But Nathaniel had been arrested by debt collectors on a warrant for treason she knew was false. He’d gone without a fight to protect her, and the chain of cogs he was tied to was in danger of being shattered.
None of that could be fixed—not here in their desperate escape through the sky or even when they reached the earth again—and it left Caris frustrated and furious. She considered herself an engineer before anything else, capable of carving clarion crystal better than anyone she knew. All her professors at Amari’s Aether School of Engineering had been impressed with the shapes she could cut. But she could not carve a way out of this mess, and there was no one to soothe away her anxiety.
They’d left her parents behind in the civic center of Amari, Portia and Emmitt Dhemlan lost amidst a protest and revenant incursion perpetuated by people masquerading as cogs in the Clockwork Brigade. Caris still didn’t know the status of her parents, and despite Blaine having access to a televox, she couldn’t call them. It was too risky, according to Lady Lore Auclair, and none of Caris’ arguments had swayed her.
Grimacing, Caris tucked the signet ring and the promise it represented back beneath her blouse. She drew the edges of her leather flight jacket together, ducking her head a little against the wind. Below, the summer-dry prairie was coming into sharp relief, clusters of trees becoming more defined as the airship’s altitude decreased. At the edge of her hearing, she could just make out the hum of the clarion crystals in the engine, the aether tugging at her awareness.
“We’ll be home soon,” Lore said from behind Caris, startling her.
Caris scowled, refusing to look back. “It’s not my home you’re taking us to.”
Lore came to stand beside Caris at the railing. “True, but my bloodline’s ancestral estate in our province was the only safe place we could conceivably retreat to.”
Caris bit the inside of her bottom lip and said nothing to that. She’d have preferred returning to Cosian in the Eastern Basin, but her wishes had been ignored during their initial frantic escape from Amari airspace.
She looked askance at Lore, taking in the other woman’s pinned-back blonde hair, stray wisps fluttering in the wind. Like Caris, she was in the same clothes from two days ago, a borrowed leather flight jacket her only addition. Unlike Caris, she carried herself with a calm sureness that spoke of knowing her place, even amidst chaos.
Caris no longer had that luxury. She thought she’d known who she was. She’d thought the road that stretched before her was set in stone, the name she’d been born with the only one she’d ever carry, even in marriage if she didn’t marry up. She knew differently now, and it felt as if her entire worldview had shifted on its axis, like she was a clarion crystal cut wrong and one pressure point away from shattering. The discordant notes of her life made no sense anymore.
“You know it was the right course of action, not turning back, don’t you?” Lore asked.
Caris crossed her arms over her chest and didn’t answer right away. When she did, she had to pry her teeth apart. “That’s your opinion.”
“You’re a cog, Caris. You must know that to shed some gears in the chain is to protect everyone else. I don’t mean that unfeelingly,” Lore cautioned when Cari’s head snapped around. “Only that we have a duty. Not just as cogs but as nobles. Do you think I don’t also worry about my mother and siblings left behind in Amari?”
Meleri Auclair, Duchess of Auclair, and her oldest and youngest children, Lady Brielle and Lord Dureau, hadn’t been with them in their mad dash through the country’s capital. Caris didn’t know what the aftermath was like—none of them did at the moment—and wouldn’t until they landed.
They’d been flying with no communication allowed, taking a roundabout flight path to the east to try to shake any Ashionen airships that might have given chase. At a certain point, they’d changed course in the night while running dark to head south to a town whose nearest city was Foxborough, in a province governed by the Auclair bloodline.
Caris swallowed tightly and shifted on her feet to account for the sway of the airship. The crew on the decking behind them were shouting in E’ridian, the language washing over her. She couldn’t understand it—she had a better grasp of the trade tongue from growing up in Cosian—but the men and women had been nothing but kind since she boarded.
“We’re descending. The town only has a small airfield, and all hangars are currently closed. We’re being told to hold position at a marker until we’re given clearance to land,” Blaine said from behind them.
Caris craned her head around to look at him. He’d been her professor once, under an assumed identity, masquerading as Ashionen when he was culturally E’ridian after escaping to that country as a ten-year-old boy. He’d taken Caris with him on the night of the Inferno but left her behind in the wilds of the Eastern Basin before he found a home in Clan Storm and a life married to ajarl.
He looked more E’ridian now, blond hair done back in a small braid twisted through with a beaded leather ribbon, hazel eyes squinting against the early morning sunlight. The flight jacket he wore was a little too big for him, but the plaid curving over the shoulder panel carried the colors and pattern used by Clan Storm. He looked at ease like this, on the swaying deck of an airship, more so than he ever had with his feet on the ground in Ashion’s capital city.
Caris wondered how she’d missed it the last four years. She’d thought she’d known the secrets of every cog she worked with. How arrogant of her to think so, she realized.
“How is the ambassador?” Lore asked, turning to face Blaine.
Blaine tipped his head to the side, shifting to plant his feet as the airship’s descent picked up. He did it in a way that seemed like an afterthought—habit of a life lived in a place like this, on the deck of an airship, and not in a classroom.
“Honovi is doing better. The crew we travel with had a magician in their ranks,” Blaine said.
“Interesting how the E’ridians had such an armed airship on standby to come to our rescue.”
Lore said it lightly, but her tone held an accusation that Blaine steadfastly ignored. “TheComhairle nan Cinnidheanwas enraged over the assassination attack on their ambassador andjarl. They opted to recall Honovi immediately. They spared no expense to have him escorted home safely.”
“Yet my bloodline’s ancestral province isn’t your home.”
Blaine’s gaze strayed to Caris, impossible to read. “It’s home enough for some of you. Honovi wants you in the flight deck, Lore. You’ve the authority we need to cut through the bureaucratic nonsense.”
Lore huffed a little, allowing herself to be dismissed from the conversation without an argument. She walked away, darting nimbly between the crew. Caris remained where she was, wind whistling past her ears. Answers had eluded her from Lore, but Blaine had proven to be far more open to her questioning—when she could pin him down at all to have a conversation with.
The crew of the airship were vastly protective of him and Honovi. She supposed, since the two were married, that made a certain amount of sense. It was frustrating, though, for when she wanted to make sense of everything that had happened in the last week.
Blaine came to stand in the spot Lore had vacated, bracing his hands against the railing and staring out at the land rushing up to meet them. In the distance, colored smoke exploded in the air, and the shouts of the crew behind them grew a little louder. She could see a herd of bison heading toward the outskirts of the airfield. Perhaps that was the reason for the delay in landing.
