The Queen of Gallagrin sat with her hands folded in her lap. Her bearing betrayed no hint of support or disdain for the arguments which the Southern Miner’s Coalition advanced against the 3rd Fleet of the Gallagrin Navy. The issue under discussion was a complex one involving pre-established rights to buy worked ore, commitments on production levels and reciprocal review of accounts.

Alari wasn’t precisely bored by these discussion, nor was she overwhelmed by them. Under normal circumstances, the intricacies of how her people conducted their business with one another, the maneuvers and stratagems they used to come out ahead while remaining within the framework of the law, was fascinating and endlessly interesting to her.

Or almost endlessly. As it turned out, the prospect of an impending attempt on her life was enough to leave Alari’s thoughts in a jangle. Long years of practice hiding her emotions from view gave her the skill needed to sit in judgement even when she was distracted though, as well as the wisdom to know when not to make a decision.

“Your request is heard,” she said an hour later after both parties presented their final points. “We will appoint an auditor to review the facts you have provided and will render our decision when their work is concluded.”

It wasn’t the answer either the Miners or the 3rd Fleet wanted to hear. Both would have benefited from a quick resolution to the disagreements they put forth. An auditor would drag the case on for months, reviewing the figures and interviewing witnesses. In the end they weren’t likely to turn up anything more than the Queen could in ten minutes of questions the representatives, but anything they did discover would be well documented and make for a more thoroughly effective resolution that anything either party was likely to agree to on their own.

“Are you feeling well?” Halrek asked her after they departed from the audience hall. As the Consort-King, he had sat in on the meeting as well, though his presence wasn’t strictly required.

“Not entirely,” Alari said after scanning their small study to be sure no one else was lingering around the doors.

“What ails you?” Halrek asked, moving to get her a cup of water to drink.

“Presently, nothing,” Alari said. “But I don’t expect that to remain true for very long.”

“Chasing phantoms again?” Halrek asked. “You know the physician has said you should retain a more cheerful frame of mind.”

“I am positive,” Alari said. “I’m merely positive that someone is going to attempt to kill me.”

Halrek sighed, and let his shoulders droop.

“And what brings on this certainty,” he asked, his voice weary and put out.

“They have killed one of my pages,” Alari said.

“And thus you are imperiled as well?” Halrek asked. “I don’t see the connection  I am afraid.”

“It is the opening shot in a larger gambit,” Alari said.

“Or it’s an unfortunate tragedy,” Halrek said. “People do get killed for little to no reason sometimes.”

“My dear, sweet, King,” Alari said. “Have you lived here so long and still not managed to grasp the currents of Gallagrin’s high society? An attack on our holdings or people is an attack on us.”

“Then am I not as much a target as you?” Halrek asked. “Perhaps some conservative family still mistrusts the Paxmer Prince who shares the throne with you?”

“We know such families exist, but I do not believe this to be their work,” Alari said. “You are well liked by many of the stronger families. A move against you would face opposition from the very families most able to accomplish it, and, more importantly, it would leave the attackers open to my wrath and retribution.”

“And you think you are not just as supported as I?” Halrek asked. “That’s your fear speaking my Queen, not your reason.”

“It is not fear to acknowledge the truth,” Alari said. “You, they are free to love, for you came and turned the tide of the battle against my father by bringing Paxmer’s declaration of peace and support for our side. There is no blood on your hands, and no madness that they look for lurking in your blood.”

“And do you look for that madness as well?” Halrek asked.

“No,” Alari said. “For I know that my father wasn’t mad.”

“That’s a strange and disturbing claim for you to make,” Halrek said. “Wasn’t the whole campaign against his rule to cut short the madness of his reign?”

“Yes, his reign was a mad one, but it didn’t arise out of insanity, at least not the fractured, raving kind of lunacy of which he is most often accused.” Alari said. “He was not gibberingly insane, he was simply overwhelmed and incapable of admitting his own errors.”

“That might be close enough to mad that no line can be drawn between them,” Halrek said.

“If he was truly mad, he would not have been as tenacious a foe to our rebellion,” Alari said. “His mind never lost sight of what was real, he simply chose to interpret everything he saw under the worst possible light, and with no acceptance that he might be wrong.”

“Whereas you are looking at the murder of your page in a clear and open fashion you claim?” Halrek asked.

“I believe so, yes,” Alari said. “Consider the situation; either the murder was part of a greater plan, or it wasn’t. If it was then the plan must be unraveled and dealt with summarily. If it was not though, then there is still someone responsible, and they must feel the full weight of my judgment, lest others with reason to oppose me be encouraged to try similar avenues of attack.”

“You have conjured enemies for every eventuality,” Halrek said.

“You think me not so different from my father?” Alari asked.

“I am trying to perceive the difference,” Halrek said, “But it seems very slight.”

“It seems slight because it is,” Alari said. “But there is a crucial gap between us. Where I see the shadow of a plot against me, I conjure shadows of my enemies that I might study them and discern if anyone real can fill their likeness. My father conjured not shadows but names. When he sensed danger, he would assign its cause to whomever he disliked the most at that moment. He reasoned that they must dislike him as much and were the most likely candidates to do him harm.”

“That certainly speeds up the process,” Halrek said. “Though I expect that it catches the guilty only rarely.”

“I thought so as well, but I’ve since learned otherwise,” Alari said. “From letters and personal conversations after we took the throne, I’ve learned that many my father put to death were in fact in secret rebellion against him.”

“So you’re saying his methods were right?” Halrek asked.

“No, exactly the opposite in fact,” Alari said. “His methods worked only because he killed so many innocents at first that overtime he turned everyone against him.”
“But there were many Lords of the kingdom who fought under his banner?” Halrek said.

“True, but they fought for a variety of reasons,” Alari said. “Some sought to be on the winning side and saw our forces as unequal to the task of ousting a sitting king. Others wanted to slay my father but only on their own terms. And some merely wished to cling to duty and tradition above all else.”

“And what will your approach win you?” Halrek asked. “Seeing the shadows of enemies everywhere can not be good for your health.”

His words carried an unspoken barb to them. The topic of her health was one which came up frequently between them. Though he never spoke of it directly, Alari felt that he must blame her for the loss of their child. It was some weakness in her that had failed the small life that had grown within her. Halrek had fulfilled his duties in regards to the royal heir, but she had not, and if her fears were correct, never would.

“Perhaps not,” Alari said, as much to her own thoughts as to Halrek’s words, “But in this particular case, I suspect the shadows I see have more substance and weight than they ought.”

“But are they not still shadows?” Halrek asked. “Or have you found some proof to rest your fears on?”

“No proof as yet,” Alari said. “But I know that it is being sought.”
“By whom?” Halrek asked.

“By the Dawn March in Nath,” Alari said. A voice within her longed to give credit where it was due, but another remembered the dead, empty words of her last parting with her Adae. If Alari’s King had cause to hold her accountable for one life, her childhood friend had cause to bear witness against her for thousands more.

“Can their findings be trusted?” Halrek asked. Though he wasn’t native to Gallagrin, he still knew where the veins of corruption ran deepest.

“Yes,” Alari said, her words hotter by a degree than she’d intended. “To the extent that they can furnish proof,” she amended, cooling her passion so that it looked like irritation at being questioned at all. It wasn’t a kind stratagem, and she had no reason to hide the truth from her husband, but neither did she wish to reveal that specific vulnerability in her heart. To him or to anyone.

“But they have not provided any yet,” Halrek said.

“Not directly,” Alari said. “But it is telling that the minor witness they sent to me was attacked by an ambush lead by a Pact Warrior as they rode in a carriage bearing the clear heraldry of the Dawn March.”

“That is noteworthy,” Halrek said. “Were they able to capture the reported Pact Warrior?”

“I am awaiting a report on that presently,” Alari said.

“If they were able to take the assailant alive, he might be able to flesh out your shadows and place a name and face to them,” Halrek said. “Unless of course this was some dispute against the Dawn March which your witness was unlucky enough to fall into the middle of by accident.”

“I think I would find an accident even more suspect than a planned attack,” Alari said.

“That speaks to a need to see enemies where none exist,” Halrek said.

“You mistake me,” Alari said. “When I say I see shadows, I look for them so that I will not see enemies where there are none. I look to the shadows to see what information I can gather. I will not be my father. I will name no one my enemy until they have proven themselves to be such.”

“If you would wait so long, then why look for these enemies at all?” Halrek asked.

“I wish to be merciful,” Alari said. “But mercy without vigilance leads to becoming a victim just as surely as vigilance without mercy leads to becoming a tyrant.”

“You set yourself a heavy task, my Queen,” Halrek said.

“It is good that I need not shoulder its burden alone then, my King,” Alari said.

“Indeed,” Halrek said. “Though I suspect you spend more of yourself on vigilance than you know. You leave little room for me to look out for you with the attention to detail you show. Or perhaps you feel the need to be vigilant of me as well?”

“Of course not,” Alari said, ashamed at the thought. “You stood by Gallagrin in her darkest hour. If not for your sacrifice, my father would still rule this land and I would hang from a gibbet tree atop the highest tower here.”

“Our marriage was no great sacrifice,” Halrek said. “And Gallagrin has been kind to me.”

“Let us hope that continues,” Alari said.

“And let us hope that these shadows which you see shall prove to be nothing more than phantoms which vanish with the dawn,” Halrek said.

“I would wish instead for the dawn to come that I might see more clearly who it is that stands against me, and who still supports my cause,” Alari said.

Before their conversation could continue there was a knock on the door.

“Allow me,” Halrek said and went to open the door.

“My apologies Your Highness,” the courier who entered said. “News has arrived from Nath, the Ambassador from Inchesso has been found slain!”

Dae relaxed and tipped her chair further back, a warm sensation of certainty spreading from her toes up through all points of her body until it settled into her heart.

“The Queen’s your employer?” she asked the Inchesso summoner, just to make certain he was willing to stick with that claim.

“Yes,” Biago said. “Our contract carries the Royal Signet. So it doesn’t matter what you discover here, or where I try to run. The Queen will overrule your findings and my guild will restore my honor and expunge any witnesses they can find.”

“Can’t say I’m thrilled with the notion of fighting a whole guild that thinks someone as powerful as this one is an expendable pawn,” Kael said. “And you’re insane if you think any of us are going to stand against the Queen’s wishes.”

Dae steepled her fingers in front of her mouth to hide the vicious smile that was twisted her lips into a shark’s grin.

It had been six years since she last saw the Queen. She hadn’t been able to meet Alari’s eyes then, and their parting had been filled with a cold, aching silence broken only by the terse, formal words required between a vassal and her liege.

Joining the Dawn March was Dae’s idea. As was her change in title and name. Everyone from the Lord Marshall of the Dawn March down to the lowliest squire in the Nath barracks read that decision as having been “suggested” by the Queen.

Theoretically, the Dawn March was as close to Royal Service as Dae’s role as the commander of Star’s Watch Keep had been. Both the outpost commanders and the officers of the Dawn March reported to a chain of command which was directly controlled by the Regent of Gallagrin.

When she was a child, Dae was told more stories of the gallant hellions of the Dawn March than any other group. They were the brave souls who rooted out the worst villains in the kingdom and brought justice to those whom the law couldn’t otherwise reach. Dae dreamed of joining their ranks for years, even after she began to see that the reality of Gallagrin’s wealthy and powerful didn’t match the fairy tales she’d grown up on.

By the time she transferred to the Dawn March, she was able to enter it with the disillusioned eyes of an adult, but it was still her decision to do so, despite no one else believing that.

To the rest of the world, Dae’s transfer to the Dawn March was both a demotion and a dishonorable discharge from her military role. Where legends had once been told of the Dawn March’s daring and honor, the centuries of tarnish that had built up on the corruption fighting institution robbed it of its luster. The Dawn March was so well bought by the interests it was meant to stand against, that everyone knew it to be the place the bad and the worthless were cashiered so that they would do as little damage as possible.

At the time that had suited Dae’s desires perfectly. Somewhere she could be worthless. Somewhere she couldn’t do any harm. In the wake of Star’s Watch’s burning, that was what her soul cried out for and she was more than willing to oblige it.

From the first day she’d reported to the Nath barracks, she’d heard the whispers of how people chose to define her. Where once she’d been praised as a prodigy, the voices in the barracks called her a failure, and she knew it was true. Where once she a trusted member of one of the kingdom’s most elite companies, in the Dawn March she was surrounded by those who took no pride in either their position or the duties bestowed upon them and she became one of their number, taking pride in nothing. Those were the truths that ate away at her soul until she had had to replace the missing pieces with the spirits she could find in a bottle, but there was one rumor that she didn’t listen to, that she couldn’t.

