perhaps two hours after dark, they found her sitting on her front step, a flowered carpet bag containing a few clothes and other essentials on her lap. She reached for her cane and got to her feet as the sergeant called the men-at-arms to a rather startled halt.
“Took you long enough,” she said cheerfully. “Well, come on, Sergeant. I’ve grown tired of the cold and the dark. I think it’s time I paid a visit to the Palace, don’t you? Always spring inside the Lesser Barrier, they do say.” And she set off down the gully at such a pace, despite her cane, that the men-at-arms had to resume quick- marching in order to give her a proper escort.
CHAPTER 15
Brenna had never imagined anything like the sensation that hurtling skyward in the airship produced. It felt as if she had left her insides behind on the ground, and at the same time was being pushed downward by some strange force. Magic! she thought, but, no, there was no magic in that entire incredible device: no magic in the enormous blue silk envelope above them, no magic in the rush of cold air as they soared above Falk’s manor. Within seconds she found herself gasping for breath, both from the cold, which had become even more intense, and because she just couldn’t seem to get enough air into her lungs…
“Air… thins… with altitude,” Anton said, panting as though he had run a race. “Good thing we… didn’t go much higher or… might have passed out.” He was peering over the side. “We’ve found… a fast wind… making fifty miles an hour, I think.”
Thin air? Brenna had never imagined such a thing. Surely air was air, and stretched all the way to the stars. But then, Brenna had never imagined being in the sky before, either, except in dreams of flying. And as for the speed… the fastest magecarriage-Falk’s-could do twenty miles an hour (though few of the roads allowed that for more than a few minutes), and she found that terrifyingly fast. And yet, up here, she didn’t feel like they were moving at all.
With a great effort she heaved herself up and peered over the side of the gondola. What she saw made her gasp anew, not from lack of air, but from the sheer shock of seeing her world in a whole new way.
The manor was little more than a dot far below and far behind, almost lost in the glare off of the vast snow- covered plain that slipped steadily beneath them and stretched away as far as she could see… or almost as far: to the west, her view ended in the Great Barrier. It looked even more immense from up here than it did from the ground, a vast wall of fog disappearing into the distance to north and south… but not above.
In fact, she realized with an almost superstitious thrill, she was above the top edge of the Great Barrier. Which meant the distant land she could see over there, identical as far as she could tell to the land stretching out to the east, flat and snow-covered, with only occasional copses of trees, was outside the Barrier, out in the world she had never even wondered about until Anton had arrived so precipitously in her life.
Anton was looking that way, too. “If only… the wind were from the east,” he said despairingly, between heaving gasps of air. “Or we had fuel… we could… fly out.” He looked away from the Barrier, and deeper into Evrenfels. “But we’re… bound northeast. We might make… a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles… if the stove works… what’s… out there?”
Brenna still couldn’t tear her eyes from the Barrier and the immense sweep of land beyond it. A whole world free from the likes of Falk and Mother Northwind, she thought. A world where no one even believes in magic, much less uses it to terrorize and destroy…
She wished for a moment with all her heart that she could fly out of Evrenfels with Anton, leave Falk and his ilk to rot inside the Great Barrier. But they were at the mercy of the wind, and, blowing from the southwest, it was bearing them steadily northeast.
Already they were not quite as high, either, she realized. She could see less of that land beyond the Barrier. Slowly but surely, it was vanishing.
She glanced at Anton. “A scattering of villages,” she said. “And then the Great Lake.”
“A lake?” Anton was peering ahead. “How big?”
“Enormous. Like an inland sea.”
“We could be over the lake when we run out of altitude,” he said, a note of worry in his voice.
Brenna thought what that would mean, descending onto the frozen lake, miles of ice between them and any possibility of shelter or help, and the air suddenly felt even colder.
But there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. They had literally cast their fate to the winds when they launched the airship, and now they could do nothing but wait and see how their cast played out.
Within a few minutes, they were breathing more easily. “We’ll be on the ground in less than half an hour if this doesn’t work,” Anton said, indicating the magecarriage stove. “Guess we’d better find out.” He knelt in the bottom of the gondola, gripped the bellows attached to the side of the stove’s round belly, and began to pump.
Smoke belched from the chimney and poured up into the gondola. The stove began to roar. Anton, sweat starting on his face even in the cold, kept working the bellows. After a few minutes, the stove began to glow a dull red. Brenna could feel the heat radiating from it where she stood, and only hoped enough was going into the envelope to make a difference.
After five minutes, Anton released the bellows, his breath coming in great clouds of vapor as he let himself fall backward. “Hard… work…” he gasped. He got up, groaning, went into the stern, and checked the instruments there. “It worked!” he said after a moment. “We’re descending much more slowly.” He flexed his hands, then stretched his arms out, wincing. “It may kill me, but it works.”
An hour went by… then two. Every few minutes, Anton worked the bellows. He quit talking altogether, just adding coal to the stove, pumping for as long as he could, sweat running from his increasingly red face, then letting go with a gasp, checking the altitude, and resting silently until it was time to pump once more.
Brenna offered to help, but discovered she simply couldn’t work the bellows fast enough. “I’m sorry,” she said, gasping, as she let go and got back to her feet.
“Just… keep a look out,” Anton said, settling himself with a groan before the bellows once more.
Brenna nodded, and retreated to the gondola’s rail.
She found the view even more fascinating as the ground grew closer, as it did despite all of Anton’s working of the bellows and the roaring of the little stove. They passed over a village, miniature dark roofs and little wisps of chimney smoke slipping silently beneath them. Brenna wondered if anyone down there would look up and see them. She hoped not: Falk would certainly be on their trail and looking for eyewitnesses.
She said as much to Anton, as he rested between battles with the bellows. “But you must have known that from the beginning,” he said. “What was your plan for when we landed?”
Brenna said nothing. In fact, she had had no plan: just the absolute certainty that they had to flee before Mother Northwind touched Anton again, before Falk returned to take them all to the Palace to further his mysterious Plan to destroy the Barrier, the Plan in which Brenna, unimaginably, somehow had a central role.
“I guess I was hoping we could find a friendly farmer to put us up,” she said. “Then… I don’t know. Flee north, I suppose. Few MageLords venture up there, and the Commoners who do appreciate that. They’d be unlikely to give us away.”
“We have no supplies,” Anton said. “Nothing but the clothes on our back. No food. No water.”
“But at least your mind is still your own!” Brenna snapped. “Anton, I did the best I could. I couldn’t get any supplies without making Gannick suspicious. We had to go when we did, as quickly as we did, or we weren’t going to escape at all.”
Anton said nothing. Then he sighed. “I know,” he said. “It’s rather ungracious for the rescuee to wish for a betterorganized rescue, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “None of this is what I expected when the Professor and I set out,” he said. “But then, I guess none of us gets a choice in what life throws at us.”
“No.” Brenna thought of her own circumscribed life as Falk’s ward. “No, we don’t.”
The airship drifted and dropped. Though Brenna couldn’t feel it in the gondola, she knew a stiff breeze was scouring the prairie below, sending snow-snakes whipping over the ground, and she welcomed it, its force sending them farther from Falk every passing minute.
When they crossed the western edge of the Great Lake about three thousand feet remained between themselves and the ice, Anton reported. “Maybe we’ll make it across yet,” he said, settling himself at the bellows
