Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (35 page)

By midnight, Panna had collected and confirmed the knights' counts. Sixty-eight dead, including all of the enassui singers and two royal knights. One hundred thirty-six injured. By dawn, both numbers had climbed even higher. Duke Ferris estimated that more than three hundred Arcadians had fled Kaellisem.

"Where are they going?" Maeve asked.

Ferris shrugged. His wingtips dragged wearily on the floor. "I do not know, a'shae," he told her. "I do not think that they do, either. They are frightened. Some may return, but…"

Maeve did not ask the duke to finish. He did not need to. Those who left would not return. If they had the chance, they might even go to Xartasia. She could protect them. If they were frightened enough, it would not matter if she used Devourers to do it. Maeve beat her wings in futile frustration, wincing at the bright slash of pain in the right one. Xia had cleaned and stitched the wound shut, but she still did not have a nanite supply to hasten the healing. Even if she had some of the microscopic surgical machines, there were those who needed them more.

The bloated red sun was rising slowly outside. Maeve had reluctantly withdrawn to her tower in Kaellisem. She did not want to leave the theater, but she was only getting in the way of those with actual work to do amid the broken glass.

"Has Coldhand found anything yet?" Duke Ferris asked.

The question was grudging. Ferris liked the Prian hunter even less after Gripper and Duaal's trick, but even the hidebound old nobleman had to admit that Logan Coldhand was the only one in Kaellisem with any sort of police experience. Maeve wished she could smile, but she was too tired. Everything hurt too much.

"He found the remains of a bomb placed beneath the stage. Any…" Maeve searched for the words Logan had used. "…trace evidence was destroyed in the blast. He is speaking with the knights who were at the theater yesterday. Perhaps one of them witnessed something of use."

"I cannot imagine why anyone would disrupt the enassui, Majesty," Ferris said. He held out a glass and Verra hurried to refill it from a decanter of watered-down wine.

"Really?" Maeve asked darkly. "I have no difficulty. We have plenty of enemies, from local malcontents to Xartasia herself. Surely she knows that we are here and that I am raising a kingdom against her."

"If that is true, my queen, then this will not be the end."

"No," Maeve agreed. "There will be more. Arcadians will die. They will bleed and they will leave. If they go to Xartasia, all we have built here will be for nothing."

Dain came into the room and waited until Maeve gestured her closer. The girl bobbed her wings. "Queen Maeve, Sir Anthem is here to see you."

"Please bring him."

Maeve felt as if she were choking as she said it. The last time she had spoken with Anthem was before the enassui. Before kissing Logan at the theater, before the bomb. When Dain returned with the knight, Maeve dismissed Ferris and her two handmaidens. With Anthem there and Logan Coldhand notably absent, Dain and Verra seemed happy enough to leave the queen alone.

Anthem's glass armor was dusty and he was not carrying his spear. But even now, his pale blond hair remained smooth and shone like Aes' light. Sir Anthem inclined his head to Maeve. "My queen," he said in a voice roughened by smoke. "Are you well? Ballad told me that you were injured."

"Just my wing," answered Maeve. Her mouth was as dry as dust. "I am well, Sir Anthem. Thank you."

The knight searched her face with midnight blue eyes. "I came to receive your orders, a'shae. What would you have of your knights?"

Sleep, Maeve thought at once. Anthem and the rest had worked throughout the night. They all needed rest. But she swallowed hard and took a deep breath.

"I… I must apologize for Gripper and Duaal," she said. "I am sorry, Anthem. They were trying to–"

"I know what they did," Anthem interrupted. When he smiled, it was sad and gentle. "My queen… Maeve… I am not a fool. I know what you share with Logan Coldhand. I know that you love him with all your heart. Swearing yourself to me has not changed that."

Maeve had no idea what to say. Her head spun. She needed to sleep, too. "But our people–"

"Need an Arcadian king," Anthem finished. "Yes, I know what Duke Ferris said to you. And I agree. Kaellisem needs us. But I understand perhaps better than you can know."

"Understand what?"

