Still, the notion of finally seeing Faerie, the country I’d dreamed of since I was a little girl—the source of real magic in orderly, insular Esting—was tantalizing beyond comprehension.
I was realizing more and more how much I’d missed Mr. Candery all these years too. So I assumed I’d leap out of bed on the day we were to land, eager to meet him, the Fey leader, everyone.
But days upon days of storms had left us all exhausted. I woke that final morning to find us all in a heap, Caro’s mouth slack open and Fin snoring like a train engine, their bright and dark curls tangled together on the pillow. I smiled fondly, then realized I could see them so clearly because of the sunlight streaming in through the porthole.
My heartbeat quickened. Wheelock had told us at dinner last night that we’d likely come within sight of Faerie’s shores early the next morning. Even now, I might look through that reinforced glass pane and see the blue-sand shores and jungles and craggy mountains of Faerie.
I sprang out of bed and made a mad dash for the nearest porthole before remembering that our suite was toward the rear of the ship, and I’d be able to see only where we’d been, not where we were going.
I looked back at my sleeping friends and debated whether to wake them. For more than a week now we’d had to keep one another from falling asleep during meals, we were so tired, but I knew they wouldn’t forgive me if I deprived them of the chance to watch our approach to Faerie.
I laid a hand lightly on each of their shoulders. “Fin, Caro, wake up,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle, but it came out trembly and excited. “It’s morning.”
Fin woke with a great snort. “Faerie!” he said, blinking, his voice and eyes still full of sleep. He scrambled out of bed and over to his steamer trunk.
Caro slept a little more soundly. I bent down and kissed her forehead. “Good morning, darling,” I said. “You won’t want to miss this, I promise.”
She yawned and squinched her eyes more tightly shut. “I’m getting up. I’m getting up.” She rolled over and pulled the pillow on top of her head.
I took my turn in the water closet and quickly changed into the arrival-day outfit I’d laid in the bottom of my steamer trunk over a month ago. It was a suitably practical shadowy green-gray, like the venturing outfits Lady Candery and her cohorts had worn on the first-ever expedition to Faerie, two hundred and twelve years ago.
But unlike Lady Candery’s ensemble, mine had trousers.
I knew perfectly well how useful trousers would be in the jungle, but fashionable ladies never wore them in Esting. The only girl I’d ever seen them on was Bex, and even she wore skirts when she wasn’t working. The thought gave me a small rebellious thrill.
They were Jules’s design and the buzzers’ creation. Later today, after landing, I’d wake them up at last and let them see the delightfully scandalous outfit they’d made me. Of course, I’d seen Jules regularly while I worked on his improvements, which I’d finally finished just a few days ago. But I hadn’t been able to truly see him, the real Jules who had slept the month-long voyage away. I missed him the same way I’d miss anyone I loved.
And just as Jules would be excited to see me in the outfit he’d designed, I was eager to see his reaction to the improvements for him I’d worked on so long and so hard. He’d approved my designs back in Esting, but I couldn’t wait to give him the chance to test them out.
I stood up on the rim of the chair-size tub to get a view of myself in the mirror before I went out into the bedroom again. The trousers were actually less revealing than I’d anticipated; the button-front waist was very high, and the fabric draped loosely over my hips, growing more fitted at the knee. My calves were clearly delineated, but some of the Nordsk ball gowns I’d seen were gathered in the front to show a stockinged shin. Anyway, I had good, thick, knee-high laced leather boots to put on once I went back outside, and then I’d feel nearly the same as I would have in one of my work dresses back home . . . or so I tried to tell myself. Rebellious or no, I started to feel a bit shy.
I resisted the urge to bundle up under my wool cloak or just change into my normal skirts. It was still cold up here in the thin air above the clouds, but Faerie was a jungle, and I wanted to be prepared.
I marched back into the suite’s bedroom in my shocking trousers. Both Caro and Fin were up, dressed, and waiting for their turn in the water closet.
“Love the pants, Nick,” Caro said with a wink.
