The Golden Lions, Ambra was finding, were not standing still for the discipline she’d planned. They wouldn’t even listen to her lecture.

Stepping up in front of Castan, she glowered up at him. Always pick the biggest of the group, she reminded herself, if you want to stamp your authority over them. Ambra was a tall woman, but Castan dwarfed most folks easily, one of those rare few giants who still moved well enough to succeed in a company of skirmishers. “Are you going to measure up, or am I going to have to make you?” she demanded.

Castan looked down at her for a moment, blinking slowly. “Are you growing out your hair?” he asked.

“Answer my question,” she growled in return. Her hair did seem to be growing more quickly than usual lately, but she was ignoring that on the grounds she had much more important things to deal with.

“I measure up already,” he said.

“I’m not so sure about that.” She considered this to be enough warning for him and threw her first punch. Castan dodged most of it, but only barely - still, he did better than she’d expected and better than she’d been banking on. His own counterpunch was fine, she stepped inside his reach and kicked his knee out from under him, tumbling him to the ground, but the reaction from the troop wasn’t what she’d hoped for.

She fell back a pace while Castan recovered his breath on hands and knees and she looked around her.

Only about half of the Lions were even watching what was happening. Rucen, who really should have been worrying about her place after being felled by the Black Spear commander just the previous day, was examining the bruise under her eye in a hand-mirror and applying makeup rather than watch. Healer Uta, the holy man, was trimming his fingernails with a knife.

Ambra looked around the Lions as a whole, staring at them. She had chosen her warriors for their aggression, their talent, and their bravery. Beauty had not been a consideration, and usually the Lions looked a motley group to say the least.

It had to be the light, therefore, some quality of the way the sun shone that day and the angle it was at, which made their hair seem to shine, their skin project an inner glow, their general appearance the kind of thing which drives roaming painters to exclaim excitedly and begin to paint.

Looking at them all Ambra felt the heart go out of her. They were still her people, still her unit. Somehow, though, she couldn’t bring herself to push them, as she had tried and failed to do with Castan. It was as if her instinct for command had deserted her, somehow.

Her heart ached at the realisation, but not nearly so much as it should have. She reached down and clasped Castan’s wrist, hauling him back to his feet, and she smiled. Looking around her troop she said “Alright, people. What I’ve been doing hasn’t been working - I’ll say it so you don’t have to worry about it.

“So we’ll try something different.” She met the eye of fighter after fighter, men and women she knew and trusted. “Rest up today. We’ll start something new tomorrow.” With a nod, she turned and headed back to her tent.

*

Valmyr had spent so much more time in the Golden Lions’ camp than he’d imagined. If he was completely honest with himself, it was a risk, and a risk that wouldn’t even attract him to take if not for the perks. On the other hand, Ambra’s perks had his attention just as closely as he seemed to have hers.

She was different. He knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Any fighter paid attention to the stances of others, and hers had changed, not just in private, with response to him - which could easily happen just through the feelings they were both developing - but even when she was training her men, or when he saw her lead them out onto patrol, she carried herself differently.

Her blade was still in easy reach to draw, the whip slightly further from her grasp. She might, or might not, be less of a combatant from her new stance; having faced her once, he wouldn’t like to speculate.

The previous night he had decided that it was time to test her, and after dinner, while she sat at the open flap of her tent, listening to the musicians in her company play, he had cleared his throat as he lay on the bed, and had waited for her to look up to see why.

“More wine, my sweet,” he said. It carried the weight of an instruction, something he would never have dared give her when they first met, or even on their second meeting.

He watched as her eyes narrowed, recognising the instruction, seeing him asserting himself over her by saying it. He waited for any sign that he’d pressed his luck when he shouldn’t.

She rose from her camp stool, her lips thin, and made her way inside the tent. And as soon as she was deep enough inside that no casual glance from the warriors outside would see it, her thin lips became a smile. Valmyr wasn’t sure she’d even noticed, but she picked up the old silver carafe and stood by the bedroll where he lay, stooping to fill his glass.

The enchanted bodice she wore offered no concealment if she bent over, and Valmyr was abruptly certain that she knew this, and that she would be very careful not to do this in front of her people. He thought of the confident woman, the soldier he’d heard called haughty several times, who he’d met, whose confidence was rooted in putting herself first.

She was, he thought, still confident. So had the root of that confidence somehow changed without disturbing it? If so, had it changed without disturbing her?

He reached up. Her chest was in easy reach from where he lay, and he caressed her curves directly above the brass band that marked out the top of her bodice.

Ambra moaned, her eyes crossing, the dim light in the pearls around her throat growing briefly stronger. After a moment, though, she straightened back up, taking herself out of his reach.

