Lance of Earth and Sky

“I wish that I could give you a ship, Vidarian. Truly I do.”

They were not in the throne room, for which Vidarian was quite grateful. Lirien—Vidarian worked, still without total success, to think of the man and not “the emperor”—looked haggard, here where his subjects and courtiers could not see him, bare of the mineral treatments and tricks of the light that Renard used to keep him appearing at all times vigorous, fresh, indomitable.

Calphille sat to his left, poised like a butterfly on her chair. Renard's hand was there with her, also; the gown she wore, black and sunshine yellow, would have been unthinkable on any other maiden Vidarian had seen at court. She wore it effortlessly, and as she looked with naked worry on Lirien, she was surely unaware of the classical stylishness of her golden hairclips, the enviable cut of her gown. Vidarian would hardly have known any of these things, but he'd heard the whispers from the other noblewomen, which Calphille herself could not be immune to.

Oneira, immaculate as always, would have been aware of Calphille's aesthetic perfection, had she not been drawn deep into herself, listless as Vidarian had never seen her. She sat to the right of the emperor, but the distance of her gaze belied faraway thoughts.

Vidarian felt his shoulders sinking as he took in Lirien's sincere regret, and consciously firmed his jaw. “I came here in a skyship,” he said carefully, watching the emperor for any sign of outrage. “The Destiny. It was lost in the errand for which I was summoned.”

Lirien sighed: tired and remorseful, to Vidarian's relief. “You are right. But every single one of my skyships is committed to the war effort, and cannot be diverted.” He stood and strode away from his chair, pacing.

Vidarian watched him, straining for any sign of judgment or doubt. He had not told the emperor the nature of his errand, only that urgent business called him away from the city, a matter of personal honor.

Lirien stopped in his tracks and turned. “Oneira—the Company has provided you a skyship, has it not?”

Oneira stirred, blinking as if waking from a dream. “Pardon, your majesty?”

“The Wind Maiden. She is at your disposal, yes?”

Now Oneira's dark eyes sharpened. She let a moment pass, visibly calculating how she might resist the emperor's will without losing his esteem, then said, “Apologies, majesty, but the Wind Maiden is currently commissioned for my research expedition to Rikan.”

The look that Lirien gave Oneira then bordered on impatience, and Vidarian wondered if he was about to see the imperial will made manifest, but Oneira scented the direction of the wind.

“There is a way I could continue my studies,” she said. “No other single artifact is a complete subject, but the automaton Iridan would be more than so.”

Now it was the emperor's turn to be taken aback. “You're suggesting that he journey with you?” Lirien asked, voicing Vidarian's thoughts. The notion of traveling with—as Oneira called him, an automaton—had not entered his mind.

“Yes, your majesty. I have requested to study him before, but the proper opportunity has not arisen.” Unspoken was the notion that she had not been permitted, and this was her price.

Lirien remained unsure. “Iridan is tremendously valuable. To transport him over an ocean—”

“With respect, majesty,” Vidarian said as gently as he could manage, “I am a water elementalist. Iridan would be under no threat of loss to the sea.”

Oneira's head turned toward him, a mixture of speculation and gratitude on her face that quickly turned to ice, then thawed again as she turned back toward the emperor.

“An acceptable arrangement,” Lirien said at last. “Vidarian, I will hold you responsible for Iridan's welfare.”

“Of course, your majesty.” He was nowhere near as certain as he sounded, but to an imperial command there was only one answer.

“If you will excuse me, I have an audience with the Rikani ambassador.”

Vidarian and Oneira rose, bowing first to the emperor, and then exchanging nods with Calphille. The dryad's eyes were full of worry again, and Vidarian was surprised to find it directed at him. He smiled, hoping to reassure her, wishing that there had been more time to see to her welfare. The currents of the palace pulled as determinedly as any he had encountered at sea.

They left the small audience chamber, passing into the hall. There was only one way back to the main arteries of the palace, and so Vidarian and Oneira were forced to walk together, or risk obvious impropriety.

“What is this errand of yours, anyway?” Oneira muttered.

Vidarian told her.

Oneira stopped, and Vidarian stopped with her, certain she was about to refuse the use of her ship. But she only stared at him, calculating, then nodded once, and set off down the hall again.


The Wind Maiden had a crew of able-bodied men and women all precision-trained by the Alorean Import Company, but for the journey they would need supplies, and preparing the ship took the better part of two days. A skyship was not limited by the tide, but every item brought aboard must be justified, for it directly impacted the ship's maneuverability.

There was also the matter of charting a course. Ruby was clear on the location of her body—* There is only one place my crew would have taken me. * But safe airspace must be found between the imperial city and that West Sea location, and a means of recovering her body once they arrived.

This latter Vidarian tried not to think on overmuch. He would be the one to pull her corpse from the waves—a thought that had shadowed his dreams since first she had reawakened.

Thalnarra and Altair joined them as a matter of course, much to the complaint of their erstwhile Sky Knight apprentices. The gryphons would be a welcome guardian force—but the surprise, as they charted course and negotiated delicately over the supply of the ship, was Isri.

