Tavi felt the warmth beginning to gather in his belly as the firecrafting finally gained momentum. Now he’d just have to be careful not to let it build too much. He might be tired of the cold, but he didn’t think that setting his intestines on fire would be any more pleasant in the long term. “But i-if I died, would you have anyone to talk to?”
“It would be bothersome, but I suppose I could find and keep track of some other bloodline.”
The shuddering finally—finally!—abated. Tavi sat up slowly, and reached up to rake his wet hair back. His fingers felt stiff and partially numb. Bits of ice fell from his hair. He kept the firecrafting going. “Like Aquitainus Attis?” Tavi suggested.
“Likely,” she said, nodding. “He’s a great deal more like your predecessor than you are, after all. Though I understand his name is Gaius Aquitainus Attis now. I’m not sure I understand why a legal process would alter his self-identity.”
Tavi grimaced. “It doesn’t. It’s meant to alter how everyone else thinks of him.”
Alera shook her head. “Baffling creatures. It is difficult enough for you to control your own thoughts, much less one another’s.”
Tavi smiled, his lips pressed tightly over his teeth. “How much longer before we’ll be able to send them a message and let them know that we’re coming?”
Alera’s eyes went distant for a moment before she spoke. “The vord seem to have realized how waterways are used for communications. They are damming many streams and have placed sentry furies to intercept messenger furies within all the major rivers and tributaries. They have almost entirely enveloped the coastlines of the western and southern shores of the continent. As a result, it seems unlikely that it will be possible to form a connection via the waterways until you have advanced several dozen miles inland from the coast, at the very least.”
Tavi grimaced. “We’ll have to send aerial messengers as soon as we’re close enough. I assume that the vord know we are coming.”
“That remains unclear,” Alera said. “But it seems a wise assumption to make. Where will you make landfall?”
“On the northwest coast, near Antillus,” Tavi replied. “If the vord are there, we will assist the city’s defenders and leave our civilians there before we march inland.”
“I am sure High Lord Antillus will be filled with pleasure at the notion of tens of thousands of Canim camping on his doorstep,” Alera murmured.
“I’m the First Lord,” Tavi said. “Or will be. He’ll get over it.”
“Not if the Canim devour his resources—his food stores, his livestock, his holders…”
Tavi grunted. “We’ll leave several crews of leviathan hunters behind us. I’m sure he won’t mind if a few dozen miles of his coastline are cleared of the beasts.”
“And how will you feed your army on the march inland?” Alera asked.
“I’m working on it,” Tavi said. He frowned. “If the vord aren’t stopped, all of my species is likely to be destroyed.”
Alera turned her glittering, shifting gemstone eyes to him. “Yes.”
“If that happens, who would you talk to?” Tavi asked.
The expression on her beautiful face was unreadable. “It isn’t an eventuality that concerns me.” She shook her head. “The vord are, in their way, almost as interesting as your own kind—if far more limited in flexibility of thought. And variety is nonexistent among them, in most senses of the word. They would likely grow quickly tiresome. But…” She shrugged. “What will be, will be.”
“And yet you’re helping us,” Tavi said. “The training. The information you can provide us. They are invaluable.”
She bowed her head to him. “It is a far cry from taking action against them. I am helping you, young Gaius. I am not harming them.”
“A very fine distinction.”
She shrugged. “It is what it is.”
“You tell me that you acted directly at the battle of Ceres.”
“When Gaius Sextus invoked my aid, he asked for prevailing conditions that would affect everything present with equal intensity.”
“But those conditions were more beneficial to the Alerans than the vord,” Tavi said.
“Yes. And they were within the limits I set forth to the House of Gaius a thousand years ago.” She shrugged. “So I did as he requested—just as I have moderated the weather for the fleet for the duration of this voyage, as you requested.” She tilted her head slightly. “It appears that you have survived your previous lesson. Shall we try again?”
Tavi pushed himself wearily to his feet.
The next attempt at flight lasted all of half a minute longer than the first, and he managed to come down in nice, soft snow instead of the icy water.
“Broken bones,” Alera said. “Excellent. An opportunity to practice watercrafting.”
Tavi looked up from his grotesquely twisted left leg. He ground his teeth and tried to push himself up, but his left arm gave out on him. The pain was unbelievable. He sank back into the snow and fumbled at his belt until his hand found the hilt of his dagger. A moment’s concentration, transferring his focus and his thought into the orderly crystalline matrix of high-grade steel, and the pain receded into the calm, detached lack of feeling that came with metalcrafting.
“I’m tired,” he said. His own voice felt unfastened, somehow, separate from the rest of him. “Bonesetting is taxing work.”
Alera smiled and began to answer when the pool of water exploded into a cloud of flying droplets and angry spray.
Tavi shielded his face against the sudden, icy deluge, and blinked at the pool as Kitai rose out of the water on a furycrafted column of liquid and dropped neatly to the cavern’s floor. She was a tall young woman of exotic beauty and extraordinary grace. Like that of most of the Marat, her hair was a soft, pure white. She had shaved it close to her skull on the sides while leaving a long, single mane running down the center of her head, after the fashion of the Horse tribe of the Marat. She was dressed in close-fitting blue and grey flying leathers. The clothes quite admirably displayed a slim physique, significantly more well muscled than an average Aleran girl’s. Her canted eyes were a brilliant green identical to Tavi’s own, and they were bright and hard.
“Aleran!” she snapped, her voice ringing back from the frozen walls. Her anger was a palpable thing, a fire that Tavi could feel inside his own belly.
He winced.
Kitai stalked over to him and placed her fists upon her hips. “I have been speaking to Tribune Cymnea. She informs me that you have been treating me like a whore.”
Tavi blinked. Several times. “Um. What?”
“Don’t you dare play innocent with me, Aleran,” she spat. “If anyone is in a position to know, it is Cymnea.”
Tavi struggled to make sense of Kitai’s statements. Cymnea was the Tribune Logistica of the First Aleran Legion—but before circumstance and emergency had forced her into becoming Tribune Cymnea, she had been Mistress Cymnea, proprietor of the Pavilion, the finest house of ill repute in the camp following the Legion.
“Kitai,” Tavi said, “I don’t understand.”
“Augh!” she said, and flung her hands in the air. “How can such a brilliant commander be such an idiot?” She turned to Alera, pointed an accusing finger at Tavi, and said, “Explain it to him.”
“I feel I am hardly qualified,” Alera replied calmly.
Kitai turned back to Tavi. “Cymnea tells me that it is custom, among your people, that those who wish to be wed to one another do not lie together before they make their vows. This is a ridiculous custom—but it is the way of the Citizenry.”