Felun

Magic spasmed down his arm. Felun moved without having to think, and father blocked his blow head-on. The air split like a whipcrack. Half a heartbeat of silence, before everyone else started moving, shouting, hollering warnings and distractions.

One of the Breakers darted forward clumsily, broken arm tucked close to his chest. Felun ducked his spellbolt and slid across the deck. He ended up in the vicinity of his father’s kneecaps and yanked up the strongest shield he could as father cast a roaring helix of scarlet spellfire. His barrier gave a warning fizzle before it gave way, exploding like a powder bomb. He reached into his satchel, found a handful of Iolite’s potion vials, and broke them on the deck. Liquids hissed and fizzled; some sputtered sparks and others foamed into bubbling clouds. Most filled the air with thick, cloying smoke. Half a dozen spells clashed in the confusion, negating each other in sprays of light and sound.

Father had drawn up his own shield now, but Felun still had his runequill in hand. He scrawled a new shield as a spell grazed him in passing and unraveled the next blast before it could slam into his chest. Then he fell back as the guards rushed out of the smoke. They were still worryingly competent without their armour enchantments, but his runebook had whirled out of his satchel and now it circled round to shield him. The book fanned out, blocking their spell-lances. That was enough of an opening for him to grab a heavy handful of pebbles from his bag and sling them into the face of the second Breaker. He heard the crack of breaking teeth. Her spell misfired as she fell just short of grabbing him.

Blinding blue enchantments arced high over him, falling like arrows out of the smoke. They converged around him like a cage. He unraveled a hole through the gathering wall and dashed out the other side, stumbling over a fallen guard in the fray. The air hissed with blindly-flung spells, even as he heard his father chant out a summons for winds to clear the smoke.

More of that blinding, kingfisher-blue spell-light chased him across the deck. He dodged behind the broken-armed Breaker, kicking him down in passing, and unraveled more as they came. The air began to stir. He realised that father had finished his chant, and mother was starting a new one. He ran in the opposite direction of her voice.

“No, don’t—!” someone said—Yichen?

And then a cold, stinging gust of wind swept over the deck, catching at the edges of the closed sails and sending the ropes flapping. The smoke cleared, borne off into the distance. Felun registered, a split second after it did, that the guards and Breakers were on the ground or out of the way, nursing injuries behind shields. But Mother stood thirty feet to his left, hands outstretched and crackling with magic. Her spell-lights were blindingly bright, humming at her back in an array of signs for tearing and binding, for gouging a body open from throat to hip. Interlocking circles. A spell that could kill. Yichen was frozen at her side, one hand gripping her elbow to little effect. And father—

Father was in punching distance. Felun leapt, but his fist didn’t connect this time either.

An armful of magic battered down on his shield, knocking him back. Behind him, Yichen yelled something and mother’s spell went wide, grazing his shield like a passing avalanche. He had a moment to feel a stab of cold shock—she used it, she really used it?—before he fell and father pressed the opening, aiming a contemptuous kick at his jaw. It didn’t touch him, just glanced off his protections while father readied real power in his hands, but the gesture was plain enough. Felun rolled to his feet, frustration welling fresh, fierce enough to stoke hatred through the despair.

Spell after spell met counter after counter. They fought in dagger-distance, each strike seconds apart. Felun breathed bloody breaths. A sound poured from his throat: an incoherent, animal howl. His runebook flapped frantically, intercepting every second spell. There was no time for him to Break with any kind of precision or skill. Father was getting on in his years, but he had a province under his heel for a reason. Felun was only still standing because he was fighting like he had nothing to lose, like all that mattered was hurting and maiming and finally, finally, getting even.

Yichen and mother were shouting at each other some distance away. He heard Yichen cry out in pain. Moments laster, the deck creaked and fissured with sickly green light. His shield shattered without warning. A dozen ghostly vines sprang from the gaps, snared his ankles, and whipped his feet out from under him. He fell roughly, cracking his chin on the landing. More vines—thorned, now—burst out to catch him by the shoulders, sticking him to the planks like an insect on a glue trap.

Father aimed a series of cold, precise spells that he couldn’t keep up with unraveling. His magic had dwindled down to the barest trickle. He shielded, lasted another minute before his shield broke for the last time. A pointed boot caught him in the ribs, knocking the air from his lungs.

