The Endless Skies

by Shannon Price

  I’ll focus on anything so long as it isn’t her.

  Across from me, Ox sets his bowl down half-eaten. The skin at his wrists is broken and bright red from pulling at our bonds on the way to Ramsgate, but his hands have stopped trembling. He has to be thinking of a way out, as I am now.

  “The humans who found us weren’t entirely afraid of us, and they didn’t hurt us,” I say, leaning my head back against the unforgiving stone of the cell. “And now they are giving us food.”

  “They want us alive, and healthy,” says Sethran.

  “Somehow that’s worse than wanting us dead,” I reply.

  “We have to consider all options,” Ox mutters. “They may be listening now. We can’t take chances. Just act.”

  Footsteps sound from the door that leads to the street. We get to our feet as it opens. A group of soldiers trudges down. One of them unlocks the cell door and comes over to me while the other points a gun at my head. I bare my teeth and spit on the human’s cheek as he pulls me forward by the iron chains binding my wrist.

  “If you find a way out, do not come back for us,” Sethran says. “You find the cure, and go straight home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Two of the soldiers keep their hands on my shoulders as the third leads the way back onto the street. We cross the same courtyard we came in through. A few kids playing with wooden swords stop to gape at me. I lock eyes with one and stare until my head is shoved forward. If that boy only sees one Leonodai in his lifetime, I want him to remember it.

  Past the courtyard, we cut through a wide walkway lined with soldiers and townsfolk. A long-legged dog trots lazily through the crowd. A couple tending to their horses waves off a merchant trying to sell them wares. Above us on the balconies, women hang clothes on lines. I linger on the sight for a moment.

  The scholars say that humans don’t treat their women like Leonodai do. Their women tend to children and the house only. Sethran once told me of a skirmish he and a few other warriors had a few months back. A human actually soiled himself at the sight of warrior Io as she towered over him, twin swords gleaming. I bet he thought that a woman didn’t have the guts to kill.

  She did.

  As I’m dragged along, I spot what looks like a market on the adjacent street. Long lines of people wait at every stall, money clutched nervously in their hands. Even from a distance, I can tell the vendors don’t have enough for everyone.

  I’m directed to a sturdy house of wood and stone guarded by one of the humans in silver and black. The door shuts behind us, cutting out the street noise like a blade cuts through thread. The hands on my shoulders are tighter now.

  The staircase beneath my feet squeaks as I’m led up. The air is warm, and as we get to the second story, I see why. An enormous fireplace takes up nearly a third of the wall. The windows are tinted an eerie amber and the light they let in just as strange. The rest of the room is lined with books, diagrams, insects with their wings pinned down in shallow boxes, and a myriad of other things I don’t understand. I’m nudged into a chair, and one of the soldiers keeps the barrel of his gun on my neck until the other human has finished tying my arms and legs to the chair.

  The crackle and snap of the fire is all that fills the room as the soldiers and I wait. Over on my left, three swords hang above the doorframe. My stomach clenches. The fine blades, the inlaid decorations in the traditional pattern of warriors. Those are Leonodai made. On the desk to my left a pair of human skulls stares back at me.

  One of the bookcases swings outward. A tall man, dressed in a black shirt, vest, and trousers, steps forth. A silver bird is embroidered on his velvet vest. His expression is drawn back in a permanent state of anger and distrust. I know that look well—it’s the same one my father has worn since his command was taken from him. It’s the look of a man who would not wait to get what he wanted. At a moment’s notice, without a thought for consequences, he would grasp for it.

  The man crosses the room slowly as if trying to read me. He pours a bit of golden liquid into a wide, clear glass, then comes over to me.

  “I am General Marchess,” he says.

  I bite down hard on my tongue and concentrate on all the ways I could possibly kill him. He repeats his name to make sure I get it.

  “I am a soldier like you. Now I am leader of this town. I take care of my people. Do you understand?”

  His Leonodai is boorish and simple, but I do understand him. I keep my gaze set straight ahead. “What is your name?”

