be happening. It simply could not be happening. She, with her brother, had worked the whole of their adult lives to make the Calderon Valley a place safe for families, for civilization-for Tavi to grow up. This wasn't a part of the world she had worked to build. This wasn't a part of what she dreamed.
Tears welled in her eyes, and she fought to restrain them, to hold back the precious moisture before it fell. Without thinking, she reached for Rill's help and did not find it. Tears trickled over her cheeks.
She hurt. Deep inside. She felt horribly, utterly alone, with only a madwoman for company. Isana reached out for Rill again, desperate, and felt nothing. Again she tried, and again, refusing to accept that her fury was beyond her reach.
She didn't hear the footsteps until they were immediately outside the smokehouse. Someone shoved the door open. The hulking, ugly shape of Kord and those of a dozen other men stood silhouetted by the light of the circle of coals.
Chapter 25
Being captured, Tavi thought, was a twofold evil. It was both uncomfortable and boring.
The Marat hadn't spoken, not to the Alerans nor to one another. Four had simply held spear tips to Tavi's and Fade's throats, while the other two trussed their arms and legs with lengths of tough, braided cord. They took Tavi's knife and pouch away and searched then confiscated Fade's battered old pack. Then the two who had tied them simply flung them over one of their broad shoulders and loped off into the storm.
After half an hour of jouncing against the Marat warrior's shoulder, Tavi's stomach felt as though he'd been belly diving from the tallest tree along the Rillwater. The Marat who carried him ran with a pure and predatory grace, moving along the land at a mile-eating lope. He leapt over a streambed, and once a low row of brush, evidently entirely unencumbered by the weight of his prisoner.
Tavi tried to keep track of which way they were headed, but the darkness and the storm and his awkward position (mostly upside down) made it impossible. The rain turned into pelting, stinging sleet, blinding him almost entirely. The winds continued to rise and grow colder, and Tavi could see the windmanes moving in the storm, wild and restless. None of them came near the Marat war band.
Tavi tried to mark where he was by the lay of the ground rolling by under his nose, but the storm began coating it in a layer of plain, monotonous white. He had no way of getting his bearings by the kind of rock or earth beneath him, no way to guide himself by the stars, no way to orient himself upon the lay of the land. Though he tried for an hour more, he gave it up as pointless.
That left him with only the fear to think about.
The Marat had taken him and Fade. While they appeared, outwardly, much like Alerans, they were not truly human and had never shown a desire to be so, and instead remained the primitive savages who ate fallen foes and mated with beasts. Though they lacked furycrafting of their own, they made up for it in raw athletic ability, courage that was more madness than virtue, and vast numbers that dwelt on the unknown stretches of the wilderness that began on the easten side of the last Legion fortification, Garrison.
When the Marat horde had rushed into the Valley, killing the Princeps and annihilating his Legion to a man, they had been driven out only through heavy reinforcements from the rest of Alera and hard, vicious fighting. Now they were back, presumably to strike in secret-and Tavi had seen them and knew of their plans.
What would they do to him?
He swallowed and tried to tell himself that the pounding of his heart was the result of the battering he was taking on his captor's shoulder, rather than from the quiet terror that had taken up residence in him and slowly grew with every loping stride.
An endless time later, the Marat came to a gradual halt. He growled something in a guttural, swift-sounding tongue and took Tavi from his shoulder, lowering the boy to the ground and stepping firmly on Tavi's hair with one naked, mud-stained foot. He put his hands to his mouth and let out a low, grunting cough, a sound that it did not seem possible for a human-sized chest to make.
An answering cough rumbled from the trees, and then