The body of Hadleigh Voss fit well enough. Younger than most he had worn, with good teeth and a full head of dark hair — vain, this one had been, which made the transition easier. Vanity was a door that opened from both sides. He flexed the fingers once, twice, feeling the tendons respond, cataloguing what the man had eaten that morning, the faint ache in his left knee that would need managing. It was good to be back in a man’s body. Women were more trouble than they were worth.

Across the hall of King Oswin’s court, Princess Lina laughed at something her companion said, and he watched her the way he had learned to watch things — with the patience of a man who has never once needed to hurry. She was young. Spirited. The court adored her, which was useful, and her father trusted his new advisor already, which was more useful still. He would marry her next year. He had decided this the way he decided most things: quietly, completely, and long before anyone else had thought to object.

Thyl had better weather than Bravia.

That was a plus.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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Frostfall brought one of the worst winters in record, with snow that never fell below three feet on the ground until the third week of Mysts and even then it remained unseasonably cold until The Festival of First Seed, marking the beginning of Plantings.

By then, Stormrest had mostly returned to normal aside from the ongoing work of reconstructing buildings. Children carried seedlings too and fro, gifting them to friends, neighbors, and strangers alike. By the end of the day, each family had a collection of a very wide variety of seedlings with which to begin their new gardens.

By the Season of bloom, seven weeks later, there would be surprises in every garden—something mislabeled or misspoken at the time of the exchange on the Festival of First Seed. It was part of the joy of the festival that lasted through Harvest.

Scarlet found Charles in the east wing of Kestrelmont, where he had converted what had once been a conservatory into something closer to a command post. Maps covered the long table. Letters were stacked and sorted. Two clerks moved quietly around him, and he did not look up when she entered.

“The Harwick grain stores,” she said.

“Arranged.” He made a note. “Three weeks ago.”

She looked at the table. The letters. The stacks organized by urgency and region in a system she hadn’t taught him and wouldn’t have thought of herself.

“The disputed boundary at Crestfall—”

“Referred to the county magistrate pending the king’s review. The reply is in the second stack, left side.”

She stood there for a moment.

Charles looked up.

“You’re very good at this,” she said.

He considered that. “Someone has to be.”

It was not a rebuke. It was simply true, and he knew it, and now so did she.

She walked back from Charle’s command post looking about the family home. The home she had come to at fourteen years old, after living the first part of her life in relative squalor. It was familiar to her. Every room. Every doorframe. Every ceiling molding. The bannister running up the stairs from the first to the second floor—the one she used to slide down when nobody was around to scold her.

Charles was the observant one. The one who sat back and watched things. The one who knew how to handle people and delicate situations with poise and attention. Details were his thing. Managing an estate was his thing. Perhaps, she wondered, if managing a whole nation was his thing.

Her skill set was action. Winning the land. Accomplishing what others thought impossible. But it wasn’t about managing it afterwards. She could, of course, but she took very little joy in it, whereas Charles was in his element.

He was more motivated now as well—the sort of thing that happens when you’ve found the one you want to be with, proposed, given her a ring you designed yourself, and had a wedding planned coincide with Harvest.

She was happy for Charles and Isabelle.

But she was unhappy by herself.

Her mother was in the small garden off the south corridor, the one that caught the afternoon light. She was not doing anything in particular — sitting with her hands in her lap, which was unusual for Elise.

Scarlet sat beside her.

For a while neither of them spoke.

“Talk to me,” Elise said at last.

“Mama. I miss him.”

“I know, dear,” she said, patting her daughter’s hand.

“I don’t know what to do with myself,” Scarlet said. “Charles has all the things done that father wanted. He’s better at it than me anyway. I just don’t know what I’m doing these days.”

“It’s natural to feel a little melancholy after an adventure on the road, when you’re cooped up in an estate doing the necessary work to make the estate run.”

“It’s not just that, Mama.”

“What do you mean, dear?”

“I am well loved,” she said. “Father adores me. Charles does in his own way. And I know you love me, Mama.”

“But?”

“Philip needs me, Mama.”

“What?” Elise said, staring at her daughter. “What did you say?”

“I love him. I want him. And I know he loves me too. But it’s more than that. I’m not needed here. I’m wanted, but not needed. Philip needs me.”

Elise smiled, a bittersweet smile. “You have found the important thing,” she said.

“What do you mean, Mama?”

“Before it was ‘I love him. I want him.’ It was all about what was good for you. All about what you wanted. And that’s important. It really is. But mature love is about the other person. It’s about what does his heart need. And now you know, Scarlet. Now you know.”

Scarlet dropped her head on her mother’s lap, and her mother played with her curls.

“I have to be where I am needed,” she said at last.

“Yes, you do,” Elise agreed.

“And Charles will be better at this than me.”

“Yes,” her mother said simply.

They said nothing as Scarlet rested on her mother.

After a few minutes, she looked up to see silent tears falling from her mother’s eyes.

“Mama?”

Her mother smiled down at her. “Love is a beautiful thing,” she said.

Scarlet wept.

After Scarlet wept, Elise went to her side table and produced a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a pen. She sat down to write.

Lady Christine, she wrote.

When she was done, she called the butler, who then brought in a guard.

“Ride with this to Wyndmere. Deliver it only to the hands of the Lady Christine LaPointe. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lady.”

Elise looked out the window into the garden, tears forming at her eyes again, but a slight smile graced her face.

Scarlet’s father was at his desk. The real Wentworth signet sat among his papers where it always did now, as though it had always belonged there, as though the eighty years of its absence had been a minor administrative error finally corrected.

He looked up when she came in and read her face before she said a word.

She told him anyway.

When she finished he was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the signet. Then he picked it up and turned it in his fingers the way she had seen him do a hundred times — not fidgeting, just thinking.

“You’re certain,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, father. I am certain.”

The king called for a scribe and dictated to him, checking with Scarlet from time to time. She nodded in agreement.

When it was done, the document sat on his desk. He held a quill in his hand, looking across the desk at his only daughter.

“Promise me one thing,” he said.

“Anything, daddy.”

“Find a temple. Be joined there. Under the light of Epherion.”

“I promise.”

He nodded, and then slowly signed his name to the bottom of the document.

He opened his desk and produced a red stick of wax. Holding it in one hand, he held the flame of a candled to the end and let the wax drip onto the paper, forming a circular blot below his signature.

He picked up his signet ring—the real one—and pressed it to the melted wax, holding it there for several seconds.

He spun the page around for her to look at and then he handed her the quill.

She underlined the word abdicate, and then signed her name at the bottom of the page below where a scribe had written her name in fine calligraphy.

She looked up at him. He looked older than he had before the winter. They all did.

“Daddy—”

“Go,” he said. Not unkindly. “Before I change my mind.”

She kissed his cheek and left him standing by his desk.

He sat in his chair, opened his bottom drawer, and poured himself a whiskey.

She packed light. Everything she needed fit into two bags and a bedroll. She had done it enough times now that her hands knew the order without asking her.

She found her mother in the corridor.

“Don’t make me cry,” Scarlet said.

“I won’t,” Elise said. She straightened Scarlet’s collar. Smoothed it. Left her hands there a moment. “Go.”

She kissed her brother in his study, and he held her for a long time, crying with her, despite her pleas that he not do so.

Scarlet Wentworth, princess of Bravia, but no longer heir to the throne, left by the south gate, heading south toward Thyl and, perhaps beyond.

She had done no further than a half mile when she heard a horse coming behind her at a gallop.

She pulled on the reins slightly.

“Whoa,” she said to Thistledown, who slowed to a walk. Then she turned to see who was following her.

She saw the flowing auburn hair first.

Christine pulled up beside her.

Scarlet looked at her, wide-eyed.

Christine smiled. “You didn’t think I would let you go alone, did you?”

“You want to come with me?” Scarlet asked.

“Hard telling what trouble they’ll get up to with out us,” Christine said, looking at the road ahead.

Scarlet nodded. “Do you think you could call me Esmerelda from now on?”

Christine grinned at her. “Absolutely, your highness.”

“Just Esmerelda.”

Christine nodded. “Shall we?”

Esmerelda Hale reached for her friend and squeezed her hand.

Then, she looked at the road ahead.

“I’m coming, Edmund,” she said.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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Twenty people sat around a bonfire in the courtyard of Kestrelmont, eating dinner outside—a thing unusual this late in the year, but manageable given Christine’s bonfire, which had proved its effectiveness on more than one occasion.

Her parents were still guests of the Wentworths. They would go home the next day to see what had become of Wyndmere, although given that Christine had obliterated so many undead in the courtyard, it was probably intact.

Isabelle Marlow and her parents were there, as they had been since the third day of the battle. Isabelle now sat close to Charles, her head on his shoulder, and Charles loved it. She had mostly returned to her former self following the Usurper’s control—though she now bore internal scars, nightmares that seized her from time to time. But she was, otherwise, the social butterfly who had dressed exactly that way at the masquerade, which had caused Charles to go to his desk at least once each day to look at the ring he had made for her the prior season.

The remaining eight exhausted knights were there along with the Duke and Duchess, and Scarlet’s cousins Travis, Bertrand, and Marcus.

It was the Duke who began the memorial. He stood, tapped his goblet with his spoon, and proposed a toast. “To Sir Drogoth,” he said. “Who burned with the fury of the sun to save the children.”

They drank together.

Amira stood next. “Those of you who only ever saw him spinning a blade of fire really missed out on who he was. He was gentle.”

Chenguer said, “He was thoughtful and educated.”

Scarlet spoke up. “He was kind and calm.”

They drank between each toast.

Aldric stood. “He was also funny. He could tell a wry yarn with the best of them.”

This brought some laughter, and a few tears.

Philip made a brief toast. “He did what Epherion asked of him.”

They were quiet for a long time, each person lost in their own thoughts as food and drink were passed around by servants who knew better than to disrupt the quiet.

Christine’s father, Richard LaPointe, spoke after a while. “We’ve lost our queen and her entire line. We’ve lost three thousand of our fellow citizens.”

“It would have been many more without the knights,” Caspian said.

“Quite right,” Richard said. He raised his glass. “To the Knights Celestial.”

“What’s going to happen to Bravia?” Isabelle asked quietly. “What’s going to happen to Stormrest?”

Richard turned to his daughter. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Tomorrow the House of Lords—what remains of us—will come together to select a new royal house.”

Elise spoke up for the first time. “I get the impression that many of the Aelvani and Urukesh, and even some of the Oroquai that came for the pilgrimage are eyeing Stormrest as a place to settle.”

“I’ve heard that too,” Scarlet said. “Some have said that directly to me.”

“Then Stormrest might become more like Falconholdt? We might no longer be exclusively a human city,” Isabelle said.

“It’s only been that way for a couple of generations,” Charles said from next to her. “Years ago there were both Aelvani and Urukesh who lived here. I’ve heard there are even some homes in the weavers’ district that are sized down for Aelfs. Personally, I think it would be great if we were a more diverse city.”

No one disagreed with his premise.

When the House of Lords finished their business the next day, Scarlet was no longer a duchess-in-waiting. Given the Wentworth immunity to whatever power the Unfinished had, the Lords had selected the Wentworth family as the new royal line to replace the deceased Arctoix in a vote that was seventy percent in favor of the Wentworths.

Caspian Wentworth would be crowned king and his wife Elise would be crowned queen. This made Charles a prince and Scarlet a princess nearly overnight.

The difficulty was that Scarlet was now faced with a choice about what her role should be. Princess and heir-apparent or a member of the Knights Celestial. If she were to stay, she would be awarded Kestrelmont and the Wentworth lands, while her parents took over the former Arctoix lands and Castle Winterhaven. If she were to go with the Knights Celestial, she would need to give all of that up, leaving it to her brother, Charles.

She had the argument with herself a dozen times before it came to a head with Sir Philip Beckwith. They were alone in the Kestrelmont drawing room.

“Chenguer has said that the Usurper has headed south,” Philip said. “Possibly to Thyl or even Corvaire.”

She said nothing.

“Esme?”

“I’ve been debating that for a few days now.”

“I understand,” he said.

“My parents, of course, want me to stay.”

“Of course.” He looked at the floor. “It’s safest,” he said.

“But part of me knows I need to fulfill this calling.”

He raised his eyes to hers.

“On the other hand, I’ve spent my whole life to achieve what is immediately within my grasp. Should I let it go now?”

“I can’t answer that for you,” he said.

“It would be a heck of a lot easier if you just told me what to do,” she said, a half smile playing on her face.

“When did you ever take the easy road?”

She nodded and chuckled. Just a little.

“I don’t know if this helps you or not,” he said. “But your father has given permission to me to ask you to be my wife.”

“He did?” Her eyes went wide.

“And I mean to ask you—” he said.

“I sense a hesitation.”

“I mean to ask you when I return.”

And there it was. He was going to go. He was going to ride south out of her life while she had so much new to deal with. She wanted him to stay. She wanted him to ask now and for things to be simple. For them to live a simple life. Happy and together and beautiful and romantic.

But he was leaving.

It gutted her.

“How long?”

“As long as it takes.”

“For what? To find a way to destroy a four-thousand-year-old immortal?”

He said nothing.

“It’s not a weekend trip, Edmund,” she said.

“No.” He shook his head.

They sat in silence for a moment, both of them struggling with the meaning of it, both of them wanting it to be something else—anything else. And they both knew that was exactly what the other was thinking.

“I have committed to you already, Edmund. In nearly every way a wife can. But I need to stay for my family,” she said.

He nodded. “I know. But the thing is that I want us to be that family. You and me.”

“We will be,” she said. “When the time is right. We will be.”

Christine and Chenguer were married two weeks later in a beautiful ceremony at Wyndmere, marred only by the scorch marks on the stonework that the servants had been unable to remove.

Scarlet was the maid of honor. Philip was the best man.

But they hardly paid attention to the ceremony. The question about timing had hung over them since that day in the drawing room. Maybe they should have done this before Philip’s departure. Maybe they should have made their private commitment public like this.

Maybe they could have had time together as a husband and wife before his departure.

What if he didn’t come back? What if it never happened?

Scarlet thought that Christine and Chenguer had been smarter about this—to at least have that time together before the departure.

She wouldn’t have that with Philip. Not in the same way. Not waking up in his arms with the sheets a mess. Not sharing breakfast in bed. Not spending a whole day locked away alone together.

Perhaps it never would happen.

At the reception, the seven knights—excluding Chenguer, who was busy with the festivities—gathered around a banquet table. Scarlet and Philip held hands. So did Senna and Aldric. Amira rubbed her left hand with her right thumb and thought about Drogoth.

“I’m going to retire,” Wardyn said.

“Retire?” Scarlet asked.

He looked at each of them in turn.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m the kind of life tired that you can’t fix with enchanted swords. It hit me after my run in with the Usurper.”

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.

“So,” he said. “This will be my last night with you. I will return to Helios and the Sun Citadel, and there give up my armor and sword and reclaim Haddagan. I’ve done what I can and I hope it was enough.”

“It was enough,” Amira said.

“There’s a woman in my lands who I wronged years ago. I don’t know her situation now. But watching this today, I’ve decided that I must go apologize and beg her forgiveness. I doubt she will, but I have to ask. I feel like I am closing in on the last years. And if there is any chance, I need to go now.”

Philip clapped him on the back. “We were lucky to have known you, and we understand.”

“Thank you for everything you did,” Scarlet said. “You have become one of my best friends, and I will miss you.”

“Hey,” he said. “Maybe some day I will come visit you. I hope with someone on my arm. I’ve seen so much love among the humans that I find myself longing for it.”

“We would love to have you come visit any time,” Scarlet said.

Wardyn Holt—the Uruk who had been Krang Haddagan—rose from the table, waved to the happy couple, and departed into the night.

Scarlet turned back to the fire. Philip squeezed her hand.

“Mama,” Scarlet said as they sat in the drawing room at Kestrelmont. “I don’t know what I should do.”

Elise nodded, not looking up from her needlepoint. “You mean about Philip?”

“Yes.”

“He wants you to go with him?”

“He hasn’t said that. I know he wants to be together, but he’s leaving. He wants us to be together when he returns.”

Elise set her needlepoint on her lap and picked up her tea.

“And part of me wants to go,” Scarlet said.

“You have responsibilities here,” Elise said.

“I know,” Scarlet said, frowning. “But I love him. I want to be with him.”

“You want him to stay.”

“Well, yes. Of course.”

“But he’s being called to go.”

Scarlet simply nodded.

“I don’t see how this can work out for you two,” Elise said. “It’s sweet that you love him and you want him. It’s sweet that it is reciprocated. But I’m not sure it’s enough.”

“I don’t know what else there is beyond that,” Scarlet said.

“Think about it,” Elise said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“Mama, I’m asking for your advice. What should I do?”

“It’s not what a heart wants. It’s what a heart needs.”

“I don’t understand,” Scarlet said. “I feel like I need him.”

Elise smiled, but said nothing more.

On a Fireday morning two weeks later, with Frostfall having come and the road already covered in snow, the Knights Celestial, bundled for winter but heading south, gathered at Winterhaven to take the blessing from the new king and queen.

Only six remained. Drogoth had passed on, Wardyn had returned to his old life as Haddagan, and Scarlet was staying behind.

There were no grand pronouncements. It had never been their style, but there were embraces and well wishes, with admonishments to be safe and return hastily.

Nobody knew how long they would be gone or even, really, what the mission was, other than to stop the Usurper from rising again somewhere to the south. Scarlet knew that was a life’s work for Philip, not a short stay.

“I’m afraid I’ll never see you again,” she said during their final embrace.

“I will return,” he said. “I promise.”

“In how long, though? It could be many seasons. Might be many years.”

“It will be as Epherion wills it,” Philip said. “And if he can call me on the road to pursue the Usurper, he can call me back home just as easily.”

“I know,” she said. “But time goes by faster than you think.”

“Wait for me, Esme,” he pleaded.

“I will always wait for you, Edmund,” she said.

She kissed him as if it would be her very last time.

Then he was gone.

She stood at the entrance to Winterhaven and watched the column until it rounded the hill and the last of it disappeared. Twenty minutes, perhaps, before the road was empty and the snow was falling again and there was nothing left to watch.

She stood there a moment longer with the cold finding its way through her coat, the courtyard behind her, the empty road ahead.

Then she turned and walked back into Winterhaven to do paperwork.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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It began in the old quarter near the river, where the streets were narrow and the cobblestones had not been relaid in a generation. A section of paving shifted and cracked, and then the first of them came up.

The horns at the north wall sounded at the same moment.

Philip was on the wall walk when the outside force moved. Five days of patience, five days of holding position beyond the walls while the city learned to fight—and then all at once, without signal that Chenguer had caught in the web, the outer mass compressed inward and hit the north wall.

He had thirty fighters on the north walk and a gate captain who had been awake for two days. He had Lightbringer.

Ladders went up in three places at once. He burned through the first two before they were seated and took the third personally, Lightbringer clearing the top of the ladder and the wall walk below it in a single pass. The thirty fighters held the line on either side.

Then Scarlet was beside him. He hadn’t sent for her. She had come up the wall stairs with Lifegiver drawn and her jaw set, and she looked at the ladders and the mass beyond the wall and did not ask permission, nor did he need to give it.

He moved left and she moved right.

Senna arrived at the first hole at a run, Sunflare already in her hand. Aldric was already there—she did not know how, he was simply there, Darksbane at his side, watching the column of Unfinished pushing up through the broken ground.

The column was narrow—the tunnel below couldn’t be wide, the Unfinished had been digging in secret for five days with dead hands and no tools but themselves, and the passage they’d made was barely wide enough for one body at a time. That was the only good thing about it. They came up in single file and spread the moment they cleared the opening, and if you let them spread you had lost the street.

Senna stepped forward and pulsed.

Sunflare’s burst went straight down into the column—a flash of blinding radiance that flooded the hole and the tunnel below it, disorienting everything still underground. The Unfinished already above ground staggered. The reaching stopped. Her vision went with it, the familiar blinding whiteness, and in those seconds she was fighting by the sound of boots on cobblestones and the memory of where everything was.

Aldric moved through the gap.

She heard Darksbane rather than saw it. One. Two. Three. Precise and clean, a single strike each, the thread of stolen life severed at the source. By the time her vision returned he had cleared the spread and was back at the hole.

More coming up.

She pulsed again.

The second hole opened two streets north while Senna was blind from the first pulse.

She heard it—the crack of cobblestone, a shout cut short—and when her vision returned she looked at Aldric. He looked at the first hole, still open, then north.

“Go,” he said.

“I can’t leave you—”

“Go.”

She ran.

The second hole was wider. Either the tunnel beneath was broader or the Unfinished had broken more ground coming through, and they were spreading faster than the first. Three fighters from the house guard were holding the edges with torches but the torch line was bowing and one of them had gone down.

She pulsed into the hole without breaking stride.

The flash lit the whole street. The Unfinished at the edges staggered. The guard who had gone down was on his hands and knees, not drained, just knocked—he looked up at the sudden light and found his feet. Senna stepped over him and drove into the spread with Sunflare blazing between pulses, not dissolving the way Darksbane dissolved but driving them back, breaking their focus, keeping the line from collapsing until—

The third hole opened behind her.

She spun. The second hole still open. The third, forty feet south, a seam rather than a tunnel mouth—the Unfinished below had found a fault in the street’s foundation and run the length of it, and what was coming up now was not a column but a line. Aldric’s hole, north.

She couldn’t cover all three.

The west horn sounded.

Philip turned. The west wall was the thinnest section—fifteen fighters, no gate, a stretch of old stone that had held for five days because the outside force had never concentrated there. It was concentrating there now.

He caught Scarlet’s eye.

“Can you hold this side?”

She took in the north walk, the ladders, the mass below. “Go,” she said.

He went.

The west wall was two hundred yards. He ran it. Three ladders up when he arrived, fighters on the wall engaged on both sides, one section of the parapet giving way under the weight of bodies pressed against the outside face. He hit the first ladder and cleared it and moved to the second and the third and came back to find a fighter down and two more backing toward the stairs.

He put himself between them and the wall and held it.

Behind him he could hear the north walk—Scarlet’s voice once, giving an instruction to someone, and then the sound of Lifegiver doing what Lifegiver did. He did not look back.

Then Yselle came over the rooftops.

She dropped into the street between the second and third holes, Eclipse in hand, four Air Aelvaeni landing behind her. She took the situation in without being told.

Eclipse went dark.

Not the street—the holes. The light above each opening snuffed out in a targeted circle, darkness falling precisely where the Unfinished were emerging, and the Unfinished, which had spent five days in tunnels underground navigating by the absence of light, found themselves blind. The columns faltered. The line at the third hole compressed back on itself, the emerging bodies pressing against the ones below that had stopped moving.

The Earth Aelvaeni came up through the walls.

Senna hadn’t known they were there—they had come through the foundations in silence and emerged from the base of the nearest building, a dozen of them, small and grey, unhurried. Their senior shaper knelt and put both hands flat on the cobblestones.

The ground moved.

Not violently. A slow, deliberate compression, the stone and soil below shifting inward, the tunnel mouths narrowing from the edges, the Unfinished still partially above ground caught in the closing and dissolved by the pressure.

The first hole sealed.

The shaper moved to the second, knelt, pressed her palms flat.

The second hole sealed.

She moved to the third. The seam was longer and she took more time with it, the ground shuddering faintly along its length as the fault was closed from below.

The third hole sealed.

The street went quiet.

Senna stood over the closed ground, breathing hard, Sunflare still warm in her hand. Aldric appeared at her shoulder—she never heard him coming—and looked at the three sealed points in the cobblestones, now slightly raised where the earth had compressed.

On the north walk, the ladders had stopped coming.

Philip felt it before he understood it—the pressure at the west wall easing, the mass outside pulling back from the face of the stone, not retreating exactly but withdrawing, as if whatever had been driving them forward had found the tunnels failed and the walls had held.

He stood at the west parapet and watched the outside force pull back.

Scarlet appeared at his shoulder. Her sleeve was torn at the elbow and there was blood on her forearm that was not hers. She was breathing hard. She looked at the retreating mass and said nothing for a moment.

