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The third day, the ships were visible from the walls of the Mountainside Palace. I stood next to Tallu, General Saxu on his other side as we watched the ships crossing over the capital. Their shadows covered entire blocks of the city.

“We are prepared if they attack,” General Saxu said, hands clasped behind his back. “But so far, they have not given any indication that they plan to.”

And they wouldn’t. I whispered it to myself. They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t attack, because my mother would know that to do so over the capital, over the Mountainside Palace, would only lead to death and destruction.

A bird launched itself from the deck of the ship, and Terror flapped to meet it, but the hawk passed him, an arrow headed straight for me. Terror made a shrieking sound, claiming that all information had to go through him and anything the hawk had to say still counted as information he had gotten for me, so he was due a fish, regardless.

I stretched out my arm and the hawk landed on it delicately, although its claws cut into my arm, nicking the skin beneath my silken jacket.

“King Rimáu and Princess Eonaî of the Northern Kingdom want to know where they should land their ship,” the hawk asked. My heart caught in my throat; I couldn’t breathe around the drumbeat of Eonaî, Eonaî, Eonaî. My sister was on that ship. The other half of me was on that ship.

They had said singular ship. So my father and sister wanted to meet with us, but they weren’t about to lose the aerial advantage by bringing all of their ships out of the sky.

I made a quick decision and indicated one of the lesser-used gardens. It had gotten overgrown while the palace had been unoccupied, but that meant I felt considerably less guilty about crushing so many plants.

“If my father planned to attack, he would not have asked,” I said, launching the hawk by throwing my arm into the air.

“If he planned to attack,” General Saxu said, “he would have dropped flaming oil down on us from above. He would have set fire to what was left of the imperial palace.”

“Do you believe my father is here for peace?” I asked.

“I believe that anyone in your family is too smart to waste an advantage like a perfected version of the ships that Bemishu failed to bring to war,” Saxu said. “They could have destroyed our remaining military several times over with those ships.”

Tallu turned, ordering his servants to prepare a feast for dignitaries from the Northern Kingdom, but as he spoke, his shoulders began to shake, his body curling in on itself. I grabbed him, my arm wrapping around his upper back, forcing healing magic into him until he no longer quivered.

Saxu said nothing, his eyes moving over the servants and soldiers around us. He finished Tallu’s orders as I pressed more and more magic into Tallu. It was taking more time every day to heal him. The cost wasn’t what I worried about; it was that Tallu needed more healing. Multiple times a day.

Prince Hallu was not much better. Naî nearly lived at his side, the dragon having taken him as one of her own. If we did not solve this soon, then I was sure Naî would do something terrible when Hallu died.

We would hold the feast in the same banquet room where we had held our wedding. It seemed oddly circular that my sister had been forced to miss my wedding and now was attending a similar feast in the same room.

We made a slow parade across the palace. By the time we reached the indicated garden, my sister’s ship had already lowered itself until it floated only a dozen feet off the ground.

From afar, the vessel had looked exactly like the ones Seka Zami had designed. But up close, I could see it was a northern ship. The hull was carved, painted, and decorated. Like one of our sailing vessels, it told a story—this one the ancient legend of a warrior who had set out to slay the great northern bear and instead died, frozen on the tundra.

The great northern bear had taken pity on him, and turned him into a borealis wolf, allowing him to return to his village and live among them. The cost had been that no one would ever know who he was, and that he could never again communicate with them.

The tale was told in carvings and paintings, beginning at the back of the ship. It ended with the ferocious borealis wolf he had become carved on the bow, a figurehead that looked as though it was about to come to life, dive off the ship, and take a bite out of the soldiers surrounding Tallu.

The Southern Imperium preferred their ships more functional than beautiful. Their ships were smooth wood and metal, with engines that could run on their magic and drive a ship even when there was no wind. They did not carve their boats with figureheads. How many imperials had even seen one of our northern boats this close?

From the deck, someone threw a rope ladder over, and warriors, their hair braided, their armor scarred, lined the railing. They did not draw their weapons—there was not a single flash of steel or a nocked arrow.

But the threat was there. Tallu might come with a dozen soldiers, but they had the manpower to meet him. Then Father appeared.

He was dressed in his full regalia. My father wore a long cloak made from bear fur. His crown was gold, delicately carved and embellished. Someone had braided his hair in complicated knots that told the story of his experience in battle, and his position as my mother’s husband. His eyes, so similar to my own, surveyed the scene, taking it in with the efficiency of someone who had already made battle plans as soon as he glanced at the field in front of him.

He was tall, half a head taller than the warriors around him. When my sister stepped up next to him, she looked small beside him. Her golden hair and pale coloring was so familiar that it caught my breath.

She wore a dark blue dress, embroidered along the cuffs and down the front. Her bearskin cloak matched my father’s, but her coronet was made of opal, glittering like Naî’s eyes in the bright sunlight. Her expression was as cold as the tundra when she looked down at us, and I was sure I was the only one who noticed the tightening in her jaw, the pinch at the corner of her eyes that meant she was holding herself together through force alone.

A third person joined them, and at first I thought it was Velethuil. Her head was shaved like his had been, and she wore the same filmy, nearly translucent wrappings he had, but her eyes were dark amber, where his had been bright green.

Still, there was no mistaking what she was: an air mage.

So, that was how my mother had perfected the ships. Ristorium and the Northern Kingdom were once again allies.

Two warriors came down the rope ladder first, and General Saxu ordered his men back, far enough that neither my sister nor father would see their presence as a direct threat, but still close enough that no one would be able to harm Tallu.