Arjun reached out and put his hand on Liv’s shoulder, and though the boiled leather of her pauldron prevented her from feeling the warmth of his skin, the gesture felt like an anchor, like something firm to hold onto.

“She doesn’t need you,” Arjun said. “She has friends who will help her. Friends who care a lot more than Ractia ever would.”

Aariv shrugged. “Friends who don’t know half of what the Great Mother could offer her,” he pointed out. “I understand you mean well, Śrī Iyuz, and you must be both talented and determined to have come to this point. But you simply do not know what she needs. You could spend the rest of your life crawling through ancient ruins and puzzling over dusty inscriptions, and still not learn a fraction of what Ractia knows. She is the single greatest repository of knowledge in our entire world, and rather than learn from her, you want to try to – what? Kill her? Do you truly think you can? And what an immeasurable loss it would be if by some chance you succeeded.”

The space between the priest’s questions, and Liv’s reply, was not silent. It was filled with the cries of the wounded, the report of Antrian weapons, the snarl of animals fighting, and the roar of fire. It was surreal to be holding a conversation, while Liv knew that her guards and her friends were fighting to give her space.

“You know,” Liv said, finally, “there is something to what you’re saying. If Tamiris or Sitia walked out of those trees right now, I would have so many questions. Even if someone like Bælris came back, one of the Vædim who stepped aside – I think I would learn from him, if he was willing to teach. To hear Elder Aira tell it, even her mother had a soft side.”

“But I’ve seen Ractia,” Liv continued, and she allowed her voice to harden as she spoke. “I’ve felt the weight of her Authority, crushing me down. I saw her, surrounded by kneeling people, worshipped as a goddess. I looked into her eyes, and I could see it. It’s how she expects to be treated – she likes it. She was one of the last Vædim fighting, wasn’t she? When our ancestors stood up and said they wouldn’t be treated like slaves anymore, Bælris left, and the Trinity supported us, but Ractia – she did everything she could to crush everyone under her foot. Can you honestly tell me, Pandit Aariv, that she treats you as anything other than her servant?”

The old man frowned, and the wind whipped his white hair out in tangles. “I have made an exchange,” he admitted. “Service in exchange for her tutelage. Things will not be as they are now forever.”

“They won’t,” Liv agreed. “Because I’m going to put a stop to this.” She raised her hand, and six blades of adamant ice shot forward, crossing the space between them in less than the time it took to draw a breath.

A cyclone of fire erupted around the priest, burning so hot that both Liv and Arjun were forced to step backward. Liv felt her swords melt away, until even the water of which they’d been composed boiled off into steam, and then there was nothing for her Authority to hold onto anymore.

The column whirled up into the air, revealing Aariv once again, and gathered atop the extended two fingers of his upraised hand, spinning about itself until it had compacted into a ball, a concentrated inferno. The old man threw his arm forward, propelling the flame toward Liv and Arjun.

She jumped, beating her mana wings to get height, while Arjun whipped his wand of Neem wood out in front of him and conjured a mana shield to protect himself from the impact. The heat of the explosion which followed only propelled Liv up higher, and she looked down just long enough to check that Arjun’s shield remained after the conflagration had passed. Though he was surrounded by only scorched earth, and gasping for breath, her friend seemed otherwise whole.

Twelve rings to silent cast both her wings and her swords - the swords that had not survived the first pass against Aariv’s fire. Four rings for the wheel of lightning, and another three to bridge the ditch with ice. That was nineteen spent before Liv had even begun to fight the old priest, leaving her with only sixteen – half her reserves gone. But she’d come prepared. Liv drew on the mana in her guild ring, and in the set of bracelet and rings she’d won from Milisant so many years earlier. Twenty-five would be enough, but she wouldn’t be using ice again.

A gout of fire lanced up through the air, but Liv tucked her wings and spiralled around it, close enough to feel the heat, but not to be burnt. She’d learned the folly of trying to block fire with ice all that way back in the courtyard of Castle Whitehill, facing off against Master Grenfell when she’d only been a child.

There was no reason she could only make blades of ice, however.

“Aluthent’he Aiveh Svec Sekim’o’Mae!” Liv shouted. Her cloud of swords reformed, only this time they were constructed from shining blue mana, veined with gold. It would have been better, she thought, as she dove down at Aariv, if she’d had time to experiment with Genevieve Arundell’s technique for building mana constructs, but these would do.

The blades swung out from her sides, coming at the old man below from above, behind, and both sides. Arjun, who’d caught his breath well enough to cast, swiped his wand at the priest, and a wave of mana knives coalesced in midair, then shot forward.

A glint of blue sparked around Aariv’s eyes, and Liv recognized immediately what he’d done. He moved much like Triss and her brothers, or even like Keri when he’d used Bheuv in the fight against the dowager queen. The old man’s body wasn’t as agile: rather than duck or roll or leap to avoid the weapons racing toward him, he shifted his body carefully, just enough that each blade passed by. There were too many for him to avoid altogether, though, and one of Liv’s swords drew a crimson line across his upper arm, leaving a cut flap of cloth to hang down from his robe.

