Note: "Munro bagging" refers to summiting the tallest mountains in Scotland, a list of which was made by Sir Hugh Munro in the 1890s.
The next update will probably be in January, but what a nice way to start off 2021, huh?
Also! Let the record show that the most excellent ThePrinceOfParties drew fanart for part 8 and sent it to me on my birthday (coincidentally) and it was amazing and I'm still giddy about it. You're the best and you know it!
Happy holidays, y'all!
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It's not being together,
It's just following the rules
- from "Destiny Rules" by Fleetwood Mac
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"I count two," Deryn says, returning the binoculars to Alek. They're magnificent binoculars, but then, the Swiss are famously clever with precision mechanicals. They also happen to be stolen… indirectly. Alek had stolen a walker in Bern, and the binoculars had been tucked inside.
She'd been dead proud; she hadn't known he had it in him. Put her laundry filching to shame.
He returns the binoculars to their case and tightens the strap across his chest. "Their walker can hold four. Let's assume it did."
Their own walker, a bitty wee runabout, was left at the base of the mountain, which Deryn and Alek climbed as night fell. Now they're huddled in the snow and rocks below the castle, spying on the trespassers inside and generally freezing their bums off in the darkness.
It's nearly summer, but Alek's castle is atop a sodding glacier, and springtime conditions here mean only a slightly thinner layer of snow. It must be a misery in the winter.
She resettles herself, wishing for a warm fire, a huge dinner, and a real bed, preferably with Alek in it. At least she's been able to leave off her skirts since Bern, when they spent the last of Eddie Malone's money on cold-weather clothes and became two lads on holiday, keen to do some Munro bagging - or whatever the Swiss equivalent is. "Who's paying for all these barking assassins?"
He looks grim. "That's the question, isn't it? This castle is a state secret. No one should know about it, and yet these men have obviously been here for a while."
Since he survived the assassination attempt in Calais, Deryn reckons. Whoever's behind it all must have sent out this crew at the same time as the one in Paris.
Their own journey had hit some snags after entering Switzerland, a firmly Clanker country. Namely: Deryn's stomach doesn't take kindly to mechanical transport. The train ride to Bern had been mostly all right, though she'd been queasy enough that she hadn't felt up to, well, feeling him up, more's the pity. But the runabout had been pure dead torture.
"Traveling by night," aye, with Alek piloting brilliantly in total darkness… except for pausing every hour so she could puke her guts out or just lie down on the ground and stop the world from spinning.
As a result, the last and shortest leg of their mad dash from Calais has taken the longest - three entire days. It might have also saved their lives, she reflects. Otherwise they would've likely arrived at the castle at the same time as the assassins. Today they were able to see smoke from the castle's chimney and adjust their plans accordingly.
For example, not coming up the glacier-filled valley like a pair of sitting ducks.
Though something about that valley gives her a sense of déjà vu. "What about your prime minister?"
The grim look turns as glacial as their surroundings. "I trust Volger with my life."
Deryn doesn't. Right now she trusts herself with Alek's life. Everyone else is suspect.
"If these were his men, their walker would have the imperial crest, or some other sign that we would be safe. Whether or not that was truly the case - though, again, I trust him with my life."
"Aye sir," she says, tone heavy with doubt.
He slants a glance at her, eyebrow raised, arrogant as only an emperor can be. "I believe you meant to say 'Jawohl, mein Kaiser.' "
That puts a grin on her face. He's been teaching her German, as promised. They've done common military phrases and the best part of any language: cursing. German's a brilliant language for cursing. Very satisfying.
"Dummkopf," she says now, not so much a curse as a tease, and is rewarded with a smile and a kiss. Rather too long a kiss, given their situation; not long enough for her liking. His lips are cold against hers, but they kindle something warm inside her chest.
"Frequently," he says. "So, Hauptmann Sharp, how are we to storm the castle?"
Deryn thinks about it. "D'you want to keep that walker of theirs?"
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Alek does not want to keep the walker.
Good, because after Deryn climbs over the outer wall, sneaks across the courtyard, and rigs a signal flare to detonate into its fuel tanks, the walker isn't going to be of much use.
Makes a lovely bonfire, though.
Four men rush out of the castle after the first explosion. They're not stupid; they're all armed, and instead of standing around and gawking at the flames rising against the night sky, they immediately fan out in a search.
Deryn and Alek expected that, of course.
The castle is a rough pentagon. Stables to one side, smaller outbuildings to the other, the keep between them. A cobblestoned courtyard, dusted over with snow. One tower standing lookout over the valley. Disintegrating curtain wall enclosing everything.
