Cedar chirped to Leather, trying to get the hippogriff’s attention. The creature flicked a soft ear towards the griffin, about the most acknowledgement he ever gave.
Cedar still chirped happily. Insufferable.
And then Athera walked into a tree.
She cursed under her breath, accidentally yanking on Cedar’s reigns as she steadied herself. The griffin growled his annoyance at her.
Tarquin started to laugh. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you’d never stepped foot in the forest. It’s a wonder you don’t show up to town covered in bruises.”
“Oh please, you’re much more apt to be injured than me working in that forge all day.”
He opened his mouth to respond and then seemed to think better of it.
They had been traveling for a couple of days, restocking in the small villages alongside the river. To Athera’s immense relief, they had managed to get enough jerky to stuff Leather’s saddle bag, and both him and Cedar had been fed plenty of raw meat the night prior. They had restocked their human food too, something that Tarquin had been very eager to do.
“We might manage to close in on them tonight,” Tarquin said as the road gave way to tight stone pavers. “We could be back home by the end of the week.”
“Do you really think we’re going the right direction?”
“The last 4 villages we went through thought so. It’s hard to miss a pirate airship flying over your village. They’ll need to go to a bigger city to offload their goods.”
Athera groaned, unwilling to vocally agree with him. Instead, she reached into her pack and pulled out her mask. She stared down at it for a heartbeat before securing it over her mouth and nose. It didn’t quite cover the faint scaring that went across her eye, but at least it covered most of it.
“Do you think you’ll need that?” Tarquin asked. “No one in the village really notices.”
“We’re not going to a village. We’re headed to one of the largest cities in Ignis.”
“I doubt anyone would even notice. The lady we bought the jerky from didn’t”
Athera was already shaking her head before he had finished speaking. “She was practically blind. Skystead is a huge city, I’d rather avoid the stares.”
Leather made an odd snorting sound as Tarquin shifted his grip on the reins.
They fell into silence after that and Athera watched as the spires of Skystead started to peek out from between the trees. They towered over the landscape, angling into the skyline where their aged copper plating was barely distinguishable from the softer blue tones of the sky itself.
“Seems ridiculous to live in a place like this,” Tarquin mumbled. His gaze was focused not on the spires, but on the lower levels of the city. The wider, soot stained bits.
“Don’t let them hear you saying that.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he snorted. “They’d all be so busy trying to prove that they’re better than me I doubt they’d listen.”
Athera almost stopped walking. “You know, I grew up in a city like this.”
“Yeah, Apolia, and then you left.” His tone was far more dismissive than she was used to hearing. She debated pressing him and then stopped. The road was widening and with it came other travelers. No point in drawing attention.
Instead she let her thoughts wander as the gates to Skystead came into view. A couple of guards were posted next to them, talking to the people going through before letting them into the city. How would a gang of pirates have been able to get through?
Bribery. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember what the gates of her own city had looked like. Definitely smaller, but hadn’t her parents complained about the guards letting too many people through?
Athera smiled to herself, for a moment caught up in the memories of her mum bent over her desk and carefully measuring out the fresh powder she had just crushed. It was from those early experiments that Athera had gotten the idea to use sulfur to ignite her rod.
Nestor had been so small back then. She smiled, imagining her brother with that unruly mop of hair he had had when they were little. Had that changed?
“He couldn’t say my name,” Athera remembered.
“What?” Tarquin asked, turning away from the couple in the colorful carriage.
“Nestor. He couldn’t say my name when he was little. He’d call me Thea.”
Tarquin pursed his lips and glanced back at the bright carriage they were traveling behind. “Kids are special,” he said at last.
“I know you’re nervous about this, but just wait until you meet him. He’s the sweetest kid.”
“He’s not a kid anymore, Athera,” Tarquin said quietly, keeping his eyes fixed on the road. She tripped on a loose paver and decided it was probably a good idea to do the same. Tarquin grabbed her shoulder to steady her.
“I just don’t want you to be hurt by this.” He said it so quietly for a moment Athera wasn’t sure if she had heard him, but the look he shot her, with his eyes full of pity, was all the confirmation she needed.
“I have to try, Tarquin,” Athera said, matching his tone. “He’s my brother.”
“Aye, I understand.” He tried to smile, but only one corner of his mouth seemed to cooperate. “Besides, we still need to get Tallis.”