Looking down at him, she said “Leave my tent tonight.”

“Pardon?”

“I can’t keep doing this,” she muttered. “So you go, as soon as the camp is sleeping.” And with that she turned and headed back to her camp stool to listen to the music.

Valmyr drank his wine and listened to his memory of her voice, and thought about how she had smiled as she obeyed. And he thought about how she hadn’t tried to tell him he couldn’t come back, and nor had she kicked him out immediately.

She hadn’t reasserted her authority in view of her troop.

That, Valmyr thought, was rather suggestive.

He wondered if his company of the Black Spear had been staying near the Marnardines, as he’d ordered, and he watched the soft waves of her blonde hair, shoulder length now, dancing in the air as she turned her attention from one musician to another.

*

Ambra had privately decided that Aric would do.

Frustration, both psychological and sexual, had set in the morning after the Valefolk left, as soon as she woke enough to be sure there was no longer anyone else in her tent.

She needed someone to take it out on. After the struggle even to tell him to leave, she needed someone who she could reassert her own authority over so she could restore her own confidence.

She was still aching over his rejection. It had been all too clear to her, in that moment, that he could have done anything he wanted. Could have ordered her to do anything. And if he had tried, she wouldn’t have been able to stop him.

The idea thrilled her. The way it thrilled her horrified her. She was carefully avoiding thinking about that.

To Ambra, the side of herself she had abruptly discovered, the side of herself which enjoyed someone in authority over her, clearly stood in opposition to her real self. She didn’t think they could be reconciled; her only experience with military hierarchy had her mother above her, and as an adult, Ambra had never taken her mother’s authority fully seriously.

Standing at the opening of her tent, she drew in a breath and bellowed “ARIC!”

He came running. She grabbed him by the collar the moment he was within arm’s reach and pulled him through the tent flap, shoving him toward the bed, setting him stumbling. Two of her troop, seeing this happening, raised their voices in something between a cheer and a catcall.

Ambra gave them both a smirk and turned toward her prey in the tent, trying not to think about how false that smirk felt on her lips. “Good news, Aric,” she said. “You’ve impressed me.”

“My lady?”

“You caught my eye,” she told him, unstrapping the burnished bodice and letting it fall. His eyes widened, staring at her body. She made a moue of her lips, posing for a moment, not playing the ingenue but making her intentions clear to the young man.

He struggled up onto one elbow. “Uh - but -“

“But what, Aric?” She was sashaying toward him, her voice a low growl in the back of her throat.

“Weren’t you, you know.” He swallowed. “With the Valeman?”

The low growl became something more aggressive. She lifted one foot, planting it on the bedroom on the other side of him, and shoved him down, her eyes on his. “New rules, Aric. Speak when I want you to.”

He opened his mouth and closed it again, and she grinned. “Good boy.”

His cock was a pretty one and there were signs he’d picked up more experience than she would have expected, but in spite of that, he would have spent before she was satisfied even if she hadn’t been trying to draw it all out, in order to humiliate him.

She should have been excited, even exultant. Instead, the ache of dissatisfaction just stayed with her.

She spoke over Aric’s stumbling attempts at an apology. “Not your fault, lad. Get out for now. Don’t assume you won’t be in here again.” Waving him off, she sat there motionless, doing silent battle in her head with the urge to reach out and find the Valeman again and let him do the things that worked so well.

But to do that, she would have to let him do everything else, too. He was too comfortable telling her what to do. Far too comfortable laying his hands on her when he felt like it, not when she permitted it.

She was too comfortable with it too, and she hated that.

*

“What do you mean, he’s gone?” Myrtresca demanded. Ambra waved a hand dismissively.

“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”

The sorceress sighed. “Meaning you think you made a fool of yourself,” she retorted.

Ambra’s eyes flashed with annoyance. Her jaw set, but wavered again just a few moments later. Myrtresca watched for things like these when she thought she saw enchantments of the mind.

Such enchantments were forbidden in most civilised nations, of course, and had been for centuries. Magelock firearms, phantom artillery, the new experimental cataphract automata the Erithnians were said to be trialling… magic had moved in very different directions since the agreement to the Edicts.

Of course, this didn’t mean nobody developed or used enchantments of the mind. And if what Myrtresca had uncovered was true, this wasn’t the work of anyone who could be prosecuted. It wasn’t even clear to her that the oracle would have known what snow pearls had once been prized for.

There was, she further thought, no real chance at all that this outlander - spy or not - would recognise them and know to take advantage. Myrtresca considered this deeply irritating, not because she was looking for someone to blame, but because it meant all of this, which seemed to be slowly incapacitating one of the best of the Marnardines, and which was certainly wasting her own time, was the result of a chain of unlikely coincidences.

