Chapter Thirty-Eight

Sebastian held the shroud in place with trembling hands, determined not to let Robert or the others see him worry. He imagined all eyes judging him, the cowardly failure who never obtained the status of Dreamer and silently begged the gods to make him better than he was—to keep them all safe. He hated being so close to the action; a battle was about to wage less than half a league away. Sickness claimed his stomach, and he fought to hold it down.

“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Robert demanded.

He nodded. Of course he could. The conversation of war carried silently along the hidden airwaves and pounded like death upon his terrified ears.

“They’re Fjorikan after all, not normal outlaws,” Sebastian whispered back. “Murdock Kelly said so.”

“A war party? Here? This far upriver?” Robert exclaimed. “Surely they couldn’t have moved behind Eston’s defenses!”

“Caroline just said they’ve been disguised among the immigrants and Murdock Kelly agreed,” Sebastian explained. “I guess he’s had real reason to distrust them. He just cursed Amash and spat, saying he and Percy Roan both warned him against letting so many across the border—that the real threat is more organized than the king wanted to admit!”

“Organized? It’s only twenty men!” Robert insisted.

“Caroline spotted three more camps, each a league or more away. There’s easily a hundred or more… probably more.”

“So the general’s right? They intend to attack Estonia from within our borders?”

“Seems so,” Sebastian agreed. “Hang on,” he said, holding up a finger and focusing his mind. Caroline was saying something he could barely make out.

“Percy Roan suspected this,” she told the general, her voice now an echo in Sebastian’s mind, brought softly along the wind. “Just last month he authorized the seizure of immigrant ships north of Estowen’s Landing.”

“Surely not? He has no authority to raise a navy without notifying me first!” Murdock Kelly protested.

“Not a navy,” Bearnard explained. “He presented the Pirate’s Guild with a new Letter of Marque, granting them pillage rights in the north in return for finding any evidence Fjorik intends war.”

“The Pirate’s Guild?” The general had grown angry at the news, but seemed pleased at the same time. “This gives me the war I wanted for sure,” he admitted, “but he and Cuyler shouldn’t have left me out of the plan! What did he pay them with? The pirates?”

“Firearms, to sell on the black market,” Bearnard revealed.

“No! They’ll find their way into Fjorik and fuel their war machine! So many will die!” the general argued.

“Nonetheless,” Caroline explained, “Fjorik plans war, and Devil Jacque and his pirates are off their coast as we speak—too far to get this news back to the chancellor in a timely manner. We must clear these camps and bring the evidence back ourselves.”

Sebastian bolted to his feet, suddenly determined to take action.

“What is it?” Robert demanded. “What did they say?”

“Devil Jacque… He’s not sailing to Pirate’s Cove! Eusari’s gone in the wrong direction!”

Eusari waited on deck, watching as her crew brought forth crate after crate of the cursed instruments of death.

“Rifles,” Anne said to Sippen. “Do you see what you and Braen Braston did to this world we’re in?”

“Thuh… these are nuh… not my design,” the little man protested, but his eyes betrayed his guilt. Every ranged weapon since those he’d first invented traced to him. Every death they brought linked him closer to hell, including that of his best friend long passed.

Eusari, reading the guilt on his face placed a hand around his shoulders. “The devil doesn’t live in the steel, nor does the steel deserve fault,” she told him. “The evil that takes innocent lives resides in the hearts of mankind, those who pull the trigger. Your invention is not to blame, but the weakness of those who wield it. We are all weak, that’s our nature, but some among us are more prone to the lies whispered in our minds when weakest. The blame does not reside with you, Sippen, but within those who ignored the signs of those abusing your design.”

“Where were these weapons going?” Marita asked Eusari.

“We don’t know, because you killed the captain who could tell us that answer!” the Constable spat.

Marita again showed her the broken nail.

“That’s not the question, Marita,” Eusari insisted. “To whom were they going? That’s the question we must answer. Who would use these weapons if we hadn’t intervened? They certainly weren’t headed for The Cove, that’s clear, but perhaps to Soston? Middleton?”

Marita suddenly stood taller, taken over by some invisible force. Her eyes remained opened, but her jaw slackened wider. “Captain,” she whispered.

“What? What do you see?” Eusari demanded.

“See? Not what I see, but what I was just told,” the woman argued.

“Spit it out, then!” Constable Thorinson shouted. Her patience with Marita had waned thin.

“Sebastian… Robert… They’re in trouble!” Marita exclaimed. “But they know where to find Devil Jacque!”

Eusari paused, her mind torn in two directions at this news. Robert, her charge, and Sebastian, her friend and faithful hand, needed her help. But Devil Jacque, that personification of evil she wished to extinguish, had her sons. “Where is he?” she demanded, making her choice.

