“THERE’S AN AIRSHIP COMING IN FROM THE EAST,” MIRAI advised, pointing back toward the Bakrabru airfield from which she had just come. She brushed strands of her blond hair from her face, glancing over her shoulder. “I think it’s flying a Druid flag.”

Redden and Railing leapt to their feet, but Farshaun Req was a little slower to rise. Age played a part in this—he was more than seventy, after all—but mostly it was demonstrative of the way he reacted to almost everything. Slow and measured, no need to hurry, everything in good time. Once on his feet, the other three waiting on him impatiently, he took a moment to stretch limbs cramped from sitting.

For the last two hours he had been engaged in conversation with the twins about ways they might modify their skimmers to make them go faster. No one knew more about building and flying airships than Farshaun. One of the chief reasons the twins had been so eager to accompany Mirai to Bakrabru was the prospect of talking with the old man about their latest project and finding out how he thought they might improve the design.

It was Farshaun, after all, who had taught them to fly airships back when they were just becoming interested in learning but lacked the necessary guidance and skills. Their mother was against their flying anything following the death of their father, but she had relented when it became clear that if she wanted to maintain even a modicum of control over her wild sons she was going to have to toss them a bone now and then. Better that they learn to fly safely before they just threw all caution to the winds and went off on their own. So she had agreed to let them go to the village of their cousins, the Alt Mers and Meridians, to study under the man who was recognized almost everywhere as the premier authority of his time.

“A Druid airship?” he asked Mirai speculatively. “What would a Druid airship be doing all the way over here? Are you sure of what you saw?”

Mirai, who was always sure about everything and didn’t like to be questioned, shrugged. “I could be mistaken.”

She said it in a way that suggested she most certainly wasn’t.

Farshaun smiled. He liked Mirai Leah. She was competent, prepared, cool, and calm in the hottest of situations. He had never seen her ruffled. It didn’t hurt in her business dealings that she was beautiful, too. Certainly Redden and Railing thought so. He wondered suddenly how that intriguing triangle was going to resolve itself—which someday soon, he suspected, it must.

“You are not often mistaken, Mirai,” he offered by way of conceding the point. “Shall we find out what it’s doing in our backyard?”