Chapter 390: Thunder in the Quarry

We left Greykeep before the children woke.

I had gone into their room first, intending only to look.

Carol lay on her side with one hand beneath her cheek. Garrick had managed to turn halfway across his bed, leaving his blanket tangled around one ankle.

I freed it carefully.

He stirred but did not wake.

For a moment, I stood holding the edge of the blanket, remembering his fingers opening mine in the garden.

Keep these ones now.

I tucked him in and left the room quietly.

Evelyn waited in the passage. Adriana stood beside her with her shawl drawn around her shoulders.

“You should both be asleep,” I said.

“A persuasive argument,” Evelyn replied. “From the person wearing armor before dawn.”

Adriana took my hand.

Neither asked for a promise that nothing would happen.

I was grateful for that, and wished there were a promise I could give them instead.

“I'll send word as soon as we can,” I said.

Evelyn kissed me first.

Then Adriana pulled me close, careful of nothing except the space her stomach required.

“Bring yourself back with them.”

“I intend to.”

She held on for one more breath.

Then let go.

The gate carried us as far as our existing routes allowed. Horses took us the rest of the way.

Elyan traveled ahead with a scout who knew the ground. He did not simply appear within the quarry to discover what might be waiting there. Eliza wanted eyes on the roads before anyone brought divine attention near the prisoners.

By late morning, we reached the wooded rise behind the old lime road.

The quarry lay beyond it.

I could hear wheels before I saw anything.

Wood creaked under weight. A man shouted for a harness to be tightened. Somewhere below, someone coughed until another voice told them to be quiet.

We left the horses under cover.

Eliza met us beside a fallen tree with an updated drawing spread over its trunk.

“They've begun bringing people out.”

Thor knelt beside her.

“How long?”

“Enough time to act. Not enough to wait until dark.”

Avarn loosened the cloth around his sword.

He did not draw it yet.

Eliza pointed to the lower shed.

“Eshara's team reaches this door through the drainage cutting. Avarn goes with them. Two scouts are already above the rear track. They will stop anyone trying to take prisoners uphill.”

Lexander studied the road.

“And the wagons?”

“Yours once the signal comes.”

Thor would take the checkpoint's main fighting force. Vaerun would control the open yard and keep fire from spreading among the timber buildings. Elyan would carry signals between the teams and watch the road beyond the bend.

I would wait until the prisoners were moving.

Then go where the line began to fail.

Elyan showed me the place I could reach.

We crawled to a gap between two thorn bushes. Below us, the quarry floor opened in shelves of pale stone. The weighing house stood near the entrance. Beyond it lay the long shed and a smaller building with barred windows.

An old loading platform overlooked the yard.

Its surface was clear except for a broken beam.

“There,” Elyan whispered.

I could see the whole platform.

Its edge. The beam. The shadow beneath a square of missing roof.

I fixed each part in my mind.

“Once you arrive, you're above the carts,” he said. “You can reach either building without crossing the prisoners' path.”

“And everyone will hear me.”

“By then, they'll have heard Thor.”

Below, a guard struck the side of a wagon with a stick.

A line of people flinched.

I counted children among them before making myself look at the rest of the ground.

One boy carried a smaller child on his back.

A woman walked with a strip of cloth tied around her wrist, connected to the person ahead of her.

There were no carts of goods waiting for passage.

Only people being loaded.

Elyan touched my shoulder once.

I drew back beneath the branches.

Waiting proved harder than the ride.

I listened to Avarn's group descend through the cutting until even the small noises of their passage disappeared.

Thor stood near me, rolling her shoulders once beneath her cloak.

“Your hammer?” she asked.

I summoned it.

Lightning moved quietly across the head.

She nodded.

“Remember what you've already learned.”

“Evelyn said something similar.”

“A sensible woman.”

We waited again.

The wind carried voices from the yard.

Then a scream.

My grip tightened.

Thor's hand closed around my wrist before I could rise.

She was listening too.

Another voice shouted. A cart shifted. The scream stopped, replaced by angry orders.

