“Come outside,” he ordered them, satisfied.
They climbed the ladder and emerged onto the warship deck. Gloom and mist surrounded them, and they could barely see beyond the ship’s railings to the closest of the trees. The captain and crew had moved well away to the stern. Several of the men held blades at the ready. Two of the crew were even manning one of the fire launchers. Stoon shook his head in disgust. What fools. They would be dead before they could bring any of those to bear, should the creatures with him wish it.
He gave the captain a farewell wave and walked to the rope ladder that had been thrown over the side, with the beasts trailing after him. Down the ladder they went, and when they were on the ground, Stoon chose his direction as best he could recall it from when he had seen the Elven airship spiral downward. By then, the Federation ship had herself been sideslipping, so he couldn’t be sure. He hoped his hunters were equipped with good instincts and sharp senses; he hoped they were the hunters Edinja had promised.
But there was only one way to find out.
“Hunt them,” he ordered, pointing west into the mist and trees.
The creatures stood where they were for a moment, sniffing the air, casting about like dogs before a hunt. They did not look at one another. They did not look at him.
Then one caught a scent that intrigued it and began to move away, the others following.
Stoon, fingering the blades strapped to his waist and legs and body to reassure himself he was ready for whatever would happen next, went after them.
With Cymrian gone, Aphenglow went back to work on her sister’s wounds. She used a fresh infusion of magic to try to wake Arling, but the other’s body resisted such intrusion and refused to respond to the effort—a clear indication that whatever was still wrong was serious. She backed away from her efforts, once again doing a slow, careful examination of her sister’s back and sides where all the damage from the metal shards appeared to be the worst. But everywhere she looked she found the same thing—all of the splinters had been extracted, and blood from the wounds was barely seeping into the bandages.
Aphen sat back. It must have been the impact of her fall. She must have suffered broken ribs or worse. But without obvious bruising or evidence of broken bones, she needed sharper eyes than her own to see inside her sister’s body.
Different eyes.
She took a deep breath to steady herself. Time was slipping away. For Arling. For Cymrian. For all of them.
Then she made the call for help, a deep-throated cry that reverberated through the forest silence. She made it three times and sat back to wait, eyes on the misty dark.
The owl, when it came, was small and nondescript, its colors unremarkable, its presence nonthreatening as it landed on her shoulder and perched there, perfectly still. A bore owl, not well known outside the Westland, and even there seldom seen. She did not look at it, did not acknowledge its presence. Instead she called up the magic she needed to bond with it, to make it her familiar, and when she was done the owl’s eyes were her own, her vision so sharply enhanced that she could see as it did.
Like the owl’s, her eyes stayed open and steady as she began a new search for her sister’s injuries. But now she was seeing so much better than before. Every scratch, every pore, every tiny hair was visible—the ridges on the surface of Arling’s skin, the tiny scars, the shadow of her bones, the minuscule places where wounds had split the skin but had already closed over. And inside her sister’s body the pulsing of veins and capillaries, the slow rise and fall of her lungs, the soft beating of her heart—Aphenglow could see it all.