A sharp pang of guilt went through Athera’s stomach at that. Tallis. Would the pirates have any idea how to care for a pregnant griffin? What if she had kitted already?
“Not to mention the cat--”
Athera whipped around, quickly drawing two fingers across her mouth before realizing with a touch of embarrassment that she had used one of the signals she used on the griffins. Luckily, Tarquin seemed to get the message.
“There’s going to be a lot of alchemists in a city like this,” Athera said quietly. “If it’s half as powerful as Catheryn said, we don’t want to draw too much attention to it or ourselves.”
Tarquin’s expression darkened and he looked to the carriage in front of them.
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“I hope you remember all that fancy high society training,” he muttered. “Because I’m going to be useless.”
“I was ten, I doubt I’m going to be much use either,” Athera hissed back as they neared the gates. Still, She reached for their documentation in her pack and adjusted her mask. How had her father done this when they were visiting family?
“Purpose?” The guard asked in a dry voice. He towered over Tarquin, something that was not helped by the giant top hat he wore, one that put Tarquin’s to shame. Luckily, Athera had convinced him not to bring it.
“Hol--holiday,” Athera managed.
The guard raised an eyebrow. “And your mounts?” Cedar helpfully picked that moment to tug at his reigns.
“Our transport. We were planning on boarding them in the menagerie inside the walls.” Athera’s voice began to come easier and she squared her shoulders, trying to appear confident.
The guard nodded and held his hand out for the papers which she quickly handed him. He nodded and then motioned them through the city gates.
“That actually went well,” Athera muttered excitedly to Tarquin.
He snorted. “He hardly gave you the time of day.”
“Exactly. And we’re in.”
Hours later the midafternoon sun bore down on them as Tarquin and Athera wandered the city. They had found a menagerie for Cedar and Leather quickly, but after that, they had been at a loss.
“They’re not going to be here,” Tarquin said as they crossed onto one of the ramps to the neighboring skyway. “Let’s go back to the lower levels, I bet they’re staying there.”
Skystead had the unfortunate architectural feature of being a bit shaped like an hourglass. The city's elite lived at the top, in a maze of sprawling glass and copper walkways known as skyways. Each level was a sort of hollowed disk so that someone at the top could look all the way down to the center and the entirety of the city was able to get sunlight. The reverse was true for the lower levels of the city. Almost everything was soot stained and dingy, but very stable. Past the center, every descending level became wider, flaring out further than the highest levels and eternally circling the great steel support beams.
Tarquin hated it.
“We already checked the shops at the lower levels and they wouldn’t tell us anything, people won’t be as guarded up here,” Athera reasoned, gazing at a shop with a domed stained glass ceiling. “Let’s ask one more shopkeeper, then we can go back down.”
Tarquin nodded reluctantly and followed her to the shop. An automaton shop, she realized, gazing in at the store front window where a large bronze panther sat with glittering onyx eyes. It would be an ideal place to pawn off scrap metal or any precious gems that a pirate might have swiped.
Inside a mosaic of brightly colored light lit up the tile floor, courtesy of the giant glass panes that made up most of the ceiling. Rows of shelves lined the walls, stocked full of automatons, some moving, some cold and still like the metal they were created from. Athera glanced over at Tarquin and had to repress a smile when she found him staring with his head tilted at a humming bird that hovered just in front of his face.
He reached out to touch it and it darted back, the bronze wings just a blur to Athera’s eye.
“You like it?” A girl from behind the counter asked. She seemed a bit young to be running a shop, but then, Tarquin had been young when he had taken over the forge from his father, just a year after Athera had come to the village. Maybe it was normal for artisans.
“It’s impressive,” Tarquin admitted. “What fuels it?”
“That one?” The girl asked, looking approvingly at the creation. “She’s built to run off lamp oil for the most part. Needs a high energy fuel source to make up for the lack of space to store it.”
“Not unlike the real thing,” Tarquin said.
“Yep. So what will it be? Looking for anything specific, or just browsing?”
“Actually, I was hoping to ask about the city,” Athera said as Tarquin shot a curious look at the bronze panther from earlier. It had wandered out of the window display and was now staring at a pair of older gentlemen. Neither seemed overly concerned and one reached down to pat its head.
“New here?” the girl asked cheerfully. “What do you want to know?’
Athera hesitated, trying to figure out how to phrase what she was asking. “Have you had any strange customers lately? People trying to pawn off goods?”
The girl’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t a pawn shop,” she said, her tone lowering.
