After five minutes, Anton released the bellows, his breath coming in great clouds of vapor as he let himself fall backward. “Hard… work…” he gasped. He got up, groaning, went into the stern, and checked the instruments there. “It worked!” he said after a moment. “We’re descending much more slowly.” He flexed his hands, then stretched his arms out, wincing. “It may kill me, but it works.”
An hour went by… then two. Every few minutes, Anton worked the bellows. He quit talking altogether, just adding coal to the stove, pumping for as long as he could, sweat running from his increasingly red face, then letting go with a gasp, checking the altitude, and resting silently until it was time to pump once more.
Brenna offered to help, but discovered she simply couldn’t work the bellows fast enough. “I’m sorry,” she said, gasping, as she let go and got back to her feet.
“Just… keep a look out,” Anton said, settling himself with a groan before the bellows once more.
Brenna nodded, and retreated to the gondola’s rail.
She found the view even more fascinating as the ground grew closer, as it did despite all of Anton’s working of the bellows and the roaring of the little stove. They passed over a village, miniature dark roofs and little wisps of chimney smoke slipping silently beneath them. Brenna wondered if anyone down there would look up and see them. She hoped not: Falk would certainly be on their trail and looking for eyewitnesses.
She said as much to Anton, as he rested between battles with the bellows. “But you must have known that from the beginning,” he said. “What was your plan for when we landed?”
Brenna said nothing. In fact, she had had no plan: just the absolute certainty that they had to flee before Mother Northwind touched Anton again, before Falk returned to take them all to the Palace to further his mysterious Plan to destroy the Barrier, the Plan in which Brenna, unimaginably, somehow had a central role.
“I guess I was hoping we could find a friendly farmer to put us up,” she said. “Then… I don’t know. Flee north, I suppose. Few MageLords venture up there, and the Commoners who do appreciate that. They’d be unlikely to give us away.”
“We have no supplies,” Anton said. “Nothing but the clothes on our back. No food. No water.”
“But at least your mind is still your own!” Brenna snapped. “Anton, I did the best I could. I couldn’t get any supplies without making Gannick suspicious. We had to go when we did, as quickly as we did, or we weren’t going to escape at all.”
Anton said nothing. Then he sighed. “I know,” he said. “It’s rather ungracious for the rescuee to wish for a betterorganized rescue, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “None of this is what I expected when the Professor and I set out,” he said. “But then, I guess none of us gets a choice in what life throws at us.”
“No.” Brenna thought of her own circumscribed life as Falk’s ward. “No, we don’t.”
The airship drifted and dropped. Though Brenna couldn’t feel it in the gondola, she knew a stiff breeze was scouring the prairie below, sending snow-snakes whipping over the ground, and she welcomed it, its force sending them farther from Falk every passing minute.
When they crossed the western edge of the Great Lake about three thousand feet remained between themselves and the ice, Anton reported. “Maybe we’ll make it across yet,” he said, settling himself at the bellows one more time. But this time he had hardly pumped a dozen times before the noise of the bellows changed, and he suddenly found his hands moving without resistance. He stopped, leaned over. “Damn,” he said. “The bellows have busted. That’s that, then.”
“Won’t the heat keep filling the envelope without the bellows?” Brenna said, looking up at the distended blue silk.
“Some,” said Anton. “But not enough. And we’ve got to throw it overboard, anyway.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s full of hot coals, Brenna. When we hit, we’re going to tip. And then…”
Brenna pictured what that could mean, and jumped to her feet.
The mageservants had carried the stove to the airship on a palette with four crisscrossed wooden staves forming handles. Together, she and Anton lifted it, still hot, teetered to the edge of the gondola, and tipped it over the side.
The airship lurched skyward as the weight left it. Brenna, looking down and behind, saw the stove crash to the ice, disappearing in a cloud of steam as it spilled its burning coals. A moment later Anton heaved what was left of the coal over the side, as well.
Anton went forward, Brenna trailing him, and together they gazed out over the ice. Snow blowing and drifting across it obscured the view ahead. They could see nothing but white haze: no sign of the far shore. “At least ice makes for a smooth landing,” Anton said, as if to himself.
Brenna remembered the scene she had found when the airship had crashed in the trees outside the manor, Anton hanging from the rigging, dripping blood, the Professor dead in the snow, and swallowed.
They dropped lower and lower, flying in eerie silence broken only by the faint creak of rope against wicker as the gondola swayed. The snow-swept ice beneath them seemed to move faster and faster as they crept ever closer to it. The shadow of the airship, stretched out in front of them as the sun set behind them, grew bigger and longer every second.
“Any minute now,” Anton said. He abruptly grabbed a rope, turned, sat down in the gondola, and pulled Brenna down beside him.
“What’s the rope?” she said.
“Vent cord,” Anton replied tersely, which did nothing to enlighten her.
Brenna had thought it frightening enough being able to see the lake surface rising beneath them. She found it absolutely terrifying to not be able to see it, to not know for certain when-
They hit the ice.
The first blow tossed her across the gondola on top of Anton, who pushed her away and gave the rope he held a furious tug. She heard a ripping sound above her.
They must have bounced; they came down again, not as hard. The envelope was deflating above them, and looking up, she saw the big square holes in the top of the envelope and realized that the rope Anton had pulled had opened them, letting the last of the warm air stream out. But the wind had its teeth into them now, dragging them across the ice like a dead rat in the mouth of a cat. The gondola tipped on its side, and only Anton’s grip kept them both from tumbling out. She seized his arm with one hand and one of the loops of rope set as handholds inside the gondola with the other. She could hear the ice scraping beneath them, could turn her head and see the dark gray surface rushing by not a foot away. She could see nothing of what lay ahead of them, the envelope, now only a third its former size, still blocking the view. It shrank further, and then, abruptly, collapsed completely. The gondola slid forward into a welter of ropes and blue silk, spun slightly to the right, and then stopped.
Brenna found herself lying on top of Anton. She pushed herself off him, rolled over, and sat up. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He nodded, his face white. She realized suddenly that this second crash in an airship must have been even more frightening for him than for her. “I’m… fine,” he said. “And I think the airship is undamaged, too.” He gave her a crooked smile. “The Professor used to say any landing you could walk away from is a good one.” The smile faded. “Neither one of us walked away from the last one. So this is definitely an improvement.”
“Let’s see where we are.” Brenna scrambled out of the gondola, and stood up. She found herself facing southwest, staring along the long gray track the gondola had made as it had scraped snow from the ice.
Then she looked the other way.
They’d been closer to land than she’d thought. Just at the limit of visibility rose a line of spruce, shadows in the blowing snow.
And then a piece of shadow detached itself from that line. It rushed toward them, taking shape as it drew nearer, until she recognized it a sled drawn by a team of dogs.