Something was happening here, and no one was telling the prisoners anything. Not what was wrong with the sky or what drew the stormhunters, and not what their own fate was to be, either.
Melliel gripped the window bars, leaning forward to take in the full panorama of sea and sky and islands. Stivan was right. In the night, the stormhunter numbers had surged again, as if every one of them in the whole of Eretz were answering some call. Circling, circling, as the sky bled and healed itself and bruised anew.
What power could bruise the sky?
Melliel let go of the bars and stalked back across the cell to the door. She pounded on it and called, Hello? I want to talk to someone!
Her team took notice and began to gather. Those still sleeping woke in their hammocks and put their feet on the floor. They were twelve altogether, all taken without injurythough not without confusion over the manner of their capture: a blinking stupefaction so entire that it felt like a breakdown of brain functionand the cell was no dank dungeon but only a long, clean room with this heavy, locked door.
There was a privy, and water for washing. Hammocks for sleeping, and shifts of lightly woven cloth so they might remove their black gambesons and stifling armor if they chosewhich, by now, all of them had. Food was plentiful and far better than they were used to: white fish and airy bread, and what fruit! Some tasted of honey and flowers, thick-skinned and thin and varicolored. There were tart yellow berries and husked purple globes that they hadnt figured out how to open, having understandably been deprived of their blades. One kind had sharp spines and hid custard within; they grabbed for that one first, and there was one that none of them
could stomach: a queer kind of fleshy pink orb, nearly flavorless and as messy as blood. Those they left untouched in the flat basket by the door.
Melliel couldnt help but wonder which, if any, was the fruit that had so enraged their father the emperor when it appeared by mystery at the foot of his bed.
There came no answer to her call, so she knocked again. Hello? Someone! This time she thought to add a grudging please and was irritated when the key turned at once, as though Eidolonof course it was Eidolonhad only been standing there waiting for the please .
The Stelian girl was, as usual, alone and unarmed. She wore a simple cascade of white fabric fastened over one brown shoulder, with her black hair vine-bound and gathered over the other. Engraved golden bands were spaced evenly up both slim arms, and her feet were bare, which struck Melliel as embarrassingly intimate. Vulnerable. The vulnerability was an illusion, of course.
There was nothing about Eidolon to hint that she was a soldierthat any of the Stelians were, or that they even had an armybut this young woman had been, unmistakably, in command when Melliels team was intercepted. And because of what had happened thenMelliel still couldnt wrap her mind around itand though they were a dozen war-hardened Misbegotten against one elegant girl, no thought entered their heads of attempting escape.
There was more to Eidolonas there was more to the Far Islesthan beauty.
Are you well? asked that elegant girl in the Stelian accent that could soften the sharpest of words. Her smile was warm; her Stelian fire eyes danced as she greeted them with a gesturea kind of cupping and proffering of her hand, a sweep of her gold-banded arm to take in the lot of them.
The soldiers murmured responses. Male and female alike, they were all in some fashion fascinated by this mysterious Eidolon of the dancing eyes, but Melliel regarded the gesture with suspicion. She had seen the Stelian do things with just such graceful gestures, unaccountable things, and she wished shed keep her arms at her sides. Were well enough, she said. For prisoners. Her own accent was coming to sound vulgar to her, compared to theirs, and her voice gruff and grizzled. She felt old and ungainly, like an iron sword. Whats happening out there?
Things that would better not , Eidolon replied lightly.
It was more than Melliel had gotten out of her before. What things? she demanded. Whats wrong with the sky?
Its tired, said the girl with a shimmer in her eye that was like the sparking of a stirred fire. So like Akivas eyes, Melliel thought. Every Stelian they had seen so far had them. It aches, added Eidolon. It is very old, you know.
The sky was old and tired? A nonsense answer. She was toying with them. Is it something to do with the Wind? Melliel asked, thinking the word with a capital letter, to distinguish it from every wind that had ever come before.
Indeed, calling it a wind was like calling a stormhunter a bird. Melliels team had been nearing Caliphis when it hit them, seizing them like so many shed feathers and sucking them back the way theyd come, along with every other sky-borne thing in its pathbirds, moths, clouds, and, yes, even stormhuntersas well as many things that the surface of the world had not been gripping as tightly as it might, like trees entire blossom bounties, and the very foam off the sea.