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Nerron dismounted.
“Bastard Bastard Bastard....”
Where did they come from?
The malachite voices.
He climbed one of the rocks until he could see the mountains lining the horizon. Did they come from there? The voices grew louder, like a chorus carried by the wind. They came from far away. Ah, to the south was a mountain range, green like a hem of emeralds against the endless sky. The lost cities. Impossible. They were way north of here.
“Bastard Bastard Bastard...”
Nerron thought he saw the distant mountains take on the color of his skin. He saw them sprout pillars, towers, saw the Bastard on the throne, Hentzau kneeling in front of him, Crookback, the Walrus, and by his side four princesses, each as beautiful as the Fairy. He climbed higher, slipped, grazed his skin, climbed on.
“What took you so long, Bastard? What kept you? What kept you?”
It would be a five-day ride, maybe less.
Wait.
Wait, Nerron.
Stop, damn it!
He leaned against the craggy rock, panting.
What was he, a bat-brain? That wasn’t the mountains whispering; it was the wind. The wind!
A siren song for the stray dog who was so impertinent to follow them. And he’d fallen for it.
He pulled the looking glass from his belt.
Of course. No sign of the Pup.
Oh, he should hang himself from the nearest tree, feed himself to the vultures circling above!
Pull yourself together, Nerron.
He slapped himself. Once. Twice. Until his stone skin burned with pain.
He would find him again. Yes.
The Pup couldn’t have gone far.
He would find him. The angrier they made him, the better.
The Right Place
A clear night gave way to a cloudy morning. Behind them lay the wide steppes that stretched from Moskva toward the east. A firebird attacked them over the old monasteries of Novgorod. Maybe their carpet had cast a threatening shadow over its nest. But it let them go when Fox shifted and bared her teeth. Brunel couldn’t take his eyes off her as he helped her gather the feathers the firebird lost on the carpet. Maybe he’d never seen a shape-shifter. The feathers were worth more than the advance the Tzar had paid to Jacob.
When Orlando finally asked about their route, Jacob lied about some storm that had made a more westerly course impossible. Fox’s presence distracted the Barsoi so much that he accepted the flimsy explanation without question. His eyes hung on her with such insistence it made Jacob wish he could make her invisible. Fox stayed away from both of them. Unlike Orlando, Jacob knew this mood—far away and by herself, in her own world. There was no reaching her when she went there, deep into the landscape of her own heart, formed from memories only she knew.
Beneath them the green of a cool summer turned into the brown of plowed fields and wide rivers. They flew over monasteries, churches, grand estates, and poor villages. The Tzar had banned the import of sugarcane because it was harvested by slaves, but most of Varangia’s peasants were barely more free than the men, women, and children who were dragged from Oyo or Dahomey and onto Arabian slave ships.
By midday, the wind freshened and darkening clouds began to bulge above them. The carpet curled its edges up like a protective railing, but soon it began to rise and drop so abruptly that the horses shied and Jacob started looking for a spot to land. They couldn’t risk asking for shelter in one of the large estates. Orlando was sure they were still over Varangian territory, and he was convinced the Tzar’s couriers were faster than the wind. They must have already carried the news of Brunel’s escape into the remotest corners of the empire. But the clouds looked like rain, and rain was something flying carpets could not tolerate. After all, they c
ame from desert lands.
The first drops were landing on their faces when Fox pointed out some strangely-shaped hills. They turned out to be a Dragon’s skeleton. The three skulls between which Jacob landed the carpet were each bigger than a train carriage. The neck vertebrae that had once supported those heads were so overgrown with dense grass that one could barely spot them, and they no longer indicated whether they’d been severed from the skulls. But there was an ominous hole in the rib cage. Varangia’s Dragons had been famous for their strong urge for freedom—as much as those in Zhonghua. Some had developed an appetite for royal daughters; others had hoarded treasure to build their nests and to give their young scales of gold and silver. Only a rare few had ever died peacefully.
