Windsinger

by A. F. E. Smith

  Then she heard Marlon’s voice.

  A small airship lay ahead of her, a dot on the horizon but growing fast. It wasn’t anything like large enough to be the Windsinger, and it was travelling deeper into Mirrorvale rather than heading away, and so Ayla didn’t attack it. It wasn’t as if Marlon had sounded frightened or hurt, only sleepy. All the same, she kept moving forward at a fair speed, anxious to find out whether all three of her children were safe.

  As the gap closed between her and the airship, she made out Penn at the controls, and heard Ree murmuring a story to Marlon. There was just one other person in the ship – Ayla could hear them breathing. Not Tomas. A child. Katya or Wyrenne? A fretful whimper gave her the answer: her elder daughter was curled up against Ree, dozing fitfully. Tomas and his little Wren were missing.

  She didn’t slow as she neared the airship, but Changed in midair, pouring herself over the side of the gondola to land in human form within.

  ‘Where is Wyrenne?’ Her voice sounded harsh and strange in her own ears. During her journey, she had inhabited her other form so intensely that some of that fierce wildness still lingered – and she couldn’t afford to let it go, not yet. Not while her baby was missing.

  ‘S-still on board the Windsinger,’ Ree stammered. ‘Captain Caraway couldn’t get her out like the other two.’

  One arm held Katya on her lap, while the other was around Marlon beside her. Both children were asleep now. Ayla kept her gaze firmly fixed on Ree’s; looking at her children’s faces would only melt her fully back to human. Of course, that meant she was intimidating Ree, but she couldn’t help it.

  ‘Tomas is with her?’

  Ree nodded, biting her lip as though she feared Ayla would destroy her.

  ‘He told us to go,’ Penn added, without looking away from the controls. ‘We thought it best to get the children to safety.’

  His expression was resolute. He would do anything for her family, Ayla realised. Even if it meant abandoning his captain. And just like that, she finally made complete peace with the fact that one of her protectors had once kidnapped her son. He was making up for it now.

  ‘The Windsinger took off?’ she asked.

  ‘It’ll have crossed the border by now,’ Ree said. ‘Lady Ayla … what do you want us to do?’

  As if in answer, Katya stirred; a small, sleepy voice said, ‘Mama?’ But Ayla hardened her heart against it. She couldn’t stay. Marlon and Katya were safe, so that only left Wyrenne. And Wyrenne was in Parovia.

  ‘Keep going,’ she said. ‘Back to Darkhaven.’ Then, fixing each of them with a fierce stare, ‘Their lives are in your hands.’

  She was already summoning the Change again as she vaulted back over the side of the airship.

  Her wings unfurled. The air rushed. The ground rolled away beneath her. She reached Mirrorvale’s eastern border and crossed it without a thought. And then the Windsinger was ahead of her, visible even through the rain that had started to fall. She didn’t need to read the name painted on the side, or identify it by size. She could have found it with her eyes closed. Because deep in the heart of the ship, surrounded but not concealed by the babble of voices and the creak of the gondola and the roar of the engines, Wyrenne was crying.

  An instant later, a note of alarm entered the voices on board the ship: they had seen her coming. Ayla heard their running footsteps, smelled gunpowder as they readied their firearms. But she didn’t hesitate. She barely slowed beneath the onslaught of bullets – bullets which, thanks to the Parovian alchemy that had created her collar, bounced off her like hailstones on a window. She felt their sting, but it didn’t turn her from her course. Instead, she plunged her horn straight into the upper edge of the airship and ripped it open, just as she once had with smaller Kardise craft.

  The Windsinger wasn’t small enough to be torn straight out of the sky, but the rupturing of several of its gas chambers caused it to list alarmingly. The hail of bullets ceased as the Parovian crewmen realised they were in very real danger of setting their own ship on fire. Ayla circled and stabbed, releasing ever more of the buoyant gas from within the airship, and it began to sink.

  Bring her in to land! she heard the cry go up. Before we lose her!

