Quince kept them fairly low to the ground, hoping to avoid notice, and they followed the course of the waterway.
“What’s the river called?” Xander asked Quince.
“It’s the Orn,” she called back. “It runs from the mountains and Gaelan in the west down to Errian and the Argent Sea in the east.”
It was nearly as wide as the Theseus. The waters sparkled in the early afternoon sunlight, giving the river a golden hue.
AFTERNOON WORE on toward evening, but still they continued on. Jameson was looking tired, and Xander hoped Quince would call a halt soon. His wings and the muscles that supported them were still new. He couldn’t be used to this kind of exertion yet.
On the north side of the river, the trees pulled back, leaving a long scar in the forest along the water’s edge. Although creepers and vines covered a lot of the damage, Xander could see that there must have been a massive fire here at some time in the recent past. “What happened down there? In that big clearing?” he asked Quince.
Her face hardened. She didn’t reply.
“Quince, what happened here?” he repeated, puzzled.
“Hundreds died,” she said at last. “It was the site of the worst battle of the Seven Weeks’ War. Though it wasn’t so much a battle as a slaughter.”
“The Seven Weeks’ War?”
She nodded. “It started when a pith runner named Danner Black killed Lyrin’s… Jameson’s mother, the Queen of the Erriani.”
Xander went pale. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
Quince turned away and swooped down toward the ground. She alighted in what looked like a large, circular plaza in the middle of the vast, decimated part of the forest.
Surprised, Xander followed, with Jameson close behind.
Xander dropped to the ground, surprised to smell a lingering burnt odor. The ground beneath his feet was hard, fused as if there had been a powerful explosion here. Did they have that kind of technology on Titania? There was so much he didn’t know about his own people.
He knelt down to touch the ground. It was smooth, like glass.
“What caused this?” He stood and looked at Quince, surprised to find that her eyes were moist with tears.
She drew herself up and looked around the empty space. “This was my home, growing up. It was a village called Ballifor—it means ‘forest home.’” She took a few steps, as if trying to gauge her location. “My parents’ house was over there, I think.”
Xander glanced in that direction. There was nothing but a broken structure that might have once been a chimney hearth.
“I had come back here after the Queen was killed. I was off in the forest with Lyrin, looking for obieberries. There was a loud explosion. Though we were miles from home, I heard it, and saw the fireball that consumed the village. I raced back, keeping low to the forest to avoid detection. When I got home, there was nothing left.” That last part came out in a whisper.
“Nothing?”
Quince shook her head. “No people, no village. Just a horrible smell and this gaping sore on the world, and Danner Black.”
Both Xander and Jameson reached out to put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Quince. I had no idea,” Xander said.
Jameson nodded. “We don’t need to stay here. I can manage to fly on a little farther.”
“No, this is as good a place as any.” The poor man was exhausted. They could fly for longer the next day—they had made good progress on this one. She took a deep breath, gathering her resolve. “We can camp over there, under the forest eaves.” She pointed across the devastation to where the line of trees began again. “Maybe I can make peace with a few of my ghosts, while we’re here.”
Xander was having a hard time taking it all in. “Who did this… this atrocity?”
“Neither side ever took responsibility. Each accused my village of working with the other, but I think the horror of what happened here shocked them all.
“Black was behind it, in league with OberCorp, I think. It had to be weaponry from Oberon. There’s nothing in Titania that could cause this kind of damage.” She looked around, her eyes downcast. “The fighting stopped after seven weeks. There’s been an uneasy truce ever since.” She knelt and put her palm on the smooth, glassy surface, whispering something that Xander couldn’t make out.
Then she stood and led them across the open space, toward the protective red branches of the forest in the distance.
THE THREE of them were starting to fall into a rhythm when they made camp. Xander set up the campsite, while Jameson went out looking for firewood and Quince went in search of food.
Jameson welcomed the little bit of time alone. His mind was in a constant state of flux since he’d touched the statue. He was trying to assimilate all the new memories he’d been given. Sometimes they fled past so quickly that he hardly recognized them. Other times, it was like he was somewhere else for a moment or two, seeing out of the eyes of a stranger.
Sometimes he felt like the old Jameson, the one who had grown up on a different world with a different story—a mother and father, a fiancée, and a stable life as a resident psych on a mining world.
Sometimes now, he was Lyrin, this strange Prince of the House of the Sun. Those memories were strange. They were entirely alien to Jameson, and yet they felt like they belonged to Lyrin. Or maybe to some of his kin. Memories of soaring above the Argent Sea on the first day of spring, when the pink sky was full of puffy clouds. A recollection of standing on a balcony looking out over the purple forest canopy with a babe in his arms—a memory that couldn’t be his as either Jameson or Lyrin.
Jameson was tired, too, exhausted from the long flight, and his wounds from the wereveren attack were acting up from the stretching they’d endured during his flight.
He pulled his mind back to the present, concentrating on looking for the wood Quince had sent him in search of. Wrenwood, she’d called it. It was a small bush, with easy-to-break-off dead branches. The wood was a mahogany brown, with small, round, red leaves, and it burned without smoke like the heart-shaped fungi on Oberon.