“They were waiting,” she said. “The tunneling. The wall assault. Both at once.”

“Yes.”

“He thought if we were looking down we wouldn’t see what was coming over the walls.”

“He was nearly right,” Philip said.

She wrapped her arms around his waist. He leaned his head on hers and they stood there a moment, the city breathing behind them, the dark still retreating below.

Above, the night sky was beginning to lighten at its eastern edge. The first grey of a dawn arriving the way it always did—on schedule, without drama, indifferent to what it was arriving into.

“All that patience,” Scarlet said quietly. “Five days. And it still wasn’t enough.”

Philip turned his face east and let the light find it.

By afternoon, a few hundred Unfinished remained, compressed into the old quarter near the river—not by strategy, but by pressure, pushed there over five days.

He laid it out in the keep: three pushes, two gates, Yselle overhead, Earth shapers sealing the basements from below, Fire shapers driving the Unfinished toward the light.

“My column takes the river road,” he said. “Drogoth with the fire shapers on the south approach. Senna and Aldric take the eastern alleys.”

Wardyn said, from across the table, “I am in your column.”

“You don’t have to,” Philip said.

“I know,” Wardyn said.

“River road,” Philip said.

They went in on the morning of the sixth day, in the grey light before full dawn.

Philip moved through the river road with Lightbringer warm in his hand and the column tight behind him. Chenguer was at his left, calling positions from the web in the low, level voice that had been calling positions since Faerlong Dell.

“Seven ahead, tight formation. Left side of the road at the crossing.”

By midmorning the river road was clear to the second gate.

Drogoth took the warehouse district with the fire shapers on the south approach.

The district had been thick with Unfinished since the first day. The fire shapers cleared building by building. Drogoth moved with them.

The school was on the south end of the district, a single-storey building with a low wall around a yard where children had played before any of this. The teacher had barricaded the doors on the first night with the children inside—eleven of them, the youngest four, the oldest perhaps ten—and they had been there since, surviving on what was in the storeroom, while the district around them filled and the Unfinished pressed against the barricaded door and found it held.

Amira found the teacher at a window when the column reached the yard wall. She was a young woman, not much older than some of her students, and she had been protecting them, alone, for six days.

The yard was clear. The building was not. The Unfinished had finally broken through after nearly a week. Through the barricaded door they could hear the movement inside—the sound of Unfinished in an enclosed space, the scrape and press of bodies that felt no urgency and would not leave.

Drogoth looked at the building. Then at Amira.

“Thank you, Amira,” he said.

She understood.

“The children first,” he said.

He went over the yard wall and through the side window that the teacher had pointed to—a window on the far end from the main concentration, a room that had been a storage space and was now empty. He moved through it and into the corridor and Sunfury’s heat moved with him, the blade running hotter than the air around it.

He drove them toward the front of the building, Sunfury warm in his hand, the radiance of it moving ahead of him in the corridor, the Unfinished retreating from the heat the way they retreated from fire. Behind him the teacher was bringing the children through the side window one by one, passing them over the sill to Amira in the yard.

He could hear them counting. He counted with them.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

The front rooms were full. He had compressed them there and they had nowhere further to go and they knew it in whatever way they knew things, and they turned.

Ten. Eleven.

The hands found him before he reached the side room. Two at his arms, one at his throat, the cold of them immediate and absolute. He felt the years begin to move—not painfully, simply steadily. And then the paralysis—the hollowing of will that preceded the theft, the Unfinished suppressing the spirit before they took the years. His grip on Sunfury loosened. His legs stopped answering.

He looked through the side window.

Amira was in the yard with the last child against her shoulder, looking back at him. She saw his face. She saw his grip. She shifted the child to one arm and raised Sunrise through the window opening without hesitation. She was not close enough to touch him, but the light found him anyway, warm and steady and the color of first morning.

His will came back.

Not his years—those were still going, the hands still on him, the cold still moving. But the will came back, and the grip came back with it, and Sunfury was in his hand.

She was still looking at him, the child against her shoulder, Sunrise raised, her face open the way it was always open. What was in it now was everything she had never said and would not say.

He nodded.

She turned away, the child against her shoulder, and walked toward the yard wall.

Drogoth released Sunfury.

Not at partial force, not at the measured output he had used on the river road and the south gate and every engagement since Faerlong Dell. He let it go entirely—the full, unmediated channeling of Epherion’s concentrated heat, the thing the blade had been holding for two thousand years, released at once in an enclosed space with nowhere for it to go but through everything in the room.

The south wall of the warehouse district lit the morning sky orange for three seconds.

Then it was over.

Amira stood in the yard with the last child in her arms and did not look back at the building. She stood there until Philip arrived, which was less than two minutes—he had seen the light from the river road and come at a run. She was still standing in the same place when he reached her, the child asleep against her shoulder, her face turned away from the building, tears in her eyes.

Philip stopped beside her.

She didn’t speak for a long time. When she did, her voice was unsteady. “He said goodbye to me with his eyes.”

Philip looked at the eleven children sitting against the yard wall in the morning light, wrapped in whatever the column’s fighters had been able to find, alive and bewildered and looking at Amira.

She handed him the sleeping child and walked to the building. Philip watched her go. Then he looked down at the child in his arms—a boy, four years old, deeply asleep in the way that children slept when they had been frightened for a long time and had finally stopped.

Philip carried him to the yard wall and sat down with him, and waited for someone to come and take him home.

After a while he noticed that the city had gone quiet. No horns. No shouts from the wall walk. No sound of boots on cobblestones moving at the pace of people who had somewhere urgent to be. The fires were still burning somewhere to the north—he could smell them—but the fighting that had fed them for six days had stopped.

He sat with the boy and let the quiet settle around them both.

Amira climbed through the burned out windows. She did not return for an hour, but when she did, she carried a suit of armor and Sunfury.

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It didn’t begin everywhere at once. It began in specific places.

The war memorial grounds east of the river, where soldiers from five border campaigns lay buried. The overflow graves outside the south wall from the last Urukesh push, six years back. The unmarked section behind the harbor that everyone in the harbor district had learned to walk past quickly at night.

These were the concentrations of untimely dead, and these were what moved first. The graves didn’t erupt. They opened slowly, and somehow that was worse.

A woman on her way to the harbor at dawn stopped at the gate of the memorial grounds and watched the nearest stone shift and tilt. She stood there longer than she should have, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, and then she ran. Later she would remember that she hadn’t screamed. She wouldn’t understand why.

In the streets nearest the memorial grounds, doors began closing. A carter left his horse in the middle of the road and walked away from it quickly. Two boys who had been throwing stones at a gutter rat stopped throwing and stood very still. The sound of the city changed. It did not stop, but it changed.

A night watchman on his last round before dawn heard something beneath the cobblestones—a slow, grinding pressure, stone against stone—and stopped walking. He stood over it for a long moment, lantern held low, and then he blew the lantern out and did not move again for a very long time.

It was not a siege from without. It was a rising from within.

Philip sent two riders west before the city had fully understood what was happening. A hard ride to Faerlong Dell. Further still to the garrison. Wardyn wrote a note in the time it took Philip to saddle, sealed it, handed it over without a word.

Winterhaven had been the first thing hit. The castle sat nearest to the largest concentration of graves, and the dead had moved outward from where they rose without preference or strategy. Philip learned this from a guard who had gotten out. He did not go to see for himself. There was nothing to be done there, and the city needed him where he was.

The city stretched out below. Smoke rising from four separate fires being used as barriers. The smell of burned corpses drifting on the cold air. In the streets Philip could see his own people moving, learning the patterns, getting better. They had not broken. That was the first thing he looked for every time he came back to this roof, and every time so far it had still been true.

He sat beside Chenguer.

“There are fewer than there were,” Chenguer said.

“We’ve been fighting all night.”

“Outside.” Chenguer turned his head east. “Something is coming from the east. Something they feel.”

Philip looked at the road. It would be empty until tomorrow, if the rider had gotten through, if help had come at all.

He stayed on the roof.

Then Chenguer stood.

“Philip.”

Christine’s thread, moving fast away from Kestrelmont. The flow of auburn hair visible below—on horseback, heading toward Wyndmere.

“Go,” Philip said.

Scarlet worked.

The keep’s great hall had become a triage room in the first hour. People simply brought the injured to the largest interior space and began laying them on the long tables, and by the time Scarlet understood what was happening there were eleven people in various states of depletion, and the city guards who had carried them in were already going back out.

She started at the left end of the first table and worked right.

The theft of years left its evidence clearly. The face was the most obvious sign—a person drained of a decade looked a decade older, which in the young looked like sudden cruel aging and in those already old looked like collapse, the last reserve of vitality gone in an instant. But it was the hands she had learned to read first. The way they lay when a person had no strength to move them. The texture of the skin.

She did not let herself think about how quickly she had learned to read it.

The third was a boy, perhaps sixteen, a house guard’s apprentice by his jacket. Someone had carried him in over one shoulder and set him down without gentleness because there had been no time for gentleness. He had been drained past the point of consciousness. She worked through him slowly, and when she straightened he was breathing steadily, though he would not wake for hours.

By the seventh she could feel the wound in her chest again. She had worked through worse. She worked through this.

By the eleventh—a guard who had been drained on the south wall and carried in unconscious—she could feel it clearly. She sealed him and straightened and held her hand over her chest for a moment, breathing.

The cost shall be proportional. She shall not be spared it.

She moved to the next table.

Wyndmere was two miles from the keep. Chenguer rode hard, took the long way around the memorial grounds, and kept his eyes on her thread the whole way.

Then it flared—almost too bright to look at—and contracted back to faint.

The gates stood open, which was wrong. He came through at a canter and pulled up hard.

The Unfinished that had gotten through were shapes on the cobblestones, burned black at a heat that left nothing behind. The guards—nearly forty, scattered where they’d held the line—had not burned. They had been taken before the fire came.

Christine was sitting in the center of the courtyard with her knees drawn up and her arms around them. Barely dressed, what remained of her clothing ash at the edges. Flames still moving in her auburn hair. Her body untouched.

He dismounted and crossed to her.

“Chen,” she said.

“I’m here.”

“I don’t—” She stopped. Started again. “I don’t know what happened.”

The scorch patterns radiated outward from where she sat. The inner face of the Wyndmere walls was darkened as if something very hot had moved across the stone and then stopped. He sat down beside her and put his arm around her and she leaned into him and took a slow breath.

“They came through the gates,” she said, after a while. “There were so many of them. The staff were already inside, the doors were barred, I was in the courtyard when they—I couldn’t get to the door in time.” A pause. “I remember being frightened. And then heat, from inside me, and then it was this.”

She looked at her hands. Unburned.

“You’re not hurt,” he said.

“I know. I should be.”

He thought about six years of small things. A summer evening when the candles on the table had burned twice as high when she laughed, and she hadn’t noticed. The time the fireplace had roared in a room with no draft, and she had been the one standing nearest. The warmth she always carried.

He held her tighter.

She looked at the east wing, at the scorched stone, at her hands. “I want to go inside,” she said.

He stood and brought her to her feet. She leaned against him a moment, then straightened.

He picked her up because the cobblestones were hot and she had nothing on her feet, and carried her through the Wyndmere doors. She put her head against his shoulder.

“I burned my clothes,” she said.

“You did.”

“All of them?”

“Most of them.”

She was quiet for a moment. “That’s going to be a problem.”

“I’ll find you something,” he said.

The doors opened and servants rushed out. They wrapped Christine in a blanket.

“There hasn’t been a human fire shaper since Dorrin,” he said. “Three hundred years.”

“I know.”

Philip was on the east wall before dawn on the second day.

He had not slept. The east wall was where he had chosen to spend the last hours of the night, watching the road. The city behind him was still fighting. He could hear it. He did not turn around.

The column came with the first light. The sound reached him before the torches did—a column of riders on the eastern road, a low building thunder across the cold air—and then the line of orange fire cresting the hill above the east gate, already moving at full gallop when they cleared the ridge.

The gate captain had the sense to open rather than challenge. The lead riders came through at a pace that scattered the Unfinished clustered at the base of the wall in every direction, hooves finding whatever they found, torches swinging out to the left and right. Philip had ordered burning oil poured from the wall walk an hour before, and the Unfinished had withdrawn from it. It had opened a lane wide enough for the column to come through.

A few undead came through with them anyway, but it was over in less than three minutes.

Philip stood at the east wall and watched the riders wheel and reform below. A full column of riders who had ridden through the night because a rider had reached them and they had not waited to be asked twice. Along the south wall, fighters who had been holding the same doors since yesterday were being relieved for the first time. He could see them stepping back from their positions, some of them sitting down where they stood, one man simply leaning his forehead against the stone of the wall and staying there. The undead did not need to sleep. His people did, and now they could.

Yselle landed on the keep roof before the column had finished coming through—she had flown the perimeter and come ahead of the others. Amira, Senna, and Aldric rode in through the north gate an hour later.

All nine Sunblades were now inside the city. Philip had not let himself think about what that meant until it was true.

On the third day, more came from the northeast—Urukesh and Aelvaeni together, moving in formation, coming fast. They arrived without ceremony and went straight to work.

For the first time since the Rising, the outside force was caught between two pressures.

Chenguer watched it happen in the web. The outside threads, which had been diffuse and steady and patient for three days, changed. Something moved through the network—a ripple, a pressure—the threads pulling, clusters that had been holding position beginning to compress.

“They feel it,” he said.

“What do they feel?” Wardyn asked.

“Uncertainty,” Chenguer said. He watched a moment longer. “They’ve never been uncertain before.”

“I thought they didn’t think.”

“I’m not talking about their uncertainty. I’m talking about his.”

Philip looked east, toward the road where the column was still coming through.

That evening he noticed something different at the south gate. Christine was on the keep roof with the Fire Aelvaeni’s senior shaper—he didn’t know what passed between them and didn’t ask. What he saw the following morning was Christine clearing an approach three times the width of anything she had managed before, the fire moving in controlled sheets, precise at the edges, the Unfinished retreating in a straight line rather than dispersing in every direction. It was not the courtyard at Wyndmere. That had been something happening to her. This was something she was doing. She stood above the gate afterward with her hands still warm and said nothing to anyone.

On the night of the fifth day, Senna heard shouting from the old quarter.

Then she felt the ground move under her feet.

She reached for Sunflare.

The cobblestones cracked.

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Chenguer did not sleep well in unfamiliar houses.

This was not a complaint. It was simply a fact he had learned to use. While the others slept, he lay still and let the web settle around him—the threads of it faint and cool in the darkness, a map of nothing significant. Servants. A dog somewhere below. The slow, rhythmic pulse of people at rest.

Earlier, he only saw the sickly colored threads of the Unfinished, but during the battle in Faerlong Dell, it had become more refined. He could see the faint threads of everyone—all living creatures within a certain range—a couple hundred yards, perhaps. He could see the Unfinished at much longer distances and the more powerful they were, the further away he could see them.

But he had not seen them since Faerlong Dell, nor their source, which made him question his earlier claim that the Usurper was definitely in Stormrest. He had been doing this since. Mapping whatever house he was in. Learning its texture. He knew this house now. He knew where Philip slept, and Drogoth, and Scarlet—and he knew, three rooms down from Scarlet on the same floor, where Isabelle Marlow lay.

He had noticed her thread for two days. He had said nothing.

The first reason was uncertainty. He had learned long ago that uncertainty, announced prematurely, did more damage than silence. He watched instead. He mapped. He waited to understand what he was seeing.

The second reason was more awkward. He had seen two threads from one person before—a pregnant woman in Faerlong Dell. He had thought about that for two days, watching Isabelle Marlow move through the house, sit beside Charles at dinner, accept a petit four and not eat it. He had thought: perhaps that is what this is. Perhaps she is expecting and the second thread is new life, and it is none of my business.

What he was seeing was two threads from one person, one cold and one not, and he did not understand it and he did not want to be wrong about it in either direction. Sometimes it moved when she was still. It pulled in two directions at once. One thread was weaker, the other much stronger. He lay in the dark and watched it, the warmth of his blanket a comfort against a room that was cool despite the active fireplace.

At the third hour past midnight, it lurched.

He was out of bed before the sensation resolved into thought. He had his blade in hand and his feet in the corridor in the time it took most men to sit up. Constellation threw no light here—he had not drawn on it—but he did not need light. He needed the web.

He moved down the carpeted hallway, his movements quiet. Oil lamps, mounted every twenty feet or so, ran the length of the long hallways along the central spine of the estate.

Seventy-five feet ahead, at the far end where a lamp burned low against the wall, something was happening to Isabelle’s thread. It was splitting. The weak thread had become gradually brighter, and then the strong thread underneath turned colors, almost like the Unfinished. The weaker thread diminished back to its former state.

Two threads, two directions. One body.

He opened his mouth.

“Scarlet!”

The shout left him before he fully understood why he had chosen her name and not Philip’s, not Wardyn’s. Some part of him had already calculated the geometry—Scarlet’s room, the position of Isabelle’s thread, the angle of what was about to happen.

He was already running.

Scarlet felt an immediate chill, her body recoiling from the intrusion of the blade.

Then she felt Isabelle stop.

The dagger was still in her, and Isabelle’s right hand was still on the hilt, but her left hand had come up and locked around her own right wrist, and the two arms were shaking with opposing force.

Scarlet fell back onto the bed and felt the blade pull from her chest. She felt the warmth of blood and pressed her hand to it—an effort to stop the flow.

Isabelle’s face was a war. Her jaw was set. The tendons in her neck were straining. Her left hand was white-knuckled around her own wrist, holding it, fighting it—as if she was trying to force a door closed while simultaneously trying to open it.

She turned her eyes to Scarlet. Something was happening in them. A surfacing.

“I’m not me,” she said. The voice was a ruin. More a gasp than a statement. It cost her everything she had left.

Wardyn and Charles came through the door as she said it.

Wardyn took the scene in one breath—Scarlet lying on the bed, blood flowing from a chest wound, hand pressed to her breast, Isabelle with the dagger, the shaking arms, the two opposing forces—and Shadowbreaker was already out and he swung the great weapon at Isabelle.

Charles, a half-step behind Wardyn, screamed no. The word tore out of him before he understood what Wardyn was doing, and what followed it was silence and the terrible weight of not knowing if it had been the right thing to scream. He stood in the doorway with his heart hammering and watched.

But there was no rending of flesh. The blow had not struck her. Instead, it passed across her, and the shadow of the blade struck the shadow of her body on the lamplit wall. The shadows had collided. The severing occurred in the shadows, where it mattered.

The sound that followed did not come from Isabelle’s throat.

It was not a human sound. It was not any living creature’s sound. It came from somewhere between the room and somewhere else entirely, a wail with four thousand years of fury in it, and then it was gone.

Isabelle crumpled.

Charles was already moving. He caught her before she reached the floor—dropped to his knees with her, got his arms under her, and held on. Her weight against him was real and warm and present in a way it had not been for weeks, and he did not know yet what that meant but he felt it in the way you feel the end of something that has been wrong for a long time.

Philip appeared in the doorway.

He crossed the room in four strides and got his hands on Scarlet—one arm around her back, one hand over hers at her chest, pressing it there. She let him because she was losing strength.

“I have you,” he said.

“My—my sw—life—,” she gasped, her eyes focusing near the wardrobe.

Philip turned and saw the wardrobe. Saw the sword leaning up against it.

Lifegiver.

He brought it to her, unsheathed, meaning to hand it to her, but it left his grip and hovered over the bed, parallel with Scarlet, as though it had been waiting for exactly this.

She felt the warmth moving through her chest. It was like sunlight reaching somewhere it had never quite reached before—slow, and certain, and unhurried. The coldness evaporated. The pain contracted and then released. Under her hand, she could feel the flesh mending and the skin closing.

She did not look down.

Philip did, his eyes on her bloodied nightgown, and she felt his arm tighten around her—not dramatically, not with the urgency of fear, just the small involuntary tightening of a man who has nearly lost something and is making sure it is still there.

She looked instead at Charles, who was on the floor with Isabelle in his arms, her dark hair across his sleeve, her eyes closed now. He was rocking slightly without knowing he was rocking. His face had not yet decided what he felt, and was simply holding on to the girl in front of him until he could.

Wardyn stood near the wall. He had not sheathed Shadowbreaker.

For a long time no one spoke.

Whatever the wail had been, it had passed through the house. The lamp burned on, though the flame had shrunk to almost nothing before recovering itself. The room smelled of blood and something else—something vaguely earthy and rotting. No one moved to open a window. No one moved at all.

Philip met her eyes.

“She’s alive?” Scarlet asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“She said—” Scarlet stopped. Her eyes went back to Charles.

He had heard it. He had been close enough to hear it.

I’m not me.

He was still rocking, and he did not look up, and she did not finish the sentence.

They knew what it meant.

Drogoth appeared in the doorway. He took in the room—Wardyn with the unsheathed blade, Charles on the floor, Philip with his arm around Scarlet—and said nothing. He leaned against the frame and folded his arms.

And now they all knew where the Usurper had been, and how long he had been there.

Isabelle’s eyes fluttered open, her breathing rushed, her eyes wide as she scanned everything. Her voice came out like dry parchment. “It’s—it’s gone,” she said.

“You’re okay,” Charles said, cradling her.

She reached up to him with both hands, holding his face. Warm hands. “I love you,” she said. “I should have said so before. I thought I’d never ever get the chance again.”

He kissed her forehead. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Scarlet sat up in bed then slid to the floor next to her.

“You saved my life,” she said. “I saw what you did.”

“You saw me stab you,” Isabelle said, tears running down her face.

“No,” Scarlet said. “I saw the Usurper stab me. You stopped him.”

“I was trapped,” she said. “In my own body. I was a prisoner.” She pressed both hands to her own face as though checking that it was still hers. “I could hear him. His thoughts running through my head. I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t—” She broke off.

“Take your time,” Scarlet said.

Isabelle lowered her hands. Her eyes had the look of someone who has seen things they cannot unsee and is deciding how much of it to say. “He is very old,” she said finally. “Older than anything I can put a number to. And he is—patient. That is the thing that frightened me most. Not the hatred. The patience. As though time is something that happens to other people.”

“What did he want?” Philip asked.

“At first, the land. Through Charles, through me, access to the Wentworth name and the restoration. When that failed—” She paused. “When Scarlet refused him, he pivoted. He always pivots. He’s been doing it for so long that it costs him nothing. One plan fails and the next one simply begins.” She looked at Scarlet. “You were the alternative. If he couldn’t use you, he would remove you.”

“And Charles?” Scarlet asked quietly.

Isabelle looked at him. Something passed between them that was not a question and not an answer but something older than both.

“He wanted Charles alive,” she said. “As long as Charles was useful.”

Charles said nothing. He was still holding her hands.

“Could you sense his thoughts?” Wardyn asked.

“Oh gods!” Isabelle said.

“What is it?” Drogoth asked.

“He means to—” She stopped. Her hands were shaking. “The things he was thinking. The things I had to—” She closed her eyes. “He wants them all dead. Everyone in the city. Everyone in Bravia. He wants—” She couldn’t finish it.

“Then, we have a problem,” Wardyn said. He leaned leaned his head against the wardrobe and closed his eyes.

Philip crossed to Chenguer and crouched beside the chair.

“Chen.”

He didn’t move for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.

“I should have said something sooner. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. How do you explain two threads in one person?”

“It’s not your fault,” Scarlet said, still not looking up.

Chenguer nodded once.

Philip stayed crouched beside him. The writing desk had a single candle burning at its corner. Constellation lay unsheathed before him, no light in the blade.

Outside, the city was silent.

Then Chenguer’s hand came down on Constellation’s grip.

“They’re moving,” Chenguer said.

“How many?”

Chenguer looked at him and answered.

“All of them.”

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“My lord,” Philip asked, as he knocked on the doorframe of the study door. “Do you have a moment?”

“Come in, Philip,” he said, “and close the door.”

Philip did as asked and crossed to the desk, but he waited to be invited to sit.

The duke didn’t offer. They stood on opposite sides of the mahogany desk.

“So you’ve spent some time with my daughter?”