  Lurching drunkenly through the sky, the vast airship descended into a flower-dotted meadow beside a river. Ayla followed, Changing even as her feet touched the ground, snatching up the simple garment she’d carried with her and thrusting her arms inside. The rain was falling harder now. Good. Water meant ice, and ice was a weapon.

  Even in human form, she knew exactly where Wyrenne was. She could still hear her crying, deep in the heart of the ship. And so she extended her senses into the wooden frame and ordered it to crack. Fissures ran up the sides, the entire structure listing and groaning. Raising her arms in the air, she gestured wide, and pieces of wood flew up and out at her command. The entire airship shattered like a dropped bowl, raining splinters down on the ground around it. Men shouted and screamed as they dived free of the collapsing ship or struggled to free themselves from beneath the fallen wreckage. Yet right in the middle of the carnage …

  Right in the middle, a single room remained intact. And within it, Tomas Caraway was singing his daughter a lullaby.

  Ayla started forward. A man lurched through a gap in the broken wall to her right, but she used her power again without a second thought, cracking one end of a loose beam and bringing it down on his head. Around her, she sensed a few people moving in the wreckage, rearming themselves with pistols and moving towards her; that was more difficult, but she followed the scent of gunpowder back to its multiple sources and froze the falling raindrops around what she found there. A pistol couldn’t be fired if its flintlock mechanism was encased in ice. The men cried out as the intense cold crackled across their pistols and into their hands. Ayla smiled and kept moving.

  She heard Tomas stop singing. She heard the key turn in the lock of the incongruously intact door. And then he walked out, Wyrenne in his arms, and Ayla forgot everything except the need to reach her child as soon as possible –

  Chill metal touched her wrist, and her senses deadened. Instinctively she wrenched her arm away, turning ready to defend herself, but it was too late. The man who’d crept up behind her had put a manacle on her wrist made of … what? She wasn’t sure, but there was steel in it. Glass and amber, too. A manacle created by alchemy, made with the same knowledge that had created her collar but for a very different purpose. And until she could get it off, all her Changer powers were lost to her.

  She spun on the ball of one foot and kicked him as hard as she could, then turned and ran for Tomas and Wyrenne. But now other men were emerging from the wreckage of the Windsinger: their clothing tattered, their expressions grim, some of them streaked with blood. They were moving to intercept her. And there, nearby, where it had fallen from the broken deck –

  A cage.

  THIRTY

  Miles lay motionless under the shattered pieces of Parovia’s greatest engineering triumph. One of his legs had been trapped by falling timber, but he didn’t have any inclination to move anyway. He simply lay there, and wondered why he was still alive.

  He had watched the short air battle from within his cabin: the golden alicorn, untouched by bullets, using her strength to tear the Windsinger from the sky. He had given her that protection. He ought to feel something about that.

  Later he had seen Ayla, back in human form, standing on the ground with arms spread wide as pieces of wood rained down around her. He had helped her to discover that power. He ought to feel something about that, too.

  And now his countrymen had trapped her with an alchemical combination derived from his own research, pinning her in human form while they dragged her back towards the cage that had also been created using his research, and he ought to feel something about that – but he didn’t. All he knew was that people were dead because of him. Lots of people, starting with Mara and her family and leading all the way up to the crewmen
lost in the rubble of the Windsinger. He had left destruction wherever he went. And Art …

  Art. Forgive me.

  If the Sun Lord had any purpose for Miles at all, he was having a hard job understanding what it was. As far as he could see, the world would have been better off without him.

  He closed his eyes, but something made him reopen them. Half the crewmen still standing were advancing on Tomas and Wyrenne. The other half were hustling Ayla towards the large cage – bent and twisted out of shape, but still functional – that had been built at the heart of the ship. As Gil had said, the Parovian crew had prepared for every eventuality. Their primary goal had been the children, but they’d take the mother if they could.

  Short of cutting her apart, there is little more to gain from her, Gil had said. Was that what they intended? To experiment on her, slicing her open in an attempt to understand the alchemy in her blood? Miles shuddered. We treat people like animals and call it science. This is what I have been working for, all these years.

  His hand moved slowly across the ground, passing over crushed grass and a broken flower until it found what it was looking for. A long, jagged piece of wood. A piece of the broken Windsinger. A stake.