She's retreated to a carefully chosen position against the keep's wall, where the shadows are deep and the firewood is stacked high, and where she'll be able to escape in more than one direction, if need be.
One of the assassins crosses her field of vision. For a moment, he's perfectly silhouetted by the burning walker. She aims for his head, fires, and he drops. Quick as a wink, she darts forward to seize his guns - the Steyr pistol he was holding and the Mauser Gewehr rifle slung over his shoulder. German weapons, which means nothing. Half the continent has German-made weapons.
Around the side of the castle, sticking to the shadows, moving as fast as she can. Next position. Toss the rifle over one of the collapsed portions of the outer wall, hopefully into Alek's waiting hands.
Onto her next position -
- straight into the sights of the enemy.
The bullet strikes the keep behind her. She drops and flings herself sideways, narrowly avoiding all the bullets the assassin sends as a follow-up.
Bollocks, she thinks. There's no good cover here.
She still has the Steyr in hand, as well as a few bullets left in the Frommer she's been carrying since Paris. She fires the Frommer twice in the blighter's general direction, then forces herself to get up and run for it. There's shouting now, none of it decipherable to her.
More gunfire.
And then the sharper crack of a rifle, fired from the top of the wall.
The assassin goes down. Alek drops into the castle courtyard, yells something to her that she can't hear because the walker's second fuel tank explodes at that same moment.
He goes left. She goes right.
Back past the burning walker, the air heavy with diesel fumes and black smoke, the heat fierce enough that it's reducing the snow around it to slush.
The final two assassins come racing down the steps to the tower. They spot her instantly and bring their guns up.
She fires at them and tries to change direction mid-step, and her foot slips in the slush, on the rounded cobblestones, and she feels something in her left knee pop.
It sends a bolt of bright-white agony up her leg and straight to her brain. No, she thinks, wild, as her leg gives out and she lands, hard, and the impact and the pain snatch the breath from her lungs. No, she can't be injured - Alek needs her, he can't take the castle by himself - no, no, no -
More gunfire. A bullet strikes the cobblestone by her head, sending a razor-sharp chip into her cheek as she flinches away.
Get up, she orders herself. Get up!
She tries. Her knee buckles into fresh agony and she's back on her arse, hardly able to see for the tears that've sprung unbidden to her eyes.
Shouting. Gunfire.
One of the assassins is coming towards where she's sprawled. Cautiously. Maybe he thinks she's been hit. Maybe he thinks she's dead.
And this would be the perfect time to play dead, to lure him in closer, but it's all she can do not to grab her knee and curl into a ball as the pain rolls over her in waves.
Bloody hell. She's lost the Frommer somewhere. She still has the Steyr.
The assassin is almost upon her. He'll shoot as soon as he can verify that she's breathing. Maybe before.
She raises the pistol. Fires.
The assassin staggers back. Doesn't fall.
She wants to scream. Instead, she fires again.
He falls.
Deryn brings her knee up to her chest, gripping it tightly through another wave of pain. It hurts like blazes, and hugging it is doing sod all.
Fear gives her a good shake. What has she done to herself?
"Hauptmann!" Alek calls out. There's fear in his voice as well, though he's kept his head enough not to give her away as a British girl. "Wo bist du?"
It's gone silent, she realizes. No more shooting, just the noise from the fire slowly consuming the walker. "Here," she calls in return, struggling to pull herself up into a more dignified position.
Then he's rushing toward her, practically falling to his knees beside her, rifle clattering to the ground unheeded. "Mein Gott - Deryn, are you shot? Are you bleeding? Where - "
"No," she says. Firm. "Better make sure the last one I shot is dead. I wasn't aiming."
He kisses her on the forehead, hard and quick, then gets up to check on the assassin. He's back a few moments later, putting an arm around her shoulders and helping her sit up. "He's dead. God's wounds, what happened?"
"It's my knee," she says, and then, like a perfect Dummkopf, she starts crying.
She hates crying.
Alek looks worried and unsure; he's likely never had a girl cry all over him before. He brushes her hair off her forehead and then fiddles with her coat lapels, tugging them straight. "Can you walk?"
Deryn wipes at her eyes with the cuffs of her coat, willing herself to stop blubbering. The pain has eased off a little, which helps. "I don't - I don't know."
Which is a problem in many ways. They've four bodies to get under a roof and out of sight from any overflights by enemy aircraft, not to mention a flaming hulk of walker wreckage to deal with. If Deryn can't walk - and she suspects she can't - Alek will have to do everything himself.
