The Elawn cut through the sky with speed never equaled by her sails. Air rushed over the deck like a gale. Gabriella’s sable hair was flattened across her face. The mage fire had made it long and lustrous. She was forced to tie it into a ponytail just so she could see. Adamantus’ fur danced and rippled, and his antlers whistled in the wind as they had that first day they crossed the grasslands. The mage fire healed the scratches and bruises on Dameon. Gabriella wrapped him in an oversized rain cloak so that he would not catch cold from the draft.
The sun was just over the bow, the eastern continent receding behind them. Gabriella scrambled to the mid-deck, placed her hand on the tail of the wyvern and spoke, “There is somewhere we must first go.”
No sooner had she pictured the island of Vasan in her mind than the wyvern turned south. The continent, with the long shadows of late afternoon reaching across its hills and dells, passed along the port rail. Gabriella could sense the mother’s reluctance to go to the island. There indeed was something about the island that kept dragons at bay.
Gabriella considered the goat skull sitting just inches from the dragon’s tail. Looking at it made her skin crawl. She would not try to plumb the mysteries of relics this day. Instead she joined Adamantus and Dameon on the mid-deck, taking one last, lingering look at the eastern shores. Gabriella guessed they all felt the same way: they must look now because this journey would not be repeated.
The Elawn reached Vasan with dreamlike speed. The wyvern soared lower over the channel. Waves and white caps passed beneath them with extraordinary swiftness. Now Gabriella knew what it felt like to be the wind.
The village came into view. Not a single ship was in the channel. Not a single chimney breathed a puff of smoke. The wyvern slowed, and they circled the buildings. All the prone figures remained on the ground. The island looked as if a plague had struck.
When the wyvern pulled the Elawn alongside the pillar, her wings kicking up eddies of dusty air, the Vasani remained motionless. The Elawn was still too high—the gangway would not reach the ground. Understanding this, the wyvern offered her tail to Gabriella and Adamantus, curling it around them gently and carrying them to the ground. As they set foot on the island, no one stirred.
Gabriella feared they were too late. Chas was just where she had left him. Gabriella knelt beside him, opening a small cask of water, and pouring it into a cup that she placed next to his face.
“Chas, please drink. We have returned your relic.”
Adamantus translated. At first the old man did not move. Gabriella wondered again if she were truly standing in one great graveyard. Then Chas lifted his head. The old man looked at the pillar just as Dameon replaced the skull, handling the relic with a delicate touch.
Then Chas saw the wyvern. Gabriella did not even try to explain. Adamantus spoke quickly in soothing tones, but it took a long time for the panic to subside from Chas’ face. It was replaced by bemused wonder, which only increased when the baby wyvern landed beside them and sniffed Chas’ hand the way a dog might. Gabriella encouraged Chas to pet the creature. He did so, then laughed aloud, incredulous.
The laughter caused others to look up. Like Chas, they first panicked, but the old leader calmed them, calling out in a hoarse voice and gesturing to Gabriella.
“What is he saying?” Gabriella asked Adamantus.
“That you left a prisoner but returned a dragon lord. You are most wondrous. You have tamed dragons, returned the relic, and saved the city.”
“Don’t tell the wyvern that tamed part. For some reason I don’t think she would like it.”
At Gabriella’s signal, Dameon pushed five trunks through the gap in the port deck. They dropped onto the town square and spilled their contents. The people gasped. Dameon bounced on the balls of his feet with pleasure as the coins spread, sparkling below him. Then his smile faded, replaced by a look of concentration as he began to count the coins. Gabriella touched Chas on the shoulder.
“Payment,” she said, “for your hospitality, supplies, and troubles.”
Gabriella was pleased to see Jambi and Naema pick themselves up from the ground, offering shy smiles. As Gabriella and Adamantus were enveloped by the wyvern’s tail again, Chas came alongside, touched his breast, and spoke.
“He promises that they will honor you,” Adamantus said. Then Chas added something under his breath that made the elk’s eye light up with merriment.
“What was that?” Gabriella asked. The mother’s tail was already curling up, lifting them back into the Elawn.
