Chapter One

Colorado Territory 1864

 

High up in the clear blue sky, a group of pterosaurs swept past the red-and-white-striped balloon of an approaching airship. The gull-sized creatures soared through the dirigible’s wake and then dived towards dark waters far below.

Grover watched the wily green pterosaurs descend to snatch silver-sided fish from the waves of the Inland Sea then go flapping back towards their roosts in the sea-swept cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. His attention returned to the star-spangled airship with its brassy gondola. The ship hadn’t yet crossed through the gray haze of the spell dome. It arched up from the alchemically fortified walls of the city and kept out most anything bigger than a songbird. Even across the distance and through the distortion, Grover thought he could make out the gold sun-shaped insignia of the US Office of Theurgy and Magicum on the gondola’s prow.

Theurgist professors, soldiers and maybe even a mage floated up there. All of them coming here to investigate the big blue sea that had flooded the states and territories from Kansas to the Gulf of Mexico.

The High Plains had transformed into a seabed. The foothills of the Rocky Mountains had become a chain of islands dotting the blue water, while high peaks now stood like a vast, great levee. As the waters had spread, so had lush fern jungles and the strange, old creatures that inhabited both.

Land and lives had been lost, and Fort Arvada had been inundated with refugees. And yet after six years, this single airship was all the aid the federal government sent. Grover just hoped they’d brought plenty of powdered alchemic stone. The city’s fortifications had been uprooted and stretched thin as paper to enclose as much farmland as possible, but the spells were old and growing weaker with every season.

Soon nothing would stand between the farmers of Fort Arvada and the old creatures.

Back on the bandstand, the musicians indulged in a final practice of their jubilant welcome to the visiting dignitaries while the gathered crowd peered up at the sky. Grover briefly spotted his cousin Frank, looking sharp despite having his nine-year-old daughter balanced on his shoulders. She waved her rag doll at the sky.

Up on the bandstand Mayor Wilder anxiously leafed through the pages of his speech. Mrs. Cora Cody and several other society women straightened their patchwork dresses and smiled at each other like they were about to attend their first dances. Then Cora turned to her husband, George, and straightened his beaver pelt top hat. Miss Xu Song shouted gleefully from the crowd that she could see the airship. Hundreds of men hooted and whooped.

From his post within the church steeple, Grover studied the expanse of cloud drifting across the blue sky. A ghostly pale wing dipped down from the white billows. Grover hefted his rifle and tracked the huge silvery pterosaur.

“Thunderbird,” Toby Cody whispered from beside him. The spindly ginger youth worked the focus of his spyglass. “Holy Moses! It’s a big’un, Grove.”

Grover continued to follow the beast through the sight of his rifle. Its silver membranous wings stretched a good thirty feet across. Sunlight glinted along the saber-sharp beak. Squinting, Grover could just make out the jet-black eyes and that slight curve that lent all thunderbirds the appearance of smiling slyly down on the rest of the world.

It swooped into a killing dive and Toby gasped. A shot rang out from spiked turret on the roof of the bank and then two more. Sheriff Lee shooting, like some greenhorn, at a target too far to hit. The sheer size of thunderbirds always made them appear closer than they were. Grover kept watching the huge pterosaur—a female, he guessed from the muted gold color of her skull crest. Such grace and speed flowed through even the slightest flick of her wings.

“Grove.” Toby’s voice rose with nervous alarm. He didn’t grasp Grover’s arm, but he sounded like he wanted to. “Grove, she’s close to the airship!”

“They got plenty of spells and guns of their own.” Grover kept his eyes on the thunderbird’s angle of descent. It was like watching an arrow in flight. “Anyhow that thunderbird ain’t interested in them. She’s after a mountain goat.”

Sheriff Lee fired again, and this time managed to wing the airship’s gondola.

“Oh Lord,” Toby whispered as the airship’s cannon ports swung open and cannon barrels angled down toward the welcoming crowd gathered in the city square.

The thunderbird snatched a white goat in her massive jaws and swooped up, soaring across the mountain face to claim a perch on a distant cliff. Likely she was young, and keeping out of her elders’ territories by nesting along the city’s fortifications. Come fall she might grow bolder. It would do to keep track of her, if she remained in the area.