  I think about the swords on the wall.

  “You can tell me,” he says.

  The curved shortsword. That would look best cutting through this human’s neck.

  When I don’t answer, General Marchess sighs dramatically. “I am not like a lot of people. The humans who brought you here have heard stories of Leonodai snatching children from their beds at night since they were children themselves. But I know you are not like that. You are worse.” Then he lunges forward, his fist catching me square in the jaw. Lights dance in my eyes as I choke back a staggering cough. “The Leonodai are liars. Do you see these?” He motions to the skulls. “One is human, one is Leonodai. Can you see the difference?”

  When I don’t look at the skulls, he grabs a fistful of my hair and makes me. But I already knew the answer. Our bones look the same. I knew it was true, but my magic screams in protest.

  “We are different,” I say finally. “We would not have let children die.” Too late, I remember what Rowan said about the peace offers we’d turned down.

  “Oh, but you already have,” he replies. “You deny my people enough food to support themselves. Deny us peace. Now your king comes with an offer of his own, begging us for help. Well, the time for kindness has passed. I have only done what he himself did before. I stood my ground.” He puffs his chest. “If I am to have the magic isle, I will have it all. That is what I’ve promised the starving faces that come to me each day.”

  I keep my mouth shut. My mind flashes to Rowan’s face as we stood in the rain when she told me of the sentinels’ lies, and the tired pain in her eyes. She said the sentinels lied to all of us, for years. What did we have to lose from ceasing the endless battles on the seas and at the Cliffs? It didn’t make sense, unless I accepted that both sides were too selfish, too proud.…

  General Marchess pulls a map from a drawer and lays it on the desk. Even from my vantage point, I recognize the curve of the Cliffs and the Heliana’s diamond points, but the Vyrinterra they’ve drawn isn’t quite the right shape. Because they haven’t been there yet.

  “We have spent the years learning about you from pieces the war left behind,” says Marchess. “We know that you bleed and feel pain just like we do. We know you get sick like we do. And now we have built aeroplanes that fly, so we can meet you in the skies. I have waited years to bring you down,” he says. “I have thought of all the ways to break you.”

  Meet us in the skies? “No Leonodai will break,” I fire back. “A Leonodai child is born braver and stronger than any human could hope to be in a lifetime.”

  “I expected you not to yield. Yet.” He sips his drink. “But I think I can fix that.” He splashes the rest of his drink onto my face. The liquid burns my nose and eyes, and I shout in rage, but the bonds keeping me to the chair hold fast.

  “Be grateful, you animal,” he says. “We will give you food and water. Anything you please. Because tomorrow, I will break you, warrior strength and all. Tomorrow, we’ll show this city who the superior beings are, before I launch my aeroplanes and decimate the magical races. Magic or no magic. You are no match for progress.”

  I shake off the sting of the drink. “Death fighting you would be an honor.”

  He smiles. “Then death it is.”

  33

  ROWAN

  A warm hand on my wrist jolts me awake.

  I sit up with a start, but Isla’s hand tightens, and she holds up a finger to her mouth, like shh.

  “Are you okay?” I whispe
r, unsure how much she understands.

  “Come with me,” she says. Then, another word that I think was an attempt at surprise.

  Isla waits as I lace up my boots, but she indicates that I should try to dress warm. Keeping the blanket around my upper body like a cloak, I follow her to the door. The girl’s eyes dart excitedly from me to the room where her mother is still asleep. She puts a finger to her lips again, and I nod. I’ll keep quiet. If my visits to Storm’s End have taught me anything, it’s to trust a young girl when she has that determined kind of look in her eye.

  We slip out into the night. My eyes adjust slowly, welcoming the moonlit scenery around us. A damp coolness hangs in the air, and wet earth muffles our steps. Ahead of me, Isla moves with fearless, confident steps. She knows this forest like I know the skies. I grin and quicken my pace to keep up.

