“You two are late,” Maude scolded, but it was a soft and joking tone she used. She grabbed Meggie and quickly helped her change, running the brush through her hair a dozen or more times so that her hair had a gloss that made it look remarkably like moonlight. Maude cleared her throat. “It is time for a bedtime tale,” she began.
“And this time, I shall be the tale-teller,” Bran said, stepping in.
Maude smiled and sat on the edge of the bed with Meggie, delighting in the story Bran told, which included a pantomime of dancing bears and assorted animal noises. At the story’s conclusion, both Maude and Meggie were laughing and clapping.
Bran took a bow.
Together the two adults tucked Meggie in and kissed her cheek and forehead.
It was then that Bran realized something was missing. “Where is your bed?” he asked Maude.
She wove her fingers together before her and looked out from beneath her eyelashes at him. “I did consider what Meggie had suggested regarding your far-too-large-for-one bed. And considering that I hear the snoring nightly all the way in here, I think I might somehow adjust to the noise being—a bit closer?”
Bran blinked at her. “Oh. Why, yes, of course.” He motioned to the bed and followed her, curious.
She closed the door between Meg’s room and Bran’s and turned off the remaining stormlight.
Bran stood there beside the bed and in the dark, both literally and figuratively. He heard the rustle of fabric and the sound of cloth hitting the floor. “If I asked you to leave here with me and Meggie, would you?”
The noise at his bedside ceased a moment. “What? Fly away with you on some airship on a grand adventure?” Her tone was hard to read and he wondered if she was mocking him.
But hearing another piece of clothing hit the floor he realized he didn’t care at the moment. She’d know he was serious soon enough. “Yes.”
“Then yes,” she replied. “I will go away with you, Bran Marshall. I will let you fly me straight to the heavens, if you like.”
She slipped beneath the covers.
As did he.
Maude rolled onto her side to face his side of the bed.
As he rolled onto his side to face hers.
They lay in the darkness together but apart until she stretched an arm out and rested her hand on his side. He snorted at the touch of her and she said, “Hush now. You stay on your side and I shall stay on mine.”
But neither of them obeyed the mandate and neither of them found reason to complain afterward, either.
Rowen was so close to the horses he could hear the swish and slap of their tails on their hides as they defended themselves against the last flies of the season.
Ransom’s saddle had begun to slip to the side and Silver’s was obviously annoying him as he tried to rub it off against the nearest tree. Not wanting to startle them, Rowen began to sing a song, softly at first, but then he picked up volume until both of their ears pricked in his direction and then he stepped out and stretched his hand out before him as if he held a sweet. He had seen his father use a similar trick once before and remembered his words of advice: “Act as if you have something they want and they will be yours for the taking.”
So with every move, he made his body tell a story of having something that surely a horse would want.
Ransom looked up, still working grass around the bit of his bridle to chew it. He tilted his head and ambled over to investigate and as his velvet-soft nose brushed Rowen’s empty palm, Rowen slid his other hand along the stallion’s cheek and wrapped his fingers around the bridle’s leather straps.
Ransom blew out a hot puff of air and shook his head to rattle his dragging reins but conceded to his capture. Rowen worked his way around his steed then, never fully releasing him and carefully tightening everything from small buckle to girth strap. “I promise a proper stall tonight,” he said, “but now we have a mission to complete and a lady to rescue. Surely you can broach no argument in that regard.” He climbed into the saddle and encouraged Ransom into an easy walk, glancing over his shoulder from time to time at Silver.
Silver stayed with them, only a few lengths behind and tearing at grass as he went.
In the saddle Rowen nodded in time to Ransom’s pace and eyed the position of the sun. He nudged Ransom and they moved into a trot, Silver still keeping pace.
Marion’s travel, hidden in an oversized carriage, even hidden among the baggage, was far faster and on a far straighter route of main roads than the winding path to Holgate that Rowen’s solitary journey had required of him. Marion tried to get comfortable, pinned as he was between two trunks and a fabric bag that smelled of cat urine. It was no easy task and finally he gave up on that least important bit of his mission, abandoning comfort for the assurance of not being discovered.
So he bounced along, cramped but invigorated by the fact that he was moving ever faster toward completing the cycle of his destiny. That if he did this one thing, if he ended things where they had truly begun, perhaps he—and others like him—might then be free of the tyranny of their enslavement as Weather Witches. And perhaps no more children would be snatched from their parents and no more lives would be ruined for the sake of the minority’s luxury and their fear.
Shortly after breakfast Bran and Meggie met Maude outside the kitchens. She was tidying her hair as best she could and taking off the broad apron that protected most of her outfit from the normal hazards of cooking large quantities of food in a space shared with a dozen other people. She folded the apron and set it on a stack with others to be laundered. “You should not be down here,” she said to Bran. “It is not a proper place for a Maker or a wee lady—now that she has better.”
“You stay on your side and I stay on mine?” Bran asked.
His dimples were obvious and Maude grinned a response.
“Let us go out into the town,” Maude suggested. “The weather—”
“Will be perfection for viewing an airship docking,” Bran assured. “I have seen to it.”
They left the interior of Holgate’s mightiest structure and blinked against the brightness of the sun.
“Gorgeous,” Maude said.
High above them and to their west an airship was in view, its back a long egg-shaped balloon with long frame and fabric wings on either side and a rudder like a fish’s tail. Its belly was a large enclosed basket woven out of glass and metal.
“There,” Bran said, leaning over to be closer to Meg’s perspective. “The basket holds all the cargo and most of the people,” he explained. “The big balloon above it helps to keep it floating in the sky when the Conductor can no longer do it.”
“Why would a Conductor not…”
Bran’s expression darkened. “Sometimes they simply cannot. Or, rarely, they will not. But that almost never happens.”
Meg nodded, watching the lumbering beast of a balloon slowly drift toward the tower.
People stood silhouetted at the balcony’s edge, cables tied about their bodies and linked to the side of the building. In their hands they held cables of another sort, just as heavy-looking and also linked to the tower’s fat wall, but at multiple spots. Those on the balcony leaned forward as others leaned out of the balloon’s basket and tossed tethers toward the balcony. They were caught and looped around yet another tether point and the airship slowly turned so that its snout faced them and it sidled up to the balcony.
The waiting people holding the cables launched themselves at the massive ship, reaching up and out to grab the rope net holding the balloon and basket more fully together. They climbed as quick as monkeys, hauling themselves ever higher on the ship until they clamped their cables to the netting’s top and leaped the impossible distance back down onto the balcony.
Meg clapped her hands together and did a little dance. “Oh, Papa, that was amazing.”
He grabbed one of her hands and, swinging her arm with his, started them walking down the row of
