Lance of Earth and Sky

Lirien's body was wrapped in velvet and hides, bunches of dried herbs raided from the herbery of the Luminous lain around him to stave off decay. Yerune, who, in defiance of her private demeanor, seemed the most openly devastated of all of the crew, insisted that he be transported in the largest stateroom of the Luminous. That he would be returned to the Imperial City was never questioned; even the most ardent of the Sea Kingdom sailors would have found the notion of his sea burial unsettling.

Vidarian stood in the stateroom, alone except for Rai, who had positioned himself just inside the doorway when the emperor was brought there and would not be moved. He had spent so much of his time in his cat form while they had been sailing—a practical enough choice for sky travel—but now that he lay on the floor, head on his paws, Vidarian could see again how much he had grown. The spines that had seemed small and awkward when he was a pup had now grown into a fierce mane, now more closely resembling his forest kin. It was an odd way to measure time, Vidarian thought, the length of a thornwolf's spines.

Lirien's stillness could only feel like a reproach. It was still impossible to believe he was dead, and yet all too real at the same time. Vidarian had been haunted for so long by the dead: his brothers, his father, Ruby, and now Lirien. When he began to count them up, more crowded in: the priestesses the Starhunter had killed, the Sky Knights sent by the Alorean Import Company, the sailors who earned death by following orders from a corrupt authority. There was so much death in the world, and it was hard not to think it was needless, especially as he looked upon the body of a friend, something he had done too often these last months.

He tried to mourn, and part of him had already caved in with sorrow, but the larger part of his awareness burned with wordless rage. Tepeki had been young, impetuous, full of contempt for the empire, but to kill Lirien? How had he had it in him, and more painfully, why had Vidarian not seen it?

There was one person aboard who might be able to provide answers, though it weighed on Vidarian to ask it of her.

The Luminous turned and the deck creaked beneath his feet, pulling him from his reverie. He shook himself, then left the stateroom, pausing only to reach down and scratch Rai's ears. The wolf's tail swished across the floor, but he did not lift his head.

Abovedecks, a small group conferred at the bow. Clouds traced by beneath them, and far aft was the Viere d'Inar; Endera and her fire priestesses had been able to restore the flagship's wing-mast with impressive quickness, melting the steel back together, and she had once again taken to the air, shepherded by Altair but under her own power.

Before the bowsprit, Marielle stood supervising Isri, Alora, and Malloray, who gathered around the bone-handled knife that Tepeki had left behind. When Vidarian arrived, they all turned toward him, sympathy and grief a palpable miasma that he tried to push away from his thoughts.

Vidarian knelt in front of Alora, putting his eyes even with hers. Despite the long history of child windreaders aboard sailing vessels, Alora still seemed too young by far to be witnessing such things. Ship children were tough, wise beyond their years; Alora with her large, soulful eyes and thin body seemed sensitive, youth embodied. “You don't have to do this, my dear,” Vidarian said.

But the girl stiffened, her eyes going wide and then strong. “I want to help, sir. I know it will be—dark. But this is the price of my ability.” The words were full of competence, comprehension, incongruous in her high voice—but still she looked to Isri for approval. The seridi nodded, and Alora flushed with pride.

Vidarian looked at Isri, knowing she would feel his discomfort. She only nodded again, the smallest motion, and a wave of reassurance wrapped around him, a warmth that said she understood, and regretted, also.

Alora turned back around and picked up the knife. She had quietly held her breath as she did so, and only when she held the bone pommel between both hands did she breathe in again.

The girl shuddered, her eyes rolling back in her head before she recovered herself. Isri placed an encouraging hand on her shoulder. “He had—some kind of arrangement with the Alorean Import Company…” Her eyes went distant, then widened with horror, still unseeing. “They were going to kill Tepeki's people. All of them. Somehow—hunt down his entire race…” Her forehead wrinkled and she squeezed her eyes shut, searching. “He didn't know how. But he knew that they could do it, that they would hunt every Velshi in the five seas. Makkta chichinot'ta Aielu—” She shook her head, focusing. “Unless he killed the emperor.”

Vidarian's throat closed, a wave of exhaustion and dizziness rushing to his head with the dread, but he fought them back. “Did An'du know about this?” He did not want to hear the answer, but knew that he must.

“No,” Alora said, her eyes still closed. Relief flowed through Vidarian like water. “An'du wanted him to befriend the empire. She will be very angry. He is afraid. The one-skin man is nothing to him, but it is anathema to kill ta'alewa. He fears it bringing a curse upon him, but must bear it for his people. He fills his heart with apologies to Akawe Sea-mother.” All this Tepeki had experienced as he dealt the killing blow, unknowingly infusing his heart into the blade for Alora to read. “A man from the Company directed him to this. He wears a smiling mask like the death-god of the Velshi shadow shamasal.”

