The Queen of Death

14

“Let me do the talking,” Burch signaled as he and Kandler threw the Phoenix’s mooring lines out to the elves standing on the cliffside dock.

Kandler nodded. He’d never been to this part of Valenar before, and he trusted the shifter’s judgment. He didn’t want any trouble here, just to stock up with plenty of supplies and head out over the Dragonreach, which beckoned beyond. His instincts told him that the longer they waited before making the trip the harder it would be.

“This doesn’t look much like what I expected,” said Esprë. She’d stuck close to him ever since they’d spotted the warclan and its riders.

The thought of exposing her to a society of elves bothered him a bit. Since Esprina had died, they’d had precious little contact with elves. None but Esprë had lived in Mardakine. Esprina had never sought the company of her own kind, instead preferring to surround herself—and by extension her daughter—with all sorts of people, mostly human.

“I love the human perspective,” Esprina had once said to Kandler. “It’s so fresh and immediate. There’s a touch of innocence to it, which you’d expect in people so young, but that just makes it all the more precious.”

She’d never wanted to talk much about why she’d left Aerenal. It had happened decades before Kandler had been born, when Esprë had been just an infant. Whatever the reason, she hadn’t tarried in Valenar either, despite landing there when she reached Khorvaire.

“Your mother and you didn’t spend long here,” Kandler said.

Esprë shook her blond head. “We spent less than a week in the capital, Taer Valaestas. Just long enough to get our bearings. I barely remember it. Then we were off for Cyre.”

A gangplank thrust out from the dock and over the airship’s gunwale. Burch went down it first, with Kandler and Esprë close behind. Sallah and Monja came after them, leaving Xalt, Duro, and Te’oma on the airship.

Te’oma had morphed herself to look like Shawda, the last woman who’d shown up dead in Mardakine before the changeling had come to town with Tan Du and his vampire spawn. Kandler respected that the changeling didn’t want to call any attention to herself—any changeling would have done so in a village like this—but her choice of disguise riled him. He saw tears well up in Esprë’s eyes every time her eyes happened to fall on the false Shawda, and that made him want to stomp over to Te’oma and beat her face into another shape.

Kandler feared, though, that the sight of such a conflict might send Esprë right over the edge. It had turned out that Esprë’s dragonmark had caused her to kill a number of people in Mardakine while she’d been sleeping. Shawda—the mother of the girl’s best friend, Norra—had been the last of these, and Esprë and the rest of the people of Mardakine had seen the woman’s body only after the Knights of the Silver Flame had hacked it to pieces. Seeing a copy of the woman standing on the bridge of the Phoenix, her hands wrapped around the wheel, turned Kandler’s stomach.

Still, if Esprë could manage to ignore it, then so would he. At least with the changeling staying on the ship with Duro and Xalt, they wouldn’t have to put up with it much longer.

As Kandler and Esprë reached the dock, he glanced around. The Phoenix had come upon Aerie from its northern edge, and the land there sloped up gently to the only gate set in the fort’s tall stone walls. A horsed patrol galloped out onto the dusty road there as the airship came in for a landing.

The southern wall of Aerie looked out over a sheer cliff that fell more than a hundred feet to the wide, fertile plains below. Beyond these gentle lands, Kandler could see a long shore of white sand at which the roaring waters of the Thunder Sea began.

As the elves who founded this place came up from that wide beach and crossed the untamed lands, this spot must have seemed like perfect place for a band of warriors to build a nest. From here, they could watch over all the lands around, like hungry birds hunting for prey.

At Burch’s instruction, Te’oma swung the airship out around the fort, far out of catapult range from the place’s walls. Then she came up slowly and easily to the airship dock that topped a short section of the southern wall, jutting out over the precipitous drop. The elves there flashed a welcoming signal—or so Burch said—and Te’oma brought the ship in to moor.

Kandler spoke fluent Elven, which had come in handy both as an agent of the Citadel and in courting his wife. He and Esprë sometimes used it as a code in front of the ignorant, but it would not serve them well that way here, where everyone would speak the tongue better than they.

As he, Esprë, Sallah, and Monja waited on the dock, Kandler nudged his stepdaughter. Jerking his head toward Burch, who stood talking with a stern elf dressed in full battle regalia, he shot Esprë a questioning look. She shrugged.

Kandler noticed that every one of the elves he’d seen so far wore a suit of armor and some kind of weaponry. The dockworkers favored spears or short swords, but the lookouts further down the wall in each direction carried longbows and stood nearby loaded ballistae and catapults that were ready to loose their loads at anyone so bold as to invade the space around the fort without permission.

Every piece of equipment bore fine filigree run through with images of death and war, and they looked delicate by human standards. Kandler knew, though, that they’d likely been made by the finest smiths and crafters. Valenar elves never made anything cheap or fragile. By comparison, the Phoenix seemed like a crude bit of hackwork churned out in a mill staffed by idiotic children.

The buildings of Aerie might have seemed ridiculously ornate to the untrained eye. Kandler knew that they would stand up to an assault better than all but the best fortifications in the Five Kingdoms. He spied few balconies or terraces built to take advantage of the spectacular views to the south. Those he did see were framed with trellises and colonnades that let in vast amounts of sky. They would also, however, protect from any attacks from above, whether by airship or some other means. The people of Aerie took their security seriously, as they should, given their proximity to the frontier nation of Q’barra, the border of which lay scant miles to the east.

“I do not care for this place,” Sallah said quietly.

Monja nodded in agreement, her head bobbing like that of a small child. “A fort like this can quickly change from a haven to a trap.”

Burch bowed to the elf he’d been talking to then trotted back to the others. Try as he might, Kandler could not read the shifter’s face. He’d known Burch long enough to realize that this was not a good thing.

“The dockmaster welcomes us to Aerie,” Burch said. “Just how welcome are we?” Kandler asked.

Burch pointed at the heavy weaponry mounted on the turrets nearest the airship. “Those aren’t for show,” he said. “I’m told the elves who staff them don’t care much for dwarves and have itchy trigger fingers.”

Esprë gasped. “Shouldn’t we bring Duro with us then?” she said. “We can’t just leave him out there to be shot down.” Burch smiled. “He’s safer there than he would be in the fort. At least out there an elf would have to work at it to pick a fight with him. Here, he’d find himself in a tangle inside an hour.

“Have you located lodgings for us?” Sallah asked.

Burch cocked his head at her. “We’re staying on the ship.” “You may be,” Sallah said, “but once you leave, I will need a place to sleep, unless you can help me arrange for passage out of here before the rest of you depart.”

Kandler winced inside, but Burch took it all in stride. “I’ll see what I can do,” the shifter said.

Kandler hoped his friend wouldn’t go out of his way to succeed.

“What about supplies?” Kandler asked. “I’d like to get underway as soon as we can.” He avoided Sallah’s gaze as he spoke.

Burch grimaced. “They don’t always sell supplies to outsiders, but they’re under orders to deal with us as if we were citizens of Aerenal.”

“How’s that?” Kandler asked, suspicious.

He glanced around and saw the dockmaster regarding him with an imperious smirk. An awful lot of the weaponry on these battlements seemed like it could be pointed at him as easily as the Phoenix.

“There’s someone here—someone important—who wants to have a word with us.”

“And this elf has enough pull to get us access to the supplies we need?”

Burch nodded. “If we go see him right now.”

Kandler narrowed his eyes at the shifter. “Who is it?” “Name’s Ledenstrae.”

Kandler felt his head spin, and he heard Esprë gasp in shock.

“My father?” she whispered.