26. Chapter 26 #2
Daiti and Alza both seemed to be judging the other mounts, prancing back and forth and tossing their heads as if trying to encourage them to do the horse masters’ bidding.
When he saw me approach though, Daiti broke off his posturing and trotted over.
I swung on to his back easily, knowing it would be easier to command respect from horseback.
Alza approached as well, but I waved her away.
“Find Erix,” I directed. She did not understand my words quite the way she did her master’s, but she didn’t need to be told twice to go to him, and she wove off into the tents with her head held high.
Then, I nudged Daiti with my knees, wheeling him back into the pen where we could herd the horses more easily.
I clucked my tongue as I did, both trying to calm the mounts and spur them into action.
Reaching out with my mind, I gently directed the flow of my magic toward the sparks of life that burned within every horse nearby.
Slowly they began to calm and follow both my directions and the horse masters’, filing out of the enclosure and joining the steady stream of clansmen retreating up the beach. By now, nothing was left of Warrick’s camp but smoldering piles of ashes where their fires had been.
With dismay, I noted that not everybody was fleeing.
Some approached the beach curiously, apparently coming to see the encroaching danger for themselves.
They began to gather around Lord Nathaira, mirroring her posture as if they scorned nature itself—not a wise decision for those who faced off against her fury every day in the fight for survival.
Now that the horse masters had the situation under control, I left them to manage the last of the evacuation and turned Daiti toward the gathering group on the beach. As I grew closer, the moonlight illuminated the maroon sashes around many of their waists.
Many of Clan Padra were unswervingly loyal to Lord Nathaira, no matter how harsh she had been. It had led them to turn their back on a girl and leave her to die at their lord’s command, and I would not wrest their devotion from her easily—if at all.
I directed Daiti between the crowd and the distant ocean.
“You must retreat!” I insisted. At the firmness in my voice and the anxiety building in my chest, Daiti reared and bucked slightly, and I let him, holding on with just my legs.
Anything to gain the attention of those who looked at me skeptically.
My gaze skated over their faces, scared I would find my parents. My stomach roiled almost as insistently as the ocean at my back.
Would they even recognize me?
“You promised a return to the old ways with your leadership, but you don’t understand the true nature of the desert if you order a retreat at the first sign of uncertainty,” spat the man to Nathaira’s left.
The assembled group rumbled in agreement.
My eyes scanned the crowd, looking for any sign of doubt—any shred of reason I could exploit to get them to move.
I noticed that the man I recognized as Nathaira’s warlord did not join in the grumbling.
Perhaps it was not easy serving a lord as unforgiving as Nathaira.
“We are not retreating,” I insisted. “We are living to fight the battles that matter. The fight to retake Kelvadan and truly heal the desert.”
I thought a flicker of doubt flashed in the warlord’s eyes, but it was too late. The whooshing sound of water built, at first a distant splashing, no louder than the waterfalls in the homes in Kelvadan, but then it grew to an insistent rushing.
I whirled Daiti around, finding a swell of water racing toward us.
I frowned as it hit us, the wave not even coming up to his chest as it rushed in.
While it was nearly to the onlookers’ waists and knocked several of them back a few steps before skittering up the beach to dampen the bottoms of the few abandoned supply tents, it was not the catastrophic wave I had imagined from Warrick’s frantic telling of the tale.
A derisive laugh sounded behind me, each mocking peal of amusement hitting me like a physical blow. I looked over my shoulder to find Nathaira with her head thrown back in mirth. The people around her started to chitter disdainfully as well.
“This is what you would have us run from?” Nathaira asked, gesturing around her to the already retreating seawater, doing nothing more than leaving them a little damp. “The riders of Clan Padra will never respect somebody who turns tail so foolishly.”
Dread dripped down my spine into my belly. I had been steely in my resolve that Erix and I together would be enough, but gnawing doubt seemed slow to leave its residence below my ribs, telling me that I was wrong to put any trust in Warrick. I had been too easily fooled by a foreigner once again.
Those doubts were overshadowed by an icy fear still in my chest as the water rushed away from the crowd on the beach, even faster than it had retreated the first time.
My intuition regarding politics was still growing, but my instincts for survival were strong—Nathaira had made sure of that.
And right now, those instincts were telling me to run.
“Look.” Clan Padra’s warlord pointed toward the horizon, his voice thick with dread.
Turning back toward the ocean, the source of my anxiety became clear. Rushing at us was a wall of water, black and turgid, but as tall and swift as an oncoming sandstorm.
“Run!” I shouted.
This time, the crowd did not hesitate. They began to flee up the beach, and I followed, putting Daiti and I between them and the oncoming wave of destruction. Daiti and I might be able to outrun the tide, but the clansmen on foot would be overtaken.
They would all die, because of Nathaira’s pride.
No. I would not let them perish because she had been unable to overcome her hatred of me. This battle was between her and me, but I had sworn I would protect all of the desert’s people.
Without slowing Daiti, I leaned forward and swung one leg over his back, so I laid across him on my stomach.
As his powerful muscles pounded into my abdomen, I grimaced at how easy Erix made these trick riding maneuvers seem, and how I had scoffed at him for their impracticality.
The muscles in my side screamed as I fought to twist myself around, hauling my other leg up and over Daiti’s back so I now faced backward.
If I had been any less attuned to every jolt and heave of his muscles, he might have thrown me off, but I was already opening my mind to the flow of the desert.
I felt Daiti’s bright energy clearly as I reached out, hoping to do whatever I could to slow the oncoming wall of water.
I had held an avalanche and redirected a sandstorm.
Surely, I could buy these people the time they needed to escape.
But my mental fingers found no purchase in the water.
It was as if my power found nothing to hold.
Where every rock and grain of sand had the essence of the desert in it, the water was something else entirely.
I sensed unfathomable darkness and mystery where in the desert I normally reveled in wildness and danger.
I could not hold the water.
So, I reached for the wind. With a cry, I shoved my hands forward, blasting my power out with all the fury of a sandstorm. Salty water sprayed my face as the wave reached us, but it split around the blade of air I had made.