“Justinian,” Vidarian growled. But fast beneath the fury that crackled through his heart came another realization. “And this happened when Tepeki was in the Imperial City. In my trust.”

“Belay't,” Marielle said, harsh but not unkind. “An'du wanted you to take him to the city. And now we know our enemies' hand.” She looked hard at Vidarian, a steel in her now that he had not known even in the decades that she had sailed knife-reefs and worse under his command and his father's. “You were right to bring us into this.”


The Luminous and the Viere flew east under the gryphons' direction, long days of sun and silence that slowly baked the sky battles into more distant memories. After two days, the Alorean coast appeared, and then the snowy ridges of the Windsmouth Mountains. The Sea Kingdom ships dispersed, tasked with harrying the ships of the Alorean Import Company still conducting trade in the West Sea, and the four skyships—the Viere, the Luminous, the Argentium, and the captured Skyfalcon—continued on alone, heavily loaded with as many Sea Kingdom sailors as would volunteer to meet the Company again in battle. It was a satisfying population.

But where they had numbers, they lacked in training. Fortunately, when it came to skyships, the Company should be at an equal disadvantage, still bridging the gap between what could and could not be adapted from sea-based warfare. And Vidarian's ever-growing force had two advantages: the gryphons, who had been skilled in aerial warfare for thousands of years, and, surprisingly, Iridan, who had both seen and studied live skyship battles in their heyday.

Once they reached the coastline, the days moved fast, heavy with drills and strategy. A new life took over the ships, an energy of anticipation and focus unlike Vidarian had ever experienced, though his father and grandfather had described it. There was fear, hanging unsaid in conversations about the size of the Company's mercenary forces, but there was also readiness and determination.

On the eighth day, they passed over a desert and began to turn northward, following a curve of the Windsmouth that changed here from granite megaliths to craggy shale cliffs, and finally to high, dry buttes of white-banded red rock. They passed beyond the snow flurries that spiraled ever off of the Windsmouth and into vaulting dry skies scudded with only the occasional thin, white cloud.

On the ninth morning they were well into high desert, and Thalnarra joined Vidarian at the bow as he surveyed the land below, trying to determine where they were.

// We've been granted permission to land. // Her voice had an electricity to it.

Vidarian turned, about to ask her why they would even consider landing in such an inhospitable place, but even as Thalnarra spoke, the encampment unveiled itself below, animal-hide tents and log-built training courses, herd-beast fields and storage buildings. They coalesced into view one at a time, then three at a time, six—multiplying as they grew closer.

Then, visible in the air below and even above them: squadrons of gryphons. Wings, Thalnarra would have called them. Groups of five to ten gryphons that flew together in formation, their every twitch of a feather perfectly synchronized, in lines and arrowheads and rows, flying patrols around their territory or practicing drills.

As they began to descend, other flyers became clear. Vidarian didn't quite believe it until they had landed, and the sight was indisputable:

Seridi practiced in groups or alone, spread out among the gryphons. And these were no mad wildlings, nor mindspeakers like Isri, nor magic-users at all, it seemed—they were warriors. Those that did not already have naturally grey or black feathers had their plumage dyed in mottled greys, blues, and blacks—the better to disappear against the sky. Their movements had a deadly grace not unlike what he'd seen in Maresh honor guards…who, now that he thought of it, had always claimed to inherit their long hand-fighting tradition from ancient extinct allies.

But the seridi were not the most surprising denizens of the camp. Off to the side, tucked into their own smaller encampment but no less active for it—almost beyond explanation—were Sky Knights.

As soon as they lowered the gangplank, Caladan urged his mount to the ground, then cantered toward his brethren. The apprentices, whose steeds were still colts and not ridable, stayed aboard the Luminous.

“He sent word around the whole empire,” Linnea said, her hand on the sprightly mane of her royal. “Some kind of code that hasn't been used in generations. He said the ones we wanted would answer the call.”

And “the ones we wanted” numbered, at a glance, nearly two hundred.

Vidarian had known that there were nearly two thousand Sky Knights spread across the empire—they were trying, and failing, to increase the fertility rates of the steeds and especially the royals—but he never would have guessed that this many would be willing to openly rebel against the men and women who held their purse strings.

