He pressed a finger to her lips. "Then it will be no more than you accepted as the price to save the tairen. If you can live with three Marks, I can surely live with one."

"Rain…"

"If these were our children, would you want me to stand by and do nothing while you risked your life to save them?"

She had no more defense against that argument than he had.

He turned to the pride's makai. "Sybharukai, if anything happens to Ellysetta, promise you will not let me fly." His lids narrowed over eyes gone abruptly savage. "And if this Mage succeeds in stealing the young, promise you will scorch Eld to a barren wasteland."

The gray tairen growled her assent. «It will be done, Rainier-Eras.»

Eld ~ Boura Fell

Shan leaned his head back against the sel'dor-lined rock wall of his prison, welcoming the familiar searing burn. Over the years, the pain had become almost a comfort. His eyes closed. Weariness and despair crowded his heart. Hope was a thing long lost.

«He has Marked her, shei'tani. She is weaving Azrahn and he Marked her again.»

In the darkness behind his lids, he summoned the image of his beloved, the sweet fire of her hair, the shining brightness of her golden eyes, so that when her answer came it was as if she were here with him, standing before him, the only light left in his world.

«She spins the forbidden magic on purpose? The Fey would never allow it.»

«She tries to save the tairen. The Mage is stealing their souls.» That much he'd gleaned from the link that had tied part of Shan's soul to Ellysetta's since before her birth. «She fights him now."

"She cannot defeat him alone.»

«I know.»

«We must help her.»

«Maur is there in the Well. He will sense our presence, just as he did when we came to her aid before.» Shan's bones were barely knitted from the price he'd paid for that effort, and Elfeya's nightmares over what the Mage had done to her still woke both of them in a cold sweat each night.

«We still must help her.»

Shan hung his head, resting his chin on his chest. He had expected no other answer. «I know.»

«Then show me her weaves, shei'tan, and be my bridge to her soul.»

The Fading Lands ~ Fey'Bahren

Ellysetta gathered the strength of Rain and the tairen and fed their power into her weaves along with more power of her own. For a moment, the healing threads lit up like ropes of sunlight. For a moment, the darkness retreated. But then, just as quickly, the light was leached away.

The kitlings cried out in desperate fear, singing the bright word of her name like a talisman and a prayer. Their trust stabbed her heart as their frightened minds reached out to her the way a fearful child's fingers clutched at his mother's skirts.

With a sob, she sent another blast of power down her weaves, brightness to hold off the dark, but just as before, after a brief flaring moment of hope, shadow consumed the light.

The weaves the Eye had shown her were not powerful enough. She tried to strengthen them with song, pouring love into every word. She spun every healing weave she knew. And still nothing worked. Her Azrahn-enhanced weaves might have been enough to save the kits before the Mage loosed his soul-stealer upon them, but now the battle had changed. She wasn't just trying to draw the kits from the Well, she was fighting to keep something from pulling them back in.

The kitlings were dying. Connected as she was with her weaves, she could feel them slipping away, not just one or two but all of them. Their bodies were perfectly healthy, yet slowly, their sweet voices and the brightness of their souls were fading.

You are a shei'dalin. Hold them to the Light.

The thought blossomed in her mind, filled with urgent conviction. She needed to spin a shei'dalin's healing weave, the kind Venarra had used to hold that dying woman's soul to life. Venarra hadn't taught her the patterns yet, but her mind must have instinctively recorded them, because the knowledge was there, as if she'd spun those weaves a thousand times.

Adelis, Bright One, Lord of Light, please, teska, help me. Guide me. Do not let me fail. The gods had answered her prayers in the past, working their miracles through her instinctive, untutored magic. She prayed they would help her again now.

She forced herself to block out the pitiful cries of the baby tairen and surrendered to the crooning, powerful song of the tairen. It flowed over and through her, carrying away her fear and doubt. Her hands unclenched. Her muscles relaxed. Her breathing became deep and even. She was a well of calm, and into that well her consciousness dove deep.

The source of her power lay far within her, shining bright as the sun, more white than gold, dazzling with the strength of her shei'dalin's love. She absorbed the power into her consciousness until every thought blazed with magical resonance. Then, when she could hold no more, she sent her spirit, the living essence of her soul, out of her own body and into the small bodies of the tairen kitlings, just as the shei'dalins sent themselves into the body of another when they needed to perform great healing.

Follow your weaves into the Well.

As if guided by the invisible hands of the gods, she found the humming threads of her healing weaves inside the kits and followed them, leaving the gleaming radiance of the world and descending into the dark realm of souls.

Light was extinguished. The abrupt darkness alarmed her. Had she fallen for one of the Mage's traps?

She reached instinctively for Rain across the threads of their bond. «Rain … »