During all of this, the Ohmsfords had failed to make use of the fire launchers. They had carried two of the weapons topside from their hiding places early that morning and placed them in the forward cradles before setting out. But the brothers were not extensively practiced with fire launchers, and on talking over how they would function in the event of an attack they realized for the first time a number of problems with trying to use them to fight off flits. First off, the launchers were not easily maneuvered and would have trouble tracking the tiny craft. Second, if they swung them even a little too far one way or the other, they would set fire to their own vessel. Third, it took time for diapson crystals to charge sufficiently to maintain the intensity of the fire stream necessary to burn attackers out of the sky, and once their power charge was exhausted the launchers were useless.
So the brothers had turned at once, on sighting the flits, to the more reliable rail slings for defense.
But seeing the raider attack shift toward Mirai, Redden had a flash of inspiration. He abandoned his rail sling and rushed to the port fire launcher, swinging the big weapon’s barrel about so that it was facing toward the speedy attackers just off the port side of Quickening.
This better work, he thought, because otherwise we are in serious trouble. And he cursed Railing for his impetuous wish of the night before.
Railing was screaming at him from the other side of the bow, presumably because he had abandoned his station, but Redden ignored his brother. He opened the barrel cap, released the trigger safety, and with the launcher ready for use summoned the wishsong’s magic.
Worked for Railing with the Sprint. Should work for me here.
He channeled the magic out of his body and down through his hands into the fire launcher. The weapon bucked in response, a lurching that very nearly unseated it from its cradle.
Redden hauled back on the trigger.
The magic-enhanced fire exploded from the barrel in a sharp burst of light and heat, the backwash of which very nearly flattened Redden. But he held on to the weapon’s handles, maintaining control of the wishsong through his grip, directing its path. Normally, the launcher’s fire would have assumed a tight, narrow beam with sufficient intensity to burn right through iron. But Redden used his magic instead to create a swath wide enough to impact a whole raft of Gnome raiders, mustering less force than a more concentrated beam would have, but enough to knock dozens of them all over the sky. Caught by surprise, the flits spun this way and that and toppled out of sight.
As quick as that, the attack was broken up. With half their force either downed or disabled, the rest of the raiders broke off and flew back the way they had come.
Redden glanced toward the stern and the pilot box. Dozens of darts and javelins sprouted from the wooden cockpit walls like quills from a porcupine; dozens more littered the decking. Mirai was still at the controls, disheveled and streaked with sweat and dirt but miraculously unharmed. She gave him a reassuring wave and began brushing splinters from her clothing.
He released his grip on the fire launcher and stepped back—right into Railing, who had appeared at his elbow.
“Good to see I can still teach you something,” his brother quipped. He had pulled the dart from his shoulder and was holding a makeshift compress to the wound. “That was pretty impressive, using the wishsong like that. I should have thought of it.”
Redden gave him a weak grin. Maybe so. But he hadn’t, and so he didn’t know that invoking the wishsong to control the power of diapson crystals in a fire launcher was debilitating and scary. Even now, Redden was shaking. The power of the wishsong had been drained by that single use, that momentary effort. He was left light-headed and dizzy, and there was something happening inside of him that he couldn’t quite define.
Whatever it was, he didn’t much like how it made him feel.
11
Khyber Elessedil stood at the bow of her personal vessel, the Ard Rhys, and watched as the docks of the Ohmsford home at Patch Run came into view. She had traveled down from Paranor with the new day, wending her way over the peaks of the Dragon’s Teeth until she reached the Mermidon, then traveling down the length of the Runne Mountains to Rainbow Lake and from there across to her destination. She was making the journey with Garroneck and a crew of four, but only out of deference to the wishes of her Captain of the Druid Guard who believed that an Ard Rhys should always travel with an escort.
Otherwise, she would have come alone.
She glanced around momentarily to watch as the Trolls prepared the airship for landing. Garroneck stood at the helm, and while she was certain he was watching her, he showed no signs of doing so.
Vigilance without interference.
She turned back to watch the shoreline. She could see the walls and roof of the Ohmsford house emerge from between the trees of the surrounding forest. The docks were mostly empty of craft; only a couple of skiffs and a barge were in moorage. A large boathouse was situated off to one side, the kind that could be used for dry-docking and repairs. Seabirds circled the shoreline, hundreds strong. Stacks of materials and assorted equipment sat in neatly stacked piles at the ends of the docks and in scattered clumps throughout the grassy rise leading up to the house. A typical workingman’s home if you ignored the absence of any men or work.
Nor was there any sign of the home’s inhabitants.
She thought about Sarys Ohmsford, with whom she would have to deal, and was immediately sad. Sarys Starleigh of the Elves—a woman of strong will and stronger emotions, a mother who loved her sons more than anything and would fight to the death to protect them. Born of a people who had embraced magic for centuries, she had been less entranced than most right from the first. Shy and skittish, she had avoided things that frightened her. Magic was one of them. But when she fell in love with Kierst Ohmsford and discovered the Ohmsford legacy, she was forced to reassess her thinking. Unable to give him up, she had persuaded herself that her children would be among the generations skipped by the magic of the wishsong. The odds were excellent, after all. Her future husband’s father, Penderrin Ohmsford, and his father and his father’s sister, Bek and Grianne Ohmsford, had all possessed it. It was time for the legacy to skip her children as it had their father. If it did not, that would mean three out of four consecutive generations would inherit the magic. That had never happened dating all the way back to the siblings Brin and Jair Ohmsford, who had been the first to have use of it.
Her terror and dismay when she discovered her twin boys had been born with the wishsong had driven a schism between herself and the rest of those in the Ohmsford family who were magic wielders—a schism that even Kierst’s efforts had failed to bridge. Once it was determined that the magic was there, Sarys had undertaken a campaign to make certain that it was never employed. From the time they were small, Redden and Railing Ohmsford had been forbidden to use it or even to acknowledge publicly that the potential for doing so existed.
The death of her husband put a finish to the Ohmsford line save for her boys, unless there were distant relatives out there in the world that no one knew about. So she was immediately confronted with the problem of how to deal with her sons’ growing desire, in the wake of their father’s death, to embrace their unique legacy and explore their magic’s potential. Beyond distraught, she had done her best to stop this. She knew she could not prevent it entirely; she understood their need to satisfy their curiosity. She resorted to negotiation, conceding one use while forbidding another, always doing her best to keep them in check. Part of her strategy was to allow the boys greater freedom in exploring other areas of interest—such as building and flying airships—to keep them distracted. Some freedoms were mandated in any case by the inescapable need for the family to find ways to survive, and her sons proved adept when it came to making favorable trades on the open market. The black market, too, though she would never have admitted to anyone that she knew they were active there, as well.