But Ridge sobered and dropped his voice again—the others had looked in their direction at the mention of sex, even if they had been using the gender sense of the word. “Listen, Sardelle. My life has never been normal, and I make dubious choices all the time. I was doing that long before I met you. Ask anyone. No, ask General Ort. He would be happy to give you a list. Or show you my file. All three inches of it. I’m just impulsive and not very disciplined. There aren’t many branches of the army where I could have made it more than five years without being bounced out on my a— my lower cheeks, as you call them. I knew that from the beginning. The only reason I joined was because I wanted to fly. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I’ve put up with the rest of the discipline and chain-of-command cra—wait, do you have a polite civilized word for, ah, fecal droppings?”
“I think you just found one.”
“Enh, it doesn’t have a very forceful ring. Anyway, what I’m saying is that I’ve put up with the army because the army keeps me in the air. The only reason the army puts up with
me
, is because I’m good up there. Usually.” He grimaced. “The king’s good graces mean less to me than they probably should. I see him as a man, nothing more, nothing less. I see everyone that way. I don’t like failing—that claws at me—and if I’m dreading a court-martial, it’s because I know that in this case it will be deserved, but it’s the having failed that will bother me, not the opinions of others.”
Ridge slumped down on the log, leaning his elbows against his knees. Sardelle thought about putting her arm around him, but rested her shoulder against him instead. He stared thoughtfully down at his hands. “As long as I can fly, that’s what makes it worth the early mornings, the horrible chow, the physical and mental exams, the long work weeks, the days off only when it’s convenient for the army to let you go, which is next to never. It’s the flying that makes everything else workable. But if there was another way… I’ve been thinking off and on, ever since you mentioned that you might be able to
make
a power crystal.”
He glanced at her, and she gave a nod. She hadn’t tried yet but thought she could.
“Maybe I wouldn’t
need
the military to have a flier,” Ridge said. “I have engineer friends; we might be able to build one from scratch. Even if you couldn’t make a power source, or it was too dangerous to, now there’s this dragon blood… Just seems like all of a sudden there are options. And I’ve wondered what it would be like to go off after my dad on one of his crazy world-exploring missions while he’s still alive. I’ve wondered what it would be like to fly all over the world, really. See it all from the sky. Maybe skipping the empire, since my head is apparently adorning bounty posters here. But if we weren’t at war with the Cofah, and there were another way to keep flying, I might have retired already. That crossed my mind while I was being flown out to those prison mines, let me tell you. But I figure it would be cowardly to leave as long as the Cofah are a threat and I’m able to keep fighting. But I suppose if the army kicked me out… I wouldn’t feel all that bad about it. And if something happened where I had to leave to help protect this particularly fine lady, I wouldn’t feel all that bad about that, either.” Ridge wiggled his eyebrows at her. “I know you don’t need my protecting, but I’d at least like to be able to take my cloak off and lay it across a mud puddle for you, so I can feel useful. I’d do that, by the way, if we ever get somewhere without snow and you’re wearing sandals instead of boots.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Sardelle should have said something more meaningful to his sharing of dreams, but she sensed that he wasn’t being completely straightforward with her. Aspects of the military might irritate him, but he loved his job and the officers who worked under him. He wasn’t ready to retire, not unless they made him choose between that or a desk job. And he didn’t want to fail or to lose the admiration of those he cared about. That mattered to him. He
liked
being a war hero, even if he waved away the attention and pretended it didn’t matter. He even believed it didn’t matter to him. Perhaps this was a case of Sardelle being able to sense things in him that he wasn’t being honest to himself about. He would be devastated if his career was taken from him and if he was ostracized. On some level, he knew that; he had to. That he wanted her enough to bury those thoughts… she appreciated it, but she feared he would come to resent her one day if she was the one who, however unintentionally, ruined his life.
She stared bleakly at the ground.
