The Bittergale shook the sails and bent the masts. Turbulence threw aeronauts up and smashed them down. One man’s tether snapped and he whisked away, shrieking into darkness.

Isabelle clung to a stanchion with her talons. The mountainous escort filled the whole sky. The vortex boundary had to be here.

The ship leapt up and dropped. And settled. The turbulence suddenly abated.

“Come to starboard! Ride the ridge!” Isabelle commanded. “Charge the keel!”

“Down!” Bitterlich shouted.

Isabelle threw herself flat just as a hail of grapeshot sprayed the deck from starboard. One sloop had followed them into the storm, but it came in too wide, out of the escort’s shelter. The Breaker’s own wind caught it. Lines snapped and masts sheared. It rolled over like a wallowing pig before vanishing in the storm.

“Help!” shrieked Rebecca.

Isabelle turned. Her heart nearly stopped.

Bitterlich had borne Rebecca to the deck and covered her with his body. He’d given himself an armored shell, but the grapeshot had torn right through it. Blood poured from a dozen wounds and soaked into the sand on deck in a widening pool.

CHAPTER

Twenty-Nine

Jean-Claude and Aria lay in the cover of brush atop a ridge overlooking Travers’s headquarters camp. Le comte had managed to anchor the stricken Potencia to the edge of a coastal plain near the mouth of the Conquest fjord. The sky cliff was rough and rocky, but the land rose from there in slow stages to the feet of some ragged hills. His men had spent two days clearing the ground and erecting a palisade as if they might be suddenly assailed by an infantry regiment.

This gray morning they rang the ship’s bell and fired a shot from their cannon, apparently in an attempt to get Aria’s attention. Then they dragged Hailer Dok out, chained him between two stout pales, and stripped him to his skin.

A herald, stationed atop a large stone at the edge of Travers’s encampment, cried into the wilderness, “For the crimes of piracy, murder, theft, and heresy, the criminal Hailer Dok, anathema of the Risen Kingdoms, is hereby condemned to death by excruciation.”

Jean-Claude’s skin crawled. Excruciation was a slow dismemberment. The victim was rendered into a carcass one joint at a time over the course of several days. Greatest care was taken to keep the victim alive, awake, and aware through the entire process, ostensibly so they would have ample opportunity to repent their wickedness. Only when a great confession was extracted was the victim allowed a swift and relatively painless death. Thus could the condemned sorcerer be permitted into Paradise Everlasting instead of condemned to Torment with the clayborn.

Aria gnashed her teeth. Her personal whirlwind bent the shrubs and grasses around her.