He looks around the courtyard. Gears turn behind his handsome face. "All right," he finally says. He shifts so that his shoulder is under hers, bracing, and lifts. "Auf deinen Füßen."
Together, they do indeed get her on her feet, then make it across the courtyard to the stables, where she leans against the wall while Alek finds an old, empty crate for her to sit on. Then he gives her the rifle and the binoculars.
"You don't even need a sodding guard now," Deryn says, grumbling to hide how that little bit of slow, shuffling movement has her knee screaming again. "Everyone's dead."
He leans down and cradles the side of her face with one hand, sliding his fingers through her hair with the other, kissing her all the while. Softly. Gently. As if she's something precious.
And when that's done, he rests his forehead against hers for a long moment, saying nothing, just breathing with her.
I love you, she thinks at him.
Blisters, how stupid of her. No future in it. Less than nothing, if she gets shot because she's hobbling around.
"Keep watch anyway," he says.
He goes off to tidy things up, and she rests the rifle across her lap and keeps watch. Not much else she can do.
It's been a long time since anatomy lessons with Dr. Busk. She can't remember how to treat a torn ligament or muscle or whatever she's bollixed up in there - and there's a lot of important bits inside a knee joint.
Deryn focuses on breathing, slow and steady, and doing her best to survey the castle grounds. Because she's an airman, she also surveys the sky, and because she knows the stars as well as the back of her hand, the movement catches her attention right away.
She fetches the binoculars from their case, fumbling with numb fingers, and peers more closely.
"Oi," she calls. "Airship approaching from the east at sixty knots."
Alek has been dragging one of the assassins' bodies toward the stables, cursing profusely as he does. He stops at her announcement. Lets the body rest on the cobblestones. Turns east. "Where?"
She starts to answer the way she would've in the Air Service, then pauses. He's a walker pilot, but how much British airman jargon will he understand? Instead she says, "Just there," and points.
He follows her finger, frowning and squinting, and his shoulders stiffen when he picks out the darker shape moving against the night sky. "Airbeast or zeppelin?"
"Even I can't tell at this distance," she says. "Closer in, the engines will give it away."
They both know full well that no Darwinist country is sending an airbeast over this patch of Switzerland right as the missing emperor arrives. This is the sodding conspiracy again.
How much money do those bastards have? Or worse: has the coup been successful? They haven't seen a newspaper since Bern. Maybe Alek doesn't have an empire to return to.
They stay where they are for a minute, watching, until suddenly he turns to her. "Can you manage stairs?"
Her knee's mostly stopped hurting - maybe it's gone as numb as her fingers - but even the thought of climbing stairs makes her stomach drop. Still. This is no time to go wobbly. She sets her spine and says, "Aye, I can make it. Might need help."
He looks offended. "Of course I'll help. You were injured protecting me, Deryn. You deserve to be appointed to the Military Order of Maria Theresa."
They lever her to her feet again. Much to her relief, her knee doesn't immediately start shrieking in pain, but she knows it's not steady. She resists the urge to use the Gewehr as a walking stick - it's too fine a rifle for it. "A medal comes with that?"
"A knighthood," he says as they limp across the courtyard.
She whistles. "Dead fancy."
He flashes a brief smile. "If you must have a medal, I'll put you in for a Military Merit Cross."
"I already have an Air Gallantry Cross," she says. She does; she hid it and pretended it was lost when the Admiralty demanded it back. Wondering if she'll be allowed to wear it on an Austro-Hungarian uniform, she adds, "No knighthood, though."
"Remarkably short-sighted of Britain, Ritter Sharp," he says, then tsks. "Ritterin, rather. You'll be the first woman named to the Order."
She takes it that Ritter is German for sir knight or thereabouts. "Aye, I usually am."
They reach the top of the tower and Deryn switches from Alek's shoulder to the stone parapet, which is much less nice to lean on. She rests the rifle against the wall and holds out the binoculars.
"No," he says, declining. "You know what you're looking at better than I do."
Since it's true, she doesn't argue. She also doesn't point out that it's hardly a kingly thing to say.
Despite the occasional display of imperial arrogance, he's thoughtful. Kind. For example, just now he stands close to her, blocking the wind with his body, lending her his warmth.
What she's looking at is an airship running without lights. Risky, but not too, given that there aren't likely to be other aircraft crossing its path.
Déjà vu stirs again.
"Will they land on the glacier?"
