Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher Page B

she had collected slowing the oncoming steam enough to allow her to flee. Beritte took a jumping step over the nearest arm of the onrushing water and ran toward the kitchen doors, sobbing.

    Isana clenched her fists and closed her eyes, wrenching her mind from the girl, forcing herself to take deep breaths, to regain control of her emotions. The anger, the sheer, bitter rage howled inside her like a living thing trying to tear its way free of her. She could feel its claws scraping at her belly, her bones. She fought it down, forced it away from her thoughts, and as she did the steam settled and spread throughout the room, fogging the thick, rough glass of the windows. The kettles calmed. The water started pooling naturally over the floor.

    Isana stood amidst the sweltering steam and the spilled water and closed her eyes, taking slow, deep breaths. She’d done it again. She’d let too much of the emotion she’d been feeling in another color her own thoughts, her own perceptions. Beritte’s insecurity and defiant anger had glided into her and taken root in her own thoughts and feelings—and she had let it happen.

    Isana lifted one slim hand and rubbed at her temples. The additional senses of a water-crafter felt like being able to hear another kind of sound—sound that rubbed against one’s temples like eiderdown, until she almost felt that it was grating her skull raw, that blisters would rise on her face and scalp from the sheer friction of all the emotions she felt rubbing against her.

    Still, there was little she could do about it now, but to control herself and to bear what came. One couldn’t open one’s eyes and later simply decide not to use them. She could dim the perceptions Rill’s presence brought to her, but she could never shut them away altogether. It was simply a fact a water-crafter of her power had to live with.

    One of many , she thought. Isana crouched down, murmuring to the tiny furies in the spilled water on the floor, beckoning them until the separate puddles and droplets began running together in the center of the floor into a more coherent mass. Isana studied it, waiting for all the spare droplets to roll in from the far corners of the kitchen.

    The reflection of her own face looked back at her, smooth and slender, and barely older than that of a girl’s. She winced, thinking of the face Rill showed her every time the fury came. Perhaps it was not so different from her own.

    She lifted her hand and traced her fingers over her cheek. She had a pretty face, still. Most of forty years, and she barely looked as though she had lived twenty of them. She might look as old as thirty, if she lived another four decades, but no older. There were no lines on her face, at the corners of her eyes, though faint shades of frost stirred in her auburn hair.

    Isana rose and regarded the woman reflected in the water. Tall. Thin. Too thin, for a woman of her age, with scarcely any curve of hip or breast. She might have been mistaken for a gawky child . True, she may carry herself with more confidence, more strength than any child could muster, and true the faint grey touches in her hair may have granted her an age and dignity not strictly warranted by her appearance—and true, everyone in the whole of the Calderon Valley knew her by name or sight or reputation as one of the most formidable fury-crafters in it. But that did nothing to change the simple and heartless fact that she looked like a boy in a dress. Like nothing any man would want to marry.

    Isana closed her eyes for a moment, pained. Thirty-seven years old, and she was alone. No suitors, naturally. No garlands to wear, or dances to plan for, or flirtations to plot. That was all long past her, even with the apparent youth her water-crafting bestowed on her. The youth that kept her always a bit distant from the other women her age—women with husbands, families.

    She opened her eyes and idly bade the spilled water to make itself useful and clean