Kethry heard a strangled croak, and turned to see Keyjon clutching her throat and turning scarlet with the effort of trying to speak. Stormwing watched her from where he sprawled; his finger traced a little arc, and her arms snapped out in front of her, wrists together, fingers interlaced.
Only then did he rise, with a curious, boneless grace, and pace slowly to where the woman stood, a captive and victim of her own greed.
Kethry got up off the ground, wincing as she felt sore places that would likely turn into a spectacular set of bruises. Tarma climbed down out of the cage, favoring her right leg.
'What happened with the fool sword?' Tarma asked, in a low voice.
Kethry shrugged. 'I guess when she couldn't identify him as positively male or female, she decided to act first and figure it out later.'
Stormwing looked up as they reached his side, but said nothing. 'What are we going to do with her?' Kethry asked.
He ran a hand through his hair. 'I do not know,' he confessed. 'I have a feeling that if I tried to harm her, that blade at your side would turn against me.'
'Probably,' Tarma said, in disgust. 'But she's killed at least one person that we know of. A shaman of the Clans, at that, and sacred. Blood requires payment-'
'Would you accept a punishment that left her alive?' the Hawkbrother asked unexpectedly.
Tarma hesitated a moment, then replied with caution. 'Maybe, if she couldn't get free to try this again. If she couldn't even leave here -- and if it was a living hell for her. My Lady favors vengeance, my friend.'
He nodded. 'My thought as well. Lady, would you be content also?'
Kethry only nodded; she felt power building, coming from some source she didn't recognize, but akin to the pool of energy available to all White Winds Adepts. She hadn't realized he was an Adept before-
He raised his hands. 'All your life, you have sought to be the power in the center of all, to be the manipulator of the fabric of the world around you,' he said to Keyjon, solemnly. 'So, I give you that; your greatest desire. Control of all you can see, manipulator of the web-'
He pointed; there was a ripple of the very fabric of the place-and a distortion that made Kethry's stomach roil and eyes water.
Then when she looked again, Keyjon was gone. Instead, hanging from a web that spanned a corner between the hedges, was an enormous gray spider, hanging fat and heavy in the center of the pattern.
'Spiders are notoriously short-sighted,' Stormwing said, as if to himself. 'Now I shall have to see to it that nothing comes here but noxious things, that deserve to be eaten-and old or diseased things, that deserve a painless death.'
He looked back at Kethry, and in that moment she knew that not only was he enormously more powerful than she had guessed, he was also older. Much, much older.
'Here is a guide,' he said, producing another ball of witch-light. 'I have much to do here, and this will take you back to your horses before dawn.' Now he smiled, and Kethry felt as if all her weariness and aches had been cured. 'I could not have been freed without your aid. Thank you, sisters-in-power. Thank you.'
'You're-welcome,' Kethry said. She wanted to say more, but the witch-light was sailing off into the darkness, and Tarma was tugging her arm. She followed the Shin'a'in into the maze, quickly losing track of where she was, but torn apart by conflicting emotions. There was so much she wanted to learn from him, so many things he must know-
If she had Stormwing's kind of power, it would make her a target for those such as Keyjon. Was the knowledge worth the risk?
Risk not only to her, but to Tarma, to the children, to Jadrek?
