“Upset? My dear compatriot, why would you imagine I would be in any manner discommoded by our recent dealings? The corpses? Well, yes, I agree they make a daring and perhaps questionable choice for decor, but really what am I known for if not my questionable decisions. But you aren’t here to discuss my aesthetic sense. We have negotiations to attend to, perhaps over a nice cup of tea?”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame speaking to Malbrin Grayfall, Middlerun Commerce Chief for House Grayfall

I grew up in a forest. Despite Grammy’s best efforts, there’s a lot I don’t know. Who, what, or even why someone might be the ‘Empresses Last Guard’ was firmly on that list and, from glancing around at the rest of the housemate’s I could see I was far from alone.

“The who?” Ilyan asked, having apparently the smallest barrier of social anxiety of any of us to overcome.

“The Empresses Last Guard?” the slim boy said, questioning not who they were but how we might have misheard Perfect Statue Girl, since clearly everyone must know exactly what they were talking about.

Five faces full of blank stares argued otherwise.

“We took down the Madness Stag at Fort Bertrand,” Perfect Statue Girl said.

I was familiar with neither a Madness Stag (though from context it was probably a Reaving Beast) nor Fort Bertrand (though again context suggested it was one of the border forts at the edge of the Empire). That looked to be about all that any of the others knew too.

“We saved Yellow Basin from being bought out by House Lightstone?” the slim boy said.

I was going to guess that Yellow Basin was a town, since it seemed like a weird name for a person, but it was possible that it was one of the mercantile companies instead. Fortunately Narla was familiar with that one.

“Oh yeah, I heard there was some deal that fell through there,” she said. “Wasn’t that because the mines got flooded though?”

“Yeah! That’s how we saved the town!” one of the other Last Guards said. I hadn’t been paying too much attention to him because Perfect Statue Girl and Slim Boy were sort of hard to ignore but once he got my attention I was left wondering how I hadn’t registered him as more of a threat.

Narla is large. Tall. Heavy. Wide. She had ‘big’ covered all the observable dimensions. Muscle Boy didn’t quite measure up to her, but he made a good enough try at it that in another other company I might have tagged him as Mountain Lad or something similar. 

He smelled too friendly though.

And his expression was so open and cheerful that I felt a physical revulsion to it. Like just looking at him was going to give me a candy induced stomachache.

“Wasn’t mining what they did there though?” Narla asked.

“Not anymore!” Muscle Boy said. “Now they can do other things.”

I glanced up at Mellina who met my gaze with a look which said we were in perfect agreement on exactly the sort of idiots we’d stumbled across.

Perfect Statue Girl seemed to be aware of that too however.

“Yellow Basin was trying to transition away from mining because they’d dug out all the good ore and only had shadow ores left to mine, which is incredibly dangerous and tends to invite around four times as many Reaving Storm as normal to an area,” she explained. “Thanks to the flooding, they have acres of land where Marsh Feylings are growing naturally.”

“House Grayfall used to have fairly solid control over that market,” Yarrin said and gave them a small nod, “Nicely done.”

“So now that you know who we are, will you let us help you?” Slim Boy said.

“We don’t,” Mellina said. When Slim Boy showed he wasn’t following her simple point, she elaborated. “We don’t know who you are. What are your names? Who are you sponsored by?”

“Ah, yes, I suppose that would allay some of your concerns,” Slim Boy said, and glanced to the others. “I am Xandir Greendell, sponsored by House Greendell.”

“Ula Zarn, sponsored by House Farsail,” Perfect Statue Girl said. I tried to remember if Farsail had spoken for anyone this year, but I was fairly sure they hadn’t.

“Ernek Bloombomb,” Muscle Boy said. “Sponsored by House Greendell too.”

“Vena and Hemaphora Nightshade,” the last two, twin girls about my size and maybe a couple of years younger, introduced themselves speaking in the sort of perfect unison that wasn’t existentially creepy at all. “Not sponsored.”

“Uh, what?” I was glad Narla had asked that since as a wolf pup I currently lacked the vocal cords to do so (I could have made some but, meh, I was tired). 

“We’re not cadets,” Vena (I think) said.

“We just like to help out.” Hemaphora said.

I’m a terrifying scary monster. There were several students who were going to be spending the night in the infirmary and a couple squads of guards who were probably going to be fine only because they had easy access to significant magical healing. I’m not supposed to feel shivers of fear dance down my spine but the idea of Vena and Hemaphora ‘helping’ left me wanting to bolt out of Mellina’s arms and find nearest den I could collapse onto myself.

Fortunately I was much too tired to follow any of my nonsense instincts like that and so I settled for snuggling closer to her. This was not my problem. I was just a tiny little wolf pup.

I tried repeating that a dozen times but I was too tired to even convince myself.

“And how can you help us?” Mellina asked.

“Thanks to the spells you wove, and her transformations,” Ula pointed at me, “no one knows who you are, but they will be able to follow you to where you go next. Come with us and we can take you to a cleansing circle where Vena and Hem can ground out your trail.”

“Yeah, then no one will know who did it!” Ernek said.

“You will,” Mellina said. 

I didn’t know if anyone else heard the undercurrent of ‘and that’s something I may have to fix’.

“No one who means you harm,” Ula said, apparently being bright enough to pick up on Mellina’s unvoiced threat.

“Why?” Mellina asked, and then, added, “Why help us? What you’re doing isn’t safe and the Houses will not be gentle if they discover you through us.”

“We each have our reasons,” Xandir said. “Your friend there beat us to something we’ve been working up plans to do for months now though and could save us a trip we’d really rather not make into the Research Quarter if she’s willing to share what she found in there.”

Mellina glanced down to check in with me, and I gave her a small nod. I had no problem with sharing info in exchange for the safety of my housemates. I hadn’t found what I wanted but I’d seen a bunch of things that were probably as unsavory as they appeared, any one of which might be what the Last Guards were looking for. 

They were offering a good deal but part of me wanted to send the others away and wait to see who would be stupid enough to try coming after me. I didn’t do that though because I knew I’d been lucky, well supported, and that striking from ambush had played to my strengths. Anyone who came hunting for me would be the ones doing ambushing while I tried to maintain the illusion that I was Katrina Riverbond, actual human girl, with no Mellina for cloaking spells or other support. That was a tall enough stack of disadvantages that I knew the inevitable fight would either end with me a discorporated pile of ashes or locked in a dungeon with magical suppression cuffs around my arms, legs, and throat again.

“Lead on,” Mellina said after a quick glance towards the others.

Shadows wrapped us up and I’d sufficiently exhausted my ability to care that their grip felt almost comforting.

Except Vena and Hemaphora were wrapped in the same shadows and could still see me. 

I shivered and forced myself to look over at them.

They weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary at all. They were just normal girls. 

Hemaphora turned her head to glance at me and smiled with her eyes widening just a bit.

I looked away.

They were not normal.

They smelled…

Uh.

They didn’t.

That’s what was throwing me off.

They didn’t have a scent.

At all.

Not like Doxle’s ability to hide or alter his scent.

They just didn’t have one.

Vena giggled. If she’d meant it to be menacing I probably would have taken off right then and there, even if it meant being reduced to ash by somebody else. Instead she just sounded amused, which wasn’t exactly a relief but at least didn’t escalate things.

