It’s exactly the sort of book I expected to see, even though it wasn’t being kept where I imagined they’d be keeping it. A big, heavy tome with a steel clasp and dark, scaly leather binding, like the hide of a dragon. Whatever it is, it ages very well. If the book is actually eight hundred years old.

For once I’m grateful Eceans don’t take magic seriously. After what we went through just to get out of the city, I’m pleased our task here was a simple one. It suits the mood right now. Arcadia has the Compendium clasped to her chest with one arm, walking alongside me with her other hand in mine. From up here we spotted a simpler way down, a roundabout path descending the rocky hills toward the cove we left Posca hiding in. Far below us, the bubble of unnatural fog still shrouds the cove and the ship hiding inside.

Arcadia can’t stop smiling. I can’t either.

She gives me a sidelong glance, squeezes my hand a little. “How long have you felt this way?” she asks.

I squeeze her hand back, as I kick a pebble down the path. “I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve been seeing things much more clearly, these last few days. I wonder why.”

When I smirk at her, she blushes and grins and looks away. Gods I love it when she does that.

I yank her in close and smack a kiss onto her cheek, making her yelp and giggle. “Stop!” she says, in the midst of laughing.

“What about you?” I ask. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Arcadia smiles, in a self-mocking kind of way, looking out over the path ahead. “I didn’t think anyone would ever want me like that. Especially the way I was. Even if I told you back then, it wouldn’t have been what I wanted.”

“Back then?”

She blushes again, risks a glance my way. “Since the day we met.”

Such things she says. They pull at me. They make my body want to be closer to her body. So I take that book out of her hands, stash it in my pack. She pouts about it, tries to grab at it, but then I grip her by the shoulders and I pin her back against a tree and I kiss her as hard as I can.

The sensations are remarkably detailed. The swoon that slips from Arcadia’s mouth after our lips meet. The fullness of her hips in my hands. The way her head tilts backward a little to give me better access. The feel of her body against mine, the warmth of her, the softness. The feathery touch of her hands on my waist. The hazy, wanting look she gives me the moment after our lips have parted.

And the blush. Always the blush.

I hear something odd in the distance. It sounds like a nest of angry hornets, but hornets aren’t nocturnal. Strange. Arcadia doesn’t seem to hear it, but my ears are a bit keener. It must be too far away.

I decide it’s probably nothing, and grin down at her. “You know, we could have been lovers back at the palace. Royals like you are always fooling about with their servants.”

Arcadia takes a moment to process what I said. Then that goofy grin comes back and she looks away blushing. "Sh-Shut up,” she stammers. “I don’t think I could have, anyway. Doing this with my old body would have made me feel sick."

That buzzing seems to be getting louder. I glance over my shoulder, but nothing is there. Arcadia gives me a puzzled look and I apologize by putting another peck on her lips.

“I’m sorry it had to be that way,” I smile, squeeze her reassuringly. “But I have a feeling things will be getting better now.”

She smiles back at me, in a way that makes me think she’s trying to convince herself this is all real. At the last moment her smile sweetens, and she comes up onto her tiptoes to kiss me again.

“Much better,” she says.

Kissing. It’s become so interesting. Like eating noodles or something, you can’t possibly stop after just one. And the way she does it is such a thrill, so delicate, plaintive even. Her eyes close, and I feel her fingertips wandering upward along the musculature of my back. It makes me shiver and hug her tighter as we lock lips again and again. We bonk each other’s foreheads accidentally, giggle a little, keep going at it. Our hands roam over each other’s bodies with impunity.

We’ll get back to the boat eventually. It isn’t going anywhere. But that buzzing keeps getting closer…

Then all of a sudden, CLACK.

Blinding light envelops us. I squeeze my eyes shut and even then I’m seeing stars. The downside of enhanced vision is that it can be overwhelmed easily, and I’m feeling it in this instance. I shield Arcadia with my body and turn, raising a hand over my brow to peer up at the source of light above us.

I can’t see much. That buzzing sound is nice and loud though, and the limbs of the trees around us wave madly in the wind it’s kicking up. Another sound joins in, a rapid-fire clicking. Then pain, as something pierces my right shoulder.

It’s a fucking… Crossbow bolt?!

