Tavi dived at the command tent, a dangerous maneuver when flying so low—but he managed to land perhaps twenty feet off without breaking his legs or ankles, then promptly redirected his windstream to catch the command tent and tear it neatly up off its posts and stakes like an enormous kite. A dozen people in the tent, staff and guards, Aleran and Canim, came lurching to their feet. Half a dozen of them, including Kitai, had already drawn steel before Tavi got a clear look at them.

“To arms!” he thundered, before either the guards or the people within the tent could react. He ran toward the tent, the sword in his hand sending out sparks that threatened to catch his own bloody cloak on fire, and shouted, “Enemy earthcrafters coming in low!”

“Oh crows take it,” muttered Maestro Magnus in a positively offended tone. He had to gather up his long tunic to show pale, scrawny legs as he stepped up onto a wooden camp stool. “Of all the ridiculous nonsense.”

“Where?” Kitai snapped, taking several rapid steps from the others, looking left and right at the ground beneath her.

Tavi focused his thoughts upon the earth beneath him. Subtle though such travel might be, his flight to the command tent had been far swifter, and he felt the foremost earthcrafting coming toward him, several yards away. Instead of answering, he stopped, took a quick pair of steps, and with the power of the earth itself behind his arms and shoulders, thrust the burning blade straight down into the soil beneath him. The blade struck home, though he could tell only from the sudden quivering jerks that ran through the steel to his hand, like the wriggling motion of a fish caught upon a hook that ran through the line and pole to the hand of an angler. He withdrew, the motion effortless with the burning sword, and struck again only inches from the first blow.

The earth beneath him suddenly collapsed downward in a circle perhaps ten feet across. One moment, he was standing upon solid ground, and the next it was falling from beneath him. One hand, formed into a stiffening claw, thrust up from the loose soil. Tavi tried not to take note of the fact that the hand was a woman’s and not young, forcing the fact of what he had just done to the back of his mind.

“Aleran!” cried Kitai’s voice. Her anxious face appeared at the top of the sudden pit Tavi found himself in.

“I’m all ri—” Tavi began.