“As you wish,” Attis said. “Thank you, by the way, for intervening. I’d hate to give her the satisfaction.”

“Don’t thank me,” Aria replied tartly. “Thank Amara. Without her warning, I might not be alive at all.” She bent over, grunted, and hauled the wounded man up and over one armored shoulder.

“Hurry!” called one of the men above them. “The vord have breached the wall!”

Without a word, High Lord Placida picked up Bernard. Cereus slipped one of Amara’s arms over his shoulders and lifted her to stand beside him, favoring her with a kindly smile. “I hope you don’t mind letting me do the honors, Countess.”

“Please,” Amara said. She felt quite dizzy. “Feel free.”

The six of them lifted off the roof in a roar of wind, and Amara saw little point in staying awake for what followed.

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 22

The ice ships flew over the bitterly cold miles at a speed that, at times, beggared the wind that drove them. Marcus felt fairly sure that such a feat was mathematically impossible by any reasonable standard. The captain of the ship he rode upon had been to the Academy, or so he claimed. He said something about the momentum upon the slight downhill slopes gradually adding up, and that the pressure on the ships’ steel runners actually turned the ice immediately beneath them into a thin layer of water.

Marcus didn’t care about explanations. It all seemed awfully shady to him.

The fleet stopped every six hours, to make repairs that were inevitably made necessary by the battering the wooden hulls endured and to give ships that had been forced to stop for repairs a chance to catch up with the rest of them. Marcus savored the rests. The entire fleet had seen the wreckage of the ships that had overbalanced and failed, and there wasn’t a thinking being among them who hadn’t realized exactly what condition his corpse would be in should his own ship run afoul of bad fortune.

But the most recent rest period had been a mere hour ago. The next would not come until after dawn.

Marcus stood in the prow of the ship as it followed its companions east. The night sky had not yet begun to brighten with the approach of dawn, but it couldn’t be far away. He watched the fleet soar over the endless ice road before them for a time, his thoughts turning in circles that slowly grew quieter and less important. A little while later, when the first blue light had begun to form in the east, Marcus yawned and turned to pace back down the deck toward the closet-sized room that was his cabin for some sleep. He didn’t know if the jolting ship would allow him any rest, but at least, for a change, his own thoughts wouldn’t be keeping him from his sleep.