~

The sun was setting over the waters of the bay. Vaska sat with Ailbhe on the deck, hand in hand, enjoying a rare moment of peace.

“It's not bad,” Vaska was saying, stroking her thumb over the back of Ailbhe's hand, “I just didn't think it would be this hard.”

“You're not regretting it, are you?” Ailbhe said. She narrowed her eyes against the distant sun and rested her head on Vaska's shoulder. There was a slight teasing note in her voice.

“No,” Vaska said. “You know me, I'll whine about anything.” The subject of her current complaints was her apprenticeship. Of course she'd expected it to be challenging, but she hadn't expected everything else. “But, seriously,” she went on, “I'm fairly sure that feeding the cats isn't a part of my training, Luke's just too lazy to do it themself.”

Ailbhe snorted. “That's what being an apprentice is like, Vaska. You basically become an errand boy for your teacher. Be thankful that all you have to do is feed the cats.”

“I will not be thankful,” Vaska said, smiling. “That horrible floracat almost bit my hand off yesterday. Look!” And she raised her other hand, revealing several claw marks and a couple of puncture wounds.

“Looks like a good opportunity to practice healing magic,” Ailbhe said mildly.

“Oh, um...” Vaska glanced around the deck, to make sure no one was listening in. The other dragons seemed to be minding their own business, but she lowered her voice anyway. “I still haven't – I still can't bring myself to... actually heal anything...”

Ailbhe's warm golden eyes were full of understanding. She nodded, tightening her grip on Vaska's hand. On this side of the ship, the view north was almost uninterrupted. The southern coast of the Starfall Isles curving away from the setting sun, outlined by orange light.

A hollow thud sounded, like distant thunder.

“What's that?” Ailbhe said quietly, frowning. Vaska followed her gaze, for a moment not totally sure what she was looking at. Just at the mouth of the bay, close to the Starfall Isles, was a plume of smoke, like a bonfire. It rose from the cliffs facing the water.

A wave splashed against the side of the ship, tilting it dramatically. Vaska grabbed onto the rigging, clinging onto Ailbhe with her other hand. Shouts of irritation rose from elsewhere on the deck. Slowly, the ship righted itself.

As Vaska searched the calm water for whatever had produced the wave, she saw it – a distant flash of light from the cliffs, followed in seconds by another thud. She leant over the railing and scanned the water, but the setting sun had cast that area into shadow, so that only the cliffs showed against the violet sky.

“There's something there,” she said, tugging on Ailbhe's hand. “Right? Under the cliffs...”

The thing on the cliff flashed again, and this time it seemed to find its target in the waters below. Flames exploded from a part of the water where there should not have been anything at all, let alone a ship. But there it was, invisible but wreathed in a halo of flame and sparks. It was a ship, but Vaska had never seen one that big before, or that strangely-shaped.

The Cú na Mara's alarm bells began to ring, calling the dragons of the clan to attention. Tadhg, the lookout, fluttered down from the topmast and made straight for the sterncastle.

The artillery on the cliffs fired and missed again. The flames were already going out, leaving nothing but a pall of smoke. For a moment there was silence, and the strange ships were invisible again.

Leo had made it onto the deck, pulling on a shirt as Tadhg trailed after him and narrated what he'd seen by the cliffs.

“I don't know why you bothered me,” Leo sighed, scrubbing sleep out of his eyes. “If it's just two people going at it in the distance, who cares? As long as they don't get any closer.”

Abruptly, the invisibility of the ships cut out. There were three of them, all long and low like barges, each four times the size of the Cú na Mara. Each flew a dark purple flag from the stern. But, strangest of all, each carried structures hundreds of paces long, enormous cylinders that lay along the length of each barge, cylinders that almost resembled-

Vaska's eyes went wide. She tried to yell out a warning, but she wasn't fast enough. With a blast like a volcano erupting, one of the enormous cannons fired at the cliff. There was a flash of light that would have blinded any given non-Light dragon, and under this harsh glow the cliff simply disintegrated. Chunks of rock broke apart in ringing silence, raining into the water, forcing up waves that didn't seem to budge the cannon-barges.

The Cú na Mara tipped again, rolling in the water with terrible slowness. The deck became steeper and steeper, and Vaska shouted but all she could hear was her heart pounding in her ears. She grabbed for a rope, slipped, and found herself facing a fall down a deck that was now almost vertical. Ailbhe caught her by the wrist, hooking her other arm into the rigging.

Someone ran past, arms out for balance. Vaska just about recognised the odd shape of Tiberius the water guardian before he dived off the edge of the ship. Just as Vaska was considering simply transforming and abandoning ship, a huge scaly paw appeared over the side of the ship. It gripped the wood, splintering the railings and severing ropes, and pulled. The ship shuddered, then started to tip back. The deck became horizontal again.

Tiberius didn't release his hold. The choppy waves were dying down, but the cannons on the barges still faced the decimated coastline.

Sound gradually returned to the world. Everyone was shouting at once, scrambling with the sails and cut ropes.

“Wait, stop!” Leo waved for everyone's attention. “They haven't noticed us yet. We need to stay as still as possible. Put out those torches – if they see us they will kill us.”

