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“Shouldn’t we have seen him before now?” I asked. “Before he was close enough to attack?”

Sand crawlers would have been visible for miles, just as our caravan had been. Even if you couldn’t see them, you could hear the loud grinding of their gears, the buzz of the motors as they traveled over dunes.

“We should have,” Tallu said. He found Zoigei, directing his men in coordination with General Saxu. “Why didn’t we know he was coming?”

“Why didn’t you tell us he had that?” Zoigei growled.

He gestured out of the front of the building, and my body went cold.

A massive ship crested over the sand dunes, followed by a second and a third. They were the ships that Lady Dalimu had designed. But she was in the north, and there was no chance that my mother would let her give her ship back to Bemishu.

The lead vessel crashed into the sand dune before launching up again, gaining a dozen feet of lift. The other two weren’t faring much better.

“He doesn’t need to lift far off the ground,” I said, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. I had assumed that by denying him the functional version of the ship, we had crushed his dreams of using it.

But in order to travel quickly over the desert, in order to move safely through the Ariphadeus sands, he only needed those few feet above the ground.

Zoigei and Saxu were ordering their men to fire their arrows. They hit the ships, but didn’t do nearly enough damage to stop them. The ships were coming too quickly, and that was how we hadn’t seen him.

Imperial soldiers launched electro attacks, and those had better results, setting fire to the lead ship. Men shouted, and the ship crashed hard into the ground as the electro mages powering its engine panicked.

But the other two ships were coming. This time, when Saxu’s men threw their electro attacks, Bemishu’s men caught the bolts and sent them back to us. I heard the electro mages scream in pain—catching a handful of lightning was no easy task, even for trained military officers.

I remembered what Tallu had said so long ago. The only way to conquer the Ariphadeus was for imperial soldiers to arrive at the goblin camps rested, hydrated, and well-equipped. Bemishu was about to put that to the test.

I couldn’t let him. It was my failure of vision that had led to this. I wasn’t going to let him.

Wind whipped around me, lifting me off the ground, and I felt as though I could simply walk into the air, my feet touching nothing. The ocean of magic inside of me fed the power I was using.

I knew whose magic it was. Crane, animalia of fishermen and the air mages of Ristorium. Using her magic, I propelled myself into the air, gazing down at the battlefield below. I could see the ships: the wood that made them and the electro magic that snapped within the hulls.

Around me, the hot, humid air of the hidden waters cooled against my skin, the chill spiraling out until the water in the air hung in frozen clouds. I reached out, tightening my hands into fists, shaping the water into ice spears.

The sharp spears hovered in the air, and I held myself still, correcting the angles. I would not even need to throw them, the pull of the earth beneath us would yank them down. Then I let them fall, the heat of the air beyond my bubble of cold melting them slightly, leaving air streaming behind them.

They were still sharp as steel when they hit the solid wood decks, cracking and slicing through hulls and soldiers alike. They tore through the ships just as easily as an iceberg would shred a sailing ship.

Raising my hand. I collected lightning from where the dry air met the damp cold. I didn’t even have to create it, simply gathered it in my hand like I was pulling strands of yarn off a spindle. I released it, directing it toward our enemies.

The ships crashed onto the sand dunes. Men swarmed from inside. We had defeated their ships, but Bemishu and his followers still lived.

Thirty-One

Bemishu’s men crawled over the sand dunes like ants, swarming toward us. We had kicked over their nest, and they were out for blood. I sank back down onto the sand, knowing a thousand things and nothing at the same time. I understood all the powers I had been given, and yet if I tried to reach for any of them myself, they slipped through my fingers.

I could still do ice magic, fire magic, and forest magic. Those I had carved into myself, learned through struggle and sacrifice and desire. Animal speak was something even Kacha hadn’t been able to tear from me, although he’d done a good job scrambling my brains when he tried.

All the other magic felt strange, foreign, as though my own body was outside my control. Using any of the new magics opened a line directly to the animalia whose magic it was and let them in to use it with me as a mere conduit and the ocean of power inside me as their vessel. It was not a fair exchange, and not one I wanted to make, as I risked my sanity and sense of myself with each usage.

The goblins leapt forward, their bodies having been designed specifically by the animalia for warfare on the sands. Each step launched them into the air, and when they landed, their feet didn’t sink, but rather balanced easily on the surface of the shifting sand.

In comparison, Bemishu’s men were ankle-deep, sinking even further when they ran, pulling themselves forward, desperate to get out of the loose, heavy sand.

General Saxu was yelling orders, his electro mages doing their work efficiently with the equipment we’d acquired from Kacha’s supply cache. An archer launched a metal arrow between Bemishu’s men. When it landed in the middle of them, I thought he had missed. Then came the lightning bolt. It streaked through the sky, so fast that all it left was an afterimage on my eyes. When the electro magic hit the arrow, the arrow split apart, individual bolts of lightning catching hold of the soldiers, the pain and shock bringing them to their knees.

Bemishu’s own electro mages seemed weak in comparison, which was strange given his focus on war. Had he drained his best electro mages by forcing them to run the ships swiftly? Or had he traded them to Kacha in exchange for something else?

Tallu stood next to General Saxu and I started to walk toward them when I saw two women dart out from behind him.