Mercedes Lackey - Elvenblood

She heard footsteps, faint and far above, but there was only one set of them. Someone was pacing, around and around the round wall of the tower, but it was only one person.

Silently Rena slipped up the stairs, pausing to peek over the edge of the next floor to see what was there.

This room was like the one below, except that it held a marble table, and a single chair. There was no one here, either, but as Rena moved up into the room itself, she saw a tray of partially eaten bread and a pitcher of water on the table. The bread did not look particularly fresh, and it was the coarse brown bean-bread generally fed to slaves.

Clever.

She headed for the next set of stairs, and once again paused to listen. The footsteps sounded as if they were directly above her now.

She got halfway up the stairs before the footsteps stopped, suddenly.

"Who is there?" Lady Viridina called sharply.

Rena couldn't stop herself; she ran up the rest of the stairs, heedless of the fact that her mother might not be alone.

But Lady Viridina was alone; dressed in a simple gown of bleached fustian, the kind a slave might wear, her hair confined in a single neat braid, with no sign of the fine lady she had once been. She stared at Rena—made a sign, and Rena felt the tingle of magic that told her a spell had just passed over her—then ran to take her daughter into her arms, babbling and sobbing as incoherently as if she had been mad.

Then again, Rena was doing the same thing.

When they both got themselves under control—and in a much shorter period of time than Rena would have thought—Lady Viridina held her daughter at arm's length and shook her as if she were once again a naughty child.

"What are you doing here?" she scolded. "Don't you know dial no one is supposed—"

"I'm getting you out of here, Mother," Rena replied, interrupting her, although she did not pull away from the admonishing hands. "Listen to me—there isn't much time to explain."

Lady Viridina did listen, as Rena made a brief explanation of how she and Lorryn had escaped, how they had met the Iron People and learned of the protective power of their jewelry, and how they had finally joined forces with the wizards. "That's what I have here," she said, pulling one of the packets out of the breast of her gown with difficulty. That was the problem with fashionable gowns—there was nowhere to put anything. "Here, this is some of it. You put this on, and we'll cross the garden to where Mero is waiting and—"

"Not this time!" With a burst of power that left her nerves jangling, Lord Tylar appeared in the center of the room as if he had been brought there by magic—which, of course, he had. Rena was familiar enough now with the transportation spell to know what it "felt" like.

If his face had been scarlet with rage when she first appeared on the doorstep, it was purple now, and he came at Rena, not with magic, but with his bare hands.

She tried to evade him, but he had been a trained warrior in his youth and he still kept in practice. With a single powerful blow of his fist, he knocked her across the room and into the marble wall.

Her body hit the wall first, knocking all the breath out of her, and her head followed a moment later, sending black waves of stars across her eyes, and leaving her stunned and unable to draw in air. She lay there in pain, trying to gasp, hands clawing at the bare marble, as with a tiny part of her mind she heard the jangle of the jewelry her mother had been holding and the clatter as she dropped it to the floor at his feet.

Rena shook her head to clear her eyes, and the movement must have cleared something else as well, for suddenly she could breathe again. She pulled in a long, cool gasp of air, coughed, and pulled in a second, then looked up, trying to make her mind work again.

Her father stood with his back to her, stiff with anger. Her mother huddled against the far wall, her face white with terror and shock. There was a gleam of silk and silver on the floor under his foot.

"Now I am going to kill you, woman," Lord Tylar hissed. "I am finally going to be rid of you, and no one will say me nay—"

His hands shot out and he seized her by the shoulders before Rena knew what he was doing. In the next instant, he threw her to the floor, where she lay limp and boneless. As he turned, Rena saw his face.

It was no longer purple, or even scarlet. It was white, pale as the marble of the walls, and as controlled as if he were talking about inconsequential Council gossip among his friends. And when he spoke again, his voice was controlled, too, and so cold that it might have frosted the marble. Rena shuddered, and her mother hid her head in her arms.

"I am going to kill you," he repeated. "But I am going to do more than that. I am going to annihilate you. I am going to destroy you so completely that nothing of you will remain to show that you ever lived. And I am going to take my time about it."

He smiled.

And a voice echoed through Rena's mind—only now she knew who the voice belonged to, and why she had seemed familiar to the speaker.

If you can change a flower petal, what else can you change? Could you, perhaps, stop a heart?

And again from a time much nearer at hand: It's not a power to use lightly, but sometimes—sometimes you aren't given a choice. If, by using that power, you could save an innocent life—

Taking the first as an omen, and the second as a benediction, Rena did for her mother what she would never have dared do for herself. Lord Tylar was armored and warded against magic attack—

But his foot was touching the iron of the necklace, and the silk packet had fallen open. There was leather between him and the necklace, but it still might be just enough.

Rena closed her eyes, and reached, just as her father raised his hand to summon his power to him.

She never knew, afterwards, if it was her spell that caught him, or the terrible effect of his own power caught so close to the iron of the necklace.

She only knew that in midreach, he gasped, the terrible energies he had been reaching for suddenly backwashed over him, and his body exploded into a pillar of flame.

Somehow, she got to her mother, past the pillar of fire, a thing that screamed and bubbled horribly, but seemed rooted to the spot, as if the necklace chained it there. She reached her mother, who was now quite paralyzed with fear; somehow she got Lady Viridina to her feet and down the stairs as the very marble of the tower began to burn and the stairs ignited practically on their heels. She and her mother staggered together across the garden, as slaves and underlings began to converge on the burning tower, staring and shouting and ignoring the two of them completely.

By then, Lady Viridina was able to move under her own power, although her face was still white with shock and her eyes resembled a pair of holes burned into her face. Shana led the way to the open gate—opened by patrolling guards who had seen the flaming tower and had pounded past the two escapees without a second glance. She had no idea how to find Mero, but this was the only way out that she could see, and by far the easiest.

But she didn't have to stagger around the walls of the estate to find Mero; he found them, galloping up with two horses in tow just as they reached the outside. Without a single word, he helped Lady Viridina into a saddle and tied her there in case she should suddenly collapse, since it looked as if she might do that at any moment, as Rena clambered into her own saddle, hindered by the skirts of her ridiculous gown.

"Lorryn's meeting us on the way," Mero said shortly. ."Your timing couldn't have been better; the real mess is just about to begin. Let's get out of here before someone figures out we aren't supposed to be here."