✷
When we came out onto the main deck, the crew was preparing to take the Imperator down below the clouds.
All around us was clear morning sky. We sailed perhaps twenty yards above a billowing white sea of clouds. The sun was high by now, and searingly bright, just enough to take a little of the edge off the freezing-cold wind that slapped at the sails and assaulted any bit of uncovered skin. I tried to remind myself that I was dressed appropriately for Faerie’s tropical climate.
“Take her down,” Wheelock called, walking swiftly across the deck. The first mate nodded to the crew.
“You may wish to stay inside for the descent, Your Highness, ladies,” Wheelock said in his most baleful, officious tones. All hints of the coconspiratorial and perhaps even rebellious Wheelock had vanished. Did he feel self-conscious again now that the voyage was over, I wondered, or was it simply that he had so much to do today?
“Oh, let’s stay on deck for the descent,” Caro said, clutching Fin’s and my hands. “When else will we get the chance to see something like this?”
A hissing sound above indicated the lowering of the flames at the base of the balloon. The crew turned the cranks that pulled the airship’s sails, and we began to descend. At the prow of the ship, the Brethren priest was intoning prayers and waving his incense. I was grateful that he stood too far away for me to hear his words.
When we’d gone down to fish and ride in the bathyspheres, the sky had been clear. This time we descended through clouds, and I discovered that I didn’t like diving down into them any more than I’d liked rushing up into them. It still felt threatening and alien; this intimacy with the sky was not something that seemed natural.
I thought ruefully of all the mechanical wings I’d built, both insect and avian, and how often I’d considered the logistics of flying without ever imagining the feeling of it, the rising, plunging, baffling freedom from the horizontal mode of living that humans had always known. It turned out I liked having a straight, horizontal line to live on. I found that I was grateful to be returning to dry land after all, even a land as unknown to me as Faerie.
As we sank, millions of water droplets kissed my skin and hair and clothes, clinging like so many tiny diamonds. Breathing in cloud felt strange too; uncomfortably wet. The disastrous journey in the bathyspheres, and especially the sight of the merman’s frayed gills, his blood muddying the water as he struggled to breathe, came to me vividly. I coughed and gagged on the mist, and beside me I could hear my friends gasping.
The drops clung to my eyelashes even after we’d finally come down through the bizarre, seemingly unending opacity of the cloud cover. So my first sight of Faerie was fractured through water.
I’d imagined it the way the first Estinger explorers had described the island, small and volcanic, wrapped in blue-sand beaches. They’d only begun to realize how vast a continent it truly was when they had hacked their way through the jungles and seen that immense mountain vista before them, the Faerie palace rising between peaks like a jeweled honeycomb. I’d thought I would see Faerie the way they had, even though I was coming from two hundred and twelve years in the future and down from the sky, not across the water.
I wasn’t prepared for the heartrending loveliness below me. I could see only ragged facets of color through the dew on my lashes at first. The endless swelling shards of turquoise and pearl—I knew that was the ocean, even though it was a more intense color than I’d ever imagined water could be. And in front of us there was land, I was sure of that much—dark g
reen land that suggested dense growth. Not the blackish green of Esting’s forests, but glowing with the verdancy of emeralds.
I blinked the cloud out of my eyes, and Faerie became clearer, brighter, more vibrant, until I thought I must have been colorblind in Esting.
I’d worried that I’d spent too much time imagining Faerie as a child, and the reality could do nothing but fall short of those childish dreams. Now I wished I could tell my younger self, the little girl who lay in her bed dreaming of far-off lands, that it was even better than she hoped. The sight of Faerie was a gift to the part of me that was still that dreaming girl. I drank in the bright colors, devoured every detail.
I was torn between looking at the ocean and looking at the jungle, and in the end I hardly noticed the descent. I even enjoyed watching the tiny speck of the airship’s shadow grow slowly larger as we came closer to the water, because the color of the sea in shade contrasted so gorgeously with the sparkling waves all around it.
