Lady of Stone, page 13
Sylph tsked and had to bottle her feelings as she hurriedly donned a vest over her shirt so she wouldn’t appear in public less than half-dressed. She thanked the spirits she hadn’t removed the trousers that went with her riding dress. She tightened the laces as she left the room, her heart pounding with fear for Thana’s safety instead of in anticipation of her embrace.
After her irritation at being interrupted faded, she wondered if the boom could be because of her presence instead of a collapse or some enemy of the countess. No matter what, Thana would want to help. Sylph’s father would call helping strangers and asking nothing in return the height of foolishness.
But he’d been wrong about so many things.
Thana needed someone to watch her back. Sylph dashed into the room again and grabbed the pyramid satchel.
Downstairs, someone screamed.
Sylph’s heart flew into her throat, and she hesitated as she left the room again, trying to swallow her fear. She took a few careful steps down the narrow staircase even though every instinct told her to run and hide. Thana needed her. She had to be brave. Amid the fear, she felt something else. She thought it might be the awakening of her courage, but no, it was the pyramid pull, the undeniable drive to reach out and connect to a power she barely understood.
“No,” she whispered, her feet sliding until she sat on the cold steps. “Stop.” She clenched her fists but couldn’t stop the call. Somewhere outside, a pyramid sang to her.
And the spirits only knew what it might do.
She fumbled with the satchel, seeking to distract herself as Thana had before. Her fingers skimmed over the crystal inside, and she grabbed on to a familiar pyramid.
Light suffused the dim stairway. The whole bag was alight, blazing with color, and the pull from outside lessened. Breathing hard, Sylph struggled to her feet, one hand on the wall and one in the bag. She stumbled down, hearing raised voices and another boom.
“Thana,” she called, all she could get out past the tightness in her chest. Her mind kept trying to reach further. “Thana!”
A figure appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and Sylph nearly cried out in relief until she focused on the countess’s face.
“What did you do?” Countess Carisse cried. Before Sylph could withdraw, the countess reached for the satchel, the source of Sylph’s hard-won control.
Chapter Eleven
Thana stepped outside and peered into the darkness. She heard someone calling from the forest nearby where the light of a torch bobbed through the shadows. Off to her right, near where the ruined part of the house stood, another torch pushed away the gloom.
A pop came from the trees, a reverberating sound that caused a tinny echo in her ears. An explosive pyramid? There was one of Carisse’s questions answered. That sound they’d heard hadn’t been the ruined wing collapsing. Someone was attacking them.
From the woods? But that torch she’d glimpsed in the trees seemed to have gone out.
Thana felt at her side where her pyramid satchel should have been if she’d remembered to grab it. Swearing, she turned for the door, but a figure blocked her way, and as she stepped toward it, it screamed and slammed the door in her face.
“Shit,” Thana whispered. She raised a hand to bang on the door but feared drawing too much attention. She slapped her palm against the wood, hoping the sound carried inside. “Let me in, spirits curse you,” she said in a loud whisper. “I’m a guest, not the enemy.”
No one answered, and she cursed herself again for forgetting the damn bag. She’d never get better at using pyramids if she was always forgetting them.
She turned back to the darkness. The moon spotted the yard with shadows, but she didn’t see anyone. She backed up against the manor wall, hoping to stay out of sight. Down the yard, the other torch she’d seen creeped toward the forest. Thana clamped her teeth on a warning cry as the torch slipped inside the trees. A scream followed, a horrid sound that cut off too quickly to be natural.
The light vanished, the silence deafening. The singing of insects slowly creeped back, filling the air with all the noise of an orchestra. Thana edged to her left, keeping her back to the wall. If she remembered correctly, the stables were in that direction. She could get under cover.
Her brain tried to remind her that a simple roof over her head wouldn’t be enough to stop an exploding pyramid, but the terror inside her drowned out that voice, insisting that she needed to hide or share the same fate as the torchbearers.
