Book 4 Chapter 28: Inconvenient Initiative
Book 4 Chapter 28: Inconvenient Initiative
++Many teach that you should never jump to magic as your first solution for a problem. I disagree. You should always jump to magic as your first solution, and then you should try to formulate a Plan A. Magic can do a great many things and it’s foolish not to take advantage of that, but one cannot disregard the…scaling issues.++
- Lecture on the use of mana in engineering, overheard at the Runborg Institute.
Victoria hadn’t really gone and planned the whole thing. She considered making it seem like she had, Isabel would, weirdly enough, probably be less annoyed if she believed the entire chain of events was deliberate and pre-meditated…but no, Victoria didn’t want to trick her sister like that.
She answered honestly, or as honestly as she could. Something about the crash made it hard to remember things. She wasn’t hurt, or at least Isabel insisted she wasn’t. They’d apparently been at one of the safest parts of the cloudscraper when it crash-landed, and Qaigor had wrapped himself around Victoria right before impact, essentially cushioning her. He wasn’t hurt either, despite the dent his skull had left in one of the metal walls. Sometimes Victoria wondered if he hadn’t gotten the better part of the deal with father ordering him to be trained as a warrior.
In any case, though her memory was muddled she could still pick through it well enough to give her sister an answer.
It had all started after Isabel told her and Qaigor they couldn’t come, citing safety concerns and a fear for their wellbeing. Victoria hadn’t liked that. She hadn’t liked how much more protective Isabel seemed to have gotten after the kidnapping. She left this particular part out of her account, but it’d made her remember all the things Isabel had said over the years about weakness, about how much she loathed it.
What did that imply for her thoughts about a little sister who couldn’t even protect herself?
No, Victoria had known that if she let herself continue being one of the distressed damsels Isabel hated so much, she’d never earn her sister’s respect. Qaigor, being Qaigor, had been very enthusiastic about sneaking aboard the cloudscraper, and the only question had been ‘how’.
Fortunately, with Blakely heading off of it, this turned out to be rather doable. There were servants outside, but they weren’t exactly standing guard. Victoria had an easy time of just resting atop an aether sledge covered with yet more aether coloured to match the grass’ green and texture as she slid along the family’s lawn. Qaigor, not a magician, had a technique for evading notice that proved nonetheless equally effective.
He ran fast. Very fast. It sounded silly, Victoria had certainly laughed when he’d first described it, but that was only because she hadn’t understood just how fleet her brother was. He was faster now than father had ever been, according to father himself, and he took barely a second to cross the two dozen or so yards separating the front door from his destination. Too little time for anyone who wasn’t actively looking for him to possibly notice. Victoria stared the whole time and she barely even saw him.
Once they were aboard, they just had to find somewhere suitable to wait. This proved easy enough, there was one large cavity in the cloudscraper that was furnished with seats and sofas and other such luxuries, then a rather bare room at the back that looked to be more of a storage section. They hid away in one corner of this, and waited for the vehicle to take off.
It had taken to the air, or at least they assumed that was what the sudden, lurching rumble had been, and carried them off. Still, Victoria and Qaigor had remained hidden.
Victoria wasn’t stupid. She knew how fast Isabel could fly because she’d felt it first-hand, and she knew that her sister was not one to accept a perceived loss in any situation. If she caught Victoria, she would very much spend thousands of crowns turning the damned vessel around to take her back, or else fly off with her personally. If Victoria was discovered immediately after disembarking, even with the journey being thousands of miles, the same thing would probably happen.
So Victoria had to wait until after Isabel had already cleared out of the vessel and departed. She’d have to follow her sister and let her presence be known only when Isabel had already lost any chance of sending her back. When Isabel was too busy to simply waste a few hours on nothing but flight.
Victoria had giggled as she lay there. She could do this. Isabel wasn’t infallible, and Agrian had been right all those years ago when he told Victoria that her older sister had a tendency to be taken entirely by surprise when you acted in a way she didn’t want.
Well, after this maybe she’d have to kick the habit. After this, she’d learn that Victoria was perfectly capable of getting things done on her own.
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“And then Qaigor slipped and knocked his head on the wall, you crashed the cloudscraper and I nearly died,” she finished her story.
“I didn’t,” Qaigor added. “I was fine.”
“A piece of metal could have shorn free from any surface and skewered you,” Isabel told him, unimpressed.
“No, not me,” he said confidently. “I’m different.”