“He’s north,” Marita gasped, “off the coast of Fjorik!”

“Hurry!” Eusari ordered her men. “Get these crates aboard Reprisal! Mr. Longshanks! Set a course to Fjorik!”

“I’ll find them,” Marita swore to her captain. “I’ll find your boys!”

Caroline and Bearnard separated, each moving behind a line of General Kelly’s dragoons. The enemy camp was alerted to their arrival, but only just in time to man their measly pickets. Even their fires and torches still burned near each line, caught without time to douse any at all. The northern soldiers hid behind their fences and berms like they had a chance to win this outcome—against the dragoons, maybe, but not against two Dreamers. This battle would be more of a rout than a fight, and she’d be back in the University by dinner.

“Company, halt!” the general shouted, no longer hiding his unit’s presence in the forest. “Scatter ranks!” On his command the dragoons fanned out, found their own cover, and formed a wide arc around the camp. There was only one way to flee, and that would be straight into the river at the enemies backs. “Hold fire,” he cautioned, “until we can see the blues of their scheming northern eyes!”

Caroline stole a glance in Bearnard’s direction. He, like her, waited to see how the general planned to use their help. So far this was his fight alone until they needed to step in.

Why isn’t the enemy firing yet? she asked her partner. It’s almost like they wanted the dragoons to form their snare.

I’m wondering that as well, the broad shouldered Dreamer replied. Something’s off, for sure.

Caroline turned to address the general, to warn him of a trap, when she noticed the slightest shimmering of air just beyond Bearnard. It had been a subtle shift of light that gave it away, and she would have missed it had it not been for the angle. She’d never seen anything like this weave—no, not a weave, more like a compressed ball of air hovering just at the Dreamer’s feet.

Bearnard! she quickly warned. Look to your left!

Where? he asked, confused and now scanning the woods beside him.

No! By your feet! Look down!

I see nothing! he replied.

Caroline wildly turned her head left and right, scanning for more and finding one off to her own right. This one she could see more clearly, certainly a compressed ball of air—no, the purest portion of it humans needed to survive. Somehow, someone had separated the particles and chose only this gas to remain as a floating ball hidden among the ferns and leaves.

“It’s a trap!” she yelled to the general.

But her warning came too late, as several enemy soldiers touched tiny fuses against their torches.

Of course! she realized how the trap would spring, but it was a moment too late. “Get down!” she commanded, and some of the lucky dragoons listened. The grenades flew through the air, each in a different direction and not necessarily into the line of dragoons. Each path was predetermined, and Caroline watched as one of the bombs flew just to Bearnard’s left and another landed just to her own right.

The explosions were violent and immediate. Each ball of compressed gas erupted with roaring flame as the traps expanded, a phenomenon the Dreamers had witnessed once before—on a battlefield so far distanced by time she’d nearly forgotten. The backdraft roared with heat and flame, flinging men in every direction, scattering both their screams and limbs into the forest.

Caroline gasped when she again lifted her head, the ringing thrumming a constant tone drowning out gunfire. All around her, dragoons recovered and fired upon the now advancing enemy and pushed them back behind their pickets. She tried to stand but the world around her swayed. The Dreamer fell hard to the forest floor. With panic controlling the pace of her heart, she noticed Bearnard no longer stood where he had. Only a blackened crater remained.

Slowly her mind settled and sound returned, drowning out the ringing tone and replacing it with soft moans of the wounded.

“Hold steady, men!” the unfocused image of General Kelly commanded, having picked up a rifle from a dead dragoon. He took aim while leading the defense. “Hold them back!”

Caroline managed to find her knees and pulled them under her belly, righting her view of the battlefield with eyes straining to understand the images as they cleared.

“Emotants!” she spat in the direction of the general. “They have emotants!”

“Find them!” he insisted.

She tried to, reaching out with tendrils to see upon the air, but abruptly let go with a puff of futility when several binding whisps wrapped like pythons around her body. There, she thought as she followed the braided strands to their source—two men and a woman dressed in northern attire, all snow white like their homeland. Upon their backs and heads the trio wore the hooded fur cloaks of their order. Snow Cats! She recognized from the war, the zealot cultists from the north.

Caroline tried to rise up and fight, but their grip tightened—there were too many to fight off. These were not Falconers, nor were they as limited in their use of the craft, they were true wielders of power—emotants destined to become Dreamers had their fates not locked them in the madness of fervent religion. They controlled her now, overwhelmed by combined strength greater than her own. With Bearnard she might have had a chance, maybe still could if the coward joined in. She struggled to free herself.

Helpless to aid, she knelt on the forest floor and watched as a gust of wind blew back General Kelly’s dragoons. Very soon they would be overrun and Prince Robert captured or killed, and all Caroline could do was watch.