CHAPTER 22

Amara leaned close to her husband to whisper directly into his ear, and said, “We must talk.”

Bernard nodded. Then he put his hand on the ground, and Amara felt a faint tremor in the earth beneath their feet as he called upon his earth fury, Brutus, to create a hiding place. A few seconds later, the ground under them simply began to flow away, a slithery sensation in the soles of her feet, and they sank downward.

Amara shuddered as walls of earth reached up to surround them. The view, as the night sky with its sudden, horribly cold sleet receded, must have been almost exactly like that had by a corpse as it was lowered into a grave. A moment later, all view of the sky vanished as the earth above them flowed into the form of a roof to the small chamber Bernard had created, leaving them in complete, subterranean darkness.

“We can talk here,” he murmured. He spoke in little more than a whisper, but even so, after days of silence, it almost seemed like a shout to Amara.

She conveyed to him everything she had seen at the end of the battle.

Bernard exhaled heavily. “Lady Aquitaine. Taken?”

Amara shook her head, then realized that in the darkness he could not see the gesture. “I don’t think so. The people we’ve seen taken were just walking corpses. They never had any expressions on their faces. They weren’t…” She sighed in frustration. “They all looked like something was missing.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Bernard rumbled.

“Lady Aquitaine looked… I’m not sure. Smug. Or excited. Or afraid. There was something underneath the surface. And she looked quite healthy. So did the Citizens I saw near her.”

“Bloody crows,” Bernard said. “Would even she side with the Vord against Alera?”

“I don’t know,” Amara said. “Once, I wouldn’t have thought anyone would do such a thing.”

“No,” Bernard said. “It’s got to be some other kind of control. If you saw them taking prisoners, then it would appear that the Vord intend to place them under similar constraints.”

“That was my thought as well,” Amara said. “But what are we to do about it?”

“Take our findings to the First Lord,” Bernard replied.

“The Legions are already running,” Amara countered. “We would have difficulty catching him-never mind the fact that we have not yet completed our mission.”

“We observed their crafters during the battle, just as he wished.”

“Observing and understanding are not the same thing.” She fumbled for his hand and squeezed it. “Right now, I can’t tell the First Lord anything but superficial details. We need to understand more before it will do any good. We’ve got to see what’s going on before we go back.”

Bernard made an unhappy growling sound, low in his chest.

“You don’t agree?”

“I’m getting tired of sleeping on the ground. Must be getting old,” Bernard said. “What do you have in mind?”

She squeezed his hand tight. “We have an idea which direction they took the prisoners. I think we should find out what’s being done to them.”

Bernard was quiet for a moment before he said, “Whatever they’re doing, it seems obvious that they’re going to be doing it in a very well-protected location.”

“I know.”

“We won’t be dodging the occasional patrol or outbound raiding party. They’ll have real sentries. A lot of them.”

“I know that, too,” she said. “But so far, none of the Vord have spotted us. If I didn’t think we had a real chance of succeeding, I wouldn’t even suggest it.”

Bernard was silent for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, “One condition.”

“All right,” she said.

“Once we get what we need, I want you to get out, immediately. Fly, fast as you can, back to the First Lord.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped.

“Nothing ridiculous about it,” he said. “If you leave at once, odds are excellent that you’ll make it back to the First Lord. If you stay with me, you’ll double your risk of being found and killed before you can get the information back.”

“But you-”

“Have worked alone before, love. I’ll be harder to locate alone in any case. You won’t be doing anything but improving my odds of getting out.”

Amara frowned at the darkness. “And you’re quite sure that you’re not doing this simply to protect your poor little helpless wife?”

He let out a quick, amused chuckle. “Don’t let her hear you refer to her like that. She’ll call up a windstorm that rips the hide right off you.”

“Bernard, I’m serious.”

His fingers stroked over hers, the motion somehow reassuring. “So am I. If we’re going to take on additional risk, I want to be crowbegotten sure that what we learn gets back to Gaius.” He paused meditatively, then added, “And if it makes my poor little helpless wife a little more likely to come out of it in one piece, that’s a happy coincidence.”

She reached out in the dark and found his face, cupping his cheek with the fingers of her free hand. “Maddening man.”

“I am what I am, Countess,” he replied, and kissed her palm gently. “We’d best get moving. There’s not much air in here.”

Amara sighed. “Back to quiet again. I miss talking to you.”

“Patience, love. We’ll have plenty of time for that when the work is done.”

She leaned over and kissed his mouth, lingering for a moment, mouth moving slowly and intently on his.

Bernard let out a growling exhale. “There are some things I miss, too.”

“Such as?”

“We’ll discuss them when we’re finished,” he said. “At length.”

Amara found herself smiling into the dark. “Good. Anything to make you more determined to get home.”

His fingers squeezed hers. Then she felt the earth begin to tremble again, and the light of the gloom-shrouded night bloomed like a darkling sunrise above them. They rose slowly and emerged into the cold, sleeting evening. Without needing to signal one another, they brought up the concealing furycraftings again, their furies winding layers of veils around them even as their cloaks changed their hues, darkening to become one with the night.

Bernard signaled that he would take the lead, then started out into the night, the sound of rattling sleet blanketing the few sounds he made as he moved. Amara wasn’t sure of their direction, in the gloom, but she knew that Bernard had a nearly supernatural facility with fieldcraft. He would lead them to the south, in the direction the Vord had taken the Aleran prisoners-and away from their friends and allies, who were retreating from the Vord.

Amara shivered against the cold and the sleet, and fervently hoped that she had been right in her assessment of their abilities-and that she had not just committed herself and her husband to cold and pitiless deaths at the hands of their inhuman foes.

CHAPTER 23

“There’s frozen ground back in Alera, too, soldier,” Valiar Marcus barked. “Without a palisade, we’ll be easy meat for the first gang of Shuarans to come along. So put your back into it and dig, or I’ll have you at a whipping post until your balls freeze and drop off.”

The startled legionare, one of the Free Aleran troopers, started up from where he sat, his face showing chagrin that quickly turned to sullen anger. The spear of legionares working on that section of the palisade wall turned darkening faces toward him.

Bloody crows, Marcus thought. It was perhaps unwise to threaten a fanatical former slave with a lashing. He had no desire to fight eight men by himself, but neither could the First Spear back down from any show of open insubordination.

Marcus turned to square his shoulders and face the men, keeping them all within his field of vision. “You know how the Legions maintain discipline, legionare, or ought to.”

The recalcitrant legionare, perhaps bolstered by the support of his fellows, drawled, “And maybe it’s time that changed, centurion.”