The seridi appeared one morning in the planning room—a side chamber graciously donated by Oneira—with a young olive-skinned girl with bright green eyes. Save for her eye color, she reminded Vidarian painfully of Lifan, his ship's windreader. He told himself Lifan and the rest of his crew would be safe with Marielle, but in spite of everything he couldn't help but be weighed down by a sense of having failed them all.

The girl, Isri said, was a Finder. She was possessed of a unique telepathic sense specifically tied to objects. If she touched an object belonging to a person, she could find that person, living or dead.

Her name was Alora, and she had nearly driven herself mad before Isri had found her and brought her to the mindcrafters in the Imperial City for training.

“You will know the general location of Ruby's body,” Isri said, the sleekness of her feathers conveying a calmness Vidarian envied, “but you'll need someone with Alora's talents to find its exact location, and convey it to you mind-to-mind that you might bring it to the surface.”

“I'm grateful, as always, for your advice and assistance,” Vidarian said, and meant it, “but will her parents allow her on such a potentially dangerous expedition?”

“She is an orphan,” Isri said, placing a feathered hand on the girl's shoulder. “And I have agreed to mentor her, if we might accompany you.” Now the tiny feathers around her beak lifted in a seridi smile. “In truth, it will be good for her to get away from the city and its multitude of sensations. It's little wonder so many go mad here.”

Vidarian thought painfully of Malloray, and how he must have suffered without knowing why, working all of those years for Rulorats. But the sea had helped him, too. Vidarian knelt and held his hand out to Alora. “I'm pleased and honored to have your service, then,” he said.

The girl smiled shyly and shook his hand, then looked to Isri for approval. The seridi nodded, and Alora giggled—a high, delighted sound. Then she blushed and ran from the room.

“She's shy yet,” Isri said, looking after her. “But incredibly talented.”

“I have misgivings on bringing so young a child on so dark an expedition,” Vidarian said.

Isri's golden eyes turned toward him, staring, as they often seemed to, straight to his heart. “Times are dark,” she said only. “We must all learn, and grow, faster than we might like.”


The ship was a fine one, a build and trim unfamiliar to Vidarian but impressive. Her measurements made no sense to him, and he suspected she might be Malinari, which raised more questions than it answered. But she was solidly built, and outfitted with more navigational and luxury mechanisms than even the Luminous had borne.

The greatest of its technologies remained hidden, however. For the first three days of sailing Iridan spent all of his time below decks, shuttered in his room. At first he would admit no one, to Oneira's outrage, but on the second day he permitted her entry, and they remained closeted for most of the day and night.

Oneira's crew was circumspect—assiduously so. None would engage beyond the most basic conversation, and so the trip was a strange one to Vidarian, taken on a foreign ship among sailors who rarely spoke. The gryphons flew alongside the ship, preferring to exercise their wings rather than ride, and Isri spent most of her time with her young apprentice.

Even Ruby was subdued, though Vidarian could hardly blame her. She provided a heading to the steersman, an uncharted expanse of ocean off the coast of Ignirole, and then she withdrew within—wherever she was.

On the third day, when Vidarian was beginning to give names to the cloud formations that passed below them, Ruby started speaking without prompting.

* ‘Dead’ is still the wrong word. When I awoke, I didn't know where I was. It took me days to realize I no longer had a human body, and I started to discover things about the place I was in. About here. It was as though doors opened, and beyond them was space, knowledge. *

Silence stretched between them, punctuated by the whistle of wind against the rigging, and Vidarian was afraid to answer, lest he break the spell that had caused her to so suddenly describe what she'd been going through all this time.

* There are things in here…things. I find them and I know things that I couldn't have known before. Sometimes they jump right out of me, skip ‘Ruby’ and go straight out into the world. And they're getting bolder. I'm not sure what I'm becoming. *

“Regardless of where it came from, that knowledge has been a great help,” he ventured.

She didn't seem to hear him. * I'm not dead, Vidarian. *

“I—” he started, unsure where he would finish, but she was gone again, back behind one of the many doors in the “prism key,” as she referred to the sun ruby.

And as if Ruby's sudden speech had broken free the ice that stiffened the air of the Wind Maiden, Oneira emerged from the hold, blinking her eyes against the white light of the cloudscape, and joined him at the bow.

“He's a remarkable artifact,” she said after perhaps two leagues' worth of travel.

To ask if she meant Iridan would be to invite scorn, and so Vidarian said, “Your interest in him seemed rather abrupt.”

She cast him a look that was perhaps five degrees warmer than total dismissal. “Justinian came all the way to Val Imris, risked exposure to awaken and study the automaton. He desires to be near it, and so I will take it far from him.”

It would have been a relief if there had been simple coldness in her voice. Instead there was something much sharper, much subtler, an emptiness that stilled Vidarian's heart for a breath. He tucked away her words and reached for diplomacy. “I've been remiss. I never thanked you for the use of your ship.”