No, he thought, sick with despair, and then: how was it was over so fast?

“Stop,” he heard Yichen yelling. “Stop—mercy—he’s fully down, mother, it’s enough.”

“Know your place, secondson,” came the cold reply. He heard footsteps approaching, her voice growing louder. “Do you even realise the damage your brother has caused? And these useless Breakers, look at them! I should’ve known the recommendation was a poor one. We’ll need replacements at once.”

“You didn’t…” Felun said. He coughed as some spell of hers stung him. “Replace the Breakers…what was her name?”

“What rubbish are you mumbling?” mother asked.

“The Breaker you sent first,” he rasped, blinking water out of his eyes. He was probably digging himself a deeper hole, but he couldn’t stop now. “You knew they killed her, didn’t you? And you sent me anyway.”

“Don’t speak such foolish nonsense.”

“I was wondering…where the faeries would get a Breaker from…funny, you had two others waiting so easily. So many contacts.” He swallowed, mouth bloody. “But about a year ago, once she was dead and I made my mistakes, you thought you could teach me a lesson—”

“Those creatures likely picked up the first blister-infected little fool they could find,” she said.

“She wrote in imperial script,” he said. The spell-vines curled tighter, their thorns pricking. “Political enemy? You sent her to die. Me, as well. You wouldn’t have cared if the faeries killed me.”

“Of all the ungrateful lies you’ve told,” mother hissed. Her boots came into view as she knelt down and bared her teeth at him. Blood trickled from her nose and mouth, and both eyes were bloodshot; he’d never seen her so disheveled. “Again and again you have refused to be obedient. You lie and steal and abandon your own kin. We have already given you so very many chances.”

“Alright now,” father rumbled. The heavy rhythm of his tread was all too familiar as he approached. “Yichen, take this blasted book away and into the stasis safe.” He paused. “Unless it has some safeguard, hm? Best raise your shield. Haoyu has already demonstrated his willingness to endanger his own family. As for you—we need to talk to you. You have no right to interfere with your mother’s spellwork.”

“But it would’ve—” Yichen started, and then shut his mouth, shoulders hunching. “What’s going to happen to him?”

“Haoyu will learn his lesson this time, we hope.”

Felun was too drained to resist as Father dragged him into the ship and through a door. He sprawled down a slope of steps, jarring his shoulder, then his elbow, then his nose, against the stone. The door slammed shut and the hold lights went out. He heard bolts sliding shut, clicking home. The outline of the door glowed green with a sealing enchantment.

The lights flickered out. His spell-sight and traced out the veiled enchantments in the walls, the door, the lock. A metallic taste seeped continuously from his gums. The pounding in his head eclipsed his thoughts. For a while, the darkness was a mercy.

===

When he came to, it was still dark save for the faint gleam of magic around the door. His magic was more than three-quarters of the way refilled, but his injuries felt worse, if anything.

Felun eased onto his back and stared at nothing. An ugly familiarity crackled in the space between his lungs. Darkness smothered him on all sides. What now? Likely they wanted him to wait meekly and beg for forgiveness once they deigned to let him out.

He sat up, gripping his bruised shoulder, wincing as his ribs twinged ruthlessly. Enough, he thought. Enough hiding. Enough of following their rules. Dungeonrunning hadn’t all been breaking locks. He might not have been as strong as Tyirn or as fast as Villette, but he hadn’t been harmless. He picked himself up and crept the steps.

Snide words and missed dinners; a cane cracking over his knuckles and mother yanking him by the ear; hands cramping from scribing his shortcomings and father handing him over like a spare key, and Suria sneering, and Iolite’s plain condescension, and—

And the dry snap and burnt char; the woodwright’s work so wasted and Ishaan left to crawl.

Were they stupid? Did they think he was still nine? He was a Breaker. When had a lock ever stopped him?

He pressed his face up against the door and strained his spell-sight beyond the initial layers of locks and wards. It took some trying; father was a thorough man, paid attention to details. But even without a clear view of the tell-tale glimmer of guard’s enchantment, he heard them conversing quietly.

“…Holding the line on jumped-up nobles,” One of them was saying.

“Their fault for being out of practice,” another grunted. “I tell you, signing on with so many cushy assignments is a nice idea only in theory. It’s guarding a tree-stump to wait for rabbits. Much comfort until a wolf comes along—they always do, the state of the world being as it is—and all you have is your rusty little boning knife.”