I hear another one whiz by our heads. Three more of them thunk into the trunks of nearby trees. Fear comes, and I shove it away with discipline. We need to move.

Arcadia seems to agree, because she takes off running the moment I do. That beam of light stays on us as we go, which, in a way, is good. It means we can see the craggy, uneven ground we’re sprinting over. But it’s also bad, because crossbow bolts are hailing down around us, pelting the ground and the trees, and they show no signs of slowing. I hear Arcadia whispering a spell as best she can while we run, and when she’s ready, she abruptly stops and turns to face our pursuer.

With a shout, she shoots her hands outward and upward, as if she were throwing a ball as hard as she can. Wind howls around us. Tree leaves spiral upward into the spiteful light, their trunks bending to the point where the thinner ones snap. It blows with enough force to send the light hurtling backward and off to the side.

I get a better look at it as soon as it’s no longer pointed in our direction. It’s… A flying chariot. Well, the front part of a chariot, anyways. The rest is unrecognizable, a machine of some kind. The source of that buzzing is a large, blurry disc above the body of the chariot itself, and behind it there’s a long wooden tail with a fin at the end. Like a fish. Big, bulky repeating crossbows are fitted to the sides of the chariot’s body.

What in the name of all the gods is this nonsense?

I glance at Arcadia, hoping the look on her face will give me a clue as to what the fuck is going on. I see surprise, and anger, and something like recognition. If, ‘Oh, shit, not this,’ had a face, her expression would be it.

I tap her shoulder, and when she looks at me I point past her, over the ledge we’re standing on. She seems to understand because she nods, so I wrap my arms around her and we take a dive down the the cliff to the next ledge beneath us. Just like the way we departed the Magnottos’ house. An upward gust of wind cushions the end of our fall, and just as the chariot seems to get control of itself again, we crouch behind a big rock nearby.

“What is that thing?” I whisper.

“A flying machine,” whispers Arcadia.

I’m ready with about a dozen more questions, but Arcadia shakes her head, puts a finger to her lips. I take her cue to shut up, and it’s a good thing I did, because that light sweeps over us a moment later. The whirring sound of the machine is close again, and after the light passes us by I peek over the rock to see what we’re dealing with.

There are people in this thing. Two of them, a girl standing behind the shield of the chariot and a man sitting in a chair a bit behind that, apparently operating its controls. I recognize one immediately, the other by description only.

Belina’s handmaiden, Cadie. And a lanky old fucker with skin like leather and a shabby cloak.

I knew there was something off about the fear in her eyes that night. The way she ran pell-mell into the dark. So. She went to fetch this man, who looks as much like a street urchin as any street urchin I’ve ever seen, and his flying chariot armed with repeating crossbows. Right. This all makes perfect sense. I mean, it makes perfect sense in the sense that it doesn’t make any fucking sense at all.

I duck down again, as the face of the chariot begins to turn in our direction for another pass. Its light sweeps by us a second time, a little lower now, a little closer. Then I hear more peculiar noises. A faint hissing. A clink of something metallic hitting the rocks. Hiss. Clink. Hiss. Clink.

Something lands near where we’re hiding, rolls toward us, stops. It’s a fist sized ball of some manner of soft metal. There’s a wick sticking out of the top of it, like a candle. But it’s not burning the way a candle would, it’s fizzing angrily as it rapidly burns away.

I’ve never seen one of these things before. But apparently Arcadia has, because she reacts immediately. She goes pale as her eyes widen. She is already muttering something under her breath, and then she extends her hands out. Air rushes past us, and the ball rolls away from us instead of toward us.

Then there’s a blinding light. But no sound. How odd.

When I regain consciousness, the first thing I become aware of is a monotone ringing in my ears. I feel cold stone against my cheek. I’m lying face down. A few blinks of my eyes and I can begin to see clearly again. That rock we were hiding behind is gone, and there’s a big black smudge of soot in its place. There are several more such smudges, all evenly spaced out from each other along the hillside.

I feel the sting of a hundred little cuts all over my body. That thing exploded, threw me back. Arcadia was thrown in the opposite direction. There’s a bloodstain where her head bounced off the rock by where she’s lying, eyes closed, a little pool of red edging outward from under her cheek.

