Tylar nodded.
The pirate leader climbed down and jumped lightly to the ground. Tylar followed, hesitated a moment, recalling how Keorn had been burned by his trespass. Then he also stepped down and joined Krevan.
As he landed with his left foot, a sharp complaint rose from his knee. He hopped off it and tottered a step.
“Are you all right?” Krevan asked.
“A stone,” he muttered, covering the twinge.
The ache slowly subsided in a couple of steps, as it had over the past two days. While normally he would have dismissed the cramp as merely some turn of his knee, the pang here was doggedly familiar, echoing back to when the same knee had once been frozen and cobbled from a poorly healed break.
It was disconcerting.
He opened and closed his fist. His little finger, still wrapped, was slowly on the mend. Maybe a bit crooked, but it would leave no lasting weakness.
As the ache faded in his leg, he pushed back these misgivings for another time and faced the flippercraft. “Keep guard on the door,” he called quietly to Malthumalbaen, who stood at the threshold.
The giant nodded.
Tylar turned away to find Krevan had already drifted off, shadowy in the mists. He limped to join him, drawing on a trickle of darkness into his cloak to steady himself.
Ahead, the pirate had stopped, his back to Tylar. A growling sound rose from him, angry, offended.
“What’s wrong?”
Krevan stepped back to reveal what his large bulk had hidden.
A shaft of peeled and sharpened wood rose from the ground, planted deep in the loam. Impaled upon it was the head of an old woman, her gray braid black with her own blood, tongue lolling out, skin mottled with rot. Flies and worms squirmed and crawled across her flesh. Her eyes had been pecked or gouged out.
Only now did Tylar note the reek hidden beneath the decay of leaf and a heavy dampness to the air. Details grew as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. To either side, he noted more burdened stakes.
Aghast, he backed a step toward the ship.
The mists slowly rose, swirling back up. Bits of dust and dried grass drifted down, cast high by their hard landing. The view opened. Tylar remembered the strange bristling he had noted as they fell out of the sky. He now understood what he had glimpsed. Climbing up the slopes in widening rings were hundreds of stakes.
All bearing aloft their ripe and rotted fruit.
“No…” Tylar mumbled.
This was far worse than any uncontested fire. A ravening darkness shadowed this realm fully. He recalled Rogger’s story of tanglebriar. He stared at the field of sharpened stakes. Seersong had indeed taken root-and here was the thorny growth that sprouted from that seed.
“Her own people,” Krevan said in disgust.
In step, both men retreated toward the flippercraft.
Then Tylar heard a whistling to the air. Flashes drew his eyes up. Streaks of flame shot through the mists like trailing stars in the night. They arced out from the shrouded forest, climbing high, then angled back downward. Score upon score blazed through the murky clouds.
“Arrows,” Krevan said, twisting to grab Tylar’s shoulder and pull him toward the flippercraft.
Too late.
Fire fell out of the sky and pummeled the flippercraft lying at the bottom of the sea of mist. The impacts sounded like hail on a wooden roof. But it was flame, not ice, that rained down upon the beached flippercraft. Not a single arrow missed its target.
Shouts arose from inside the ship.
But before Tylar could even call to the others, a second volley of flaming arrows filled the sky with their streaking brilliance. A moment later, amid the shocked cries of the others, another round of flame beat down upon the back of the craft, already aflame.
Again, not an arrow fell astray.
If it was madness that truly ruled here, it had honed its marksmanship.
The fires spread rapidly, sped by some alchemy imbued in the oil of the arrows. Flames ran like fiery snakes across the hull.
“Get the others out,” Tylar ordered Krevan. There was no use attempting to escape by air. The flippercraft would burn down to its mekanicals by the time they cleared the mists.
Unless he did something about it.
Tylar wiped his brow, then slid out a dagger. He drew its edge across his palm and drew a fiery line of blood.
Sweat to imbue, and blood to open the way.
He would fight the flames with his own humours. He pictured ice, as frigid as the cold that had stolen Eylan from them. He built the blessing in his bloody palm, prepared to use his sweat to cast it upon the craft. He would freeze the flames from his ship.
He raised his hand-but before he could slap palm to wood, an arrow struck exactly where he had intended to place his hand. The thunk of its impact startled him back a step. It was as if the arrow had sprouted out of the hull, rather than being shot from afar.
The feathered end quivered at his nose.
But that was not all.
Skewered on the shaft of the arrow was a raven, one of the messengers he had sent ahead.
Here at last had come his answer from the Huntress.
A threat by marksmanship.
At any moment, an arrow could be sent through his own heart.
He lowered his arm.
Krevan came dashing out, leading others from the ship.
“Run!” the pirate shouted and pointed an arm up the slope.
Before Tylar could even turn, the top of the flippercraft exploded away in a great gout of swirling flame. A wall of heat knocked them all off their feet. Krevan was the first back up, scooping Dart under one arm, dragging Brant by an arm.
“Go!” he shouted.
They were all running as fiery planks fell, raining down into the loam. It was sheer luck that no one was struck. Once clear, Tylar counted heads. Too few.
“Horas? his men?” he asked.
Krevan shook his head. “The arrows…bore a dark alchemy of loam, anathema to air. Captain tried to tamp the mekanical. Save the ship.”
The pirate turned to Tylar. Fire shone in his eyes, burning with the promise of revenge.
As if challenging this threat, laughter carried to them, floating out of the mists above, as if from clouds themselves.
Brant stepped to Tylar’s shoulder. “The Huntress,” the boy said, naming the true source of the amusement, hidden up in the mists, aloft in her castillion.
Her words echoed down to him, powered by Grace.
“Welcome, Godslayer…welcome to Saysh Mal!”
A SCRATCH AT THE WINDOW
“Are all the townsfolk secure?” Kathryn asked.
Keeper Ryngold nodded. “We’ve turned the Grand Court into a makeshift inn. The accommodations in the amphitheater will be nothing more than a stone bed and a blanket, but it’s warm and out of the winds.”
They spoke in private outside the door to a gathering room midlevel in Stormwatch. She heard the murmur of
