In the dim light just before dawn, on the day chosen for departure, Wren slipped through the quiet halls of the keep atop Bald Peak, passing from one circle of light through the darkness to the next, each cast by a brazier set in turn along the inner walls of the corridors. Each brazier was filled with glowing charcoal, sprinkled with sage, which flavored the smoke with a clean, earthy scent.

The rooms in the first floor of the keep were all jumbled around, being used for every purpose but the one they would eventually be put to, when the rest of the floors were finished. To Wren’s understanding, there wouldn’t be much use for a vault in any case, because Liv stored all of her money with the Bankers Guild; and so, Nighthawk Wind Dancer had been set in one of the meat cellars, which had already been engraved with Vædic sigils in the stone of the walls. Though Wren hadn’t made a study of the ancient language, even she could recognize Cel by this point, with how much use Liv made of it – and the two guards stationed outside the door had made certain to stand out several feet from the wall, to get themselves out of the chill.

These two were members of Liv’s personal guard. The idea of placing some of the newly trained soldiers here, instead, had been raised in at least one meeting that Wren had been present at, but Keri had insisted that they weren’t ready – and that, on top of that, he wasn’t training castle guards, but pikemen and crossbowmen. Wren suspected that sooner or later there was going to need to be a dedicated castle guard, separate and distinct from those under Kaija’s command who protected Liv, personally.

“Commander,” one of the guards said, inclining his head. The other lifted a key from the ring on her belt and used it to unlock the door.

Wren stepped inside, into the cold. It still felt odd to be addressed by a rank, but since she was the one leading the scouting expeditions to rifts around the world, she’d had to accept it in the end.

This room had no windows, and so it had been designed to be lit using enchantments in the ceiling. Here, the natural mana stone veins of the mountain had been left in place, and the motion of Wren’s body moving through the chamber activated the magic, causing the striations in the stone to light, shining a brilliant blue with sparks of gold.

The enormous block of ice resting in the center of the room reflected the glow. Wren’s boots rung against the stone of the floor until she reached her father’s frozen body, and there she stopped.

“I’m going to be gone for a while, again,” she said, pulling up the wooden chair that she’d left in the room on one of her previous visits. It creaked when she sat down. “To Freeport, this time. I’d rather we didn’t go, but I understand Liv’s reasons. I just can’t feel like we’re getting bogged down in politics and diplomacy and… in the meanwhile, Ractia’s out there doing something. I wish you could tell me what it was.”

They had made an attempt: two dreamstones, made by Master Grenfell, with one left resting atop the ice, and the other given to Wren. They’d thought that if Nighthawk Wind Dancer was going to be willing to speak with anyone, it would be his own daughter. But the moment Wren had entered his dreams, he’d attacked her.

The dream itself had been terrifying: a vast ocean of blood, endless and undisturbed by so much as a single ripple, under a dark and endless sky. There was no moon, and no ring, and the stars overhead were strange. Wren had spent her childhood learning to navigate the jungles of Varuna, and that had included how to use stars to find which way was north. She knew the difference between the summer sky and the winter, and what she saw in her father’s nightmarish world was neither.

Out of that entire, wide world of blood and sky, the only thing that broke the monotony was the rusting hulk of some ancient machine, half submerged in the blood. At the highest point, far above the blood lapping at the corroded metal, Nighthawk Wind Dancer had perched, like some horrible vulture, looking for a particularly choice corpse to descend upon.

Wren reached out for the ice, but stopped herself from actually touching it with her fingers. The last thing she needed was to get her skin stuck. “I’d like to take you back home to Varuna some day,” Wren said. “You should get to breathe the jungle air at least once before you die.”

☙

She wasn’t surprised that Ghveris was waiting for her outside the door when she left; Wren had made a habit of visiting her father before each of their expeditions. The guards locked the chamber behind them, and the Antrian fell in at Wren’s side as she set off back down the corridor. The sun had crested the mountains to the east, and now orange beams of light, nearly horizontal, shot in through the glass windows of the keep.

“Are you going to the great hall to eat?” Ghveris asked, once they were far enough away from the guards to have a conversation.

“The kitchen, first,” Wren told him. “To make sure they’ve refilled my enchanted vials. I don’t want to have to mess around trying to find a butcher and get blood in Freeport. You’re reloaded and recharged?”

A huff of steam and a rattling of machinery came from the enormous warrior at her side: it was, Wren had learned, the closest sound to a laugh he could make. “All of the supplies from the Tomb of Celris are here now,” Ghveris assured her. “I am ready to fight, and I have made certain everything I require has been packed to come with us.” There was a moment of silence, and then he asked, “have you been to this city before?”

