Below the town, after the falls fed into rapids and the Umber River’s rage finally cooled, there was a group of homes. Almost a village, but all the building were smoldering. There was a green drafter, skin filling with power, facing several of King Garadul’s Mirrormen.
“That’s a child!” Karris said. “Two! Gavin, we’ve got to save them.”
“I’ll bring us down as close as I can. Roll when we hit.” They leveled off ten paces above a plain of rock and brush and tumbleweeds. Gavin threw out a small bonnet to slow the condor again. It snapped open, but this time they were both ready for the whiplash and braced themselves. Gavin threw out another and another. They slowed down faster than he’d expected. The condor pitched toward the ground.
Gavin flung his hands out, blasting the condor to pieces. As they fell, he wrapped Karris and then himself in an enormous cushion of orange luxin, rimmed with a shell of segmented flexible green, with a core of super-hard yellow.
They slammed into the ground, the orange and green luxin slowing them before exploding from the force of their landing. The yellow luxin was formed into a more rigid ball around each of them. Gavin crashed through some bushes, bouncing and rolling half a dozen times before the yellow luxin cracked and spilled him unceremoniously onto the ground. He wiggled his fingers and toes. Everything worked. He jumped up.
“Karris?”
He heard a yell. Not a good one. He ran.
Karris sprang to her feet, twenty paces away. Her hair was askew, but he didn’t see any obvious injuries. He came to stand by her. “What is it?” he asked.
She glanced down. There was a rattlesnake at her feet, as long as Gavin’s spread arms. A dagger through its head pinned it to the ground. Karris’s dagger.
As Gavin stood there, mouth open, Karris put a foot behind the snake’s head and pulled the dagger out—with her hand, for Orholam’s sake, not with drafting. Sometimes Gavin forgot how tough Karris was. She wiped the blood off on a black kerchief the Blackguards carried for such purposes—black didn’t show hard-to-explain bloodstains. She shook slightly as she tucked the kerchief away, but Gavin knew it wasn’t fear or nerves. It took a body time to relax from the amount of adrenaline imminent death triggered.
Karris didn’t blame him for nearly getting her killed. She grabbed her bag and bowcase, strapped her ataghan belt around her narrow waist, checked to make sure neither blade nor scabbard had been damaged in the fall, and threw her bag on her back. It was like the sudden violence had reminded her of what she was—and of what they weren’t. Back on the ground, back to reality.
“Sorry ’bout that,” Gavin said. “I should have gone for the sea.”
“If we had, there could have been sharks.” She shrugged. “And now I’d be wet.” She smirked, but it didn’t touch her eyes. He wasn’t going to reach her now. Work loomed—and her work was dangerous, a job that might well lead to war, a job that might require her to kill or to die. She had to ruthlessly cut away any entanglements that would distract her.
“Karris,” he said. “What’s in that note… it isn’t true. I don’t expect you to understand or maybe even believe me, but I swear it isn’t true.”
She looked at him, hard, inscrutable. Her irises were jade green, but now the flecks of red were like starbursts, flaring, diamond-shaped. One way or another, through means magical or mundane, luxin or tears, Gavin knew that soon those eyes would be red. “Let’s save those children,” she said.
Karris ran, and he followed her. They cut back and forth down a hillside dominated by eucalyptus trees, peeling bark scattered on the ground, brush slapping them. Karris cut toward the skinny child, leaving Gavin to save the one facing the red drafter.
But it didn’t matter. Neither of them was going to make it in time.
Chapter 16
It was too far to run for the punt, even for Sanson. A cool realization settled on Kip: he was going to die. He was surprised at his own reaction. No panic. No fear. Just quiet fury. Thirty elite Mirrormen in full harness against a child. A trained red drafter against a child who’d first drafted yesterday.
“When I tell you, run,” Kip told Sanson.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something flash over the trees hundreds of paces to