Lady Vidora Windstrom was waiting for them on the school's eastern landing, and Xavier understood, within about four seconds of laying eyes on her, exactly why Elrick had specified "try to look competent."
She was small. Smaller than he'd pictured, silver hair pinned back in a severe knot, a wind-carved cane in one hand that she plainly did not need for walking and just as plainly used for emphasis. She carried herself with the exact stillness of someone who had never once needed to raise her voice to be obeyed. She looked the three of them over, slowly, top to bottom, with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing.
"So," she said finally. "You're the werewolf boys."
"There was no werewolf," Bruce said, on pure reflex, before visibly wishing he'd said literally anything else to a noblewoman he'd known for six seconds.
"I'm aware. I read the report." Something that might have been the ghost of amusement crossed her face and was gone before Xavier could be sure he'd seen it. "My son speaks well of the two of you who stayed at the manor. I'm told the third one has a habit of dying dramatically and getting back up. We'll see if that holds."
Beside her stood a young man in immaculate grey livery, perhaps not much older than Xavier himself, clutching a leather ledger against his chest like it was the only thing keeping him upright. He had the harried, meticulously groomed look of someone who ironed his own sleeves out of principle.
"Desmond," he introduced himself quickly, before Vidora could do it for him, or not do it at all. "Lady Vidora's attendant. I handle the schedule, the supplies, the... everything, really. If something goes wrong on this trip, it is almost certainly going to be my fault, so I'd appreciate advance warning before anything goes wrong."
"Nothing's going to go wrong," Stephan said, with the specific confidence of a young man who had never once been right about that particular sentence.
Desmond looked at him the way a man looks at a forecast he already suspects is lying to him, and made a small note in his ledger without further comment.
"How long have you worked for Lady Vidora?" Xavier asked, mostly to fill the silence while Vidora conferred quietly with a dockhand a short distance away.
"Four years. Since I was seventeen." Desmond said it with the particular weariness of someone who had aged considerably more than four years in that time. "My family's served House Windstrom for three generations. My grandfather kept Lady Vidora's own mother's schedule, if you can imagine keeping a schedule for someone who's been dead longer than I've been alive. It's something of a family trade at this point."
"Do you like it?"
Desmond considered the question with more seriousness than Xavier expected. "I like her. She's exacting, but she's fair, and she's never once blamed me for weather." A faint, dry look crossed his face. "The job itself is mostly ledgers, schedules, and reminding very important people that the wind doesn't actually care how important they are. Some years that's dull. Other years..." He glanced, briefly, at the darkening sky to the west. "Other years it's considerably less dull."
"Has this happened before? The pilgrimage going wrong?"
"Not wrong, exactly. Difficult, once or twice. There was a year, before my time, when the crossing to the third shrine cost the escort two guardsmen." Desmond said it plainly, without theater, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd tried to make it dramatic. "Lady Vidora doesn't discuss that year. I'd suggest not asking her about it directly."
Xavier filed that away next to several other things he'd decided not to ask about directly.
The vessel waiting at the landing was unlike anything Xavier had seen since arriving in this world — sleek and narrow, built more like a sailboat than an airship, with no visible engine or gasbag holding it aloft, just a single, elegantly curved sail stitched through with faintly glowing silver thread. It sat in open air a few feet above the landing itself, bobbing gently, as if the wind itself had simply agreed to hold it there.
"The Zephyrine," Desmond said, with the exhausted pride of a man who had explained this a hundred times. "Windstrom family vessel. Wind-woven hull, no engine, no gasbag. She moves purely on current and a very old piece of family magic none of us fully understand anymore. Lady Vidora's grandmother commissioned her. She has never once needed repairs, which honestly terrifies me more than if she constantly broke down."
Bruce circled it once, visibly itching to take something apart just to see how it worked, and just as visibly restraining himself under Vidora's watchful eye.
"We depart within the hour," Vidora said, studying the sky with a faint, appraising frown. "There's weather coming in from the west. I'd prefer to be well clear of the plateau before it arrives."
Desmond followed her gaze, and his harried expression deepened by several noticeable degrees. "My lady, with respect, that's not ordinary weather. Those clouds have rolled in awfully fast."
"The tradition doesn't pause for weather, Desmond. It never has." Vidora's tone allowed for no further discussion on the matter, and Desmond, visibly biting back several further objections, simply made another note in his ledger and said nothing else.
Xavier glanced west himself. The clouds gathering there were a deep, bruised grey, rolling in far faster than any storm front had a right to, threaded through with the occasional distant flicker of light that didn't quite look like ordinary lightning yet.
"That does not look great," he said quietly to Bruce.
"No," Bruce agreed. "It really does not."
Stephan, meanwhile, had wandered to the very edge of the landing to get a better look at the Zephyrine's hull, peering up at the glowing silver stitching with open fascination. "Can it get struck by lightning? Like, is that a thing that can happen?"
"Please don't ask the ship that question out loud," Bruce said. "I feel like it's bad luck."
"I'm just curious!"
"Be curious quietly."
Desmond, overhearing, closed his ledger with the particular finality of a man choosing not to answer that question either, and went to check the sail's rigging one more time, muttering something under his breath that might have been a prayer.
Behind them, entirely unbothered, Josh leaned against his carriage in the distance and watched the whole scene with the mild, detached interest of a man who was very glad, for once, that his job ended at the landing.