Wartime weddings were all the rage in a land where every single day threatened, quite emphatically, to be one’s last, but the skies could rain stones for seven nights without ever hitting an available officiant. Most clerics were at the front lines, singing to Sardovian troops of Mahagir the Saber-Heart’s courage and guiding the souls of dying soldiers to the eternal twilight of Adapa the Harvester’s willow groves. By some rare stroke of good fortune, however, there was one cleric remaining in the mountain city of Frostplum, where Talasyn’s regiment was stationed and where her fellow helmsmen Khaede and Sol had decided to pledge their troth.
Not that it’s any great mystery as to why they left this grandfather behind, Talasyn mused, watching from a dim corner of the thatched longhouse as the stooped, elderly cleric in pale yellow robes struggled to lift a large pewter goblet over the crackling fire that was reflecting off his marble-ball scalp. In reed-thin and quavering tones, he meandered haphazardly through the closing words of the marriage rite while the bride glared at him.
Khaede had a glare that could cut through metalglass. It was a miracle that the frail little man wasn’t sliced into ribbons on the spot. He eventually managed to hold the smoke-warmed goblet to the groom’s lips and then to Khaede’s, so that the couple could drink of the golden lychee wine consecrated to Thonba, goddess of home and hearth.
From where she hung back at the edge of the crowd, Talasyn applauded along with the other soldiers when the cleric tremulously pronounced Khaede and Sol bonded for life. Sol flashed a shy grin, one that Khaede was quick to press her lips against, her ire at the bumbling officiant a thing of the past. The raucous cheers from their comrades echoed off the thick limestone walls.
“Think you might be next, helmsman?”
The jovial quip came from a point over Talasyn’s shoulder and she rolled her eyes. “Nitwit.” As Khaede’s closest friend, she’d been on the receiving end of similar wisecracks all evening and it had left her feeling rather defensive. “Why would that even be on my list of priorities—” Her brain caught up to her tongue as she turned around, and she snapped to attention upon realizing who the jester was. “Respectfully speaking, sir.”
“At ease,” said Darius, an amused smile lurking underneath his bushy beard. When Talasyn joined up five years ago, the coxswain’s hair had been salt-and-pepper; now it was mostly just salt. He lowered his voice so as not to be overheard by the people around them. “The Amirante would like a word.”
Talasyn’s gaze darted to where she’d spotted Ideth Vela in the crowd earlier. The woman who held supreme command over the entirety of Sardovia’s armed forces was now in the process of disappearing into a side room, accompanied by a portly officer sporting a black horseshoe mustache. “General Bieshimma’s back from Nenavar already?”
“Just arrived,” said Darius. “As I understand it, the mission went belly-up and he had to pull out. He and the Amirante need to discuss a crucial matter with you, so—go.”
Talasyn made her way through the crowd. She didn’t hesitate to use her elbows, her sights fixed on the door at the other end of the longhouse behind which Bieshimma and the Amirante had vanished. She was so curious that it burned. And it had only partly to do with the fact that she’d been summoned.
The embittered league of nation-states known as the Sardovian Allfold had sent General Bieshimma southeast of the Continent to the mysterious islands of the Nenavar Dominion, in an attempt to form an alliance. Perhaps even rekindle one, if the old stories were to be believed. The general was a former political adviser who’d swapped his badge of office for sword and shield, and he had been expected to utilize all his diplomatic prowess in convincing the Nenavarene queen to help Sardovia defeat the Night Empire. Things had clearly not gone according to plan, given his swift return, but still—Bieshimma had been to Nenavar.
Talasyn’s stomach fluttered with the blend of intrigue and unease that thoughts of the Nenavar Dominion always, without fail, evoked in her. She’d never been there, had never so much as strayed from Sardovia’s dwindling borders, but the slightest mention of that reclusive archipelago across the Eversea always left some part of her oddly hollow, as though she’d forgotten something very important, and she was desperate to find out what it was.