“I could explain to you the piercing formulas I am using to calculate that you would, in fact, be impaled, or you could simply assume that I am right as usual,” Isabel sighed. “Regardless, I do not have the time to see which you choose to do. Victoria, this was utterly idiotic of you.”
“Why?” Victoria asked, forcing herself to be defiant. It wasn’t exactly easy, the glaring emeralds currently pointed her way could, and had, stared down oil barons and Highmages. That they belonged to her own big sister suddenly felt rather less substantial a detail.
“Because this is a dangerous place and anything could happen to you here,” Isabel said evenly.
“So far the only danger I’ve been in is because you crashed the cloudscraper,” Victoria pointed out.
“I did not crash it you stupid worm!” Isabel snapped. “My idiot bodyguard shot out a window.”
Blakely cut in at that. “I only did that because I heard an infiltrator moving around.” He turned to Victoria. “Which was you, so actually you put your own damn self in danger if you think about it.”
“Why did you shoot a gun at random because you heard a bump, you maniac!?” Victoria snapped.
She’d known that Blakely was a madman already, of course. Growing up, he’d been a constant, distant presence in the house that father never missed an opportunity to warn her of getting too close to. It was quite another thing to know that she’d almost died in a cloudscraper crash because he was startled while asleep, though.
The man just shrugged, and didn’t even offer an explanation. Isabel spoke up before the conversation could continue any further in that direction.
“I am taking you back to Garamon,” she told Victoria.
“No you’re not,” the other man who survived the crash snapped. Victoria turned to look at him now, and she very much liked what she saw. He was tall and strongly built, maybe a few years shy of middle age with the sort of tan skin that a man only got from great lengths of time spent outdoors. He had one of those ‘cowboy hats’ that were so popular in Poloira, but otherwise was the archetypical explorer in his wardrobe. Complete with the gun on his hip, of course.
Isabel turned to him looking about as impressed as she might have if a maggot had started getting snarky with her.
“And why is that?” she asked him.
“Because this crash will have attracted the attention of everything in the surrounding area whose brain is larger than a fist. I’m not staying here alone, certainly not for hours. And I’m not hauling my equipment across the forest alone either.”
Isabel’s eye twitched, that way it always did when someone defied her. Victoria used to find that funny. Now she wondered what was going on with that eye. She’d seen what Isabel did when she was truly, deeply angry. She’d also smelled it, the scent of cooked meat and exposed viscera. Maybe that eye was just quicker to lash out than the rest of her. Maybe it twitched because it was just a shade closer to the line than her body.
For a long moment Isabel did and said nothing. She just stood there, shifting slightly like a tree in the wind, staring at the cowboy. Then, all so fast it was like she’d been waiting for a signal, she nodded.
“Fine then. Victoria, Qaigor, you may accompany me, for now.”
Victoria tried not to grin. She failed hard.
“Stop that,” Isabel snapped.
They set off shortly, after a brief delay to check the cowboy’s equipment. He wasn’t pleased with the results. “Half of it smashed beyond use, half of what remains is going to need some tuning up before I can use it to measure so much as a brick.”
“Can you do your job?” Isabel asked him.
Victoria didn’t know why, but she felt a shiver run down as that question was asked. She saw the cowboy stiffen and suddenly thought he was feeling it too.
“Yes,” the man replied quickly. “But I’ll need to repair this as we go. I won’t be able to do much for a few days.”
“Teach me what repairs need doing as we walk and I will help,” Isabel told him confidently. “Until then…” she waved her hand and Victoria watched aether melt into existence with the same unearthly dexterity that any feat of magic happened with when it was at Isabel’s hands. This time it formed a sled.
“Qaigor, you will push this as we move,” Isabel told their brother.
Qaigor scowled. “Why?” he demanded. “Make the soldier do it, or the idiot who can’t even fix his own gear.”
“You will do it because you are the most suited to the task,” Isabel told him. “And because I have barely decided on letting you stay with me. If you cannot obey instructions then you are too much of a hindrance to be worth bringing on this trip. I will settle for making an aether raft and carrying us all back across the ocean to fund another one later.”
A brief staring contest then took place, with Isabel on one side and Qaigor on the other. Victoria was about as surprised to see their sister win as she was to find that the sky had not fallen during the time taken.
Qaigor started shoving the sled with a grumble once they’d all piled themselves and any required supplies onto it.