Chapter 5

Fifth Month in the Eastern Basin of Ashion came with cool winds blowing off the Eastern Spine, rolling down over frontier cities and towns scattered at the base of the mountains. The spring winds brought with them the insidious risk of poison and threat of spores all citizens of Maricol had learned to live with over time.

Growing up, the former Honorable Caris Dhemlan never went anywhere in the frontier city of Cosian without a gas mask hooked to her belt or strapped over her face. Now, carrying the name Rourke and the shadow of a crown she had never wanted, her old habits refused to break.

Some of the people who now called Cosian home weren't used to such habits, but they learned, as did the soldiers trying to hold their defenses on the front line stretched through the eastern provinces. Fighting past the safety of a city's thick outer walls was a frightening prospect that had become all too real. Nine months since the first illegal border crossing by Daijal, and many citizens in Ashion's eastern provinces were learning how to survive in places where only wardens once walked.

All because of Caris.

She might be considered queen to the half of Ashion who backed her, but the employees of the Six Point Mechanics Company she'd retaken control of last year knew her as an exacting supervisor these days. In the quiet hours of the night, when no one could see her uncertainty, Caris wished her family's company was all she had to worry about. War wasn't anything she'd been raised for, but then, neither had she been raised to be queen.

A familiar figure took up the empty space next to her at the long table in the meeting room typically used to present new engineering designs for them to be picked apart and reworked. Lately, it was used to discuss weapons. Lady Lore Auclair graced Caris with a tired smile. "It won't be much longer. We're waiting on one more officer."

She spoke with a cut-glass accent favored by the nobility in Amari, but Caris had heard her affect various others over the years. Lore could become anyone when wearing a veil, as Caris well knew. No matter the identity, Lore carried herself differently when undercover, using her entire body to become someone else.

She'd had practice for most of her adult life as Mainspring, one of the key cogs that oversaw the Clockwork Brigade. Caris had always admired the way Lore could read people and situations and tailor herself to each in order to gain information. It was a skill Caris lacked. She always felt she was better at engineering than she was with people.

True to Lore's prediction, the door was pushed open, letting inside the last officer needed for this meeting of military minds. Caris didn't know his name, but he crisply saluted General Clarence Votil before snapping another one off in Caris' direction. She nodded an acknowledgment, even as Clarence started speaking.

"With the season change, we'll be faced with an escalation of attacks now that the snow has melted. The army is implementing strategy for the front lines, but we must also focus on the logistics of our supply lines," Clarence said.

"Defending our critical cities should also be a priority as well, should it not?" Caris asked, hoping she didn't sound ignorant of the situation.

"Any city where you are will be defended."

Caris tried not to flinch at that statement. "A single city does not a country make. The rivers need to be defended as well. Myself and other engineers didn't spend all winter working on devices only to see them collect dust."

Clarence nodded. "I know our engineers built new devices to defend the rivers in this province. I commend everyone's efforts on that front. The transportation and implementation of these new devices is critical, but the Ashion army has very little manpower to spare an escort. Neither do we have the ships necessary to blockade the river farther downstream while the engineering corps works to deploy the devices. Even if we did, we'd have to contend with Urova's submersibles once word got out, and they've proven damnably difficult to target. It's a risky endeavor right now with Daijal forces entrenching themselves in the province west of the Serpentine Lake for another attack."

Clarence tapped at the image of the lake on one of the large maps spread out over the table with a pointer stick. This particular map showed the eastern provinces that surrounded the Serpentine Lake and the waterways that branched off it. The maps were gridded in a way favored by wardens as opposed to general cartographers. Different shaded areas showcased the poison fields and the degree of poison embedded in the land. Caris knew these days it had probably spread more than the wardens would have ever allowed in the past.

The date on the map's corner showed it had been drawn up in the summer of 936, most likely finished before the unconscionable attack on the Warden's Island in the southeast by the Daijal army. Since then, wardens had pulled out of Daijal and Urova completely, leaving those countries to deal with revenants on their own. If wardens weren't guarding their assigned borders or working to rebuild the half-destroyed fort on the Warden's Island, then they were giving aid to the Ashion army where revenants were concerned.

The Poison Accords demanded wardens be neutral for the sake of Maricol's survival. Queen Eimarille Rourke had broken the agreement in such a way the wardens had been forced to choose a side for the first time in their long-established history.

Their ranks had been thinned in the attack—too many tithes and wardens on the island killed—and the destruction of infrastructure and the loss of historical border reports had dealt a heavy blow. While the underground laboratories had survived, much of the wardens' alchemy tools and devices used to help cleanse the land and fight revenants not already in use in the poison fields had been destroyed.

