CHAPTER
12

Rienne!” Jordhan’s voice was a distant siren, drawing her out of sleep. She awoke in his cabin, her cheeks wet with tears, wisps of dream clouding her thoughts, Gaven’s name on her lips. Jordhan was calling down from the deck, and as the haze of sleep lifted she could hear the urgency in his voice.

She sprang out of the bunk, snatched up Maelstrom in its sheath, and bounded through the hatch to the deck. Sunlight cast long shadows across the polished wood beneath her feet, but she couldn’t tell whether the sun was about to dip below the horizon or just emerging above it. Jordhan stood at the helm, alert, watching something off the starboard bow.

“What is it?” she asked, hurrying to the bulwarks. She saw before he could answer—three pairs of wings, fierce eagle beaks and talons in front, powerful body and horse-like hooves in back. Hippogriffs—each one carrying a rider. The sun gleamed on the riders’ metal armor and shone on the tips of the long lances they carried. The majestic beasts soared on wide-spread wings, on a course that would intercept the airship’s in just a few moments.

“Have they hailed you?” Rienne called back to Jordhan.

“Not yet.”

“Where are we?”

Jordhan scoffed. “The middle of nowhere. We’re almost back to the edge of the forest, ahead of the barbarians again.”

“These riders aren’t from the horde, though.”

“No. There seem to be Eldeen forces coming together somewhere near here—I’ve seen quite a few contingents moving beneath us.”

“So the hippogriffs are part of the Eldeen defenses.”

“I’d assume so.”

Rienne slid Maelstrom into the sash at her waist and tried to relax as the hippogriffs closed the distance. She should have nothing to fear from the Reachers—she was here, after all, to help them defend their land from the barbarians. Ostensibly, though, that was the same reason that Aundair had sent troops into the Reaches. House Lyrandar had close ties to Aundair, so she wasn’t sure of the reaction she should expect from these riders.

The hippogriffs approached in a tight wedge, the wingtips of the two in the rear almost touching each other near the front one’s tail. Rienne backed toward the helm to make room on the deck for one of the beasts to land, and a moment later the two rear hippogriffs split off to either side as the front one fluttered into a graceful landing, its rear hooves clattering against the deck. The rider was a human in thick hide armor, covered with a sage green tabard bearing the oak-tree emblem of the Eldeen Reaches. His skin was a shade darker than Rienne’s, almost black. He set his lance into a sling attached to the saddle and dismounted.

“Captain Lyrandar,” the man said with a small bow toward Jordhan, “and lady, I apologize for this intrusion. I am Sky Warden Kyaphar.”

Rienne glanced over her shoulder at Jordhan, who smiled at the Sky Warden. “I am Jordhan d’Lyrandar—you’ll forgive me not leaving the helm to greet you properly. This is Rienne ir’Alastra, of Stormhome.”

“What can we do for you, Sky Warden?” Rienne said.

“Can I inquire as to your business in this part of the Reaches? Are you carrying cargo?”

Rienne drew a deep breath. “We are here to offer our support to your leadership, to help defend the Reaches from its attackers.”

Kyaphar’s face twisted in anger. “Which attackers do you mean? The Carrion Tribes or the armies of Aundair?”

“I believe the Carrion Tribes to be the greater threat,” Rienne said, “with dragons as their vanguard.”

“And vultures at their rear. But Aundair is no less an invading army. The defense of the Reaches is a Reacher concern, not Aundair’s, and not yours. What is your stake in our fate?”

Kyaphar’s words echoed the words of her dream, and she shuddered. Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones of the numberless dead. “I had a dream,” she said, to herself as much as to him.

“And your dream led you to the defense of the Eldeen Reaches?”

Rienne threw a sharp glance at Kyaphar, but his face held no mockery—rather, he seemed intrigued.

“Yes,” she said. “I believe my destiny is intertwined with that of the barbarian leader.” The Blasphemer, she thought.

“And you believe that the two of you, and your airship, can make a difference in this war.”

“We already have,” Jordhan said from the helm. “One fewer dragon flies before the horde already, thanks to Rienne and this airship.”

Rienne felt embarrassed at Jordhan’s boast and looked away. Kyaphar’s hippogriff shifted nervously on the deck, while the other two riders circled their mounts around the airship. The sun was sinking behind the distant mountains, streaking the smoke-filled sky with red.

“All our fates are intertwined,” she said. She stepped to the bulwarks and looked eastward. The forest dwindled away into the farms of the eastern Reaches, and beyond them the writhing line of the Wyr River glowed red in the evening sun. The land across the river was Aundair—more fields, vineyards, and bustling Fairhaven at their heart. She struggled to find words to make sense of something that hovered at the edge of her understanding. “The Blasphemer is coming,” she said. “This isn’t a war of conquest. He doesn’t want your land, or Aundair’s. The barbarians aren’t going to settle down and start farming these lands when this is over. It’s about annihilation. He will sweep through behind his dragons, and leave nothing in his wake. I don’t know if I can stop him, but I have to try.”

Kyaphar stared at her for a long moment, then he nodded slowly. “I would welcome your help against the Blasphemer,” he said. He turned to Jordhan. “If you would be kind enough to bring your vessel to the ground, I would like to introduce you both to the Mosswood Warden.”

Jordhan looked to Rienne, and she nodded. The airship started to descend, startling the hippogriff. It squawked and flapped its wings, spreading its legs to keep its balance. Kyaphar turned to the beast and laid a hand on its neck, soothing it.

The Mosswood Warden, Rienne thought. The Eldeen Reaches were governed by druids, nature priests of various sects who led by wise guidance and example, striving to keep their people in harmony with nature as much on the farms of the agricultural east as in the wilds of the Towering Wood. What would the druids have to say about the Blasphemer?

