Venturess

by Betsy Cornwell

  I swallowed. I looked at him, trying to take in both the hidden young rebel and the officious, awkward captain. I knew this was the last time I’d see either of them.

  Wheelock looked right back as if he were trying to memorize me too.

  The ship lurched again.

  “It’s time,” Jules rasped, stamping his front hooves.

  I dug the balls of my feet into the stirrups and gripped the handles in his shoulders. The railing couldn’t be much higher than the jumps Bex had taken him through . . . and the fact that I hadn’t jumped any horse since I was a child, or jumped Jules ever, didn’t bear thinking of.

  At least I wouldn’t have to worry about sticking the landing.

  “All right, Jules,” I murmured into his long steel ear. “Let’s see if these things work.”

  He nickered back at me. I pressed my forehead against his neck for a brief moment of comfort, and then he started forward. He moved like rushing water, all fluid forward thrust, and we crossed the length of the deck in mere instants. I felt the gathering force behind me as he pushed out his back legs with all the strength he had, and we were airborne. I had the sense of flying before we even cleared the railing, and it transferred so smoothly into really flying that it was all just one extended jump. I could almost hear the call of a hunter’s horn.

  I kept my gaze straight ahead, my knees locked tight to Jules’s sides, my hands gripping the handles for dear life. I took in a deep breath as we left the ship behind.

  Jules’s huge wings unfurled around us with a flurry of sparks, stretching out so far I couldn’t see their tips. Thousands of bronze and tin and aluminum feathers clattered in the wind before they locked into place. Raindrops rang against them like dissonant bells.

  I felt Jules’s strength as he gave one great flap with those huge wings, felt our descent shift gloriously upward, heaving so powerfully that my own body pressed down on top of Jules’s. He began to raise his wings again.

  Then I heard a horrible screeching, ratcheting sound from his left wing. Our smooth ascent juddered to a stop.

  Jules looked back at me with the whites of his glass eyes showing in panic, and we fell.

  The lurch as gravity claimed us was like all the fear and seasickness I’d felt at the start of our voyage wound together into one horrible moment. The plunge downward. The moment of knowing death.

  The fall stole my breath away and I couldn’t scream, couldn’t speak.

  Jules kept struggling, kept maneuvering his wings, even though it was obvious that something had happened to the left one. I mentally ran over the designs we’d worked on so long together. I’d learned so much since I’d remade Jules from a toy-size horse into the behemoth he was now, I was sure I had accounted for the changes in mass, in weight, in inertia—​

  I couldn’t think. I could only watch the swiftly rising ocean and silently beg my past work to save us.

  A hot gust of updraft crossed us. Jules hooked his wings into the air and locked them in place again, and I felt that blessed, compressing lift. I could breathe, and we were flying once more.

  My breath came in short, stuttering bursts, and tears streamed from my eyes and mixed with the warm raindrops. We were flying again, really flying. Jules’s left wing still shuddered with every upswing, and our flight was neither straight nor steady, but he was doing it. He was flying. My brilliant Jules.

  My hands still gripping the handles as tightly as if they’d been fastened there, I began to scan the ocean below for signs of my friends. I could see black-and-silver parachutes dotting the water. We were maybe three hundred feet in the air, and I could just make out the forms of Fin and Caro, parachutes already discarded behind them, slowly swimming toward the far-off beach.

  “Thank goodness,” I whispered. My voice came out a teary rasp, and I began to shake with relief. I would rather have plunged to my death on the ship than known that my friends hadn’t made it.

  Then I heard the blast.

  “Jules!” I cried into the wind, but he was already banking around.

  The storm was returning, and from this distance I could see that it roiled around the Imperator far too perfectly, too specifically, to be anything but magic. The sound we’d heard was lightning hitting the remaining segments of balloon. Forked lightning struck again and again, with the precision of cannon fire. The wall of storm clouds behind the ship was purple and green inside its gray coils, the lightning flashes like angry, knowing eyes. I could hear the hail returning between the rolls of thunder, too, bigger than before, smashing through the deck and sails.