The last meeting between the Queen of Gallagrin and the former commander of the Star’s Watch Keep was a private one. No one knew what was said between the two women, and so everyone speculated wildly on it. The general consensus was that the Queen had cast Dae out, and that Dae took the job with the Dawn March because she hated her liege and wished to join the one organization where she could retain her pact spirit and yet never have to see the Queen again.

Dae hadn’t corrected that impression. She hadn’t addressed it at all. It wasn’t something she could bring herself to even think of.

Sitting opposite Biago and hearing his claim of the Queen’s guilt in the Lorenzo’s murder filled Dae with warmth for one reason; she knew Alari hadn’t done it.

Her earlier reasoning about the deception Biago’s true employer would employ was solid, but not definite. It would have been foolish for his employer not to deceive the assassins in his employ but people made mistakes all the time, even very smart people and very stupid mistakes kept company with each other on a regular basis.

Dae’s certainty didn’t spring from her logic. It rose from something deeper and something much simpler.

She knew Alari. Six years separated them, but it could have been sixty years or six hundred and it wouldn’t have mattered. For years, Dae had been the only one Alari could share everything with, and Alari had been the only one whom Dae could trust completely. Dae had seen Alari on her best days and her worst ones. She knew Alari’s pettiness, her cruelty, and her malice as well as she knew her friend’s joy, and kindness and selflessness.

When Dae heard how the civil war ended, and of the sacrifices Alari had to make to secure the new peace, she hadn’t been surprised, only heartbroken. Dae knew the shape of Alari’s soul, she knew the actions her friend was capable of, the losses Alari could endure, and the burdens the new Queen could bear. What shattered Dae was the knowledge that Alari had been forced to act and endure and bear up without her. That in Alari’s very worst hour, Dae hadn’t been there for her.

Dae hid that wound and buried it under silence and sarcasm. No one knew her true feelings, and so she’d been drawn into the plot as a perfect catspaw. They mistaken her for someone too stupid to give up easily, someone who could find a believably well buried clue and someone who would be all too willing see the Queen burn.

Dae’s shark smile sent a thrill racing to the tips of her fingers. Whoever was behind Lorenzo’s murder had made a terrible error when they let Dae get involved in the investigation and it was going to be delicious watching them learn just how wrong they were to endanger Alari in an arena where Dae had anything to say about it.

“You’re forgetting something Kael,” Dae said. “We busted a forgery house two months ago. And another one six months before that. And two others a year ago.”

“You’re still thinking there’s a grand mastermind at work here?” Kael asked.

“Maybe not so grand, and maybe not so much of a mastermind,” Dae said. “Ask yourself though how hard it would be to fool a bunch of Inchesso assassins with a fake Royal Seal?”

“We verified the seal,” Biago said. “It was legitimate.”

“Verified through who?” Dae asked. “You don’t have the original Seal to compare to, and Inchesso counterfeiters don’t hold a candle to our local Gallagrin scum.”

“We have contacts in Gallagrin,” Biago said. “We are not stupid.”

“Those would be the same contacts who brought you commission? Right?” asked Dae.

Biago scowled at the accusation but didn’t try to deny it.

“Don’t feel bad,” Dae said. “You’re not exactly in a trust inducing line of work. That your guild has any contacts outside of Inchesso at all is a mark of prestige. You may not be top notch but you’re at least respectable.”

“Doesn’t sound like you respect them much,” Kael said.

“I respect them just as much as I respect you and the rest of my fellow officers,” Dae said.

It was Kael’s turn to scowl at that.

“I still think if the Queen’s involved in this we should just drop it,” Kael said.

“You want to let him walk?” Dae said. “It sits right with you that he and, what, a half dozen other professional killers, murdered a boy who was too young to shave?”

“I’m less concerned with a dead boy who isn’t going to get any deader than I am with my own neck, which I’d like to keep in its current, unslit, condition,” Kael said.

“You’ve got a pact spirit,” Dae said frowning at Kael in distaste.

“Yeah, and I’m old enough to know that it doesn’t make me invulnerable,” Kael said. “We’ve got Biago here on the hook now. If he tries to call up any of his little shadows we can take his head off his shoulders before he pronounces the first syllable of their name. We both know we’ve got to sleep at some point though.”

“We don’t have to worry about that,” Dae said. “Biago doesn’t want to kill us, he wants to die to restore his family’s honor. If we go to sleep, he’s not going to risk attacking us and having our pacts defend us. He’ll off himself with the fastest tools he can find.”

“I will not need to kill myself, my guild will come for me,” Biago said.

“And you’re counting on that because that’s how they can be sure that the job was actually done,” Dae said. “That’s an awfully strong fixation on honor you’ve got for a guy who was willing to murder a child.”

“You understand nothing,” Biago said.

Dae studied him for a long moment.

“You’re not worried about honor to gain your family’s favor are you?” she asked. “They have your family don’t they?”

“What do you mean ‘they have his family’,” Kael asked.

“Standard technique for the life bound assassin guilds,” Dae said. “Failure always ends with death. Either the assassin takes their own life or their family is killed in their place. And then the wayward assassin is killed as soon as the guild can find them.”

“Doesn’t seem like you’d get many recruits like that,” Kael said.

“You do if you’re giving out pact spirits,” Dae said.

“I thought only the Royal houses gave those out?” Kael said.

“It’s the same in Inchesso as it is here,” Dae said. “Everything’s for sale.”

“How do you know that?” Kael asked. “You never served in Inchesso.”

“I’ve read all kinds of things I shouldn’t have,” Dae said, leaving out the explanation that most of her knowledge on the underworld came from the intelligence reports that King Sathe commissioned and that Dae and Alari pilfered when no one was looking.

Reams of scrolls that the adults were bored to tears by became a secret treasure horde for the two girls, and the first of many rebellions that eventually tore the country apart for a brief period.

“Sounds like our assassin got a pretty raw deal then,” Kael said.

“Not as raw as the one Lorenzo got,” Dae said.

“I wasn’t the one who killed the boy,” Biago said.

“Sure you did,” Dae said. “Even if you didn’t hold the dagger, you were with them when your guildmate did the deed. You agreed to take the contract. Lorenzo lost a lot of blood. There’s plenty to cover your hands too.”

“You are right,” Biago said. “If you seek justice for the boy, then you should kill me too.”

“I’m not that kindly,” Dae said.

A knock on the door to the small apartment captured the attention of everyone inside it.

“Your guild a particularly polite one?” Kael asked.

“It’s not his guild,” Dae said. “It’s the other party that’s interested in talking to our friend here.”

Biago and Kael both looked at her in confusion but Dae simply gestured to the door, waving Kael over to answer it. The Dawn March officer looked at Dae, and then at the prisoner and then at the door, trying to decide which of the three was the least dangerous. With a renewed scowl he settled on the door as the safest option and walked to it calling out “Who’s there?”

“Squire Telfin,” a young man called back. “I’ve come from the barracks with new orders.”

“Your presence is being requested,” Dae said to Biago.

Kael let the squire into the room

“Commander Ketel said to bring the prisoner back to the barracks. The Inchesso ambassador is demanding to see him. The prince’s family is coming here and are requiring that the culprits be presented to them in chains when they arrive!”

Dae took a long pull of her sugared lemon water and felt the much needed hydration course through her body. Across the table, the summoner Biago glared at her. He’d taught her an impressive array of Inchesso curses already but after the first three hours he’d started repeating himself. Dae took steps to address the problem of his incessant babbling when she grew tired of it and while the gag he wore didn’t look particularly comfortable, even the summoner knew it was preferable to the state he would have been in if he’d been left to the Dawn March’s Chief Interrogator’s care.

“They’re not going to come for him,” Kael said.

“Want to put some gold on that?” Dae asked, taking another long guzzle to finish off her drink.

“You’ve already cost me enough gold with this whole mess,” Kael said. He stalked around the dining room of the “safe house” where they had transferred Biago after Dae dragged him bodily into the barracks and frog marched him through each step of the official arrest processing.

Getting the Inchesso summoner out of the barracks should have been difficult. There were all sorts of forms to fill out and special permissions to obtain to detain prisoners off site, especially prisoners who possessed Pact magics.

Dae had pushed through all of those procedures by the simple expedient of ignoring them and never letting Biago out of her grip. She’d made sure all of the requisite documents were filled and filed, for reasons that escaped each of the clerks she encountered. For similarly inexplicable reasons, she conducted the official interrogation session in the open arena where any of the other Dawn March personnel could participate as well. None had chosen to, but plenty had come to watch.

Biago had been less than forthcoming during the questioning, to the surprise of no one present. Many of the officers present had begun to wonder if Dae had simply dragged in a mute to abuse until she’d instructed Biago to demonstrate his summoning capability for the record. She also instructed him that if the summons attempted any mayhem, she would be displeased.

The summoner refused to display his power at first, but swiftly changed his mind when Dae explained that she was going to cut something in half and left it as Biago’s choice whether that was a summons or himself.

On discovering that Biago was an actual summoner, and was capable of spawning his creations at range, the crowd that was watching the interrogation found hundreds of things it needed to be doing instead. No one liked the idea of entering battle against a deathless foe who could appear anywhere, at any moment. Better to let the barrack’s designated crazy officer deal with that particular headache.

That sentiment was largely responsible for Dae’s success in extracting Biago from the Dawn March barracks. To Kael’s dismay, Commander Ketel had ordered him to accompany Dae to “ensure the safety of Dawn March personnel”. Everyone involved was able to translate that order to its actual meaning of “keep an eye on Dae and report whatever insane thing she’s doing so that no one we care about or have to report to gets caught in the backlash.”

“If you’d just let me squeeze him a bit, we could get out of this dump and spend the evening in more enjoyable locations, specifically ones far away from each other,” Kael said.

“He’s part of a life-bound assassin’s guild,” Dae said. “Failing and being captured is supposed to require their death.”

“Yeah, and?” Kael asked.

“Squeezing him isn’t going to get us any information,” Dae said.

“Doesn’t have to get us information so long as it gets us out of here,” Kael said. “If he’s not going to talk, I don’t see the point in keeping him around like this.”

“So you want to kill the suicidal assassin?” Dae asked. “That’s your idea of a good plan?”

Kael frowned and reached for his rancid malt drink.

“It’s a better plan that wasting a perfectly good night sitting here doing nothing,” Kael said.

“The door’s not locked,” Dae said. ”Nobody’s saying you’ve got to stay.”

“Wrong, the commander’s saying I’ve got to stay,” Kael said. “You’ve got him convinced you’re going to burn the whole city to the ground hunting these guys down.”

Dae was silent at that. Kael didn’t see her flinch at the mention of a burning city, and wouldn’t have understood if he had.

“Of course there’s another option we have here,” Kael said. “This safe house is supposed to only be for endangered witnesses. You and I both know that the barracks are were a scrot like this is supposed to be.”

“The barracks have a few big problems,” Dae said.

“That someone else would be in charge of the prisoner there?” Kael said and took another pull of the rancid malt.

“That’s one,” Dae said. “But there’s a bigger issue with putting this guy in a cell.”

“If he tries to summon anything, we’ll run a sword through his brain,” Kael said. “I hear that kind of thing tends to disrupt summoning spells.”

“Probably wouldn’t break your concentration though would it?” Dae asked.

“Funny Kor,” Kael said. “You know you don’t want to go a round with me.”

“No, no I wouldn’t want to do that,” Dae said, the ghost of a smirk tugging at her lips. “The problems not with our friend summoning things here though.”

“You sure about that?” Kael asked. “It looked like those archers did a number on you.”

“He certainly thought they did,” Dae said. “But look at things from his perspective. He was able to select the best position he could find, split us up to get a one on one fight, throw as many summons at me as he had the magic to power and he still got caught.”

Dae stood up and walked around the table to remove Biago’s gag and untie him from the chair he was strapped too.

“There,” she said. “Now you’re free to take another shot if you want.”

“Seems like he was in this same position for this first two hours we were here,” Kael said. “What’s different now?”

“Nothing,” Dae said. “Except that he’s had a few hours to cool off and consider things.”

“I have nothing to consider, you gallowscut,” Biago said, opting for a more international insult in place of the purely Inchesso ones he’d stuck to previously. Kael kicked Biago’s chair on general principal and the Inchesso summoner tipped over along with it.

Dae’s reflexes were quick enough and her strength sufficient that she caught both the chair and the summoner before they hit the ground. Without a grunt or a groan of strain, she lifted the two back to their normal seated position.

“You’ve got your whole life to consider,” Dae said.

“Which more or less amounts to nothing,” Kael said.

Biago scowled at both of them but remained silent.

“These last few hours you’ve been thinking,” Dae said. “There are certain inescapable facts of your situations that can’t have escaped you.”