To help distract himself, he thought about Quince, the woman who had, apparently, been something like a mother to him for the earliest part of his life. Today he had seen her as truly human—a person with wants and needs, vulnerabilities and pain. With her wings and her strength of character, it had been easy for him to view her as an angel. Or maybe a superhero.
There was more to her behind the mask than that.
He followed the forest edge, along the perimeter of the devastated area, not venturing too far from it so he wouldn’t get lost. As he thought about the wrenwood bush, he could see an image of it in his mind’s eye, as clearly as a memory.
It was. Just not one of his.
The branches were a beautiful deep purplish brown, branching at regular intervals like antlers, tipped with the bright red leaves.
After a few minutes searching, he stumbled upon one of the bushes. It was as tall as he was, and had quite a bit of deadwood. There had been no one here to harvest it in twenty-five years.
Jameson broke off as much as he could carry, arranging it into a compact pile and tying the rope Quince had given him around it. He laughed when he realized it was the protective rope they’d used to keep out the wereveren. They wouldn’t need that again anytime soon, God willing.
He threw the bundle of sticks over his back and headed back toward the campsite.
“WHY ARE the skythane separated into Erriani and Gaelani?” Xander asked as they shared a dinner of fish and hoarberries. The little berries were good, leaving a sweet red stain on their tongues.
“They were one people, once, when the first wave of colonists arrived from Earth.” Quince finished off her piece of fish and licked her fingers. “With Oberon being a smaller world than Earth with lighter gravity, it made sense to fly. It also eliminated the need for a lot of heavy machinery.”
Xander nodded. “I can see that. So what happened?”
“Landers.” Jameson looked up, as if surprised to hear his own voice.
“He’s right.” Xander saw the appraising look she shot Jameson. “Over time, the skythane, as they came to call themselves, spread across Oberon, and discovered the nimfeach, and the waygates.”
“Nimfeach?”
“Spirits. The ghosts of the ones who came before. No one knows for sure.”
Xander laughed. “Surely that’s just rank superstition—”
“I’ve seen one.” Quince looked up at him, her face deadly serious.
“Okay, okay. So there are spirits.” He tried to laugh it off, but the look on her face stopped him cold.
“In any case, the nimfeach helped our people access the waygates, and soon we spread across Titania too.” She ate a few of the hoarberries, staining her fingers, and handed some to Morgan, who accepted them greedily. “The skythane on Oberon were the Gaelani—the children of the moon. Those on Titania were the Erriani—”
“The sun children.” He glanced over at Jameson.
“Then the landers came.”
Jameson nodded.
“You know the story?” Quince asked.
“I remember it. Xander’s people were pushed off of Oberon when the second wave of human colonists came, though a few remained. The refugees came to Errian, here on Titania.”
“Yes. There were… incidents… before the Gaelani were eventually resettled halfway across the world in their own city.”
Xander laughed. “We’re like Romeo and Juliet.”
“Or Romeo and Romeo.” Jameson smiled wanly.
Quince snorted. “A couple of clowns, you two are. In any case, things continued in that fashion for a long time… hundreds of years, two nations in competition with one another, but there was no open war until twenty-five years ago….”
“When Danner Black killed my mother.” Jameson closed his eyes.
Xander could feel his pain. “And now?”
Quince shrugged. “After Ballifor, things cooled off again. Now OberCorp is a part of the game, at least in Gaelan. I don’t know much more than that.”
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough.” Xander stared at Jameson across the flames. Were their people enemies still? Or allies with a common cause?
Only time would tell.
THEY SETTLED in for the night. Quince was numb. She’d known they would pass this place, but she hadn’t planned to stop here. And yet, Jameson needed the rest. Besides, it seemed right.
She had unfinished business with Ballifor. A quarter century had passed, and she could still remember what had transpired here as clearly as if it were yesterday.
She lay on her side, looking across the firelight at the dark spaces between the trees. Where the village had once lain.
She wasn’t sure when she crossed the line from sadness to sleep.
Quince held Lyrin in her arms as she climbed out of the village of Ballifor onto the hillside that looked over the town from the north. She was keeping a low profile. She would have loved to soar with him over the village, but she was wary of Danner Black and his men. The pith runner had a network of spies in both kingdoms. Even here, where she should have been safest, she kept indoors most of the time.
It had been a week without word back from Robyn, and she needed to get some fresh air.
Her brother Dillan had taken her in without question, though his lingering gaze told her he knew who the infant she carried was. Still, despite the danger, he’d pulled her inside when she’d arrived in the wee hours of the morning and found a place for the two of them among his brood.
Her mother had been overjoyed to see her. Both were shocked at the news.
“The Errian Queen?”
Quince had nodded, on the verge of tears as she recounted what she had seen. She hadn’t missed the frightened look her mother shot at Dillan before looking back at Lyrin with narrowed eyes.
It was best for them all if she and Lyrin left here as soon as it was feasible.
Robyn still hadn’t replied.
