Hundreds of warrior-born worked to add new sections of the God Shackle, even as the current links groaned with strain.

They thought they could contain a god.

But in a corner of that island, in a camp that used to be rocky cliffs and seagull perches, another group chopped and sawed and sanded a forest of newly grown trees, fashioning them into small ships. They were crude vessels, meant merely to float when the God Shackle inevitably snapped.

Some humans tended gardens, which had grown up out of nowhere. Eagerly, they packed jars of preserves, packets of dried fruits, and barrels full of vegetables. These were people who’d learned to live with nothing, and they knew the danger of waste.

When the dragon shadow passed overhead, they looked up, but they didn’t pause their work.

All across the Fallen Isles, they prepared.

They planned.

They prayed.

It would do no good.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

IN THE MORNING, NINE UNMOORED THE SKIMMER and climbed up to the quarterdeck, where she took the wheel. Using some sort of magic, she manipulated the sails, and the skimmer carried us out of the cove.

The rest of us stood on the main deck, careful to stay out of the way of the rigging as we leaned to watch the red sandstone cliffs grow smaller in the distance.

“This ship is fast,” I said. Good thing, too. The eclipse was only two decans from now.

Gerel nodded. “It took Chenda and me almost no time to catch up with you on the Chance Encounter. The wheel has all these sigils carved into it, some for speed, some for the sail, some not immediately obvious.” She shrugged. “Seven told us a couple of them, mostly because he didn’t want me to crash his ship, but I think I would have figured it out eventually. Besides, the ship is metal. It probably would have done more damage to the rocks.”

“I don’t understand how it doesn’t sink from the weight.” Hristo ran his fingers along the rail.

“More of their magic,” Chenda said. “There are sigils for buoyancy and speed carved all over the hull.”

That must have been how Nine communicated with her superiors so efficiently, then: magic. More and more of it.

“Do you think all their magic works away from home?” I asked. “Like these ships and the weaver device?”

“I don’t know,” Gerel said. “Their magic is different from our god gifts.”

“Imagine how quickly they could conquer the Fallen Isles,” Zara murmured. “If they wanted.”

Gerel shot my sister a look. “I said their magic is different, not better. What they have is impressive, but our gods give us strength. They would never have defeated us, had they come here looking to conquer.”

Or maybe we were just so small and out of the way that no one cared about us as much as we thought. We had god gifts, which made us dangerous to keep on the islands but useless away from home. We had noorestones, but clearly the empire had other forms of illumination that worked just as well. And we had dragons; they were probably the most tempting resource of the Fallen Isles, but difficult to capture.