Chapter Three Hundred and Forty-Three - Hopping the Border

The wyvern riders dismounted and immediately began unpacking the saddles strapped to the almost-dragon’s sides.

Winnow was the only wyvern knight I recognized, the other two were new, so once we landed I hopped off the Redemption and bounced over, only stopping once I was just outside of the wyvern’s ‘I can nom you without stretching’ range. Just in case.

“Hello!” I cheered. “I’m glad you found us. Was the flight okay?”

“It was fine,” Winnow replied. She grunted as she flew up and back and hauled out a large metal can from the satchel she was working on. “We have your fuel, and a few other supplies as well. You’ll be surprised to know this isn’t the first time we have to do a refuelling.”

“It isn’t?” I asked.

“Oh no, it happens several times a year. Some cheap merchant or noble who wants to show off their ship forgets to bring enough fuel, or because of bad weather an airship will burn a lot more fuel than it accounted for, and it runs out. Then we get sent over to resupply because they landed somewhere too precarious for a proper ship to land.”

Winnow handed me the canister. It was a sort of jerry can which sloshed with every motion. “Thanks! I’ll bring this to Awen.”

“We have a few other things too. We weren’t sure in what kind of shape the ship you found would be in.”

“It’s not that bad. I think it could use a bit of love, but Awen seems excited to get onto that,” I said.

Winnow nodded, then looked over at the ship and shook her head. “A proper Snowlander boat. You’re lucky you’ll be escorted, that crossbow emplacement on the front wouldn’t be allowed in civilian hands.”

“It wouldn’t?” I asked.

“Oh, World no. There’s pages and pages of documentation required to even just carry any kind of large ranged weapon on a ship, let alone having it installed and ready to use like that. The only ships with fixed weapons placement allowed in Sylphfree skies are part of the air force, and if it was up to them, even the wyvern knights would be reduced to delivering strongly worded letters.”

I giggled at the mental image of that. The Beaver had Awen’s auto-crossbow on it, but it had been tucked away when we flew to Sylphfree. And Bastion had been onboard to distract the inspectors. Maybe we’d narrowly avoided a heap of trouble there. Or Bastion knew and did us a favour?

I made a mental note for later: Extra hugs for Bastion.

“So, once we’re back in the air, we just follow you?” I asked.

Winnow nodded. “That’s the gist of it. We’ll escort you back to Goldpass. If the wind keeps up, the trip shouldn’t take too long at all. We’ll have to fly the wyverns slow.”

“We could stop for the night,” I suggested. “We don’t have a big crew to begin with, and even with the fuel you brought, it might not be enough to coast through the entire night.”

Winnow hummed. “We’ll think about it. We’re meant to have you back at Goldpass as soon as possible, but while I’ll always follow my orders I take exception when they fly in the face of proper safety precautions or common sense. If slow is safer, then slow it will be.”

With the gangplank lowered it wasn’t hard to get the fuel aboard. It was exactly what Awen was hoping for, and she recruited Calamity to help her empty the can into the ship’s bunker--which is what she called the tank under the deck where the fuel went.

The other wyvern knights unloaded a few more cans and I hopped over to help them carry the containers aboard. With two cans per wyvern we actually had enough to fill the bunker right up to the quarter mark.

“We should be able to make it all the way, I think,” Awen said. Then she turned towards me and locked her eyes onto mine. “But we absolutely can’t head off in another direction for a side quest.”

“Why are you giving me that look?” I asked.

Amaryllis sniffed, which was like a huff, but even more disdainful somehow.

“Hey!”

“If that’s all,” Winnow said past our team drama. “We’ll be taking off again. If you need to communicate, you should have some flags aboard, right?”

“Oh, we do,” Awen said. “Ah, but they’re Snowlander. I don’t know if they’re the same?” We ended up checking, because even Amaryllis wasn’t sure, but as it turned out semaphore flags were pretty much international, which I supposed made sense. It wasn’t exactly a language with its own dialects and nuances.

Winnow gave us a quick salute, then she and the other wyvern knights quickly inspected their barding, mounted up, and took off.

Getting the Redemption up into the air was a bit more involved, but we weighed anchor and started up the engine without too much trouble. I helped trim the sails, then got behind the wheel again. I kinda missed Clive. The old harpy knew how to pilot so well that I found myself wishing he were here to point out what I was doing wrong.

In fact, I missed the Beaver Cleaver as a whole. The ship had become home at some point, though I guess that was bound to happen. You could only have so many adventures, share so many meals, and sleep in one place so much before it inevitably became ‘home.’

The Redemption felt different, but that wasn’t a bad thing. It’d become part of our family or it wouldn’t. Time would tell.

“Broccoli, why are you hugging the wheel?” Amaryllis asked.

“Reasons,” I said.

