The contrast between the high desert and the mountains clustered around Nightfall Peak was obvious from high above. It was the colors, more than the elevation: shades of brown, orange, and gray gradually began to include muted greens, until at last the slopes which were fed by snowmelt bloomed a vibrant emerald. And through it all, the southern tributary of the Airaduinë wound its way down, down from the heights, gaining strength and swelling in size with every mountain rill that emptied into its course.

Wren could just make out the encampments along the upper slopes, where Calm Waters had found her a year and a half ago. Rather than makeshift tents and trenches dug for latrines, there were now barracks and houses, stockades and corrals, all fashioned from wood. Woodsmoke from a score of cookfires drifted up, eventually fading into the endless blue of the open sky. It was a town in all but name, with streets of bare dirt worn into the mountain side by the tread of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet. On a sun-drenched rock face, two wyrms coiled about it each, soaking in the heat. There was even a garden, off to one side, with fresh turned earth for the spring planting.

And yet, even in the air, she couldn’t risk approaching any closer. Not with a half dozen bats in the air, flying patrols, and the layers of wards that had been laid down all along the approach. She could see them below - ridges of black iron, fastened into concentric circles around the encampment. Lower down the slope, wooden stockades, observation towers which were little more than platforms atop four poles, trenches lined with spikes blocked off every path of ascent. At each stockade, ten Antrians waited.

Dipping one wing, Wren turned and began to descend, making for the camp where the other Alliance scouts were waiting for her. More than two dozen tents had been pitched on the plateau that Commander Soile had picked out, just beneath the first cataract. She hit the ground mid-shift, her Dakruiman boots landing with a muted thump on green grass that they hadn’t quite managed to kill, yet. That would come in time, as the camp grew.

Emma Forester and her father Kale, along with Eliina, the white-haired commander of House Syvä’s Ice Hunters, and Old Bill Walker, the mountain man with a wild beard nearly as wide as Wren’s waist, were all waiting for her, just outside the largest of the tents.

“Any changes?” Eliina asked. Her short, direct sentences had come off as brusque until Wren realized that she was still learning Lucanian.

Wren shook her head, and together they all shuffled past the flap of canvas, to where a map lay unrolled on the ground. Each of them crouched or sat: they were all scouts, woodsmen and hunters here, and none of them needed the sort of folding camp chairs, tables and cots that would come later, with the main part of the Alliance army.

“Still ten Antrians at each choke point,” Wren said. “I saw one here, past the third cataract, that we didn’t have marked before.”

It was Emma who dipped a quill in ink, marked the spot, and wrote a neat label. She had the best handwriting out of all of them – from keeping her husband’s ledgers, if she was to be believed. Wren had a hard time imagining the other huntress content raising a pair of children and helping her husband around the smithy, but then she’d never had much luck in relationships, herself.

“Call it seventy of the rust-buckets, then,” Old Bill muttered. He brought out a wooden pipe that looked like the nicest thing he owned, and began packing it.

“That fits with the numbers we believe they brought out of the Foundry Rift,” Wren confirmed, with a nod. “Half a dozen bats in the air. I still didn’t see more than two wyrms.”

“Safe to say that’s all they have, then,” Eliina said. “They lost one at the Hall of Ancestors, more at the Foundry –”

“One in the jungle on the way to Nightfall Peak,” Wren added.

“-- and House Iravata rarely had more than a score trained for war at any time, in the first place,” Eliina finished.

“The total numbers are less than I expected,” Emma admitted.

Her father shrugged. “You’re letting what happened at the pass mix your thinking up,” Kale told his daughter. “It took supply lines on both sides to support those armies. These people have just been squatting on top of a mountain, hunting and growing whatever they can to survive. There was no way they could support thousands of fighters.”

“Still, Ractia has a waystone,” Wren said. “We have to assume that she can pull in soldiers from every other rift in Varuna that hasn’t been claimed by our people. And spreading out like that would ease the burden, as far as finding food.”

“The bitch of it is going to be all that magic,” Old Bill grumbled, stabbing one fat finger down at where they’d marked the wards on the map. “Five good hunters we’ve lost to those wards.”

Grim looks settled on every face in the tent, and Wren couldn’t help but feel the same frustration as the others. They should have been able to get closer to Ractia’s lines. Every single scout they’d brought was a practiced stalker, capable of taking a stag by surprise. It was galling to be stymied by magic – and the process of finding buried wards was exhausting.

The first had been a complete surprise: one of the mountain men from Gold Creek took one step too far upslope and hardly had time to scream before a single, curling spike of black iron erupted out of the base of his neck, spraying blood everywhere. The man had died twitching on the ground, unable to even draw breath.

It was only after they’d dug up the area with spears that they found a line of iron, buried beneath the earth. It must have been there for months, because grass and scrub had grown over it so thickly that no sign of digging could be spotted.

After that, everyone had been on high alert – but the wards were camouflaged so well that they lost one of the Elden ice hunters next, this time to spontaneous combustion. The only one of the commanders with her own magic, Eliina had eventually concluded that the mana stored within the scout’s body had been transmuted to fire, burning him alive from the inside out.

