Amara felt her heart stop for a single, terrible, seemingly eternal moment, then Bernard came up behind Rook, his bow in hand, his face pale and nauseated. He had one hand on the small of the spy's back and was pushing her up more or less by main strength. Relief flooded through her, and she clasped her hands tightly together and bowed her head until she could blink sudden tears from her eyes. "What happened?"
"Kalarus tried to burn us out," Bernard said, his voice hoarse. "Lady Placida countered him. Sheltered us from the flame, then sealed the stairway in stone. '
"He meant to say, 'Lady Placida and I' sealed the stairway in stone," Lady Placida said firmly. "Though your friend there was struck on the head by some debris. I've exhausted myself, and it won't take Kalarus long to open a passage through the stone we put in his way. Best we hurry."
No sooner had she spoken than the wind rose to the familiar roar of a shared windstream, and Lady Aquitaines mercenary Knights Aeris swept down and landed heavily, clumsily on the roof, the coach slamming down onto the stone.
Amara reached out to Cirrus, preparing to raise a windstream of her own, and found that her connection to the fury had grown fainter, more tenuous. She swore and shouted, "Hurry! I think Kalarus has his wind furies interfering with ours to prevent our escape!"
"Just be thankful that doing it is keeping him downstairs," Lady Aquitaine said. "I'll try to counter him until we can get farther away. Into the coach!" She flung herself inside, followed by Odiana, Aldrick, and Atticus Elania.
While Bernard covered the doorway with his bow, Amara shrugged the bewildered child from her shoulders and into Lady Placida's arms. She helped the dazed Rook into the coach, which was rapidly growing quite crowded. Then another tremble in the stone beneath her feet made her look up and around in time to see two gargoyles, much like those Lady Placida had dispatched, as they clawed their way up the outside of the tower, talons sinking into stone as if it was mud, and over its battlements.
"Bernard!" Amara screamed, pointing.
Her husband spun, drawing the bowstring to his cheek as he did, and let an arrow fly at the nearest gargoyle out of sheer reflex.
Amara thought the shot would be utterly ineffective, given that the gargoyles were made of stone and that the wind the Knights Aeris were summoning would have made such things impossible for all but the best of archers.
But Bernard was one of the best, and Amara had reckoned without the deadly combination of an earthcrafter's superhuman strength working together with the sheer, deadly expertise of a woodcrafting archer. Bernard was fully powerful and skilled enough to have qualified as a Knight Terra or Flora in any Legion in the Realm, and his war bow was one of the weapons borne by the hunters and holders of Alera's northernmost reaches-a weapon designed to put down predators that outweighed the holders by hundreds of pounds and powerful enough to punch through breastplates of Aleran steel. Too, Bernard was using a heavy, stiletto-headed arrow, one designed for piercing armor, and the experienced earthcrafter knew stone as few other Alerans could ever understand it.
All of which combined to mean that, as a rule, when the Count of Calderon released an arrow at the target, he expected it to go down. The fact that his target was living stone rather than soft flesh was only a minor detail-and certainly did not qualify as an exception to the rule.
Bernard's first arrow struck the nearest gargoyle just to the left of the center of its chest. There was an enormous cracking sound, a shower of white sparks, and a network of fine cracks spread over the gargoyle's stone chest. It leapt from the battlements to the towers roof-and fell into half a dozen still-thrashing pieces upon impact.
Before the first gargoyle fell, Bernard had drawn again, and his second arrow shattered the left forelimb of the second gargoyle, sending it into a sprawl on its side. Another arrow cracked into the gargoyle's head as it tried to rise a beat later, and the impact sheared off a quarter of the gargoyle's misshapen head, knocking it down again and evidently disorienting it as it tried to scramble upright again with futile energy.
Bernard leapt for the coach just as the windcrafters began to lift off. He caught the running board along its side with one hand, slung his bow over his neck, and used both hands to struggle to pull himself up as the coach rose away from Kalare, steadily gathering speed.
Amara called to Cirrus and found the fury more responsive, if still more sluggish than normal, presumably thanks to Lady Aquitaine countercrafting against Kalarus's wind furies. She soared up to the coach, landed with her feet on the running board, twined her left arm through the coach window, and reached down to Bernard with her right.
Her husband looked up, glanced at all the leg she was showing in her scarlet slave tunic, and leered cheerfully at her as he grasped her hand. She found herself both laughing and blushing-again-as she helped him up to the running board, then into the coach.
"Are you all right?" he shouted to her.
"No!" she called back. "You scared me to death!"
He burst out into a rolling laugh, and Amara stepped off the coach's running board and into Cirrus's embrace, stabilizing herself before darting ahead of the coach and slightly above. She looked back over her shoulder, cursing that she hadn't been able to braid her hair for the disguise, and hadn't thought to bring along something to tie it back with. Now it whipped around her face wildly, in her eyes whenever it wasn't in her mouth, and it took her a moment to get enough of it out of the way to see behind them.
She almost wished she hadn't done it.
The gleaming figures of Knights Aeris were rising from Kalare. Rook had warned them of the twenty or so who had remained in the city's garrison. Amara looked at the four mercenary Knights Aeris struggling to keep the overloaded coach in the air. They did not have the speed to evade a pursuit, and the terrain below them offered them few opportunities to play hide-and-seek with Kalarus's forces. Without being able to rise to the higher winds, they could not use the clouds as cover, the other favored tactic for evading airborne pursuit, and the only one their slower group might have successfully employed.
Which meant, Amara thought, that they would have to fight.
It was not a ridiculous prospect for them to fend off a score of enemy Knights or so-not with Amara and no less than two High Ladies of Alera there.
But as Amara watched, more Knights Aeris rose from the city. Twenty more. Forty. Sixty. And still more.
With a sinking heart, Amara realized that when Kalarus returned to his citadel, he must have come by air-and that he must have brought his personal escorts, the most capable and experienced of his Knights Aeris.