“I have, sir.”

“Do you think you can handle her?”

Philip paused. “Any man that would make such a claim would be unworthy of her, sir.”

“Quite right,” Caspian said. “Let’s sit.”

“Thank you, sir,” Philip said. He waited for the duke to sit and then sat across from him.

The afternoon light came through the curtains at a low angle, laying a stripe of gold across the desk between them.

The duke steepled his fingers, placed his jaw on his thumbs, and regarded the young man. At last, he said, “I wonder if I’ve done myself a disservice a dozen years back.”

“How so, my lord?”

“Scarlet has informed me that you are the very same street urchin who I told her to stay away from when she was ten years old, give or take.”

Philip thought about that for a moment. Started to say something, then stopped. A beat later he spoke. “I wasn’t quite a street urchin,” he said. “But I suppose I can see why someone might think that, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it. But, in fact, I was a working child. I began working when I was eight and I have worked ever since.”

“A working child?”

“I delivered baked goods. In fact, that’s how I met Scarlet. But she was called Esme at the time.”

“Esme—” Caspian whispered. A brief smile flashed on his face. “You know, I thought I was the only one who used that nickname.”

“That’s what she called herself when we met,” Philip said.

“Did she?” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “That’s interesting.”

“But what disservice have you done yourself in those days?”

The duke smiled. “I warned her off of you.”

“How was that a disservice to you?”

“If I’d have let it go, she might have gotten tired of you on her own. Instead, she had this idealized memory of you—a memory against which no other man could ever measure.”

Philip kept his expression steady. “You’ll forgive me, sir, if I don’t take that as negatively as you might.”

“A fair point,” Caspian said, nodding. “There’d be no reason for you to be unhappy about being the standard for her. But I should like to think her father ought to be the standard.”

“We might not be that dissimilar, sir.”

“I can’t tell if you’re slick or sincere, young man.”

“No one has ever accused me of being slick, sir. It’s not really my nature, nor I think, yours. But let me answer you directly so there’s no mistake. I am absolutely, one hundred percent sincere about your daughter. I beg you to never think otherwise.”

“Let’s say I don’t doubt your sincerity then, Philip. Let’s then go to intentions.”

“I intend to love your daughter until the day I die.”

“As will I. So will many people. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to know her without loving her.”

“The difference is that I make her happy. Would you want a man who was annoyed by her insatiable drive, or one who is inspired by it? Would you want someone who saw her flaws, or someone who saw them as beauty spots? I have held an idealized version of her for fifteen years, my lord. And having found her—I find the reality exceeds it.”

Caspian nodded. “Do you like her?”

“Yes, sir. She makes me laugh. She frustrates me sometimes if I’m being honest, but she has this way of making you forget that because she’s just so intent on what she’s trying to accomplish. I can’t help but admire her.”

“Tell me about it,” he said wistfully. He cleared his throat. “Now the hard part.”

“Sir?”

“The Knights Celestial. You recognize what you’re asking her to give up?”

“I have nothing to do with that, sir. That is something between her and Epherion. I won’t interfere with her calling and I won’t pretend it’s for me to decide.”

“You would not dissuade her?”

“If I had my way, I would have her stay somewhere safe and leave that kind of thing to me. But then I’d be asking her to be someone she’s not, and I can never do that.”

The duke opened the bottom right drawer of his desk and produced a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He poured two before putting the bottle away.

“Very well,” Caspian said. “You may ask.”

“My lord. I seek your blessing to ask Scarlet to be my wife through all of our days.”

“She is my most precious jewel.”

“Mine too,” Philip said.

Caspian slid the second glass across the desk. Philip picked it up.

“To good women everywhere,” the duke said. “To Scarlet.”

“Hear. Hear,” Philip said.

They downed their glasses.

Isabelle arrived via carriage around three in the afternoon. She was greeted by Charles who had been waiting impatiently for her.

He gave her his hand.

She took it and stepped down.

“Good afternoon, my love,” he said. He hugged her.

She hugged back. Her arms were there. The warmth was not. Disappointed all over again, he led her into the drawing room where the family sat, accompanied by several people she did not know. The fire had been lit against the chill, and the room smelled of woodsmoke and the cut flowers Elise had arranged that morning.

Charles introduced each of them to Isabelle. She curtsied to each, saying a kind word or observation, unique to each individual.

“I’ve saved you some petit fours,” Scarlet said, winking.

“What was that?” Isabelle asked.

“Petit fours,” Scarlet said, eyebrow raised. “You told me at Christine’s they were your favorite dessert.”

“Yes, indeed,” Isabelle said. “Thank you for remembering.”

She took just one.

Scarlet noted it. The girl certainly didn’t seem in need to watch her weight. If anything, she looked more scrawny than she had at the masquerade. She wondered, briefly, if the girl had become sickly and this was why Charles was seeing her differently.

“Are you well, dear?” she asked Isabelle.

“Quite well, thank you,” Isabelle said.

“Is my brother treating you well?”

“Perfectly,” she said. “He’s always a gentleman.”

The petit four remained untouched as she held it in a napkin on her lap.

Charles took in the napkin and then met Scarlet’s eyes briefly. He gave her a very slight shrug of his shoulders. He’d been observing. That was Charles in a nutshell.

Cook had chosen lamb for dinner, which no one was unhappy about except Wardyn. “We don’t eat goat or lamb,” he said.

“But you eat horse,” Scarlet said.

“Horse is delicious,” he said. “I find lamb and goat distasteful.”

Charles took in the curved horns and filed that away.

“I’d be happy with more of that ham from earlier,” Wardyn said.

Chenguer arrived with Christine just as Cook was bringing the first course out, which saved them both from missing anything important and saved Elise from having to hold the table. Christine embraced Scarlet with both arms and held on longer than was strictly necessary, which Scarlet didn’t mind at all.

They found seats. The table filled. The wine went round. The candles had burned down an inch since the first course. Outside, the wind had come up, and somewhere in the house a shutter was tapping irregularly against its frame.

The sickness idea wouldn’t leave Scarlet as she kept watch on Isabelle throughout dinner. At the masquerade dinner, she had been lively, to the point of annoyance in Scarlet’s mind, about how delicious everything was. She’d commented on the herb-crusted Corvaire hens, the garlic potatoes, and the Drakkaran wine, not to mention the petit fours for afters. But today, she was eating mechanically. She called the food delicious when Scarlet asked, but gone was the delight the girl had once had for flavors.

Scarlet had heard of sicknesses that caused loss of appetite and taste, and she decided to mention it to Isabelle.

“If you’re not feeling well, our house doctor is a very capable man. I can send him to your room after dinner.”

“Thank you, but no,” Isabelle said. “I’m perfectly fine. I’m just not that hungry. I ate so much at teatime.”

Except she hadn’t even eaten the one petit four she had taken. Scarlet let it go after that, but saw Charles register their exchange. She turned her attention to Christine who was talking about having a second party.

“I keep thinking about the masquerade,” she said, to no one in particular. “How strange it was to spend an entire evening with people and not know who any of them were.”

“Stranger still,” Chenguer said, “to know exactly who someone was, and have no way to say so.”

Christine turned to him. “Did you know? Even then?”

“I knew enough,” he said.

Elise, who had been there for the story of the jade pendant, smiled and said nothing.

“I think that’s the thing about masks,” Scarlet said. “They’re meant to hide you. But sometimes they do the opposite. Sometimes you see a person more clearly when everything else is stripped away.”

“The owl,” Philip said quietly, beside her.

“The owl,” she agreed. She didn’t look at him, but her hand found his under the table. “I thought—here is someone I recognize. And I didn’t know his name. Didn’t know his face. Didn’t know a single thing about him that I could have told you the next morning. And yet I knew him.”

Someone reached for the wine. A chair shifted. The candles guttered briefly as the shutter knocked again outside.

“That’s sweet,” Elise said. “Did you think the same thing, Sir Philip?”

“We were ten years old, playing in abandoned buildings, with different names entirely. And yet—something was still there.”

“You didn’t recognize each other at all?” Drogoth asked.

“We were so different then. Plus we had different names completely.”

“Remarkable,” Wardyn said. “Clearly you were meant to find each other. You knew each other at some higher level.”

“I suppose what frightens me,” Scarlet continued, her voice still easy, still conversational, “is the reverse. Thinking you know someone. Being quite certain of it. And then realizing the person in front of you is not who you thought at all. That what you knew was only the surface, carefully arranged.”

She reached for her wine.

Isabelle had gone very still.

Charles noticed. His sister’s eyes were on her glass, her expression thoughtful and distant, as though she were talking about something that had happened a long time ago.

Which she was.

Isabelle’s jaw hardened.

Charles noticed that too.

Scarlet was awake, but she could not have said why. There was no sound, no premonition. Just a restlessness that had come over her in the small hours, a vague sense of the world being slightly wrong that she had learned, since Helios, not to dismiss.

She was already watching the door when it opened. She had heard the soft footsteps, deliberate, the kind that meant to be quiet. She had her hand on the lamp before the figure stepped into the doorway.

Isabelle.

She was in her nightdress, her dark hair loose, her face pale and composed, arranged into an expression that was almost Isabelle’s but not quite. The lamp threw her shadow long across the floorboards as she stepped inside, making her appear taller than she really was.

“Forgive me for intruding,” Isabelle said.

“Lady Isabelle,” Scarlet said. “What is wrong?”

She crossed to Scarlet. “Something you said at dinner got me thinking—”

“About what?” Scarlet asked. “Do you think you might be ill after all?”

“You’re really quite clever, aren’t you?” Isabelle said.

The voice was Isabelle’s. The cadence was not.

“What do you mean?”

“Compulsion is useless.” Her hands were at her sides. “Shadow to no avail. Charms ineffective. Seduction pointless.”

Scarlet set the lamp on the side table and rose to sit at the edge of the bed, reaching her hand to Isabelle’s shoulder, comforting her. “What are you talking about?”

Scarlet’s eyes dropped, briefly—to Isabelle’s right hand, which had moved to the fold of her nightdress.

“One thing always works,” Isabelle said.

“Works?”

“Steel always works,” Isabelle said.

Somewhere outside, the shutter fell silent.

The dagger caught the lamplight as it came up—and Scarlet’s arms crossed in front of her, training and instinct moving faster than thought. Not fast enough. Isabelle was faster than she should have been, and the blade came through the crossed guard and pierced her left breast before Scarlet could pull back.

She heard herself make a sound she had never made before.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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A unique feature of Bravia was that if you dug deep enough, you found cold, no matter the season. Under Kestrelmont, for example, three meters below the main pantry, a cold storage locker kept things cool. Food that needed to be frozen was stored deeper in the underlying tundra. It was one of the reasons prolonged sieges against castles never really worked in Bravia. There might be two years of meat stored below the castle.

Kestrelmont was one of the bigger estates. An enormous selection of venison, beef, mutton, pork, and fowl was available, though most of it was frozen.

Cook had to rearrange her plan for the coming week given the unexpected increase in guests. Charles volunteered to go below and move several cuts from frozen to the next floor up, and he brought up an entire cold ham to replace the half turkey that cook had been planning to use for lunch.

Scarlet met him in the cold storage.

“What’s going on with your life?” she asked as he shifted cuts of meat around.

“Oh, you know. The usual. Fall in love with a girl. Fall out of love with a girl.”

Scarlet chuckled. “Already getting tired of Isabelle?”

Charles inspected a pair of lamb legs, handing them to Scarlet. “Here, Cook says we’ll need them for tomorrow.”

Scarlet passed the legs overhead to the main floor and shoved them so that they slid into the main pantry. It would take most of a day for them to thaw.

“I’m not tired of her,” he said. “I guess. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a typical boy for my age. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be like that. But here we are.”

“What are you talking about? Pass me that turkey while you’re at it.”

“I don’t know. She seems different. Like, maybe she put on a show to win my affections and now that she has them she doesn’t care anymore? Like she’s gotten complacent. Actually, it’s almost like she finds me distasteful, which is making me feel the same way.”

“You’re weird, brother,” Scarlet said.

“Yeah, I know. But not everyone can charge across a continent to collect an army. Some of us have to stay behind and manage what’s here.”

“Ha! Imagine you managing anything.”

“Actually,” he said. “I’m pretty good at it.”

“I know you are. I’m just teasing,” she said.

“Should I grab some hens?”

“Did Cook ask for some?”

“No, but we’ve got a few people here.”

“Grab a dozen. Can’t hurt.”

He handed them to her, one by one. Spirehens. About two pounds of delicate meat on each one. They paired well with wheat ales.

Charles already knew that, so when he hefted up a keg of ale, it surprised neither of them.

“In any case,” he said. “She’ll be here in a bit and I’m not sure I really want her here anymore.”

“Then tell her so.”

“The thing is that I keep hoping she’ll become who she was. I was totally in love with her just a few weeks ago. I even had a ring made.”

“You did not!” Scarlet squealed.

“Honest truth. It’s in my desk even now. But I guess I got cold feet.”

“You don’t just fall in and out of love like that though,” Scarlet said. “Something happen? What did you say to her?”

“Nothing, I swear. Nothing said. Nothing untoward. We did kiss some.”

“Mmmmm,” Scarlet said. “Kissing is nice.”

“Oh, you know about that now then? That Philip guy been snogging my sister? Do I need to have a talk with him?”

“You will not have a talk with him,” Scarlet said sternly.

“Oh, boy. That makes me feel like I actually need to have a talk with him. Do you like him, Scarlet?”

“I love him,” she said.

It was simple, but it caught Charles off guard. He set down the cut he was holding and took her hand and kissed it. “I’m glad for you, sis. Really.”

She smiled at him.

“Wish I could say I was still feeling that way.” He frowned.

“Want me to talk with her and see if there is a problem?”

“I guess,” he said. “I talk to her still and she says there’s no problem. Still hints she wants me to propose. But either I’ve changed or she’s changed and I can’t put my finger on what it is.”

“You seem the same to me,” Scarlet said. “Though a bit more gloomy.”

“The whole thing is making me gloomy,” he said. “You ever look at someone and see sunshine and then when they don’t think you’re looking you see shadow?”

Scarlet was about to say something and then she stopped. “What did you say?”

“Sometimes when I look at her and she doesn’t know I’m watching, it’s like she’s not even there,” he said.

It struck a chord in her. She held it for a moment, but couldn’t place it. “Just be kind to her. You’ll figure it out.”

“I am always kind,” he said.

“To a fault. But don’t change,” Scarlet said. “Hand me some sausages will you?”

“Wardyn is a very interesting fellow,” Charles said as he handed up four long links, one at a time. “I was very interested to meet a Uruk.”

“Wait until you see Yselle,” Scarlet said.

“Who’s she?”

“A very beautiful aelf with wings. Just in case things don’t work out with Isabelle.”

He frowned for a moment. “Any fire aelves?”

“Not that I know of,” Scarlet said.

“I’d love to meet a fire shaper.”

“I’m not sure they even exist anymore,” she said.

Lunch was a divine affair in Scarlet’s eyes. The cold ham. The fresh bread. Chilled white wine from an eastern valley vintner. Cheese, crackers, and a very rare pineapple sauce.

She patted her stomach when it was over, but could only watch as Drogoth and Wardyn filled plates for a third time. Even Philip wasn’t able to keep up with them in consumption.

Philip and Scarlet had their pinkies looped together under the table.

She noticed her father watching her from the far end—not the way he watched guests, which was with the polite attention of a host, but the way he watched her when he had made a decision and was simply waiting for the right moment to act on it. He caught her catching him and looked down at his plate. When he looked up again, the host’s expression was back in place.

She knew that expression. She had been waiting for it, in one form or another, since the bridge.

“Scarlet,” her father said. “Let’s have a talk in my study.”

“Yes, father,” she said. She grabbed her wine and followed him across the foyer into the study—a place that smelled of pipe smoke and leather.

“Close the door,” he said.

She sat at the narrow end of his desk near the fireplace. He packed a pipe, sat down, and lit it.

Laid out on the desk were some of the maps and drawings and the treaty that he had clearly already looked at before joining the lunch.

“Tell me about Benedict,” he said.

This was always going to be the hardest part of coming home.

“Father, there is a story I must tell you that you won’t first believe, but you must because it is true and is the most important thing I have ever told you.”

His expression shifted from annoyance to something more careful.

“There are tales from lore, stories of fantasy, that we have forgotten were based in truth. I need you to understand that and not mock me when I tell you. It is the reason I have joined the Knights Celestial.”

Caspian was quiet for a long moment. He looked down at his desk, at nothing in particular, and then back at her.

“Okay, I will listen.”

She nodded, stood, and paced as she spoke to him.

“There is an ancient creature known as the Usurper. No one knows where he came from or why, but the knights archive names him as a pawn of Shaetan.”

“Shaetan!” he hissed.

“The Imprisoned One plots continually,” she said. “At some point in the far distant past, the Usurper made a bargain with Shaetan and from it he gained a power over death.”

“What kind of power?”

“His body is dead. Long, long gone. He walks as a spirit. But he maintains himself by stealing life from the living.”

“Now this sounds like a fairy tale,” he said, frowning.

“It’s absolutely true,” she said. He held her gaze and found nothing in it that wavered.

He nodded.

“Father, he can raise dead men from the grave and give them a false life stolen from others. They are his thralls, obeying his every command.”

“You’re talking about undead,” he whispered.

“I am.”

“Legends.”

“Truth. I have seen them with my own eyes. They killed five in Harrowgate. Killed two in Tallfellow Canyon. Killed two in Faerlong Dell. They killed Lance Ashcroft who had come to look for me. They tried to kill me. But Benedict slew them and fell protecting me.”

Her father turned briefly toward the window, then back. “Benedict was the best man I ever employed,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, father. It’s my fault. My fault for bringing him into danger.”

“It’s my fault. I sent him.”

“But I knew you would. It was part of my plan.”

He raised an eyebrow and then nodded once, slowly, in the way he had of closing a subject he couldn’t do anything about. “And this Usurper. Where is he now?”

“We think he is in or near Stormrest. But here’s the thing. He can live inside others. He can take over their bodies. You think you are talking to someone, but it’s not them anymore. It’s the Usurper.”

“Possession?”

“I guess so. I think he did it to Lance Ashcroft.”

“It could be me then. Anyone.”

“No,” she said. “For whatever reason, the Wentworths—our bloodline—is immune to his powers.”

“How—?”

“I don’t know. We don’t know.”

“Is there anything that can be done about him?”

“With Epherion’s help, perhaps. The Knights Celestial are not just a brotherhood. We were established two thousand years ago by Epherion himself.”

“The sun god?” Caspian said.

“Yes, the creator. We can defeat these undead with the power of the star. He has chosen us.”

“Chosen you?”

“None of us are worthy,” she said. “But Epherion is worthy. We do his bidding.”

“Do you?”

“He has spoken to my mind, father.”

He held her gaze steadily, looking for the crack in it. She didn’t give him one.

“You’ve changed,” he said.

“I hope for the better.”

“In some ways. But I fear my little girl is gone.” He got up, poured himself a stiff drink, downed it, and poured a second, before returning to his desk.

“I’m still here, daddy. It’s still me.”

He smiled at her.

“Let’s talk about the other thing.”

“Okay,” she said, breathing carefully.

“You’ve promised every Wentworth in the land a thousand acres as a freehold to serve an army that will be disbanded on the first day because you were too efficient. There is no more war to serve in. I don’t know how you achieved it.”

“You used those words, father years ago, in our flat that always leaked winter. Before we knew there was a chance to be legitimate again, you wondered if a promise of land would bring people to join us. A thousand acres was the traditional standard for family members who served in war.”

“You’re right. I did say that. Good memory. But then one hundred acres for just anyone who serves?”

“We can’t have just a landed gentry,” she said. “We need regular people to repopulate our lands. We needed a yeomanry, and a hundred acres isn’t a lot. There are two million acres. Someone needs to maintain it.”

“How many contracts did you get signed?”

“Over thirteen hundred.”

“Thirteen—hundred? You recruited thirteen hundred from Psalter’s Point? That’s half the town!”

“It’s not even a quarter of the town, father. It had grown over the years. In any case, I have established them for now at Faerlong Dell. As there is no war to fight, we have put them to reconstruction, beginning with the dell.”

“And this treaty you’ve signed with the krangs, without my consent—I might add—you think it will hold up?”

“Time will tell, but it’s something at least. We’ve had nothing for decades.”

He tapped the treaty with one finger, considering it. “Fair point. You’ve done well, Scarlet. Very well.” He set it aside. “I only have one concern.”

“Which is?”

“Philip Beckwith.”

She kept her expression neutral. “He is a concern why?”

“Because the boy wants you.”

“That’s okay daddy. I want him too.”

He stared at her. “Really? I thought you despised him.”

“No, daddy.” She shook her head. “I never said that. I despised the queen’s plan. I didn’t know him.”

“You know he’s probably going to ask for your hand?”

“I sure hope so,” she said.

He leaned back in his chair. “Have you known him long enough to say that?”

She looked down at her feet, then straightened. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Promise not to be angry.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, weighing it. “Okay. I won’t be angry.”

“Remember when we found the ring and the papers?”

He went still. “A day impossible to forget. Of course I remember.”

“The boy who found the ring. The one you made me stop looking for—”

“Yes?”

“It’s Philip.”

“What? Philip is—was the urchin who found the ring? It’s the same person?”

“It is daddy. He’s the boy.”

He set his drink down and was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the real Wentworth signet where it sat among the papers on his desk, and then back at her.

“Did he know all along?”

“He didn’t learn it until after the masquerade. And then when he knew it was me, he came to find me. He rode nearly all the way to Psalter’s Point, alone. He nearly died. Twice.”

Caspian exhaled slowly. He picked up the drink, looked at it, and set it down again without taking any. “When you are young, it was harmless, but then you started to get older, and it stopped being harmless.”

“I’ve loved him since we were kids.”

He tried to smile, but then his face cracked. And then he broke into tears.

“Oh, sweetheart—forgive me.”

She came around his desk and hugged him close.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I thought he wasn’t good for you.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all okay. It worked out exactly the way it was supposed to.”

“It did?”

“He loves me. He always has. The time apart gave us perspective. Now it’s not just a childish infatuation that grew. It’s always been what’s missing. He’s what has been missing. And I for him.”

“Young love,” he said, smiling.

“You will say yes if he asks, right daddy?”

“Probably not,” he said. He finished his drink, put the bottle away and left the empty glass on a tray on his desk.

“Daddy?”

He snickered as he walked out of the room leaving her behind.

“Well, don’t ask me,” Elise said to her daughter. “Your father is a man of his own mind.”

Scarlet smiled slightly. “Daddy would never say no.”

“Probably not,” Elise agreed. She set her book down and gave her daughter her full attention. “He danced with you at the masquerade.”

“He did.”

“And rode halfway across the world to find you.”

“He did that too.”

Elise was quiet for a moment. “I saw it the moment you rode over the bridge together holding hands.”

Scarlet nodded. “Then you know.”

“I know what I saw,” Elise said. “And I know my daughter.” She picked her book back up, though she didn’t open it. “Look at Charles. Two weeks ago that girl was his moon and stars. Now he can barely—well. You’ve seen it.”

“Philip is not Charles, and I am not seventeen,” Scarlet said. Not unkindly. Just plainly.

“No,” Elise said. “You’re not.” She opened her book. “I simply want you to be sure. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“I’m sure, mama.”

Elise turned a page without reading it. “Then I suppose that’s enough for now. I’m just glad that you are home and safe. That’s the most important thing to me.”

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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Wardyn arrived in the morning to see the ash remains of the undead being burned and the town of Faerlong Dell halfway between hope and despair. He now wore the regalia of the Knights Celestial, but that didn’t stop many humans withdrawing inside doorways or standing behind carts when he arrived, on foot, as the Urukesh always do.

But as he joined the Knights Celestial—clearly one of them—some relaxed their guard. A few even came to see him, an Uruk not trying to slaughter you or steal your land, to see what they were really like. When they took in the size of him, they immediately developed a deep respect for the knights who had pushed the Uruk back over the last five or six years.