The sorceress didn’t like that.

“You know he’s bewitched you,” she said curtly. “Right?”

Widening eyes underlined that Ambra had not. “What? How?”

“Well, that’s the odd part of all this,” Myrtresca said. “I’m not convinced he knows you are. It’s that necklace of yours…”

She watched Ambra put her hand up to the snow pearls and close it around them protectively, and she sighed inwardly. This would all have been much easier if the enchantment, whatever it was, hadn’t made itself precious to her.

“He had nothing to do with me getting this.”

“Well, that’s true,” Myrtresca conceded. “Nevertheless, you’re under a spell cast by it, and he benefits. We need to get that off you.”

The fear in the warrior woman’s eyes was already curdling into suspicion. “I don’t know…”

Myrtresca sighed. “The necklace will oppose you taking it off, Ambra. But that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do.”

“Wrong or not, it’s not happening. I earned this power.”

“Do you know what it does?”

Again the pause, but the suspicion of the sorceress which this line of questioning had driven was still very visible in her eyes. “No.”

“You can’t know it’s helping you, Ambra. And I’m telling you it’s not.”

“You want it for yourself, don’t you?” Ambra snapped. “My whole troop is coming together now in a way it hadn’t before. We’re closer than ever. Clearly you want that.”

Myrtresca made a mental note to try and examine the Golden Lions and see if they really were effected. In the meantime she raised her hands in defence and surrender. “I won’t insist on it, then.”

“Thank you.”

“But we can’t have this Vale spy running around anywhere he likes.”

A loud snort. “He’s nothing to me.”

"Hm.” Myrtresca was already thinking, considering alternative options, rejecting some, considering others more closely. “Would you like him to be?”

The way the woman’s eyes changed, her attention sharpening, the suspicion buried beneath other things… “What do you mean by that?”

Myrtresca was silent for a few moments. Sometimes, at a time like this, silence yielded more information.

This was not one of those times. “Let us set aside the question of whether you are enchanted,” she said. “It is possible for me to enchant him, on your behalf. Which, depending upon how you break it down, either reduces the threat of his enchantment of you, or gives you free rein with him.”

It also involved the sorceress breaking many laws, but as Ambra would be most involved in prosecuting her, this wasn’t as bad a threat as it appeared.

“How?” Ambra asked. She was eyeing Myrtresca with more than a little concern, but as far as the sorceress was concerned, this was both reasonable and not something she was going to worry about.

“I have a potion,” she said. “Well, technically it’s a philtre, but think of it as a potion.” She smiled. “When he comes back, we either feed it to him and make sure you’re the next person he sees, or you slip it to him in his drink and just sit in his view until it takes effect.”

She’d expected Ambra - cut-throat, focused on results Ambra - to either dismiss it or agree immediately. Instead the warrior pulled a face. “I don’t know…” she said.

Myrtresca nodded. “Well, those are just the things I wanted to make sure you knew,” she said. There was more she’d love to do - breaking the enchantment of the snow pearls topped her list - but she couldn’t risk the resistance it would bring down on her.

She rose. “I shall leave you to your planning.” Ambra had always been headstrong, she reminded herself. Hopefully enough of her would now be fighting the enchantment that the issue could be turned around by the next time Myrtresca brought it up.

“Until we speak again,” Ambra answered as Myrtresca left her tent.

*

Ambra had watched Myrtresca walk out of her tent, her head a whirl with all the questions the woman had raised, and then the tent flap had fallen closed after her, and all of those thoughts had ceased without her noticing.

She reached up and stroked the silver and pearls of her choker. It was warm to the touch, sometimes, and it felt comforting to run her fingers along it. Ambra had noticed herself doing just that from time to time, without really even thinking about it.

She had other things to think about, in any case. Myrtresca hadn’t known it, but her arrival had interrupted Ambra’s plans to experiment with makeup for the first time. She wasn’t the only one among the Lions to have had this thought, and the troop were generally joking among themselves about this new ‘fad’.

At least, she thought idly, they were giving credit to her for the new fashion among the troop for longer hair. Thinking about that, she smiled, preening slightly, and ran her hand through it.

It hadn’t just grown long, but it was clean and untangled; something she’d only achieved before when not in a tent out on patrol. It was, she’d found, intensely satisfying.

She carefully applied the lip paint, watching herself in the mirror, and sat back to inspect it, smiling to herself. Glossy red lips would once have seemed an irrelevant frippery to her, but now they were a source of pride.

She was proud of much more about herself lately. That surely couldn’t be wrong.

