Sword of Fire and Sea (The Chaos Knight Book One) (31 page)

Then, just before the gate, the ground rose up, and Vidarian wrapped his arms around Ariadel, gathering himself to leap. He looked at Ruby, who knelt beside him, ready to take cover as well. But the clay and rock, still topped with the grass that had been below them a moment ago, swung up in a protective curve, sheltering them from the destruction.

A creature that was almost human but significantly not so ducked under the arc of the protective mantle with them. She—somehow he knew it was a she—was covered with brown and black speckled feathers, a pair of massive wings folded at her back like a great cloak. As she crouched, he saw that her feet terminated in birdlike claws, and her hands also bore more delicate ones. Large golden eyes, twice again too round to be human, looked out at the chaos atop a compact black-tipped beak. Her clothing was an ancient style he'd never seen before, a kind of wrap that accommodated her wings, and a gold pendant hung suspended in the middle of her forehead.

When she was satisfied that the wall of earth would protect them, she turned to him.
“Isri,”
she said, and he wondered how they would understand the creatures’ language, but she said, “My name is Isri,” in clear, unaccented trade-tongue. “I am elder mindspeaker for the Treune seridi. You are gate-opener. We've been expecting you for some time!”

“Pleased to meet you,” he shouted, and at the sound of his voice Ariadel stirred in his arms.

Her eyes slowly opened, unfocused at first, then fixing on him. His heart leapt and his eyes stung. Then her soft expression of love as she saw him, so welcome and familiar, transformed with the arrival of conscious thought to horror, and betrayal. Her hand came up, shaking, to touch his face. “Vidarian,” she whispered, her voice rasping, “what have you done?”

A gurgling cough behind them turned both their heads. When Vidarian looked up from Ariadel and saw Ruby's ashen face, and how she fought to remain standing, his heart shouted astonished denial.

All things
, the Starhunter whispered, returning to his mind with ease and solidity,
and their antithesis.

The wound at her side was darkening with blood, suddenly overcome as if it had been ripped open anew. Out of some instinctive reach for power, Ruby extended her elemental sense—a massive arm of it that lit her face with shock. Vidarian automatically raised his own in a shield—and was crushed to the ground under the weight of the energy that poured out of him. He stemmed it back, and even in restraint it was as if the sea energy poured from him in a torrent, wild and near uncontrollable.

“It's…” Ruby gasped. “The healing magic…it's all wrong…. ” And at once Vidarian realized that the infused poultice would now have its energies thrown out of balance by the same shift that had many-times multiplied their own elemental energy. And it was killing her.

Ariadel, by contrast, was rising under her own strength, leaning toward Ruby, her eyes streaked with tears. Vidarian turned to Ruby, and the breath stopped in his throat.

“No sentiment, please,” Ruby said, her neck straining. “But I did tell you…I wanted to die on my ship,” she said, and fell to the ground. Vidarian dove after her, his head swimming, looping his arm under her neck. Her muscles were slack, her eyes shut, her head lolling. And there, as Vidarian clasped her nerveless fingers, the Queen of the West Sea departed the world, the rush of her powerful elemental presence winking out before him.

“She's gone,” he said.

T

The camp's activity had now doubled with the arrival of the seridi, and only the fast organization of their leaders kept it from tripling or more. Like the gryphons, the seridi seemed to be organized by element and led by elders; these, wearing pendants like Isri's, clustered around the gryphons from Thalnarra's pride, conferring. Catching up, Vidarian thought, on two thousand years of gossip. Meanwhile, thousands more of the creatures were spreading out in all directions, hurrying to create or find shelter and sustenance for over a million refugees. Small mixed teams of gryphons and seridi were dispatched to the gryphon prides and the priestesshoods.

Except for Isri, the seridi uniformly deferred to him to the point of stopping whatever they were doing, and so Vidarian eventually distanced himself from the camp. His pursuit of solitude eventually returned him to the gate and the little flight craft that still sat beside it, nearly forgotten. By some silent agreement the gryphons had sent Altair and Isri to follow him, and he couldn't bring himself to stop them.

Vidarian went to the craft and rested his hands on the bow. Just below its curved surface, encircling the entire craft, was a row of stones he'd never noticed before; he'd assumed they were large nails. But now each of them glowed softly with an internal energy, a pale blue light. As he knelt to examine them more closely, Isri joined him at the craft's side.

//
It was a skyship, long ago
, // Altair said.

“That's right,” Isri replied, her hands passing gently over the ship's hull as if swallowed by a memory. She seemed to delight in every physical sensation—the wind, the warmth of the late afternoon sun, the scent of the trees. Now she hopped adroitly into the craft and knelt, inspecting wooden cases set into the shallow deck. Vidarian had thought that they contained ballast or some kind of stabilizer. But when Isri flipped a series of catches and opened them, she reached in and pulled up a slender mainmast made of a light, flexible metal Vidarian had never seen. Still rigged to it was a sail made of light translucent silk, and when she straightened the mast, it snapped loudly—and firmly—into place. Intrigued, Vidarian climbed into the ship after her to get a closer look.

As if this weren't enough, while he inspected the main, Isri proceeded to open two more cases hidden in front of the benches to the fore of the craft, unpacking two more sails and even slimmer masts. These folded out over the sides, unmistakably mimicking birds’ wings.

The little skiff was hardly the
Quest
, but suddenly it was a piece of something like home.

“May I?” Vidarian managed.

In answer, Altair raised a foreclaw, and the blue cabochons set into the hull pulsed into life one by one as his magic touched them. With a soft groan, the craft lifted just off the ground beneath Vidarian's feet, and he scrambled to take hold. There was no wheel, but a slim capstan just before the galley had yet another clever catch system that, when opened, revealed a control mechanism shaped to fit a human hand.