Meanwhile, on the open ground of the square the hundreds of folk, all turned out in their Sunday best, stood frozen staring up at the airship’s glinting long guns.

Toby’s blonde aunt, Cora, rose to her feet on the bandstand. The blue ribbons festooning her yellow hat and dress wavered in the breeze as she started to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”. The band struck up after her, and soon the entire crowd joined in, belting out the anthem. In response the airship’s cannons retracted and the gunports fell closed.

The massive dirigible descended, its alchemic engines droning over the gathered crowd. Blue light flared as it passed through the spell dome. Federal airmen dropped ropes and slithered down them to secure the lines to the ground. As they hauled the airship down, Toby looked to Grover and grinned.

“You read that thunderbird like the Bible, Grove.”

Grover shrugged but indulged the youth with a smile.

At ten, Toby was still more in awe of Grover’s sharpshooting and tracking skills than he was aware of him as a Black man. Even that didn’t mean what it would have once, not with slave states from Texas to Georgia and down to Florida underwater. Blacks, Whites, Indians, Mexicans, even Chinese—they were all refugees in the mountains now, and for six years the people of Fort Arvada had only had one another to trust in and rely upon.

“You figure them federals are gonna put everything back to how it was before?” Toby asked.

“Stranger things happen, I reckon,” Grover replied. Though he wasn’t sure how he felt about returning to an age of cotton fields and plantations. He’d take floods and dinosaurs any day if it meant an end to pattyrollers and slave catchers.

“You think they brought sacks of magic dust with ’em?”

“Sure they have.” How much they’d charge for the ground alchemic stone was another matter, but Grover figured that if anyone could bluff, bluster and charm a load of federal bigwigs it would be Mayor Wilder.

“Do you suppose one of them’s a real live mage?” Toby leaned against the steeple railing and studied the line of uniformed men descending the gold stairs of the airship gondola. Grover followed the boy’s gaze. He took in the two slender white men both sporting blond mutton-chop sideburns and top hats. Not much of interest to see there, aside from the fact they appeared to be twins. An emaciated, gray-haired woman wearing a mink jacket and a massive sapphire dress over a cage crinoline followed them. The mourning band sewn to her coat sleeve displayed the Union Jack often worn by the English diaspora. Grover wondered if she was one of those lady mages who’d forfeited her title to practice magic legally in the US. Or maybe she’d fled to escape the floods in England and France. She looked old as iron and hard enough to split flint with her glare.

A fourth figure stepped down from the stairs and started towards the bandstand where Mayor Wilder stood waiting. For an instant Grover felt like his eyes failed him. As the tall, lean man approached the bandstand, the mayor’s composure faltered. His lined, pale face flushed, and he grinned like a joyous child. Cora Cody, on the other hand, paled noticeably, and her husband reached out to steady her.

Grover’s grip on his rifle nearly slipped, and his heart began to beat so hard he felt it in his temples. He gaped down at that angular face and the wind-tousled auburn hair he’d never thought to see again in his life. Lawrence Wilder took the stairs of the bandstand quickly and embraced his father.

Grover couldn’t pull his gaze from Lawrence. Every detail of the other man held him, from the supple, worn quality of his black boots and long army coat, to the string of medals decorating the chest of his blue uniform. He’d grown broader in the shoulder, but his face seemed hollowed and his smile appeared oddly fleeting. There was something slightly off about the motion of his right arm as well. He held it stiffly and moved it with deliberate care.

Grover wondered if his skin still smelled like ponderosa pine or if that boyish hitch caught in his low laugh when he was drunk. Did he even remember Grover or their secret adventures into the woods?

“Who’s that?” Toby pointed as if Grover might have missed the spectacle.

“Mage Lawrence Wilder, the mayor’s son.” Grover hoped the boy didn’t notice how his voice caught on the name. “He went off to fight the Arrow War over in China eight years ago. He died in battle—” The anguish of that loss tore through Grover even now. Unlike Cora who publically mourned her fiancé’s demise, Grover had found solace only in the isolation of the wilderness. He still couldn’t ride past the apple trees of the Wilder House without feeling as if someone had pushed a knife into his chest. “Or that’s what was reported.”

“But he’s alive.” Toby angled his spyglass down at Lawrence.