“Morning all,” Wardyn said. “I see that you’ve discovered something my people have known about for a few seasons. How did you fare in the battle?”

“Nine casualties, seven that Scarlet was able to help. Two who were beyond help,” Philip said.

Wardyn nodded. “May they rest well,” he said.

It was a simple sentiment, but brought people to silence for a moment.

“I see there was very little by way of ransacking here. Looks mostly like abandonment.” He nodded toward Scarlet.

She nodded back. “Some places were abandoned long ago. At this point, it doesn’t matter why. All that matters is restoring things.”

“There we agree, Sera Esmerelda.”

“Esmerelda?” one of the townspeople asked.

“It’s my name among the knights,” Scarlet said. “But I remain Scarlet among my people.”

Wardyn inclined his head at her, took her meaning, and endeavoured to be more careful of his speech—as she had been endeavouring to be more careful of hers.

“Let me just say this,” he continued. “Your Lady Scarlet represented the humans well at the council, and we are now at peace—finally—a long lasting peace. Perhaps now we can return to the cordial relationship of our grandfathers’ times.”

“You represented your tribes well, Krang,” she said.

“I am no longer krang,” Wardyn said. “My people have chosen new leadership.”

He didn’t go into any detail about how or when that happened, and no one asked.

“You oversaw the return to peace,” Drogoth said. “That’s more than can be said for any other krang in recent memory.”

Wardyn nodded. “Well said, and thank you.”

“What are we to do here?” Amira asked. “We can’t leave these people unprotected.”

“I would ask,” Philip said, “that you, Senna, Yselle, and Aldric remain behind to lend protection to the people here. Given the powers Epherion has granted each of us, this seems to me to be a good unit. Is anyone opposed?”

“Yselle is not here,” Amira said. “She left in the night.”

“Without telling anyone?” Philip asked.

“She told me,” Amira said. “She had something to attend to.”

“Which was?”

“She didn’t offer and I didn’t feel compelled to ask,” Amira said.

“Then, perhaps I should stay,” Drogoth said. “To make it four.”

“I think we may have need of you in Stormrest,” Scarlet said. “If the Usurper is truly there.”

“He is there,” Chenguer said.

“Can you really see him?” Drogoth asked.

“It’s difficult to explain,” Chenguer said. “I see a map when the Unfinished are close to me. I can see their power and relationships and I can see the source to which they tie. He is there, or was last night.”

“Then it will be three that stay behind. Prepare the settlers for fire. The Unfinished shy away from it. The rest of us ride for the Garrison and then onward to Stormrest. Any objections?”

No one objected. The three staying behind walked them to the edge of town. There were no long goodbyes—knights didn’t tend toward them—but Scarlet held Amira’s hand for a moment before she mounted.

They arrived at the garrison at Tallfellow Canyon shortly after dark, having ridden the last half hour in twilight. Thankfully when Ashira and Isen rose for the evening, they smiled down on Vael, showing a dimly lit path down into the valley.

They were challenged upon arrival, and cheered when they identified themselves. Undead had attacked the garrison as well, although they were few in number. Two men were drained, but still living, and Scarlet restored them. As with Philip and the others, the restoration was never fully complete, but sufficient.

They spent the night. For the second time Scarlet slept in Philip’s bed alone, and for the second time she didn’t want to be alone.

The next day, they arrived in Harrowgate, where fewer undead had arisen, but had wreaked more havoc, killing five townspeople. Two others were hovering on death’s door, but Scarlet restored them with Lifegiver.

They did not stay long. The town had its own people moving through it now, doing what people do after a crisis—clearing, accounting, beginning again. Scarlet left them with what she could: the knowledge that the Unfinished feared fire, and that help was coming from Stormrest. It wasn’t enough, but it was something, and something was what she had.

The road west from Harrowgate was long and they rode it mostly in silence. Philip kept pace beside her. The land they moved through had been fought over for two generations, and you could see it if you knew what to look for—the abandoned farm, the broken fence line no one had repaired, the village that was smaller than its road suggested it should be. She had spent her whole life fighting for this land in the abstract. Riding through it, she understood for the first time what restoration actually meant. Not a legal document. This. The fence repaired. The farm reoccupied. The village full again.

By noon on the third day, they were at Kestrelmont.

Charles dreaded the idea of Isabelle coming for afternoon tea and dinner. He still loved her, but he felt like he was no longer in love with her. And he still felt like it was a flaw in his personality. She was perfect—but different now. Even her kiss was not the same. Not that long ago, it made him tremble. Now? It made him want to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. He didn’t, but the instinct was there.

He sat at his desk, leafing through grain reports that his father had given him. Normally, this would go to Scarlet, but he had taken on more of this in recent weeks, and was well inclined to the task, except his heart was not in it at the moment.

He stared out the window at the bridge leading to Kestrelmont, its low rise over the moat. Charles remembered playing there when he was eight or nine years old, when life was simpler. He remembered his sister riding there on her horse, her blonde hair catching the light.

He straightened in his chair. Someone was crossing the bridge—blonde hair, that particular way of sitting a horse.

He jumped up, dashed down two flights of stairs and ran out through the front entrance as fast as his legs would go. In the foyer, his mother called out to him, but he didn’t hear a word she said. Some admonishment about running in the house, he was sure.

He met her at the foot of the bridge, where she dismounted.

“Scarlet—”

“Hi, Charles. I’m back.”

He scooped her up, noticing that she was, perhaps, a little shorter than she had been when she left—unless he had grown. And then he smiled as he realized which was the more likely case.

He spun her around.

“You’re back! You’re back!” Then he dropped her to her feet, held her at arm’s length, and took her in—the armor, the sword, the whole of her. “What on Vael are you wearing?”

Then he looked up and saw four others, similarly dressed.

One was an Uruk!

“Who—Who are you all?” He paused. “Forgive my manners. Good day, I am Charles Wentworth. I am Scarlet’s brother. Welcome to Kestrelmont.”

They all dismounted, except the Uruk, who did not ride a horse.

“Where have you been? What happened? Are you just getting back now? Are you okay?”

Question after question spilled out of him.

Scarlet laughed and said, “There’ll be time for all of that.” She looked up to see her parents coming along the drive, their faces full of questions.

They were still thirty paces away when she saw her mother reach out to grab her father’s arm and say something to him before covering her mouth with her hand.

Her father glanced at his wife and then back at her. His jaw set and then his jaw released and he grabbed her mother’s hand as they hurried together.

Mother must have said many things, but she could not make out a single word other than her own name being repeated as her mother held on for dear life.

She reached for her father who held her tightly, then pulled away to look at her.

He gave her that look he always gave her when he didn’t need words—a little displeasure over what she had done, mixed with pride that she’d had the fortitude to do the impossible anyway.

Then he noticed the Uruk, and the astonishment on his face was something to see. He turned back to Scarlet.

“The war is over, father,” she said. “Our lands are restored.”

He nodded then and said, “I am very angry with you. But also very proud.”

“I know, daddy,” she said. “We have a lot to talk about. I did some things. Made some promises. Did what I needed to do.”

“I’m not going to like it, am I?”

“You’ll come around.”

“Of course I will.”

The other knights had been quiet, observing this reunion, the impact slightly different on each. Something in Drogoth’s bearing had eased—a calmness that was close to a smile. Chenguer made no attempt to hide his. Wardyn laughed quietly at the first, but a wistfulness settled on him afterward and stayed.

Her mother, still wiping her eyes, had not let go of her daughter’s hand and, just gently, rested her head against Scarlet’s shoulder. Her father still had his arm around her.

“Mother. Father,” she said. “Let me introduce you to some of the Knights Celestial.”

“Wait—” her father said. “You’re wearing the same armor.”

“I have joined them,” she said, raising her eyebrows slightly, watching him carefully.

“You have joined the Knights Celestial? A woman?”

“I am far from the only woman,” she said.

“Joined?” her mother asked. “What does that mean?”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Scarlet said. She paused and then walked her parents to each of the knights, individually.

“This is Sir Drogoth. He’s from Drakkar.”

Drogoth gave a very short bow—not the type one gives to royalty of their own lands, but one meant to show respect. “Your house has produced worthy children,” he said.

“And you know Christine’s Chen, right?”

“Yes,” Elise said between sniffles. “I believe we met at Christine’s party.”

“Indeed, madam,” Chenguer said. “We did. I am glad to see you again. And you, sir, I believe you were dressed as a lion the last I saw you.”

“Good memory,” Caspian said, shaking hands with Chenguer, after a similar bow.

“This,” Scarlet said, “is Wardyn Holt, a knight, and former chieftain of his clan of Urukesh. He was one of three to sign the peace treaty.”

Scarlet was astonished to see her father give a short bow first. “I am told,” Caspian said, “that the war is finally over.”

“As am I,” Wardyn said, returning the bow. “One thing we both established early in the negotiation was that it was no Wentworth who began the hostilities. But it was a Wentworth who ended them. I hold your daughter in very high regard.”

The statement made Caspian’s lip tremble and brought a very slight dampness to his eyes.

“Well said, Sir Wardyn,” Caspian replied.

“Your people have always fascinated me,” Charles interjected. “Did you know in my great grandfather’s day we had Uruks in our household—before the war?”

“I did not,” Wardyn said, somewhat surprised.

The two wandered off chatting.

Scarlet took a few more steps to her right. “And this,” she said, “is Sir Philip Beckwith.”

“My lady. My lord,” he said, bowing to them a little more deeply than the others had.

Scarlet caught her mother’s eye. Elise’s attention moved from Philip to Scarlet and back again with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had already understood everything and was simply confirming it. She squeezed Scarlet’s hand.

“I believe you danced with my daughter at the masquerade,” Elise said.

“I am not sure I did much dancing,” he said. “It’s more like I tripped over my feet while walking beside a graceful swan.”

“Oh, hush,” Elise said. “You two were the talk of the evening.”

Philip nodded at her politely. “It is kind of you to say.”

“So you are the knight who has been recovering the land and now holds a legal claim on it,” Caspian said.

“The legalities,” Philip said, “are a matter of some debate and I, my lord, am not a great debater, and won’t pretend to be.”

“Do you intend to pursue the claim?”

“I have something else in mind,” Philip said. He glanced briefly at Scarlet, then returned his attention to the Duke.

Caspian caught it, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Oh. I see.”

“What are you two talking about?” Scarlet asked.

“Man stuff,” her father said. “Never you mind.”

“Well, let’s not stand out here all day,” Elise said. “Come. Come in. We were just about to set out lunch. I will have cook whip up something more substantial. You must all be hungry and thirsty following your ride.”

“If you don’t mind all,” Chenguer said. “I will take my leave for now. There is a certain young lady who I need to see.”

“Of course, Chen,” Elise said. “But if you do find her, bring her back for dinner will you?”

“I will try my best,” Chenguer said. He climbed up on his horse and headed to Wyndmere where Christine waited for him.

Wardyn and Charles remained in an animated conversation as they walked.

Philip walked beside Scarlet, but didn’t touch her. She noticed, and she took his hand, making things plain.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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They came from the tree line—shadows in the dark.

There was no warning sound. No footfall, no branch-crack, nothing that the sentries could have recognized before the wrongness fell on Faerlong Dell. One moment the dark between the trees was empty. The next it wasn’t.

The firelight had seemed warm a moment before. Now it only made the dark between the trees darker, and the shapes moving out of it reflected the orange fires like a mockery of warmth. People ran into each other. Someone’s torch went over and the grass caught for a moment before someone stamped it out. The camp had been a home for twelve hours and now it was a corridor for panic. Shapes, moving with the gait of things that had once been people and no longer were, drifting into the firelight from three directions at once.

A man screamed.

Scarlet’s army had encountered Urukesh. They had faced bandits and hard roads and the ordinary terrors of a long march. They had not faced this. The scream broke the camp open and people ran and the shapes moved through the panic without hurrying, without sound, reaching.

The first touch took a young man from Psalter’s Point off his feet. He didn’t fall so much as crumple, his color changing in the firelight, his face suddenly that of someone much older. The woman beside him screamed his name and grabbed his arm and the Unfinished moved on, reaching for the next.

Chenguer saw them all at once.

It was like a web laid flat over the world, a map drawn in nodes and pulsing connections over everything real. He could see the camp, the fires, the running people, and overlaid on top of it: sixty-three points of sickly light moving through the tree line and between the tents, each one a marker on a surface he’d never been taught to read but somehow knew how to use.

Philip was already moving toward the nearest cluster when Chenguer caught his arm.

“Seven o’clock,” Chenguer said. “Twelve of them, coming around the eastern fire line.”

Philip checked his stride, adjusted. Scarlet was already moving.

“Three o’clock,” Chenguer said. “That’s where the families are.”

Scarlet went.

“Straight on, six o’clock.” He paused. “That’s the main push. Eighteen.”

Philip looked at him once, then drew Lightbringer.

The night changed.

Philip moved into the center of the camp with eighteen creatures coming at him from the southern dark and Chenguer at his side. Lightbringer came out of its scabbard and what the light did was both illuminate and accuse. The nearest Unfinished turned toward it the way moths turn toward a lantern. That was the mistake. The first swing took two at once where they had crowded together, and what Philip felt was not the resistance of a body but the absence of one, like a vapor releasing.

“Two breaking left,” Chenguer said, and was already moving before Philip turned.

He took the first one with a direct cut that finished cleanly, and the second was on him before he cleared the stroke—hands reaching for his head, the killing touch. He dropped his weight and drove his shoulder into it, breaking its reach, and took it across the back as it stumbled forward. He was back at Philip’s left before the body dropped.

“Gap forming, nine o’clock,” he said. “Three are trying to go around.”

Philip pivoted without stopping, cutting back across his own arc, and Chenguer went the other way on a parallel path, but from a wider angle, cutting off the flankers before they reached the tentline. He killed one on the approach and the other two turned toward him, which was when Philip’s light found them from behind.

The overlay was not a distraction. It ran underneath everything else, the map updating constantly, the cold points winking out as the Unfinished fell and new ones registering as they pushed out from the trees.

“Behind you,” Chenguer said, “closing fast.”

Philip dropped without breaking stride. The reaching hands passed over him. He came up inside the creature’s reach and drove Lightbringer upward through it. The light went through it like dawn through a window.

They moved through the southern push together, Chenguer calling the positions as he took them, the overlay burning clear as each marker winked out. Eighteen became twelve became seven. Philip was breathing hard, the blade using him as much as he used it, the fire burning through him. Chenguer stayed at his shoulder and kept him from having to turn around.

“Three left,” Chenguer said. “Then a gap.”

Philip heard gap and pushed harder. Chenguer went wide on the last cluster, driving two of the three toward Philip’s light from the side, and Philip burned through all three in a span of seconds neither of them would afterward be able to recount clearly.

When it was done Philip was still upright, barely.

“Report,” he said.

“Seventeen down in this group. One broke north.” Chenguer checked the overlay. “Scarlet has it.”

She did.

The creature had been reaching for a child—a girl of maybe six who had run the wrong direction and ended up alone behind a supply cart—when Scarlet arrived. The Unfinished turned from the child toward Scarlet with whatever instinct governed it, both hands reaching for her forehead. As before, she felt the attempt, and the absence of something to grip. The creature’s hands were on her face and she looked at it and it looked at her and there was a moment where neither of them understood what was happening.

Then she drew Lifegiver and cut through it, and the body that fell was just a body. The life from the blade encountering the death from the creature. Whatever had animated it was gone.

The girl was unhurt, but frozen with fear, eyes wide, unable to cry.

“Hide under the cart,” Scarlet said, shooing her.

“Twelve o’clock,” Chenguer’s voice carried across the chaos. “Eight of them, moving in a line.”

Scarlet ran toward them.

She understood the gift differently now, four creatures deep into this fight. Lifegiver was a blade that balanced. It was a response to what should not exist, the life it carried meeting the stolen life in the Unfinished and coming out even, a zero where there had been something.

Each creature she slew felt less like a kill and more like a correction. The eighth one she never broke stride for, stepping into its reach and through it in one motion, and when she turned back there were eight still shapes on the ground and the people who had been their intended victims were still standing.

One of them—an older woman, a Wentworth cousin no one had thought to ask the name of—had not run at all. A creature had touched her, turned away, moved to the next person. She stood with her arms folded, watching Scarlet come past with an expression more offended than frightened.

“Where are they coming from?” the woman asked.

“The trees. Stay low.”

“I was staying low.”

Scarlet was already past her.

“Ten o’clock,” Chenguer called. “Seven, clustered. Philip can’t reach them.”

She adjusted her angle without slowing.

The eastern fire line was where Aldric and Senna had ended up, which was where they needed to be.

Aldric had found Senna in the first thirty seconds. He’d pulled her sideways out of the path of an Unfinished and she’d given him a brief nod—she’d already known he was there—and then they’d stopped talking and started working.

The first creature had reached for a woman near the fire before either of them could get to it. Senna felt energy pass through her—her will to stop the creature taking shape—and it did stop. Its hands fell away from the woman and the draining reversed. Not fully, but enough. The woman blinked and gasped and scrambled away, and the creature turned from its interrupted work toward Senna with the first thing like attention any of them had shown. Senna met it with her blade and the flare that ran from her into the creature was like a breaking storm, a crack almost like thunder. The creature came apart.

Aldric was already on the next one.

He understood his gift by then. He’d not done this before, but there was an ancient memory he hadn’t been aware of until now, muscle and instinct and two thousand years of knowledge arriving in real time. He moved through the edge of the fighting with a calmness that should not have been possible in that chaos, each strike timed to land when the creature was already turning toward something else. He didn’t fight with the light of judgement like Philip. Instead, the things Aldric killed did not see him coming.

What the two of them made together was something neither made alone.

Senna pulled the creatures’ attention. The disruption she carried was to the Unfinished like an itch, like a sound just at the wrong frequency. They turned toward her. She let them come, reading the timing, holding until Aldric had his angle and then letting the storm crack loose, which completed whatever the creature had been reaching for and left it open for the half-second it took Aldric to finish it. It wasn’t a system they had discussed, but it arrived naturally to them.

They moved together through twelve of the Unfinished this way along the eastern fire line. Aldric took the last one by himself because Senna was still managing the disruption on the second-to-last, and when it was done he came back to her without thinking and found she had already taken his hand, which neither of them remarked on.

What mattered was the people behind them were alive.

On the western edge of camp, Drogoth, Amira, and Yselle arrived into the worst of it.

Fourteen creatures in a rough mass, moving in loose formation toward a section of camp that had tried to barricade itself behind overturned wagons and a prayer.

Yselle went in first, which was not anyone’s plan. Eclipse hit the group like a cloud crossing the sun, somewhere between light and darkness, though not either. It was more like a dimming that left the Unfinished disoriented. Three of them turned in place, reaching for something they could no longer locate. Another two simply stopped, caught in whatever Eclipse made of attention and will.

Yselle moved through the gaps they left, unhurt, untouched, moving on feathered wings, her sword flashing in the firelight. Her blade caught one that had staggered sideways and she was airborne again before it fell.

Drogoth was in the midst of seven of them. What happened when his blade found the first creature was light, but not Philip’s light. It was less like the light of dawn and more like a forge at full heat, orange-white and furious, and it did not illuminate so much as consume. The creature it touched did not come apart cleanly. It burned. Whatever cold stolen life the thing had carried went out like dry evergreens catching.

Drogoth did not notice.

He was already on the next one, and the next, the rage finding the shape Epherion had always meant for it, the blade swinging in arcs that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the fire moving through him. The light was getting brighter. He could feel it rising in him the way a fever rises—past discomfort, past warning, into something that had no ceiling. The heat kept climbing and didn’t stop.

Amira worked behind him. She moved through the aftermath of the staggered and disoriented creatures still reeling from Eclipse, looking for the ones still draining, still crouched over settlers who were breathing but barely, faces aging by the second.

She held Sunrise over the first one, and what the blade did was not complicated. It was a sunrise. Another day. With it came hope, and the will it restored went directly into the person being drained, returned to them. The woman on the ground opened her eyes with an expression of total fury and hit the creature in the face with a closed fist. The creature reeled. Amira finished it.

The second was already releasing its victim when it sensed her, turning with both hands, the killing reach. She stepped inside it, the blade between them, and held her ground. Sunrise burned through whatever connection the creature had made and the victim rolled clear and scrambled toward the wagons while Drogoth put the thing down from behind without breaking stride.

He did not break stride because he could not. The fire had him fully now.

The last creature fell and Drogoth kept moving, blade up, the orange-white light throwing wild shadows through the tents. His breathing had gone ragged and loud. He was making sounds, but not words, and the people nearest him were backing away. He was moving toward the tentline because the fire did not know the difference between an enemy and a canvas wall and neither, in this moment, did he.

Amira stepped into his path and put Sunrise flat across his blade.

The collision of the two lights was not loud. It was almost quiet. Warmth meeting heat. Drogoth’s arm drove forward against the block and she held it, both hands on the hilt, and held his gaze across the crossed blades.

“Drogoth.”

The wild went out of his eyes by degrees. Then he was present again, blinking at her across the steel.

The fire didn’t leave him all at once. The fever broke with a shudder, the heat dropping by degrees until he was standing in the middle of the camp with his sword arm trembling and his lungs burning and nothing left to fight.

He lowered the blade.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

“I lost it,” he said.

“I know.”

“I would have gone until—”

“I know,” she said again.

He stepped back. She let him.

“Thank you,” he said.

She nodded once.

Into the quiet that followed, Yselle’s voice came from somewhere in the dark beyond the firelight.

“Two more.”

“I don’t see them,” Drogoth said.

“You don’t need to.”

There were two sounds in quick succession—blade passing through flesh, and then the flap of wings as she swooped over their heads and landed silently beside them.

Drogoth shivered. Amira took his hand, then drew him down gently until his forehead rested on her shoulder, and held him there while the aftershocks moved through him.

“It’s okay,” she said.

When Philip cut down the last creature, he found Chenguer at his side, already facing the tree line.

“That’s all of them,” Chenguer said.

The overlay in his vision—the sixty-three cold points, one by one extinguished across the last few minutes—showed nothing. The forest was empty. Whatever had sent them had not come itself.

By the time the last of the Unfinished had been unmade, the camp was very still. Sixty-three creatures gone. Seven people injured in ways that were not physical, with Scarlet attending each. Two dead, both drained of life before anyone could reach them.

Travis was found with one hand on his own forehead, alive and unaged, his attention fixed on the space where one of the creatures had touched him and passed on. He didn’t offer an explanation. Didn’t seem to have one.

The unnamed Wentworth cousin was sitting on an overturned crate, watching the cleanup with the expression of a woman who intended to speak to someone in charge about this later. She had been touched once, full on the forehead. She had not fallen. The creature had stepped back and walked away from her as though she were furniture.

Moses was found near his own doorway.

He had made it that far. Out of the house and almost to the street. One of the Unfinished had found him at the threshold. He lay on his back with his face turned toward the door he hadn’t quite reached, very old and very still, dead for some minutes before anyone reached him.

Scarlet stood over him with Lifegiver in her hand and could not make herself kneel. She already knew. She had known from ten feet away, from the stillness. She knelt anyway, and held the blade over him, and felt nothing move through her. Lifegiver had nothing to say to the already-gone. She put her hand on his chest once, briefly, for reasons she couldn’t have explained. He had been alive three hours ago and had shown her his house and said the thatch wasn’t pretty. But there was no coming back from the end.

Philip found her at the edge of the firelight, facing the tree line. He didn’t say anything. Neither did she.

They stood together in the dark for a long moment, the camp behind them beginning slowly to stir, the sound of voices returning. Someone rebuilt a fire. Someone else called a name and heard it answered.

Then Yselle landed lightly beside them. “Eclipse blinds them,” she said. “Its power puts them in disarray around me. Thankfully, I was able to stay mostly out of their reach.”

Drogoth joined them. “Everyone okay?”

“We’ve lost two people that I know of,” Philip said.

“Moses Miller,” Scarlet said quietly. “The first person we met here. And then Armand Linker, a young man from Psalter’s Point, whose mother was with him.”

“There’s nothing to be done for it,” Philip said.

