by Colt, K. J.
Sardelle turned three hundred and sixty degrees, checking for fresh attackers, prepared to defend herself. Rifles fired and metal clanged in all directions. Red and gray uniforms mixed, as men fought hand-to-hand. The drab garb of prisoners was everywhere too. She had forgotten—the shaman had released the miners. A pickaxe slammed into a man’s back. The victim wasn’t, as she had feared, one of the fort’s soldiers. It was a Cofah warrior. The prisoners were helping the soldiers, not hindering them.
Light flared in the night sky, and a cheer erupted. The rear of the airship had exploded, and shards of wood flew in every direction. Its balloon was already a misshapen, half-sunken mess. A single bronze dragon flier streaked out of the remains of the explosion, its frame gleaming with the reflection of the flames eating at the back of the airship. The wooden craft slumped in the sky, floating lower and lower, a crash inevitable.
Sardelle wished she could join in with the celebration and wait for Ridge, give him a kiss and a hug for his heroics, but she remembered those bullets all too well. As long as General Nax was in charge, she wouldn’t receive fair treatment here.
With tears stinging her eyes, Sardelle checked the shaman one last time to ensure he was dead, then ran for the balloon craft that had delivered the Cofah. A single man waited in the large basket, the pilot doubtlessly. He was kneeling with only his eyes peeking over the rim. When he saw Sardelle coming, he leaned out and cut a line, then a second. They were attached to anchors holding the balloon down, and as soon as he severed them, the craft rose. Her run turned into a dead sprint. As dubious a craft as a hot air balloon might be for flying over the Ice Blades, it was all she had to escape these mountains.
She tossed her soulblade into the basket—that ought to alarm the pilot—then leaped, catching one of the dangling lines. Though she was weary from the battle, and no great athlete under any circumstances, she was motivated enough to find a way up. Half afraid the pilot would brain her, she rushed to claw her way over the edge and into the basket. Her sword was the only thing waiting inside.
I flared at him, and he jumped over the side.
You make an effective bully, Jaxi.
Thank you.
Sardelle pushed herself to her feet. In a minute, she would figure out how to work the controls. Sometime after that, she would contemplate her future and decide where she wanted the craft to take her. For now, she simply inhaled and exhaled the cold mountain air, feeling some of the tension ebb from her body as the fort grew farther and farther away.
The clank-thunk-kertwank of the dragon flier’s engine drifted to her ear, and she found Ridge, the light of his power crystal illuminating him in the cockpit. He was flying toward the fort as she drifted in the other direction—by the sickly sound of that engine, it was doubtful his craft would make it much farther—and too much distance separated them for words. He gave her a nod though and lifted a hand.
Her throat tight, Sardelle returned the gesture. Even if nobody else in that fort understood, he did.
Is that enough?
Sardelle wiped her eyes. It has to be.
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EPILOGUE
THERE WERE EITHER NO FISH, or his bait wasn’t fooling them. Or he was too drunk to realize they had snickeringly made off with the bait an hour ago. He pondered whether fish snickered. And then he pondered whether he had the strength to get up from the chair, go inside the cabin, and make something to eat. It sounded like a lot of work. Much easier to lean back on the deck and enjoy the winter sun—if one could even call this weather “winter” in comparison to what the Ice Blades experienced. There wasn’t any ice on the lake, and it felt more like autumn with the sun warming his skin.
On the other side of the water, a rooster crowed. There were only two other houses on the lake, part of the reason Ridge had bought it, but he wasn’t sure he was enjoying the solitude at the moment. Given his mood, it might have been better to stay on base, to wait in the company of others for his squadron to return from their latest mission. But he hadn’t given Sardelle his address there. He doubted she wanted anything to do with the military again.
Ridge picked at a sliver on the chair and wondered if he was being a fool. Did he truly expect her to show up? Was he even sure he wanted her to? After seeing… all that he had seen?
“You’re sitting here, aren’t you?” he mumbled.