Ula led the group of us through the Cadet’s quarters, weaving through abandoned buildings and empty garden areas until we reached a courtyard with stairs which wound down into the ground. Following people into dark holes didn’t rank high on the list of ‘Sensible Actions to Ensure One’s Long Term Survival’, but I’d left sensible behind the day I hadn’t fought to stay with Grammy. 

That the rest of my housemates followed us down into the dark sent a fresh pang of worry through my heart, which apparently wasn’t so tired that it couldn’t still torture me with anxiety.

Why had I fixed the stupid thing again? What the reason was I was sure it wasn’t a good one.

Self-recriminations aside though, we reach the bottom of the stairs and Xandir called forth a half dozen tongues of flame to light the room which waited for us.

It was large than I’d expected, with a ring of columns outside a simple band of gold which had been inlaid into the floor. The golden ring was wide enough that the ten of us could have stood inside it without touching each other unless we stretched out our arms to do so.

“Your friend may want to change back,” Xandir said. “The cleansing magics tend to disrupt active spells, and I gather that being forced through a transformation isn’t particularly pleasant.”

For a regular form shifter I was sure that was true. What he, nor any of the others (except maybe Yarrin?), knew was that I wasn’t under the effects of a transformation spell. I’d changed into a wolf pup with my magic, but I didn’t need magic to maintain the shape. I was a wolf pup as much as I’d been a human girl.

Well, maybe not quite as much. I’d spent so long in my human form that it felt different, more natural, than any other form I took. It was probably just a psychological thing, but it made me hate the idea of transforming back a little less than I would have.

I grumbled anyways, which some of them apparently thought was cute, and wiggled a bit to show Mellina she could put me down.

“You’ll need this,” she said and handed me the bathrobe she’d been carrying for me this whole time.

With bathrobe in mouth (how else was I supposed to carry it), I trotted behind one of the pillars, and switched back to being the daughter of House Riverbond who everyone expected me to be, morphing into the robe so I could skip putting it on separately and being cold for even a moment.

“Oh wow, she’s tiny,” Ernek said when I walked back around to their side of the pillar, which won him a scowl from me.

I was not tiny. I was somewhat smaller than other girls my age because I chose to be.

“Might want to remember that she can turn into a dire wolf pretty much in the blink of an eye,” Xandir said.

“Oh, yeah, right,” Ernek said with a sheepish laugh.

“We should do this sooner than later, right?” I said, ignoring them both and focusing on Ula.

“Yes. This next part isn’t terribly pleasant though, so if you need time to prepare, we can make sure you have it,” Ula said.

Because tonight hadn’t been unpleasant enough.

I sighed and looked to my housemates.

“We’re ready,” Yarrin said. “What do you need us to do?”

Ula drew a sword of glass from thin air.

“Bleed,” she said.

“It is always refreshing to have a calm and reasonable conversation with someone who holds a fundamentally different opinion on the issues which stand between you.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame to the newly runebound ghost of Olthas Lightstone

I should have been afraid of Mellina. I wasn’t, but a part of me was still in awe of the idea that she’d managed to outplay a family of future-seeing seers, even if it had cost her a significant amount of physical pain to do so.

“What had your family wanted of you?” Yarrin asked.

“Marriage, among other things,” Mellina said.

“Let me guess, he was around sixty, smelled like a sewer on his best day, and had been interested in you for the last ten years?” Ilyan said.

“Probably not,” Mellina said. “They hadn’t  selected a spouse for me yet. They wanted to see what my destinies looked like once I completed training as a cadet.”

“Destinies?” Narla asked. “I thought Astrologia didn’t really use foresight spells and people just laughed at them because they used to long ago?”

“They don’t use future viewing magics how most people imagine they do,” Mellina said. “It’s true that efforts to predict the specific shape of the future were finally abandoned more than a century ago, and it was mostly a fringe research subject by then anyways.”

“But they were using those magics against you anyways?” I asked. For all that Mellina seemed open and confident in the small group we were in, I recalled how careful she’d been when we first met, and how quiet she’d been in our interactions with people outside her immediate circle. That sort of behavior could be the result of natural inclinations, but knowing the Great Houses, I suspected it was a response to the kind of trauma only family can inflict.

“I’m not special because of that,” Mellina said. “Your Houses are a collection of families under a broad umbrella of close relations. House Astrologia isn’t concerned about that. It’s broken up into ‘Project Teams’.”

“What sort of projects do they work on?” Narla asked, frowning in entirely well founded suspicion.

“Each team has a different focus,” Mellina said. “In the end though they all have the same goal; acquire or create a caster who can undo the effects of the Great Disjunction.”

“That’s what Astrologia calls the calamity that killed the Empress?” Yarrin asked.

“So they’re trying to save the Empire?” Ilyan asked, his disbelief well warranted.

“No. If Astrologia can complete its Grand Design, there won’t be an Empire anymore. There’ll be a Holy Protectorate under the Divine Aegis of the New Divinites.”

I could hear each of the capital letters in the words she spoke, and caught the echo of a dozen generations of Astrologians who’d pursued their family’s decidedly unholy agenda.

“So they were going to have you marry a god?” Narla asked. I didn’t blame her for being confused, since there were still a lot of missing pieces to Mellina’s story.

“More like give birth to one,” Mellina said. “Or really, give birth to a better caster than I am, who’d then spawn a better caster and so on until, however many generations down the line it took, one of them turned out to be powerful enough to control the broken planes and make a claim to godhood they could successfully back up.”

“It was more than just a bad marriage that you wanted to get away from though?” I said, certain enough not to make it a question, but curious if she’d chose to explain what else her family had in store for her.

“Being part of a ‘Project Team’ means living under a very specific set of restrictions,” Mellina said. “The Team Leader’s visions of the future are more revealing if the lives of the members of the team are shaped to illuminate the possibilities the leader needs to see. There are bindings each team member is expected to accept to help ensure that.”

“Bindings that do what exactly?” I asked, thinking of the ones I’d allowed Doxle to inflict on me.

“The early ones are simple monitoring constraints,” Mellina said. “You can’t lie, or hold any secrets from the Project Team, but you’re still mostly free to act as you wish. That freedom vanishes in stages with each promotion as punishment and then direct control constraints are ‘gifted’ to the Team members who excel at the tasks assigned to them.”

“And if you don’t excel?” Yarrin asked.

“Then you only get the punishment constraints,” Mellina said.

“I’m glad you got out of that,” Narla said. “My family is awful but yours sound like slavers.”

“They see it as an honor and a blessing,” Mellina said.

“On a scale of ‘Won’t Send You Birthday Presents’ to ‘Will Send You Assassins’, how annoyed at you are they going to be for you leaving?” Ilyan asked.

Mellina laughed at that, which broke some of the tension that had been building up in the room.

“Somewhere around ‘Happy to Finally Have Me Out of Their Visions’, I think,” she said. “Some of them might keep in touch, but my immediate Project Team probably won’t speak to me again for the rest of my life, unless I seek them out. That’s when they’d send the assassins.”

She’d adopted a joking tone, but her scent said she was being entirely serious.

Which meant I had a new sister it seemed.

Possibly two of them and two brothers too from the look of things.

I wondered if Grammy would object to adding a few extra rooms to the cottage, or if she’d tell me to build my own. Probably the latter. The old lady who lived in a house in the forest that supported a tiny staff and one replacement grand daughter was not, as it turned out, terribly fond of people. Shocking, I know.

