Crossing out some words in a letter she doubted she’d send to anyone, Farisa decided, it being late at night, she would try this again with a fresher morning mind. She could not, after eight months of travel, put all of herself on paper. Her writing was either too stiff to convey anything, or too effusive to be credible.
As happened when Farisa’s heart beat fast, the scar on her shoulder burned.
“I miss you,” she said in the darkness, not sure who she might be speaking to. “I still miss you.”
A gentle wind brushed the frosty window. She scribbled out the day’s date and added a week to it. She would have her thoughts in order by then. The aborted letter being scratch paper, she used it to jot down a few phrases she wanted to use, but hadn’t figured out where to place.
First of all, never use “first of all.” It reads like a fucking shop list.
Her self-critique must have become audible because Mazie, asleep on the other side of the room, turned over in her bed.
Farisa whispered, “Sorry, I’ll be quieter.”
Jakhob’s Gun had been returned to her, and was sitting on her writing desk, but she had forgotten to read the note inside, so she opened the book to find Saloma’s handwriting.
We need to talk. Just you. Come to the Rose Garden at nine.
#
Eight fifty. Farisa had, on the trail, often awakened suddenly and before dawn, but this morning she had slept into the bright hours while Claes and Andor debated downstairs the structural engineering of the house they were inside, reaching awareness gradually of her pocket watch ticking. Seeing the time, she bolted out of bed and hurried to the Rose Garden, breaking a sweat in spite of the January chill.
Out of breath once at the garden’s entrance, she apologized to Saloma for her tardiness.
“Late?” Saloma smiled. “You are timely.”
“Thank you for being polite.” Farisa looked at her pocket watch. “Alas, I am seven minutes overdue.”
Saloma led the way into the garden. “We are not as insistent on precision as your kind.”
“I feel bad for making you wait.”
“There are worse places to wait.” Saloma smiled. White roses and lavender were in bloom. The elfin woman let Farisa through a half-acre maze of trellises. “We do not hurry in our world.”
“I can see that,” said Farisa.
The garden had been designed with careful attention to symmetry and color balance, every bulb planted with care. There were about thirty other Macski here, some collecting rose hips, others engaged in small talk, and a few meditating in the sun, for it was noticeably warmer here than on the province’s northern periphery. No one’s face had been marked by hierarchy or labor.
“How do your people...?” She started to ask a question that she second-guessed, for it might be rude.
Saloma pursed her lips. What?
“How do you subsist? Who does the work?”
“We have a kind of magic, but not the same as yours. Terzain will discuss the matter in detail, as his knowledge is vast. It has only taken him sixteen hundred years to acquire it.”
“Sixteen hundred?” To Farisa, Terazin had looked no older than thirty-eight and a day. “Such a span of time is...”
“Unimaginable,” Saloma said. Rain dripped from an overhead cherry blossom. “That is the weight of it. It is unimaginable to us, too, though some of us end up living it.”
“So, are Macski immortal?”
Saloma stopped and turned around. “I implore you not to use that word around here.”
“ ‘Immortal’? Is it offensive?”
“It is simply inaccurate. We do not age like humans, it is true, but we die, all of us. I will die and Terazin will die. Sickness, violence, and injury exist in our world as much as they do in yours. It is even possible, though rare, that we go mad from the abuse of magic. So, while we are not afflicted by the bodily decay of animals in the wild, we still feel the march of loss, and it is relentless.”
“I guess it means every death in your world is a young death.”
“That’s correct,” Saloma said as she gathered pink berries in a wicker basket. “As we see it, you are the immortal ones.”
“We are? How?”
“Our children are born heavy with past lives. They remember their deaths. You are born, as a human, with no memory that you ever died. Each time, you forget everything, and this includes the losses. I have read it is not uncommon for a human to reach forty years of age and realize, only then, that half his time has passed and that he will not be excluded from the inevitable. Even still, your world has so much conflict and commerce, limitless distraction is available, and one can avoid mortality’s inescapability. You live as if death does not exist and, while you are taken to sleep every eighty years, you are not disturbed on waking by the sleep’s having happened—instead, you are reborn, again immortal. We never forget that death is real. It is our first memory as infants. We spent hundreds, thousands of years in its shadow.”
They walked around a fence and came to a field of red winter kale. The air was chilly, but the overhead sun prickled the back of Farisa’s neck.
“I don’t understand,” Farisa admitted. “How can death be bad, if you are certain of rebirth?”