Chenguer looked at Drogoth. “You okay?”

“I did not feel like myself,” Drogoth said.

Yselle tilted her head at him. “Maybe that’s how Epherion wants to use you.”

Drogoth considered. “Perhaps.”

Senna and Aldric arrived together holding hands.

That was new.

No one said anything. Also, no one was surprised.

“I am able to disrupt their draining,” Senna said.

“I just destroy them,” Aldric replied.

“You make a great team,” Yselle said, which was the closest anyone came to commenting on the other thing. Her comment settled over the group. No one added to it.

Senna looked down at their joined hands as though noticing them for the first time. He didn’t let go. In the middle of two dead, seven drained, and a camp that would not sleep again tonight, something had apparently also begun. The world was like that sometimes.

“My observation,” Amira said. “When an Unfinished attempts to drain you, they suppress the victim’s will. Sunrise restores it—gives it back directly, the way a real sunrise does. Another day. Another chance to push back.”

“My observation,” Philip said, “is that anyone named Wentworth seems immune to their power.”

The group turned to Scarlet.

She nodded. “It’s like they can’t find purchase on whatever it is they pull away from other people. This is the second time they’ve failed to touch me. I saw it happen to others too—once they can’t grip, they move on. They don’t waste effort.”

“A bloodline thing?” Drogoth asked.

No one had an answer for that.

“I saw them mapped,” Chenguer said. “All of them, moving together. I saw their source.”

“Source?” Philip asked.

“The Usurper is in Stormrest,” Chenguer said.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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The road into Faerlong Dell had not been a road for some years. Grass had taken the ruts, and the tree line on either side had crept inward, branches meeting overhead in places, making a tunnel of green-gold light that the horses moved through without complaint.

Scarlet and Philip rode at the front, the armor of the Knights Celestial catching what light filtered through the canopy. Among her people she was still Scarlet, and they called her so, and she answered.

Nobody else spoke.

The village revealed itself slowly. A roofline through the leaves. Then a garden wall, still standing, with something that had been roses gone entirely to cane and thorn. A well with a wooden cover warped off its hinges. Doorways standing open to the weather, and inside them the dark and the smell of damp and the beginning of moss.

But the bones were good. Anyone who had ever kept a house could see it. The stone was sound. The walls stood plumb. War and occupation, not rot or fire, had driven people out.

A bird moved in the eaves of the nearest house and then was gone.

Scarlet did not dismount immediately. She sat her horse and took in the whole of it—the quiet street and the untended green and the long grass bending in the slight wind—and felt it settle in her. It was her land, but it needed work.

“Listen,” Philip said.

She stilled and tilted her head.

The sound of a hammer nailing something came to her ears.

“Someone’s already here,” he said.

They rode on further and found people. Not many—just enough to suggest a slow remigration had already begun. A town that once held three or four thousand people was now home to fewer than two dozen, all of them two generations removed from the original owners.

A man on a ladder, shoring up a stone wall in a house with no roof, caught the movement of the column and climbed down quickly, stepping out into the overgrown street to meet them.

“Fine morning, lords and ladies,” he said. “We weren’t expecting a wagon train.”

Scarlet and Philip both dismounted, as did others with them.

“Fine morning to you, too,” Scarlet said. “I am Scarlet Wentworth. What might your name be?”

“Lady—Wentworth? Returned? Begging your pardon, I’m Moses Miller.”

“This is your family home?”

“Aye. Belonged to my grandfather Abner Miller. But it’s in worse shape than I feared. Roof completely gone, two walls in a state of disrepair, floorboards rotted. It’ll take me seasons to complete it.”

“We’re here to help,” Scarlet said. “I have with me two thousand of our fellow countrymen and women who intend to settle here temporarily. I am no construction expert, but we have people of that skillset among us, and I think we begin by working on individual homes. We’ll start with yours if you would like the help.”

“Absolutely,” Moses said. “If you’ve got a stonemason with you, I have some questions I’d like to pose.”

“I’ll see to it, my lady,” Travis said without being asked.

“Bertram, Marcus. Let’s spread out and find the people who are here in need of assistance. It’s not yet ten in the morning and we can get in many good hours of work to help these fine people get one home at a time ready for habitation.”

“Pardon, my lady,” Moses said. “But there is a crew working on the town hall as we speak. We could use some help there as well.”

“Excellent,” she said. “We’ll pitch in.” She paused. “I wonder if you might direct me to two women: Charlotte and Patty.”

“You’d be talking about the Thompson sisters what are restoring their family home, two streets east. They’ve got their brother David running them ragged.”

Charlotte and Patty came out of their rundown home when they saw the two knights approaching in gleaming white and gold armor. A man with a similar build and features—presumably their older brother—came with them, dripping with sweat. The trio were filthy from the work.

“Fine morning,” Charlotte said. “My lady, my lord.”

“I am no lord,” Philip said.

“Oh!” Patty said. “You’re Sir Philip Beckwith of the knights!”

Charlotte stepped closer, studying Scarlet’s face.

“My lady, haven’t I met you somewhere before?”

“Yes,” Scarlet said, dismounting. “At the Whitewater Inn, weeks back when you were on your trip to see the floating gardens of Stormrest.”

“Yes!” Patty said. “You’re Esme, if I remember right.”

“I’m sorry that I deceived you at the time,” she said. “I’m Scarlet Wentworth.”

“What—the Lady Wentworth?” Patty said.

“And we treated you so common,” Charlotte said, feeling abashed.

“You treated me as a person,” Scarlet said. “And that’s what I needed at that time.”

Patty turned briefly toward Philip, then back. “Told you the sights were worth seeing out at the garrison, my lady.”

“You did indeed. And you were right.” She almost blushed.

“What brings you here, my lady?” David asked.

“I have brought many people from Psalter’s Point. My company numbers north of two thousand. Come to settle here temporarily and help recover the town. Can I send some people your way to help with your home?”

David took a step back. “To—to help us?”

“Yes. We have carpenters, stonemasons, woodcutters, you name it. We’ve suddenly got a whole community here to help bring Faerlong Dell back to its former glory.”

“I could definitely use the help,” he said. “These two spend more time gossiping than working.”

Scarlet smiled. “I’ll send people your way.”

“Would you stay for some tea?” Charlotte offered. “My lady. Last we knew you were headed somewhere in the east. Would love to catch up.”

“Another time?” Scarlet asked. “There’s much to see to today and the sun is moving quickly.”

“Two thousand people?” David asked. “That’ll be an enormous help for the town.”

“Let me be the first to tell you,” Scarlet said, “that the war with the Urukesh is now over. We have signed a peace treaty. There will be no more hostilities and, if you meet an Uruk traveling, they are to be left unmolested.”

“Peace?” David asked. “What, in my lifetime? Is that really true?”

“It is,” Philip said. “Lady Wentworth met with the Uruk leaders yesterday, drew new territory lines, and put an end to it. The Urukesh were ready for it to end as well. So yes, it is finally behind us.”

“That calls for a celebration!” David said. “I’ll be one moment.”

“Any excuse to get out his whiskey,” Charlotte said under her breath.

And that’s exactly what he did.

The remainder of the day saw Scarlet and Philip moving from home to home—about fifteen of them—offering assistance from the skilled crafters formerly of Psalter’s Point. It was gladly accepted by the resettlers, who carried fatigue and in some cases despair over what they had found in Faerlong Dell.

The streets had been cleared first, because they had to be. Two thousand people needed to move, and the overgrowth and debris wouldn’t permit it. Teams had gone through with scythes and axes and bare hands, pulling the long grass back from the cobblestones, dragging aside the fallen timber and the broken tile and the years of accumulated windfall. The cobbles themselves were mostly intact beneath it all, which drew more than one remark.

The broken tiles had not been wasted. Someone—nobody was quite sure who had started it—had begun sorting them into piles, loading them into carts, and depositing them in sorted fashion near the river bank. The piles had grown throughout the day as more people understood what they were for. By midafternoon there was enough crushed grog to begin mixing the first clay, and three long trench-cuts had been opened in the riverbank where the clay ran good and deep. Children too small for heavier work had been given the job of gathering broken tiles, fetching water, or treading the mixed clay with their feet. The latter job had been met with enthusiasm.

Moses Miller’s house had a rough thatch over its frame before noon. It wasn’t pretty, and Moses had said so, and been roundly ignored. Two stonemasons had looked at his walls, argued briefly with each other about the better approach, and reached a consensus by midafternoon. The sound of chiseling had not stopped since.

The town hall had required more hands and got them. Its roof frame was largely intact, but the tiles were in a state of disrepair. A crew had spent the day clearing the interior, relaying the fallen rafters, and beginning the slow work of salvaging tiles that had come off whole. Perhaps a third of them had. The rest would wait for one of the six clamp kilns that were nearing completion by dinnertime.

Twelve homes had been assessed. Four had been deemed sound enough to sleep in that night with minimal work. The other eight were projects, some of them long ones, but none of them hopeless.

And the cook fires. That was perhaps the thing that changed the feel of the place more than anything else. Smoke rising from dozens of chimneys that had not drawn in a generation, the smell of food moving through streets that had smelled only of damp and abandonment that same morning. People sat on stoops that weren’t theirs yet and ate together and the sound of conversation filled the gaps between the houses.

David Thompson had shared his whiskey more broadly than perhaps he intended, and nobody had complained, except David Thompson, who ended the evening with no whiskey.

The undead came before midnight.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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The council was held over a fire pit, with Scarlet Wentworth, Marcus Wentworth, and Edmund Robbins on one side, and three of the Urukesh krangs on the other—Haddagan, Borridor, and Vanderhast. There was history in the space between them even before a word was spoken.

The morning session was mostly a discussion between Marcus and Vanderhast, both presenting documentation of historical maps and written record about land borders. While there were some minor disagreements, none of them rose to a level of anger, each resolving in kind. One hundred acres here for one hundred acres there and a new border agreed to.

“Lake Taneka is a problem,” Vanderhast said.

“How so?”

“You have humans owning ninety percent of the shore, and we show equal use of the lake historically. I’d ask that you draw that back to the halfway position.”

“First,” Marcus said, “I think we should agree that whenever there is a body of water where the bordering land is held by both sides, that the entirety of the body of water should be available to all parties.”

“You’re suggesting,” Vanderhast said, “that if a river runs between our peoples that we should be able to fish and boat the entirety of the river and so should you?”

“That’s what I’m proposing,” Marcus said. “I think there is historical precedent, not just in Bravia, but in most nations.”

Vanderhast’s shoulders shifted—a small thing, but Marcus had been watching borders long enough to know what it meant. Borridor scowled. Haddagan nodded.

“It is agreed,” Vanderhast said. “About Taneka?”

Marcus smiled. “You’ll recall please that I had a similar issue in the south with the Sandwash River and you declined to budge?”

Vanderhast frowned.

Scarlet interjected. “We’ll pull back to the halfway point. Let it be so.” A slight pause—she felt the weight of it even as she spoke it. Marcus drew on his map while Vanderhast did the same on his.

As before they compared maps and shook hands on the resolution.

“Let’s take a break,” Haddagan suggested. “I don’t know about you, but my stomach has been growling for a while now, and I am smelling meat from the firepits. Can we take an hour or so?”

“Agreed,” Scarlet said.

At that they each closed their maps, picked up their papers, and stored them safely as people began moving to the various fire pits in the rocky field. Humans on one side. Urukesh on the other.

Scarlet grabbed Philip’s hand and said, “Let’s break this wall.”

She led him to where Krang Haddagan and Vanderhast sat, and dropped down beside them without ceremony. Neither Uruk moved toward her, but neither moved away.

Scarlet sat on a smooth stone, cleared her throat, and said, “People at peace eat together.”

Haddagan nodded, said nothing, and handed her a skewer with meat on it. He then handed one to Philip.

Scarlet took a bite, chewed, and then nodded, smiling. “It’s good. What is it?”

“Horse.”

Her stomach lurched, but there was no outward sign as she finished the skewer of meat. Peace, she reminded herself.

Philip followed suit.

The silence afterward held longer than it should have—but no one broke it.

The afternoon session opened with Krang Haddagan setting down his water skin and folding his hands on the table.

“We have a significant issue to address,” he said, “which we have been putting off.”

“Which is?”

“Kethara and Vorghast.”

“I don’t know what those are,” Scarlet said. Marcus turned his palms up—neither did he.

“They are Urukesh towns along what was the former border. Technically on land that, it appears in both versions of the histories, was Wentworth land.”

“Then they must be ceded back,” Scarlet said. “That’s the agreement in principle.”

“You’re talking about uprooting six thousand of our people from homes that have been theirs for two generations. We cannot agree to that. Humans have not even been there for sixty years.”

“I appreciate this concern, but our people were uprooted without mercy,” Scarlet said. “For decades, as you pushed deeper into my lands.”

“Because you had taken Gharaveth. There’d have been no war if you had not done that.”

“Let me remind you, Krang Haddagan, that I did not do that, nor did anyone in my family. Your dispute on Gharaveth was really with the Ashcrofts, whose baron is recently deceased, nevertheless, we agree that it is your land and always should have been.”

“Be that as it may,” Haddagan said. “There are about thirty thousand acres along the strip that contain those two towns that we cannot relinquish.”

“What do you offer in exchange?” Scarlet asked.

“I have a suggestion,” Haddagan said.

“Go on.”

“There have been recent revelations about a certain mount two days east of here, named Helios, on which sits a citadel—home to the Knights Celestial.”

“Yes?”

“It is currently unguarded. My proposal is to establish the Heliosi, an elite company of guardians to protect the Sun Citadel.”

A pause lingered after he spoke, longer than the words themselves.

“It would be made up mostly of Urukesh, since it is nearer to our lands, but would certainly be open to humans to join.”

Scarlet and Philip both sat back from the table. She pressed her fingertips and thumbs together, forming a cradle in which she placed her chin, and did not speak immediately.

Haddagan pushed on. “In exchange for these thirty thousand acres and towns that have become Urukesh over the years, I propose that the Urukesh fund the Heliosi and maintain those guards on behalf of the Knights Celestial.”

Scarlet held the position a moment longer, then set her hands flat on the table. “A new order?” she asked.

“Yes,” Haddagan said.

She was silent for a while, her attention moving over both groups—Urukesh and Human—and then drifting east toward the mounts, toward where she knew Helios sat, two days distant.

“I need a moment to discuss with my people,” Scarlet said.

She, Philip, Marcus, Bertram, and Travis moved a ways off from the negotiations.

“Thoughts?” she asked.

“My lady,” Philip said. “Does this not go against the very wishes you expressed to me yestereve? That the Knights Celestial should be neutral?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s proposing trading Wentworth land, something you would give up, for protection of the Knights Celestial. The knights get the benefit, not you.”

Marcus nodded. “I agree with Philip.”

“Bertram?”

“It’s hard to disagree that you see no benefit from the proposal—or at least our family does not,” he said.

“Travis?”

“My lady,” he said. “I think he needs to trade thirty thousand for thirty thousand. Somewhere else along the border and that the Heliosi, while a great idea, is a totally separate issue that should be managed directly by the Knights Celestial. Otherwise, the Wentworth are, effectively, paying for the Heliosi, while the Urukesh are claiming to do so. That crosses the political lines, in my view.”

Scarlet nodded. “I appreciate all of your thoughts.”

They returned to the negotiation and sat. Scarlet made a motion to smooth her skirt, but stopped when she realized she was wearing riding trousers.

Drogoth had joined them—standing at the edge of the circle in the gleaming armor of the Knights Celestial, hands folded, having arrived without anyone hearing him come.

“I will not interrupt the negotiations,” he said. “Only to state the position of the Knights Celestial.”

He inclined his head toward each side in turn.

“If the Heliosi is formed, it must remain independent of all factions, including ours.”

He paused.

“That is all.”

He stepped back to rejoin the other knights, who continued to observe in silence.

“Krangs,” Scarlet said. “The Heliosi are an excellent idea. But as Sir Drogoth has pointed out, that is an issue for the Knights Celestial. I do not speak on their behalf. I speak on behalf of my family, and therefore I cannot agree to the exchange.”

“We aren’t willing to leave those lands,” Haddagan said.

“Let’s not let this be the one thing that keeps us apart,” she said.

“Then will you concede it?” Borridor asked.

“No,” she said. “But I offer an alternative.”

“Let’s hear your proposal,” Vanderhast said.

“I propose,” she said, “that we expand the territory to sixty thousand acres. Thirty thousand on each side. And that this space be designated as the borderlands. And further that this space be freely available for both Urukesh and Human to settle and live. Now—we make it clear that racial infighting won’t be tolerated. And what we wind up with is Urukesh and Human living together again. We make this our trial.”

Marcus glanced down at the map, not trusting the simplicity of it. Borridor started to speak, then stopped.

Haddagan said nothing for a moment. He picked up a stone from beside his boot, turned it in his fingers, and set it down.

“And if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

“Then we draw the border down the middle and the Urukesh withdraw.”

Haddagan raised his hand to protest, but she interrupted him.

“I recognize this puts your people in those towns at risk. But it’s also an incentive for peace.” A pause. “Will the Urukesh make peace?”

The Urukesh withdrew into themselves, speaking sharply in their own language, the firelight catching the edges of their tension.

When they returned, Krang Haddagan sat calmly. His companions stood behind him now.

“Fifty thousand,” he said. “Twenty-five thousand on each side.”

“Agreed,” she said immediately.

It came too fast to feel safe—but it was the only path forward.

Krang Vanderhast and Marcus Wentworth drew the lines together, compared maps, and shook hands.

Handshakes were exchanged as the negotiations finished. Even Borridor and Philip shook hands, although Borridor referred to him as Edmund, rather than as one of the knights.

Scarlet and Haddagan joined hands and together, called loudly, “Let there be Peace!”

After the treaty was signed, people from both sides stayed at the fire, eating and talking.

A Urukesh soldier passed a skin of drink to a human woman on the far side of the fire. No one commented.

She nodded, hesitated, and then cut a loaf on a cutting board and placed it on a stone near the fire for all to share.

Laughter rose somewhere behind them.

The line that had existed all day simply stopped mattering.

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Charles Wentworth was troubled, but he’d been troubled for weeks, ever since his sister left unannounced to head east in a stupid attempt at valor, unaccompanied, poorly provisioned, and utterly unprepared for what lay before her.

Despite all of that, he knew she would be successful. She always was. He admired her for it—despite her penchant for doing dangerous things.

Their swordmaster, Benedict, had a saying for this: “Falling in shit and coming out smelling like roses.” There was no better explanation for his sister.

He loved her for it.

But he was worried about her this time. Especially since Lance Ashcroft had come inquiring about her, suggesting that he had proposed to her and was simply waiting for her reply.

The baron’s statement, “I’ll not have it said that a Wentworth woman came to harm while Lance Ashcroft stood idle,” had come off performative, as almost everything did with Ashcroft.

Charles couldn’t believe for a moment that Scarlet would give that idea any serious consideration. She’d probably dismiss it out of hand.

But Scarlet could be tricky.

He had been learning that recently.

As if on cue, Isabelle knocked and entered his bedchamber without waiting for an invitation.

They had built an intimacy over the weeks since the masquerade ball—familiar and candid, a proper intimacy. There was never a question of impropriety, but she had made herself at home in ways that Charles had found quite endearing and charming. Isabelle had a way of putting him at ease that he had never known before her.

Until she wasn’t.

This time, she made him cringe.

“Your mother says dinner is nearly ready and she expects you in ten minutes,” she said, sweetly. She came over to the desk where he was sitting and placed her hand on his shoulder. It was a gesture he had loved until a couple of weeks ago.

Now it felt hollow—something expected of her, rather than something that felt like comfort.

Like it was his favorite meal ever, but had become bland and tasteless.

He blamed it on himself.

Could it be possible that he was a typical seventeen-year-old male with feelings as fickle as the tide? Was he starting to fall out of love with her already?

The idea surprised him. He had never thought of himself that way—as the kind of man who could possess feelings of devotion one week and exchange them for feelings of unease the next.

What was wrong with him?

She turned to leave, but he stopped her.

“Would you mind sitting with me for a few minutes?”

“Of course, Charles,” she said, smiling. A smile that seemed painted on, rather than genuine.

“I wonder, if I have done something to upset you?” he asked. “I have heard father ask that of mother before. I am led to understand that men sometimes do things that upset their women, but they don’t know what they’ve done and they need gentle reminders of how this was harmful. So I would ask if you could simply say, gently, what it is that I might have done?”

“Oh, heavens no,” Isabelle said. “You’ve done nothing worth mentioning.”

“Worth mentioning? So something, but you don’t want to mention it?”

“Well,” she said shyly, “there is one small, tiny thing.”

“Tell me, my love. I would correct it immediately!”

“It’s just the matter of our closeness,” she said. “I would have thought that after weeks of courting me that you would have decided whether or not I might be the girl for you.”

This hit him like a gut punch.

Two weeks ago, there was never any doubt in his mind. In fact, a ring sat in the top drawer of his desk even now, and he’d been prepared to beg for her hand. But now he wasn’t sure.

Maybe that was the problem after all. Maybe they had both reached the point that it was time to declare intentions and ask for her hand, but he had become frightened at the most inopportune time, and this had changed her outlook. This had shifted her somehow.

She had become less tender. The words were still the same. The motions were still the same, but there was no life in them anymore.

There were times when he noticed that she seemed to be in a totally different world. She always snapped back to attention when he mentioned her name and re-engaged him, but there were times she was elsewhere.

Had he killed their love so early?

Perhaps he wasn’t meant for this. Perhaps he would always hurt people unintentionally and quietly.

What more was there to do but try again?

He took her hands, gently.

“Isabelle. You are the girl for me, and I think I am the man for you. I’ve thought that, honestly, since the first night we met. I would just ask for you to be patient with me as I struggle through my emotions as we approach a momentous decision for both of us.”

“Oh, Charles,” she said, embracing him. “I was hoping that you still felt that way. There has been some strangeness of late, I know. It is me, perhaps, being frightened by how quickly I have fallen. I too, have had anxiety about that moment.”

He stood, offering his arm.

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “I’m glad we talked.”

“Me too,” she said. “But I think the sooner the better.”

They joined his parents for dinner. Isabelle, as she had been doing for weeks now, sat in Scarlet’s chair.

This didn’t use to bother Charles, but it had been causing him unease of late. He wasn’t sure why, but it had felt as if she was intentionally replacing Scarlet.

Thankfully, their talk had settled the matter and he pushed it from his mind, digging into the roast beef, gravy, potatoes, and carrots.

“Mama?”

“What is it?” Elise called from her chambers.

“Can we talk?”

“Give me a moment,” she said.

Charles heard rustling as she donned a housecoat. She opened the door after a short pause.

“Come in,” she said. Then she took his face in her hands. “What’s got you down?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’ve been thinking about Scarlet a lot.”

“She’s okay,” Elise said. “I just know she is.”

“I worry that Ashcroft went after her. I don’t trust him.”

“Nor should you. He’s as much a snake as his father and his father before him.”

“I’ve a mind that he had a hand in his father’s death,” Charles said. “To become a baron.”

“Hush,” Elise said. “Don’t spread rumors.”

“Not saying he did,” Charles said. “I just wouldn’t put it past him. And then he goes after Scarlet, talking all high and mighty about how great he is for doing it.”

“What’s brought this on?”

“I don’t know. I’m feeling out of sorts. Missing my sister. Things just aren’t right.”

“Everything okay with Isabelle?”

He said nothing.

“Is there a problem?” Elise insisted.

“I think I’m the problem,” he said.

“Nonsense,” Elise said. “There’s nothing at all wrong with you.”

“I just don’t know if she’s the one, Mama.”

“What brought this on? You took some of your inheritance to buy her a ring. You were absolutely positive two weeks ago.”

“I think maybe I’m just a failure at love.”

“Come now,” she said, hugging him. “You’re not a failure. Tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try.”

“How do I put into words what made me want her to begin with? She was so full of life! I mean when she walked into the room, she made it brighter for everyone. I felt like the sunrises paled in comparison to her—the sunsets too.”

“And—?”

