Liv couldn’t sleep for hours, filled with a nervous energy that kept her thoughts racing from one problem to another, hunting for solutions when she wasn’t blaming herself for how long it had taken to get the silver crown to Feic Seria.

If she’d been alone, she would have pushed on to Whitehill even through a blizzard, even if it took her until morning. Or she would have begun hunting down whatever raiders Benedict had sent through the mountains. The headache building behind her eyes only made her more irritable, and eventually she gave up at even making the attempt to sleep. Liv carefully extracted herself from Rose’s arm, and took a seat by the fire.

One of Piers’ subordinates was awake, which made sense; he had enough men to set shifts, if not enough to actually stop an enemy force coming through the waystone. For some reason, he kept looking at Liv for a brief moment, and then glancing away.

“What is it?” she asked, keeping her voice low so that she didn’t wake any of her friends.

“I saw you at the stockyards, you know,” the man said - the kid. He looked younger than a first year at Coral Bay, with a rash of pimples spread across his cheeks and the kind of fuzz on his chin that would stand in place of a beard for years yet. “When you and the duchess and Master Mage Grenfell fought the blood monster. I was just a boy.”

You still are just a boy, Liv thought to herself, but didn’t say it out loud. “Your family worked at the stockyards?” she asked. “Drovers, tanners -”

“Butchers,” the boy answered, and Liv nodded. “Albert Butcher, but all me friends just call me Bertie. Bertie Butcher. Me Da is Hugh.”

“Why’d you become a guardsman, then, Bertie?” Liv asked. “Butchering’s a good trade. You’re more likely to grow old butchering than fighting.”

Bertie shrugged. “It’s obvious, in’t it? Those southerners want to come to our mountains, tell us what to do? That lowland king’s never once bothered to travel up here - even my gran can’t remember a Freeport king ever visiting. Baron Henry and Duchess Julianne have been good to us, and some stuck up tosspot from way off says they’re traitors? They can fuck right off.”

Liv closed her eyes for a moment. She wanted to be alone in the cold and the dark and the quiet, until the stabbing feeling behind her eyes went away. This was how it started, wasn’t it? She’d told Ghveris that she wasn’t one of the Vædim, but it already hurt to spend time outside of a rift.

Bertie the butcher’s son didn’t have the slightest idea what was coming for Whitehill. The closest thing Liv had seen to a battle was the lines of Eld holding the pass between the Garden of Thorns and Al’Fenthia - or perhaps the ksatriya of Akela Kila throwing themselves against an unending tide of corpses, far beneath the ground.

On both occasions, it had been men and women - whether human or Eld - against monsters. But King Benedict wasn’t sending monsters north. The army that crashed against the southern pass was going to be made up of dozens of Butchers, Tanners, Smiths and Coopers. Hundreds or thousands of boys like Bertie who’d left behind good, safe trades to get a few weeks training with a halberd or a spear, and had never seen what a blast of fire, lightning strike, or conjured soldier of ice could do. And Liv was going to have to kill them.

She opened her eyes and stood up. “You’ve got an important job keeping watch here,” she told Bertie. “I’ll see what we can do to get you all more guards and some proper barracks here. In the meanwhile, I’m going to get some fresh air.”

Before the boy could respond, Liv strode to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the cold winter night. The moon was bright, nearly as bright as the ring, and the light from both picked out flakes of gently falling snow.

“Are you well, Lady of Cold and Winter?”

The voice rumbled from beneath a mound of snow, piled up against the wall of the guard shack. Ghveris moved for what must have been the first time in hours, and a miniature avalanche of soft powder poured down off his armored pauldrons and helm. Burning blue eyes lit up the shadows.

“You’ve been to war,” Liv said, turning to meet the Antrian juggernaut’s gaze. She spoke in Vakansa, matching the language she’d been addressed in. “I never have been. I’ve fought in rifts - I even helped drive off Ractia’s assault on the beach at Coral Bay. But this - what’s coming - it feels different.”

Ghveris nodded his great helm. “It will be. You will kill men and women you’ve never even seen before, who have done nothing wrong but to be born in the lands of your enemies, rather than your own. Some of those you love will die, and you will not be able to save them. Even when the battles are over, you will dream of them for years to come. Your old wounds will ache when the storm clouds gather. Are you certain this fight is worth what it will do to you, Livara?”

“The alternative is what, to run away?” Liv asked him. “To try to evacuate the entire valley? We might be able to do it. Get everyone into Elden lands by waystone, or to Varuna, and build a new town.”

“It would mean less killing,” Ghveris said. There was no tone of judgement in his mechanical voice, one way or the other.

“It would also mean leaving Benedict and Genevieve in charge of the guild,” Liv said. “The Dowager Queen - she tried to kill Julianne and Matthew, and she tried to kill me. The princess. We were all just living up here, we weren’t hurting them. And Genevieve killed my teacher, Jurian. He was - he protected me, when I was just a child.”

