The Saiga warriors advanced down the slopes at a casual pace, their posture in the saddles revealing their surety of a successful capture of horses and hostages. Gilene grabbed Saruke’s hand. “We can’t outrun them. They’re too many and too close.”
Saruke shook her head. “What else can we do?” She tugged on Gilene’s arm, pulling her toward the horses stamping and snorting as they sensed the tension in the air.
A plan took shape in her mind. A crazed one with about as much chance of success as outrunning the Saiga. However, if it worked, they’d all make it back to the encampment, with no one captured and no one dead. If it didn’t, then the families of the fallen and the taken would have a ready source to blame in her. She would never see Beroe again if it did fail, and the thought made her pause for the space of a breath. So be it.
She wrested her arm free of Saruke’s grip and grabbed the other woman by the shoulders. “Tell them not to run. Tell them to stay here. Together. To get off their horses and blindfold them with whatever they have.”
Saruke gasped. “Are you mad?”
“Just do it. Tell them the agacin demands it.”
She didn’t wait to hear whether Saruke followed her instructions, but raced back to where she had doused the cooking fire. Voices argued behind her. She ignored them. All her attention centered on the pile of ash, and the tiny red spark that still glowed at its perimeter. No bigger than a bead, it had escaped the drowning from turnip water and gleamed bright and hot amid a bed of wet ash.
She crouched, her hand outstretched, palm down. The steppe, the women protesting her command, the steady drum of hoofbeats drawing closer—all faded as she stared at the jewel of hot coal and turned inward to listen to her magic.
The red thread was a stream now, still thin but unbroken. It spilled from the once empty well inside her, flowing through her veins in a steady current. Eager, waiting.
Fire magic was a harsh and unpredictable mistress, quick to turn on its wielder if not held in check by a firm hand. Gilene’s life had been defined by controlling her birthright and suffering the consequences when she didn’t. And now she’d be tested again, not by Savatar fire witches who demanded she prove her magic, but by Savatar warriors bent on raiding.
The tiny coal glowed hotter, brighter, bigger, until it surged up in a slender column of flame no bigger than a young willow branch. Unlike the god-fire of the Veil, it owed no allegiance to the Savatar and would readily burn any of them except the immune agacins. While the priestesses refused to recognize Gilene as one of theirs, this small flame obeyed its mistress. It shot through the space between her fingers, crackling in a merry dance that should have blistered her skin. Instead, more flames cascaded over her hand with a lover’s touch, licking along her wrist and forearm, leaving flesh and clothing unharmed.
Gilene swept her arm in a graceful arc and whipped the fire across the ground, where it devoured the damp grasses in a shower of sparks and smoke that formed a circle around the now silent women and children. They watched her, eyes wide as she bent the fire to her will, feeding its hunger with the long grass, controlling its ravenous appetite with the magic she spun out in carefully measured strands.
The flames crackled low and close to the ground, the only hint of their presence to the approaching horsemen the telltale veils of smoke rising into the air. Gilene took her eyes off the fire long enough to find Saruke. “Tell them if they haven’t yet blindfolded their horses to do so now or they’ll lose them.”
Saruke’s rapid Savat broke the frozen tension, and more shuffling and horse snorts filled the air as the last of the horses had their eyes covered by torn bits of blankets, shawls, and the hems of tunics.
A trickle of sweat tickled the length of Gilene’s back as the Saiga riders closed the distance, their casual pace speeding up until they hit full gallop. The whistling twang of an arrow loosed pierced the air, fired from the bow of one of the Kestrel scouts standing guard outside the fire circle. All six archers raised their shields as a thin volley of return fire spilled around them, arrows embedding in the ground around them and in the shields they held.
“A little closer,” Gilene muttered. “Just a little closer.” Patience, she reminded herself. Patience ruled fire. Not strength, not speed, and definitely not impulse.
The Saiga horsemen were almost on top of the defending archers when Gilene drew hardest on her magic. Were her power fully returned, the flames shooting up from the circle would have towered over them nearly as high as the Veil. Instead they created a wall only knee-high. Undeterred, Gilene incanted an illusion spell, and the flames exploded upward with the deep roar of an ancient draga’s bellow.
On both sides, people cried out and horses whinnied as she shaped the flame into a colossal monstrosity of claws and teeth and glowing yellow eyes straight out of a Kraelian Book of Nightmares. The thing arched back before cannoning forward, its monstrous jaws snapping on a fiery bellow that sent the terrified horses of the equally terrified Saiga screaming and bucking as they fought their riders’ control and lunged away from the horror threatening to either devour or burn them.
Gilene pitied the Kestrel archers, who cried out their terror and struggled to control their own maddened mounts, but there was nothing she could do for them. Outside the circle, all had to believe that an agacin of immense power had just raised a fire demon or some monster of equal horror and hurled it at them.
She fanned both flame and illusion with her magic until the last Saiga rider disappeared over the ridges, some now riding pillion with a compatriot, while their riderless horses bolted in the same direction, reins snapping behind them like angry vipers.
Once the Saiga were gone and the Kestrel archers paced their panicked mounts a farther distance back, calling out the names of those inside the circle, Gilene snuffed both the fire with a snap of her hand and the illusion with a softly spoken incantation. All that remained was a ring of blackened grass and the acrid smell of smoke.
Except for the occasional whicker from the horses and the ceaseless song of the wind, a heavy silence settled around her. Tamura, still shield-clad on her nervously pacing mount, wore an expression of wary shock. The same look was reflected on the faces of the other archers. Gilene’s back prickled, and she pivoted to face the crowd inside the charred ring of grass.
Women clutched crying children or held the reins of blind horses with hands gone white at the knuckles. Their eyes were huge in their faces, some tear-stained, others pale with either terror or wonder.
A shudder racked Gilene, followed by a warning twinge along the underside of her arm. This magic she wrought was only a shadow of what she unleashed in the Pit each year, and the price she’d pay for it temporary. Painful blistering would ease over a couple of days with a soothing poultice. The red thread inside her still streamed and tumbled, undiminished by her careful use of its power combined with that of illusion. She might have cheered the triumph of her plan were she not being suffocated by dozens of Savatar stares.