Wren shook her head. “No. I’ve been to Whitehill, to Courland, and to Coral Bay. By the time I came to find Liv, she’d already been back from Freeport for years. I heard bits of the story – from her, Thora, and some of the others. It’s where she met a lot of them for the first time.”

“I do not know what to expect,” Ghveris admitted.

“Be more comfortable if we were gearing up to go to war?” Wren asked him, turning to look up at his helm-like face. She was fairly certain everyone else – well, except for maybe Liv – assumed that it could come off; after all, it had been designed to look like a piece of armor. But just like all of the other plates of enchanted steel, it was actually the closest thing to skin that the war-machine had. Pry it off, and all you would find were the stones graven with Bheuv, the word of sight, which were all that allowed him to be aware of his surroundings.

“Yes,” Ghveris admitted. “I could study our enemies – their tactics, their equipment, their lands. But there is no clear goal to achieve here, no tactical advantage to be gained, no enemy to eliminate. We are stepping into risk, and our failure is allowing something to happen to Liv. We can lose, but I see nothing to be gained.”

“Well, I know how to make you feel better,” Wren said, reaching out to place a hand on the vambrace that made up his arm. “While Liv’s dancing around at masques and negotiating, you and I are going to be going hunting in Freeport.”

“What sort of game?”

“Cultists,” Wren said. “Think about it. We know the dowager queen was worshipping Ractia, and at least some members of House Sherard. Supposedly the dukes and Archmagus Loredan have been looking for any others, but we’ve been occupied in Varuna. We haven’t had a chance to see what we can turn up in Lucania until now. And if we can find members of Ractia’s cult –”

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

“They may know where she’s fled to,” Ghveris rumbled. “Yes. Yes, this sounds much more to my tastes. Let us go hunting together, Wren.”

From the kitchen, Wren retrieved half a dozen of her enchanted vials, each of which had been filled with fresh chicken blood from the feast the evening before. She slipped them through the leather loops on her belt, and then accompanied Ghveris to the great hall, where Liv was already seated at the high table with Keri, Arjun, Sidonie, Miina, and Vivek Sharma. Two of Kaija’s guards stood to either side of the door, and two more were placed along the walls near the high table, where Kaija herself stood behind Liv in full armor.

The scent of shaved steak cooked with Whitehill sauce, sausages, eggs and fresh bread wafted through the room, lingering above the tables where guards and soldiers intermingled, clinking goblets, scraping knives on their platters, and laughing at each other’s jokes. It was enough to make her stomach rumble, and Wren knew there would be a platter waiting for her, but she hesitated.

“Doesn’t it get lonely?” she asked Ghveris. “Watching us all eat and drink, while you can’t do either?”

The enormous war-machine turned to her, and Wren could see the spark of blue flame from the enchanted stones hidden inside his armored helm. “Of all the things I wish I could do,” Ghveris told her, “feasting with my companions is not at the top of the list.” He gave another his of steam and grinding of gears. “But nor is it at the bottom. Go and eat, Wren. I will be here, and you will need your strength if we are to hunt our enemies.”

The Antrian’s massive gauntlet touched her back, ever so softly, and Wren was once again astounded by how gentle he could be. The same hands of articulated, enchanted steel which could rip an enemy in half, which could certainly have crushed her head as easily as one of those eggs which had been cooked up in the kitchen, had never once accidentally bruised her.

Wren nodded and hurried up the center aisle, where the voices of her friends greeted her, and where an empty place had been saved.

☙

By the time the expedition was ready to depart, gathered on the waystone at the foot of Bald Peak, it was rather large. Kaija had insisted on bringing all twenty of Liv’s personal guard, which left Wren to wonder who would be watching the door to the meat cellar where her father’s slumbering form was stored. Likely some of the House Syvä warriors who’d been garrisoning the walls since before the battle at the pass, she guessed.

To her surprise, Liv and Keri had been convinced to ride in a carriage, repainted from the Summerset green and white to the white and blue which had become Liv’s colors. Their horses were part of the baggage train, and the decision made more sense to Wren once she saw Keri’s son climbing into the carriage with them. Thora scooted in, as well, but she’d never been much of a rider, in Wren’s experience.

Miina rode with Wren, Kaija, and the guards, while Sidonie and Arjun would remain behind to help Matthew and Beatrice. Master Grenfell and Vivek Sharma had been given a second carriage, which Wren thought to be good judgement: both men were old enough that a fall from horseback would present great risk.

And then, of course, Ghveris walked alongside the horses and carriages, too large and heavy to be carried by anything but one of Liv’s conjurations.

Where once Liv might have been the one activating the waystone, now two of her guards took the task for themselves, signalled only by a very slight nod from Kaija. Light erupted from the waystone, obliterating the world, and for a time that was both all too brief and yet somehow eternal, Wren only existed between, in the emptiness. It might have been terrifying, if she hadn’t already been somewhere far worse, in her father’s dreams.

