Shae had watched Kayden hold himself together through the night as he’d prepared what they would need for the journey. She’d seen him keep a strong face this morning as he’d said his goodbyes to his family in the courtyard where the two horses were waiting. His hands had trembled as he’d helped Shae get into the saddle, but he’d hidden it quickly by cinching down the saddlebags and the sword that were strapped across her horse’s back.
Only now, when they started off—when they passed through the gate of the Mar family’s home—did his tears begin to fall.
They came in silence, and Shae pretended she did not see them. She kicked her horse forward a few paces and led the way down the road through town to the bridge over the river. She hadn’t the slightest notion where they were going—the Blue Keep meant nothing to her, though she’d heard members of the household whisper it like a condemnation—but she knew that at least the first part of getting anywhere from the manor meant going downhill.
Shae didn’t understand everything about how power was wielded here—though seeing what the king had done to Kayden had been an education—but from the beginning, she’d known that there were those who had it and those who didn’t. She had no love for such power structures—a woman, she felt, ought to be free to cut her own wake across the sea—but she at least found comfort in the familiarity that those who had power here, as in the Fair Isles, could always be found uphill. “The reason,” an older pirate had once told her, “is their shit runs downhill.”
In truth, so much was familiar here. If she could in her mind take away the defensive ditches and the lumicklines—those metal cables, glowing pale blue, that were strung around the perimeter of the town where water couldn’t go—the whole town of Felcamp really wasn’t all that different from a Seaborn town. It made sense, given what she and Bela had learned from Kayden Mar—back when he was their prisoner—about how the Windborn and Seaborn had long ago been one people.
There were little differences, of course, and Shae took note of them as her horse carried her down the cobblestone street. The roofs were taller, more sharply pitched. The doors were heavier. The windows had thick curtains. All of it, she knew, because they needed extra protection from the cold when it came—something foreign to the Fair Isles.
Winter. It was the reason there was a brown, bear-fur cloak draped over her shoulders. The reason she was wearing a heavy shirt and warm woolen trousers that seemed to resist every movement she made. Back home, her clothing was light and loose. Here, the chill in the air meant thick cloth that fought every action. Halfway through town, she was already tugging and twisting at the restriction.
“Too tight?” Kayden asked from behind her. His horse trotted up, and Shae saw that he’d wiped his face dry. He sat straight-backed in the saddle, ignoring the occasional stare from the townspeople here and there on the side of the road. Word would’ve traveled quickly through Felcamp, she supposed. They knew why he was riding out.
She sighed in exasperation. “Don’t know how you fight in these.”
He shrugged. His fur cloak was a beautiful glossy black, and she wondered whether it was a sign of wealth to have such a thing. Perhaps his family had insisted that he take with him that small sign of what he’d once been. “Easier than fighting without them,” he said.
“I assure you, it’s not.”
He smiled at that, glancing over with an eyebrow raised. “Is fighting naked a tradition among the Seaborn I didn’t observe?”
Shae wasn’t sure if he was amused or interested. “A pirate reality now and again,” she said. It was the truth.
He pursed his lips thoughtfully, then once more looked down the road. Shae wiggled the cloth around her hips, and finally got everything where it felt right—just in time for her sleeves to bind up at the elbows. “Will it get much colder?” she asked.
“Assuredly.” Kayden nodded to a man unloading barrels by the door of a house. “Folks are stocking up for the winter. They say it’ll be a cold one. Heavy, hard snows are already falling up north.” He sniffed the air. “But we wouldn’t really call this cold yet.”
“This isn’t cold?” Shae said.
“Brisk, we’d say. Cold is when it runs your toes and fingers numb.”
“To’whir’s hand,” she cursed.
“As you say,” Kayden said. Then, after a moment, he shifted in the saddle so he could look at her more directly. “To’whir is your god, yes?”
“A god.” Shae held the reins with one hand so that she could rub the other across her thigh, both to straighten the wool and to warm the skin beneath it. “There are nine.”
“Nine gods?”
“Yes. Nine. To’whir is the god of storms.”
“That’s a lot of men in the sky, Shaesara.”
“Only a man would think the gods are all men.”
“Some of them are women?”
“And some are neither.”
“Neither?”
“Or both.”
“I … I don’t understand.”
“I’m not the least bit surprised,” she said.
He smiled at that, and it seemed to her that it was genuine amusement. He’ll be all right, she thought. Maybe he’ll even be better for all this. Maybe losing everything would be a way for him to get a fresh start.
It was a clear day. High clouds and bright, cold light. Far off to the east, she could see the sleek, swordfish shape of the king’s airship, its triple-rotored engines churning it through the air back to Silverhall.
