The Will of the Empress by Tamora Pierce Read Free Book Online Page A

between them and Tris. Herds fled, splashing among the wagons and the riders.
    Chime shot into the air. Lightning rose to cling to the dragon, outlining her graceful figure. Down she swooped, harrying the Traders’ dogs and sheep, driving them into the river and keeping them from fleeing downstream. Briar and Sandry charged back into the water, followed by Traders, making sure people rode across instead of fleeing along the river’s length.
    I’ll kill Tris when everyone’s safely out, thought Daja, keeping the column tight on the upriver side. For causing such a fuss, for frightening everyone, and why? The mimander said there’s no flash flood coming. His specialty is weather with water—the ride leader told me so when we left Summersea!
    She glanced at Tris. The redhead screeched, “Not fast enough!” at the mimander and the caravan leaders. Two long, heavy braids popped free of their ties. These did not crawl with lightning, like the rest of Tris’s braids. They were lightning.
    She dragged fistfuls of blazing power from each andsqueezed them through the gaps between her fingers, creating about seven strips of lightning in each hand. “ Move! ” she screamed, and hurled them in the caravan’s wake. Lightning cracked like whips over the heads of horses and mules. It lashed close enough to one herd of sheep to singe wool and to leave scorch marks on the side of a nearby wagon. Daja saw Tris drag on it to keep it from touching the water. Thank the gods for that, she realized. One strike in the water and we all might cook.
    Three lightning strips flew at the mimander, the caravan leaders, even Daja herself, nipping at the rumps of their horses. Thunder boomed in the canyon, startling the herds into a run. Animals, Traders, and non-Traders alike decided they’d had enough. They, Sandry, and Briar fled across the river with Tris behind them, just in back of the last wagons.
    “Keep going!” Tris screamed, her voice hoarse. Now she used her lightning to goad the caravan’s rear and its front, scaring the horses and the oxen who pulled the wagons until they rushed up the inclining road. The end of the caravan was a scant twenty feet above the canyon floor when a rumbling sound made the cooler-headed riders stop.
    Rocks pattered down the cliffs that overlooked the road. Bits of the ledge that overlooked the canyon floor crumbled away from its edge. In the distance they could hear a dull roar.
    This time, Tris, clinging to her horse’s mane, didn’t need to speak. Everyone scrambled to move higher on thesteep road. They were sixty feet above the riverbed when a wall of tree- and stone-studded water snarled down the canyon to swamp the river flats. It ripped boulders from the ford, ground the road away, and plowed on down into the canyon again. Had they been just a little slower, the savage torrent would have swept them up and carried the remains far downstream.
    “But there was no rain, no snowfall, higher in the mountains.” That lone voice belonged to the mimander. Daja did not look at his veiled eyes, out of consideration for his shame. Trader mimanders studied one aspect of magic all their lives. They chose their specialty when they were young, and risked their lives to learn all they could about winds, or the fall of water from the skies, or avalanches, or storms at sea.
    How humiliating, she thought. It must look like he missed this coming, even after years of study. He knows this caravan puts its life in his hands.
    And how humiliating, to yell at your sister because she doesn’t have time to save over two hundred people and explain herself, too.
    Briar looked at the swirling mess below. He blinked. For a moment the trees were bodies: gaudily dressed men, women and children who were missing limbs or heads, their wounds streaking the brown water red. They were joined by the bloated corpses of yaks, goats, even birds, and by the corpses of soldiers. The stench of the rotting dead swamped him.
    Not here, he