Wren felt the heat of the painted desert hit her in the face with all the force of a warhammer. Spring in Whitehill was still nothing compared to the high, arid terrain surrounding Silica’s nest in the Vædic ruins left behind by Staivis, the long dead Lord of Stone. Half a dozen of Liv’s new personal guard were already fanned out around the waystone, having come through first. Every one of them had their helm on, now, and weapons at the ready. Wren stepped off the stone, with Ghveris at her side, onto the floor of the ruins proper. She wondered whether it was just as obvious to everyone else as it was to her how Liv’s entire posture changed the moment she stepped into a rift. The young woman’s back straightened, her shoulders loosened, and her jaw unclenched, all with the first breath of mana-dense air. It looked as if she’d been labouring under some great weight on her back - a sack of flour, perhaps, or a barrel of wine - and then she set her burden down, just like that. “Just like Ractia,” Wren murmured, angling her head toward Ghveris. “Not quite so bad, yet,” the ancient war-machine protested. “Did you see them outside of the rifts, much, during the war?” Wren asked him. Liv was already striding out of the waystone chamber, a great room excavated from the same sandstone as most of the ruins, and into the corridor beyond. Wren hadn’t spent enough time at Feic Seria to learn the layout of the ruins, but Liv had moved through them confidently from the moment she’d used the Crown of Celris to make a connection. The new guards, with Kaija directing them silently, split into multiple groups, surrounding Liv to the front, sides and back. It was an odd feeling, Wren thought, to have others taking responsibility now, for the girl she’d spent a year and a half protecting, day in and day out. “Not at the beginning,” Ghveris admitted. His language had improved tremendously, but then, he’d been forced to learn quickly. “At Corsteris, and for miles around it, the land, sea and air were saturated with mana. The Vædim could walk their streets of white stone freely, look down from their towers, sit in the cool shade of their gardens, where fountains splashed and flowers bloomed.” Liv had told them just how large Godsgrave was, and Wren tried to imagine it. A crater miles across, and half a mile deep. It had been an entire city, once, and everyone who had lived there, served the old gods there, had spent every moment inside mana at least as dense as the shoals of a rift. “It would have been death to humans,” Wren remarked, as they followed the guards through the ruins. Ghveris nodded, his words emerging from his steel helm with the underlying tones of grinding gears and hissing steam. “Only the Cotheeria could serve the gods directly,” he confirmed. “For the Centhäoria, it was the mines, the fields. But once the rebels began destroying rifts, dead-mana zones appeared.” “It must have been a pretty effective strategy,” Wren remarked. “Denying entire swaths of the countryside to their enemies without even having to use an army to hold the ground.” “It forced the Vædim to create us,” Ghveris agreed with her. “Our people, the war-machines of Antris, the great Wyrms of Iravata. Soldiers to fight battles in the places the gods could not walk.” Liv led them out of the ruins into the high desert itself, where the curtain wall which Rosamund had raised still stood. That, and the general lay of the terrain, were perhaps the only ways in which the land surrounding the ruins had not changed. Someone - perhaps a few of the Eld with the word of stone, more likely Silica herself, or some combination of the two - had been hard at work the entire time that Wren and her friends had been in Whitehill. When they’d left, the curtain wall of sandstone, running in clean lines from each node of upthrust rock to the next, had encompassed mainly empty space. Valtteri’s small contingent of troops had been nowhere near enough to fill the area up, nor even to adequately guard the walls. Their camp had been makeshift, placed in the shadows cast by the cliffs that reared overhead. Now, however, Liv led them into the well-organized encampment of an army. Every cliff or formation of rock had been hollowed out, the word of stone used to create caves that led down into the earth. Where the use of Stai had ended, shovels had picked up the work, digging down into the loose, sandy floor of the desert. Rather than being removed entirely, the stone which had been displaced had clearly been employed in the raising of walls and structures. Over the walls had been stretched canvas, likely originally meant for the purpose of tents, now simply providing shade. “I feel like I’m letting her go,” Wren admitted, softly, to the enormous man at her side. A man encased in metal, but then, weren’t the knights of Lucania, as well? Ghveris reached out for her shoulder, and rested a great, steel gauntlet there. Once, she would have flinched away. Would it have been because she feared he would be too clumsy, too ignorant of his own strength, to avoid hurting her? Or would she simply have been frightened of him? Now, Wren understood just how delicately Ghveris moves, so that she barely felt the weight of his mechanical body. “You have left her before, to scout our enemy,” the war-machine said. “This is no different. You will return soon. And if these new guards do not have your confidence, yet, trust that I will keep her safe.” Wren opened her mouth to reply, and then bit her tongue. Liv’s father was leading a group of Eld out of the largest rock formation. The entrance there was guarded by two Elden warriors, standing in