The dark stillness of the place between the waystone shattered into light, smoke, and the screams of the wounded and dying.

Liv blinked away the glare of the waystone’s dying magic, and saw scores of castle servants, wounded soldiers, and a handful of nobles recoiling from her arrival. The guards had formed two ranks facing the waystone, the first kneeling and the second standing, all with crossbows pointed directly at Liv and her companions.

“Hold your fire,” she shouted. “We’re here to help you get to Whitehill.”

“Liv?” A tall young woman, with her dark hair pulled back into a braid, pushed two of the guards aside and strode up to the edge of the waystone. She wore a bedraggled gown in deep red, worked with gold embroidery, and to Liv’s surprise, they’d met before.

“Bryn!” Liv stepped off the waystone to catch the other mage by the arms. Though they’d only worked together during a single king tide, and been a year apart at Coral Bay, it was a comfort to see even a single familiar face. “You’ve been the one sending people out through the waystone?”

Bryn nodded, and held up her left hand, to show the guild ring on her finger. “It was fully charged for the first load,” she explained. “Court Mage Fulke, my aunt Dasella, and her children have helped share the load, but it’s a twenty-ring stone. We can just manage one last trip, but that’s the end of it.”

Liv scanned the young family that had emerged from behind the soldiers, and her eyes lingered on one boy of perhaps ten. There was something about the shape of his nose that made him look like a younger version of her teacher, but he had his mother’s hazel eyes. At Lady Grenfell’s right hand, a red-faced and sweating man of immense girth clutched a sigil-engraved staff, as if he needed it to help support his weight. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the guild ring on his finger.

“Lady Grenfell,” she said. “My name is Livara tär Valtteri, and Kazimir Grenfell taught me from the time I was a little girl. If you’d be kind enough to take your children to the waystone, Sidonie here and the rest of our people will make up any difference in mana you can’t handle.”

“Thank you.” Isaac Grenfell’s widow looked brittle, like a blade that could snap at any moment. Liv felt bad that she didn’t even know the woman’s name, and resolved to correct that later. “Come along, children.” She took a son and a daughter in either hand, and ushered them forward onto the waystone.

Sidonie and Piers moved to help load the disc of white mana stone, and Liv was pleased to see how efficiently her friend took charge, continuing to prioritize the wounded, children, and servants who couldn’t fight.

“What’s your plan?” Kaija asked quietly, stepping up to Liv’s side.

Together, they looked over the fortifications that surrounded the waystone. Like at Freeport, stone walls had been built to control the area, but that meant that Liv couldn’t get a good look at the battle - and she’d never visited Ashford before.

“I have to get up so that I can see what’s happening,” Liv muttered, and drew her wand. “Hold this point, and help get everyone out. Aluthent Dvo Fetim Æn’Mæ.”

“I’ll make certain we hold back enough power to get ourselves out on the last trip,” Kaija promised. “But are you certain you don’t want us to go with you?”

“Don’t bother,” Liv said, as blue wings of mana slowly coalesced into being, extending from her back. “I’ve got a tether to Bald Peak.”

“A what?”

“I can get us back,” Liv said. “Just hold this point and get out as many people as you can. I’ll try to cover the retreat.” With a powerful downstroke of her magical wings, she flew up above the stone walls that surrounded the waystone, caught an updraft, and beat for as much height as she could get, diverting only to swerve through one of the wisps of ambient mana that drifted through the battle and seize it with her authority. “Thirteen,” she whispered to herself. Combined with her ring, the pearl she carried in one pocket, and the pommel of her wand, that made nineteen rings of mana, which would not be enough to activate the waystone on her own - nevermind fight a battle. But she had a plan.

Ashford spread out beneath Liv’s eyes like an unrolled map, and she spun about in midair to get a look at everything that was happening. The source of the town’s name was clear to her immediately: she could see where the river that passed through the valley ran broad and wide, flowing over a shallow, stony bottom that would have been an easy crossing even before bridges were built. Combined with a grove of ash-trees, with bare branches currently covered in snow, someone must have thought themself particularly clever when it came time to naming things.

If it hadn’t been for the army storming the walls of the castle, it looked like it would have been a nice place to live. The castle itself was square in shape, set atop the closest thing to a hill that overlooked the river. Rather than a separate keep, four structures of various sizes anchored the corners of the curtain walls, with all joined together as a single piece of construction. The northeast tower was approximately the size of a keep, and at a glance she guessed that it rose two or three stories above the walls.

A single stretch of double walls protected a road down from the castle to the waystone, with a gate at either end to control the passage. The waystone was set just above the river, north of the ford at a series of cascades that fell from a dam above. Having seen something similar in Varuna, Liv immediately recognized it as Vædic construction, and likely the heart of the local rift.

The fact the Grenfell’s had built so close to the rift told her it was a minor one; Liv could tell the moment she’d left the shoal, which must have just extended to the waystone, but not the castle or the town itself. Unlike the damaged connection at Bald Peak, the shoals would have been enough to keep this small waystone charged, so long as it was used sparingly. She wondered what sort of monstrous fish and eels might live in the lake above the dam, but there was no time to indulge her curiosity.