“You stand against us,” Biago said. “So you are the one who cannot escape.”

“Do I look like I’m trying to escape?” Dae asked.

Biago glared at her but didn’t respond.

“That’s got to worry you just a little,” Dae said. “Doesn’t it?”

“I have no worries if you’re stupid enough to stay here and die,” Biago said.

“Why’s she going to die?” Kael asked, stepping away a half pace.

“Because Biago knows something,” Dae said. “And that’s the other problem with the barracks jail. They’re too secure aren’t they? You would actually be safe there.”

“Nothing,” Biago said. “You get nothing from me.”

“That’s brave,” Dae said. “It’d be more brave if you kept saying that after the Chief Interrogator got his hands on you, but I think you know you’ve got more to be worried about from me than from him.”

“You don’t scare me, scut,” Biago said.

“That’s good,” Dae said. “You shouldn’t be scared of me. I want you able to think.”

“Thinking’s just going to let him figure out how to get away from us,” Kael said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dae said. “There’s nothing left for him out there.”

“You don’t know anything about that,” Biago said.

“I know your guildmates aren’t coming to rescue you,” Dae said. “But they are coming, and you know that too.”

“Why would his guildmates come here?” Kael asked.

“Because Biago failed at his assignment, now they’ve got to maintain their reputation,” Dae said.

“By attacking us?” Kael asked. “That seems profoundly stupid.”

“They’re not coming for us,” Dae said. “Although they’ll be happy to kill us in the crossfire if they can.”

“Wait, you said it’s a life bound guild?” Kael asked.

“Yeah, didn’t know that when I tangled with the first one but it’s kind of hard to mistake the effects of a suicide pill,” Dae said. “Had a bit of trouble getting this guy’s pills away from him but we came to an arrangement, didn’t we?”

“Let me guess, you agreed to not break any of his fingers and he agreed to not provoke you into trying?” Kael said.

“Something like that,” Dae said.

“So since you convinced him not to off himself, his buddies are going to swing by and do the deed for him?” Kael asked.

“That’s how it works, right?” Dae said, returning to her side of the table and locking eyes with Biago. He didn’t answer at first but he wasn’t able to meet Dae’s gaze for long either. Eventually he nodded.

“And that his problem,” Dae said. “There’s no good path out of this for him. Even if he killed both of us, he failed and was captured. The guild can’t trust him anymore and their contract rate will drop unless they can prove that any member who fails is terminated.”

“That’s a hell of a club to belong to,” Kael said.

“Hell of a paycheck that comes with it I imagine,” Dae said.

“It’s not about the money,” Biago said. “It’s never about the money.”

“Oh, it’s always about the money,” Dae said. “You’re just at a level where you’re not the one bringing it in.”

“My guild will come for me,” Biago said. “They will restore my honor.”

“No, they’ll come for you and they’ll kill you and then they’ll never speak of you again,” Dae said. “You’ll be forgotten and forsaken, a footnote they erase so that they can go on believing that they’re the best of the best and worth every bit of coin they get.”

“You can’t stop them,” Biago said. “They are the best.”

“I’m afraid not,” Dae said. “There’s around a hundred of assassin guilds in Inchesso, and at least a quarter of them require members to take the death pledge when they join.The best don’t need to take jobs like this though. You’re out of your element, you’re doing the dangerous work yourselves, and you’re understaffed for the task at hand.”

“Seems like having a summoner and a pact warrior ought to be plenty to assassinate one little page?” Kael said.

“They’re not here to assassinate Lorenzo,” Dae said. “Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that’s not the only reason they’re here.”

“You don’t know anything,” Biago said, but worry lines creased his forehead.

“If your contract was only on the boy, you would have left as soon as the killing was done,” Dae said. “If there wasn’t something dangerous in the vampire’s testimony you would have left him alone. And, of course, if you actually knew who you were working for, your employer wouldn’t have sent you against me on your own.”

“What do you mean?” Biago asked.

“You’re a summoner,” Dae said. “That makes you a strategic asset. Only an idiot would send you out unprotected. Of course there’s lot of idiots in the world, but it would take a truly special breed of stupid to send someone to attack me when I’d just beaten a high end warrior type.”

“My skills are different from the ones Sandros possessed,” Biago said. “If you were strong against him, you should have been weak against me.”

“That’s your problem”, Kael said. “She’s weak against everyone, you people just suck.”

“Weak or strong, anyone with an ounce of sense would have sent more than one of you against me the second time,” Dae said. “They just sent you though, which means, however strong you are, they weren’t really trying to win. They left you exposed rather than sending a team that was certain to be able to finish me.”

“We do not waste our lives like that,” Biago said. “I should have been able to kill you both.”

“There’s more of you here,” Dae said. “Is ‘should have’ the level of commitment the Denarius Consortium brings to their work? Or did your employer have a series of tasks that all needed to be executed at the same time and you were all they could spare for the vital function of killing Kael and I?”

Biago was silent, but his mouth was open as he searched for the words to deny Dae’s claim.

“You’re not our killer,” Dae said. “At least not in your employer’s eyes. Sure, he probably would have been delighted if you could have put us down. He might even have expected it was something you could possibly do. A skilled planner doesn’t expend resources on shaky odds though, not unless they can arrange things so that each outcome works out in their favor.”

“So how does it work out for this mystery employer if we catch him?” Kael asked.

“If he killed us, we’d be one less problem to deal with,” Dae said. “If we catch him though, he becomes a messenger.”

“And what kind of message would a guy who wants to eat a suicide pill carry?” Kael asked.

“You know how good the Chief Interrogator is,” Dae said. “No amount of training or devotion to the cause is enough to keep someone’s lips sealed when they fall into his hands. Not forever at any rate.”

“I would never speak,” Biago said.

“You would never give up your guild,” Dae said. “But the employer who betrayed them? The one who was toying with you all along and came to visit to mock you? The Interrogator would make sure those things happened and then you’d definitely turn them in.”

Biago’s dark skin couldn’t drain of color, but his expression spoke of his dismay clearly enough to communicate the same thing.

“I thought we could skip all that unpleasantness though,” Dae said. “You can’t tell me who your employer is, because you don’t actually know. The whole time you’ve been here it’s been secret meeting with people who spoke for your employer and relayed orders to your guild. None of that is interesting to me. What I want to know is who do you think you’re working for?”

Biago glanced over at Kael, and up at Dae.

“You’re life doesn’t need to end here,” Dae said. “The Queen brought Gallagrin close to Paxmer with her marriage. You can go to there, become someone completely new, leave everything you were behind.”

Biago chuckled at that and deflated.

“It will not be so easy,” he said. “It was the Queen who hired us.”

Duke Lares Telli balanced a gold coin between the knuckles of his left index and middle fingers. It took drawing on the magics of his pact to keep his hands steady enough to perform the simple trick.

“My lord,” Serk Ketel, his chief attache said. “We have not received further word from the Denarius Consortium and it has been an hour since their last report.”

The gold coin tumbled to the carpet and with a long, slow breath Telli retrieved another from his desk and began his meditation again.

“Their summoner has been captured then,” Telli said.

“Does this present a problem?” Serk asked. He stood to the side of his lord’s polished wood desk, his body still as a drawn bow string.

“An opportunity,” Telli said. “It’s early to spend one of our pieces on misdirection but that will perhaps make the summoner’s tale ring even more true.”

“The last member of the Consortium who was caught perished by their own hand,” Serk said. “Isn’t the summoner likely to pass in the same manner as well?”

“They’re likely to try, but I suspect our Officer Kor will be ready for that stratagem this time,” Telli said. The coin was balancing well but he felt a tremor in his hand that was threatening to send it plummeting to the floor to join the others. Power was the answer to that. The strength age had stolen from him, could be replaced, he just needed the daring to seize it.

“Is there anything I should prepare for the next phase?” Serk asked.

“No,” Telli said. “The pawns are moving, already dancing to the tune that we’ve set. This part of the game requires that we step back and give them room to fail as we’ve prepared them to.”

Serk was silent in response to that.

“I can tell that you wish to say something.” Telli said. “Speak of it, there will be no censure.”

There were few men who Lares Telli regarded as worthy of respect and none who he felt were his equals. In Serk, the Duke found not someone of his own caliber but someone who at least was sensible enough to have opinions worth listening too.

“I’m concerned about this Officer Kor,” Serk said. “She has been significantly more aggressive in pursuing this case than any other member of the Dawn March would have been. And she’s been more successful at it too.

“Our plan did call for a resourceful and dedicated investigator,” Telli said.

“Yes. I merely find it worrying that she has been a very successful one as well.” Serk said. “Isn’t there a danger that she will see through the disguise we have wrapped this situation in?”

“I’m sure she will,” Telli said. “In time.”

“I have our own assets standing by,” Serk said. “We can move to neutralize her as soon as you command.”

“It’s a tempting thought isn’t it Serk?” Telli said. “She is dangerous, and so we want to make her an enemy. And we want our enemies to be dispatched as quickly as possible. It keeps our lives simple to fit people into that category.”

“I believe she is intent on becoming our enemy regardless of whatever we might make her,” Serk said.

“Yes, because she believes we are dangerous, even if she doesn’t yet know who we are,” Telli said.

“She will have an easier time striking against us if she should discover the truth of our plans,” Serk said.

“Will she?” Telli asked. “Officer Daelynne Kor is one woman, alone, with no more support than the time-withered affections of a small group of old loyalists. She was a torch which sputtered brightly with the first blush of adulthood and then was snuffed to a lingering ember after her great failure.  Her power to accuse us or to make anyone listen to her is as broken and empty as her name.”

“Your Grace is doubtlessly correct on that,” Serk said. “My concern is chiefly with her lingering royal connections. She was able to transport her witness to the Queen despite our best efforts to prevent that.”

“Oh I won’t argue that she’s not resourceful,” Telli said. “If I’d had any idea that my son’s vampire would be in a position to cause me such strife I would have beheaded the monster rather than merely beating him.”

“I regret not counseling you to do so as well, my lord,” Serk said.

“But there too, Serk, we both would have been wrong,” Telli said. “The vampire is our enemy too, but an enemy without the power to strike back is what?”

“A tool?” Serk said.

“Exactly,” Telli said. “Thanks to Officer Kor’s heroic efforts we now have an Inchesso vampire to cast in the role of the agent for the Queen. No one will have any trouble believing the story that the Queen hired the Denarius Consortium to kill her own page because poor young Lorenzo saw her engaging in a tryst that he wasn’t supposed to witness. Not when she is engaging in private meetings  with a disowned vampire of Inchesso stock.”

“The Queen herself will believe the vampire’s tale though, will she not?” Serk asked.

“Of course,” Telli said. “But the vampire doesn’t know the details she needs to be warned of and by the time they come out, any defense she makes will seem like a belated set of lies to cover her scandal.”

“A vampire and a Dawn March Officer are one sort of prey,” Serk said, “With someone as influential as the Queen though, will the same stratagems really work?

“Before she was a Queen, she was a princess and before she was royalty of any kind Alari was a woman,” Telli said. “Once her virtue is called into question, her word will be as open to question as any common scullery maid. With an air of illicit love, and conspiracy, and murder to set the imagination ablaze, there will be too many who want to believe in her guilt for royal privilege to silence all of their tongues.”

“Perhaps where royal privilege fails, royal power will be exercised,” Serk said. “She is the daughter of the Butcher King after all.”

“Yes, and she earned her sobriquet as the Bloody Handed Queen quite fairly,” Telli said. “But her reign has not been what her father’s was. She has not invested in the bedrock of terror that Sathe’s rule stood upon, nor will she undo the strides she’s made in walking away from her father’s shadow just to quiet the tongues that speak against her. She will bid her time and look for the right moment to strike back.”

“If she finds that moment, her wrath will be terrible,” Serk said. “We saw that at the end of the Unification war.”

“We saw very little of what a royal is truly capable of then,” Telli said. “If the Queen could bring her power to bear, we would count ourselves lucky if she only chose to personally behead us. But that won’t be an issue.”

“Your plans proceed at your pace, of course, your Grace, but I would urge you to ensure that they proceed as quickly as possible,” Serk said. “None thought the princess could overthrow her father and become Queen, I mistrust leaving her fate to chance.”

“In that we are agreed my good attache,” Telli said. “Where we differ is only in the timing.”

“Your Grace?” Serk asked, sensing that his master held a secret from him still.

The Duke maneuvered the coin he was balancing from one set of knuckles to the next. It was a slow, deliberate move, without the flash that a young performer would have put into the trick but the coin moved as Telli willed it to nonetheless.