Quince had borrowed her mother’s old baby harness for the walk, and Lyrin was wrapped in it on her chest, burbling happily. Quince would feed him once they found a quiet spot to rest. She hoped to find some hoarberries—little blue and green and red berries covered in a sweet white “frost”—to sweeten her lunch.
She stopped, frowning.
There was a high-pitched whine in the air. Like the buzzing of a hundred bees, then a thousand. She looked around, but she couldn’t see the source of it.
Then she glimpsed something dark shooting across the sky from the east. In half a second the buzzing increased a hundredfold. She covered her ears as the object arched up over the forest and then descended into Ballifor.
There was a flash, and then the ground shook as a blast of heat and wind knocked her on her back, her wings bending awkwardly with the force of the blow.
Then, silence.
She sat up slowly. What in the three hells was that?
Lyrin began to cry.
Nothing seemed to be broken, although her left wing ached. She was likely to have a nasty bruise there.
She stood unsteadily and ran back to the peak of the hill to look back at the village.
It was gone.
Wiped from the face of Titania as if it had never been, along with a swath of the forest. In its place was a smooth black plain, and broken trees smoldered all along the edge.
“Mamma! Dillan!” she screamed, and ran down the hillside, back toward where Ballifor had been.
She reached the edge of the destruction and could go no farther. The ground was hot, and the trees around its edge still burned.
The place she had grown up had been erased in an instant. Ballifor was no more.
She fell to her knees and cried, her tears wrenched out of her, letting go in a way she hadn’t done when the Queen had been killed. Great, wracking sobs.
Lyrin wailed with her.
Her family was gone.
She had no idea how long she sat there in the dirt, lost to grief.
Eventually, sanity slowly reasserted itself. Her sobs slowed, then stopped. Her tears no longer fell.
She stood and gazed out at the destruction, feeling numb.
Then she noticed something else in the sky.
Instinctively, her self-preservation instincts kicked in, and she ducked behind a redoak tree. She shushed Lyrin, holding him gently against her chest, whispering softly in his ear.
Five wing men flew in from the east, hovering above the destruction.
One of them was Danner Black. She didn’t recognize the others.
“He’s dead for certain, the Queen’s bastard,” he said to the others. “This will goad Theron and the Gaelani into war against the Erriani. We can take care of the other one then. Accidents often happen in the fog of war.”
Quince pulled back behind the tree. She couldn’t let them find her now. It had only been by dumb luck that she and Lyrin had survived.
She huddled as close to the tree as she could, hoping they didn’t come looking. She could take down two of them easily, unencumbered, but with a babe and five to fight?
The other one.
They must mean Davyn. Robyn’s boy.
She had to find the Queen of the Gaelani. She would fly back to the House of the Stars. Robyn would be there waiting for her, if she’d gotten Quince’s message.
She had to be.
Quince awoke, her eyes wet with tears. It was still so fresh. This place brought it all back to her, memories she had buried for years. That terrible reckoning, and it had happened because of her. Because she had come back here with the child.
The forest around her was still, and the clearing beyond was lit by the silver light of Bandia. It had to be close to midnight.
Xander had taken the first watch, and she’d managed to get a few hours of much-needed sleep. She sat up and looked around, her eyes adjusting to the light. Xander was sitting against a tree on the edge of the open space.
She stood and made her way quietly past the sleeping forms of Jameson and the child, tucked into their other sleep sack together.
Xander looked up at her approach. “Nothing to report,” he said softly. He looked back out at the open space beyond the trees. “I’ve been trying to imagine what it must have been like for you.”
She sank down next to him on the soft forest floor. “It was like being confronted by oblivion,” she replied. “Like everything I had ever known, that I had grown up with, had never really existed. Other than myself, there was no proof.”
Xander nodded. “I guess we all have our own trials and secrets.”
She put her hand on his knee. “And our own joys. Always celebrate your joys, your little victories. The bad things are many, but the joys that counterbalance them are so few.” She stood again, brushing off the leaves.
“Time to make peace?” He stared up at her, a look of comprehension and compassion on his face.
“Yes. Past time. You don’t have to wait.”
“I don’t mind. I can manage another hour or so. Go.”
She smiled, grateful, and leaned down to kiss him on the forehead. “My gallant knight. I’ll be back soon, little sparrow.”
Xander looked up at her, his head cocked to the side and his brow furrowed.
She took her leave, wondering if, after all this time, he still remembered his mother’s childhood nickname for him.
She strode out into the meadow under the silver moon, making for the place where her village had once stood, the place she had left behind to join the service of the Queen. And then had returned to, ever so briefly. They said the middle of the night was the best time to speak to the dead, that their world and the world of the living were closest together then.
When she reached the plain of glass, she took off her shoes and walked barefoot on the smooth surface. It was cool on the soles of her feet, belying the terrible heat that had created it so many years before. She sank down to sit as close to the middle of the blast radius as she could manage, where the ripples in the glass seemed to originate. She crossed her legs and rested her hands on her knees, letting her wings settle against her back. She closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath, then another, and another.
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