“It’s like she died inside,” he said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but something happened and not in a good way.”

“Have you talked to her about this?”

“I have. She reassures me that she loves me and she hints that she wants me to make a proposal.”

“There probably isn’t anything to worry about,” Elise said. “People don’t just change overnight. It could be that she has some fears about becoming a wife.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it’s just me.”

Elise hugged her son tighter. Then she patted his back. “It’ll be alright. You just wait and see. Love is a beautiful thing.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mama.”

“Just keep talking to her. Being open and honest about how you are feeling is the best thing you can do for each other.”

“Thanks, Mama,” he said, standing. “I’ll talk with her again tomorrow, I’m sure.”

“What time do you expect her?”

“She’s an early riser. I expect she’ll be here by eight, perhaps nine.”

“We’ll keep breakfast warm then.”

“Thank you, Mama.”

On the third floor of Toffin Place, last room on the left, Isabelle Marlow lay in her bed, staring at the canopy.

She still existed, but was so buried under the weight of the invader in her mind that she had become only an observer to her own life.

The presence was male. Of that she was certain. She could hear his thoughts. Dark and dangerous. Death was ever on his mind. The death of thousands.

Everyone in Stormrest and beyond.

She felt a prisoner—convicted of crimes she had not committed, locked in a small square stone cell, except she had a window to the life she should have had.

It only let little bits of her sneak out. Just tidbits. Enough to inform the conversation without giving herself away. Enough to seem like Isabelle.

Except she was not Isabelle anymore. Not the Isabelle she knew. She was a passenger behind her own eyes, watching herself move through rooms she loved, touch the hand of a boy she loved, and feel nothing reach him. The warmth that used to travel from her chest to her fingertips when Charles took her hands was gone. She could remember it, but she could not find it.

He knew something was wrong. She had seen the careful way he observed her for weeks now, the slight crease between his brows when she said something that missed its mark.

Charles was very unlike his sister Scarlet, who was always about taking action. He was calmer, more patient, more observant. He paid attention to her. And he was doing it now. He was noticing.

But the things he said made her feel that he was falling away from her—that she was losing the only thing that mattered. She hoped he would figure it out and she screamed inside to tell him. But she could not.

She had tried. In the early days she had screamed and fought and thrown herself against the walls of herself until the darkness came—swift and total, like a hand closing over a candle flame. After that she had learned to be still. Stillness preserved what little she had left.

But lately, at night, when the presence retreated into whatever passed for sleep, she could lie in the dark and simply be herself. She could not move. She could not speak. She could blink, and she could cry, and she had done both, quietly, in the small hours when no one was watching.

Patiently, she had mapped the boundaries of her cage, ever feeling at the edges, looking for gaps—cracks in the prison.

And then, three nights ago, she had felt it.

Her toes, first. A faint tingling, like a foot falling asleep—except the opposite of that. Like a foot waking up. She had not moved them. She had not dared. She had simply lain still and let the sensation exist and memorized it, so she would know it was real the next time.

Her fingers, last night. Just the tips.

She did not know what it meant. She did not know if it would amount to anything at all. But she thought about Charles’ face—the careful, unhappy way he had watched her tonight at dinner.

Tears fell from her eyes.

He had called it love, in those early weeks. She had not corrected him, because she had not had the words for it either. She still didn’t. But she knew that whatever it was, it belonged to her, and she intended to have it back.

She blinked, once, in the dark.

She waited.

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Sir Philip Beckwith and Sera Esmerelda Hale were the first of the Knights Celestial to leave the Sun Citadel on Helios, just as the sun began to fall in the west.

She still felt like Scarlet, but the name was also a call back to her youth, so it wasn’t uncomfortable. Once she donned the armor set aside for her as one of the nine justices—white and gold and emblazoned on the chest with the symbol of Epherion—she felt like she had become one of them.

Marcus was the impetus for leaving. “I told him twelve hours. It’s been nearly that. He will start climbing these stairs soon. He’s sixty-two. I’ve got to get back before he decides to start climbing in the dark.”

Philip agreed and they descended the stairs together. The others followed close behind.

Sir Wardyn Holt did not wear his armor, nor was his new sword strapped to his side. He retained his old gear, carried his spear strapped to his back, and carried his new belongings in a pack. He did not belong fully to either world yet—and he was not pretending that he did.

He walked more quickly than the humans, but Yselle was able to keep up with him easily on her feathered wings. The result was that the four of them came down out of the mountain together with the other five trailing behind.

“You look adorable in that armor,” Scarlet said.

“Why thank you,” Yselle said, somehow pulling off a curtsey while still flying. “I think it brings out the color of my eyes. But I think we all look splendid. Except for Wardyn here, who refuses to wear his.”

“It’s not that I refuse,” he said. “I will in due time. But I am still Krang Haddagan for the time being, and if there is going to be a council with my people, I assuredly will sit on the side of my people until negotiations are concluded.”

“And you can’t look like you are on the same team as the Knights Celestial until that happens,” Scarlet said. “That makes sense.”

“I am on both teams, just to be clear,” he said. “The Urukesh team and the Knights Celestial team. I’m not on the human side of these negotiations, so I beg you not to take offense if I insist on what is right for my people.”

“We won’t take offense,” Philip said. “I’d be dismayed if you didn’t advocate for your people.”

The steadiness in his voice settled something in her.

“All we want,” Scarlet said, “is to restore the borders.”

“I will hold my tongue on this matter until the council is convened,” Wardyn said.

“Did anyone else notice that we didn’t need to drink, eat, or sleep while we were there?” Yselle asked.

“I wasn’t there long enough to notice,” Philip said.

“No, she’s right,” Wardyn said. “You were gone a week, and we never ate or slept. I did lie down a few times, but I was always well rested.”

They met Marcus a hundred yards from the end of the stairs.

“What a magnificent sight you make, dressed in this armor,” he said. “But I am confused that you are dressed the same, my lady.”

“While I remain Scarlet,” she said, “I have joined the Knights Celestial and have taken the name Esmerelda Hale. But I will remain Scarlet Wentworth among my people.” Saying it aloud made the split feel real—and heavier than she expected.

“What’s next?” Marcus asked. “Bertram and Travis have been directing the people to collect firewood and forage for food sources in your absence.”

“We are about three days travel from our lands and another two to Stormrest itself, but we shan’t be going that far.”

“No?” Marcus asked.

“We’re going home first. The town of Faerlong Dell is within the lands Philip has recovered, and I happen to know two women who are among the first eager to re-establish it. Stormrest can wait.”

“Faerlong Dell!” Marcus said, excitedly. “I’ve always loved that area. It was where my grandfather once lived.”

The name settled among them. Someone fed a log to the nearest fire. The group’s attention shifted—not toward Stormrest, but toward the land itself.

“So we will settle there?” Marcus asked.

“Yes,” Scarlet said. “The houses have stood empty or been ransacked, but the bones are there. We’ll settle in while we work. It won’t be permanent—those homes have rightful heirs and we’ll honor that—but it’s a beginning.”

She looked at Marcus. “And you’ll be coming with me to Kestrelmont. We need a historian.”

“I would hope my people haven’t ransacked Faerlong Dell,” Wardyn said, frowning.

Scarlet frowned as well. “I apologize. I did not mean any offense.”

“I understand,” Wardyn said. “But words matter.”

“I don’t disagree,” Scarlet said.

“I think I’ll take my leave of you at this time,” he said. “I will go to prepare a council. Sir Philip, we will meet where we fought the wolves. Does this suit your side?”

Philip nodded. “I know the place. Let us hope that it becomes a monument to peace.”

“Indeed,” Wardyn said.

He moved west along the road, moving far faster than a human. Before he was out of sight, the remaining five members of the Knights Celestial were among them.

Scarlet watched him go until the road was empty. “I need to be more careful. I used the wrong words with Wardyn.”

Philip said nothing for a moment, his attention still on the western road.

“In point of fact, they did ransack a number of towns,” he said quietly.

“You’re right,” she said. “But that misses the point.”

It was not about accuracy. It was about fracture lines.

“Fair enough.”

Introductions were made between the knights and many of Scarlet’s people. They had already eaten dinner, but there were leftovers aplenty, and they were happy to share with the knights, who had suddenly become hungry.

Scarlet slipped her hand into Philip’s. “Can we talk privately?”

“Of course.”

They found a spot a ways off. Philip cleared off a spot on a log where they could sit.

“What is it, Esme?” he asked.

“Tomorrow’s council. It’s between the Wentworths and the Urukesh.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“It needs to be a negotiation between Krang Haddagan and Scarlet Wentworth, not Sir Philip Beckwith of the Knights Celestial.”

“Do you forget that it has been the knights who have freed dozens of miles of that land?”

“No, Edmund. I am not forgetting. Don’t read it that way.” She pressed on. “What I am saying is that the two negotiating parties need to be the people who have ancestral rights, not conquest rights. It sets the right tone. If you are there representing the right of conquest, then that gives them two planks, because they can argue their conquest was as legitimate as yours.”

“It is exactly as legitimate,” Philip said. “And why wouldn’t we have the same two planks on our side?”

“We would. Except you and I are not on the same side, exactly. I am on the side of my family and our rights to possess the land. You are on the side of conquest and the right to possess via acquisition.”

“I would call it re-acquisition.”

“Either way, the real problem is that I don’t think you should be there as part of the Knights Celestial. Especially with Wardyn now a member. He’s not wearing the armor of the knights, nor will I. It will be the Urukesh and the Wentworths.”

“But the knights have had a role. We can’t turn a blind eye to that.”

“The Knights Celestial needs to be neutral going forward,” Scarlet said. “They can’t be on the human side any more than they can be on the Urukesh side. They can be there, but not on a side of this dispute.”

He frowned. “I’m not going to accuse you of not caring that we bled and died for this land. But you’re not giving it enough credence. Plus, I know Haddagan well enough and he will expect me there.”

Scarlet sighed. “I just think the right thing to do is separate the Knights from this council. You should be there as a neutral observer.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t do that.”

She stared at him.

The fire crackled between them. Somewhere in the camp a child laughed and was shushed.

“But I do agree with your principle,” he continued. “The knights should be neutral. The six of them that will be there. I will come as Edmund Robbins, without the regalia. I will represent the brave men who fought to take the land back.”

Scarlet tilted her head and considered. She could see what it cost him—and what it preserved. She turned it over, looking for the flaw in it, and found instead that it was simply better than her own proposal in the way that occasionally, irritatingly, someone else’s solution was.

“Actually,” she said. “That’s a better idea than mine.”

“I don’t mean to be difficult,” he said. “But I did fight for this land for a very long time.”

“I know,” Scarlet said. “And I won’t forget it.” She squeezed his hand. “I’ll make sure the men who fought for this land are rewarded. They’ve earned it.”

“It’s not only about that. It’s about not simply dismissing the people who made this possible by half.”

Scarlet nodded. “I see your point. And I concede it.”

“Thank you,” Philip said.

She reached for his hand and he accepted hers.

They walked back together and joined the rest, having a meal of leftover turkey and a second round of grunoch jerky.

When they were finished, they sat together with wool blankets again.

“I am on your side,” Philip said.

“I probably didn’t use the right words,” she confessed. “Sometimes my mouth moves faster than my mind.”

“You were mostly right. I guess I was being stubborn.”

She stared at the fire. “Tenacious. We both are. We’ve both needed to be.”

“It’ll be okay. As long as we can disagree and still like each other,” he said.

She leaned her head on his shoulder. “It’s just that so much of my life has been wrapped up in this… and it culminates tomorrow.”

Philip adjusted slightly so she could rest more comfortably. “I have faith in us.”

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The vault opened when all nine stood before it.

No key. No mechanism they could see. Yselle had examined the doors twice already in the days before Scarlet arrived—running her small hands along the seams, tapping the stone, tilting her head as she did when she was listening to something just below hearing. She had found nothing. The doors had simply waited.

Now they swung inward without sound.

The room beyond was not large. Stone walls, a vaulted ceiling, a single window set so high and narrow it admitted a column of light no wider than a man’s hand. The light fell on a table, and on the table sat the archive. A single bound volume, its cover dark with age, set apart from everything else as though it had always known it would be opened last.

Scarlet was still holding Lifegiver. She hadn’t sheathed it since the gate. The pale light of the blade caught the column of sun and threw it softly across the table.

“Drogoth may be our most learned,” Philip said. “Why don’t we start with the text you brought from Drakkar?”

Drogoth nodded and read to them from the text.

It concerned itself with time. How one person lives one hundred years, but another only seventy, and what happens to the missing thirty years. What happens to the time normally allotted a person if that person is stillborn? What becomes of their lost years? Does it accumulate somewhere in the cosmos? Does Abba keep track of the balances of fate such as this?

The treatise continued in this vein, waxing philosophical about equities and inequities in life in all matters—not just time, but wealth, love, appreciation, kindness, and the negative things like anger, hatred, abuse, injustice. Is it Abba that tracks these balances, or does she not care? Does the afterlife adjust for these inequities experienced in life?

“It leaves ambiguous the identity of the pawn of the Imprisoned One, but then names nine justices called by Epherion to judge his evildoing,” Drogoth said.

“And we are the nine justices,” Yselle said. “And you are the chief justice, Lightbringer.”

Philip’s jaw set. He said nothing.

“My teachers suggest the text was apocryphal and probably not true, but so far it has turned out to be true,” Drogoth said.

“Let’s open the archive,” Philip said.

Drogoth nodded and opened the cover, gently. It was clear that he was used to old tomes of this nature.

The script was archaic in places but not unreadable—someone, at some point in the book’s long history, had made a careful copy in a cleaner hand, and it was this he followed. The first pages were history: the founding of the order, the making of the blades.

“On the world anvil!” Chenguer said. “So it does exist.”

“So it would seem,” Senna said.

“Doesn’t mean the worldtree doesn’t though,” Amira said. “I’ve always believed both myths carried some truth.”

Aldric spoke. “Some in Elindor think that both myths are simply metaphorical and that Epherion merely spoke and the world began, that he willed it and life sprang from the world, that he thought it and the Aelvaeni were the first to rise.”

Drogoth read aloud.

Silence settled over the vault.

“So something does, in fact, control those undead—those Unfinished,” Scarlet said.

“It seems to me that Ashcroft controlled them,” Philip said. “But he is now dead.”

“Was he possessed by this Usurper then?” Wardyn asked.

Scarlet said nothing for a moment.

She remembered the hollowness of Lance Ashcroft. The times when he did not know she was watching—when he stopped seeming real, stopped seeming human, until he became aware of her again and the mask of life returned to his features. She had told herself it was brooding. She had told herself it was his nature.

But then Ashcroft had proposed to her. Had he done so while controlled by this Usurper? Is that why it had never felt true? And if true—if the real Lance had remained hidden away somewhere in a mind commandeered by an ancient spirit—then what had he endured? What had been done through him against every faculty he possessed, as the archive put it, while he was still in there?

She sat with that for a long moment.

“Poor Lance,” she said, quietly.

“What do you mean?” Yselle asked.

“I think he was possessed,” Scarlet said. “I traveled with him during that time, and he was always trying to manipulate me. When he did not get what he wanted, Lance was no longer useful to the Usurper. That is why he died.”

“What did he want from you?” Philip asked.

Scarlet swallowed hard. She had avoided this subject with Philip up until this point. She thought about it for a moment—her goal to not hurt the one she loved.

“He wanted to resolve the dispute between our families.”

“How?” A beat, and then something shifted in Philip’s expression. “Oh. I suspect this means he had an alternative plan to the queen’s designs.”

Scarlet looked away, the directness of his understanding too precise in the moment.

“No,” he said. “It makes total sense if you think about it from the perspective of a Usurper. He just had no idea who he was up against.”

She looked back at him. His face held nothing but steadiness and a quiet, unperforming kindness.

Whatever she had felt for Philip—for Edmund—prior to that moment was no longer the largest version of itself.

Chenguer drew his sword—Constellation. “Somehow this is related to him. Somehow this is a map to the Usurper and his Unfinished.”

The others turned to him.

“I just need to figure it out,” he said.

“Do you mean you think you can find him—the Usurper?” Amira asked.

“Possibly,” he said. “But I don’t understand any points of reference or coordinates.”

“What do you see?” she asked.

“I see a web of interconnected nodes. I can pan around it and see them. I see where some of them are broken. I see that some of the web strands are stronger and some are weaker.”

“Can you travel through the nodes?” Scarlet asked. “Can you search through it?”

“I’ve been trying that, and sometimes I do hop from node to node in my vision, but I don’t know why or how that happens.”

“A way to find the Usurper would change everything,” Philip said. “Keep working on it.”

“I haven’t been able to think of anything else,” Chenguer said.

“What more is there in the archive?” Philip asked.

“The names of every knight are here,” Drogoth said.

“Is it true that a member of the Knights Celestial has to take a new name?” Scarlet asked.

“They are called a new name,” Philip said. “But they remain who they are in reality. I am still Edmund, though I am called Philip as a member of the Knights Celestial—and this is how everyone but you calls me.”

“Edmund?” Chenguer asked. He chuckled. “I’m going to remember that.”

“You do that, Wei Liang,” Philip said.

“How—how did you know my true name?” Chenguer asked.

“I know them all,” Philip said.

“How?”

“I just do.”

Chenguer nodded.

“So I’ll need to take a new name,” Scarlet said.

“The names of the nine justices are given here,” Drogoth said. “The nine who will be called by Epherion. Wardyn, your name is here.”

Wardyn studied the text. “I thought I was picking that name of my own free will.”

“Prophecy is strange that way,” Drogoth said.

“So you are all named there,” Scarlet said. “What is the ninth name?”

“Esmerelda Hale,” Drogoth said. “Apparently that’s your name in the order.”

Scarlet and Philip looked at each other.

The name had been written here for two thousand years. Before she was born. Before her parents were born. Before the Wentworth title was stripped and the family fell and she grew up in three rooms with a crack in the wall that let in the cold. Before any of it. The archive had known what her life would cost her, and it had written down what she would be called when she came out the other side.

Drogoth read:

“Ready to carry both?” Scarlet asked. “I wonder what that means?”

“We don’t give up our names,” Wardyn said. “I am still Haddagan, but I will no longer be Krang among my people.”

“We give up titles?” Scarlet asked.

“The calling is singular,” Amira said. “We forsake those ties for the greater good.”

Scarlet stared at the older woman. She understood what that meant. The Wentworth name. The name she had spent her whole life fighting to restore, had stood in a theater and asked sixteen hundred strangers to trust. She would now be asked to give it up in the hour of finally realizing her success. She would become something else. Something that had been waiting in a book on a table in a locked room since before her grandmother’s grandmother drew breath.

“May I read it?” Scarlet asked. “If it’s about me?”

Drogoth stood aside as she read the words.

Scarlet read them over twice, the inscription ending at the bottom of the right-hand page. When she let out a sigh, the page turned on its own. She hadn’t touched it. And then she read what the ninth was called to do.

She thought about Philip at the pool, the quill poison working through him, his eyes finding her face with the last strength he had. She thought about what she had felt move through her when she prayed—not her own strength, something older and larger that had used her hands as the nearest available instrument.

She had not known what it was then. Now she did.

She closed the book carefully.

Around her, the others were moving—Chenguer had found something in a secondary document that he was showing to Drogoth, Wardyn stood before a carved relief on the far wall with his arms folded, Senna and Aldric were reading together over a second table. The vault was full of quiet industry, the nine finally understanding what they had been summoned to understand.

Scarlet stood at the table with her hand resting on the closed cover of the book and said nothing.

The sword was warm in her other hand. The column of light had shifted slightly as the sun moved, and it fell on her now instead of the table.

She didn’t move out of it.

“We are to war against the Usurper, a creature of spirit and shadow, and defeat his minion to prevent them from taking more lives—more years—from the people,” she said.

“I think that about sums it up,” Chenguer said.

“That was—is—the purpose of the Knights Celestial,” Philip said. “Epherion established us to defeat the pawn of the Imprisoned One.”

“But what is the Usurper’s purpose?” Amira asked.

“And,” Aldric added, “what were the terms of the bargain that he made? The vault said he was once a man.”

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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They rode west for two days. On the morning of the third, the people from Psalter’s Point introduced them to a novelty: cake for breakfast. Scarlet and Philip watched the production with something close to reverence.

Two women poured batter on cast iron skillets. It did not cook long before the cakes were expertly flipped. Once off the skillets, a generous slab of butter went on each.

“I think,” Philip said, “that you might have just put an unofficial end to the war with the Urukesh.”

“You think?”

“Probably not immediately, but once they are trained, they’ll be an overwhelming force. I would be happy to volunteer my services to train your army, my lady.”

“I was hoping you would say that,” she said.

“We’ve been skirmishing by the dozens for months now. I get the sense that Krang Haddagan is about done with war, but he’s not their only chief. With a legion of fighters, we should be able to take the land back quickly and just put an end to it.”

“You’ve been fighting mostly in the south of the land, but in the north, I am told that we hold ancestral tribal lands that truly belong to the Urukesh,” Scarlet said.

“We do?” he asked.

“Yes. In fact, there is a good argument that the entire war was started when the Ashcrofts encroached on that land to mine for gold. We might be the ones who started this.”

The cooking women produced jars with a golden liquid inside.

“What is that?” Scarlet asked them.

“The thickened sap of a maple tree, my lady.”

“Tree sap?” Philip asked.

“It’s delicious,” the woman said.

The jars were carried as carefully as hoarded gold.

Plates, forks, and three layers of cake were handed out.

Philip took a bite and then raised an eyebrow.

“Wow!” he said.

Scarlet couldn’t finish hers, but she delighted in feeding the last bits to Philip with her fork. There was even a sticky kiss mixed in. It tasted of maple, which wasn’t exactly an improvement, but was far from unpleasant.

Philip needed to wash his beard from a basin of heated water to remove the stickiness from his face. Scarlet washed her hands as well, standing close to him.

“So you’d like to control the fighting, sue for peace, and ask the Urukesh to come redraw the lines with you?” he asked.

“Exactly,” she said. “Marcus has the history with the original lines.”

“Maybe Haddagan will see the sense of it. Your army might not need to serve three years.”

“We’ll keep them in service even if there is no war,” she said. “The land’s been fought over for fifty years. Reconstruction will be needed—and they’ll want to, since they will be improving their own lands.”

Philip nodded, then went quiet, his attention drifting north.

“What is it?”

“Huh?”

“I can sense you are thinking about something,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Which is?”

“I’m going to have to leave you.”

“What? Why?”

“I need to return to the mountain.”

“Helios,” she said.

He stopped. “What do you know of Helios?”

“The name is in my mind,” she said, “since the moment at the pool when Epherion healed you. Somehow I knew you would need to go there.”

“You did?”

“I’ve been thinking about it, too, over the last couple of days, and I think we should accompany you there.”

“It’s not a climb that horses, carts, and wagons can make. The last mile is a stone stair through cold snowpack.”

“Is there no place for us to camp near there?”

“Actually,” he said, “there is a flat spot just at the foot of the stairs. The problem is that I don’t know how long I’ll be. I could be weeks. I could be—I don’t know. I don’t want you hanging out on a mountainside freezing to death when you could be at Kestrelmont in your own bed, with your family again.”

“I am with family,” she said. “I do have Wentworths around me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” she confessed. “How about this? We come stay on the mountain with you in case your stay is short. We’ll camp there for a few days and then you can come tell me what the outlook is. After that I can decide whether or not to move on to Stormrest.”

Philip nodded, but his gaze went to the mountains and stayed there.

“What is it?”

“The dead aren’t just wanderers,” he said. “Something is controlling them.”

“Who?” she asked. “It’s not Ashcroft. He’s dead.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But Epherion has called us to remember our purpose. I fear it involves the undead, but more than that, against whoever or whatever is controlling them.”

“Haddagan mentioned to me that there were creatures that feed on conflict,” she said. “I didn’t know he meant the undead. I should like to see him.”

He nodded and stopped his horse.

“We turn here,” Philip said, gesturing toward an inclining path toward the mountains.

Helios.

