Career airmen always said northerners were a wild lot. Old legends claimed they were brash mountain folk so hot-headed that their hair grew red. Northerners lived upon the rocky, white-capped slopes of Pelaeia—a once-living mountain, now dead. Every one of them was born to the open skies.
The northern clans had been the Coalition’s fiercest proponents. And they had suffered for it commensurately.
It was a northern ship, the Freewind, that had taken us onboard. Evie, Little, and I were confined to the lower decks of the vessel, ordered to help Physicker Holloway tend to the injuries of Coalition soldiers—always under the watchful eye of at least one well-armed rebel. We were lucky, we came to learn; the Freewind’s surgeon had perished in the battle when a broadside ripped apart their starboard hull. The lack of a surgeon made Physicker Holloway more welcome than he otherwise would have been.
It was still a very chilly, angry sort of welcome.
The Freewind’s captain worked Holloway around the clock. Eventually, it became clear that this was a different sort of vengeance—that the rebels meant to keep the physicker on his feet until he collapsed. But our unlikely protector, Dougal MacLeod, did indeed keep faith. He argued down the captain in an explosive, undisciplined sort of shouting match, the likes of which we never would have seen on a proper Imperial vessel. We heard only bits and snatches as we cowered in the surgeon’s quarters, expecting the worst. Over and over, the name Pelaeia came up. Remember Pelaeia! one man yelled. Who will pay for Pelaeia? another one demanded.
To this day, I don’t know what Dougal said to convince the others. But eventually, the shouts died down to a weary murmur. Dougal returned and told us all to get some rest.
Some of the northerners on the ship still looked at us with sullen anger. But most of them now just looked… tired. I found the lack of jubilation confusing. The Imperial Navy had always encouraged us to celebrate the Imperium’s victories; whenever word came back of a major rout, they doled out extra rations and toasted the fallen. More than once, I’d heard the officers laughing about the rebels they’d thrashed. Every once in a while, I’d laughed with them, imagining our enemies fleeing with their tails between their legs.
The Coalition had achieved the impossible; if there was such a thing as total victory, then they had managed it. But on this ship, at least, there was no joy.
For a long time, Dougal MacLeod was the only man to talk with us—and even he had only so much time to spare. Eventually, however, the ship’s halcyon crossed that invisible line.
Elfa Goodhollow—one of the small folk known as a nisse—was even shorter than I was; I was constantly surprised to find myself looking down at someone thrice my age. Elfa had a naturally pleasant-looking face, with a button nose, broad dimples, and plenty of freckles. Like everyone else on the ship, though, her eyes were haunted, and exhaustion clung to her in an ever-present shroud of misery. Her uniform consisted of a ragged jumpsuit and a Carrain-cut militia overcoat. She wore her cerulean halcyon’s cloth around her shoulders like a shawl.
I hadn’t met many nissar, growing up in Morgause. Any nissar who did wander into the city often ended up quietly chased out of the community in order to prevent others from following them. The industrial overseers there called nissar ‘halflings’—since they were half the size of most folks. They believed that nissar made poor workers due to their natural irritability. Halflings don’t take orders well, I’d heard a foreman say. Half the time, they don’t do half the work! And whenever one of ‘em gets mad, you end up dealin’ with all of ‘em. I’d always imagined that nissar were twice as spiteful as those twice their size, because they had to fit the same amount of bile into an even smaller body.
Elfa Goodhollow didn’t look angry to me. In fact, the first time I met her, she brought biscuits.
I had to ignore the dried, bloody handprints on her sleeve, courtesy of the injured and the dying. Everyone on board looked like that, to some extent or another. Washing clothing was a waste of water, and the Freewind still had a ways left to go before her crew would be able to replenish her stores.