"I still love Titania. Though I know that she is a traitor to her blood. I know that she is our enemy and that the day will come when we must deal with that. But I love her still, Maeve. I always will." He took Maeve's hands delicately. They were dirty with ash and curled immediately into anxious white fists. Anthem ran his thumbs over the tightened fingers. "But you are a noble woman, Maeve. You are strong, fierce and beautiful. I see why Logan loves you, how you fill even his icy heart with fire. I said that I could love you and I asked you the same. You have never answered."

Maeve's stomach twisted into a hard, painful knot. Could she? Anthem was a good knight. He had been nothing but kind to Maeve, even as she spat insults at him. Anthem was noble and intelligent. He had already taken up some of the burden of rulership from Maeve, but never with the overbearing disapproval that she faced so often with Duke Ferris. Anthem was handsome, she had to admit. He even shared Logan's blond hair and blue eyes…

And he was Arcadian. Humans made for difficult lovers, so much larger and stronger than their fairy partners. There were always the wings, too, which humans could not seem to figure out how to handle. Anthem would understand Maeve's culture and language. She would never need to translate for him. She would never need to explain the Arcadian gods to him, or why an enassui was different from a coreworld opera. But Anthem would never understand her as Logan did. Her hunter. Logan had been there in her brightest and darkest moments, always holding her in that unwavering ice-blue gaze.

Sir Anthem still held her hands and drew Maeve to him. Something inside her wanted to struggle, to pull away from the knight. But something else craved Anthem's closeness. Her work kept her so busy. She barely saw Duaal, Xia and Gripper anymore. Logan was usually nearby, but Ferris and her handmaidens watched always, ever on guard against impropriety. They had shared only that first act of the enassui, interrupted by the explosion. And then Maeve herself had sent Logan away to find the bomber.

She was lonely. Anthem leaned in slowly. Maeve could have stopped the kiss, but she did not. He held her there against his armored chest and did not comment on her tears. Maeve, in return, said nothing of his.

________

Xia worked through the night. Gripper wished that she would not, but the Ixthian would not listen to anything he had to say. Every time he poked his large brown head into the medical bay, Xia ignored Gripper and kept working on the endless stream of wounded Arcadians. Eventually, he brought a bowl of soup and a large cup of coffee. He put them on the counter and left without trying to talk to Xia.

Duaal was waiting for him in the corridor outside. Other than Xia's busy medbay – which smelled now of blood and burnt feathers, finally overwhelming the pungent chemical scent of disinfectants – the Blue Phoenix was eerily quiet. Was it still night outside? Gripper had not looked out a window in a while and found that he didn't really care. He missed having Maeve and Logan on the ship. He missed grumpy old Tiberius and even the ill-tempered, sharp-taloned Orphia.

"Is she still mad at us?" Duaal asked Gripper.

"Who?"

"Xia."

"Yeah, I think so."

Duaal could not walk beside the huge Arboran in the ship corridors, but followed close behind Gripper as he made his way to the engine room. The old ship groaned metallically all around them. She didn't like sitting in the sand and gravity so long. The Blue Phoenix was meant to fly. Not unlike Maeve, Gripper thought unhappily. All he and Duaal had tried to give her was a little time to be herself. To be Maeve, Glass… not the queen of Kaellisem.

Gripper ducked through the human-sized door into his favorite room. The engine was quiet and still inside its cylindrical fibersteel case. Cables and pipes and wires snaked across the ceiling and floor, out into the rest of the Blue Phoenix. Duaal pushed himself up onto the edge of Gripper's oil-stained workbench and looked around the engine room.

"I don't think I've ever been back here," he said. "What's that?"

He pointed to one of the walls of the engine room. It was a patchwork grid of lights and monitors. Most of the screens were dark, but a few displayed readouts, columns of numbers or blinking cursors. "That's the computer core," Gripper told him. "It pretty much runs the whole ship."

"I thought that was my job."