And besides, lions should have manes, a thought which brought a contented smile to her ruby lips. The fact she’d once made the inverse joke, about how lionesses didn’t, simply didn’t occur to her.

*

Perhaps inevitably, she felt, the Order of the Black Spear returned a bare handful of days after their last encounter, perhaps three days after she’d banished the Valeman from her bedroll. Ambra was still feeling the ache of his absence, but she wasn’t going to let that interfere with her duty.

She was actually hoping for a return from the Order, despite the poor results from the last time; all her other methods of working out her frustration had failed so far. If she could eke out a win against them, she was very hopeful that would do it.

For the first several minutes of the clash that same optimistic determination stayed with her. She stood toe to toe with a group of the Valefolk’s elite and fought them back, besting them in every exchange. The exhilaration was such that she nearly pressed forward without her men and women behind her, and only years of ingrained training prevented her from making the obvious mistake.

The problem, she quickly realised, was that she was the only one sticking to that discipline. From the glimpses of the wider battle she saw beyond her swordarm, she knew her soldiers were splintering, and her bellowed orders were paid no heed.

The Black Spear seemed to be more daring than before, too; from under the heavy black helm of the commander she heard the voice from her first encounter. She wondered why he hadn’t been present at their second battle - was there something he’d had to deal with which required his attention more than her?

That, she realised, was a very strange way of thinking about it. The Black Spear weren’t here to battle the Golden Lions. They had some mission, something that drew them to the Marnardines. The Lions simply patrolled the area that made for their most convenient entry into the mountains.

Yet she was thinking of the battles between their regiments as a struggle between her and the other commander, and there was no good reason she was doing this. She wondered briefly at the path her thoughts had taken her.

That turned into her mistake. The commander was suddenly in front of her, flanked by two of his men, and she was on her own. Her thoughts came back from reverie to high alert in a hurry, but it wasn’t enough of one; her sword was coming up to guard position when the commander caught her across the wrist with the flat of his spear, a huge swing behind it.

There is a point by the wrist which, if struck, causes the hand to fly open, releasing whatever is in its grip. Ambra was certain that her opponent had not been lucky; that they had drilled just this blow in combat situations before, against opposition wielding different weapons, to be capable of reliably disarming a foe if they wished it.

His foot was on the blade within a heartbeat of it touching the ground, and as she reached in rising fear for her whip, he caught her wrist in his other gauntleted hand.

She looked up, startled, met confident eyes behind the masked black helm, and felt a jolt of something run through her, but with it came a frisson of arousal, and Ambra was as shocked by that as by everything else happening. The men who were with him took her arms and held and bound them behind her, and the commander turned to continue.

Ambra could see the Lions around her, fighting and losing and separating themselves off, and while some were still doing well, she could see only two ends to this battle. With their surrender, they would at least live to fight another day. Without it, there might be too few Lions left to rebuilt.

With tears welling in her eyes she raised her voice and called out “LIONS! Hear my words and lay down your arms!”

The battlefield seemed almost to freeze, with combatants on both sides watching to see what her people would do. Ambra herself was almost holding her breath. But, for the first time in the clash, one by one and however reluctantly, the Lions wiped clean and sheathed their blades, and they allowed themselves to be taken in.

The Black Spear marched them to their camp - not far away, in the shadow of a copse far too close to the Marnardines for Ambra’s pride - and set about making sure their prisoners would not become a threat, with swords and even holdout blades gathered in.

At least, Ambra thought, they were showing some respect in the way they did it; the Lions were not being roughly handled, and she was the only one whose wrists had been bound, something which puzzled her until she realised her captors had deftly removed her whip from her belt to have something to bind her with.

She watched all of this done, standing between her two captors, in silence. Many of the Order had started to shed their armour, the masked helms first, now that they were back in camp, and the atmosphere overall was surprisingly jovial; she was startled to see one or two of her Lions actually flirting with the soldiers confiscating their swords and frisking them for hidden weapons.

Eventually she was taken in her turn to the second largest of the tents in the encampment. The dark blue fabric matched the other tents, but the three-feet-across blazon of a crown embroidered into it with gold and silver thread made clear the owner of the tent was Valefolk royalty.

“Your parole, lady captain,” one of her captors murmured. “Before we admit you to see the Prince, we ask your parole.”

That suggested, quite strongly, that she wouldn’t be accompanied inside. All the same, she was herself royalty in all the ways that mattered, she assured herself. She would conduct this as if it were a meeting of equals. She nodded assent before stepping forward and under the tent flap.

