The Queen shrieked again in anger and flung herself airborne. For a moment, Tavi thought that her wind furies were still in a state of disruption and that she wasn’t going to have enough lift to fly—but then a vortex like a small tornado abruptly gathered beneath her, tossing her own brood about like toys, and she came rushing up at them at terrible speed, a wave of raw anger pulsing through the air before her as she flew straight toward Kitai.

Kitai set another salt-headed arrow to her bow, drew, and calmly waited until the last instant to loose it. The arrow leapt from the bow.

The vord Queen snatched it out of the air with her left hand, turned her wrist in a sinuous movement too swift to follow, and drove the tip toward Kitai’s throat. Kitai lifted an arm in a desperate block, and the salt-crystal tip drove through her forearm and began to emerge from the other side before the arrow’s slender shaft snapped. The blow still drove her forearm up against her mail, and the protruding portion of bloodied salt crystal was powdered to grains against it.

Kitai dropped like a stone.

Tavi sheathed his sword and altered his course smoothly, pouring on the speed, and hoped that Kitai had the presence of mind—even as she plunged through a lethal fall—to realize what the Queen was almost certain to do next.

Even as Kitai fell, she drew her third—her last—salt arrow from the specially designed quiver and loosed it at the Queen in an instinctive snap shot. The vord Queen had to swerve to one side to avoid the arrow, even as another firecrafting blossomed forth from her dark-nailed hand.

Tavi rolled so that his belly was to the sky as he intercepted Kitai, her shoulder blades slamming into his belly, her head whiplashing against his armored chest, even as he made a greater effort of furycraft to bear both of their weights. The Queen’s firecrafting boomed deafeningly, exploding less than ten feet away from them with enough intensity to char Tavi’s eyebrows and fill his nose with the reek of burned hair.

Tavi had caught Kitai perhaps twenty feet from the ground, and his back actually bounced off a hibernating mantis’s head before their fall stopped, and he started gaining altitude again. He let out a grunt, made sure his arms were around her solidly, and poured on all the speed he could, running for the cloud of mist that had enveloped the abandoned steadholt.

“Kitai?” he called. “Kitai?”

She did not answer.

Thunder rumbled across the face of the Valley, a threatening, growling sound from the thunderheads gathering around Garados’s snowcapped peak, colored a deep orange by the first rays of the rising sun—Thana, the wind fury known to the Valley’s holders as Garados’s wife, was preparing a battle force of her own.

“Kitai!” Tavi screamed.