From then on, they’d started catching rabbits, squirrels, and any other small animals they could get, which they used for probing the ascent. It was slow, boring, gruesome work, and every time one of the rabbits died in some horrible, gruesome way, they marked down another ward. The magic of, presumably, Ractia, riddled the mountain.

All of which had been done in less than two years - because Wren didn’t recall any of these defenses from her time at Nightfall Peak. Back then, they’d been happy simply to have found a place to stop moving, and their efforts had been turned toward securing shelter, food, and water. Wren could only imagine that after suffering a string of small defeats – at Coral Bay, the Foundry Rift, the bridge, and the Hall of Ancestors – Ractia had begun fortifying.

“Any particular messages to pass on?” Wren asked, looking around the tent.

“Just as long as the higher-ups know we can’t hold here,” Old Bill said, letting out a puff of sweet-smelling smoke that filled the tent. “If they come down the mountain with all those machines and wyrms and what have you, we’ll have to scatter. There’s got to be five hundred cultists on this fucking mountain – maybe more.”

“Valtteri will know that,” Eliina said, with a tone of utter confidence.

“If they move downslope before I get back, just scatter,” Wren reminded them. She grabbed the map, blew gently on the fresh ink where Emma had marked an addition, and when she was satisfied, rolled the piece of calfskin up. “And if I’m not back in two days, send a pair of messengers on foot through the desert. Silica should find you once you hit her territory.”

Everyone in the tent nodded: they’d all marched across the high desert in the first place under the shadow of Silican’s enormous, spread wings, as the great wyrm circled overhead like a wandering storm-cloud. With the map in hand, Wren ducked back out of the tent, took her bat form, and winged her way east.

Stolen novel; please report.

☙

When Wren reached Feic Seria, it was much the same, though with far more people in the room.

She arrived at sundown, and was immediately ushered into the same cavern where the commanders had met on the day that Wren and Liv had first arrived by waystone. The smaller map used by the scouts was immediately rolled out alongside the enormous one which had been crafted for strategy sessions, made up of four hides stitched together. Goblets of wine, platters of food, and bottles of ink, along with quills, were set out close at hand to each of the people around the table. Wren noticed that lower-ranking soldiers stood silently against the rock wall, each one awaiting an order to carry a message, run and fetch something or someone, or perhaps even to clear away the food.

Liv sat at one end of the table, with her grandmother on one side of her, and her great-uncle Eilis on the other. Wren assumed that Eilis had come to represent House Däivi among the group of elders who had assembled to fight Ractia, since Liv’s grandmother was technically a part of House Syvä, by marriage.

At the other end of the table, the grey-eyed commander from Soltheris, Juhani, sat in a cluster with Keri’s father, Ilmari, Sohvis, and an elder that Wren didn’t recognize – an old woman with eyes that matched Juhani’s. That would be the elder of House Kalleis, then.

On one side, spread out between the two poles, sat the humans from Whitehill and the mages guild: Bryn Grenfell, Brom, and Sir Randel, who, despite once having objected to Liv’s leadership due to her lack of experience, now had been placed in command of the Whitehill knights who remained fit to do battle.

Opposite the humans, Liv’s father, Valterri, sat with commander Soile and Elder Aira, as well as Aatu and a man with a lavender tinge to his skin. From the resemblance, Wren identified him at a glance as a member of House Asuris, just like Taika, in Calder’s landing. Kaija, Miina, and Ghveris stood behind Liv, with the massive Antrian at the center, but they weren’t the only protection: two members of the new personal guard were stationed at the entrance to the hollowed out cavern.

While Ghveris gave Wren a nod, Liv didn’t meet her eyes.

“Report,” she said, in the cold tone of a queen.

“Our best estimates put them at perhaps seventy, seventy-five Antrians,” Wren began. “Call it a hundred each from House Iravata and Manfred’s mercenary troops.”

“Those traitors are no members of my house,” Aatu interrupted, with a scowl.

“Whatever you want to call them, they’ve got at least two wyrms left,” Wren continued. “They keep half a dozen bats in the air at all times; if we assume they’re doing that in four shifts, that would be twenty-four Red Shield hunters. There were a score of blood-letters, when I was there last, so I think it's safe to assume all the hunters have been given some kind of predator form, better suited to fighting than a bat. Our best count is two hundred cultists making a sort of militia or levy, and gathered from all over - Lucania, the north, Lendh ka Dakruim. They aren’t trained soldiers, but they’ve got spears. Probably daggers.”

“Five hundred, roughly,” Soile announced, having done the tally in her head.

“Meaning we want at least fifteen-hundred for an assault,” Juhani observed.

Wren shook her head. “Keep counting. First of all, we need to assume they can bring more fighters in from the other rifts that are under her control. I know of three that we stopped at one the way to Nightfall Peak, on top of the bridge.”