“You needn't,” she said. “Your hand is reasonably well played, and I have been curious about your trapped friend for some time.” She indicated the stone in his pocket with a glance. He must not have masked his shock adequately, for she smiled, hollow as bird bones. “Don't toy with me, Captain. The Company was keeping secrets before your grandfather was born. Remember that.”


On the fifth morning, as Vidarian was drinking a steaming cup of kava at the bow, Altair landed on the deck behind him.

Vidarian started to offer him a sip from the cup, in jest—gryphons were violently allergic to both kava and alcohol—but stopped when he caught sight of the gryphon's roused neck-feathers.

// There's a disruption here, // he said, and the peppermint brightness in his mind-voice was curious, worried. // There is a signature on the water—it came from a gryphon, a powerful air wielder to impose a geis this long-lasting. //

* His name was Urri, * Ruby said softly. * He left a mark on the water where my mother was slain. I thought it was respect, but years later realized it was a warning-mark. *

Ruby's words called up a cloudy memory of the largest tattoo on her body—a white gryphon, and one of the only stories she had never told Vidarian. They must have been related.

* This is the only place my crew would have buried—my body. *

“Then we should begin this now, and be done with it.” The voice was Isri's, and from behind them. She stood with her hand on Alora's shoulder, her wings partly spread.

Vidarian whistled, then signaled the boatswain to direct the Wind Maiden down to the surface of the water. They would approach as closely as they could, and then he would lift Ruby's body from the water.

He had managed to put off specifically envisioning the task Ruby had demanded until this moment. Now, as they descended through the clouds, passing interminably toward the water, he could imagine little else.

Vidarian had seen rotting bodies before, but none pulled up from the seafloor. She would be wrapped in linen, tight. The thought of Ruby's body, as he had last seen it, now emerging from the waters, desiccated, eaten by sea creatures, made the gorge rise in his throat. Grimly he fought it back down, worked his thoughts through what they must do.

The ship leveled out, and below them stretched the glass surface of the sea. A shadow flickered overhead; Thalnarra, keeping a watch from high above. She gave a short, piercing cry, then angled into her circling patrol pattern.

Isri's touch on Vidarian's forearm made him jump. He turned toward her, and had to look away from her golden gaze, too full of sympathy. She realized his discomfort and dimmed her presence, withdrawing. He hadn't known she could do that. “You have the object that she carried?”

“I only have—her,” he said, drawing the ruby from its pouch at his side. He passed it wordlessly to Isri.

The seridi raised the ruby to the light, staring through it. The sense of her presence increased, and he knew she was focusing herself through the gem, testing its safety. “It will be a challenge,” she said, turning to Alora and offering the stone. “But she is up to it.”

Alora, seeming even smaller than Vidarian remembered her, reached out to take the stone.

As soon as the ruby touched her pale skin, Alora fell to the deck, writhing. Vidarian dropped to his knees beside her, diving to break her fall.

“No!” Isri said. The sharpest word he'd ever heard her utter, it stopped him mid-movement. He pushed himself away, losing his balance and falling to the deck. “Don't touch her! If another object touches her, she may not be able to contain the reaction.” Isri spread her wings, arcing them around the girl, who still convulsed, her throat opening and closing in ragged gasps.

Vidarian stood and turned away, stung at his own helplessness. He nearly ran into Oneira, who, to her credit, looked as sick as he felt. Without being asked, she turned to the nearest crewman and gave orders for blankets, hot drinks.

“Shh, it's all right,” Isri murmured, insinuating herself around the girl without touching her, dodging her thrashing arms and somehow making sure she was turned in just the right direction to keep from injuring herself.

“Can't you help her?” Vidarian asked, when the fit showed no sign of stopping.

Isri's eyes came up, and for a moment there was outrage in them, an otherworldly focus that made him take a step backward. “It must pass on its own. She will grow stronger in overcoming it with time. Any interference only jeopardizes her sanity.”

At length, the convulsions diminished, replaced by a wordless murmuring of syllables that seemed to have no beginnings and no ends.

“She is ready,” Isri said, and without warning, touched Alora's nerveless hand to Vidarian's arm.

Ruby's life, and several hundreds of other memories, facts, places, objects, hurtled into Vidarian's mind. It was a faraway self that fell again to the deck, knees banging against wood, back slamming into the rail. Everything Ruby had ever been, every object she had touched, invisible threads spun out from his mind to where they had been. A hundred thousand memories, more—

Push them away, Isri's voice was in his head, an island of cool identity. Imagine her body. The flesh as it was. Imagine what you seek.

It was there, ten thousand fathoms below, resting against the silt and rocks, dark beyond darkness. It was there, her body, like an extension of his arm, pressed in by miles of water but as real as his own hand.

Vidarian reached toward it, shaped the water around it with his will, separated it from the silt until it was weightless, encased only in water.

“I've got her,” he whispered. He centered his focus deep beneath the waves, and began to pull.