His face was drawn tight, his eyes burning. "I can't, shei'tani. If I thought I could give you what you need and still keep my oath, I would. But this is too much. Don't ask it of me. I would break my honor. Forgive me." His mouth turned grim, his eyes went bleak. "And forgive me for this as well." He raised his hand. She watched without comprehension as magic gathered at his fingertips, then spun out to surround her. She fell, unconscious, in his arms.

He passed her gently into Ravel's keeping. "Guard her," he bit out. "Keep her safe." He didn't wait for Ravel's answer. He simply stepped outside and leapt into the sky. The tairen's roar rattled windows in panes across the city, and a fierce jet of flame lit up the darkness. He shot up into the icy ether and arrowed east through the night, away from the city.

Sian and Torel ran south through the forest, dazed and shaken by what they'd learned from the woodcutter Brind Paldwyn. They didn't speak, didn't look at each other. For a full bell at least, they just ran.

«We should call General vel Jelani, » Sian finally said, breaking their long silence. «He'll want to know.»

Torel stopped so abruptly, Sian went pelting ten yards past. "All right," he said. "We'll call him now. You're stronger in Spirit than I. Do it. I'll stand guard.”

Torel's nerves were singing as Sian closed his eyes and summoned his power. If the information they now carried was true, it was beyond deadly.

Twenty miles back, in the hut Sian and Torel had left in such a hurry, long, pale fingers passed over the sightless eyes of Brind Palwyn, pulling the lids shut. A pale hand turned over, palm upward. Fingers curled as if cupping a ball. A shadowy spiral, glowing with red lights, rose up from the fingers. Black eyes flickering with red lights stared deep into the whirling spiral of Azrahn. Light and shadow flickered on the ridges of the scar running from the center of his forehead and through his eyebrow to just below his right ear. A moment later, the Azrahn weave dissolved, and the weaver's eyes faded back to their normal piercing pale blue, colder than the glaciers beyond the Mandolay mountains to the far north, the elongated pupils narrowed to thin slits.

The crouching black figure rose to an imposing height and pointed one long finger, calling Fire. Brind Palwyn's body burst into flames, searing, unnaturally hot flames that turned his body to ash in moments, yet never spread to the rest of the cabin.

Swift and agile as a deer, black-booted feet raced through the night-darkened forest, the footsteps soundless, as if they never touched ground.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Flaming gods, Rain was never going to survive this courtship.

Lying on his back on the still-warm sands of Celieria's Great Bay, he stared blindly at the sky as the salty, rolling surf of the Pereline Ocean washed over him. Every muscle in his body was still drawn tight in throbbing knots, desperate for the release he was beginning to doubt would ever come. Or if it did come, it would be too late to save him from insanity.

His need for Ellysetta was an intense, living, driving thing, a relentless torture that kept him near to screaming on the razor-sharp edge of his control.

Gods rot the soulless bastards who invented pinalle. Plague take the servant who kept pouring the bottled blue frustration into her glass. And Rain hoped to all the seven bitter hells that Dorian mated the very life's essence out of Annoura tonight for her thrice-cursed, sowlet-stupid idea of plying Ellysetta with pinalle in the first place.

Because Ellysetta had not only roused Rain's passion with her sensual, heavy-lidded glances and unguarded emotions. Oh, no, it went far, far beyond that. In her uninhibited, pinalle-induced and keflee-enhanced daze, she had woven a Spirit web of carnal hunger so subtle and yet so scorchingly strong that she had sent every breathing person in the banquet hall—mortal and Fey alike—spiraling into an abyss of driving sexual need before anyone knew what was happening. When last he'd seen his fellow dinner attendees, they were falling upon one another like ravening wolves, some couples staggering off to find privacy while others shed every last ounce of reserve they ever possessed on the very spot where they stood.

Bel and the rest of Ellie's quintet had barely managed to make it to the Baristani home before pleading for Rain to release them from their duties. He did, of course. They would have been useless in the state they were in. They'd all five taken off walking towards Celieria's brothel district, but by the time they reached the end of the block, they were running.

After leaving Ellysetta in Ravel's care, he'd thrown himself into the sky and flown here, to the silver beaches of the southern coast, hoping to find some respite—or at the very least a lessening of the weave. He'd found none.

The gods alone knew how long the effect of her weave would last, but it was still going agonizingly strong three bells after its inception. Even with hundreds of miles separating himself and Ellysetta. Lying in the surf, Rain shrieked his fury to the open skies above and pounded his fists in the wet sand around him.

Torel paced restlessly as Sian attempted for the sixth time in the last two bells to contact Belliard vel Jelani and relate what they'd discovered.

"You still can't reach him?" Torel asked in concern. He ran his hands through his dark hair and blew on his fingers. The woods seemed colder than they had just chimes ago.

Sian shook his head and dissolved his weaves.

"Try someone else.”

"I already have. I can't reach Bel or any of the Feyreisa's quintet, nor Dax, Lady Marissya, or any of her quintet. I even tried to contact the Feyreisen. None of them are answering me. They must still be at that palace dinner Bel mentioned earlier today. We dare not pass the information on to anyone else.”