Neither Fin nor Caro nor I said a word. We were all too entranced to speak.
I realized that I couldn’t see our shadow anymore. The whole body of water underneath us had grown dusky, so that it no longer seemed to throw out light but to suck it in, draw it out of the sky and down into its depths. I shivered.
The air grew dark and cold. Since we’d so recently come through the misty water of the clouds I didn’t notice it at first, but it was starting to rain. Little needling drops, hardly harsher than the clouds had been, turned with breathtaking quickness into a torrent. After the rain came an aggressive tapping of hailstones.
They skittered across the deck, then slapped, then pounded. One heavy hailstone knocked splinters from a guardrail post.
“All souls below deck!” Wheelock yelled, and then his arm was around my waist and he was pulling me away from the railing where I’d clung instinctively, knowing only that I needed to hold on to something solid, something safe.
Several crew members rushed to Fin, and Caro started moving toward shelter too. As she walked across my field of vision I saw a hailstone the size of my fist bounce off the back of her head, and she collapsed.
“Caro!” I broke free of Wheelock’s grip and ran for her. I brushed my hand quickly over her head, and when I didn’t feel blood or any obvious breaks in the bone, I put my arms under hers and dragged her toward the shelter of the galley hatch. Another large hailstone hit me in the upper arm with shattering force. I bit back a scream and watched it roll away as I pulled my friend to safety. There was something strange about this hail, I thought as Caro regained her footing, something about the way it looked . . . Hardly thinking what I was doing, I reached out and stuffed a few of the smaller hailstones from the deck into my trouser pocket.
“Close the door, Nick!” Wheelock called, forgetting honorifics. But before I did, I heard the most terrible sound: a rending hiss, a death rattle, like all the air let out of a lung at once. I looked up toward the source and saw a ragged spot of light shining through one guttering flap of the balloon above us, with hailstones of increasing size sailing through it.
I slammed the door shut as we all felt the ship lurch. The floor creaked, and wind and hail hammered at the walls around us. All the lights had been doused, all the gas shut off. I thought of the sailors still working the ropes, battered by the storm, risking their lives to keep us sailing true. I felt my old airsickness coming back, and I briefly let my eyes close.
Wheelock was looking at the door too, his face haunted; I knew if it weren’t for us he’d be out on the deck with his crew. “Not to worry, Your Highness, my ladies, we shall come ashore in less than an hour now,” he said, returning to his formality and clinging to it as if it were the last thing he had. But he opened a hidden hatch under the galley table, and he started pulling out bulky, intricately folded packages.
“Your parachutes and life jackets,” he said, handing them out to us. “Just a precaution for you, before I return to my crew outside. Not to worry. You’ll hardly need them. Not to worry.”
But I heard the fear in his voice, and I’d seen the rent in the balloon. I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Caro, Fin, and I each clutched a parachute. Wheelock helped Fin with his while Caro and I strapped in each other. I watched as Caro and Fin buckled life jackets over their chests and I tried to believe that such flimsy things could keep us safe.
The ship lurched again.
I shook my shoulders to settle my parachute straps, then made for the hatch.
“Nick! What are you doing?” Fin called, lunging forward. “We have to stay in here until we land, unless—” He looked down at his life jacket.
All it would take was a direct order from Fin, and Wheelock would strap me to the wall like one of the trunks. And if Fin thought he needed to give that order for my safety, there was no doubt in my mind that he would.
I looked right into his dark eyes. “I won’t leave Jules,” I said, quiet and steady. Then I opened the door, and I went back out.
The hail coming down was the size of small melons now, and strangely smooth, seeming almost to glow as it crashed past. The sky overhead was a weird, mottled green-gray of roiling clouds, with spider webs of lightning crawling through them.
I stood in the shelter of the stairwell, eyeing the door across the deck that led down to the living quarters and the storeroom where I kept my beloved Jules and the buzzers. Hailstones were blowing holes in the floor itself now, leaving ragged splinters, and the wood was littered with dark scraps of sail. I could see crew members desperately trying to patch holes in the ragged fabric above. With hailstones this big, I knew it was only a matter of time before even the reinforced hide of the balloon’s center segment was punctured.
