Page 6 of The Hurricane Wars

Her comrades hadn’t left her behind yet, but theywereleaving, effectively ceding more ground to the Night Empire. Ground that they couldn’t afford to lose.

Talasyn landed on the deck on her hands and knees. It waschaos. People were rushing about; healers were tending to grisly wounds. Talasyn could only tell the soldiers from everyone else by patches of uniform amid the soot, grime, and blood.

The rope ladders were retracted as the carrack set sail over the snow-laden Highlands on emerald clouds of wind magic. Talasyn gazed upon Frostplum, its burning rooftops and broken walls growing ever smaller with distance. She turned, unable to keep looking at what was left of the place where they’d found a moment of peace and happiness, and she stopped dead as her gaze fell on a couple several feet away. And what was left of her world was pulled out from under her.

Huddled against the bulkhead, Khaede held Sol’s limp form in her arms, his head pillowed on her lap. Both their clothes were spattered with his blood, pouring out of a gaping hole in his chest. A crimson-drenched crossbow bolt lay across the wooden planks.

Talasyn knew, even before she walked over on unsteady legs, that Sol was gone. His blue-black eyes stared up at the heavens, unblinking. Tears streamed down Khaede’s cheeks as she stroked his dark hair, the wedding band that he’d slipped onto her finger only a few hours ago gleaming in a tangle of moonbeams and lamplight.

“He almost made it,” Khaede whispered once she realized that Talasyn had sat beside her. “Our wasps crash-landed and we fought our way to the docks. We went up the ladder—he made me go first—and when I turned around to help him climb over onto the deck, there was that”—she nodded jerkily at the crossbow bolt—“thatthingsticking out of his chest. It happened so fast. I didn’t even see it actually happen. I...”

Khaede took a deep, shuddering breath. She fell silent, not so much as sniffling, although her tears continued to flow. Her hand dropped over Sol’s heart and stayed there, beside where the Kesathese bowman had hit true, her fingers running all the redder from his fatal wound.

Talasyn was at a loss what to do. She knew Khaede was the type of person who despised what she considered pity, who would brutally rebuff any attempt at comfort. Talasyn couldn’t even cry for Sol because her early years on the Great Steppe had dulled the part of her that wept, long before the Hurricane Wars. She had considered this a good thing in its own way—if she cried for everyone who fell in battle, she’d never be stopping—but now, looking at Sol’s lifeless body, remembering the kind smiles and good-natured jokes, remembering how happy he’d made her friend, her numbness sickened her. Surely he deserved the tears that she was too exhausted to give?

Her gaze strayed to Khaede’s midsection, and bile surged up her throat. “You have to tell Vela that you’re pregnant. So she can pull you off active duty.”

“I’m fighting until I can’t,” Khaede interrupted in a low growl. “Don’t youdaretell her, either. I’m the best helmsman in the Allfold. You need me.” The hand that wasn’t on Sol’s unmoving chest touched her stomach. “The baby will be all right.” Her bottom lip quivered before she pressed her mouth into a taut, resolute line. “They’re strong like their father.”

The mixture of sorrow and defiance on the other woman’s face made Talasyn decide to let it go. Now wasn’t the time. Instead, she looked around the busy decks for any sign of the cleric who had officiated at the wedding—only to see pale yellow robes peeking out from a makeshift shroud draped over a still, supine form.

She would have to do it, then. As she’d done for others on battlefields all across the Continent, when they’d been too far from god-shrines and healing houses.

Talasyn leaned over Sol and gently closed his sightless eyes, his skin devoid of life’s warmth beneath her fingertips. “May your soul find shelter in the willows,” she murmured, “until all lands sink beneath the Eversea and we meet again.”

Beside her, Khaede drew another harsh breath, one that wasalmost a sob. The carrack flew on, over the mountains and the valleys, on the oars of winter and of starlight.

“Why didn’t Kesath bring in a stormship?”

Talasyn’s question broke the tense silence that had settled over the Amirante’s office after her debriefing. She’d helped wrap Sol in a shroud and gotten Khaede settled in a spare berth half an hour ago. Now she was seated across from Vela, her damp and singed outerwear traded for a blanket draped over her cotton-clad shoulders.

