Liv pushed her plate of venison pie, now covered with only a few remaining crumbs and a smear of brown gravy, across the table to give herself a little bit of room. She leaned back in her chair, feeling pleasantly over-stuffed, and sighed.

“I’ve missed your cooking, Mama,” she admitted.

Margaret Brodbeck grinned, from across the table where she sat next to Gretta in the afternoon sunlight. “There’s less mana-rich stag meat than there used to be,” she admitted. “Between most of the hunters having been with you in Varuna, and then all the construction at Bald Peak scaring the animals away, I think. But I managed to get a nice helping of stew meat, just for you.”

“You look good,” Gretta said, just a little too loudly.

“Thank you, Gretta.” Liv made certain to raise her own voice in return, and to speak clearly. The old woman looked more frail than Liv had ever seen her before: her eyes were cloudy, her hair thin, and even the skin of her knuckles looked as thin as parchment. She also, it turned out, did not hear as well as she once had.

“She’s right,” Margaret observed. “I’m guessing you’ve been in a rift, recently?”

“Nightfall Peak, while we searched through what Ractia left behind,” Liv admitted. “And then we came back through the waystone, of course. I haven’t been at Whitehill long enough for the headaches to begin, yet, though I know they’ll be coming. I don’t intend to stay that long, to be honest.”

“Archie seems to think you’ll build a palace right on top of the mountain,” Margaret said.

The man who’d wed Liv’s mother wasn’t present; he still had his hands full functioning as steward of Castle Whitehill, particularly in the absence of Matthew and Beatrice. As a result, Liv doubted that he spent much time at the home she’d bought for her mother, in The Hill.

The building was more aptly described by the term ‘house,’ rather than manor, and was one of the more modest buildings in the wealthy neighborhood. Before the war against Lucania, it had belonged to an old family of knights who had served Baron Henry and his ancestors for generations. Only a father and a son had remained, the elder a widower and the younger unwed, and after both had died fighting at the pass, Liv had decided to make the property a wedding present.

The dining room, however, had been fitted with several large, paned windows, each set with clear glass. It was the most modern room in the building, filled with natural sunlight and, now that Margaret Brodbeck had taken ownership, all manner of potted herbs. Liv found it much more pleasant than the great hall at the castle, which was designed for feasting large numbers of knights, guests, and soldiers late into the night, by the light of roaring fires.

“I don’t know about the word palace,” Liv grumbled. “I’d intended to use the rock of the summit to finish a castle, but we stopped once we had a curtain wall, siege engines, and barracks, because there simply wasn’t time to finish.” She’d thought, at the time, that Rosamund would enjoy designing a place for the two of them to live, once the fighting was all done with. That clearly would not be happening.

“It’s pretty far down my list of things to get done,” Liv admitted. “Between this council at the Hall of Ancestors, getting a functioning college built, and the fact that I’m going to have to go to Freeport at some point…”

“You do actually need a place to live, though - a home,” her mother pointed out. “Someplace that isn’t going to make you sick simply by the act of living there.” Margaret Brodbeck hesitated for a moment. “And you aren’t the only one.”

Liv frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I know that you went out of your way to bring in healers from the east,” her mother said.

“Everyone knows that,” Gretta broke in loudly. “It’s one of the reasons most people like her.”

Margaret patted Gretta on her arm. “Yes. You don’t have to look very far to find someone whose brother or sister, husband or wife, survived the pass because of the easterners’ magic. But there are also quite a few people who died; and I imagine once all of the troops are back from across the ocean, we’ll find there’s quite a few who were lost fighting there, as well.”

“Unfortunately.” Liv nodded. “It could have been more. What Ractia did at the end -” she held off from telling her mother that the entire army could have been destroyed.

“Which means there are children who’ve lost their parents,” Liv’s mother continued. “War orphans. And even some of the refugees who came from Ashford, or who fled Lucania before the worst of the fighting started – well, some of those people died on the way. Got sick or starved. The point is, Liv, if you go down to the Lower Banks, you’re going to find a lot of poor children living on the street. They don’t have a trade, and they don’t have anyone to take care of them.”

The crowds of children who had followed Liv up through the city to The Hill took on an entirely different meaning, now that she listened to her mother speak. She’d assumed they were the sons and daughters of the butchers and drovers and other tradesfolk who lived in the Lower Banks, and that they had home to return to each night. If she’d known, she would have bought them each a meal, instead of a piece of candy.

“I want to turn this place into an orphanage,” her mother explained. “I understand it would look badly for the queen’s mother to be a cook in the castle kitchens, now. But I can’t simply sit around all day and do nothing. There are more rooms in this house than I’d ever know what to do with, even having Gretta with us. And you know Archie and I are too old to have any more children. A lot of the bedrooms, we could fit more than one bed –”

Liv made a decision, and raised her hand, holding up the first two fingers in a gesture that she would never had used with her mother even a year before. “Yes. Yes, of course.” She sighed. “I should have thought of this. I’ll give orders to Master Teller, with the Banking Guild, to give you funding. Put together an estimate for how much it would cost you to get everything started. I’m certain Archibald can help with the numbers – he’s been running a castle for long enough. And they need to be educated. I’ll send Lia Every to speak to you about that.”