I could not see what had happened.

That ignorance felt like a physical thing.

Thor did not tell me to be calm.

She kept her hand where it was until a brief white gleam appeared between the trees.

Elyan's signal.

The teams were ready.

Thor released me.

Then stepped out of cover.

Her first lightning strike shattered the empty guard platform beside the road.

The second struck the weapon rack beneath it.

“Weapons down!” her voice carried across the quarry. “Away from the prisoners!”

For a heartbeat, everything stopped.

Then the yard broke into motion.

Lexander's team surged onto the road. Two men cut the lead wagon's traces and caught the frightened horses before they could bolt into the people behind them.

Vaerun came over the lower wall in a burst of rain.

At the long shed, Avarn's blade flashed once.

The bar across the door fell in two pieces.

Eshara disappeared inside with her soldiers.

I saw the first prisoners begin moving toward the cutting.

Then a guard near the barred building lifted a crossbow toward their backs.

I chose the platform.

The world became white.

Thunder struck the quarry walls.

I stood on the loading platform with my hammer in my hand and the crossbowman below me.

He looked up.

I threw a sheet of ice between him and the fleeing prisoners.

His bolt struck it and vanished beneath a spreading white fracture.

I jumped.

The hammer broke his weapon before he could aim again. He fell backward, released the splintered stock, and raised both hands.

I moved past him.

Two more guards rushed from the smaller building.

One carried a spear.

I saw its point coming toward my ribs and, for the first time in a real fight, let my body stop being solid.

The spear passed through turning wind and rain.

The man's expression changed before he understood why.

My hammer struck the shaft, breaking it close to his hands. I caught his shoulder with my free hand and drove him against the wall hard enough to leave him sitting, stunned, beneath the window.

The second guard stopped.

“Drop it,” I said.

He did.

Rain spun through my chest. I held the shape for another breath, looking beyond him rather than at him.

There were people behind the bars.

The small building had once been an office.

Now thirteen people occupied a room made for perhaps four clerks.

One lay beneath the window. Two children crouched beside him. Several others had metal bands at their wrists, joined by short lengths of chain.

The door was locked.

I returned to flesh, braced the frame with ice, and broke the lock with one controlled blow.

Inside, nobody moved toward me.

They stared at the hammer.

At my eyes.

At the rain still falling from my shoulders.

I dismissed the weapon.

“We're taking you out of here.”

A woman near the wall shook her head.

“The bands.”

I looked more closely.

Symbols had been cut into the metal.

Not ordinary restraints.

Behind me, battle crashed through the yard. I wanted to seize the chains and tear them apart.

Instead, I called for Eshara.

She arrived with two soldiers, took one look, and sent a runner for the ward specialist attached to her team.

“Don't pull them,” she told me.

“I haven't.”

She nodded once.

Then knelt beside the man on the floor.

Across the yard, Vaerun had become a storm broad enough to fill the space between the sheds.

Arrows passed into him and tumbled out, their force lost in the revolving air. A torch disappeared beneath a rush of water before it could reach the dry roof.

He still struck like a man.

An arm shaped from rain seized a guard's wrist. A shoulder of wind drove another away from the prisoners. When a soldier swung a blade through his neck, Vaerun caught him by the belt and threw him into a stack of empty baskets.

Beyond him, Avarn fought at the mouth of the cutting.

He did not chase the men retreating before his sword.

He held the space the prisoners needed.

Every movement kept his blade between them and the guards trying to reach them.

I saw one enemy slip toward his left.

Avarn turned, cut the man's weapon aside, and put him on the ground without taking a step away from the escape route.

Then he looked back to count the people passing him.

The bridge had taught him something.

Now he was using it.

A horn sounded near the weighing house.

Not ours.

The guards still fighting began falling back toward it.

A man emerged wearing white bands over dark armor. Gold lines ran across the plates at his chest and down the weapon in his hand.

He was not a god.

The power around him belonged to one.

“By order—” he began.

Thor struck the ground in front of him with lightning.