I was predisposed to mistrust nissar… but Elfa seemed perfectly sweet. Besides which, she was a halcyon of the Benefactor—perhaps, I thought, His mercy had tempered her otherwise-irritable nature. She asked us careful questions over biscuits: Were we injured? Did we have a warm place to sleep? I took turns with Evie giving short, wary answers, most of which seemed to satisfy her. Little said nothing; ever since our fateful last day on the HMS Caliban, he’d endured our daily existence with a vacant gaze and a troubling, uncharacteristic silence.
“Do you have any questions for me?” Elfa asked, once we’d demolished her miniscule bounty.
I hesitated. I did have questions—many of them. My instinct was that those questions would get me into trouble. It was hard to ask too many questions in the Imperial Navy without seeming insubordinate.
I was starving for a friendly face, though, and Elfa had been nothing but kind. My question spilled out of me before I could stop it.
“What else do they want from us?” I asked the halcyon. I meant the words to come out strong and defiant—but I was still a twelve-year-old boy, and they came out desperate instead.
Elfa blinked at me slowly, as though trying to absorb the question.
“They’ve beaten us!” I quavered. “We’ve surrendered. They destroyed the Sovereign Majesty, and the capital, and they killed the emperor. What else do they want?”
Elfa heaved a long, heavy sigh. She gave me a pitying look.
“The Coalition didn’t destroy the Sovereign Majesty,” she said. “Best as we can tell, someone sabotaged the Sovereign Majesty from the inside. But our faction—Carrain and the northern clans—we had nothing to do with it.” She softened her tone as she continued. “As to the rest… the people of Pelaeia want their families back. They want their homes back. But they cannot recover either. Their hearts shall yearn for the impossible for the rest of their days.”
Evie clutched at the copy of the Word that Holloway had given him. He hadn’t dared to put the book down; he carried it with him everywhere we went. “I don’t understand,” he said. “We didn’t take anyone’s home from them.”
I knitted my brow. “There was… a battle at Pelaeia,” I said slowly. “The Imperium won. It was a decisive victory.”
Elfa dropped her eyes to the book in Evie’s hands. “There was no battle,” she said calmly. “There was a slaughter.”
The words hung in the air. I felt them try to penetrate, but my mind refused to accept them.
Evie cleared his throat uncomfortably. “But they told us… Wraithwood and Verdigris led the charge. It took a Silver Legionnaire and an Armiger to win Pelaeia.”
I closed my eyes, remembering. I thought of how we’d cheered when news reached us that the Imperium had crushed Pelaeia—the largest clanhome of the north. Gone were the great shipyards that had once manufactured outflyers and frigates by the dozen. Fearsome Wraithwood and noble Verdigris had clipped the northerners’ wings at last.
I had toasted the fall of Pelaeia, just as I had toasted every other victory. I had indulged in wild fancies that night, dreaming that I was a powerful aethermancer, so loyal and respected that Emperor Lohengrin himself had given me a silver sword and made me a Silver Legionnaire. As I slept, I imagined myself charging into Pelaeia next to Wraithwood, cutting down vicious, faceless northerners by the score. As I returned home, triumphant, people watched me pass with awe and confusion. A goblin Legionnaire, they whispered. We were so wrong to spit at him before.
I doubt I was the only cabin boy to dream that way. But I knew in that moment that I was the only cabin boy who should have known better.
“The Imperium sent a Silver Legionnaire and an Armiger to raze Pelaeia,” Elfa said. “It was meant to send a message—to crush the northerners’ spirit. They destroyed the shipyards… and then, they slaughtered the workers. They killed whole families. They bombed the slopes of the mountain with aether, and cut down the northerners as they fled its destruction.” She paused. “I left the Imperium’s service that day. Every other halcyon I know did the same.”
“No one ever told us,” Evie whispered. His hands were white on the Word in his hands. “They said that we won the battle. They said that the halcyons were too soft-hearted, and…” He winced at the understanding. “…and they had to leave.”
No one, of course, had told us that the halcyons had chosen to leave. We’d been told that the Imperial Navy had removed them from active service. The official word was that there was a place for mercy—and that place was on the ground, far away from the practicalities of war.
