The Will of the Empress - By Tamora Pierce Page 0,167

dragged the heat from the stones around them into the metal of the bows and of the bowmen's armour. They shouted in pain and dropped their weapons.

Vines sprouted from the cloth ball at the captain's feet, slithering up and around his legs like snakes to hold him in place. He drew his sword and tried to hack at them, only to have the weapon suddenly grow hot in his hand. He dropped it. Daja summoned more heat to the men who faced her, running her fingers over the living metal on her hand as she tried to hold the line between too hot for comfort and hot enough to do permanent damage. The border guards yelped and shed belts, helms, swords, and daggers, any metal on their bodies as Daja called heat to it all.

"If you want a fight, have it with us" Briar called to Isha. "Leave these soldiers out of it. They'll get hurt."

He felt something like a shiver in his bones. It was a swell of power on the far side of the stone gate. With it rose plants, stones, even trees, all things that had been growing in the track where the spell anchors for the magical barrier had been set centuries before.

Sandry rode up to the gate and tried to go through. She met a force there like a solid, invisible wall. Her mount shied when it struck it, spooked by a barrier that it could not see. Sandry fought her mare to a stand, then dismounted. She walked up and found the barrier was every bit as solid as stone, for all that is was completely invisible. It was as if the air had gone hard.

She turned to look up at the people on the platform. "How does my cousin intend to keep me, Viymese Ladyhammer?" she demanded. "In a cage like this?" She struck the barrier with her fists. "Married off and locked up in some country estate, my name signed in blood and magic to a promise to be a good little sheep? Can you people afford to keep me long? All magic has limits. There is no way you can force me never to use my power again. You know power must be used, or it goes wrong. And when I have the chance to use my power... You all wear clothes. You all stitch things together." She tried to pinch some of the wall, to twirl it. If she could make thread of it, she could unravel the wall.

She could not even scratch it.

"You might well spend your life in a cage, if you will not sign a vow of obedience to the imperial throne," Ishabal said calmly. "You cannot be so foolish as to think the powers of the world might allow you to pursue your own selfish desires all your days. Wake up, children. It is time to learn to live in the real world. What the empire wants, the empire keeps."

Briar walked up next to Sandry, carrying his shakkan on one hip. "She doesn't know anything about us," he murmured in Sandry's ear. "Me and Daja wrapped up Quen like he was fish from the market. Her 'real world' is just more dead fish." He held out his hand.

Sandry hesitated, then put her hand in his. Daja dismounted and took her staff from its sling. With it in her grasp, she came over to join hands with Sandry.

They let their combined magics pull and tug at the barrier. Daja dragged more heat up from lava flowing far underground. Sandry borrowed part of it and a length of magical vine from Briar. Fixing the image of a drop spindle — like a top with a long stem and flat disk — in her mind's eye, she wrapped the heat-soaked magical vine around the spindle and twirled it back and forth like a handmade auger, trying to bore an opening through the wall. It made not a dent.

For an hour or more they struggled. They sought the top of the barrier and its roots, unable to crack it. Daja hammered. Briar spread himself as a vine, seeking even hair-thin cracks into which he could insert a tendril, as he had in Quen's glove spells. Sandry hunted for loose threads, with no luck.

"Are you quite finished?" called Ishabal from her platform. "I am impressed — most collapse long before this — but it changes nothing. Better mages than you have pitted themselves against our barriers and lost. You will not