The Floating Islands

by Rachel Neumeier

  Araenè and Cesei looked at each other. Araenè thought the little boy was even more frightened than she was. She sat down in Tichorei’s old place and patted the floor by her side. Cesei came to sit next to her. He leaned against her shoulder like the child he was, too tired and scared and hurt to remember his eight-year-old pride.

  Araenè stroked his bright hair. She missed her mother, suddenly and intensely: she wished her mother was here. Not just for her, but for Cesei. He didn’t remember his, she recalled. That would be even worse than missing a mother who had died.… She put an arm around the little boy. “Does it still hurt?”

  “I’m trying not to think about it,” Cesei muttered. There was a long silence.

  Then Cesei leaned suddenly forward, staring at the spheres. “Oh,” he said in a surprised tone, closed his eyes, and was instantly gone after whoever had overextended. Araenè pulled back and watched him, terrified that she would miss the moment Cesei himself overextended and lose the boy—but if she panicked and broke Cesei’s extension too early, they might lose whomever he’d gone after.… Then the little boy gasped twice like a drowning swimmer coming back into the air and opened his eyes. “That hurt,” he said accusingly, glowering at the unconscious Tichorei.

  “I’m sorry,” Araenè said humbly. She was older than Cesei; she knew she should be doing the hard part. But she could only sit and watch the boys do the dangerous work.

  It was going to be a very long day. And a very long night. And at the end … what chance did they really have, Araenè wondered, of throwing back the Tolounnese? Everyone knew the Tolounnese never gave up.

  For the first time since everything had started, Araenè remembered her cousin. Trei was Tolounnese, too. Half. He didn’t give up, either. Maybe … maybe he would actually get her dragon’s egg all the way to … to wherever he’d said the Tolounnese had their terrible engines. Maybe …

  11

  A dozen times that night, Trei concluded that he must have made a mistake in navigation—that he’d lost sight of the right stars or calculated an angle wrong, and so they’d gone wildly far from their path. Then Kojran, best of them all at keeping track of passing time, would sing out the count and Trei would take careful note of the stars and decide they were probably still on course after all.

  The air was good, though: the wind wanted to come from the north, but up in the heights it could more easily be coaxed around to come from the west and south. Genrai was good at pulling the wind around behind them. So was Kojran, and the two of them worked the wind for everyone. They could soar most of the time: easy flying.

  The sun came up right where it should, ten points behind Trei’s right wingtip. They were flying high, where the air was lightest and the winds easiest to turn. From this height they could see a long way. But all around them stretched out the wide and empty sea. There was no sign of the waystation.

  Trei adjusted their course a feather’s width more northerly, and they flew on. And on, over the unchanging sea. His shoulders and back ached; his elbows felt strained out of shape from the unrelieved flight. His wings had grown so familiar that he thought he could feel the separate angle of every individual feather. The great white-winged albatrosses could stay aloft for days—for weeks, Trei had heard. But the albatross feathers woven into the kajurai wings didn’t seem to be providing quite as much endurance as Trei might have hoped.

  A bell past dawn. Half another bell. Trei knew they’d missed the first waystation. If they’d passed the waystation, probably they’d been too far to the west. If they struck back a little more easterly, maybe they could still find it. If they kept their course, they’d never make the second waystation, not if they’d missed the first. Not the younger boys, at least. Trei wasn’t sure whether he could fly that far without rest or not. Maybe it was time to think about handing the egg off to Genrai.…

  Then Tokabii whooped, spun out of formation into a tumbling somersault, spilled air from his wings, and dropped into a steep dive. Trei back-winged in astonishment, but then Kojran shouted, too, and followed Tokabii. After that Trei, too, spotted the elliptical dimple in the wind where the bulk of a floating island disturbed the air—little more than a large pebble, but enough to create telltale spiraling ripples where the moving air spilled into its lee.

  “It’s the right waystation, right enough,” Genrai assured Trei wearily once they were safely down. “A pond, a single tree; look, here’s the mark.” He nodded toward the jagged sign carved into the high lintel of the pavilion’s doorway.

