Kao, out cold . . . or dead, that Yaz came to a stumbling halt. Behind her Hetta had cleared her eyes, still framed by that band of scarlet skin, and now came forward, howling murder and scything her sword before her.
Yaz turned. Even as she did it she was asking herself why. The boy was immature and too full of himself. And yet the answer came to her even more quickly than Hetta did. Throw any single life away as if it holds no meaning and how will your own life be valued thereafter? Everyone she had ever known had stood and watched her brother be thrown down the Pit of the Missing. Abandoning Kao now would say that they were right.
The river that runs through all things had first revealed itself to Yaz in a moment of great calm when her mind lay serene, clear as slow-ice. She had been watching the new sun rise over the white plains, and the reaching redness of its rays had become a multitude twisting in her mind, flowing and joining, and the river had been before her and in her and through her.
To see the river again so soon after touching its power was not easy. To do it in the grip of terror as death rushes howling upon you, impossible. But Yaz had set aside her fear and stepped forward accepting the likelihood of her own end. She reached out into that calm and found the river, rushing at her more swiftly than her enemy. Where before Yaz had only dared a finger or the palm of her hand, this time she thrust both hands into the flood and immediately the power of the current came roaring into her.
Yaz tried to pull free before the river’s surge carried her away or the force of it swirling through her tore the flesh from her bones. She found herself flying backwards, jolted by the separation, drunk on the strange energies she’d taken, overfull, bursting. The world around her seemed uncertain, fracturing into dozens of possibilities, each drawing Yaz along a different path into the future.
Kao lay helpless before Hetta but she carried on past the boy, aimed squarely at Yaz.
It took the singular threat of Hetta’s continuing charge to nail Yaz to the moment. For several heartbeats it had seemed to Yaz that she would simply fall apart into different fragments of who she might be. Instead she rose, blazing with barely contained power, incandescent in her hands, trails of magic scintillating down past her elbows as if it were a liquid drawn by gravity’s pull.
Yaz raised her arm against the swing of Hetta’s sword and with a bright retort the blade shattered. The other hand, driven flat-palmed at Hetta’s chest, slammed her backwards, both feet leaving the ground. The force of the blow threw the cannibal for yards, sending her hammering into the ridge of rock that she had previously hidden behind. She collapsed against its base in a broken heap, her chest smoking.
“Yaz!” Thurin was the first to reach her. He gazed at the fallen gerant. “What happened?”
Yaz folded her arms under each other, trying and failing to hide the light still shining from her hands and well past her wrists. “Kao didn’t get up. I couldn’t leave him.” She willed the remaining energies she’d taken to sink deeper into her flesh but they were slow to obey.
Thurin knelt beside the boy, checking the back of his head. “I made the water in the puddle cushion his fall. He seems to be in one—”
Kao let out a groan and his eyes fluttered open. Quina and Petrick were approaching Hetta now, Maya with them, trailing at the back, her eyes full of watchfulness rather than fear. All of them glanced Yaz’s way. It’s next to impossible to hide a light source in a dimly lit cavern and although the power in her was fading it was not yet gone.
“We need to tie her,” Yaz called out and moved to join them.
“We need to cut her throat before she wakes up,” Petrick said, knife in hand. Already Hetta’s limbs had begun to twitch and she made a low groan of her own. A purple stain had begun to reach up across her thick