Caladan came cantering back up, his tricolored steed tossing its head and snorting with happiness to be among its brothers and sisters. The knight was smiling, the first time he'd done so since Lirien's death. It was not a joyous smile, but a satisfied one; small and hard. “Nearly two hundred have come,” he said, confirming Vidarian's estimate. “And more are coming in every day. The smaller provinces especially, and those far from Qui. They too have felt the heat of the Company for months.” He trotted back to the other knights, then, after a hasty bow; Vidarian felt a flush of gratitude to see him truly among his own people again.

Vidarian worked his way toward what appeared to be a command tent, Rai so close to his side that his spines brushed against Vidarian's leg. Small girls and boys ran back and forth endlessly across the camp, packs of them forming fluidly whenever one or more of them was on an errand to the same location. They were wild and swift, tough-soled and utterly unsocialized; // Gryphon-wards, // Altair offered, when he too had descended from the Luminous and followed Vidarian. // Honorary members of the pride. //

“That's what Brannon wants to be?” Vidarian only barely kept himself from raising his voice. “‘Gryphon-wards’—they're real? I thought Thalnarra was just trying to…inspire him to good behavior.”

A low sound that was almost a growl, but pitched upward into laughter. // They are very real, and very needed, particularly for the prides with especially large gryphons who can't even manage a buckle with their own talons. The little ones are our hands and sometimes even our eyes. //

“And what are you teaching them?” Vidarian asked.

Altair's head drew back, his tufted ears low as he thought over the question. // They learn wildness. Survival. And a bond with their pride as strong as the bond between gryphon pridemembers. //

“Wait—you said ‘especially large gryphons.’ What do you mean? Thalnarra seems quite able to manage herself—”

Altair was looking at him, wry amusement radiating from him with a scent like fresh-cut basil. // Well—I imagine you'll see in a moment. //

They were almost upon the tent when Thalnarra herself landed next to them. She panted softly with exertion; she'd been busy greeting all who needed greeting, and well she might; Vidarian had never seen so many gryphons—or so many different kinds of gryphons—in his life, nor his imagination.

There were two tents that looked command caliber, and Vidarian entered the one on the left at a quick nod from Thalnarra's beak. Inside, his eyes took a moment to adjust—and then, sitting there, waiting for them, were the two largest gryphons he had ever seen, short of the Starhunter's giant companion, which he half suspected he may have imagined.

// Pridemother, I bring you Vidarian Rulorat, and Altair, our wind brother. //

Vidarian realized that the standard against which he had measured gryphons—Thalnarra—was an excellent one, but not nearly large enough. The pridemother was massive, an athlete among gryphons, her shoulders half again as broad and her wings long and gleaming. On seeing her, Rai actually barked a warning, and Vidarian hurried to shush him.

But large as she was, the pridemother herself was dwarfed by a gryphon beside her, whose long head—bearing the single largest beak Vidarian had ever seen, an eagle's hooked weapon twice the length of his spread hand—was several handspans above the pridemother's at rest. His rectangular wings were also the largest Vidarian had seen, with powerful golden primaries. And next to the large-beaked gryphon's, Thalnarra's talons looked slim and dainty; not only were her claws smaller overall, they were significantly smaller by proportion.

Looking at the monstrous creature—and boggling all over again when he realized that he was a drake gryphon, a male, meaning that a female of his type would be even larger—Vidarian's entire view of gryphons shifted. Thalnarra was a striking creature, without doubt, but he had been so used to thinking of her as the largest of her kind, as she was broader and larger than Altair or the other gryphons he had met. Now he realized that he had only encountered scouts and supporters—excellent creatures, well-suited to border tasks, but hardly the fighting core of gryphonkind. And Kaltak and Ishrak, whom he had always thought of as average in size, now seemed awkward and adolescent, as no doubt they were when compared to the elders of their pride and flight.

// Welcome, Captain Rulorat, to our camp. I am Meleaar. // The huge gryphon's voice was warm and rich, almost like hot butter and a sharp spring morning.

“Thank you, Sir Meleaar,” Vidarian answered, at a loss for what to call him. “And Pridemother. I—had no idea you were out here, that there were gryphons on the northern continent.”

All four gryphons clicked their beaks gently, chuckling. // We would hardly call our own home ‘Gryphonslair,’ // Meleaar said. // Our allies refer to it thus. We are a temporary encampment, owing to the eastern campaign. //

“Eastern campaign?” Vidarian blinked. Thalnarra had said nothing about this.