Still wearing his masked helm and sitting in the tent, on a camp stool by a low writing desk, was the commander, but her eyes passed over him only briefly as she drank in the finery within the tent. Much more money had been spent on keeping this man comfortable than the Golden Lions could ever have justified. She felt a pang of jealousy, and was proud that she didn’t let it show on her face.

He looked up from his writing and sat back, then gestured her toward the other stool. She sat, watching him cautiously, aware that there was something here which she did not understand. Something about the way he moved itched at the back of her mind with familiarity.

After a long moment of silence he lifted his hands to his head, then removed the helm, and smiled.

If she had been proud that she kept jealousy from her expression before, so much greater would be the embarrassment she would feel in recalling how utterly shocked she had been and how clear this must have been to him. The Valeman. The anonymous Valeman Myrtresca had labelled as a spy. She’d dismissed that and now here she was, within his tent.

Her cheeks were flushed. The time spent away from him, she discovered, had only made her desire him more. The smile on his lips, the same amused, confident expression she’d seen before - she wanted so much to be the cause of that smile.

“We were never introduced,” he said. “Address me as Prince Valmyr.” His smile broadened, and Ambra knew that this was no slip in manners, nor a calculated insult by lapsing in courtesy. He had seen her obey instructions and smile before, and doubtless wanted to see if she would do so again. She determined to give him her most regal frown, to best convey her refusal.

It emerged as a pout.

He waited, watching her closely, in silence. She thought of Myrtresca suggesting he had enchanted her in some way, and grudgingly admitted that there might have been truth to that. It would explain why, the longer she went without answering him, the wetter she knew she was becoming, the needier she was.

This was embarrassing in ways she hadn’t been ready for.

Time continued to pass. One of the items in the tent, either a ridiculous frippery or a comfort of home depending on which of the warriors in there you asked, was a carriage clock, constructed such that the bouncing of travel wouldn’t throw off its delicate mechanism. It marked each moment off with a decisive tick.

Each one seemed to make her neediness worse. She squirmed in her chair, not helped by her wrists still being bound. And he still watched her, just smiling, as if he knew everything.

“You fought well,” he said in the end, to break the silence. “For what that’s worth.”

It didn’t just break the silence. The lips she’d clamped shut parted with a deep indrawn breath loud enough to be almost a sob. “Th-thank you,” she blurted, and then added, almost against her will, “Prince Valmyr.”

“That’s better,” he said, and his tone was so reassuring that she found herself smiling. She was glad she’d applied her makeup that morning, she thought.

“You gave your parole,” he continued. “You are a prisoner, but I would like you to consider yourself my guest.” He opened a small chest beside his writing desk and took out two silver goblets, followed by a glass bottle. Wine?

Her guess was all but confirmed when he gestured her to come closer. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?” he asked, his voice lightly teasing, clearly unworried.

“No, Prince Valmyr.”

“Turn around, then.”

He picked up the knife on his desk and cut her whip, freeing her hands. She turned back to face him and he nodded to the wine bottle.

Ambra stared at him. Was this a challenge? A taunt? It was the same order she’d ejected him after last time.

Valmyr smiled back at her.

Wordlessly she picked up the bottle and poured a measure each into the two goblets. She hesitated, standing by the desk, then handed him his goblet.

“Thank you,” he said. He plucked a cushion from his bedroll and dropped it onto the rug on the floor directly in front of him. Ambra looked at this, too, slowly and wordlessly. He wasn’t testing her, she realised; he was teaching her. Showing her something about herself that he had already understood.

Placing one hand on the edge of the writing desk, she sank to her knees on the cushion. She knew she must be blushing crimson, but her attention was divided almost equally between his eyes as they studied her and the burning, needy heat between her legs.

“Do we understand each other now, my sweet?” he asked.

She swallowed. She didn’t want to say yes, to admit it. Didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

She picked up her own goblet and raised it to her lips for a sip, buying herself time to think. She wanted this so much, but she knew it was wrong.

And what did he want in the Marnardines? Now they were alone in the same place together, she could be sure her capture had been part of his plans. But had that been from the beginning or was it something he’d improvised later?

There was something odd about the aroma of the wine. She sniffed it again, catching spices on the wind; cardamom, coriander, cinnamon, and more, a complex scent that spoke of arid heat. It wasn’t something she expected from wine at all.

And indeed, she suddenly realised, it wasn’t even coming from the wine. The scent was in the air, the first intrusion into the tent of magic.

Swiftly the aroma became a reddish smoke, swirling from floor to head height in a tight spiral, and then tightening and thickening out until Myrtresca stood revealed, heavily robed against the cold, a satchel of paraphernalia slung over one shoulder, her mystic staff clutched ready in both hands.

“This,” the sorceress said firmly, “ends now.”