  Trei, still adjusting to the idea that his course had been good after all, couldn’t think of anything to say. He couldn’t stop shaking, although the morning was already warm. Genrai had had to work his own wings off and then strip Trei’s off as well; Trei couldn’t get his fingers to steady on the buckles. Kojran was almost as badly off, but Tokabii, stunningly resilient, had already dashed down to the pool to try his luck at fishing.

  “Kajuraihi stock every pool large enough to come through a hot summer,” Genrai said, amused at Trei’s expression. “Did you miss Berinai’s lecture about that? Can you make a fist? Can you open your hand all the way? I should have thought to bring salve. Kojran, can you go see if there’s any salve in the pavilion?”

  Kojran went without a word.

  “Tokabii doesn’t realize how near we came to missing the station,” Genrai commented. “But Kojran does. The kajurai he mentioned, Kerii? Kerii was a kajurai in a play. He dropped out of his formation, stayed behind on a floating pebble like this one. In the play, everyone thinks he’s a coward. But he makes a fragrant cedar fire that guides all the other kajuraihi to shelter when they’d otherwise have been lost in a blinding fog.”

  “Oh.”

  “The thing is … Kerii really was a coward. It was just the Gods’ grace that redeemed his cowardice.”

  “Ah.”

  “Tokabii would be my choice to wait here. But he won’t, you know. Kojran isn’t so proud.” Genrai waited for Trei to think this through, then added, “It’s farther on the way back than it is coming. We won’t have to coax the wind around: this time of year the low wind is out of the hard north all the way; that’ll help. But even so, we don’t dare miss this station.”

  “No, I see that.” Trei looked around. Bare red rock, thin soil trapped in the crevice where the single tree grew. The pool. The pavilion. Wood stacked inside the pavilion. “Cedar?”

  Genrai nodded. “There’ll be coal, too. Black smoke by day, a tall, fragrant fire by night. Enough for a couple days’ burning. It’s a famous play.”

  “Can Tokabii make it to Teraica and back?” Trei tried not to wonder whether he could. He tried even harder not to wonder whether he wanted to.

  “There’s one more waystation. And a scattering of random pebbles, so there’s less chance of dropping into the sea. But from the second station, it’ll be straight in, hit the engines, and straight out—nearly a hundred miles each way. Tokabii will have to wait at the second waystation—by the time we reach it, he’ll be ready to admit it.” Genrai gave Trei a long look.

  Trei met the older boy’s eyes. “You can make the whole round-trip.”

  “I think so.”

  Trei nodded. He opened and closed his hands, carefully. He could just about open his fingers all the way, but his hands were too stiff to make tight fists. His wrists hurt, too. And his elbows, and his shoulders, and all the way down his back … Genrai didn’t look nearly so stiff. Trei wished fervently that he was seventeen, with the strength to make little of a two-hundred-mile flight. He said reluctantly, “I suppose we’d better go on soon.”

  “Lie down,” ordered Genrai. “I don’t know what’s taking Kojran so long—I’ll see about the salve. You just rest. Sleep, if you can. I’ll wake you by fourth bell.” He gave Trei his own vest as a pillow and walked away.

  The second waystation was much easier to find; flying during the day was just easier in every possible way. Even the air seemed more buoyant. They found the waystation a li
ttle before dusk and spent a night that was almost comfortable. Even so, Genrai proved correct: even by dawn, Tokabii remained exhausted enough to be willing to wait at the waystation.

  “I hope you paid attention to your lessons,” Genrai told him sternly. “If you don’t see us by late this evening, certainly by tomorrow’s dawn, you’ll know you’d better take word back to the Islands. You have a clear idea of the way?”

  Tokabii tried to smile. “Straight south. That’s not complicated. But I’ll expect you. Today’s Gods’ Day. That’s good luck, anyway.” He carefully worked the Quei feathers out of his wings and offered them to Genrai and Trei. “You’ll need the luck.”

  Genrai hesitated—then gestured for Tokabii to give all six of the feathers to Trei. His manner was so uncompromising that Trei gave in without arguing and fixed three of Tokabii’s Quei feathers into each of his wings.

