them, her head tilted back, her arms outspread, her long, silver-gray hair and her white robe billowing around her in the wind. And as Ryana watched, the wind actually became visible, took on form, swirled around and around her like a whirlpool, then coalesced into three separate funnel shapes, much larger than mere dust devils, more like the funnel clouds of desert tornados, only smaller and more dense. And in those whirling, roiling funnel clouds, gathering greater and greater force as they spun around and around and around, Ryana could suddenly make out features.
She stared with disbelief, having heard stories of natural elementals before, but never having actually seen one, much less three. Within those whirling funnel clouds of gale-force wind, she could see, indistinctly, the rough approximation of eyes, and mouths that seemed to shriek like banshees.
She tightened her grip on Sorak’s hand, holding onto it with all her might, and she felt an incredible pressure in her chest. She tried to breathe, but she couldn’t seem to draw any air into her lungs. And as Ryana watched, unable to tear her eyes away, much as she wanted to, Kara began to spin around and around and around, her arms outstretched, twirling with wild abandon, like an elven dancing girl. Her shape grew indistinct. It seemed to blur as she spun around, faster and faster. Her form became even more blurred until she completely disappeared from view and became a whirling flannel cloud herself, just like the three elementals that hovered all around her. And then those four funnel clouds all came together and twisted violently, bending underneath the woven mat they sat upon and lifting it into the air.
Ryana felt the platform lurch suddenly beneath her, and then it lifted and began to turn, slowly going around and around as the force of all that wind gathered beneath it. She somehow found the strength to close her eyes once more, squeezing them shut tightly, and she held onto Sorak’s hand with all the force that she could muster. If he said anything to her, she could not hear it for all the shrieking of the howling wind.
The platform was raised higher and higher, until it cleared the tops of the trees in. the pagafa grove and went up higher still, turning around and around as it rose twenty feet above the ground, then thirty, then forty, and higher still, until finally, Ryana forced herself to open her eyes once more and saw the desert spreading out far below her.
She saw the village of Salt View from a height of several hundred feet above the ground, the neatly whitewashed buildings, illuminated by torchlight and braziers in the streets, looking very small and not quite real. And then the wind beneath them shifted and they began to move forward, gathering speed as they were swept out across the white, salt desert far below them.
They were flying, buoyed up by the winds, the air elementals Kara had raised and joined with. The crudely woven mat they sat upon floated like a feather i on the strong winds, tilting forward slightly as they were blown away from Salt View and across the southern part of the Great Ivory Plain, toward the inland silt basins in the distance. All around them, the night sky was lit up with sheet lightning, illuminating their way, and thunder crashed with a deafening roar as the elemental storm swept across the desert with increasing speed.
Ryana suddenly let go of Sorak’s hand and threw her arms up into the air, crying out with sheer delight. Her fear was gone, replaced by an exhilaration the like of which she had never felt before. She threw back her head and laughed with an unrestrained joy that permeated every fiber of her being. She felt marvelously free. She turned toward Sorak and threw her arms around him. And he held her close, and she knew that whatever trials lay ahead of them, she would face them at his side, unafraid and filled with a sense of determination that came of knowing, without the faintest scintilla of a doubt, that the path she had chosen was the right one, the one she had been born to follow.
Unable to restrain herself, she shouted out over the shrieking wind, “I love you!”
And she felt his arms tighten around her, and heard him say into her ear, “I know. I love you, too.”
And that was all that mattered.
* * *
Valsavis awoke in the morning, shortly