“You fight for revenge, then,” the war-machine concluded.

“No.” Liv shook her head. “If I thought they’d keep a peace treaty - but they won’t. As soon as the old king was dead, Benedict brought back his mother, though she was supposed to stay in exile. He took over the guild, and built an army, just to have more power for himself. We won’t ever be safe as long as these people have the means to strike at us. All of my friends, all of my family - if we don’t force our enemies to stop, they never will.”

For some reason, saying it out loud, even with only the ancient war-machine to hear her, made Liv more certain of it. She clenched her fists inside her gloves, forced herself to ignore the stabbing pain in her forehead, and drew her wand.

☙

By the time dawn had come, a foot of snow had accumulated on top of the waystone, and Liv had finished sculpting a twenty-foot curved wall to surround it. She made the wall ten feet thick, with a flat top that had crenelations facing the waystone, two sets of stairs along the outside, and an arched gateway opening out onto the road. The entire structure was made of adamant ice, as strong as steel.

“I would have made you a gate,” she admitted to Piers, when everyone had come out of the guard shack and gathered around her, “but hinges made out of ice have a tendency to melt and refreeze a bit when the temperature changes. They wouldn’t be able to move for long. Still, when you see the light coming, you can set up on the walls with your crossbows. And I’m sure you can make some sort of wood barricade to drag across the opening.”

“How long will it last?” Bertie the butcher’s son asked.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on NovelBin. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Until the spring thaws come, and flood season,” Liv answered. “But I intend to have it replaced by stone well before then.”

“Thank you, m’lady,” Piers said, bowing his head just enough that it was obvious.

The guardsmen had the waiting horses saddled quickly enough; with only six riding, there were extra that remained tied up beneath the low, sloping roof that served in place of a barn. In the morning light, Liv could see that it had been recently built of green wood, and simply attached to the back of the guard shack.

Ghveris, of course, could not ride. His immense weight would simply have cracked the spine of any horse he tried to mount, even the largest destrier. Instead, the war-machine ran beside them along the mine-road, heading south with the partially frozen Aspen River on their left.

The war-machine’s stride was not as fast as a horse at full gallop, and they had to keep their gate to a canter, but Ghveris also showed no signs of tiring. Compared to a column of marching troops, Liv imagined that a force of Antrians would eat up the miles at a frankly terrifying pace - especially if they marched through the night. They were on track to reach Whitehill in good time, following the road around the city to the west, until Wren spotted smoke on the horizon.

“It could be from a chimney, couldn’t it?” Sidonie asked.

Keri shook his head. “No. A chimney lets out a thin trail of smoke - that’s a burning building. Maybe more than one.”

“It will be difficult for you to see this,” Eilis told Liv. “But you must.”

Liv looked away from her great-uncle, and scanned the countryside. “This area is all farms,” she said. “But it's fairly close to the city. In fact -” She kicked her horse forward, into the untouched snow drifts and away from the road. One part of her mind decided that she was going to have to send a message to Al’Fenthia, to have Steria brought through the waystones to Whitehill, if she was going to be doing a lot of riding. The other part of her, however, recognized the great oak atop the rise in the land as she rode uphill.

The Cotter Farm was burning.

All around the buildings, the snow was melted by the intense heat, and trampled by the prints of many boots until it had created a morass of mud. The house and barn had mostly already collapsed, and one of the blackened beams gave way while the group watched. They’d arrived at the tail end of the fire, it appeared, and it must have been set sometime during the night.

Liv swung down from her saddle and lifted herself onto a disc of blue mana, which she sent skimming above the surface of the snow until she’d reached the blade. She tried to get close enough to see into the fire, even the attempt was painful, and she was forced to pull back. If there had been anyone inside the house, there was no possible way they could have survived.

A shout came from behind her, and Liv spun her disk around. Rosamund was waving to her from a row of apple trees, their branches all bare and frozen over with ice that glistened in the dawn.

Five bodies hung from the branches of the apple trees.

Big White Cotter and his wife; their son, Little Whit and the young woman Liv had seen when she’d come to the farm on the day of blood, and at the end, a little girl of no more than five years, dressed in a nightgown, all swayed back and forth, suspended from nooses fastened tightly around their necks.

Set beneath them was a long board, perhaps broken off the barn before the fire had been set, painted with a single word: ‘Treason.’

Frost cracked out from Liv before she was even aware of Cel roaring at the back of her mind, and even the blaze of the burning farmhouse retreated from her. Coals that had been glowing red, orange and gold a moment before died.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to hunt down whoever had done this and string their bodies across the length of the mountains, spiked up on pillars of ice as a signal to anyone who tried to come north what was waiting for them.

