Raven's laugh--Raven's power--rises to meet it, bright and wild and true.
they hear the wind they hear beyond the wind the other sea
"Power itself is a cage, Blodwen Rowlands--a trick, a trap, a joke. I know it very well."

No thread tangles at his fingertips, no charms hang from his sleeve. All that he uses is that laughter, spinning through the thunder and the lightning and the shriek of the wind.
like a closed shell near them, they don't hear
"Freedom is in the choosing, in the changing. And you have said, I think, that it is a thing you cannot do."
anything else, they don't look among the shadows of the cypresses;
Something is building, stirring, springing to life around him--nothing like light, nothing like flame, but something else altogether.
for a lost face, a coin; they don't search,
"But I can."
watching a raven on a dry branch, for what it remembers.
And now he moves, darting forward, heat haze spilling from his hands, from his eyes, from his skin, rushing to meet her through the rising storm.