The mast was as far as she could go. Talasyn squeezed into the barrel-shaped crow’s nest and just—stayed there, her heart heavy and her mind blank. Blademaster Kasdar had been an institution. She’d been there almost from the very beginning, and she had personally trained all of the recruits. Her death seemed symbolic of the demise of the Sardovian army itself. She was the one who had taught Talasyn how to fight with swords and spears and daggers and all kinds of other weapons that the latter initially hadn’t even known which end of to hold. Kasdar had been a demanding instructor and they rarely got along, but it was starting to sink in for Talasyn that she would never see the burly, stone-faced veteran ever again. That realization brought with it a dull ache that experience had shown her would soon scab over on top of layers upon layers of all the other old scars.
When will it end? Talasyn asked herself at this great height, her vision afire at the edges with the crimson sunset that gilded the empty horizon and the shifting waves. The Hurricane Wars took and took, but there was still so much left to lose.
She turned around, the wooden planks that made up the bottom of the crow’s nest creaking beneath her boots. Her gaze fell on the Nautilus. It lumbered after the two carracks, nearly seven times their size combined.
Khaede had lived in a fishing village before the hurricanes thundered through it and she fled to the arms of the Heartland. She had once told Talasyn that the stormships reminded her of the otherworldly creatures that sometimes got tangled in the nets along with the day’s catch. These were beings from the darkest depths of the Eversea—bottom-dwellers as Talasyn had been, in the lowermost slum levels of Hornbill’s Head—and they looked more like insects than like fish, their bodies segmented and oval, the softer parts protected by shells as hard as armor plates.
What protected the Nautilus and all its ilk, though, was an external steel frame binding together panels of extremely durable metalglass and iron ore. Because of its immense size, it took the work of entire flotillas to bring down even just one stormship—and, more often than not, the stormship had already caused massive amounts of damage by then. When Kesath’s first such vessel took to the skies, it had completely altered the nature of warfare. And now, nineteen years later, an entire fleet of them had helped Gaheris realize his ambition of total control over the Continent.
Talasyn hated the stormships. So many would still be alive if not for them. Even the ones that Vela had stolen when she defected hadn’t been of much use in the long run. The Sardovian army had rarely unleashed them on areas where there would have been high numbers of innocent casualties and, in any case, what were eight stormships compared to the Night Empire’s fifty?
Three now, she reminded herself with bitterness. Maybe even fewer.
It was a terrible situation. Talasyn’s plan gave what was left of the Sardovian Allfold only the barest glimmer of a fighting chance. The odds of it panning out were not in their favor.
Once the sun was a molten half-sphere jutting from the horizon and the pale silhouettes of the seven moons hung in the heavens, a flurry of activity swept through the decks, a cry spreading among the Summerwind’s passengers. Land, ho. Talasyn tore her gaze from the gargantuan form of the Nautilus and angled her body toward the bow of the carrack—and there they were, in the distance: the countless green isles of the Nenavar Dominion, rising up from a darkening ocean in towers of rainforest and earth. Something in her chest trembled at the sight before her. She had an unsettling sensation that she was about to pass the point of no return.
The convoy paused in its flight, hovering over the ocean, the wasp coracles sliding into their hangars on the Nautilus, and Talasyn climbed back down to the Summerwind’s quarterdeck. Enchanters had found several nearby frequencies on the aetherwave, but their attempts to patch through were being rebuffed, eliciting a deep scowl from Bieshimma.
“Bunch of airships clearly in distress show up on their doorstep and they won’t even deign to make contact,” the general muttered under his breath.
“The Nenavarene know about the war,” Talasyn pointed out. “Maybe they don’t want to invite trouble.”
“Let’s hope that changes when we tell them we have their long-lost princess.”
Talasyn bit down on her lower lip to stop herself from shushing a superior officer, but she cast a furtive glance at the crew milling about. As far as everyone else was concerned, they’d flown to Nenavar simply because it was the nearest realm and they were hoping to appeal to the Dragon Queen’s charity.
They eventually decided to send one of their few remaining pigeons to Port Samout. Bieshimma scribbled a message in Sailor’s Common and tied the roll of vellum to the cooing bird’s leg, then set it loose in the direction of the shining harbor.
“Do you think they’ll respond?” Bieshimma asked Talasyn as they watched the pigeon flutter away.
“I’ll honestly be surprised if they don’t just shoot it down,” Talasyn replied.
“Don’t even joke about that, helmsman,” he warned her. “This is the only chance we have.”
Khaede would have butted in with something to the effect of, That’s Your Worship to you, General, and once again Talasyn felt the pang of loss. Felt that familiar fear crawl its way up her throat.
Their little winged messenger soon returned, with neither the original message nor a response. They waited and they waited. Hours passed and night slowly descended in starry black velvet curtains over the Eversea. Talasyn could barely taste the boiled salt beef that she had for supper, so anxious was she that the Nenavarene really would ignore them, after all. Maybe they had concluded that she wasn’t Elagbi’s daughter, that she had no connection to them. Maybe what she’d done the last time she was here was too great an insult to let slide. Maybe they were preparing to attack the convoy with those fatally elegant winged coracles.
Granted, it wasn’t as though supper would have been laden with flavor even if she’d eaten it while in the best of moods, and there was far too little of it as well. Supplies had dwindled considerably after a sennight in the air. The Summerwind had simply not been equipped to take on this many passengers for a long haul. Food was being strictly rationed but, still, it wouldn’t be long before they ran out.
Perhaps a month. More likely less.
Talasyn slept out on the quarterdeck, not willing to risk missing a transmission from Nenavar—or from Khaede. As the night crew puttered around her, she fell asleep on the wooden floorboards, under a net of constellations. She dreamed of her city of gold.
A strong wind rustled across her face and she woke with a start, her mind screaming stormship attack. But it was a false alarm. The carrack’s moonlit decks were quiet and the gust of wind that fluttered the edges of its furled sails smelled of seagrass and dried fish, with the underlying tang of sweet fruit.
“Anything yet?” she called out to the white-cloaked figure stationed at the aetherwave transceiver.
The Enchanter shook her head drowsily, and Talasyn swallowed a lump in her throat. Still no word from Khaede or from Port Samout.
Going back to sleep was impossible with so much anxiety eating away at her. She cast her bleary gaze around the Summerwind and it landed on Ideth Vela, a solitary figure at the prow, shoulders squared as though she were holding up the sky.