Kandler nodded. “The Valenar warclans used to run strikes into southern Cyre every couple of weeks. Ironic when you consider that Gyre brought them into the Last War as an ally in the first place.”
“They do not bother the warforged or the Lord of Blades,” Xalt said. “The Lord of Blades sometimes sends his best fighters to test their mettle against the warclans, though. Sometimes a warclan will wait for weeks outside of the Mournland, waiting for a warforged force to show itself and enter battle.”
“That’s madness,” Te’oma said. “They fight just to fight?”
“Not everyone does it for money,” said Burch. “Some people take pride in their work.”
“I never took pleasure in it,” the changeling said.
“Can they do anything to harm us up here?” Sallah asked.
She addressed Kandler directly. The two of them were speaking to each other again; although they both treated each other so respectfully, so dispassionately, Kandler felt like they might as well have kept their distance instead. Still, if she wanted to play things that way, he didn’t wish to stop her. Being with her, even in such a stilted way, was better than not being with her at all.#
“No,” he said. “We’re too high up now. Sometimes they have a wizard or sorcerer in their retinue though. That’s why I had Esprë move us higher as soon as Burch spotted them.”
“Where are those riders headed?” Sallah asked.
Kandler looked to Burch. “Probably Taer Shantara,” the shifter said. “It’s one of the six forts that stretch around the last stable border Valenar had. The warclans always try pressing out farther—into Q’barra and the Talenta Plains these days—but geography and weather always tar up their supply lines. Besides which, none of the Valenar elves want to bother with guarding a supply caravan instead of being in the thick of things, so eventually they run out of food and water and come galloping home.”
Te’oma stared at the shifter. He raised a quizzical eyebrow at her. “I think that’s the most words I’ve ever heard you say in one stretch,” she said.
“You’re not usually worth talking to.”
“Are we headed for Taer Shantara?” Sallah said. “It seems it would be a logical place to gather supplies for your journey across the sea.”
Kandler noticed that she hadn’t included herself in that journey.
Burch shook his shaggy head. “The elves at Shantara are too war-crazy, and those riders are sure to get there before us to warn that we’re the vanguard of an invasion from the north.” He held up a hand to cut off protest. “True or not, it doesn’t matter. Better to pass them by for Aerie instead.” “That sounds like my kind of place,” said Duro. “Clear mountain air and filled with eagle-riding dwarves, I’m sure!”
Burch snorted. “It’s the westernmost Valenar fort, the favorite launching pad for raids into Q’barra. It sits in the foothills at the very end of the Endworld Mountains, overlooking the sea. It’s our last chance to stop.”
“Assuming the elves there don’t decide that we’re the leaders of an invading force too,” said Sallah.
Burch smiled, showing his pointed fangs. “Last chances are last chances,” he said.
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.