Another boom sounded against the far side of the manor. Thana clapped a hand over her mouth, holding in a scream. As the boom faded, she heard the scrape and slide of falling rock. She glanced that way, her feet frozen. A cloud of dust flitted through the moonlit yard like a ghostly horde. Why attack the part of the manor already in ruins?
Because they knew they couldn’t get through the stout doors? Did they think the walls would be easier? Well, the exterior ones, no, but at a place where the structure was already weak?
The questions gave her rational mind a foothold, and her heart calmed a little, giving her control of her senses. As she peered around again, listening for footsteps or voices, she caught a glint of light within the trees and heard a soft sound, either the susurrus of leaves or people whispering. She hurried to where the shadow of the manor’s corner jutted across the lawn like a pointing finger, then followed it into the trees.
The same trees where the torches had disappeared, and people had screamed.
Not smart.
She clenched a fist and told herself to get a grip on her fear. She couldn’t stay stuck to the side of the manor or hide in the stables if someone was throwing pyramids around. She was a spirits-cursed pyradisté in service to the crown. Stopping enemy magic users was her purpose.
Straining to listen, she edged forward. A glimpse of light came again, not the flicker of fire but steady pyramid light, and by the way it came and went, she guessed someone was covering it, probably hiding it in their hand.
“It’s not working.”
Thana froze again, then crouched. This voice sounded angry. Another murmured a response.
“I don’t care,” the first voice said. “And we shouldn’t have used one of the new pyramids on some random person who happened to wander out of the fucking manor.”
“We didn’t know it was some random person, and keep your voice down,” the second voice said, a tone just this side of calm.
“Shut up and keep throwing,” a third voice added near Thana’s side.
She squeezed her lips together to keep from crying out. She hadn’t realized she’d gotten so close to someone.
“The rest of ’em will have to come out eventually,” the third voice added, and the other two didn’t seem inclined to argue.
Light bloomed shortly, uncovered then covered again three times in a row, the burst ruining Thana’s night vision but letting her see a clump of undergrowth in front of her face.
Another boom came from the manor house, then silence for a few moments before the angry voice said, “Let’s just set fire to it.”
“It won’t burn easily,” the second voice said.
“Stay calm,” the third voice said, a slow, threatening tone. “We don’t want to kill everyone inside, just the traitor.”
Thana fought to keep quiet. Who? The countess? Sylph? What had either of them done to be branded a traitor? Sylph could be a traitor to her class, maybe, but Thana couldn’t picture a bunch of nobles or courtiers skulking through the woods to teach the daughter of a duke some lesson about not making friends outside her social station.
Thana’s stomach shrank. Oh, spirits, it was her. She’d told Sylph of the queen’s plan and had run off with her. Now Queen Earnhilt had come to flush her out. Thana scowled, her anger driving away her fear even as she continued to think. Earnhilt wouldn’t use pyradistés. She’d march up to the door and demand Thana answer for her crimes. And this couldn’t be Sylph’s father, either. He’d never use pyradistés. Then who?
And what could she do to stop them? Even if someone considered Countess Carisse or someone in her household a traitor, bombing their house until they surrendered didn’t seem exactly law-abiding.
She had to distract them. Or at least make them think there were more enemies in the forest than they thought. Maybe if she spooked them, they’d leave.
After a long, silent breath, she eased back, waiting for them to make a rustling sound before she moved. When she’d taken a few steps away, she felt for something small enough to throw. She found a stick and launched it into the trees, listening to the attackers try to discern the source of the noise and praying for the spirits of wisdom and intelligence to abandon them.
* * *
Sylph clutched the satchel tighter as the countess demanded to know what she was doing. “Don’t take it,” Sylph cried. “I’ll lose control.” Already, it was slipping. The pulsing need to reach for nearby pyramids lessened somewhat, but she could still feel them out there, waiting. And she didn’t know if she’d set them off or retune them. She might kill everyone outside the manor house and inside, too, and just the thought made her hold on to the light pyramid all the harder.