Gripper did not have the heart to smile. He wasn't even sure that Duaal was joking. "There are way too many things on a starship to keep track of. When you bank the Blue Phoenix, there are like seventeen systems that need to do stuff at the same time. Do you know how many filters and pumps work to keep us all from asphyxiating? The Blue Phoenix has over a thousand subsystems. There isn't a captain in the galaxy that doesn't rely on their computer. That's why it was so bad when Hunter had me get into the Oslain'ii's computers."

Gripper fell silent. Duaal kicked his feet, polished boots flashing under the lights. His shirt was torn, missing most of the left sleeve and there were several black scorch marks on Duaal's cream-colored pants. But his shoes were still as shiny as beetle shells.

"Do you need something, Captain?" Gripper asked at last.

Duaal looked up from his boots, which seemed to have captivated him as much as they had Gripper. "No. I just don't know what else to do. There's nowhere to fly. What do we do now?"

"I'm not sure," Gripper admitted.

"You can help me with this."

They turned to find Logan in the door. The Prian tossed a folded mycolar bag to Duaal, who caught it out of the air and held it up. There was maybe a spoonful of black ash inside.

"What's this?" the mage asked.

"A piece of the explosive, I think," Logan answered. "But it's been completely fused by the heat. I need you to tell me what it used to be."

"Xia has a bay full of equipment."

"This isn't organic," said Logan. "It's chemical. Nothing Xia's got can reconstruct consumed fuel, which I think is what we've got here. But Duaal's magic deals with things like chemical reactions. Can you figure out what it was?"

Duaal turned the bag over in his hands and shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "I have to be able to visualize or at least conceptualize what I'm trying to do. I have no idea how this used to be structured, so I can't revert it. Sorry."

He tossed the bag of ash back. Logan pocketed it and nodded. He turned to go, but Gripper spoke up.

"Hunter, can't the Gharib police help with that?" he asked. "They must have labs to analyze this sort of thing."

"Yes." Logan lingered in the door. His pale eyes were hard. "But they won't talk to me. I'm not a licensed bounty hunter anymore."

"What the hells is wrong with them?" Duaal growled. He jumped down from Gripper's workbench. "Let me call Kessa. She got the Gharib police to come to the rescue once. Maybe she can make them do it again."

His determined march from the engine room was somewhat undermined by having to squeeze sideways past Logan through the door. But, ever with a flair for drama, Duaal made up for it by swearing blisteringly the whole way across the ship. Gripper waited until the captain's voice had faded.

"Hunter?" he asked at last.

Logan looked up. "Yes?"

Gripper hesitated. Was he angry? Gripper could never tell what his friend was thinking. Was Logan Coldhand really his friend? The thought tripped Gripper up all over again and he almost couldn't speak. But he had to know.

"Is… is what happened tonight our fault?" Gripper barely managed to say. "Shimmer and me? Because of what we did?"

For a horrible moment, Logan didn't answer. When he did, there was nothing gentle or even friendly in his voice.

"No," Logan said. "You and Duaal had nothing to do with it. Anthem couldn't have stopped that bomb from going off. He might have been able to organize the knights a little faster, but Ballad did a good job bringing them to Maeve for orders."

Gripper's eyes filled with tears. "Are you sure? We… I didn't kill all those fairies, Hunter?"

"You shouldn't have locked Anthem up. That was a dishonorable way to deal with him and it was dangerous… But no, the bombing wasn't your fault."

Before Logan could protest, Gripper bounded across the little engine room. He banged his head on a pipe but did not care. He grabbed Logan up into a long-armed hug and squeezed. "Thank you, Hunter," he sobbed, lifting Logan several inches up into the air. "It was so awful, what I did to the Oslain'ii pilot, but he was trying to kill us. I couldn't stand that I might have killed a bunch of innocent fairies. Thank you!"

The Prian was very still in Gripper's embrace. The relieved, over-exuberant hug probably hurt. "But until we find the one who is responsible," Logan said, "Maeve and all the Arcadians in Kaellisem are still in danger. Duaal and Kessa won't get anywhere with the Gharib police. They only helped before because Kessa promised them Maeve's bounty. Unless we pay them, the local cops won't raise a finger. I'll be working alone on this."