An instant later, the girl in my arms came back to life. My Wit-sense of her blossomed into full bloom. She had stopped struggling at the moment of the dragon's death. Now she suddenly curled into my arms. “I'm so cold. I'm so hungry,” she wailed, and then, as I looked down in astonishment at her, she burst into childish tears.
“A moment, a moment,” I told her, and hated that I had to set her little bare feet down on the snow. I tore Chade's cloak from my body and settled it around her. It came all the way down to her toes, and as I picked her up again, she pulled her feet up into it gratefully, huddling into a shivering ball in my arms. “Give her to me, give her to me!” Peottre demanded. Tears were streaming down his face, cutting through the blood.
“Oh, little fish, oh, my Kossi! Elliania, look, look, our Kossi has come back to us. She is herself!” The old warrior turned to his niece, and then as if joy had drained his strength from him, he fell to his knees, holding the child to his chest and murmuring over her.
Elliania looked over at us, her heart in her eyes, and then looked down at the woman who sprawled in the snow at her feet. She dropped to her knees by her mother and her tears came as she said, “We saved one of them. At least we saved one of them. Mother, I did my best. We tried so hard.”
Dutiful looked over at her from where he knelt on the other side of the woman. Gentle as a nurse, he pushed the filthy hair back from her emaciated face. “No. You saved both of them. She's unconscious, Elliania, but she's back, too. I can feel her with my Wit-sense. Your mother has come back to you, too.”
“But . . . how can you know this?” She stared down at the woman's face, not daring yet to hope.
Dutiful smiled at her. “I promise you, I know this is so. It's an old Farseer magic, a gift of my father's lineage.” He stooped again to take up the lax woman. “Let's get her to warmth and shelter. And food. The battle seems to be over, for now.”
They all just stopped fighting when the dragon died, Chade confirmed for me as I stood and peered out over the battlefield below us. It was as if they all just suddenly lost heart.
No. They regained it. It's hard to explain, Chade, but I feel it with the Wit. Her servants were partially Forged, but with the dragon's death, all that was taken and put into him came back to them. The same thing happened to the Narcheska's mother and sister. They're no longer Forged. Have the Outislanders speak to those we fought. Offer them food and welcome. And comfort them. They may be very confused.
I allowed my eyes to wander over the battlefield below me, and saw the truth of my own thought. The Pale Woman's soldiers, to a man, had dropped their weapons. One man stood, his hands clapped over his ears, weeping. Another had seized one of his fellows by the shoulder and was laughing wildly as he spoke to him. A small group of men stood clustered around the stone dragon. Lifeless, it had settled unevenly into the glacier, an ugly statue set awry.
But strangest of all was that Tintaglia had come to her feet. She walked stiff-legged as a stalking cat toward the stone dragon. Cautiously, she extended her head on her gracile neck. She sniffed the monster, nosed it cautiously, and then without warning, struck it a ringing blow with her clawed forepaw. The stone dragon rocked stiffly in the snow but did not fall over. Nonetheless, Tintaglia lifted her head high on her long neck and trumpeted her triumph over her foe. Blood might still ooze from the bites and scratches he had dealt her, but she claimed victory as hers. And around her, men raised their voices to join their cries of triumph to hers. If ever there had been a stranger sight than this dragon celebrating amidst human cheering, then no minstrel has ever told it.
From high above, a trumpeting call echoed hers. Battered and tattered, Icefyre circled in a wide spiral above us. He banked his wings and slid down the sky, swooping over us in a lower circuit. On the ground, Tintaglia threw back her head and bugled again. Around her throat, panels of her scales suddenly stood up like a mane and a crest on her head, scarcely noticeable before, stood erect and silver like a crown. A wash of color went over her, from deepest blue to brightest silver. The men who had gathered around her drew back. When she leaped from the ground to the air it was effortless in the manner of a cat floating from the floor up to a tabletop. Her wings opened as she sprang, and with three beats of them she was climbing.
Icefyre immediately tipped his wings and stroked them frantically, but the female easily outdistanced him as they climbed. He trumpeted after her lustily, but she did not bother to reply. Her wings carried her up and up, until to my straining eyes she might have been a silver gull winging overhead. Icefyre, almost twice her size, starved and tattered, battered his way through the sky in pursuit of her. I blinked as they passed before the sun.