These days, the wardens were putting their alchemy skills to use for war.

Many had followed Caris from Veran to Cosian, where the Ashion army command was running the war out of. Caris' childhood city had become the de facto capital of Ashion, with Amari still occupied by Daijal, the citizens there unable to leave. The Ashion parliament was all but controlled by Eimarille these days, and those who had voted against her favored bills hadn't been heard from since the gates closed.

The walls still stood around Amari, just as they did around Cosian, and the wardens had worked to keep it that way in the east. Ksenia, a master alchemist, had overseen the wall defense upgrades for most of autumn before leaving for the Warden's Island. The warden who had taken her place as advisor to Caris and Meleri Auclair, Duchess of Auclair and Lore's mother, was a tall man with a grizzled look to his weather-worn face at odds with the smoothness of his voice.

Enmei understood alchemy as well as any warden, but he excelled more as an engineer. He'd been in E'ridia when the Warden's Island had almost fallen, and his knowledge had thankfully not been taken from them. Caris had given Enmei free rein of her company's laboratories in Cosian. They'd worked together throughout winter, along with other civilian and military engineers, to create new devices to aid in the war effort. Many of those had gone into production in nearby factory towns more used to sending heavy farming equipment and mining tools off the line rather than war machines.

Some of those devices were why Caris had tried to convince Clarence she should be allowed beyond the walls, a request that had been immediately denied. Meleri had also been adamantly against her leaving, despite knowing that securing the river that provided Cosian water was critical.

Aside from being able to hear clarion crystals sing better than anyone, Caris' command of starfire was more than enough to keep herself safe against revenants and Daijalan soldiers. No one else was in agreement with her. Meleri insisted using starfire would put a target on Caris' back. She'd been warned to cast it only as a last resort whenever she was allowed to travel, for if the enemy knew she was beyond Cosian's walls, they'd muster a team of Blades or worse to neutralize her.

Caris had lived with a warrant hanging over her head since the protest in Amari last year and refused to be cowed by such a threat, not when she had other problems to worry about. Urova, with their icebreaker ships and submersibles capable of traveling through frozen-over rivers, had launched a dozen attacks against Cosian during winter. Nine months on since the start of the war, with winter fading away in Ashion everywhere but on the mountaintops, the Ashion army was struggling to stop Daijal's advance.

Enmei uncrossed his arms and picked up another pointer stick. He used it to tap at the mouth of the river that branched off in an easterly direction from the Serpentine Lake. "Blockading the river isn't advisable. You risk your barges and ships if you do and putting the other side on notice that something is going on. Your submersibles on watch duty near the fork haven't signaled to the soldiers on land of any approach by Urovan forces in the last few days. If we're going to implement the crystal-breaking devices, now is the time to do so."

"We're ready to load the airships," Caris said.

Clarence's gaze flicked to where she stood shoulder to shoulder between Enmei and Lore, watched over by a trio of Royal Guards in their distinctive uniforms. "I'd ask that you remain inside the walls, Your Royal Majesty."

"If you won't let me see the devices to the river, I'll see them onto the airships."

"She'd be safe enough at the river if you let her go, especially if she wore a veil. No one would know who she was," Enmei said.

Clarence frowned deeply. "No."

Enmei shrugged in the face of that flat denial, catching Caris' eye. "We'll hope the readouts match the results we obtained here in the laboratories. I'll know what to look for."

"If they don't, then I'll make my way to the river," Caris promised.

Clarence seemed appalled by that statement. "Your Royal Majesty?—"

"I understand everyone's concern about my safety, but my concern revolves around the safety of everyone in this city and those towns residing by the rivers. If the clarion crystals need to be recut for any reason, I'm the only one who can do that quickly on the spot. I hear the way clarion crystals sing better than anyone."

Every nation cut clarion crystals differently. Steam power had long been the predominant form of providing heat and energy throughout every Age. While magicians could cast magic with energy drawn from the aether through clarion crystal–tipped wands, engineers had been studying the use of clarion crystals as a power source for some time now.

Televoxes were one such device come into recent play, used by every nation's military as well as by government officials, to say nothing of those who claimed bloodlines written down in the nobility and royal genealogies. Powered by clarion crystals, the communication devices had no need of the wires that connected telephones and telegraph machines.

The crystal-breaking devices Caris and several other engineers had created over winter operated under the same design, powered by the aether as opposed to steam. Divers had taken clarion crystal off sunken Urovan submersibles and brought the pieces to Cosian for engineers to study how the Urovans cut them. The notes of those songs had been different than the clarion crystals used on land, meant for the water rather than the air.