Engines.
Rotors.
The words were still new to her, the technologies strange, but she nevertheless felt a kind of comfort in knowing a bit about how these things worked. For years, the Windborn airships had been a frightening mystery: where they came from, how they stayed aloft, how they sailed through the sea of the sky. Now, alone of all the Seaborn and pirates in the Fair Isles, she knew. The ships came from here in Aionia. Their great bags were filled with a kind of air that came bubbling through the waters of a lake near what Kayden called the Heron Marshes. And the ships sailed the sky using the turning rotor, driven by lumick engines.
Lumick.
On the night she’d fought with the magicker Mabaya atop the Spire—the night Kayden had spirited her away from the Isles—she’d learned about the soulglass that powered the alumen. The strange crystals, she’d learned, connected to the Stream, a power that bound everything and everyone together, accessible through a portal that the ancients had opened in Ealond, the ancestral home of both the Seaborn and Windborn. The power of the crystals gave life to the metal men. But stripped from their bodies, it could be used to fight them. Shae had often tried to imagine the act as she sat on her rock by the river: the men wading through the water, desperately tugging at the frozen thing’s silver panels so they could reach in and pull out its still-glowing heart of soulglass. She tried to imagine their elation, despite their losses, their excitement when Felcamp sent out its call for the nearest roving lumicker to come and use that crystal to power more humming lines that alumen couldn’t cross, the engines of another airship, or some other wonder not yet devised.
It was extraordinary, even if she still couldn’t fathom the inner workings of such things. Not that Kayden could either. This was why lumickers existed, he’d laugh. Just the same, he’d told her that what drove the airships was a machine, like the ballista that she’d help build on the deck of her own ship to take down Kayden’s. A machine. Pieces and parts.
It wasn’t magick, and she’d taken comfort in that fact. Things that weren’t magick could be destroyed.
“Thinking heavy thoughts,” Kayden said from beside her.
Shae had been looking up at the airship for too long, she realized. Staring, like an enraptured child. “Nothing.”
Kayden followed her gaze with his own. “Oh,” he said, seeing the airship.
“What’s going to happen to Sylverlyn?” Shae asked.
Kayden brought his attention back to the road and made a point of straightening the reins in his hand. His horse shook its head in response. “I thought you didn’t like her.”
“Why would you think that?”
“You’d think a pirate would be a better liar.”
Shae chewed on her lip, thinking. “I didn’t,” she said. “It’s true. But then yesterday, what she did—”
He nodded. “Yeah. But, look, I know Syl. She didn’t do it just for me. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Even when it looks like she’s adrift, she’s got a rudder in the water.”
Kayden thought for a moment. “Sounds about right.”
They’d reached the end of town, where the cobblestones gave way to the wide, weathered stones of the bridge over the river. Shae pulled rein and looked upstream. The metal man was there in the distance. Same as he ever was.
“Everything all right?” Kayden asked.
“I’ve never been across the bridge,” she said.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” he said. “A lot farther than this. Come on.”
Their horses set forward again. There were farms across the river—the farms, she supposed, that the aluman had attacked before it walked into the water—and threading around them were the ditches fed by the river. Not just irrigation, she knew, but lines of defense against more metal men. Not far ahead, where the ditching ended, a stone archway had been built over the road, wide and tall enough for a large wagon. Extending beyond it on both sides of the road, she could see, were the metal cables, the height of an aluman’s chest. In the bright light, she could barely see their blue glow. The twin lines reached a pair of support pillars in the distance, then turned out of sight as the road bent around a tree-covered hill.
“A long way to go,” she said.
*
Night had fallen, and the campfire was crackling when Shae realized that Kayden hadn’t once looked back. She wasn’t sure if he would regret it in the end, but she was nevertheless glad for it. It was a sign that he was moving forward.
He’d had his moments of quiet, of course. But he hadn’t wept again. And when something did break the silence, he wasn’t sullen or grave. He was just a man—an Aionian man, she corrected herself, since no man in the Fair Isles would carry himself so freely.
Camp was made upon the road itself. She’d expected that they’d set up beside it, in case other travelers came along, but Kayden assured her that this was how things were done in Aionia. Between the lumicklines, they’d be safe from alumen. And besides, they’d seen only a single tradesman’s wagon during the long day of riding. Traffic on the Greensward Road wasn’t likely to be much this time of year, Kayden said. As they’d seen in Felcamp, people were preparing their homes for the winter, not traveling between towns.
