way down, a slow ascent back to wakefulness, his senses struggling to focus as his eyes blinked and his arms clutched protectively at his body. The world was gray, and there was a sense of not being anyplace he recognized or even anywhere solid but instead of being suspended in nothingness. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, coughing hard as he did so, his body shaking.
“Hold on, hold on!” a voice muttered.
An aleskin was held to his lips and the pungent liquid slid between his lips and down his throat to loosen the tightness and waken him further. He drank greedily, hands lifting to clutch the skin so he could continue.
“There, that’s enough,” his benefactor announced, taking the skin away. “Let’s sit you up. Then I have to get back to flying.”
Hands pulled him from his slumped-over fetal position to one where he was sitting upright, and he found himself in a padded seat. Wind rushed against his exposed skin. He was flying in an airship below a sky thick with mist and gloom.
He fixed his gaze on the figure at the helm of the fast clipper.
Arcannen.
His memory came back in a rush. Slipping out from the sorcerer’s underground lair into the ruins of Arbrox to face the men who had come to kill them. Searching the shifting haze until suddenly Arcannen was no longer there, and he was alone. Facing a giant with a huge beast on a chain, then another man with smaller beasts. Summoning the wishsong to create images and in the end to fool the beasts into attacking one of their handlers. Watching both men die—one by his hand, one by Lariana’s …
Lariana!
“Where is she?” he demanded, his voice a rough croak, almost lost in the wind’s rush. “What’s happened to her?”
Arcannen glanced over his shoulder. “If you are referring to Lariana, I imagine she’s with the Druid and her protector. She’ll be all right.”
“You left her?”
Reyn was incensed. He struggled to rise, to charge forward and take command of the controls, to turn this craft about and fly back to where she had been abandoned and rescue her. But without even looking at him, the sorcerer struck him hard across the face and shoved him back into his seat, where he collapsed once more.
“I went to a lot of trouble to save you. Kindly don’t undo my efforts. Lariana will be fine. She knew this might happen. We talked about it long before now. Give her some credit for being able to take care of herself.”
The blow still stung as Reyn shifted to a sitting position and rubbed his face. Blood dripped from his nose. He felt suddenly drained, robbed of strength and hope, despairing. “Why didn’t you bring her with us?”
“That would have been difficult.”
“You would say that, wouldn’t you?”
“I say it because it is true. Think back. You were caught in a standoff with Bael Etris. He had a knife at your throat. He was clearly mad—raving and unpredictable. The Druid and her protector were too far away to do anything. You were frozen in place. So I used magic to create a smoke screen that hid all of you while I freed you and dispatched Etris. Lariana must have woken and stumbled away, probably in shock. I didn’t know where she was. I could only save you. I did what I had to.”
Reyn was not satisfied with his explanation. The sorcerer’s calmness only served to make him angrier. He could explain all he wanted to but in the end the result was the same. He had left Lariana behind, something Reyn would never have done.
“You don’t know what they will do to her,” he said finally.
Arcannen chuckled. “Oh, you think they might hurt her, do you? Hardly. They want me. And quite possibly you, knowing you have magic. They don’t care about her. They will try to discover where I am once they’ve figured out I didn’t die in the attack. But she won’t tell them. She’s too clever for that. She’ll lead them on a bit and then free herself and come find me. She knows how to do that. I told you, we worked it out a while back.”
Reyn was confused. Worked it out? Arcannen couldn’t have known how the confrontation with those hunters was going to turn out. He couldn’t have known that the Druids would come searching for him in the ruins of Arbrox. So what was he talking about? Worked out what?
“Why didn’t you stay