Hundreds of soldiers swarmed the walls of the castle, throwing up ladders at half a dozen points. There were two siege towers, which had been rolled up and opened so that dozens of royal soldiers were already fighting atop the battlements. As Liv took in the view, a group of attackers worked together to push a scorpion over, letting the siege engine fall inside the courtyard, where it crushed a defending soldier.

It was clear the Ashford soldiers were crumbling, even to someone like Liv, who’d never seen an actual siege in her life. And the presence of mages with the attacking troops only made it worse.

A flock of ravens descended on a trebuchet crew, pecking at the men’s eyes so that they couldn’t finish loading. Brilliant blue knives of coherent mana rose up from the assaulting force to take a defending archer in the neck, throwing up a bright spray of blood. The ramp of a third siege engine fell, revealing a storm of shining silver shards that swept forty feet of the battlements clear of defenders, leaving only bloody chunks of flesh behind.

Everywhere Liv looked, men and women were dying. For a moment, she wanted nothing more than to dive back down to the waystone, take everyone she could, and get out. She remembered how Anson Fane had screamed when she’d killed him, and how the grasping ice of her pillars had been stained pink with his blood. Her stomach roiled.

Liv flew away from the battle and swooped low into the thick mana above the dam. The crown on her forehead reached out to the ancient Vædic magic below, and made contact. Most of the enchantments were closed to her, and she didn’t have the time to sit down with Sidonie and work through the defenses to gain full access. But she didn’t need it.

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There were massive banks of mana stone, holding enormous quantities of power, and she seized them with the crown. Liv opened her mouth and breathed in, like her father had taught her to do so long ago, and let the raw, unfiltered mana of the rift surge into her.

At the same time, she reached up with her wand, stretching it above her head, and began to work at the clouds overhead. Even this far south, there was plenty of water. Liv wouldn’t have been surprised if Ashford was due for a good bit of snowfall that evening, but she had other plans. In cloud after cloud, she used infinitesimally tiny particles of ice to begin to build a charge.

In the end, she had to settle for less than she wanted. If she’d thought the defenders could hold, Liv would have held off until the sky was fit to burst with pent up lightning - but if she didn’t move quickly enough, her magic would be useless anyway.

It would have to be enough.

Liv banked away from the dam and the rift, flying as quickly as she could toward the attacking army. She needed to stay high enough that they couldn’t reach her with crossbows, but it was hard to judge the distance...

“Lucent Aiveh Nevn Æn’Manim!” Liv shouted, and flung her wand forward to point it at the heart of the besieging force. Twenty-eight rings of mana left, she counted in her head, as the royal word of lightning roused at the back of her mind.

In rapid succession, nine tongues of lightning stabbed down from the clouds overhead, connecting the sky with the ground in flashes of light that came so close together, they might almost have been one. The rumbling peals of thunder followed an instant later, but by that time, the damage had already been done.

At each impact point, bodies smoked, and the taste of the lightning lingered on the air. For just a moment, the fighting seemed to pause, as if everyone on the battlefield caught their breath at once, and Liv felt hundreds of eyes on her.

Rather than hunch her shoulders in to hide, she moved immediately to her next spell - one that she didn’t have to speak aloud, after all the time she’d spent practicing in the bath chamber at Coral Bay. Six blades of adamant ice formed from the ambient moisture in the air around her, three hanging to either side, held not in her hands, but in the grasp of Liv’s authority. Twenty-two rings of mana left; just more than enough to use her tether.

Liv tucked her wings and dove down to the battlements, skimming above the walls at nearly the speed of a gyrfalcon intent on its prey. Around her, six frozen swords spun, cutting men around her as she passed. A sword-hand went flying, hilt still clenched in a fist that would never unclasp again. A man who’d been foolish enough to remove his helm paid for it with a skull split cleanly as a melon. A woman in royal colors, wielding a spear, screamed when Liv took her behind the knee, where she knew there would be no armor.

Soldiers saw her coming and threw themselves down onto the cold, wet stones of the ramparts, trying to escape. The swords found them anyway. A few even decided to try their luck leaping off the wall, preferring to chance the fall rather than face her.

When she’d cleared a single side of the castle, Liv swept her wings around and rose in a cloud of blades. “Get to the waystone,” she shouted, and the Ashford men scrambled for the stairs.

Aluth whispered at the back of her mind, and Liv spun to see a mage with a hooked nose and a widow’s peak, rising above the battle on a disc of shining blue mana. His face looked vaguely familiar.

“If we’d thought there was a good chance you’d show yourself here, the guild mistress would have come herself,” the older man shouted across the wall. “Good fortune for me. The king will reward me handsomely for your head, girl. But he’d pay even better for a prisoner. I’d recommend you throw down that wand.”

Liv frowned. “Who are you?”

“Jasper Cawley, Court Mage of Duskvale,” the man answered, raising a wand of ebony. “And I’ve been culling rifts for longer than you’ve had a word of power.”

