First Lord like that?
Gaius replied with wry amusement in his own voice. “Behold my own.”
“Mmmm,” she murmured, a pensive sound. “Some of your folk are among them.”
“Nonetheless.”
“I have no preference,” she said. “Not of my own accord. Though I admit that I have grown… accustomed to you and yours, child.”
“I ask for no exemptions,” Gaius responded. “Only prevailing conditions.”
She laughed, a gently mocking sound. “You, child? Seeking to prevail? Surely not.”
“Time presses,” Gaius said, his tone polite, but thick with an underlying urgency.
“With you and yours, it seldom does otherwise.” She paused for a moment, then said, “It is entirely possible that we may never speak again.”
“I have made my wishes known.”
“Your father would be… what is the phrase?”
“Rolling in his grave,” Gaius supplied.
“Yes. Were such a thing possible.”
“But you will honor them?”
Ehren blinked again, not so much at the words the First Lord had used as at the intonation.
It had been a question. Not a command.
To whom would the
“It has never before been done this way. But I believe so.”
The First Lord’s voice dropped to a lower register, relief evident in it. “Thank you.”
“Gratitude?” the woman asked, her tone quietly merry. “What is the world coming to?”
Ehren, burning with curiosity, eased up the last few stairs and opened the door as silently as he possibly could, peering around it.
Gaius stood where he had before. A woman stood beside him, facing him, his equal in height. Her skin was a deep bronze, her hair silver, threaded with rare strands of scarlet and gold, though her face was younger than Ehren’s own, strong and beautiful in a way he had never seen before. She wore a simple gown and shawl of what Ehren first thought was homespun, but at a startled second glance he realized that the clothing was made purely of what looked like opaque grey mist, as thick and swirling as any storm cloud, but holding its solid shape as if it were cloth.
The woman turned her head abruptly to one side, her eyes flicking toward him. They were brilliant gold. As Ehren watched, they flickered to silver-metallic silver, not simply grey-and a heartbeat later became sky blue, then green and faceted, like a masterfully cut emerald, then dark and glossy as obsidian.
Gaius turned as well, and the woman was abruptly gone. There was no flicker of a veil coming up, no blur of motion as of a windcrafter’s drawing upon a fury for additional speed, nothing. One instant she was standing, regarding Ehren calmly, and the next she was simply… not.
Which was clearly impossible.
“Cursor,” Gaius said, nodding calmly. “Something to report?”
“Sire?” Ehren blinked and recovered himself. “Ah. Yes, sire. Pardon me, I did not mean to interrupt.”
Gaius lifted both eyebrows and asked, a hard little edge on his words, “Interrupt?”
“Your conversation…”
Gaius narrowed his eyes. “Conversation?”
Ehren coughed. “I was thinking, sire, that the vordknights depend upon wings for flight. Like birds. Birds depend upon using the air. They won’t fly in a storm.”
“I’d been thinking the same thing,” Gaius replied with an approving nod. “What else?”
“I would also advise cutting the causeway behind us periodically as we retreat. Every mile or so should be sufficient to ensure that the enemy can’t use it.”
Gaius winced, but blew out a sigh. “Yes. I suppose that would be for the best.”
A cold wind suddenly washed across the tower from the north, a chill blast that felt as if it must have begun at the Shieldwall and come to Ceres without crossing the intervening space between. The First Lord turned into the wind and closed his eyes for a moment, stretching out his hand with his fingers spread. Ehren saw him murmur something under his breath, then nod once. Ehren went to the tower’s edge beside the First Lord, and saw the wind as it crossed the city below, and spread out into the fields beyond. Almost at once, it seemed, fog began to rise from streams and ponds.
In the air above the fields, Ehren saw that the disastrous rout had somehow been arrested, and it did not take long to see why. A second bright star of light, the glowing blade of a High Lord, had risen into the skies, and around that brilliant core of light, the battered Aleran forces had rallied. The bright scarlet of the star identified the High Lord of Aquitaine, and he had gathered what fliers remained into a cohesive force that had moved together in close formation, the sheer power of its combined windstreams sending vordknights scattering wildly through the air-a Legion shieldwall, taken to the skies.
Scarlet lightning flashed through the night, raking Vord from the air and slowing the advance of the oncoming tide. The fleeing cavalry began to emerge from beneath the shadow of the Vord, running for their lives, and only the courage and power of the few men who remained aloft and fighting the Vord sheltered them from being destroyed en masse.
The First Lord lifted his face to the evening sky and closed his eyes. He did not speak or move, but his expression became strained.
The vordknights began to reach the walls of the city, mostly the strays who had been blown that way by the disrupting gale of the Aleran aerial rear guard. The Legions defending Ceres had moved back into position after the first massive salvo of furycraft had taken them from the walls. Knights Flora and Ignus began hammering the Vord from the air with fire and arrow.
One vordknight streaked toward the tower where Ehren and the First Lord stood, only to be struck by half a dozen arrows loosed from the bows of the Knights Flora of the Crown Guard positioned on the neighboring towers. It dropped instantly, smashing into the battlements with a brittle, crackling sound, one of its wings still buzzing uselessly as it fell toward the courtyard fifty feet below.
The cold wind from the north grew colder yet, and Ehren shivered, his cloak suddenly inadequate against it. He turned to look over his shoulder, to the north, and saw the stars change from sharp, clear pinpoints of light to murky, blurry spots of silver in the night sky.
Gaius nodded once, and said, “Let’s begin, then, shall we?” He turned his palms to the sky and lifted them in a single, sharp gesture.
The low-lying fog that had formed on the ground, somehow untouched by the wind, suddenly leapt skyward. It boiled up over the walls of Ceres and swallowed the tower in a sudden rush of warmer air. The fog passed them, and Ehren saw it lifting away into the sky like some enormous blanket.
Gaius sighed and lowered his arms, his shoulders slumping wearily. “Let’s see if this works.”
Ehren swallowed. “Sire? You don’t think it’s going to work?”
“The theory is sound. But we’ve no way of being sure, have we?”
“Ah,” the young Cursor said. “What will we do if it doesn’t?”
Gaius arched an eyebrow and said, calmly, “I expect we will die, Sir Ehren. Don’t you?”
Thunder rumbled through the greyness overhead.
Ehren shivered, but before he had time to respond, he felt the first ice-cold raindrops begin to fall. They came one by one at first, then began to fall more and more thickly. He walked over to stand beside Gaius, who stared out at a battlefield that had been almost entirely occluded by rain. The burning sword of High Lord Aquitaine was leaving a plume of steam behind it, even as the Aleran fliers began to turn back toward the city, losing altitude as they came.
“You knew Rhodes was going to be killed when you sent him out there,” Ehren said quietly.
“Did I?” Gaius asked.
“And when this is over, Aquitaine is going to look like the man who created an orderly retreat out of a rout.”
“Not to quibble,” Gaius murmured, “but Lord Aquitaine