“No, of course not.” Athera looked to Tarquin for help, but he looked as clueless as she felt.
“What about people in the city?” he tried after meeting Athera’s gaze. “With winter coming there has to be a lot of people coming in.”
“Yeah,” the girl shrugged. “Lot’s of traders are coming in. Probably more staying in the lower levels.”
“What about the real seasonal types?” Tarquin tried again. “People that need to keep a low profile.”
The girl tilted her head in consideration. “Most people I know that stay here seasonally are the sea traders. It’s too dangerous to be out on the open water in this kind of weather.”
“What about pirates?”
She went half a shade paler before grabbing one of her tools and starting to tinker with an assortment of tiny gears in front of her. “I’m afraid I don’t keep up with those types. I’d hope the guards wouldn’t let them past the gates.”
Tarquin opened his mouth, but the shopkeeper cut him off. “Would you like to buy anything?”
Tarquin was so taken aback, he stood there frozen, mouth still open. “The hummingbird,” he said suddenly. “How much is that?”
“About 30 shillings,” she replied brightly.
Tarquin fished the amount out of his satchel while the shopkeeper caught the hummingbird, swiftly tucking it into a small wooden box. She handed it to him with a smile and moments later Tarquin and Athera found themselves standing outside the shop.
“You were right,” Athera said, gazing down the skyway at the walkways and square below them.
“I was…what do you mean?” Tarquin asked. He was clutching his flimsy wooden box, reluctant to put it in his satchel.
“The upper levels are useless. We should have stayed closer to the ground.”
“I don’t know if I’d say that was useless,” Tarquin said. At last he tucked his box into his satchel.
“I appreciate you--” Athera started, but then she caught Tarquin’s grim smile.
“She knew something,” he said in a soft voice with a glance back at the shop. They started down the ramp to the square below us, our first of many in getting back down to the ground level.
Athera frowned, thinking back on the girl. “The pawn thing? I think I actually offended her.”
“Or she’s a fence,” Tarquin said. “Either way, by the way she reacted to me mentioning pirates, she knew something.”
Athera frowned, unsure if the girl was in on it like Tarquin suggested, or just afraid of pirates. Had pirates been a concern when she was a kid? Try as she might, she couldn’t remember either of her parents mentioning them. The first time she could really remember pirates being an issue had been several years after she had moved to the village and even then it had just been whispers of activity in the surrounding countryside. Never something that they had had to worry about personally.
“So what do we do?” Athera asked as they descended a flight of stairs. She glanced up at the plants hanging over the edge of the skyway. Even just three levels down the light felt filtered--as though she were standing at the base of the forest floor.
“I wish I knew,” Tarquin sighed. Now that they were in the city center and not a balloon was in sight, Tarquin was relaxing. He pointed them towards one of the smaller stairwells, avoiding the main one that people used to ascend the city.
“We can try watching the shop,” Athera said, trying to map out some semblance of a plan in her mind. They had identified several fences on the lower levels already. Should they watch them too? Athera hadn’t wanted to give too much away and was sure that they would be watching her just as much as she was watching them, but maybe it would be worth it?
“Probably our best bet,” Tarquin agreed. “I just don’t know how we’re going to manage it without being found out.”
They continued musing on their way back to the ground level of the city. By the time they made it back to the menagerie they had gone through becoming avid patrons of the café across the walkway from the shop, touring the area around the square, and finally, paying a child to become very interested in the automatons themselves. Athera had thought the last one to be the most promising, but Tarquin was concerned that any kid willing to do it would also have a big mouth or could easily be bought out from under them.
Cedar clicked his beak excitedly when Athera walked in. One of the stable hands shot him an exasperated look that she couldn’t help but smile at. Approaching the griffin, she stroked him over the stable door, letting her fingers sink into the glossy feathers. Tarquin hesitantly approached Leather, who was in the stall next to Cedars, but the hippogriff just cocked his head before returning to his bucket of straw.
“Right then,” Tarquin muttered.
“I don’t think it’s you,” Athera said softly, staring at the strange creature.
Cedar helpfully thrust his head into Tarquin’s hand and he absently rubbed his beak.
“I’d guess we’d better call it a night,” Tarquin said with another glance at Leather.
Athera yawned and nodded. It had been a long day, but even as they made it to their inn room, she couldn’t resist looking out the window. Was Nestor really out there somewhere? And where were they supposed to find him?