hand, quietly lethal intent in his eyes. The swordsman glided forward, toward Amara and his uncle, the blade catching the scarlet light of the fires raging around.
Kord had regained mobility and hauled himself to one side. He roused Aric with a few kicks and started to fall back into the woods, letting his son scramble after him as he tried to regain his senses. But even as Kord left, there was a rattle in the blazing brush, and Bittan backed out of the middle of a blaze, blinded and choking on the smoke. He waved a hand before his face and found himself standing a few scant feet from the swordsman, between the man and Bernard.
Tavi never even saw the swordsman's arm move. There was a hissing sound, and Bittan let out a surprised choke, and fell to his knees. The swordsman moved past the boy. Tavi saw scarlet puddling around Bittan's knees, and the boy fell limply over onto his side.
Tavi felt his gorge rise in his belly. Fade let out a hiss of breath and clutched at Tavi's arm.
"Bittan," Aric choked. "No."
For a moment, that tableau held, the boy on the ground in a pool of his own blood, scarlet firelight all around, the swordsman, blade extended to his side, moving with patient grace toward the people standing between him and Tavi.
Then everything happened at once.
Kord let out a bellow of raw and indiscriminate rage. The earth rippled around him and lashed out toward the swordsman.
Amara came to her feet, her blade in hand. She threw herself forward even as the swordsman's blade descended toward Bernard, intercepting it. The earth heaved and threw them both to one side, locked together in a close-quarters struggle.
The innocuous looking man extended his hands toward the far side of the river, and the trees groaned in response, the air filling with the twist and crackle of branches, of movement.
And the storm arrived.
One moment, there was relative stillness-and the next, a wall of fury and sound and power thundered down over them, engulfed Tavi's senses, blinded him, and whipped the surface of the river to icy foam. The flames Bittan had started buckled for a moment beneath the wind's onslaught, and then, as though the storm had sensed their potential, they blossomed and bloomed, spreading and growing with a speed as terrifying as it was amazing. To Tavi, it almost seemed as though faces gibbered and shrieked in the wind around those flames, calling them, encouraging them.
Fade let out a squeal, cowering down against the winds, and Tavi abruptly remembered his aunt's commands. He seized the slave by the arm, though still terrified for those behind him at the ford, and dragged him into the twisting woods, along the paths he knew, even in the semidarkness, away from the river.
They struggled forward together, holding one another in the screaming, frigid gale, Tavi filled with a sense of gratitude that there was another living human being there to touch. He was unsure for how long they struggled away, their path winding forward and then slowly uphill, before he heard the flood waters.
They rushed forward, nearly silent, preceded only by a whispering sigh and the groans of a thousand trees stirred in their ancient earthy beds. To the top of a hill, Tavi and Fade struggled, and he turned back to see, dimly through the ferocity of the storm, the dancing of the trees, that some pent-up tide had been loosed from up the stream of the Rillwater. The little river had exceeded itself and flooded its banks, and those cold, silent waters began to swallow Bittan's fires as swiftly as they had spread. The waters rose, and in that screaming cyclone of the furystorm, Tavi was uncertain how anyone, even his aunt, could survive such an onslaught of the elements. Terror rushed through him, pounded through his veins with his blood.
Darkness swallowed the land as the silent waters of the flooding river swallowed errant flame, and in moments the werelightning of the furystorm flashed, green and eerie, to show Tavi which way to go. In silence, he turned back to his path and stumbled forward, leading Fade. Twice, windmanes swept toward them, but Tavi's salt crystals, though partly dissolved from their time in the water, drove them away.
They made their way from the twisting wood an endless time later. Fade let out a sudden yelp and threw himself against Tavi with a sob of fear, forcing the boy down, the slave's heavy body atop