Chapter 4 

Lenna had to admit: carrying an entire person while jogging was a situation she hadn’t trained for. In the future, she’d definitely try; it was a damned challenging workout.

“Left this time,” Miria said, just as assured as when she’d said ‘right’ when they’d first come to this intersection.

She’s still a Forde sibling, and thus you are oathbound to her service, Lenna reminded herself. Besides, it wasn’t fair to blame the Princess in her arms. They were trying to navigate with haste through nearly identical pitch black corridors navigating with only a lantern reduced to a low glow for a light source. But every moment spent in this catacomb was another that Katerina was in danger.

Lenna took the direction, hurrying her steps at the risk of catching her feet on something. If they fell over, then they fell. She’d rather damage her pride than lose Kat to inaction.

“So,” Miria whispered as if holding a conversation during a theatre performance, “how did you and my sister first get together?”

“Is this really the best time for this line of questioning?” Lenna replied.

“I’m trying to keep myself distracted from a dozen things, not the least of which is that I’m being carried like a sack of beets. We’d be no better aimed if I were to stay silent, I assure you.”

She could have mentioned that they were only by the barest definition armed and attempting to sneak through tunnels that may very well be patrolled. But, in the end, Lenna decided that talking might just help calm herself down from the anxiety about Katerina’s safety that threatened to choke her. And so, she told her the whole story.

Well, she left out the more sordid bits. The presumptive future Queen didn’t necessarily need to hear about the moment where Katerina turned her sword into a phallus and penetrated her in front of her former lover. But the abridged version was scandalous enough. It was a romance between a Princess and someone of low birth, after all. Heavens! What would the other ladies at court say?

“I see,” she said when Lenna had wrapped up the guided tour of the last year of her life. “I…well—keep straight up here—it was about what I had heard. But I’d assumed Katerina had gotten married as a means of preventing herself from being betrothed by Father. I knew she cared for you, but that your relationship strengthened after you completed your transformation…”

Miria’s tone had taken less of the decisive mettle that Vladimir had displayed in abundance when they’d spoken. Given the subject matter, it was easy enough for Lenna to piece together what was bothering the Princess in her arms.

“You’re worried about Turai,” she stated bluntly. As Miria sputtered denials, Lenna blitzed past them. “I get it. I’ve had the same discussion with Katerina. Thankfully, she’s equally interested in men and women and just about anyone in between. I can’t vouch for your wife, but—”

Miria scoffed in frustration. “That’s not it at all. I know that she’s attracted to women,”

Lenna slowed her pace. “You do?”

“Of course I do. You’ve seen Jenniq, she follows her everywhere.”

Lenna’s tone changed from confusion and annoyance to mild amusement. “Wait…I thought they were sisters?”

“Sword-Sisters,” Miria corrected. “It’s apparently a bond formed between two women who, despite loving each other very much, must also perform the roles given to them by nature and—”

“You’re telling me she’s just had her mistress standing around beside her this whole time?”

Miria stiffened in her arms. “Jenniq is a formidable warrior! When I suggested she get a Houseguard now that she was within striking distance of becoming Queen, she balked. I told Marten to offer to spar with her, to prove that she needed a real Knight of the Realm to keep her safe.”

A beat. “Jenniq kicked his ass, didn’t she?”

“Handily,” Miria said with a tired sigh.

“Well, he’s not the first man to make losing once to a woman his whole personality. But on the matter of whether Turai will accept you as you are now…I suppose that question only matters if you intend to stay one. A woman, I mean.”

A longer beat, long enough for Lenna to pick up the pace again. “I doubt the Magisters would be willing to change me a third time, considering—left…yes, left up here—they’re the ones who put me into this position.” Miria waved off the idea as if it was simply a matter of a lack of means, something even Lenna could see was a dodge.

“They’re not the only alchemists out there. And that doesn’t answer the question: if you were offered the chance to become a man again, would you?”

Before either of them could hear the answer that Miria might have given, a sound like wind cut them off. Very unusual, given that they hadn’t heard any wind so far. Doubly so because they were deep inside a mountain. Lenna told Miria to turn the lantern’s light to full burn. As the illumination put out by the burning kraken oil increased, they saw it.

At first, it could have been a trick of the light. But as the lantern jostled from the shivering of Lenna’s arms transferring to Miria’s, the black space that should have been attrited by the lantern rejected the light. It pushed it back, and the absence of illumination formed a shape all its own. It had the appearance of a man. but its feet didn’t touch the ground so much as drag along its surface. Its head was covered with the shape of dark fabric, with the only exposed piece a distended, skeletal jaw. The jaw opened even wider, and from it, it spoke.

“Back,” it howled, voice like a gale blown through an abandoned hovel, “back to your cage.”

Lenna didn’t know which of them started screaming first, but by the time she was in a dead sprint away from the shadow thing, it was just Miria. Lenna was too busy trying to keep her breath while running like a mad woman down the barely visible passageways, dodging debris like she was a champion race horse on some last push for a laurel before being retired.

There, in the distance, Lenna saw three edges of a glowing rectangle. A sealed doorway! Perhaps one of those she’d passed during her tour of the Kralgrav, or perhaps somewhere deeper in the mountain fortress. It didn’t matter. They’d almost made it. They were almost safe.

Lenna didn’t notice the second spectre until it had grabbed a hold of her ankle. It snapped her back mid-stride, and Miria launched helplessly from her grasp. The Princess was able to turn it into a rough logroll as opposed to a violent crash into a wall or obstruction, but it required the use of her arms to brace herself, and that meant the lantern went flying too, leaving both women separated and caught by two nearly invisible assailants in a smothering black void.

Doesn’t matter, Lenna told herself, Katerina is counting on me.

Lenna picked herself back up, feeling the icy grip of the shadows tug her back. But she was stronger. She had to be. They tore at her clothing, and she felt seams pop. There was still the broken haft of the ancient sword. She drew it and sliced through the space where she felt their limbs. It went right through, not damaging them but breaking their grasp at least enough to get moving again. With the sword still in one hand, she yanked Miria to her feet with the other. Then the pair hobbled as fast as possible, slowing only long enough to scoop up the lantern, which Miria was able to bring back to life before the flame snuffed out entirely.

They reached the source of the light: a boarded up entrance in a corridor that carried on in either direction. It’d been sealed with planking that let cracks of light through the top and sides, but otherwise looked extremely sturdy. Lenna gave it a swift kick, but the wood barely bowed.

“That’s…that’s not budging. New plan?” she asked, her voice as calm as possible given the circumstances. Miria was slow in answering, leaning out with the lantern to project its light as far behind them as possible. Just as the edges of the creatures appeared, they melted back into the darkness.

“Fire,” she said excitedly, “it must have some effect on them!”

Lenna remembered the exploding potion that Katerina had thrown and watched the creatures recoil. But if their only effective weapon was their only source of light…

As if to prove them wrong, a gaunt arm extended into their pool of light to reach for Miria’s wrist. It only vanished when she swung the lantern toward it with force. The shadow limb sizzled when the flame passed through it, and its gaping mouth howled in outrage. But both creatures remained, searching for angles to get closer. Intelligent predators testing the walls of a cage.

“Can anything else hurt them?”

“Only other magics.”

“Right, right…ah fuck it, we’re dead anyway,” Lenna said bitterly. She yanked the lantern from Miria’s hand, and swung it like a flail towards the shadows.

“Do you have a plan?” Miria asked.

“If I had a running start, or maybe a sledge and a few minutes, I could get through to the other side. But not while holding these things off. So I’m going to fight them with what I have, and you’re going to try and find one of the open passageways. You told me you can move, right?”

“Yes, yes of course, but—”

Lenna cut her off. “Then go, damnit. Crawl if you have to! Follow the wall with your hands and look for another light source. There should be more exits down the corridor. Just hope there’s not another one of these things guarding it.”

She swung again with the lantern, hitting less of the mass of the void that wore a human body than the first swing. This was going to be a very short final stand. She didn’t hear footsteps leading away, so she snapped her gaze back for just a second to see Miria’s face had lost the rictus of fear. Instead, there was a singular focus. The resolute gaze of someone with a task to do that mattered more than anything in the world. Even their own life.

“Thank you, Dame Lenna. I…I would have liked to get to know you better. But I think I understand what my sister sees in you. Your sacrifice will not be in vain, I promise.”

“Right, likewise,” Lenna said rather flippantly. Then, with a little less bite: “Sorry. Thank you, Princess, and farewell. Save my wife, save the kingdom.”

Miria hobbled away, eschewing any attempt at regal appearance to get as much speed as she could away from the threats Lenna held at bay. When the shades attempted to slither after the Princess, the Knight leapt in their way. In that moment, spectres backlit by that false promise of safety, Lenna realized what she’d just promised to do: fight a losing battle in service to a woman that, in many ways, she’d just met.

But if that wasn’t an end for a Knight worth singing about, what was?

She laughed, swapped the hands that held the sword and lantern, and got ready for a proper finale. Whatever these things wanted from her, they’d have to kill her first.

“C’mon then,” she said, lantern out like a shield, “I’m waiting!”

Whether out of intelligence of their own or some conscious command driving them, both shades charged at once. Lenna assumed their goal was to recapture Miria, so she had to put herself between them and her if she had any hope of escaping. But as she swung the lantern once more, frost-laden hands grabbed her arms again. She thrashed against them, and managed to cut one with the sword. But then more hands came. And more. They seemed to abandon their guise as human figures and become nothing but grasping shadows. That and their skeletal mouths, unhinged jaws full of blurry teeth.

What felt like a dozen hands squeezed down on the hand holding the lantern, and she dropped it. This time the flame did not return. She was back in the darkness with these things. The heat bled from her body as they wrapped her in their abyssal embrace. It closed in and snuffed out the gleam that slid past the borders of the sealed door, leaving her in absolute, unnatural darkness. Even alone with her father, out in the field camp when they’d dulled the fires to keep the enemy from seeing them coming, she could at least look up at the stars above. But here…smothered by shadow…there was nothing.

…

…

…

And Then There Was Light.

For a fraction of a second, Lenna thought the whole mountain had been ripped out, bathing all beneath in the searing light of a noonday sun. It took her eyes a long time to adjust to the glare enough to see that the light had come not from the sky, but from a single sliver of perfect incandescence. Even with her hand shielding her eyes, she could see the glow through her skin. All the while, the unearthly wailing sounds of the shadow creatures had turned to the sounds of sizzling, popping meat over a griddle. Soon that too faded, and shortly afterwards, so did the light. Lenna lowered her hand and felt the skin that the light had touched still cling to a tingling worth, like she’d spent hours beneath a clear summer’s day.

Blinking away the spots in their vision, Lenna beheld the form of a slight woman, wearing a cloak of queer dark material that looked woven from a single piece of fabric. At her feet were the remains of the shadowmen: a faint dusting of black ash on the floor.

“Not bad for a hedge witch, huh?” Riven asked with a smirk. Then, she stumbled, catching herself before her legs could drop out from under here. “Whoo. Wow. That’s more power than I’ve ever put into a spell before. Suppose I should’ve expected—”

Her explanation was rudely interrupted when Lenna grabbed the mage in a bear hug and didn’t let go until she complained about her ability to breathe.

“How in the Pit did you find us?” the Knight asked, then, after remembering what had just happened in the last few moments: “Is Miria okay?”

“Who? Oh! The maid? Yeah, she’s back there, pointed me this way. I was using these back passages to move around out of sight of the guards and those Resplendent fuckers. I figured they’d tied you up somewhere, but I had no idea where to look. Thankfully, you make a lot of noise.”

Lenna laughed and felt something awful slide off her back. The pure, earnest relief of something happening in her favour felt like a balm her soul had needed. From accepting her futile end moments before to an executioner’s reprieve. Their fate wasn’t sealed. They could survive this terrible night. But she could not rest here. Not now.

“Alright, take me to Miria, and you can fill us both in on what you know.”

