Chapter 182: Four Elements

(Elizabeth Aurelius POV)

Every fight has a second breath, my first combat tutor used to say: the one you take after your first plan has failed. He said most people die before they take it.

I took it standing on the old flagstones, with the creature’s long head turned toward my chest and its forelimb folding slowly back into its body.

It hadn’t hurt me yet. That was information too.

From the direction of the steps, muffled as though it were coming through deep water, a whistle sounded. One long call. Everyone on the convoy knew that one.

Hold your position.

Further off and fainter, another long call answered it from the gate. My guards had looked for me among the rocks, found nothing, and sounded the hold, and Renn had heard.

The water I had thrown at its legs lay in a dark slick across the flagstones, doing nothing useful. I called it back up, and it gathered above my left shoulder again, smaller than before.

I started with its legs.

The stone of the platform came up around its two front limbs in rings, thick as my wrist, and closed. A horse would have fallen. A bear would have torn the rings out of the ground and taken a few flagstones with them.

The creature did neither. It leaned forward, and the rings broke along their weakest lines, as though it had known where those lines were before it pushed.

I made one more pair, and this time I put the weak lines where no push would ever find them: deep inside each ring, at the back, away from where it leaned. Plain force would have cracked the front first.

It didn’t lean forward this time. It twisted each leg inside its ring, only slightly, and the rings split along the lines I had hidden, at the back, where nothing had been pressing. Whatever it was reading, it was reading the stone itself.

So I stopped trying to hold it and started watching it instead.

I let my air settle over it, as lightly as a cloth laid over a table, and read its weight. Before every step and every turn of that long body, the weight moved first. That was how I found the tell.

Before it reached, its weight went back. It wasn’t much, only a settling into the hind legs, the way a cat settles before it jumps. A breath later, a forelimb would unfold.

It reached for me twice more while I learned this. Both times I was already somewhere else when the limb arrived.

Both times, it reached for the centre of my chest.

It never struck at my head. It never went for my legs to bring me down, which is what I would have done in its place. When the limb missed, it didn’t swing or follow through. It simply folded back, and the long head turned to find me again.

It wasn’t trying to cut me. It was trying to hold me still.

That came to me like a word in a foreign language that finally makes sense, and it left me cold.

And anything that wants you still will come to wherever you stand.

So I stood still.

I planted my feet and let the fire above my shoulder go small, and I waited. I made myself look exactly like a thing that had finally run out of ideas.

Its weight went back.

The forelimb unfolded slowly and carefully, bending in its three wrong places as it reached for the place under my breastbone. I let it come. I let it come close enough that I could see the pale lines moving under its hide.

Then I closed the stone.

This time I didn’t make rings. I brought the platform up around the reaching limb in a sleeve, from its shoulder to its first bend, and locked it there. At the same instant I let the fire go, straight into the joint where the sleeve ended, and it burned.

The creature made a sound I hadn’t heard from it before. It came from deep inside it, long and low, like a great weight shifting on old timbers.

The pale lines along the burned limb flared and ran, bright as lightning seen through cloud.

Then it pulled. The sleeve of stone burst apart. The limb tore free and swept across me as it came, with no more aim in it than a falling branch.

Its edge caught my left shoulder. The hide along it was as hard as split slate, and it went in at the top of my shoulder and tore halfway down my arm, through cloth and skin and the muscle under them. I felt it grate on the joint.

For a moment there was only cold. The pain came after, and I was on one knee on the flagstones without remembering how I had got there.

Blood was running down inside my sleeve, fast and warm, and dripping off my fingers onto the stone. I tried to close my left hand. It closed slowly, and not all the way.

I made myself look up.

The burn on its joint was real. I had seen hide blacken and split. Now, as I watched, the dark hide was closing back over it, slow and certain, like ice closing over a hole in a river.

Underneath, the pale lines had gone dim again, moving as slowly as they had before I touched it.

I had no idea what that meant. I filed it away anyway, because the things you don’t understand in a fight are the things that kill you after it.

I gave ground. I didn’t want to, but I was bleeding faster than I could afford, and I needed room to think more than I needed the ground.

