“I’m the First Lord,” Tavi said. “Or will be. He’ll get over it.”

“Not if the Canim devour his resources—his food stores, his livestock, his holders...”

Tavi grunted. “We’ll leave several crews of leviathan hunters behind us. I’m sure he won’t mind if a few dozen miles of his coastline are cleared of the beasts.”

“And how will you feed your army on the march inland?” Alera asked.

“I’m working on it,” Tavi said. He frowned. “If the vord aren’t stopped, all of my species is likely to be destroyed.”

Alera turned her glittering, shifting gemstone eyes to him. “Yes.”

“If that happens, who would you talk to?” Tavi asked.

The expression on her beautiful face was unreadable. “It isn’t an eventuality that concerns me.” She shook her head. “The vord are, in their way, almost as interesting as your own kind—if far more limited in flexibility of thought. And variety is nonexistent among them, in most senses of the word. They would likely grow quickly tiresome. But...” She shrugged. “What will be, will be.”

“And yet you’re helping us,” Tavi said. “The training. The information you can provide us. They are invaluable.”

She bowed her head to him. “It is a far cry from taking action against them. I am helping you, young Gaius. I am not harming them.”

“A very fine distinction.”

She shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“You tell me that you acted directly at the battle of Ceres.”

“When Gaius Sextus invoked my aid, he asked for prevailing conditions that would affect everything present with equal intensity.”

“But those conditions were more beneficial to the Alerans than the vord,” Tavi said.

“Yes. And they were within the limits I set forth to the House of Gaius a thousand years ago.” She shrugged. “So I did as he requested—just as I have moderated the weather for the fleet for the duration of this voyage, as you requested.” She tilted her head slightly. “It appears that you have survived your previous lesson. Shall we try again?”

Tavi pushed himself wearily to his feet.

The next attempt at flight lasted all of half a minute longer than the first, and he managed to come down in nice, soft snow instead of the icy water.

“Broken bones,” Alera said. “Excellent. An opportunity to practice watercrafting.”

Tavi looked up from his grotesquely twisted left leg. He ground his teeth and tried to push himself up, but his left arm gave out on him. The pain was unbelievable. He sank back into the snow and fumbled at his belt until his hand found the hilt of his dagger. A moment’s concentration, transferring his focus and his thought into the orderly crystalline matrix of high-grade steel, and the pain receded into the calm, detached lack of feeling that came with metalcrafting.