“Fliroth carriage is the most ancient form of transportation in Luana. A true honor to be traveling as such.” Eslar puffed his chest, as thoughhehad been the one to bestow this upon them.
“So the king said,” Takako murmured as she sat, clearly in apparent awe of the surroundings.
“We’ll be taking off in five minutes,” their elvish guide announced suddenly, barely giving them time to respond before he was collapsing the stairs and sliding the carriage door shut.
“Might as well get comfy, I guess,” Jo said, still staring at the door.
Wayne wasted no time, moving from his seat to one of the lush couches and plopping down with a groan. “At least we can guarantee a good thirteen hours of peace before all hell breaks loose,” he said, leaning his head back and kicking his feet up onto a table.
Jo walked up to the couch opposite Wayne and took her own seat. She rested her elbow at the armrest, looking out the window at the other carriages and elves that bustled around them.
“Don’t jinx us,” Jo said, folding her legs underneath her and willing herself to get comfortable. “For all we know, Pan could be waiting to shoot us out of the sky.”
“Seems counterproductive,” Takako said, turning to aim a smirk in Jo’s direction. “But not unlikely. Knowing her, she’d do it just for laughs.” She was already busying herself by unpacking a few of her guns onto a cloth she’d laid on her own table. Tools for dismantling and cleaning them soon followed. Samson and Eslar settled into their own set of couches, conversing in low voices that Jo would probably be able to hear if she tried, though she opted to give them their privacy. Though, given how their fingers had interlaced on the sofa between them, they may not care about privacy any longer.
“Either way—” Jo’s thought was interrupted by a softoomphas the carriage lurched forward. Her eyes turned as the world became a blur, trying to catch a glimpse of the beast at the helm taking long strides to get them airborne. “Either way . . . whether Pan attacks now or later, the plan is already set in motion.”
Jo felt the moment the carriage became airborne, a hollow sensation deep in her stomach. It was just before the stone of the castle tower disappeared from under them and was replaced by the depths of the sea. High Luana’s vast landscape blurred past, the whole carriage jerking violently for a moment as the creature turned before settling in a glide. In one solid lift-off from the carriage deck, they were making their way with impressive time up towards the clouds. What had felt like years of waiting and inaction to Jo had come to an end.
They were moving forward, back to Aristonia once more.
And finally back to Snow.
Chapter 24
Together Again
“If it can’t be taught in eight hours with a captive audience, then it can’t be taught at all.” Wayne threw his tile down, frustrated.
“You haven’t been learning for eight hours,” Eslar corrected, leaning back in his chair. “You slept for the first four, you drank for the next two, slept for an hour again, complained for an hour about how long our journey was taking, and then decided to sit down and learn tarith.” Tarith, Jo had learned, was the name of the elvish tile game they had all been trying to pick up for the past two weeks. Naturally, Eslar seemed to be somewhat of a master at it. “And even then, you’ve only spent a collective two hours of the past four actively trying tolearnthe game.”
“I’ve been trying,” Wayne insisted, folding his arms over his chest and looking like a pouting child. “You’re just not a very good teacher.”
“Or you’re not a very good student,” Samson said without missing a beat, not even looking up from the gun he and Takako had been working on.
“What was that?” Wayne turned in his seat. Jo couldn’t stop herself from laughing. “What?” He turned to her. “Is something funny?”
“Yes, you.”
“It’s not like you’ve had any more luck than I have. You gave up an hour ago.”
“I didn’t give up,” Jo insisted. “I just got bored and wasn’t too proud to admit it.”
“It looked like giving up to me,” Wayne huffed.
Jo just rolled her eyes, no longer indulging the conversation. The truth was, she’d stopped being able to focus about an hour ago. She knew they were close to Aristonia, though how close was impossible to tell—traveling by fliorth was unsurprisingly low-tech; there were no in-flight maps. Instead, all she had was the vast ocean, and the eventuality of seeing land on the horizon.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Wayne turned back to find Eslar packing up the tiles and board.
“I assumed you were done.”
“No, you and I are going another round. I’ll get it this time.”
Eslar looked skeptical, but before he could insist on putting away the game, the carriage dipped downward. Jo pressed herself to the window, looking for any sign of Aristonia.
“Look, there.” It was Takako who spotted it first.
The Kingdom of Aristonia took up what had been North America and Greenland in Jo’s time. She spent a few hours at the start of the flight looking at maps Eslar had found in a cabinet. For the most part, as Jo had first suspected, the continents and general layout of the world was familiar to her. However, there were some minor differences. Jo had no idea why they were there—what magical occurrence had led to what had been Canada and Greenland being connected by a land bridge, for example—but she took it in her stride as just another thing to accept with this new Age of Magic.