“He says that they will be arguing for years whether or not the relic still works after having a dragon alight on the island. It will give the old men something to debate about.”
Gabriella blew Chas a kiss. The wyvern wrapped her tail around the ship once more. As she flapped her wings, whirlwinds of dust twisted through the crowds of people. They shielded their faces, but no one turned away, no one could avert their eyes from the graceful glistening beast. Chas, Jambi, and Naema waved with both hands raised high above their heads. Gabriella waved back and even shook Dameon’s arm towards them until the three Vasani were too small to distinguish.
The Elawn in tow was a transformed experience. The wind was constantly howling. Sometimes if they encountered a gust that hit the ship broadside, or worse, on the prow, the deck would heave or drop suddenly, sending trunks and their contents jingling. Lighting a fire was near impossible until they created a windbreak with the treasure chests at the stern.
On their first visit to Vasan, the people had packed them ample flat bread, salted meat, as well as yellow-green apples, unlike the red apples familiar to Gabriella. She found jars of peanuts as well as boiled eggs. She dragged over a bag of oats from one of the compartments for Adamantus to feast upon. The Vasani had seen to everyone’s needs. No one need grow hungry—they had enough food for a return journey of many weeks.
But weeks were not needed. Adamantus estimated that at their present speed they would reach Harkness in just four days. Gabriella checked and doubled-checked with Dameon how much time had elapsed since they had left Harkness. It was unbelievable to Gabriella, but she imagined they just might reach Harkness before the new moon.
Feathers returned to her stomach. That night Gabriella waited anxiously at the stern for the waning moon to rise. It was nothing but a sliver. In a day or two, it would be gone all together. Adamantus and Dameon were confident of each other’s estimations. All there was left to do was wait and hope.
At night they all huddled together, wrapped in blankets to keep out the cold. Even the baby wyvern could not keep up with his mother’s pace, so often times he rested with them. They slept on mattresses dragged onto the deck within the shelter of their wind break. No one wanted to sleep within the cabins, not when the moonlight was dim and the stars, scattered from horizon to horizon, were so bright that they hovered within the touch of an outstretched hand. Not when they knew their trip sailing together in the heavens would soon end.
They passed Foyle Island on a sunny afternoon. Its shape was clearly visible over the sea, but a blue haze obscured the island like a pall of sadness. Fortunately the mother did not fly close. After a time, Gabriella could not bear to look at the place. She tracked its position by the reflection in Adamantus’ eyes while she rolled the sprig with the blue leaves between her fingers and moistened the cloth around it.
The wind continued to roar over the deck. The rigging hummed and stretched the frames of the sails. When she needed a change or a distraction, Gabriella made her way to the bow where she sat wrapped in a cloak, listening carefully to the groans of the old ship, but most of all watching the sea and the sky go by, often with Ghede’s leaves in her hands.
During her interludes alone on the prow, she thought of Omanuju. She also thought of Mortimer. For Omanuju, she felt pure sadness. But her feelings about Mortimer, his courage, his betrayal, and his death were too complex to put into words. She had not spoken of him to either Adamantus or Dameon. She mourned Omanuju. She even mourned Mortimer a bit, but she was not certain whether she mourned the man who was, or the man that he could have been. As the Elawn pressed westward, ever closer to home, she could not shake the feeling that they had left too many Harkenites, friend or no, behind.
Clouds passed. Scattered clouds like spilled cream. Blotted clouds like droppings from cotton sacks. Mountain ranges of clouds that were painted the colors of the sunset—oranges, reds, purples, blues. Menacing clouds that hung, black as anvils, cracked apart by lightning. All while the sun rolled through the dome of the sky, from one horizon to the next. The sea sometimes took on the sun’s color, sometimes the sky’s, sometimes its own moody, brooding gray, flecked with white, like an aging man’s hair.
Gabriella saw sets of islands she recognized from their travels. They passed the sulfuric smelling fumaroles, those rents in the earth where gases hotter than a summer day poured forth. They flew over the islands where thousands of puffins and pelicans roosted, where no person had ever set foot.