Seeing her turns my heart to ice. For a moment every single muscle in my body goes rigid, before I explode into a sprint toward her. The light on the front of the chariot snaps onto me, and I’m pierced by a half a dozen crossbow bolts before I can make it.

I barely feel it. I barely feel anything.

Stiffly, I turn to face the light, bleeding from more places than I can count. This flying war machine hovers just above me, perhaps readying itself to pincushion my body with another volley of projectiles. But I won’t give them the chance. It’s my turn to make them bleed.

This time I run at the ledge, leap at the last second, and for a gut-wrenching series of moments I am flailing in midair. The flying machine tries to pull up and away from me, sending a jolt of sheer terror down my spine. But then, just when I feel like I’ve missed my chance, I catch one of the spokes of the chariot wheel.

And the canyon around me beings to spin. Rapidly. Because the machine itself is spinning and I’m holding on for dear life. I try to reach up with my left hand to grab something, any kind of handhold, when fresh pain blossoms in my shoulder. The one Metellus chopped through not even two days ago. It chose this moment to reach its limit. A cry of pain escapes me, but I choke back the worst of it. I don’t have time for it right now.

Another swing and a miss, and this one hurts worse than the last. The puncture wounds from the crossbows don’t come close to the level of pain in my shoulder. I look up in despair as the chariot continues to whirl around, out of control, and I have a revelation.

It happens when the chariot passes directly underneath the red moon. I get a better look up at the blurry disc keeping it aloft, realize it’s a blur of moving parts. Blades. Like the oars of a boat but longer and skinnier, spinning so fast the eye can’t keep up. If something were to catch in those things, tangle them, this chariot would come down like a stone.

There’s a rope with a grapnel in my pack. I didn’t use it on the climb because I wanted to show off for Arcadia. Now my shoulder’s paying doubly for my mistake, but I don’t have another moment to fret about stupid choices. I reach into it with my left hand as we tumble through the air, and a breathtaking bolt of pain shoots through me when my arm bends.

But I find it. I pull it out. And I fix my gaze on the spinning blades above me, as I whip the grapnel around to give it speed.

Then I take my shot. And the blades deflect the grapnel away, far faster than I threw it.

But I don’t have time to curse my bad luck, because there’s a sharp cry of pain that same instant. My grapnel struck the man at the controls, and now he’s clutching his bleeding shoulder, doubled over in pain. Cadie makes no move to assist him, but then again we’re spinning uncontrollably through the air, so I sort of understand. She’s clutching the rim of the chariot, her knuckles white, red hair streaming about the mask of terror that is her face.

I realize they have the same color hair, though the man’s is greying at the temples and his crown is mostly bald. It’s strange, the things you notice in situations like this.

The sensation of falling gets my attention next, because it feels like my stomach just leapt up into my throat. This chariot is hurtling toward the rocks at sickening speed. I glance down, see that we’re over the waters of the cove, and realize that this is the best chance I have to let go safely.

This time the falling sensation is much more pleasant, because at least I’m falling straight down. Just before I plunge into the fog, I see the spinning blades of the flying machine snap against the rocks. Then the rest of it crumples and shatters, its remnants tumbling down the hillside. That’s all I see, before I see nothing but fog, and then I splash down into the water like a rock.

Cold darkness envelops me. The water blocks out everything, light and sound and even pain. But my peace only lasts a moment, before my eyes snap open and I urgently swim up toward the surface of the water.

By the time I’m crawling up onto the rocky shore of the cove, Posca and his crew are making their way down the gangplank, calling out to me through the fog. I see the light of their torches, call back to them as many times as it takes for them to find me.

Posca’s face is the first I see, and the sight of all the crossbow bolts sticking out of me makes his eyes widen in alarm. He holds the torch out toward me, leans in to get a better look.

“What happened to you?” he asks. “What the hell is going on out here?”

I turn my gaze to the hills, point my shaky left hand toward them. “Arcadia’s up there. She’s hurt, I don’t know how badly. Have your men help me get her down here.”

Fear and concern touch his expression at the same time, in a way that makes me like him just a little more. He complies without another word, barks orders to his men, and all of us set out to climb to Arcadia’s rescue.

And if there’s anything left of the people who did this to her, they’ll pay. Dearly.