First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera 6)

So, he thought, take that advantage away.

The Queen had begun to create a bond between herself and the great furies of Calderon, a task that Tavi felt was surely well beyond his own abilities. But in furycraft, like in everything else, it was far more difficult to create than it was to destroy.

"Alera," he whispered. He had no idea if the great fury could hear him, or if she would appear if she did. But he pictured her intensely in his thoughts, and whispered again, "Alera."

And then the great fury was simply there, appearing silently and without drama, the hazy shape of a woman in grey, blending into the cloud and mist, her face lovely but aging, weary. She looked around at the situation, her eyes pausing upon the motionless vortex longer than upon the spark-flooded battle raging between Kitai and the Queen.

"Hmmm," she said calmly. "This is hardly going well for you."

Tavi fought to keep his voice calm and polite. "Has the Queen truly bound the great furies to herself?"

"To a degree," Alera replied. "They are both held motionless, fury-bound, and are... somewhat upset about it."

"She can control them?"

"Not yet," Alera said. "But the house of her mind has many rooms. She is accomplishing the binding even as she does battle. It is only a matter of time." She shook her head. "Poor Garados. He's quite mad, you know. Thana does all that she can for him, trying to keep your folk away, but she's scarcely less psychotic than he is, the past few centuries."

"I need to break her link to Garados and Thana Lilvia," Tavi said. "Is it possible?"

Alera lifted her eyebrows. "Yes. But they are not mortal, young Gaius. They will take vengeance for being bound, and they will not show you the least gratitude."

"Binding can be done even by someone like me," Tavi said. "I mean, I could make Garados sit still if I had to. That's what happened at Kalare and Alera Imperia - and with you, to a degree. Someone like me bound them not to act."

"Correct," Alera said.

"Then show me how to break the bond."

Alera inclined her head and reached out her hand. Like the rest of her, it, too, was covered in opaque grey mist that one could mistake for cloth if one didn't look too closely. She touched his forehead. Her fingertip was damp and cool.

The means simply appeared in Tavi's mind, as smoothly as if it had been something remembered from his days at the Academy. And, like much of furycraft, it was quite simple to implement. Painful, he suspected, but simple.

Tavi touched the stone with one hand and stretched the other up to the motionless sky. The principal furycraft used in the binding was watercrafting. It formed the foundation of the effort, while the appropriate craft related to the fury was added atop it: earth for earth, air for air, and so on. But water was the foundation. He had to cancel the watercrafting with its opposite.

Tavi bowed his head, focused his will, and sent fire, fire spread so fine that it never came to life as flame, coursing down deep into the rock of Garados and up in a broad, slewing cone into Thana Lilvia's misty presence. There was a flash of pain as the two forces collided, a kind of cognitive acid that felt like it was chewing clean the inner surface of his skull.

The Queen's head snapped toward him as she backpedaled lightly from Kitai.

The reaction from Garados and Thana was immediate.

The ground shook and swayed, and the Queen and Kitai both staggered several steps in the same direction, their bodies slamming against a rock shelf as the mountain tipped back its head and let out a bone-shuddering roar. An instant later, the darkness grew until it was nearly as black as night, and a storm blew up that made the worst weather Tavi had ever seen feel like a gentle shower. The wind screamed through the rocks, howling in mindless rage. Sleet fell from the sky in half-frozen, stinging sheets. Lightning writhed everywhere, a dozen bolts coming down around them in the space of a few seconds.

Worst of all, Tavi's watercrafting senses were abruptly overloaded with a single mindless, boundless, endless emotion - rage. It was an anger more vast than the sea, and it made the very air in his lungs heavy, hard to move in and out. And, he thought, it wasn't even being directed at him. There was a bladed point to that spear of anger, and he had only been grazed by it.

"Are you mad?" cried the vord Queen, staggering before the onslaught of the great furies' wrath. "What have you done? They will destroy us all!"

"Then we will have chosen our deaths!" Tavi screamed back, struggling through the horrible pain and confusion in his thoughts, through the unbearable rage of the great furies. "Not you!"

The Queen let out a shriek of frustration and terror and flung herself into the air. For a second, the wind of the storm seemed to rise to oppose her, only to relent. She hurtled forward, and in a flash of lightning, Tavi saw her pass into what looked like a great, fanged maw made of clouds of rain and sleet. The jaws of Thana Lilvia closed with a roar of wind, and Tavi saw the Queen spinning, spinning out of control, whirling down miles and miles of cloudy gullet lined with rings and rings of windmanes, their claws flashing and slashing.

Kitai struggled to reach him in the rocking fury of the storm and the mountain's anger, finally throwing herself down next to him as a bolt of lightning hit a rocky ridge not twenty feet away. He gathered her in close, and said, "I'm going after her."

Her head snapped up, and her green eyes were wide. "What?"

"We must be sure," he said. "Alera is here. There must be a way to soothe the great furies, or at least to direct them somewhere else. Talk with her."

"Chala," Kitai cried. "You will be killed in this!"

He caught her hand in his, squeezing tight. "If she is not finished, there will never be a better time. And too much is at stake. It must be done. And I am the First Lord." He drew her hand to his chest and kissed her mouth, swift and heatedly. Then he rested his forehead against hers, and said, "I love you."

"Idiot," she sobbed, her hands trembling as they framed his face. "Of course you do. And I love you."

There was nothing else he needed to say. Nothing else he needed to hear.

Gaius Octavian rose and flung himself up and into the teeth of the storm.

Later, he would never remember that final flight as more than bits of frozen imagery, painted onto his eyes by flashes of lightning. The vord Queen as a tiny and distant dot, spinning in the fury of the storm. Windmanes, their eyes burning with unspent lightning, slashing at his armor, their claws like thunderbolts. Pain as the wind and water of the storm cut at him like knives. The great and terrible face of the fury, its anger lashing out at the Queen, hardly brushing him - and all but killing him even so.