“So as to calm your nerves, I will share a confidence with you,” Telli said. “You see the Queen growing in awareness of our scheme and reading to move against us. Though she is blind now, still she seeks those shadows she can see rising against her. You fear that if we do not strike soon, she will strike first and we will be undone. In one part of this you are correct. Those who strike first are those who prevail.”

“Then you will accelerate the plans and move against her soon?” Serk asked.

“There is no need,” Telli said. “I won’t attack her directly at all. The Queen is already undone, already the shadows strike against her. Even if our plan were uncovered this very evening and we were hauled to Highcrest in chains tomorrow, the Queen’s life is already compromised. She will die before we ever stand before her in a trial.”

From the corridor beyond Duke Telli’s study the sound of rapidly approaching boots interrupted their conversation. The runner paused at the door and knocked soundly on it, as the Duke insisted his subordinates do regardless of the urgency of the news they brought.

“Enter,” Telli said and fumbled the coin from his fingers as he tried to grasp it and hold it still.

A tall, thin, whip of a man entered. Volk, one of Telli’s trusted messengers, though not so trusted as the chamberlain, looked to his Duke for permissions to speak. Telli nodded at him to get on with his report.

“News from Elinspire,” Volk said. “Your son, Rendolan, has fled the estate!”

“Fled?” Telli gripped the edge of the desk and fought to stay in his seat. “There was supposed to be a guard watching him at all times. How did he flee?”

“The guard captain says that Renaldo was a model son, compliant with your orders until the previous evening. Then he tricked Marcelo, the guard who was watching his room in the small hours of the night. Renaldo gave Marcelo the wine he hadn’t drunk with supper and slipped out while all the house was asleep.” Volk said.

The Duke listened to the tale and grew visibly redder with each word that was spoken. When Volk finished the Duke was silent for a long minute.

“I strive to protect my boy, and this is how he thanks me?” Telli asked. “Volk, tell the guards at Elinspire that they are to spare no effort to find my son. If any harm comes to him, I will have every last one of them whipped. Tell the captain that if my son is not safely home within the day, I will have he and his family flayed alive. Am I clear?”

“Perfectly your grace,” Volk said and disappeared out the door, his boots beating an even  faster retreat than their approach.

Telli picked up another coin and fumbled it. He grabbed it before it could fall completely and hurled it into the wall with enough force to flatten it. Forcing himself back to a state of seeming calm, he sat down at the desk again.

“All great plans must sail through uncertain waters,” Telli said, speaking as much for his own benefit as for Serk’s response.
“Here, again, we have an opportunity,” Telli said, grasping another coin in his hand and squeezing it between his thumb and fore finger.

“What opportunity is that my lord?” Serk asked.

“My son is integral to our plan,” Telli said. “The Consortium thinks they are working for the Queen and that I am her agent. Only by keeping them within our domain can I keep them out of her eyes, but that means many trails of inquiry will connect them to my house.”

“You wish to deflect that suspicion onto your son?” Serk asked.

“Not deflect no,” Telli said. “I will leave my son his good name, it would not do to cast aspersions on any who bear the name Telli lest we all be affiliated with their wrong doing.”

“But your son will provide you with a shield against the accusations of the other noble houses no?” Serk asked.

“Indeed,” Telli said. “In life Renaldo has ever been a disappointment. I hoped that as he came into his manhood he might find the spine that he misplaced as a child, but that was never to be. I have one good child Serk, only in my eldest son does the Telli blood run true. He will be a fit heir for me to hand power too when it is my time to pass. And my daughter, mad though she is, can be used to secure us a kingdom. Only Renaldo holds no value to this family, and so only he can I raise up and give the honor of shielding us from blame. Through his death at the hands of the Denarius assassins will we be cast in the victim’s light, our guilt washed to innocence by the blood he spills.”

A smile played across the Duke’s face, mirroring the fondness in his words. All would be as he had always hoped it to be, if only he could find his wayward son.

Surviving with a half dozen arrows run through your chest is impossible. Human organs have grave issues with being punctured by long shafts of steel tipped wood. Hearts in particular tended to be upset when plant-based obstructions like arrows interfered with their ability to pump blood to the other organs that were crying out for it.

Dae gave silent thanks to Kirios that she didn’t have to worry about that particular problem. Thanks to her Pact spirit’s power, her real body was still safely ensconced in the magic of the transformation and held in a dimension slightly offset from the material world. The illusions of the armor falling away from her was the sort of trickery that any suitably proficient Pact Warrior could pull off though very few ever had cause to, and even fewer ever practiced.

The bond between Pact spirit and their warrior was a crucial one, and determined how much power their fusion had access to in battle. For most Pact Warriors, training to improve that bond was a daily task in the early weeks of their association. Beyond the first few months though the Pact relationship was largely defined and further efforts to improve its scope yielded little results.

Little results were fine with Dae though. With few other distractions in her life, she was constantly fiddling with Kirios’ capabilities. Most of her “personal training” was unfocused and unproductive, but she still made headway in tiny steps.

It was thanks to that constant probing of the boundaries of their power that Kirios was able to configure his appearance to look like Dae as she lay on the roof and waited to see what the summoner’s next move would be. She was wagering on several gambles at once with her feint, from her adversary being at least slightly foolish, to herself being the better judge of the fight’s pacing. She didn’t need all of those risks to pay out, just any of the right ones.

If the summoner was of Inchesso stock, as she guessed they might be, the odds were that they wouldn’t be intimately versed in the capabilities Pact Warriors possessed. To the untrained observer, it should have appeared that Dae ran out of power and chose to drop her protection, or lost it while reaching for more. She couldn’t be sure of her acting prowess but she thought she’d put on a good enough show in wading through wave and wave of shadow archers, slowing down with each one until her final “collapse” to make the summoner’s victory believable.

Another Pact Warrior would have questioned at least a few elements of her performance though, not the least of which being why she chose to attack several waves of archers rather than flee faster than they could follow.

A novice fighter could easily find themselves locked into a mindless fighting pattern by pure bloodlust but Dae didn’t move like a novice. Anyone with her level of training would have known exactly how powerful a fighting retreat could be, and definitely would have been aware of the value of fleeing an ambush in order to engage the enemy on terms that weren’t so favorable to them.

Fighting a summoner on the grounds of their choosing meant giving them the benefit of whatever concealment they’d chosen as well as the lightest burden for resummoning their forces that they could setup. In a running battle it was much harder for the summoner to stay hidden and an exposed summoner against a Pact Warrior had a lifespan measured in milliseconds in most cases.

Which isn’t to say that there weren’t problems with running battles in the middle of a busy city.

“The rest of you I save because it’s convenient”

Dae’s words echoes in her ears. There was more truth in them than she wanted to admit. She avoided fighting through the city because she wanted to arrive at this moment, when her quarry made the mistake of thinking she had fallen, when they would feel safe enough to make a mistake. A side effect of the strategy was that the general populace remained unharmed.

Dae stilled her breathing and thought back to a time when her priorities would have been the reverse of what they’d become.

Another arrow thunked into her, interrupting her concentration but not forcing her to break the illusion of her death. The summoner wasn’t as foolish as she’d hoped, but it was only one arrow, so her guess as to their reserves of magic, or the lack thereof, was looking to be correct. All she needed to do was wait. Not that waiting was easy. Until she heard them move, she had to maintain her ruse and remain dead still or she would never lay her hands on them.

To ignore the damage that Kirios was holding at bay, Dae let her mind drift into her memories. The image of two girls racing through a long abandoned tower surfaced from the waters of Lethe that drowned her past.

“You’ll never catch me Alari!” the child Dae squealed as her strong legs boosted her up the wobbly stone stairs three steps at a time.

“Sleeping Gods you’re part mountain lion Adae!” the princess who followed Dae called out.

“Rar!” Dae said, doing her best impression of a creature she’d never actually seen as she flew up the steps even faster.

“You’re not getting away from me!” Alari yelled in a very unprincess-like fashion.

In her mind’s eye, the adult Dae could picture the enormous scale of the open room that waited at the top of the stairs. It wasn’t that large but from her younger self’s perspective it was vast area for potential mischief. The colors of the ancient carpet remained in Dae’s memory even after more than a decade and a half since she first saw them. There were worn golds that still shone with a shadow of their former luster, rich blues faded to pale watercolors where traffic had worn them down and reds that had once been vibrant as fresh apples but were long since brushed down to soft pinks. To her younger self, the carpet was an tapestry ocean that told hundreds of stories.

It was also quite flat. That detail stuck with her because of how badly Alari tripped on it when she entered the room and spied Dae on the far side of it, almost at the stairs leading to the next floor.

Alari’s fall wasn’t bad because it looked painful. If anything it was the lack of pain that gave it away. One step the princess was streaking across the room trying to catch her playmate and then next she was sinking to floor having “tripped”. Her landing was so gentle though that Dae knew it had to be faked.

“That’s cheating Alari,” Dae said, narrowing her eyes at her friend. Alari didn’t move. She didn’t even make a sound.

Dae crept a step forward, waiting for the princess to roll back to her feet and resume their race, but Alari didn’t budge.

“You’re never going to catch me like that,” Dae said and edged a few steps closer.

Still no response from the princess.

“Are you ok?” Dae asked, concern leaking into her voice.

Alari treated Dae like a friend, like an equal if Dae was honest, but Dae knew she wasn’t as important as Alari. The castle staff, and more importantly the King, tolerated Dae because Alari liked her. For as awful as King Sathe was, Dae saw feet swinging in the breeze, he at least doted on his daughter.

People said that the King changed when Alari’s mother died, but Dae didn’t think that was true. Queen Halia may have mitigated the worst of her husband’s madness but Dae had never known a time when the King’s name wasn’t spoke of in fear, and for good reason.

Dae took another step closer to Alari and reached for her. If something had happened to the princess, her protection of Dae would vanish. The thought was terrifying but it was only a small worry compared to the idea that something might actually be wrong with the princess. Dae knew for sure that Alari was faking, but if she wasn’t, if she’d truly been injured because of Dae’s taunting then the King wouldn’t have to kill Dae. He wouldn’t get the chance to.

Dae wasn’t Alari’s equal. She would never rule a kingdom like Alari would. She would never bear the burdens that her best friend was destined to live under. Alari’s destiny was to stand on a greater stage than Dae could ever act on, but that didn’t meant mean that Dae couldn’t support her.

In a very real way, Alari had saved Dae’s life by claiming her as a handmaiden. A moment latter and Dae’s feet would have swung in the breeze as well. The princess didn’t see it like that, but Dae and everyone Dae spoke to did. For that alone, Dae would have been grateful and given the princess anything she asked. Except Alari didn’t ask for anything.

As a royal of Gallagrin, Alari could have commanded Dae to do almost anything, but instead she’d asked, just quietly requested, Dae’s company each day, as though it were a new request each time.

Technically Dae was one of many handmaids but the rest were all sensible older women, ladies concerned with proper decorum and the needs of the court. Dae was supposed to follow their lead in all things, but when she could never bring herself to. From the first hour she was in Alari’s service she saw how everyone else treated the princess. It was like Alari was a crystal doll, too fragile to touch or even to be near for long. The castle, and Alari’s rooms in particular was a marvelous edifice but even as a young child Dae could see that they were little more than a box that the people of the castle were very content to leave Alari packed away in, safe, protected but also completely isolated.

That wasn’t driven by Alari’s needs or requests of course. It was the fear of her father that kept the handmaids and the rest of the staff at arm’s length or beyond. No one wanted to be the person who drew the King’s attention, even if it was for supporting his daughter. The Butcher King was too erratic to risk any chance of being noticed by him.

That was why Alari’s request for Dae to spend time with her were always phrased so that Dae could have easily refused. Alari wasn’t stupid. She knew how dangerous her father was and the peril that being with her entailed.

That, in turn, was why Dae never refused. She couldn’t understand how a monster like Sathe had an offspring as compassionate as Alari, but after what Alari did for her, Dae wasn’t going to let her stand alone. Not against anyone or anything.

In that moment of seeing Alari crumpled on the floor, the worst of Dae’s fears surged through her mind. If she hurt her princess or let Alari down, Dae knew she would never forgive herself. It was the one thing that would destroy her and so she reached very tentatively towards the princess’ motionless form on the carpet.

And Alari grabbed her arm.

Dae screamed, certain that ten years had been scared out of her by Alari’s move.

“Gotcha!” the princess said.

“Gods’ piss, you’re evil!” Dae didn’t even try to pull her arm free. She was too busy try to make sure her heart didn’t explode from the fright.

“I’m not evil,” Alari said. “I just do what it takes to win.”

That had proven to be more true than either of them could have guessed.

It warmed Dae’s heart to think that she was still learning things from her friend, even with the years that separated them. She wasn’t able to keep the smile from crinkling the edges of her lips as she heard boots that were decidedly more solid than a shadow archer’s crunch on the tile of the flat roof. Thanks to Kirios’ senses she felt the summoner draw close and bend down to inspect her fallen form.

