Arrow’s Flight Read Online Free Page A

had touched Elspeth with her Empathic Gift, that sense of calm purpose had infected her as well, and she could no more have disobeyed its promptings than have launched into flight from her tower window.
    In a dreamlike state she half-stumbled out into the middle room, fumbled her way to the door, and cautiously felt her way down the spiraling staircase with one hand on the cold smoothness of the metal railing and the other on the rough stone of the wall beside her. She was shivering so hard her teeth rattled, and the thick darkness in the stairwell was slightly unnerving.
    There was light at the foot of it, though, from a lamp set up on the wall. The dim yellow light filled the entranceway. And the wood-paneled corridor beyond was lighted well enough by farther wall-hung lamps that Talia felt safe in running down the stone-floored passageways to the first door to the outside she could find.
    The wind hit her with a shock; it was a physical blow so hard that she gasped. It nearly wrenched the door out of her hands and she had to struggle for a moment she had not wanted to spare to get it closed behind her. She realized that she had gotten only a hint of its force from her window; her room was shetered from the worst of it by the bulk of the Palace itself.
    She found herself at the exterior bend of the L-shaped Herald’s wing; just beyond her bulked the Companion’s stables. Elspeth was nowhere in sight.
    More certain of her ground now than she had been in the unfamiliar wing of the Palace, Talia would have run if she could, but the wind made that impossible. It plastered her clothing to her body, and drove unidentifiable debris at her with the velocity of crossbow bolts. She couldn’t hear anything now with it howling in her ears; she knew no one would hear her calling. Now she became vaguely alarmed; with the wind this strong and in the dark, it would be so easy for Elspeth to misstep and find herself in the river—
    She mindcalled Rolan for help—and could not reach him—
    Or rather, she could reach him, but he was paying no attention to her whatsoever; his whole being was focused on—what it was, she could not say, but it demanded all his concentration; for he was absorbed in it with such intensity that he was shutting everything and everyone else out.
    It was up to her, then. She fought her way around the stables toward the bridge that led across the river to the main portion of Companion’s Field. It was with incredible relief that she spotted the vague blur of Elspeth ahead of her, already across the river, and headed with utter single-minded concentration in the direction of—
    There was only one place she could be heading for— the Grove.
    Talia forced her pace to the fastest she could manage, leaning at an acute angle into the wind, but the girl had a considerable head start on her, and had already entered the Grove by the time she had crossed the bridge.
    The pale blob was lost to sight as the foliage closed around it, and Talia stumbled over the uneven ground, falling more than once and bruising hands and knees on the stones hidden in the grass. The long grass itself whipped at her booted legs, tangling iher feet with each step. She was halfway to the Grove when she looked up from yet another fall to see that it was—gods!—glowing faintly from within.
    She shook her head, blinking, certain that her eyes were playing tricks on her. The glow remained, scarcely brighter than foxfire, but unmistakably there.
    She started to rise, when the entire world seemed to give a gut-wrenching lurch, disorienting her completely. She clutched at the grass beneath her hands, as the only reality in a suddenly unreal world, the pain of her bruised palms hardly registering. Everything seemed to be spinning, the way it had the one time she’d fainted, and she was lost in the darkness with the wind wailing in a whirlwind around her and the Grove. There was a sickening moment—or eternity—when nothing was real.
    Then the