Though, now that I thought of it, Doxle had mentioned something that suggested he knew her already.

I wasn’t sure why that was worrisome, but on recalling it I couldn’t imagine anything good coming from that fact.

“On the upside, that means you’re now free to marry whoever you want, right?” Narla said.

“Which would be no one,” Mellina said.

“Haven’t found the right person yet, or they’re already taken?” Ilyan asked.

“Neither,” Mellina said. “I don’t feel like that about people. I know that makes me weird, but I don’t need someone in my life romantically. I never have.”

“That’s not what makes you weird,” Ilyan said. “Half my extended family hate the relationships they’re in but none of them will ever admit it. You being honest about what you don’t want is something people should give you an award for.”

“I think the award is ‘she won’t get stuck in a miserable, loveless marriage’,” Narla said.

Ilyan pointed a finger at her and nodded his head in agreement. “That’s a good reward.”

“So what is she weird for?” Yarrin asked, an relaxed mischief playing in his eyes.

“Huh?” Ilyan said, not expecting the teasing from Yarrin of all people.

“You said my romantic preferences or the lack thereof weren’t what made me weird,” Mellina said, joining in on Yarrin’s mischief. “That implies something else does.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ilyan said, as though the answer was too obvious to need explanation. “This.” He gestured too all of us. “That we’re all here and not doing what everybody expected of us. No one’s going to understand that, and I’m perfectly happy that they won’t.”

“Does that no one include your sister?” I asked. For no reason at all. Just idle curiosity really.

“Yeah. Maybe. Probably,” Ilyan said. “She’s not going to know what to do with me next time we run into each other,” he paused as a thought occurred to him. “I’m kinda hoping she doesn’t stab me in the heart like she did you, but I’m not sure I’d lay money on it.”

“Why would she…wait, she stabbed Kati in the heart?” Mellina asked.

“Only once,” I said.

“Yeah, and kicked her off a platform like the ones we were fighting on today,” Ilyan said.

“Onto something soft?” Yarrin asked.

“Sure. Granite’s pretty soft, right?” Ilyan said turning to me. From his smile, it was apparently my turn to be drawn into the teasing.

“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds,” I thoroughly and completely lied. “We were fighting a duel over an insult to House Ironbriar’s honor, I think?”

“You think you were fighting a duel?” Mellina said.

“Or you think it was about Ironbriar’s honor?” Narla asked.

“The honor thing,” I said. “Doxle had provoked them I guess?”

“And he didn’t fight the duel why exactly?” Mellina asked.

“It wouldn’t have been fair?” I said, not quite recalling why it had fallen to me to get stabbed. The truth was he and Enika had wanted to see how I and Idrina fought, and the duel had been a convenient pretext to arrange that. We’d all understood that going into it so the rationalization for it hadn’t really stuck with me.

“Well, you survived, so good job there I guess,” Narla said.

“She didn’t just survive. She won,” Ilyan said.

“And Idrina survived too?” Yarrin asked.

“I won on a technicality,” I said. “Idrina set foot outside of the ring by mistake.”

“And then she stabbed you through the heart?” Mellina asked.

“Yeah. Just once though,” I said, as though that made it a perfectly reasonable and minor event.

“You are really good at form shifting aren’t you?” Ilyan asked.

I glanced at Yarrin who had apparently been able to see that I was doing more than simple form shaping, but his expression was clear of any sign of the fact that he knew already the answer to the question.

“It’s the strongest part of my magics,” I said, which was mostly truthful. It was certainly the aspect of the magics available to me which I’d practiced the most and I was more than willing to put myself up against the best form shifters in the Empire if anyone wanted to challenge me on that.

“I’m glad,” Mellina said. “I’d seen a few futures where you won your arena duel but there were far too many to be sure they would be the ones that came to pass and it looked a lot worse for you when I saw it for real.”

“His weapon was weird,” I said. “It did something to my magics. It wasn’t a suppression effect but it felt similar to it. It was like when it hit my my magics got all twisted up.”

“I saw a few of the Cadets had weapons like that,” Narla said.

“Armor too,” Yarrin said. “And you’re not wrong about them twisting magic. I don’t know how they manage it, but those swords are casters in their own right.”

“Casters? But they’re not people?” Ilyan said. “They’re just tools.”

“No, Yarrin’s right. When I was fighting, the gear was casting its own spells on me,” I said. 

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Mellina said. “Objects can be enchanted with magic, but it has to flow through a caster to be set into a material. A magic sword can only express the spell that’s been worked in it, the casting is long since finished at this point.”

“Materials can absorb magic or be warped by it if they’re exposed for long enough though,” Yarrin said.

“That’s still a resting effect,” Mellina said. “Dynamically moving magic requires a sentient mind to form the bridge between the two worlds.”

“Maybe someone was casting through the swords from far away?” Ilyan asked.

“I don’t know how they could, but I guess that could work,” Mellina said.

“Doxle said it was House Lightstone who were trying out the new weapons,” I said and glanced over to Narla.

“Could be,” she said with a shrug. “Lightstone does a lot of experimenting and some of it’s pretty messed up. Swords that scramble your magic sound like the kind of thing they’d pay a ton of gold for, even if they needed a second caster powering it at a distance.”

The conversation moved onto something about the feasibility of having a distant caster channel their magic working through a conduit someone else controlled, but I stopped listening then.

Over the delicious aromas of the food that had been laid out, stronger than the current of wary curiosity which gripped my new housemates, I caught one breath’s worth of a scent I’d been yearning to find for days.

Trina, my first sister, was here.

“When one enters a negotiation, one should always keep in mind what one hopes to gain, and what one cannot afford to lose. It is perhaps useful at the present moment to draw your attention to how very little I have and how uniformly consistent I have proven myself to be when it comes to losing even that. Reflect on that before another word passes your lips and we may all wind up spending a far more enjoyable evening than your previous utterances suggested as the course of action you preferred.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle, punctured by three magical knives and gripping Layton Greyfall by the throat.

People wonder about the afterlife, but there is a heaven and I was soaking in it. To say that the mist women knew their stuff when it came to setting up a bath was a criminal understatement. I would have suggested violence against anyone who disparaged their work, but floating in the tub, wrapped in perfect warmth and an array of aromas which could only be described as transcendentally soothing, everything just melted away. My anger, my strength, the whole terrible day, and week, and month that had led me here.

I could have let myself literally melt, but while a blob floating in the water has no back to have back pains in, it was the feeling of my body absorbing the comfort and releasing the pain it held which brought me the true relief that I was feeling.

Floating there forever seemed like a fine idea until my watery paradise was lost, not due to any change in the bath, but due to me. 

My stomach grumbled. Loudly.

All the other pains I’d been carrying had pushed my hunger to the distant background but as the agonies of the day fell away my ever practical belly informed me that sustaining myself by consuming real food was tremendously easier than subsisting on raw magic.

And also much, much tastier.

The dining room wasn’t close to my bedroom but I’d fixed up my nose and the spiced meats which had been laid out were aromatic enough to call me even given the distance involved.

