courtyard fountain, or an ornamental pond, but the bulk of it stayed beneath the earth, like a tailor-made distraction just waiting for me to use it. It fed the hot baths Caius liked so much, among other things, but it was going to be real useful to my purpose. Even the smallest of houses needed a well. Needless to say, a palace required a whole lot more than that.
If I’d had more practice with using my Talent, I might have known better how to shape it to my will. As things stood, I just knew where the water was—uncomfortable as it was to admit it, I could feel it—and I homed in on that like a marksman on his target. As deftly as pulling back the bowstring, I yanked on the vein of water as hard as I could with all I had in me, just to get it where I wanted it to be.
The room began to shake, sending gravel skittering across the floor from where the soldiers had tracked it in. One of the guards screamed as an arrow sprouted in his shoulder, and I turned around quickly to find Temur.
He had the beginnings of a black eye, and a cut on his leg was seeping blood through the cloth, but other than that he seemed in decent enough condition. Also, he was wielding one of those longbows. It suited him.
“That’s your cue!” I shouted over the rumbling, briefly swaying off-balance. “You’ll lose your chance in a minute, so you might as well go for it now!”
I really thought for a minute he was going to make some kind of speech, like the remembrances left by poets and playwrights for fallen heroes, except if he’d tried that, I would have hit him. Instead he hesitated, and so I lunged forward and shoved him ahead of me, which seemed to snap him out of the mood quickly enough.
Not a moment too soon, since I could hear the hiss of water spraying up between the floorboards. Soon, I knew, the ground would start to crack under the pressure. Who knew where else the repercussions would be felt? I only hoped that, by then, Caius and Josette were on their horses and far away from the stables.
“I will return with your men,” Temur promised, as a geyser erupted outside and the archers howled in surprise and fear.
“Get out of here, fool!” I grunted, turning away to guard his escape.
If Temur didn’t make it through, then we were both sunk. Literally.
The polished floor beneath my feet groaned and stretched against the pressure of the water, swelling upward and knocking guards off their feet in a way that would have been almost comical if I hadn’t been fighting for my life. At least I’d be able to take the looks on their faces with me to the grave. Meanwhile, I reached out with my Talent again, wrenching the water upward this time with everything I had.
The room exploded. Splintered floorboards shot upward as if caught in an upside-down waterfall and all the lanterns went out, extinguishing even the dim light that had shone before. I could see the shadowy outlines of the guards as they got caught up in the rush, but more than that I could hear them shouting in their language, which I’d never bothered to learn, calling for backup, or help, or maybe even their own gods. They were the same gods, I supposed, who gave me my Talent in the first place. Pleading with them would do little good.
I backed up quickly, throwing myself against the wall without throwing myself through it and squinting after Temur to see whether he’d got down the hall in time. I couldn’t tell.
In the end, it probably didn’t really matter that much. Not that I was a pessimist or anything, but Temur and I had both come there with reasonable expectations of what we were going to get out of this little rescue mission, and staying intact definitely hadn’t been one of them.
Water swirled hungrily around my feet and rained down over my head, soaking me through in a matter of minutes. I heard a loud crack in the distance that nearly stopped my heart before I realized what it must have been—the giant fountain in the gardens crumbling under the pressure. Good. I hoped it was Iseul’s favorite giant fountain, and I hoped it was ruined forever.
The earth was still shaking with the aftershocks of the explosions. I readjusted my hold on