When she reached the center of the clearing, she raised her voice. “To make sure you understand who you now must deal with…”

She gave her anger to fire, forming it into a circle behind the circle of women. She held on to it long enough so that flames a finger-length high shot up from the ground, giving the women enough warning to step forward before the fire roared straight up as high as a man, forming a burning wall.

She formed another circle an arm’s length from the fire and summoned air and water. Wind whipped around that circle with enough force to knock several women off their feet. It rose into the sky, twisting through the clouds overhead, gathering them until they turned dark and heavy with rain.

Thunder rumbled, loud enough to make the ground shake. Lightning flashed.

She gave her power to the storm, letting her temper and raw feelings be its channel.

The clouds released their burden, and torrents of rain pounded the clearing and the women inside the circle. In the pauses between thunderclaps, she heard horses neighing in fear, she heard the Fae men shouting, she heard women wailing—and she heard the angry, distressed bugling of one other horse.

Then she heard nothing. She fed the storm. The storm fed her. The Fae didn’t want to accept her because she wasn’t exactly what they were? So be it. Let them see exactly what she could be. Let them—

She saw the woman and her four companions. The woman, whose face had been filled with joy and delight while watching the dance, now looked at her with terror-filled eyes.

Do no harm.

For a moment, her mind went blank, her feelings went numb. In that moment, she felt something flowing from the land, something that had been striving to reach her through the fury of the storm.

Joy. Celebration. Love.

Rhyann.

Do no harm.

She heard the horse’s angry bugling and turned to see Mistrunner rearing on the other side of the wall of fire. He wheeled, galloped away from the fire, wheeled again, and charged toward the flames. He stopped short of the flames, then wheeled again to make another charge.

“No,” she whispered. The breeding or training that instilled in him a need to protect his rider would soon override his instinctive fear of fire. He would try to leap that wall of flames in order to reach her and—

Fire burns.

Do no harm.