Gabriella thought of how she had changed since first glimpsing the islands far below on their outward journey. Back then the height had been a sickening curse, the ship a confusing mystery to her. She had been a complete mystery to herself. Now she was skipper, her vertigo for the most part gone, and, she knew herself better. She knew how strong she could be. Gabriella remembered feeling that these rocky shores were so far from home, so distant, and desolate. Now ironically they seemed close, a sign of nearing their destination. Passing Kejel was like passing a neighbor’s house. Gabriella thought of the outfit she had made for herself on the island, the look in Ghede’s eye when he saw her in it, the feeling of power she had experienced wearing it.
As the leagues passed, the Elawn shook and shuddered. These speeds, these winds, and these miles had not been kind to the airship. The Elawn was like a wife yearning for her passed husband, but Ghede was long gone. In his absence, the Elawn deteriorated, the widow withered.
Dameon had counted twenty-seven pieces of the hull that had broken free in the wind since they had left Vasan. At such a speed, the boards would snap free and clatter along the hull, sucked into their slip stream, announcing another breach before soaring out behind the ship into the empty sky. The chamber enclosing the magnetic stone was riddled with sunlight pouring in through fresh holes in the hull. The ropes wrapped about the axles holding the stone had long since lost their tautness and hung loose. They were so frayed Gabriella did not even consider trying to tighten them for fear of snapping them. The metal vices Mortimer had fixed were already corroding. The gaps in the axle beams were three-fingers wide now. All the rigging had begun to crumble in her hands. She prayed, to whom she no longer knew, but she prayed they would hold together.
On the last day of their journey—by their best estimates they would reach Harkness at day’s end—Dameon, Adamantus, and Gabriella gathered in the stern. They sat in silence. Gabriella wondered why she felt no excitement or relief, being so near her home island, but a sense of loss instead. She would miss the closeness to Adamantus and her brother that their adventures had fostered. She would also miss the sense of discovery that every day had brought. She knew they had to return home, but she was already wondering when she might broach the subject of trying to repair one of the remaining airships for future trips with Adamantus.
The notion helped to ease her melancholy. Even the baby wyvern was morose, sensing that a farewell was imminent. The parting came in the late afternoon when the mother wyvern called out from the bow in a gentle trumpeting roar to her offspring. The wind was dying around the ship. The dragon’s tail had gone slack and was sliding over the railing, a retreating snake.
Harkness, wreathed in white surf, waited below.
They had reached the eastern, unpopulated side of the island. Gabriella could see the cove where they had first found the Elawn to the north. Long shadows of leafless trees stretched across the island slopes. Some valleys were already lost in the shade of evening. An entire moon had passed, days had grown darker; autumn was fading into winter. A night mist rolled toward the hilltops.
For Gabriella, it was strange to see the island. Not because it had changed, but rather because it had not. So many things had changed within her. She had half expected her home to have adapted to reflect it. But the island moved to a much different time, the same slow movement that had turned Dis into forested ruins. In her short life, she knew, Harkness would remain constant, steady, eternal.
The baby wyvern nudged her. Gabriella rubbed its scaly face a moment before it leapt over the rail to fly beside its mother, who stroked her wings at a more leisurely pace now. Her offspring was a nervous and bobbing dragonfly beside her. With a final and loud gust of air from her nostrils, the mother who had been their enemy, their champion, and finally their savior twisted in the air and swept over the Elawn, waving her wings in a dramatic swoosh so that one last blast of air rocked Gabriella, Dameon, and Adamantus like an affectionate caress. Then the two dragons flew off into the east where the evening star was visible.
Gabriella raised the sail and caught a strong breeze. It was the gentle wind that blew inland as each day turned into night on Harkness. She recalled how her family had adjusted the windows of their home to the breeze, depending on the time of year. She planned for the Elawn to ride the breeze over the highlands of the island and land at the edge of the forest in a well-hidden dell. Adamantus could carry them, as well as a trunk, to the edge of town, and then Gabriella and Dameon would take the trunk to Chief Salinger’s house from there.
Dameon’s finger tapped out a rhythm on the railing beside him. She could tell he was pleased that they were returning home. He asked Gabriella if she thought mother would fix his favorite meal of fried chicken or if she would scold them.