I reluctantly got out of the tub, toweled off, and tossed on one of the bathrobes that Pastries had left for me. It was too big, but was my own fault. It was sized for a normal woman of my age and I was not that. I could have grown up into a tall and imposing woman like Narla if I’d wanted to, or even a regular sized one like Idrina. I hadn’t wanted to leave behind too much of the form I’d modeled myself on though, and Grammy Duella was short, so I’d only changed my height a little bit over time. I told myself that less height and weight meant more mobility with the musculature I had, but given that I could shift to far more mobile forms with a thought I knew I was mostly fooling myself.

Whether I was too short for it or not though, the bathrobe was still soft and warm and that was enough for me. I followed the scent of the food as much with my stomach as with my nose. It led me down stairs again, though not to the foyer I’d come into but some other room, like the house was made of puzzle blocks and fitted them together in whatever odd order it felt like at any given moment.

A hallway, an observatory, and a trip through a room decorated as an underground hot spring grotto led me, finally, to the dining room.

I was the last one to show up.

I was also the only one who wasn’t dressed in a cadet’s uniform.

Huh.

I probably should have checked for that in my room before I left.

Not particularly caring, I plopped down in the open seat between Mellina and Ilyan. The table had room for twelve but with only five place settings out, it was pretty obvious which chair had been left for me. Narla sat opposite Ilyan which put Yarrin beside her and opposite me.

“Try the Cressnut Salad,” Ilyan said, pointing to one of the three dishes in the center of the table which were in front of me. “It’s better than my Nan makes.”

As far as I could tell he hadn’t noticed or thought to care about my attire, which was oddly refreshing. Mellina meanwhile wore a tiny smile that suggested she found it amusing, and Narla and Yarrin were too busy fork-fighting over a candied yam to show any reaction.

“Did Doxle want to talk about anything important?” Mellina asked, leaving the question open ended enough that I could have avoided answering it without resorting to pure silence.

“He wanted to apologize,” I said. “I guess people are going to be upset that I’m part of House Riverbond?”

“Well, sure,” Narla said. “Riverbond was supposed to be one of the dead Houses. Whoever their senior house was, they’re going to be worried about losing control of all the Riverbond money they’ve been ‘managing’.”

“Riverbond was part of House Lightstone’s coalition when it was active,” Yarrin said. “I’m guessing they don’t talk about the House’s they’ve absorbed though?”

“They don’t talk and I never listened,” Narla said. “I wasn’t what you would call one of their favored daughters.”

“Why?” Ilyan asked. “You’re amazing!”

“I’m strong,” Narla said. “But not how my family, or I guess my ex-family now, wants people to be strong. Also, I don’t exactly look like a ‘Lightstone Princess’, do I?”

Ilyan and Yarrin were both silent for a moment, glanced at each other, and, like they’d been practicing it, said in unison, “Yes, you do!?”

Narla tipped her head to the side and looked annoyed at that.

“Don’t lie. I don’t need it,” she said. “I know who I am. I know what I’ve got and what I don’t.”

“But no, you’re…” Yarrin managed to say, before Mellina cut him off.

“Okay with who she is, like we should all be?” Mellina said. 

It was hard to argue with that, so neither Ilyan nor Yarrin tried, and Narla seemed happy with that outcome. Or at least she smelled satisfied with it and I think it was a nod of thanks she gave Mellina.

“Is that why you left them?” I asked, still puzzled how I’d wound up with not one but four new members of House Riverbond.

“Oh, no, not really. I was used to that,” Narla said. “I mean I’ve wanted to leave my family since I was five I think.”

“It’s not easy though is it?” Mellina asked, solidifying my impression that being part of House Riverbond had been none of their first choices.

“Somedays? Somedays it seemed like it would be, but I could never make that leap,” Narla said.

“Because where would you leap to?” Ilyan said.

“Especially since they’d come looking for you,” Yarrin said.

“You two get it,” Narla said. “It’s supposed to be such a privilege to be part of the one of the Great Houses, and, I can see why. There’s no chance you’ll starve, you’ll always have clothes, a lot of things people worry about won’t be a problem for you. Your House will do everything for you that they need to so they can look good. Which means there’s always the thought that ‘if I leave I’ll have it so much worse’, and I probably would have. What was I going to do at eight years old the first time they sent me to the dungeons to ‘starve the fat off me’?”

I knew I’d heard that correctly, but I very much wanted to believe I hadn’t. It was that or water the seed of another killing rampage and I’d just started feeling better from the last one.

“I think I want to hurt your parents,” Ilyan said.

“You’d be part of a big group there,” Narla said. “They weren’t the only reasons I wanted to leave Lightstone though. The rest of my family was just as terrible.”

“Your brother too I imagine?” Mellina asked.

“He was the worst of them,” Narla said. “I came here today because I knew he’d be one of the Senior Cadets for the third trial. He promised me if I ever called attention to myself and the fact that I was a part of House Lightstone that he would kill me himself for ‘dishonoring our house by claiming that anyone of their breeding could produce a deviant like me’.”

“You wanted him to try that in front of witnesses?” Mellina asked.

“No, I wanted to kill him for all the other things he did to me, and if he faced me in the arena I thought I wouldn’t get in trouble for it,” Narla said.

“House Lightstone sounded like they still wanted you after you won your match though?” I asked.

“Sure. I’m not good enough to be a proper daughter of House Lightstone but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be a useful tool for them. Put me in some armor so no one can see me, and trundle me out to a Reaving Storm and they can claim that they sent a mighty House Lightstone warrior to deal with it, and if I don’t survive then they haven’t lost anything of value.”

She was too far away for me to hug, and I wasn’t sure if she’d even want one, or need the comfort for horrors that had faded to being a part of the background noise of her life.

“They said those exact words, didn’t they?” Mellina asked. Her voice was mild but her scent had the frozen scent of a killing frost.

“They stuck with me,” Narla said. “But I got over it.” She hadn’t. I could smell the pain the memories brought back to her. “And today I got to see a sight that almost made up for all of that.”

“Your grandfather’s face when told him to shut up and go to hell?” Ilyan asked.

“Oh, yeah, that too,” Narla said. “Today was really good day but that wasn’t the high point.”

“You were happy when I killed your brother,” I said. It wasn’t a question, but I was still somewhat surprised, though less so than I’d originally been.

“You are an angel. I cannot tell you how many time I prayed for someone to do what you did. I cried myself to sleep hoping that someone like you would find me,” Narla said. “It didn’t look easy or fun for you, and I’m sorry for that. I wish our fights had been reverse so you could have avoided getting stabbed so much, but I don’t think I could have done what you did.”

“You wouldn’t have gotten stabbed,” I said. “Even if he meant to kill you, I saw how you fight and how he did. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge the punch you threw, or tough enough to survive it.”

Narla wiped away a couple of tears and said, “Thank you. For everything.”

“We all owe you,” Mellina said, placing a hand on my shoulder in support of Narla’s point.

“I literally owe you my life,” Yarrin said.

“Me too,” Ilyan said.

“Wait, how?” I asked. “I get that Yarrin’s family had lethal plans for him, though I’m not clear on why, but I thought Ironbriar loved you?”

“They did,” Ilyan said. “Or at least who they thought I was. I’m not that guy though.”

“And they were going to kill you for that?” Yarrin asked.

“Not directly,” Ilyan said. “Ironbriar’s doesn’t need to stab the family members they hate in the back. They just send them out under-equipped, on impossible missions, and let the Reaving Beasts stab them in the front.”

