The newest pilots to arrive had disembarked, and their still levitating unit was being pushed into line by a couple of flunkies in bright red tunics. It was the flashiest color I’d ever seen the Svarestri wear, who usually matched their mountains. But I guessed it helped with visibility, so no careless flyboy ran them down.

I tried to count the small craft but gave up after a moment because there appeared to be another cave linked to this one, and I glimpsed some in there, too. And maybe more on the other side, for all I knew. There could be thousands all together, which made me wonder what they’d been doing during the battle for the capitol.

Maybe they were too flimsy to take part? They certainly looked as if an accidental blow from one of the stone giants would obliterate them, much less a well thrown battle spell. But they could have stayed high and dropped potion bombs, the way Caedmon’s fey had done from their gryphons.

Yet Aeslinn hadn’t used them.

Maybe he’d been afraid to hit his own people? Because, by the time we’d deployed the gryphons, most of our troops were either dead or under heavy shielding. We hadn’t had much to lose.

But when I thought of the fey that Aeslinn’s dragon form had ground under his huge belly, crushing them to pulp, I wondered—did he really care so much for his soldiers? Because it hadn’t looked like it then. It hadn’t looked like it much period, frankly, as far as I could tell.

So, what was he doing with his airborne armada?

I had no idea. Just like I didn’t know what he’d been doing in Romania. We’d only found him because we’d been looking for the goat creature, which my powers had allowed us to track to roughly the right place. Only to find, upon arrival, that Aeslinn was having a party with the local disaffected vampire clans.

They’d long had a problem with the current system, ever since our consul introduced the idea of rules back in the fifteenth century. They’d even rebelled against her for a while, until she proved that she deserved her reputation, and killed half of them off. The rest had learned some manners, but they’d never been what you would call staunch supporters.

The fact that Aeslinn had been meeting with them worried me. What worried me even more was that it had been the Aeslinn from our era—Zeus had admitted as much. Jonathan, the time traveling necromancer, had taken the king back to eighteenth century Romania, presumably to evade us after his defeat.