It was a little before eight when Owen and Gareth made their way toward the departure grounds.
The estate was far busier than usual. Soldiers crossed the grounds with field packs on their backs and sealed equipment cases in their hands, and near the boarding area an officer was working through a roster, calling surnames one after another. Each soldier answered and was sent off toward baggage loading, engine preparation or their assigned section. Somewhere ahead, steam hissed every so often, mixing with shouted orders, bootsteps and the metallic knock of cargo being secured.
A pair of soldiers glanced up as the brothers passed.
"That’s the younger one," one of them murmured. "The one who fought General Rooke."
"Eyes on your crate," said the sergeant beside them, and the conversation ended there.
They cleared the last building, and the airship came fully into view.
It was enormous. An elongated lift envelope stretched above an enclosed hull of dark metal, with several propellers mounted along its sides and a row of observation windows running beneath them. The loading doors stood open, and the silver Ferrers crest was displayed prominently on the hull. Thin plumes of steam escaped from vents near the stern while engineers and soldiers moved around it, checking lines and loading the last of the cargo.
Owen had seen airships before, but he had never travelled any real distance aboard one. What interested him more than the ship itself was where it was going.
Eleanor was waiting near Edmund, with Edith and Mercer standing a short distance away. She came forward as soon as she saw Owen and checked his outer coat, then turned him slightly so she could make sure his field pack was properly secured.
"Do you have everything Edith told you to bring?"
"Everything on the list."
She gave the strap on his pack one last tug, then looked up at him. "Listen when Gareth, Edith or your father tells you something. Even if you think you can handle it yourself."
Owen didn’t joke. He understood exactly what she meant.
"I will," he said.
Edmund was already occupied with the expedition. He spoke briefly with Mercer, confirmed that everyone was present, and Mercer turned and signaled to the crew. Around them, the Ferrers contingent began to board.
Owen boarded with Gareth while the soldiers filed toward their own section of the ship.
The passageways inside were narrow. Bolted benches lined the soldiers’ compartment, with racks built along the walls to hold weapons and equipment in place during flight, and farther forward there was a wider compartment for Edmund and the officers. Windows ran along both sides. The air smelled faintly of hot metal and oil, along with something sharper that Owen guessed was whatever fuel the engines burned. A steady vibration ran up through the deck beneath his boots.
Mercer and the officers were working before the ship had even left the ground. Maps lay open across a table in the forward compartment, and lists were being checked and equipment assignments confirmed. Edith came through once, looked over Owen’s and Gareth’s field gear herself, tugged at one of Owen’s straps, and moved on to the soldiers without comment.
The airship began to move before it lifted. The propellers picked up speed, and the vibration in the deck deepened into something Owen could feel in his chest. For a moment, loose fittings rattled all along the passage. Then the ground fell away beneath them, and the noise from outside thinned out strangely as they rose.
"You can go to the window," Gareth said, settling onto a bench. "Nobody’s going to stop you."
Owen went.
From above, the estate stopped looking like the whole world. The training yards, the residence and the military buildings he had spent his life moving between became one compact section inside something much larger. Beyond its walls, the Ferrers city spread outward in every direction: dense residential streets, commercial districts, workshops, barracks and storage yards, and roads crowded with people who had nothing to do with the Ferrers bloodline at all.
As the airship climbed, the city thinned into farmland and smaller settlements. Main roads branched off toward towns and villages, and watch posts and military stations sat along the more important routes. Farther out, the cultivated land gave way to patches of wilderness.
Owen stayed at the window longer than Gareth seemed to expect. He had travelled around parts of Ferrers territory before, but seeing the roads, the settlements and the farmland all connected from this height made it far more obvious how much his family was responsible for. With dozens of settlements passing below them, a report about one village near a forest no longer felt quite so abstract.
After a while, Gareth got up and joined him at the window.
"How different is Mowbray territory from ours?" Owen asked.
"Smaller," Gareth said. "Less land, fewer big settlements. But a lot more of it borders forest and rough country. Their soldiers spend more time on patrols and dealing with things that come too close to the towns than ours do."
"You’ve been there before?"
"A few times. Father and Lord Mowbray are close, so I’ve known his eldest son for years." Gareth leaned against the frame. "If he asks you to spar, eat something first. He doesn’t know when to stop."
Owen smiled slightly. "Will he be joining the subjugation?"
"I’d expect so. We won’t know the assignments until we get there, though."
Owen found himself interested in that. He had grown up around Ferrers swordsmen. Someone close to Gareth’s age, raised inside another Great Family’s martial tradition, would be something new.
The journey went on without much to mark it. Owen spent part of it watching the land below, part listening to Gareth, and part simply sitting while the officers worked in the forward compartment.
Eventually, the landscape began to change enough that he went back to the window. Large stretches of farmland became rarer, and forest spread farther between the settlements. The roads below were still well maintained, but the watch posts along them looked more heavily fortified, and the villages sat farther apart.
Then a broad river came into view, cutting across the land beneath them. Fortified crossings stood at intervals along it, with watch posts on both banks. On the near side, the posts carried Ferrers silver. On the far side, the colors were different.
The first patrol Owen spotted on the far bank carried polearms, not swords.
He realized before Gareth said anything that they had left Ferrers territory.
The signs kept coming after that. Soldiers at the roadside posts carried spears. Polearms stood in neat racks outside the barracks they passed over, and the practice yards near the settlements were laid out with far more open space than Ferrers yards, enough for long-weapon drills.