full, enchanted armor just in a small patch of shade. If not for the magic that controlled the temperature of their war-gear, Wren knew the two soldiers would have baked alive. Liv moved forward to embrace her father first, and then her grandmother. Even Elder Aira got a hug, it seemed, though the old woman put on a show of being mean-tempered and impatient. “Elders,” Liv greeted them. “It is good to see you all again. And you, Commander Soile, Commander Juhani. I trust the scouts from Whitehill have arrived in good order?” Valtteri nodded. “We’ve already sent them up into the foothills, along with our own people,” he assured his daughter. “And Silica had long since excavated shelters for them just outside the borders of the rift. Come into the shade - this is our command post.” Wren watched, her eyes lingering on how efficiently Kaija split up the guards she’d recruited. Two of them joined the pair of warriors at the entrance, taking up position there. Two more accompanied Kaija and Liv inside, while the remaining sixteen took up the packs of their four compatriots and set off with an Elden guide to make camp. “She wanted me to be part of that,” Wren told Ghveris, while they waited for the elders to make their way back down into the shade of the cavern. “That is high praise,” Ghveris answered. “I have watched her train them, when I could. Kaija is demanding.” Wren shrugged. “It wouldn’t be a good idea.” And as much as she knew that for fact, for all the reasons she could have listed without a moment’s thought, there was still a sadness to the answer. Things were changing, and it would never again be simply her, Liv, and Thora, making hushed plans in a bed chamber on the second floor of High Hall. Finally, she ducked beneath the canopy and made her way down steps of packed earth, set with flat stone along the top, into the command center. Ghveris had to hunch over behind her, the Antrian once again too large of frame for the spaces he was forced to cram himself into. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. For all the differences in where these conversations took place, the actual content, Wren was finding, remained much the same. She only half listened to troop counts, to discussion of when the first pack animals from Lendh ka Dakruim might be expected, to estimates of just how many soldiers might be supported by water from the lake at the center of the ruins. The water, of course, was so dense with mana that it would kill any normal human who drank it within hours, which meant barrels of mana-dead water needed to be brought over from Al’Fenthia or Whitehill, through the waystone. It did not surprise Wren in the slightest that the Elden warrior from Soltheris kept sneaking glances at her, as the meeting went on. Oh, he tried to be subtle about it, no doubt of that. But there were only so many people in the room, and Wren might have been the only one not concentrating entirely on talk of logistics. Well, her and Liv’s new personal guards, whose eyes never stopped roving over the entire area for the slightest hint of a threat to their new charge. Even Ghveris spoke up to contribute to the discussion - he’d once been a general, after all, in Ractia’s service. “Antrians fight best in formation,” he rumbled, from Wren’s side. “When the first rank can merge mana shields, and then second rank shelter behind them to fire. If this Manfred is the commander you think he is, he will use them on open ground, where you do not have the advantage of using terrain to break their lines apart.” But again, after a moment looking in Ghveris’s direction, the gaze of Juhani kæn Kalleis slid away from the juggernaut, down to where Wren stood at his side. It was almost like the flirtation of a nervous young warrior - if Wren hadn’t been able to clearly sense the antipathy in Juhani’s gaze, the cold, burning anger. Rather than flinch away, she met his eyes evenly. “And what of the Great Bats of Ractia?” Juhani asked. “How are they best to be used?” “As we were during the war,” Ghveris answered. “As scouts and skirmishers. To watch our own troops, to fall upon the flanks and the rear from above while the Antrians pin our front line in place. To set ambushes, and to harass supply lines.” “Sneak attacks,” Juhani said. “Like at Soltheris.” To Liv’s credit, she tried to cut that line of discussion off immediately. “We aren’t at Soltheris now. We’re in the high desert, and it will be the supply trains coming from this waystone most vulnerable,” she said. “And I believe I’ve already offered, Commander Juhani, to go to Soltheris and adjust the waystone.” “Your offer is noted,” Juhani said, tossing his gray hair back over his shoulder. “I will relate it to the city elders in my next report.” From his tone, he did not seem to be in much of a rush, and Wren doubted that Liv would be heading to Soltheris any time in the near future, if that man had anything to say about it. “Still, I find it troubling that we keep, essentially, a potential enemy spy here in our councils,” the Elden man said. At Wren’s side, Ghveris shifted, and she put a hand on the sigil-etched vambrace of his right arm to stop him from responding. “If you’re going to say something, Commander, just come out with it,” Wren told him. “No need to dance around.” Juhani set both hands on the table, where an enormous map had been stretched, and leaned over it toward Wren. “You are already once a turncloak, Wren Wind Dancer - if that can be believed. You have admitted that you were part of the assault on Soltheris.” “If by assault you mean she went through the waystone, saw what was happening, and then left,” Liv