Talasyn hopped into the well of her ship, pulling on the pair of brown leather gloves that she’d tucked into her coat pocket, and she yanked at several levers in swift succession with the ease of familiarity. The wasp raised its sails and the crystalline aether hearts embedded in its wooden hull flared a bright emerald, bringing the craft to life as they crackled with the wind magic from the Squallfast dimension that Sardovian Enchanters had distilled into them. Static blared from the transceiver, a box-shaped contraption inlaid with dials and filaments of conductive metals, the aether heart within it glowing white, laden with magic from the Tempestroad, a storm-streaked dimension that produced sound, normally in the form of thunder, but it could be manipulated to carry voices across a distance through what was known as the aetherwave.
Fingers around the spoked wheel, Talasyn took off from the grid, her vessel spitting out fumes of magical green discharge, and she slipped into an arrowhead formation with the other Sardovian airships.
“What’s the plan?” she asked into the mouthpiece of her transceiver, her question echoing through the aetherwave frequency used by her regiment.
From the head of the formation, Sol replied, in that calm and easygoing manner of which only he was capable during combat. His words emerged from a horn atop the transceiver, filling the well of Talasyn’s coracle. “We’re outnumbered ten to one, so standard defensive tactics are our best bet. Try to keep them away from the city walls until the residents are in the shelters.”
“Affirmative,” said Talasyn. She couldn’t risk telling him about Khaede, not with so many of their comrades listening in, not when they needed him to be at his most focused. Still, she couldn’t resist adding, “Congratulations on your marriage, by the way.”
Sol laughed. “Thanks.”
The Sardovian wasps formed a tight swarm around Frostplum’s walls and the Kesathese vessels met them head-on. While a wasp coracle couldn’t hold a candle to the multi-stacked repeating crossbows and iron-hurling ribaults of the Night Empire’s wolves, it more than made up for that by virtue of sheer agility—an agility that Talasyn used to full advantage over the next few dizzying minutes. She careened through the night air, dodging one deadly bolt after another and firing off several of her own from the crossbows affixed to her ship’s stern. The enemy coracles lacked maneuverability and her aim was true most of the time, ripping through sailcloth, splintering wooden hulls.
But there were just so many wolves, and it wasn’t long before they broke through the defensive perimeter, roaring closer and closer to Frostplum’s moonlit sprawl of thatched rooftops.
And in the distance . . .
Talasyn’s heart sank into the pit of her stomach when she spotted the monstrous double-masted silhouette of a Kesathese ironclad looming up over a snow-capped peak on whirling clouds of emerald aether. To meet it, two Sardovian frigates—full-rigged and square-sailed, and smaller but just as replete with cannons—rose from the nearby valley where they had been lying in wait for such a vessel to appear.
It was going to be a bloodbath. But at least the Night Empire hadn’t brought in a stormship. As long as there was no stormship, there was still a chance.
Talasyn sailed to where the combat was thickest, hurling her wasp headlong into the fray. She fought and flew as hard as she ever had. Out of the corner of her eye, her comrades’ ships burst into flames or shattered against battlements and treetops around her. Only a little while ago, they had all been safe and carefree in the longhouse, celebrating Khaede and Sol’s wedding.
That had been an illusion. No warm place, no sliver of joyous time, was safe from the Hurricane Wars. Everything that Kesath’s Night Empire touched, it destroyed.
The first faint embers of burning rose within her. It crawled from her core to the very tips of her fingers like white-hot needles, lurking beneath the skin.
Snap out of it, she ordered herself. No one can know.
You promised the Amirante.
Talasyn swallowed the burning back down, quieting the inferno in her soul. Too late, she realized that several wolves had managed to outflank her while she was distracted. Their ribaults’ iron projectiles pummeled her airship from all sides, and soon the world was nothing but free fall as she spiraled to the waiting ground.
Chapter Two
In her dream she was fifteen years old again and the city of Hornbill’s Head was all rammed earth and wooden lattice and animal skin, rising up from the straw-colored grass of the Great Steppe like a precariously layered cake nestled within soaring walls of mudbrick and salt. She was running from the watchmen, the pockets of her tattered clothes stuffed with flatbread and dried berries, cursing the shopkeeper’s alertness with her every labored breath.
Hornbill’s Head was—had been—taller than it was wide. Its inhabitants learned from an early age how to go vertical, higher and higher, and Talasyn was no exception. She scrambled up ladders and ledges and sped over rooftops and crossed the rickety bridges that connected one building to the next, all while the watchmen chased after her, puffing on their bird-bone whistles. She ran and ran, climbing ever higher, feeling the familiar ache the city left in her limbs and the rush of fear as the watchmen snapped at her feet. Yet on she went, up and up and air and sky, until she reached the battlements of the west wall. The frigid wind dug hard fingers into her hair and stabbed at her chapped lips as she hoisted herself onto the battlement, the whistles shrill and insistent behind her.
She had planned to skirt around the city walls and then drop back down into the lower slums, where she lived with the other bottom-dwellers, and where it was too much trouble for the watch to continue tracking an orphaned street rat who had stolen a few loaves and some fruit. However, as she straightened, balancing on the mudbrick ledge, the Great Steppe spread out miles below her feet in a vast expanse of tallgrass and rabbitbrush, she saw it.
The stormship.
It loomed on the flat horizon, arthropodous and elliptic, lightning cannons dangling from bow to stern like an array of jointed legs. In Talasyn’s memory it was five hundred meters in length. In her dream, it was as big as worlds.
Fueled by scores of aether hearts that had been imbued with rain and wind and lightning magic by Emperor Gaheris’s cunning Enchanters, pulsating sapphire and emerald and white through the metalglass sheets comprising the translucent hull, the stormship approached Hornbill’s Head with all the grim finality of a tidal wave, dragging black thunderclouds in its wake: the endless sea of burnished grass bowed beneath it, bent by the gales from the Squallfast that its enormous turbines spun under a steadily darkening sky.
Talasyn stood frozen in terror. In her memory she’d run away, heading low, diving into the first shelter she could find, but in this dream her body refused to obey. The stormship drew nearer and nearer and the wind blew through her heart like iron bolts and suddenly—
She woke up.
Her eyes flew open, a gasp escaping her parted lips. Thick smoke rushed into her lungs and she coughed, her throat spasming as it was seared through. The world was lit red, sparkling with shattered metalglass. Her gloved hands fumbled with the buckle at her waist until the harness gave way and she fell onto a bed of snow, shards of her wasp’s sidescuttle raining down all around her.