“Careful,” she said, “slow, go slowly-” when he thrust himself at her. Warning him, with the last of her sanity.
The room went white, and blue and green, and thunder cracked, spinning her through the dark, through warm summer air, through-
-nowhere, till she came to herself again, lying dazed under a starry sky, with the ramshackle maze of Sanctuary buildings leaning above her. She felt nothing for a while, nothing at all, and shut her eyes and blinked at the stars again, her fingers exploring what should have been silk, but was instead dusty cobblestone. The back of her head hurt where she had fallen. She felt bruised along her whole back, and where he had touched her she felt a burning like acid.
He never lost consciousness. For a moment he was clearly elsewhere, then lying stunned on pavement with a curbside against his ribs. He had hit hard, and he ached; and he likewise burned, not least with the slow realization that he was not in the riverside house, that he was lying in a midnight street somewhere in the uptown, and that he hurt like very hell.
He did not curse. He had learned a bloody-minded patience with the doings of gods and wizards. He only thought of killing, her, anything within reach, and most immediately any fool who found amusement in his plight.
When he had picked himself up off his face and gained his balance again there was no question which direction he was going.
* * *
It was a long tangle of streets, a long, limping course home, in which she had abundant time to gather the fragments of her composure. Her head ached. Her spine felt quite disarranged. And for the most urgent discomfort there was no relief until she rounded a comer and came face to face with one of Sanctuary’s unwashed and ill-mannered.