"It's too soon," Amara breathed. "Days too soon."
She was hardly aware of Bernard's presence until he rumbled, "Amara. What is it?"
She shook her head and wordlessly leaned over, reaching out to let him see through the sightcrafting Cirrus had provided.
"Crows," Bernard breathed.
"How could this have happened?" Amara asked.
Bernard was silent for a second, then let out a sharp, bitter bark of laughter. "Of course."
She arched an eyebrow at him.
"We were told that they're furycrafting now, correct?"
"Yes."
He gestured at the road below. "They're using the causeways."
A chill went through Amara's belly. Of course. The explanation was utterly simple, and yet she had never even considered it. The furycrafted roads of Alera, whose construction allowed Alerans to travel swiftly and almost tirelessly across the countryside, were a staple of life, practically a feature of the landscape. They were also the single most reliable advantage Alera had in defending the Realm against the foes that so often outnumbered her. The causeways allowed the Legions to march a hundred leagues in a single day-more, if the need was dire. They meant that the Legions would always be able to field a maximum amount of force to ideal positions.
Of course, none of those enemies had used furycraft.
If Bernard was right, and the Vord could make use of the causeways, Amara wondered, then what else could they do? Could they intercept messages sent by water fury through the rivers of the Realm? Could they tamper with the weather? Could they, bloody crows, rouse the sleeping wrath of one or more of the Great Furies, as Gaius had done with Kalus, the previous year?
Amara stared at the fleeing holders and the rising smoke and the circling crows, and in her heart became abruptly certain of a simple, undeniable fact.
Alera could never survive what was coming.
Perhaps if they had acted sooner, in accord, instead of bickering and infighting, something could have been done. Perhaps if more people had heeded their warnings, and had been willing to back their belief with resources enough to create some kind of sentinel organization, it might have been nipped in the bud.
But instead... Amara knew-not feared, not suspected, but knew-that they were too late.
The Vord had come, and Alera was going to fall.
"What are we going to do?" Amara whispered.
"The mission," Bernard replied. "If they're using the causeway, they've got their crafters with them. In fact, it should make them easier to find. We just follow the road."
Amara began to reply, when her horse suddenly threw back its ears and danced sideways for several steps with several harsh breaths of apprehension. Amara steadied the animal only with difficulty, keeping the reins tight and speaking quietly. Bernard's mount reacted in much the same way, though he had far more skill at calming the beast. A touch of his hand, a brush of earthcraft, and a murmur of his rumbling voice calmed his mount almost immediately.
Amara swept her gaze left and right, to see what had startled the horses so.
She smelled it before she saw it-putrescence and rotting meat. Then a breath later, she saw the grass lion emerge from the shadows beneath a stand of scraggly pine trees.
The beast was eight or nine feet long, its golden hide dappled with greenish stripes that would blend perfectly with the tall grasses of the Amaranth Vale. A powerful creature, far more heavily muscled than anything resembling a common house cat, the grass lion's upper fangs curved down like daggers from its upper jaws, thrusting past its lower lip, even when its mouth was closed.
Or, more accurately put, a living grass lion's fangs would do so. This grass lion no longer had a lower lip. It had been ripped or gnawed away. Flies buzzed around it. Patches of fur had fallen away to reveal swelling, rotted flesh beneath, pulsing with the movements of infestations of maggots or other insects. One of its eyes was filmy and white. The other was missing from its socket. Dark fluid had run from its nostrils and both its ears, staining the fine fur surrounding them.
And yet it moved.
"Taken," Amara breathed.
One of the more hideous tactics employed by the Vord was their ability to send small, scuttling creatures among their enemies. The takers would burrow into their targets, killing them and taking control of their corpses, directing them as a man might a puppet. Amara and Bernard had been forced to fight and destroy the remains of scores of taken holders, years before in the Calderon Valley, during the first Vord outbreak-the one that had been stopped before it could become too large to contain. The taken holders had been oblivious to pain, swift, strong beyond reason-but not overly bright.
The grass lion stopped and stared at them for the space of a breath. Then two.
Then, moving with a speed that a living beast could not have bested, it turned and bounded into the trees.
"A scout!" Bernard hissed, kicking his horse into motion after it. "We have to stop it."
Amara blinked for a second, but then slapped her mount's neck with the reins, left and right, and sent it after Bernard's mount. "Why?" she called.
"We've killed one Vord queen," Bernard shouted back. "I'd rather whichever one was commanding this force didn't learn that we were in the area, and set out to actively hunt us down."
Amara lifted a hand to shield her face as branches slapped against her. "Useless," she spat. "I'm going high!"
"Go!"
Amara seized her bow and quiver. She slipped her feet from the stirrups, lifted them to the saddle, then smoothly rose, and all as part of the same motion, leapt into the air. At her silent bidding, Cirrus rushed into the space beneath her, catching her up and sweeping her skyward. Her wind fury brushed aside tree branches from her path until she shot up into the open air over the ridge and wheeled south, to follow the path of the fleeing Vord scout. She spotted Bernard at once, and focused ahead of him until she caught a flash of racing motion perhaps thirty or forty yards in front of him.
The taken grass lion was not running the way a true grass lion would. Such a beast, running through the trees and brush, would have been all but invisible, even to Amara, moving with lithe, silent grace through its natural habitat. Possessed by the Vord, though, the grass lion simply ran in a straight line. It smashed through thickets, heedless of brambles and thorns. It tore through brush, shouldered aside saplings, and altered course only to avoid the trees and boulders it could not plow aside or leap across.
For all that it lacked grace, it was fast, though. A true grass lion was not a cross-country runner, even if it could move very swiftly over short distances. Taken by the Vord, it ran at its best speed, tirelessly, and it was steadily leaving Bernard's horse behind.