A Midwinter Night's Dream (Part I)

When the snow picks up, I think I can still hear the gryphons scream.

There were only four of them that night, but when the sea of clouds twist their shadows you could have sworn it was forty. They certainly attacked us like they were forty, leaping in and out of the clouds with the ease of apex predators, each rattle of the airship sending our engineer Bea into a panic as she unloads her borrowed rifle into the distant storm. Nobody blames her for it — not until it happens a third time, then a fourth. Our cartridges are too damp with frozen rain and our wounded too close to death to afford any more mistakes.

When it happens a fifth time, my sergeant loses the last of her fraying patience. "Bea!" she snarls. "Are you sure you can't get over here and help me with these wounded?"

"I don't know how to…!" Bea almost screams. "I can't handle that much blood and what if I do something wrong, and— and— what if Lise dies because of me, and then Celeste will kill me and it'll be my fault again and—!"

"They'll all be dying of heart attacks if you keep this up! Besides, Celeste won't hate you any more than she already hates everyone else on this crew—!"

"All of you, quiet!" I command through gritted teeth. "Celeste, do you think you can loose your sparrows to distract the gryphons for at least a few minutes? It might… The scent of their blood might afford us some much-needed respite."

Celeste doesn't look up from her spot behind the leaking pipes, her voice almost lost to the engine rumble: "My darlings' lives are worth more than just a few minutes, Capitaine, and the ship is already flying too fast for them to be useful." She cradles one of her injured sparrowhawks in broken hands, sniffling softly as she watches Anneliese stitch up our medic's maimed torso. Her misshapen thumb strokes the bird's bloodied feathers as she sings it one of the mournful lullabies she spends her off-duty hours composing to perfection.

I had told her not to do that — we can't risk anything that might send our wounded into a more permanent sleep, but she's doing it anyway and nobody's stopping her. I almost snap at her again until I meet her eyes through the lantern-lit dark — slouched like a grieving, vengeful mother — and find that I can't bring myself to say anything either.

"How much longer until you can see to mine, Annie?" Celeste croaks, presenting the sparrowhawk uselessly to my sergeant, still hunched over our medic with a needle and thread.

"I'm sewing this hole up like I would a used rag." Anneliese tries to keep her tone light but she cannot hide her faint tremble. "What do you want me to do about a bird? And you told me to look over Lise first."

"I want them both to live." Celeste glares at me through misty eyes. "We can turn back."

I force my own gaze forward and scowl. "There's a storm chasing us not three thousand metres away."

"I meant land the ship, Capitaine. It's a lot easier dealing with gryphons when they can't sneak up on us, and that's assuming they won't just return to their mothership when we go to ground."

"That mothership is flying straight for Grand-Chambie. Are you suggesting we abandon our duty over some wounded women and sparrows?"

"It's taking too many false turns to be headed for Grand-Chambie." Celeste turns to our navigator Miriam for confirmation, who tenses behind her jury-rigged console. "Say something, Miriam. Tell her what you told me."

"I think the Capitaine knows best," Miriam offers with a stiff smile. "I owe my life to her good judgement. If she thinks it's a bad idea to land here, then—"

"We can't let them reach the Capital," I insist, although I feel the words losing strength as I speak them. "We can't, Celeste."

"You mean you can't." The woman's words burn a hole through my chest, and it takes me longer than is comfortable to will my heart to freeze over again.

"Yes." I finally meet her eyes. "I can't."

The wall of clouds roars in pain around us and turns my legs into paper mash. I think I hear the laughter of men above the engines. Our target is watching us — that bastard mothership and its crew, jumping in and out of cloud cover like cowards.

They can't keep it up forever. Airships bleed, they tire, just like us, and I know that they must be close to death now. They wouldn't be cowering in this darkness otherwise, when they are almost twice our size. Somewhere amidst all those hot flashes of white lightning there's the spark of an overworked engine that gives away their location, asking for a bullet to finish it off. The excitement tightens my windpipe like a vise — and I know I don't have a lot of time before my lungs fail me again entirely. Something needs to die before that happens.

"Where is it…?" I hear Bea's strangled whisper from behind me. Her rifle remains shy and unsteady in her sooty palms, almost comical when contrasted against the two grizzled markswomen flanking her.

"I think I saw a spark," the one on her right says. "Due east."

"Can't waste powder on a hunch," says the one on her left.

