She spared a quick glance at him and smiled before returning her attention to the airfield. “I suppose you ache to tell me of the tools used to frame the airship, or perhaps how your father owns a claim in the company that supplies the army its canvas balloons,” she said. She meant the words in jest, though from his reaction they carried a stronger bite than she intended.
Outside, a few men scrambled about releasing the giant iron stakes that pinned the airship to the ground. Engines groaned, rattling the gondola. Coal smoke puffed. A man with a pair of flags signaled to the pilothouse in a series of sharp gestures, and with a lurch, the ground started to fall away.
She felt herself lighten, as if the airship’s act of rising had somehow caused her to float in her seat. Her smile broadened. She had felt the sensation once before, with the stardust-fueled wings stolen from the trow warren in Duncairn. The memory of that flight brought on a flood of delight.
Conall laughed. “I confess, my knowledge lies with rail lines. I am as green to the experience of flight as you.” His amusement grew as he eyed her awed expression. “More so, if I now recall.”
“Then how do you avoid staring outside?” she asked. “Don’t you want to see the ground fall away? I will never grow old of such a wonder.” Below, the proud granite structures of Aberdeen retreated until they appeared only as quaint rows of grey blocks surrounded by clustered dots marking the outskirt villages. The airship banked, and she saw for a moment the open sea, with its white caps leaping to and fro.
He leaned closer and whispered so only she could hear. “I have a wonder of my own to take in,” he said.
Heat rose to her cheeks, yet she could not keep her eyes from the porthole. Clouds began to roll across the glass. The frothy wisps obscured patchworks of rolling green fields and shadowed hills under a murky grey canvas.
She flicked her gaze about the cabin. The soldiers had made an effort to stretch out as they could and sleep. Snores and muttered breaths came from throughout the room. The lieutenant remained in the pilothouse.
“What was she like, your fiancée?” she asked.
He flinched in surprise. His brow narrowed. “Do you really want to know?”
“No.” She shook her head. She didn’t know why she had asked. Perhaps she meant only to remind herself that he had loved another. But whether that was to give her confidence that he could give himself to such an act, or to persuade her into thinking his love was easily given, she did not know.
He traced a finger along the back of her hand.
“You came for me,” she said. “A dashing hero straight from an Austen novel.” As she spoke the words, she wondered whether it meant their fates were intertwined.
“You need no dashing hero, Effie of Glen Coe. You never have. Your friends, the Croys, Thomas Stevenson, Stuart Graham, myself—all these years you have gained friends. But never have you needed another hero besides yourself.”
Her head bowed. She recalled a harrowing escape from Edmund Glover, the crazed Fey Finder, and the starvation she faced, left alone in the hills with no direction, no home, and no sense of place. She thought of her mother and the loss that could never be repaired.
“You don’t know what it is like to be orphaned,” she said.
“Aye, I don’t have any idea what it means, nor what it means to live between races, ostracized by almost all I meet. Yet I wonder if the same resilient skin that hardship fostered also acts against you now. You are no longer an outcast living on the fringe. You cannot run off alone to challenge the whims of fate.”
She took in the words, but a part of her rankled, fighting against them. She managed to keep the snip from her tone, but asked, “What am I then?”
His face relaxed. His head shook slightly, as if in disbelief of her unknowing. “You are the center, the heart that beats hope into the lives of all who share our cause. Is it any wonder Caledon seeks your council? Or Lieutenant Walford? Or countless others, myself included?”
“Our cause?” Her heart warmed.
Conall’s lips pulled apart. A glee came to his eyes. “It must be so, I have realized, if I am to call myself a just man. To live further with blinded eyes toward the plight of inequity is to enjoy a falsehood that stains the soul.”
She forgot herself. Gripping his cheeks in both hands, her fingers twirled through his curled locks. She pulled him close, until their lips met. He tasted of salt and of the flowery whisky he nipped from his flask. He pressed in, and her breath grew quick.
A soldier’s snore trumpeted through the cabin. The man’s breathing changed rhythm as he rolled over. Effie pulled back from Conall. Her heart thumped as she remembered those pressed around them. Her eyes watered from the heat on her cheeks. Conall panted. He swallowed and blinked, as if to shake himself from a desperate hunger. His eyes darted about the crowded cabin before he slunk back against the hard wood of the bench.
Effie put a hand over his chest and felt its rapid beating slow. She smiled at him before turning once again to the porthole and the open sky beyond. Tucking herself into the bench, she drifted into slumber thinking of the rhythmic pulse of his heart.
The airship’s engines whirled, puffing out clouds of coal smoke and shaking the gondola. The vibrations rattled Effie awake just as the giant pinnacles of the Storr came into view. Resting on the eastern slopes of the Isle of Skye, the jagged formation of broken rock plummeted toward the sea, leaving half its former might standing lone sentinel over trickling burns and shadowed ravines.
Gentle waves lapped against the shoreline of the isle as the airship began a circling descent. Of the Seily Court, Effie saw no evidence. The Scottish fey had long used the Storr as a gathering place, but their numbers were far fewer since the release of the Sidhe Bhreige. Many had left for Elphame, and those who remained had learned to hide themselves well.
As the airship touched down in a stony field, Lieutenant Walford emerged from the pilothouse. He ran a hand over a few days’ whiskers as he greeted her and Conall. “Caledon invited us to bring you here,” he said, “but it is a fey gathering not meant for the likes of lumbering soldiers. We’ll encamp here and await your return.”
Effie opened her mouth to protest but realized the lieutenant was right. Even in their current circumstances, most fey would rather run and hide than speak openly in the presence of the queen’s riflemen. She and Conall took their leave as the lieutenant’s men pounded giant iron stakes into the ground to tether the airship.
Tufts of wild grass sprouted along the coastline and continued as the ground rose toward the rocky crags of the Storr. There, deep shadows marked out a patchwork of clefts and hollows. The early snow from recent days had all but melted away, yet a cold wind bit at them from under an overcast sky.
They had not marched for long when a familiar aura popped into Effie’s awareness. “Rose Brewer,” she said to Conall, indicating the direction. She quickened their pace, and they soon found the fey woman awaiting them near a large thicket of bramble.
Several others stood with her. Though heads shorter than Rose and harder to distinguish from a distance, Effie could name them all. Surprise washed over her, but it was quickly replaced by joy and curiosity. The last she had seen of Freiherr Jörg and Ana, they had aided her in her efforts to rescue Catherine Granville from the cult of Les Revinirs. The gnome from the Order of Freiwald stood with his hands clasped before him. His white hair fell straight around plump cheeks and a bulbous nose. His great leather coat fell to his knees, with a high collar in the style of the continent. He nodded to her, yet his eyes darted warily toward Conall.