The ship was rising, and he only had a few seconds to decipher the controls. One was clearly a barometer, and another delicate device set beside it he suspected was an altimeter, this one built into the ship. Now the ship was higher off the ground, its bow even with Altair's head. Vidarian touched a cylindrical switch at the bottom of the panel and heard a clunk below and aft. A long rudder—more a fourth sail, composed of a springy metal spar and another sail—had unfurled below them, steadying the ship. Vidarian thought about the Sky Knights and how they had dominated the air, giving the Alorean Empire unprecedented advantage over the surrounding territories. “This changes everything,” he breathed.

//
You changed everything
, // Altair said, then dipped his beak in a small salute. //
Good flying, brother.
// The title lifted Vidarian with a surprising flush of pride and affection.

When they reached the tops of the trees, Isri shocked him by leaping over the starboard rail. He kept his hand on the rudder control to steady the craft, then ran to the side while it floated. Below, the seridi had snapped open her barred wings and was soaring gently over the forest canopy. While he watched, she gave a few powerful flaps of her wings and glided ahead, then up, riding the wind.

They were still rising, and Vidarian returned to the controls, finding one that seemed to increase the power of the air-stones, propelling them forward, and another that lessened it. There were none at the capstan for turning the craft or changing its altitude, and it took him a few moments to realize these were controlled by the three sails and traditional shiplike rigging. Managing the ropes and sail, drawing them back and checking knots, the scents of rope and wood and wind, dropped him in gentle, old memories.

Long ago, his family had owned a skiff not unlike this one, a small training vessel on which his father had taught Vidarian and his brothers how to sail. If he looked out over the bow, out instead of down, he could imagine he was on the sea, not in the sky.

Shortly he had the craft leveled out and floating. The side-sails were new to him, but after a few alterations in the rigging he found that a slight backward curve and a low propulsion setting allowed the ship to float gently where it was, teased by the breeze but not moved. Below, the world unfolded; forest melted into grassland, grassland rose into hill, hill spread into jagged coastline. And the sea—which had so shaped his existence, he'd thought—crashed there, distant and strange.

A pulse of wings on air drew his attention back to the here and now. Beside him, out in the air, Isri hovered. Her feathers were lifted in what he'd learned meant excitement in a gryphon, and her breathing was fast but steady. Watching the glisten in her eyes, Vidarian found a sudden jealousy for her and the gryphons’ direct experience of the exhilaration of flight.

“May I?” she called, her wings beating twice every few seconds to hold her in the hover.

“Please,” Vidarian answered, doing his best to hold the craft steady in the high wind.

He thought the mechanics of landing on a ship that floated in the air would be complex, but she must have done this before, and he stopped himself from the dizzying contemplation of when that might have been. With an ease she hadn't shown on takeoff, she dove and then looped in a quick arc, bringing herself directly on top of the
Destiny
. Then she folded her wings and dropped, one foot outstretched and the other ready to brace for impact, into a neat landing on the bench beside Vidarian. She gave one quick flap to steady herself, mantling like a hawk, and then her wings flipped back and closed with a whisper of soft, sleek feathers. With a lightness that spoke of birdlike bones, she hopped into the bench seat next to Vidarian. Her feathers smelled of sun-warmth and spice.

Vidarian was looking at the sun, staring into the sun where it now sunk into the sea in a pool of searing, liquid light, and for a long time Isri followed his gaze silently. But as the spots it burned into his eyes turned deeper and darker, he realized he was trying rather pathetically to punish himself and looked away, tracing his returning vision up the coast.

In the distance, a flash of unnatural lightning that came from near the ground revealed the location of one of the seridi that had flooded out of the gate, wreaking havoc wherever they passed.

“Why are they doing this?” Vidarian asked, his throat dry from the altitude.

“They're mad,” Isri replied. “For every year that my people remained trapped with the Starhunter, it seemed one of us lost the battle to retain our sanity. Her massive and chaotic mind eroded our own.”

“Why would you give yourselves to such a thing?”

“We didn't know we would survive the passage into the gate,” she said. “When we lured her through, we thought it was to certain death. None had ever survived passing into the gate when a destination had not been opened on the other side. The Starhunter kept us alive—we were her bargaining chip if she were to ever be released again.”

“And I fell into her hands,” he said, remembering Ariadel's silence like a knife between his ribs. “The gryphons and magic-users here insisted that the gate should be sealed, not opened.”

She turned to him, her pupils pinning like a gryphon's with shock. “And leave us trapped there for eternity, all condemned to the slow descent into madness?” When he didn't answer, she said, “You have set us free. Whatever paths lay ahead of you, you must know that you have the gratitude of an entire race, trapped for untold time between worlds.”

For the first time since the awakening of his magic—and it now felt to be wholly
his
magic, as it never had—the weight of the Starhunter was lifted from his mind. A hollowness he felt in the world itself said that she was there—her ambiguity, her truth—but she was no longer his alone to bear. And he wondered if it was this relief he had sought all along. Had he really opened the gate for Ariadel? Had the Starhunter herself contaminated his thoughts?

In the quiet that had settled on his mind, he knew the singularity of purpose that had filled his being for that one moment. It was Ariadel's life that had compelled him, for good and for ill. And he knew that if it were left to him again, he would again release chaos into the world if it meant correcting an imbalance that he'd known in his heart threaded reality itself without her.

“It's beautiful,” Isri said, looking out at the sunset spilling light and brilliance across the distant ocean far below and to the west. She closed her eyes, and the gentle wind lifted the feathers around her face.

The future was nebulous—two thousand powerful magic-wielders released into the world, the disruption of healing magic, ships that could fly—but suspended as he was among the clouds, the deep blue sky filled with fire and light, the richness of a new land spread beneath them…in that moment, at least, Vidarian agreed.