What reason did she have to come though, now that she had her sword—her big glowing sorcerer-slaying sword? She didn’t need any more favors from him.
“Drinking again?” came a soft voice from behind him.
Ridge nearly fell out of his chair. He did knock his fishing pole in the water as he jumped up and spun around, his mouth hanging open.
Sardelle stood at the head of the dock, wearing an elegant forest-green dress that hugged her slim waist and accented her curves far more nicely than the prison garb had. Her black hair hung lush and thick about her shoulders, and framed her face, including the spattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Somehow Ridge had never pictured sorceresses with freckles. He was glad for them though. They made her seem more… human. That and her archly raised eyebrow as she regarded his bottle.
“It’s only the second time in a month,” he said.
“Ah. I hope it’s not because of bad news again?” Her eyebrow lowered, and her expression grew earnest. Concerned. Maybe she thought he had gotten in trouble because of her.
“Nope. I was allowed to return to my squadron, and I got an award for my—” Ridge rolled his eyes as he quoted the rest, “—cunning, bravery, and initiative.” Some idiot had threatened to promote him as well, but Ridge had squashed that snowball before it could roll downhill and turn into an avalanche. Generals didn’t fly; generals commanded brigades—sometimes forts. He had no interest in enduring that again for a long time, if ever.
“Oh, I see,” Sardelle said. “And that’s why you’re sitting out here and drinking, as if you’ve lost your oldest friend.”
“The king and general of the armies were so happy to get that pile of crystals that they just had to award someone. With General Nax gone, I guess I got it by default. I’m not a believer in awards that are given without being earned. I didn’t do a single intelligent thing while I was out there, and in the end I didn’t do much more than blow up an owl. Someone else was paramount in defeating the Cofah.” Ridge gave her a pointed look. It had all been in her hands all along.
“All I did was defeat their shaman. You blew up their airship. And that owl was big.” Sardelle tilted her head. “When you say General Nax is gone, do you mean… ?”
“A little band of those Cofah sneaked up to the wall and got to him. I actually missed him when I got back down. There was no senior officer to foist all of the cleanup on.”
“Regrettable,” Sardelle murmured.
Ridge wondered if she would have kept flying away in that balloon if she had known the general had already been dead at that point. Probably. From what he had heard later, his own people had been shooting at her, right along with the other sorcerer.
“Sardelle, I… ” Ridge stuffed his hands into his pockets and studied the dock boards at her feet. “I can’t imagine it means much, but I want to apologize for the way you were treated there. I’d like to say things would have been different if you had told me the truth from the beginning, but… ” He shrugged.
“I was afraid that if I did… Among other things, would you have spent the night with me in that cave if you had known?”
“Seven gods, no. I would have been afraid you would melt my dragon if I didn’t please you adequately.”
Sardelle snorted softly. “Just so we’re clear, you’re talking about… the little wooden figurine, right?”
Because a woman would find a man who called something else a dragon silly. Right, he knew that. “Of course.”
“And the night in the library?” she asked.
“Oh, I was drunk enough then, that I might have risked your ire.”
“I see.”
Sardelle padded down the dock, soft green shoes that matched the dress whispering across the boards. He wondered when she had gone shopping—or how. Did she have money? Or had she simply snapped her fingers and willed the dress into existence? He swallowed as she drew nearer. He wasn’t afraid of her, but at the same time… he couldn’t pretend nothing had changed. She looked the same, but… it was hard not to see that aura that had enveloped her when she had held her sword aloft.
He glanced toward the yard and the cabin. “You didn’t bring your shiny sword?”
Sardelle stopped a couple of paces away, her head tilting. “I didn’t think I would need it here.”
“No… it’s generally safe, though the mosquitoes can be a powerful threat in the summer. Still, it doesn’t seem like something you should leave lying around for anyone to find. Or for a mountain to fall on top of.”
