seemed to melt into the chaos of the air; and without even realizing he was doing so, he shouted her name. He felt a cold shock of relief when she reappeared again, swaying unsteadily, but still alive and on her feet.
He scanned the slope, searching for the quickest way to the top. Below the tower the face of the hill was almost sheer, but a little to the west there appeared to be a path, not much overgrown. Swinging down from the saddle, he tossed the reins to Aell and began to climb. He heard Kivik and Skerry crashing heavily through the dry brush behind him. More agile than either of them—and more determined—he soon outdistanced them.
In the camp below, thread after thread of shining silver spun out from Camhóinhann’s hands. But before he could bind them together they faded, and it was all to do again. “There is too much magic in the air; it is distorting the spell,” he told Dyonas. “I cannot hold her this way. I must try something else.”
Rolling a furious eye in the High Priest’s direction, Goezenou scrambled atop a pile of rocks. “Let us have done with it then. It has gone on too long already.” Making signs on the air, he called out a word that crackled like lightning, and a slender column of light appeared in his hand. Too late, the others understood what he was doing.
As he drew back his arm to cast his weapon, Camhóinhann and Dyonas both cried out warnings at once—but Goezenou’s spear of elemental fire had already left his hand.
On her precarious perch above, the young wizard took the full force of the spear. If she called out in agony as it pierced her, no one heard her, for there was a loud concussion in the air like two thunderstorms crashing together, and the tower on the hill rocked. For just a moment she remained standing, silhouetted against the morning sky, illuminated by the fire of Goezenou’s spell.
Then the fire died, and there was only a broken body falling. Falling from the tower in a shower of stones.
Ruan was nearly to the top of the hill, craning his neck to get a better look, when something streaked through the air, heading straight for Sindérian.
She might have moved, she might have dodged it. She did neither. Ruan watched, raging at his own helplessness, as the spear impaled her, the air boomed, the tower rocked. He watched her body tumble more than a hundred feet to land among the jagged stones below.
There was no hope, no hope at all. If the spear had not killed her, the fall had surely done so. There was no reason for him to turn as he did and start back down the hill, stumbling into Kivik and Skerry along the way. In his haste, he slid almost to the bottom before he was beaten back by a wall of force: a mighty wind that seemed to rise from Sindérian’s broken body, scattering leaves, rocks, and bushes, and almost knocking Ruan himself off his feet.
As the wind grew in violence, it went roaring toward the Pharaxion camp. On every side, the forces of nature began to run wild. Goezenou was the first to die, thrown to the ground and buried under a rain of stones. Two guardsmen standing outside Winloki’s tent were swept away by the turbulent air. Trees were ripped out of the ground. Any of the horses that had not already pulled up their pickets and fled did so now.