I went back across the platform toward the steps, with water still turning above my shoulder and stone ready under my feet.

Halfway to the steps, the air changed.

It was very faint. On one side of a line I couldn’t see, the air lay still around me. On the other, it moved, the westerly wind coming over the ridge as if nothing on this platform had ever happened.

Between them ran a seam, and the air slid along it the way water slides along glass.

I had found the edge of whatever this was.

I sent a thread of air across it. Nothing caught it. The thread went straight through and lost itself in the wind on the other side.

I lifted my fingertips to the seam, very lightly. There was nothing there to stop them, only the wind from the far side, cool against my skin.

I pulled my hand back.

Three paces to my left, the younger of my guards came up the steps at a run.

He stopped as though he had run into a door.

He stood there with his palm flat against nothing at all, a few feet from me, staring at the empty flagstones. He pushed. His hand didn’t move. He pushed harder, with his shoulder, and the empty air didn’t give.

It held him. It hadn’t held my air, or my fingers.

The older guard came up behind him and put out his own hand. It met the air and went no further. He said something short that I couldn’t make out, and the younger one turned and ran back along the path toward the gate.

The hold had already gone out. He would be running to tell Renn the rest of it: a wall nobody could see, and somewhere behind it, me.

The older one stayed where he was, with his palm against the air, staring straight at me without seeing me.

They knew I was gone. They didn’t know where, and they couldn’t reach me.

But I could reach them.

I could take one step and be on the far side of that line, beside a man with a whistle, with the gate a few hundred paces away and Renn’s whole garrison behind it.

I looked back.

The creature was following me across the platform without hurry, its head turned toward my chest. The burn on its joint had almost closed.

I didn’t know whether the seam would hold it. I had no reason to think that whatever had made a wall like this would stay politely behind it.

My guard was still at the seam, a few feet from me, with his palm flat against nothing. If I stepped out and the creature followed me through, he would be the first thing standing between it and me.

He wouldn’t step out of its way. My guards never do. I had just watched that creature tear its own limb out of a sleeve of stone, and I didn’t believe for a moment that he would survive it.

Behind him, the path ran back along the ridge, past the low wall where I had left Alash lying on his pillow with Daphne beside him, and on to the gate.

I couldn’t know what it would do. It was arithmetic with half the numbers missing.

If I stayed and I was wrong about the seam, I was the one standing nearest to it. If I stepped out and I was wrong, he would be, and then whoever came next along that path.

I stayed inside, but I wasn’t going to fight it a step from my guard. If it would come to wherever I stood, then I could choose where that was.

I waited for its weight to go back. When the forelimb unfolded, I was already moving, low and fast across the flagstones on a gust of my own air, past its shoulder and on toward the parapet.

Its head turned to follow me, and the rest of it came after.

When I landed, the parapet was at my back again. The creature was coming toward me across the platform, away from the steps, and away from the man standing at the seam.

Until now I had kept the fire close and narrow. The whole ridge was dry grass, and the people I had brought here were scattered along it.

But the platform was bare stone, and the air inside the seam had gone still. Fire is mine to steer. I could keep it on the creature and pull it back before it ever reached the grass. That would have to be enough.

The first time I put all four together like this, I was standing in a training chamber, and I did it because I wanted to know if I could.

My instructor told me that I could, and that it did not mean I should. I told him that sounded considerably less important.

He had been right, until today.

Water struck earth. The fist of stone behind me burst into thirty pieces, and air caught every piece before it could fall. Fire swept through all of it.

For half a breath, the space between us was full of burning stone.

Then I threw it.

The creature took the whole of it along its length. I heard the stones hit, a hard, rolling sound like a cart going over a bridge. Its hide split in a dozen places. Fire got into the splits and stayed there.

This time the pale lines blazed white, all along its body, running and branching under the hide as though the whole creature were made of cracked ice with the sun behind it.

It staggered. It actually staggered, one long leg folding under it, and for a moment its head swung away from my chest.

Then it straightened, and its head swung back, and it came on.

It hit me before I had finished breathing out.