“What do you want? Are those your friends outside?” Countess Carisse gave the bag another yank.
“No!”
“Liar. You won’t take my child’s inheritance.”
The satchel slipped from Sylph’s shoulder. She grabbed the strap, but her senses were already stretching, called by some pyramid outside. She tried to see, to keep her eyes and mind on the satchel, but the light pyramid didn’t call to her like the others did. She couldn’t lose herself in it without Thana guiding her.
Unless she changed it.
She liberated the light pyramid as the countess tore the satchel from her. She clutched it to her chest and looked for the stone through it, twisting it until she could feel the walls of the manor rising like sentinels around her. Part of the wall was broken, lying in ruins outside, and as she kept her mind on it, another crack tore through it, chunks of masonry raining down as if they’d been smacked with a giant hand.
She could fix that.
Everything else began to fade: the staircase, the countess, the sound of a child crying, and voices raised in alarm. She grabbed the stone with her power and yanked the broken pieces upright, pulling large slabs up to be one again with the whole. She let herself flow with the power instead of fighting as before, and it didn’t hurt, didn’t howl through her like it had in the garden. She had something to focus on here, something to fix.
Sylph lost herself in the feeling, the rightness of fitting seam to seam and mending cracks and holes. These walls had stood far longer than they’d been in disrepair. If she concentrated, she could feel the history in the rock, the miles it had traveled, the quarry it had come from, the millennia it had lain dormant. And before that, a whisper of an echo spoke of countless ages spent under the sea.
The land had once been a sea. She’d never dreamed such things could change.
She’d nearly finished when the staircase and the countess came back in a rush. Sylph had forgotten they’d ever existed. Countess Carisse’s face seemed panicked, desperate. She clutched the remains of a vase in her hands, ceramic bits cascading from her fingers.
Sylph’s own body came back slower, the haziness around the edges of her vision, the pain in her head, the slight scent of blood. She couldn’t think what had happened, could barely think at all, and she couldn’t control her body as it fell backward, and the haziness overtook her eyes, dropping her into blackness.
* * *
“Shut up and listen,” one of the voices in front of Thana said with a growl. She could almost feel them listening.
When another started to protest, she threw another bit of forest flotsam.
They shuffled, sounding as if they were headed in the direction of where it landed. Maybe if they wandered far enough, they’d just leave. And without these three signaling, the bombardment of the manor house had stopped.
Now she only had to decide what to do next. Find whoever was using the explosives? What if they were pyradistés, but they weren’t in their right minds? A concerted attack didn’t sound like any of the other incidents. Those had sounded spur-of-the-moment, acts that came from being overwhelmed. Journeying to a manor house in the middle of nowhere to hunt a so-called traitor seemed the height of deliberateness.
A screech sounded from the manor. Thana leaped from her hiding place. In the moonlit-dappled forest, a pair of wide eyes stared back at her. Light blinded her for a moment before she realized it was someone holding a pyramid.
The signaler.
Another shrieking noise came from the manor, followed by the grinding sound of stone and the rumble of shifting rock. Thana jumped, her heart in her mouth. The pyramid-holder let out a gasp of alarm, and the light tilted. Thana caught a glimpse of dark hair, a beard surrounding an open mouth.
He was going to call out.
Thana leaped without thinking, wanting to stop any warning cry. Her breath left her as they crashed together. The pyramid bounced into the undergrowth as Thana’s target fell, taking her with him and cutting off a brief cry in a whoosh of breath.
Thana tried to disentangle herself and get up, but her hands and feet kept sinking into flesh as her captive squirmed. He gasped or coughed, the wind knocked out of him, but that wouldn’t last forever.
As if goaded by her thoughts, he flailed, and Thana clamped her teeth on a cry as an arm connected with her cheek, sending pain rattling through her skull and making stars streak past her right eye.