“How about you?” Narla asked, nodding towards Mellina. “You were friends with Kati before this right? How come you both didn’t go into House Astrologia?”

“Was it because you lost control of your magic during the fight?” Yarrin asked.

“I didn’t,” Mellina said.

“But you flooded the stadium with it?” Ilyan said. “After you got burned.”

“Yeah, that part wasn’t fun,” Mellina said. “But it was the only thing that would convince them to let me go.”

“The greatest comfort we have is each other. That is complicated by the fact that what we most often need comfort from is each other.”

-Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame.

A thousand bitter arguments rose to my lips in response to Doxle saying we needed to talk. He’d had his chance to chastise me over what happened at the arena. I wasn’t going to listen to any criticism after I’d finally started putting myself back together.

Except waiting to criticize me in private was much better than doing so in public.

That did nothing to cool my temper, but it did help me keep my jaw locked closed before I could say anything regrettable.

“Fine,” I said and walked forward to make it look like it was my decision as much as his.

The others were left, understandably, a little uncertain by this but I heard them follow along after me into the bright and clean foyer of Doxle’s house after a moment anyways.

“There’s a bath waiting for you Lady Kati,” Sea Cotton said, gesturing up the curving stairs which ran the length of the foyer and back as it rose to the second floor.

I glanced over at Doxle demanding that he explain what the priorities were here. Was I going to get in trouble right away, or was I going to have to stew in the bath and my own feelings for a while first.

“She’ll be along for that shortly,” Doxle said. “Anyone else who wishes to bathe before dinner is welcome to though.”

Narla and Ilyan gave themselves a few quick sniffs and seemed noncommittal about the idea, but Yarrin and Mellina were already following Sea Cotton so they joined her.

“They’ll get settled in and you can all have dine together,” Doxle said, gesturing towards the door to a study which was adjoined the foyer.

I followed him in, selecting my angry rebuttals to whatever complaints he tried to lodge against me.

“You seem ready to scream at me,” he said. “By all means, please do so.”

I opened my mouth with my best comeback ready. Except it wasn’t for that. 

Doxle collapsed into one of the stuff chairs and gave a tired wave directing me to my choice of the two sitting opposite it.

“I can’t sit in those. I’m a mess,” I said.

“They’re only chairs,” he said. “Rest. Today has cost you enough already.”

I stared at the chairs. I really was a mess. Hiding in a drain pipe after the ugly battle I’d fought had not left me in anything resembling a presentable state. Both chairs looked brand new and the moment I sat down they were going to be ruined.

Doxle noticed my hesitation, waited a moment, and then flicked his fingers towards the chair nearer him which was sucked into a warp in space and replaced by a much older and less puffy chair. It was clean but it showed the stains and repaired rips that only age and use could inflict.

I was going to make a mess of it, but he wasn’t wrong that I needed to sit.

“I won’t keep you long,” he said once I’d collapsed into the older chair. “But you are owed an apology and restitution.”

I tried to respond to that, but words were not…they weren’t a thing I had at that moment.

Angry screams? Sure. More tears? Probably, but I wasn’t going to burden anyone else with those. Coherent words though? I’d left those somewhere outside the magic door it seemed.

“It was not my intention to reveal your lineage or standing publicly, nor to place you in the position you now occupy,” Doxle said. “Should you be planning any revenge, please rest assured that your grandmother will doubtless hear about the outcome of today in short order and Duella will enact a far worse vengeance than anything you have the wherewithal to engineer.”

“Revenge?” I asked. The concept had been floating around in my consciousness since my match, but only in relation to what the senior cadets would do to me or anyone near me.

“The plan, such as it was, had been for Holman to convince House Astrologia to speak for you, and I would then be able to claim your debt to them in trade for one of the several hundred favors they still owe me.”

I could hear his word, and I could understand what they meant. Translating the fact that he was apologizing to me into whatever language my heart spoke though was proving to be fairly difficult. Mostly due to the staggeringly giant wall of disbelief which had hemmed in my thoughts.

“So this isn’t…” I started to say and cut myself off. Why would I want to bring up what I’d done? Any of what I’d done.

“No, it’s not where I’d planned to have you stay tonight,” Doxle said, missing my point deliberately. “I dispatched some couriers to arrange the proper grants of occupancy after the idiots from Lightstone and Greyfall objected to Riverbond’s claim.”

“Why…” I started and again cut myself off. “What happened to the original plan?”

It was a ridiculous question. I was wearing bits of what had happened to the original plan still.

“Lightstone decided to try out some of their new toys,” Doxle said. “Which I also owe you an apology for, and a new set of armor it seems.”

“Wait, no,” I shook my head. He was not making any sense and part of me felt a lot more comfortable with the idea of being in trouble rather than inhabiting whatever strange world it was that I’d stumbled into. “Why do you owe me anything? I…you didn’t have to do any of this. We could be starving out on the green tonight and you still wouldn’t owe me anything.”

“You entered our contract in good faith and I promised in return to teach you what you needed to know,” Doxle said. “Your side of the contract binds you into taking it seriously, but on my side no such binding exists. I am free to do whatever I please, including nothing for you.”

“Exactly!” I said.

“Which is why I owe you an apology and new armor,” Doxle said. “All I have to be worthy of the contract between is the choices I make. You are free to rage, and hate me, and say all the horrible things you can imagine. None of that would lessen your worth. When I fail you though, I allow myself to become someone the one person I have ever loved would turn away from, and even after all these years without them that is the one thing I cannot do.”

“So, you’re taking care of me for someone else?” I asked, not quite following what he was saying beyond the broad generalities of it.

“No. I am taking care of you for you, because it’s what I pledged against your freedom. To do less would make me less.”

“Oh,” I said. He wasn’t hiding his scent. The ash and lightning was shot through will an ancient longing and the pain of a wound which a blade of hope would never allow to mend.

“I would like to speak again later,” Doxle said. “I have some ideas which might help if you need to face one of those odd blades the Lightstone cadet was carrying and there are logistical considerations we’ll need to work through for your new household of fellow cadets. For now though, I’m sure you’d prefer to soak for a bit, change into some fresh clothes, and then enjoy the dinner which awaits you all.”

“I don’t think I have any fresh clothes,” I said.

“Your travel case awaits you in your room,” Doxle said. “It’s doubtless missing some of its contents, but it seemed to be fairly fully still. If you like I can arrange for a tailor to stop by tomorrow to replace or add to your wardrobe.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering how he’d managed to find my travel case. 

“I will likely be out for the rest of the evening,” Doxle said. “Certain parties need to hear a few choice words before their dried up little raisin brains concoct any foolish ideas. If you should have need of me however I’ll leave you with my calling card.”

“Calling card?” I asked.

“Yes,” he conjured a small rectangle of white paperboard and gold ink into his fingers. “Pitch this into a fire and I’ll arrive in a moment or two. Maybe three. It’s a somewhat tricky method of travel but I’m sure I can manage it still.”

“So, not for if I just feel like having a chat,” I said holding onto the card since I didn’t have anything like a clean pocket to put it into.

“For any reason,” he said. “I doubt I’ll enjoy very many of my engagements tonight. At the worst you’ll be giving me a reason to depart early. At best you might save someone’s life, though that is, I must admit, unlikely.”

So he was going somewhere, for me I had to assume, and homicide was on the table if he didn’t like the answers he received.

I finally grasped why he had no criticisms to level against me for my actions in the arena.