“I rode a horse here.” She waved to the trees by the road. “Jaxi—my sword—and a pack are on it, but I wasn’t sure if I should… presume to drop my things on your porch. I wasn’t even sure this would be your porch. That address… at first, I thought it was some research facility the general had meant to ship my sword to.”
“No,” Ridge whispered, distracted by the thought that she wanted to drop her things on his porch.
“Then by the time I got that balloon over the mountains and down to civilization, and figured out what city that address was in, I was a little concerned I might find you here with… someone else.”
“Who else would there be?”
“I don’t know. Given how quickly the general’s daughter—I presume she’s still alive?—grew infatuated with you, I gather you don’t have much trouble finding female company.”
“Oh.” Ridge decided not to mention that he had ridden home with Vespa, who had tried to convince him to console her physically over the loss of her father. “She was actually infatuated before she came, I gathered later, and more by my reputation than by actually knowing me. Once women get to know me, they often flee the other way.” Not exactly true. The incompatibility issues didn’t usually arise until they tried living together, and he was off for months at a time, trying to get himself killed—their words, not his—and leaving them alone at home to worry.
“Ridge, are you lying to me?”
“Maybe a little. I thought it was my turn.” He smiled and crossed the last few feet between them, sensing that she wanted that from him, and took her hands. “If you can tolerate my mendacious ways, maybe you could stay a while, see if you find the knowing more appealing than others have.”
She leaned against his chest, their hands still clasped. “I’d like that.”
“Good,” he whispered, locking eyes with her. His heart was beating as fast as a propeller. He felt like a teenager filled with that mix of exhilaration and terror as he mustered the courage to kiss her. But as soon as their lips touched, there was a sense of the familiar… and the right.
Read Chapter One of the Book #2 in this Series on the Next Page, or Alternatively, Purchase Book #2 from Amazon Now.
DEATHMAKER PREVIEW
CAS DIDN’T LIKE HER NEW cell. After having spent two weeks jammed into a dark locker on a Cofah warship, the space so confining that she couldn’t stand up or stretch out straight, she probably should have considered this an improvement. But she wasn’t one of those irritatingly cheerful optimists. She hadn’t liked the last cell, and she didn’t like this one either. The window might let in the ocean breeze, but it was too small to climb through, not to mention barricaded with iron bars. The cries of parrots and the yowls of monkeys beyond it were a reminder that she was in a strange land, far from home, without hope of rescue.
Heavy footsteps and the jangle of weapons sounded in the hallway.
Cas bared her teeth, hoping the guards would only stroll past on their way to attend to another prisoner. It had been scarce minutes since her welcome-to-the-Dragon-Spit-prison-and-here’s-a-thorough-beating-to-make-you-feel-at-home greeting. She was still lying on the floor and recovering, so she flinched at the idea of another round with those bone cudgels. For all her vows to stay strong, she had spent most of her first beating curled in a ball on the ground, clutching her gut, and doing her best not to whimper. Whimpering wasn’t expressly forbidden in the “Survival, Evasion, and Recovery” chapter of the army field manual, but the line about the “inherent stoicism of soldiers” seemed to discourage it.
The footsteps stopped, and the door opened. Yellow lantern light spilled in from the hallway, making Cas realize that twilight had fallen outside. Not that the time of day mattered much.
A guard scurried inside carrying a stool. He set it down, the legs scraping against the hard sandstone floor, then he stood beside the door. Thanks to the shaven head, scarred face, and broad shoulders, he would have been ominous and forbidding even without the bone cudgel and short sword secured on either hip and the shotgun gripped in his hands.
Another shaven-headed man walked in, this one older and wearing a tiger fur cloak over his brown uniform. It didn’t look particularly climate-appropriate. The man wasn’t carrying any visible weapons, but Cas assumed he was in charge. If the Cofah military was anything like her own, only important people got to tinker with the dress code. For a moment, she thought of her own commander, Colonel Ridge Zirkander, and the way his non-regulation cap was always tilted at a rakish angle, but she hurried to push the image away, lest tears form in her eyes. She could be tough while they questioned her, but only as long as she didn’t let herself think of comrades—friends—back home... and whether she would ever see them again.
