of an effort to remain on her feet after the tension of flight left her. She felt like crawling into a hollow tree and sleeping for a week.
Instead, she reached down to her tattered dress, tore at the hem on one side, and from it withdrew a small disk of bright copper.
"River Gaul," she whispered, pushing whatever reserves she had left into the effort to speak to the water furies. "Know this coin, and hasten word to thy master." She dropped the coin, giving it a slight spin, and the image of the First Lord's profile spun and tumbled, alternating with the image of the sun in the bloody light.
Amara slumped down then, by the water, reaching out to cup her hands in it. Long runs were not as draining as an hour of flight-even on a good day for it. She had been fortunate. If the winds had been different, she would not have been able to escape to the Gaul.
She stared down at her faint reflection and shivered for a moment. She thought of the water writhing its way up her hands, down her nose and throat, and her heart thudded with sickly fear. She struggled to force it away, but it wouldn't leave her. She could not make herself touch the water.
The water witch could have killed her. Amara could have died, right there. She hadn't. She had survived-but even so, it was all she could do to keep from cowering back on the bank.
She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to force the image of the woman's laughter out of her head. The men who had been chasing her presented no special fear. If she was captured by them, she would be killed with bright steel, perhaps brutalized-but all of that, she had prepared herself for.
She thought of the smile on Odiana's face as her water fury had smothered Amara, drowning her on dry land. There had been an almost childish, unrestrained glee in the woman's eyes.
Amara shuddered. Nothing had prepared her for that.
And yet she had to face that terror. She had to embrace it. Her duty required her to do no less.
She thrust her hands into the cold water of the river.
The young Cursor splashed water onto her face and made an abortive attempt to comb her hair with her fingers. Even though she wore it shorter than was customary, barely to her shoulders, and even though her hair was straight and fine, a tawny, brown-gold, still, a few hours in gale winds had tangled it into knots and made her look like a particularly shaggy mongrel dog.
She eyed her reflection again. Thin, harsh features, she thought, though with the proper cosmetics, she could whittle them down to merely severe. Listless hair, cobwebby and delicate-and currently as tousled as a haystack. Her face and arms, beneath the grime, were tanned as dark as her hair, giving her a monochromatic look in the water, like a statue carved of pale wood and then lightly stained. Her simple clothes were tattered, frayed at the edges from hours in the wind, and thickly stained with mud and spatters of dark brown that must have been blood around the slice in her blouse where her arm throbbed with dull pain.
The water stirred, and a furycrafted form rose out of it-but instead of
the First Lord, a woman took shape. Gaius Caria, wife to Gaius Sextus, Alera's First Lord, seemed young, hardly older than Amara herself. She wore a splendid high-waisted gown, her hair coiffed into an intricate series of braids with a few artful curls falling to frame her face. The woman was beautiful, but more than that, she carried with her a sense of serenity, of purpose, of grace- and of power.
Amara abruptly felt like a gangling cow and dropped into a curtsey as best she could, hands taking the soiled skirts and holding to them. "Your Grace."
"Academ," murmured the woman in reply. "Not twenty days have passed since my husband gave you his coin, and already you interrupt his supper. I believe that is a new record. Fidelias, I am told, did not see fit to drag him from his meal or his bed until at least a month had gone by."
Amara felt her face flush with heat. "Yes, Your Grace. I apologize for the necessity."
The First Lady gave her an arch look, up and down the grimy length of her body. Amara felt her blush deepen, and she fought not to squirm. "No apology