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.Igraine’s persuasive words filled the silence.“If we don’t change our ways, we’re doomed.Did you-all of you!-not see it in Takar?” He swept his arms wide.There was murmured assent.“Did you not feel the hopelessness, the uselessness in your lives?” Jyrbian looked around at the crowd, saw the eager faces, the fevered eyes.Igraine’s voice took on a compelling, urgent quality.“Can you not see what our kind will become if we continue on that misbegotten path? Have you ever felt more alive, living as we have these past few weeks, than in all of your miserable lives before?”He had them now, their hearts and minds.The surge of joy, of faith from his followers, was almost tangible to behold.“We will leave in the morning,” he said.“We will find a place of our own, where we can be safe and happy.”The crowd sighed.The Ogres, arms around their loved ones, began to drift away.Everlyn went with her father, without a glance for Jyrbian, who would have followed her had Lyrralt not caught his arm and pulled him back.“Is this heresy what he has been preaching all along, about not having slaves?” Lyrralt accused his brother, his glance taking in Khallayne, too.Jyrbian shrugged, watching Everlyn’s disappearing back.“I’ve been too busy to sit around Igraine’s feet like a doting child.” He turned away.The others also walked away, leaving only Khallayne and Bakrell to hear Lyrralt’s horrified voice.“This is madness! It was bad enough when he was talking about ‘choosing for yourself’ Now he wants you to live as humans live, digging in the dirt for food, building miserable clay huts with your own hands! Don’t you even care?”“Do you? Care, I mean?” Bakrell peered closely into Lyrralt’s eyes as if to gauge the sincerity of his answer.“Well, I don’t care,” Khallayne said, before Lyrralt could answer.“You don’t care as long as you can practice your heretical magic!”She met his angry gaze with an expression of equal determination.How long since she’d thought of her magic as a thing to be hidden away? As a wrongness? Any philosophy, heretical or not, was worth the peace and joy and sense of belonging of the past weeks.She shrugged, looking eerily like Jyr-bian a moment earlier.“You’re right.I don’t much care about his philosophy, one way or the other.”She turned and walked away, leaving Lyrralt alone with a renewed conviction that he must act soon, whether a good opportunity presented itself or not.He had been looking for a safe moment to kill Igraine, one that would allow him to escape before his deed was discovered.Perhaps he would have to die in the act.The runes hummed approvingly on his skin.* * * * *Fear.The face was there, and it was her own.But it wasn’t.The pale sea-green complexion, which had always drawn men to her like bees to honey, was mottled, as splotchy and knotted as tree bark.The black eyes were dull and stupid and humorless.But they were hers.Screaming woke her.The sound so nearly matched the images of her nightmare that for long moments, Khallayne lay, twisted in her blanket, wrapped in screams that seemed to be her own, except…The screaming went on and on, growing louder then ending abruptly in a silence more terrible than all the noise.Thinking, at last, that the voice crying out in terror had been Jelindra’s and not her own, Khallayne leapt to her feet, stumbling as her blanket caught around her ankles.Across the campfire Tenaj and Lyrralt each fought free of their blankets, too.Nearer the tent where Igraine slept, Jyrbian tossed off his blankets with a curse that woke more people.“‘What in the name of Sargonnas is happening now?”Before anyone could answer, a new scream ripped through the air.Without hesitation, Jyrbian drew his sword and wheeled in the direction of the disturbance.But his sword would be of no use against the thing that had sprung into the air, conjured out of nothing.Or maybe there was more than one.Khallayne wasn’t sure.As Jyrbian charged, slashing with his sword, the cloud that rose into the sky might have been one or twenty creatures
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