then turned at a right angle and struck the stern of the flier that had fired it. The guards aboard the flier hurried to put out the flames.
Sela looked back and realized that Timha had been too late. The fire was spreading across their deck; the wheel was aflame. Ironfoot and Timha were backed into a corner. Timha continued to make his sigils, but whatever he was attempting didn't appear to be working. Silverdun was struggling to reload his crossbow, but the crazy movement of the vessel made it nearly impossible.
The yacht stalled, then lurched. A gust of wind caught the loose mainsail, and the world began to spin around Sela. Flames licked the sail, and it caught fire as well, smoke spiraling up from the top of the mast.
Then came a percussive sound that made Sela's bones shake. The deck dipped and swayed. Seta lost her balance and fell onto the deck, and then somehow the deck was above her, and she was spinning, spinning, falling.
She turned over in the wind, and now she could see below her. Wind ruffled endless wheat fields like waves in the ocean, growing gray in the moonlight. In the center of the wheat, however, was a great, irregular oval of blackness, a space of utter darkness. Strangely, it did not look as if she was falling. Had Silverdun or Ironfoot done something to arrest their descent? All around her was smoke and flame. She couldn't see anything other than the ground below her.
Wind blew up at her, forcing her skirts up and her hair back from her head. Her skirts and sleeves were whipped by the air, flapping frantically against her skin.
Now she saw that she was falling, but from such a great height that it hadn't seemed like it at first. The black oval was like a mouth; it reached out toward her. The farther she fell, the larger it grew, and she realized that she was falling directly into the center of the umbra, the shadow of Preyia. Where it was bad luck to stand.
Now the ground was rushing toward her, the blackness expanding around her on all sides. The umbra was pure, velvety blackness; no moonlight illuminated its depths.
She fell and fell, her breath caught in her throat. The blackness grew and grew until it was everywhere and there was nothing but the black below and the smoke and the fire above and they came together and Sela gasped and the flame met the blackness with Sela in the middle. Dark and light. A loud rush and a silence.
The only Fae surface dwellers in the Unseelie are the Arami, that strange breed who maintain the ways of the wild Fae clans from before the time of Uvenchaud.They scrupulously avoid their airborne counterparts, or anyone else, for that matter. Thus, very little is known about them.
It is speculated that the odd, guttural language that has so confounded linguists (on the rare occasions the Arami have consented to be interviewed) is actually a variation of the original Elvish tongue. If they are to be believed, they are the last remaining vestige of the aboriginal Fae.
The Unseelie take no heed of the Arami. The Unseelie only leave their flying cities to take water from the wells that dot the landscape during periods of little rain, which are common in that northern clime. The Arami scrupulously avoid them when they come to ground.
-Stil-Fret, ''The Arami: the Unknown Fae of the North;' from Travels at Home and Abroad
atterns. Ironfoot was lost in patterns. Two of them, one superimposed on the other. They were similar, but not the same. Almost identical, in fact. But at the heart of them was a discrepancy, an error, like an elegant equation that hid an undefined term somewhere within it. Everything looked right on the surface; it was only by traversing the threads of the patterns that the impossibility was visible.
But where was this error? What caused it? He traced the pattern in his mind, but it was so large and elusive that he couldn't hold it. As he envisioned one portion of it, the others slid away from him; it was impossible to connect it all. He needed paper, and his map.
He reached for paper, but his arm wouldn't move. He tried to sit up, but something heavy was on top of him. He began to panic. He opened his eyes. It was dark, black within black. His throat made a strangling noise, halfway between a whimper and a scream. Where was he?
'Over here!' came a voice. 'I heard something!'
Ironfoot reached into his body and tried to calm it, as Paet had tried to teach him during one of their regular trainings a few weeks earlier. He'd never quite understood what Paet had meant; but his mind was attuned to patterns at the moment, and suddenly he could read the patterns within his own body, the energies that coursed through him and the objects that the energies connected. There was his heart, thudding. He willed it to slow and it slowed. There was another tiny thing, spitting out panic into his blood. He willed it to stop, and it stopped.
He willed strength into his arms and pushed. He and Silverdun had