  With one last crash, the final balloon segment exploded, and there it was, the sight I’d feared ever since I’d watched the first hailstones crash through our sails—​the Imperator, breaking up in midair. The bow snapped free of the ship’s midsection and plunged downward. Ebony splinters from here, surely huge up close, bobbed in the waves. The midsection clung to the flaming balloon, sinking toward the sea. Black sails like ruined bat wings fluttered on the water. And then with a great hiss like the sound of one of the serpents I’d seen on the map, the balloon hit the ocean and collapsed in on itself with a final convulsion, and the home that we’d known for the past four weeks was gone. The ocean roiled under the storm, raising waves big enough to drown even the strongest swimmer.

  Now that it had dealt with the ship, the storm began to spread itself out in the sky, sending lightning down against the water like searching fingers, picking off any crew members who hadn’t already gone under the waves. Fin and Caro were farther away from the eye of the storm, a little closer to the shore, but nowhere near close enough.

  “Go, Jules!” I yelled.

  My horse pressed his new wings back against me and we dove toward the water. The descent was over before I had time to feel sick, before I had time to feel anything.

  Caro and Fin struggled in the rising waves, and Jules tossed and flapped above them, dodging the slapping water that threatened to pull us down too. “Take my hand,” I called, and for the first time since we’d galloped across the Imperator’s deck seven hundred feet in the air, I forced my right hand to give up its hold on Jules’s handles. My fingers didn’t want to uncurl, and they burned like fire when they finally did, but I had enough strength to help hoist Fin and then Caro up onto Jules’s back.

  A hailstone hit the water just to our left as Caro clambered up behind me. With his human burden suddenly tripled, Jules fought to get fully clear of the sea. His hooves and the tips of his wings hissed against the waves, raising steam.

  And yet somehow, straggling, struggling, we rose. Salt spray stung my eyes and my cheeks, and I could feel Fin’s grip around my waist like a vise.

  Behind us both, Caro gasped as Jules finally caught the wind again. I assumed she had gasped in fear, but in another moment I heard her awed, grateful laughter.

  “The most wonderful thing!” I could just barely hear her say as waves and hail crashed around us.

  I saw the joy of it then too: flying astride Jules with the two people I loved most in the world at my back. Caro could find the beauty in any moment, no matter the danger, no matter the fear, and she could make me find it too. How could I do anything but love her?

  Jules still dipped and jerked, carrying more weight than I’d ever calculated he could take, his left wing clattering horribly. But he took us away from the eye of the storm above and at last, at last, down onto the blue-sand shores of Faerie.

  Part iii

  AS soon as Jules saw beach below us instead of water, his wings gave out and he collapsed, and we all tumbled from his back.

  I swallowed a mouthful of sand and coughed and sputtered to bring it back up. Then I tried my hardest to stand, knowing that we had to take cover as soon as possible to avoid the hailstones and lightning, the searching, intelligent force of that storm. My calves, thighs, hands, and shoulders all felt as if they’d been dipped in molten steel, and it was all I could do not to collapse entirely.

  While I struggled to ra
ise myself onto my knees, I felt two pairs of hands under my arms, supporting me, pulling me up.

  “You saved us, Nick,” Fin said.

  Caro added: “You were magnificent.”

  I finally got enough sand out of my mouth to say, “Jules was magnificent.”

  My wonderful horse was struggling to stand too. Steam and smoke poured from his nostrils, his ears, and a few disturbing fissures in the glass panels along his face and his flanks. His left wing had completely detached from his shoulders in the fall, and it lay splayed and half buried some thirty feet away from us, shining like treasure in the sand.

  I limped slowly over to Jules, the muscles in my legs still screaming. I stroked his nose, but he was burning hot and I jerked back. My fingertips blistered instantly.

