While bowmen took up their positions on the walls and infantrymen assembled barricades in the streets and helmsmen hurried to the grid, Talasyn squinted up at the starry heavens. There probably wasn’t a stormship, she conceded—she’d have spotted its hulking silhouette by now.
She quickened her pace and joined the scramble toward the grid, dozens of army-issued boots trampling snow into mud. It seemed to take ages before they reached the outskirts of the city, where slender coracles bearing Allfold sails striped orange and red were docked atop platforms of honeycombed steel. Curved at the ends like canoes, the small airships, nicknamed wasps because of their diminutive size and lethal sting, gleamed in the copious moonlight.
In the mad dash to her coracle, Talasyn found herself running alongside Khaede, who was also heading for hers.
“You can’t be serious!” Talasyn yelled over the clamor of warning gongs and officers’ barked instructions. “You’re two months along—”
“Not so loud,” Khaede hissed. The line of her ebony jaw was resolute against the falling snow. “The bean sprout and I will be fine. Worry about yourself.” She clapped Talasyn on the arm and was gone before the latter could reply, swallowed up by the throng of helmsmen.
Talasyn scanned the grid for Sol, swearing under her breath when she spotted his wasp already in the air. She doubted that he’d signed off on this. Unless Talasyn missed her guess, Khaede and Sol were due for their first fight as a married couple.
But she couldn’t dwell on that now. In the distance, the Night Empire’s own coracles surged over a forested ridge. These vessels were called wolves, vicious things with sharp prows that hunted in packs and were armed to the teeth, so numerous that they blocked out the horizon, their black-and-silver sails streaming in the chill breeze.
Talasyn hopped into the well of her ship, pulling on the pair of brown leather gloves that she’d tucked into her coat pocket, and she yanked at several levers in swift succession with the ease of familiarity. The wasp raised its sails and the crystalline aether hearts embedded in its wooden hull flared a bright emerald, bringing the craft to life as they crackled with the wind magic from the Squallfast dimension that Sardovian Enchanters had distilled into them. Static blared from the transceiver, a box-shaped contraption inlaid with dials and filaments of conductive metals, the aether heart within it glowing white, laden with magic from the Tempestroad, a storm-streaked dimension that produced sound, normally in the form of thunder, but it could be manipulated to carry voices across a distance through what was known as the aetherwave.
Fingers around the spoked wheel, Talasyn took off from the grid, her vessel spitting out fumes of magical green discharge, and she slipped into an arrowhead formation with the other Sardovian airships.
“What’s the plan?” she asked into the mouthpiece of her transceiver, her question echoing through the aetherwave frequency used by her regiment.
From the head of the formation, Sol replied, in that calm and easygoing manner of which only he was capable during combat. His words emerged from a horn atop the transceiver, filling the well of Talasyn’s coracle. “We’re outnumbered ten to one, so standard defensive tactics are our best bet. Try to keep them away from the city walls until the residents are in the shelters.”
“Affirmative,” said Talasyn. She couldn’t risk telling him about Khaede, not with so many of their comrades listening in, not when they needed him to be at his most focused. Still, she couldn’t resist adding, “Congratulations on your marriage, by the way.”
Sol laughed. “Thanks.”
The Sardovian wasps formed a tight swarm around Frostplum’s walls and the Kesathese vessels met them head-on. While a wasp coracle couldn’t hold a candle to the multi-stacked repeating crossbows and iron-hurling ribaults of the Night Empire’s wolves, it more than made up for that by virtue of sheer agility—an agility that Talasyn used to full advantage over the next few dizzying minutes. She careened through the night air, dodging one deadly bolt after another and firing off several of her own from the crossbows affixed to her ship’s stern. The enemy coracles lacked maneuverability and her aim was true most of the time, ripping through sailcloth, splintering wooden hulls.
But there were just so many wolves, and it wasn’t long before they broke through the defensive perimeter, roaring closer and closer to Frostplum’s moonlit sprawl of thatched rooftops.
And in the distance . . .
Talasyn’s heart sank into the pit of her stomach when she spotted the monstrous double-masted silhouette of a Kesathese ironclad looming up over a snow-capped peak on whirling clouds of emerald aether. To meet it, two Sardovian frigates—full-rigged and square-sailed, and smaller but just as replete with cannons—rose from the nearby valley where they had been lying in wait for such a vessel to appear.
It was going to be a bloodbath. But at least the Night Empire hadn’t brought in a stormship. As long as there was no stormship, there was still a chance.
Talasyn sailed to where the combat was thickest, hurling her wasp headlong into the fray. She fought and flew as hard as she ever had. Out of the corner of her eye, her comrades’ ships burst into flames or shattered against battlements and treetops around her. Only a little while ago, they had all been safe and carefree in the longhouse, celebrating Khaede and Sol’s wedding.
That had been an illusion. No warm place, no sliver of joyous time, was safe from the Hurricane Wars. Everything that Kesath’s Night Empire touched, it destroyed.
The first faint embers of burning rose within her. It crawled from her core to the very tips of her fingers like white-hot needles, lurking beneath the skin.
Snap out of it, she ordered herself. No one can know.
You promised the Amirante.
Talasyn swallowed the burning back down, quieting the inferno in her soul. Too late, she realized that several wolves had managed to outflank her while she was distracted. Their ribaults’ iron projectiles pummeled her airship from all sides, and soon the world was nothing but free fall as she spiraled to the waiting ground.
Chapter Two