I was in a daze after what I had just learned, and delirious to find myself so abruptly under the sun again. We all looked about ourselves in astonishment—and the durrow, with fear and the quick but ultimately unnoticed snatching up of their hoods—but I, most of all, felt instantaneous relief.
How had we gotten aboveground? Had we gone ourselves, like sleepwalkers in the clutches of some dream? Or had we been in some way teleported by the most powerful magic-user I had ever met?
In either case, I found myself before a familiar face. Lively regarded us as though we had simply walked up to her, and in fact seemed mid-turn as though to address someone who had tapped her on the shoulder.
“Oh,” she cried, her face lighting up to see us, “oh, there you lot are! Almost too late—cor! You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Rorke.”
“Only tired, Madame,” I told her, patting her shoulder when she briefly embraced me. When we released, Lively drew our purse from her bodice. As Odile took it, I assured our friend, “It’s been a long, long day, and looks like it’s going to be an even longer one.”
“Well, it would have been infinitely longer if you hadn’t gotten here when you did. The porter’s just made a call for five minutes to launch.”
“Did you get the tickets, Lively?”
Beaming, the kind woman plucked five oblong and ornately carved chips from the pocket of her apron. Each bore an intricate design of the airship’s logo—in this case, a fragile-necked swan with two marvelously plumed wings outspread—and a small magical sigil that glowed to indicate the tickets’ authenticity. She turned them about for us, then passed them over.
“The Battle Swan,” read Indra, a few locks of white hair falling across her eyes and thereafter pushed back into the mess hidden in her hood. “What a strange name!”
“Swans are vicious,” I said, “and some of these airships running today are re-purposed from previous wars…this is just such a one.”
Dubious, Odile fit her goggles on and peered up above the gates of the airport. The swollen edge of the dirigible was just visible, shining on the other side of a tarmac heated with the noonday sun. Forced to grimace against the glare even with her welding goggles, the skeptical rogue said, “I don’t know…the last time you people were at war was before you were born, Burningsoul. Do we really want to risk riding in a thirty-year-old dirigible?”
“Now you’re starting to sound like Sharp,” I teased her, adding as I distributed the tickets, “but rest assured, the airships are maintained by dedicated crews. There’s very rarely an accident. I’ve heard it said riding in an airship is safer than riding a horse.”
“That may be so, but you lot be careful on your journey.” Kissing my cheek, then Branwen’s, then the rest of us in turn, Lively pressed the tips of her fingers to her lips and regarded us with glittering eyes. “Oh! I’m getting bleary. Get on with it, now! Pray for me, Master Burningsoul, and I’ll pray for you in turn.”
“That sounds like a deal to me, Lively. Fare you well! We’ll be in touch, we swear.”
And then, by Weltyr, we made it aboard the airship.
Perhaps it seems anticlimactic that, given our pursuit, we managed to board the blimp without further problem—but the truth was that the porters were annoyed with our last-minute arrival and barely bothered to glance at the economy class tickets they took from our hands. Actually looking in our faces was out of the question. If there had been any concern that we might be identified, or that the durrow might be singled out due to their species, those evaporated when aboard the airship.
The only trouble was, of course, our weapons—one may imagine I was even less keen to check Exigence than I had been to permit temporary confiscation of Strife—but I was confident none of us would need anything of the sort. Especially not as we entered the airship and saw the happy faces of all the laughing, chatting, bright-eyed, excited passengers.
The Swan was an older ship than some of the ones the Rhineland airports might have boasted, but it was my first and, still to my mind, the most beautiful I’ve seen. When it was initially remodeled there had been no such thing as an economy class, and as a result the economy passengers were seated in a renovated ballroom. Past gilded scroll-work windows and through the polished arches of doorways, my companions and I found two rows of empty seats. Arranged in threes as they were, we were able to form a merry group by trading seats with an amiable couple who would be getting off at the layover in Estos, the region in the Eastern half of the continent where a few species of orc made their homes alongside some populations of human and wood elf. The thought of this reminded me of Soot and their new gimlet neighbors. How I prayed they would be successful!
And how refreshing it was to talk of mundane things with good, wholesome, god-fearing people who took one look at my durrow companions, assumed correctly that they were nothing more than a species of elf about which they’d never heard, and paid the matter no further mind. After the shock I’d received that morning with Zweiding and the Order’s position on mankinds other than human, I had to wonder about nearly everyone I met. Did they, too, harbor some secret impulse against the other species in the world? How could such kneejerk reactions be overcome in any way that mattered? I thought of my own constant rivalry with Grimalkin, who was in his turn quite opposed to humans—the men, at least. Was he aboard the Swan? I hoped he was; it seemed now that we owed it to one another to make amends.
When the ship was steady in the