“Likely both,” Gabriella said, smiling. She felt relieved at the thought of a meal with her parents, but it was bittersweet for it would be a meal without Adamantus. After all they had been through, she knew she wanted to have him in her life more than ever, and she was loath to spend even a single night without him. She fantasized about building a cottage in the highlands where she could stay part of the year with Dameon and Adamantus.
She turned to the elk. “Adamantus, I know you are without Omanuju now, but I hope we can be friends, forever.”
“I would like that—” A loud snap followed by a lurch cut the elk short.
Gabriella screamed for Dameon to hold on. The paneled sail tilted, and the canvas went slack. With a terrible groan, the Elawn began to tilt downward. Trunks of treasure tumbled forward. The mid-deck rose alarmingly. Planks splintered and cracked as if a whale were trying to surface beneath them. The ship began to slide sideways.
“It’s the stone!” Gabriella yelled. “The axles have given way.”
As she spoke, the ship tilted again. The black surface of the stone became visible through breaks in the wood.
“What do we do?” she asked breathless.
“The stone will keep pressing upwards until it is free. The boards will not hold it. We must land,” Adamantus said, searching over the side.
“How?”
The elk looked to the levers in the wheel well. Gabriella knew there was no other way.
“Dameon,” she said. “Come over to Adamatus’ side.” As Ghede had done for her, she strapped Dameon into the sickness seating. There was no time for Adamantus to secure himself in the cabin so she buckled him across two of the folding seats.
She threw herself into the chair behind the wheel. She yanked the leather lap straps across her thighs and pulled them extra tight. She had spent hours in this seat working with the wheel but had never needed to touch the pedals that worked the side sails. She knew she would have to reach them now.
The stone shifted again, and slivers of the planks popped out and danced across the deck. The ship’s forward momentum had all but disappeared. They were simply floating, crippled.
“It’s best to just release the stone.” Adamantus tossed his head. “If we just sit here, there is no telling how much of the deck it will take with it.”
“Which lever?” Gabriella cried, but then she realized she already knew. The black one, the one with a head carved like a skull. The one that, when she had pulled it halfway down before, had flipped the stone.
“The black one! Pull it all the way back.”
She locked both hands around the lever and yanked downward. It came surprisingly easily, then stopped where the groove cut to the right. There was no turning back. She heaved it left, then down again. This time it took all her strength. Just when she was beginning to think it was jammed, it dropped into place. Something beneath the mid-deck popped. Hinges squeaked, and the mid-deck of the Elawn opened up. The stone floated upwards like an emancipated storm cloud.
The Elawn plummeted as if dropped off a hook. No more levitation. No more stone.
“The sail, the sail!” Adamantus cried over the rush of air.
Gabriella’s hair was in her face again. She reached blindly for levers, trying to remember which ones did what and pulled one. Nothing. She pulled another and with a swinging of booms, a rolling of wheels, and snap of canvass, the sail slid sideways into a wing overhead. The Elawn righted itself and glided smoothly, silently over the forest. The sea was just ahead of them.
“You will have to steer us or we will land in the sea, and we know this ship is not sea worthy,” the elk said, twisting in his straps, the whistle from his antlers rising in pitch as they accelerated. Gabriella wished the wyvern had not left them so soon.
They were still descending. Adamantus was right. At their present course, they would miss the island completely and crash down in the sea to the south. She pushed a pedal. The ship veered to port. That was east. They needed to go west. She pressed the other pedal. The ship turned a few degrees to starboard. She released the other pedal, and the Elawn gave itself over to the western turn completely.
The forest rushed into view. She could make out the familiar contours of the land she knew, even the fields of farmers that lived the furthest from town. The woods would be her first choice of landing spots. The tree branches and pine needles might cushion their decent, and the trees would hide the ship and the treasure. But the Elawn was dropping too rapidly. She searched the land below for alternative places, but the fields passed beneath them too quickly. Gabriella experimented with pulling back the wing, which decreased their descent, but also increased their speed. The wind rose to a roar around them. Adamantus was saying something.
She stretched the wing again.