“Given the terrain and the existing conditions, adding more weather would have been disastrous for all parties involved. Avalanches tend to put quite the damper on morale.” Vela spoke with calm authority from behind her desk. “Not to mention that, with Frostplum’s small size relative to cities on the plains or the coasts, the rate of civilian and allied casualties would have been too high.”

“That’s whywedidn’t bring in a stormship,” Talasyn pointed out.

“Quite so.” A hint of a sardonic smile darted across the Amirante’s weathered bronze features. One of the Legion had gouged out her left eye the year before, and in its place was an intricately carved patch of copper and steel that only added to the redoubtable figure she cut among her troops. “In Kesath’s case, I suspect that they believed they didn’t need one to win. Ialsosuspect that they were content to merely run us off instead of giving chase because they’d gotten what they came for.”

“They did,” Coxswain Darius said shortly. He was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, a haggard imitation of the good-humored officer that Talasyn had spoken to at the longhouse. “Now that he has Frostplum, Gaheris is in prime position to conquer the rest of the Highlands. It won’t be long before he brings the King on the Mountain to heel.” Vela made no response and Darius sighed, fixing her with a morose gaze.“Ideth, the Sardovian Allfold’s holdings shrink with each year that passes. Soon there will be nowhere left for us to run.”

“What would you have us do, then?” countered Vela. “Surrender is not an option. You and I both knew that when we left Kesath. Gaheris made it plain: anyone who stands in the way of his empire’s destiny will meet a terrible end.”

It was Darius’s turn to say nothing, although he kept his eyes fixed on the Amirante while she returned his stare. Not for the first time, Talasyn felt like an intruder witnessing a conversation that she couldn’t hear. Vela and Darius had their own silent language; they had known each other since Vela was a new recruit to the Kesathese fleet, and ten years ago they had defected together with several other officers and some loyal soldiers, taking eight stormships with them over the border to Sardovia.

Vela and Darius were resolute in their determination to prevent the Night Emperor’s cruel reign from encompassing the whole Continent. But the Hurricane Wars had dragged on and Sardovia was down to five stormships, and Talasyn was starting to see the cracks in her superiors’ facades.

Darius rubbed a weary hand over his face. “If only Bieshimma had been successful,” he muttered. “If only the Nenavar Dominion had agreed to help.”

“It was a long shot in the first place,” said Vela. “They’d already turned away our previous envoy. I’m sure that the Nenavarene are still smarting from thelasttime they sent aid to a Sardovian state.”

There it was again, the quickening of Talasyn’s pulse that accompanied anything and everything to do with the Dominion. “So it’s true, then?” she blurted out. “Nenavar sent airships to help the Lightweavers of Sunstead during the Cataclysm?” She’d heard the old stories; they were whispered in taverns and marketplaces, bandied about in the barracks.

“Yes,” Vela confirmed. “I was a quartermaster in the Kesathese fleet at the time. I saw the Nenavarene flotilla froma distance, but they never reached our shores. Emperor Gaheris sent the stormship prototype out to meet them.”

“It was his father’s pet project,” Darius added, lip curling in distaste. “Ozalus had just been slain in battle. Gaheris was newly crowned, and angry and desperate. He ordered the first stormship to be deployed. It hadn’t been tested yet, but it worked. The Nenavarene flotilla never stood a chance.”

Talasyn pictured it—bursts of straight-line winds, torrents of heavy rain, waves of destructive lightning, unfurling over the dark blue Eversea and crushing the Dominion’s airships as though they were matchsticks. After Kesath annexed Sunstead and became the Night Empire, they had kept on building more of these dread weapons. Huge armor-plated vessels, nearly impossible to bring down and wreaking untold devastation on the land.

Each stormship required hundreds of aether hearts to be fully operational, but Kesath’s mines were on the brink of depletion, and so Gaheris had looked to his neighbors. The remaining states of the Sardovian Allfold had refused. Deciding to take Sardovia’s supply of aether hearts by force, Gaheris began conquering one Allfold city after another, his Night Empire growing with each victory. Vela and Darius and their men had rebelled and brought stormship technology to the Sardovian forces and now, a decade later, here they all were. Fighting a war without end.

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