Underneath my calm façade, though, my mind kept cycling through the same calculations. How long since the flare? Forty minutes. How long for the base camp crew to reach the ranger station? Twenty minutes, maybe less. How long for the call to travel through the protocol chain? Unknown. How long for a flight to mobilize and fly to our position? Unknown.
There were too many unknowns.
What I knew for a fact was that I would compensate Voser's and Moran's families from my personal accounts. The expedition was insured, so they would get paid by the insurance company, but that wouldn't cover a lifetime of lost wages by their breadwinners. I had to make up the difference. It wouldn't bring back their loved ones, but at least they wouldn't be financially devastated.
That part was easy. The hard part was informing them of the tragedy. I could let Jeffson do that, but I felt obligated to do it in person. It was going to kill me, but I would never forgive myself if I cowered and let someone else bear the burden.
"Hey," Gavon said to catch my attention. "How are you holding up?"
I shrugged. "I'm not the one with a broken ankle. How is it doing?"
"Better than your guilt, it would seem."
I frowned. "I'm not?—"
"Yes, you are. I can read your face with ease, and that pinched expression tells me that right now you're composing letters to Moran's and Voser's families in your head."
I had been composing my speech, not letters, but his guess was close enough. I'd been rearranging words that would never be adequate, searching for a way to tell two families that their husbands and fathers had died on a mountain because a princess had insisted on crossing a boundary she shouldn't have.
If I had known the Silver Princess would cost me the lives of two porters, I never would have embarked on the expedition to search for it. But I hadn't known, and I'd taken risks before and had come out victorious.
This time, though, luck hadn't been on my side.
"Stop beating yourself up," Gavon said. "Right now, you need to focus on getting us home."
"There's nothing more I can do until help arrives."
"Then just sit with me and keep me warm."
I leaned against Gavon's good shoulder and stared at the sky. The auroras were shifting from green to violet, the colors rippling across the sky in waves that seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat. Or maybe that was just the altitude playing tricks on my perception.
"What would you write?" I asked him. "For your script. If you were writing this scene?"
"I'd cut the waiting. Audiences hate waiting. I'd have the dragons arrive five minutes after the flare."
"That's unrealistic. Life doesn't edit for pacing."
"Which is why art exists." He shifted, wincing as the movement jostled his ankle. "But if I had to keep the waiting, I'd use it. Close-ups on the faces. The hope fading. The cold getting worse. And then, just when the audience thinks help isn't coming?—"
He stopped.
"What?" I followed his gaze toward the sky.
"I think that help is actually coming."
I saw nothing at first. Just the mountains, the auroras, the empty sky stretching toward Elucia's impossible peaks. Then a flicker of movement, so small it might have been a bird or a trick of the light.
Did birds fly in formation?
Sometimes they did.
I looked at Jeffson, who had raised his hand to shade his eyes, squinting toward the peaks. For three long seconds, he said nothing. Then his weathered face split into a grin that took ten years off his age.
"The dragons are coming," he said.
The word rippled through the group. Heads turned, and even the injured pushed themselves up for a better view.
"I want to see!" Denna fumbled for her broken spectacles and shoved them onto her face, or rather tried, since the frame was so warped that she couldn't fit it over her nose. "I've never seen dragons up close."
