But it meant risking the possibility that he might never have a chance to come back for her.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Good-bye,” he said softly to the darkness.

Then he turned away, walked back to the trail that had brought him down into the ravine, and began to climb.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-SEVEN

The hand shook him gently awake, and Drumundoon’s familiar voice whispered, “Captain, they’re coming.”

The Federation army. Preparing to attack.

Pied Sanderling opened his eyes to dawn’s faint glow on the eastern horizon, scanned the maze of hills and ravines that surrounded him, and waited for the buzzing in his ears to quiet. Every muscle and joint in his body ached, but he couldn’t very well complain. He was lucky to be alive at all.

He closed his eyes again, remembering. The explosion of fire, rocking the Asashiel, sweeping away railguns and deck crew. The plummet of the craft toward the earth as he clung to his safety line and called in vain for Markenstall. The impact of the airship as it slammed into a grove of wide-limbed conifers, breaking them apart, leaving him hanging from their shattered boughs. Miraculously, in one piece. No broken bones or severed limbs and no cuts or slashes deep enough to bleed him dry while he waited to be found.

And found he had been, almost at once, by Elven Home Guard in retreat from the airfield, who had watched his vessel fall out of the sky. His own troops, who had recognized him instantly and cut him down, pleading with him not to die, begging him to hold on until they could get help. He had been half-delirious then, burned and shocked, fighting demons that he imagined still flew overhead and hunted him as a hawk would a mouse seeking refuge where there was none to be found.

He had come around eventually, sometime during the long nighttime retreat through the cut to the hills north of the Prekkendorran, getting his first good look at the ragtag condition of his valiant Home Guard. Obedient to his orders, abandoned by Elven army regulars, they had stood alone against the hordes of Federation attackers that had swept across the airfield. The Home Guard had tried to hold their position, a hopeless task that, in the end, had failed. He had learned this much from Drumundoon, who had found him somehow during the night and stayed with him. He had learned, as well, that the Elven sector of the Prekkendorran was lost and that the Free-born allies, besieged on three sides, were in danger of being overrun. The battle was still being fought, a mix of Bordermen, Dwarves, and mercenaries fighting under the command of the charismatic Dwarf Vaden Wick. But disheartened by the death of their King, broken by the swiftness of their defeat, the Elves had abandoned the field.