.
According to etiquette, at least, if I really was the non-royalty that I was pretending to be, I should not have been addressing the prince while staring down at him from my shooter’s perch on the wagon. However, Rufin did not give me the opportunity to climb down.
“My Lady, I apologize for the rush, but this is for the benefit of your friends.”
“First of all, Your Highness, shall I climb down from here? Talking down to you this is somewhat improper.”
“Ah… ” he blinked, thrown off by my reminder, then nodded brusquely. “Yes, by all means.”
By the time I reached the ground and stood appropriately lower than him, Allia had ridden up and dismounted. Either she felt, as party leader, she needed to join us, or she had overheard the ‘for the benefit of your friends’ comment.
“Commander, I hope you don’t mind if I butt in?” she asked.
“No, it concerns your company, after all,” he told her, then turned back to me. “My Lady, regarding the intelligence you wouldn’t confirm earlier, we received reports that you showed considerable skill at flying in stealth.”
I sighed. The Arelians were getting some awfully good intelligence out of the Amaga homeland. The other stuff might have come from spies embedded with the Berado, but if they understood about my stealth abilities, that meant they had people with connections inside the Amaga clan. Or, perhaps Rufin had a diplomatic back channel with the Amaga?
It wasn’t my problem. I laid it aside and focused on the more important present.
With a nod, I replied, “I have certain skills in that direction, Your Highness.”
“Would you be willing to tail those flyers when my people chase them out of here?”
I frowned, as I considered the request. I didn’t have the heavy charge of Darkness saved up in my core as I’d had in previous days, but I did keep some in reserve. I didn’t want to be forced into a situation like that time when I had to take shelter in Eurybia’s Temple.
“It would depend on the reasons for it,” I told him. “It’s difficult to maintain in the daylight.”
He nodded. “Of course. Here’s the issue. A reconnaissance flight like this one isn’t unexpected, but the timing certainly is. Those guys are at least two days early. It suggests they have a nearby base. I don’t want your company splitting off from us without knowing where that base is, when we break camp in the morning.”
“So you want me to tail these guys back to it,” I concluded.
“I don’t have anyone capable of following them in stealth. If we follow in plain sight, they are just going to lead our flyers somewhere else and call in support.”
I nodded. It made perfect sense. But still, it was a little annoying to be immediately called upon to run a mission for this guy when I wasn’t getting paid.
I looked at Allia with a frown. “We didn’t come along to do this sort of thing, but…”
Allia twisted her lips sideways and nodded. “But he has a point. We’ve barely made it across the border and the Berado already have scouts overhead. They must be nearby.”
She looked back to the prince. “Is your purpose to decide whether to let us travel farther with you tomorrow, before we split off?”
The prince nodded. “I need to know if there’s a significant force nearby and not just an advance party because they had advance warning about this expedition. Your group seems strong enough to deal with raiders if it has to, but having to fight them off would interfere with the work you need to do.”
The ‘work we need to do’, in the prince’s mind, would be the search for the Berado mine, but in Allia’s glance at me, I was reading the thought that a significant enemy base would interfere with our real mission, too.
Allia shook her head. “We will split off before daybreak tomorrow, as planned, no matter where they are. But it would be good to know their location, so we don’t ride straight into them.”
The prince scowled, and looked like he might disagree with her, but he must have decided that was an argument for later, since he didn’t respond.
“Very well,” I nodded. “I will only tail them back to their base. If you are looking for anything further than reconnaissance, I shall need to charge you appropriately.”
The prince held up his hand with a wry smirk. “Just reconnaissance, My Lady.”
I curtseyed to him and to Allia, then used Vampire Cloak first before springing into the air. I enjoyed the look of shock on the prince’s face, seeing sudden empty air, as I ascended in front of him.
“Hey, Old Man?” I prompted while touching Durandal’s pommel as I set course for a spot above the intruders, where I could watch both them and whatever might be happening on the ground.
Shall I handle defense as usually, My Lady?
“Ah,” I blinked. “Yeah, that too. I’m not planning on fighting, though. I was wondering if you were listening to my conversation with Lady Dilorè?”
About the monster’s pet in your wallet? Certainly.
The Arelian birdkin had reached the altitude of the intruders and were setting up a circle above the cavalry column, a bit like vultures. Well, eagles do it too, just not in groups.