“How comfortable do you feel in borrowed clothes?”
Farisa remembered her frantic run out of Cait Forest. “Not very.”
Saloma continued. “Imagine waking up inside a stranger’s skin and nerves. Your mind, after centuries in one body, insists it does not belong in the childish, powerless new one. You lose understanding, because you are an infant, that you cannot go back to the old one, and grieve this realization as you come of age. We endure this, every time we take a new life, and we live knowing it will happen again. It forces us to exist simultaneously inside and outside each life’s identity. Your kind is spared this trauma. After death, you get to forget death for a while. At the very least, you get two years of squalling idiocy.”
“Oh, some of us make it more than two years—a whole life, if you can believe that.”
“I know, but I was being polite.” Saloma chuckled as she grabbed a handful of cherries from a tree. “Recently, I found a poem I wrote four centuries ago. The woman who wrote it used my name, but she is as dead now as you will be in a century. There is so much in our way of life that should not be envied. I noticed that you came with a cat. We have pets in childhood, but never as adults, because the time between a kitten’s birth and her death by old age is so little—fifteen years, out of thousands—that we cannot bear to keep animals.” Saloma sniffled, then looked down at the grass. “That said, our way of life is our way of life, and we do intend to defend it.”
“Of course.”
“I suppose this makes as good a time as any to let you know that the decision to admit you into Lupinia was not unanimous. It is not that you did anything wrong. Terazin and I argued in your favor, but there is a superstition among our kind that having any interaction with the outside world—any entanglement at all—brings on a risk of rebirth there.”
“Among us ‘orcs,’ ” said Farisa.
“Mind you, that is not a prejudice I share. Your short lives produce such diversity of language and culture. Your literature, even though you have so little time to learn the craft, is superior to ours. What we call novels run fifteen million words, impeccably beautiful, but say nothing. A hundred pages, about a single oak tree. Your world, on the other hand, has such a forceful quickness that new things are being invented all the time, and so it produces so much to learn; alas, you are denied the time to learn much of it at all.”
Farisa ducked a branch that hung overhead.
Saloma continued. “We live long, but we are a fragile people. Only five hundred thousand of us exist. Half of us live in one city, Oran-Yi.”
Farisa stepped over a long puddle with green grass at the bottom. “Why so few? You have the resources to support millions.”
“Our nation’s lands could support twenty million, but it would be a terrible life, one marked by scarcity and competition. We would sicken and die from crowding and overwork.”
“Like us,” Farisa said.
“We would consider it better not to be born. That said, there were a million of us when I was a child, and I do wish we could halt our number’s decline.”
“Why can’t you?”
"You can see that we live for centuries and look no worse for it. Still, like your kind, we reach physical adulthood at twenty and begin to lose fertility at twice that. Our women are barren by sixty, our men by eighty. At the same time, a Macska’s career has hardly begun at the age of one hundred. When a birth does occur, there is always an air of scandal about it because, while the poverty of your world does not exist in ours, our people still feel that children should not be had by those who have not yet proven themselves.”
“Do children ever just... happen?”
“It is rare. Unlike your kind, we can deactivate the parts of ourselves that might lead us astray, and often we do. Desire is not, for us, the issue that it is for humans. We know there will be more time.”
Farisa started to say something, then stopped herself.
Saloma pointed to a hardwood bench. The two women, so unalike in lifespan and experiences, sat there together. The elder continued.
“It possibly cannot be helped that our numbers shall decline. Four hundred thousand in two centuries; three hundred thousand, in five. Still, I will not stand to see us become extinct. Thus, we may require aid in our defense.”
Farisa found herself uneasy. What could she offer to these people, who had so much?
“I must speak cautiously. In my language, I speak in long flowing sentences, five hundred words without error. In yours, I struggle to put twenty together. Terazin and I have deciphered the message in Jakhob’s Gun and, indeed, the content of it was crucial to our case for admitting you into Lupinia. Did you know that T. C. Teller is not the author’s real name?”
“A pen name, yes.” Farisa looked behind herself. “I believe I did know that.”
“Did you know that the novel’s author is your father?”
“That’s impossible.” Farisa crossed her arms. “My father is—”
“Believed widely to have died in a house fire on October 28, 9976. Shortly after your mother’s death, he deemed it safest to convince the world he was also gone. He arranged, through a friend of his—”
“That would be Claes.”
“—to have his four daughters raised in separate corners of the world. He suffered in isolation, having a nervous breakdown in 9977. He spent five years as a vagrant in a city called Tsash Teng.”