When the Mowbray seat city came into view, the contrast was the strongest yet. It was smaller and more compact than the Ferrers seat, but its defenses were built with the wilderness in mind. The outer walls were thicker, more watchtowers faced the side of the city that looked toward the forest, and there were broad military yards inside the walls and a noticeable number of armed patrols moving through the gates.
The airship descended toward the military landing grounds of the Mowbray estate.
As they came lower, Owen could make out the soldiers waiting below in ordered ranks. Their coats were a deep forest green with bronze fittings and bronze rank markings, worn over dark trousers and boots, with reinforced forearms and a crest bearing a spear at the breast or shoulder. The cut was different from Ferrers uniforms, looser around the hips and legs, and it gave the soldiers a different silhouette altogether.
Past the landing grounds, in one of the military yards, rows of soldiers in the same green were drilling with spears, the long shafts rising and falling together.
The ranks waiting for them were orderly, but nobody had turned the landing into a ceremony. Mowbray was receiving reinforcements for an active operation, and its soldiers looked like it.
The airship settled, the ramp went down, and the Ferrers delegation stepped out.
Lord Mowbray was waiting near the front with his eldest son and several officers. He was around Edmund’s age, and he carried himself like someone used to command, without needing armor or a drawn weapon to prove it.
When Edmund came down the ramp, the two of them began formally, exchanging the proper greetings between the heads of two Great Families while officers from both houses looked on. It lasted only a few moments.
"So it takes a monster problem to get you into my territory," Lord Mowbray said.
"You could always visit mine," Edmund replied.
"I’ve been to your dinners, Edmund."
"Then you know the food is better than yours."
Lord Mowbray laughed and clasped his forearm, and whatever formality had been left between them disappeared.
He greeted Gareth next and clearly remembered him. "You’ve gotten broader. Is your father still burying you in work?"
"Only when I’m home, my lord," Gareth said.
The Mowbray heir stepped forward and clasped Gareth’s hand. "You took your time."
"It’s good to see you too."
Both of them grinned, with the ease of two people who had known each other long enough not to need anything more.
Then Lord Mowbray turned to Owen and looked at him a moment longer than he had at Gareth. "You’ve grown considerably since I last saw you."
"It’s been a while, my lord."
"Congratulations on your awakening." He said it simply. "I heard there was some confusion at your ceremony, and then that you manifested a sword after all. I also heard you’ve already broken into Tempered, and that you forced General Rooke to use her own power during an assessment." He glanced at Edmund. "It seems your father has been understating your progress. I’ll admit the second part interests me a great deal more than the gossip about the first."
"I only forced one serious defensive response from her, my lord," Owen said. "She controlled the rest of the assessment, and she ended it right after."
Lord Mowbray seemed to like that answer. He nodded once, then turned back to Edmund, because there was real work waiting for both of them.
"I won’t repeat what you already know," he said. "Since we suspended hunting and put patrols and restrictions in place, there haven’t been any more deaths in the village. But my scouts came back this morning with fresh tracks. Whatever is happening deeper in the forest hasn’t stopped."
He nodded to one of his officers, who stepped forward.
"Several separate trails appear to be heading toward roughly the same section of the forest," the officer said. "It’s deeper in, beyond our usual patrol routes. We don’t know yet whether something is drawing the monsters there, whether something is driving them out of somewhere else, or whether it’s only temporary."
"How fresh are the tracks?" Edith asked. "And which routes were your scouts using?"
"The freshest were made overnight, General. They followed the hunting trails out from the village and turned back before reaching the area where the trails seem to meet."
Mercer asked how messages were passing between the village and the Mowbray patrol stations, and the officer explained that runners were going between them at regular intervals. Mercer made a note and didn’t ask anything further.
"There’s no reason to spend the day inside the estate," Lord Mowbray said. "The village is where this will be run from. Give your people a short while to unload and reorganize, and we’ll leave for the settlement."
"Agreed," Edmund said.
The Ferrers soldiers began transferring their equipment off the airship while the Mowbray soldiers prepared for their own departure.
A few paces away, the Mowbray heir called his spear into his hands and ran his eyes along the shaft, checking it with the ease of someone who had done it thousands of times.
Owen noticed the length of it first, and how far the point would reach before any of his swords could. Then he watched the way the heir held it, hands spaced along the shaft, adjusting its balance with a small movement of his wrists. Owen had spent a month learning how much a change of sword altered a fight. A weapon like that would alter it far more, and he found himself watching for longer than he meant to.
The reorganization didn’t take long. Before midday, the combined Ferrers and Mowbray party was moving out of the seat city.
Owen ended up near the middle of the column with Gareth and the Mowbray heir, while Edmund, Lord Mowbray, Edith, Mercer and the commanding officers led from the front.
The city noticed them as they passed. Shopkeepers paused in their doorways, children tried to see around the adults in front of them, and here and there Owen saw people pick out the Ferrers crest among all the Mowbray green. Nobody paid him any particular attention. Most of them had no reason to know who he was.
Once they were through the walls, the buildings thinned quickly. The smell of the city gave way to damp soil and grass, and then to something heavier and greener coming from the wilderness ahead.
The road rose over a shallow ridge, and from the top, Owen finally saw the forest from the ground.
It was far larger than the small section Mercer’s map had shown. The canopy stretched across the horizon in one almost unbroken expanse, dense and green and ordinary-looking, and the road toward the village ran straight toward it.
The forest didn’t look sinister. What changed the way Owen saw it was its size. Somewhere inside all of that, hunters had disappeared, twelve people had already died, and the newest tracks said the monsters were still on the move.
As the column started down the ridge, Owen’s hand drifted to his side, to where the grip of his sword would settle the moment he called it. Once they reached the village, the operation he had spent the past month earning a place in would finally begin.