The other elves slowly came to their feet and made their way out of the room to their own chambers on a lower level of the armada. Cirathorn rubbed his eyes, feeling an ache in his head flow and ebb with each beat of his heart.

"Are you well, my admiral?" came a silk-soft voice.

"No." He dropped his hands and looked at his battlewizard. "No, I am not well. Our people are not well, and our future is ill-but we have a chance, one pathway to salvation. You have been our best guide, and your direction has served us well. I must trust to the gods that it will be enough."

The pale battlewizard nodded but said nothing.

"Have you heard any more from the lookouts about the signal light emitted from the gnomes' ship?" Cirathorn asked. "Has anyone been able to translate the code?"

Mirandel mumbled a response to the negative.

"We will need to warn our ally with Teldin, then." Cirathorn's gaze ran up and down the female elf s thin frame. "You still grieve for your sister," he said. "Why?"

"She and I were very close," said the battlewizard, her voice failing. Her shoulders slumped. "Since the battle, I… I feel lost. She was my only friend when we were children. I…" Her voice trailed off as she looked at the floor, unable to speak further. She appeared to be ready to cry.

Cirathorn frowned, sitting up. "I need you, Mirandel. Don't leave me now to fall inside yourself. I lost six generations of my family when Aerlofalyn was taken. We are in the crucible. For all that we have lost, we will lose far more if we give in to weakness now. Be strong, my Mirandel. We will avenge your sister Yolantha and all who died with her."

The battlewizard nodded her head slightly, barely enough to detect. "Yes," she whispered. "I am sorry to be so weak, my admiral, but it is hard. I miss her."

The admiral got up from his throne, his robes rustling, and stepped down to put a hand on the battlewizard's warm cheek. With a careful stroke, he brushed her long white hair with his fingertips. She never looked up.

"You are my strength," he said softly. "You devised the plan by which we can keep a closer watch over Teldin Moore, and we were able to use that plan to warn the accursed gnomes of the orcs' invasion. I need your brilliance in this darkness. Help me find a way to fight the orcs. Save us."

The battlewizard nodded after a pause. "Yes, my admiral." Her voice was so weak that he could barely hear her.

Cirathorn smiled. He would wear the Cloak of the First Pilot before long, of that he was certain. He would then have the Spelljammer, and the ores across all space would feel the flaming spear of elven rage. Mirandel would come through with something clever. She would not fail him now.

He pressed his lips to Mirandel's smooth forehead as his arms encircled her and her thin body leaned into his for comfort. She was the best of all battlewizards, the best of all spouses, the truest of lovers. It was a shame he did not love her back, but surely she knew that and accepted it. There was no time for love now in these days of blood and war. There was time now for only vengeance.

*****

"Well," said Dyffed heartily, as he sat down to breakfast, "I have some good news and some bad news."

As one, Teldin, Aelfred, Sylvie, Gaye, and Gomja paused, exchanging glances. They then put down their wooden spoons and looked in the gnome's direction. The group was packed so closely together in the ship's narrow dining area that Teldin feared he would go mad from claustrophobia if the diet of creamed soaked grains did not kill him first. Gomja sat on the floor beside the table, unable to squeeze into one of the absurdly confining wooden seats, each mounted to the wall. Whoever was at the far end of the table was trapped there by everyone else who took a seat afterward. On this day, the eighth one out from Ironpiece, Teldin was the one who got to be trapped. The air was overly warm and stale, reinforcing his sense of confinement. His stomach was queazy and tense.

Dressed in the same clothes he'd worn since landing on Ironpiece, Dyffed spooned large dollops of sludgy gray creamed soaked grains into his bowl, taking them from the steaming pot resting at the near end of the table. He took a deep sniff of its flavorless aroma, sighed with contentment, and took a seat next to Aelfred, who looked at Sylvie with a why-me expression and shrugged. Sylvie fought back a smile.

"What's the news?" said Teldin, unable to wait any longer. "Your good and bad news."

"Hmm?" said Dyffed absently, about to take his first bite. "Oh! Yes, of course. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we're about to run out of food." With that, he began to consume huge spoonfuls of creamed soaked grains, each bite accompanied by much lip smacking and "Mmmmmm!" sounds.

Teldin felt an irrational urge to jump on his chair, run across the tabletop, and strangle the unkempt gnome. He closed his eyes and counted to ten instead. It didn't help.

"I suppose that can be considered good news," remarked Aelfred dryly. His bowl was half finished, consumed only to avoid starvation. "So, what's the bad news?"

Dyffed took a moment to swallow. "Ah!" he said, spitting out a few bits of cereal, "the bad news is that we won't be able to steer or take showers." He chuckled to himself. "That's quite the funniest thing, really." The gnome shoveled another spoonful of creamed soaked grains into his mouth.

There was a fragile silence. Gomja used the break to carefully heave his enormous bulk up from the floor and help himself to his sixth bowl of gray mash this morning. Unlike everyone else but the gnomes, Gomja, a vegetarian from birth, loved creamed soaked grains ("Gnomes know how to cook!" he once had confided to Teldin).

"Dyffed," said Teldin, his patience virtually gone, "what are you talking about?" He was aware that everyone but the gnome was staring at him, and he tried with little success to stem his rising anger. He had spent the last eight days stumbling over gnomes in hallways, finding them repairing springs in the middle of the night under his bed, and wedging himself into impossibly small spaces that obviously had been built for gnomes and no one else. Aelfred ran things aboard the ship, directing the gnomes in their duties, but he couldn't be everywhere at once. The gnomes were restless and ill at ease these days, and they were always in the way.

Gaye put a hand on Teldin's arm and squeezed to distract him. Teldin tried to relax, contenting himself with imagining now terrible it would be if he were to give in to his baser urges and begin throwing gnomes off the ship.

"Well," said Dyffed, wiping his mouth on his once-white shirt front, "once we run out of the creamed soaked grains, we shall have nothing left to feed the two giant hamsters in the hydrodynamic pumping station, and we shall be forced to eat them instead, and once we butcher them, we shall, of course, have nothing to make the water pumps operate, so our showers will stop, and we will also be unable to connect the steering gyroscope's drive shaft to the pumping station, since our hamsters are being baked, unless we gnomes run inside the giant wheels in place of the hamsters. It's quite simple."

Gomja stopped eating his cereal and wrinkled his nose in disgust at the mention of eating the giant hamsters. Gaye looked positively stricken, her mouth falling open in shock.

"What happens when we run out of hamster meat?" asked Sylvie, clearly not looking forward to the answer.

"Oo, wuh fine sunthun en thuh galley," mumbled Dyffed, his mouth full again. "Don worra aboud id."

"Can't we find something else to eat besides hamsters?" asked Gaye, her voice breaking. She turned to Teldin and pulled on his sleeve. "Teldin, please talk to them! I know how to cook! Don't let them do that! Do something!"