Riven did so. Miria had her back to the wall, kneels pulled in, her skirt blithely hiked up in a way that made it clear she hadn’t remembered the particulars of a woman style of clothing for a while. Saving both Riven and Lenna from commenting, she stood back up when she saw them approaching, an act that seemed to cause her some discomfort.

“Thank the Light. I trust you vouch for this one?” the Princess asked.

“Ah, yes, I suppose you haven’t met. Miria Forde, this is Riven…” Lenna paused for a second, then smiled, “Stone. She’s Katerina’s apprentice and spymaster. Riven, this is Katerina’s sister. Formerly her brother.”

Riven looked between the two like she was waiting for them to disclose a jest she wasn’t party to. Then, in a low accent she’d rarely showed any signs of in regular conversation: “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”

“We can commiserate over our shared experience later. Where is Katerina?”

To her credit, Riven was quick to land back on topic. “Ah, right. She’s in the Greathall, the place with the big fancy table? I’m guessing Savin’s there too, along with at least one of the other brothers. Paris too, if what I overheard is correct. I haven’t found Magnus, I assume they’re holding him prisoner somewhere. Savin’s got this night playing out like Katerina has summoned the ghosts of the vengeful dead to ascend the throne, with Adam and his Knights Resplendent as the gleaming bulwark against her foul witchcraft. I’d assumed Vladimir had been killed, but—”

“—but male succession takes precedence over female,” Miria said bitterly, “So even if I prove that I was, once, Vladimir Forde, the details of my birth as female would be enough to cause doubt among the Banners as to the worthiness of my cause.”

“Pricks,” Riven said.

“Indeed.”

Lenna swept the flat of her hand through the air. “Claims be damned! If we prove Thrast is working with Adam, it won’t matter. Half the nations on our borders would invade us and smash whatever farce he tries to hide behind.”

But Miria wasn’t swayed. “But if they do that, there’s every chance our foreign friends would not leave. In fact, I know of at least two nations who have claims on our lands dating back to before the Mage Tyrants. No, no we have to end this ourselves tonight. We defeat Adam on the field, or better yet, show his army of virulent anti-mages that they are being manipulated by a Magister, then we break this fever before it can spread to the rest of the body.”

That made enough sense to Lenna to be the basis of a plan. If anything, it would get them moving, and she was getting anxious from doing nothing for longer than a minute. 

“Alright,” Lenna said, finally nodding, “all that leaves is the matter of how we are to best over a hundred Knights Resplendent, an unknown number of traitorous guards, the swordmaster who knocked my head off the last time I sparred with him, his enormous brother, and one of the most powerful casters on the face of Argan.”

Riven laughed. “Well, what are we waiting for?” She took off down the corridor. Before Lenna could follow her, she felt Miria’s hand on her shoulder.

“A moment, Dame Lenna?” Miria asked, adding an unnecessary: “If you please.”

Lenna whistled to get Riven’s attention, then exchanged a ‘halt’ gesture for a silent nod. She took up a static watch at the nearest T-junction, making sure they weren’t interrupted from that direction at least.

“We have to move, Princess,” Lenna said. “You yourself agreed that time was a factor.”

“I did, and I still do. But I’d like to command you, as far as my authority as a member of the dynasty you are sworn to protect will allow.” She gripped Lenna’s shoulders with surprising strength. “No more suicidal last stands. Even at the cost of your honour, I am begging you to think of not just the moment, but of the future for this Kingdom. I need your help, Lenna. And you can’t help me if you’re dead.”

A part of her wanted to justify her previous actions. Those things would have overwhelmed them both. But instead, Lenna nodded and, knowing full well she could not promise such a thing, gave her word. She thought back to her discussion with Crys about how sometimes you simply had to lie to nobility for their own good. They simply couldn’t understand certain things. It wasn’t their fault; you don’t take oaths when you’re born into rank, after all.

With the matter settled, at least in name if not in deed, Lenna helped Miria over to join Riven, who motioned that the coast was clear. 

“So,” she began in a casual tone, “we were all boys once and were then forcibly turned into girls against our will. We should start a social club.”

“Jape later,” Lenna told her curtly. “First we get to Miria’s study. Apparently she has a secret hoard of magical items that could give us an edge against both the Knights and those shadow things.”

Miria flinched. “I…hmm…I guess it can’t very well stay a secret and help us at the same time, can it? Very well. Let us make haste to my ‘secret hoard’.”

Riven took up the Princess’ other arm and, with as much speed as they could manage, they marched back into the Western side of the Kralgrav.

***

Lenna’s party made their way to the study without encountering hostile guards on patrol, or even anyone making sure the room was secured. Evidently the room’s contents were still secret. Lenna and Riven helped Miria inside, and the Princess practically leapt out of their grasp to fetch a pair of crutches from the back of the room. Though Lenna hadn’t resented being a mobility aid for her sister-in-law in a time of need, she had to imagine the indignity of being carried everywhere would have worn out its welcome for Miria long before Lenna’s arms got tired.

“I would attempt to swear you all to secrecy about this,” Miria said, moving over to the bookcase beside her desk, “but I suppose if we fail, it’ll be a moot point. If we succeed, rest assured, I’ll be moving these to another location.”

She put her hand flat to the wall and stuffed her fingers into the narrow gap behind the bookcase. Some hidden mechanism clicked with the furniture and, with a gentle tug, the enormous, weighty stack of tomes swung on a hinge as easily as any wooden door might.

“How is it so light?” she asked.

“Architectural trick. It’s all a matter of simple machines, leverage and torque. A similar machination to how the Kralgrav’s own door functions, in fact. Besides, if I couldn’t open my secret vault by myself, it wouldn’t stay a secret for long.” Miria explained glibly, then let Riven help her inside. A little bit of the arrogant prick who’d lived in this room had returned. A blessing and a curse, as far as Lenna was concerned. Why did everyone in the Forde family have such gargantuan egos? Even Magnus was trying to cure all disease, though that was a more altruistic goal than ‘hoard magical weapons for an apocalyptic fight to the death’.

As Riven illuminated the long, thin room, Lenna decided that ‘hoard’ was the right word for it. On display on various pedestals, mounts, and stands was the largest collection of magical oddities that even a laywoman like her knew not to touch without good reason. There was a peculiar hatchet made of cerulean metal, a gleaming necklace of finest emerald that tightened around the neck of the bust it was displayed on as Riven’s hand neared it, even an unstrung bow made out of some kind of petrified wood. Notably absent, however, was a sword.

“I don’t suppose you’d have anything…” Lenna held out her flattened palms to about the length of her beloved crystal blade. Miria shook her head.

“I’m sorry, in my travels securing only the most rare and powerful items, I did not procure the exact length of blade that you are accustomed to,” she said, then motioned to the panoply of curious weapons. “You’ll have to do with something off the rack, I’m afraid.”

Lenna did her best to hide her grumbling, poking at the items until she found an axe whose head was made of green-tinted glass.

“Is this for decoration purposes?” she asked, picking up the weapon and testing its heft.

“Try it out,” Miria said, holding out her hand toward the case of old books. Lenna didn’t think twice before swinging with the weapon. She only registered hearing the Princess say ‘Not my bookshelf, you dunce!’ after the weapon impacted, and by that point her focus was on the aftermath of the strike. It didn’t shatter. Instead, there was the brief snap of air as it moved, then a dull crunch as the axe sunk into the wood.

“Apologies,” Lenna said, not bothering to sound like she meant it. It seemed a formidable weapon. Still…it wasn’t her sword.

“Stop complaining,” Riven admonished, “I gave the Thornblade to Crys, leaving me totally defenceless. A helpless maiden! You don’t see me whinging.”

Lenna folded her arms. “I saw you boil a man made of shadows to death through my closed eyelids.”

She flapped her thumb and fingers together like a yapping mouth. “Yeah yeah, details details. Let me know if you see something I can trade her to get it back.”

Lenna snorted and went back to looking. The next item that drew Lenna’s eye wasn’t a weapon at all. Or at least, not primarily so. It was, however, the most obvious supplement to her training as a woman at arms: a shield.

Lenna had trained for a large portion of her military career to use shields when preparing to fight in combat. Only in service as a Houseguard did she make do without one, and that was more a matter of aesthetics and convenience than practicality. In her time, she’d seen dozens of varieties of shields, ranging from the simple buckler to the gargantuan pavise. This was more like the familiar heater shield, though its shape was the only familiar aspect to it. Having seemingly sensed where her attention had been drawn, Riven gave the shield a light tap with her foot. The blow caused the material it was made of to ripple like water in a pond, or from a finger plunged into liquid mercury.

“No way…I think it belonged to one of the Praetorians of the Solar Dawn…” Riven said in a voice barely above a whisper, as if speaking the idea aloud would make it vanish before her eyes.

Miria nodded. “The last one in existence, as far as I know. Most of them were presumed lost with the rest of the City of the Second Sun fell. I’ve some theories—”

“Don’t care,” Lenna said flatly, grabbing the shield without further awe or ceremony and sliding her hand into a belt mounted on the inverse side. Whatever material it was made of, it felt disgustingly like the shed skin of a snake. “What I meant to say was: what is the specific arcane nonsense that makes this special? It’s not going to eat my arm or something, right?”

The Princess exchanged a look with Riven close to what older siblings might share when their younger peer asks a ridiculous question that neither wanted to answer. In the end, Miria was the one who caved.

“Well, it was built to deflect magic, so it should sop up a portion of any attacks sent your way. It’s also a formation breaker, I suppose you could say. The material it’s made of turns the wielder into an unstoppable force, either by accelerating them or increasing the kinetic impact of their impact by some means. According to legend, nothing could stand up to a charge by the Praetorians.”

“’According to legend?’ You mean you didn’t try it?” Lenna asked, looking up to see Miria making a contemptuous face. “Oh. Right.”

The Princess waved it off. “I would have tried all these items, had I the physical stamina. Or someone I could trust to keep secret about their existence. I had almost trusted Marten with the knowledge, and it had nearly cost me everything.”

Marten.

After all that had transpired, she’d nearly forgotten about him. That traitorous wretch. He had to have been the one to betray them to Adam, which was foul work enough. But for a Houseguard to turn his back on his charge?

“I still cannot believe a Knight would do something like this,” she said, fist tensing.

Miria’s reply was flippant. “Every Knight has their price.” When Lenna’s eyes snapped back to Miria, she clarified: “Well, perhaps not every Knight. If I may eschew my normally cynical detachment for a moment, I would like to say that you, Dame Lenna, are a shining, wonderful exception to just about every depressing rule I’ve found to govern human behaviour. Would that we lived in a world with more of you and less of me.”

Lenna found herself self-conscious about the caustic rebuke she’d been preparing to spit back at the Princess, assuming she’d been about to insult her intelligence, her honour, or both. The sudden earnestness left her uncertain how to proceed, not to mention what to do with the unprovoked compliment. So instead she let the matter drop and found something else in the collection to examine with utmost haste.

Riven’s own attention had already wandered to one of the stranger items: a statue of a humming crystal made in the image of a man with the head of a steer.

“I can’t even imagine what this all cost to acquire,” she said with a mystified shake of her head.

Miria chuckled. With enough to lean against and plenty to hold onto, she’d drifted over to a cabinet against the far wall. There, she ran her hand over dozens of little drawers labelled in an inscrutable scrawl, clearly looking for something in particular.

“No, you really can’t. Certainly a much easier task when you control the nation’s finances. But I did not spend wastefully. In the absence of a reliable magic user to rely on to defend ourselves from the Magisters, or any of the other kingdoms who would use mages to do their bidding, I had to act. Some of these are donations by my wife’s kin, actually. They don’t trust enchantments that they don’t make themselves, yet they come across plenty of items of interest on their Long Ride. One of them was, in fact, a wedding gift…ah, here it is.”

Miria pulled out a necklace from one of the drawers and laid it on the cabinet’s top. A veritable bouquet of precious gems and silver ornamentation, it was far too gaudy and ostentatious even for Katerina’s tastes.