  “One more hard flight,” Genrai said then, laying out the wings for Trei. “You can manage it.”

  Trei nodded.

  “I don’t know how,” Tokabii muttered. “You’re not that much bigger than me.”

  Trei didn’t answer.

  But Genrai turned and put a hand on the younger boy’s shoulder. “ ’Kabii … Trei doesn’t expect to make the return flight. Just the flight in.”

  Tokabii took this in. He stared at Genrai for a long moment. Then his expression, from petulant, became almost frightened. He turned toward Trei.

  Trei found he was feeling a little ill. Having Genrai say it that way, just out like that, plainly … Trei knew there was almost no chance he would be able to fly down to the Tolounnese engines, throw in the dragon’s egg, and get away again. But to comfort Tokabii, he said quickly, “I’m Tolounnese—I can just slip away into Teraica and work my passage back to the Islands after things have … calmed down.”

  Tokabii looked relieved. Genrai said merely, “Of course you can.”

  “One last flight,” Trei said, and then wished he hadn’t. It sounded altogether too final.

  “Black smoke by day, fragrant fire by night,” Genrai reminded Tokabii. “Get a tall fire burning by dusk tonight, yes?”

  The younger boy nodded. He said, “You’ll come back,” confidently.

  Genrai shrugged and looked at Trei. “Ready?”

  “I wish we had two eggs,” Trei admitted. He rubbed the hard shell of the one they did have through the cloth of its sling. “I hope it’s all right.”

  “Your cousin didn’t say it needed special care? Then I’m sure it’s fine.” Genrai hesitated. “Trei—you’re sure you don’t want me to take it? You don’t even have to go the rest of the way if you, you know …”

  Trei shook his head. “I’m the one who understands engines. Those drawings weren’t very detailed. Are you sure you’d recognize the right place to throw in the egg?”

  “How hard can it be?”

  “I don’t know. But neither do you. We only have one egg. We both know that I have the best chance to use it.”

  Tokabii stared from one of them to the other. “Besides, you’re not Tolounnese!” he said to Genrai. “You couldn’t hide in Teraica!”

  “… right,” said Genrai. He looked at Trei for another moment. “Stay above me,” he said. “I’ll get the wind round for you, get you proper lift. All right?”

  Trei nodded.

  Genrai nodded back and said to Tokabii, “Help me with my wings, will you?”

  The way was, for the first time, more east than north. Trei was too tired, or maybe too emotionally numb, to pay much attention to their direction. He just rode the wind, trusting Genrai to hold it in the right quarter of the sky. They stayed low, letting the dense, warm air buoy them.

  The day was clear and fine, without a trace of cloud. The ordinary islands that guarded the harbor at Teraica became visible from a startling distance: a dark lumpiness on the horizon, with a haze of black smoke in the sky above the town.

  As they approached the harbor, Genrai rose suddenly, passed Trei, slid into a spiral, slowed as Trei came up beside him, and eased closer still, until their wingtips all but overlapped. He turned his head to call, “Engines?” with a jerk of his chin down toward the edge of the harbor.

  Trei didn’t answer. There, where the sand met the sea, stood the three great steam engines, just as Ceirfei had drawn them. Their scale was clear from the ships docked along the harbor, from the warehouses set back from the tides. Gangs of men, tiny at this distance, labored to pour wagonloads of coal down into each furnace. Billows of white steam mingled with the smoke, visible long before the engines themselves came into sight.

  Trei slid down the wind toward the engines. They were so much bigger than he’d expected—so much bigger than he’d ever imagined, and he found himself doubting whether it was after all possible to overheat so vast a boiler. When the wind changed suddenly, he found himself flying through choking black smoke—then hot white fog—he beat his wings hard and pulled against the air with dragon magic—it occurred to him that it was lucky the Tolounnese hadn’t saved some of the immense power of the furnaces to kill the air around and over Teraica, but maybe they’d need all of that power to use against the Islands.

  He broke at last into the clear winds, gasping. He looked for Genrai, couldn’t find him. Then did: well away toward the sea. But there was no point in joining Genrai now. There was nothing to say—at least, nothing Trei felt able to say.