shot back across the table. “She didn’t kill anyone.” A spike of guilt and shame stabbed through Wren’s belly, as cold as Liv’s ice magic. Not for the first time, she wondered if it would have been simpler just to admit it from the beginning. She’d shot a single person, with one arrow, before she’d hardly even had a chance to get a look at what was happening. Was it really so big a difference? But Arnold Crosbie had wanted to execute her, Baron Henry to hang her for murder. When Julliane had pronounced the sentence of a severed hand, even suspended, Liv’s own father had spoken of Soltheris. It had all dangled on the most delicate thread, and the weight of one single admission might have caused that thread to snap. And so Wren kept her face still, and remained silent. “So she says,” Juhani said. “We have no proof of it.” Valtteri shifted from one foot to the other. “The Red Shield Tribe - the true Red Shields, under Soaring Eagle - have proved themselves to us,” Liv’s father argued. “We would never have found our first foothold on Varuna without their aid. And it was, in large part, Wren Wind Dancer’s name that secured that goodwill. So far as I am concerned, she has proved herself to us.” “That is your opinion,” Juhani said. “But neither you nor I are elders, Valtteri. And this is a matter best decided by the elders.” “I have made my judgement on this matter clear, I believe,” Aira said. “You have, Elder.” Juhani bowed his head. “And yet, you speak only on behalf of House Keria. This woman’s guilt or forgiveness must be decided by the entire council, at the Hall of Ancestors. Therefore, I propose that she be disarmed, taken under guard, and brought back to our lands. House Kalleis will be more than happy to secure her at Soltheris, until the war against Ractia is over.” “No,” Liv said, immediately, and Wren’s heart fell. Not for me, she silently begged. Don’t start this fight for me. “I trust Wren absolutely,” Liv continued, turning to offer a smile that only made Wren feel all the more ill. “She’s saved my life more times than I can count, and proven herself over and over again. She is here to fight Ractia, the same as you or I, Juhani. We will not be arresting our own soldiers, not unless you have some proof that she’s committed a crime. Do you?” Juhani considered the question for a long moment. “Proof? No.” He shook his head. “Moving on, then,” Liv said, and the crisis passed. Wren was packed by the time the sun had fully set. She didn’t need much: her bow, quiver, and enchanted daggers, she carried all the time. Her enchanted boots, from Lendh ka Dakruim, had long since replaced her old pair. Liv’s father had been kind enough to supply her with glass bottles of blood, brought over by waystone with the supplies from Al’Fenthia, just for her. Sigils had been etched into the glass, and the magic of House Syvä frosted the vials, keeping the blood cool so that it wouldn’t spoil. A second enchantment would activate when Wren popped the cork, heating the blood again to the temperature of a living body. “You’re heading out, then?” Liv asked, padding across the sand toward her. Kaija’s guards had found them an excavated cavern just at the edge of the shoal, so that Liv could sleep inside the mana she needed, and the human members of her new guard could pitch tents just outside the edge, for relief from the turbulent magic. Mixing Eld and human soldiers was causing their commander quite a few complications, and Wren doubted that she would have made the same decision. But then, she’d given up the right to offer an opinion on that when she’d refused Kaija’s offer. “Night’s the best time for a bat to go without being seen,” Wren replied. She picked up her pack and pulled it over her shoulders before turning to face Liv. Liv nodded. “Good luck, and stay safe. I’d rather you come back to us with any information at all, than you not come back. Emma and her father should already be in the foothills, you’ve worked with them before.” Wren nodded. “I’ll find them. And I’ll keep an eye on your old friend - make certain she gets back to her kids.” ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʟᴀᴛᴇsᴛ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀᴛ 𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭•𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚•𝕟𝕖𝕥 “Thank you.” Liv smiled, stepped forward, and wrapped her arms around Wren. The gesture was unplanned, uncalculated, genuine, and it was more than Wren could take. “I lied,” she admitted, lowering her voice so that only Liv could hear her. “I’m sorry. I did loose one arrow at Soltheris.” “What?” Liv gasped, and Wren felt the girl’s body stiffen. “It was a guard, I don’t know his name - he’d just put his spear through the leg of a woman, and I shot him through the throat.” Liv pulled her arms away from Wren, and took a step back. “You lied to me.” “I’m sorry,” Wren said. “But if I hadn’t, would Julianne and Henry have let me live? Or would they have hanged me?” Her friend’s mouth opened and closed for a moment, as Liv clearly struggled to answer. “We won’t ever know, because you didn’t give them a chance to decide,” she said, after a moment. “And you made me a liar, Wren. I just spoke for you, in front of all those people, and you made me a liar.” “I know.” Wren looked away. “And I’m sorry.” Rather than give her friend a chance to say anything else, she collapsed into her bat form, beat her wings, and flew up into the night sky. Wren winged west across the high desert as fast as she could, catching the currents of hot air rising off stone below, soaring higher and higher until she’d left Liv behind.