It had taken Caris weeks to find the difference in pitch and tone in the Urovan clarion crystals. She'd broken more clarion crystal than she'd have liked, considering they only had access to E'ridia for limited trade of the commodity these days. But the end result was worth her efforts during long winter nights.

The crystal-breaking devices engineering teams were readying to deploy into the river were set up like a filtration machine, the design meant to disguise their true purpose. Each crystal had been painstakingly cut in order to amplify their song in the water and channel the splintering spell a warden who was also a magician had come up with for use in the poison fields. She'd created the spell through trial and error over the years and these days could shatter bone from half a mile away with a flick of her brass-plated wand. It made eradicating revenants on her border route easier, to be sure.

The engineers and fellow magicians had taken the framework of that spell and applied it against the Urovan-cut clarion crystal. Caris had found the shape that worked best in creating a song that shattered the clarion crystal used in Urovan submersibles, sinking them. The devices were less dangerous to soldiers, trade boats, and barges than using water mines.

While they'd been tested as extensively as they could in a scant few months, no one knew how well they would work when pressed into the war effort. But they had to try because if the devices worked, they'd keep Cosian and its citizens safe just a little longer.

It was the small victories Caris hoped for, because they'd had so few of those lately.

"We'll work with our engineers to get the airships loaded quickly. Caris can help coordinate that effort. You needn't worry that Caris will be on board when they launch," Lore said to the general.

"If that's settled, let's get the cargo onto the trucks and out to the airfield. You can let the soldiers at Lockwood know we'll be coming," Enmei said.

Clarence looked as if he'd bit into the black coriche candies favored by miners and found it too bitter for his taste. Caris knew he'd rather she stay behind Cosian's walls and never leave the city, but she'd sworn when she took up the mantle Meleri had guarded for her that she'd never be anyone's puppet.

"Let me know the number of people going so we can figure out the housing situation," Clarence said.

"We can bunk in the airships if need be."

The Ashion army had slowly drawn out of Haighmoor after the Inferno. When parliament, at the behest of the Daijal court, cut funding for the military, it had been easy to close some of the army's production factories while secretly appropriating others in eastern provinces with the help of the Clockwork Brigade. The sleight of hand had taken years to accomplish. The foresight of Meleri and the Ashion officers who still believed in the old monarchy was the only reason they'd been able to stand against the Daijal army for so long.

Lockwood used to be a frontier factory town that handled trade by river, filled with people who knew what hard work meant. They should have been far removed from the front lines, but war had found them anyway over winter. The Urovans had attacked from the river, damaging the town's outer wall and forcing its citizens in that residential section to retreat behind the town's inner wall for the duration of winter.

The damage to the outer wall hadn't been fixed quickly enough to stop revenants getting through. It had taken wardens an entire week to flush out every last revenant hiding in the residential section before they could comfortably say it was safe. With most of the citizens already pulled back, the Ashion army had chosen to take over that part of the town, with soldiers bunking up in homes behind remade walls.

The people of Lockwood had traded in their old livelihoods for the war effort, and most everyone in that town worked to support the army now. Its production factory, once used to build farming tractors, armored crawlers, and other heavy vehicles, now churned out motor carriages meant to traverse rough terrain, trucks for troop transport, tanks, and digging machines for the trenches.

Enmei headed for the door, ending the meeting with his departure. Caris turned to follow him out, with Lore staying by her side. The Royal Guards fell in around them, a constant presence Caris had taken months to get used to.

Caris pulled her brass goggles down over her eyes once they stepped outside into the laboratory's shipping yard. She slipped her fingers beneath the collar of her blouse to touch the gold necklace that held Nathaniel Clementine's signet ring and a pair of clarion crystal shards.

The man she loved wasn't nobility but came from a merchant family who had lost everything due to his and his parents' ties to the Clockwork Brigade. Daijal had seized their Clementine Trading Company, his family shipped west after being snatched up by debt collectors, and Nathaniel had been turned into a rionetka. He lived only because of a clockwork metal heart, thought a traitor by many because of it, despite the alchemist manipulation wardens had provided to give him back his mind and a fragile sense of free will.

People still saw Nathaniel as a risk—to the war effort and to Caris. Meleri no longer considered him a cog, and Nathaniel was kept away from all details on the war effort. Caris had fought to keep him involved because he'd suffered more than any of them, but Meleri—and later, the military command—had been against it. Caris had abided by their wishes, and even Nathaniel agreed with them, but it still felt like a betrayal on her part.

