His mouth hung open for a moment but finally said, “Savior come.” He bowed himself out as if leaving the presence of la reine.

When the door shut behind him, she swallowed her heart. Would that it constrain itself to pumping blood and abstain from engaging in frivolous yearnings.

Passion brings only pain. Make your heart a stone, her chorus chimed in with a clawlike tapping down her spine.

“I can’t disagree with that,” she muttered. Some days she wished she could banish all desires, especially those of the body.

She turned her attention to the orrery and adjusted its focus to the smallest scale to keep both the ship and Fishers Point in view. She took heart from the fact that the skyland still showed up in her aetherscope, because it meant their orrery was still intact. The first and most important rule of owning a sympathetic navigational beacon was to destroy it rather than let it be captured. No enemy must be allowed access to the chartstone shards in the sympathetic matrix, lest the stolen splinters reveal the position of every ship that had the skyland charted.

Isabelle calculated the distance to the skyland, the likely average speed, the rotational period of Fishers Point. When the Thunderclap arrived, they’d circle to the windward side and ride the skyland’s vortex around. The Skaladin would see them coming but they wouldn’t have much time to loft if they didn’t want to be caught ashore. It was as good a plan as she could make without more information from the site, and that would have to wait for word from Bitterlich and Vrain.

Reports started coming in from all stations. The course was set. The guns stood ready. The armory had been opened and weapons distributed. The marines were girded. The Thunderclap became a war falcon baring her talons, a menace on the wing, every piece of her swift and deadly.

Every piece except the capitaine. What if she froze? What if she failed? How many would die by her inexperience?

Yet those people needed her: men, women, and children. Something deeply maternal stirred in her at the thought of children being taken, something hot and sharp and made of bright-edged steel. She had always defended the weak and the helpless, often to her own great cost and the scorn of the mighty. None of those victories would she trade for more glittering prizes.