There was no way of telling whether or not the clan had been noticed. The barges continued to drift along the coastline, moving south. Vaska held her breath, her heart pounding, as they drew closer and closer. She saw what she should have noticed much sooner – that there was a fleet of smaller ships accompanying the barges, hidden among their bulk. A quarter of Rezann's army was in the bay, approaching the Cú na Mara. She closed her eyes and tried to think of something else, anything else, but all her mind would show her was that terrible moment in the old clan camp, when the army had come through the trees and left the clan in ruins. An echo of pain ran along her side, where she'd narrowly avoided being hit that day.

She bit her lip until she tasted blood.

One of the approaching vessels fired on the Cú na Mara. The thud of the carronade was followed almost instantly by the sound of a cannonball splashing into the water. A warning shot.

“What do we do?” someone asked Leo in a tiny, strangled voice.

“I don't... I don't know,” he said.

He delayed just a second too long. The next shot hit the Cú na Mara's foremast and blew it to splinters. Ailbhe shoved Vaska down, shielding her from the rain of splinters and shards of wood. Almost instantly, the Cú na Mara fired back; dragons in the gun-decks must have been prepared for it. It was a mistake, of course.

Engaging an entire fleet of ships and three enormous barges was folly at its finest. Vaska flattened herself to the top deck and clamped her hands over her ears, hating that her biggest fear was that she would be called to heal, rather than that there would be people who required healing in the first place.

There was a short lull. Then one of the Commander's smaller ships simply blew itself to bits. A corona of pink light shredded sailcloth and wood alike in a soundless explosion. The ship went down almost instantly, leaving a scattered trail of debris on the water's surface.

Before Vaska had a chance to absorb this, another ship blew up. When it happened a third time, she saw it – a burning neon rune appeared on the ship's hull, spitting out sparks and steam before simply exploding. She turned on the spot, terrified that some third party had come to complicate things, but the surrounding waters were empty and quiet. She did see John, though. He leant against the rigging while he aimed, his cane upright at his side, both his hands joined as if in prayer. He formed an aperture with his fingers and a new rune flickered into life in the gap.

Leo stood beside him. “Can you get the barges?” Another cannonball whistled overhead and Leo ducked, but John didn't seem capable of much movement. Steam rose from his waistcoat.

“If I know Commander Rezann,” John said, taking aim again, “he will have placed wards on the cannons. But I can aim for the boats, instead...” He spread his hands, making room for a larger rune this time. Vaska could only stare, feeling thoroughly inadequate and useless.

A sparking pink rune appeared on the side of one of the barges, right above the waterline.

“Get down!” John called. Vaska fell to her knees, gathering up Ailbhe in her arms and squeezing her eyes shut. Ailbhe trembled slightly, her breaths harsh on the side of Vaska's face.

The great flash of pink light burned through Vaska's eyelids. Heat grazed the back of her head. This magic was strangely familiar to her – despite its colour, it almost resembled her own Light spells, but was just alien enough to raise the hairs all over her body. She cracked an eye open and glanced across the water. The barge had been halved, and dragons swarmed over its surface, trying to hoist up the cannon before it sank with some success. Some kind of flotation device had deployed under the cannon, so even as the barge broke apart around it, it did not sink.

John was panting now, his clothes burnt in large patches. One of his eyes was bleeding. But he took aim again, this time for the cannon itself. In the split second before the inevitable explosion, Vaska caught sight of his face and shuddered, an instinctive wariness rising in her at the sight of his eyes, one gold and one magenta.

Then the entire world exploded, and Vaska didn't duck in time.

She woke to a terrible ringing and a blur of gold; Ailbhe was leaning over her, tapping her cheeks, trying to rouse her. Vaska blinked and sat up with a groan that she did not hear, and brushed aside the spell tag that had been stuck to her forehead so that she could see. The deck was in chaos, dragons sprawled out on the cracked wood. Two of the masts were in ruins, but somehow the ship was moving at a fast clip, away from the burning smudge on the horizon.

She peered over the edge of the deck. Nothing remained of the fleet except a scattering of burning debris and the end of one of the cannons, still sinking under the surface. Within a couple of seconds, all three of them had vanished under.

“Ow...” Vaska shook her head, trying to clear it. “What – how are we moving?”

“Tiber's pulling us,” Ailbhe said. “But we need to get somewhere safe so that we can recover.” She nudged Vaska and pointed. “Should you, um, should you be helping them?”

A few paces away, all three of the clan's healers were kneeling around John, Fiach directing the other two, who wrote onto the same scroll in relative silence. Zeta looked like he'd been crying, Luke looked like they'd only just woken up; they wore one of Rúth's shirts, back-to-front.

Vaska approached. Most of John was hidden under a pile of spell tags. But the deck around him looked as if it had been hit with a mallet, cracks radiating out from where John lay. And in those cracks in the wood was something shiny and mottled yellow and pink.

“Hey,” Vaska said, clearing her throat. “Do you... need help?” Please say no, please say no...

“No, Vaska,” Fiach said, pausing his writing for an instant. “This is too advanced for you. But you can tend to the rest of the clan, so long as their injuries are minor.” He glanced down at Luke. “She can, can't she?”

“If she's been paying attention, yes,” Luke said. Vaska frowned for a moment, indignant. Of course she'd been paying attention.

She glanced back, at the various bruised and scraped-up dragons on the deck, then snatched up a stack of empty spell tags and a pen.

“Did we win?” she said, before going to do her job.