Liv skimmed close to the ground, collected her swords, and beat her wings to rise again, spinning around to keep her eye on the old man. She suspected that Vivek Sharma would have something to say about a priest using that word of power to fight. She could picture the disgust on his face. But if Aariv was going to be able to dodge most of their attacks, she would simply need to throw a spell at him that he couldn’t possibly avoid.

Before she could follow that line of thought any further, however, Aariv spoke.

“Sedētis Aiveh Æn'Ye,” the fallen priest intoned, and Liv was flying close enough to hear the incantation, this time. His authority reached out to wrap her, and Arjun as well, in a warm, comforting blanket of calm. Her anger at Ractia’s offer, her fear that while she was occupied with Aariv, something might happen to Wren, to Ghveris, or to Kaija, the pounding, racing thrill of battle, the disgust and horror Liv had felt at the sight of the dead and dying – all of it simply drifted away.

Below her, Arjun lowered his wand, tension draining out of his stance, his posture becoming relaxed and at ease. Liv wasn’t certain he had any idea what was happening, any longer. It left him wide open to a counterstroke.

But Liv had faced down the Authority of an archmage.

She spread her wings wide with a shout, and frost crackled out along the ground twenty feet beneath her. Flakes of snow swirled in the air, and Liv’s emotions came rushing back as she pushed the old man’s spell away. She reached up with her wand, toward the stormclouds she’d gathered overhead before the fighting even began, and pulled down a bolt of lightning.

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It was probably the fastest attack she had. When Julianne had first shown her the difficulty in surviving an assault that used Luc, on the beach at Freeport, Liv had immediately realized she could never move quickly enough to dodge it. Instead, she’d relied on a contingent defense. Aariv, it seemed, had made the same calculation, and come to the same conclusion.

The old man, like the dowager queen had, collapsed into a viscous mass of blood just as the lightning touched him. Red steam rose up from the point of impact, dirt and small stones sprayed in every direction, and the ground was left blackened. When his body reformed, he staggered.

The spell hadn’t killed him, but it had clearly broken Aariv’s concentration. Arjun shook himself, as if waking from a dream, and pointed his wand at the old man. It was only when Liv recognized the incantation that she understood how angry her friend was.

Bones erupted up out of the skin of Aariv’s left arm, ripping out of his flesh in saw-toothed spirals and wicked spikes. Blood sprayed in every direction, chunks of flesh went flying, still wrapped in gore-soaked scraps of cloth, and the old priest wailed in agony.

Liv dove at him again, her six blades shooting out ahead of her to finish the fight.

“Nesēmus,” Aariv gasped, the word a ragged, desperate scream. There was a flash of light, and Liv’s swords flew through the empty air where he’d been, sinking nearly hilt deep into the scorched ground.

“Blood and shadows,” Liv swore, landing next to Arjun. “Ractia must have taught him how to make a tether.”

“So he’s up on a waystone, somewhere beneath the peak?” Arjun asked, looking to the summit high above them.

Liv nodded. “Let’s finish this.”

☙

The enemy Antrians – under Manfred’s command, it was confirmed; Soile had caught sight of a man in old-fashioned Lucanian plate – had retreated in good order up the mountain. The Great Bats, after their assault on the alliance rear had been met with unexpected ferocity, had retreated back to the sky, taking wing in their bat forms. The palisade was destroyed, pieces of it still burning on the ground. Already, the alliance troops were sorting the bodies of the dead, separating their comrades from the enemy. Arjun treated the worst of the wounded.

Liv had finally allowed the wards to activate, once she was certain that no one was close enough to be affected by them. As the contingent spells vented their fury – an awkward mess of mana and water that ultimately dribbled onto the earth from a lack of appropriate targets – she conjured two enormous hands of coherent mana, dug the great fingers into the earth, and seized hold of the iron. Once she’d ripped it free from the ground, she rent it into pieces and then threw them over the side of the mountain, where they crashed down amongst the trees.

“I can hold things here,” Soile told her. Liv noticed the Kerian commander waited to be certain Liv was finished with the wards before she approached.

“They might counterattack,” Liv pointed out, gazing upslope.

“They might,” Soile agreed. “I don’t think it's likely, so soon after a retreat – and not with you having sent one of their commanders back wounded.”

Liv turned toward where the wounded lay, so that she could check on Arjun. He seemed focused entirely on his work. “This time it was Arjun who struck the blow,” she pointed out.

“I didn’t get a look at what he did,” Soile admitted. “But a few of the soldiers did, and the rumors going around are… disturbing. Not the sort of spell I’d ever want to have to face.”

“He hates using it,” Liv murmured. “Alright. If you’re confident you’ve got this area under control, I’ll help get the wounded back down to the plateau.”

