“Oh no you don’t!” she shouted, even though he wouldn’t be able to hear her over the roar of Squallfast-infused aether hearts whirring to life. She scrambled to commandeer a coracle of her own, and none of the Nenavarene tried to stop her. Indeed, when she glanced over at the soldiers, and at Elagbi and at Rapat, they were all frozen in what seemed like shock, looking as though they had just borne witness to something impossible.
But Talasyn barely spared a thought for any of the Nenavarene. The world of Lir had narrowed to encompass only Alaric’s stolen airship as he coasted over the treetops. It wasn’t long before she followed, her knuckles clenched white around the wheel, the ground falling away, the aether hearts shrieking, the jungle opening up into air and sky.
Chapter Nine
The girl was so mad at him.
Alaric found it amusing at first, but soon enough he had to admit that he was quite possibly in trouble.
The ivory-hued hull of the Dominion coracle was constructed from an opalescent, lightweight material that made it a dream to maneuver. It was roughly cylindrical and tapered at both ends, with blue-and-gold sails that flared out from port and starboard like wings and another set of sails that extended from the vessel’s stern in the shape of a fan. After a few seconds of fiddling with the controls, Alaric discovered the levers that operated the airship’s weaponry—only, instead of ribaults or repeating crossbows, what opened fire was an array of slender, swiveling bronze cannons. And instead of iron projectiles, they shot those strange bolts of shivering violet magic that lit up the night, their glow more intense than that which the soldiers’ tube-shaped devices had fired.
This coracle was a marvel of engineering. An elegant yet deadly weapon.
The problem lay in the fact that the Lightweaver was currently manning one as well.
She chased him over the woods. Aetherspace surged through her vessel’s cannons, pelting him with wave upon wave of amethyst that took all of his skill and cunning to dodge. She was out for blood and he couldn’t resist goading her, and another round of fiddling granted him access to the aetherwave. “This hardly seems like the time and place to have it out,” he remarked into the transceiver.
“Shut the fuck up.” Talasyn’s voice echoed through the well, a growl of static-tinted rage. She set her cannons to stutter-fire and clipped at Alaric’s sails. For him she existed as a silhouette against the moons in their different phases, sliding along the crescent of the Second, vanishing briefly into the eclipse of the Sixth, coming at him from the shadows of the Third’s waxing gibbous.
“Aren’t you in the least bit curious about that barrier that we created?” he asked.
“I am,” she said silkily. “Retract your cannons and stop moving around so we can talk about it.”
A chuckle rose in his throat, unbidden, but he hastily swallowed it back down. “Nice try.”
He let her have her fun firing at him for a while before he pulled into a sharp ascent, spiraling in the air and then dropping back down behind her. He’d hoped to have the element of surprise on his side but, unfortunately, Talasyn’s reflexes were razor-sharp, bringing her coracle into an abrupt about-face that he was mildly surprised didn’t snap her pretty little neck. They hurtled toward each other, the strange magic spouting from the cannons meeting in violent conflagrations that trailed sparks down onto the jungle canopy, withering every leaf and branch that they came into contact with.
They were on a collision course. His brow knitted as he realized that she wasn’t going to give way any time soon. Sardovia’s lone Lightweaver had no sense of self-preservation. It was a miracle that she’d survived this long into the war.
Alaric swerved to the right mere seconds before what would have been a devastating impact. His head spun with the dizzying move, but he managed to activate the transceiver again. “See you at home,” he drawled, for no purpose other than to rile her, and then he darted up into the star-strewn heavens.
Talasyn didn’t give chase, which was a rare show of common sense on her part, Alaric thought. After all, they were still deep in what had become enemy territory. Unless he missed his guess, the Nenavarene were not going to take kindly to their historical ruins being vandalized, their soldiers maimed, their airships commandeered, and one of their bird things set loose from its cage.
Remembering the bird made Alaric shake his head at how odd this country was. Shortly after Talasyn had been led away for questioning, he had pounded on the door of the cell, demanding to use the facilities. There had only been one guard stationed outside, young and spotty-faced and far too confident in the fact that the prisoner was cut off from the Shadowgate. It had been easy to take him by surprise, to wrestle his weapon out of his grasp and fire at the cage hung outside the cell. Alaric had feared that aether-based weaponry wouldn’t work, either, but the nullifying device apparently only affected aethermancers, and the cage was blasted off its hinges and sent rolling to the floor by unchecked streams of magic that he didn’t know how to control. He certainly hadn’t been prepared for the twisted golden beak and the blaze of red-and-yellow feathers that had come into view as the cage shattered and the bird glided away with an affronted chirp, but the Shadowgate had reopened for him by then and he’d knocked the guard unconscious and crept through the garrison in search of the exit—until the alarm was raised and he’d had to fight his way through.
Alaric’s mission had turned out to be quite the catastrophe and he didn’t even have a dead Lightweaver to show for it. He would pay dearly upon his return to Kesath.
But, now that he was well away from the garrison and its hostile forces, he had the opportunity to reflect on what the Nenavar Dominion’s unique arsenal meant for the Night Empire. In addition to their lightweight but deadly coracles, their aethermancy was highly advanced; it had to be, seeing as they had tapped into a dimension of death magic that he’d never even heard of. They’d somehow outfitted even their smaller munitions with it when the only weaponry in Kesath built large enough to hold the required number of heartstones were the lightning cannons of the stormships. As if that wasn’t enough, the Nenavarene also had creatures that could block both the Lightweave and the Shadowgate.
Even if the Zahiya-lachis was willing to let bygones be bygones with regard to this incident, Nenavar could still pose a problem in the future.
At least the dragons seemed to be a myth. For what felt like the hundredth time since he’d made landfall on Dominion shores, Alaric furtively scanned the skies and found nothing of interest.
He had docked his wolf in a clearing near the coast. No sooner had he entertained the notion of retrieving it when he began to consider the airship that he was currently steering. How fast it was, how gracefully it moved. How its dizzying array of controls could unleash magical beams a thousand times more powerful than iron projectiles. Beams that shriveled every living thing that they touched.
This was valuable technology. It would be the height of stupidity to let it go to waste.
And he had to hurry to tell his father about how his and the Lightweaver’s magic had combined. He’d never heard of that before, either.
Alaric set course for the Night Empire.
Talasyn landed on a riverbank, thumping the control panel once the stolen Nenavarene airship had powered down. That failed to take the edge off her frustration, so she screamed, the wordless sound ear-splitting in the coracle’s dark and silent well.