“Gotcha” she said, grabbing his arm.

His scream was very similar to the little girl scream Dae had emitted years previous and, like Alari before her, Dae couldn’t help but feel a surge of triumphant glee as her plan brought her quarry to ground.

The volley of arrow the shadow archers fired wasn’t enough to block out the sun. The summoner who called them was powerful, but even still there were limits to how many avatars they could manifest at any one time. Dae took that as a good sign. After she defeated one of their members, she wasn’t sure how the Denarius Consortium would react, or the kind of resources they would have to bring to bear.

From the reports she’d gleaned of the Duke’s celebration of the Royal Unification Gala, the Consortium had been composed of six “merchants” plus an equal number of “attendants” and a like number of hanger-ons such as Lorenzo. That made them one of the smaller parties invited to the affair, but by virtue of being foreigners, they stood out.

Dae was able to obtain testimony from a number of different party goers affirming that the Consortium claimed it was a newly formed business enterprise and that this was the members first time visiting Gallagrin. More than one of the guests reported a sense of unease at being in a Consortium member’s presence, and that the “merchants” seemed less interested in mingling and discussing business than they were with determining what activities their fellow Inchesso countrymen were involved in.

That wasn’t damning evidence by itself. All nations in the Blessed Realms relied on spies to one extent or another. Inchesso in particular was known for cultivating a rich intelligence gathering network. Its neighbors didn’t object much as the primary goal of Inchesso’s espionage efforts seemed to be spying on itself.

Gallagrin had a long history of internecine struggles between its nobles, but despite having hosted a full blown civil war six years prior, it was still a model of trust and camaraderie compared to its neighbor to the east. For Inchesso it wasn’t a question of whether a particular noble family had a blood feud with another family, but rather a which blood feud they felt like using to justify whatever act of betrayal they had planned at any given moment.

It never made sense to Dae how a country could sustain itself under that level of internal pressure, and to some extent Inchesso wasn’t sustaining itself. Once the most powerful of all the nations in the Blessed Realm, Inchesso’s influence had been shrinking for centuries as the blood of nobleman and commoner alike ran into the gutters and out to the Red Coast.

Inchesso’s decline was slower than its history suggested though, which told Dae there were powers at work within the country. Powers that shaped which feuds were carried through to bloodshed and which merely lead to unpleasant dinner conversations.

Whatever the goal of those powers were, Dae guessed they didn’t involve supporting the Denarius Consortium. If they had, if Lorenzo’s murder was carried out by a party with the support from whatever cabal actually ruled Inchesso, then they would have had much better resources to throw again two Pact Warriors than a single summoner.

Dae pondered that and watched as the arrow storm drifted towards her, their flight slowed to the pace of leaves falling on a windless day.

People who were unfamiliar with Pact Warriors tended to assume that the time they spent transforming was when they were at their most vulnerable. People who tried to take advantage of “opening” usually did not have a chance to learn from their mistakes.

Kirios, Dae’s pact spirit, had waited, patient as only something ageless can be, when Dae called him up. He sat on her shoulders as an invisible, insubstantial mantle of power. The moment she released him though that power unfurled.

Light flared out from Dae, radiating from eyes and mouth and chest and hands and legs. It was the energy of the pact spirit’s incarnation, a tiny fraction of the magic is brought into the world, radiating away. Kirios missed it less than Dae missed the road dust that she kicked off her cloak each night when she got home.

In the moment of transition, Kirios was the most fully at his peak. His power was released into the material world and the constraints of the Pact were, for the brief instant of the transformation, not yet fully binding.

The arrows in flight drew bolts of golden lightning which arced from arrow to arrow and then back to the archers that fired them. Nothing the lightning touched survived.

Dae had no say in that, and had to struggle harder to complete the transformation. If Kirios’ power was allowed to run out of control her attackers would certainly be destroyed but a worse fate than that awaited her.

Gritting her teeth, Dae forced the light streaming from her to coalesce into the rigid metal plates and mail of her armor. It wasn’t the armor she’d designed during her Pact Binding ceremony. That was lost to her. Lost with the fall of Star’s Watch.

In its place, she wore the mail of a commoner. It was armor devoid of any ornamentation or augmentation, just like her surname, and so it suited her. Ugly but functional. It was as much as she could aspire to but the gauntlet’s still felt subtly wrong when she looked at them, like they were incomplete.

Beside her, Dae watched as Kael transformed as well. His transformation was more theatrical than her own. Each piece of his armor materialized separately, slamming into place with a crashing, metallic, thud. To the uninitiated, it looked much stronger and more forceful than Dae’s since they could see the weight and power of each element of Javan’s attire. The extended duration of the transformation was a liability and a crutch in Dae’s eyes though.

By taking more time to transform, Kael was able to bind each piece of armor more easily. Novices pact binders performed the basic armor manifestation spells over a period of hours, working slowly to build their control of the magics in simple, clear stages. As their skills improved, the pact binders learned to accelerate the process, weaving multiple threads of control around their spirit’s power at once. The most skilled transformations were performed with little fanfare or displays of power at all, but Dae didn’t strive for that either. Too much care in transforming was a waste of time, but allowing the change to be visible and clear was useful on its own. More fights were won on the psychological battleground than by actual force of arms in her experience.

“What in the Holy Goat’s hairy butt was that?” Kael asked as his transformation completed. Above them, the archers that had been disintegrated by Dae’s lightning riposte reformed from the smoky clouds they’d been blown into.

“An ambush,” Dae said. “Topside now, unless you want to play pincushion down here.”

As though they’d practiced it, the two Pact Warriors leapt two stories into the air to land on the roofs of the buildings on the opposite sides of the alley where the shadow archers were firing at them from.

A swipe from Dae’s blade as she landed split the two nearest archers in half. Though they only appeared to be composed of dark smoke, cutting through them was like hacking trees in half. Fortunately for Dae, Kirios was more than capable of felling trees or shadow archers in a single blow. Unfortunately, the shadow archers were more than capable of reforming when their bodies were destroyed.

Parrying another volley of arrows from archers on the other side of the roof, she looked around to get a sense of the forces set against them. The odds weren’t grim, not with Kael drawing the attention of the archers on the southern building, but thinning the opposition’s numbers wasn’t looking like a promising option either.

“Why aren’t these things staying dead?” Kael asked, shouting from one building to the other.

“Summoner’s got to be nearby,” Dae said. “Must be resummoning as we drop them.”

An arrow clipped her directly between the shoulder blades. Kirios stopped the thorny bolt from penetrating her torso, but she felt his protection fade slightly in exchange for that. Two more shots hit her. One clipped her shoulder but lost its force to the curve of the plating there. The other struck her dead center on the side of the thigh. Kirios shielded her from that blow as well, but another drop of his secured power vanished in turn.

Dae leapt thirty feet, from the side of the building she was on, to the opposite corner and sliced through the trio of summoned archers who had landed blows on her. From the center of the roof another trio of attackers materialized though and plinked away still more of Kirios protection.

“This isn’t going to go well if we can’t make some headway,” Kael shouted as though Dae was unfamiliar with the limitation a Pact Warrior fought under.

The phenomenal power offered by a Pact spirit came with a price. Once the transformation was complete, the spirit placed as much of its power into the armor and weapons as the Pact Warrior could hold. That was far from the full amount of magic the spirit truly possessed though. As a Pact Warrior’s available magic ran down they had two options. The sensible one was to withdraw from battle, before the transformation ran out of magic and the protection granted by the spirit wore off.

The second option was to call on more of the spirit’s power. More Pact Warriors died attempting that than were ever killed directly by their enemies. The mildest form of failure was that the Pact Warrior’s call for magic would be unanswered and they would revert to their purely mortal form immediately. The more common failure mode was that the power would be given, but it would burn the warrior from the inside as they failed to control it. Occasionally the magic fire would be explosive enough to also take out their opponents, which was seen as at least a partial victory by some.

In the worst case though, the warrior would get the power they called for, but rather than the warrior controlling it, the raw, mindless, destructive force would control them. The resulting creature would often undergo a second transformation and would become a true monster. More than one grand battle had been called to a temporary and immediate truce when a failing Pact Warrior turned berserker and began slaughtering everything on the battlefield.

“Find the summoner and we can finish this,” Dae shouted back to Kael.

The problem with that strategy was that summoners knew they were the weak link of their forces and, as a result, learned to hide themselves well if they planned to live beyond their first battle.

The other problem with looking for the summoner was that they had the resources to keep Dae distracted. Resources in the form of a fresh horde of the shadow archers materializing to supplement the first group.

“Getting busier every second here,” Kael said, dispatching an archer with a series of five strokes that rendered it into well dispersed pieces. Behind him, two more archers materialized, launching arrows as they did so.

“Head to the ground, see if he’s hiding out there!” Dae said. Technically it wasn’t her place to issue orders to Kael. He outranked her. That was in theory. In practice though Kael was more than happy to get off the rooftop and dropped over the side and to the alley below without a word of backtalk.

He wasn’t going to find anything. Dae knew that. For the summoner to be calling in the unending stream of archers, they had to be somewhere which offered visibility to the rooftops. That limited the possibilities tremendously. There were only two buildings that were close enough and had the proper view of the roofs Dae had chosen to stage the fight near.

If she wanted to place the obvious bet, Dae would have picked the Casbel Grain warehouse as the spot where the summoner was. It was accessible, and it was slightly closer (which made for easier spell casting) and it offered multiple avenues of escape. A smart summoner would be hiding there with a small army of summons waiting in the wings in case anyone found them.

While Dae didn’t doubt her adversary’s intelligence, she was also reasonably sure they weren’t on the Casbel Grain warehouse.

Around her, the horde of archers swelled faster than Dae was taking them down. More and more arrows pounded through her defenses, chipping away bigger and bigger chunks of the Kirios’ magic.

Unleashing a burst of speed that surpassed sight, she flew to three corners of the roof and struck down the groups there before collapsing to one knee, panting.

As she caught her breath, the archers reformed and she sprang at them again. And again. And again.

A shot from one of the bows landed and shattered her shoulder guard. She downed the archer responsible and another arrow fractured a section of armor at her hip.

With one last rush, she cleared all of the archers from the roof and collapsed, gasping for breath. It took a long moment, but not as long as Dae getting her breath back, before a small contingent of archers reformed.

Dae rose unsteadily but as she did her armor fell away from her and arrow after arrow thunked into her chest, transfixing her like a target dummy.

As she fell to the roof, Dae forced a smile off her face. Everything was going right according to plan.

Dae left Commander Ketel’s office glad to be rid of the stench of the assassin she’d dragged back from the ambush site. It had been long and unpleasant work to carry the body that far. Without her Dawn March heraldry on display the Nath Watch probably wouldn’t have let her in the gates, but rank did have its privileges.

The barracks were sparsely populated, which wasn’t an uncommon scenario in Nath. With the “close connections” between Duke Telli and the commander there wasn’t much call for the Dawn March to fulfill its primary duty of regular reviews of the watch and the Duke’s personal forces. Instead the officers were assigned various cases as though they were backup members of the Watch.

Anything the city guards couldn’t handle, or didn’t want to, filtered up to the Dawn March and then, under normal circumstances, into one of the many fireplaces in the barracks where the case amounted to a few moments of warmth and little more.

The casefile on Lorenzo’s murder wouldn’t hit the hearthfires though. It fell into the “someone sufficiently important cares about this” category. That didn’t mean that it would actually be investigated however. A real investigation would have some slight chance of turning up the real culprits and, given that the killers were well connected enough to know when, where and how Teo was being transported out of the city, it was a safe bet that the person behind them was powerful enough to send the investigation down all the wrong tracks.

Since she had been officially removed from the case, Dae had no further stake in seeing the problem averted though. According to the Dawn March by-laws she was to stay as clear and uninvolved with the ongoing investigation as a regular civilian would be. Generally this struck her as a good operating principal. If an officer was removed from a case, it was usually for incompetence and the last thing the investigation needed was for them to muddy the waters further with their blundering. A poorly run investigation didn’t just allow the guilty party to escape, it confused things to the point where guilt and innocence were impossible to determine for anyone involved, including the investigators themselves.

Thanks to her general attitude, Dae was used to being removed from cases. Most of the time in fact her attitude was due to having no interest in working on whatever “important case” was assigned to her. She might discover that a flour merchant was cutting his wares with sawdust and the commander wouldn’t let her choke him to death with his own product? She might as well get kicked off the case and let someone else deal with the guy, as far as she could see.

“You do not look like a woman who has been giving the rest of the day off,” Javan Kael said as Dae strode out of barrack’s main offices.