"That's not a spark," Bea says, "that's a—"

Her words are cut off by the crack of coordinated rifle fire as all three women unload their shots at whatever had swooped in close. There is a ruffle of feathers like the unfurling of a foil sail, tacking in mid-air and disappearing again into the clouds, but beyond that, nothing. No screams of pain, no sign at all that the shots had struck home.

"Do those things not feel our bullets at all?!" one markswoman hisses out, ramming a swab down her barrel to clear it for another shot.

"Capitaine, the plumage on those things…" Bea says.

"Black and gold," the last markswoman whispers. "At least, I thought it looked black and gold, but—"

"Focus up," I demand loud enough to startle them, following it up with a shot to a gryphon's eye as it glides too close to my window — and I know this one hits, because it screams. Like tenfold thunder it screams, every woman in the cabin clutching her head against the din as it trails off into the valleys below, three stray feathers snagging on the squall and drifting to the mud-streaked floor beneath my boots.

"Bloody hell—!" Anneliese screams. "I can't focus in these conditions! I barely even know how to clean a wound—!"

"The feathers," I cut in. "What colours, Celeste?"

I don't really need the confirmation from her, hateful eyes still fixed at my back — "Black and gold. Royal colours," she says — because I have known the enemy's identity all along.

Our target is the Zaslonow, capital ship of the second prince of Volkhovya.

It emerges from the clouds like a dragon from myth — all fifty tons of it, bound in a cage of warded silk and steel — barely five-hundred metres away and abreast of us, flying with confidence born of a thousand victories. I shout a warning just as canisters of poison gas fly through the open windows and ricochet off the cabin walls, a dozen or so more bouncing harmlessly off the hull and spilling death into the savage winds.

Sergeant Anneliese pushes our last working respirator onto our medic while our mechanics drop everything they're doing to contain the threat, but all of that is radio static to me, training my sights on the colossal airship to scan for an exposed valve or a breach in the hull or anything at all — they're fresh out of a different engagement, they have to be, a dragon-class wouldn't be carrying only four gryphons otherwise. I pull my eye briefly away from the scope only to meet with a gryphon's open talons, and I would have died then and there had Anneliese not taken me by the ankle and slammed me skull-first into the metal floor.

The gryphon had ripped open a hole in the hull — it should not have succeeded when our wards were still strong, but the storm had been bleeding us no better than the beasts. Screams erupt above the ringing of my ears and I scramble to my feet to the sight of Anneliese shielding me with her body, barking orders while dancing out of the way of swiping talons and wild tackles, managing to carve a glowing line into the gryphon's side with her bayonet, but drawing no blood. I reach for my own gun only to grasp empty wind.

Powerless, that evil part of my mind whispers. I am powerless to stop this. We should have stayed put and turned back when we had the chance.

Fresh memories choose that moment to invade my senses and wrest me out of the present, and I swear I feel talons on my shoulders, dragging me back to that animated dinner table, the heady scent of bone broth smothering my swollen windpipe and the warmth of spices pushing down my gullet. I am drunk with love and laughter, a hand caressing the small of my back, an age-worn voice asking about my deployment over the summer.

The Zaslonow is flying for Grand-Chambie with a payload of bombs enough to punch craters down to sea level. I have the power to stop it. I have to stop it.

But when I scan the cabin for even a single woman to aid me, whose face betrays even a trace of fighting spirit left in her, I find myself helplessly alone again.

They would only slow me down.

My legs launch me into the control room before the decision fully forms in my mind. "Abandon ship!" I bellow, wrestling the helmswoman free of the console. "Take your parachutes and rendezvous at Cleineberch! Go now!"

"What about the wounded—?!"

"There's still gryphons outside—!"

"Take who you can and leave the rest!" I demand, throwing the door shut behind me and slamming the lock into place. My fingers feel around for the engine controls and, with a muttered prayer, I throttle them to maximum power and disengage the central clutch. The steering rods seem to be as frozen in terror as the rest of me, but I grapple with them all the same, controlling my ship's ascent with an eye to the wind and with a numb feeling of peace eating away at my heart. Engine, right side, overheating, soon to explode. Left side has a minute left to go at most.

I drive my ship in the direction of the enemy. Quakes wrack my body when our engine collides against its left flank.

Everything that follows is a haze of blood and sharpnel.

I remember falling.

Falling.

An ear-shattering screech as metal rends silk — rends… me.