“It’ll be good to have little ones running around, getting underfoot,” Gretta remarked. “This place is too quiet.”

For a moment, Liv could see it: the old woman surrounded by children, as she told them stories of Mirriam, Semhis Thorn-Killer, or some other ancient hero. The image made her smile.

☙

That was perhaps the most pleasant of all the matters Liv had to deal with before leaving Whitehill again. She set herself a limit of three days and three nights in the city, and by the end of that, she wasn’t certain whether her pounding headache was the result of all of the work she had to do, or came from spending too much time outside of a rift. If she was being honest with herself, the answer was probably both.

A response came from Valegard, on the third day, confirming that Arnold Crosbie would meet Liv and her party at Al’Fenthia, to proceed from there overland to the Hall of Ancestors, which she understood to be centrally located in Elden lands. That was one thing resolved easily.

Ambassador Ridley had to be put off, which was difficult: the old woman wanted an answer as to precisely when Liv would be visiting Freeport.

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“Call it six months,” Liv finally declared. “Time enough for my sister-in-law to give birth, and be settled back home with Matthew at the castle. I’ll feel more comfortable leaving for a while when I know Triss is safe and the baby is healthy.”

The answer put a sour look on the woman’s face, but it was an answer, and she took it, departing the solar with a promise to write back to the Council of Regents in Freeport immediately.

Liv visited the captive members of the Red Shield Tribe, in the dungeons maintained by the city guard. Those cells had been meant to hold, for the most part, petty criminals and men who’d gotten themselves arrested after a night of carousing and drunken brawls. It had never been designed for seventeen prisoners of war to be held indefinitely.

Kaija insisted on half a dozen guards accompanying Liv there. There didn’t seem to be any danger of prisoners breaking free, and even if they did, there were already plenty of city guards – nevermind the fact that Liv could probably put a stop to an escape all by herself. Still, if she didn’t listen and then something happened, Liv knew that she’d never hear the end of it.

The whispers began, from either side of the stone corridor, as soon as the hunters recognized her. “Lady of Winter” was clear enough, but half of it was in the tongue of Varuna, which Liv wasn’t yet fluent with.

It was a man with a wicked, fresh scar running from his forehead, across a ruined nose all the way down to his jaw, who stood up, walked to the iron bars, and spoke with her.

“What’s your name?” Liv asked him.

“Rolling Thunder.”

“You and your people are coming with me to the Hall of Ancestors, in the north,” Liv explained. “We’ll begin travelling by waystone, but much of the route will be overland. I’d rather not worry about you all trying to kill us or escape along the route. So, I’m telling you now, that representatives from the Red Shield Tribe under Soaring Eagle will be there. My aim is to send you all back with your people.”

“You won’t kill us?” a woman called from the cells behind Liv.

“Not if you don’t make me,” she answered, half turning around. The woman had lost her arm at the elbow: it looked as if some great predator had fastened its jaws there, and bitten right through the bone. It might even have been Wren. “We’ll be bringing Nighthawk Wind Dancer there as well, and his daughter Wren will be meeting us. Can I trust you all to make the journey without causing me trouble?”

“Most of us are in no condition to fight,” Rolling Thunder admitted, raising empty hands to either side, to show that they had no weapons, in any event. Still, Liv knew that most of them could take forms that would be dangerous in and of themselves. However, his next words gave her pause.

“Nor would we fight against one of the gods.”

Liv hesitated. “One of the gods.”

Rolling Thunder nodded. “None of us would ever have imagined the Great Mother being defeated – but we have listened to your soldiers talk. Many of them say you are the Lady of Winter; that you consumed the heart of your ancestor in his frozen tomb, and now wear his crown. This, we understand. We had no place interfering in a fight between two goddesses.”

Liv wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a goddess. But if believing that would keep them out of trouble during the trip north, she decided that it would be better not to throw a gift away. “You know not to abuse my mercy, then,” she told them all, raising her voice to be certain they heard. “My men will fetch you when we’re ready to leave. Until then, you will wait here.”

The common element between all of Liv’s troubles was, of course, money.

Her mother needed coin to get an orphanage running. Arjun needed more to set up a hospital. Keeping seventeen prisoners cost money, as did building the new campus at Bald Peak. Kaija had spent everything Liv had given her to set up Liv’s personal guard. And before all of this, Julianne and Henry had thrown every resource they had at their disposal into preparing for war, including paying a premium to have workers from the Masons Guild raise the wall at the south pass – a wall which now needed to be repaired.

