Adrin

A wave of relief washed over Adrin when Naomi burst in through the door and rushed in.

“The seal’s going to break in Bulrisa! Esar just dreamed it—he told me to tell you!”

Adrin’s heart sank. Why now, why was a seal breaking now when everything else was going wrong?

“Did he tell you anything else? How long do we have?” Zafrys asked.

“He said it was—hard to say.” There was a breathlessness to the way she spoke, even in the dream. “A couple of days. Two, maybe three at most.”

“Then we should go. Thank you, Naomi. Tell Esar—thank you.”

This couldn’t wait until morning. Adrin knew he had to wake up immediately, alert the Ethereal Guard, and be on their way. The linecar could carry them as far as Gradalla, but they’d have to cover the rest of the distance on foot. If they pushed hard they could get to Bulrisa on time, but if they only had two days before the seal broke, they’d be cutting it very, very close. Yet Adrin hesitated.

Naomi looked down at the floor. “I wanted to go with you, but Esar says I need to stay with him. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. The Guard knows what they’re doing and I . . . well, I’m as ready as I’m going to be.”

“You’re . . .” Naomi glanced over at Zafrys, then back to Adrin. Her eyes weren’t so strange when you got used to them. “Yeah. You’re going to be just fine. Good luck.”

“You too,” Adrin said, managing a wan smile. “Take care.”

Wake up . . . now.

Adrin sat up in his bed in the palace, fully awake, with no lingering drowsiness to drag him down. He pushed the blanket aside and climbed out of bed. His body moved automatically to get dressed while his mind swam with everything Naomi had told him that night, but he had to put her, and Nalla-Bidharac, out of his mind. At last he hooked the scabbard with Isuld’s sword to his belt and left his chambers.

Only two days to reach Bulrisa before the dralk broke free. They were lucky to have any warning at all. The incident had severed all the connections between Thaliron and the watchstations, and it could have been days or weeks before they found out if a construct had broken its bonds. Fortunately, they had a direct line to the Tresuan.

How was he going to explain that to the others? What if they didn’t believe him?

Adrin met Zafrys in the hallway, speaking to an attendant about dispatching messengers to retrieve the members of the guard who lived outside the palace.

“And we’ll need to call back Meliand,” Zafrys finished. “All right, let’s go, Adrin.”

“Isn’t Sangar an archer, too?” Adrin strode towards the Ethereal Guard’s quarters alongside the queen mother.

“Technically, yes, but he’s not half the archer she is, and dralks are tough to shoot down.”

Adrin nodded. He still didn’t like the idea of pulling Meliand away from maternity leave to rush out and fight a construct, but the construct sealed in Bulrisa was one of the winged serpents called dralks, and they’d likely need to bring it down from the air.

“I think it’s better if you explain, rather than me. They’re more likely to trust you.” Adrin activated the lights when they reached the Guard’s practice chamber. The only time he’d found the room this quiet was during Farn and Tsachrian’s early morning practice sessions.

“Well, they have to trust you. They don’t have a choice. You’re the only one who can seal the construct.”

Right. There was that. Adrin rested his hand on the hilt of Isuld’s sword—no, his sword. He breathed in deeply, feeling the currents that moved around him and through him, the way that Farn was teaching him to do—not as individual streams, but as a whole, the way one sees a picture instead of the strokes of paint. He might never achieve the deep quiet, but he could bring his troubled mind under control and make his decisions from a state of peace instead of panic.

He felt them approaching, making ripples in the currents. Suzari arrived first, along with Dacrine. Then came Edardes, Farn, Reidas and Sangar; only Meliand had yet to arrive.

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“Better have a damn good reason for dragging all of us out of bed,” Reidas grumbled.

“Same reason as usual, isn’t it? Thought you’d have figured that out by now. How many years have you been doing this, old man?” Sangar buzzed around his uncle, who tried to wave him away as if he were a fly.

“Fourteen,” Reidas said. “You won’t be so anxious to run out and fight once you’ve seen as many battles as I have.”

“Doubt that. This is going to be awesome. I can feel it. I mean, now we’ve got a real Prince Ethereal with us, too. He may not be as strong as Raen was, or as fast, or as amazing in every way . . . but he’s smart! Right?”

“I don’t know how much more of that sort of flattery I can take,” Adrin muttered.

“What I want to know is how you know that a seal is breaking.” Suzari stepped between Sangar and Adrin. She wasn’t a large woman—Adrin was head and shoulders taller than she was—but she could be more intimidating in her way than Reidas.