“That does appear to be the case.” Eight years he’d been gone and six of those presumed dead. What in the blazes had happened?

On the bandstand, Lawrence and the mayor broke apart and welcomed the other officials from the Office of Theurgy and Magicum. Briefly, while the mayor read from his speech, Lawrence seemed to search through the gathered crowd. Grover fought the urge to shout or wave like a mad man—that sort of scene wouldn’t do anybody any good, and that was assuming it was him Lawrence looked for.

Eight years without a single letter wasn’t exactly an indication of fidelity.

Toby toyed with his spyglass and heaved a particularly dramatic sigh.

“You wanna go down and sing with Aunt Cora and Uncle George?”

“Nah, I ain’t likely to recollect most the words.” Grover hardly pulled his gaze from Lawrence. His pulse still pounded so hard that he felt certain his voice would quaver like some old auntie if he tried to sing. “I’m going to keep watch up here a while longer. The dome ain’t quite healed up from where the airship burned through it.”

Toby hesitated. But after Grover pointed out that Maria and Claudia Garcia were selling cochinito cookies one dozen for a nickel, Toby abandoned him right quick.

Grover watched and listened to the formal welcome but in such a shaken state that he wasn’t certain he understood half of what was said. He couldn’t stop staring at Lawrence or wondering what had happened to him.

The mutton-chop twins revealed themselves to be the brothers David and Nathaniel Tucker, both war veterans and professors of theurgy. While they grinned and offered assurances about advances in alchemic engines and expanding the fortification spells, the gray-haired woman, Lady Honora Astor, glowered at the crowd. When asked to offer a few words, she stated that justice would be had for all those thousands whose lives and homelands had been torn from them.

Her words inspired resounding cheers from the crowd, but made Grover feel uneasy. Lady Astor’s ire reminded Grover of when he’d been six years old and Reverend Dodd had stormed into his family’s cabin, red-faced and accusing Grover of feeding his parishioners’ dairy cows locoweed and cursing their milk. Grover’s ma had looked terrified, but she’d stepped right between the reverend and Grover and hefted her snakewood broom like she meant to lay Reverend Dodd out with it. A moment later Grover’s pa had bounded in from the tanning shed with his fleshing knife still in his hand and sent the reverend running.

Grover had felt both awed by and proud of his parents that afternoon.

But a week later, Grover had woken, choking on smoke as his ma pulled him from his bed and flames climbed the walls of their cabin. He and his ma escaped, but his big, gentle pa had died fighting to save their home.

Instinctively, Grover glanced to Mayor Wilder. He’d been the one who’d given Grover’s ma work at his mansion after the fire, and he’d seen to it that Reverend Dodd let them be. The mayor was a strong believer in abolition and also related by blood to too many genuine mages to confuse a little boy’s capering with any sort of real curse.

Today the mayor beamed at his son and assured the officials that all the resources of Fort Arvada City would be at their disposal. Then Cora Cody and her friends in the Ladies’ Christian Charity Union sang a hymn. Grover could sense Cora fighting not to stare at Lawrence the entire time. Lawrence offered her a curt smile but he didn’t hold her gaze, nor did he sing along.

At last the public welcome ended. The party of federal officials and the city’s most prominent citizens began dispersing to prepare for the private celebration to be held that evening at the mayor’s residence. Though just as Lawrence reached the steps of the ribbon-festooned bandstand, he raised his head, and Grover thought that he stared straight up at him. But Lawrence’s expression remained distant. He descended into the crowd flanked by ranks of blue-uniformed soldiers while all around excited throngs cheered and waved.

Long rays of setting sunlight shot between the jagged peaks of the surrounding mountains. Up in the cliffs a pack of coyotes howled high and long against the wails of a flock of pterosaurs.

Grover shifted in his saddle and tipped back his wide-brimmed hat.

He hadn’t been down to the Wilder House in years, and in truth he had no right or reason to go now. If he possessed a drop of common sense, he’d turn around right now and ride back to his room in the Codys’ boarding house. Because what the blazes was he going to do when he got there? Hitch Betty to a post with a bunch of nervous horses and stroll on in through the front door like he’d mistaken himself for a man of high society rather than the son of their former cook?

