Read Online Heart and Soul by Sarah A. Hoyt - Free Book Online Page B

had to know he’d mortally wounded the flight magician. But he could not know this man was possessed of a supernatural sense of duty.
    Retreat, she screamed mentally, putting the force of Wen’s ring—the force of Wen’s power—behind her scream. Retreat now. Flight magician wounded. The ship might crash any moment. Retreat now.
    Around her, her people jumped and ran toward the Dragon Boats, some of them pursued by the few Englishmen left alive on the deck, others pulling at one another while they ran.
    She, too, should leave. Or else she should search the Englishman and then leave. But as she looked at him—he had gone so pale that he seemed almost transparent—and felt him using all his strength, all the vitality that remained in him, to keep the carpetship flying, she lost her mind.
    One thing she’d been trained to do, besides fight, was to treat the wounds acquired on these raids. More often than not, Jade was not allowed to join in the raid. Not unless her father thought there was some advantage to taking her with them. This usually meant, if she joined, it was to keep an eye on Wen and keep him safe.
    But her normal place during these raids was in the Dragon Boats, in the women’s quarters. Every man who had been injured came there. And Jade had been trained from a very young age to treat saber cuts and power burns.
    She wouldn’t have time to carefully heal the man’s cut and repair the muscles. But she could keep him alive long enough to land this ship without killing everyone aboard.
    She waved a hand and threw her power at his bleeding wounds, willing the skin to reknit, the muscles to close, the blood vessels to stop spewing forth blood.
    The flow staunched and—without pausing to make sure this was due to her spell and not to his death—she got up and ran toward the rope that linked this ship to the Dragon Boats. Because if indeed the man were dead, the carpetship could crash at any minute.
    She danced across the magically taut rope with the ease of long practice, her wicker-soled slippers not faltering, and jumped onto the Dragon Boat, turning immediately to magically untie the end of the rope from the English ship and to collect it in her hand in a tight coil.
    Unmoor, unmoor, unmoor, she yelled, mentally, using the Imperial voice of command. Unmoor from the foreign devils.
    Without turning to make sure her commands were being followed, she saw through the corner of her eye that the nearest boats were collecting their ropes and that the few stragglers were dancing across the ropes still tied to the carpetship. She bent down, at the very prow of the boat, and picked up the barge pole kept there to steer the boat in shallow water or midair—since the magical gesture steered it as easily as if it were in shallow water—turning the Dragon Boat around and steering it speedily away from the carpetship.
    There must still have been people alive in the carpetship—enough crew at least to command their defensive weaponry—because large powercannons took aim at the fleeing ships, firing volley after volley of magic after them. The magical fire could not hurt them, of course. They were were-dragons. Or at least, almost everyone on board was a were of some sort. Even the spouses brought aboard were often members of other were-clans.
    But the magefire could burn the Dragon Boats around them and cause considerable damage. And also, though dragons could not be killed that easily, they could be hurt, and could take a long time to recover. Evasive maneuvers, Jade mentally screamed, as she joined action to words and set the boat she was steering on a zigzag course and increased its speed. And then, quickly, as a blast of fiery magic flew past the bright red sails of her boat, Those still in dragon form, return fire.
    Some dragons—probably the youngest of the attack party, since those always insisted on staying as dragons the longest—blew a curtain of fire toward the carpetship. They were too far away to burn