  After a while, she bends down to duck under the rotted, hollow core of a tree that has long since fallen. Other younger trees have surrounded it, one growing directly through where the other one split. I kneel to duck under the branches, but Isla’s smaller frame is better suited to crawling around here.

  “Wait,” I say, shedding the blanket. Isla turns, smiling wide.

  “Sorry,” she replies. “I, uh…” She motions to her head. “Didn’t think.”

  “It’s okay,” I assure her, then motion forward. “Where are we going?”

  “I found this,” she says. “I want to help.”

  I crawl through the narrow space, trying to ignore the mud that’s seeped through my pant legs. Isla leads me further, but she walks more slowly now and makes sure I’m keeping close. Healthy green stalks of grasses peek between the otherwise dark earth. Suddenly, Isla turns and points to the ground just beyond another secluded thicket.

  “I heard you asking about the flower,” Isla says. “Is this enough?”

  I look where she’s pointing and gasp.

  The red blooms are wet with dew and rain, and they are everywhere. Clusters of the cure burst from nestled alcoves between the cypress roots, between rounded rocks, and below the grasses.

  “Yes,” I whisper, tears coming to my eyes. “Yes, this is enough.”

  * * *

  We retrieve the blanket and repurpose it into a kind of bag, then carefully collect as much of the cure as I dare take from this sacred, hidden source. Murmuring Noam’s memory device to myself, I pick enough petals and stems to heal a hundred children. The sheer, unrelenting relief of holding so much of the cure in my hands is a feeling beyond words.

  “How?” I ask Isla as we gently fold up the blanket. I gesture to the cure we’re leaving behind.

  She shrugs, completely unaware of the gravity of her gift to me. She picks at a handful of the cure, tying one of the stems around the others until it’s a tiny bouquet. “I like the trees.”

  She’s always running around exploring the woods here. That’s what Ellian had said. Isla spent her whole days—no, her whole life—exploring what little of the world was safe for her to. The fact that she could find what no one else could was a matter of the world having given up on looking, and Isla not knowing that she shouldn’t.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you, Isla.” She leans forward suddenly, wrapping my arm in a tight squeeze.

  “Thank you, too,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For finding us.”

  We walk the short distance back to the cottage. Ellian stands in the doorway, looking more curious than cross. She’s woken up to a missing daughter before.

  I wait while Isla excitedly reports to her mother where the plant came from. For a moment, Ellian looks frustrated, but it melts into confusion more than anything else.

  “She never told me,” Ellian says, switching to our shared language. “If I’d known, I would have sent you there.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, laying the blanket out on the ground. Isla, reading my thoughts, excitedly fetches my bag from where I’d left it near my bed.

  Ellian crouches down, taking one of the delicate flowers between her fingertips. “This will save the prince,” she says reverently.

  “It could save a hundred princes,” I reply, trying to focus on that joyful fact and not the growing pit of dread in my stomach. “It will save the city. I just have to make it back in time.” My hair falls in my face, and I brush it back, annoyed, as I look at the growing light coming in from outside. “Tabrol has at least day and a half left, maybe even two. If I leave right now and don’t stop, I can make it. I can find the train again and—”

  Ellian frowns. “What of your companions?”

  I freeze, my heart pounding as I draw out the words. “I’ll go on without them. I have to.”

  “Will you be able to make it all the way back on your own, though?” she asks. “It’s a long way from here back to the Cliffs.”

  My heart thuds. “The prince does not have time for me to take detours.”

  “It’s not a detour,” Ellian replies quickly. “If we go into Ramsgate, I could help you get passage on a riverboat. Barges travel back and forth, bringing materials from the mines and mountains to Ramsgate. I can walk you to the city, and we’ll see if we hear of your companions. If not, you can take a barge.”

  I open my mouth to protest again, but Ellian’s face has lit up more in the past minute than I’ve seen since we met. If she believes in this plan, I will, too. “It’s no train,” she adds. “But every hour you save is important, isn’t it?”

  I know from Renna’s anger and Noam’s surprise that the disease is unpredictable. If I shave off even an hour’s time from my journey, that will be worth it.