In all her twenty years, she had yet to tell a soul about the strange connection she felt to Nenavar. It was a secret, too fragile to be spoken out loud. But talking to someone who had just returned from there seemed as good a step in the right direction as any.
Despite her eagerness, Talasyn slowed down when she passed by one of the lance corporals who had escorted General Bieshimma on his diplomatic mission. The boy was pink-cheeked from the cold outside, snowflakes melting on the upright collar of his uniform as he recounted the adventure to a small circle of raptly attentive wedding guests.
Everyone else was in uniform as well, including Talasyn. Wool breeches, thick boots, and padded coats the color of orange peels. There was no time for pretty dresses or an elaborate ceremony. This wedding was a stolen moment in between skirmishes.
“It went as badly as it did when we last sent an envoy to the Nenavar Dominion,” the lance corporal was saying. “Remember, a couple of years back? Although I’ll grant that this time they let us make landfall instead of turning us away at the harbor again, it was only so we could rest and resupply. Their queen, the Zahiya-lachis, still refused to see us. Bieshimma gave the harbor guards the slip and set out for the capital on horseback, but he wasn’t even allowed into the royal palace, apparently. The concerns of outsiders are not the concerns of the Dominion—that’s what the harbor guards told us when we tried to state our case.”
A bowman leaned forward with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eyes. “See any dragons while you were there, then?”
Talasyn stopped walking altogether and other conversations happening nearby petered out as several soldiers craned their necks in interest.
“No,” said the lance corporal. “But I never left the docks, and the skies were overcast.”
“I don’t even think they’re real,” said an infantryman, sniffing. “All we have to go on are rumors. If you ask me, it’s smart what the Nenavarene are doing, letting the rest of Lir believe that their dragons exist. People won’t bother you if you’ve supposedly got an army of giant fire-breathing worms at your disposal.”
“I’d kill for a giant fire-breathing worm,” the bowman said wistfully. “We’d win the war with even just one.”
The group started bickering over whether a dragon could bring down a stormship. Talasyn left them to it.
A surfeit of vague images rushed through her head as she stepped away: from nowhere, so sudden, in the space of only a moment’s breath. She could barely make sense of them before they darted out of reach. A coil of slick scales undulating in the sunlight, and maybe a crown as sharp as diamond, as clear as ice. Something inside her, awakened by the soldiers’ conversation, tried to fight its way out.
What on earth—
She blinked. And the images were gone.
It was likely an effect of the pine-scented smoke from various firepits suffusing the longhouse, not to mention the sheer heat radiating from so many bodies crammed into one narrow structure. Sol was kind and charming and much loved, and it showed in how nearly a quarter of the regiment had turned up for his wedding.
They were definitely not here for his bride—rude, prickly, caustic Khaede—but Sol adored her enough for a hundred people, anyway.
As she reached the closed door of the side room, Talasyn glanced back at the newlyweds. They were surrounded by effusive well-wishers clutching mugs of hot ale while the regiment’s field band struck up a lively tune on fife, bugle, and goatskin drum. A beaming Sol pressed kisses to the back of Khaede’s hand and she tried to frown in annoyance but failed miserably, the two of them looking as radiant as it was possible to look in helmsmen’s winter uniforms, the garlands of dried flowers around their necks serving as the only nod to their status as bride and groom. Once in a while, Khaede’s free hand would come to rest on her still-flat stomach and Sol’s blue-black eyes would shine like the Eversea on a summer day against his oak-brown skin.
Talasyn had no idea how these two planned on caring for a baby in the midst of a war that had spread throughout the whole Continent, but she was happy for them. And she wasn’t jealous, exactly, but the sight of the newlyweds stirred in her the same old yearning that she’d lived with for twenty years as an orphan. A yearning for somewhere she could belong, and for someone she could belong to.