“Agreed,” Valtteri said. “That was defended by Antrians, and Ractia made an effort to take it back during the eruption at the Garden of Thorns. We have to assume she’s holding those other points with a mix of Antrians and Red Shield.”

“We need to hold every waystone that we can confirm Ractia has visited,” Liv said. “When it's time to make the final push, we need at least one elder at every one.”

Many of those sitting around the table frowned, but before anyone could ask a question or raise an objection, Elder Aira spoke. “Livara is correct. That is absolutely necessary.”

“The second reason you’re going to want better than a three to one advantage is that she’s spent the last year, year and a half digging in,” Wren continued.

“She can’t have built a castle in that time,” Sir Randel objected.

“No, but she does have every route up the mountain blocked with at least one trenched palisade, with a watchtower and wards,” Wren explained. “You can see them marked, like this.” She leaned over the table to stab her finger down at the map that she and the rest of the scouts had prepared. “Each one’s held by ten Antrians, but the Red Shield on patrol can swoop down to reinforce them very quickly. And the longer they hold, the more time Manfred has to shift troops into position.”

“What sort of wards?” Bryn Grenfell asked. “Blood, obviously, which is bad enough.”

“We can confirm wards that involve, to be honest, a horrifying variety of ways to die,” Wren explained. “One of them seemed to conjure spikes of iron from inside a person’s body. Another one lit mana itself on fire, to burn one of our Elden scouts. Another one wrapped a squirrel in thorny vines that lacerated, strangled and poisoned all at once –”

“A squirrel?” Miina asked, her voice a bit hoarse. She lifted a goblet and took a sip of wine.

“We had to start capturing animals and using them to test the wards,” Wren explained. “It was the only way to get information on them without losing our people. One of them filled a rabbit’s lungs with water. Another grew these horrible tumors, in a matter of moments.”

“Ract,” Liv’s great-uncle, Eilis, declared. “Æter. Ais. Ved. Deru.”

“Aluth,” Bryn added.

“Are we really saying this monster is wielding six words of power?” Sir Randel asked. “That’s utterly insane. Archmagus Loredan was famous for having, what, three? Four?”

“I have time.” Liv shrugged. “Some of the enchantments in the Tomb of Celris used half a dozen words of power – even the healing enchantments we used to treat Keri and Rose involved four words. This is one of the Vædim. Against Benedict’s army, we had magical superiority. I think everyone here needs to get accustomed to the fact that our position is now reversed.”

“Perhaps not in numbers,” her father muttered. “The traitors to House Iravata make up too small a portion of Ractia’s troops, and most won’t have a second word. But yes, in absolute magical power, the Lady of Blood must be treated as out-classing any one of us. And she’s had plenty of time to set her defenses. We’re going to need to take our time bypassing each ward in turn.”

“All while under fire from Antrians,” Ghveris pointed out, the low rumble of his voice filling the entire cavern.

“We must assume that, yes,” Valtteri admitted. “Small teams, with people using Aluth and Dā at least – and anything that can break the wards themselves. What are they made of, Wren?”

“Iron,” she answered. “Buried in the earth, for the most part, and with enough undergrowth on top that you can’t tell by sight anyone’s dug the ground up.”

“But the outlying rifts need to be under our control, first,” Liv said. “So that she can’t escape, and to force her to pull everything back in to the mountains.”

Valtteri tapped his fingers against the table. “What’s the terrain on these other three rifts you know of, Wren?”

“There’s a ruined tower on top of a chunk of rock that floats about a hundred feet off the ground,” Wren said, raising her fingers as she listed targets off. “Best Aariv could guess, something went wrong with the enchantments at some point, and ripped it out of the ground. Not my favorite place to spend the night – I felt like it could come down at any moment.”

“There was a crystal – well, one big crystal, as big around as the trunk of a tree, with smaller ones growing all around it,” Wren continued. “That was wonderful, I had the worst nightmares I’ve ever experienced in my entire life while we stayed there. Then there was a cenote with a black obelisk at the bottom, knocked over on its side. She said it had been a shrine to Asuris. We lost someone swimming in the water and never found the body.”

“I will lead a group to the cenote,” Elder Aatu declared. “It may be that I can do something to counteract whatever is there.”

“Which means I should go to the crystal,” Liv declared. “As I believe I’m the only one here with the word of dreams. Bryn, I need you and Brom to go with whoever strikes the tower. You can use mana-discs to get everyone up there.”

“I will lead that particular expedition,” Juhani said.

“And I will begin moving troops forward to fortify the foothold our scouts have prepared,” Valtteri said. “I have word that the beasts for the baggage train have been purchased in Akela Kila, and are on their way. We must assume that as soon as we begin moving our main force to the plateau, Ractia’s general will begin harassing us at every opportunity. It will be bloody work.”

As the meeting began to break up, Wren tried to make her way through the crowd to get to Liv. Rather than greet her, however, her friend turned away and left the cavern, flanked by Kaija, Miina, and her new guards to either side.

For the first time since she’d agreed to protect Liv for Duchess Julianne, Wren realized that she was on the outside. And she didn’t at all like how it felt.