First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera 6)

Kitai dropped like a stone.

Tavi sheathed his sword and altered his course smoothly, pouring on the speed, and hoped that Kitai had the presence of mind - even as she plunged through a lethal fall - to realize what the Queen was almost certain to do next.

Even as Kitai fell, she drew her third - her last - salt arrow from the specially designed quiver and loosed it at the Queen in an instinctive snap shot. The vord Queen had to swerve to one side to avoid the arrow, even as another firecrafting blossomed forth from her dark-nailed hand.

Tavi rolled so that his belly was to the sky as he intercepted Kitai, her shoulder blades slamming into his belly, her head whiplashing against his armored chest, even as he made a greater effort of furycraft to bear both of their weights. The Queen's firecrafting boomed deafeningly, exploding less than ten feet away from them with enough intensity to char Tavi's eyebrows and fill his nose with the reek of burned hair.

Tavi had caught Kitai perhaps twenty feet from the ground, and his back actually bounced off a hibernating mantis's head before their fall stopped, and he started gaining altitude again. He let out a grunt, made sure his arms were around her solidly, and poured on all the speed he could, running for the cloud of mist that had enveloped the abandoned steadholt.

"Kitai?" he called. "Kitai?"

She did not answer.

Thunder rumbled across the face of the Valley, a threatening, growling sound from the thunderheads gathering around Garados's snowcapped peak, colored a deep orange by the first rays of the rising sun - Thana, the wind fury known to the Valley's holders as Garados's wife, was preparing a battle force of her own.

"Kitai!" Tavi screamed.

She was limp in his arms.

The vord Queen let out a shriek of triumph and shot after them in deadly, intent pursuit.

Amara woke up with something foul in her mouth. She tried to spit it out, only to feel someone pushing it back in. She let out a weak grunt of protest and lifted a hand.

"Countess," said the First Lady's calm, quiet voice. "You must leave them in your mouth. Thanks to your wardrobe, you received considerably more poison than Aria, and if you spit them out before it has been neutralized, I fear you could relapse."

Amara shivered and blinked her eyes open. She was lying in a pool of shallow water, her head resting on Isana's crossed legs. Whatever the stuff in her mouth was, it tasted musty and vile - so much so that it almost completely neutralized the pain throbbing steadily through her cut and bruised body.

Which meant that she was alive. Which didn't make sense. One moment, she'd been about to sell her life for an extremely unlikely chance to combat the vord Queen - in fact, as she remembered it, she had taken that gamble and lost, handily, even before the wasp-things had slammed into her.

"Here comes another one," said a rasping, oddly metallic voice. She turned her head to see what looked like a gargoyle fashioned of steel in the image of Araris Valerian. It took her a second to realize that it truly was Araris, employing a form of metalcrafting they had only heard about Gaius Sextus performing.

Even as she tracked the thought, a vord mantis dropped from the ceiling of the hive - and landed on the ground in two essentially equal-sized pieces. Araris flicked the blood from the sword in his hand and kicked them to either side to clear the space beneath a pair of holes in the ceiling. He was building up quite a pile of remains. There were the various parts and pieces of half a dozen mantis warriors and what must have been eight or ten blade-beasts.

They were still in enemy territory.

That thought pushed another one to mind. She fumbled for her waist pouch and opened it. She reached around inside it with her fingers until she found the stone she was looking for, a smooth river rock the size of her fist. Then she started pushing at the vile mass in her mouth, trying to get it to move to one side.

Gentle hands pushed hers away from her mouth and Amara slapped lightly at them, letting out an irritated, mush-clogged growl.

"She's trying to talk," said a thready, exhausted voice. "Let her. See, the stone in her hand? She must have had some kind of plan for getting us out of here if things went bad."

Amara looked up to see Aria Placida sitting with her back against the wall, beside the pool. Her face was sunken and pale, and she looked as if she could barely hold up her own head, but her eyes were clear. To Amara's surprise, High Lord Antillus Raucus lay beside her, stripped of his armor, with an enormous, ugly purple scar wrapping around his waist like a belt, and the cauterized stump of his arm ending obscenely a few inches from his shoulder He was breathing unsteadily and clearly unconscious.

Isana's hands withdrew, and Amara pushed the mush in her mouth mostly into one cheek. "Firecrafting," she said, holding up the stone. "Signal flare. Need to get it into the open. I convinced Aquitaine to give me the Windwolves' contract. They're up high, waiting to get us out of here."

"Windwolves?" Aria asked.

"Mercenaries in service to the Aquitaines," Isana said. "They're mostly Knights Aeris."

Amara nodded. The movement made her a little dizzy. "Followed us, far enough back and high enough up that they wouldn't be detected by Invidia. They'll know where we are, generally, but we have to signal them our exact location."

"No good," came Araris's voice. It sounded as if his words were rattling around the interior of a metal pipe before they left his mouth. "These holes were where the blade-beasts were being kept for a rainy day - but they don't open beneath the sky. There's some kind of structure above us. If we threw the rock out, it might not be visible outside - "

Three wax spiders abruptly plunged down through both holes. Araris cut them all into quarters before they touched the ground.

" - the building," he finished, never altering the cadence of his words. Then he turned to look at Isana, and Amara noted that the metallic surface of his skin seemed cracked, rusted, and pitted over the right side of his chest and his right shoulder. She realized, with a shudder, that the "rust" was blood seeping out through the cracks. Evidently, the crafting did not make him entirely impervious to harm. He met Isana's eyes for a moment, then said, to Amara, "Give me the stone."

Amara felt the First Lady stiffen. "No. Araris, no."

"Only way," he said quietly.

"I forbid it," she said. "They'll kill you."

"If we all stay, we all die," he said in a quiet, firm voice. "If I go, there's a chance some of us will live." He turned his right hand palm upward, and said, "Countess."