Amyu huffed out a long breath. It didn’t matter. She had failed in her search for airions, but even that really didn’t matter. She’d a new goal: to make sure that Joden reached Keir and Xylara safely.
She returned to the fire, to find the stones almost hot enough for cooking. She didn’t want to wait, brushing off the embers and placing strips of the meat on the rock. The sizzle made her mouth water.
The pile of blankets erupted, as Joden stiffened and went into convulsions.
Amyu froze.
Joden’s arm worked free, knocking over the pot of water, setting the coals to sizzling.
Amyu moved then, to push him back from the flames, to try to restrain his body as it shivered and jerked under her hands.
It may have only been a few breaths, but it felt like an eternity before he relaxed, sighed and seemed to slip back into sleep. His breathing was normal now. Amyu’s was not.
After a long moment Amyu covered him up again with the blanket, then set about rebuilding the fire, refilling the pot and setting the bones back to boil after cleaning off the worst of the dirt.
Her hands did the work routinely. But her thoughts raged.
They might kill him if she took him back.
How many times has she seen it? Theas escorting the old, the sick, the feeble away from camp, returning alone? Or taking the mis-born babies out into the wide, wide grasses, returning with empty arms and grieving eyes?
And as her time had come and gone with no babes of her own body, she’d known her failure to the Plains, and her duty. Only the intervention of the Warprize had prevented her from going to the snows.
A fierce need to protect him rose suddenly in Amyu’s chest. She nodded to herself as she placed the pot on the far side of the fire from the sleeping Joden. She’d take him to the Warprize, and Master Eln. They’d not let any kill Joden outright.
And should any warrior bar her way, she’d buy the time he’d need.
As good a way to lose her life as any.
Chapter Thirteen
“There is power in death,” Hail Storm said.
He spoke to the young warriors seated before him using a formal teaching tone. He kept his voice low so as not to be overheard by the theas hovering just out of earshot. The theas had agreed to treat his words as if he were under the bells.
They had met well away from Antas’s main camp and the surrounding thea camps. The less that knew of this, the better.
Antas had ordered the theas to bring the young ones to Hail Storm to be tested. But none of them were pleased, and they expressed it with crossed arms and frowns as they watched. Suspicious, as always.
The young ones before him listened with the wide eyes of youth being told secrets.
Children on the verge of adulthood, who had not yet been through the Rites of Ascension, but were eager to be out from under the control of the theas. Old enough to go to war. Young enough to be shaped to his hand and his will.
Hail Storm sat before them, using a thick cloak to cover his arm, to appear wise and noble and remote as a warrior-priest should. These children had seen the glow of the power of the Plains. They had the potential for power, and certainly, the innocence he required.
No real problem to introduce them to the ways of blood magic. Except for their overprotective theas.
Hail Storm wasn’t stupid enough to challenge theas. Antas may have decided to risk it, but Antas was a fool. Theas were terrors in defense of their charges, and Hail Storm would not risk their wrath.
Persuasion. Seduction. Those were methods he would use. Slower, admittedly, but far more powerful.
“The glow you see now is only the beginning,” he continued, letting his gaze meet each child’s. “For even as there is light in the day, there is darkness in the night. Both are the natural course, following each other over the Plains.”
These young warriors leaned forward, fascinated.
“A new threat to our way of life calls for new ways.” Hail Storm explained. “You would have been tested at your Rite of Ascension, and that is a season or two off.” Hail Storm forgot himself and gestured with his hand to sweep widely over the wide sprawling grasslands. “But the Plains needs warrior-priests and you have within you the potential for that power.”
The faces of the young told him he’d made a mistake. They’d focused on his arm, where the hand no longer existed, the cloak draping over, revealing the stump.
