Page 57 of Turncloak

The invisible fallowwolf must have lunged for the sentinel, because she too fell dead, ravaged, a bloody chasm where her heart had beat mere moments ago.

Tears prickled behind the boy’s eyes, then fell in warm rivulets down his round cheeks.

Why had he wanted this?

Excitement? Adventure?

What he wouldn’t give for his safe, warm bed, for the feel of his brother’s body pressed against his.

Fear paled the face of the last remaining sentinel—the navy-shrouded Enchanter—as she muttered something inaudible. A kind of glimmering shield materialized in front of her, but the boy knew it would not protect her against the fallowwolf.

Most of the wardholders who’d torn upstairs to the vault turned back, realizing that the thief was only one guard away from escaping with her life, but they were hesitant to approach when an invisible, feral beast was stalking the atrium.

“D’or laquissier,” a Wielder yelled. Water rose in thick tendrils from every stream and fountain—then crashed down on the spot he knew his mother to be crouching.

There was no cough, no splutter, no gasp.

Which meant she had gone under.

Every time the water spread shallowly over the concentric flagstones, the Wielder lifted it again and again, thrashing great columns of it down on the stone bridge behind which Lorissa hunched.

A small object materialized from thin air, drifting like flotsam on the surface of the rapidly forming lake.

The gold weaverwick wand box.

Lorissa had let it go, which could only mean one thing.

She was either dead or dying.

“Stop,” the boy pleaded, a primal plea, like the very night his mother and father had found him.

And so the Wielder stopped.

Stood frozen on the staircase, arms raised like a mad cleric mid-worship.

So too did the water, hanging suspended in the air like a liquid tower.

Confused yells in unintelligible Bellandrian chorused through the atrium. Two more mages sprinted to the entrance, one futilely checking dead wrists for pulses, the other standing squarely with their wand outstretched, as though expecting the drowning intruder to rise at any moment. Their gaze frantically scanned the room for any white flash of murderous fallowwolf. The boy thought they were maybe the bravest mage in the world.

For several beats, time seemed to hang suspended like the pillar of water.

Then the boy heard the best sound of his young life.

His mother’s cough.

She was alive.

“Sen debilitan,” she croaked, the words echoing several yards away from the overflowing central fountain, but the curse fizzled and died.

The remaining mages descended on her position.

This was the true purpose of the wards, the boy realized. They did not exist never to be broken, but to weaken the breakers badly enough that when reinforcements came, victory would be foregone.

Lorissa’s invisibility faded in and out, enough to show her stumbling across the room to behind a teller’s desk. Every tiny lamp seemed to flicker with terror. In the brief shards the boy saw of his mother, she was jamming the last remaining button on her masochistic vambrace.

Several mages pursued her—though not the Wielder the boy had compelled, since he had not given permission to move again—but his mother had vanished once more. The wardholders glanced around, terrified, blindly firing stone statue curses.

None hit their mark.