"Give me the relics," Remus said, once everyone was aboard and the ship had cleared the treeline for good, the Nightforged patrol craft's drone already audible again somewhere behind them and closing fast.
Pompey passed them across one at a time, the crown first, then the Lion of the North, then the Raven's Claw, and Remus laid each in turn across the ship's open window frame, charcoal in his other hand though he barely needed it now, the design already burned into memory from the moment he'd first laid palm against every one of the three.
"Craft," he said. "Wall of Shadows."
Materials Used: Crown of Belsarius the First, Lion of the North, Raven's Claw (all consumed).
Item Created: Wall of Shadows.
The air behind them cracked open into a wide, shimmering curtain of pale light, translucent, humming with a pressure Remus felt in his back teeth even from the cockpit, and the first Nightforged craft to reach it simply ceased to exist on contact, a brief, silent flare and nothing left afterward to mark where it had been. A second slowed in time to avoid the worst of it, peeling off hard enough that Remus caught, even at this distance, the shape of the pilot's own panic in the maneuver.
"It's holding," Pompey said, disbelief and relief tangled together in his voice.
"There's something else you all need to hear," Remus said, once the ship had leveled out and the barrier's steady hum had settled into something less immediately terrifying behind them. "Something I should have told you the moment I climbed out of that enclosure a year ago instead of letting you all assume it was simple kidnapping."
"Tell us now," King Belsarius said.
"That ship," Remus said, "and every one like it, runs on people. Sixty-three of us, strapped into enclosures exactly like the ones back at Autumnshade, drained slowly enough to keep the ship in the air as long as possible before we burned out entirely. I freed everyone I could reach before we escaped the last one. I don't know how many more are out there right now, still strapped in, still burning."
Annabelle's hand went to her mouth. "How could anyone build a machine to do that on purpose."
"I don't know," Remus said. "I only know I lived inside one, and I'm not willing to let it keep happening to anyone else if there's a single thing I can do to stop it."
"Then we stop it," King Belsarius said, some of the boy's old uncertainty burning away into something considerably harder around the edges. "Whatever that takes."
Remus set the ship down, at last, on the near side of the newly risen barrier, in ground that had, until a year ago, belonged entirely to the Southlands and now, by the barrier's own indifferent geometry, apparently belonged to the Eastlands as well.
"Pompey," he said, watching the old dwarf's face as the realization visibly landed on him in real time, "you're doing the math already. I can see it happening."
"The barrier doesn't distinguish between one duchy and the next," Pompey said, slow, turning the thought over out loud the way he did every idea he wasn't yet sure he trusted. "It's shielding the Eastlands exactly as thoroughly as it's shielding us. Duke Corvath's people are protected whether he asked for it or not."
"Then he owes us for it," Andrea said.
"He'll see it that way eventually," Pompey said. "Whether he sees it that way today is an entirely different question."
---