Amara frowned, then said, “They must have diverted a river. Like Aquitaine did at Alera Imperia.”

Bernard thought it over for a moment, then nodded. “The Little Goose is about a mile and a half past that last hill. Would it be possible to move it that far?”

Amara tried to picture the intervening terrain in her mind, especially elevation. “It shouldn’t be,” she said. “We must be thirty or forty feet higher here than at the river’s nearest point.”

The plume doubled and redoubled again, and the rising column of steam began to approach their position on the wall.

Bernard whistled. “Serious crafting. And they did it far enough out so that even if the Queen was in on it, we’d never come within sight of her. Invidia’s idea, you think?”

Amara shrugged. “It would take several crafters working together to accomplish this. Water is heavy. To make it move against its nature that way—I’m not sure if even Sextus could have done it.”

Bernard spat on the ground in frustration. “I make it maybe three-quarters of an hour before they can walk right on up to the wall again.”

Amara shook her head. “Less.”

“Figured we had two, three hours at least.” Bernard clenched his jaw and turned to descend the steps toward the waiting horses. “We’d better get moving.”

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 38

Tavi had been tricked.

Kitai, of course, had been in on it.

He hadn’t meant to sleep, not with so much work left to do securing the city. But between the recent bleeding for Marok and the enormous effort the furycrafting of the Rivan gates had required, he had already been exhausted. And Kitai had been particularly... he searched his thoughts for the proper descriptive word. “Athletic” didn’t seem to convey the proper tone. “Insistent,” while an accurate description, fell somewhat short in any but the most objective sense. He decided that his language lacked entirely a word sufficient to the task of describing such hungry, joyous, utterly uninhibited passion.

There had been food, at some point, discreetly left on the wagon’s seat. Tavi suspected, in retrospect, that it had been laced with a tiny amount of aphrodin, which would explain both his, ah, extreme focus on the evening as well as the nearly comatose state he’d found himself in afterward.

He looked down at Kitai’s hair. As he lay on his back, she was pressed up against his flank, her head pillowed on his chest. Her fine white hair veiled her face, except for the softness of her lips. A strong, slender arm draped over his chest. Her leg was half-thrown over his thigh. She was sleeping heavily, occasionally emitting a sound that an uncharitable (and unwise) person might have called a snore.