“Anyway,” Ridge said, flexing his clasped hands and returning his gaze to them. “I can’t read you the way you can read me, so I don’t know how you truly feel, but I want you to know that if you’re looking for an excuse to leave, you don’t have to give me a story. Just say that’s how it is, and I’ll understand. I’ll drink myself into a stupor and pine horribly for days, but I’ll understand. You’re like an eagle, and I’m a crow, and it was probably strange in the beginning that we got all lustful in that cave—I’m still sure that was because of you fondling my chest—but I’ve been enjoying flying with you, so if you’re really just worried that you’re affecting my reputation or my career somehow, please don’t be. I won’t go so far as to say I don’t care at all about those things, but at this point in my life, I’m ready to care about someone else… more.”
That
was a truth, a whole truth.
Sardelle wiped at the corner of her eye. A lump had grown in her throat while he was speaking, else she might have protested his notion that she was an eagle or any sort of magnificent bird or animal. She didn’t trust her voice though, and when he gazed over at her, she put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.
It did seem unfair that she could read him when he could only guess at her true thoughts. She didn’t know if it would alarm him, but with the touch of her lips, she tried to share her feelings and emotions with him as well, things that were too hard to prove with words, that she didn’t want to leave him but she would never forgive herself for wrecking his life. She also admitted that she was afraid sometimes that she had attached herself to him too soon and with too much zeal because he had been the first nice person to walk into this new life of hers, a life she was still struggling to accept fully. He had been like a life preserver on a rough sea, and she had clung on with more fervor than she usually would have when meeting a man. But at the same time, she knew if they had met three hundred years ago, she would have wanted to explore a relationship with him then too.
She shifted so she could slip her fingers beneath his jacket, running her hand up his waist and around to his back, enjoying the contours of his hard muscles, wanting to slide over into his lap and feel more of him. Yes, falling for him would have been easy in any time period. He was handsome, charming, playful—
And he does that thing with his tongue.
Jaxi!
I’m only interrupting because some people have noticed you’re using this log for more than a bench, and it’s almost dawn.
Is there a Cofah airship on the way?
Nothing close enough for me to sense. Yet.
Good. Now, go away.
Sardelle would have gone on kissing Ridge for a few more minutes—or hours—and who cared who was watching, but for all his words about being indifferent to what happened to his career, he had a more developed sense of duty than she. He broke the kiss first, though his eyes didn’t leave hers. The intensity—the heat—in them made her wonder if he might suggest running off into the woods instead of attending to any sort of duties, but he eventually sighed and leaned back farther. “That is… compelling,” he breathed, his voice husky.
“Do you mean, ah, did you sense… me?” Very eloquent, yes. But she didn’t want to say she had been trying to foist her emotions onto him if it hadn’t worked. Just because he understood her words when she spoke with her mind didn’t mean the rest would come through.
“Some fears, concerns, something about a life preserver, but I was mostly talking about the end where you were thinking lustful thoughts about my… back.”
She blushed—those hadn’t been the feelings she had been trying to share.
He caught her hand when she pulled it out from beneath his jacket, giving it a kiss before releasing her, his eyes holding a promise of later. He eyed the sky, which was no longer as dark as it had been, and the camp—contrary to Jaxi’s warning, the others were doing a polite job of
not
looking in this direction. “Looks like it’s time to go. Are you ready to storm a secret Cofah compound?”
Chapter 11
R
idge tucked his spyglass into a pocket and picked his way down the spruce that he had been using as a viewing platform. He grimaced as sharp needles scraped his cheeks and branches thwacked him in the back of the skull. He still had a knot back there from the crash. He probably should have given the tree-climbing job to someone else, but after moving the fliers, the squadron had hiked all afternoon and was approaching the coordinates for the secret Cofah facility, and Ridge had wanted to see for himself what awaited.
From the ground, it had almost looked like a forest fire was burning beyond the snowy ridge ahead, because plumes of white-gray smoke rose from numerous spots, drifting up into the clear evening sky. Thanks to his elevated perch and the spyglass, he had found the real reason for the plumes.
When he dropped to the ground, all eyes turned to him. The group was taking a break, resting and waiting for night to fall.