Here we go. “It has to do with the Ocean, and my dreams, so if I can’t get the words out, you’ll know why. There are some things that I—that we—can’t say.” Adrin looked to the door to see if Meliand had arrived yet.

“I can confirm that what he says is true. I’ve met our informant in the dreamspace as well.”

“Informant?” Suzari cocked an eyebrow.

“There is a person,” Adrin said slowly, expecting the words to get stuck in his throat. He found that he could speak if he was careful and deliberate about it. “She’s with the Tresuan, Esar Semfrey. I—we—got the information from her. He had a dream, and he said that in about two or three days, the dralk in Bulrisa would break its seal.”

Suzari scowled. “So we’re running out to Bulrisa in the middle of the night on secondhand information from the broken Tresuan?”

“Yes,” Adrin replied.

“Raen trusted him,” Suzari’s wife reminded her softly.

“All this is true, Zafrys?” Edardas asked.

“It’s all true. Our source is trustworthy, and I heard everything that Adrin did.”

Meliand came in as the former queen was speaking. She stretched like she’d just rolled out of bed, though she must have walked some distance to the palace from her home in the city.

“Thanks for calling me up, highness,” she greeted Adrin in her muddy accent.

“Aren’t you the cheery one?” Suzari drawled.

Meliand grinned. “I’ve been a milk-and-diaper machine for the last three months. I’m more than ready for a change of pace.”

“Well, you’re lucky the Prince Ethereal came to break you out of your self-inflicted hell,” Suzari said. “We’re going to be running from Gradalla to Bulrisa. You think you’re up for that, Ed?”

The captain of the Ethereal Guard shook his head. “I don’t think it’s wise. I would become a liability. But my armor may fit the Prince Ethereal, if you can sync it to him, Dacrine?”

Adrin hadn’t expected such an offer—had figured he’d need some sort of standard-issue armor, since his own only existed in the form of a few drafted sketches. “That’s—thank you, sir.”

Professor Wyess looked from Captain Halwer to Adrin and back, squinting. “I’ll see what I can do in the time we’ve got. Come on, Adrin.”

Adrin followed her to the workshop. The armor would probably fit; Adrin was of a similar height to the captain, and not that much skinnier. Edardes Halwer had a lean, sinewy build, unlike Reidas, who looked like he could stop a linecar with his bare hands. Edardes had to be getting close to sixty years old, though—not yet old enough to be struck by the Blight, but old enough that the run would have been rough on him, even if he didn’t have to make it on an artificial leg.

Dacrine helped Adrin to don the armor and adjust the fit where possible. It wasn’t as comfortable as a suit truly designed for him would have been, but it wasn’t terrible, either. Once he initialized the channels, the weight seemed to lift from his limbs.

Adrin thanked Dacrine and left the workshop. The other guardians were either dressed for battle or completing their preparations, and Suzari was speaking with Zafrys and Captain Halwer.

“Your source is only as trustworthy as the information she’s getting from Esar Semfrey, and putting lives on the line because of something he says he foresaw just doesn’t sit well with me.”

“I understand your concern, but if he is mistaken, we lose only our time and energy. If we don’t take his warning seriously, the consequences could be far more dire,” said Edardes.

Adrin would have liked to hear more of their conversation, but Meliand approached him and spoke.

“So Esar foresaw this, but he’s still down in Norana, isn’t he? How’d you get a line all the way to him?”

“In a dream,” Adrin replied.

Meliand nodded. “Ah. Interesting. I’ve been missing out on all the fun, haven’t I?”

“You’re welcome to it. I’ve had more fun than I can handle.”

“How is Esar doing, anyway? I haven’t seen him since his brother’s funeral. He was taking it pretty hard.”

How was Adrin supposed to answer that? “I haven’t actually seen him, but I think he’s . . . enduring.”

Meliand laughed. “Sounds about right.”

“You know Esar Semfrey?” Adrin asked.

“Oh yeah, I’ve known him half my life. And I’d trust him with my life. Whatever went wrong in Bhadrat, it wasn’t his fault. I’m sure of that.”

A chill traveled down Adrin’s spine, though he tried to ignore it. This was a very different situation than the Bhadrat mission. The Ethereal Guard was heading out to fight a single construct, not mounting an expedition into a territory crawling with those monsters.

But now more than ever Adrin wondered what it was that Esar saw to inspire that doomed mission . . . and why the records of those visions had disappeared.