“Tsash Teng? All the way across the Polar Ocean?”
“You would know your world’s geography better than I. He writes that during those years, he hoped to die, but he did not. When his mind came together, he took work as a literary translator, and later as an in-house novelist, at White Lightning Press.”
Farisa stood, finding she had made fists.
“Did I insult you?”
She paced around the garden. “White Lightning is an imprint of—ten years ago it was bought by—the Global Company that we are fighting against.”
“He has lamented this, but it seems to be true.”
“Do you realize what you are saying, Saloma?”
Saloma, still seated, put a hand on her own leg. “I suppose this is a lot for you to hear right now.”
“You are saying that my father works for the Global Company that murdered his wife. That is one hell of an accusation.”
“I believe your world’s term for this is ‘espionage.’ He chose Tsash Teng because—”
“His dark skin wouldn’t stand out,” Farisa said.
“Using the disguise of a mass market novel, he transmits information about the Company’s weaknesses to its enemies.”
“It has no enemies.” Farisa kicked a clod of snow that had fallen from a garden pot. “That’s the problem, Saloma. It has won so thoroughly, no enemies to it are left.”
“I can see that you do not like this information.”
“Dashi, you pathetic fool.” The long-lost daughter growled. “If the Company’s enemies can decode your message, so can the Company. The Employer always wins. Don’t you see that? If you are getting a message out, it is because they are letting you do it.” She looked north in anger. “I hope you’re enjoying Hampus Bell’s blood money.”
Saloma held a respectful silence before saying, “If I understand your world correctly, all money is blood money.”
“You have made an excellent point,” Farisa said, as she sat back down. “Maybe he is doing the best he can.”
“I did not think it was that unusual, in espionage, to take employment by the enemy.”
“I can’t help but feel like he abandoned me,” Farisa said. “He made me an orphan, to go write smut for the Globbos. Whatever he thinks he’s doing against their interests, it won’t work. They have the people and resources to think of everything.”
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Saloma’s hand touched her arm. Farisa knew this to be a rare gesture; in general, Macski were not tactile, even among intimate friends. “Maybe not everything. Your father carries immense guilt about having left you to fend for yourself, and trust me when I say he is doing all he can to bring on the Global Company’s collapse. Now, the question of whether he succeeds is, I suppose, up to you and us.”
“How so?”
Terazin, wearing a blue tunic, approached. “Are we ready to speak to the others?”
#
They sat, six humans and two Macski, for an outdoor lunch about a mile south of the guesthouse. The dish was a stew of local vegetables—to Farisa, it tasted like a mix of spicy garlic and olive—served in a blanket of spongy sourdough. Coffee was served by Vai, Terazin’s eighty-year-old adopted daughter. From a distance, this meal could have been taken for a leisurely picnic on a sunny afternoon—not the site of a discussion that would steer the world’s fate.
Claes said, “I understand you are vegetarian?”
“Only at home,” Terazin said. “We are allowed to fish and hunt when we travel in the wild.”
Saloma added, “That is something we prefer not to do, though. We have all kinds of terrain, and in all seasons, here.”
“Your world to our north is much larger than ours.” Terazin ran his hands over the tablecloth. “There is one, of similar size, to our south. Sometimes, one or the other drags us into a war. Macski do not like to fight, but when forced to do so, we are brave and efficient.”
A pair of sparrows, one chasing the other, flew overhead.
Saloma said, “This year, when is the Vehu Week of Exile?”
“August,” Mazie said before Farisa could.
“Exile starts on the ninth, and the Lifting of the Fast will be on the sixteenth.”
Terazin shook his head. “Seven months is not enough time.”
Farisa looked at him, then Saloma.
He continued. “But it’s what we have. Exile is when the Company intends to attack the city of L’Tae-Verida.”
“Tevalon,” said Saloma.
Farisa looked down at her lap. “Why?”
Terazin said, “As you probably know, but the others may not, the Library of Tevalon was built before the Vehu arrived—before the Melting, which is—”
“Why no one has been in the basements.”
“No one yet.”
“The books would all have rotted away by now.”
“The Global Company’s interest is not an old book,” said Terazin.
Saloma asked, “Have you noticed that the strength of your magic depends on where you are?”
“I have,” Farisa said. “It got stronger as I came south, and it was stronger near Tevalon than in Cait Forest.”
