Mercedes Lackey - Sanctuary

Well, some of the Healers wouldn’t agree . . . Heklatis, after all, was a Healer, and he was the one who would be making up those fire pots.

“Don’t take any risks,” he told Menet-ka and Aket-ten, for the hundredth time. “Don’t let yourselves be seen. Just drop your messages and get out of there. The best revenge we can have is to get the Healers out underneath their noses, like we got ourselves and the Winged Ones out.”

They both nodded, Menet-ka earnestly, Aket-ten with impatience and rebellion in her eyes. He saw it, and it made him sick with dread, but what could he do? He had given his word, and she already resented that she’d been forced to prove she had the right to a place among the Jousters and an equal share in the danger they all faced. All he could do was to urge the utmost caution.

“This is probably even part of an elaborate trap,” he went on, knowing he was grasping at straws, but hoping against hope that something would get through to her. “You know how much the Magi hated the Jousters, and that was before we pulled the Winged Ones out under their noses. Now, they must really loathe us, and they would probably do anything to capture any of us.”

Unfortunately, Menet-ka chose to take this as evidence that Kiron was letting his concerns and fears get the better of him. “I doubt it’s gone that far,” the Jouster said with a weak laugh. “Oh, I’m sure you’re right about the Magi hating us, but they have no reason to think we would come to the rescue of the Healers.”

Kiron didn’t agree with that in the least, but there was no point in arguing. “Just remember what they did to the Winged Ones,” he repeated, and stepped back.

Aket-ten was only waiting for that, it seemed, because she was in the air and flying toward Alta the moment he was clear of Re-eth-ke’s wings. Menet-ka gave him a sympathetic look, and then sent Bethlan into the sky after her. And all he could do was to watch after them.

“She feels as if she has to do this, Kiron,” said Nofret quietly in his ear. “She feels guilty that she didn’t manage to save all of the Winged Ones; she thinks if she’d just been brave enough, or fast enough, or—something, the gods only know what—she’d have been able to get them all out. You can’t argue with that sort of guilt; it doesn’t answer to logic.”

“Well, if she wants me to treat her as if she’s a logical person, she ought to behave like one,” he replied, irritation momentarily overcoming his feeling of sick dread.

Nofret gave him a crooked smile, and patted his arm. “This is logical,” she pointed out. “No one is going to take her seriously if she doesn’t do everything one of the boys is doing.”

And what, after all, could he say? The Far-sighted Priestesses saw nothing—well, they actually could not see anything anyway, for the Magi had now effectively blocked their ability to See inside the Seventh Ring. But they had no intuitions of anything going wrong. Kaleth saw nothing, and the gods had not spoken through him to warn them. By all logic, he was overreacting, being overprotective of Aket-ten.

And yet, he was certain, so completely certain down deep in his soul that this was going to end in disaster that he avoided everyone else for the rest of the evening, and all but hid in Avatre’s pen. She seemed to be just as uneasy as he was—

But that could just be because she’s picking up my unhappiness, he reminded himself, and tried to soothe her even if he could not himself be soothed.

And he resolved not to sleep. They were supposed to return before dawn, and he was going to be awake—

Despite his best efforts, he dozed off, sitting in Avatre’s sand, some time after the middle of the night. And it was a cry of wordless anguish coming from above that woke him.

It woke him out of nightmare into nightmare. And he knew. He knew, without being told, what that haunting cry on the wind meant. The nameless dread he had been laboring under turned to the certainty of disaster, and as he struggled to clear the fog of sleep from his eyes and stagger upright, he felt, not an anguish matching the wails now coming from the landing field, but a kind of numbness.

It was as if someone had just cut off his arm, and he hadn’t yet felt it. It was going to hurt; he knew it was going to hurt. But at the moment, he could only stare at the bleeding stump in a mingling of despair and disbelief. . . .

Except that instead of a bleeding stump of a limb, he knew that it was Aket-ten who had been amputated out of his life. He knew when he felt what had happened, it would be worse than any physical wound.

With leaden feet, he forced himself to go to Bethlan’s pen. There, they were all gathered, all those who were still awake and eager to hear how the message drop had gone. And he did not say a word, could not manage a single syllable, as he listened to Menet-ka stammer out the tale, while someone else unsaddled Bethlan. Both of them looked terrible. Menet-ka must have pushed Bethlan to new speeds to get here as quickly as he had.

“There was fog,” he said, exhaustion dulling his eyes and blurring his voice, as he leaned heavily against the wall. “We hadn’t expected fog. We couldn’t tell where we were. Except that we could see a ring of torches and bonfires, and I figured that was where the soldiers that the Magi had set to watch had put up a line of guards. I thought we should just drop our messages in the center of all of that and hope that some of them landed in courtyards instead of on the roof. But she wouldn’t hear of it, and before I could say or do anything, she took Re-eth-ke down. And that was when the fog just—cleared away. It practically melted out of sight; she wasn’t more than halfway down when it was all gone, and by then, it was too late to pull up.”

“It was magic, then?” Gan managed, his eyes gone round and horrified.

“A trap,” said Ari flatly, and closed his eyes. “Curse it all, Kiron was right. At least half of this business with going after the Healers was a trap meant to take Jousters. They set a trap for you, Menet-ka. They knew we’d send Jousters if they did to another group what they’d done to the Winged Ones, at least to scout, and they set it all up as a trap and used the Healers as bait.”

I was right, he thought dully, with no sense of triumph. He had never wished to have been wrong more.

“They used war javelins and throwing sticks, they didn’t use bows and arrows,” Menet-ka said trying to control the quaver in his voice. “And they weren’t wasting time trying to hit the rider or me; they aimed for Re-eth-ke.”

“They hit her?” Orest gulped, and Kiron choked back a sob.

Menet-ka nodded miserably. “I couldn’t see how many hit or where; enough anyway, that she just—just crumpled her wings and fell out of the sky. They were both screaming and screaming—it was horrible, hearing them scream like that.”

He could see it; in his mind’s eye, he could see it. The javelins filling the air, the dragon folding up in pain. He could almost hear Aket-ten’s scream of fear and anguish. . . .

“She hit the ground with Aket-ten still in the saddle, and she absorbed most of the impact,” Menet-ka continued, unconsciously pulling at his own hair with his right hand. “But I knew she hadn’t been that high, just skimming the rooftops—I pulled Bethlan around, and I saw Aket-ten moving, and I tried to get down to her—”

What? After all that, he expected to hear that she’d broken her neck in the fall!

She was alive—but she was also a Winged One.

He felt himself shuddering. By now she might be wishing she’d died in the fall.

“You mean Aket-ten’s alive!” Gan shouted incredulously. “She’s all right! We can go back, we can rescue her!”