Kyaphar returned to his saddle and raised a hand in salute to Rienne and Jordhan. “I will guide you to a safe moorage,” he said, “then escort you to the Warden.” He gently pulled on his mount’s reins, and the hippogriff’s wings spread out wide. Catching the wind, it lifted off the deck as the airship continued her descent, and Rienne watched Kyaphar and his mount soar over them, then swoop down past them to a towering oak in the forest below.

As the airship followed Kyaphar down, the ground came alive to Rienne’s eyes. Soldiers massed in ragged lines, spear tips glinting in the sun—militia called from their farms to defend against the invaders. Clumps of warriors in thick hide armor formed around enormous Eldeen bears, clad in their own plates of metal-studded leather. Men and women in flowing robes of green, brown, or gray huddled around menhirs and obelisks of rough-hewn stone, raising their voices in droning chants. Rienne couldn’t see a settlement of any sort, let alone a wall that could help hold the barbarians back. What were the Reachers hoping to defend here?

The spreading branches of an ancient oak made a perfect mooring tower for the airship. Kyaphar left his hippogriff on the ground and climbed a rope ladder into the branches. He walked nimbly among them, tying ropes to hold the ship in place, then helped Jordhan and Rienne off the deck and led them down the ladder to solid ground. At the bottom of the ladder, he extended an arm toward where a small clump of people waited for them.

Rienne had formed a picture in her mind of the Mosswood Warden, based in part on Sky Warden Kyaphar—an old man, as dark as Kyaphar but with gray hair and a long beard, so hunched he was almost lost in his moss-green robe. Her image could hardly have been more wrong. As Rienne approached, one woman stepped forward to greet her, and Kyaphar introduced her as Mosswood Warden Elestrissa.

She did wear some moss green in her cloak, but that was where the resemblance to Rienne’s mental picture ended. She was a gray-skinned half-orc, taller by a head than Kyaphar and powerfully muscled. Her long black hair was strung with beads that clattered as the wind stirred them, and her powerful chest was wrapped in armor made of thick bark sewn to tough leather. In one hand, she held an ornate shield carved of dark-wood, and the other clutched a short spear tipped with a gleaming crystal point.

The Mosswood Warden’s face was grim as Kyaphar repeated what Rienne and Jordhan had told him on the airship—about their desire to help defend against the barbarians, and Rienne’s conviction that her destiny was linked to the Blasphemer’s.

“Tell me your dream,” she said to Rienne.

Rienne felt the half-orc woman’s eyes bore into her. They were steel gray, intense, perhaps haunted. “I was in darkness,” Rienne said. Her dream suddenly was as vivid in her mind as when she’d had it in Argonnessen, four weeks earlier. “All I could see was my sword, suspended in the air, so I took it by the hilt and it lifted me into the air. I heard words—no, I didn’t hear them, I just knew them. The words of the Draconic Prophecy.” She closed her eyes and recited them.

“‘Dragons fly before the Blasphemer’s legions, scouring the earth of his righteous foes. Carnage rises in the wake of his passing, purging all life from those who oppose him. Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones of the numberless dead. But the Blasphemer’s end lies in the void, in the maelstrom that pulls him down to darkness.’”

She opened her eyes, feeling the weight of the Mosswood Warden’s stare, and found Kyaphar and a circle of retainers all staring at her intently. “Then I was on a battlefield. I saw dragons in the air, and the barbarians’ white banner in the wind. I was fighting, and I killed many soldiers before I finally stood before the Blasphemer.”

Elestrissa didn’t move, but kept staring, as if waiting for more.

“That’s all,” Rienne said. “That’s when I woke.”

The half-orc’s shoulders slumped. “So you did not foresee the Blasphemer’s death,” she said, clearly disappointed.

Rienne thought back over the dream. It seemed strange, but Elestrissa was correct—she had seen herself standing before the demonic figure of the barbarian leader, but there her dream had ended. She had associated the dream with the Blasphemer’s death because of the words of the Prophecy. In her mind, the maelstrom was her Maelstrom, the blade that had led her into the dream in the first place. She shook her head as she repeated the words: “‘But the Blasphemer’s end lies in the void, in the maelstrom that pulls him down to darkness.’”

“Look around you, lady,” Elestrissa said. “Does this place look familiar to you? Might this be the place where the battle took place in your dream?”

Rienne looked at the forest behind the Warden, and turned to see the trees thinning off to the east into farms and fields. “No,” she said. She closed her eyes again. She had not been in the forest in her dream. She saw open sky, and heard the shouts of soldiers and the screams of the dying … and the rush of the river. “No—in my dream I was at the river.”

“Then it appears your destiny is bound to the defense of Aundair after all, and not the Reaches.”

“I have to help stop the Blasphemer, if I can.”

“And perhaps you will, when he crosses the Wynarn. But by then, it will be too late for us. We take our stand here, even if it is our last.”

“I will fight here,” Rienne said, “if you will let me.”

“We will not refuse another sword pledged against the barbarians,” Elestrissa said, shaking her head and turning away. “But I fear it will do precious little to help us. Kyaphar will put you and your airship where he thinks you can do the most good.”

“Wait—”

“Good fortune, Lady Alastra, Captain d’Lyrandar.” The Mosswood Warden and her retainers walked away, leaving Rienne and Jordhan alone with Kyaphar.

“Well, that was strange,” Jordhan said.

“Ten Seas! There’s so much more I wanted to ask.”

“Ask me,” Kyaphar said. “You seem to have been placed under my command.” He smiled, and Rienne couldn’t help but return the warmth of it. “Let’s go back to your airship, and you can ask me anything you need to know.”

“The most important thing is, what are we defending? Why make our stand here?”

“I suspected that might be your first question. And it’s a question best answered from the air.”