An involuntary warmth spread through her at the word, which she could not explain and did not try to.

“What is there?” she asked.

“The Sun Citadel,” he said. “The true home of the Knights Celestial. Hidden for centuries.”

“Hidden? Why?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“We’ll go as far as the stairs,” she said. “And we’ll wait for you.”

Chenguer met him first when he entered through the gate into Helios, the outer courtyard.

“Constellation,” he said, by way of introduction, holding the blade out so Philip could see the seven jade inlays in the grip. “Hold it, Captain.”

Philip did. It was cool in his hand.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Do you see anything though?”

“What do you mean?” Philip asked, examining the blade.

“When it’s in my hand, I can see a web. A pattern of some kind. I haven’t worked out what yet.”

Philip handed the blade back to Chenguer, who clearly cherished it.

Drogoth emerged from the citadel next.

“He’s confused about his sword,” Chenguer whispered.

“Why?”

“He’s the most even-keeled member of our company. He has spent years sitting in monasteries, waiting a half hour in silence just to speak to anyone. Sunfury just seems so different from his personality.”

Drogoth came to stand next to Philip, but waited.

Finally Philip addressed him. “You don’t need to wait to speak, Drogoth. Just speak when it comes to your mind.”

“Two others have come in your absence,” Drogoth said.

“Two?”

“Yes, we are eight.”

“One of us is delayed then,” Philip said.

Drogoth nodded.

The rest came to greet him. First, Senna, carrying Sunflare. Then, Aldric, who carried a sword called Darksbane. Krang Haddagan introduced himself anew. “I am now called Wardyn Holt, and I carry Shadowbreaker.”

“You chose Wardyn?” Philip asked. “The guardian of your people. It makes sense.”

“The guardian of all people, now,” Wardyn said.

“There are two others,” Senna said. “Women, both.”

The two emerged from the citadel, as diverse a pair as you might find.

The first was a woman whose age he could not read—somewhere between forty and timeless. Olive skin, unbound grey-streaked hair, a blade that glowed like the last light before dark. She raised it to him, and he had the distinct sense she had been expecting him specifically for a very long time. She moved as though the air made way for her. “I am called Amira.” A pause. “The vault has been waiting a very long time. I am glad we are finally here.”

The second looked like a child, carrying a short sword with a fourteen-inch blade, emanating darkness. Philip remembered the weapon. Drogoth had read the name on their first day here: Eclipse. “I am Yselle,” she said in a quick manner of speech. She was no taller than three and a half feet, with blonde hair similar to Scarlet’s, and amber eyes that caught the light strangely from time to time.

“You’re an Aelf,” Philip said.

“And you’re a human,” she smiled.

“I did not know that aelves had wings,” he said as he watched her fly and flit around the courtyard.

“Only air aelves,” she said. “And only some of us.” She paused, glancing behind him. “We hoped you might have brought the ninth.”

“No, I did not meet another member of the Knights on the road.”

“Did you find who you were looking for?” she asked in her musical voice.

“I did,” he said.

“Well, the last sword has been moving all day,” she said.

“Lifegiver?”

“Kind of rattling in its holder, like the ninth is close.”

“That sounds like good news,” Philip offered. “Maybe we will be able to open the vault soon. I wonder if they all did this as we approached? Did all of the swords move?”

“Did anyone see Eclipse move in its stand while I was flying here?” Yselle asked.

Nobody had.

But two days went by with no new arrival.

On the morning of the third day, Lifegiver leapt from its holder as if wielded by an invisible hand.

Yselle was the first to notice it.

She called to the others and they ran as the blade floated across the room and out the door. It sped up as it left the citadel and became a flash of light as it hurtled toward the gate.

Philip was already moving. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew.

Scarlet lost her patience after two days and decided to climb the stairs to see what was taking Philip and the Knights Celestial so long.

“You’re going to go up?” Marcus asked her.

“I need to be there for him.”

“I am loath to let you go alone,” he said. “We should send a company with you.”

“I need to do this alone. Give me twelve hours. Then come find me.”

“As you wish, my lady.”

Scarlet climbed the stairs.

She stopped twice, the climb working her hard, and considered going back each time. But she felt compelled to continue.

Besides, secretly, she really wanted to see the Sun Citadel—even if it was something private for the Knights Celestial. She wouldn’t try to sneak in or anything. But just peek in. Peeking wasn’t sneaking, right?

The closer she got to the top, the more excited she became.

And then, as she approached the last rise, she saw golden roofs emerge from the snowy mountaintop, and she hesitated for a third time.

Perhaps she should not intrude on this.

It felt holy.

And she felt wholly unworthy to be there.

She sat on a step, feeling the chill around her, uncertain whether her next step should be up or down. The cold worked through her coat. Below her the stairs fell away into mist. Above her the gold roofs caught a light that didn’t quite belong to the sun—warmer, steadier, the light of something that had been burning longer than the mountain it sat on.

She thought about the girl who had slammed her bedroom door. She thought about the woman who had stood in a theater in Psalter’s Point and asked sixteen hundred strangers to trust her name. She thought about Edmund, grey at his temples, standing in a pool of warm water reaching out to her.

She took another step.

And then another.

And then there was a gate.

She stepped through.

She reached a shaking hand toward the citadel before her, and the sword came.

Lifegiver crossed the courtyard in a flash and arrived pommel-first in her outstretched hand as though it had been falling toward her since it was made.

She was not surprised at all. She had always been seeking this without knowing what it was.

She was the Lifegiver.

She wept.

Philip had been moving before the sword left the armory, some knowledge arriving before its explanation, and he was in the courtyard when Lifegiver flew past him toward the gate, and he was at the gate when it landed in her hand.

He stood there and looked at her.

Eight people behind him. An ancient citadel behind him. Two thousand years of waiting behind him. And Scarlet Esmerelda Wentworth standing at the gate of Helios with tears on her face and a blade in her hand, her expression that of a woman not even slightly surprised by what has just happened.

He had left Helios to find her. He had found her. He had brought her home without knowing that was what he was doing.

There was nothing that needed saying.

A small flying figure with feathered wings landed beside her, sword sheathed, and looked up at her with the frank appraisal of someone who has been waiting longer than anyone else in the courtyard.

“Welcome, Number Nine.”

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After more kisses than she could count, but not a single one she regretted, Scarlet and Philip left the warm pool behind.

“Bring her clothes!” Philip shouted. “And a blanket!”

He turned back to her and she held his face in her hands. “You’re here. I can’t believe you’re here.”

“Shall I call you Scarlet? Or Esme?” he asked.

“Esme and Edmund when we are alone,” she said. “You look older.”

“I have been through some things.”

“We both have,” she said.

He nodded and then touched his thigh. The wound was still there, but closed—better. There would always be a scar. “How did you do that?”

She looked up into the sky rather than answer.

He understood.

Two women arrived with clothing and a blanket.

Philip looked at the blanket. Wool. It seemed familiar.

Scarlet caught him looking and raised an eyebrow. He raised one back.

She grinned, pink rising to her cheeks.

He reached out and touched her chin and her nose, her cheek, her hair. Like the comfort from the blanket, but a thousand times better. She kissed his palm.

The two women held the blanket between them while Scarlet changed.

When the last of her wet things were gone, she rose on her toes, peered over the top edge of the blanket at him, and smiled—almost a dare. She raised both eyebrows.

The tips of his ears went red first, then the rest of him caught up.

At that moment, Scarlet would have given up the duchy to have that night back in the garrison with the knowledge she now possessed.

They brought fresh clothing for Philip as well and an identical wool blanket, which they held while he changed. Once his trousers were off, he wiggled his eyebrows at Scarlet and she laughed out loud.

“It’s a wonder you didn’t drown in this pool,” she said.

“Can I help it if I saw your footprints here and thought I should take a bath before I saw you again? I had weeks of road grime on me.”

“Okay,” she said. “That’s fair. You do smell pretty good. I don’t know what I’d have done if the stinky version of Edmund tried to kiss me on purpose.”

“Tried to kiss you?” he asked. “I think you were the one initiating nearly all of that.”

“I think it was pretty even.”

“Okay, that’s true,” he said. “And I take nothing back.”

They stood for a moment at the edge of the pool, the steam rising around them, neither of them reaching for the road yet. The army was out there. The rest of the world was out there. It had been waiting for them before and it would wait a little longer.

He turned to her with the expression of a man confirming something he has suspected for a long time and is only now allowing himself to believe.

“Esme?”

“Yes?” She turned her attention to him.

He sat on a stone near her, held her hands, and after a moment looked down at his feet. He scuffed his boot in the dirt as if debating, and then spoke softly. “I’ve loved you ever since we were ten years old.” He paused. “I wanted you to know that.”

It was the first time a man had said that to her and meant it, and it was everything to her. All the years of hope resolving in one simple statement. Unconsciously, she brought her hand to her mouth and shook her head just slightly—not to deny it, but because she could hardly believe it.

Happy tears came, and she let them. “I have loved you for just as long.” She said it because it was true and he had earned it and she wanted him to know as well.

“I did try to find you,” she said. “I went back to the abandoned building every week for months. But finally, my father put a stop to that and we moved back to our ancestral home, out of the city. But I looked for you for years.”

“I did too,” he said.

Scarlet nodded. Somehow she already knew that. “Besides, I knew you loved me when you stole that first kiss.”

“Stole? I’ll have you know I have a very good memory of that moment.”

“As do I, and you kissed me.”

“I remember it differently. A certain girl brought her lips way, way too close for the situation.”

“I was twelve. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“You knew exactly what you were doing.”

“Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t.” She smiled at him.

Philip feigned consternation and frustration. “I’m going to warn you right now, miss. If I’m going to be blamed for every kiss, then I’m going to make sure they are worth it.”

She considered this for approximately half a second.

“Okay,” she said, smiling happily.

She took his hand, and they walked back toward the road.

By the time they stepped out of the tree line, the morning mist was gone and the full scale of Scarlet’s company became apparent to Philip. He stopped walking.

Carts. Wagons. Horses in numbers. Entire households strung out along the road as far as the tree line would allow him to see. Children sitting on the backs of carts watching him with frank curiosity. Dogs. A goat, for reasons he could not immediately determine.

“How many people did you bring from Psalter’s Point?”

“One thousand, six hundred thirty-two contracts,” she said. “Over two thousand people came.”

He looked at her.

She looked back with the expression of a woman who has done something enormous and is waiting to see if anyone is going to point that out.

He looked back at the road. At the carts. At the goat.

“You brought an entire legion.”

“Among them, two hundred sixty Wentworths by name or proven blood,” she said.

“How did you convince them?”

“The promise of land.”

“As tenants?”

“As owners,” she said.

He was quiet for a moment. He had spent six years fighting for this land one mile at a time, with two hundred men, losing scouts in the eastern pass. She had ridden twenty-eight days alone and come back with an army and a migration.

“We have got to win the land first,” he said.

She loved that he said we, but did not comment on it.

“You must have run into Urukesh on your trip,” he said.

“I met their leader.”

“You’ve met Krang Haddagan?”

“Yes,” she said. “I met him early in my journey and he let me pass in exchange for venison. When did you meet him?”

“Weeks ago. And venison was also involved. We fought off wolves together.”

“Really?”

“And there’s something else about him.”

“What?”

“He’s joining the Knights Celestial.”

“An Urukesh in the Knights?”

“There is precedent. The order is two millennia old.”

“I think he will make a fantastic knight. I found him to be very wise and thoughtful. It was he who first warned me about the—Philip!”

“What?”

“You don’t know about Ashcroft!”

“Know what?”

“He’s dead,” she said.

Philip went very still. “What happened?”

Scarlet told him the story—about how Lance had shown up at the moment of Benedict’s death, how the undead creatures drained him of his life, and tried to do the same to her. How Ashcroft had accompanied her to Psalter’s Point and then decided to return to Stormrest.

She left out the part about the marriage proposal. There wasn’t any point in telling Philip about that. The question had been asked. The answer given. It was over.

“But then he was found, drained of life, just like Benedict was. Those undead killed him too.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Philip said.

“Why?”

“Because they were working for him, or with him. They were with him when he passed through the garrison, though I did not know what they were. And then they killed Benedict. And then Ashcroft showed up just in time to save you—very convenient I might add.”

“Right, but I’m not following,” she said.

“After they killed Benedict, he sent them after me.”

“That’s not possible,” she said. “We destroyed them at the river. Ashcroft himself cut one of them down. I watched them fall.”

“All I can tell you is that the ones that came after me—one of them was wearing the same boot I saw at the garrison with Ashcroft. Three claw marks on the heel.”

She went still. “One of the ones that killed Benedict had that same mark.”

“Yes.”

“But we destroyed them.”

“I know,” he said. “And yet they tried to kill me. And they nearly did. That’s why my hair has turned. They took some of my life.”

“How did you survive it?”

“Epherion channeled fire through me,” he said. “And somehow what was drained from me returned—mostly returned.”

“You have been through a lot,” she said.

Philip nodded, gravely.

“He manipulated me,” she said quietly. “But it still doesn’t make sense. Why would they then kill Lance if he had been working with them? And why was he working with them in the first place?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Philip said. “Ashcroft was a pompous blowhard, not a necromancer.”

“I don’t know,” Scarlet said. “He knew a lot of things.”

“Are we talking about the same man?” Philip asked.

Dinner that night on the road was far different from what Philip had become accustomed to. There were two thousand people in their company. There wasn’t just one dinner. There were hundreds of them—shared across the mass of people.

It was the first night on the road that Philip felt he might sleep well. It was unlikely that anything was going to try to attack such an encampment.

Philip sat next to Scarlet on a log that he had carried to the road for a bench. They ate warm, freshly baked bread slathered with peanut butter, drank goat’s milk, and chewed on jerky said to be made from a grunoch, which tasted better than it sounded.

Jaden Smythe, who provided it, said, “They are bad-tempered and territorial, but delicious. Nobody admits liking grunoch jerky until they’ve had it three times, which we will before we get to Stormrest, so keep your opinions at bay until the third try of it. And then let me know what you think.”

After Mr. Smythe moved on to entice others with his grunoch jerky, Scarlet said, “Actually it’s pretty good.”

“I’ve had much worse,” Philip agreed.

They sat in a companionable quiet, Scarlet legs crossed, bouncing her top leg and mindlessly tapping the back of his calf with her stockinged toes. He didn’t mind at all.

“I set our tents right next to each other,” he said.

She nodded and then shivered.

“You cold?”

“A little.”

He hopped up off the log and was back two minutes later, draping a wool blanket around her. He had one of his own around his shoulders.

“I switched blankets,” he said.

“You did? Why?”

“First of all,” he said, “I totally thought I misplaced it and was quite upset with myself for my stupidity, so I was glad to have found you absconded with it.”

“Can I tell you the truth without you making fun of me?” she asked.

“That’s really hard to guarantee,” he said. “But I’ll try very hard.”

“I took it because it smelled like you,” she said. She held her hand to her face as she said it, biting the tip of her thumb and raising her eyebrows.

But he was nonplussed. “That’s why I switched them just now.”

“Why?” she asked.

“You’ve had that blanket for weeks. Now it smells like you. So I’m keeping it.”

She giggled.

“You captivated me as the swan. And honestly when you first took your mask off I wanted to ask if we had met before.”

“Really?”

“But it became obvious you were the Duke’s daughter. So it couldn’t have been true.”

“When did you know?”

“Chenguer mentioned your middle name. Later that night I figured it out.”

“I never knew.”

“So you felt nothing before?”

“Well—you said you didn’t want me…”

“I never said that.”

“Well you said—” and then she paused. No, he hadn’t said that, had he?

“Never said that. Never thought that,” he insisted.

She thought it over and realized she had constructed the idea—a wall of protection. She got up, flipped a half-burned log back into the center of the fire, and sat next to him again. “Just so you know, I did feel it too.”

“Truly?”

“Oh, yes. When we were in your lodge, alone?”

“Yeah?”

“I was afraid.”

“Why?”

“I thought you were going to kiss me. But I was also afraid you wouldn’t.”

“You were afraid of both?”

She nodded. “I was ready to fall in love with you even then, plus you asked me to spend the night.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Shush,” she said. “Let me remember it how I want.”

He reached over and placed his hand on her knee and just let it rest there. Scarlet wrapped both arms around his.

“Do you think, someday we might not sleep in separate tents?” he whispered.

“Edmund!” she whispered. “That’s very bold of you.”

“Not at all. I have heard that husbands and wives do sleep in the same tent.”

“Yes,” she hissed, glancing around to make sure no one heard them. “Husbands and wives, which we are not!”

“That could be remedied,” he said.

She studied his profile as he looked into the fire. Then she smiled in the darkness and was quiet for a while as they watched the flames.

Finally she asked, “You know what?”

“Huh?”

“There’s something kind of special about falling in love with you twice.” She laid her head on his shoulder.

“I know exactly what you mean.” He tilted his head to touch hers.

They breathed together. Calmly.

They slept side by side in separate tents, so close that they held hands most of the night.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.

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Philip woke to a misty morning and prayed to Epherion, asking forgiveness for leaving Helios to find Scarlet. But his request for forgiveness was couched in terms of an argument: what good is fighting a war against darkness if you can’t save the ones you love?

Love.

He stared into the coals of his morning fire and contemplated the word and its many meanings. Which of those had he meant?

It plagued him through his breakfast of cabbage soup and tea. The tea, for some reason, seemed to ease the throbbing in his leg.

The fever had come on the first day after the sting. The throbbing yesterday. Today the stiffness and swelling would come. It was then a matter of whether or not he survived it.

He was still at least seven days from Psalter’s Point, which cut both ways. The closer he got, the more likely it was that Scarlet had made it. But it also meant more time in which something might have gone wrong.

As for Ashcroft, he didn’t have enough information to know where the man might be. He was convinced that the undead who had nearly killed him had been in Ashcroft’s company at Tallfellow Canyon—unless the same claw marks on boots were more common than he thought.

That meant that either Ashcroft was working with the undead or that they had infiltrated the ranks of his men. Philip hoped it was the latter. He hoped that Ashcroft wasn’t aligned with creatures of undeath.

But none of that gave him any idea where Ashcroft might be. Had he found Scarlet? Was he still with her? Why had the undead separated from him? Had they killed him somewhere?

He feared for Scarlet in too many ways to name. She was capable—he’d known that even when they were kids—but capable against the undead? That seemed unlikely.

At times he wanted to give up the pursuit and return to Helios to learn and study the archive. But something kept him pushing east, and Epherion did not turn him back.

The throbbing worsened and the stiffness increased as the day wore on, so that he was listing badly in his saddle in the early hours of the afternoon, nearly folded over, holding on to Bella’s neck to stay on the horse. He could no longer guide or grip with his right knee.

By ten in the morning, with mist still rising from the thawing road, he noticed an especially dense patch of fog emanating from the forest on the north side of the trail.

He rode on by it until he noticed many hoofprints on the soft soil at the left-hand edge of the road. With great effort he stabilized himself and studied the tracks. Several horses had been here, probably a couple of weeks ago.

He dismounted Bella, letting her graze by the road, and limped into the woods, dragging his bad leg.

Less than thirty yards in, he found fresh gravesites, sufficient to hold five or six people, along with the remains of a camp along a river.

The graves gave him pause, especially the lone grave. Fear gripped him.

Please let it not be her.

Epherion had said she had her own path, so surely it could not be her—unless that path was death.

He surveyed the area where two tents had obviously been placed. Among the tracks, he found the footprints of a woman and he stopped, catching his breath. Then he moved back westward, downstream, watching the ground. She had crossed once in each direction along the river.

Then he found a pool, heated and steaming from underground vents.

He reached his hand into the water, gingerly. It was perfect.

He removed his armor and set it carefully to one side. When he leaned over the pool he drew back—his own face in the reflection, ten years older than it should have been, flecks of grey in his sideburns and one streak of grey in his hair.

He peered back over the edge into the pool again, longer this time.

Then he withdrew and sat on a rock, gently rubbing his right thigh, avoiding any pressure over the wound.

He removed his tunic but left his breeches on. He didn’t think he could have gotten them off if he’d wanted to, much less got them back on. In a day’s time, he might have to cut them open if the swelling increased.

He lowered himself into the pool, moving slowly.

Walking around the campground had been a mistake. He was sure that more tiny fractures of the quill were poisoning him all over again, even as he lay in the water. But the warmth did make his leg feel better. He found a shelf to lie on and still remain submerged, and fell asleep there.

He rested for nearly two hours—until the delirium came.

His eyes opened, but all he saw was mist. His eyes refused to focus, and his limbs were too heavy to move. He saw vague shapes now, flashing lights—more undead creatures come to attack him and drain his life away. Voices of men, deep and slow.

They spoke to him, but he said nothing. The effort of talking was too much, and he didn’t want to listen to the undead anyway. So he closed his eyes again, hoping the nightmare would go away.

Then hands took hold of his face. Not the clawed hands of undead or the rough hands of a man, but soft hands that reminded him of what his mother’s might have been like if she had lived.

And then a face came down out of the mist. Green eyes. Beautiful lips. Blonde hair.

“Esme?” he whispered.

Scarlet remembered this stretch of road.

She could hear the small river flowing just inside the forest.

Benedict was buried just ahead. She dreaded going to his grave, not knowing what she would say to him. How do you ask for forgiveness from a man whose death was your fault? What words could she use, knowing that he could not hear them anyway?

She nudged Thistledown to ride slightly ahead, rounding the corner first.

And then she reined in sharply.

A horse grazed along the right-hand side of the road. Saddled, carrying bags and packs by someone who had traveled a long way. But no rider.

Scarlet raised her hand into a fist, and she heard the company behind her come to a halt. Then two riders, Travis and Bertram—her cousins, who had proven themselves excellent leaders on the trip back west—rode up beside her.

“My lady?” Bertram whispered.

“Do you remember I told you about Benedict, my swordmaster?”

“Yes, my lady,” Bertram said.

“He is buried just here, inside the woods, in a single grave. Our attackers are also buried there in a mass grave. West of that, you’ll find a pool steaming with warm mists. Would you be so good, the two of you, to scout along the river?”

They nodded, drew swords, and took their leave.

Scarlet still intended to visit Benedict’s grave once she discovered who the rider was. Bringing Thistledown on a slow walk, she came near the other horse but did not encroach upon its space.

She watched as the two animals both craned their necks forward, sniffing, nearly touching noses.

She brought Thistledown a step closer and carefully reached for the reins of the other horse and gently—whispering while she moved—brought the horses side by side.

It was the pommel she saw first. A white stone, pale as the mist around it and yet somehow brighter, catching a light that wasn’t there. She stood at the horse’s side for a moment just looking at it before she reached down and drew it free. The steel carried the same quality—as though the light were coming from within the metal rather than falling on it. She turned the blade slowly in the grey morning air, watching it, feeling the warmth of the stone in her palm and the balance of a thing that had been made for a purpose. Then she sheathed it carefully, and left her hand resting on the hilt a moment longer than necessary.

She moved around to the left side of the horse and lifted open the flap of a saddlebag, peering inside.

Scarlet stopped.

She caught her breath.

There, just inside the flap, was a wool blanket, folded neatly, and lying up against it was a dark leather journal, worn at the corners.

“Philip!” she called loudly.

At the same time, she heard Travis calling from up ahead. “My lady! There is a man in the pool. He is very unwell.”

“Dear gods,” she whispered, and she spurred Thistledown, arriving where Travis stood at the edge of the road, dismounting before her mount came to a stop.

She ran into the woods, down the little hill, and slid to a stop near a pile of armor and clothing.

“What is wrong with him?” she asked.

Bertram, who had stayed with Philip, gently lifted a swollen, inflamed leg out of the pool.

“Poison,” he said.

“Dear Epherion!” she whispered.

She rushed to Philip, bent into the pool, and held his face in both hands.

“Philip! Philip! Can you hear me?”

He didn’t answer her.

“Philip—my love, please come back.”

His eyes fluttered open. But his gaze was unfocused, looking through her rather than at her. Then his eyes found her face. A little strength filled him, small and fragile as a candle in wind.

“Esme?” he whispered.

Scarlet stopped breathing.