Panicking, she lost her balance. Her captive bucked. She threw herself forward, one hand landing in the dirt and the other smacking him again. A small cry answered her, so she pressed down and felt for a weapon with her free hand. She groaned as another blow caught her in the stomach. Aches radiated through her midsection, but she pushed the feeling aside as her fingers closed over the roughness of bark.
“Get—”
His words cut off as Thana brought a broken branch over her head and sent it down without looking, without thinking, only hoping she wouldn’t have to do it again.
He went still. Shuddering through a few deep breaths, Thana fell to the side. The rumbling from the manor had stopped, but the rattle of cascading stones filled the silence. She had to move before someone came looking. She felt for the light pyramid in the undergrowth. When she felt the smoothness of crystal, she snatched it up, holding it close.
She cradled her aching stomach as she moved back to the captive and riffled his clothing. Another pyramid. She grinned and stuffed it in her pocket. After she’d found another, she stood, having no room for more. She wondered if she had enough time to discern what the pyramids did before—
Light blinded her again, this time coming from between her and the manor house. She gasped and fell into her pyramid, fighting through fear to sense its fiery nature. She cocked her arm to throw, but Timmony’s voice stopped her.
“Lady Justine?” he whispered.
* * *
Sylph’s first thought was that she was walking. Funny, she’d never walked with her eyes shut before. Was she sleepwalking? The air passed over her back, and her arms swung beneath her. Sleepwalking was much more…horizontal than she’d expected.
A funny thought, but she couldn’t laugh, couldn’t do much of anything. She tried to stop, but her legs met resistance, as if someone was holding them. Another aspect of sleepwalking she didn’t expect.
“She’s waking up,” someone said, the words more than a little breathless.
“Quickly.” This voice was near her feet. The other at her head. She was being…carried. Why? “We have to get her outside.”
“We don’t know that she was attacking us, Your Grace.”
“Then why did it stop when I hit her? Stop talking and move.”
The words fell into place as memory, but Sylph still couldn’t do anything about them, could hardly move at all. She’d have to fight harder if she wanted to escape this dream…memory…whatever. She couldn’t open her eyes, and all she could hear was the huffing breath of the two people carrying her and the shuffle of their footsteps over carpet and stone. Her head began to pound, made worse by the musty scent of the old manor house. If they were taking her into the fresh air, that could only be a good thing.
Or not. Because…
Pyramids.
Now that she’d thought about them, she could feel them. She tried to call out a warning but could only cough, prompting her bearers to go faster, the one near her head making little whimpers of alarm. Sylph tried to focus on the feel of the normal pyramids, the relatively safe ones, but there was also a siren-like call like the one at the garden party and in the academy, and it made panic flutter through her chest.
She tried to breathe deeply to keep it from consuming her and forcing her to lash out in an effort to stop this ghastly pull, but it felt too much like trying to relax when something sought to pull her off a precipice. Not panicking felt too much like succumbing to doom.
No, Thana would argue that staying calm would help her avoid the abyss, too. Thrashing would only speed her fall. She pictured Thana’s dark eyes, her lips saying, “Breathe, breathe.” She demonstrated deep breaths along with the words, smiling proudly when Sylph copied her.
Ah, the pride of another. She never knew how much she’d needed it until Thana.
A rush of cool air rewarded her. “Do your dirty work out here or begone with you,” the countess said.
Sylph thumped lightly against the dirt. The pull of the pyramid became stronger. She clamped her teeth and balled her fists, trying to picture the struggle as a physical one. Finally, her eyes opened.
The countess stood above her. “Timmony,” she called. “I’ve gotten her out. Come back.”
“Countess?” two voices called from a distance, one male, Timmony, but the other was like a sweet balm to Sylph’s frazzled nerves.
“Thana?” Sylph wanted to reach for her even more than she wanted that pyramid, but she couldn’t risk moving. The pyramid called for her like a long-lost love. “Thana, help.”
