Our forces were waiting at the very edge of the jungle, concealed with shadows and ombrossus and spells I couldn’t name just behind a wide expanse of gently sloping blue beach. If we could not choose the time of this last battle, Talis had said, we could at least choose the place. When Fin suggested that the Estingers’ unfamiliarity with the jungle might be a better advantage to the Fey, both Talis’s advisors and my mother had shut him down. The beach was the place, they insisted.
I remembered my mother’s reaction to my idea of sea automatons, and I wondered if they hoped we could simply drive the soldiers into the water and douse their furnaces . . . but I doubted it. There were far too many of them for us to have even a hope of driving them all back.
No, we had to meet them in battle.
I could feel the hushed presence of thousands of quietly breathing souls all around me. And the presence of those that weren’t breathing too; all our own animals, to which Mother and I had given these new warlike bodies. They risked as much as we did, I was sure of that. And they’d already sacrificed more.
We waited, souls clothed in flesh or metal, in silence for our fate.
The airships drew steadily closer. They never gained speed. They had fired no more cannons since Fin and I left the ship.
Had they hoped to arrive unnoticed, to simply drop the troops on top of the Fey capital with no resistance? Surely not. And Fin, Jules, and I had removed any doubt they might have had that we knew they were coming.
When they were some few hundred feet from the shore, they began to descend.
At a signal I didn’t hear, the biggest dragonflies to my left took off.
They rose into the sky in an acute V formation, followed closely by giant copper bats and canaries with two Fey riders apiece. Their engines hissed and whirred in perfect synchrony.
The first Fey rider threw a grenade. It blasted into the lead airship’s side, and then the cannonballs rained down.
✷
The battle seemed to be happening in memory even as I moved through it. Part of me was there, riding Jules, clutching Fin, throwing the grenades tucked into pouches at my waist when we got above the airships again.
But the biggest part of me was detached, not even frightened or overwhelmed, just . . . watching, as if from some safe future, refusing to believe that I was experiencing these things as they happened.
The Estinger airships reached the shore. They hovered just a few yards above the ground and I watched as they dropped their cargo, seven-foot-tall toy soldiers that snapped to life under the shadows of the ships and then marched forward, gleaming in the tropical sun. Hordes of them. They were an infestation covering all the many miles of the long stretch of beach where Talis’s commanders had decided that we all would live or die.
They had a cavalry. It was foolish ever to have thought they wouldn’t. Hundreds of horses, so closely modeled on Jules that I was sure Fitz had somehow stolen my designs.
And yet . . . I stared down from our great height, disbelieving. The horses’ heads weren’t heads at all, too bulky and straight and with . . .
Not horses’ heads, but human torsos, with human heads and arms above, arms that ended not in hands but in bayonets.
The clockwork centaurs clacked forward with a gait that was more insect than equine, their bayonet arms long enough to help propel them, six-legged, along the ground.
But we had a cavalry too. Our huge spiders and beetles rushed out of the jungle to meet them. The Fey soldiers astride their backs threw so many bombs that all I could see of the battle below was a muddle of smoke and fire, the occasional singing glint of steel.
Still, I could see all too well how the battle was progressing; the anguished cries of Fey soldiers soon drowned out the metallic clashing on the beach and even the great, low rumble of the airship fires. The automaton army’s numbers were overwhelming, turning the blue beach black with metal and smoke.
But another battle raged in the sky. Our dozens of flying insects zipped through the air, sending bombs down onto the shuddering airships while the ships volleyed cannon fire back.
I watched one cannonball crash into a dragonfly with a sickening crunch, a rush of flame as its furnace was exposed, and I couldn’t look away as the steed and its two riders plunged down into the smoky chaos of the battle below.
Jules watched too, his spiny wings hooked into the air to glide. I tore my eyes away in time to see the rifleman on the ship below aiming his barrel, but Jules didn’t.
Fin.
I’d vowed I’d be there to stop any bullet that came for him, after that first awful time at the Exposition that now seemed so long ago. Yet here in my very arms he was shot again.
I didn’t scream because it would do nothing. I could do nothing.
It hit him in the belly below his breastplate, no mere shoulder wound this time, with such force that he was propelled out of Jules’s saddle and nearly out of my grasp.
I clutched his right leg as he fell, his dead weight slipping away from me, dangling toward the edge of the airship’s deck, toward the clashing, roaring bloodbath on the ground. We were hundreds of feet in the air.
“I can’t hold him!” I called.
Jules looked back, ears flat to his head. He veered away from the airship and out toward the open water.
I heard the groan of straining ropes and sails as the ship banked around to follow us, but I couldn’t look away from the body I was barely holding on to, the bloodstain that spread below Fin’s useless armor. I cursed the Fey and my mother for telling Fin it made him safe. I cursed Fin for believing them, and most of all I cursed myself.
Jules sailed away from the battle, down and down. When Fin’s leg finally slipped out of my white, numb fingers, we were only twenty feet above the calm water.
His body hit with a crack like breaking bones.
But to worry about breaking bones when he might be dead . . . no. The fall at least hadn’t killed him, and if I could get him back to Caro and those Fey healers . . .
