Page 123 of Fortune's Blade

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Dory

“What the hell is that?” I yelled, peering into the night.

The yelling was necessary as we were still on dragon back, or should I say again, after a brief stop. Louis-Cesare was ahead of me, holding onto Regin’s gigantic mane and shielding me from some of the wind with his body. But talking was like being on the back of a motorcycle doing eighty, only without the engine noise.

That didn’t appear to bother the dragons, whose deep voices rumbled through the air like thunder, and seemed to have a permanence that ours lacked. Meanwhile, we had our words blown away as soon as we spoke them, along with the bonuses of chapped faces, frozen fingers, and tear-filled eyes, the latter of which was making me think that I might be seeing things. But no.

Louis-Cesare was also squinting and blinking and looking like he doubted vision that was considerably sharper than mine. “It . . . appears to be . . . a city . . ..” he trailed off, because he knew what it looked like as well as I did and it was stupid.

Even for Faerie.

“Ah, it’s wedged itself into the cave’s mouth right and proper,” Regin said, from beneath us. “Good luck to them getting it back out again.”

I took a moment to absorb that.

It didn’t help.

“What?”

“Hrafnavirki, the queen’s capitol,” he gestured with a gigantic claw. “It moves about. But the pixies only just assumed control and haven’t yet learned to park properly.”

I waited for the rest of that sentence, and for something that made even a slight amount of sense.

I didn’t get it.

“What?”

“The city moves?” Louis-Cesare said, somewhat more eloquently.

“Yes, indeed,” Regin said proudly. “It is the main reason the dark fey managed to avoid what happened to Nimue for so long. The green fey have been thrown into disarray due to the recent assassination of their queen, and Caedmon has dodged I don’t know how many attempts on his life and that of his heir. The Svarestri have been trying to decapitate all of the leadership of their rivals, but it is difficult to kill someone if you cannot find them.

“Of course, they did manage to get Kaliphranges in the end, but the wily old thing avoided them for some time—”

“But . . . the city moves?” I reiterated, because I was fairly certain I had heard wrong.

“They stash it in a pocket dimension for easy portability,” he explained not at all, because that was not how pocket dimensions worked. I should know. “But they have to re-emerge at their destination, and well . . . they sometimes misjudge the distance. Still, I’m sure they’ll get the hang of it eventually, should it survive long enough.”

I didn’t comment. I was still trying to wrap my brain around the concept of a bunch of pixies tear-assing across the countryside in a floating city, which they were driving like a bunch of drunk teens with their first car.

That wasn’t working so well, but the city was getting closer, and damned if it didn’t look like someone had rammed it smack into the cavern’s mouth. But it didn’t entirely fit, leaving worrying cracks radiating deep into the mountain on either side, crumbled bits of former buildings scattered around the bottom, and a group of tiny people prowling about the rocks, gesticulating and looking pissed, even at this distance. I rubbed my streaming eyes, but the view didn’t change.

“There goes their insurance,” Louis-Cesare murmured, as Antem came up alongside.

He was doing better despite a beat down from his father, which had looked fairly savage to me. But it seemed to have been the dragon equivalent of a cuff upside the head and it had knocked some sense into him. It had also caused him to spill what he knew, not that I understood half of it.

Neither did he, as he’d gleaned it by hanging around Steen’s court and overhearing things, not by anybody explicitly telling him anything. You don’t clue in the stooge, I’d thought but hadn’t said, because I was grateful for whatever I could get. Even if it was a confusing jumble about an ancient gateway, another world, and my sister, who was supposedly the key to both.

Antem didn’t know why she was believed to have this power, but Regin thought that it might be because our mother had been designed as a godly assassin, and would need to be able to stalk her prey wherever they went. And where they went was apparently more extensive than just Earth. There were nine worlds that the so-called gods had explored and partly colonized, all linked by the ley line system that bound our two universes together.

While on Earth, their usual hunting ground, they were ever watchful, for the demon lords that were their favorite prey sometimes returned the favor and set traps for them. But on worlds that they held more tightly in their grip, they dropped their guard a bit. Giving an assassin a better chance—if she could reach them.

Regin thought that Dorina’s mother must have been designed to follow the gods on their travels, even through portals locked to everyone else. Of course, that shouldn’t have mattered once Artemis’s spell blocked them all anyway, cutting off Faerie and Earth from the gods’ highway system. And resulting in the situation we had now, with them on one side of a cosmic door and us on the other.

And we really, really wanted it to stay that way.

But Zeus did not, because this war wasn’t turning out to be as much of a slam dunk as he had hoped, and he likely wanted the reinforcements that waited on the other side. Why Aeslinn did not also want that Antem didn’t know. Or why either of them thought that Dorina could get around a spell that had held back godly armies for thousands of years.