There was no settling back this time, and none of its old care. It came at the centre of my chest with the whole weight of its body, as though being hurt had finally made it hurry.

Its shoulder drove me back into the parapet. I hit the stone with my back and slid down it onto the flagstones.

The blow had cost it something too. All that weight had stopped against the parapet at once, through me, and the leg that had folded under it before buckled again. It lurched back a few paces, scraping on the stone, with fire still burning in the splits along its hide.

For a moment the sky was the only thing I could see.

It was very blue. The fire had gone out above my shoulder. The water had fallen apart into rain that pattered on the stone around me.

I could hear the creature breathing, slow and even. Through what was left of my air, I felt its weight steady as it found its feet, and then settle back into its hind legs.

I knew that settling. I had a breath before it reached for me, perhaps two.

I got my good hand flat against the flagstones.

When I was thirteen, my earth tutor taught me a technique. He gave it a name with three titles in it, which I have never used, and he taught me the most important thing about it: a technique shown once is a technique someone can prepare for.

So I never showed it at Zenith, where my instructors spent a year wondering what the First Princess was holding back.

I had used it fully exactly once, in the old training hall at the palace, with nobody watching but James. When it ended, I fell, and he caught me.

He wasn’t here.

I reached down through the flagstones into the ridge.

Earth is the slowest of the four. Water flows and fire leaps, but earth has to be asked, and it answers in its own time. Most days I ask it for a fistful, or a ring around a leg.

Now I asked it for everything.

The whole lookout answered me at once. The platform and the old stone of the ridge beneath it woke in my hand together, and I closed my fingers.

The platform rose. It came up in layers, wall folding over wall, with pillars locking into the gaps between them. I kept every wall of it on my side of the seam.

It rose around the creature and around me until the open stone we had fought on was gone, and there was a structure in its place. It had corridors and narrow places, and I had made every one of them.

Every space the creature could move into was a space I had chosen.

I fought it from inside my stone.

I sent water down grooves I had cut in the walls and let it out under its legs, so that the stone was never dry where it stepped. I sent air through gaps it couldn’t see, so that I could read its weight from every side.

Fire I kept for the long corridors behind it, so that every way it turned there was heat waiting.

And I closed the walls, a finger’s width at a time, until the creature was standing in a narrowing room of my own stone. When it was small enough, I brought both sides of it together.

I heard its hide crack. I heard a long, deep sound that I think was one of its legs breaking, and the pale lines lit the whole structure from inside, white through every gap.

It was the most damage I had done to anything in my life.

It was costing me everything I had.

The technique drinks from the core faster than any core can fill. I had known that since I was thirteen. I could hold it for well under a minute, and I was already deep into that minute.

My channels were burning from my palms to my shoulders, a hot bright pain that grew every time I asked the stone for anything more.

Somewhere far away, my left arm had stopped answering me. My shoulder was still bleeding. I could feel the warmth of it soaking into my side. I held on.

Then the creature began to fold.

I watched it happen through a gap in my own walls.

Its joints bent backward. Every one of them bent, one after another along its length, against the way a joint should go, like a page folded back against its crease.

Its long body narrowed, and its shoulders drew in on themselves. The pale lines blazed so brightly that I had to look away and then make myself look back.

And it poured itself through a gap in my stone that no body that size should ever have fitted through.

It came like water finding a crack in a dam, a little at a time, until suddenly the whole weight of it was on my side of the wall.

On the near side of the gap, it unfolded again, joint by joint, back into the shape it had been. One of its legs dragged now, and it didn’t seem to care. The burns along its hide were already closing.

Its head turned toward me.

I tried to close the gap behind it. The stone answered slowly, and then it barely answered at all. The walls of my structure began to tremble around me, because the hand holding them was shaking.

I had given it everything, and everything had broken its leg and shut it in a room of stone, and it was still coming.

I reached for fire, and got a handful of sparks that died before they reached the ground. Water came as a thin trickle down my wrist, and stopped.

I knelt among what was left of the lookout with my channels on fire and my left arm hanging, and watched it walk toward me without hurry along a corridor I had made.

There was nothing left in my hands to put in its way.