“Be careful,” I said as I got up. I wasn’t sure if Advisor’s could be the victims of a homicide and I definitely didn’t want to find out the answer first hand.

He replied with a wry smile and a wave but, tellingly, nothing like a firm commitment.

I could have worried about that but he was, at a minimum, hundreds of years old and had been playing the games the Great Houses got up to for centuries. 

So I trudged up the staircase to the second floor. The layout of this part of the house wasn’t at all familiar but I figured if I walked far enough I’m stumble into something that looked like my room. Instead of a room though, I stumbled into a patch of clear air that smelled of warm pastries and cold milk.

“I’m so sorry,” the unseen Pastries said, supporting me before I could fall over. “I was just coming to see if you were done with Doxxy.”

Behind her the door to my room stood open and I could smell the warm, soapy bath water awaiting me.

“My fault,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”

“Did Doxxy forgot to teach you the spell for that?” the empty air asked.

“It’s been a busy day,” I said and lumbered carefully towards the bath.

“You can leave those clothes out in the main room and I’ll…” she looked at the shredded armor and clothing I was wearing. “Burn them. I will probably burn them, unless you’ve developed a sentimental attachment to…” Closer to the bath, the mist was starting to give her a vague outline so I could see as she gestured to all of me.

“Burning sounds lovely,” I said. “The armor might be a problem there though.”

“Not if I try hard enough,” Pastries said. 

I waited until she closed the door and then stripped down by simply shifting my body directly out of the clothes leaving them in a rumpled pool on the ground as though I’d been disintegrated.

Climbing into the bath nearly knocked me out. 

I’d fixed up my muscles and bones but the experience of being chopped up had lingered inside me nonetheless. In the warm embrace of the water that started to flow away.

The scented shampoos and soaps helped too. As the blood diluted into the warm waters, the worst of the day diluted with it and I felt my fears and hurts and angers diminish too, just a little bit.

They were part of the past. I wasn’t particularly adept at letting go of that, nor did I necessarily want to be. I wanted to remember what had happened. I wanted to remember what I’d done. I wanted to remember a friend I’d only had for a few hours. My body would forget, the wounds would vanish out of sight, but I’d carry my experiences forward as elements that would define me. 

But not the only elements. Or the most important ones.

I had other days worth of experiences to blend them in with, and many more to come to help refine what those experiences would mean to me. 

Out beyond my rooms I heard distant voices reminding me that, though I was far from home and the little family I loved, I was also far from alone.

“We all need a place of refuge in our lives. Somewhere we can go to feel secure, somewhere we can recover the strength the world seems intent on sapping away, somewhere we can arrange to our own tastes. It is for this reason that one should never have children.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame

I had been through a day. My brain was literally still broken. That wasn’t an excuse for anything in my case. I only sort of use my brain.

And that is a line I can never utter aloud or Doxle will never let me hear the end of it.

The point is, when Sea Cotton opened the door and invited us in, I was not ready for it.

Mellina, blessed wonder that she is, was just as silent and still as I was.

Yarrin however, smiled, nodded, and walked in like it was exactly what he’d been expecting.

And that was good enough for Narla and Ilyan, who followed him right on in too.

“Lady Kati?” Sea Cotton asked.

I think my expression may have suggested that I was not okay with this turn of events. I think the others might have noticed that too when Sea Cotton cocked her head to the side.

Why they weren’t more concerned about a woman made out of mist, who they did not know, inviting them into a place that magically hadn’t been there a moment earlier? That doors to people could be anywhere and that was ok was not processing for me.

Yes, Sea Cotton was, from our brief interaction, a kind and generous spirit. Sure, Doxle’s house had doors that were connected to things other than his actual walls. Dinner sounded lovely too. And if Sea Cotton was there, I’d probably even be able to have another bath, which would be fantastic. Because I was covered head to toe in blood.

I should not have run away.

That wasn’t a rational response to the situation.

If anything all it did was place me in more danger. My fellow Cadets, at least the senior ones, were proven killers. In a one-on-one tourney, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to think I could defeat, or at least survive, any of them. After my performance in the arena though, the chance that they’d ambush me one by one was less than zero. If they found me, and I still reeked of blood so I wasn’t exactly hard to track, they would come as a mob. 

Would they bring someone who knew how to kill something like me? Probably?

And there could be doors anywhere.

Even in a blank wall.

I needed Yarrin. He knew how to find hidden doors.

Except if he was with me, they would definitely kill him too.

I am fantastically good at hiding when I choose to, and so I found a spot they wouldn’t track me. Huddled inside a rain water pipe that was only a half a foot in diameter wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it did give me a moment to breathe.

Breathe and reflect on what an idiot I was being.

My brain wasn’t broken. I’d fixed up the rest of the damage I’d taken a while ago. Sure there was more work I could do. I had some ideas for strengthening my collar bones for one thing, since taking swordstrike through them was not fun and they really should be able to do a better job than they’d done.

That wasn’t important though.

What was important was that my brain wasn’t broken. 

I was. 

There wasn’t a mob after me at the moment.

The senior Cadets were killers, but that didn’t mean that more than a few of them cared about the guy I’d killed.

The guy I’d killed.

Yeah.

That was probably what was going on.

Living with Grammy Duella, I’d heard all sorts of accounts of how horrible the Great Houses were. We lived in the woods though. It wasn’t like either of us got into many duels to the death with Great House scions. 

And by not many duels to the death, I meant none.

For me at least.

She never talked about it, but I had the sense Grammy had a more colorful life before retiring to the woods than she ever let on.

I wasn’t sad about killing the Imperial Cadet though.

He’d deserved it and I’d do it again, without hesitation.

In fact if I had a chance I’d do it sooner.

I could have made the leap into the arena while Kelthas was still fighting.

It had been obvious how that fight was going to go.

He couldn’t have won it.

He wasn’t a threat to the Imperial Cadet at all.

He’d been helpless at the end and no one had helped him.

I heard some familiar voices speaking in a low whisper as they walked past my hiding tube. They weren’t going to think to look for me here. No human body was even vaguely capable of fitting into a spot like this.

Their voices and steps faded away without a pause.

Except for one.

The last remaining was quiet and still, but their breathing was impossible to miss. For me. I caught their scent too, but in the form I’m glooped myself into I’d forgone a lot of human elements like a nose, so all I picked up was who was waiting for me.

“You can take your time,” Yarrin said. “I’ll bring the others back to the dorms in about fifteen minutes. If you’re not back in an hour or so, I’ll come and drop off dinner for you.”

And then he left.

I was not okay, but Kelthas had been his friend, or at least his acquaintance, longer and if I was this messed up by the death of someone I could barely claim to have known, it had to be harder for Yarrin. 

“How did you know I was in there?” I asked as I glooped out of the rain pipe and resumed the closest thing to a ‘real form’ I had.

“It’s my magic,” Yarrin said. “I can see things.”

“You could see me through a metal pipe?” I asked. It was magic, so anything was on the table, but there were a bunch of other possibilities too. None of which were important at the moment but it was easier talking about those than what was actually going on in my head.

“Yeah,” he said, and glanced away, as we started walking back to our new dorm.

Oh right. My clothes were a wreck since I’d dragged them up into the pipe with me. I wasn’t indecent or anything, but I did look like I’d gone three rounds with a patch of sentient swamp and lost every one of them.