Nobody had called her that in over a decade.

It was a common enough name. It meant nothing. It could have been delirium—a fever-name, some girl from his past, a coincidence of syllables. She told herself this in the half-second before the rest of her caught up.

Her hands were shaking.

“Tell me true,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. “Your name before the Knights Celestial. What were you called then?”

He looked up at her. Held her in his eyes with the last of what he had.

“I’m Edmund,” he said.

The word struck her like a physical blow.

She stayed where she was. Her hands were still at his face. Something that had been wrong for twelve years was, irrevocably, right—and she had no words for it yet.

Edmund.

The ring spinning under his thumb on the garrison road. The dark curls. The blue eyes. The way his hands at her waist had felt like something she already knew and couldn’t account for.

She had kissed a boy named Edmund when she was twelve years old, in an abandoned building. It had very nearly been an accident, but she knew it wasn’t. It had been a moment of realization about a boy who was then simply gone. And she had carried the absence of him like a stone in her chest and measured everyone who came after against him.

She wept silently, holding his head, his face in her hands, and cried out from her heart to the creator.

Epherion! Giver of life. Hear me! Hear my prayer. I give my life for him. Let him have my years.

She had no promise it would work. No sign. Nothing but the asking, and the willingness to mean it completely, and she did—every word of it, with nothing held back.

His breath became shallower. His eyes never left her.

She bent to kiss him, her lips at the corner of his eye.

And then a flash in her mind—she heard the voice. Ancient and immense. Her body shook. She tilted her head back and looked up just as a sunbeam broke through the morning mist and made its way through the canopy to touch her face.

Daughter, be blessed, for you are chosen.

It began as a lion’s roar, coursing through her, and then stilled to a quiet whisper as she felt the love of Epherion flow through her, through her arms, through her hands, and her fingertips, which took on an unearthly glow. The glow passed into Philip, lighting the pool.

From his swollen thigh, pieces of a quill emerged, falling into the pool along with a viscous, clear fluid. It ran for several seconds, followed by blood, and then the wound closed on its own. The swelling abated, the redness left, leaving healthy pink, and the glow faded from the pool.

Bertram and Travis withdrew to the road without a word and left the pool to the two people in it.

Philip’s eyes changed—and he rose from the pool.

He stood in the water a moment, breathing, his hands out, taking stock of himself. Then he looked at her.

She had not moved. She was still kneeling at the pool’s edge where she had held him, her hands resting open in her lap, her face wet. She was looking at him in awe—a dream she had stopped letting herself believe.

He reached for her hand.

She took it without thinking and stepped down into the warm water beside him, boots and riding clothes and all, and did not look back toward the treeline or the men or any of the things waiting for her beyond the edge of the mist.

The water rose around her. The warmth settled in.

He put his arms around her and she leaned into him, and for a long time neither of them said anything, because there was nothing that needed saying yet, and everything that did could wait.

The pool steamed quietly around them, and the forest held its breath, and the morning light came down through the canopy in long gold shafts that touched the water and made it shine.

She sought his mouth and found he was already seeking hers.

His hands came up slowly—one at her jaw, one at the back of her neck, his thumb tracing the line of her throat. The water moved around them, warm and unhurried. And unlike her dreams, she felt the solid weight of him under her hands rather than vapors—the steady rise and fall of his chest, the realness of him.

The kiss was careful, the way you are careful with something you have been without for a very long time. When you’ve crossed a desert and are parched, you do not spill a drop. And Scarlet did not spill a drop. Then the warmth became heat that had been gathering for years.

It wasn’t the beginning. It was the continuation of a long delay. Surprise, suspended for so long, had finally become something fiercely wanted.

When they finally stopped, neither of them moved far. His forehead came down to rest against hers. Her hands were still at his chest. The water steamed around them. Somewhere beyond the treeline, people were waiting, and neither of them cared even slightly.

“Esme.”

“Edmund.”

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.

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He had not recognized Scarlet as Esme when she took her mask off at the masquerade dinner, nor when she spent a day and night with him at the garrison. He remembered the easy comfort of her presence, and beneath it something he could not name that had unsettled him without his knowing why. And even with her green eyes matching his memory of Esme, he had not put it together until he’d heard that her middle name was Esmerelda.

They were both very different people from then. He had to allow for that.

Celeste Boffrey had been the proprietor of the Crusty Edge in those days. He hadn’t been back there in years and wondered if Celeste was even still living. She must have been in her fifties then.

He’d been a street urchin, of sorts, although he wasn’t homeless like most—just mostly homeless. He had a bed near his father, but his father was gone by dawn and not back until well after dark, earning a half shilling a day and spending two pence on booze a night. It had been survival—nothing more.

There were kids far worse off—those who slept in abandoned buildings or under someone’s house curled up against the hearth footing where a little heat could almost be felt. He’d never quite reached that point. In fact, he’d often brought those kids into the flat when his father was passed out, hiding them at the foot of his bed under clothing so they could sleep through a particularly cold night.

He’d hung near Celeste’s place most mornings, hoping for a dropped scrap—but rarely finding one—until one morning she’d confronted him.

“You’re here every morning,” she said.

“Yes, mum,” Edmund said.

“That’s better than I can say for some of my helpers. What say we get some bread into you this morning? But here’s the catch—you work for me. Taking deliveries ‘round. You do that for me, you get one square a day. Got it?”

He got more than one square meal per day out of the deal. There might be some leftover crusts, or something burned, or an extra biscuit that accidentally fell into his mouth while carrying a package of them to Mrs. Yearnst. Or Betty Moss who, whenever he brought her a pecan pie, would always give him a tiny sliver of it as a reward, with a little fresh cream on the side.

It took him about two hours in the mornings and another three in the afternoons, leaving four hours midday with nothing but time on his hands.

That’s when he discovered the old common house—a building bought by a new owner who intended to tear it down and replace it with a new tavern—which he eventually did. On the site now sits the well-regarded Cap and Quill, an establishment frequented by university students who would one day become merchants.

But before the Cap and Quill, the old common house had been a place for adventures.

The pretty blonde girl with the green eyes, like a living forest, had come to Celeste’s to buy a basket with bread and hermits. Celeste was well known for her hermits—a delicious molasses cookie filled with nuts and bits of fig, cooked as a single loaf on a large rectangular cooking sheet and then cut into squares and wrapped individually.

She had caught his eye while holding the basket, and he’d smiled goofily at her. She remained aloof through the encounter until she’d paid a penny for her basket. She skipped off, heading wherever it was she lived, but stopped a few paces on, turned her head, made sure he was watching, and gave him a wink.

Later, he saw her near Celeste’s, moving slowly as if she’d misplaced something, and then brightening when she spotted him.

“Hi,” she’d said. “I’m Esme.”

“Edmund,” he’d said. “Pleased to meet you.”

She’d fiddled around in her skirts and produced two of the individually wrapped hermits, giving him one.

They’d gone to his hideout—the old common house basement, where they ate hermits and planned how they might one day become king and queen and make sure that children everywhere always had hermits to eat.

Three years they had adventured in the old common house while the city argued with the new landowner about the size of the tavern.

By then, they’d shared many hermits, doughnuts, sponge cake, and even a slice of strawberry pie once that Edmund had thought the best thing ever invented, except girls. Well, except for one girl. One certain girl. With the eyes like the forest, who moved like the wind, and who smelled of every spring flower all at one time.

They were twelve by then, and he was totally in love with her, though he was afraid to say it, and she never gave any hint of reciprocating—instead reminding him often he needed a bath, which were very hard to come by. On the other hand, she continued to show up three or four times a week, even against her father’s wishes, and that was not nothing.

So when he’d shown her his treasure, and she kissed his cheek, he had turned his head on purpose to try to catch her lips. It was a joke, really. Just fooling about. But the result had been something that landed differently than anything before it, and he had not been the same about her afterward.

And then she had simply been gone.

Philip had excuses for why he hadn’t recognized it was her.

But he’d spent the time since assuming she hadn’t recognized it was him either. What if she had? What if she knew he was Edmund all along and had made it clear she didn’t want him? Why should he assume she didn’t know? Why should he think he was the only one operating with limited knowledge?

Was it because, when he was introduced as Philip Beckwith, she hadn’t asked, I thought you were called Edmund? Was that the only reason he assumed she had not recognized him too?

Maybe he was the only one without a full hand of cards. Maybe at the masquerade, when the owl’s mask came off, she had known exactly who he was.

His stomach turned at the thought.

But what was there to do other than ride to her, hopefully find her, and let her know he finally knew who she was? He could apologize and try to explain his failure to see it. She might accept that. Esme had always been brighter than him. It was one thing that had drawn him to her.

He was almost certain that Scarlet and Esme were the same person. He’d convinced himself it was true—it must be true. It must be the same family—the same girl to whom he gave the papers and, eventually, the ring, when her father had demanded it.

That day in the abandoned house when she’d returned with her father in tow. He’d been happy to see her and then immediately fearful for his life. It had been the last time he saw her. He could still remember her turning her head to glance over her shoulder as her father pulled her by the hand, out of his life, for good.

It had to be the same girl. He was sure of it. Wasn’t he?

He reached down and patted Bella’s neck. She was one of six he owned, but she had recently become his favorite—steady and reliable. Not perhaps as fast as Dart, his chestnut Bagstock stallion who he rode in battle. Bella had become more of a traveling companion on a lonely road. She was, as he was, growing tired of the journey, but she never complained.

He stopped early for the day, with the sun still up. If Scarlet were still alive, she would certainly be in Psalter’s Point by now. But so would Ashcroft, who almost certainly had some association with the creatures of undeath that had attacked him and drained his life force.

He shuddered at the thought of one of them touching Scarlet.

But he was so far behind that if they’d meant to do that, they might already have done so. Either he would find her or he wouldn’t. Trying to ride at breakneck speed to overtake them was pointless. He hadn’t caught them and wouldn’t.

But he would not be much good to her without sleep, and he hadn’t rested well for a couple of weeks. He built a bigger fire than normal, given the increased chill of the last few nights, and cooked a piece of salted pork alongside beets.

He was halfway through his first beet when a northern fox came threading through the woods at the edge of the firelight. Much bigger than a typical red fox, but smaller than a wolf, they were efficient predators, though not a threat to a man. This one had its nose to the ground, unaware of him as he sat silently, unmoving.

The fox paused, one paw up midstride.

And then something between them scurried.

Philip heard a sound like the snap of a whip. The fox jumped, whined, and darted past the fire.

He heard a second snap.

Then he felt the sting. Two of them. One in the thigh, another in his ankle. Like bee stings.

He never saw the creature. Just motion in the underbrush that moved through the forest and disappeared.

“Shardtail,” Philip whispered.

That was not good news.

The creatures weren’t normally dangerous to humans, provided you left them alone. They were a medium-sized lizard, low to the ground, typically slow moving, but capable of dashing quickly for short bursts. They grew five to seven quills from their tail which, when whipped at a creature, flew at significant velocity and embedded in the flesh.

Hence the initial sting.

But the initial sting wasn’t the problem. The venom was the problem. And two quills in Philip was the worst kind of wound. Not enough to kill him, just enough to make him wish he was dead.

They didn’t act like arrows. An arrow tore, bled, declared itself. These went in almost clean. The tail flicked, there was a sting like a wasp, and then—nothing that seemed worth stopping for. A rider might curse, shift in the saddle, and keep moving.

The quills were barbed, but not for holding. They were designed to catch on withdrawal. The shaft was rigid near the tip, then subtly jointed. Every step of the horse, every twist of the rider’s torso, worked it. Not deeper—looser. The outer segment separated along a natural fault line, like a twig bent back and forth with each movement.

Inside each quill was a narrow reservoir, sealed under pressure. The venom was contained, waiting for the break. When the shaft finally fractured, it didn’t just snap. It splintered inward, a tiny collapse that drove the fluid through microchannels along the barbs and into the surrounding muscle.

It wasn’t a flood. It was worse than that.

A slow leak.

The long-term effects were unpleasant to deadly and the worst thing you could do was pluck the quills, breaking them off inside you—which they were designed to do. There would be fever, muscle stiffness, paralysis. If they stayed in long enough, every movement over multiple days would break open more of the channels in the quill, redosing you with venom over and over again, eventually distributing paralytic agent to your heart and lungs.

Philip cut his trousers at both the thigh and ankle, carefully pulling back the cloth and inspecting the quills.

The one in his ankle was not deep and not dangerous. A few minutes with his knife, a binding cloth, and torqwood sap would do the trick, but working on his ankle with a quill still in his thigh would not be easy. It would risk continual breakage along the length of the quill. And the one in his thigh was deep.

The tiny wounds were already reddening at the edges.

There was no choice. He was going to have to cut the one out of his ankle whole and accept that the one in his thigh was going to remain there. It just meant he would have to ride gingerly for the next several days, possibly up to a week, leaking a little more venom with every movement, and being prepared for the sickness, until it became infected. Eventually, the venom would weaken, pus would surround the quill, and he could then extract it like a large sliver and begin the healing process.

But that meant a very bad week coming up.

Philip gingerly leaned down and held his knife blade in the flames, and opened the flesh of his ankle as tears came to his eyes.

He held the extracted quill up to the firelight. The end barb was fully intact. He tossed it into the fire.

Then, wincing, he dug through his pack. Torqwood sap and cloth strips. The sap was known to be clean and hold flesh closed. The cloth strips would protect the injured flesh.

He applied them carefully, first to his ankle, and then over the small spot in his thigh where he had cut off the second quill.

He lay down in his bedroll, draping his arm over his forehead.

“Well,” he said. “This trip just got worse.”

He grabbed his journal, opened it to the last page and saw his last entry.

The girl I love is the girl I love.

Below that, he wrote:

I don’t love shardtails.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.

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The wolf mask had been comfortable.

They always were, at first. A new face carried a kind of freshness—the novelty of a different voice in his own ears, a different set of memories to sort through and file. Lance Ashcroft had been a well-organized man, which made the work easier. His history was tidy, his ambitions legible, his social connections mapped and maintained with efficiency. The man understood that influence was a garden requiring constant tending.

He had been useful. For a time.

He stood at the edge of the ballroom and watched the room with Lance Ashcroft’s eyes, through Lance Ashcroft’s face, wearing Lance Ashcroft’s patience—and felt the certainty of the evening arrive, cold and complete.

The girl was not going to yield.

He had known it before the masquerade. He had known it from the moment he watched her on the dance floor, before the masks came off. There was something in her that did not bend in the ways he needed. Not stubbornness, exactly. He had broken stubborn people before. It was something deeper.

The bloodline, of course. He understood that now. The immunity ran through her the way water runs through limestone, invisibly, shaping everything it touched. He could not drain her. He could not take her. And without that, all the elegant social machinery of a courtship—the careful words, the champagne, the manufactured intimacy of a garden bench at night—was precisely what it appeared to be.

Performance.

She had seen through it. Not because she was suspicious by nature, though she was. But because there was nothing in her that the performance could find purchase on any more than the draining could. He had offered her a door, and she had stood in front of it and told him, with perfect courtesy, exactly what kind of door it was.

What do I become, if I say yes?

He turned the champagne flute in Lance Ashcroft’s fingers—slowly, without thinking, a habit the man had carried and that he had absorbed. Four thousand years and he still caught himself doing things with borrowed hands that the original owners had done without knowing why.

The Ashcroft hands were familiar, in their way. He had worn them before—not these hands, not this man, but the great-grandfather’s. A baron, in those days, with a baron’s access and a baron’s usefulness. It had been the work of months to perfect the ducal seal—the practice forgeries, the careful repetition until the impression was indistinguishable from the original. The ring he had made himself. When the letter was finished and the Duke of Wentworth was hanged for a treason that had never occurred, he had burned what he no longer needed and moved on to the next face.

He had not thought about the forgeries in decades. A servant had pulled them from the fire before they were fully consumed—not out of loyalty to the Wentworths, but out of the oldest human instinct: leverage. The servant had imagined blackmail. But you don’t blackmail immortals.

He had drained the servant to death, prolonging his own life, searched the premises thoroughly, and found nothing. The documents had been hidden somewhere he could not locate, by a dead man who could no longer say where.

He had made a decision—one he had made many times across many centuries: if the thing resurfaced, he would handle it when it did. Most things did not resurface. People died, houses were sold, hiding places were lost to time. He had calculated the odds and moved on to the next face and the next century.

He had, apparently, miscalculated.

And yet here was the Wentworth girl, standing in a restored manor, wearing a restored title, the sharp intelligence behind the swan mask catching everything and giving nothing back. The documents had found their way to the queen. The Duke had been exonerated. The title was law.

It was an irritation. Not a wound—he did not suffer wounds, not in any sense that lasted—but a loose end he had thought he had accounted for. It did not matter now. The restoration was done, and the girl’s bloodline had made her beyond his reach in any case. What mattered was that the Ashcroft name had served him once, across a generation he had long since vacated, and was serving him again now in the great-grandson’s body. There was a tidiness to that which he appreciated, the way he appreciated all things that closed neatly upon themselves.

He had come to the masquerade with a plan. The plan had been Scarlet—the land, the name, the clean resolution of a complicated legal situation through a marriage that would have solved everything at once. The Wentworths had spent eighty years without the land. They were motivated. The girl was capable. It would have worked elegantly if she had been anyone other than who she was.

But she was who she was. And the land still needed acquiring. He was considering this—turning it over with the same unhurried patience he applied to every problem of duration, which was all of them—when he saw the unicorn.

The boy was seventeen, perhaps. Taller than Scarlet but with the same coloring, the same quality of attention in his eyes that the girl used to see through people and the boy apparently used to be charmed by them. He was dancing with a butterfly—a genuinely pretty creature in a gown of layered silk, her movements exactly as light as the wings she wore. They were laughing.

He watched them complete a turn.

The boy’s name was Charles. He had been at the dinner table. A younger son—the Viscountcy of the River, once the Wentworths had their land back, which was not yet but was the direction things were moving regardless of what happened to Scarlet. A younger son was not nothing. A younger son, properly positioned, was in fact quite a lot.

He watched Charles say something that made the butterfly laugh again.

The plan revised itself with the clean efficiency of something that had been waiting for its pieces to arrive. The land did not require Scarlet. The land required a Wentworth. Charles was a Wentworth. Charles was also seventeen, which meant he was at exactly the age when a man’s judgment is most thoroughly routed through his feelings, and his feelings were currently located somewhere in the vicinity of that butterfly’s smile.

The butterfly’s name was Isabelle. Lady Isabelle Marlow. He sorted through Lance Ashcroft’s social memory and found her there: minor gentry, Bravia, no complications. A gentle family. A small estate. A daughter known for her warmth and her genuine sweetness, both of which Charles Wentworth appeared to be in the process of discovering in real time.

He watched her laugh.

No complications, he thought.

He set the champagne flute on a passing tray. There was no urgency. There never was. He had learned, across a very long life, that the worst mistakes were made by people in a hurry, and he had stopped being in a hurry sometime in the second millennium. Lance Ashcroft still had uses. The body was in good health. The social position remained intact.

And Isabelle Marlow was still entirely unaware of him.

Charles Wentworth had not intended to dance with anyone four times.

He had intended to be pleasant, and present, and not embarrass Scarlet, which were the three instructions his mother had given him and which he had resolved, with some sincerity, to follow. He had managed the first two. The third had become complicated approximately forty minutes into the evening, when a butterfly had asked him if he thought the peacock on the far side of the room was aware of how much he sounded like one.

He had laughed before he could stop himself. It was exactly the right thing to say.

Her name was Isabelle, which he did not learn until after the first dance, and then the second, and then after they had stood at the edge of the room for twenty minutes talking about everything and nothing with the ease that only comes when you are not yet afraid of the other person. She told him the peacock’s name was Lord Duvall and that she had been dreading his inevitable conversation all evening, and Charles had felt a warmth he did not entirely have a name for, which was the warmth of being genuinely liked by someone worth being liked by.

She was not trying to be interesting. She simply was. That was the thing about her—Isabelle Marlow seemed entirely unaware of her own quality, which made it more apparent rather than less. She had opinions. Not strong ones, but real ones, held gently and offered without an agenda. She disagreed with him twice during dinner, both times correctly, and apologized for neither.

He had traded seats with Scarlet to sit beside her, which had the secondary effect of moving Scarlet one seat closer to the owl. He had noticed the owl. He had also noticed how carefully Scarlet did not look at the owl, which amounted to the same thing. He would think about that later.

Right now there was Isabelle.

The dancing had resumed after dinner, and he had asked her a fourth time without quite planning to, and she had said yes without the pause that would have told him she was being polite. They moved through the last dance of the evening with the ease of two people who had already sorted out the basic questions and were simply enjoying the fact of being in the same place.

She was not Scarlet’s height—shorter, with the kind of face that arranged itself into warmth as its natural expression. When she laughed, which was often, something happened in her whole face that Charles could not have described if someone had asked him to. He was seventeen and the vocabulary for it had not yet arrived.

The music came to its end.

They stood in the middle of the floor while the room rearranged itself around them.

“I should find my mother,” Isabelle said, though she didn’t move immediately.

“I should find mine,” Charles said. “She’ll have opinions about the evening.”

“Do you dread that?”

“Surprisingly, no,” he said. “Her opinions are usually correct. It’s just that she delivers them before you’ve had time to arrive at them yourself, which takes some of the fun out of it.”

Isabelle considered this with what appeared to be genuine recognition. “Mine does the same thing. I used to find it irritating. Now I find it humorous. I know what she’s going to say before she says it.”

Charles was quiet for a moment.

“That’s a very grown-up way to feel about it,” he said.

She smiled. “I’m practicing.”

He thought about that on the carriage ride home, while Scarlet sat across from him and their mother said measured things about the evening that were actually less measured than they appeared. He thought about Isabelle’s face when she said I’m practicing—direct and a little amused, but sincere.

He told Scarlet, when their mother was speaking with the driver at the house, that Isabelle was precisely what her butterfly wings had promised.

Scarlet was quiet for a moment, and then nodded, with the expression she got when she had already decided something and was letting him arrive at it himself.

“She is a sweet girl,” Scarlet said.

This had caused him to smile, which he hid by turning his face to the side of the carriage.

Four weeks later, somewhere in the gardens of Marlow House, in the blue hour before the household rose, Lady Isabelle Marlow walked alone along the garden path she had walked every morning since she was a child.

The dew was still on the grass. The light had not yet decided what color it intended to be. She was thinking about a letter she had received the previous week—Charles Wentworth’s handwriting, careful and slightly too formal, which she had found endearing—and whether the reply she had drafted was too eager, and whether being too eager was actually a problem when the thing you were eager about was real.

It was he who had written that he wondered if he had become too fond of her for his own good, which had driven that very eagerness on her part. She thought the fondness was very good for both of them.

She felt the chill first. Just a chill, the kind the morning sometimes brought down from the hills. She drew her shawl tighter and walked on.

Then the isolation—a sudden, absolute quality to the quiet around her, as though the birds had stopped and the house behind her had moved very far away and the garden had become a room with no doors. She slowed her step. Something told her to turn back. She had no name for what she was feeling and no reason for it.

She did not turn back.

The presence found the door it had been looking for and entered without force, without pain, without any of the violence that might have made it comprehensible. It simply arrived. She felt a dimming—not of the light, which remained exactly as it was, but of herself, of the part of her that had been Isabelle since she was old enough to know she was Isabelle. It receded like a tide, slow and complete, until she was standing in her own body the way a stranger stands in a house whose furniture has all been moved.

She paused at the window in the garden door, caught her reflection in the glass.

She did not see the invisible presence. She could not feel the malevolence. But it looked back at her from behind her own eyes, and smiled the slow smile of something that had just found a very comfortable place to live.

It looked at the reflection for a long moment.

When Charles Wentworth arrived for tea that afternoon, she was entirely herself—warm, gentle, direct, and real in all the ways he had come to rely on. She laughed at the right moments. She disagreed with him once, correctly, and did not apologize. She touched his hand when she said goodbye.

He noticed nothing.

He would not notice for a very long time.

And by then, it would be too late.

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.

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