Lost mark 3 The Queen of Death: by Matt Forbeck

launching pad for raids into Q’barra. It sits in the foothills at the very end of the Endworld Mountains, overlooking the sea. It’s our last chance to stop.”
    "Assuming the elves there don’t decide that we’re the leaders of an invading force too,” said Sallah.
    Burch smiled, showing his pointed fangs. "Last chances are last chances,” he said.
    Chapter
    14
    Let me do the talking,” Burch signaled as he and Kandler threw the Phoenix’s mooring lines out to the elves standing on the cliffside dock.
    Kandler nodded. He’d never been to this part ofValenar before, and he trusted the shifter’s judgment. He didn’t want any trouble here, just to stock up with plenty of supplies and head out over the Dragonreach, which beckoned beyond. His instincts told him that the longer they waited before making the trip the harder it would be.
    "This doesn’t look much like what I expected,” said Espre. She’d stuck close to him ever since they’d spotted the warclan and its riders.
    The thought of exposing her to a society of elves bothered him a bit. Since Esprina had died, they’d had precious little contact with elves. None but Espre had lived in Mardakine. Esprina had never sought the company of her own kind, instead preferring to surround herself—and by extension her daughter—with all sorts of people, mostly human.
    "I love the human perspective,” Esprina had once said to Kandler. "It’s so fresh and immediate. There’s a touch of innocence to it, which you’d expect in people so young, but that just makes it all the more precious.”
    She’d never wanted to talk much about why she’d left Aerenal. It had happened decades before Kandler had been born, when Espre had been just an infant. Whatever the reason, she hadn’t tarried in Valenar either, despite landing there when she reached Khorvaire.
    "Your mother and you didn’t spend long here,” Kandler said.
    Espre shook her blond head. "We spent less than a week in the capital, Taer Valaestas. Just long enough to get our bearings. I barely remember it. Then we were off for Cyre.”
    A gangplank thrust out from the dock and over the airship’s gunwale. Burch went down it first, with Kandler and Espre close behind. Sallah and Monja came after them, leaving Xalt, Duro, and Te’oma on the airship.
    Te’oma had morphed herself to look like Shawda, the last woman who’d shown up dead in Mardakine before the changeling had come to town with Tan Du and his vampire spawn. Kandler respected that the changeling didn’t want to call any attention to herself—any changeling would have done so in a village like this—but her choice of disguise riled him. He saw tears well up in Espre’s eyes every time her eyes happened to fall on the false Shawda, and that made him want to stomp over to Te’oma and beat her face into another shape.
    Kandler feared, though, that the sight of such a conflict might send Espre right over the edge. It had turned out that Espre’s dragonmark had caused her to kill a number of people in Mardakine while she’d been sleeping. Shawda—the mother of the girl’s best friend, Norra—had been the last of these, and Espre and the rest of the people of Mardakine had seen the woman’s body only after the Knights of the Silver Flame had hacked it to pieces. Seeing a copy of the woman standing on the bridge of the Phoenix, her hands wrapped around the wheel, turned Kandler’s stomach.
    Still, if Espre could manage to ignore it, then so would he. At least with the changeling staying on the ship with Duro and Xalt, they wouldn’t have to put up with it much longer.
    As Kandler and Espre reached the dock, he glanced around. The Phoenixhad come upon Aerie from its northern edge, and the land there sloped up gently to the only gate set in the fort’s tall stone walls. A horsed patrol galloped out onto the dusty road there as the airship came in for a landing.
    The southern wall of Aerie looked out over a sheer cliff that fell more than a