“They were still better-practiced than most in Sixth Garrison.”

“Don’t talk to me about court trash, nephew. Liu’s maggot-eating jester of a cousin still owes me a new sword…”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

One of the others snorted a laugh.

There were only four of them, for now. Felun eased away from the door and squinted into the darkness. His runequill had been lost somewhere up on the deck. The runebook and satchel, too, were gone. But he still had himself, mostly whole and functional. And he was grateful for the spell-sight. Moving as quietly as he could, he felt around the darkness of the hold for anything he could use.

From the shape of the walls and objects around him, he guessed he was in one of two small aft compartments. If he was where he thought he was, then he must be surrounded by sealed crates of books and linens and other cheap trade goods. Perhaps it was too optimistic to hope for a forgotten crowbar or hammer or some other makeshift weapon to brandish. When his search predictably turned up nothing of the sort, he found one of the larger crates and began working at a corner to dislodge a nail. It took a long time, and his own nails were ragged and bleeding by the end of it. But that was no great loss, he thought bitterly. The Breaker work wrecked his hands all the same.

Now he had a somewhat bent nail, smooth and cold and sharp enough. He sat on the steps to think and wait. Father wasn’t stupid enough to lock him in a room with more than one exit, even supposedly humbled and deprived of his tools. He could try whittling away at one of the walls to sneak out, but the hull proper stood between him and the ship’s exterior. The thick walls of enchantment were almost blinding when viewed directly with his spell-sight, and they would undoubtedly drain his limited magical reservoir without a runequill and other pre-prepared runes at hand. Breaking through the adjoining wall would do him little good either, leaving him stranded in a room just like this one that opened into the same hall the guards were standing in. So he would have to do this the inconvenient way.

The guards had quietened down save for the occasional mutter and grumble of gossip. He heard a shift change as it happened, both groups exchanging pleasantries as they did so. There was no way to tell whether this new group was more or less formidable than the last, but one made a remark about the quality of the supper they were given, so he supposed it must be well into the evening. He could only hope they were lazy and sated enough to blunt their vigilance. Better yet, mother and father would likely be out negotiating with the Magicians. That didn’t mean the rest of the ship would be empty, though. And the Sungrazer faction was a tightly-woven one.

He waited another five minutes, counting in his head. By now, his magic had replenished almost completely, and his injuries bothering him as little as they would without medicine that he didn’t have and days of rest he couldn’t afford. Knowing father, he’d likely come down and give him another beating to guarantee he didn’t get too sure of himself.

The anger was still there, simmering. He wasn’t a helpless child anymore. He was a firstson, yes, but he didn’t belong to them anymore.

Felun used the nail to gouge lines of runes across the doorframe and onto the handle. It was slow work. He was stingy with his magic, which meant adding a few dozen strings of amplification and reinforcement he wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with. He had to be quiet about it, too. When it was done, he took a few steps back and shielded himself. Plugged his ears for good measure.

The door blasted off its hinges.

Dust, wood, splinters—he burst out running. The guards turned, shields already flaring around their bodies. He didn’t beeline for a target this time. Instead, he reached into the walls, ripped through the physics-bending enchantments keeping his family’s fucking joke of a luxury skyship together, and brought a good chunk of the roof down on them.

Wooden beams crashed in a burst of splinters, one missing him by inches. One guard crawled out of the crush and leapt for him. He fired a readied spell into her chest, barely stopping to register her fall. Then he was off, sprinting up another flight of stairs and past startled-looking family members he only vaguely recognised. By the time they’d put down their teacups and risen to their feet in a jumble of shouts, he was hurtling down the main corridor, slamming doors behind him and forcing the enchantments into locking alignment. He threw two quick shields and a thick handful of slowing runes onto the floor for good measure. It’d buy him a few more minutes. He broke into mother’s office, spending a precious handful of magic to burst the stasis-safe open. His runebook was inside, and so was his satchel. No runequill, but he grabbed one from mother’s desk and ran for his room.

The Magician’s cloak was soaking wet and leaking inky dye, but he flung its sodden weight around his shoulders anyway. Grey water trickled down his arms, feathering through his bandages. He dashed back into the hallway to find that Ishaan had crawled out at the commotion. The runestones in his legs had locked up, gone dull, and he was wincing as he dragged the weight of the metal.