“The Benefactor is soft-hearted,” Elfa said. “How could He be otherwise? He’s the source of all our mercy.” Her expression flattened into exhaustion, once again. “We tried to convince the other three orders to support us—to send a unified message. But the other Tuath Dé care nothing for mercy. The only thing we managed was to exile ourselves.”
Some part of me still didn’t want to believe it. But days later, we finally descended the gangplank of the Freewind… and the truth was suddenly inescapable.
Pelaeia was still burning.
Perhaps my memory is being overdramatic. Either way, swaths of the mountain were still a smoking ruin. Gutted remnants of the city expanded up the sharp, rocky slopes, limned in eerie licks of aether-light. An entire portion of the upper district had collapsed in an avalanche, wiping out at least a third of the city below it. Ramshackle buildings and landing areas barely stood in the lower levels amidst the debris. The burnt-out husks of fighter ships and larger vessels dotted the mountainscape. Over it all fell large, fluffy flakes of ash.
I’d expected to find tents or ships-turned-homes fielding many of Pelaeia’s wounded… but if there were wounded, then they were few in number, tucked away where I couldn’t see them. As I stepped off the gangplank, it dawned on me that the crewmen from the returning northern ships outnumbered the survivors that had huddled on the slopes of that mountain.
The wind howled—and for a moment, I thought I heard a ghostly wail upon it, carried down from the ruins above us. I shuddered and stared. The sound was too persistent to have been my imagination, which could only mean one thing.
Echoes.
Growing up around miners had exposed me to plenty of ghost stories—many of them true. To the best of our scientific knowledge, echoes were spectral apparitions made of ambient aether, doomed to replay their final moments in an endless cycle.
I’d never actually seen an echo before; only those who died around large amounts of aether tended to leave behind such imprints. But between exploding ship engines and aetheric cannons, I realised, the Sundering War was bound to have left behind whole swaths of echoes.
Was Pelaeia an entire city full of echoes? I couldn’t fathom it. The sheer scale of that horror was beyond my understanding.
Dougal caught me looking. "Aye,” he mumbled. “Echoes linger in Pelaeia. They always will. We dinnae dare even go and collect the dead. Figure we’ll have to get’n aethermancer’s help eventually, but…” He trailed off, staring at the city with a pained expression. “After what Wraithwood did, we’d sooner no have any ae their kind nearby.”
Our group fell into a horrified silence as we went, crunching over ash and snow. The cold shadow of that eerie, burning mountain swallowed us on all sides. My impressionable young mind imagined that Death Victorious had spread out their black cloak, and that this darkness was merely its edges, peeking out into the mortal world. At any moment, I thought, that dread Tuath Dé would come for my soul.
They say that when Death Victorious comes to spirit you away, the featureless shadow within that cloak shall demand the story of your life. In the shadow of burning Pelaeia, I began to recount the things that I had said and done… and I trembled at their weight. When Death Victorious came for me, I knew that I would have to tell the faerie that I had cheered the atrocity before me; I would have to recount my fantasies of butchering northerners next to heroic Wraithwood and noble Verdigris.
It was a religious experience, in the truest sense of the phrase.
Let me live, I begged the mountain’s corpse. Please, don’t let this be my story. I will do better. I will do everything differently, I swear.
The mountain only wailed.
The sun was nearly gone. As it dipped behind the slopes entirely, the aether that still limned the city glowed ever-brighter, back-lit by the bloody sunset. Holloway slowed his step. His undamaged eye was half-fixed upon the sight; I heard him muttering prayers beneath his breath.
“Oh, don’t go prayin’ tae the Benefactor,” Dougal said to the physicker. He’d spoken softly to me before, but his voice gained a harder edge as he addressed Holloway. “It was His empire that did this. Elfa’s a good sort, but we don’t keep her on board ‘cos ae her merciful Tuath Dé. He can go an’ hang Himsel’.”
I cringed at the open heresy in these words—but none of us dared to contradict Dougal, with that awful graveyard still in sight.