“I’m off the case,” Dae said.

“Good then, that makes two of us,” Kael said.

“How much did it cost you?” Dae asked. “I had to pay an arm and a leg.”

“I saw the body you brought in here Kor. There was more left than an arm and a leg.” Kael fell into step with Dae, following her out of the barracks HQ and into the bustling streets of Nath.

“Yeah, but the rest was all white meat,” Dae said. “Can’t stand the stuff myself.”

Kael drew back a half step.

“That’s disgusting Kor,” he said, letting her merge into the crowds. “I’d be proud, but coming from you that just doesn’t sound right at all.”

“Maybe I’m not myself?” she said, pushing further into the later afternoon bustle that swamped the city’s narrow streets.

Kael used a combination of his larger form, his Dawn March heraldry, and lifetime of skill at navigating crowded mobs to push himself through the throng and catch up to Dae.

“What’s got you so worked up about this one?” Kael asked.

“I’m not worked up,” Dae said. “I’m focused.”

“Yeah and the last time I saw you focused like this is never, so what’s special now?” Kael asked.

“Who says anything’s special now?” Dae asked.

“You do,” Kael said. “Normally when you get an afternoon free you spend a few hours brooding at you desk and then you go and get plastered at whatever dive will have you.”

“And you just skip the brooding,” Dae said.

“This isn’t about me,” Kael said.

“That’s probably the first time I’ve heard you utter those words,” Dae said. “I’d almost think you mean them except well, this is you talking.”

“I notice you’re not heading to the Low Quarter either,” Kael said. “Which tells me you’re not drinking either.”

“The night’s much too young to say that,” Dae said.

“It’s afternoon,” Kael said.

“Plenty of time then right?” Dae said.

“What worries me is what you’re going to do between then and now,” Kael said.

“Probably get myself killed,” Dae said.

“Dammit Kor, it’s not a joke when you’re serious about it,” Kael said.

“And you would care why exactly?” Dae asked.

“Because I’ve got an inkling about who you’re going to get to kill you, and I don’t need the Duke killing me too for being associated with you,” Kael said.

“Seems funny that you’re walking beside me then,” Dae said.

“Pretty hard to strangle you if I let you get out of arm’s reach,” Kael said.

“Anytime you’d like to try…’ Dae said.

“Seriously, why are you going to bother the Duke,” Kael said. “Or are you going to pretend that we’re not walking directly towards the castle now?

“I’m not pretending anything,” Dae said. “I’ve just got a few questions for his Grace.”

“You’re off the case Kor. Those aren’t questions you’re allowed to ask anymore.”

“Didn’t say they were questions about this case,” Dae said.

“So you’re just trotting up to the castle to ask the Duke what exactly? How he like his eggs in the morning?”

“Road safety,” Dae said. “The roads out of Nath have some serious ruts in them.”

“And you’re going to ask the Duke about that?”

“It’s his job to maintain all the bridges, tunnels and roads in Nath,” Dae said. “It’s why he collects all those taxes right?”

“That’s a thin excuse Kor, real thin,” Kael said.

“Good, there seem to be a lot of thin excuses going around, I’d hate to miss out on my share” Dae said, dodging around a fruit cart that was being driven home for the evening by its owner.

“What I don’t get is what kind of connection you’ve got to this Inchesso kid that lit your fire up so high,” Kael said.

“It’s not the kid Kael,” Dae said. “But it probably should be, shouldn’t it?”

“Plenty of kids get themselves dead Kor,” Kael said. “There’s no point in bringing the Duke down us for one of them that’s a foreigner.”

“So you’d be more engaged if it was a local kid?” Dae asked. “Or maybe one of your kids?”

“I don’t have any kids Kor,” Kael said. “At least not any I gotta pay for.”

“You’re a gem Kael, a real gem,” Dae said.

“What I am is honest,” Kael said. “And that’s something you don’t seem capable of being.”

“What makes you think I’ve lied to you Kael,” Dae asked. “Everything I’ve said could be true.”

“Just because your words are true doesn’t mean you are,” Kael said. “You’ve been going around like you’re above the rest of us even if you never said it in so many words.”

“You sure that’s not a personal complex you’re wrestling with there Kael?” Dae asked.

“Don’t think so,” Kael said. “I’m not a complex person.”

“Your words, not mine,” Dae said.

“You’re not that complex either Kor,” Kael said. “You think you’re some kind of holy crusader, here to help all the little people, only you’re trying to be all humble about it and pure, not looking for fame and glory and money while you do it.”

“Yeah that’s me,” Dae said. “Helping out every orphan I can find at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.”

“That’s right,” Kael said. “Because you’re smart.” It was an accusation Kael spat out like a wad of acoustic contempt. Dae laughed, struck by how ridiculously off target the comment felt.

“If I’m so smart, why aren’t I living it up like you are?” Dae asked.

“Because smart doesn’t cut in this world,” Kael said. “Smart just lets you see how pointless it all is. You crawl into those bottles because you’re smart enough to see that if you cripple yourself you can’t be held responsible for all those poor old ladies and little toddlers that nobody can do anything for.”

“Doesn’t sound like a smart plan to me,” Dae said. “Eventually you sober up after all.”

“Can always reach for another bottle,” Kael said. “Or you can wake up.”

“And what do you think there is to wake up to?” Dae asked.

“You don’t need the bottles Kor,” Kael said. “They’re fun enough, don’t get me wrong, but all you really need is to figure out the trick to life.”

“And that would be?” Dae asked. They were still far off from the castle, and she wanted to make sure to keep him distracted for as long as possible. If Kael figured out that they were being followed, he could screw up her whole plan.

“The real trick to life is that you just can’t care about it,” Kael said. “All those sad sacks you spend your night’s killing yourself over? None of them matter. And none of them will care if you save them. Not the next day anyways, they’ll just ask what you’re going to do for them now. All they are is a big mess of problems and no matter how many you solve, there’s a dozen more that they’ll invent so that they can keep sucking away at you.”

“Sounds like a pretty miserable deal,” Dae said. “Let me let you in on a little secret though.”

“What?” Kael asked.

“All those kids and old ladies and sad sacks you think I’m bent on helping? You know how many I’ve drunk to forget?”

“No, and I’m betting you don’t either,” Kael said.

“None,” Dae said. “I never drank with even one of them in mind.”

Kael narrowed his eyes and searched Dae’s expression for a sign she was lying, but nothing more than an empty slate greeted him.

“The truth is, you don’t know me at all,” Dae said. “I’m not some noble paladin. We’re different from each other by maybe the thickness of a slice of paper.”

“That’s another one of your pretty little lies,” Kael said. “If you thought you were like me, you’d end it right then and there.”

“Sad thing to say Kael, although maybe that explains why you think I’m trying to kill myself right?” Dae maneuvered them into a side alley and spared a glance down at a puddle before stepping over it. The reflection in it showed her everything she needed to see.

“I think you’re trying to kill yourself because I’ve seen plenty of officers just like you,” Kael said. “Young things, fresh out of training, thinking they can change the world and save everyone in it. Can’t tell them anything and they keep thinking like that right up until they’re floating face down in the sewers somewhere.”

“I’m not a young thing anymore,” Dae said, counting her steps down the alley and estimating where the midpoint was.

“You’re young enough,” Kael said.

Ten more steps to the center of the alley.

“Young enough for what?” Dae asked. Eight more steps.

“To think you matter, to think you can change how the world works,” Kael said. “Except that never happens. The world’s too big for us and nobody gets to change it because too many people like it just how it is.”

Three more steps.

“Kael, I never wanted to change the world,” Dae said. “And I never wanted to save everyone. In the end there’s only one person I care about saving.”

Last step.

Dae caught the first arrow half a foot away from her left eye and the second half an inch from Kael’s throat.

“The rest of you I save is just because it’s convenient,” she said and broke both of the arrows.

On the buildings around them, dozens of archers composed of shadow and thorn began to appear, drawing back their bows and releasing a flight of arrows down upon the two unarmored officers.

The corpse landed on Sendrick Ketel’s desk rousing him from what should have been a pleasant late afternoon nap. Flesh crashing onto cheap wood and the subsequent thud of papers and brick-a-brack on the floor was nowhere near as disturbing as the smell the seethed out from the rotting body. Ketel managed to get one eye open and have his worst fear confirmed. Officer Daelynne Kor had returned from the crazy hunt she’d gone on.

“You can tell the Duke I found one of his assassins”, she said.

Ketel was immeasurably pleased to see that she wasn’t still garbed in her Pact armor. Kor was a temperamental asset with unpredictable connections. As a hound, she was a useful mallet for solving otherwise intractable problems, but Ketel was never perfectly comfortable that she wouldn’t turn on her masters someday. Or that he could feel sure he knew who she thought her master really was.

“Careful how you say that Kor,” Ketel said. “Don’t want people to think you’re making an accusation against His Grace.”

“Right,” Dae said and let silence linger for half a breath too long. “Of course I mean the assassins the Duke is searching for with all possible vigor.”

Ketel had encouraged Dae to learn to play politics, but the closest she’d come was knowing when to shut up occasionally. Whenever she lost the sense to do she became one of the bigger pains in Ketel’s backside.

“When they hang you, make sure to look in the crowd,” Ketel said. “I’ll be selling popcorn.”

“I’m not going to hang commander,” Dae said. “They’ll never get me to the noose alive.”

Ketel looked at his subordinate and struggled to find a sign of human emotion there. If she had any, they were too well hidden for his sleep addled mind to make out. In the long run that was for the better he decided. The Duke had requested her specifically for this investigation and there was no hope that it was going to turn out pretty. That the Duke had known to ask for her in the first place told Ketel a wide variety of things that he had no reason or interest in reflecting on.

“Probably going to kill you myself before then,” Ketel said. “Now would you care to tell me why this pile of festering puss is on my desk and not down in the morgue where it belongs.”

“You worked in Inchesso for a while right?” Dae asked.

“Spent a summer in one of their blighted swamps,” Ketel said. “If I never see another fire tick it’ll be too soon.”

“Ever seen a poison like this one?” Dae asked, pointing at the corpse’s mouth.

Ketel had seen plenty of dead bodies in his line of work. A few had even been ones he hadn’t killed himself. Despite his experience though, he’d never seen a corpse quite like the one Dae had slammed onto his desk.

The assassin, assuming that Dae was telling the truth, had been a young male of Inchesso descent. His skin was darker than the wood of the desk he lay on but there were veins of white scar tissue that radiated down his body. Following them back up, Ketel saw they converged around the assassin’s mouth.

“This looks old,” Ketel said, poking at the assassin’s scar with the tip of his knife.

“They’re not,” Dae said. “He looked fine after I bet him.”

“What happened?” Ketel said. “And start from the beginning. I’m going to have to tell the Duke all about this.”

“Don’t know what the beginning was,” Dae said. “But you can tell the Duke that I’ll work it out.”

Ketel wondered if Dae was insane or suicidal. She’d been damaged goods when she first arrived and the years she’d spent on his payroll hadn’t done anything but make her more cynical. Taunting the Duke wasn’t part of her normal mode of operations, but Ketel knew that behind the cynicism and weariness, his hound had a sharp mind too. She couldn’t know exactly what the Duke was up to, Ketel was farther in the loop than she was and he had no idea what the Duke’s plan was (and no desire to find out either). Even the mystery of it though looked like it was enough to tell her something was wrong.

With a mental shrug, Ketel pushed those thoughts aside. So long as whatever mess Dae dropped herself into didn’t splash onto him, Ketel didn’t care how wrong things were or what the Duke or his underling did to each other.

“That’s very cute,” he said. “Now explain this body, or get out of my office.”

“Remember how I told you our vampire informant was going to be attacked?” Dae asked.

“Yes, and I told you no one was going to bother with a witness who’d already given their testimony,” Ketel said.

“I packed him up on a carriage to the Queen’s Guard,” Dae said.

“Which I did not authorize,” Ketel said. “We could have protected him here.”

“You didn’t protect one Inchesso prince, why would you think you could protect another?” Dae asked.

“Wait, the vampire was a prince?” Ketel said.

“Former,” Dae said. “His noble house was wiped out. Happened when he was a kid.”

“How’d he get away?” Ketel asked.

“He didn’t,” Dae said. “He was already in Gallagrin. Part of the same page-transfer program that Lorenzo was working under.”

“If he’s the heir though, why didn’t someone come and bump him off,” Ketel asked.

“He’s not the heir,” Dae said. “I looked in his history while we were grilling him. Before his family fell, his mother officially disowned him. Stripped him of name, rank, everything.”

“Isn’t that awful for him,” Ketel said. “We still could have protected him.”

“Sure,” Dae said.