  He curved around instead, dropping lower, skirting the billowing smoke and steam. The engines roared: a sound that he imagined might be like the roaring of dragons. He had never imagined anything so big! Trei thought suddenly of Uncle Serfei saying, Tolounn’s only art is the art of war, and found himself wishing that his uncle could have seen these great engines. The art of war, yes, maybe, but how splendid an art sometimes! He struggled against a totally unexpected dismay at the thought of destroying something so great and powerful.

  What a wonder Tolounn had made, here at the boundary between engines and magic! How could anything the Floating Islands do match this? If the Islands couldn’t defend themselves, then whatever Trei did or failed to do, eventually Tolounn would conquer them—and was that so terrible? Tolounn was generous to territories it conquered. Not like Yngul.

  Though … it was true that no land Tolounn conquered ever regained its independence. If Tolounn took the Islands, the king and all his family would surely be imprisoned in Tolounn and a Tolounnese provincar would be put in place to rule. Tolounn’s only art is the art of war. It was true, in a way, and in the service of its art, Tolounn always required newly conquered territories to provide conscripts. If the Islands were subjugated, few young men would be allowed to become chefs or, or … whatever they might have wanted to become. They would go instead to swell the ranks of Tolounn’s armies—especially if the Tolounnese Emperors saw the Islands as a stepping-stone on the way to Cen Periven. Which they would. My fault, Trei thought. My fault if I can’t do this and then we lose. Then he blinked, realizing that for the first time he’d thought “we” and not “they.”

  “I am an Islander,” Trei said aloud into the rushing, smoke-filled air, but the wind roared in his ears and swept the words away as though he had never spoken them, and he found himself uncertain whether he’d spoken aloud at all. Yet he had chosen to be Islander, and now he had to take the egg down—had to complete this task, or why had he come?

  Even if probably the dragon egg wouldn’t do anything to those engines anyway, not even if the heat quickened it, and there was no guarantee even of that, was there? He was suddenly certain it wouldn’t work. Araenè had just been wrong about what she’d thought the dragon wanted—or about what the egg would do if it was thrown into a furnace—even now, at this last moment, if Trei just found a place way out on the edges of Teraica, he really could rest there and then, in a day or two, fly back to the Islands. Give the egg back to Araenè, tell her he hadn’t been able to use it after all.

  If Araenè was still there. The long flight had all blurred
in Trei’s mind, but Tolounn’s attack on the Islands had begun, what, two full days ago? The Islanders hadn’t seemed to be mounting any kind of defense. Trei shook his head angrily, trying to think. Any little town in Tolounn would be ashamed to manage so little defense. The Islands had no business assuming the simple fact of their height would always be enough to hold back a determined enemy! One thing was becoming clear the more he thought about it: nothing he did could possibly make any difference—

  A ripple in the smoke gave way to Genrai, swinging in and down to match Trei’s course and speed. He shouted, “The middle engine, yes? The place where the coal falls down? Let me take it, Trei! What you said to Tokabii was true: you could land somewhere hidden, rest, make your way back later!”

  Trei realized that Genrai thought he’d frozen in terror, here on the edge of success. And, Trei also realized, the older boy was right. It was fear—not anything else—that underlay all his hesitation. He was afraid to try to reach those engines, so he’d just been making up reasons not to try. Even after he’d promised Genrai he would do it—after he’d promised Araenè he’d do it. Trei shouted, furiously, to himself more than to Genrai, “I am kajurai!” This time, he shouted loudly enough: the angry words seemed to echo in the wind.

  He tipped sideways and dropped through the smoke. The smoke choked him, but he could see through it—he couldn’t see the engines, exactly, but he could see the waves of heat they flung out into the air. The smoke was hard to breathe, but it didn’t bother his kajurai eyes at all. He could see the intense heat that marked the entrance to the coal furnaces.

  The middle engine: yes. Because if the one in the middle exploded, maybe the explosion would destroy both the other engines as well. Trust Genrai to think of things like that.