“They hammered the shipyards first,” Dougal said grimly, breaking the guilt-ridden silence. “Wraithwood, an’ a whole regiment ae aethermancers. They slipped in at night, cripplin’ our defences. By the time we realised what was happening, they brought their dreadnought up the mountain an’ started bombing the clanhome.” He watched my face in particular as he spoke. “People tried tae flee. But Verdigris an’ they Imperial troops were waitin’. They cut our people down. Workers, children, elders. They did it aw disciplined an’ efficient. Just how the Imperium does everything.”
I stacked the stories I had heard against the brutal reality before me. On the one hand, there was Wraithwood the bandit-killer; Wraithwood, wyvern-slayer and protector of the realm; Wraithwood, who had once saved the young prince from terrible assassins. Wraithwood, with his mysterious mask and his blazing silver sword.
And Verdigris—the grand Armiger, called by the name of their wargear. I had never learned the nature of the pilot inside that great machine, I realised now. Whoever they were, stories said they’d hunted the fearsome hydras of the Greymire, and faced down the marauding wartracks of the Rustland Corsairs.
But there had been no bandits or hydras in Pelaeia.
I was crying. That was why Dougal had looked at me. Tears froze upon my cheeks and eyelashes, harsh against my skin.
I was too young and selfish to mourn Pelaeia—a city I barely knew, full of people I’d considered enemies. In that moment, I mourned the death of the image I had crafted of myself: a brave and righteous soul, labouring under the unfair yoke of the world’s prejudices. I cried because I was not a noble soul, but a thoughtless child soldier, idolising butchers in my dreams. I cried because I had to bury my heroes upon the slopes of Pelaeia.
In the years to come, I would learn to mourn the people that had died. But mourning myself… that was a start. The hideous self-loathing that soon followed was a necessary first step on the road to becoming someone better.
* * *
Of course, mortals make their plans, and the Lady of Fools laughs at them.
Twenty years later, a terrible apparition glared down the edge of her monstrous blade at Barsby. Her gaze was cold and shimmering with iridescence. Her pale hair danced along aetheric winds.
“You have one chance to flee, coward,” Hawkins told Barsby, in a voice as chilly as the grave. Wisps of blue-white light escaped her mouth with every word. She hadn’t used a focus to create the sword, I realised. She’d broken one of her aether vials and inhaled the stuff directly, foregoing the mechanical buffer that most aethermancers used to protect their mind and body. I had scrapped with aethermancers before—but none of them had ever dared to touch the gift of the Everbright directly like this.
Truly, Silver Legionnaires were a cut above the rest.
What have I done? My mind sputtered like a whirligig, refusing to process the horror of my situation. For twenty years, I’d done everything in my power to recant my crimes and foreswear the Imperium… and now, I’d sworn an Oath to one of its greatest champions.
Barsby scrambled back with a croaking, gurgled cry. His sword—and his hand—lay forgotten on the pier.
Hawkins turned those empty, glowing eyes upon me. “That ship is very important to you, isn’t it?” she asked me. Aether spilled from her lips as she spoke… but there was an odd sentimentality in her tone. “You shall have it, Captain. But no more delays. You gave your Oath.”
Dougal’s outflyer still dangled unsteadily from the crane. There was no way we would get it into the hold in time. Hawkins’ sword had done the unthinkable: It had driven all thoughts of Dougal’s ship from my mind. Revulsion roiled in my guts as I realised I had contracted a Silver Legionnaire to save his vessel.
Dougal would have been horrified.
And yet—Hawkins sighed and released the aether around her. The blue-white light disappeared; her foci whirled once more and died.
Hawkins headed for the crates and reached down towards one of those terrible canisters. I widened my eyes and staggered forward to stop her—but before I could take more than a few steps, she opened the valve once more.
Black rotten aether hissed out from the spout in a vile cloud. I was sure, in that moment, that the woman before me would dissolve into a hideous mess upon the pier—but Hawkins sucked in her breath and flexed her grey-gloved fingers. The inky vapour froze in midair, shivering like some amorphous, nightmarish creature.