“Felun?” Ishaan asked, startling. “Sorry, my legs, they stopped working? What the hell is all the noise? And where were you? It’s been more then a week. I was getting worried.”

Fury welled in Felun’s throat and he swallowed it before he could scream.

“I hope you have that back-up plan of yours ready,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.”

“What happened to sneaking out?” Ishaan detached the silver hand and legs, pulling himself back into his room with a hiss of complaint. He yanked the quilt off his bed and struggled with the mattress. “I have a construct. It’s in parts. Won’t take long.”

Felun stepped in to help. Twists of metal were wedged between the mattress and frame, interspersed with bronze gears and tarnished metal fittings. Some of it looked oddly familiar. Felun’s brain wrangled with the similarity for a split second, before he recognised a twist of Shenzhou-style garden trellis.

“I see,” he said as Ishaan unfolded it in two deft movements. It looked like an emaciated crab, scavenged from lost parts and barely large enough to sit on. No real artificing to it, either; Felun couldn’t see any winches or engines to power the damn thing. “Now what?”

Back in Ironport, Ishaan’s strengths lay in setting off clockwork explosions and flash-freezing opponents to the ground. He took point when the tunnels opened up into subterranean lakes; more than once, he’d bridged a river with nothing more than magic and willpower and a whole lot of coughing up blood. Felun trusted his abilities enough to let him cover his back, but the little detonating spiders he cobbled together were nowhere near the size of this mangled steed. Felun frowned and considered the Archival float runes in his book, which he didn’t fully know how to use.

Ishaan grabbed haphazardly at his ridiculous pile of tea boxes and fruit packets, emptying from their contents with a clatter. Not tea or fruit at all, Felun realised.

“Not done yet,” Ishaan said grimly. “Water’s ready in the bathroom—sink cupboard.”

Realisation dawned: a memory of Ishaan making little ice tigers to amuse them with around the campfire. The movements had been almost lifelike. They’d been just as small as the detonating spiders, but maybe when combined with imitation clockwork…

He dashed into the bathroom, expecting hidden buckets, but there was more—jars and bottles and swollen waterskins filled every square inch of the space. He stared. The preparation this must have taken. And Ishaan hadn’t known he’d have help, back then. The magnitude of it loomed before him again: the lack of answers, the invisible cage. Near-total solitude. Of course he must’ve been desperate.

Felun made three hasty trips and placed them down where Ishaan pointed. As Ishaan worked, he busied himself sticking half a dozen runes to the largest window and its frame, each sigil the size of his hand. Even combined, they weren’t as powerful as that one he’d used up in the Library, he thought regrettably. Ishaan fitted more pieces to his construct, freezing handfuls of water into ice and using it like glue.

“I tied a parcel to the back of the bedframe,” Ishaan said hurriedly. “Can you get it? Bit tricky, with…”

Felun stepped onto the bare slats and pulled out a lump of cloth from the far corner. Ishaan was done with his clockwork crab. The abundance of water had added to its bulk and now it stood three feet tall, its metal skeleton coated thickly in clouded ice. There was a saddle strapped to its back, along with a sturdy brass handlebar along the front. Had Ishaan bought them from the market? he wondered momentarily, but there were more urgent questions to ask.

“Are you sure you have enough magic to power that?” The sounds of yelling and hammering were getting closer. Distantly, he sensed one of his shields being breached; the other wouldn’t hold for long. “If it melts, and you don’t—”

“I will,” Ishaan said, tearing through the parcel.

A handful of green crystals fell out: sharp-edged, cut by an explosion. Too familiar. Time seemed to stop. Felun saw spears of the stuff sunk through Tyirn’s chest, lodged into Vilette’s skull. Fragments crunching like glass beneath his boots. The crunching. Why was it coming back to him now? That sick crackle with every step, his burnt hands tearing a strip off his tunic, his sorry excuse for a tourniquet soaked through in seconds, hands shaking as he tried again—

“Is that…” he croaked, before shaking his head. Of course it was. “How did you—”

“Apparently they, uh, embedded into my body,” Ishaan said with a grim shrug. “The medicine-lady let me keep them.”