“I think I’ll pass,” Lenna said, staring at the bauble-laden jewellery with naked contempt, “I’m not one for such…frippery.”

“Oh for pity’s…” Miria cut off what would have likely been a very out of character barrage of curses and instead yanked a single immaculately faceted ruby and handed it to Lenna. “The rest of the necklace is just a facade. Well, it’s an extremely expensive facade, but this is the stone that holds the actual enchantment. Just keep it about your person and it should still function.”

Lenna took the offered stone without question, then realized she probably should ask at least one.

“Why?”

Riven started making excited hooting noises, raising her hand like a star pupil. “I think it’s a Death Ward…correct?” She looked at Miria to confirm before continuing. “Very rare enchantment magic. It’ll protect you from a single fatal wound; no more, no less. Obviously, that doesn’t count the loss of blood from non-fatal wounds, or the lingering effects of a poisoned weapon. Or drowning, suffocation, or…” Riven trailed off when she realized the look she was getting from Lenna. “Ehm, sorry. To put it simply: if your head would be struck from your shoulders, or an arrow should pierce your heart, the gem shatters, and you don’t.”

“Okay…but if it’s so useful, why is this here in a cabinet of curiosities and not around your neck?” she asked, turning to Miria.

“I was a man at the time,” the Princess answered with a shrug. “It wouldn’t do to show the world that I was frightened of dying. Or worse: that I was the kind of effete androgyne who wore necklaces.”

Unable to give Miria’s male guise guff for the ridiculous stance without calling attention to her own previous reluctance to wear it, Lenna relented.

“Whatever, just give it here. I’ll…” She fished around in her pockets for a good place to put it that wouldn’t let it fall out should she be knocked about. Riven again came in for the save. With glowing thread in hand, she held out her other for the gem. With quick, lively gestures, she Wove something around Lenna’s throat.

“Katerina’s always trying to get you to look pretty when you’re not in your armour,” the magical seamstress said as she stepped back to admire her work. “I think that’ll do nicely.”

Lenna’s calloused fingers felt the soft, conjured fabric of the collar around her neck. It was a choker, the kind Katerina sometimes wore. Whereas the Princess had one with a rose quartz in the middle, the same gem that made up Lenna’s enchanted sword, the ruby was, well, red. Incidentally, one of the colours of the House of Forde.

“It’ll do. Thank you, Riven,” Lenna said. The stick-thin former assassin had come a long way from the day she’d tried to plunge a pair of daggers into Kat. Life had started them on different paths, but it was heartening to see her bloom as she had.

Not that Lenna would ever say something so nakedly sentimental to anyone but Katerina. Besides, Crys might hear about it, and then she’d never hear the end of how soft her heart had become.

“You’ve gathered the greater portion of the nation’s magical treasury about your person,” Miria said, looking Lenna up and down. “Any more accoutrements and you’d be dragged to a crawl beneath their weight. But…I believe I have one last gift to offer you both.”

The Princess opened a false panel on the side of the cabinet and withdrew a trio of small, square bottles full of purple fluid. Lenna recognised them immediately as similar to the ones she’d seen before.

“Magnus’ healing potions?”

“Indeed. He gave several of them to me, seeking to fix my infirmity. I had to pretend that I’d imbibed them to null effect for fear of undoing the magic that the Magisters used to transform me. If this healing potion somehow saw Vladimir’s masculinity as something to be fixed—”

“---then you would have gone through all that strife for nothing,” Lenna finished. Both her and Riven pocketed one each. The vials were sealed and should be sturdy enough to carry into a fight.

“Quite. I gave the rest to some of the staff who had injured themselves or had family members who had infirmities that couldn’t be easily remedied. Under pain of death if they spoke of where they received this boon, of course…not that I’d ever follow through with such a threat. I’d say it was to buy loyalty, but in truth I couldn’t keep staring at a small forest of vials that would likely cure my infirmity every time I entered this room.” The last sentence ended with a morose touch of her true feelings on the matter, and Miria closed her eyes and sighed sharply.

Lenna did her the service of not asking if she was alright, knowing from personal experience that was a short path to making the person you ask fall apart under the weight of the answer. Instead, she picked one of the bottles up and gave it a gentle shake to see if the contents were still mixed together, just like Katerina had taught her at some point. Her face was briefly reflected in the glass of the bottle, and the implications of what Miria had just said finally clicked.

“Are you saying these potions might change me back? To being…to not being a woman?” Suddenly faced with the prospect of a reversal of her sword’s curse, Lenna surprised herself with how horrified she was. Had she truly gotten so attached to this form?

Miria’s mouth formed a flat line before she answered. “I don’t know. Alchemy has uneven results when interacting with magical effects. I couldn’t take the risk.”

“I understand,” Lenna began, then corrected herself. “No. Again, I can’t know. In truth, I was not uncomfortable as a man, I simply preferred to be a woman once the option was presented to me…after a fashion. But to become a man knowing in your heart that you’re aren’t one sounds like…” She struggled for the words, but Miria was quick to find them for her.

“Like wearing a costume for your whole life that rots you from the inside out? How every glimpse at your reflection, every assumption made at your expense, every role and title grates and scrapes at you until there’s little left but bitter ash in your mouth and ice in your heart?” Miria took in another deep breath. “Yes. All that and more.”

“So why did you agree to do it? Why did you keep up the ruse for so long? Even in royals, being crossborn is not unheard of. From what I heard you’ve been running the kingdom for years now. Surely you could have—”

She shook her head. “Out of the question. You’ve seen my brothers. I say without ego that I am the only worthy successor to my Father’s legacy. The only chance this Kingdom has to keep the foreign threats at bay and the banners beneath ours united and safe. The Frontiers are vast — a logistical nightmare, to speak it plainly. But I have held us together for years as King Magnus’ health failed him and Pyotr was…Pyotr. My marriage as a male, my ability to sire heirs, that was the scaffold on which a future could grow.”

“With all due respect, Highness, you could just be honest and say you wanted power.”

Lenna expected a rhetorically cogent yet emotionally hollow rebuke. But instead, the Princess offered only a broad shrug and a pathetic laugh.

“Ah, well, I suppose I did. No point hiding that. I wanted to rule my own destiny, to steer my own ship. And I didn’t see a way to do that as Miria. Even now, as the eldest living child of King Magnus, I’m still a crippled woman. Our world holds very little value in that combination of traits. Now, is there anything—”

Lenna took the other woman’s hands. The sudden intimacy took the Princess by surprise, causing her to jerk away on instinct. But Lenna’s grip was like wrought iron.

“As your impertinent, crude, low-born sister-in-law, I’m obligated to tell you not the flattering platitudes you want to hear but the frustrating, annoying truths that you need to hear. And the truth is this: you and Katerina are two sides of the same coin. Stubborn, selfish, and deeply privileged in upbringing and outlook. But you’re also intelligent. And courageous, and have the kind of boundless strength of will that normally takes a lifetime to cultivate. I love her, but both of you are worth fighting for.”

Miria looked into the middle distance with an expression belying some reluctance to accept the words offered to her. It didn’t matter if she accepted it; it needed to be said regardless.

“Hey, Lenna?” Riven cut in, “there’s three potions here. Would you like the second one?”

The Knight let go of the Princess hands to shoot an incredulous look at the lithe spymaster. “Why? I can take more punishment than you.”

Riven’s expression didn’t change. “That’s funny. Katerina said something similar.” Before Lenna or Miria could blush, Riven handed her the second potion. “Take it, you oaf. We both know you’ll be doing something equal parts foolish and brave in the next few hours. Might as well stand a chance at living through it.”

With a touch of resentment at how predictable she had apparently become, Lenna nodded and pocketed the second potion as well.

“Alright. We’ve waited long enough,” Lenna told them with iron surety. Somewhere in the Kralgrav, her wife was being held hostage. She could abide no more stalling.

Riven flashed her a smile, her hands landing on her slender waist. “I’ve never been a hero before. Should be fun!”

Chapter 5

The party made their way toward the part of the Kralgrav that Riven had said there might be those loyal to their cause, with Miria setting the pace for an alert and wary Riven and Lenna. They saw more signs of a struggle, but they were increasingly those of a battle that was already over. After a while it was a simple matter of following the trails of corpses. 

Someone very good with a knife had cut several guards with golden handkerchiefs tied to their arms to bloody ribbons. Others had no such accoutrements, but had died all the same. Stab wounds, blunt trauma, grievous cuts to the torso and neck. All of these soldiers had, at one point or another, been loyal servants to the crown. They’d died in the same pools of blood as their traitorous siblings. Perhaps literally, in some cases. Matching facial features, matching hair colour…

She tried not to notice that some of those faces were familiar and failed miserably. A woman she’d led on patrol around the capital lay folded around a dagger, its blade lodged in her ribs to the point it was merely left behind. Her name was…Olga? No… Oksana. And there lay Bavel, a soldier with a great bushy beard that had helped Lennox unstick a carriage from the sucking spring mud had crawled for a good distance, dragging the scarlet of House Forde across the stone.

“Civil war,” Lenna pronounced, the word tasting like bile. She’d seen its like before, but this was different. This was…home.

“No,” Miria corrected her sharply, “not yet. This is a coup attempt, nothing more. Lives lost in the dozens, not the thousands. We can stop it from becoming a war, but only if we act quickly and decisively.”

They heard a scream of pain. Lenna and Riven lowered Miria and readied their weapons. But it was not followed by the sounds of combat, or of threats harshly offered to foes. It was conversations. Harried, nervous even, but it was the sound of people communicating. Lenna let herself hope as she picked the Princess back up and surged forward, heedless of the danger, desperate for a fraction of good news. They came to the doorway into the banquet hall, and suddenly all the weight of Miria’s body was on Lenna as Riven launched herself like a ballista bolt. A moment later, her cry of relief answered why.

“Crys!”

There, standing watch near a shattered and blood-stained barricade, was Crys fucking Duskchaser, Head Guard of the Winter Court and a damn good sight to see. She was discussing some mad plan with a small crowd of armed men who all had to spring back or be knocked over by the spy-turned-projectile. Crys managed to open her arms a little before impact, Riven tackling her with a hug that knocked them both to the floors. Tears of joy, not sorrow, flowed freely from both women. Probably some of the spectators too, though Lenna was using all her self control not to beam like a fool at the display of naked, pure affection between two of his closest friends.

“Never do anything that stupid again,” Crys told Riven in a deathly serious tone, but only after a kiss that nearly drained the breath from them both.

“No promises,” Riven replied, “now where’s my knife?”

More laughter, more tears, more kissing. The vicarious joy at seeing the two lifted the pall of anxiety for a moment, only to drop down once more when she remembered that her own love was still in danger. She had to harden her heart. She couldn’t break. Not here. Not now.

“Good to see you still around to make trouble,” Lenna managed, but only after swallowing a lump in her throat.

The guardswoman crossed her arms. “Likewise, Lenna. And I believe I found something you’ve lost.”

Before she could ask what she was talking about, Crys rushed over to the side of the room and retrieved something. She placed it between both hands, held horizontal like a royal offering. It looked for all the world like a longsword in its scabbard, with a jewelled pommel the colour of rose-quartz.

“One of these traitors practically fell over himself to give it up,” Crys explained, voice like she was trying to hock some cheap forgery on the streets of the Capital. “I’d wager he wouldn’t have enjoyed what would have happened had he kept it.”

“Probably not. It’s a nice sword, though,” Lenna said, nodding in feigned vacant appraisal. The corners of her mouth, however, refused to stay flat.

“That’s a nice axe,” Crys countered, offering the blade hilt-first with one hand and her open palm in the other. “Trade you for it?”

Lenna grasped the hilt of her sword. Pulling it free of the scabbard, seeing its facets gleam in the lantern light. The sword that had made her Lenna. The sword that bound her to Katerina’s service in more ways than one. Her skin prickled. All the political machinations and schemes, magical powers and creatures made of shadows, it was all quite above her head.