Hawkins gestured violently towards the outflyer. The Unseelie aether leapt to her command, winding its way around the ship in shimmering bands of night. The outflyer lurched free of the crane—or no, I realised, the Unseelie aether had eaten through the crane’s straps and let the ship loose. The craft jolted its way down towards the pier… and settled itself directly before us.
“Hop aboard,” Hawkins ordered me. “Now.”
Her voice shook on the words. Her body trembled beneath the strain, and I knew then that this was no casual parlour trick, even for a Silver Legionnaire.
Kill her now, a panicked voice within me insisted. Now, while she’s weak. Whatever she’s doing here, it can’t possibly be good.
It was true that I had sworn an Oath that Hawkins would make it safely to her destination. For most people, that would have been the deciding factor. But I had broken an Oath once before—and under the right circumstances, I knew that I could live with the consequences.
It was her expression that stopped me. There was a raw, knowing grief there—an uncanny twin to the misery in my own heart. I knew in that moment that Hawkins had buried someone dear to her, not long ago at all.
I could always kill her later.
I clambered onto the stub of the outflyer’s hacked-off wing. Hawkins followed, with effort; I heard her laboured breathing beside me, as dark, shifting aether lifted us from the dock. I balanced on the wing, gripping the edge of the cockpit with my hands until my knuckles turned white. There was a sudden sensation of falling upwards; the hiss of aether; the smell of spoiled, rotten filth…
White aether flashed abruptly. Hawkins gasped in pain, releasing her grip on the ship to clutch at her right hand, which still held the silver sword. Something about the Unseelie aether had destabilised the sword. Even as I stared with alarm, the skin of Miss Hawkins’ hand began to burn.
The silver sword winked out, plunging us back into darkness.
The ship floundered; I yelped and clutched more tightly to the edge of the cockpit. Miss Hawkins gritted her teeth against the pain, however, and slowly—drunkenly—the outflyer righted itself, stuttering through the air.
The ship bounced roughly against something. Darkness cleared, and I saw the Rose’s hold rising up to meet us with alarming alacrity. I remembered, far too belatedly, that perhaps a quarter of our heretical cargo still lingered there. If the outflyer hit those crates, it was likely that none of us would survive long enough to worry about New Havenshire’s flak guns.
The outflyer caught the edge of the deck, catapulting me entirely off the side and down into the open hold. I saw my crew’s ashen faces out of the corner of my eye and heard their panicked shouts.
If I survive this, I thought to myself, I am never smuggling aether again.
I hit the deck, and darkness took me.
* * *
Thankfully, this story does not end quite so ignominiously. Though I am sure that Barsby would have had quite the laugh if it had.
I awoke sometime later. That was a welcome surprise—until the headache returned. This time, I hadn’t even had the pleasure of drinking an entire bottle of fire-rum beforehand.
Warm light pressed against my eyelids. A hammock swung gently beneath me; the welcome sound of the Rose’s engine hummed through the wood that surrounded me. A wet rag pressed against the ghastly, throbbing bruise at my brow.
I groaned, and someone smacked me in the thigh. Hard.
“Are you sure you’re not hiding a red cloth somewhere, Captain?” Lenore snapped. “I could swear you’ve pledged yourself to the Lady of Fools directly.”
I cracked open my eyes and found myself staring down the barrel of a fully loaded, scolding finger.
“I’m not a Fool,” I assured my gunnery chief, with a weak smile. “I mean… not a proper one, at least. I’m certainly an everyday sort of fool.”
Lenore narrowed her eyes at me in the flickering lamplight. “There is nothing everyday about your foolishness, Cap’n,” she sniffed. I heard a slight waver in her voice this time. Footsteps sounded nearby, and three other ladies poked their heads into view.
“Captain’s awake?” Martha asked worriedly.
“Of course he’s awake,” Navi grumbled. “Why else would Lenore have smacked him?”