She hmms and lowers the binoculars. "Only good space for it. It's tricky to land in the mountains, regardless. The air's unpredictable."
Alek nods, eyes fixed on the growing black shape of the airship. "We saw an airship nearly crash on that glacier, not long after we arrived in '14. Of course, it was under attack at the time - that hardly helped, I would imagine."
His tone is casual, but the back of her neck is prickling. "A British airbeast?"
"Perhaps?" he says. He frowns. "In fact, yes. It was being attacked by German planes."
"Barking spiders - that was me!" she exclaims, certain of it, and growing more certain every moment. Now all the déjà vu makes sense, though it's been ages since she's thought of it - so many mad things had happened afterwards that that one early skirmish barely signified. "The Leviathan, I mean. Right at the start of the war, German fighters nearly brought us down in the Swiss Alps. Bloody good thing they didn't, or we'd never have been able to get up again. And I was topside for most of the fight. I would've been thrown overboard if we'd crashed."
He stares at her. "Deryn."
"Don't start blethering on about destiny," she warns.
"No," he says, then stops and shakes his head. "No. Only - it would have been nice to have met you then. I sorely needed a friend."
"So did Middy Sharp," she says. It's an admission she wouldn't make to anyone else in the world, but it's true. She nudges him with an elbow and grins, trying to lighten things. " 'Course, that might not've worked, once your friend Dylan started mooning over you. I was prone to mooning, then."
"I don't know," he says, thoughtful. He puts an arm around her waist and snugs her against him. "I do find you very attractive in trousers."
She kisses his cheek, which is scratchy with stubble after a week of no shaving, and focuses her attention on the sky again.
"Zeppelin," she says. It's adjusted its heading slightly, and she can see moonlight glittering on the metal frame of the balloon.
He mutters something in German, too low and fast for her to parse, and then says, "It will be Volger."
Her eyebrow goes up. "You're sure?"
"It will be Volger," he says again, more firmly, as if he can make it so simply by demanding it.
The engine noise reaches them: the heavy thrum of big Clanker engines running hard, familiar to her from four years of war. She knows exactly what sort of damage an armed zeppelin can do.
If it's not Volger, they're going to die very quickly.
She forces down her fear and trusts the young man standing behind her. "Jawohl, mein Kaiser."
Alek doesn't say anything, but his arm tightens around her, and then he lets go and deliberately moves so that he's between her and the zeppelin.
It'll do sod all to protect her if there's shooting.
It's both the most and least kingly thing he's done yet.
The zeppelin's slowing even as it comes upon them, turning broadside to the castle, the engine noise rumbling through her chest, ugly and invasive as only machines can be. The markings on the balloon and gondola are Austrian, but that means nothing. Deryn grips the barrel of the Gewehr.
A spotlight blinks on in the zeppelin's gondola and sweeps through the night until it lands squarely on them. Pinning them in place.
Deryn shields her eyes. Daft. She ought to be ducking down, dragging Alek with her, into the dubious shelter of the parapet.
The spotlight blinks off. Then a smaller light - a signal light - begins blinking on and off in rapid succession. She automatically translates the Morse code to letters, but of course it's not in English, so it makes no bloody sense to her.
What does make sense: they're not shooting. Barking spiders, it really is Volger.
"I knew it," Alek says, grinning at her. In relief, she suspects. "Do we have a light?"
She shakes her head. "I can reply with semaphore, if you spell the message out for me."
Whatever he says must be satisfactory to the folks aboard the zeppelin, because it shoves off and manages a fairly decent landing on the glacier. Almost immediately, a small group exits the gondola on foot and starts for the castle.
Deryn hands over the binoculars. "Anyone you recognize?"
"Volger himself, and thank Heaven for it."
She's still not wholly convinced of the much-vaunted Volger's good intentions, but a full week of being shot at with bullets and rockets, of dodging and hiding and living by their wits, keeping a clueless emperor out of sight and out of danger, falling in love with that emperor, with not enough food and not enough sleep, and now a busted knee… all of that suddenly comes crashing down on her shoulders. She's tired. She wants to turn her burden over to someone else for a few hours.
Just a few. Then she'll get back to saving Alek's life.
"I'll take the knighthood, but I want that sodding promotion, too, Your Majesty," she says, watching Volger's group progress. They're moving fast. Must have brought snowshoes. Of course they would've; Volger had lived in the castle too. "Colonel would be best. Major if I have to."
"I was considering something higher," he says, putting his arm around her again. When she looks at him, the question on her face, he asks, "How about empress?"
She's going to kill him.