Beneath him, Betty ruffled her rust-speckled feathers and twisted her long neck back to cast him that eerie owl-like stare of hers. Grover reached out and stroked the warm blue skin between her huge amber eyes and her glossy bronze beak. In response she produced a sweet little chirp then picked up her pace, carrying Grover down the road at a breath-taking clip.

Betty was no more natural to this world than the hulking, toothy giants that stalked the mountains. Grover knew that. But he’d found Betty five years ago, still trapped in her egg at an abandoned nest, and something about her plaintive peeping had moved him. Maybe he’d just been too lonely out in the woods with no company but his memories of Lawrence—he didn’t know.

Whatever the reason, he hadn’t left her to die. Instead he’d carefully pried the shell open and kept the little beast fed and warm all through that fall and winter.

In spring when he brought her with him back into town, it had caused a stir. But Betty liked to show off, and that made it easy to demonstrate how well he’d trained her. Both Robert Haim and Will Blackhill had offered to buy her off of him. Grover declined as politely as he knew how and sold them the hides and feathers of other dinosaurs instead. To stable her, he’d handed over an extra pound of salt alongside the pelts and dried meat that he normally traded George Cody for his own room and board.

Round the dinner table at the boarding house, George Cody reckoned Betty was some kind of early relation to an ostrich. (He was a firm believer in Mr. Darwin’s evolution theory.) He’d shown around several lithographs from his fine volumes of natural-science books. But comparing an ostrich to Betty was like comparing a canary to an eagle. She stood hip to hip with most horses, and instead of tiny wings, she possessed feathered arms, ending in three-taloned fingers—which she was not shy of slashing at any stallion that came after her feed. Claws like Bowie knives tipped each of her long toes, and her plumed tail rippled with so much muscle that she could lash even the meanest dog ten feet in the air.

Though tonight, Grover hoped no one would be setting dogs on him and Betty.

Ahead, the Wilder House loomed up over the other tidy wood-trimmed homes lining both sides of the packed dirt street. The three-story house sported wide steps, carved pillars, big windows and a steep, sweeping roof. The setting sun lit the touches of gold that adorned the oversized front door and glimmered from the star-shaped weather vane.

The gnarled apple trees that Grover and Lawrence had climbed as children had grown taller than the wrought-iron front gate. Their white blossoms littered the brick drive like confetti. As he rode up the drive, Grover caught the long notes of a fiddle emanating from the house. Then the rest of a string band swung into a lively dance tune. The music sounded nearly as raucous as a flock of pterosaurs singing into the cool twilight. When he drew nearer, the low rumble of conversation drifted to him from behind the impressive white walls.

Silhouettes fluttered and danced across the white curtains of the big bay windows. Couples circled and promenaded while music and muffled laughter drifted on the evening wind.

To Grover, the flickering figures looked ghostly, like phantoms of the years past when he had so often peered between the kitchen doors, spying on all the high-society folk of Fort Arvada as they strutted in uniforms and gowns.

Before Lawrence had grown old enough to join his father’s guests, he, too, had crept down the backstairs and crouched beside Grover. They’d sat and laughed at how clumsy the guests became after they guzzled too much of Ma’s special punch. Lawrence always leaned into him like he couldn’t keep warm without Grover’s arm around him.

Though all too soon Lawrence had numbered among those cavorting in the ballroom. More than once, Grover had been called upon to carry out the silver trays laden with punch-filled crystal glasses—by then he’d been much more able to manage the weight then either his ma or the housekeeper.

He scowled at the grand porch, remembering the anger he’d felt, having to bite his tongue and drop his gaze like a beaten dog in front of Lawrence. Equal parts shame and frustration churned in him as he recalled how he’d alarmed his ailing ma by acting up—one night he’d even sassed Lawrence in front of a dozen white guests. Lawrence had been startled but then conceded the point to Grover. But Grover’s ma had been furious. She’d tanned his backside like she’d caught him thieving.

That had been the first time Grover had run off to sulk in the woods. Back then he hadn’t understood that his ma had witnessed and endured brutal reprisals for “uppity” behavior. She had borne horrific scars across her back and thighs, which Grover had never seen until after her death, when he’d washed her body. Before then, he’d simply felt aggrieved that she encouraged him to be proud and honest like his freeborn father but also expected that he’d keep his mouth shut and his head down.