Terazin said, “There is a belief, shared by our people, that this geographic anomaly is caused by certain relics, long hidden and buried for their destructive potential, that enhance abilities such as yours. The Global Company believes that one exists under the Library, and they intend to excavate. The device, if it exists, is called m’khaupfwyn.”
Farisa, recognizing similarities to Lyrian, said, “Lion’s scale?”
“Lions don’t have scales,” Saloma said.
“Well then, that’s no m’khaupfwyn,” said Farisa.
Terazin said, “Our translation would be ‘elder weapon.’ We believe there are eight of them. Seven are in the South, and one exists in your North, which is the one the Global Company means to possess.”
Farisa, as a child, had read stories about these elder weapons—artifacts used to level cities, reshape continents, and summon creatures from other worlds—but had found the tales so ridiculous that, even so young, she rejected the tales as anything more than myths. “Do you really think Elder Weapons exist?”
“We do not know.” Terazin lowered his eyes. “It does not matter, because the Global Company does.”
Claes said, “The Vehu will never allow excavation. The Library has been theirs for three thousand years.”
Terazin said, “The Company knows this. Their war machines are moving north now for a summer assault.”
Mazie looked over her shoulder, then back at the others. “We must go back and defend Tevalon.”
Saloma said, “You must, I agree. This is one of the things we brought you here to discuss.”
Terazin added, “If Elder Weapons exist, we cannot permit this Global Company to find one.”
Claes looked down. “Tevalon’s Old City might withstand the initial assault, but even if it does, the Company will lay siege, so we need some way—
“To make Tevalon’s cause the world’s,” said Mazie.
Saloma said, “We are delighted you have reached our same conclusion. We need you to return to your world. We will not send you back empty-handed. You will have six of our finest battle mages to assist you.”
Farisa looked at Claes but could not read his expression.
Terazin added, “What you may find difficult to hear is that we do not intend for all of you to go.”
Saloma said, “You have great power, Farisa, but you come from a world in which proper training is impossible to find. People born with your talents often meet terrible ends, because your world does not understand the rules that govern them.”
Although Farisa had come in repudiation of a previous world, she hated the idea of splitting from people she’d imagined would be part of her life forever. “You have magic, though. Why do you need me?”
Saloma said, “This word ‘magic’ is one you apply to numerous separate powers. What you have, we call Zrflaya.”
“Flare,” Farisa said.
“It is swift and potent, as changeable as wind or fire, but prone to cause fatal exhaustion when abused. The magic powering our world, our economy, is of a more stable, long-lasting kind—enchantments, glamors, infusions—that we call Urmanya.”
“Mana.”
Saloma nodded. “Mana can be learned and taught, although the discipline tends to require hundreds of years. Flare, on the other hand, seems to be an inborn talent, and is just as rare among us as it is for you.”
Terazin added, “We believe that if we combine our world’s knowledge with yours, we can assemble the means to defeat—and possibly destroy—the Global Company. This may require years of research and collaboration, but the people of Tevalon need our help now, and in the off chance that this ‘Elder Weapon’ truly exists, it is imperative that the Company be stopped.”
Saloma said, “Our airship, the Mode VI, docks south of here in seven days. It will take you to Oran-Yi, where a kasa connects to the ruins of Thur-Vybbik.”
Terapic. Farisa remembered the squat sandstone building; Garet had said that no one had seen its door open for thousands of years—perhaps it only opened from inside.
Terazin said, “Claes and Mazie, you will go north. We shall give you various protective relics and, as promised, six of our best mages, who will serve as your bodyguards. You will have sixty pounds of silver for travel fare.”
Farisa looked at Andor, Saito, and Eric. “What about them?”
“They shall go to Oran-Yi, the center of our research, but you will stay here.”
“Your talents have impressed us,” Saloma added. “It is not every century that a curse like the one on Qaelet is broken. If an ‘Elder Weapon’ is found to exist in Tevalon, then we will consider the theory of their existence confirmed, and must secure the seven others to our south that exist in far more perilous places. To find, retrieve, and safeguard them will require someone of exceptional ability, character, and skill.”
Terazin said, “Your northern world festers with the pestilence of the Global Company, but there are dangers and malevolent forces of similar magnitude to our south. There are hostile powers that outmatch your skill as it is now. You will require our training and, indeed, I have sent for several of Oran-Yi’s best zrflarim, but we cannot afford to waste a day. Right now, the man best equipped to commence your education is me.”