Ishaan jammed them into the bulk of the ice, where they started to glow. Green dust powdered his palms; he brushed it off and hauled himself onto the thing’s back. Felun’s spell-sight traced out translucent veins spreading through the construct, ice and metal mingling. His second shield cracked and shattered. Footsteps in the hallway, a muffled shout.

All his brain wanted to think about was those damned crystals, but there was no time.

“Get back,” he said.

He detonated his spells, and the windows shattered outward. Most of the surrounding walls went, too. They were two storeys up, but the sand was soft. Felun clung to the edge and dropped the remaining distance, rolling to cushion his landing as best as he could. Ishaan’s steed gave a jerky leap, spring-loaded legs bouncing with the impact, torso rocking with an audible creak.

“Where to?” Ishaan asked, flattening himself over the steed’s back. There was a commotion somewhere above them on the dock proper, and someone was yelling and gesturing from the remains of Ishaan’s window. Felun ignored it, staggering to his feet, and started running.

“We’ll steal a ship,” he called. He wiped the blood from his nose and spat out sand. “The fleet is—they keep the smaller ones that way. It’s close. You worry about your…invention…thing…I’ll deal with the guards.”

“How are you going to get back up there?” Ishaan asked.

Though the hulls of the skyships rested well into the sand, the decks of the smaller ships were still several feet above their heads.

“This might make the jump,” Ishaan said through gritted teeth. His hand gripped the handlebar for dear life. “Well, the front limbs are hooked enough to grip, if not. Do I go first and try to lower a rope, or—?”

His steed kept well up with Felun’s stumbling sprint. It was a pity he hadn’t been able to make two, Felun thought as he kicked up sand and tried to ignore the complaints of his bruised ribs.

“I’m fine,” he grunted. “Just follow.” His book riffled. He pulled out an Archival float rune and stuck it to himself.

The magic latched on as he threw himself forward, the momentum sending him soaring much faster than expected; he felt like a cat being yanked up by the scruff. He ripped the rune off just in time to crash into the guard running at him. The impact sent them rolling; fear reared dimly at a flash of bespelled metal, but the guard’s sword was knocked away, sent skittering across the deck as they grappled with fists and stinging spells. Felun made the runebook swoop down and clobber the guard across the face. He got in a lucky blow as it did and wrenched loose back up on his feet.

The book whipped through the air, flashing open to intercept a bolt of spell-light. He shielded and ducked, mother’s fancy runequill springing to hand, slashing symbols of his own through the air. Several found their mark, and the guard gave a pained shout, folding over onto hands and knees. The cabin door slammed open and two more guards poured out, followed by apothecary Yawen.

“Haoyu?” she called out bewilderedly. “What’s going on?”

The first guard groaned on the deck, looking barely conscious. “Traitor…”

His colleagues raised their weapons.

Felun scored a line in the air with his stolen runequill. “Get off the boat.”

Yawen frowned. “You can’t possibly be…they’ll shoot you down, you realise?”

It wasn’t nearly so late that everyone was asleep. The commotion was spreading down the length of the dock. He’d collapsed enough of his family’s ship to make extrication difficult, but sure enough, there were distant figures pointing his way. Azure-blue Magician cloaks puddled in the distance. Perhaps his parents were among them.

“Call them off,” he snapped. “It’s no skin off your back.”

“Thirdson Haoyu,” one of the guards started, and that was when Ishaan hauled himself up onto the deck, clockwork crab and all. Its legs thudded against the deck, leaving deep scratches across the wood.

“Listen to him,” Ishaan croaked, “or deal with me.” He brought his steed to its full height; it cast a much larger shadow than Felun did on his own. The crystals crowning the construct flared with venomous green light, sizzling like a bonfire.

Yawen’s gaze flicked between him and Ishaan and the bizarre, clicking mass of ice and metal he sat astride.

“Alright,” Yawen said, backing away. She put her hands up placatingly. “You two, go help Liu. I’ll splint that leg soon. There are supplies on the other ships.” She eyed Felun. “Unless you’ll permit me to fetch from the cabin—no? Alright, then. We’re going.”

Felun kept his runequill up, hand thrumming with a waiting spell. Ishaan’s steed swivelled behind him. “There’ll be more coming,” Ishaan warned as Yawen helped her guards drag their fallen colleague away from the ship. “Is that your brother?”

Felun whipped his gaze along the dock. Sure enough, that was Yichen running full pelt at them.