And then the world returned, solid beneath her boots, along with the scent of the ocean, the cry of gulls, and the noise of a bustling city. Wren saw that the Freeport waystone was enclosed by stone walls, and a gate before them blocked access to the rest of the city. A cold wind came whipping off the ocean, below them and to the west – the same sea air that whipped Caspian Loredan’s beard to one side, where he stood waiting.

Wren hadn’t seen the Archmage since she’d left Coral Bay with Liv, and for a moment the sight of him anywhere else was jarring. The old man fit so well at the college that it was difficult to imagine him leaving it.

The door of the carriage swung open, and Keri stepped out first, offering Liv an arm. It was polite theater: the girl could have blown the carriage open and flown up into the sky on shimmering wings of pure magic, if she’d wanted to, and a little step down to the ground wasn’t going to cause her any trouble. But the politics of the capital had clearly already begun, and Wren wasn’t even certain that Liv hadn’t enjoyed it, from her smile and the flush to her cheeks.

That was fine; it was the job of the rest of them to keep her safe. Wren pressed her knees against the flanks of her horse, moving herself right up behind Liv, Keri, and Rei, who had of course scrambled out of the carriage to follow his father.

“Livara.” Caspian Loredan said the name as if he was setting down a great weight, beneath which he had stooped and labored for a long time. “Thank you for coming. It is my dearest wish that this visit to Freeport will be far less eventful than the last time you made the journey.”

“Archmagus.” The wind teased a single strand of white hair out of Liv’s braids, and tossed it out to flutter like a pennant. Wren saw that her friend was wearing the Crown of Celris. “I wasn’t certain whether I’d ever see you again, after I left Coral Bay.” There was a moment of hesitation: someone less familiar with her friend might have missed it, but Wren didn’t.

“I hope you know that I didn’t kill Jurian,” Liv said.

“I have always found it difficult to believe that you would,” the old man admitted. “But when you and your friends fled, that left Genevieve as the only witness.”

“It’s that bitch’s fault he’s dead,” Wren said, before she could think better of it. “I almost wish she wasn’t dead, just so I could kill her for it.”

“Wren Wind Dancer.” The archmage met her eyes, and inclined his head. “I see that you still wear the daggers my friend made for you. I think that would make him happy. But I see a great many faces here that I am unfamiliar with, and I am being rude. I am Caspian Loredan, Archmagus of the Watchful Guild of Magim, and one third of the Council of Regents of Lucania. I welcome you all to Freeport.”

“You know Wren,” Liv responded. “This is Inkeris ka Ilmari, of the Unconquered House of Bælris, and his son Rei.”

“You addressed the great council, following the Day of Blood,” Caspian said, after a moment’s thought. “And I believe you visited Coral Bay as well, however briefly.”

Keri nodded. “When Liv’s grandfather was dying.”

“What makes you an archmage?” Rei asked the old man, in halting Lucanian.

Caspian Loredan smiled. “I will be happy to explain it to you,” he answered, in the same language. Then, he said something quietly in Vakansa, which made the boy smile.

“My cousin Miina –” Liv said, before being interrupted by the blue-haired young woman.

“Lady in Waiting.” Miina grinned.

“ – Ghveris, and Kaija, head of my personal guard. Master Grenfell and Vivek Sharma, who is a priest of the Trinity, originally from Lendh ka Dakruim, are in the second carriage. I suspect they may want to remain there until we’ve reached Acton House.”

“Rooms have been prepared for you at the palace,” Loredan offered, but Liv only shook her head. Wren had known this was coming: none of them felt comfortable on ground they couldn’t control.

“Matthew and I inherited the estate from Duchess Julianne and Baron Henry,” Liv said. “It is where our family has always stayed when we visited Freeport. We’ll be far more comfortable there. In fact, I sent my steward and a full staff ahead to open the house for us.”

“As you wish. We assumed that you would want the rest of the day to settle in, but there is a reception planned for tomorrow evening, which I hope you will do us the honor of attending.”

Liv nodded, and then Caspian Loredan called out to the guards who were manning the gate. In only a few moments, Liv, Keri and Rei had climbed back into the carriage, Caspian had stepped aside, and the entire procession was rolling out into the city.

Wren rode up close to the windows of the carriage, and was relieved to see a soft blue glow behind the windows, rippling with veins of gold. She rode up next to Ghveris and leaned over to murmur, “Her shields are up.”

No matter how Liv’s former teacher might feel about her, on a personal level, she was returning to the capital of Lucania not as the adopted daughter of Julianne, nor a mage of the guild – but as a rebel queen who’d won independence by personally crushing a crown army. Sooner or later, Wren knew, someone was bound to cause trouble.

And when they did, it was her job to stop it.