  I started to become aware of another kind of pain along my arms; not just the shaking, strained muscles but something else. I looked down and saw that the fabric of my jacket had burned away, and under its charred edges my skin was burned too, marked all over with swollen pink lines in strangely angular patterns . . . feathers. Jules’s metal feathers, which he’d pressed against my arms when we dove down to the water to rescue Fin and Caro.

  “Let’s get to the forest,” Fin said, looking out at the ocean, where the storm still roiled. Lightning struck the water in a disturbingly even rhythm so that the clouds seemed to crawl toward us on glowing legs.

  I followed Fin and Caro to the tall, lush trees a few feet ahead, carefully holding my burned arms away from the rest of my body.

  “You’ll bear those scars forever if you don’t cool them off soon,” Caro said. “Here.” She tore a wide strip off her sopping-wet, sandy skirt and began to walk toward the beach. Lightning hit the sand three feet away from her, and she rushed back under the tree cover.

  “I’m sorry, Nick,” she said.

  I shook my head, trying not to wince at every little movement. “It’s all right,” I said. “As long as I can move, I’m fine.” I looked ahead of us, into the dense, dark jungle. “I think I remember something about the medicinal plants Lady Candery found on her voyage, you know. Mother always loved to tell me about her.”

  As I said those words, I could almost hear my mother’s voice, and feel the soft, light blankets in my big childhood bed, the warmth of her callused hand stroking my forehead, back when I was so young that one bedtime story could fill up the whole scope of my mind, could become my whole reality. Mother would quiz me on the stories’ details as she went, and I was always a little too eager to please her, to prove to her my intelligence. But sometimes, when the story was really good, we’d both get swept up and lost inside of it. And she loved to tell the story of Lady Candery, the only woman on the first Estinger voyage to Faerie, the only venturess among venturers. I’d loved Lady Candery too, not least because I liked to imagine that she was an ancestor of our half-Fey housekeeper.

  All the neatly tucked-away love and loss that I felt for both my mother and Mr. Candery swept through my exhausted mind like a tidal wave. I missed them both as horribly in that moment as if I had only just learned of my mother’s death, Mr. Candery’s departure. They had both been parents to me.

  “Cap-o’-rushes,” I whispered. My throat felt too raw for me to speak clearly. “It grows on the north-facing sides of trees here. Deeper in the jungle. It cools burns.” I felt the pain in my muscles with greater intensity now, as if the heartache of losing Mother and Mr. Candery had transferred to a physical ache all over me.

  Fin nodded. He straightened his stance, and I could see the hero he wanted to be in the determined expression on his face. “Right,” he said. “It’s into the jungle, then. I’ll go, and you two can stay here until you’ve rested a bit, until you’ve got back your strength.”

  “No!” Caro and I said together.

  “We can’t let you go off on your own into Fey wilderness,” Caro added. “You’re the Heir of Esting, Fin. Don’t be absurd.”

  Fin’s eyes snapped with anger. “Right now I’m just a body lucky to be in one piece, and I’ll help someone if they need helping,” he said. “Next you’ll build an automaton like Fitz’s to keep me safe. I’ll go. After we put the cap-o’-rushes on Nick’s burns, we’ll be able to start moving toward the capital together.”

  “That took the first explorers more than a week,” I said. “And Caro’s right. For the sake of all our safety, Fin, and not just yours. Besides, you won’t be able to do Faerie much good if you’re killed on your first day here.”

  Fin huffed, but his anger was starting to melt. “All right,” he finally agreed. “We’ll stay here a while until you feel a bit better, and then we’ll all go looking for the rushes.”

  “We should wait here for other . . . survivors,” Caro said.

  We looked back at the ocean and the hissing storm slowly growing closer. No broken planks or scraps of parachute floated on the water; no one swam toward us, and no voices called for aid.

  We stared silently. All the crew . . .

  If it hadn’t been for Jules, the storm would have drowned us, too. There were no other survivors.

  Near the beach, hailstones smacked into the shallow water, and lightning hit the sand again, leaving a glassy crater.

  “We have to leave now!” I said, pulling my friends farther into the safety of the jungle.