I had to believe he was still living. What I had to worry about now was drowning.
I held on tight, and Jules descended until the tips of his wings and hooves splashed in the waves, throwing salt drops that clung to my skin and clothes and hair. He wasn’t raising steam the way he had the day we first plunged toward Faerie three or four lifetimes ago, and he didn’t struggle to stay airborne as I leaned precariously off his side to pull Fin out of the ocean.
There was blood, so much of Fin’s blood, dissipating into the water. Dark, menacing red blossoming into the green like a painting of flowers.
The swirling pattern transfixed me, and even after I had dragged Fin’s unconscious but still bleeding, still living body back onto Jules and he’d lifted us airborne again, I kept staring at that muddy, spreading patch of darkness, like a bruise on the skin of the sea.
I kept staring as we rose, until it vanished as suddenly as if it had been swallowed.
Fin began to shiver violently. His clothes were drenched, his fibrous armor swollen and heavy. I worried that it was constricting his breath, but I couldn’t risk pulling it off; I didn’t even want to risk taking one hand away from supporting him in order to try.
Jules banked as far away from the center of the battle as he could without losing too much time.
When we approached the shore, I bent forward over Fin, covering his body with my own as Jules sped past the fighting in the air and on the ground. No more bullets would reach Fin except through my own body.
I squeezed my eyes closed, sure that at any moment I would feel metal tear through my skin, shatter my bones, sure that there would be a final crack and shock of pain, and I would know no more.
But then Jules touched ground, moving smoothly from flight into his rolling gallop, and I remained whole.
I pulled my head up, keeping my arms and torso in their protective hunch over Fin, who was still shivering, still barely conscious. My whole body, my whole mind became one prayer as we sped towar
d the barracks and the healers’ halls.
Save him. Save him.
TALIS was still standing where we’d left fer, at the top of the barracks wall. Fer skin was sallow under the blue freckles, and dark shadows lurked under fer eyes.
I saw fer with absolute clarity as we rushed past, in more detail than should have been possible. I saw fer haunted look, and I recognized it; I felt that way too. Someone I loved might be dying. I felt it now, with Fin in my arms, and I’d felt it before, when each of my parents died—or when I thought they had.
But on Talis’s face, that hollow look was multiplied a thousandfold. If anyone ever doubted the multitudes of fer parentage, the look on fer face now would make it certain.
Thousands of Talis’s parents were dead and dying.
My heart twisted as we sped past the ruler toward the healers’ halls. For a moment even my own pain, even the pain of every soldier, flesh and metal, on the beach, was nothing to what Talis felt.
Then Fin’s blood trickled across my forearm, and I forgot. I urged Jules on.
Healers were waiting to meet us at the gate, wrapped head to toe in their immaculate white, only their eyes showing through small, screened slits in their headscarfs.
Jules knelt and Fin lolled forward, still barely conscious. The healers unrolled a thin fabric stretcher, too much like the one I’d seen at the fiery geyser.
Fin couldn’t even groan as the soldier in the horrible clearing had done. He was utterly still and limp and gray-skinned. He vanished down a trapdoor in the healers’ hands.
Even from there, I could hear the battle raging on the shore. All I wanted was to stay away from it—not to be with Fin, because I didn’t think I could bear it if I had to watch him die, but just . . . just to preserve myself.
I climbed back onto Jules before the idea could take hold. Fin was seeing out his beliefs to the bitter end, and I wouldn’t let him down by giving in to my cowardice.
Jules rose from the ground, and we plunged back toward the battle.
The only word for what I saw on the beach when we returned was carnage. I was sure we’d been away less than an hour, but nearly all of the menagerie was demolished, wings and legs and thoraxes over which Mother and I had labored for so long strewn across the beach in pieces, while the automaton Estinger soldiers and their horribly clacking centaur cavalry seemed to dance over the wreckage. I could see human soldiers too, the colonizers who had been left in the small pockets of Faerie where Esting still ruled; it seemed as if every single one of them had joined the battle. More airships were hovering over the littered beach, releasing fresh forces in numbers unimaginable.
I looked toward the ocean—yet more airships haunted the horizon.
“Nicolette!”
My body reacted to my mother’s scream before my mind did, a child that wanted its mother. I couldn’t do anything but go to her, and Jules reacted just as quickly, taking me to the place where the scream came from—and wasn’t she his mother too?
A centaur had stabbed her through her metal chest with a bayonet; it was trampling the pincered head of the spider steed she’d built for herself weeks before. Smoke began to pour from the hole where a human heart would have been.
Jules reared up, his wings cloaking around us for a heartbeat and then pulling us upward, and with one thrust forward he kicked the centaur’s back so that it went sprawling across the bloody, oil-pocked sand. I grabbed a grenade from my pouch, removed the pin, and threw it, barely thinking as I did. When it consumed the centaur in flame I felt that same detachment, as if it were only a memory, not the result of a choice I had just made.
And then Jules turned us back toward my wounded mother, and I thought of nothing but her.
She was incredibly heavy, all iron and steel, and when I finally pulled her onto Jules’s back, it took him a few heaving efforts to get airborne once more. But just as another centaur saw and lunged for us, Jules pulled up and away, and we were rising toward the darkly floating airships again.
