THE STORM

Dale’s condition delayed Alton’s search for answers. He’d tried to hide his impatience from her—it wasn’t as if it was her fault. According to Leese, the Rider’s slowly healing wounds and the travel from Woodhaven had strained her and hampered recuperation. She’d been allowed to leave Woodhaven too soon, Leese had insisted, and Tower of the Heavens would have to wait a few more days for Dale to rest up.

It was true, Alton reflected as he approached the tower. He’d observed dark rings beneath Dale’s eyes and that she moved stiffly. She would not admit being tired or in pain, and he chose blindness, not wanting to see what was right in front of him because he needed answers, and he needed them now. Leese, however, had other ideas, and Dale was forced to take bed rest and swallow noxious teas that were supposed to help her heal. When Alton left her, he saw her expression of guilt for letting him down.

He could have said something reassuring to her, but he hadn’t. He’d just left her tent, bridling with frustration, frustration verging on anger at the delay. Now he stood before the tower, his hands clenched at his sides, needing to vent all he held within.

Delay!

His urgent need to fix the wall rose in him like a fever. He could no longer abide waiting. Every day lost meant another day closer to disaster. As if shadowing his mood, clouds built all morning, blotting out sunshine and turning day to dusk, and now they hung bloated and leaden above, ready to loose torrents of rain. The tips of trees wavered in the growing wind, as restless and unsettled as he felt. The wind carried the tang of the sea. This was a sea storm brewing, the kind that racked the coast in late summer and into fall, and here they were not all that far from the ocean.

He could practically feel the oncoming storm throbbing through him, and when he closed his eyes, he saw winds peeling spray off the crests of waves, layers of waves that plunged and reared gray-green and spewed foam. That turmoil roiled inside him.

Wind whooshed through the encampment snapping tent flaps and banners and sending sparks from campfires showering through the air. Columns of smoke bent, coiled, danced. It was as though the Earth had made a great exhalation.

Then everything stilled.

“We’re in for a good blow, m’lord,” said a nearby soldier on guard duty by the tower.

“Yes,” Alton replied, his voice quiet and tight. He gazed up at the sky and the first fat drops of rain fell from the heavens and splattered on his face.

The storm deepened the dark of night, the wind whipping the walls of Alton’s tent. He secured his shelter as best as he could with extra lengths of cord, and so far it was holding, but rain battered its way in through any hole it could find, and the wooden poles that supported the tent braced against the force of wind. He thanked the gods the tent was on a platform or he’d be swamped.

When his candle’s sputtering and twisting light added to his growing headache, he blew it out and went to his cot, which he’d had to move from beneath a leak, and laid down, pulling his damp blanket over him.

The shriek of wind and groan of tree boughs became voices in his mind as he drifted into uneasy sleep, and the drumming of rain on canvas was the hammer blows of a thousand stonecutters.

It was the voices, though, that bore deepest into his mind, their wailing, their despair. Their hatred. Walls of stone closed in on him and he tossed on his cot. The voices screamed at him.

He turned to his side, breathing hard, fist opening and closing even as he slept.

Go away, cousin, the voices said. Stay away. Die, cousin, we hate you.

Alton cried out, his own voice lost in the storm. The maelstrom raged on.

The residue of Blackveil’s poison flamed in his blood, bringing on the fever and the dream that haunted him. Karigan came to him in the ivory dress, her brown hair sun-touched with gold. His head rested on her lap and she caressed his temple, her touch warm and soft.

Behind her the limbs of trees swayed and groaned, turned black and snarled, reaching around her for him. Karigan’s hair fluttered in the breeze, and she began to transform into a loathsome creature with yellow eyes and claws that scratched his cheeks.

Betrayer! Alton screamed. He launched from her lap, fell from his cot onto the tent platform. A peal of thunder extended his scream.

He knelt there, panting, sweat dripping down his face. He was insufferably hot and the storm without only seemed to fuel the storm within. The wall hated him, and he hated it back.

He stood, kicked over his chair, swept a pile of books off his table. He staggered out of his tent without even donning cloak or pulling on boots, lightning illuminating the way.

Outside rain pelted his face and instead of quelling his fever, it empowered him. As the storm ripped tents from their ties around him and snapped branches, Alton reveled in his own power and screamed at the wall, screamed in fury at Blackveil and Mornhavon the Black.

“I hate you!” he yelled. “I’ll find a way! You can’t defy me!”

He then cursed the gods and lightning filled the sky above him, but he continued his tirade, no longer conscious of his words or the destruction the storm wrought around him.

Even when Dale rushed out to him, her greatcoat draped over her shoulders, and tried to drag him out of the rain, he didn’t stop his cursing or shaking his fist at the heavens.

“Idiot!” she cried at him, and she slapped him.

He hit back.

The world clarified around Alton. He saw the devastation as if for the first time, and all he felt was cold and tired, his inner storm spent. A flash of lightning revealed Dale in the mud at his feet, struggling to rise, but obviously hurting.

“What have I—?” He bit off his own question and helped Dale up, then, supporting her, led her through the rain back toward her tent, its flaps whipping in the wind.

“I’m sorry,” he told Dale.

“I know,” she replied.