  Even as we walked away from it, I wondered if there was some way to take Jules’s wing with me; flight was an asset we might need to survive on this strange continent, and I hated to see so many months of hard work left behind after so little use.

  The rest of Jules was miraculously unharmed, at least in any lasting way. Most of his glass hide and face had shattered, so he looked in places like the metal skeleton of a horse, but even without his skin, he could move and walk unimpeded. I couldn’t feel any pride in my engineering then, only gratitude that he had survived.

  As we moved deeper into the jungle, the sound of thunder began to recede behind us. The clatter of hailstones grew quieter too, until finally it was gone. I didn’t dare to hope at first, but eventually I had to believe that the storm wasn’t following us inland. If it had been a guard, perhaps it guarded only the shore?

  But the Fey knew to expect us. Why would a Fey storm attack a ship they were supposed to have invited?

  “So, exactly what do those captain’s rushes look like, again?” Fin asked. The jungle had grown quiet around us when we first entered, but now sounds of birdcalls were growing loud enough that they threatened to drown out his words.

  “Cap-o’-rushes.” I took a shallow breath; deep ones stretched the burned skin on my shoulders. “Flat brown fungus. A pattern on top like a woven basket.”

  “That man at the Night Market had some, didn’t he?” Caro asked, circling the base of a tree that was at least twelve feet around.

  I looked upward, and the tree was lost in shadowy mists before I could see its top.

  We weren’t even that far into the jungle yet, and we were already dwarfed. I shivered.

  We had come to a place where we would never be able to survive on our own. We were arrogant fools, all of us.

  Jules nosed my hair gently, as if he could push the despair from my mind. He stepped more confidently across the slippery fallen leaves and huge protruding roots than any of the rest of us did. Soon he was leading our group.

  He had come from this place, after all, or his Ashes had. Watching him walk calmly ahead, I found I was a little less afraid.

  “You know,” Caro went on. “The night we got the lovesbane for my mother.”

  “He did,” I said. I would always remember that night, because it was the first time I told Caro she was part of my family and that I wanted to be part of hers. I’d been afraid to say it, but thank goodness I had, because then Caro had let me help her buy the lovesbane that saved her mother’s life. “He knew what the Ashes were, too, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

  Jules shook his head and I quickly returned to the subject at hand. “Those cap-o’-rushes were
dried, though, so they probably looked different.”

  We kept walking, scanning the trees for fungi. My skin throbbed. Once in a while, the creak or moan of a branch interrupted the strange bird songs around us. There were rustles and scuttlings in the trees too, and once a low, faraway howl that made us freeze in our tracks like prey.

  There was something about the light here that reminded me of our underwater sojourn that now seemed so long ago. It was heavy, changing, mysterious light that somehow clung to the skin like liquid and then scattered like shaken dewdrops when you moved into shadow.

  We made slow progress through the jungle. I knew I was keeping us back with my stiff, limping walk, and I hated it.

  “Could the buzzers help us look, Nick?” Fin asked then. “I mean, if they . . .” He looked stricken and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Nick. It’s just that I’m so used to them hovering around you all the time. Of course they were still in the ship.” He reached out to touch me before he remembered my burns and pulled back.

  I started to smile, but even that small movement hurt my skin. I wondered what my face looked like. Had the heat from Jules’s wings scarred me there, too?

  “No, they’re here,” I said.

  Jules stopped walking, and I reached for the briefcase on his back, then stopped when I heard the skin on my arms crackle.

  “Let me,” Fin said quickly, pulling the briefcase down and then settling himself on the ground to open it. He fiddled with the clasp for a while, and I watched him blankly for a few moments before remembering that the lock needed my hands, and no one else’s. How badly had the fall, the flight, shaken me, that my mind was now working so slowly?

  Carefully, I bent down far enough to reach the clasp. I pressed my finger against it. Nothing happened.

  I turned my hand over. The palm was red and puffy. My fingers had swollen with blisters, and I couldn’t see their prints.