Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [154]
They have a sorcerer. The origin of the flash of chaotic power that had popped the wagon’s axle pins and burst the rear wheels off seemed revealed to Ista’s inner eye, for the color in his body still pulsed and shivered as if in some aching reaction or echo. Yet even as she stared across at him, the demon light seemed to shrink in on itself, retreating.
The page and the waiting woman, clinging to each other, were prodded out of the back of the wagon at sword’s point and made to stand near Arhys. The march’s eyes flicked to them, half closed as if in some attempt at reassurance, and returned to the old woman and the officer. Illvin and the Daughter’s men had all disappeared from sight. Scattered? Captured? Slain?
Ista grew conscious of her plain riding costume, stripped of decoration or marks of rank, of her flushed face and sweat and dirt. Too-familiar calculations raced through her mind. Might she pass for a waiting lady or a servant? Conceal from her captors the value of their prize, effect some escape from their inattention? Or would they just throw her to their troops for a cheap tidbit, to be tormented and discarded like that unfortunate maidservant of the rich woman from Rauma?
The sorcerer-officer’s eye took in Goram, and widened briefly, then narrowed in thought. Or even . . . recognition? Thought, but not confusion. He sees Goram’s ravaged soul. Yet it does not surprise him. His eyes traveled on to Arhys, and his lips parted in true astonishment.
~Mother, she shines with a terrible light, and her guardian is a dead man!~ he said in Roknari to the woman at his side. His stare at Ista intensified, grew fearful, as if he wondered if she were performing Arhys’s appalling marvel of revivification. As if he imagined she concealed some further bodyguard of walking corpses, about to erupt from the dirt of the road beneath their feet.
This must be the Dowager Princess Joen herself, Ista realized with a shock. And Prince Sordso. The erect, slender young man looked anything but a sot right now. And yet—was it Sordso, in that alert body? The demon light seemed utterly ascendant. He took a step backward; the woman grabbed his arm, her fingers pinching fiercely.
~She bears a god, we are undone!~ he cried in rising terror.
~She does no such thing~ the woman hissed in his ear. ~Those are nothing but smears. She has barely enough capacity to channel a little sight. Her soul is choked with scars and disruption. She is afraid of you.~
That much was surely true. Ista’s mouth was dry, her head pounding; she seemed to float on a rocking sea of panic.
The woman’s blue eyes narrowed, flared with triumph. ~Sordso, look at her! This is Ista herself, just as she was described! Half the prize we came for, delivered into our hands! This is a gift from the gods Themselves!~
~She hurts to look upon!~
~No, she is nothing. You can take her. I’ll show you. Take her now!~ The clawed grip shook the young man’s arm. ~Undo her.~ One of the coiling strings of light writhing from her dark belly seemed to brighten, blaze. Its distal end, Ista saw, terminated in Sordso’s body like some obscene umbilicus.
The young man moistened his lips; the violet light returned to the margins of his body, and intensified. He raised a hand, using the dense habits of matter to direct a force that had nothing to do with matter at all. A purple glare boiled off his palm and wound around Ista like a coiling snake.
Her knees went first, buckling beneath her, dropping her into the dust. Her cracked scabs split open altogether, and she could feel the blood trickle and soak, slick beneath the battered, sweat-stained, loosening bandages. Her spine seemed to unhook itself, bone from