Dame Lenna Stone, Houseguard Knight and wife of Katerina Forde, swept her sword from left to right. Feeling its grip. Its weight. This was something she could understand. With a sword like this, she could win.

“Light scald me,” a man who looked like the sweaty, blood-stained ghost of Guardsman Murrow said, emerging from the group Crys had been speaking with and squinting as if to peer past a mirage, “is that you, Lenna?”

Another familiar face. Lenna slid the belt and scabbard around her waist and greeted him warmly with another clasping of arms. Murrow had been one of the last people in the castle to stop calling her Lennox. She doubted it was malice; he’d never been cruel about it. Just an older sort set in his way of the world. However, hearing her name come out of his mouth did make the relief at seeing him all the sweeter.

“Indeed it is. Somehow alive and still in the fight,” she said, looking behind him to the small crowd that had gathered in the royal banquet hall. Admittedly, it was less than he had hoped for. Including Crys there were ten, perhaps eleven both able and willing to bear arms. The rest were either too injured for another fight or were very obviously disinclined to participate in this microcosmic civil war. Outside the banquet hall, a grisly barricade had been formed out of the bodies of those already fallen. Loyalists and traitors both had been piled unceremoniously together out of expedience. If there was grim consolation, they were united again now that they were at rest.

Murrow must have noticed Lenna’s eyes lingering on the rude display. “We lost a lot of good men and women tonight. Verity perished allowing a group of us to escape the cordon around the barracks. Krue didn’t make it either. Stubborn old mule…”

“Damnit,” Lenna seethed, voice dropping lower than she was normally comfortable with. Krue’d been a kindly soul past his gruff exterior. And Verity…They all had to pay for their crimes. Savin, Adam, and that traitorous Knight Marten.

“Forgive me, Dame, but what in the Pit is going on?” Murrow asked, hand on his hips. “Is this some kind of sorceress trick? Some spell on our minds to force our own countrymen to kill us?”

Of course they wouldn’t know what was going on, Lenna thought, it was all they could do to just stay alive. Just the essentials then.

“It’s not an enchantment. Adam’s made a play, aligned himself with the worst of the Magisters of Thrast. They’ve summoned dark shadows to attack us, all in a bid to frame Katerina as a regicide. In the chaos, and with Vladimir’s disappearance—”

“Vladimir?”

The question provoked a head to rise from behind one of the banquet tables, someone she barely recognised. The gorgeous dress had been replaced by riding leathers and a bandage on her upper arm of what looked like a deep cut. Her hair no longer in elaborate coifs but tied around itself into a tight, practical braid.

“Lenna,” Turai said, wiping her hands on her stained trousers to offer her a clasped arm of a fellow warrior. “It pleases me that you haven’t died. Have you news of my husband?”

“Likewise,” she began before, with an embarrassing lack of celerity, she remembered who she’d just spent the good part of an hour escorting.

Oh.

Right.

Miria Forde gently handed her crutches to Lenna, which she took and stepped out of the way. Then, the Princess took a pair of short, quick steps towards the other woman, her back straight, eyes forward.

“This…this is going to take some explanation,” the transformed Princess began, taking in a deep breath to steel herself. “But Turai, my love, it’s-”

“I know.”

Miria froze. A thousand words of careful explanations and guarded expectations died on her lips, slain by two words Lenna’d never expect hearing if she had a year to guess them.

“You know?”

Turai closed the distance between them and, rather than rushing to offer her assistance in standing, merely swept the hair from Miria’s eye on her left side.

“On the Sere, when a star falls from the heavens, it signals the birth of one whose flesh does not match their…zhra, their spirit-self. The moment I met you, I knew you. The real you. But I also knew that you Southerners can be stubborn. I just had to be patient for you to find her for yourself.”

Miria stood in confused silence for as long as she was able. Then, as her legs finally began to buckle, Turai swooped in to catch her.

“Thank you,” Miria said, her voice breaking.

“I’ll always catch you, love. No matter what.”

There were more conversations and more relieved embraces and clasps of hands, but time was of the essence. Every moment spent in idle bonhomie was another moment Katerina was in danger. Nevertheless, Lenna relieved to see Vikka was alive and seemingly unarmed. It was her that Turai had been attending with a damp cloth when they’d entered. Apparently she’d passed out from seeing all the violence.

Damn shame such a gentle soul like her had to see this mess.

“Alright, all those who can hold a weapon and are willing to fight, come with me. We’re putting an end to this damn coup and putting boot and blade to the bastards behind it.”

A cheer went up, the voices heartfelt if a little ragged. One mouth stayed silent, however: Princess Turai.

“I just got my wife back,” she said, having sat Miria down on one of the surviving banquet hall chairs. “I would like to remain to protect her, as well as those who cannot fight.”

As much as Lenna wanted to say ‘no, abandon your wife and help me run a suicide mission’, Turai had a point. And if they failed, Miria’s changed physical appearance meant there was nobody left with a clear claim to the throne to oppose Adam. But on the other hand…

“Your Highness, we’re asking a lot of the men. We’ll be fighting their traitorous countrymen and Light only knows how many Knights. We need someone they know to rally behind.”

Crys broke from Riven’s tangling grasp long enough to say: “I’ll stay.”

This time Lenna’s reaction was opposite to Turai’s declaration. All logic said it was a reasonable suggestion, but not to have Crys’ sure sword arm by her side when they went up against the wall was an impossible consideration. If they were going to have any hope…

Lenna threw back her head and did her best not to scream. Then, finally, with sense prevailing over sentiment, she nodded.

“Is that alright with you, Princess? Crys is one of the finest soldiers I’ve had the privilege of working with. I’d trust her with Katerina’s life, I hope you can trust her with Miria’s.”

Turai looked back and forth between her wife and Lenna. Finally, to break the dilemma clearly on her mind, Miria spoke up.

“Go, love. You are the most formidable woman I know, and our people need a banner to stand behind. Stop my brothers and save my sister.”

The Princesses kissed one last time, then the woman from the Northern Sere raised to her full height, leapt over the upturned table, and retrieved a well-worn bow and a quiver. When Turai met Lenna’s eyes again, there was a fearsome light in her eyes that she could compare to very little in her experience.

A forest fire, perhaps.

Lenna gathered the rest of the dozen or so souls willing to risk their lives in this desperate gambit. They were varying levels of haggard, some looked just as tired as she felt. But all had at least drawn their weapon against a fellow countryman this night, and that was no small measure of courage. Nor was it without mental cost. The least she could do, as the one putting this Forlorn Hope together, was give a speech.

She hated giving speeches. That was Kat’s job. She struggled with a few false starts, all feeling hollow. Then, mercifully, Turai took up a place next to Lenna and spoke in her stead. Like a true leader, her voice was clear and resolute. After merely a handful of words, all eyes in the room were on her.

“All of you know me. Many of you I’ve come to regard as family. My people…our ways are different, as you may know. We prize our natural born kin and our chosen bonded alike, cherishing both ties of blood and honour as worthy. As worth defending. But they are not inviolate. Bonds can be broken. Things such as egregious desecration of the sacred, unprovoked violence against the innocent or the helpless, and yes, betrayal. There are those who wear our colours who sought to break our trust, murder their friends—our family—this cannot be allowed to pass.”

A chorus of “Aye”s, though not as loud as either woman would have liked, came up from the assembled guards. 

“I get it,” Lenna added, finding her voice just in time to let each of them see just how fucking tired she actually was, “you don’t want this fight. Neither do I. I fell asleep in my bed next to my wife and then saw a shadow from a nightmare rip her out of my arms. Somewhere beyond the Hall of Headmen is the perpetrator of this whole terrible plot. A Magister of Thrast named Savin. Whether Adam is merely under her thrall or a voluntary component of her scheme, I care not one whit. If Savin has her way, she’ll turn this Kingdom into another Thrast. Another spellbound puppet. Do you want that?”

This time the “No!”s had a little more verve to them. But she needed elan. She needed them to fight. One more push.

“Let’s show this foreign witch and her puppet princes what the sons and daughters of the Frontier are all about!”

“Aye!” they chorused, and Lenna figured that was as good as it was gonna get.

Thank fuck. I was worried I’d have to do this whole suicide mission myself. The idea of her own mortality reminded Lenna that she was starkly, painfully naked at the moment. Her armour was still resting in a chest in her and Katerina’s room. But they couldn’t waste time running to retrieve it just for her own protection, and she couldn’t imagine fighting in anyone else’s ill-fitting cuirass. No. She had the potions, she had the Ward, it’d be enough. It had to be enough.

The crowd broke up to say their farewells to those who wouldn’t be coming with them. As they did, Riven sneaked within earshot of Lenna.

“I have a suggestion,” she began, voice briefly dropping into the playfully sinister one she used when she was about to suggest something underhanded.

“Is the suggestion throwing us to the wolves?” Lenna asked with equal joviality. “I bet Savin will take a second look at your credentials if you turn coat on us, say this whole thing was a mistake.”

Riven snorted. “The only thing I’ll regret is if I’m not the one to kill her myself. But before we commit, might we take a detour back to Miria’s study?”

Lenna raised an eyebrow, then remembered a very good reason indeed.

“I think we can find ourselves heading that way.”

Chapter 6

There was no escape for Katerina’s mind from her impending doom. The baleful apparatus loomed on one side, the network of bottles, tubes, titration columns and alchemical reduction vessels placed atop the vast table that had the day before been used for the Mounting. She followed the theoretical flow of the solution from one vessel to the next, trying to make sense of it. Each time she had a conceptual handle on the mechanics of this synthesis, a new substance she hadn’t noticed before would make itself known, or he would do something that seemed counter-intuitive. Whatever procedure Magnus had devised for stripping her of her powers, it was of his own creation.

“I’ll have to give you credit,” she said, still working at the bonds which held her in place, “it looks like you’ve been doing your research.” Riven had shown Katerina some methods for escaping bondage, but she must have been talking about a very different kind of restraint. She’d have to take the matter up with her later, preferably when she is equally immobilized.

Magnus had so far refused to speak much. Once he’d gotten all the apparatuses, he put himself into a monomaniacal focus that she recognised all too well. She should have been proud of how similar to her he’d grown up to be. Her baby brother, working on his first courtly betrayal.

But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting.

Savin had fallen silent, staring blankly toward the door that led out into the rest of the Kralgrav. Not even Katerina’s best taunts could get her attention, which meant she was performing some kind of spellwork. Likely the shades that had nearly killed Lenna and rendered her helpless. Another person who’d been working on their craft while she’d been playing Princess.

The urge to blame herself terminated the moment it arose. She stepped on its throat and didn’t lift her boot until it stopped moving. No. She was Katerina Forde. She never lost a game, she simply started a new round.

There were the guards who stood on either side of her, looking for a hint of magical energy to slap the gag back on her. But she neither knew their names nor did she wish to. That left two people she could conceivably goad into a conversation. Adam had already spewed the bile that had built in his throat and seemed spent. He was going over the last details in coordinating the evidence to be left behind of “her” coup with some of his loyal guards. That left the last brother, and the one she’d spoken to the least.

“Paris?”

He’d come to a rest a few minutes ago, taking over from both Savin and Adam as her guard while the last of Magnus’ apparatus was assembled. Leaning against the wall, the Sword of Forde resting next to him like it was a hammer or some other tool of manual labour that Katerina couldn’t name, rather than the symbol of her whole dynasty. His eyes were loosely aimed in her direction, but his attention was clearly elsewhere.

“Yeah, sis?” His accent had lost its preformative elocution of the castle in the years he’d been gone. It made him sound a little uncouth, but perhaps that sort of vulgarity played better with a rougher crowd. She’d had to curtail commenting on Lenna’s choice of words when she got flustered. Apparently most people don’t like being corrected when their ankles are kissing their ears.

A dozen equally convincing arguments for him to abandon his cause and side with her rose to her lips. But the first thing she said to him furthered no agenda besides that of a younger sister to her older brother.

