The name, he would keep. Kronus. It was Brie he’d been thinking of when choosing it—of whatever demons she had lived with and stood against. Day after day, suffering, but unbroken. Undiminished. Unbowed. With such a name, he might seek to honor her, living as he imagined might please her, without apology or shame.
If there was more to it than that, he would learn it along the way.
He had but one more call to make. A visit that took him to the bowels of the Mire. To the stoop of a rotting shack shunned by even the most sordid inhabitants of that underprivileged district. To a creature whose mere sight curdled his blood.
“Finally got bit, did she?” her grandfather asked, once Kylac had delivered news of Brie’s death. “I told the little whore to tread clear of them vipers. Girl was deaf as I am blind.”
Kylac flinched, but suffered the words, stinging as they did with a measure of truth. He’d allow that Brie might have been better served distancing herself from Talonar and its machinations—from Rohn and even from Kylac. He’d allow that and more, if only the crusty old mole could manage to shed a tear. A single tear was all Kylac would demand of him, accepting it as a sign of guilt, of remorse, of confession to whatever horrors the old man had inflicted upon her.
“Well, snake?” the monster asked after a time. “What would you have of me?”
Rohn had been right. His second kill was easier to stomach than the first.
Leaving the roaches to feed, Kylac set forth.
This story began almost two years ago, when the fabulous Erika Swanson made me a plush Temeraire for my daughter to play with, and I asked her for a story prompt by way of thanks. She offered me the lovely idea of the Temeraire-universe dragons encountering early attempts at human aviation. And so when Shawn asked me for a story, I decided to write one about my Victory of Eagles character Perscitia bumping into a hot air balloon.
Possibly I was asking for it, given that I was writing for an Unfettered anthology, but I’ve rarely had a story so completely dig its heels in and run away in the opposite direction. I don’t want to say anything much about what is in the story, as I think it’s more fun to read unspoiled, but I will say that there are no balloons. A dragon or two may have snuck in, though.
— Naomi Novik
IN FAVOUR WITH THEIR STARS
Naomi Novik
He woke and did not immediately know where he was, a thick cottony taste in his mouth, bitter, and a small stinging pain near the base of his neck and at his wrists. He was secured in wide straps crossed over his chest and thighs, and his sight was badly blurred and in black-and-white; all he saw above him was a smear of gray light. He put his hands out on instinct and met cold glass only inches away from his face. Fog spread out from his fingers. He shoved on the glass in panic, then pounded against it with his fists, bare feet kicking and toes sliding uselessly against the invisible coffin-lid, his heart thundering rapidly but it refused to yield in the slightest, and a shuddering wave of exhaustion made him fall limply back against the padding underneath.
He lay there breathing, gasping. He worked his mouth until a little moisture came into it, and he swallowed. His sight began to sharpen little by little. Faint blue outlines began to become visible on the glass above him, and nearly simultaneously, his mind began to function again. He was still in the cradle. That was the ship’s medical bay, outside him; he’d been awoken from shipsleep; and that meant—
He had barely an opportunity to look up and see the large implacable countdown display; then the cradle dropped abruptly, his stomach following a moment after the rest of him, and the walls of the launch channel rose around him. From instinct, he tried to brace himself against the lid as the roar and white blaze of propulsion echoed at his feet, as useless as that was; then the launch channel was blurring past and gone: the cradle was ejected out into the void, and ten million stars were turning in their stately course all around him.