“Fire?” Apex was sitting on a log, with his pistol and weapons cleaning kit out.
“Not fire,” Duck said, his boot up on the end of the log. They had been having the same discussion when Ridge had gone up the tree. “Smell the air,” Duck added. “It’s got sulfur in it.”
“So does the air above your bunk at night, but that doesn’t preclude a fire in the stove.”
Duck didn’t look like he grasped the joke. No matter. Ridge wanted to share what he’d seen, not break up a fight.
“It’s steam, not smoke,” he said. “Looks like a lot of hot springs and geysers. One of the little ponds started shooting steamy water twenty, thirty meters into the air while I was up there watching. There were a lot of spots like that. There’s a big mound, almost a mountain, in the middle that might be manmade. At the least, it’s been excavated by man—there are some metal doors set into one side, big enough to be hangar doors. I’m not sure how easy it is to get to them. I didn’t see a road, and there are a lot of those steaming pools.”
Tolemek, who was leaning against a tree near Sardelle and Ahn, nodded. “I thought that might be the source of the smell and the steam. We’ve gone west far enough to reach the Taiga of Boiling Death.”
“Boiling
Death
?” Duck asked.
“I haven’t been here myself, but they say swimming isn’t recommended. The geysers and pools will scorch your skin off. Even some of the streams run so hot that nothing can live in the water. Just traveling through the nearby forest can be dangerous, because in some spots, there’s nothing more than a thin crust over scalding water. If you break through it and fall in, you can get burned to death.”
“Burned to death?” Ahn asked. “You don’t have a goo to fix that?”
“I did bring some of my healing salve along, but it’s not
that
powerful.”
“Boiling Death, huh?” Ridge asked. “Sounds like a cozy place for a secret base.”
“There are people in the mountain,” Sardelle said, “Fifty or sixty. Jaxi isn’t positive, but thinks some are guards and some are workers. Researchers or engineers. She says there’s a
lot
of dragon blood in there. She can sense it.”
“Thank you.” Ridge appreciated the intelligence, but he took note of the concerned looks Duck and Apex shared. Maybe he should have sent them back in one of the fliers with an intelligence report for the general, but that would have left them a pilot short, and they had both volunteered to stay with the mission anyway. He was still battling with the decision, though, knowing that someone had to survive and that this intelligence
had
to make it back.
We’ll survive
, came Sardelle’s determined whisper in his mind.
He had grown used to that more quickly than he would have imagined. Maybe because it was her, and she was the one person he didn’t mind having secret conversations with. The sword was another story.
“Uh, who’s Jaxi?” Duck asked, apparently dwelling on Sardelle’s report.
“My sword.” Sardelle drew the weapon from its scabbard.
“It… talks to you?” He licked his lips, eyes big as he stared at it, then glanced around, like he might flee into the woods at any moment.
“She talks to just about anyone who’s willing to listen,” Sardelle said.
“And some who aren’t,” Ridge muttered. “Duck, you want to go scout for me? See if there’s a way out to those doors? If anyone can scamper around in a forest and avoid pools of boiling death, it ought to be you.”
Duck wore a doubtful expression, but he said, “Yes, sir.”
“Want me to go with him, sir?” Ahn asked. “Watch his back? Or pull his butt out of the boiling river when he falls in?”
Duck sniffed. “I don’t need anyone to pull me out. I’ll be better on my own. You city people are so noisy when you walk in the woods.”
“Noisy will be you when you fall into a geyser and start screaming,” Ahn muttered.
Duck waved dismissively, grabbed his rifle, and headed off through the trees. Scouting, Ridge assured himself, not fleeing from Sardelle. Duck’s speed and the way his shoulders were hunched up to his ears made it seem like the latter, though.
“What constitutes a
lot
of dragon blood?” Tolemek asked. “Is it possible there’s a whole dragon inside their base?”
“Jaxi doesn’t believe so,” Sardelle said. “I think even
I
would sense a dragon at this distance.”
“Hm.” Something about the set of Tolemek’s mouth suggested disappointment.