Honor and Blood

"It's safe now," he told them, wearily. "Miranda, could you help us carry Jula back to the Tower?"

"Is it safe?" Miranda asked.

"I was told it was," he replied.

"Then come over here. I'm not carrying her over to you, you know."

"What just happened, my mate?" Jesmind asked. "I felt… something. Just on the edge of my senses."

Tarrin remembered that Jesmind had minor Druidic ability. It was enough for her to sense that. He padded over to Jula with them following him. "The Goddess showed me how to banish the Demons," he explained. "That's why they disappeared, and the Goddess told me they were the last ones. That magic you felt was the Firestaff," he said grimly. "It's revealed itself, just like the Goddess said it would."

"What does that mean?" she asked fearfully.

"It means, love, that now we'll have to race everyone to get there first." He reached down and picked up Jula, his bond-daughter, and looked down at her. She really was a pretty young thing, her wary expression softened by her slumber. His mind was racing, but he kept enough about himself to assign priorities. If he didn't have to stay in the courtyard anymore, he could go help. But he couldn't leave the Tower grounds, so if he saw any more fighting, it would have to come to him. Before he worried about that, though, he wanted to get Jula into a warm bed, and make sense out of the two major events that had just happened.

Why couldn't these things ever come at him one at a time, when he had time to digest them before the next big shock came along?

"You realize that there was a direction in that," Miranda told him. "We're going to have company."

"You felt it too?" he asked, then he remembered what Miranda was.

"Who wouldn't have felt that?" she asked. "I thought my blood was going to freeze."

He didn't answer that. If he told her that it came through the Weave, and she shouldn't have felt it, it would leave open all sorts of questions he wasn't quite sure for which she was prepared to accept the answers. "I know," he answered her original question. "But they won't know exactly where they're going, only a general sense of it."

"That's still enough to make it a crowded journey."

"It's a big ocean, Miranda."

"Not that big."

"I can't argue with that. I'm sure they'll find some way to get in our way."

Things weren't quite so peaceful for Allia, Keritanima, Je

The screams of the dying and the wounded were drowned out by the sharp cracks of Wikuni muskets, their deadly weapons withering the advancing Goblinoids along the walls. One brave Were-kin had turned one of the massive ca

"Watch it, watch it!" someone shouted, and a Sulasian used a long pole to push a ladder of Waern off the wall. Though they had breached the gate, they still tried to come over the walls to surround the defenders. Keritanima shouted for her bodyguards to get clear, and they melted out of her path immediately as the Sulasian soldiers scrambled out of the way themselves. A host of Trolls tried to surge forward as the soldiers blocking their way suddenly fled, but all they managed to do was rush headlong right into a savage blast of pure fire that lashed over the battlement at the top of the wall, frying a good fifty foot length of the wall's top and everyone atop it.

Keritanima blew out her breath, panting. Je

The soldiers closed ranks before Keritanima, the Sulasians using their pikes to push the burning Trolls back among their own burning kind, or forcing them to fall from the walls. The ones that were burning shrieked and flailed wildly, some of them impaling themselves on Sulasian pikes in a mad attempt to run in their pain. But more Goblinoids advanced over the burning bodies of their cousins, Waern and Dargu, filling in the hole she had made before they could advance to retake that section of the wall.

That was enough! Keritanima could see that they weren't going to be able to stop the Goblinoids from taking the wall, unless they took the wall away from the Goblinoids! She looked down, where Je