Farisa leaned back in her chair. She wanted to refuse. They had not marched all this way to take orders, but in the rising thrum of her heart, she could hear the beating of war drums, a rhythmic sound to swell a world into painful but necessary action, and she realized the best option for everyone would be to accept their offer—to give the world more than its seven months to live.
She nodded, giving consent—hers, and the group’s—to the plan.
“We will teach you how to do things you thought were impossible,” Saloma added.
#
The night before the Mode VI arrived, the six of them traveled south to a “resting house,” as Macski called their hotels. No concept of rent or a room rate existed here—if one needed to sleep somewhere, one did. The travelers did have to double up in rooms, as a holiday left only three rooms available in the thatched-roof building. Tomorrow, all but one of them would depart for Oran-Yi to the east and two would continue on, by kasa, to the north.
By midnight, Farisa had given up all hope of getting to sleep. Instead, she sat in a rattan chair that hung from the ceiling, reading Macskir poetry. Moonlight brightened Mazie’s face while she slept; her locks cast shadows on her forehead.
I’m going to miss you so much, Mazie Naveed.
Mazie’s brown eyes opened. “Can’t sleep?”
“No,” Farisa admitted as she closed her book. “Hardly the best part of a reader right now either.”
Mazie sat up, and Farisa considered asking her to go on a last walk together under the bright moon. She imagined that their hands might touch, and that perhaps their arms and shoulders would rub together, and that this could bring one of Mazie’s memories back into reality so that Farisa could tell herself it hadn’t all been a fluke, but... no, Farisa, don’t be selfish. This southern world needs you; the northern one needs her, the Leopard of Tevalon. God will reunite us, if...
No one was sleeping; that had become collectively obvious. So they gathered in the lodge’s common room, where a fireplace roared. Farisa mentioned in passing that she still had the deck of cards they had used to play ehrgeiz (or, as the game had been poorly named, ambition) in Obbela.
“I’ll play,” Saito said.
Eric said, “I’ll join.”
“I should pass,” Claes said. “I’m either too good or too bad at card games. Either way, I’ll break the table.”
Since the game required four players and they had five, Farisa and Mazie formed a team, switching places each round, as they had before. Cards were dealt, chips collected, and points scored. The jokes they shared over the course of the game made no sense except to those six, as if a new language had been invented on their journey.
Andor, turning out to be the best player, struck an early lead.
“You said you barely knew this game,” Mazie said.
“I’ve played games like it.” Andor paused. “What, do you think they let us do real work at Salinay?”
“Ah, work,” Claes said as he looked out the window. “I realized something just now.”
Farisa said, “What?”
“We never did discuss what we did for work in the world we left.”
Saito said, “Why would we have?”
“I’ve probably mentioned that I studied to be an engineer,” Claes said. “Alas, I never did any engineering.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Farisa said.
“Still, I would have liked to have built something—a bridge or a dam, even a house.”
Mazie raised her handless stump. “I was a thief.”
“More,” Farisa said. “You were, and are, so much more.”
“It’s your turn,” Eric said.
“You all know my history,” Farisa said. “I was a teacher. Soon, I shall be a student.”
“I mean, it’s your turn to play.”
“Oh, right.” She played the king of onions under Eric’s two.
Andor said, “Wasn’t Garet—?”
“A police chief, if you can believe that.” Farisa shook her head. “One of us, on the force.”
“That must be why they fired him,” Claes said. “He cared more about human life than property, and the Globbos, as we know, feel exactly the opposite way.”
Farisa looked around. “What was Runar? What was his trade?”
Andor scratched his chin. Eric counted the chips in front of him. Claes looked at Saito, who shrugged.
Mazie said, “He was a carpenter.”
Farisa leaned forward. “Really? How do you know?”
“He told me.”
“He never said anything about it.”
“No one else asked.” Mazie played the seven of coins. “He took a lot of pride in his work, though. He did a lot of work for the local library in Rushton. He said he’d show me if we ever—” Mazie sniffled.
Andor said, “I wish I had gotten to know him better.”
They paused. Eric swapped five white chips for a red one from the center, then looked at his cards.
“I am so glad to have come all this way with you,” said Andor.
Mazie said, “I feel the same.”
“If we ever get back to the old world—and somehow find our rightful places in it—all of you must visit me in Salinay.”
Eric looked out the window and spotted, on the eastern horizon, the first blade of light.
Claes noticed it, too. “We should get to the airship.”
They walked under a chilly sky, black turning blue. Their possessions, once mingled in their husker wagons, sat in separate packs, which they carried until they were in the dirgible’s shadow and young Mascki—at least, they were shorter than human adults—insisted on relieving them of the weight.