“It is good seeing you again, and healthy too. Even despite the…situation.” She punctuated the statement with a shake of her wrists. If he saw it, he didn’t comment.

“Likewise. I wrote to Mother every few months when she was still with us, but honestly, the Kingdom seemed like another lifetime. No excuses. I should have written to you, too.”

“Yes, you should have.” She didn’t want to chastise him, but there was so much she wished he would just stop and think about. “What brought you back to us? Last time I remember, Adam wasn’t your favourite sibling.”

Paris closed his eyes and took a long, considered breath. “Adam told me the truth. He said Father was dying, and that the Kingdom needed a strong ruler. It needed all its Princes to come together...the real Princes, I mean.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?” she asked, appearing blithe to the implication even as a sinking feeling threatened to pull her under.

“You know what I mean,” Paris snapped. “All of us born after Adam never met her, but we all know the truth about our dear sister Miria. Thankfully, she’s back the way the One made her, and safely out of the way.”

Katerina’s eyes widened. She’d pieced together the truth about Vladimir’s original birthname and sex years ago, but it was just one of the many things that her family didn’t discuss. Of course Savin would know about it. It was the Magisters her father had turned to in the first place. But if they’d found a way to reverse the spell…

“You…you didn’t…” 

“What?” he asked, making an incredulous face. “Don’t tell me that you of all people have a sudden burst of moral fibre over the forcible reassignment of someone’s gender. That would be hypocritical in the extreme, don’t you think?”

Katerina closed her mouth. Any attempt to distinguish between what she did to Lenna and what her family had done to their own brother would only make her come out looking worse. They had done this in an attempted struggle for power. Sinister but understandable goals. Why had she bent all those boys before Lenna? For pleasure? To see them squirm?

If she didn’t feel a knife in her back before, she certainly did now. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he continued, half to himself, “the hard part is over. We just have to do the cleanup and get everyone’s stories straight. By sunrise, there’ll be a new King.”

“You’d serve Adam?”

“What of it? He’s the other brother, that’s how such things are determined.”

Something about the answer tingled at the back of her head. Something that told her he wasn’t laying out the whole picture for her.

There we are, she thought, back on track. I was worried I might lose myself to blubbering self-pity.

“And did he promise you anything for your help?” she asked as if it was the most obvious question in the world, then: “Did you even ask for anything?”

He straightened off the wall, raising the Sword to rest across his shoulder. “Of course. I’m to lead our personal forces into battle, should it come to that. I’ve experience enough in combat, and plenty of time to learn what I don’t know—”

Katerina scrunched up her face like she was trying to hold back a laugh. “Your reward is to be our older brother’s blunt object? Surely you asked for more than that.”

He inhaled sharply. “You may not understand this about me, but I take my duty as a Prince seriously.”

“You do?” she asked, and not even incredulously. She was genuinely curious how he squared his years of absence playing sellsword as anything the most rank of derelictions.

“Of course I do!” he shot back. “My time out West was not idly folly, sister. I was building myself up to be useful for when our family needed me. It did not need another blunt object. But someone who could speak several languages, who had dealings with all manners of people, learned about other ways of structuring laws—”

“You studied foreign law?” This time her tone actually was incredulous.

“I am NOT the FOOL you TAKE ME FOR!” 

The roared declaration made everyone else in the room look at him askance. He saw the mixture of concern and derision in their faces and clearly tried to reel himself back in. Paris had bellowed with the same outrage when she’d spent an evening picking at the mistakes in his arithmetic homework. He may be the largest Forde by far, but to Katerina’s eye, he was still an angry little boy.

When the silence in the room was deafening, he broke it in a conciliatory tone. “I’ll never be as smart as you, or Mir, or Magnus. I know that. But I am curious about the world. I wanted to see it, before I was drowned in obligation. I’ve ideas how our Kingdom can thrive taken from my travels, and I hope to contribute. But I won’t shirk my primary duty to my kingdom and my family…something you should have thought of before you got married to your own Houseguard.”

A weak jab; she ignored it in favour of one of her own. “I’ll admit you seem to have changed since we last spoke. You would have had to. The Paris I know would have never had me kidnapped, seen my wife assaulted—”

Before she could finish rattling off the crimes, it was Magnus who leapt in between them with an indignant outburst of his own.

“Do you think we wanted this?!” he asked, hands spread out to the Greathall around them. “This could have all been avoided if Adam had been willing to compromise, or if Vladimir and yourself had just let Adam win the vote without a backdoor machination. First you forced me to be the Arbiter, which I gladly performed in an effort to maintain the peace. But then you guilt me for not taking your side! So don’t you claim some moral high ground, Katerina. Both of you are two sides of the same coin!”

Another knife thrust into her back. Or perhaps more accurately, a dagger to twist into her stomach. On his many good days, Magnus could be the kindest, gentlest soul that Katerina knew. So much so that she’d forget once more just how much fury could be stored behind his soft features. Especially when he thought something wasn’t fair, or when he thought someone had abused his good nature.

“I know why Paris is doing this now, and I know why Adam does anything. But you still haven’t told me why you betrayed me, Mags. I thought we were closer than that.” It was challenging for her to keep the actual hurt out of her voice, but she tried her best.

For a moment she thought he’d fallen back into focused silence, staring intensely at one portion of his apparatus. But a dam had burst, and he had a deluge of previously hidden emotions to pour forth.

“I love you, Katerina. You’re my sister. You’re smart, and funny, and you were kind when the others weren’t. But I wasn’t lying last night. Above all, my guiding principle is to do the least amount of evil. From where I stood, Adam’s plan had the greatest chance of succeeding with a minimum of harm.”

She tried to gesture at the devices around her, but could only point with her chin. “From where I sit, about to be hooked up to an execution machine, I feel modestly harmed.”

“It’s not…you’re not going to die,” he sputtered, “we’ve worked on this for months! It’ll just be like an oil lamp getting turned down to low, then flickering out on its own.”

One of the large flasks at the start of the apparatus began to boil, causing the material within to dance in the churning, translucent fluid. When she saw the shape of the leaves that were being extracted, the exact mechanism of her mutilation became painfully clear.

“Throttler,” she pronounced, unable to believe her own eyes. Her own brother was preparing to poison her with Throttler. Ironic, considering she’d grown her own for potential use against Savin. The poison extracted from the flower had varying levels of effect on a mage, depending on concentration and dosage. Anywhere from temporary inability to cast all the way to death. But whatever the machine he’d devised had some other use for it. Otherwise they could have just stabbed her with a dagger laced with the drug and gone about their day.

As he spoke, the looming nature of the fate that awaited her made it hard to focus on the literal meaning of the words and more imagining how much the procedure would alter her.

“Don’t worry,” he insisted, “we’ve spent months on perfecting a way to take away your ability to cast magic without hurting you. That was the only way I’d do this.”

“Forgive me if I don’t take your word.”

“But it’s the truth!” Magnus explained in a grotesque facsimile of his normally ebullient tone when he was explaining some figment of trivia that fascinated him. “Adam put me in touch with a contact in the Magistry months ago. At first as a source of alchemical reagents, then to discuss the means and methods of extracting the ability to use magic. By the time I found out it was Savin, and this was all a way of finding a cure for your magical ability, I...Adam said it was just for an emergency. Something to be used if you or another caster in the Kingdom became too dangerous to herself or others. Someone like you.”

Katerina couldn’t stop herself from looking to Savin again. How had she ever been in love with such a viper? Someone so virulently evil that they could turn Magnus’ inherent good nature against her? Without the option for retributive violence, she could only watch as the extracted poison slowly evaporated out of one glass bottle and into another, each carefully calibrated step bringing closer a seal on her fate.

It was getting more and more difficult for Katerina to mask her fear. Magic wasn’t just something she did. Magic was a part of who she was. It was a source of power when she was powerless, it was a source of comfort when she was alone. Without her spells she would have never met Lenna…the real Lenna. The prospect of it disappearing forever…

“Mags…please,” Katerina whispered, “whatever I did wrong, I’m sorry.”

He hesitated before he spoke. For a moment, she thought she was getting through to him. But he’d merely spotted a loose connection among the hoses.

“If I don’t do something,” he told her wearily, “Adam will kill you, or you will kill him. And I don’t want that. Pyotr is gone. Father and Mother are dead. I’m tired of burying my family. Losing your magic is tragic for you, and I am sorry, but it’s a small price to pay. But we all make sacrifices for our family, do we not?”

Something about his pretensions of mercy made her next reply hostile. “I don’t see you sacrificing anything, you little pest.”

His shoulders tensed. “That’s…that’s not…”

But something dark was speaking through her now, and it kept up the attack. “What are you giving up, huh? What limb are you cutting off? You know what my magic means to me? What I had to do to get it? Who I would kill to keep it?”

Paris stepped in, ruffling the hair of his little brother as he’d done so many times growing up. “She’s just winding you up. Mags. She won’t hurt you. Say, is it safe for you to step away for a moment? Catch your breath?”

The youngest brother opened his mouth, but his jaw quivered before any objection could form. He nodded limply, then walked off to sit in one of the old chairs on the opposite side of the enormous table, looking about ten years older than when he’d started the evening.

Just when she thought she had real momentum, she’d been stymied again. Everything she tried, every angle, every ploy…it was all coming to naught. She turned her attention back to Paris and, returning her tone to that of a wounded sibling, she asked the one thing she’d never bothered to consider until the moment she realized nearly all her siblings had stabbed her in the back.

“Was I a bad sister?”

Paris knelt to put himself at eye level with her. Even still, the width of his shoulders dwarfed her. Between them, he rested the enormous Sword of Forde at a crooked angle. Their birthright. Their burden.

“No, Kat, you weren’t a bad sister. Not really. But I think…I think if all of us are going to survive, if Father’s legacy is going to continue after us, we’re going to have to be terrible brothers. I hope you’ll forgive us one day.”

The silence in the wake of that statement stretched on for an eon, only ended when Savin suddenly yelped and toppled backwards. As awful as she felt in that moment, Katerina couldn’t ignore the spark of dark enjoyment that seeing the mastermind behind her torment briefly fall on her ass like a cut-rate jongleur ignited in her heart.

Adam was quick to break away from his own discussion to rush to her aid; Paris barely noticed.

“Are you alright, my lady?” Adam asked, offering his hand. She refused it, using her control of the voidblack material that made up her dress to lift herself back to her feet.

“Of course I am. But it seems that I have…miscalculated. My constructs will be of no further use to us. At least until this night is through.”

What she means to say is that they were dispersed, violently if I had to guess. Summoning multiple coherent forms, controlling them for an extended period, that’s taxing for even a Magister. I know I killed one before I was captured. If there are others out there who have been—

Her heart skipped a beat. The only thing that can flat-out kill a magical construct is a magical weapon. And she knew of only three within the grounds of the Kralgrav. One was the blade in Paris’ hands. The other two…

“Lenna or Riven,” she whispered, afraid that merely saying the names would pop her hope like a bubble. It was too much to ask for one woman, no matter how brave she was. But bound, rendered helpless, and about to have her magic stripped away from her for life, she held onto that hope like it was flotsam in a writhing sea.

“That’s alright,” Adam told her, “they were not necessary for the rest of the plan.”

Savin’s eyes hadn’t left the ancient wooden door leading out from the Greathall, however. “Before I was interrupted, it was clear that those loyal to your sisters have marshalled their strength. They have dispatched the majority of the guards loyal to us and are marching on the Hall.”

“It’s fine. They’ll never make it. Paris?”

The tallest of their siblings jogged over to Adam’s side. He seemed eager for action, or at least, to get out of the line of Katerina’s withering glare.

“Yes, brother?”

Adam’s delivery was that of carefully prepared remarks rushed through on a harsh deadline. “Take the Sword and show the family colours with the Knights Resplendent. I’ve told them of our sister’s betrayal, and they’ve stationed forty of their finest knights in the Hall of Headmen along with several Forde men loyal to us. See to their honourable conduct, and make sure that nobody interrupts us here.”

