A bowman leaned forward with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eyes. “See any dragons while you were there, then?”
Talasyn stopped walking altogether and other conversations happening nearby petered out as several soldiers craned their necks in interest.
“No,” said the lance corporal. “But I never left the docks, and the skies were overcast.”
“I don’t even think they’re real,” said an infantryman, sniffing. “All we have to go on are rumors. If you ask me, it’s smart what the Nenavarene are doing, letting the rest of Lir believe that their dragons exist. People won’t bother you if you’ve supposedly got an army of giant fire-breathing worms at your disposal.”
“I’d kill for a giant fire-breathing worm,” the bowman said wistfully. “We’d win the war with even just one.”
The group started bickering over whether a dragon could bring down a stormship. Talasyn left them to it.
A surfeit of vague images rushed through her head as she stepped away: from nowhere, so sudden, in the space of only a moment’s breath. She could barely make sense of them before they darted out of reach. A coil of slick scales undulating in the sunlight, and maybe a crown as sharp as diamond, as clear as ice. Something inside her, awakened by the soldiers’ conversation, tried to fight its way out.
What on earth—
She blinked. And the images were gone.
It was likely an effect of the pine-scented smoke from various firepits suffusing the longhouse, not to mention the sheer heat radiating from so many bodies crammed into one narrow structure. Sol was kind and charming and much loved, and it showed in how nearly a quarter of the regiment had turned up for his wedding.
They were definitely not here for his bride—rude, prickly, caustic Khaede—but Sol adored her enough for a hundred people, anyway.
As she reached the closed door of the side room, Talasyn glanced back at the newlyweds. They were surrounded by effusive well-wishers clutching mugs of hot ale while the regiment’s field band struck up a lively tune on fife, bugle, and goatskin drum. A beaming Sol pressed kisses to the back of Khaede’s hand and she tried to frown in annoyance but failed miserably, the two of them looking as radiant as it was possible to look in helmsmen’s winter uniforms, the garlands of dried flowers around their necks serving as the only nod to their status as bride and groom. Once in a while, Khaede’s free hand would come to rest on her still-flat stomach and Sol’s blue-black eyes would shine like the Eversea on a summer day against his oak-brown skin.
Talasyn had no idea how these two planned on caring for a baby in the midst of a war that had spread throughout the whole Continent, but she was happy for them. And she wasn’t jealous, exactly, but the sight of the newlyweds stirred in her the same old yearning that she’d lived with for twenty years as an orphan. A yearning for somewhere she could belong, and for someone she could belong to.
What would it be like, Talasyn wondered as Sol chuckled at something Khaede said and leaned in to hide his face in the slope of her neck, his arm looped around her waist, to laugh like that with someone? To be touched like that? An ache shivered through her as she let herself imagine it, just a little bit, reaching for a phantom of an embrace.
A nearby drunken soldier stumbled forward, splashing ale all over the floor by Talasyn’s boots. The sour odor assailed her nostrils and she flinched, briefly overcome by childhood memories of caretakers stinking of steeped grains and curdled milk, those men of harsh words and heavy hands.
Years ago, now. Long gone. The orphanage in the slums had been destroyed along with the rest of Hornbill’s Head, and all of its vicious caretakers had probably been crushed underneath the rubble. And she couldn’t discuss a crucial matter with her superiors while in the throes of despair over some spilled ale.
Talasyn straightened her spine and steadied her breathing; then she rapped smartly on the door of the side room.
As though in response, the deep, brassy tones of warning gongs pierced through the limestone facade of the building, cutting across the merriment like knives.
All music and chatter ceased. Talasyn and her comrades looked around as the watchtowers continued their urgent hymn. They were stunned at first, disbelieving, but gradually a tidal wave of movement swept through the firelit longhouse as the wedding guests sprang to action.
The Night Empire was attacking.
Talasyn ran into the silver night, adrenaline coursing through her veins, a numbing layer against the freezing cold air that bit at her exposed face. Lights were winking out all across Frostplum, window-squares of cheerful gold fading into blackness. It was a precaution to avoid becoming an easy target for air raids, but it wouldn’t do much good. All seven of Lir’s moons hung in the sky in their various phases of waxing and waning, shedding a stark brilliance over the snowy mountains.
And, if Kesathese troops had brought in a stormship, the whole city might as well be a dandelion puff in a stiff breeze. Its houses were erected from stone and mortar and covered in wooden roof trusses and multilayered thatch, built strong enough to withstand the harsh elements, but nothing could withstand the Night Empire’s lightning cannons.
Due to its remote location, all the way up in the Sardovian Highlands, Frostplum had always been a peaceful settlement, drowsing in evergreen blankets of longleaf pine. Tonight, however, it was plunged into mayhem, fur-clad cityfolk stampeding to the shelters and shouting frantically for one another amidst a whirlwind of military activity. It was finally happening, what everyone had feared, why Talasyn’s regiment had been sent here in the first place.
While bowmen took up their positions on the walls and infantrymen assembled barricades in the streets and helmsmen hurried to the grid, Talasyn squinted up at the starry heavens. There probably wasn’t a stormship, she conceded—she’d have spotted its hulking silhouette by now.
She quickened her pace and joined the scramble toward the grid, dozens of army-issued boots trampling snow into mud. It seemed to take ages before they reached the outskirts of the city, where slender coracles bearing Allfold sails striped orange and red were docked atop platforms of honeycombed steel. Curved at the ends like canoes, the small airships, nicknamed wasps because of their diminutive size and lethal sting, gleamed in the copious moonlight.
In the mad dash to her coracle, Talasyn found herself running alongside Khaede, who was also heading for hers.
“You can’t be serious!” Talasyn yelled over the clamor of warning gongs and officers’ barked instructions. “You’re two months along—”
“Not so loud,” Khaede hissed. The line of her ebony jaw was resolute against the falling snow. “The bean sprout and I will be fine. Worry about yourself.” She clapped Talasyn on the arm and was gone before the latter could reply, swallowed up by the throng of helmsmen.
Talasyn scanned the grid for Sol, swearing under her breath when she spotted his wasp already in the air. She doubted that he’d signed off on this. Unless Talasyn missed her guess, Khaede and Sol were due for their first fight as a married couple.
But she couldn’t dwell on that now. In the distance, the Night Empire’s own coracles surged over a forested ridge. These vessels were called wolves, vicious things with sharp prows that hunted in packs and were armed to the teeth, so numerous that they blocked out the horizon, their black-and-silver sails streaming in the chill breeze.