Stone exploded upward.

He staggered back behind a shield of pale light, the unfinished proclamation lost beneath the thunder.

I might have smiled if he had not turned toward the smaller building.

The bands inside it rang.

The woman nearest the door cried out and dropped to her knees.

Every chain drew taut.

“He has the controlling piece,” Eshara shouted.

I saw it then.

A metal rod held in the armored man's left hand.

He was pulling the prisoners toward himself through their restraints.

One child slid across the floor beside the fallen man.

I caught the doorframe and froze the threshold into a smooth ramp before anyone's wrists could strike the broken stone.

Then I looked for a place to stand.

There was a clear patch beside the weighing-house steps.

Close enough to see.

Far enough from the prisoners.

No ally between us.

I became lightning.

For an instant, there was nothing but the arrival.

Then my boots struck stone beside the man with the rod.

He turned too late to stop my hammer hitting his shield.

The pale barrier broke with a sound like a bell splitting.

His sword came around toward my neck.

I became rain.

The blade passed through.

But the gold along its edge burned across the wind of my shoulder, scattering droplets into steam.

Pain tore through the shape.

Divine power.

Vaerun had warned me.

I moved with the blow, refusing the instinct to rebuild flesh around it. My hammer struck the man's left forearm.

The rod fell.

Across the yard, the chains went slack.

He lunged for the rod.

I kicked it beneath a skin of ice and drove him back with the hammer's haft.

He raised his sword again.

This time, I drew my own.

I was not Avarn.

The man opposite me knew his weapon, and his first change of angle nearly proved how much I still had to learn.

I caught the cut too far from my guard.

Steel scraped.

My shoulder burned.

Then I heard Avarn's voice in memory.

Keep the point where the fight is.

I shortened my movement.

Turned my wrist.

The next attack slid along my blade instead of dragging it aside.

I stepped in, struck his sword arm with the guard, and put my point against the opening beneath his chin.

“Release it.”

His eyes flicked toward the rod beneath the ice.

I pressed the point closer.

“The sword.”

He let it fall.

Thor reached us a moment later, seized him by the back of his armor, and pulled him clear of the weapon.

“Prisoners,” she said.

I turned at once.

The controlling rod remained intact beneath the ice.

That mattered.

The ward specialist would tell me afterward that breaking it while the bands were active might have left their last command burning through the prisoners' bodies.

At the time, I only knew not to smash what I did not understand.

Elyan appeared beside the threshold in a flash of white.

“The road is held. No wagons got through.”

“The restraints—”

“I'm bringing the specialist what she needs.”

He vanished again.

I stayed with Eshara while the first band was made safe.

It took longer than I wanted.

Everything took longer than I wanted.

Outside, Vaerun's storm settled into rain. Lexander's soldiers searched the carts. Avarn walked the length of the cutting to make certain nobody had fallen where we could not see them.

Inside, the woman who had warned me about the bands watched the specialist work.

“Will it come off?”

“Yes,” the specialist said. “But I need you to keep your wrist still.”

The woman closed her eyes.

I knelt beside the fallen man and helped Eshara lift him onto a stretcher.

My shoulder hurt.

I was grateful to have something straightforward to do with the rest of me.

We counted seventy-three prisoners.

Sixty from the shed and the wagons.

Thirteen from the office.

Then counted them again as they passed the lower cutting.

Two needed stretchers. Several could walk only with help. A little girl refused to leave until someone found the shoe she had lost beneath a cart.

One of Lexander's soldiers found it.

He carried her afterward when she proved too tired to use it.

We had wounded of our own. A cut along one scout's thigh. A broken wrist. Burns on the hand of a soldier who had caught a smoldering door before it fell against the escape route.

The healers worked beside the stream beyond the quarry.

No one was missing from our teams when Eliza finished the count.

I listened to that report twice.

Thor understood why.

She stood beside me while I watched the stretchers being secured.

“Your shoulder.”

“I know.”

“Show the healer.”

“I'm going.”

