I had expected only to fly as far as whatever destination Audrey wanted to take me to. I learned very quickly that the Blackbird had been the destination, herself. I was going to fly with them until they returned to Iscalis.

I wasn't sure whether I should be excited or afraid at the prospect of spending nearly a month on a crowded airship with a crew made entirely up of men. They were coarse, dirty men as most sailors were, but they were of a lower sort, nearly pirates in my eyes. Audrey turned out to be no different. He had been acting like a gentleman before.

The thought makes me laugh less now than I did then. He has mellowed a good deal with age and is now much more gentlemanly than he ever was in his youth. At the time, however, his most gentlemanly behavior could not even match Vincent's ungentlemanly behavior. I didn't like to think that, though, because I'd decided that there was no point in thinking about Vincent anymore. I was determined to forget him entirely and I hoped he would forget me.

The time I spend on the Blackbird was some of the most interesting of my life. It was also the happiest month of my life so far. I learned to be comfortable around the men and their coarse manners. I began to joke with them just as much as they joked with me. I was on pleasant terms with the captain. Most of all, I learned so much about airships and airsailors.

Apart from the mechanics of the airships, which I learned in finer detail and just as adeptly as I had learned everything else in that area, I learned the mechanics of their society. There was a hierarchy of importance among the Shinra's airships. There were the fancy, streamlined ships reserved for carrying passengers. After the passenger ships were the strongly built cargo ships. Beneath them were the privateers.

When I'd thought that the crew of the Blackbird was nearly pirate, I was right. They were on the lower end of the cargo scale and took commissions for privateer work to supplement their wages. That meant that they hunted down the pirates who bothered ShinRa ships for money. They didn't take any of these commissions while I was on board but the crew was not disappointed. The luck of having a lady on board was more warming to them than the loss of the money was painful.

I was sad to go when we arrived back in Iscalis. While I really didn't know any of the true dangers of being an airsailor, I thought that I knew everything about that sort of life. I'd decided that it suited me. I wasn't sure that I could happily go back to being a waitress when I'd seen so much more of the world than I'd ever hoped to see before.

I was both surprised and delighted, then, when the captain pulled me aside before I left and said, "You may be a wee slip o' a thing and you may not know yer business quite so well as you think you do, but I wouldn' be sorry to ha' you on board for longer, Miz Thorne. Th' Shinra didn' know that you was onboard but they ain' against havin' a woman or two on their ships. Them who show promise, that is. An' I ain' seen more promise than in you, Miz Thorne."

I had been determined, after seeing what happened to my father, never to work for the Shinra. I'd thought the only job there for me was a secretary's post anyway. The draw of working on an airship was stronger than my resolution. The only thing that kept me from crying my joy out loud was the thought of how my family would react to my becoming an airsailor. I would certainly be irredeemable in my father's eyes. The support of my mother would almost certainly be lost as well. Victoire could never agree with something our parents disapproved of and Tommin… Well, Tommin probably wouldn't mind much, the ideas of social norms never really touched his wandering mind. He wasn't strong enough to stand against the rest of the family. If I took the job, I would likely never be welcome among them again.

I told the captain very solemnly, my spirits dampened, that it was a generous offer but I would have to think it over.

"You do that, lass," he answered, "but don' take too long. We're leavin' Iscalis again in three days and won' be back for another six weeks."

I promised that I would not wait too long to make my decision and returned home for what could have been one of the last times.