“How did you recognize me?” I asked, wondering if it was the disheveled clothes and torn armor that had tipped him off.

“You’re sort of hard to miss,” he said. “I…,” he hesitated, wrestling with some decision I couldn’t begin to guess until he spoke at last. “I know what you are. In general terms. I have since you walked up to us before the Trials.”

I stopped walking.

That was more frightening than any horde of upperclassmen could ever have been.

So why wasn’t I afraid?

“What do you think I am?” I asked. I wasn’t going to try to deny anything. If he was able to track me into a rain water pipe, he would be able to see through any denials I could conceivably come up with in my current state. 

He looked around as though checking to be sure we were alone, which I was already pretty sure we were. One thing about freaking out like I had? All of my senses were cranked up to levels no human could possibly match.

At least without magic.

Which, given where I was, meant I was far less certain than I’d thought I was on reflection.

Yarrin didn’t suffer that limitation though. 

“I think you’re something other than human,” he said. “Or, maybe something not from this world would be more accurate. Except that’s not true either. You’re both from here and not from here. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but that seems to fit what I’m seeing the best. Unless my magic is as messed up from today as the rest of me feels.”

“You’re magic is fine,” I said. “I’ve been here a long time but this isn’t my world. I’m from some place else.”

“Well, I’m glad your here now,” he said. “Or, oh, is that okay? Is this where you want to be?”

“I killed a guy to get here, so signs seem to point to yes,” I said.

“No, I mean in this world?” Yarrin asked. “I’m glad you’re here for selfish reasons, but if you were dragged here unwillingly, I might be able to help you find out how to get back home.”

I shook my head.

“This is my home,” I said. “It’s complicated but I’m okay here. No need to feel bad.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re the one who got me out of the pipe,” I said.

“You’re the one who made sure the Cadets didn’t kill me in the third trial,” he said.

“That…” that was exactly what I’d intended with my final remark before leaving the arena, but I didn’t want to claim credit for it. I’d still been half berserk then. And I’d already failed at that point. “That should have come sooner.”

“I didn’t see it coming either,” he said and there was no need to specify what ‘it’ was. “I can see so much, almost everything it feels like most of the time, but I’m not House Astrologia, I couldn’t see what that cadet was going to do to him. I thought…I thought they’d send him to medic tent and fail him out of the Trials.”

“He was supposed to be safe,” I said. “I thought his magic meant I didn’t have to worry about him.”

He hugged me. Like the too-young kid that he was, he hugged me, and we spent several minutes shedding tears for the boy who was supposed to be with us and who never would be and the people we never would be as a result.

“Thanks, I needed that,” Yarrin said, pulling away and drying his eyes. “The others are heading back. Did you want to wait for them.”

“No, but I should,” I said, “they didn’t have any better of a day than either of us did.”

“I don’t know,” Yarrin said. “Narla looked like she had a pretty easy time in the last trial.” He smiled in broad appreciation at the memory and mimed her single fight-winning punch.

“Oh yeah. That was amazing,” I said, his excitement for her performance proving to be more than a little infectious. “I was thinking I was going to have to jump back in the ring and then, just, damn, the sheer crunch of that hit.”

Again, I probably should have been horrified, someone had died there. It wasn’t Kelthas though. And I hadn’t done it. And it had been provoked. And…and none of that made it right. 

It wasn’t right, but neither was the alternative, and I wasn’t sure Narla had really had any better options.

As answers went, it needed work, but if I couldn’t acknowledge my own limitations and the ones of the people around me, I was going to tear myself and them apart. I needed work, but acknowledging that I’d run into my limits was an idea I could live with for the time being.

“Oh, you found her!” Ilyan said.

“Yeah, sorry folks, I…we should probably go have dinner,” I said, with my usual masterful eloquence.

“Sounds good to me!” Narla said, patting her ample stomach. “This doesn’t run on skipped meals.”

“Is that how your magic works?” Ilyan asked. “Food gives you strength?”

“Food gives everyone strength,” Yarrin said with a roll of his eyes.

“Yeah, but she’s amazing,” Ilyan said. “One hit! It only took her one hit!”

“That uh, that wasn’t my best punch even,” Narla said, blushing a little.

“WHAT!?” Ilyan, Yarrin, and I said in chorus.

I lost track of time on the trip back to the dorm, and didn’t even notice Mellina cloaking us in shadows again thanks to the rest of us badgering Narla for details of what she could do for the whole trip.

This time when the door opened, Sea Cotton wasn’t waiting for us. Doxle was. 

“Ah, good. You’re back. We need to talk.” he said.

“Sometimes I wonder why I even bother. Then I remember that if I don’t bother with things, things will most decidedly come and bother with me.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame

For setting off on a stealthy heist, we attracted a worrisome amount of attention. Narla stood head and shoulders over most of our fellow Cadetlings, and Ilyan seemed to know at least half the people we walked past as we headed towards the dorms.

“Yeah, nice form in your fight too!” he said with a wave to a blonde haired kid who seemed to be organizing a squad of Greyfall cadets. “Catch ya tomorrow.”

We took about four more steps before a red haired girl from Greendell punched him on the shoulder and said, “You beat me by four whole points you jerk.”

“Can’t let you win all the time Gennie,” Ilyan said, hamming up how much the punch had hurt.

“Let me win? Oh, I am so gonna get you next time,” she said, her smile betraying the odd lack of murderous instinct most of the people who greeted Ilyan seemed to have.

The easy camaraderie he shared with a decent chunk of the incoming cadets was simple to understand. Where Idrina was iron and sweat, he was cozy cotton and aromatic tea. Oh, and nearly as deadly as she was.

From what I could tell, he hadn’t been holding back in his last trial any more than she had, and had only lasted as long as she did because the Decent Cadet had limited himself to fighting in Ilyan’s preferred style. Granted Ilyan’s preferred style didn’t leave much room for invoking other techniques or magics, but Idrina didn’t need room. She made room.

Despite being second best to his sister though, he’d still placed in the Top 10 of the incoming students, and with all of the support he clearly had I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he’d asked to be sponsored by House Riverbond.

The obvious solution to that would be to ask him, but it wasn’t like I could kick him out if I didn’t like his answer.

Also, it was somewhat nice being invisible in his and Narla’s shadows.

Not that people couldn’t see me. I was walking in the front because I was still expecting a lethal attack to come at any moment, and even someone foolish enough to try that couldn’t be foolish enough to think that I wouldn’t repeat my performance from the arena on them if they targeted someone else besides me.

The other Cadets moved out of my path, but no faster than they would have for any other traffic that was trying to pass. I would have mistaken that for indifference to the brutal murderer in their midst except for the razor cuts of panic which stabbed through most of the cadets when they recognized who I was. 

Most didn’t let their unease show but even the ones who suppressed their reactions the best didn’t make any particular effort to share pleasantries. They wanted me gone and I wanted to be gone, so silence suited us all.

Narla did not believe in silence any more than Ilyan did though.

The half of the cadets that he didn’t know? Those ones were all best friends with her.

“You won me ten crowns Narla! I love you!” a beefy and newly minted Astrologian cadet said.

“Only ten?” Narla said. “Who was betting against me?”

“Hah, like anyone wanted to bet against you?” Beefy boy said. “We were betting how many hits you’d need to win!”