“Oh, Captain!” Mary fawned, reaching out to pat my sleeve. “We had such a fright when you fell into the hold!”
A hollow, miserable feeling tugged at my stomach as the past few days came flooding back to me. I didn’t deserve this sympathy.
The Red Reaver’s Revenge. Dougal. Barsby. Hawkins. I had bungled everything I’d touched—and we weren’t even done paying for it yet.
The gunnery ladies continued clucking over me, unaware of my gloomy thoughts. Martha stood hunched over me, still clutching her needlepoint hoop in one hand. She was the tallest woman I’d ever met, looming easily above the other three. In the full light of day, her skin was a dark brown—but in this light, it looked more like rich ink. Her hair was pulled back into thick locks, tied with an old, fraying kerchief. Her full lips pursed with relief as she looked down at me. Her head tilted slightly askew, as it always did—Martha had gone near-deaf in her right ear a few years ago, due to a misfired cannon.
In another life, Martha had been a carpenter’s daughter, soon to be wed. The war had claimed her father, though, and burdened her would-be husband with an awful temper. I never did find out exactly what happened to her betrothed… but Martha had been clear that she needed passage out of town in a hurry, and I’d been careful not to ask too many questions. She’d been a reliable fixture on the Rose ever since.
The steaming scent of hot porridge filled my nose. My stomach remembered that it was a mortal thing in need of sustenance, and it awakened like a ravenous beast. Martha smiled wryly and passed me a bowl. “Have mine, Cap’n,” she said. “I can just go grab more.”
I was too hungry to argue. Still, I wasn’t so far gone that I forgot my manners in front of Lenore. Thank you, I signed politely. A dozen unfamiliar aches and pains protested as I reached for the bowl, and I winced. Lenore reached out to guide me upright. As I pressed the bowl to my lips, she brushed absently at the dust on my shirt, scowling at it as though it had personally offended her.
Mary leaned forward to catch the damp cloth that fell from my forehead as I sat up. Her brown eyes flickered golden in the lamplight as she draped the cloth over the top of my head instead. One of Mary’s many precious adventure novels—Jack Blue’s Last Laugh—sat bookmarked in her lap. It was rare indeed that Mary offered her undivided attention to anything other than Jack Blue, and I found myself touched by her sudden focus upon me.
Sixteen-year-old Mary was wide-eyed, petite, and still so painfully young. Though she was often severe and fond of utilitarian clothing, the crew of the Rose still considered her our darling. Mary wasn’t actually related to anyone on the crew, but her dusky complexion was so conveniently ambiguous that she’d pretended more than once to be someone’s sister, daughter, or cousin. Lenore occasionally convinced Mary to let her weave a few bright ribbons into her dark hair; currently, there was a reluctant green bow at the base of her braid.
Lenore had brought Mary onto the ship with her when she’d arrived, and she’d been as good as family ever since. Mary had clever, talented fingers, which she put to use in a hundred different ways—she’d been a natural addition to the gunnery ladies’ knitting circle, and she’d even helped out Holloway a time or two as his assistant nurse. Unfortunately, Mary had also spent a very long time using those clever fingers to survive as a pickpocket—and every once in a while, when meeting someone slightly too wealthy and slightly too insufferable, Mary still got it into her head to relieve them of whatever happened to be in their pockets. She called these ill-gotten gains her “book fund.”
Mary had many books.
Presently, Mary had put her talents to work upon my ragged coat. I saw it draped across a nearby stool; the hole in the shoulder was already stitched back together. Mary had done the best she could with it, but I could tell that the coat was starting to consist of more stitches than material at this point.
Navi fretted on my other side. Her aged, imperious face held more wrinkles than I last remembered, and her ebony hair was threaded with more silver. Her fingers worried absently at the edges of her elegant blue sari. “What spectacular tomfoolery that was,” Navi scolded me. “I swear, Captain, one of these days you’re going to end up like my youngest son did.”