What would it be like, Talasyn wondered as Sol chuckled at something Khaede said and leaned in to hide his face in the slope of her neck, his arm looped around her waist, to laugh like that with someone? To be touched like that? An ache shivered through her as she let herself imagine it, just a little bit, reaching for a phantom of an embrace.
A nearby drunken soldier stumbled forward, splashing ale all over the floor by Talasyn’s boots. The sour odor assailed her nostrils and she flinched, briefly overcome by childhood memories of caretakers stinking of steeped grains and curdled milk, those men of harsh words and heavy hands.
Years ago, now. Long gone. The orphanage in the slums had been destroyed along with the rest of Hornbill’s Head, and all of its vicious caretakers had probably been crushed underneath the rubble. And she couldn’t discuss a crucial matter with her superiors while in the throes of despair over some spilled ale.
Talasyn straightened her spine and steadied her breathing; then she rapped smartly on the door of the side room.
As though in response, the deep, brassy tones of warning gongs pierced through the limestone facade of the building, cutting across the merriment like knives.
All music and chatter ceased. Talasyn and her comrades looked around as the watchtowers continued their urgent hymn. They were stunned at first, disbelieving, but gradually a tidal wave of movement swept through the firelit longhouse as the wedding guests sprang to action.
The Night Empire was attacking.
Talasyn ran into the silver night, adrenaline coursing through her veins, a numbing layer against the freezing cold air that bit at her exposed face. Lights were winking out all across Frostplum, window-squares of cheerful gold fading into blackness. It was a precaution to avoid becoming an easy target for air raids, but it wouldn’t do much good. All seven of Lir’s moons hung in the sky in their various phases of waxing and waning, shedding a stark brilliance over the snowy mountains.
And, if Kesathese troops had brought in a stormship, the whole city might as well be a dandelion puff in a stiff breeze. Its houses were erected from stone and mortar and covered in wooden roof trusses and multilayered thatch, built strong enough to withstand the harsh elements, but nothing could withstand the Night Empire’s lightning cannons.
Due to its remote location, all the way up in the Sardovian Highlands, Frostplum had always been a peaceful settlement, drowsing in evergreen blankets of longleaf pine. Tonight, however, it was plunged into mayhem, fur-clad cityfolk stampeding to the shelters and shouting frantically for one another amidst a whirlwind of military activity. It was finally happening, what everyone had feared, why Talasyn’s regiment had been sent here in the first place.
While bowmen took up their positions on the walls and infantrymen assembled barricades in the streets and helmsmen hurried to the grid, Talasyn squinted up at the starry heavens. There probably wasn’t a stormship, she conceded—she’d have spotted its hulking silhouette by now.
She quickened her pace and joined the scramble toward the grid, dozens of army-issued boots trampling snow into mud. It seemed to take ages before they reached the outskirts of the city, where slender coracles bearing Allfold sails striped orange and red were docked atop platforms of honeycombed steel. Curved at the ends like canoes, the small airships, nicknamed wasps because of their diminutive size and lethal sting, gleamed in the copious moonlight.
In the mad dash to her coracle, Talasyn found herself running alongside Khaede, who was also heading for hers.
“You can’t be serious!” Talasyn yelled over the clamor of warning gongs and officers’ barked instructions. “You’re two months along—”
“Not so loud,” Khaede hissed. The line of her ebony jaw was resolute against the falling snow. “The bean sprout and I will be fine. Worry about yourself.” She clapped Talasyn on the arm and was gone before the latter could reply, swallowed up by the throng of helmsmen.
Talasyn scanned the grid for Sol, swearing under her breath when she spotted his wasp already in the air. She doubted that he’d signed off on this. Unless Talasyn missed her guess, Khaede and Sol were due for their first fight as a married couple.
But she couldn’t dwell on that now. In the distance, the Night Empire’s own coracles surged over a forested ridge. These vessels were called wolves, vicious things with sharp prows that hunted in packs and were armed to the teeth, so numerous that they blocked out the horizon, their black-and-silver sails streaming in the chill breeze.