One team set up a wheel in the sky toward the back end where my companions were stationed, the other toward the head. A third trio was paralleling them as they flew, not approaching but simply shadowing. The purpose of this formation was simple: as long as the two circles held their air, the intruders couldn’t fly over the column again without tangling with them. But, just like the weapons below were aiming but not firing, none of the birdkin soldiers were intercepting them.
I asked Durandal as I rose to a position above both Arelians and intruders, “What do you think? Should I literally just take it out and talk to it?”
Is there any harm in giving it a try?
“It would make me feel more than a little foolish, if it didn’t work.”
I didn’t think the holy sword would understand that I was afraid Dilorè had been trolling me, hoping to trick me into trying to talk to a rock like an idiot. It turned out he did understand.
My Lady, in that case, wouldn’t it be better to do it here, where I’m the only witness?
I gave a weak chuckle, and admitted, “You’re right.”
After I reached the air above the intruders, I hovered. When I hover, I’m upright instead of prone. It’s essentially the same thing as swimming versus treading water. My feet hang down while my wings gently scull the air. Wind magic is supporting me when I hover rather than aerodynamics, but I don’t have enough control over my [Flight] skill to hold my wings completely still, the way Mother or Serera can. Using my wings while I hover is basically an involuntary reflex, just like going prone like Supergirl when I fly forward.
I did it in order to safely get into my wallet without stuff falling out. I wasn’t sure if I needed to have the stone in my hand, but it made sense to me to start off that way. Once it was out, I began flying again, while I considered the purple jawbreaker with pink splotches in my palm like Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick.
For want of something better to say, I asked, “Spirit, will you answer me?”
Within the spirit stone, I could feel something like a stirring, but I didn’t receive a response.
The intruders wheeled, turning a hundred eighty degrees, and flew beneath me the opposite direction. I and the Arelian birdkin soldiers turned as well, expecting them to do another pass along the column, since they had lined up that way, but they suddenly broke away and sprinted toward a nearby ridge.
We were essentially at the foot of the Giant’s Fortress, but the mountainside was broken by a ridge line perhaps two hundred paces above the road. I was already high enough to see that no ambush forces were hiding behind that slope– actually, I could see some Arelian scouts riding the monsters known as mountain goats in the area where an ambush would have had to set up– so their only goal was to break visual contact with the Arelian column.
As I flew, loafing along at birdkin top speed (which is basically a slow walk in the clouds for a fairy), I tried a slightly more direct approach.
“Spirit, speak to me.”
Again, that feeling of a stirring. I frowned and asked Durandal, “Old Man, you’re something like this rock, right? You’re a spirit inhabiting that sword the way this spirit is inside this ore. Can you tell what I’m doing wrong?”
It’s somewhat different, My Lady, the holy sword answered. I don’t have the option of abandoning my body, as that spirit could abandon that rock. Mother grafted three spirits of differing affinities onto a stem from her own soul within her womb, forging them into the embryonic soul which she could weld to this blade. It is my vessel, like a living creature’s body. To that spirit, its stone is merely a dwelling place.
My mind boggled for a bit. She did what?
I knew that my grandmother had somehow created Durandal. Apparently she and several other demigoddesses received orders from their parents to create holy weapons. All she had told me was that she had commissioned a Svartalfar smith to create a sword, which she imbued with magic and a soul and gave to the legendary heroine Arlane. She hadn’t said anything about creating that soul within her own womb.
Well, she did call Durandal her child, so maybe she had said so after all, in a fashion.
“I see,” I frowned, disappointed. “So you don’t necessarily know what’s going on with this critter. I can feel it reacting, but it isn’t answering.”
The trio descended to skim the ground behind that ridge, as I had predicted. Since the Arelian aerial troops had not followed, they slowed to a more normal traveling speed for birdkin, around twenty five or thirty miles per hour. They couldn’t have sustained that forty mile an hour sprint for long.
My Lady, my origin does give me the ability to speak to spirits, if they feel like conversing. But I’ve tried several times to address this one, without success.
“Hm,” I frowned, pondering the problem and getting nowhere.
Durandal had an idea, though. I wonder if the behavior your cousin spoke of isn’t somehow an issue.
“What behavior?”
Trade, he replied. Trading mana. Perhaps he doesn’t wish to reply without a suitable donation?
I scowled at the stone, then told it, “If you will reply, I can give you mana. Any kind you like. I’m carrying every element. Speak to me.”
At last, from the stone, a tinny voice, somewhat feminine, replied, “No way! Fairy lady mana hurt!”