We wouldn’t be landing in one piece.
There was no more time. I lunged across the deck, trying not to think about hailstones connecting with my head. Somehow I made it to the other side safely. Then I went down, down, down the steps, through the corridor, into the royal suite, and across it to the locked door of my storeroom.
My hands were shaking so badly that it took me several seconds to get the keys out of my trouser pocket, where I fumbled with the hailstones I’d collected. But once I had the key ring in my hands I felt better, capable. I remembered why I’d come, what was at stake. I plunged the keys into their locks and shouldered the door open.
Thank goodness I hadn’t built Jules’s storage box back around him, or I would have lost more precious minutes freeing him. Instead I could rush right up to his sleeping form and stroke the three spirals on his shoulders that would wake him up.
He raised his heavy neck slowly, shaking his head to wake up out of his long sleep.
“I’m so sorry, Jules, but we have to leave right now,” I said. “The ship’s going to crash.”
“Get on,” he wheezed.
I felt the biggest shudder yet rack the ship. I grabbed the briefcase with the unused Ashes and the buzzers sleeping safely inside. Using the leather belt that had strapped it to the wall, I secured it to Jules’s back, behind the saddle. Then I hoisted myself up over him and astride.
“We’ll be running trials a little sooner than I thought,” I muttered as I hitched my feet into the retractable stirrups. “I’m sorry about that, Jules, but what else can we do?”
“Hold on, Mechanica,” he huffed, and coming from him just then, the reviled name was a wondrous comfort.
I fitted my hands into the steel handles at the base of Jules’s neck and flattened myself down onto his back as he made for the door. I feared for my scalp as we charged through, out into the suite and then into the corridor. I mourned a little for the unused supplies I’d left behind and all the other belongings in my trunk, but with more rending hissing sounds coming from outside every moment and most of the portholes cracked or shattered from the impact of the hailstones, there was no time to retrieve anything I didn’t absolutely need. My clothes and equipment fit that category. Jules and the buzzers did not. I would work no
less hard to save them than to save Fin and Caro—harder, because I knew Fin and Caro had parachutes and could look after themselves and that Wheelock was looking after them too.
No one would bother to save Jules but me.
We came charging up onto the deck to see the whole crew there already. Wheelock was screaming last-minute parachute instructions into the roaring wind, and all of them held their hands over their heads for protection. It wasn’t hailing anymore, but that blessing had come too late for the tattered sails and two segments of the balloon that had already punctured. The seascape below us reared and tilted, growing ever closer.
I watched, horrified, as Walsh stepped up to the gate in the railing. The ship pitched again as the man jumped overboard—just jumped into open air and driving rain. He had nothing to meet him below but the water, nothing to help him but the parachute on his back and a flimsy life jacket. And nothing to get to but Faerie, if he even survived the fall.
I couldn’t see Fin or Caro anywhere.
I urged Jules toward Wheelock. I worried for a moment about how we’d cross the broken, pitching deck with all of Jules’s metal weight, but he managed it nimbly, stepping across from one safe plank to the next as delicately as a show pony.
“Wheelock!” I shouted over the driving wind. “Wheelock, where are they?”
Wheelock fairly shuddered with relief when he saw me. “I thought you were gone for sure,” he yelled back, the wind stealing away most of his voice. “I made them go over first. They wouldn’t go without you, so we had to—we had to—”
He didn’t have to finish. I watched as the courage of the next crew member in line failed; the man behind him gave a short push, and he fell screaming into the blue.
“They’ve gone over,” I whispered.
I knew that no matter how much my own courage might want to fail me, I couldn’t avoid following them any longer.
“Come with me,” I said to Wheelock.
He stared at Jules, then shook his head. “I can’t, Miss Lampton,” he said. He shot me a brave smile, the young man showing one more time through the formal shell. “A captain goes down with his ship.”
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