  They would pass right by him, on the way to the cage.

  Ayla’s death would destroy Mirrorvale. More to the point, Ayla was his friend. Did that mean anything, after all he’d done? Perhaps not to her. But to him … yes. Though Art had mocked him for the lines he refused to cross, they were still part of him. He wouldn’t let Ayla or any of her family die, whether quickly now or slowly in a laboratory. He’d allowed a war to unfold, and caused untold harm to Mirrorvale, for the sake of a lie; now he knew the truth, he owed Parovia nothing.

  As the two crewmen with Ayla between them drew level with him, he rose up and drove his makeshift weapon hard into the nearest of them. The man yelled, his grip on Ayla loosening as his hands went to his bloody thigh. Ayla twisted free. Miles had a moment to see that, to see her twisting free.

  Then another crewman kicked him backwards, planting a boot on his chest, and stabbed him, reopening the bandaged wound that had already come close to taking his life. Miles saw the man’s face above him, drawn into a snarl. He felt the hot splash of saliva hit his cheek. And then the man was gone.

  The colour had begun to bleach out of the sky, now. The sounds of angry men faded to a wash and hiss, like the random ebb and flow of the wind. Miles had little sensation left in his hands, or anywhere for that matter, but he reached into the inside pocket of his coat for the letter he had written to Art while he was on board the ship: the one that told Art how much he loved him, truly, and how much he regretted everything he had done. He hoped Ayla or Tomas would find it. He hoped they would take it back to Art. Maybe Art would never read it, but if he did, perhaps he would find a measure of comfort in the knowledge that whatever else Miles had lied about, he had never lied about what lay between them.

  The numb feeling had spread throughout his body, now, and he was thankful for it. He fumbled the letter to his chest and closed his eyes. The end was coming, and his overwhelming emotion was one of relief.

  He would die on Parovian soil. Somehow, despite everything, there was peace in that.

  As Miles fell, and Ayla broke free of her distracted captors, Caraway was already running. Two of the Parovians tried to block his path, but he punched one of them and, as the man staggered back, plucked the short Parovian sword from his belt and used it to stab the other one. Then he wrenched it back out without any finesse whatsoever and ran on, flicking the blood from the blade. Still clutched in his left arm, Wyrenne screamed relentlessly.

  Good testing exercise for future Helmsmen, some small, sarcastic part of his brain observed. If they can fight holding a distraught one-year-old, they’re in.

  Ayla met him halfway, taking the Parovian sword from him without a word and spinning to face her pursuers. Caraway drew the sword he’d taken from one of the guards, earlier, and turned as well. Back to back, they gripped their weapons as the remaining crewmen encircled them. Spotting her mother over Caraway’s shoulder, Wyrenne stretched out her arms and screamed louder than ever.

  ‘Stay still, Wren,’ Caraway bit out. Make that a distraught, wriggling one-year-old. If she wasn’t careful, he was going to drop her. He hitched her further up his shoulder and – as the Parovians advanced – began yet again to sing her favourite lullaby.

  ‘The moon is up …’ Two of us and four of them – no, five if you count the one with the broken nose. ‘The stars are bright …’ It’s not impossible. ‘The owl has come to say goodnight …’

  He spun to block one attack, converted it into a lunge that sent his opponent reeling backwards, then turned in time to meet the next man’s blow. Wyrenne still cried, but it was a grumbly sort of cry rather than the utter outrage of before. The song was working – either that or the constant movement. But what came after the damn owl? He must have sung it a thousand times, today alone, and yet he couldn’t remember. He started from the beginning. ‘The moon is up …’

  Every so often, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Ayla. She wasn’t used to the short swords of Parovia; he’d only ever trained her with the Mirrorvalese Helmsman’s standard issue. An omission, perhaps, though he could never have imagined these circumstances. Still, she was holding her own. What she lacked in technique, she made up for in feeling. He recognised the feeling, because it was one he shared: I’ll be damned if I let you have my daughter.

  ‘Will you stop – bloody – singing that?’ one of the Parovians panted. Caraway smiled and ran him through. One down.