The flight was pretty easy. The wind turned a little and was coming almost directly from behind us, which just made us move a bit faster. I was worried about the poor wyverns, of course, but they just floated off way above us and eventually started to fly in long ovals that intercepted our flight path and then ranged out ahead.

As night came around we dipped back down and found a place to settle behind a few big hills which conveniently kept the wind at bay. The Redemption had enough buoyancy that we could stay afloat without doing more than idling. The wyverns settled down nearby, and we joined them for a quick meal before returning to the Redemption and putting those bunks to use.

The night passed easily enough, I got middle watch, which was annoying--but it was my turn, so I did my part, standing on the deck and looking out into the hillside for trouble while also practising my magic a little.

I had a lot of spells to learn, but not much time to knuckle down and learn one well, so I practised my mana manipulation, then I made myself bigger and smaller using my new Proportion Distortion skill. If I was ever going to use that in a fight, then I’d need to have it down to second nature. It was strange to feel like the ship shrank and grew around me, instead of feeling like I was the one whose size was changing.

Amaryllis woke up to take her turn, but she just stood there and stared at me. “Broccoli.”

“Hi, Amaryllis,” I said.

“I know how you’re that size, but I don’t understand why.”

I was currently no taller than Amaryllis' knee, if I were standing on the deck. Of course, because I was on watch, I was standing on the railing which was plenty wide enough when I was smaller.

“I’m practising,” I said.

“Are you... wrapped up in your own ears?” she asked.

I hugged my ears closer. I hadn’t figured out how to make them shrink with the rest of me, so they were still as long as normal, which meant they reached down to my feet. Obviously, I’d wrapped them around myself like big warm, furry blankets.

I snuggled deeper into the ear fluff. My tail also didn’t shrink, so I had a sort of fluffy beanbag to flump onto. “Yes,” I said. “They’re warm, and it’s cold out. I’d make myself all big and cover you in my ears, but they stay the same size when I embiggen myself, so they end up looking tiny.”

“I see,” Amaryllis said. She rubbed her eyes clean. “Go to bed, Broccoli.”

“Okay!”

The next morning we had a quick breakfast of hardtack and tea while the sun hadn’t quite risen yet. By the time it did though, we were already rising up and the wyvern knights were circling around.

Technically, we were right on the edge of Sylphfree, but according to Amaryllis that depended on whose map you looked at. The Trenten Flats claimed the area just as much as Sylphfree did. Neither group had any use for the land, so it was mostly just another thing for the two nations to argue over. It did mean that the wyvern knights could relax a little bit. They were over home territory, and no longer camping in a foreign land without permission.

We crossed over increasingly hilly terrain, taking a rather circuitous route that confused me a bit. Fortunately, Calamity was there to explain.

“All of the land to the northeast of the Greenstone is dangerous. No one smart travels there if they can avoid it. Not much in the area anyway, so it’s not a big deal.”

“That sounds weird,” I said. The evidence was impossible to miss though; a huge swathe of the grasslands and hills were utterly bare, revealing dull brown dirt. There wasn’t a speck of grass or a tree to be seen for kilometres. Off in the distance, a great billowing cloud of dust had been dragged up by the wind and was rolling steadily east.

Calamity said that no one knew what made the Greenstone or how it worked, and no one seemed eager to find out.

Eventually, a bit before noon came around, we were back in the mountains of Sylphfree and swinging around mountaintops which were taller than the height we dared bring the Redemption to.

Goldpass, when it finally came into sight, was revealed to be a surprisingly small city. It didn’t even have a wall, and was instead just a sprawl of multi-floored homes packed tightly in a valley surrounded on three sides by mountains.

A wide, but shallow-looking river passed by, with tributaries joining it from the various mountains so that it was quite wide before the river just... stopped. It was only as we got closer that I realized the entire river tumbled into a big cave-like crack in the ground. Did it fall into an aquifer? An underground river? It was weird.

The city had an airshiport to its south which was mostly occupied by commercial ships, though there were a few sylph military vessels parked there as well. And, in the middle of them, a very familiar ship.

“The Beaver!” I shouted.

“The what?” Calamity asked.

He followed my pointing finger to the Beaver Cleaver. The twin-hulled ship was sitting at port, its prow, with its two top-hatted ducks, looking mighty and proud. The balloons were different, no longer the patched-up ones we’d been using for so long, instead they were replaced by two sky-blue balloons, with a paler blue below.

The wyverns cut out ahead of us and dove towards the port, and I saw Winnow gesturing towards an open landing berth just across the dock from the Beaver. Of course, we immediately started to drop down and prepare to land.

I was practically bouncing on the spot. I was so excited! Were all of our friends there? We had so many new stories to share!

The Redemption came in for a nice, gentle landing, with all four of us doing our very best and with a bit of help from some dock-working sylph who flew over with ropes to tie us down with.

By the time we were secured, there was a small crowd waiting for us. Mostly guards, but in the middle of them was Caprica, and by her side, Bastion.

***