Jim Butcher - Furies of Calderon

She should have been more careful. She should have forbidden him to leave the steadholt this morning. She should have seen to her brother more swiftly, should have understood the Kordholders' plans before it had come to violence. She had fought as hard as she could. She had tried. Furies knew, she had tried. But all of her efforts had been for nothing. Time had swept down on her, swift as a hungry crow.

Tavi was out there in the storm. Alone.

O furies and spirits of the departed. Please. Please let him come home safe.

Amara strove to ignore the exhaustion and the cold. Her limbs shook almost too hard to be controlled, and her entire body throbbed with weariness. More than anything, she wanted to collapse upon the floor and sleep-but if she did, it might cost the boy his life.

She had wiped the mud from his face and his throat as best she could, but it clung to him in a thin layer of slimy clay, grey-brown and mottled over paler skin. It made him look almost like a corpse, several days old. Amara slipped a hand beneath the boy's shirt, feeling for his heartbeat. Even in this weather, he wore only a light tunic and cloak for warmth, evidence of his hardy upbringing here on the savage frontier of the Realm. She shuddered, soaked and half-frozen, and glanced up yearningly toward the nearest of the funeral fires.

The boy's heartbeat thudded against her own mud-stained palm, quick and strong, but when she drew her hand out, she saw the mud dappled with bright scarlet. The boy was wounded, though it couldn't have been anything major-he'd have been dead already. Amara cursed under her breath and felt for his limbs. They were dangerously cold. While she struggled to force her weary mind to decide on a course of action, she began rubbing briskly, at once scraping more of the frigid mud off of him and attempting to restore warmth and circulation to his limbs. She called his name, several times, but though his eyelashes flickered, his eyes did not open, nor did he speak.

She took a quick look around the chamber. Amara shuddered to think of what the mud of the Field of Tears, where so many had fallen, might do to him if it got into his blood. She had to clean it off, and quickly.

She undressed him roughly. He was too limp and heavy, for all his slender appearance, to allow her weakened hands to be any more precise. His clothes tore in a few places before she got them off of him, and by the time she had, his lips had tinged with blue. Amara half-carried, half-dragged him over to the water and then down into it.

The water's warmth came as a pleasant shock to her senses. The pool's floor sloped down sharply until it was about hip deep, and even as she kept the boy's face out of the water, she sank gratefully into it and simply huddled there for a moment, until the rattle of her teeth chattering had begun to slow down.

Then she dragged him a few feet to one side, out of the mud-clouded water, and began to rub roughly over his skin, brushing the clay away until the boy was clean.

He had a shocking collection of bruises, scrapes, abraded skin, and minor cuts. The bruises were fairly fresh, only a few hours old, she judged. His knees had several layers of skin peeled off, apparently a match to the ragged holes in his discarded trousers. His arms, legs, and flanks all showed patches of purple, slowly forming, as though he had been recently beaten, and a lattice of long, tiny cuts covered his skin. He had to have been running through thickets and thorns.

She cleared the mud from his face as best she could, using her already-torn skirts to clean him, and then dragged him back up, out of the water, and over to one of the fires.

As soon as she felt the air on her, she began to shiver again and realized that the water had not been nearly so warm as it had felt-she had simply been too cold, relatively, to feel the difference. She settled the boy in a heap on the floor, as near to the fire as she could manage, and huddled there for a moment, on her heels, her arms wrapped tight around her.

Her head nodded, and Amara let out a startled sound as she fell to her side. She wanted to simply surrender to the exhaustion, but she could not. Neither of them might wake up again. She felt her throat tighten on a whimper of protest, but she drove herself to her feet again, shivering nearly too hard to move, to think.

Her fingers felt like lead as she struggled from her own soaked clothing, thick and nerveless and unresponsive. She let the lighter clothing fall in a sopping heap to the marble floor and staggered to one of the stone sentries facing the bier. She clawed the red cape from its shoulders and wrapped it around her. Amara allowed herself a brief respite, leaning against the wall and shivering into the cape-but then drove herself along the wall to the next statue, and the one after, claiming both of those capes as well, then returning to the boy's side. With the last of her strength, she wrapped him in the scarlet cloaks, securing their warmth around him, near the fire.

Then, huddled into a ball beneath the scarlet fabric of the Royal Guard,

she leaned her head back against the wall. It took nothing more than that for her to sleep.

She woke, warm and aching. The storm raged steadily, all howling winds and frozen rain. Amara pushed herself to her feet, her body weary, stiff from sleeping crouched down on her heels, and blessedly warm beneath the heavy fabric of the cape. She moved to look out of the doorway of the chamber. Night still reigned outside. Lightning flashed and danced without, but it and the accompanying thunder seemed more distant now, sound rumbling along well after the light. The forces of the furies of the air still battled, but the winter winds had pushed their rivals to the south, away from the valley, and much of the rain that fell outside now rattled and bounced against the cooling earth as true hailstones.

Gaius had to have known, Amara thought. He had to have been aware of the repercussions of calling the southern winds to bear her north to the valley. He had been crafting too long, and knew the forces that affected his realm too well for it to have been an accident. Thus, clearly, the First Lord had intended the storm. But why?

Amara stared out at the bleak night, frowning. She would be trapped until the storm relented. And so will be anyone else in the Valley, fool, she thought. Her eyes widened. Gaius, with this act, had effectively called a halt to any activity within the Calderon Valley until the storm had relented.

But why? If speed had truly been of the essence, why rush her here, only to fence her off from acting? Unless Gaius felt that the opposition was already in motion. In that case, her arrival would put an effective freeze on their activities, perhaps giving her a chance to rest, regain her balance, before acting.

Amara frowned. Would the First Lord truly arrange such a deadly storm, a furycrafting of proportions she could scarcely visualize, merely to allow his agent to rest?

Amara shivered and wrapped the cloak around her a little more tightly. She could only deduce so much of Gaius's reasoning. He knew far more than most in Alera ever could-most would not even begin to grasp the scope of it. He was oftentimes a subtle ruler: Rarely did his actions have only one objective, only one set of consequences. What else did her ruler have in mind?

Amara grimaced. If Gaius had wanted her to know, surely he would have told her. Unless he trusted her competence to work out on her own what he intended. Or unless he still doesn't trust you.

She turned away from the doorway and padded silently back into the chamber, her thoughts in a whirl. She leaned against a wall beside one of the stone guardians, denuded of his cloak, and raked her fingers through her hair. She had to get moving. Surely, the enemies of the Crown would not be idle once the weather broke. She had to have a plan, at least, and get to work on it right away.