She wished desperately that he were there with her, despite the risks. She loved him when she hadn't thought she'd ever learn how to want someone the way her peers had back when all she had to worry about was school and her company and being a cog.

Lore glanced at her, her expression softening. "You'll see Nathaniel tonight. He's always waiting for you at your home, no matter the hour."

Caris dropped her arm to her side. "I know."

Lore hooked her elbow around Caris', veering in the direction Enmei was headed. The warden walked with a sure stride, his field leathers distinctive amidst everyone else's uniform or everyday clothes. He was kitted out in the typical gear of a warden, though his bladed weapon of choice was a heavy battle-axe that he carried across his back at an angle with ease. The clockwork gears hidden in the handle distributed poison across the blade for fighting revenants but were just as deadly against the living.

Caris knew the devices they were putting into use in the battlefield were needed, but they were a stopgap measure at most. What Ashion desperately needed was allies, and so far, none had answered her envoys' calls. Solaria had closed its border in the south, E'ridia was reluctant to give aid of any sort, and they'd not had any direct outreach to the Tovan Isles since the Inferno.

Honovi, jarl to Clan Storm and a fine aeronaut captain, was doing his best to convince his country's ruling body to break out of its insular habit. So far, the Comhairle nan Cinnidhean had yet to pay heed to his arguments despite the atrocity E'ridia had sustained to their own government from rionetkas. Honovi knew, like Caris did, that neutrality would save no country in the face of Eimarille's desire to rule all of Maricol.

"This way," Lore said, tugging at Caris' arm.

The yard was lined with trucks that were already being loaded with their precious cargo while the motor carriages were parked in a designated section. Lore led her to one of those, neither of them surprised at being flagged down by a clerk who gladly gave them an update on the loading process so far.

After Caris finished speaking to the clerk, she and Lore climbed into the back seat of a motor carriage. Maurus Nash, captain of her Royal Guard, got behind the steering wheel. He closed the door to the motor carriage with a sigh. "It's dangerous beyond the walls even if no sighting of the enemy has occurred, my queen."

"My parents took me beyond the walls as a young girl because our business depended on tracking the poison data from field markers for testing purposes. I'm well aware of the dangers, captain. It won't stop me from doing my duty," Caris replied.

Maurus said no more to that and drove off the lot, keeping his attention on the street around them, pistol ever close at hand. The remaining Royal Guards were in the motor carriages directly before and after theirs, and the vehicles drove down the cobblestone street for the main city gate, following after several trucks.

They drove through two sections of the city, passing through one of the inner walls as they made their way to the main city gate in the outer wall that led to the airfield. When they approached it, Caris' gaze lingered on the automatons standing guard on the wall over the gate, Zip gun arms bent and at the ready to fire on any threat. Other soldiers were up on the wall as well or posted at the gate proper, checking the arrival of everyone wanting to enter the city.

Physical checks for rionetkas were still a requirement for everyone, no matter their status. It made the customs officers' jobs harder and the lines to gain entry longer, but everyone grimly adhered to the requirements. Spell-detecting devices couldn't be mass-produced and sometimes didn't work well in crowds. False positives had resulted in incorrect detentions of people in the past in Cosian, but the devices were still in use at the city's gates. Meleri had kept the ones installed in her temporary home, and the military command had kept theirs.

Caris had declined to have them put up in her home, for that was where Nathaniel stayed, and the spell-detecting devices would go off constantly if he were around. Besides, she could hear the distinctive song of the clarion crystals that powered a clockwork heart. Caris didn't need a machine to tell her when a rionetka was nearby.

Their motor carriage drove through the gate and into the airfield. It was located south of the city, spread out with dozens of long piers and hangars to anchor airships. Mixed in with the airfield workers were wardens keeping watch.

The trucks and the motor carriages were directed to a set of berths in the middle of the airfield. The airships waiting there were owned by her bloodline's company but hadn't been used for merchant purposes since last summer. Maurus pulled off to the side, giving more room for the trucks to get unloaded, and set the brakes.

Maurus got out first, hand on the grip of his pistol and gaze sweeping the nearby area. Caris got out as well, ignoring the frown he sent her way. She rather thought he wanted to lecture her about making herself a target again, but this time, at least, he held his tongue.

Enmei jumped out of one of the trucks and strode over to them, giving Caris a quick nod. "The airfield workers on the drive over said they're ready to start loading what we've brought."

Caris squared her shoulders, looking up at where the sun burned bright in the sky, having cleared the distant peaks of the Eastern Spine some time ago. "Let's get the machines onto the airships and pray they work."

"I leave my faith to science, not the star gods."

Caris cracked a smile. "Then I'll pray for the both of us."