For a time he’d tried to please her, particularly after she’d fallen so ill. He acted meek as a mouse those last three months. But after she passed on, he couldn’t bring himself to go on simpering and scraping. He’d left the Wilder home and taken up his pa’s trade of trapping.

Now he wasn’t anyone’s servant, and he’d never been anyone’s slave. He walked straight into a place through the front doors or he didn’t go in at all.

But the Wilder House wasn’t a saloon, dry-goods store, music hall or boarding house—in those places Grover was a man, as good as any other, and he’d flatten any man who tried to say he was otherwise. But never in his life had Grover walked in through the front doors of the Wilder House. Studying the broad steps now, Grover felt like he’d shrunk back down into the scrawny scared six-year-old he’d been when he’d first arrived here.

He didn’t want to go back to that past, and at the same time the ghost of his ma seemed to curl around him, whispering warning of where his pride would lead him.

You give them any cause, they will kill you just like they did your pa. They won’t feel any more guilt for murdering you than they’d feel over throwing a flea in the fire.

The sound of a wagon rolling up the street behind him drew his attention, and Grover peered back into the twilight to see George and Cora Cody riding towards the house. No doubt they’d been invited—even through the gloom Grover could see that they were both dressed for a dance.

The last thing Grover wanted was to slink past them like he’d been thrown out on his ass. They’d both of them make too much of it and probably insist that he come along with them. They’d been among the few white citizens who’d stood up against Sheriff Lee and Reverend Dodd during the riots that followed the first floods. Still, Grover hated to be looked at all sad and sympathetic, like he was a runt puppy. They meant well, he knew that, but Grover didn’t particularly enjoy others intervening on his behalf when he could damn well stand on his own if he felt like it.

So instead of turning around he nudged Betty towards the back of the house, past the tidy stables and the outbuildings, to the deep shadows of the garden. Grover glanced at the beds of peas, carrots, seedling cabbages, tomatoes and sweet peppers. He wondered if the new cook still tended the strawberry patch his ma had planted. But he didn’t venture along the rows of vegetable beds. Instead he swung down from Betty and led her up the low hill where iris blossoms and daffodil flowers dotted the shadows beneath six apple trees.

Betty snapped several fat bugs from the air while Grover closed the distance to the largest apple tree.

Back when he’d only been twelve, he’d thought himself real clever, secretly carving his and Lawrence’s initials on the underside of one of the lower branches. Of course the tree had been pruned a couple years later and his precious little spell had gone up in the wood stove. Just as well, cause if his ma had known he was trying to ensnare another boy in a love spell she would have beaten him like a dusty rug.

A figure suddenly loomed out from the shadows of the tree, and Grover had to stop himself from going for his gun out of reflex. He was the one trespassing here, after all. Faint gold light angled across Lawrence Wilder’s sharp features and caught an unruly lock of his hair, making it look almost red. He held Grover’s gaze only an instant before his left hand came up in the striking position for a killing spell. Blue light hissed up between Lawrence’s long fingers.

“Hey now! No harm done.” Grover stepped back fast and caught Betty’s saddle. He didn’t know that he could make it clear of the spell at such close range, but at least he could shove Betty aside.

Lawrence’s expression turned to confusion.

“Is that thing yours?” He didn’t drop his hand but nodded in Betty’s direction.

“Betty? Sure. She carries me all around. She’s quicker than any horse and don’t need shoeing.” As he spoke Grover realized why Lawrence had appeared so shocked. Though now his expression melted into something more like amusement.

“You domesticated an avemosaur?” The hint of an English accent lent Lawrence a disconcertingly foreign tone. He dropped his left hand to his side and peered at Betty, who paid him little mind as she pecked a plump spider from the trunk of an apple tree.

“Found her still in her egg and she took to me.” Grover hadn’t heard the term avemosaur before, but since the telegraph lines had flooded out, news reached them real slow across the Inland Sea. The bigwigs and college deans back east had probably christened the old creatures with fancy new monikers. Grover named the dinosaurs he encountered, but they weren’t proper titles made up from Latin and Greek. George Cody delighted in explaining the meanings of various scientific names to him, but they didn’t exactly roll off Grover’s tongue.

