Terisa still couldn’t get her legs under her. Her knee felt numb, dead. She. wanted to say, insist, Help me, is he all right, did you kill them all? The only thing her throat and stomach agreed to do, however, was retch. She had green blood in her hair, and it stank – it smelled like corpses rotting in sewage. The head and most of the shoulders of Geraden’s horse had been chewed away, devoured—Like the Castellan’s two guards and Underwell. She kept gagging, but nothing came up.
Maybe Mordant wasn’t at war. But she and Geraden were.
Oh, yes.
The Termigan’s men dismounted. Two of them heaved the appaloosa’s carcass off Geraden; the third lifted Terisa to her feet. They were hard men with grim mouths and red eyes: they had spent too much time staring into the destruction of Sternwall, watching it boil closer. “All right,” one of them said harshly, “you’re safe. We’ve saved you. Who are you? What’re those things?”
“Imagery,” Geraden gasped. He still seemed unaware of the men. His attention was on Terisa. “There could be more. He could translate them right now. We’ve got to get out of range.”
The men wanted answers – but they also understood Geraden. Just for a second, they glanced at each other, hesitating. Then the man who had helped Terisa off the ground picked her up and leaped for his horse.
The other two mounted instantly; one of them pulled Geraden up behind him. The horses stretched into a gallop back toward the city’s gates, putting as much distance as possible between the riders and the point of translation.
Terisa still had her knife clenched in her fist. Her hand and the knife were covered with foul, green blood.
“Relax!” the man holding her gritted into her ear. “We can keep your balance better if you relax.”
She couldn’t relax. She couldn’t stop trying to retch.
“How far?” one of the other men asked Geraden. “How far do we have to go to be safe?”
At last, Geraden began to respond to his rescuers. “Can’t be sure.” The pounding of hooves muffled his voice. “Depends on the size of the mirror. And how far the focus was adjusted to reach us.” A moment later, he added, “A hundred yards should be enough.”
“Right!”
The Termigans drove their mounts up to the gates of Sternwall. There they risked stopping.
Terisa didn’t feel anything sharp or cold in her stomach. She didn’t feel anything except nausea. No more of the gnarled, black shapes jumped out of the air.
Now instead of wanting to throw up she began to think it would be nice to faint.
She didn’t get the chance. The man carrying her dropped her to the ground, then slid down beside her. The pressure of his grip made it clear he had no intention of letting her go. One of the other men held onto Geraden as he dismounted.
There was sunset in the air now, as well as the glare of lava. The heavy timbers of the gate were tinged crimson; red ran in streaks along the edges of the buildings. The faces of the men hinted at bloodshed.
“All right,” one of them repeated. “Now tell us who you are. Before we decide to close the gate and leave you outside.”
Terisa could still hear the deep, visceral boiling of the lava. That noise seemed to undermine everything around her; it made the Termigans sound malign, full of coiled malice.
But Geraden nodded to them. “We’ve just come from Domne,” he panted. “I’m Geraden, the Domne’s son. One of his sons, anyway. Houseldon has been burned to the ground.”
The men stood motionless, caught between who he was and what he said. A crowd began to gather in the gate: more of the Termigan’s men, hostlers to take care of the horses, merchants, passersby. They all had the same red light in their eyes.
After a moment, one of the men said noncommittally, “You better tell us who the woman is. And why you were attacked.”
Instinctively, Terisa put a hand on Geraden’s arm, reaching out for protection against a threat she couldn’t identify.
He also seemed to feel the menace. His arm was tight; he held himself poised. His gaze searched the faces around him. Carefully, he said, “My father has been a good and loyal neighbor to the Termigan all his life. The last time I was here, I slept in the Termigan’s house as a welcome guest.”
No one wavered; no eyes dropped. The man who appeared to be the leader of the guards rested a hand deliberately on his sword. “I’m sure that’s true,” he growled. “You’ll probably be a guest there tonight again. But not until you tell me who she is and why you were attacked.”
The man’s tone nettled Geraden. He straightened his shoulders; his voice gave off hints of authority, as if he were accustomed to command respect. “She is the lady Terisa of Morgan, arch-Imager and augured champion. For that reason, the foes of Mordant wish to destroy—”
He didn’t get any further. Or if he did she didn’t hear him. Somebody hit her on the back of the neck so hard that the ground seemed to flip over and rush away into the sky.
As she lost consciousness, she grasped that the Termigan was also at war.
Later, the war seemed to be taking place somewhere between the back of her neck and the front of her skull. There was a contest of pain going on. Her forehead hurt as if someone on the inside belabored it with a cudgel; the back of her neck ached stiffly. But which was winning? She didn’t want to think about it.
Then she remembered Geraden.
Groaning, she tried to roll out of bed.
At once, both sides of the war joined forces against her. Every movement anywhere in her body took on a dimension of agony.
She sat up anyway and pushed her feet over the edge of the bed.
Her knee commemorated the occasion with a throb as sharp as a howl. She gave an inarticulate gasp. For a moment, she had to sit without moving, hold herself stationary while she tried to regain some measure of control.
She still had the smell of green blood in her hair. It was still nauseating.
Geraden, she thought.
Who hit me?
Despite the pain, she forced her eyes into focus.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed in a large but rather austere bedchamber. A number of candles lit the stone walls and wooden ceiling; the mats of woven reeds on the floor; the massive chairs, so heavy that they might have been designed to accommodate the Tor; the dark planks of the door. Compared to the places she had slept recently, the bed was luxurious.
She wasn’t alone.
A man sat across the room from her, in a chair beside the door. He wore a plain brown shirt and breeches, simple boots; he had no weapons that she could see. His eyes were flat; his hair seemed to have no color. The lines of his face and the edges of his features were rough, crudely shaped. His arms were folded across his chest as if he were prepared to wait for her indefinitely.
She recognized him.
The Termigan. The lord of the Care.
“So,” he said after scrutinizing her for a while. “You turn up unexpectedly, my lady.”
She stared back, trying to fight down the pain so that she could think.
“The last time I saw you,” he went on, “you were there for no good reason except to demonstrate that things went wrong when the Congery tried to obey King Joyse. We were supposed to believe you were just an accident, a nothing – only a woman. Now you’re here, and Geraden says you’re an arch-Imager.
“I want an explanation.”
His posture suggested that he would never let her leave this room until she satisfied him.
Terisa made an effort to clear her throat. “Where’s Geraden?”
The Termigan shrugged slightly. “Next door. My men didn’t have the nerve to hit a son of the Domne, so he’s been struggling and shouting ever since I had you taken away from him. But he’s bolted in, and he won’t get out until I decide to let him see you.”
“When is that going to happen?”
The lord shrugged again. His flat gaze didn’t shift from Terisa’s face. “I’ll make up my mind when I hear what you’re going to tell me.”