It took half a dozen deep, shuddering breaths before Liv was able to quiet Cel and pull the cold back inside her. She felt something cold on her cheeks, and realized that she’d frozen her own tears.

“You knew them?” Rose asked, once she was able to get close enough not to be shouting.

“Big Whit won the bare-knuckle fighting at every fair from as early as I can remember,” Liv said. Her voice sounded very far away, as if someone else was talking. “Then his son took it up after him. On the Day of Blood, Baron Henry sent me to stop the blood-orb rampaging through their fields. They didn’t -” Liv choked for a moment, and her jaw twisted until she was almost grinding her teeth before she managed to get the words out. “They didn’t have a granddaughter yet, last time I saw them.”

Rose put her hand on Liv’s shoulder, but the pauldrons of her armor prevented Liv from feeling skin against skin. There was little comfort in a leather glove.

“Wren,” Liv called. “I want you to hunt them.”

“And when I find them?” Wren asked. She slipped down out of her saddle, and walked away from the horses.

“Then you come back to Whitehill and tell me,” Liv said. “I want to know how many of them there are. I want to know where they’re camping, and who’s leading them. And then we’re going to kill every one of them.”

“Understood.” The huntress nodded, but before she took her bat form, she looked aside from Liv for just a moment. Something passed between Wren and Ghveris, and the juggernaut simply nodded. Then, Wren dissolved into a cloud of blood, reforming an instant later into a dark bat. She winged her way up into the snow, and vanished.

☙

By the time they had the bodies down and the fire extinguished - the second task accomplished by Liv simply freezing what was left of the buildings over - a patrol from Whitehill had arrived.

“We’ll see to it from here, m’lady,” one of the men said, bowing to Liv.

“They need to be prepared for a funeral,” Liv said. “I don’t - Little Whit’s wife should have family in town, at least, or one of the farms. Someone needs to find them and let them know.”

“Elena was a Wainwright, from Fairford,” the guard said. “We’ll send word to her family, m’lady. I promise. They’ll be waiting for you at the castle.”

She turned away from the bodies, and examined the man. He was in his late thirties, she thought, or perhaps his early forties, with a great bushy black beard. She didn’t think she knew him.

“Tyler Mercer, m’lady,” the guardsman told her. “Saw you trap that fox from the wall, when you were just a girl. Don’t expect you to remember me.”

“Thank you,” Liv said. “How many times has this happened?”

“A dozen outlying farms, at last count,” Mercer said. “This is the closest to the city the raiders have come yet. The duchess put out the word for all the farmers to evacuate into the city, but - well, you know Big Whit. No one was gonna chase him off his land.”

Liv nodded, then stalked over to the gelding she’d been loaned, set her foot into the stirrup, and pulled herself up into the saddle. “Don’t stay out here too long, then, Mercer. Get your men back behind the walls as quick as you can.”

“Aye, m’lady,” the guardsman said, bowing his head. “A word of advice, m’lady?”

“Yes?”

“The -” Mercer hesitated. “The man in that great suit of armor. There - there is a man in there, isn’t there?”

“Ghveris is an Antrian war-machine,” Liv responded.

The juggernaut took a step toward Mercer, and the guard stumbled backward.

“Might be best if you were escorted through the city,” Mercer suggested. “Just so that everyone knows Lord Ghveris is a friend.”

Liv took the guardsman’s advice, and commandeered an escort of half a dozen city guards at the gate into Whitehill. As a result, their procession through The Lower Banks took on something of the appearance of a parade, and though Liv couldn’t bring herself to share in the excitement of the people she passed, she also couldn’t really blame them for it.

They made quite a sight: Liv, Rosamund and Keri were all well armored, in steel and leather that had clearly seen fighting and hard travel in the recent past. Sidonie didn’t wear any obvious weapons, but the wand on her hip marked her as a mage, and her dress was clearly that of a noblewoman. For his part, Liv’s great-uncle, Eilis, like her had hair of a shade that was never seen naturally among humans, and was dressed in robes of silk brocade cut in the fashion of the Eld. Ghveris was - well, Ghveris. He stalked along next to Liv’s horse, towering over even the largest men who gathered along the side of the street as if they were nothing more than children.

The city was crowded with more people than Liv had ever seen there before, even in the Lower Banks, which had always been the poorer of the two neighborhoods. With the armored city guards marching to either side, and Liv’s white hair caught by the wind, it wasn’t long before she began to hear first murmurs, and then shouts.

“It’s the Duchess’s Elden witch!”

“What kind of monster is that?”

“Lady Livara!”

“Are the Eld coming?” one woman called out. “Are the Eld coming to fight with us?”

Liv reined in her gelding, and looked first to Keri, and then to her uncle Eilis. Both men nodded.

“Yes,” Liv called back to the crowd. “The Eld are coming. The Eld are coming to fight with us.”

Up and down the street, cheers erupted.