saw her running through the crowd toward the gates. The child was bundled close and safe against her breast. The courtyard was ablaze, outbuildings collapsing. Smoke billowed from the lower windows of the keep. By morning Feruche would be nothing but stark, blackened stone.
Someone reeled into Sioned, his clothes on fire. Her Fire. She would have killed Ianthe with it, laughing, but this man was not her enemy. The inferno would take Feruche, and she could do nothing about those who might be trapped within, but this man she could save from death. Save herself from having killed him. She knocked him to the cobbles, flung herself atop him to stifle the flames. Boot heels crushed her leg, smashed the tip of one finger, and she sobbed her pain into the man’s nape, begging his forgiveness, smelling his burnt flesh and her own singed hair. But he stirred beneath her, moaned, tried feebly to push her off his back. Strong hands helped her up, steadied her.
“Sioned! Hurry! He’ll be all right. I promise you he’ll be all right.”
She couldn’t seem to stop crying. Even as she hauled the man to his feet and gave him a push in the direction of the gates, saw him stagger his way to and through them, the breath sobbed in her lungs and she kept repeating, “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—”
“I know,” came Ostvel’s deep, sorrowing voice. His arms were around her in a hard embrace for just an instant. Then he said, “Come on, or we’ll lose Tobin and the baby.”
She clung to him as he shoved a path for them through this furnace of her making. The main gates were a hollow ring of Fire through which terrified people leaped for their lives. Sioned sucked in a shallow breath of smoke-heavy air and followed Ostvel, then looked over her shoulder. Flames fountained from the castle now, fierce and deadly. Feruche was dying because of her; perhaps people would die because of her.
She dragged a sleeve across her sweaty forehead, her tearing eyes, and whimpered as the material scraped her burned cheek. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought, panic tightening her chest. The mark of her own Fire set into her shoulder—that she had known would happen. But in the vision she had seen scars across her brow. Not one on her cheek.
“Ostvel, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way! Not like this!”
“What in the name of the Goddess did you think would happen?” he rasped, pulling her along with him away from the burning castle walls.
“Not like this!” She flung away from him and stared wide-eyed at the flames, one hand to her cheek to feel the salt sting that brought fresh tears to her eyes. “There was supposed to be Fire—but not this way! Ostvel, how many did I kill?”
He turned her around by the shoulders and then gripped her head between his hands. “Don’t start,” he ordered roughly. “I won’t let you take any of these deaths onto yourself. Do you hear me, Sioned?”
“It was my Fire! Mine! Goddess, what have I done?”
“Ask yourself that once we’re safe! Sioned, I’ll knock you out and carry you if I have to! Now move!”
It was a long way to where they had tethered the horses. Someone had stolen them. Tobin waited for them there, walking back and forth in the shadows, trying to quiet the fretful baby. Sioned took her son into her arms, shaking with silent tears.
It was Tobin who suggested the empty garrison below Feruche as shelter. Most of the other refugees continued along the main road, through the Veresch into Princemarch. The blazing castle lit up the night and the people around her, showing Sioned injuries more serious than her own. Ostvel asked a servant if anyone had been caught in the flames, and received a dull shrug in reply.
“Not that I’m knowing. Most everybody was out in the court, drinking to the princess and her new little one.” The woman’s face suddenly crumpled. “And now she’s gone, and the baby, and the three other boys with her—”
A man walking beside her said, “When the High Prince hears of this, I wouldn’t put the price of a day on the life of anyone who was there. I don’t recognize you, so you must be with the Cunaxan lord that rode in a few days ago. Give my advice to your master—disappear. That’s what I’m going to do.”
Sioned, who had hung back slightly, listening, reached for Ostvel’s