If he’d been thinking at all straight, Grover would have asked what avemosaur meant and made himself sound a lick smarter than he’d been before Lawrence had left.

Instead Grover stood there staring, like he’d never seen another man in his life. He’d thought so often of Lawrence and held him in in his memory so dearly that it felt somehow strange to see him in the flesh and realize how much he’d gotten wrong—or maybe it was just how much Lawrence had grown up and changed. The years seemed to have carved all the softness from Lawrence’s body and demeanor.

Deep angry lines etched his brow, and a series of sharp white scars cut across his right cheek. He held himself straight, and though his clothes looked slightly past their best, the neat, polished quality of them still stood out. Grover counted five medals pinned to his uniform.

By comparison, Grover knew he presented a dusty, rough figure. Normally he didn’t think much of looking a bit shabby; with the cotton plantations gone and sea monsters sinking so many of the ships that attempted to cross the Inland Sea, even the wealthiest folks in Fort Arvada sported patches and made do with older cloth. At least hunting gave him easy access to the gold-patterned dinosaur hide that made up his chaps and Betty’s saddle, as well as the black plumes that decorated his coat.

Still, he felt very aware of the fact that his shirtsleeves weren’t quite long enough for his arms anymore and the buttons running down his shirtfront didn’t match. A ragged tear marred the brim of his hat.

If he’d known he’d see Lawrence face to face today, he would have paid Mr. Chen to cut and slick back his wavy hair. But he’d shaved this morning and worn his clean shirt.

Lawrence appeared lost for anything to say as well. He glanced towards the house, and Grover expected him to announce that he needed to go back inside. He didn’t want Lawrence to leave him, but at the same time he knew it would be better, probably for both of them. So he decided to make it easier for Lawrence.

“Well, I should probably move on.” Grover managed to get the words out. “Betty will be wantin’ her feed soon—”

“No, Grove, don’t—” Lawrence caught his hand. “I just… Father has been talking a blue streak about how you know the rift lands better than anyone. He says you’ve hunted monstrirex and ichthyosaurs… I’d love to hear all about it. Don’t go.”

Lawrence flashed him that charming smile and met his gaze like they’d only been apart for a couple days. But it had been years—years Grover had mourned—and all this time Lawrence hadn’t bothered to send even a postcard much less come back home.

His fingers felt warm against Grover’s cool skin, and Grover imagined that if he leaned in close and took in a deep breath that rich scent of ponderosa and smoke would roll over him again. Only they weren’t boys playing around. They were grown men who hardly knew each other anymore.

“I don’t reckon I have half the stories to tell that you do.” Grover drew his hand back with the pretense of scratching his own shoulder. “Eight years gone halfway across the world and mistaken for dead. Bet you could make a fortune selling that story to one of them fancy periodicals.”

Lawrence’s smile compressed to a flat line.

“That’s a bet you’d lose, Grove.” Again, he glanced over his shoulder to the house, his expression deeply troubled, almost angry. Golden candlelight glowed from the windows, throwing soft pools of light across the grounds. Moths flitted around the light, and Betty watched them with predatory excitement.

Grover caught the leather lead attached to her saddle before she could race to one of the windows and likely scare the blazes out of someone. Lawrence eyed Betty, then his expression softened a little.

“Will she let anyone but you touch her?” Lawrence asked.

Grover nodded. Bottom fact was that Betty took to folk too well. She didn’t know what sons-of-bitches some could be or how bad they’d like hurting her. But Lawrence had always been tenderhearted about animals and so, changed as he might be, Grover couldn’t imagine him doing Betty any harm.

“Go on, hold out your hand to her,” Grover instructed him.

Lawrence extended his left hand like he might have to a horse. Betty cocked her head, giving him her owl-look, then she dropped her head down and stroked the side of her big beak and cheek against Lawrence’s fingers. Lawrence smiled as Betty worked her beak back over his hand like a cat wrapping itself around a fellow’s leg. He laughed when Betty nudged up beside him and started her little song and dance of scratching the dirt and crooning as she settled herself down on the ground.

