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The crack of a machine gun had Merrik craning his neck and jerking the control stick. Three Mongavarian aeroplanes were bearing down on him from above.

He was outnumbered. Alone. At an elevation disadvantage.

Merrik juked his aeroplane, dodging one stream of bullets even as he worked to bring his nose up to shoot back. With its superior, magically-powered engine, his aeroplane could strike from below in a way the Mongavarian aeroplanes couldn’t. He stitched a line of bullets across the wing of one enemy aeroplane before turning his sights on a second.

Yet the third enemy aeroplane broke away, diving past Merrik to swoop toward the ground.

No. That aeroplane was going after Fieran. After all the airships he’d taken down and the pilots he’d killed, the Mongavarians had decided to make sure he was well and truly dead.

Merrik could continue as he was and take out the two Mongavarian aeroplanes above him. But he would abandon Fieran to his fate.

Or he could turn and defend Fieran. But doing so would leave his tail unprotected, and the two enemy aeroplanes above him would take him down.

No matter the risk—never mind the fact that Fieran was likely already dead—Merrik wouldn’t stand by when action could save his friend.

Merrik turned his aeroplane and dove. As he closed on the Mongavarian, he pulled the trigger for his machine gun. The enemy broke away without firing at Fieran’s prone form, dodging Merrik’s stream of bullets.

The chatter of two sets of machine guns blared above him, and his aeroplane shuddered with the hits. A line of holes appeared across a wing while tiny fires flared to life as the flammable resin coating the linen caught. More bullets slammed into his engine, and it sputtered, smoke coughing into the air.

Something slammed into his right calf as Merrik gritted his teeth and gripped his control stick. Agony sliced through his leg as he shoved on the rudder bar, struggling to turn his damaged aeroplane to face his attackers.

He wasn’t going to make it. The next bullet would hit his chest.

Two more aeroplanes roared in, these with the red, white, and green circles of the Alliance Kingdoms.

“We’ve got you,” Pretty Face, one of his friends and a member of his squadron, shouted into the radio a moment before his machine gun chattered.

“Yeah, you’d better run!” Stickyfingers whooped as he fired his aeroplane’s machine gun at Merrik’s attackers. The Mongavarians wheeled, fleeing the incoming members of Merrik’s squadron.

“Lt. Loiatir.” Lt. Rothilion, the commander of the elven half of the integrated elf-human squadron, spoke with his usual unruffled tone, even as his aeroplane soared into view overhead with Aylia, his wingwoman, behind him. “Return to the aerodrome. The rest of us can guard him now.”

Merrik sent one last glance over the side of his aeroplane to where Fieran lay. Then, his leg throbbing and blood pooling in his flight boot, he wrestled with his aeroplane, turning it sluggishly toward the western horizon. “Acknowledged.”

Ahead, the blue of crackling magic spilled across the landscape. Fieran’s dacha, the famous elven warrior Farrendel Laesornysh, was coming for his son.

Merrik willed his aeroplane to remain in the air, even as his head grew increasingly light from the blood soaking the wool lining of his right flight boot. The miles toward the border, toward safety, crawled beneath him.

Flames devoured his wings, and he poured his magic over his aeroplane, trying to suffocate the fire long enough to reach the airfield.

The bluffs of Fort Defense reared before him. It seemed like his aeroplane barely cleared them, his wheels skimming just above the headquarters buildings.

The grass airfield spread before him. The end closest to the huge nested hangar was clogged with aeroplanes waiting to take to the sky, reinforcements that the beleaguered squadrons in the air desperately needed.

His aeroplane dropped lower. He couldn’t wait to land until after they had taken off. He lined up on the airfield, trying to hang on to the vestiges of control over his dying warbird.

He was coming in too fast, and his aeroplane was too far gone for him to slow it. He was going to crash.

If he crashed on the airfield, he’d block it for the waiting aeroplanes until the wreckage was cleared. His squadron, up there in the sky, would have no more reinforcements coming.

At the last moment, he yanked on the stick. The aeroplane turned, its wheels plowing into the tall grass at the edge of the airfield.

The impact flung him forward against his lap belt. His head struck the scant padding of the leather at the front of the cockpit, and the world went black.

Blinking through a haze, Merrik struggled to bring a blurry world of white into focus.

A hand touched his shoulder. “Merrik, sason.”

His dacha’s voice—and the extra note in the elvish word for son—drew him further out of the weariness. He managed to open his eyes the rest of the way, tilting his head just enough to take in the sight of his dacha—his father—sitting on a chair beside the bed. Dacha’s chestnut hair, the same color as Merrik’s, straggled down his back while deep shadows smudged beneath his eyes.