Mazie tapped Farisa’s elbow. “Before we part, I want to say something.”
“What’s that?”
Concern rounded her half-raised eyebrows. “You need to forgive your father.”
“He makes millions selling smut for the—”
“He works against them. You know that. You told me it was his message that got us in here.”
“That was an accident of fate.”
“I doubt it. A man like him would never work in the Company’s interests, not even for a billion grot per year.”
Farisa put her hands on her hips. “You’ve never met him. How could you possibly know that?”
“We’ve both read his message. His fury is a kind that a poet knows on sight.”
She looked aside. Mazie was rubbing the stump of her lost arm in a way that made Farisa uncomfortable.
“Besides, he is old.”
“He’s not that old,” Farisa said. “He’s not even fifty.”
“Beyond half his age, it is common for the false to remain false, and the true, true.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I feel the press of years myself.”
“You’re twenty-six, Maze.”
“It’s been a long twenty-six.”
“That, I might give you.” Farisa paused. “I’m not angry with him, and I am thankful that he is trying to bring the world to Tevalon’s aid. My issue is...”
“What?”
She let the silence move through her before she spoke again. “I can’t picture him. I have no idea what he looks like, or how he moves about the world, whether he’s remarried and has more children. I try, and I draw a blank. But I’m glad he’s alive.”
They had reached the loading dock. The Macski, unusually busy for their kind but efficient, rolled barrels of produce into the airship’s hold. The Mode VI’s circumequatorial transit time was fifty-four days—two months of freight for an entire civilization, this equatorial mountain archipelago split by impassible hot deserts, had to fit inside.
Mazie and Farisa hugged. Farisa’s arms, toned by the work of travel, tightened around Mazie; she did not want to let go. The smell of Mazie’s neck still quickened her in a way it felt slightly indecent to experience in front of others. Unguarded, due to lack of sleep, she said what she had promised herself she would not.
“I love you so much, Mazie.”
“I love you, Farisa.”
Mazie meant it, Farisa knew. There was love, genuine love, of a kind even rarer than the sort attendant to (and conditional on) sexual attraction. Still, Farisa wondered: Could she not have both? She had felt something raw and rare every time they had coupled, from the first tryst on the red arch to the last time, just two days before Lethe Tell. Would she ever feel it again? She had doubts; she had lived for twenty-one years, and that was long enough to know that women like Mazie Naveed were rare.
“I shall sing your praises wherever I go, Farisa La’ewind. We will meet again.”
Farisa smiled. “Tevalon is beautiful in the summer. And autumn. And winter.”
Mazie’s hand lingered on Farisa’s elbow. Farisa wanted to burn a picture of her perfect brown eyes into her mind to the exclusion of all else.
Still, they did need to part. The woman in the tan leather jacket, black locks bouncing as she walked, looked back as she boarded the airship. Saito remarked on Lupinia’s charms and said he might want to move his family there so they could reunite. Eric promised he would win the next time they played ehrgeiz. Andor, eager to learn the technologies of Oran-Yi, said to Farisa, “We will never be far away. Whatever surrounds us, surrounds all of us.”
Claes was last to get on the Mode VI. “As you know, I am lousy at goodbyes.”
Farisa pointed northwest in the direction of Cait Forest. “By reputation, I am worse."
Claes chuckled. “Too soon for that joke.”
“If no one makes the joke, it stays ‘too soon’ forever.”
He scratched the underside of his eyebrow. “I will work to clear your name.”
“Worry about my name once we’ve won. Keep yourself safe, and defend Tevalon.” She opened her arms. “Come here, you big, goofy man.” She threw her arms around him. She started crying. “See what you did, old bastard?”
“This is not the end, Farisa. You will meet m—the rest of my—family. I am sure of that.”
The airship’s conductor, the only Mascka to wear even the marks of late middle age, issued the last call for boarding.
Claes, after stepping on the ship’s deck, its surface in slight lateral motion as wind pulled the balloon adrift, looked back with a sad smile that softened as he realized that, at least, he truly was going home. The dirigible undocked, lifted into the sky, and sailed into the pink haze of a rising sun. From the young mage’s vantage point, it shrunk to the size of an eagle’s silhouette, then a swallow’s, then a lady bug’s, and then it passed over the horizon, leaving Farisa here alone.
Ouragan’s furry side brushed Farisa’s leg.
Not alone.