“You will have to descend more quickly. We won’t have a chance to turn back.” The elk had read their trajectory better than she had. They would be lucky not to overshoot the length of the entire island, and there would be no circling around.
Then she saw the harbor and the village come into view. The glowing houses were the very picture of welcome. The town square was alight with torches almost as if it was festival time. Had they been gone so long that it was already the Harvest Festival? Her mind raced to recalculate the dates before being distracted by the need to adjust their speed and their altitude.
“Do you think we can reach the town?” she asked Adamantus.
“In the dark, it may now be our best course,” he said.
It would not be the inconspicuous landing Gabriella hoped for, but at least if they were in town they could find Chief Salinger’s house quickly, and perhaps he could send men to protect the treasure and the ship. Surviving had become paramount to secrecy.
She checked their course. They were drifting too far to the north. She swung the ship left, southwards. It was too abrupt, she realized. Soon they were heading directly towards the sea again, towards deep water.
No, no, no . . .
A cacophony of snaps at the starboard railing drew her attention. The ship lurched again.
Could nothing go right?
The rigging that held the starboard end of the wing was breaking, lines snapping like strings on a fiddle. The eye-bolts where the lines connected to the ship were coming loose and pulling wood free alongside them. Old, dried caulking fluttered up from the spreading planks and spun in the air like autumn leaves.
Please, just a bit further.
She eased the starboard pedal to bring them closer to land again. She winced as she did so, for she knew she was putting pressure on the crumbling side of the ship. She made sure the turn was slow and shallow, keeping them over the water longer than she would have liked. Soon the island was beneath them again. The ground was closer now. Houses passed below. She imagined they must have appeared to be a great dragon swooping over the tree tops to anyone on the ground. By the road and the barns below, she could tell they had already passed their own farm.
The town was just ahead. She sensed they were going to crash into the mass of buildings. She told herself that she was a fool to have aimed for the town. Unless she landed in the square, the place was a maze of walls and houses. There was no room for error. She pressed the port pedal. They soared over the harbor. It would buy her more time. The ship continued to descend. She was a bit high, but better that than too low. The air above the water was colder. Figures carried torches, and crowds of people filled the square. The whole town was out! It suddenly occurred to her that they could not see her coming. Why would they? Who expects a flying boat to drop out of the night sky?
“Watch out!” she screamed, but her voice was lost in the wind. She screeched again only to have her voice crack. Dameon covered his ears and beat his head against the back of his chair. Adamantus strained against his straps and lifted his head to the sky like a wolf howling at the moon. A deep baritone moan rose from deep within him, so deep that, like a large drum, its note reverberated in Gabriella’s breast.
Faces in the square turned their way. At first there was no reaction except the opposite of what was most urgently needed: people gathered at the harbor’s edge to see what the noise was. Adamantus howled louder. An arm pointed. A scream—a chorus of shouting, and the crowd surged apart. Gabriella tightened her grip on the levers.
“Thank the stars, you have a singing voice. They see us.”
“Good, now slow us!”
She tried. Their speed was tremendous. Every movement Gabriella made was too extreme—tilting the ship too far to port or too far to starboard. The landing called for finesse. They straightened but lost more altitude than she had intended. They were over the docks now. They were too low.
They smashed into the naked masts of moored ships. Crows nests crashed over the railings and splintered against treasure chests. The port wing ripped, the sound of the canvas splitting reverberating. Gabriella pushed both wings to full extension. The ship shuddered and trunks slid forward. The Elawn was going into a spin, but Gabriella clipped the wings, her own arms feeling heavy with the force of the rotation against her. The town square was just under the bowsprit.
The Elawn was skidding through the brightly lit square. No faces were visible now, only the retreating backs of people. The Elawn’s speed diminished. The sound of wood scraping on stone diminished. A building loomed up in their path. There was no stopping now. Gabriella braced herself.
Bricks and thatch fell down on the deck as the ship crashed into a building. The Elawn shifted once more, tilting over to the starboard side, rocked, then went still. Gabriella imagined the airship breathing her last. Gabriella patted one of the levers affectionately as Ghede had when landing in Nicomedes’ secret workshop, then leaned back coughing from the dust.
They were home.