In the amber stone record, the brown floodwater rose to Theru’s chin as a tangled mat of uprooted pine trees slammed into the upstream pilings.
Fifty yards out in the torrent, young Azhrak was tearing through the white water on all six legs—catching a tipping cart with its broad back shell, shoving three drowning children up onto the dry abutment, and bracing its snout against the middle span until the last families tumbled onto the mud of the safe bank. Hundreds of people lived because the young beast held the middle current.
And because it was fifty yards out holding the middle span, it could not reach the first pier when the uprooted pines sheared the oak strut in two.
Through the bond, Ysabet felt the old, crushing wave of young Azhrak’s terror hit Pip’s chest—the exact same sickening drop in the stomach Pip had felt in the burning salt marsh outside Bent Reed when it kept the mouse warm in its pouch and arrived one breath too late to save the scorched thorn hare in the ditch. Saving the ones within reach did not magically keep the river from taking the one you loved fifty yards away.
Pip’s front claws dug hard into the limestone gravel of the cavern floor. Its neck muscles bunched, pushing its lattice antler harder into the amber crack as if it could reach across a hundred years of stone and haul Theru out from under the falling timber.
