“That takes care of the waystone,” Sidonie muttered, leaning over Liv’s shoulder so that she could get a good look at the glowing Vædic sigils crawling across the central glass pane in the control room of Feic Seria. “It will only accept incoming travel from Al’Fenthia, the Tomb of Celris, Bald Peak, Valegard, the dam, and the ring. Are you sure about that last one?”

Liv nodded, tracing a finger down the writing that filled the left-hand page of Sidonie’s open notebook. “I’m pretty confident that Ractia is still locked out of it,” she murmured, then tapped a sequence of sigils on the glass.

Even with the key she’d brought, there was no way they could have taken complete control of the Painted Desert rift without the guide that Elder Aira had helped Sidonie prepare. The rift’s magical systems recognized the authority of the silver crown to an extent, but it didn’t allow Liv to spread her awareness out across the rift in the same way she could at the Tomb in the far north.

Liv had asked Silica, while the great wyrm was recovering in between sessions with Arjun, what had happened to Staivis’ key. If the thing had just been lying around in some dusty room, it would have made their lives a whole lot easier, after all. Unfortunately, the enormous winged serpent had only shaken her head.

“A casualty of Mirriam’s assault on the high desert,” Silica had explained. “The Lord of Stone’s seneschal went out to fight the assaulting army, and someone used Vær to turn his stone defenses into molten lava. The key melted along with the seneschal.”

So they were doing what they could using the workarounds that Aira tär Keria had written out in exhaustive detail. The Vædim had been prudent enough to plan for the possibility that the owner of a rift might not be available in an emergency, but also sufficiently paranoid not to make the process of taking control anything less than circuitous, maddening, and sometimes actually torturous.

The fact that it was all in a twelve-hundred year old language that had been only partially preserved only made the task more complicated.

As far as defenses were concerned, unfortunately, Feic Seria had come through the war and the intervening years in much worse condition than the Tomb of Celris. Whatever enchantments had once protected the place were, with the exception of the magic that opened and closed the doors, long since broken. According to Silica, Mirriam had flown her people down through the opening at the center of the mountain on the winds of an enormous storm, bypassing the front entrance entirely.

Instead, holding a rift so close to Ractia’s mountain strongholds was going to rely on the punishing environment, one that made it a slow and difficult process to move in soldiers, combined with whatever fortifications Rosamund and Keri could slap together in the limited time they had.

It took Liv and Sidonie the entire day to not only make all the required adjustments to the surviving waystone, but also to remove the security enchantments on the doors so that they would open and close for anyone. Finally, they put in place the same lock out commands Elder Aira had used at the Garden of Thorns, so that Ractia couldn’t simply use the control room at Nightfall Peak to overload the rift with mana from the ring overhead. There would be no conveniently timed surprise eruptions in the high desert.

By the time Liv finally walked out into the shade of early evening, her back was stiff and twisted as a branch that had been washed up on the banks of a mountain stream. She winced at the cracking feelings from her spine when she stretched backwards, then looked around to get a view of the magical construction.

Rosamund had recovered quickly from being imprinted with Stai; she’d only been passed out for perhaps a quarter of a bell. After that, Liv had loaned her lover not only her wand, but her guild ring and pearl from Coral Bay, as well. Sidonie had passed over a ring, before the two of them had set to work, and it seemed they’d provided more than enough mana to work with.

“I don’t think any of the professors would believe you did this on your first day using a new word of power,” Liv called up to Rose. The dark haired girl was sitting on the parapet of the new sandstone curtain wall that bridged the gap between one rugged rock face and another. There were at least three more such walls that Liv could see, every one thirty feet high, with crenellations and room enough at the top for a line of crossbowman or Elden archers to shoot down at an oncoming force.

“Well, Stai has a lot in common with Cem,” Rose remarked, then took a sip from her wineskin. “They just feel

so similar. We joked about an archmage spell using both words, but honestly Liv I don’t think it would take much to do that. I’m sure the Eld have one just lying around in their records somewhere, because it feels like such a natural fit. On top of that, I had Keri to plan out where everything was going to go.”

Liv climbed the sandstone stairs that had been pulled up out of the ground at the same time as the curtain wall, and attached to the inside surface. Once she got to the top, she caught sight of Keri, who was sitting in the shade of the crenellations, where they blocked the last rays of the setting sun.

“It would have been better to take a week here,” the Elden warrior admitted. “Rose did an incredible job, but we simply didn’t have the mana or the time to set this up properly. Instead, we used the rock faces which were already present as anchor points, and connected them with walls. It means the inside - our courtyard, if you will - is an irregular shape. There’s no gate, so the only way in or out is the waystone, or to come over the walls.”

“That’s not as hard as it sounds,” Rose admitted, “because the natural cliffs we left up are all the sort of thing someone who’s really determined could climb. We’ll just have to rely on guards to see them coming.”