The entire time Lawrence’s right hand remained shoved deep in his coat pocket, his arm stiff at his side. Wasn’t no question of whether he’d been hurt during the Arrow War, only of how badly.

Bad enough to be pronounced dead, Grover thought. Was it any wonder he didn’t want to tell all?

Lawrence knelt beside Betty gently stroking the long feathers of her folded arms, then he dropped his hand and simply studied her as she settled and coiled her tail around her body so the long plumes covered the tip of her beak. For a few moments he continued to gaze at Betty with the same thoughtful expression Grover remembered him wearing when he was out in the woods sketching leaves and birds in his diaries. He looked up at Grover.

“In all this time fighting, I’ve never seen one of these old creatures so…” Lawrence didn’t finish but just offered Grover a brief smile and turned his gaze back down to Betty. He ran his hand over her back like she was blown glass.

The reel floating from the house faded to be replaced by a more plaintive melody. One of the ladies sang something about her boy coming home across green fields. Grover leaned back against the apple tree and searched between the breaks in crooked branches for the stars overhead. Dark protective spells nearly blacked them all out from here in the city. He’d only been back under the dome a month but already he missed the sight of clear, bright stars. Though Grover thought he could just make out the constellation of the big bear where Lawrence’s airship had burned through earlier.

“You back to stay?” Grover asked. “Or just blowing through with the Office of Theurgy and Magicum?”

Lawrence looked up at him.

“I don’t know,” Lawrence said. “It’s not all up to me.”

“No? The blathering Tucker brothers giving you orders now or is it Lady Honora Sour-Cherry?”

Lawrence snorted but his grin didn’t last. He rose to his feet.

“Honora’s not bad. She used to be a joy but…” Lawrence seemed like he was searching for the right words but only shook his head. “Beijing took a lot out of all of us.”

“Sure,” Grover said. Wasn’t much else he could say. For him, Beijing was just a yellow star printed on a map in George Cody’s seventh volume of Parley’s Cyclopaedia of Universal History. He’d read all he could of the long, convoluted history that accompanied the map—knowing that Lawrence was there—but the author went out of his way to twist his sentences around and evade any clear conclusions.

What Grove had managed to work out was that the Chinese rulers despised the opium trade England had imposed upon them. It had reduced thousands of their citizens to impoverished addicts and also funded English, French and American acquisition of Chinese estates rich in alchemic stone. Since the emperor was embroiled in a civil war against Taiping rebels, foreign opium dealers felt secure that he couldn’t afford to waste his resources fighting their nations as well. But in 1856 the seizure of an English ship loaded with contraband opium and alchemic stone set off a series of battles. The emperor declared war and withdrew to a gilded city populated entirely by eunuch-mages and tiny, ferocious courtesans.

Even now it wasn’t clear who, if anyone, had won the war. If rumors were true, a quarter of China was underwater, though far more of England and France lay submerged beneath a sea of ichthyosaurs and ammonites. The United States had lost the south and been split in two.

“So all that about justice that Lady Astor was saying?” Grover asked.

“Honora wants compensations to be made to those who’ve lost extensive property,” Lawrence replied. “Mostly she’s thinking about her relatives in England and France being offered citizenship and sanctuary here in the US.”

“Cora and George have got a couple rooms free in their boarding house,” Grover responded, and that won him a grin from Lawrence. “It’s a nice place if you don’t mind all the books.”

“I had wondered where you were living now.”

“I still have the cabin outside the fortifications. Come fall when the weather turns, most of the old creatures—dinosaurs—migrate back through the rift and they’re easy to pick off.”

“You really do hunt them?” Lawrence stared at Grover. “On your own?”

“Betty comes along.” Grover shrugged. “Anyhow it ain’t as if I go after giants like bigtooths or thunderbirds or longnecks. I only once made the mistake of pulling a sea monster out of the water. What about you? You said something about fighting them.”

“We’re closing the rifts.” Lawrence said it quietly like a secret.

“We had heard rumors that the rift in England sealed back up,” Grover said, nodding.

“We managed to collapse it, as well as the one in China. No more water’s getting out from either of them. Not that we’ll see many great changes for years.” Lawrence frowned, but Grover wasn’t sure if it was work itself or talking about it that displeased him. “But it’s not as if I’m on my own. I have support.”

