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“Is this the best you can do? Ai, God. You are become pathetic.”
She was not fool enough to turn her back on him. She backed up cautiously, felt for the step with a foot, and knelt down to gather Blessing’s body into her arms. The girl was all limbs, awkward to hold but not particularly heavy.
He did not move, preferring to remain in the light of the rose window that painted him with its pleasing glow. “I would think, my beautiful Liath, that after all this you would know better than to dismiss my words so lightly. I sent Brother Heribert north because he is infested by a daimone. Heribert is dead. I don’t know how he died or how and when the daimone got into his body, although I believe it happened at Verna. But the daimone seeks Heribert, whom it professes to love. I told the daimone to seek Heribert within the body of Sanglant. Once the bastard is possessed—”
She set the girl down.
She rose.
She stepped away from Blessing, for fear of engulfing her in that instant of unbridled rage and fear.
Hugh was ready. A cold howl of wind ripped in through the open doors, so strong that benches tipped over in the nave and slammed into the stone floor. Her clothing writhed around her body, tangling in her legs, and she had to lean backward, overbalancing into the force of that wind, to keep from falling to her knees before him.
Thunder boomed outside. In its wake, shouts and frightened cries split the air and folk shrieked and clamored as Hersford’s residents woke from their enchanted sleep to find themselves caught beneath a tempest. The wind screamed over the valley, rumbling along the roof, blasting into the nave like a raging current of water. Hugh’s hands were working, in fists and then open, part of the magic of binding and working.
Always, his fingers choked that which he wished to control. Always, he throttled that which did not obey him.
Struggling against the howling wind, she straddled her daughter, a foot fixed on either side of the child’s prone body. She fought against sorcery, no longer protected from it by the shield of Da’s magic.
How could it be that he knew the secrets of the tempestari and she did not? What would she give for such knowledge? How much would she give up?
They were alike, after all. Ai, God. It was true.
“I am afraid!” she cried in a voice that carried over the growl of the wind and the cracking shout of the thunder. “I am afraid of becoming like you. But I never will.”
At these words, she saw the truth within him: the twisted fury that distorted his expression as she defied him.
“It’s better you are dead than lost to me!”
“God help me,” she rasped. “You dragged off my daughter only to lure me. You threaten my beloved, because you hope to make me weak, knowing I was weak before. But I have walked the spheres. I have survived the storm. I am no longer weak.”
“Yet neither am I, my rose. Fear me, as you did once.”
Lightning lit the rose window. Its snap sent a shock wave through the entire stone edifice. Thunder broke as if between them, inside the church itself. The rose window shattered. Its shards rained over them like so many slivers of ice.
She called fire into the slow glass, and the fragments poured as shooting stars and peppered the smooth slate floor of the apse. Hugh staggered back against the altar. He slapped the burning remnants off his sleeves and his golden hair. Yet when he looked up, he raised a hand as against a blinding light shining into his eyes.
“Fear you?” The anger burned at such a blue-white heat that she could no longer contain it. In her fury, unbidden, unasked, her wings unfurled with a roar. “I am not the one you will harm! How many more who are innocent will suffer because of you? God forgive me for thinking I should let you go unharmed. Because you will run, and who will be able to find you, when you can weave the stars and walk the crowns?”
He saw her, or saw beyond her, into the heart of her blazing wings. He saw what she had become and what she truly was, and his expression changed. In the wreckage of the rose window he slipped and scrambled.
He fled from what he saw.
A surge of furious triumph scalded her, shameful as it was, to know that he feared her as she had once feared him. How easy it would be to make him grovel and plead, to make him obey her, to make him crawl.
But she let it go. She had to let it go. Hate makes you blind.
She reached and, with her touch, with the knowledge of the fire that slumbers in all creation, she found the recesses within his eyes where the smallest of messages pass from the world to the mind.
“I beg you.” He fell to his knees.
She found the depths within his eyes that formed the passageway of sight, and in this place she sought the slumbering fire. Called fire, with a needle touch, precise and delicate.
Burned him.
Hate makes you blind. And so would he become, who had been blinded by hate and envy for his whole life long.
With a strangled cry, he fell to the floor in spasms as the pain bit deep, but she had already let him go.