“Lieutenant Caslin ‘Raptor’ Ahn,” High Lord Cloak said, settling on the stool. “Wolf Squadron.”
Cas searched for something cocky to say, something to show that she wasn’t intimidated by him or this situation—Zirkander would have had a witty riposte for this statement of the obvious—but all she got out was a muffled, “Yeah?” Her lips were split and swollen from the beating. Even that single syllable hurt.
“Raptor?” Cloak made a point of eyeing her up and down, or rather, since she was on the floor, forward and back. Then he smirked. “Truly?”
Cas would have liked to stand up and tower threateningly over him, but she had to wear her thick-soled combat boots to brush the five-foot-two mark on a measuring wall. So far, she hadn’t managed to tower over anyone older than ten. It would have hurt too much to climb to her feet anyway.
“I didn’t give myself the nickname,” she grumbled. Not that she minded it; most of the squadron had embarrassing nicknames, especially the other young lieutenants. Pimples and Snuggles came to mind.
“Well, Raptor, our latest intelligence confirms that your people know your damaged flier sank during the skirmish in the Seven Tides Strait. They believe you’re as dead as the other pilot.”
The other pilot—Dash. Her eyes threatened to water again. She had seen the fire in Dash’s cockpit, seen him burning, his skin charred, his mouth open in a scream of pain right before his flier plunged into the ocean. There was no chance he had swum away as she had, having survived by clinging onto a piece of a wing until someone pulled her out of the water hours later. The wrong someone.
Cloak leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped as he regarded her. “That means nobody’s coming for you.”
A monkey howled in the distance. Cas wouldn’t have minded making a similar screech. She muttered a, “No kidding,” instead. Maybe she shouldn’t be saying anything. But if she responded to him, she might get a scrap or two of information in return. Though she wasn’t sure how she could manage it at the moment; escape had to be her priority. That was specifically mentioned in the field manual. Escaping and reporting back, that was her duty.
“That means we can keep you here as long as we need to.” Cloak smiled. Someone who found joy in his job. What a soul to be treasur
ed.
“Oh, good,” Cas said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t get to thoroughly appreciate this hot, humid-as-spit climate before getting shipped somewhere else.”
“We’ll interrogate you, of course,” the man continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. Maybe he was used to talking to himself. “I doubt you know much. What are you, a year out of the academy?”
A year and three months, thank you, but she kept the thought to herself. No need to start giving away intel before they began the interrogation; no matter that they already seemed to know more about her than she would like.
“But you are Wolf Squadron,” Cloak went on. “If you’ve served under Zirkander for a year, my emperor will want whatever information you can supply on him.”
Cas had been beyond proud when she had been selected for Wolf Squadron straight out of the academy—she had done her best to live up to the prestigious unit’s reputation—and she would never regret that choice. But, for the first time, she realized her position might not serve her well. Everything that made her commander a lauded hero in Iskandia would make him a loathed enemy here.
“Zirkander?” she asked, licking her lips—odd how dry her mouth had suddenly grown, humid air notwithstanding. “His favorite color is green; his favorite meal is pot roast; he prefers beer to straight spirits; and, when winter comes, he’ll throw a snowball at anyone, even officers who outrank him. If that’s enough intel, you can leave my cell door open, and I’ll be happy to show myself out.”
Neither the guard nor Cloak seemed to find her sarcasm amusing. Given how much saying all that had made her mouth hurt, she shouldn’t have bothered.
Cloak pulled a dagger out of a sheath that his furry garment had hidden. Cas tried to draw back, or at least manage a sitting position, but he moved quickly for an old prison commander. The blade came up beneath her chin, the sharp point digging into tender flesh. She froze, but that didn’t keep a drop of warm blood from welling and dripping down her throat.
