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“I think so. Try to keep it localized to your arms. You want the heat trapped in the air pockets under the wings, not dispersed in the air.”
“All right.” She willed the flame to dance up her palms and into her neck and shoulders. Her upper body felt deliciously warm, but almost immediately her wings began to smoke and sizzle.
“Kitay?” she called, alarmed.
“That’s just the binding agent,” said Kitay. “It’ll be fine, it’ll just burn off—”
Her voice rose several pitches. “It’s fine if the binding agent burns off?”
“That’s just the excess substance. The rest should hold—I think.” He didn’t sound convincing in the least. “I mean, we tested the solvent at the forge, so in theory . . .”
“Right,” she said slowly. Her knees were shaking. Her head felt terribly light. “Why do I let you do this?”
“Because if you die, I die,” he said. “Can you make those flames a little larger?”
She closed her eyes. Her leather wings lifted at her sides, expanding from the hot air.
Then she felt it—a heavy pressure yanking on her upper body, like a giant had reached down and jerked her up by the arms.
“Shit,” she breathed. She looked down. Her feet had risen off the ground. “Shit. Shit!”
“Go higher!” Kitay called.
Great Tortoise. She was rising higher, without even trying—no, she was practically shooting upward. She kicked her legs, wobbling in the air. She had no lateral directional control, and she couldn’t figure out how to slow her ascent, but holy gods, she was flying.
Kitay shouted something at her, but she couldn’t hear him over the rush of the flames surrounding her.
“What?” she yelled back.
Kitay flapped his arms and ran in a zigzag motion.
Did he want her to fly sideways? She puzzled over the mechanics of it. She could decrease the heat on one side. As soon as she tried it she nearly flipped over and ended up hanging awkwardly in midair with her hip level with her head. She hastily righted herself.
She couldn’t drift laterally, then. But how did birds change direction? She tried to remember. They didn’t move straight to one side, they tilted their wings. They didn’t drift, they swooped.
She beat her wings down several times and rose several feet into the air. Then she adjusted the curve of her arms so that the wings beat to the side, not downward, and tried again.
Immediately she careened to the left. The swift change in direction was terribly disorienting. Her stomach heaved; her flames flickered madly. For a moment she lost sight of the ground, and didn’t right herself until she was mere feet away from the dirt.
She jerked herself out of the dive, gasping. This was going to take some practice.
She flapped her wings to regain altitude. She shot up faster than she’d anticipated. She flapped them again. Then again.
How far could she go? Kitay was still shouting something from the ground, but she was too far up to understand him. She rose higher and higher with each steady beat of her wings. The ground became dizzyingly far away, but she had eyes only for the great expanse of sky above her.
How far could the fire take her?
She couldn’t help but laugh as she soared, a high, desperate, frantic laugh of relief. She rose so high that she could no longer make out Kitay’s face, until Arlong turned into little splotches of green and blue, until she had even passed through a layer of clouds.
Then she stopped.
She hung alone in an expanse of blue.
A calm washed over her then, a calm that she couldn’t ever remember feeling. There was nothing up here she could kill. Nothing she could hurt. She had her mind to herself. She had the world to herself.
She floated in the air, suspended at the point between heaven and earth.
The Red Cliffs looked so beautiful from up here.
Her mind wandered to the last minister of the Red Emperor, who had etched those ancient words into the cliffside. He’d written a scream to the heavens, an open plea to future generations, a message for the Hesperians who would one day sail into that harbor and bomb it.
What had he wanted to tell them?
Nothing lasts.
Nezha and Kitay had both been wrong. There was another way to interpret those carvings. If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed. The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.
Nothing lasts.
This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.
She, the Last Speerly, called the greatest power of all.
And the Hesperians, no matter how hard they tried, could never take this from her.
Landing was the tricky part.
Her first instinct was to simply extinguish the fire. But then she dropped like a rock, plummeting at a breakneck speed for several heart-stopping moments until she managed to get her wings spread and a fire lit beneath them. That made her come to a lurching halt so rough she was shocked the wings didn’t rip right off her arms.
She drifted back up, heart hammering.
She’d have to glide down somehow. She thought through the movements in her head—she’d decrease the heat, little by little, until she was close enough to the ground.
It almost worked. She hadn’t counted on how fast her velocity would increase. Suddenly she was thirty feet from the ground and hurtling far too quickly toward Kitay.
“Move!” she shouted, but he didn’t budge. He just reached his hands out, grabbed her wrists, and swung her about until they collapsed in a tangled, laughing heap of leather and silk and limbs.
“I was right,” he said. “I’m always right.”
“Well, don’t be so smug about it.”
He groaned happily and rubbed his arms. “So how was it?”
“Incredible.” She flung her arms around him and hugged him tight. “You genius. You wonderful, wonderful genius.”
Kitay leaned back, arms raised. “Careful, you’ll break the wings.”
She twisted her head around to check them and marveled at the thin, careful craftsmanship that held the apparatus together. “I can’t believe you did this in a week.”
“I had some time on my hands,” said Kitay. “Wasn’t out there trying to stop a fleet or anything.”
“I love you,” she said.
Kitay gave her a tired smile. “I know.”
“We still don’t know what we’re going to do after—” she started, but he shook his head.
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about the Hesperians. For once, I haven’t the faintest idea, and I hate it. But we’ll figure our way out of it. We’ve figured our way out of this, we’re going to survive the Red Cliffs, we’re going to survive Vaisra, and we’ll keep surviving until we’re safe and the world can’t touch us. One enemy at a time. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” she said.
Once her legs had stopped shaking, he helped her strip out of her gear. Then they climbed back down the cliff, still light-headed and giddy with victory, laughing so hard that their sides hurt.