Liv sidled up next to Rose and put her arm around the other woman’s waist; Rose leaned into her, and Liv could immediately feel how overheated and sweat-drenched she was, from a day in the unforgiving sun of the high desert. “How would you both feel about a bath, a meal, and a real bed in Whitehill?” she asked.

“Please,” Rose practically begged.

“You’ve finished what you needed to do inside the rift?” Keri asked.

Liv nodded. “It’s still winter there, so we’re going right from overheated to shivering. And Arjun will have to catch up with us, once he’s finished treating Silica. But I don’t see much more we can do here that my father can’t take care of, now that there’s a waystone straight to Al’Fenthia.”

“I know you’ve been in a hurry to get back to Whitehill,” Rose said.

“I just don’t trust things to go as planned,” Liv told them. “Not when so many people I care about are at risk. We got lucky here, not having to fight Silica -”

“Nevermind what would have happened if we’d happened to show up at the same time as Ractia’s commanders,” Keri added.

“I’d almost have preferred that,” Rose admitted. “We could have wiped them out all at once. Then she’d have to take time to rebuild while we’re dealing with the mess in Lucania.”

“Trust Valtteri to handle whatever happens here,” Keri told her.

Liv grimaced. She didn’t like the idea of leaving her father back in Varuna again without her. “I’d rather he come with us,” she said.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“I respect Airis, and his son is coming along quickly,” Keri said, shaking his head, “but there’s no one better suited to hemming Ractia in and holding the waystones we’ve taken than your father.”

☙

There was, however, one thing they still needed to do before making the last waystone journey to Whitehill.

The shoals of the Tomb of Celris were already more calm than Liv had ever seen them before, and the mana more thin. It was full night on the eastern continent of Isvara, and green, blue and purple lights danced in the sky, shimmering like a gauzy curtain that had been placed just in front of the stars.

The shock of stepping from the high desert to the far north caused a violent shiver to run through Liv’s body, but she sculpted a wreath of flowers - blue columbines - to lay at the foot of her aunt’s pyre, and then used the waste heat to keep not only herself, but all of her friends and companions warm. The prevalence of armor that regulated body temperature made the task easier, but there was no way that she was going to take any chance of allowing someone to catch sick from a brief stopover.

There were actually two pyres built, stuffed with herbs, and soaked with whale oil: one for Livara of the Five Blades, and one for Taavetti’s sister, Vettia - the woman whose corpse had been preserved in the great hall, where Liv and her friends had been assaulted by their own reflections.

Both women’s corpses had been covered in gauzy white veils; in the case of Liv’s aunt, because her face had been so withered and frozen, after nearly forty years impaled before the throne of Celris, that it was difficult to look at her.

Airis ka Reimis was there, and he’d brought his son - another person who shared Liv’s namesake. She noticed that Airis’ wife, Saana, was absent, and not for the first time wondered exactly how that relationship worked. There was a contingent from House Asuris, which included Taavetti himself, now seated in the same sort of wheeled chair that Baron Henry had used for years. Liv assumed that Airis, in the course of moving supplies into Whitehill, must have taken care of that. The crippled Elden man had a great white fur spread across his lap, and just imagining how soft it was made Liv wish for one of her own.

They stepped off the waystone together, Liv and her father, to be immediately caught up in the embrace of her grandmother, Eila, who was accompanied by a tall, armored man with the same deep-blue hair.

“My brother, Eilis,” Liv’s grandmother introduced him. “This is your great-niece, Livara.”

Rather than exchange a bow for a curtsy, Liv was pleased to find that Eilis clasped her arm and met her eyes. “I have taken command of the House Däivi warriors who will support you in Whitehill,” her great-uncle said. “At my sister’s request.”

“It will be good to have you,” Liv told him. “I’ll introduce you to Duchess Julianne and Baron Henry once we arrive.”

“We will speak more after we say farewell to your aunt.” Eilis released Liv’s forearm, and they turned back to the pyres. Rose quietly stepped up beside Liv, and they clasped hands. Even with leather gloves separating their skin from actually making contact, Liv found it comforting.

“My older sister often drove me mad,” Liv’s father said. She wasn’t surprised to see him speak first, just as he’d done at his father’s funeral. “Not that we didn’t love each other - but that she was just so talented. At swordfighting, at magic. She had the kind of charisma that drew people to her, as if she was a warm hearth, and everyone wanted to come in out of the cold. I remember Livara had half a dozen suitors, and she truly wasn’t even trying. She was more interested in fighting her way through rifts.”

A few soft laughs spread throughout the crowd at that, and Liv was suddenly aware that she was, in some sense, on the outside. She had no memories of her aunt. She’d never met the woman, only heard stories about her.