“Forty? I saw almost a hundred on the way in.”

This time the answer was delivered with even less aplomb. “I have the…less stalwart of my companions guarding the entrance to the Kralgrav from the outside, and others on wild hare chases hunting down Katerina and Vladimir’s ‘foreign conspirators’. A few trusted hands are searching for any witnesses that might give…alternative stories as to what transpired here tonight. There appear to have been more paths out of this tomb than I was led to believe. Mir’s penchant for subterfuge again. If anyone has already escaped, they must be apprehended if our plan for a seamless transition is to succeed. Rest assured, forty will be more than enough for the rabble that might still be against us.”

Paris’ pursed his lips. “These Knights of yours…they’ll fight for us if it comes to that, correct?”

“Of course,” Adam said, clasping a hand on the taller man’s shoulder, “We stand as bulwark the machinations of my sorceress sister, after all. But they’d be bolstered by a male Forde of the blood representing the rightful rulers of this Kingdom. I’d go myself, but…” His eyes briefly flicked to Savin. “I trust you to handle this.”

Paris nodded agreement, then pointed at the pair of guards with their eyes on Katerina. “You and you, come with me. My sister isn’t going to be dangerous to anyone in a few moments, and we’ll need all the help we can get.”

Adam’s face was a granite slate, but she could tell he was fuming at the breach in the presumed chain of command. Nevertheless, he nodded, and the pair of traitors marched off to join Paris. When they left, Adam threw the locking bolt on the old door, then did his best to look composed.

So there are cracks after all, Katerina thought. Her situation might not have improved, but the game had not concluded. Even still, the vile concoction continued its march through Magnus’ apparatus. Defeat and permanent removal of her power may not be inevitable, but it was still the most likely outcome.

But maybe…

Maybe…

Chapter 7

The Hall of Headmen’s great chamber was no longer the empty, mournful display of kings long past. It was populated, almost entirely, with members of the Knights Resplendent. Adorned in the colours of their houses and wielding shields embossed with the coat of arms of lines ancient and venerated. Among their number stood several of the remaining traitorous guards. Perhaps the last of them, perhaps not.

The Knights wasted no time when they heard the sound of marching boots on stone. They formed a shield wall, presenting dozens of heaters decorated in the family coats of arms toward the west side of the hall. The guards formed a pair of loose cadres on either flank. Lenna doubted this band of Witchseekers had fought a real peer force in generations. Much easier work cleaving barbarians and ensorcelled peasants; easy pickings for a disciplined rank of sword and shield. Even still: common military doctrine had it that a man in plate armour was worth three, all things being equal. 

Lenna’s job was to make things unequal.

Her allies filed into a loose rank behind her. Men and women of the Kralgrav, their hearts bolstered, ready to put paid to the notion that they were unimportant factors in the intrigues of would-be Kings. Unlike their opponents, the weapons they wielded were not uniform. But that might be the one edge that they had.

Turai strode through the loose formation. Lenna joined her on her left, Riven to her right. In her hands the bow of petrified wood. Once she’d seen it, she’d told them it had been a wedding gift from one of her siblings. She’d no need of it at the time, so she let her wife hold onto it in his curious little collection. When asked what it could do, she’d smiled.

“Often the music of death is a cacophonous clash of steel and hooves. I offer an alternative: a Final Whisper.”

A plumed helm bobbed up from the pack of massed muscles and steel, and after a not insubstantial grumbling, the row of shields parted down the middle. Standing in the red, black, and silver of House Forde, the Sword of Forde slung over one shoulder, it was not hard for Lenna to guess which one this was.

“Princess Turai!” Paris declared, voice tinny through the visor he spoke through. “I am heartened to see that you are alive and unharmed. There has been sorcery most foul on this night, and I request that you and your soldiers return to quarters and wait for this matter to be resolved.”

Turai was much more direct in her counter offer. “Bond-Brother, I have no desire to kill you, but the Magister who tugs at your strings must die. Either help us or get out of the way.”

Murmured voices from within the ranks of the Knights Resplendent, but Paris’ expression didn’t change. He was wearing a helmet after all. “I’m afraid you have it confused, and I don’t blame you for being deceived into abetting an attempted regicide. Nor do I seek vengeance on you for the sorceries of your wife, Dame Lenna. Once the nefarious powers my sister has manifested are dealt with, you and her will be allowed to live in comfort in the Winter Court, or go to any place else to live out the rest of your days. There needn’t be further bloodshed.”

Lenna’s eyes slid across the line of shields until she found what she was looking for. Among the rainbow of colours and heraldic animals stood a familiar face. A face she’d burned into memory by now.

“Knight Marten?” Lenna said, pointing her amethyst sword like a scribe’s stylus. “I’m glad to see you’re not dead. I’m going to change that momentarily once I get past the rest of these gormless princelings.”

Laughter muffled by a dozen helms sounding like some metallic musical instrument. Some turned incredulous looks to their fellows. Lenna’s lips were a flat line. She brought her rose quartz sword to a salute in the old style, crystal blade angled to cut the room in two. Behind her, the guards readied their own weapons. A keen eye among the Knights Resplendent might notice they were not ordinary arms. They’d emptied the contents of Miria’s impossible armoury, all brought to bear by the Kingdom’s loyal sons and daughters. Queer swords, deadly axes, maces beyond description, even a polearm or two. Joining them, Riven slid the Thornblade from its sheath, while Turai pulled back on the string of Final Whisper, prompting the magical weapon to manifest an arrow of…something? Fog? Solidified air? Some substance or another. Lenna shrugged. Whatever it was, it likely wouldn’t be her problem to figure out.

“You appear to vastly overestimate your odds, dear sisters-in-law! There are nearly fifty of the finest Knights this land has ever seen. What hope do you have?”

Not one for poetry on the whole, some words she’d spoken a while back came to her. And unlike the speech in the banquet hall, this time Lenna didn’t have to fake the enthusiasm in her voice.

“I told Princess Katerina that I would cut down the night to keep her safe. I intended to keep that promise. Either I kill every last bastard one of you in my way or I light this fucking place to the ground and make this mountain my funeral pyre. One way or another, there will be a dawn.”

“Knights Resplendent!" Paris said.

“AYE!” they chorused. An even more intimidatingly loud sound in the echoing, enclosed space.

“Kill these Witch-lovers.”

Lenna didn’t wait for any signal before she started charging. It might as well have just been her rushing forward, eyes fixed beyond the wall of shields and swords. Finally! A tangible foe! She was half-way to reenacting any number of memorialized yet painfully doomed cavalry charges before she remembered the weight in her other hand. She brought the Praetorian Shield into a bracing position against her shoulder and aimed for the nearest Knight in the opposing wall.

She had no idea what to expect. Maybe some extra energy to her steps, perhaps a multiplicative effect to her momentum. But when her shield connected with the Knight on the opposite line, it was with a satisfying crack akin to summer lightning, and a visible shockwave tore through the air. Bodies of fully armoured men flew through the air in an arc away from her charge. Those behind were either knocked to the ground by their allies-turned-shrapnel or were frozen in shock. In moments they would snap back to reality and close ranks. Lenna didn’t give them a chance.

“FOR THE CROWN! FOR THE SWORD!” she bellowed the old Forde battlecry with as much verve as she could offer, then let her weapon do the rest of the talking. When the enchantment had been merely a pommel, it was merely a longsword of fine castle forging that, very slowly, turned you into a woman. Now that her sword was composed entirely of that same enchanted crystal, Katerina’s hands had not been idle. Its edge parted mail, and its tip could pierce plate steel with enough force. And her time as Lenna had been spent, above all, making sure she could bring the exact amount of force necessary to strike against her wife’s enemies.

The first man who met her blade didn’t have a chance. Still startled by the impact of her shield, she knocked him senseless with a slam of her pommel, then levered her body to bury her sword in the muscles of his upper arm. He fell screaming, body dislodging her sword as it fell. The next was almost as easy. After that, though, the Knights had their wits about them again.

“Just kill her! She’s just one woman!” one of them cried, like it was somehow unfair that she was doing this well. She bodied him with a short charge that nevertheless sent him sprawling. Arms. Legs. Torsos. Her sword never stilled. She’d tried to avoid fatal blows, but Lenna fought to win.

And she was not alone. A moment’s consideration as she turned to carve a man twice her age to pieces saw the guards of the Kralgrav fall on the Knights Resplendent with the feral enthusiasm of a proper barbarian host. Their weapons carved through steel, or hammered the flesh beneath, or did all manner of unspeakable things that Lenna simply couldn’t see. A moment to catch a sword swing saw one of Turai’s arrows dodge around the back of a helm to slide through the eyeslit of another. Another caught the vulnerable space between arm and chest when a Knight raised his blade to strike, something only possible if the arrow changed the direction of its flight at a right angle.

Propriety be damned, Lenna thought, if I survive this, I’m kissing Turai square on the lips.

But in time, the numbers and combat skill, not to mention superior armour, of the Knights began to tell. One by one the loyal guards fell, magic weapons pried from their grasp or severed from their arm entirely. And while Lenna prided herself as being more than a match for any man alive, the overwhelming numbers she found herself facing extracted a toll.

A sword cut across her bicep. A black eye from a pommel strike. A sharp impact made her bite into her lower lip, and her mouth filled with the taste of metal. Bruises blossomed across her body like it was a palette for a painter who specialized in sunsets. A jewelled misericorde that looked more expensive than half the magical arms in the room ended up buried in the meat of her thigh before she could send its owner a receipt, care of her blade. She howled as she yanked it free. The long, thin dagger meant for piercing armour to finish off a foe left a clean wound, but a wound nonetheless.

Perhaps there were limits to what a magic shield and a lot of pent up aggression could do?

Barely a second after she’d had the thought of her own limitations when she was forced to throw her whole arm out to catch two swords that plunged in from her left side. They clattered off the shield, and with a great heave with her whole body, she battered them backward. They retreated, but the act left her wide open. Lenna just caught the glint of a third blade seeking her heart before it was too late. She managed a parry with a fraction of a second to spare, but the sword point slashed across her stomach, only missing her internal organs by fractions of an inch.

“Not good enough, Lennox,” Knight Marten told her, yanking his sword free of her flesh. “How’d you ever make Houseguard? Housemaid, I get. But Guard?” He must have been waiting for an opportunity to use that line almost as long as he’d been waiting for a chance to steal another man’s victory. Waiting for others to do the dirty work that was the sensible option, but it wasn’t very chivalrous. Neither was calling her by her old name. It didn’t bother her any more than receiving a letter sent to a previous tenant might. But she could taste his ire. His loathing. Marten hated her almost as much as he disgusted her.

There was no way in all of Argan she would let this faithless dog kill her. She’d die at her own hands first.

Lenna was already moving before he could follow up his strike, shoving him back with her shoulder. He didn’t budge much, but it gave her enough room to slide around him and find some open space before he or his two companions could land another blow. A graceful pivot, like Crys had taught her on the dance floor, all the easier to do without armour slowing her down. She blocked the next two strikes with her shield and sword hilt respectively.

“How does a Houseguard turn traitor?” she asked, quickly checking over her shoulder before backing up some more. “Did you have any honour at all? Do oaths part for you as easily as your mother’s thighs?”

Thankfully the melee was largely confined to one side of the Hall. Around them, dour kings and lords of centuries past stared with pitiless expressions as another struggle for kingdom played out before them. Like a court theatre troupe come to play the classics for a familiar yet loyal audience.

Hero. Villain. Loyal. Traitor. Knight. Dastard.

The two Knights Resplendent who had nearly had her number surged up to join Marten. Before they could close the distance, one yelped as a blade like a living thorn appeared through his chestplate like the metal wasn’t even there. The other swung for a grey blur at his side, but caught nothing but the wind as Riven’s little sewing needle slid in and out of him as well, silently and methodically plying one of her many trades. Marten didn’t notice his backup was dying behind him. Instead, he swaggered forward with all the bravado of his chosen King’s champion.

