“The babies!” cried the woman at the window. “They sleep together and I can’t drop them!” She pointed to a small side chamber near her.

Daja shoved the first woman that she had wrapped in blankets at the door. “Go!” she ordered, pointing. “Get them out of here!”

She grabbed a third pitcher of water, dumped it onto a tumble of sheets, and carried the wet linens to the nursery door. She could feel the blaze in the main house advance. She had to slow it down. Freezing for a moment, Daja closed her eyes and threw up the biggest shield she had ever created in her life, a solid barrier the width of the nursery, stretching from the ground floor to the roof overhead, to prevent the fire from going under or jumping over her floor. She placed her shield ten yards into the main house and made it as hard as she could, knowing her real fight would come when the fire reached it.

The cool-headed servant was already in the babies’ nursery, bundling up three infants there. Daja followed her inside. “Why so many children here? So many babies?” she shouted as she folded a sheet into a sling.

“Two of us are nursing our own-we’ve permission to keep them with the Ravvi’s newest,” the woman yelled over the roar of the burning house. She was streaked with soot: working in the open window, she had been in the path of any smoke that entered the room and passed outside. She coughed for a moment desperately, gasping for air as she clutched a small gilt figure of Yorgiry that hung on a ribbon around her throat. “And Ravvikki Lisyl had her tenth name-day, with her friends to stay the night.”

Using sheet slings, Daja hung one baby off each of the young woman’s shoulders. The fire approached her barrier. Once it touched her defenses, Daja’s war would begin. She would have to hold it in place or no one would get out alive. If it reached the nursery, the open windows and the corridor leading to the door outside would act as chimneys, pulling fire and smoke down the only exit.

She draped the young woman in wet sheets. “Cover your nose and mouth; keep the babies covered,” she ordered, picking up the last child. They went into the main nursery. The women Daja had ordered to get out still waited by the door, too frightened to move.

There was no time to waste breath on curses. Daja gripped her companion’s arm. “You’re the only one with sense. Lead them out of here-down the hall to the first stair, and outside. Hurry them. Go!”

“But you-” The woman reached for Daja. “You must lead!”

Daja shook her head. “I’ve got to hold the fire. Get them moving!”

She shoved the woman toward the rest. The servant hesitated, then ran to her fellows, yelling. When they balked she thrust them and the children around them through the open door, harrying them like an overworked sheepdog.

Daja slung the infant she carried on her back, draped a final wet sheet over her as a cloak, then stood at the center of the main nursery as the others left. She faced the wall between her and the main house, listening to her power. The topmost part of it was weak. There wasn’t enough to keep the third floor blaze from its hungry advance. She retracted her power there before the fire ate it. A moment after she did so, she heard the third floor shutters overhead smash open under the fire’s pressure. Now the roof on that part of the building would burn. On the other side of the wall before her the huge blaze pressed her barrier, leaning on her. She felt her power forced back, inch by inch, until the wall started to smoke. Tiny gray threads worked through cracks in the plaster.

She had kept back some of her strength in case she needed it. That time was now. Daja fell deep into her power and freed it of all boundaries. She dragged her shield to her side of the wall and filled it with everything she had, on that floor and the ground floor. If she held the blaze on the other side of her barrier, the women and children had a chance to reach the outside door below.

Some would die. The air was very hot: water-soaked blankets and sheets would dry fast. As protection against suffocation they were half-measures at best. All she could do was pray to the Bookkeeper that their accounts weren’t due. Her task was to pit her strength against that of a blaze that was dining well on a wooden house rich with paints and oils, whipped to white heat by a hard wind streaming off miles of icy lake. She needed her friends for this; she needed Tris, who could help her shove the fire into the icy canals and the cold water death of the Syth. She needed Sandry to weave the blaze into a net that would imprison it. All she had was herself. It would have to do.

The fire roared, a massive tide of heat and destruction. It wanted her to know it was no tame forge fire.

“And you’re no forest fire,” she informed it, her teeth chattering with fear. “I handled one of those that would make you yelp like a puppy.” She did not admit that her friends had lent her their strength, that Sandry managed one woven strip, and Frostpine another. This fire didn’t have to know that.

Frostpine-was he all right? Was he putting his will against this thing in the servants’ dormitory?

Her barrier wavered: she couldn’t think about Frostpine. NO, she thought grimly, leaning forward against the blaze’s force as she might lean into a high wind. NO.

It pressed. Her skin felt taut, as if she were a cooking sausage about to pop. The fire stuck a finger through one gap in the wall, then another, widening them. Daja backed toward the door. She would have to give the fire the nursery to keep it from breaking through in the hall and on the ground floor. She couldn’t hold this room, not now.

She eased through the door, still fighting to hold the barrier upstairs and down. Her magic was burning to feed her shield, burning, and running out of fuel.