My mother leaned forward against Jules’s neck. Smoke hissed out of her chest, the fuel in her furnace burning away in the open air. Within moments her flame died and she whirred down into silence.
I started to shake as violently as Fin had when I’d pulled him out of the water. Everything I hadn’t been able to feel in the rush of battle, all the rage and revulsion and pain, was swallowing me whole. I looked away from my mother’s motionless second body, away from the bloody fighting. I couldn’t bear it, not any of it. The only place I could look was the sea, so close to us, so calm and peaceful beyond the shallows.
But something was changing out there too. Something was shifting, a darkness far from the shore.
A bruise on the water, like the bruise Fin’s blood had made.
I forced myself back into the moment, forced my mind to focus. A huge, dark, watery shape, growing closer more quickly than even the airships had done.
“Look, Jules,” I said, but he was already watching it. He reluctantly moved us nearer when I urged him, balking at first, his ears flat back against his head. He brought us higher up into the sky than we had ever been before, and we soared past the airships and far, far out to sea.
From that height, I recognized the huge, sinuous shape at once. Shim’s serpent in Talis’s story. The map in the Imperator’s library.
Here be monsters.
The creature was the shifting, unnamable color of deep water, and it was unimaginably vast. Its body twisted through the waves, thick as a ship and so long I had no scale for comparison. Even from our great height, I could look at it only in sections.
There were pale specks in the water around the serpent, as white as the beast was dark. Not sea foam, because they moved with purpose and intelligence, forward to the shore with their behemoth, only a few at first and then hundreds, thousands. We dipped down just close enough that I could see them reaching out, reaching toward the shore . . .
Then I heard them singing, and it was a song I knew.
I saw Fin cutting the merman free from the net, their blood twining together in the water. Heard the creature’s keening that had turned into a song that sounded like a promise.
A promise now kept.
I shifted my grasp on my mother’s body and urged Jules lower but he refused. I looked back at the shore, certain that I was about to see a great serpent rise up and swallow the marauding forces on the beach, swallow even the airships themselves.
But as the eerie singing swelled, the throng of merfolk stopped their movement forward, and the monster stopped too. It began to circle around the singers, faster and faster, and then it reared up a narrow frilled head twice the size of any airship and dove.
Watching the slick, endless length of its body follow its head beneath the water was the most entrancing thing I’d ever seen.
Jules flapped his wings and rose yet higher, so high that I had to gasp just to get enough air into my lungs, and I began to wonder whether there would be enough oxygen to fuel the fire in his furnace.
“Careful, Jules,” I croaked. But he tossed his head, staring down at the ocean.
The serpent’s body was even longer than I could have imagined, and its tail rose out of the sea in front of the merfolk, whose song I could barely hear from such a height.
Then the merfolk began swimming back, away from Faerie, toward the deep open ocean again. Still singing, they swam away so quickly that I could see the water they churned up even from our great height.
Jules understood before I did. He heaved his wings through the air and headed for the mainland as quickly as he could with the weight of myself and my mother’s metal body.
I looked back at the merfolk and the serpent, and I was confused because the ocean seemed to be bending, folding up toward us. A trick of perspective, an illusion caused by the path of Jules’s flight somehow?
No.
A tidal wave.
A rising hump of water that dwarfed even the sea monster swelling toward Faerie,
toward the invading Esting army. Ahead of us I watched the line of water recede from the shore, revealing more and more deep blue sand and then long limp stretches of kelp and the splotched, naked rainbow of an exposed coral reef. Still the water pulled away, widening the battlefield tenfold.
The automaton army continued their massacre, single-minded. I doubted even one of them turned to look.
I did, though; I looked back at the wave as Jules heaved underneath me, and I knew he was not flying fast enough. The wave that the merfolk had sent to save Fin would take us out before we even reached the shoreline. It would douse Jules’s furnace and rend apart his body and my mother’s as easily as it would break my own. Like the doomed armies on the shore, we would be only so much wreckage.
Jules’s wings creaked and shuddered. I knew without looking that the coal in his belly was running low.
“Ballast,” he growled back at me. “Margot.”
I looked at my mother’s body. I forced down all the many kinds of revulsion that I felt. I knew Jules was right.
I pulled my wrench from my waistcoat belt and spun the adjuster, then set to work dismantling my mother.
Her arms came off first and most easily, the jointed fingers gesturing like a ballerina’s as they plummeted into the sea below us. Her legs, bolted at the hips, were heavier and harder to pull apart, but at last they tumbled away too, the abrupt absence of their weight making Jules jerk suddenly higher up into the sky. But we still weren’t light enough.
I opened the back of my mother’s head, under the silky brown wig that was such a close simulacrum of my own hair that I felt the ghosts of fingers at my nape too. Shivering, I withdrew the small box of Ashes that I knew would be hidden there, just as it was hidden in all the buzzers she’d made and in Jules’s head too.
I tucked the box into my breast pocket, and with sudden ferocity I pushed my mother’s head and limbless torso away from me as hard as I could. As I watched it fall, I felt like crying and laughing and being sick all at once.
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