“As if you would know what honour meant. I’ve never known a woman to be a decent Knight. Sure, you’re not a real woman, but still, this pathetic farce had to end eventually. Happy to break the cold, hard truth to you, ‘Dame.’ Men with coin and great, big swords run this world. The rest just serve.”

He launched into a textbook assault, his sword seeking her perceived weaknesses. But as he struggled and pivoted, swung left and slashed right, he found nothing. What his blade discovered was an infinite bulwark of metal and muscle who has been training almost all her life to best men better than him and now, this same bastion yearned for a chance to shut his fucking mouth.

He wound up his arm to break her guard with a pummelling blow. He was strong. He might have been able to do it. They’d never find out. She smashed her shield forward with all her might, the brief burst of momentum activating the magical effect enough to shatter his ribs and sternum. He keeled over, just in time to see a pink, feminizing sword slam into his shattered chest.

“Big enough?” she asked him, then let his mute form slide off her blade. When he fell, he joined a growing sea of fallen from both sides. Some still writhed in pain, others were still. The Knights that remained were still double what few loyalists were still in the fight. Perhaps as precaution, Paris had pulled a small cadre—the remainder of the traitorous guards it looked like—back to defend the path toward the Greathall. She had to choose: help her fellows, or push forward to save her wife.

Perhaps seeing her indecision, a kindly face appeared to break her stalemate.

“Go!” Crys shouted, pulling the glass axe out of a smoking wound in a dead man, “we’ll catch up when we can!”

“What about protecting Miria and the others?” Lenna screamed the question over the cacophony.

“The Princess gave me a complicated explanation,” the guardswoman said, then shrugged, “but I didn’t catch it. Suffice it to say, this fight is for all the marbles, and none of our lives matter if we can’t stop Adam and Savin. Now go!”

Lenna silently thanked her and headed toward the Greathall. Six men-at-arms stood in his path, standing in three pairs. Towering above them, yet cowering behind them, stood Paris’s lumbering form. The big trueborn bastard nursed a new cut to his rugged features. Perhaps it had been her own blade. Perhaps not. Retreating with all the martial grace of a child having touched a hot stove, he’d apparently been watching from a safe distance as she’d brought down a whole generation of secondborn Princes. Now it was his turn.

But before she could thrash him silly, she’d need to get through half a dozen of his traitorous minions, all adorned with the golden handkerchief tied to their arms. She’d felled plenty of their like by now, and Knights beside. But each combat had taken a toll. Marten’s strike had nearly disembowelled her, and the leg with a hole in it was already stiffening. After her many ordeals tonight, she needed stitches, a compress, and a good eight hours of sleep.

Thankfully, she had something better.

Between great, heaving breaths she fetched the rejuvenation potion. Uncorking the stopper, she only paid a moment’s heed to Miria’s fear that it might undo her transformation.

No matter what, she told herself, I’m still Lenna fucking Stone.

The cool fluid slid down her throat, coating her whole esophagus in an unfamiliar, yet nevertheless refreshing, chill. Like a sea breeze on a hot summer’s day. The pain fled from the spreading sensation, chased away until there was naught but a tingling sensation. Then the wounds themselves began to close, a healing frenzy worthy of some invincible creature of myth. Even the lingering headache from the sparring session with Adam vanished in a sizzling fizzle all around the back of her head.

She felt good. Way too good.

As she swallowed the last gulp, one of the guards got a brilliant idea and went in to ruin her delightful narcotic stupor. She snapped her whole torso back out of the arc of the blade, then did it twice more for good measure. Her body moving like she’d just warmed up, Lenna was practically giddy with the chance to get to work. As he prepared a fourth, she kicked him in the chest hard enough to knock the wind out of him. He crumpled, though not fast enough to miss the knee of her opposite leg rising up to greet his face. His head connected with her patella, then even harder with the stone wall behind him.

The other guards stared at her like she’d just killed a sacred animal in front of them. Maybe it was the ease with which she dispatched him, or the unnerving glee that found its way to her face. If anything, toppling a man so easily had made her sinister smile wider.

Another,” she told them, beckoning the nearest man forward. They took a step back. Then another. One actually backed into Paris, who pushed him forward.

“Coward! Defend your Prince!” he invoked. Bravery impugned, the guard audibly swallowed, and rushed for Lenna with sword held high.

Smash. Stab. Pull.

What was left of his neck anointed her in a sickening ritual bath as his heart pumped its last. As their numbers dropped to four, Lenna looked up at Paris, her eyes peering from a crimson mask like two moonlit windows on the inside of an abattoir. She stalked forward, stepping over dead men and shattered egos. Gathering enough that had slid into her mouth to spit it on the floor, she barred crimson-stained teeth.

“Next.”

Two of the quartet broke and fled to one side, chased by a mix of panicked entreaties and bitter insults from Paris as their weapons clattered to the ground. Two left. They flanked the Prince on either side looking far more resolute than the others had been. Paris still held that enormous sword, but he handled it with something less like an executioner’s surety and more as if it was a giant elongated shield. Like he was prepared to parry with a weapon almost as tall as she was. With his strength and size, maybe he could pull it off.

“Dame Lenna, I beseech you,” Paris called, stepping closer in tandem with the others. “You may not be of royal blood, but you are my sister by marriage and were once a loyal Knight of the realm! End this senseless violence!” 

Her lips curled. “I don’t take loyalty lessons from a man currently engaged in a coup.” 

A beat. Two. Lenna was practically hopping up and down to get this done. But she figured she’d let them take the first strike. Who knows? They might get lucky, and she wanted to see how long this effect lasted.

Right came at her with some skill. Experience in the eyes beneath the pot helm, it seemed. They exchanged martial pleasantries: stab, cut, thrust. His shield met her crystal sword. It cracked, but stayed firm. Ironwood, perhaps. No mere guard then. It took a moment to put the thoughts together: if Marten had been Vladimir’s Houseguard…

Right, likely as not one of the brothers’ Houseguard Knights, shoved her back with his shield while swinging his blade down in one singular, fluid motion. The pair of strikes caused her to stumble, breaking the illusory sensation of invulnerability that the potion had given her. As she faltered, Left surged forward to take advantage. Were they both Houseguards? Her sword snapped out to deflect it too late. His blade bit her skin, and she howled. Lenna pulled a hand back from against her ribs. Trembling fingers touched wet flesh and more pain. The potion’s last dregs stopped the bleeding, but nothing more. Good enough.

The artificial ecstasy was gone, her head clearing with the sharp ring of pain in her side. She could think clearly again, and not a moment too soon. The pair was coordinated in a way the others weren’t, aside from the drilled simplicity of the Knight’s shield wall. Maybe they’d fought together before. But while Right was clearly a veteran, Left got cocksure. He swung for a decapitation, shield cantilevering the momentum of the blow like the weight of a trebuchet. She ducked and thrust forward, the crystal of her blade parting plate, muscle, and bone.

“No!” Right howled. The noise wasn’t the one for a comrade in arms. She spun to put Left between her and his ire. For a gleaming instant, the battle between them ceased.

“Brother?” she asked.

“Son,” Right admitted, eyes like bare dinner plates and focused on the man she held hostage. She shoved Left forward, knocking both into a pile on the ground. Right scrambled to free his sword arm, but Lenna leapt upon him like the reaping wind. Her magical blade sunk into the stone a finger’s breadth from his neck. The Knight…the Father…froze at once.

“His wound is bad,” she told him, “but not fatal if he’s seen to soon. Grant me your parole and you can still save him.”

“I…I grant it,” he told her, voice equal parts grateful and astonished. Satisfied he wouldn’t spring up and kill her once she turned her back, Lenna leapt back to her feet.

Paris mistook the moment of grace as a sign of weakness. He bellowed a war cry straight from the grand arena, blade coming out in a horizontal swing to cleave her apart. To her, it looked like it was in slow motion. She dropped her shield to the ground; blocking the sword was out of the question. She’d never overpower him, but she didn’t need to.

As the gargantuan weapon scythed the air, Lenna rolled under it like some great, ponderous death trap. Then, as he brought the arc back around, shot her boot out like a missile. It slammed into his knee as the Sword of Forde’s sheer heft carried him into a helpless overextension. He made another noise, this time of pain, as she must have popped something important. 

“Pit take you!” he swore, putting his weight on the sword as if it were a cane. He was strong, and that sword moved through the air like it was made of papier-mâché, but that didn’t mean shit if he couldn’t walk. More heavy swings, each easier to dodge as his stamina and steadiness burned through in equal measure.

Lenna couldn’t stop herself from sneering. “I can’t believe I used to be like you. Too slow. Too reliant on brute force. All that muscle, all that training, and I’d have had a harder time handling a drunk wielding a sack full of fruit.” Another boot, this time to his hip at just the right moment, and he toppled. The family’s heirloom blade went flying from suddenly limp fingers. It clattered to the ground, ending his struggle with an anticlimax. He knelt on his one good knee, and it was all she could do to keep from drinking in his humiliation like the finest wine.

“Do it then,” he demanded through barred teeth. “Traitorous cunt.”

“You think I don’t want to?” she asked, then popped her fist into his great mitten of a face. He toppled with a groan, though the sound was more of relief than agony. “But if I killed my wife’s brother, I’d never hear the end of it. And I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

Lenna turned around, seeing the battle in the Hall of Headmen still in progress. Her friends were still in danger. Riven. Crys…But her oath, and her heart, pulled her in the opposite direction. She had to save Katerina. She picked up her shield, cleaned the stains from her sword with Paris’ crimson cloak, and started running.

Hold on, Kat.

Hold on just a little longer.

***

“Not long left,” Adam assured Katerina as he watched Magnus work out whatever last details he had to arrange to complete the concoction. At the moment, he was fretting with the very end of the synthetic pathway. A beaker with a stopcock valve at the bottom, attached to a long length of flexible, almost organic tubing. The tubule was partially translucent and coiled, attached at one end to the stopcock and the other terminating in what looked like a sewing needle mingled with the hollow interior of a bird’s feather. It didn’t take much of her boundless imagination to understand the purpose of the quill sharpened end of the quill. The poison would be made to enter her blood. No risk of her spitting it out, no risk of choking. Just a pinprick to her arm or leg and then…nothing.

With the heavy wooden door closed and the rest of the occupants of the room either preoccupied with the coup or tormenting her, there was no way for Katerina to influence any events that may or may not be happening outside the Greathall. Whether her wife was dead or alive, whether the Kingdom had already fallen, all of that was out of her hands. All there was to do was stare as the poison crawled towards her, and scheme.

She much preferred the latter option.

“I’m surprised you have the free time to loom over me as I’m stripped of my powers,” she said with a tone as dry as the Sere. “Don’t you have some trechery to complete? Or are you letting Savin do the thinking for you as well as the dirty work?”

Adam seemed at least partially willing to engage with her. Perhaps it was his impending victory that made him generous. Or maybe he was just bored. He pulled up one of the great, uncomfortable chairs from the central table and sat opposite her while Magnus worked.

“You’ll need to do better than that, sweet sister.”

Kat shrugged. “Are you sleeping with her?”

A twinge, just at the very corner of his eyes. A light crinkling of premature crow’s feet, just like Father used to when he—

Oh. Oh Gods, why did I ask that? Why did I even ask a question I didn’t want to know the answer to?! Oh, where is Vikka to draw me a scalding hot bath…

But that did explain what Savin got out of it. But it also might explain why this is just her. The Magisters are individually powerful but it’s take the kingdoms of Argan to bring down Thrast at its full power. She’s not here with their backing at all, is she? This is a solo play for power, using Adam’s naivete and desperation to get a role as Queen or Grand Adviser or somesuch. Then puppet him, just like the old rulers of Thrast…

Oh Adam…Adam what have you done?

Rather than admit a blow had been struck, Adam quickly changed the topic. “Have you given any thought to what you’ll do after tonight? My offer of comfortable exile still stands, of course. But there might be room for you in my court after my ascension. You’re one of the smartest women I know, Kat. And I do love you, even if you may hate me forever for this.”

