Amicia shook her head. “No. Please—more killing will not help our cause. And right now the sorcerer is having it all his own way. I know—better than most—what the captain intends. Let me try this.”

“To distract him?” Prior Wishart asked.

“Because it is the right thing to do!” Amicia said, surprised at her own vehemence. “We are religious, not killers like—”

Bad Tom smiled and all his teeth gleamed. “You mean me, lassie? Aye. I’m a killer.” He leaned forward. “I warrant you’ll want me around before this day is older.” He was annoyed, she could see.

She ignored him and his annoyance. Amicia dismounted and walked forward on the path alone. They were on the western road, and she was aware in some distant place in her mind that the gorge and the great falls were only a few miles to the east. But that was not her work, not today or any other day—memories of that Amicia were increasingly difficult to access. She shut them away, or merely forgot them. Something was happening inside her, some cascade of belief and realization.

She banished her doubts and new discoveries, reached out for her sisters at Lissen Carak and then reached into the sky.

She touched the wyvern. Wyverns were, she knew, strong, almost elemental folk—stubborn, and difficult to break to anyone’s will.

This one had been broken—or at least bent. The binding was unsubtle and of immense power. Her answer was more subtle, but the result was never in doubt—no matter how thick a rope is, a knife will cut it. Amicia severed the binding.

The wyvern, six hundred feet above her, turned—and flew away, with a low, deep cry of anger.

The second wyvern she liberated more quickly.

Fifty leagues to the north, while pushing his forces across an Alder break so wide and so tortuous that Thorn feared his army would sink into the mud rather than cross, he felt the opposition.

Ash became next to him, an insubstantial black mist that coalesced into a young child with two heads. “Fuck her and her piety,” Ash screamed in his harmonious chorus of voices. “I hate humans.”

Thorn felt ops torn from him and from the world around them. Trees died. An irk shaman five hundred winters old was leached of his powers and then his soul.

Thorn, I am not yet of this world. Give me your power and I’ll teach this child of men to play with one of my bindings.

Thorn had little choice. But—greatly daring—he attempted to hide potentia in the new place in his head.