Kayden had a tent, but the bugs were down with the chill, and there seemed little chance of rain. So, while he’d rolled out their sleeping mats on the packed earth of the road, Shae had built a fire to bring warmth to their hands and hot food to their bellies. Watching the flames grow had been strangely comforting, and she’d wondered, sitting in the blue glow of the strange lumicklines, if it was because the fire felt like something familiar from back home.
The cured pork they’d packed had sizzled and popped over the flames, and they’d both chomped it down quickly. She hadn’t expected to be so hungry, but the day in the saddle had left her famished. And sore, she was realizing. Her crotch felt like it was bruised from the hard saddle, and the insides of her thighs were chafed raw.
“How many more days?” she asked.
Kayden was poking at the fire with a stick. “What’s that?”
Shae stretched, then winced at the movement. Her back hurt too. “I never asked how far it was.”
“You didn’t have to come,” he said.
“If I hadn’t said I was going to, I think the king would’ve taken me with him and tried to get more information out of me—though I don’t have any.”
“My father might’ve protected you.” Kayden said the words, but his heart didn’t seem to be behind them.
“I wouldn’t have been welcome in Felcamp. You know that. I wasn’t really welcome before, and now—”
“Now you’d be seen as the reason I had to leave.”
“Exactly.”
He looked up at the sky. There was a strip of stars between the glowing blue cables. “A week if the weather stays like this.”
“Will it?”
He grinned his way back down to the flames. “I doubt it.”
She had to smile. “Figures.”
“To’whir’s tit, right?”
The image in her mind was so sudden that she laughed out loud.
Kayden frowned. “What?”
Shae wiped at her eyes. “To’whir doesn’t have tits.”
“A man?”
She nodded.
He sighed, and used his stick to quash an ember that kicked out when a log popped in the fire. “Well, I tried.”
“You did,” Shae said. “Thank you. Truly. I suppose it must be confusing for you. From the union of To’ma and Ta’wa—sky and sea—came two children. Their son is god of storms. Their daughter is Ta’koa, the earth.”
“Union?”
“For the one thing a man can provide a woman that another woman cannot.”
He seemed to chew on the thought for a moment. When he opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something more, Shae had a feeling in her gut that she wouldn’t like what it was. “So the Blue Keep,” she blurted out. “Ever been there?”
He closed his mouth, tossed his stick into the fire, and watched it burn. “No,” he finally said. “I haven’t.”
“What is it?”
He pushed back from the flames, shifting to his side and stretching out on his blanket. “It’s a fortification in the Pillars. Guards one of the passes.”
“Passes?”
“A low spot where it’s easier to get from one side of the mountains to the other.” He grinned again. “I guess you don’t really have those on the sea.”
“Not really,” she admitted.
“A pass is like”—he thought for a moment—“like a channel between islands.”
“Somewhere you can get through.”
He seemed to be pleased that she understood his analogy. “That’s right.”
“So, what’s on the other side of this pass?”
One of the horses huffed, and Kayden rolled over to look at it. Both animals were tied off to support poles that held up the lumicklines. One of the beasts was twitching its tail, but it looked like they were just settling in. Kayden turned back over. “The other side of the Pillars,” he said, “is what we flew over when we came from the Fair Isles. It’s mostly empty land. No one lives there.”
Shae’s eyes narrowed. “So why fortify it?”
“Sorry?”
“This pass. If there’s no rival kingdom on the other side, why guard it? Are there pirates?”
It was Kayden’s turn to laugh a little at an image. “On land, we’d call them bandits. And no, don’t get your hopes up. There aren’t bandits on the other side. Just alumen.”
“Alumen?”
“That side is where our people first came ashore after we left Ealond. So it’s where the alumen first came ashore too. We fled west, pushed up to the mountains. Some of us found the passes and got through, though, and came down here into Aionia. We fortified the passes behind us.”
“So the Blue Keep holds back the alumen.”
“There are other keeps at other passes, and now and then the alumen find another way around. But yes.”
“And now you will be in charge of the Blue Keep?”
Kayden’s face was tight. “As the king wishes.”
“This is a high honor.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“I don’t understand. You’ll be protecting all these lands.”
Kayden leaned back and looked up at the stars. “I suppose it looks that way. But no one gets much honor for holding the Blue Keep. I honestly can’t tell you the name of the man I’m replacing. I don’t think I can remember ever knowing the name of the man who held it.”
“Why not?”
He took a deep breath and let it out at the sky. “No one lives long enough to have their names known, I suppose. The alumen don’t ever really stop trying to get through, Shae. And not just one here and there. Not like what happened in Felcamp. They come in waves. So, no, holding a Pillar keep isn’t really an honor. It’s a death sentence.” He thought for a moment and then looked over at her with a tight smile. “We are dead even now.”