“A habit that seems to be shared by her niece,” Valtteri continued, and then Liv felt many eyes turn toward her - some familiar, some strangers. “For all that I could never best her at anything, Livara never looked down on me. She was endlessly patient, and she’d spend hours in the courtyard teaching me. I must have been such a bothersome younger brother to her, but she never let it show. And when she didn’t come back from the Tomb of Celris - it broke something in me.”

He looked down at the ground, at the crusted snow just off the waystone, within sight of the great canyon, upon which the pyre had been built. “We would not be able to put her pyre here, if my daughter hadn’t conquered that rift,” Valtteri said. “Already, the mana beasts here are less aggressive. There is something fitting about that - my sister’s death sent me south, where I met the mother of my only child. I still wish that my sister were here; but I am thankful to have a daughter.” He took a step back, and then Taavetti was wheeled forward by a member of House Asuris that Liv didn’t recognize.

More people spoke than she had anticipated - first Taavetti, and then Airis, and others from the three houses who had gathered to shiver together under the harsh winds of the far north. Liv allowed their words to pass through her like a mountain breeze whispering through Aspen leaves; she hadn’t known Vettia at all, even by reputation, and so shared childhood anecdotes didn’t catch at her heart.

Finally, the last words were spoken, together, by the assembled crowd, and Liv joined in. She heard Rose praying along with her, and not far away Keri and Sidonie. Wren and Ghveris had, perhaps wisely, chosen to go directly on to Whitehill.

“After a life wracked by storms, a life of striving to live up to our potential, Sitia welcomes us into her arms. Like any other change, death is frightening - but it comes to all of us. Remember, the Lady lends us strength. You who remain, send these women on their way with your love, and take comfort in each other. Livara tär Auris and Vettia tär Eliel, we give your bodies to the fire, so that your mortal blood may not feed the wicked. May your souls be free at last.”

Once the pyres were burning, people began taking their leave, and Liv didn’t blame them. Even with thick furs, parkas, or enchanted clothing, a winter night in the far north was the sort of cold that could kill. The heat from the fire was carried away by whipping, chilling winds: you either stood close enough that the heat was painful, or you didn’t feel it at all.

Airis and his son left first, and the members of House Asuris not long after. Taavetti caught Liv’s eye on his way to the waystone, and she nodded in return. Finally, it was only the members of House Syvä who remained to watch the bodies burn, along with Liv’s friends and the great uncle she’d just met.

There was a grim sort of pride to it - to testing yourself against the cold, to standing vigil when the southern houses stepped aside. Liv might have remained until dawn if Rose hadn’t given a sudden, violent shudder, pulled her hand away, and wrapped her arms around her body. It was only at the jarring motion that Liv realized she hadn’t sent any waste heat into her friends for some time.

“Go,” her grandmother called over the whipping winds. “Get your friends - and my brother - to Whitehill. You’ve stayed for long enough.”

Liv hesitated - it felt like showing weakness, somehow. But a glance at Rose, Sidonie, Eilis, and even Keri showed her that she couldn’t keep them here. She nodded, embraced her grandmother and her father one more time, and then led the group over to the waystone. All five of them knelt together, sharing the burden of the passage, and then they waited for the light to carry them away.

☙

The guard-shack set up next to the Bald Peak waystone was warm and waiting for them, with a gray trail of woodsmoke emerging from the chimney to trail across the night sky. A light snowfall drifted down peacefully. Wren opened the door, ushered them all inside, and then shut it behind them again, while Piers dished out bowls of stew. He had half a dozen men with him now, rather than just two, and the space was cramped with everyone in it.

Liv was three spoonfuls in before she noticed that they were missing someone. “Where’s Ghveris?” she asked.

“Outside,” Wren said. “No room for him in here. He just leaned up against the wall and settled in. Probably covered in snow by now.”

“That would explain why we didn’t see him.” Rose huddled as close to the fire as she could get.

“Are you really planning on pushing straight to Whitehill tonight, m’lady?” Piers asked. “I know you can make them magical flying birds and all, but it’s only just started snowing a bell ago. You won’t be able to see anything in the dark.”

“I’ll have the light of the ring,” Liv said. She motioned to Rose, Sidonie and the rest of those who’d come from the north. “I want to get them all warmed up in the hot springs, and into a real bed tonight. We can’t afford to have anyone getting sick. I probably kept them all out longer than I should have, already.”

Piers grimaced.

“What is it?” Liv asked him.

“It’s just if you wait, we can ride with you,” the guard said. “The Duchess made certain we had enough horses here. And there’s been, well...”

“There’s been what?” Liv pressed.

“Raiders,” Piers answered. “Raiders coming over the mountains. Scouts, you might call them, except - well, they’ve been hitting farms, m’lady. Burning them.”