  “But what about my eyes?” I ask. “One good look at my face would give me away.”

  She thinks. “I have a wide hat you can borrow, and I’ll give you a dress to hide your uniform. So long as you act shy, no one will think twice. If you’re willing to part with those earrings, I’m sure we could fetch enough that a river trader won’t ask questions.”

  I touch the pearl first, as if the blue stone in my other ear wasn’t there at all. The pearl I could part with. I don’t know about the other one. This is not about you, I remind myself. Tabrol needs to live. The sentimental value of one earring couldn’t outweigh the future of our people.

  “Okay,” I reply. “Let’s go to Ramsgate.”

  * * *

  Ellian insists on getting some food in my stomach for the journey. “I’ll hurry,” she says, seeing my look. We’d just agreed how urgent my mission was. My stomach, however, agreed with Ellian.

  Minutes later, she and Isla have finished prepping a small plate of vegetables and eggs mixed together. The flavors are strange but wonderful, and though my mother would wish me to be more polite in a moment like this, I eat more than my fair share of the bread. I’ll need every ounce of energy to get back to the Heliana.

  “Do you like it?” Isla asks.

  The steady, deliberate cadence of her words makes me smile. “Yes, thank you.”

  Isla giggles and wipes her mouth on the sleeve of her dress. “Do you live on a floating island?”

  “Yes,” I reply, matching her words so she’ll understand. “I do live on a floating island.”

  “She’s been waiting for someone new to practice on,” Ellian cuts in. There’s a look in her eye I don’t quite understand. Pride? Regret? “Evidently, I’m a boring practice partner.”

  “My name is Isla,” Isla says. She says each word with the solemnity of a scholar. “I am Leonodai.”

  Yes you are, I think. Whatever the human who Ellian loved was to Isla, for the short time they shared, I can see her mother’s influence more clearly. Dress her in human clothes and teach her the human words, but Isla has magic.

  When we’re done eating, Ellian hurries to ready my disguise. Isla watches from the doorway of her mother’s room. She says something in the humans’ tongue—a question, by her tone.

  Turns out no sounds the same in the human tongue as it does in Leonodai. The gi
rl stomps her foot and disappears into her own room.

  “Did she ask to come with us?” I ask Ellian when the other woman comes back, bearing a dress and hat as promised.

  “Yes,” she replies. “Someday she’ll know why she couldn’t. Here.”

  I take the clothes with a sigh. It’s much safer if Isla stays here. She’d slow us down with her smaller strides, and if things go wrong in Ramsgate, she’d only be in the way. Still, I feel a pang of pity of her. For me to arrive and leave without her learning much, if anything, about her heritage must be hard.

  I put on my damp uniform first, much cleaner thanks to Ellian’s washing, then slip on the dress. While the long sleeves will cover the vambrace, I’ll have to leave my breastplate behind. My shortsword and knives fit under the dress, although the latter pokes uncomfortably into my lower ribs.

  “I’ll wait outside,” I say. “There’s something I want to do first.”

  I head into the garden as Ellian puts on her own hat and says some things to Isla that sound like stern instructions.

  Taking a deep breath, I use my free hand to pull my long hair forward. At least one of the humans who ambushed us knows what I look like, and I’m not taking chances. Before I can second-guess myself, I take one of my knives and press it into my hair, hacking away until everything below my shoulders is gone. When it’s done, I run my fingers through my uneven locks and laugh.

  Ellian joins me, and I give Isla a hug goodbye. She presses something into my hand. It’s a bundle of paper folded upon itself a few times and wrapped around something soft.

  “No,” she says when I go to open it. She says something to her mother in the human tongue.

  “She says to give it to the prince,” Ellian explains. “As a gift from one Leonodai to another.”

  “Thank you,” I tell Isla in Leonodai. Isla believes I’ll get home in time to save Tabrol. I have to believe that, too. I tuck the precious package into my underclothes beneath all my armor, and with her mystery gift next to my heart, Ellian and I set off.