“You’re one of Genevieve’s then?” Liv nodded, as the memory came to her - him sitting with the woman who’d killed Jurian, one of the coterie that lingered in the supposed guild mistress’s wake.

“Last chance,” Cawley offered. “Surrender and the king might be inclined to mercy. Better to be hanged than drawn and quartered.” He cocked his head to one side. “You’re a woman, though, so I suppose it would be burning at the stake, instead.”

It was all Liv could do not to laugh at the man. She tried to compare his threats to the oppressive feeling of power which had come from Ractia in her vision, or even the shade of Celris. It was like trying to threaten a wolf with an ant.

Cawley flourished his wand, and cast silently. Half a dozen blades of mana flew forward, but Liv simply allowed her Authority to extend outward. Frost cracked along the stones of the wall beneath her, and the mana-blades dissolved into motes of mana, which she drew in to replenish herself. Twenty-three. Then, Liv pressed.

The court mage collapsed to his knees under the weight of her Authority, crushed against the surface of his mana platform. Liv considered whether or not she should simply dissolve the disc and let him fall; it was unlikely that he would survive, and even if he did, he’d at least break a limb. That would take him out of the battle.

Before she’d quite made up her mind, however, the glint of light on metal gave her just enough warning to click a button on her wand. A wall of ice rose between her and the incoming storm of silver, but one small shard skittered off the top of the wall, rather than getting caught and embedded. Liv tucked her wings and threw herself to the side, but not before the jagged, glinting thing drew a line of blood across her right cheek.

Arianelle Seton floated in the air above the castle wall, lifting herself up above the barricade of ice that Liv had raised. Bracelets of silver on her wrists, torcs at her upper arms, a great polished buckle on her double-wrapped belt, and even the buttons on her boots, were all made of the same metal. Her strawberry-blonde hair had been braided back tightly, to keep it out of her way, and the cruel smile on her lips was the same one that Liv remembered from every time the girl had said something horrible and cruel.

“Authority isn’t particularly useful against me,” Arianelle called across the length of the empty rampart between them. “I missed you when you ran from Coral Bay.” Twisted, jagged chunks of silver tore themselves free from Liv’s icewall and returned to the spinning vortex of metal around the other woman.

“You got me through the thigh, actually,” Liv admitted. “But it wasn’t quite enough to kill me.” She reached out with her left hand, palm flat, and swept it down. Her Authority crushed the spell that Jasper Cawley had been using to reach the top of the wall, and it fell apart like smoke, dumping the court mage out of sight with nothing more than a scream. She couldn’t afford to be kind if it meant facing two enemies at a time.

“That’s a nice crown you’re wearing,” Arianelle said, with a smirk. “Is it silver?”

Liv’s eyes widened, and she moved, beating her wings for height while her swords dove instead, swooping straight for the other woman. Chunks of metal knocked into the first three swords, deflecting them so that they shot wide.

“Arget - ah!” Arianelle’s incantation cut off with a wordless scream when Liv’s fifth sword slashed across her mouth, slicing her face open so horribly that Liv caught a glance of the girl’s teeth through her opened cheek before she’d gotten far enough above that she couldn’t see anything clearly anymore.

Liv had just enough mana to activate her tether, but if she got drawn into an extended fight that was liable to change quickly. She could dip into the stores in her ring and wand if she needed to, but staying to face a woman who might use the crown Liv was wearing to crush her skull didn’t strike her as the smartest matchup.

Instead, she flew over the walled-road that connected the castle to the waystone. The Ashford soldiers, what was left of them, were in full retreat, with the royalists pursuing them. Liv drew mana out of the stone in the pommel of her wand, just enough to raise an icewall between the defeated troops and their pursuers, then tucked her wings and landed to one side of the waystone, which was trailing wisps of mana after its most recent activation.

“Report,” Liv ordered, looking to Kaija. Her swords hovered to either side of her, waiting for the next threat.

“We sent through everyone we could and held nothing back,” the Elden armorer said. “Just like you said.”

Which meant, Liv realized, that the only one left who could activate the waystone was her. She glanced back toward the open gate, where scores of Ashford soldiers were fighting a desperate retreat. There was no way she could possibly take them all.

“Blood and shadows,” she cursed. No matter what she did, Liv didn’t see a way to save them. Instead, she pointed her wand at the waystone. “Get back.”

Liv used her father’s favorite spell - she had to suck her guild ring and pearl dry to do it, and it left her only twenty rings, but that was all she needed. Crystals of adamant ice erupted from beneath the waystone, cracking the white disc into chunks. The Vædic enchantments that had lasted twelve hundred years sparked and died.

“What have you done?” Sidonie gasped.

“Now they can’t possibly follow us, or get back to Freeport. Everyone grab onto me and take hold.” Liv waited just long enough for all of them - Piers and the Whitehill soldiers, Kaija and the Kelthelis warriors, and Sidonie, to crowd around her, and stretch out their hands. Then she spoke a single word.

“Nesēmus.”