For once, she believed me.

The burn was narrow and ugly, but shallow.

The healer cleaned it while I explained what had happened to Vaerun.

He listened closely.

“You held the form after being struck?”

“For a moment.”

“And then?”

“Changed back once I'd moved.”

He nodded.

“Good. You didn't try to prove the storm couldn't be hurt.”

I looked toward the captured man sitting under guard.

“It made its point.”

Avarn joined us carrying my practice lessons into the aftermath without any apparent difficulty.

“Your second parry was better.”

I stared at him.

“You saw?”

“Enough.”

“The first?”

“We'll discuss it tomorrow.”

Thor laughed.

Then Avarn rested a hand briefly on my uninjured shoulder.

“You kept him away from the rod. That's what mattered.”

He went to help load the last stretcher.

Elyan carried word ahead.

We followed at the pace of the people we had come for.

I did not travel home as lightning.

The boy who had carried his younger sister through the yard walked beside my horse until I dismounted and offered him the saddle.

He looked at the animal with suspicion.

“Will it throw us?”

“Not if we go slowly.”

“Both of us?”

“Both of you.”

He allowed me to lift his sister first.

Then climbed up behind her.

For the next part of the road, I led the horse and answered the little girl's questions about my hair.

Was it always that color?

No.

Did snow do it?

Something like that.

Would hers turn white if she went where we were going?

No.

She seemed relieved.

After a while, she fell asleep against her brother.

He kept one arm around her and watched the trees.

By the time we reached the gate on our return route, Havenreach was ready.

Evelyn met the first stretchers. Ilyen and the other healers took over the careful work of deciding who needed immediate treatment and who most needed warmth, food, and uninterrupted sleep.

Mirelle stood near the receiving tables with Mary.

She did not ask the newly freed people to recount what had happened.

She asked for names.

Then repeated each one back correctly.

Cassia and Lysandra arrived after their lessons to help with the written records. Their cases remained stacked beneath a bench while they checked spelling, family connections, and which children belonged with which adults.

Julian waited farther back with Garrick Valewood.

He had brought no games this time.

Only cups, which he carried where the attendants directed him.

When he saw me, his eyes went to the bandage on my shoulder.

“I'm all right,” I said.

He gave me a look painfully familiar from Evelyn.

Then handed me a cup too.

Evelyn found me once the most urgent patients were settled.

She examined the burn and listened to the account without interrupting.

When I finished, she rested her forehead against mine.

“Seventy-three?”

“All here.”

Her breath left her slowly.

Adriana joined us a little later, walking more carefully than she had in the morning. I moved to meet her before she could cross the whole room.

“Sit,” she told me.

“You were about to say the same thing,” Evelyn observed.

“I was.”

We found a bench wide enough for all three of us.

For a while, neither woman asked for anything more than my presence.

I gave them that gladly.

Across the hall, Avarn stood beside one of the rescued families. A child had caught his sleeve, and he waited while the mother finished speaking to a healer.

He had held the way out.

This time, the people behind him had reached it.

The children were still awake when we returned to our rooms.

Apparently the news of my arrival had made bedtime negotiable in their opinion, though not in Helena's.

Carol came first.

She stopped short of embracing me when she saw the bandage, then climbed carefully onto my uninjured side once I sat down.

Garrick stood in front of me.

“Did you do the rain?”

“Yes.”

“Did it work?”

“It helped.”

He studied my shoulder.

I let him.

“And the lightning?”

“That helped too.”

Carol rested her head against my chest.

“Did you come home faster?”

I thought of the little girl on the horse. Her brother's arm around her. The line of people making their slow way beneath the trees.

“Today I came home with everyone else.”

Garrick considered that.

Then climbed beside his sister.

Later, after they were asleep, Adriana opened her book at the desk we had given her.

I watched her write the number seventy-three.

Then she paused, drew a small line beneath it, and began a new sentence.

Uriah came home tired, and the children kept him sitting still.

Evelyn read over her shoulder and smiled.

I stayed where they had put me.