He was good with words in a way her dour folk were not. It was a gift she envied him, if truth be told, for she was not good at saying how she felt. And in his own strange way, she felt that Jaeger was a good man. He could fight when that was called for, but it was not his whole life, the way it was for the men around whom she had grown up.

There were times when she thought that he was not hard enough, and there had been times when he surprised her with just how cold and ruthless he could be. Certainly only a dangerous man could be an associate of Gotrek Gurnisson’s. From what the dwarfs who had built the tower had told her, the Slayer was already a dark legend among his people.
She shook her head. This was getting her nowhere. She had her duties to perform. She was her father’s heir, and she was needed here to ride the borders, to lead the riders, a duty she fulfilled as ably as any man, and better than most.
Footsteps sounded nearby. She turned her head to see Max Schreiber walking along the parapet towards her.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked, smiling. “I could mix you a potion.”
“Checking the sentries,” she said. “It’s my duty.”
She looked at the magician. He was tall and dark with a scholar’s pallor and wide eyes. Recently he had taken to cultivating a goatee beard, which suited him. He was wearing the formal garb of a magician of his college, long flowing robes of gold over a jerkin of green, and yellow britches. An odd-looking skullcap perched on his head. A handsome man, she thought, but one who made her uneasy, and not just in the unsettling way good-looking men sometimes did. Here was one who truly stood apart from most of humanity, by virtue of the power in him, and the training that let him wield it. She did not quite trust him, which was the way she reckoned most of humanity felt about magicians in general. You always wondered about them — could they read your mind, bind you to their will with a spell, ensnare you in illusions? And you feared to say such things aloud or even to think them in their presence just in case they could, and they took offence.
Schreiber himself had never given her any reason to doubt his benevolence. It was just…
“You were wondering about the airship,” he said.
“Are you a mind reader, then?”
“No. Just a student of human nature. When I hear a young woman sigh and see that she is looking north into the Wastes, I can put two and two together. And I’ve seen you and Felix together. You make a good couple.”
“I think you presume too much.”
“Perhaps.” He smiled; a little sadly, she thought. “Herr Jaeger is a lucky man.”
“What’s lucky about having to cross the Chaos Wastes?”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“I am not a mind reader either, Herr Schreiber, so how can I know what you mean if you do not say it?”
“Why do you dislike me, Ulrika?”
“I don’t dislike you.”
“You do not seem to approve of me.”
“It’s just you are…”
“A sorcerer?”
“Yes.”
He smiled a little sadly. “I am used to it. People do not tend to trust us or like us much either. It was not that long ago that they stopped persecuting us in the Empire.”
“They still burn witches here, sometimes. Warlocks too.