Beside me, Einhen sketched out the patterns of the stars and examined them more closely with a ruler and a magnifying glass, etching little dotted lines between them to show their trajectories. In the sand alongside him was a telescope. I was too lost in my thoughts to be of any help. Perhaps that was the real reason I had never closely consulted the stars, instead, consulting a court-appointed seer. I couldn’t be troubled to concentrate for that long on the series of silver speckles.
My mind continued to wander to Penelope. What if Lethe thought he could take advantage of Penelope? He certainly still loved her. She was my wife… and if he laid so much as a hand on her, I would be forced to take measures of my own. Things would certainly get ugly. Very ugly. What if he—
Off to my left, Einhen’s writing utensil scratched harder and faster on the surface of his yellowed papyrus scroll.
“Dear gods,” he breathed, distracting me from my worry. “Theon!” Einhen tore his eyes from the scroll, darted them to the stars once more, and then turned them to me. They were wide with alert, with panic. “The stars!”
“Yes, they’re…” I wasn’t sure quite what to say. I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself. Sighing, I asked, “What are they?”
“They have not changed position!” Einhen clapped a hand on my shoulder. “They remain with us still!”
“What?” Without thinking, I snatched the scroll from beneath Einhen’s hands and examined the crude map he had been drawing.
He was right. I couldn’t see a single star out of alignment within the sky which had always hung over The Hearthlands every night of my life until the day that I had departed for Earth.
“The gods,” Einhen cheered. “The gods will give us an advantage in war, in travel, in luck… though the weather remains unfavorable.”
“Unfavorable?” A sharp note crept into my voice. “Einhen… we require the storms to relent, lest they extinguish our fire and drive us from the territory. We need a window of clarity in the sky.”
Einhen’s shoulders sagged. “Perhaps unfavorable is not the word,” he corrected himself. He scooped the telescope from the sand at his side and examined the mottled sky over Everwinter yet again. “Unpredictable. The clouds move too quickly… some are dark, some are light… it’s impossible to be certain when or where the next storm will begin in Everwinter, and impossible to tell how long it will last. I can say it is not snowing right now. And at night the storms seem to abate, to at least soften. Perhaps the astrolabe machinists retire in the night hours, and the sky clears for a precious few hours.”
“So the weather is uncertain, but the gods will grant us… luck.”
“The ice people appear to have not changed every disc of the astrolabe. And we did not notice. We never mapped them again after seeing their new positions. They changed back right over our very heads.” He looked away from his telescope, breathless with relief, with excitement. “We must strike now. Tonight. The ice dragons surely know this folly, and are working to repair it.”
“We were always going to strike tonight, to tell you the truth,” I admitted to him, pushing up to a stand and turning toward the waiting camp of fire soldiers—the loyal remainder. “One never knows if they shall live or die. Even now, we cannot be sure.” I looked away from Einhen and again thought of Nell. “The gods do not decide everything.”
The night sky over Ixwane Ocean was filled with fire dragons, all in brilliant shades of gold and crimson and bright, flame orange. As we approached our distant shore—now a silvery crust, where it had once been a verdant series of hills much like the ogres’ beach—my eyes shifted from one bank of cloud to the next. As long as those snowy mists held their loads overhead… we would be able to travel onward, toward the city itself, with our weapons and ammunition strapped to our necks. My emptied satchel had been packed with driftwood, reeds, and other dried materials from the ogres’ beach. It was highly flammable, and it would do what I could not. It would cover the city itself, sent forth like an arrow.
We traveled through the frigid air, eyes half-closed against the dry atmosphere. At least, being as dry as it was, it would help the fire to burn. And it would need to be a lot of fire. It would need to overwhelm them.
For almost an hour we flew onward toward the city as fast as we could. The time was precious. There were only a few dozen of us left. If it started to snow…
“Heading into a flurry!” Einhen announced.
“We have to turn back!” one of the smaller red dragons cried below me.