  He did have to stop singing, though, shortly after that. It was that or drop Wyrenne, or drop his sword, neither of which were acceptable outcomes. But as soon as he faltered, Ayla picked up the lullaby. She kept singing while she hacked a man’s hand off at the wrist. She kept singing while Caraway blocked a thrust and, through more luck than skill, deflected it to injure his second opponent. She sang until, finally, the last man fell and they were able to turn to face each other.

  Ayla’s thin tunic was torn and bloodstained in several places; she had a gash on one cheek and a deeper cut down one arm, but Caraway couldn’t see any damage more significant than flesh wounds. He knew he’d been cut in multiple places himself, and the knee he’d injured racing after Ayla six years ago – which had never been quite at full strength since – throbbed in a way that told him he’d suffer for it in the days ahead. But they’d survived it. Against all odds, they’d survived.

  ‘Is Wyrenne all right?’ Ayla asked.

  ‘Yes. She’s angry, but she isn’t hurt.’

  ‘Can you get this off?’ Ayla held out the wrist that bore the manacle. He handed her Wyrenne, before wrenching the strange metal apart with his bare hands. Something in her expression eased, a hint of tension dissipating as her full abilities returned to her.

  ‘Thank you,’ Caraway said. ‘You got here just in time.’

  She managed a smile. ‘I thought it was probably my turn to rescue you.’

  ‘Oh, Ayla.’ He rested his forehead against hers, careful not to crush the baby between them. ‘You did that a long time ago.’

  For a moment they stood in silence, just breathing each other in. But only for a moment, because Wyrenne’s cries – which had died down to exhausted, hiccupping sobs – were beginning to ramp back up again.

  ‘She’s tired,’ Caraway said. ‘And hungry, and wet. I wish I could have done more –’

  Ayla shook her head. ‘She’s alive.’

  Sinking to her knees, heedless of the carnage around her, she put the baby to her breast. Caraway took off his coat and draped it over her shoulders. Then he stood on guard beside them, but there was no sound or movement from the wreckage. The three of them were alone with the dead.

  He had seen far too much death since this time yesterday morning.

  He walked in a slow circle, fighting the heaviness of his limbs, scanning the battlefield f
or hidden threats, and that was how he stumbled across Miles. The alchemist lay on his back, eyes closed. His hands clutched a folded paper to his chest – and scrawled across the outside, clear to read despite the bloodstains, was the name Art Bryan.

  Caraway stood and looked at that piece of paper for some time. Perhaps he should leave it behind, or destroy it … but it wasn’t his decision to make. When it came down to it, all he could do – all he had the right to do – was deliver the message to Bryan and deal with the consequences.

  He leaned down to pick up the letter, and caught the shallow rise and fall of Miles’s chest. Alive.

  Again, Caraway ran through his options and just as quickly discarded them. Leave the man behind … but that would run the risk of him surviving to fall into Parovian hands, and no doubt there were still Nightshade secrets that could be extracted from him. Kill him … but without Miles, they’d all be in captivity right now. He was the one who had kept Ayla from being locked in a cage; Caraway couldn’t repay that with murder. Which meant the only choice they had was to take the man with them back to Darkhaven. But how?

  By the time he returned to Ayla and Wyrenne, the baby had finished feeding and had drifted off to sleep. Ayla looked up at him with a question in her eyes.

  ‘We need to get back across the border,’ he answered it softly. ‘We’re vulnerable here. It shouldn’t take long to walk –’

  She shook her head. ‘There’s a Mirrorvalese force coming by air, somewhere behind me. I can carry us to meet them.’

  ‘It’s not just us,’ Caraway said. ‘Miles is alive.’

  ‘Miles is the reason we’re in this situation in the first place.’

  ‘I know. But …’

  ‘We can’t just leave him to die,’ Ayla finished for him. ‘All right. I’ll carry all three of you.’

  ‘Are you sure? You must be tired after –’

  ‘I can rest when we’re safe.’ She stood up, a practised fluid motion that barely jolted the baby at all. ‘Here, take Wyrenne.’