The presence of a dead body on his desk helped Ketel keep his anger in check. He’d watched Dae train and from the scores she earned on the yearly tests he knew his Pact was widely more powerful than hers. Or at least that’s what the numbers said.

“Anyways, I rode with our witness,” Dae said.

“And I didn’t authorize that either,” Ketel said.

“Dock my pay,” Dae said.

“You’re getting billed for cleaning up my office too,” Ketel said.

“Can I burn it down then? Dae asked. “Always wanted to light this place up.”

“Get on with the story,” Ketel said. He pondered the value of a good fire. There were lots of documents in room that should never see the light of day. Some that he collected a nice weekly revenue from by keeping them secret and others that would land him in a noose alongside a bunch of important people. Since having leverage on important people was a key tactic in avoiding the hangman’s noose, Ketel decided against “blazing inferno” as a method of reclaiming his office space.

“We weren’t far outside of Nath when someone, this guy here probably, dropped a tree on us,” Dae said.

“That could just be your winning personality you know,” Ketel said. “Plenty of times I’ve wanted to drop a tree on you. Like now for example.”

“You wouldn’t use a tree,” Dae said. “Trees can miss. You’d use poison.”

“For you I’d consider doing both,” Ketel said. “You’re special like that after all.”

“Not as special as our witness then I guess,” Dae said.

“They did more than just drop a tree on you I take it?” Ketel asked.

“This guy had a bunch of local muscle with him,” Dae said.

“The locals still alive?” Ketel asked.

“They were when I left them,” Dae said. “But the woods aren’t exactly safe at night.”

Ketel closed his eyes and sighed. The murder investigation was supposed to be a simple matter. Send in the least fixed up person on his payroll, she’d identify the body, put two and two together that the Inchesso Prince’s friends were behind the murder and the Queen would be properly warned by someone she trusted. What wasn’t supposed to happen was Kor turning the incident into her own private war and stirring up trouble with the local leg breakers. That was going to cost Ketel money, and Sendrick Ketel hated anything that was going to deprive him of his expected and required cash flow.

“Lorban,” he shouted.

“I already sent him to tell the Slaughter Pigs to pick up their guys,” Dae said. “If they’re not all drunk already they might even get there before the wolves do.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely off this case,” Ketel said.

“Kael’s going to be heartbroken,” Dae said. “Or did he already come to an arrangement with you?”

“Your partner has the good sense to treat this case as it deserves to be treated,” Ketel said.

“He wants to drop it like it’s a lava rock,” Dae said.

“I stand by what I said. And I still want to know how this guy got like this!”

“Well, after they dropped the tree on us, we had a bit of a disagreement,” Dae said.

“A disagreement? Did he bring the wrong sort of tea and biscuits?” Ketel asked.

“No, just the wrong sort of weapons,” Dae said. “They were packing enchanted arrows.”

“Enchanted arrows?” Ketel said. “That’s out of the Slaughter Pig’s league. If they had that much coin they’d go bother some place nicer than here.”

“I figure it was special supplies for this job,” Dae said. “They were hunting a vampire after all.”

She reached in her back pocket and tossed a pair of broken arrows on top of the corpse.

“See anything interesting about those?” she asked.

Ketel didn’t want to see anything about them at all. Every little detail that he was forced to acknowledge was a thread in the noose he knew he’d someday hang from.

“Look like regular bird stickers to me,” Ketel said.

“Think so?” Dae said. She picked up one of the broken shafts and plunged the arrow into the corpse. White hot fire flared from the wound and a truly foul smoke poured out.

“Uh-hugh”, Ketel struggled to get to his window before he wretched. Dae made it as far as his waste basket, which was more considerate of her than he’d expected.

“Ok, that was not my best idea ever,” Dae said once she stopped heaving. “You see my point though.”

“I see that you’re a hellsborn menace is what I see,” Ketel said.

“Never claimed I wasn’t, but leaving that aside, magic arrows, right?” Dae asked.

“Fine, yes, the arrows were magic,” Ketel said. “What does that have to do with this guy?”

“He was the only one who wasn’t a local,” Dae said. “And he had Pact armor.”

“Pact armor? What is he?” Ketel asked.

“An Infiltrator? A Shadowform?” Dae said. “I don’t know. I never served in Inchesso, and they’re pretty secretive about their pacts there.”

“You beat him?” Ketel asked.

“His armor was pretty thin,” Dae said.

“You might be right then,” Ketel said. “Maybe an Infiltrator type. But those are rare. Why send one here? And for a worthless lump like that vampire?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same things,” Dae said. “Don’t think I like the answers I can come up with either.”

“I don’t like any of this,” Ketel said.

“This last part’s not any better,” Dae said. “After I had him down and broken out of his armor he managed to swallow a pill that did what you see here.”

“He killed himself like this?” Ketel asked. “That doesn’t make sense. They’ve got about three hundred poisons in Inchesso that kill you nice and peacefully. There’s one that literally kills you with happiness. Why would anyone take one that left them looking like this?”

“The white scars you see were just the aftermath too,” Dae said. “However that pill killed him, it hurt, a lot. Took maybe ten seconds to work and he was beyond screaming the entire time.”

“Surprised you didn’t kill him yourself then,” Ketel said.

“I probably should have,” Dae said. “It was bad enough though that I wasn’t sure I knew what I was seeing.”

“Well you don’t have to worry about seeing this at all anymore. Like I said, you’re off the case now. The Duke’s having the trading Consortium brought in and he’ll handle the questioning.”

“Right. That sounds like it’ll turn out well.” Dae said. “Guess I should just head back home then for a nice quiet evening.”

Dae smiled at him as she left and Ketel shook his head. Nothing good ever came of Dae smiling.

Ketel started to make a mental checklist. He needed someone to get the corpse off his desk, he needed someone to send word to the Duke about what had transpired and he needed someone to keep an eye on Dae who was very definitely not going home and very definitely not going to leave the case alone.

When Teo was arrested he assumed he was going to spend the rest of his life, painful and short though it might be, in one of the Dawn March’s dungeons. When he was loaded into an unlocked and rather comfortable wagon he was puzzled, up till the moment that he understood he’d been used as bait. From there he presumed the trip to the dark and dreary dungeon was going to resume as scheduled.

“This is not at all what I expected a prison to look like,” Teo stared at the soaring, white stone ceilings and gem bright, rainbow windows of the palace they stood in.

Officer Sol had driven their carriage into a wide underground passage inside the capital city’s third wall. That matched Teo’s original expectations, though after their conversation, the vampire had thought Sol was not particularly interested in upholding the Dawn March’s more questionable mandates like locking up an innocent man. Their carriage had passed through numerous checkpoints though, and, with each one, Teo heard an additional lock clicking shut on the remainder of his life.

When the carriage finally came to a halt, Teo expected to find himself in the bowels of a fortress with rusty locks and mold growing everywhere. A busy transit hub was something he couldn’t have expected or imagined under the circumstance, so the presence of other carriages and carts and a whole marketplace of commercial trade goods struck him much the same as an invading army would have.

Sol had eventually talked the vampire out of the carriage, assuring Teo that he hadn’t driven them to Pandemonium’s shores.

From the Underhub, the two ascended through an even more tightly guarded series of checkpoints until they were standing in a reception room that was more elegantly appointed than any estate Teo had ever seen while in on the Telli’s service. Everything in the room was done in fine satins, or polished gems, or rich, dark woods with gold and silver accents providing a warmth and light that left Teo feeling both relaxed and in awe at the same time.

“You have some funny ideas of what ‘protective custody’ entails vampire,” Sol said. “Just wait here for a bit. I’ll get our presence announced and we can see about getting you turned over to the Queen’s Guards.”

“I’m sorry, but what are you saying?” Teo asked. “The Queen’s Guards are going to arrest me? I’m afraid I’m really not that important.”

“Oh you poor, poor wretch,” Sol said. “If you didn’t want to be that important, you should never have let the Captain get her hands on you.”

“Believe me I wish that could have been avoided,” Teo said.

“No use crying about it now,” Sol said. “I’ll just go and tell the proper folks what’s up. I expect it will take a while. These sorts of people always move slow. If you don’t hear from me in five or six hours, I’m sure someone will be by with lunch. Shouldn’t take much more than a day to get this sorted out though so you probably won’t need a billet for the night.”

And with that Teo’s driver was gone, leaving him alone in a room that could have hosted breakfast for twenty with room left over for the servants to pass unnoticed. Teo settled in for a long wait, perplexed at the turn of events that led him from lying  bleeding and broken in an alley to sitting on a couch that was so comfortably cushioned he wasn’t sure he was capable of leaving its embrace. He didn’t have a great deal of time to consider his situation however as barely a half hour later a page arrived in the room.

“You are summoned to attend an audience with the Her Majesty,” the page said. “Please follow me.”

“Did you saw Her Majesty?” Teo asked. “As in Her Majesty the Queen?”

“Yes, sir,” the page said. She held her position at the door with great patience. Teo remembered serving similar duties. There was always the tension between the desire to fulfill your appointed duty as quickly as possible and the desire to avoid annoying someone who could be an honored guest.

Teo rose from the couch, regretting the departure from the lazy stupor he’d sunk into, and nodded to the page.

“Thank you, please show me where to go,” he said. In the back of his mind, his thoughts spun and scrambled and shattered apart on each other trying to answer the question of why he could be meeting with the Queen, of all people in the realm. The temptation to ask the page what was going on was strong, the young girl was the only source of information he had, but he knew from experience that she almost certainly knew nothing of his situation and that even if she did there was no method short of mind control that would pry the information out of her unless she’d been instructed to tell him.

The two walked in silence, down Royal hallways, up Royal staircases and through Royal doorways, each of which managed to convey its exalted status in the materials they were composed of, the architectural styles applied to them and the fact that there were more guards per square foot than Teo could remember seeing in most lending houses.

With his mind caught trying to absorb the whirlwind of spectacles that surrounded him, Teo barely noticed when they arrived at their destination.

“Presenting Teolicianza Si’Nostrum,” the Queen’s seneschal said as Teo was led into the room.

“We would have privacy with this witness,” the Queen said and to Teo’s horror, everyone else in the receiving room filed out in an orderly fashion, including Sol who had apparently been presenting Teo’s case to the Queen moments earlier.

Standing before the sovereign of his adopted realm, Teo could summon only two thoughts to mind. First that it was crucially important with royalty to address them at all times in a manner befitting their station and second that he had never once received training in the proper etiquette for dealing with the supreme ruler of the Gallagrin.

“You have rather vital information,” the Queen said, gesturing for Teo to come forward and take a seat at one of the testimonial desks before her. “Say what brings you to my court today.”

“My apologies your Majesty. I was not aware…” Teo said, struggling to think of where to begin his tale and what the Queen might consider to be vital information. He eased into the cushioned chair which put him directly in front of the Queen and glanced around looking for some obvious clue as to where to start explaining his situation.

“You weren’t aware that you were being sent to us?” the Queen said, guessing at the probable cause of Teo’s flustered speech.

“Regrettably, no,” Tea said. “I would have endeavored to present a more appropriate semblance both in appearance and manner.”

“Neither your appearance nor your manner displeases us.” the Queen said. “Your tale grows more intriguing each moment though. What game is she playing I wonder?”

“I am not at all sure of the games others may be engaged in Your Majesty,” Teo said. “I suspect my role is only a minor one.”

“On such have kingdoms been won and lost,” the Queen said. “Please begin your tale wherever you would like, we would hear all of it and will have questions on many of the details, if our intuition is correct.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Teo said and began to recount his story, starting from his arrest by Officer Kor and working largely backwards in time from there.

The Queen listened intently to his story, prodding him gently for additional information on areas he was tempted to skip over. Her questions were broadly focused, but Teo had the sense that there was a central figure the Queen was trying to discern through his eyes. At first he thought she was interested in hedging in Duke Telli to determine his connection to the matter but the longer they spoke the more her questions tended towards oblique inquiries as to Officer Kor’s status. Despite not having a great deal of insight into the strange woman’s psyche or situation, Teo grew increasingly comfortable speaking about his experiences. The Queen was warm and considerate and seemed genuinely grateful to have a new source of information on her kingdom.

Then they came to the news of the murder at Castle Nath.

The Queen’s consideration and gratitude remained but when she learned the name of the boy who’d been slain, a name Teo had only overhead while he was being questioned by the Dawn March, all of the warmth drained from her features.

“Are you certain of what you heard?” she asked him. “Has Lorenzo truly been murdered?”

“I will stand by my recollection of what the Dawn March officers stated,” Teo said. “Whether they were speaking the truth however is beyond my capacity to ascertain.”

The Queen rang a small bell that sat beside her throne, and a moment later the page who led Teo to the receiving room entered through a small side door.