Katerina snorted. “That you’d even offer me that tells me you’re not prepared to be King. I would be a constant and perpetual threat to your power. The moment you’d display a mote of weakness, I would be in a position to strike. I would kill you for what you’re going to do to me, Adam. You must understand that, surely?.”

For a moment, the man at the heart of this entire coup d’etat actually looked wounded. “You would?”

“Adam. You’ve made a deal with my former lover to mutilate me for your own personal gain. I will die with a curse for your very soul on my lips.”

Magnus spoke up, his hand conspicuously holding the needle. “It’s…you won’t feel any pain, if that’s what you’re concerned about. Savin told me that this procedure—”

“Yes, yes, you told me what she said. Do you really believe that? She’s at the heart of all these lies to further her own goals. She lied to me, bent me into her playmate. She used Riven, kept her locked in a body she loathed to further her own uses. And now she’s manipulating your naivete,” she looked at Adam, “and your naked ambition. In the end, only one of you will be on the throne, and their name won’t be Forde.”

A scathing rebuttal was sure in coming, but a hammering fist at the Greathall’s door jolted them all out of the conversation. Katerina’s heart leapt when she heard it, then sagged in her restraints when the opened portal revealed nothing but the face of one of Adam’s traitorous guards.

“Your Highness, sir,” he began between gulps of air, “the Knights Resplendent are engaging those backing the pretenders. They’re outnumbered, but they’re fighting like wild animals! It must be another of your sisters foul magic giving them strength.”

Adam quickly returned to his character as the resolute monarch, clapping the man on his shoulder. “Thank you for telling me. Send word to the reserve standing watch outside the entrance to the Kralgrav. Pull all our forces back to the Hall of Headmen and dig in. The Greathall must be protected at all cost!”

The man nodded and took off, shutting the door behind him. Adam threw the heavy deadbolt across, the mask of reserve and confidence flagging as soon as there were no commoners in eyesight.

“This is not going how we planned it,” Adam said toward Savin, who was lost in concentration as she performed some strange spell that saw the shadows under her command flow from one palm to the other. “You said it’d be over in a matter of moments. That there’d be nobody foolish enough to stand up for a pair of women!”

When she replied, she didn’t bother to look up at him. “Ah, just women, are they?”

Adam let out a breath and recalibrated his tone. “My…apologies. What I meant to say—”

“You said what you meant to say. You thought your claim would be secured by the genitals that so gracefully dangle twixt your legs. Our world has a sense of humour, does it not? That your sex’s strength and mine’s affinity for magic would leave us equally powerless in the times when we most need its surety?”

“I’ve no time for games, witch. Conjure another of your shadows and chase them off!”

Savin stared at the claimant to the throne of the Kingdom of the Frontiers like he’d just spit up all over himself. “You want me to hurl a construct into the middle of a fight between Witchseekers and your sister’s loyalists, at least one of whom is my old protege, and have them DEFEND the WITCHSEEKERS?” The spell sputtered in her hands as she lost the concentration it required. “You absolute, motley-clad, churlish, bell-spangled fool. Using them as your muscle in this scheme was your idea, and I was against it from the moment the ridiculous thought leapt from your head. If they suspect for one fraction of a second that a Magister of Thrast is helping you, they will kill you for consorting with me and peel me apart like bakery-fresh bread!”

But Adam wasn’t chastened. If anything, the insults made him dig in his heels deeper. Something Kat had seen plenty of times when men were challenged by women they couldn’t silence by force.

“I know this doesn’t matter to you, but there are good men dying out there. My men, both loyal to the Kingdom and to my own honour as a Knight. The quicker we end this, the less blood we need to shed.”

“You cannot play this particular game without getting your hands dirty,” she told him simply and without ire. “If you’ve yet to figure that out by now, you’d best be quick about it. Even the most gleaming throne sits upon a sea of bones. It’s a matter of lordly prerogative to decide if you wish to be cruel or kind with the power. Spare the lash or strike with it, but its cost is the same.”

Adam turned to walk away from her, instead finding the glowering, bound form of his own sister. Even behind the trained, masculine affectations of stoicism, the corners of his mouth and furrowing brow told Katerina everything she needed to know. He genuinely, truly, didn’t think it would come to this.

Fool. Even more than Paris. At least he came by it honestly. Katerina knew a crack she could wedge open when she saw one.

“She’s right, you know. But as they say: you cannot make a cake without breaking a few eggs. How many do you think will die who were alive this morning, hmm? How many of your ‘good men’ will your new throne rest atop?”

He ran a hand through his hair as he struggled to conjure a deflection, pulling away tangled, silver strands in the process. Staring at them, he laughed weakly.

“Father used to complain that stress would drive him bald eventually. I suppose…I was the good son for Father. I was strong, I was studious, I listened, I obeyed. I turned myself into the person who the Kingdom could trust. Strong. Resolute. But not without compassion! And I was so close to achieving that without anyone having to die. Had you just let me take the victory in the Mounting, I would have brought us together. We would have been unstoppable! Just like we were when Father was alive.”

Katerina inhaled as her spinning mind thought of the right words to make him break. It wasn’t hard, but saying them aloud would be.

“If you would have said that at the Mounting, I would have voted for you.”

He stopped pacing. “What?”

The next words came out as slowly and measured as drops of poison from an assassin’s phial. “I recognise my solution wasn’t the most realistic, but I could never be under anyone’s direct authority. You know me, Adam. I cannot be a Princess in the way that Father might have wanted for me. Married to some suitor as a bargaining chip? But if you had said, directly and without artifice, that you wanted my help to build a better Kingdom with you as its head, I would have voted for you to be King. And this whole night would have been nothing but a bad dream.”

It didn’t matter if it was true or not. Katerina couldn’t decide if it was herself. The implication alone was enough. She stared, unflinching, as the man who thought himself King had the full measure of what he had done slice past his defences. He didn’t sniffle or hiccup, but the tears that spilled down his cheeks were obvious. It hurt her to do that to him. She was his sister, after all. But this had to end, one way or another.

“Damn you, Katerina,” he told her, voice cold and hollow. “If only you’d…if only I’d…” He sat back down in the chair, sagging forward like an abandoned doll. His confidence of mere hours ago was nowhere to be seen, leaving him mired in self-doubt and muttered recrimination.

Light, this was almost too easy.

“She’s baiting you, imbecile,” Savin’s voice cut through Adam’s half-formed response, “and yet you snap at every tug of the line! Do you have any self-control? Any self-awareness? Or are you just a barking animal like the rest of your empty-headed sex?”

The insults’ cadence spoke of someone who had given the same warnings again and again, only for it to fall on deaf ears. Katerina wondered how much convincing it had taken for Adam to go through with this coup, and how much of it was just preparing him to be the villain.

“I know,” he shot back, but the fire had left his voice as much as it had fled his heart. Instead of trying to convince either woman of his sincerity, he leapt back up to pace once more, wearing a path with his sabatons into a rug likely a century older than all of them combined.

“You picked the right horse on this one,” Katerina said, turning her sights on Savin. “Really, well done. Bet the Magisters’ will be pleased with an unstable boy on a fraying leash running their operation.”

“I’ve no interest in your approval,” Savin said with a dismissive gesture, “I’ve seen how you run your affairs.” Her former lover would not be so easily played with. In the aftermath of their relationship, they said a lot of vile things to one another. Things that were hard to top or take back. But still, there had to be an angle into which she could jam a verbal prybar. There always was.

Before she could find it, Magnus approached with the words she’d been dreading.

“It’s…it’s almost finished,” he said, voice shaking, “I’m going to insert the needle now. Please, Katerina, don’t move.”

Kat wanted to do more than move. She wanted to shove him away. She wanted to take Lenna’s sword and smash this entire apparatus to pieces. But most of all, she wanted to say a thousand terrible things to hurt Magnus deep to his core. But she didn’t. Despite it all, despite everything he’d done, everything he was about to do, he was still her baby brother. So she told him the truth.

“I’m sorry that I forced you to choose between us. I was desperate, and scared, and I thought I had a chance to gain my freedom in perpetuity with your help.”

He offered a weak smile, then brushed a clear fluid onto her upper arm. “A topical analgesic, and purification reagent. This should reduce the chance of a negative reaction to the formula.”

She couldn’t quite manage to thank him for making her poisoning a more pleasant experience. If anything, the care he put into his actions made the whole experience more perverse. But at least he didn’t hate her. She couldn’t live with herself if he’d come to hate her.

“Care to gloat one last time?” she asked Savin, ignoring the pinch in her flesh as the needle slid in. “You’re about to see me powerless. Surely a sight worth all this toil and torment.”

The Magister swanned over, her impossibly black dress swirling around her body slightly out of time with her motion. “Don’t think you can guilt me like you attempted with your brothers. We both know that won’t work.”

Katerina nodded. “Of course. You’re a heartless wretch, a true exemplar for what men believe all casters to be. I’ve no more chance to stir your soul than you do besting Lenna in an arm-wrestling contest.”

“I’ve never seen why you enjoy that one more than the others,” Savin admitted, once again ignoring the insult in lieu of something else to bite into. “We broke several boys under our heel together, didn’t we? You threw all of them away except for this one. Why?”

Katerina blinked. It seemed impossible, but Savin’s voice, the things she said, they were radiating something she hadn’t considered her former lover could ever emit. Not really. Maybe in jest but…

“Savin,” she began, barely able to keep a straight face, “are you jealous that I chose Lenna over you?”

The Magister laughed a little too hard, rolled her eyes a little too much, turned around and threw up her hands a little too quick.

“You must be fucking joking. Kat, you weren’t THAT good.”

But Katerina smelled blood in the water. “You are, aren’t you? You can have any woman, or man,” she shot a glance at Adam and suppressed a shiver, “you want. But you wanted a partner. Someone who would pin the flies down while you pick off their wings. You thought you had that until we fell out, and now you’re spiralling. Did…did you do this whole charade out of petty revenge? Is this the Magister version of tugging on my pigtails?” Katerina forced a laugh, but the more she thought about it, the less she had to force herself. This whole absurd night was the result of a jealous lover? It’d be too absurd if it wasn’t so painfully, obviously true!

“Absolutely not!” Savin snarled, then pushed Magnus hard out of the way. “You’re taking too long, damnit. This last step doesn’t need to reach the listed temperature, just add the yttrian powder and agitate it.”

Savin worked the apparatus to perform some unclear goal, but Katerina was still laughing. That was clearly getting to her more than any well-struck insult she could devise. Her face contorting, Savin leapt upon her captive and unsheathed the tattoo dagger from her flesh. It slid into her dominant hand, and she pressed it to Katerina’s chin. It stopped her laughter, but the mirth still clung to her eyes.

“Your plan is falling apart, sweetie,” Katerina purred, like she was sharing a lover’s secret. “Your allies are weak-willed children, nobody will accept your ridiculous story, and I’d bet my magic that you’re about to see a whole world of pain come marching into this room.” She didn’t even acknowledge the knife at her throat, turning her attention instead toward the door. Ostensibly to end the conversation, but her captor took a whole different meaning from the gesture.

Savin yanked her gleaming silver hair back, eyes wild, conjured dagger now pressed a twitch away from opening up the Princess’ bare throat. “She’s not coming! Your precious little dress-up doll is either dead or in chains. And even if she wasn’t, there’s an army standing between you and her.”

Katerina’s playful tone didn’t drop a mote. “Just one?”

And that is when the door to the Greathall exploded.

Through a shockwave of splinters and shattered metal hinges emerged Dame Lenna Stone. Unfettered and unbroken, Katerina’s knight in blood-drenched armour skidded to a halt, magic sword and shield in her hands and unholy fury in her eyes.

The Princess couldn’t help the grin that split her face. Despite it all. Despite dire calamity, despite the blade pressed to her neck, she knew everything was going to be alright.