She found Wren and Ghveris with three corpses who were dressed in the same sort of hunting leathers her friend often wore. Liv also noticed that one of the three was a dead woman with a lock of her dark hair dyed purple.

“Your people?” she asked, when she’d gotten close enough to speak comfortably.

Wren nodded. “I knew all of them,” she said. “Hawk's Wing. Kicking Bear. Leaping Water.” With each name, she pointed down at one of the dead people.

“I’m sorry,” Liv said. It felt lacking, but she wasn’t certain what else she could do.

“Can you give us long enough to bury them in the earth?” Ghveris asked.

“You don’t burn them?” Liv frowned. From Lucania, to Lendh ka Dakruim, to the north, everyone who followed the Trinity built funeral pyres for their dead. Of course, the Red Shield tribe had worshipped Ractia, not the Trinity, and they’d been the very reason that Eld and human alive used fire.

“No one did, before Mirriam’s rebellion,” Ghveris explained. “That only came after.”

“Take as long as you need,” Liv told them.

By the time Arjun had exhausted his mana for healing spells, and Wren and Ghveris had honored their dead, Liv had conjured a disc of mana large enough to hold everyone who was too injured to walk. Soile ordered ten of the soldiers who would be remaining at the choke point to help load the wounded onto the disc, and Liv finally set off back downhill with her friends, surrounded by her guards.

“It seems to me like they did well,” she observed to Kaija. “They turned aside that assault on our rear by the bats.” Liv deliberately kept her voice loud enough that she was certain several of the closer guards would be able to hear her clearly. She wanted to encourage them.

Kaija nodded. “Every one of them was already a veteran of the fighting at the pass. It isn’t fighting I’ve been teaching them; it’s how to protect someone. A different way of thinking. And then, of course, drilling how to handle mana from a rift.”

“They’ll need that for our next stop,” Liv explained to her. “Once we’ve dropped off the wounded, I’ll use my tether to take us directly to Bald Peak.”

“You’d rather rest there than Feic Seria?”

Liv shook her head. “No. We’ll go from Bald Peak to the Tomb of Celris. I think I can use pieces of the enchantments there in the spell I’ve been working on. We’ll only stay a day or two – just long enough for me to soak in the mana and recover, and to take a few notes. Then we’ll come back to Varuna for the final assault on the summit.”

The walk back down the mountain to the plateau took the rest of the day, even with the wounded riding a mana disc. If it had just been her, Arjun, Wren and Ghveris, Liv would have just flown everyone down, whether on gyrfalcon constructs, or some other way. But between her guards and the injured, there were simply too many bodies to move.

Her father’s scouts must have seen them coming, however, for a mile out from the walls of the encampment, they were met by a contingent of healers, escorted by soldiers. Liv was happy to hand the wounded off to them, and once they were able to move more quickly, the returning group managed to make it down and inside the walls of the camp before dark.

Liv had only just managed to wash the blood, grime and sweat of the day off in the privacy of her tent when her father arrived. She set the dirty bucket of wash-water outside, wrapped her hair in a soft towel, and collapsed into one of her camp chairs, wearing a clean linen shift and a comfortable skirt.

“The third ward is down,” Liv explained, once Valtteri had settled into a chair facing her. “We broke the palisade and sent them into a full retreat. Manfred kept them from a route – I didn’t see him myself, but others did. I did fight Aariv, though, with Arjun’s help. He got away using a tether – presumably to the waystone at Nightfall Peak – but it’ll take him a long time to recover from what Arjun did to his arm.”

“Good,” Valtteri said, slouching back against the canvas. “It’s worth knowing that Ractia’s taught some of her people how to do that. We’ll expect it now, the next time we see that priest on the field. It’s even possible some of the Iravata soldiers who serve her could pull it off. You’re going back to the rift to rest?”

Liv nodded. “Well, not the desert. I’ll use my tether to Bald Peak, and from there to the Tomb.”

“Not the place I’d choose to regain my strength,” her father commenced, with a frown.

“I have complete control of it now,” Liv reminded him. “If anything, I can use what’s left of the defenses to protect myself. It’s not very comfortable, but I want another look at the enchantments.”

“Have you settled on your archmage spell?” Valtteri asked.

“I have a direction, at least,” Liv said. “I keep wondering if I’m making a mistake, doing all this the hard way, instead of just learning one of the family spells.”

“If you had the time to do this safely, we’d be doing a lot of things differently,” her father reminded her. “As long as you let the elders guide you, I have faith you’ll be fine.”

“It couldn’t have been this much of a pain for you, though,” Liv pointed out.

Valtteri shook his head. “No. But your grandparents had been teaching me Cel and Dā from the beginning. Your aunt, as well. All we had to do was follow the plan laid out for us. But you’ve always followed your magic in unexpected directions, Liv. Having learned from human and Eld alike is one of your greatest strengths. I have faith you’ll find something truly special at the end of this road. Something no one else has considered doing before.”