Fire in the Mist by Holly Lisle Read Free Book Online Page B

not all just stay under that bridge, waiting."
    She noticed movement from the crowd, as the people who had been standing in the front moved aside to let several others through. Faia was close enough now that she could make out details.
    The ones who had come through the crowd to stand in front were two men and two women dressed unlike any she had seen in her entire life. The men wore gaudy gold-and-green robes that swept in smooth lines to the ground, and rich carmine hoods that fell away from their faces in gracious draping curves. Their hair was long, pulled back and braided, and their beards were worn long, also braided, and adorned with heavy gold rings and wires. The women had their hair cut straight off at their shoulders and worn loose—in fact, had it not been for the revealing tightness of their clothes, she would have thought them to be men as well. They wore leather pants and matching leather jackets—the tall, dark brunette wore red, the tiny redhead, pale blue. Both sported soft, loose black boots that bagged around their calves, and heavy silver rings at neck and wrist and ankle over the boots.
    The two men were standing close together, conferring; they were obviously maintaining as much distance from the two women as they could without going out and standing in the muddy, swollen river.
    "Lady bless," Aldar whispered. "I have never seen anything like them before."
    Wonderful. Faia shivered in the cold rain and worried. There is something off kilter about that mob on the bridge, and about their interest in us—
    "Aldar, stay here," she hissed. "I do not like this, and I do not want you to get hurt. I will go up and talk with them and find out what is going on."
    "But what about you?" Aldar worried.
    Faia thought of what she had done to the village of Bright, and shook her head grimly. "I can take care of myself if I have to. I want to know that you are safely out of harm's way first, though."
    Apparently Aldar was remembering the village, too, because his eyes grew round again. He gripped her hand. "Be careful, sis'ling," he said, using that childish term of endearment for the first time.
    She bit her lip. "Just stay put."
    She and Aldar had paused several stones' throws from the entryway to the bridge. It was trouble that was waiting for her, and no doubt of it. She took a firmer grip on her staff, and even though she had not intended to, she pulled the energy of earth and sky like a cloak around her and Aldar. Then she strode forward to meet and challenge whatever Fate had in store.
    It had been a long and weary wait. The Sensings of the magic that had first been felt when it blasted Bright came at odd intervals. Those Sensings were almost always in the dark of night or the very early morning. They were random fluctuations, undirected—unlike that first horrifying burst that had destroyed the entire village to such a degree that only the etchings of foundation marks melted into the native bedrock remained to show that the village had been there. And though the random power only reappeared in brief, untraceable, and apparently harmless bursts, the talent behind it was still so awesomely strong that Frelle Medwind Song broke out in a nervous sweat just thinking about it. The surges couldn't be pinpointed, but the general areas of their occurrence could be mapped—and whatever was making them, it had been heading directly from Bright to Willowlake.
    Medwind and her colleague, sitting in their shared office in Mage-Ariss had figured direction and speed and had determined that whatever it was that was causing the disturbances—and whatever it was that had, not incidentally, leveled Bright—would be arriving in Willowlake fairly early on Terradae morning.
    Apparently, in Saje-Ariss, the same calculations had been made and the same conclusions drawn, for along with Medwind and her colleague, Frelle Jann Raxesmotte, there were two sajes on the bridge in the pale, cold, rainy morning, as tense and drawn and