In short, Liv’s new kingdom was bleeding money faster than a man who’d had his neck sliced open. She transferred the entirety of her own savings in the kingdom account, but of course Benedict had cancelled the royal stipend Liv had once enjoyed under King Roland.

Whatever spare time she could snatch for herself – usually at mealtimes – she spent with Keri, trying to learn just what she was getting into when she travelled north. One of the first things she found out was that her count of votes had been wrong.

“There are more than seven houses?” Liv set her goblet of wine down on the table with an audible thunk. “But only seven houses ever sent troops to help fight Ractia. I kept track.”

Across the table from her – they were eating in the solar, rather than in the great hall – Keri set his knife down next to his plate. “That’s because four of the houses don’t maintain any significant military force,” he explained. “If you’d grown up in the north, you would have learned all this. You’d have met Isakki stone-workers, or had a family member who trained with the Esteri healers at Kathis.”

Liv groaned, raised her hands to her face, and ran her fingers through her hair in frustration. A count of seven houses, at three representatives each on the council, added to six between Whitehill and the Red Shield Tribe, had meant she was only planning on needing a total of fourteen votes. Now she had no idea how many people she needed.

“How many are there, actually?” she asked.

“Eleven left,” Keri told her. He picked his utensils back up and cut a slice of roast hare. Liv could see how carefully he moved, as if he still didn’t trust that his left hand would do what he wanted it to. “We’ve lost three, over the course of twelve hundred years. In addition to the two I just mentioned, I imagine you haven’t had any exposure to the Unconquered Houses of Kaulris or Veitha.”

“This is the first I’m hearing of either.” Liv felt stupid and foolish, for having promised Wren that she would be safe. Four additional houses meant twelve additional votes - at least six of which she would need to earn, somehow. From people that she’d never met, and whose motivations she knew nothing of.

“The Veitha were servants of the Vædic Lady of Song,” Keri explained, in between bites. “She left with Bælris, when the war first started. She taught them to accompany her - to sing harmony, to support her voice with theirs.”

“...I can see how that skill set doesn’t exactly lend itself to fighting,” Liv grumbled. “What about the other one?”

“House Kaulris is a different matter.” Keri seemed to choose his words carefully. “They were twisted by the Lord of Fear. He was killed early in the war, but… his tastes were different. You know that most of the old gods wanted beautiful servants?”

Liv nodded. “That’s why our hair, our eyes, come in colors you won’t see in any human.”

“Kaulris didn’t care about beauty. He wanted servants who inspired fear naturally - on sight. He twisted them, formed them into hideous shapes. Even among the other houses, those from House Kaulris never show themselves openly," Keri explained. “If you see a woman wearing a veil, a man with a mask that covers his entire face - robes that obscure the body. Those will be Kaulris’s descendents. They have, as you might imagine, a difficult time making matches outside of their own house.”

“I thought Celris’s statues were horrible,” Liv murmured, her meal temporarily forgotten. “But that sounds like torture.”

“The kind of torture that still persists, over a thousand years later,” Keri agreed with her.

“What can I offer people who have suffered like that?” Liv wondered aloud. “What could I possibly say to them that won’t seem like an insult?” She had a hard time thinking of herself as beautiful, even though she knew that both Cade and Rosamund seemed to have liked her appearance well enough. But even the scars Arjun’s work had left her with were nothing compared to what a god with unlimited time and too much power would have been able to do to his slaves.

“I don’t know,” Keri admitted. “They keep to themselves, Liv. If they talk to anyone, it will be the other unconquered houses. Perhaps that will give us an opening.”

“Give you an opening,” Liv said. “It’s House Bælris that is Unconquered – not Syvä or Däivi.”

Keri shrugged. “I suppose so. I’ll see if I can set up that meeting, then. Now, we don’t want to get there too early. Being one of the first houses to arrive makes you look desperate. People who actually have power can make others wait for them. But we also don’t want to arrive too late, because we need time to negotiate before things begin…”

☙

When they rode north along the mine road, the morning of the fourth day, it was with Liv’s entire personal guard, Keri’s riders from Mountain Home, a carriage for Master Grenfell and Thora, a wagon loaded with Wren’s father in a block of ice, and seventeen prisoners marching on foot. That wagon – one of three – had been loaded with everything needed to make camp at the Hall of Ancestors: tents, ropes and poles, cauldrons for cooking, sacks of grain, barrels of ale and wine, and furs and blankets for sleeping in the cool northern nights.

Steria had arrived from Varuna in time to carry Liv north, and she rode at the front of the column with Keri, Kaija, Linnea and Olavi. Though she knew Wren and Ghveris would be joining them, it still felt uncomfortable to be leaving Arjun behind.

When they reached the construction around the waystone, the Elden soldiers began sending the prisoners and the wagons through to Al’Fenthia. Liv and Keri, however, had one more thing to do before they left the Aspen Valley: they needed to ascend to the ring, high above, and find out exactly what Beatrice Crosbie had been up to during all her time among the ruins of the Vædim.