Meleaar and the pridemother exchanged startled glances. // Well, of course. We assume that your forces are here for that reason—and quite welcome they are. // When Vidarian did not immediately answer, Meleaar continued. // We won't keep you long. We are sure there is someone you should be seeing at once. //


After the pridemother, Thalnarra shepherded Vidarian to the tent adjacent, pushing him and Rai through its flap with her beak…and then leaving. Vidarian started to call after her, but knew by the determination in her step that she would never hear him.

Rai whined, and Vidarian turned around—almost directly into Ariadel.

She had stood from her desk, piled high with parchment and message tubes, and walked halfway to the tent flap, her arms folded across her chest. Her stomach very visibly swelled now, and her cheeks were red—and not, he thought, out of joy at seeing him. Heat and pressure filled his chest at the sight of her, and it was all he could do to keep his hands at his sides.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I never authorized a landing.”

Vidarian started to answer, then blinked. “You—command this place?”

“Of course I do,” she said, turning back to the desk. “This is the heart of the resistance. They didn't tell you that?” And then, without waiting for him to answer, “Someone had to do something.”

Parchment crinkled on the desk—Raven, the cat, even larger than Vidarian remembered, still flame orange and striped.

Rai started barking and charged, the puppy-wolf taking over his brain. Vidarian shouted wordlessly and dove after him, tackling. He earned an accidental shock for his efforts, but Rai immediately left off, whining apologies.

“I've done what I could,” he said, more sharply than he meant to, standing, his arm smarting from the electricity. “I've brought you two dozen Sky Knights, nearly two hundred Sea Kingdom sailors, and four skyships.”

“You brought them?” Ariadel said, moving to the opening to draw back the tent-flap and peer out. “Skyships?” Her eyes had gone dark and thoughtful, calculating.

Vidarian stood, and before he could blink, Ariadel rushed into his arms, pulling him tightly against her. His own arms fell around her, carefully, hardly daring to touch her, and especially careful of the fragile curve of her stomach. The feel of her pressed against him, and the thought of her condition, the child she carried, made his head spin. Something started to break loose in him, but then her head was coming up, and she kissed him, fierce and with abandon at once. Her hands lifted to bring his face even closer, and then there were no thoughts at all, only fire and ocean, depth and height, as it had always been with her from the moment they met.

“I'm sorry,” she said, when she drew her head back, then pressed her forehead into his collarbone. “I thought—I didn't—”

“It's all right,” he said, kissing her hair. “Of course it's all right. I never should have…” He couldn't finish the sentence.

She laughed softly into his chest, saying without words that he didn't need to. They stood that way for a long time, and yet if it had been years it wouldn't have been long enough.

“I didn't think you'd ever forgive me,” he said. The words fell out, as they had so many months ago, but this time not nearly so disastrous.

“I wasn't going to,” she said, looking up at him, then looking away. “But—spending this much time around gryphons has a way of sinking in.”

“I didn't know gryphons were the forgiving type.”

“They're not,” she replied, and his eyebrows lifted. “But they mate for life.” She pulled away, but only to look at him.

Vidarian rested his hands on her shoulders, searching her eyes carefully. “At risk of losing everything I care about right this moment—that doesn't seem an especially good reason.”

Ariadel covered one of his hands with her own. “They have—a more distant perspective. Whatever this is, and much as we'd hate to admit it, something larger than either of us has brought us together. And it didn't think about taking its time or making it easy. But that doesn't mean it was wrong.”

Vidarian straightened, startled at hearing his own thoughts echoed back in Ariadel's voice.

“Just promise me a future when we can learn more of each other,” she said.

“I would move worlds to make that happen,” he said.

“All right. We're even.”

Turning back to the desk, she drew away, and again he fought not to move immediately with her. It was enough to have the terrible pull in his chest alleviated, if only for a moment. It was enough to have true purpose again.

Raven, the oddly named cat, perched on the edge of the desk, her head down and nose almost touching Rai's as he looked up at her in fascination. A tiny spark of electricity jumped from his nose to hers, and she hissed, slashing at him with a paw. She missed, but he yelped, more than half an apology, and ran back behind Vidarian, tail low.

Ariadel moved behind the desk, shifting stacks of parchment with one hand. “There have been rumors of a weapon, something large and terrible, capable of killing multitudes at once. It was also rumored they would test the weapon on the prison camp.”

“Have you found your mother?”

She looked up, the answer already on her face when she shook her head. “We believe she is in the camp. But we don't know.” Then, as she dropped her eyes to the desk, searching, her face hardened again. “But with your skyships, we'll have tipped the balance.”

“The ships and all we bring are at your disposal.”

Ariadel smiled, but only halfway, a world of sentiment in half a movement. “Rest today, but we must attack tomorrow, before they can send reinforcements.”