“Let’s have a song,” said Matrick, who Clay thought had been the one flying the ship. It turned out nobody was, though that didn’t seem to matter much anyway, since the thing essentially flew itself. “You’re supposed to be our bard, ain’t ya?”
“A song it is, then,” said Kit. He looked from face to face, and then closed his eyes, swaying like a riverside reed. “Let me see, let me see. Ah.” His eyes snapped open. His fingers fluttered and the bones in his wrists popped as he flexed them. He strummed a few disparate notes, hands dancing like spiders upon that eight-sided web, before a melody emerged, flitting like a bird into the warm evening air.
And then, in a scratchy, lilting, remarkably pleasant-sounding voice, he sang.
Moog bobbed his head to the tune. Matrick’s fingers drummed along on his belly, while Ganelon watched the revenant’s roving hands as though mesmerized. Gabriel, as he did so often of late, turned his gaze to the west, toward Castia. And Clay, as was his habit, looked behind them, toward home.
Kit’s song, as the best songs did, told a familiar story in a simple, striking way. He sang of Grandual’s gods, the Holy Tetrea, and of the Summer Lord’s battle against a spirit of utter darkness. Victorious, he banished it to the heavens, where it watches and waits for time to unravel, its million eyes twinkling in the unfathomable dark.
He sang of the Summer Lord’s wife, a goddess of compassion and surpassing beauty, who bore him two children. The first of these was Vail, the Autumn Son, but the boy’s spirit was spiteful and sickly, and his Father shunned him. Next the Mother gave birth to Glif, the Spring Maiden, though in doing so she perished.
Clay realized partway through the song that Kit was now singing in an altogether different tongue. He knew enough druic to recognize the language, but the words themselves were shapeless, formless, as delicate and deliciously random as the petals of flowers grazed in the dark.
Still, he knew how the story ended.
Vail, who men now called the Heathen for the hatred he bore his father, gave his own life so that his mother might be reborn. Death, however, had changed her. The fruit of her compassion withered to harsh austerity. Her beauty grew cold and terrible, if no less lovely.
And so went the cycle, turning and turning upon itself until the end of days, as autumn’s death gave rise to winter, and winter gave birth to spring.
The last, lingering notes of Kit’s song shivered into the evening air. Ganelon, Clay saw, was snoring softly. Moog and Matrick wore wistful grins; the wizard’s eyes were shimmering with unwept tears.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Just beautiful.”
And it was, of course—even more so for having been rendered in a lost tongue and given music by an instrument that was, very likely, the only one of its kind remaining in the world. Even so, Clay had long suspected the story was just that: a story. A means of making sense of an all too senseless world. It couldn’t be true—not all of it, anyway. It was simply too incredible to believe.
But then again, he supposed, a little embellishment was so often the difference between a good story and a great one.
The following morning they spotted something in the sky ahead. Clay’s first thought was that Lastleaf had discovered their plan to rescue Rose and had flown to intercept them. He squinted, fearing to see the flap of draconic wings, but whatever it was moved far too slow to be the druin’s fearsome matriarch.
“It’s a skyship,” announced Gabriel. “It’s changing course, coming toward us.”
Ganelon slipped his axe off his back. The weapon’s whispers filled the air around him. “Might be pirates,” he said.
Clay chuckled. “Right. Sky pirates?”
The warrior shrugged. “Why not?”
Clay could think of several reasons why not, but he gripped the cool haft of the hammer at his waist, just in case.
His fears were unfounded. The ship, which appeared to belong to another band, was just passing by for a look. She was bigger than the Old Glory, but not by much. The words Lucky Seven had been painted on her belly, but the seven had been crossed out, as had the six below it. The word five was scrawled underneath, but Clay only spotted four people at the rail and wondered silently if the ship was due for another paint job.
They’d been attacked, it looked like. Their skyship’s front sail was mangled, though it looked like they’d rigged it to remain functional. One of its two tidal engines was inoperable. Its rings, Clay recalled Moog mentioning, were made of pure duramantium, and so could not be broken, but they’d been knocked askew somehow.
Matrick waved. “They must think we’re crazy, flying a boat like this over the Wyld.”
“No more so than they,” said Kit. “They are but one faulty engine away from a long fall.”
One of the “Lucky Five” waved back, then pointed behind past the stern of her ship. Squinting, Clay could see a pile of ominous clouds spanning the western sky. The woman began gesturing emphatically in the opposite direction.
Moog stated the obvious. “She thinks we should turn back.”
Clay glanced over at Gabriel. “Looks like some kind of storm up ahead. We could land,” he suggested. “Wait for it to blow over?”
“Land?” Matrick sounded skeptical. “In the Heartwyld? I vote no. And I’m technically still your king, remember.”
“We’re not landing,” said Gabriel. “And we aren’t turning back. Unless you think a few black clouds are worse than this Larkspur you say might be following us?”
They both looked to Clay, who was busy weighing the threat of the darkness ahead against the darkness behind. At last he sighed. “Into the storm, then.”
Chapter Thirty
The Dark Star
So going into the storm turned out to be an orc-shit idea.
Plague winds rocked The Carnal Court. Black rain washed the deck. The triple sails hummed with barely harnessed electricity. All this, however, unnerved Clay a fair bit less than the lightning wrought by the storm itself.
It couldn’t just be normal lightning—the kind that killed men and set whole forests ablaze. Oh no, not here in the Wyld, which had an evil reputation to live up to. This lightning was blue. It announced its arrival with a crack like a giant’s spine snapping in half, and then roared into crackling pillars that seemed to buttress the roiling clouds above.
Moog was back in the pilot’s chair, though in fact he was standing. His fingers danced on the steering orbs as he manoeuvred between columns of blistering light, doing his best to see through the rain-scoured windows fronting the cabin.
Matrick was drunk and clinging to the siren on the prow, one hand cupping a golden breast. He screamed wordlessly into the face of the storm. Clay watched him finish off half a bottle of wine before lobbing it toward a pillar they’d very narrowly avoided. The bottle blew apart, and Matrick whooped like a child watching summer fireworks.
That’s my king, Clay thought miserably.
As if wind and rain and lightning weren’t hazard enough, there were sparkwyrms to worry about. The serpents were each as long as The Carnal Court, near invisible until they approached one another and their bodies glowed a brilliant blue-white. Crackling strands of electricity linked pairs together, and Clay couldn’t help but imagine two of them passing on either side of the ship, dragging a current across the deck that would kill them all in an instant.
We should have landed, he told himself. Or turned back until this storm broke.
The ship rocked beneath him as Moog veered away from the crack and boom that signalled another blast of lightning, which struck so close Clay felt his heart jolt and the hair on his arms stand on end. The shuttered windows of the pilot’s cabin thrashed and were torn from their casements. Rain and wind battered the wizard, hurling him backward. He toppled over the arm of the chair and disappeared from sight.
The Carnal Court ploughed aimlessly through the storm, beset by high-voltage cyclones and snakes of coiled lightning. Clay took hold of the rail to steady himself, and made the terrible mistake of thinking things couldn’t get any worse.