I winced at the reference. Jahnavi Varma, a kumari of Aarushi, had lost nearly a dozen family members to the war, including her father, her husband, and her sons. Most of them had been noble airmen. After so many years, the lady had mostly tamed her grief; she now had a habit of telling fond stories of her deceased relatives whenever the situation reminded her of one. The stories were sometimes oddly enlightening, in fact; Navi had picked up an incredible amount of knowledge regarding weapons, politics, and ships-of-war. Had they allowed women to serve in the Navy, I daresay she would have made an excellent admiral.
Navi had lost everything: her estate, her affairs, her family. There was a bittersweet freedom in her loss, however—for finally, she had made her way to the rickety airship of her dreams. Our ageing, erstwhile kumari now spent much of her time maintaining the ship’s mounted guns with all of the love she’d once afforded her own children. She had names for every one of them.
“Your youngest son was… Sameer?” I guessed faintly.
“Sameer was the second-youngest,” Navi corrected me with a sniff. “Hassan was the youngest. He died when the ship’s munitions blew up around him. Poor, dear Hassan was very brave… but tragically dim.” She somehow managed to state this matter-of-factly, with the benefit of twenty years of distance.
“Ah,” I said dimly, in between gulps of porridge. “Yes, that does sound like me.”
Mary fidgeted with a nearby book, though she didn’t open it. “Mr Holloway said you’d only cracked your head a bit,” she told me. “He had to see to the lady, so he told us to watch you for now.”
“The lady?” I mumbled. I knitted my brow, forcing thoughts to fit together. “You mean Miss Hawkins? Did something happen to her?” I forcibly squelched the small part of me that thought this might not be a bad thing. A dead Silver Legionnaire on my ship still wasn’t ideal—but it was far more ideal than a live one. I wasn’t actually certain whether Hawkins dying on my ship would break my Oath by default. I wanted to believe that Noble Gallant would understand why I couldn’t ask a dead woman where she wanted to go…
But who was I kidding? His priests were called judges.
“She used that black aether,” Martha said grimly. I forced myself to return my wandering attention to the conversation. “It went down about as well as poison, apparently. The physick’s trying to flush it out of her system, but he’s not sure she’ll survive it.”
I winced at that. Hawkins wouldn’t have used Unseelie aether at all, if I hadn’t insisted so wildly on bringing Dougal’s ship with us. Silver Legionnaire or not, I knew I owed her more than just my life.
It was all so damned complicated. Once upon a time, I had convinced myself that if I ever saw the shadow of the Imperium again, I’d know it for the evil that it was. The next time around, I thought, I wouldn’t be taken in. But I had managed to forget the reality of it all—how the very same people who committed atrocities against little children could also be kind and sympathetic and even self-sacrificing, given the right circumstances.
How on earth am I supposed to feel about this? I wondered.
Maybe, I hoped, the choice would be taken away from me entirely. Perhaps Hawkins wouldn’t survive at all. It was a coward’s hope.
“Why did an aethermancer trouble herself on our account, Captain?” Lenore asked me carefully.
It occurred to me then that no one else on the ship had got a close look at the sword that Hawkins had drawn. From up above, it must have looked like just another bit of aethermancy. It had been very powerful aethermancy, of course… but there was no way the rest of the crew could have guessed at the truth. Even I found it unbelievable—and I had been there.
“I made an Oath to Miss Hawkins,” I said slowly. “I promised to take her anywhere she wanted, in return for her help.”
Lenore let out a long breath. “Well then,” she said sardonically. “I hope Miss Hawkins doesn’t intend to go far—given that we never capped off our fuel in New Havenshire.”
I closed my eyes and groaned.
Damn you again, Barsby, I thought.
“We’ll have to stop at Pelaeia anyway,” I mumbled. “Maybe we can make a deal there.” I opened my eyes again and struggled up to my feet.
“Captain!” Mary scolded me, in her best nurse-like tone. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
I shot her a wry look. “I’m headed up to see our physicker,” I told her. “I expect that’s worth the trip.”
I didn’t tell her that I intended to make a few extra stops along the way.