“What on earth are you doing?”
“Trying to get this to work,” she answered, not looking up. Another snap of the fingers and the blue flame erupted around her hand. She shook the flames out with a look of frustration.
“Do you think this is the best time for that?”
He noticed that Nila was paying close attention to where she positioned her fingers when she snapped them. Each new try she moved them slightly, and then attempted a quick combination of snaps, rubbing her thumb against first her forefinger, then her middle finger.
“I might not get another chance.”
“Well, look,” Adamat said. He knew what she was thinking. Make it work. Save everyone with her newfound sorcery. But of course she couldn’t learn to use her sorcery in just a few moments, and the very idea of the girl trying seemed incredibly absurd. As absurd as him standing here with his cane sword drawn. “We need to get as far toward the back of the camp as we can. Once the fighting starts, we could make a run for the Adran lines. Then we could… Ah!”
A jet of flame shot from Nila’s hand and traced a finger of blackened earth across the ground twenty paces away, nearly setting fire to a nearby corporal.
Nila gave a scream – half startled, half victorious. “I’ve got it!”
“What? You haven’t got it,” Adamat said. “Do you even know what you did?”
Nila held her off-hand away from herself gingerly, pointing toward an open patch of ground between two nearby tents. She brushed her thumb across her forefinger, then touched it gently to her pinkie. Flame erupted from her dominant hand – not a thin tendril this time, but a gout that seemed to spring up from the ground, setting fire to the grass and rising five or six feet in the air, traveling from her to the spot she’d pointed at as if following a line of lamp oil.
“All right,” Adamat said. “I’m impressed.” “Terrified” seemed a better word for it, but Adamat didn’t think the girl needed to hear that. She didn’t know what she was doing. Who knew what an untrained Privileged was capable of? She might be able to set fire to the entire enemy army, but could she keep from doing the same to her allies?
He wondered if he should head toward the Adran lines. If Tamas was back, Adamat would need to report everything that had happened over the last several months. But during a battle wouldn’t be the best time.
At least it might get him farther away from the approaching Kez auxiliaries.
“Nila, we should…” He trailed off. The girl was gone. He cast about, then spotted her sprinting, skirts in hand, toward the Wings’ rearguard and the Kez auxiliaries beyond them.
What was she doing? She couldn’t possibly think she could help. She was just rushing off to get herself killed.
Adamat looked toward the Adran lines. He could make it. The Adran command tent was less than two miles away. He could get there and report to Tamas, and maybe manage to send some help this direction.
The girl wasn’t his responsibility. She was Bo’s, and Adamat owed Bo nothing.
With a curse, Adamat set off after Nila.
Nila shouldered her way through the line of soldiers preparing to defend the Wings’ camp and ignored their yells as she scrambled over the fortifications and ran toward the enemy brigade.
A little voice in the back of her head screamed at her to turn around and run the other way. What the pit was she doing? She was running straight to her death. Even if she could replicate the fire, she couldn’t possibly use it to destroy an entire brigade. She might take a few of them with her, but they’d gun her down and trample her body into the mud. She wasn’t going to do any good out there.
But she ignored the voice and kept heading toward the enemy.
The voice in her head changed tactics.
You’re going to try to kill people. These are human lives you’ll be ending. You’re not a warrior. You’re a laundress. They’ll die in an inferno, burned alive, and the screams will haunt you the rest of your life.
But, she argued, if I do nothing, then the Wings’ mercenaries will die. The infantry will be overwhelmed and all their noncombatants will be put to the sword.
That’s what they’re paid to do.
Nila slowed, no longer convinced she had the strength to do what was necessary. What would Bo say? Wouldn’t he tell her to stop being a coward and learn to act like a Privileged? Hadn’t he also said that courage was overrated? Contradictory bastard.
She suspected that in this situation he would tell her she was an untrained bloody fool about to get herself killed.
Nila came to a stop. She was about fifty yards in front of the Wings’ lines and the enemy advanced toward her, churning forward like a machine. She could hear the calls of their sergeants and the thump-thump of their march in time with the drums.
“Nila!” Adamat snatched her by the arm and pulled her back toward the Wings’ lines. “We have to go.”
She shook him off, a terrible weight settling in her stomach. It was too late. The Kez were less than a hundred yards off. The Wings would open fire soon, regardless of her presence. She and Adamat would be cut down by the barrage. She’d gotten both of them killed.
“Step back, Inspector,” she said. She dropped her skirt and moved forward a couple of paces. She tried to open her body to the Else, the way Bo had showed her, to make the flow of the sorcery come smoothly. Her hands trembled fiercely as she raised them both, with her left hand pointed toward the Kez brigade and her right hand raised above her head. It struck her how theatrical the pose was, and that it was completely unnecessary.
Bo would have approved.
She brushed her thumb across her forefinger and willed the Else to flood the world at her command.
Nothing happened.
She had done it wrong. Her hands shook uncontrollably now. It would be impossible to make the proper connection. Her body had betrayed her, and now she and Adamat would die for it.
Her breath was suddenly squeezed from her, as if she’d been stuck through the stomach and lungs with a lance. A gasp tore itself from her lips and she fought against the dizziness that followed, and when she thought the pain had become unbearable, fire suddenly showered the world.
It spread out from her in a cone like a wave of pestilence, leaving nothing but cinders in its wake. She watched it spread toward the enemy lines and suddenly, without warning, blackness claimed her.
Adamat dashed forward just in time to catch Nila as she fell.
He watched, stunned, as the wall of flame rolled toward, and then over, the Kez brigade. The screams reached him a moment later, but by the time the flame had washed over the advance elements of the Kez infantry, they had already been silenced. Charred skeletons decorated the landscape, twisted horribly from the heat. When the flames finally died, over three-quarters of the brigade had been reduced to ash.
Adamat pulled his gaze away from the spectacle and lifted Nila in both arms. She was a small woman, and were he ten years younger, it would have been easy enough to hurry back to the Wings’ lines. As it was, he struggled to trudge back with his burden, feeling every old ache and wound as he did.
Several infantry dashed out to help him get over the earthen barricades. One of them took Nila from him.
“Get her as far away from the fighting as you can,” Adamat said, following the soldier back into the camp. They hurried through the tents until they reached the eastern edge of the camp, closest to the Adran lines, and the soldier lay Nila on the ground and sprinted back for the front.
Adamat held a hand over the girl’s mouth, and then put a finger to her neck. It took him a few moments, but he was able to find a pulse – albeit a weak one.