Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [123]
“We are clearly Fire,” said the dragon Adamant. “Ekaterina is Water.”
“Zephyr blight thee,” mused Sasha. “How can Air blight?”
“Weaken him?” the Horse suggested. “I haven’t anything in my scant arsenal that could do that.”
Sasha closed his eyes for a moment in thought; so much of what he did depended on knowing The Tradition and trusting to Luck, but this was not the time to trust to Luck. Was there anything he could do as a Songweaver? “I am not a fighter,” he said, slowly, “but I could sing the strength out of him.”
“Music is Air,” Sergei agreed. “So that is three of the four. But the key one, the one that imprisons him, Earth, must be the strongest of all.”
The Queen frowned, but said nothing.
Why is she so reluctant to join us? Sasha repressed anger at her recalcitrance. It would do no good to get angry with her.
After the silence had gone on long enough to be awkward, the Horse coughed. “How goes the tunneling?”
“One blow of a pick and my men are through,” the Queen said shortly. “You need only say the word.”
The four friends exchanged a look. “With or without Earth,” Sasha said finally, “we must go now, and hope that something turns up.”
“I concur,” said the Horse. The dragons nodded.
“All right, Sergei,” Sasha said, swallowing. “Go and tell Katya to get the girls into the head of the tunnel. I will send the bird as the sign we’re going to break through. I’ll come through in the tunnel itself and join her.”
“We’ll come down out of the sky,” Adamant said. “The bird should bring the Jinn, and we’ll trap him between us.”
“It’s as good a plan as we’re going to get,” Sasha sighed. It felt incomplete. Well, of course it felt incomplete. It was.
“I will tell my miners,” the Queen said abruptly, and stalked off. Rather than one of her elaborate gowns, she wore a slim, calf-length green skirt, a tunic cut away at the neckline and shoulders in a fanciful pattern, and green boots.
Sasha would have preferred to see her in armor. But then, he had hoped that coming out to see the devastation first-hand would turn her more fully to their side.
Alas, it appeared that such was not to be.
“Have I left any argument out?” he asked the others, feeling obscurely like a failure. He should have been able to persuade her, shouldn’t he?
The dragons shook their heads. “You pointed out that the Jinn is not likely to permit a rival power on his doorstep. You noted that although he might be a power of Fire, he is not going to find going underground any sort of hardship, and that he could very well call forth the Earth-fire in the form of volcanics and lava and never have to personally leave the surface to attack her. Her own advisers told her how she has lost or is losing half of her allies. I can’t think of anything more that you could have said.”
He sighed. “Nor can I.” Encourage them, Sasha. They need to think that you think we can all win. He smiled weakly. “Well, my friends, dawn approaches. Let’s get into place. Sunrise will tell us if Fortune favors us or no.”
The ten captives were assembled in the kitchen, with the door to the root cellar open. Katya looked to the nine young women who had spent a fundamentally sleepless night until the arrival of Sergei. Her stomach was a knot, her nerves wound up tight. This was going to be, literally, the fight of her life. And she was not a fighter. She couldn’t let these girls know how frightened she was, though, or the good saints only knew what