“Your Majesty?” the page asked and bowed low in her sovereign’s presence.

“Send a missive to Telli,” the Queen said. “He is to report here, to me, today, with any information he has concerning any members of my Page Corp who were on holiday in Nath.”

“At once Your Majesty,” the page said and left the room so quickly Teo thought she’d simply vanished.

“Please, continue your tale,” the Queen said. Coming from royalty it was a command, not a request, but the Queen’s demeanor left Teo with the sense that it was a command he could have asked permission to refuse if he had good reason.

“My words feel as though they are all a jumble,” Teo said. “I do not know for sure if this is connected, but I would find it straining coincidence if it was not; we, Officer Sol and I, were accosted on the journey here. Someone felled a tree in front of us and attacked with enchanted arrows at the very least.”

“Yet you appear safe from harm,” the Queen said. “Is that why you appear so famished?”

“No, I was not the one who fought off the attackers,” Teo said. “Officer Kor had ridden in secret on the top of our carriage. When we were ambushed she revealed herself and took the fight to the attackers.”

“And what became of her?” the Queen asked.

“I’m not certain,” Teo said. “Officer Sol seemed to feel she was in no danger and she’d ordered him to continue on in the event of an emergency, so he drove us off before the battle was decided.”

“She’s gone back to Nath,” the Queen said, her voice softer than it had been.

“There is still a great deal of uncertainty regarding the murder from what I gather,” Teo said. “And I don’t believe Officer Kor has a great deal of faith or trust in the other members of her barracks.”

“That is a view which is perhaps warranted,” the Queen said.

“I didn’t mean to cast aspersions on any of your agents, Your Majesty,” Teo said.

“Perhaps you should,” the Queen said. “We know well the effect our father’s reign had on this kingdom. And our grandfather’s before that and our great grandmother’s before them both. Even our own ascension to the throne has left us with a variety of perilous issues to contend with.”

“I’ve heard that you’ve made great strides in the last six years though,” Teo said, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

“For each piece of the house which is rebuilt, two more threaten to crumble,” the Queen said. “There was no kindness between our father and ourself but perhaps we can extend him the mercy of acknowledging how the crown can drive one to madness.”

“If I may do anything to help lighten that burden…” Teo said.

“Your words today have revealed a heavy load that we must carry,” the Queen said. “But it appears to be a load we were destined to carry regardless of whether we were aware of it or not.”

“Which of my words have given offense?” Teo asked.

“No offense has been given, but we see the pattern now,” the Quee said. “Someone is moving against us. Someone resourceful, someone clever and someone who is determined to take my throne and, quite probably, my life.”

Queen Alari Gallagrin woke, as she did most days, in solitude. The Royal Bedchamber was located in the highest spire of castle, its doors and windows braced to prevent even the slightest sound from escaping the sanctuary the room provided. The quiet was a gift from the chambers previous occupant, the departed and unmourned King Sathe. Alari had removed every other trace of the Butcher King from the room when she assumed the throne, but had found the shutters as valuable for keeping sound out as her father had found them for keeping sounds in.

For the four thousandth time, the Queen’s hand drifted to other side of the airy mattress and found only the chill of empty sheets where once there had been comfort and warmth in even the darkest of nights. She couldn’t return to those days, no matter how many times her dreams lured her to them, too much had changed over the years of her reign. There had been too many prices to pay, and too many losses she had failed to account for.

Beside her bed, the cradle stood as it had for over a year. Unused, unneeded. A remembrance that Alari wanted no reminder of. Her staff, the ones who had known her from when she was a girl, the ones she trusted, had asked, in their gentle, respectful fashion, if they could remove the simple piece of furniture until it was needed again?

She hadn’t let them. It brought a fresh wave of pain to see the cradle there each morning, but she could bear the pain, at least more so than she could bear the bone deep certainty that she would never have need of it again. She was too damaged, in too many ways, for that dream to ever become real.

Melancholy ate away at her, like the sea crashing in waves on the beach of her mind. The beach pushed back each small surge of tide but not without piece of it eroding away one pebble at a time. As storm tossed as she felt though, Alari nonetheless pushed herself out her bed and began her morning routine.

For the other royals in the Blessed Realms, or any noble in her kingdom, the day would start much the same; upon waking they would call for their servants to begin preparing both attire and the morning’s repast. Alari’s appetite was a fickle thing though and until she was ready to greet the world she had no need for her royal regalia.

So she wrote.

The Queen’s Diary was ensorcelled with a killing curse, but, even still, she encrypted the thoughts that she recorded within its pages in code. Most of her missives were simple letters to her future self. Observations she wanted to record for later consideration, lists of problems to be addressed rather than forgotten and, occasionally, dreams that stood out with particular clarity.

As she took quill and ink to the next page of her diary, Alari’s thoughts shifted away from her melancholy and to the melange of dream and memory that she’d walked in before opening her eyes.

She was ten once more and the castle was the giant endless labyrinth that she’d seen it as then. Outside the walls of the castle, the world was dark and horrible, but inside the castle there was room for adventure and exploration.

“We should raid the armory!” the child Alari had said. The excitement that accompanied those words echoing down across almost two decades.

“What for?” her handmaid asked, hoisting a wooden dowel onto her shoulders. As makeshift swords went, the dowel had been adequate in real life, but in Alari’s dream memory it shrunk to the width of her handmaid’s pinky finger.

“If I am to be the Queen, my knight must be properly outfitted!” child Alari said. The adult Alari, who was watching the dream play out as little more than an observer still felt her childish awe at the idea of being Queen someday.

In child Alari’s mind, her reign would begin on her twentieth birthday, once she’d had the time to learn everything that a Queen needed to know. She would be so smart by then that everyone would listen to her and do what she said because she’d be able to convince them with just the right words.

Alari’s journal writing stopped there. Even guarded by a killing curse and written in code, it was difficult to record that she’d ever been as naive as her dream had shown she was.

As a gift to her future self though, she returned her quill to the page. She’d already paid the price for her naivety many times over, hiding it from herself wasn’t going to make it any easier to avoid mistakes like that in the future.

“If I’m your knight, shouldn’t I be keeping you out of danger?” her handmaid asked Alari.

“Won’t you have an easier time doing that if you have a proper weapon and armor?” child Alari said. Her handmaid thought about that and brightened at the idea.

“You’re going to be the best Queen ever,” she said.

Child Alari clung to those words so tightly that they survived in her memory long past the time when the Queen’s experience proved them untrue.

Down wildly distorted dream corridors which never existed in the real palace, the two girls raced. Memory and dream splashed against each other and Alari saw visions from years later. The castle under siege. An older version of herself racing up the spire instead of down, ascending to her throne and the fatal destiny that stood between her and it. She almost lost herself in that memory, its gravity warping the dream with the same force that it warped her soul. Ahead though, almost lost in the distance, she saw her handmaid beckoning from the doorway to the castle’s treasure trove.

The memory of her days of childish foolishness offered little hope of earning wisdom, where recalling her most desperate struggle might bring Alari the insights she needed to ensure that it was never repeated. Regardless, she chose to follow her handmaid. She re-fought her battles constantly in her mind, if for one moment she could see her long lost friend again, even knowing it was only in a dream, the choice was easy for the Queen to make.

The treasure room appeared much as it had in reality. No gems or gold or finely crafted objects. Those were secreted elsewhere and neither Alari nor her handmaid had any interest in them. For the two girls, the true treasures were the ones that offered tangible power; steel plated mail, enchanted swords that thrummed with the power contained within them, and far out of their reach, behind wards they couldn’t hope to dismantle, the sigil stones needed to work a Pact binding ritual.

“This one looks about the right size for me,” the handmaid said, hoisting a sword as long as she was tall up to inspect it.

“Can you even swing that?” Alari asked.

“Of course I can,” her handmaid said, making the attempt and managing to not quite topple over in the process.

“Now, you’re really are my knight!” Alari said, delighted at the show of prowess and strength.

“I will protect you from all dangers, my lady! If anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll chop their head clean off!” her handmaid said, bowing to the child-would-be-Queen. The memory of that pledge stung Alari. She had a whole kingdom to defend her, regular troops by the legion, and full Pact Knights, and the mantle of the Royal Regalia she had wrested along with the crown, but she didn’t feel even a thimble full as safe with all of that as she had when she believed her handmaid’s vow.

“Then I name you here and now, my first and truest Knight,” child Alari said.

“Aren’t you supposed to wait till I’ve done some deed of valor to do that?” the handmaid asked.

“If you’re willing to be my Knight, then that’s the bravest thing I can think of anyone doing,” Alari said.

The dream shifted, consumed by the memory of her father that had tinged her words with fear even then. King Sathe had never posed a direct danger to his daughter, but even as a child she could see the madness that held him in its grip, and she knew his rule couldn’t last forever.

In her diary, there were already hundreds of pages that carried Alari’s thoughts about her father so she stopped at adding more. She’d woken from the dream at that point anyways so some part of her mind was willing to let those ghosts rest for the day.

Fully awake, if not fully pleased to be so, she finally signaled for her servants to enter and begin preparing her for the day.

An hour later she joined her husband, Consort-King Halrek, for the first of the day’s many sessions with their supporting noble lords.

“You look well this morning,” Halrek said, glancing up from a budgetary map of the Duchy of Tel.

“It’s kind of you to say so,” Alari said. “Has there been any word from the northern provinces?”

“Not yet,” Halrek said. “The rebuilding there should be proceeding according to schedule, but with the gala…”

The Royal Unification Celebration had been Alari’s idea originally and she still acted as one of its chief sponsors. The civil war that placed her on the throne had left huge rifts in the society of Gallagrin. One day of celebration a year couldn’t undo the damage that had been done, not alone at any rate, but as part of an overall campaign of reintegration she could see some positive changes coming out of it.

As with many of her youthful ideas though, Alari had been surprised at the reception her plans for healing the country’s wounds had garnered. She thought her enemies in the civil war, her father’s supporters, would be the ones to spurn her offers of peace and reconciliation. Many of them had leapt at the chance to return to the good graces of the monarchs in power though. By contrast, the people who had sided with her in the war were the ones who were the most disdainful and opposed to the process, citing the heavy rebuilding costs that still remained and the need for the royalty to remember those who supported them, Alari found that her closest allies were in many cases her strongest opposition as well.

“We should dispatch envoys to the north,” Alari said. “If their couriers are being mislaid, we might need to increase the Inward Patrols.”

“Our borders are still a concern,” Halrek said. “North, East and West, we are beset by neighbors who don’t look at us with a friendly eye.”

“At least there is Paxmer that we may rely on,” Alari said. Her husband having once been a prince of Paxmer, relations between the two countries were at the most peaceful that they had ever been, this despite the damage Paxmer wrought on Gallagrin during the latter’s civil war.

“Yes, we could draw down our forces on the southern border to reinforce the north, but that’s a long march and places the troops out of use for quite some time,” Halrek said.

“We can discuss that with the southern lords today then,” Alari said, already able to picture the bickering that was likely to ensue at the suggestion that royal troops would be redeployed from the locations where they were currently spending their hard earned gold.

“Your Majesty, a special courier has arrived from Nath for you,” one of the royal pages said to Alari.

“From Nath?” she blinked in surprise. She had seen Duke Telli at the gala a few nights previously and he hadn’t mentioned anything of significant importance that was due to occur within his domain. “Escort the courier into my receiving room.”

Alari left Halrek to attend to the beginning of the meeting. Nothing of merit would be discussed for the first half hour anyways so she felt in no rush to rejoin it. A special courier for her though was unusual enough to capture her interest.

When she arrived at the receiving room, the Queen found her guest already waiting before the throne.

“Your Majesty, may I present Sergeant Sol Korshin of the Dawn March,” the Queen’s seneschal  said.

“Please rise Sergeant Korshin and state your business,” Alari said.

“I’ve been sent to convey a vampire into your care and keeping,” Sol said.

“I am not in the habit of collecting sentient beings,” Alari said, a chill running through her at even the hint that she might continue a family tradition. “Who sent you.”

“Officer Daelynne Kor of the Dawn March Nath Barracks,” Sol said.

The name was strange in Alari’s ears but within a breath she placed who Sol represented.

“Did she send a message with the vampire?” Alari asked, grateful that she was already sitting down.

“Yes, she said if you hadn’t yet heard of a reason to be concerned about Nath, then you should question the vampire immediately,” Sol said. “She also wanted me to say that she’s ready to chop off a few heads if you ask her to, but I think that’s just her ruthless streak showing through.”

Alari forced herself to breath, and to suppress the smile that wanted to brighten her face. The vampire bore horrible news, she had no doubt about that, but the short message that accompanied him let her know that she wasn’t facing it alone.