Bernard leapt for the coach just as the windcrafters began to lift off. He caught the running board along its side with one hand, slung his bow over his neck, and used both hands to struggle to pull himself up as the coach rose away from Kalare, steadily gathering speed.

Amara called to Cirrus and found the fury more responsive, if still more sluggish than normal, presumably thanks to Lady Aquitaine countercrafting against Kalarus’s wind furies. She soared up to the coach, landed with her feet on the running board, twined her left arm through the coach window, and reached down to Bernard with her right.

Her husband looked up, glanced at all the leg she was showing in her scarlet slave tunic, and leered cheerfully at her as he grasped her hand. She found herself both laughing and blushing-again-as she helped him up to the running board, then into the coach.

“Are you all right?” he shouted to her.

“No!” she called back. “You scared me to death!”

He burst out into a rolling laugh, and Amara stepped off the coach’s running board and into Cirrus’s embrace, stabilizing herself before darting ahead of the coach and slightly above. She looked back over her shoulder, cursing that she hadn’t been able to braid her hair for the disguise, and hadn’t thought to bring along something to tie it back with. Now it whipped around her face wildly, in her eyes whenever it wasn’t in her mouth, and it took her a moment to get enough of it out of the way to see behind them.

She almost wished she hadn’t done it.

The gleaming figures of Knights Aeris were rising from Kalare. Rook had warned them of the twenty or so who had remained in the city’s garrison. Amara looked at the four mercenary Knights Aeris struggling to keep the overloaded coach in the air. They did not have the speed to evade a pursuit, and the terrain below them offered them few opportunities to play hide-and-seek with Kalarus’s forces. Without being able to rise to the higher winds, they could not use the clouds as cover, the other favored tactic for evading airborne pursuit, and the only one their slower group might have successfully employed.

Which meant, Amara thought, that they would have to fight.

It was not a ridiculous prospect for them to fend off a score of enemy Knights or so-not with Amara and no less than two High Ladies of Alera there.

But as Amara watched, more Knights Aeris rose from the city. Twenty more. Forty. Sixty. And still more.

With a sinking heart, Amara realized that when Kalarus returned to his citadel, he must have come by air-and that he must have brought his personal escorts, the most capable and experienced of his Knights Aeris.

Against twenty Knights, they would have had a chance. But against five times that number-and, she felt certain, Kalarus himself…

Impossible.

Her throat went dry as she signaled the coach’s bearers that they were being pursued.