“Lady Astor and the Tucker brothers?” Grover asked.

“Honora, yes. She’s incredibly experienced and particularly good with subtle spells.” Lawrence’s expression turned briefly fond, but then he scowled like he’d tasted something foul between his back teeth. “Tucker on the other hand, he—they’re the worst kind of theurgic professors.”

Lawrence had never been too keen on holier-than-thou types, and most theurgic professors were supposed to be real Bible-thumpers. All their spells came from the good book—at least if they were practicing legally in the US—and the ground-up alchemic stone that powered their charms and curses were said to be God’s gift to the righteous. So if a theurgic professor’s spell worked or failed, well, that was down to the Lord’s will.

For mages like Lawrence, the spells and the power just came out of them alone. They didn’t need magic dust or holy books to work wonders or knock a man dead.

Which was probably why folks tended to grow nervous about mages and why theurgic professors were supposed to always be in charge of them.

“They worse than Reverend Dodd?” Grover asked.

“Oh, they’re just as abrasive in spirit,” Lawrence replied. “But far more dangerous in scope.”

“How do you mean?” Grover asked. “They got it in for you?”

“Not just me.” Lawrence leaned back against the trunk of the apple tree, beside Grover. “They’re brewing up something particularly nasty, and I suspect that they intend to catch me or Honora acting against their orders so that they can charge one or both of us with sedition or even treason.”

Grover stared at Lawrence in disbelief. That sounded like the lowest, petty kind of purpose a man could have. Particularly when, as far as Grover understood it, Lawrence and Lady Astor were trying to close the rift and save the rest of them.

“Why?” he asked at last.

“Because we are in the way of what they want and because we’re the last two who were in Beijing when the rifts opened and all this happened.” Lawrence gestured offhandedly at Betty.

“You were there but so what? Everyone knows it was the work of the Imperial Consort Cixi.”

Lawrence’s troubled expression gave Grover an uneasy pause. He leaned a little nearer to Lawrence, watching his face intently.

“It was her doing, wasn’t it?” Grover whispered.

Lawrence dropped his gaze, and the muscle in his jaw flexed like he was fighting to hold his mouth shut.

“Lawrence!” Mayor Wilder’s call from the kitchen door startled the blazes out of Grover. He managed not to jump back guiltily as he would have done as a youth, but his pulse still quickened like he’d been caught with his arms around Lawrence. Lawrence straightened but didn’t draw away from Grover’s side. He squinted into the light pouring out through the open kitchen door.

“I’m catching up with Grover,” Lawrence called back to his father.

Mayor Wilder appeared only briefly puzzled by that and then he waved.

“Well, bring him inside, son. It’s hardly sociable to make the man chat with you out in the dark.”

“Oh no, Mayor Wilder.” Grover stepped closer to the stairs leading up to the kitchen porch. He touched the brim of his hat in respect. “I was just passing by, sir. I shouldn’t intrude—”

“It’s no imposition at all, Grover. Fact is I was bragging about you to the Professors Tucker and Lady Astor. They’re all roaring to meet you. They hope you can help guide them right to the rift.” Mayor Wilder smiled at Grover with such easy warmth that he likely could have told Grover his invitation had been lost in the post and Grover would have believed him—at least for a minute.

“I’d need to stable Betty,” Grover pointed out.

“Well, sure.” Mayor Wilder didn’t miss a beat. “You settle that ridingbird of yours in one of my stalls then come join us in the house, straightaway. I won’t hear otherwise, young man.”

“Yes, sir.” Grover responded out of ingrained reflex more than desire.

“Now, Lawrence”—Mayor Wilder’s slick, professional charm softened and a little worry crept into his wide smile—“son, come inside. It’s cold out there and our guests are asking after you.”

Lawrence sighed and cast Grover a look that he didn’t quite understand—conspiratorial but also tired.

“Alright, I’m on my way,” Lawrence replied to his father. Then he marched up the stairs to the kitchen door. As Mayor Wilder fell back, Lawrence glanced over his shoulder to Grover.

“Don’t leave me waiting too long, Grove,” he said.

That seemed rich coming from a man who’d been gone eight years. Still the sentiment touched Grover. He offered Lawrence a lazy salute and went to settle Betty.