Talasyn hopped into the well of her ship, pulling on the pair of brown leather gloves that she’d tucked into her coat pocket, and she yanked at several levers in swift succession with the ease of familiarity. The wasp raised its sails and the crystalline aether hearts embedded in its wooden hull flared a bright emerald, bringing the craft to life as they crackled with the wind magic from the Squallfast dimension that Sardovian Enchanters had distilled into them. Static blared from the transceiver, a box-shaped contraption inlaid with dials and filaments of conductive metals, the aether heart within it glowing white, laden with magic from the Tempestroad, a storm-streaked dimension that produced sound, normally in the form of thunder, but it could be manipulated to carry voices across a distance through what was known as the aetherwave.
Fingers around the spoked wheel, Talasyn took off from the grid, her vessel spitting out fumes of magical green discharge, and she slipped into an arrowhead formation with the other Sardovian airships.
“What’s the plan?” she asked into the mouthpiece of her transceiver, her question echoing through the aetherwave frequency used by her regiment.
From the head of the formation, Sol replied, in that calm and easygoing manner of which only he was capable during combat. His words emerged from a horn atop the transceiver, filling the well of Talasyn’s coracle. “We’re outnumbered ten to one, so standard defensive tactics are our best bet. Try to keep them away from the city walls until the residents are in the shelters.”
“Affirmative,” said Talasyn. She couldn’t risk telling him about Khaede, not with so many of their comrades listening in, not when they needed him to be at his most focused. Still, she couldn’t resist adding, “Congratulations on your marriage, by the way.”
Sol laughed. “Thanks.”
The Sardovian wasps formed a tight swarm around Frostplum’s walls and the Kesathese vessels met them head-on. While a wasp coracle couldn’t hold a candle to the multi-stacked repeating crossbows and iron-hurling ribaults of the Night Empire’s wolves, it more than made up for that by virtue of sheer agility—an agility that Talasyn used to full advantage over the next few dizzying minutes. She careened through the night air, dodging one deadly bolt after another and firing off several of her own from the crossbows affixed to her ship’s stern. The enemy coracles lacked maneuverability and her aim was true most of the time, ripping through sailcloth, splintering wooden hulls.
But there were just so many wolves, and it wasn’t long before they broke through the defensive perimeter, roaring closer and closer to Frostplum’s moonlit sprawl of thatched rooftops.
And in the distance . . .
Talasyn’s heart sank into the pit of her stomach when she spotted the monstrous double-masted silhouette of a Kesathese ironclad looming up over a snow-capped peak on whirling clouds of emerald aether. To meet it, two Sardovian frigates—full-rigged and square-sailed, and smaller but just as replete with cannons—rose from the nearby valley where they had been lying in wait for such a vessel to appear.
It was going to be a bloodbath. But at least the Night Empire hadn’t brought in a stormship. As long as there was no stormship, there was still a chance.
Talasyn sailed to where the combat was thickest, hurling her wasp headlong into the fray. She fought and flew as hard as she ever had. Out of the corner of her eye, her comrades’ ships burst into flames or shattered against battlements and treetops around her. Only a little while ago, they had all been safe and carefree in the longhouse, celebrating Khaede and Sol’s wedding.
That had been an illusion. No warm place, no sliver of joyous time, was safe from the Hurricane Wars. Everything that Kesath’s Night Empire touched, it destroyed.
The first faint embers of burning rose within her. It crawled from her core to the very tips of her fingers like white-hot needles, lurking beneath the skin.
Snap out of it, she ordered herself. No one can know.
You promised the Amirante.
Talasyn swallowed the burning back down, quieting the inferno in her soul. Too late, she realized that several wolves had managed to outflank her while she was distracted. Their ribaults’ iron projectiles pummeled her airship from all sides, and soon the world was nothing but free fall as she spiraled to the waiting ground.