“Oh now that’s what I want to hear!” Narla said and flexed for beefy boy, a gesture he returned before they parted company.

I cast a glance at Mellina to see if this looked anything other than completely mad to her. She replied with a small shrug reminding me that while she knew more about the Great Houses than I did, we were both well outside our familiar domains here.

Yarrin might have been able to comment on the reaction our two arena stars were getting but he was staring absently forward. His jaw wasn’t set and his shoulders were lose but his eyes were not tracking anything that was in front of us.

“Over here,” he said and directed us to a side passage between two buildings which led off the expansive quad we’d been walking through. 

Ilyan and Narla waved to a few of their friends/admirers and joined the rest of us as we marched into the shadows.

“Can you work with this Mellina?” Yarrin asked, stopping as we reached the midpoint of the small alley.

“Yes. This is perfect,” she said and turned to the rest of us. “I can get us to one of the unused dorms unnoticed, but it will be a lot easier if we’re quiet and avoid attention as best we can without relying on my magic. Also, don’t swallow the shadows. I can’t promise you’ll be safe if they get inside you.”

Since no bad idea ever started with a warning like that, I nodded for her to continue.

“Sorry if this feels weird,” she said before closing her eyes and inhaling deeply.

I was expecting a fatal attack to come next – it would have been the perfect time for an assassin to strike – but what we got instead was Mellina breathing out slowly and the shadows around us dripping down to the ground like cold oil. What the shadows left behind was not of our world, and wasn’t something any of us probably should have been looking at for too long.

I looked anyways, because, well, I’m me, but after a moment of staring into the other world I caught the scent of discomfort. Whatever was there, it didn’t want to be gazed upon.  So I stopped. I was curious, not rude. Grammy had taught me better than that.

Also the shadows which had run down to the ground were crawling up my legs.

And they felt as much like cold oil as they looked.

Around and around, they wrapped me up and I felt their magic smothering my own. We weren’t where we were supposed to be anymore. We were where they lived.

Without a word, Mellina waved us forward and Narla and Yarrin started to follow her.

I wanted to do the same but pushing through the shadows was distinctly uncomfortable. They weren’t hurting me, but I was pretty certain they were going to.

To my side, Ilyan was struggling against his too. Where I was trying to figure out which form would let me slip free of the shackles the shadows were trying to bind me with, he was straining to break free of them by sheer force.

I know I didn’t look terribly good, but I felt I kept the panic I was feeling off my face better than he did. I’m sure Mellina would back me up on that. We hadn’t known each other long, but she would lie for me I think.

Yarrin came back for Ilyan and calmed him down with a wordless touch on Ilyan’s shoulders. With gentle touches, he guided Ilyan’s hands down from the fighting posture Ilyan had taken when the shadows started flowing up us. 

Yarrin then gestured for Ilyan to exhale and relax. 

Ilyan nodded and followed Yarrin’s lead, his whole body untensing for a moment before Yarrin took his hand and led him forward for a few example steps.

I turned from Ilyan’s victories over the shadows to find Mellina close by and ready to help me. She threw a glance toward Ilyan, questioning if I understood what he’d done.

Breathing and relaxing, I tried to take a step forward.

And the shadows bound me tighter.

I let my dismay show and Mellina waved her hand before tapping me on the center of the chest and the middle of my forehead. She then repeated the gesture Yarrin had used for ‘relax’.

Which made sense.

Shadows weren’t a physical thing, so why would relaxing our bodies matter to them?

And they weren’t hurting anyone else.

I knew that. Believing it however was not as easy.

If I could understand what they were doing, I knew that would make things easier.

And I could find that out by devouring one of them and breaking their magic down.

Which, of course, was exactly what Mellina had said not to do.

And she knew her own magic.

I looked into her eyes again.

She wasn’t trying to kill me.

This was her magic and she wasn’t trying to kill me.

Whatever was in the realm beyond the shadows, or whoever this power was drawn from may not have been overly friendly, but the power was flowing through Mellina.

I let a long breath out and shoved a bunch of highly reasonable fears aside. 

And I could walk forward at last.

The shadows were still binding me into the form I was in, and only that form, and that stability was uncomfortable but as we walked I started to understand it.

The shadows were limiting me, and they had to. They had to bind us to the world we knew because without that the flow of magic which kept us hidden would have swept us into the realm where Mellina’s magic came from. Walking on the shores of that realm was safe enough, but out in the depths of it lurked all sorts of things we didn’t want to meet.

Our trip to the abandoned dorm took only a few minutes, Yarrin had chosen our starting point well, but it still it felt like hours to get there. 

It also appeared to be a wasted effort at first glance.

Mellina had led us to a blank section of wall beside one of the other dorm buildings and then through a perfectly disguised rotating door to a secret area beyond it.

A secret area which was full of dead and withered plant life as well as a shattered door leading into a darkened, and overgrown interior.

The shadows dropped away from us and Mellina gestured to the broken door in the frame.

“We’re here,” she said. “Hopefully.”

“Not bad, not bad,” Ilyan said. “It needs some work, but it’ll clean up nice.”

“Gives us a room over our heads even for tonight I guess?” Narla said.

“We don’t want to take away any of the plants from here,” Yarrin said. “Or clean up at all.”

“We’re going to live with it like that?” Narla asked, which I wanted the answer to as well.

“This isn’t where we’re going to live,” Mellina said.

“But you just…” Ilyan started to say but Yarrin put a hand on his forearm and cut him off.

“This is our ‘doorway’,” he said. “The trick is we need to get through the door. Not the broken one you see there. The real one.”

“Oh! This is all an illusion,” Narla said.

“Not quite,” Yarrin said. “What you see now is all real. What’s an illusion is that you’re not seeing where the door really is.”

“The real door is a portal, but it’s hidden here somewhere,” Mellina said.

I liked that idea. People not being able to find where I was sleeping seemed infinitely preferable to waking up with a poison dagger in my heart.

“I heard about these,” Ilyan said. “They’re impossible to find, aren’t they?”

“Found it!” Yarrin said, pointing towards…I wasn’t sure what he was pointing towards.

I wasn’t sure because there was a compulsion spell making me look away from the direction Yarrin was pointing. 

I sank my teeth into the spell and prepared to tear it to shreds but stopped myself before I damaged it.

“We don’t want to reveal this place to anyone else, do we?” I said.

“It would be safer if only we knew where it was,” Mellina said.

“Let me just do this,” Yarrin said and drew a sign in silver light on the air. In the light of the sign, the ‘Look Away’ compulsion faded and marble door with tiny glyphs carved into the image of a roaring water dragon on it stood where the broken door has a moment earlier.

“Look through my sigil,” Yarrin said. “Focus on the door for five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One.” When he hit zero the silver tracing shattered but the new door remained.

“We’ll be able to see this door for a year and a day now,” he said. “If we survive till next year, we can either move or I can cast the spell again.”

“This door looks a lot nicer than the other one,” Narla said. “I don’t just mean the carvings either. Someone cleaned this. Recently. Like it’s still damp.”

As she said that the door creaked open to reveal Sea Cotton, the mist woman from Doxle’s house waiting for us.

“Come on in,” she said. “Your rooms are almost ready, and dinner is on the table.”

“The best method of ensuring that you are always far busier than you would ever prefer to be is to attempt to expend as little effort as you possibly can. A life dedicated to idleness and ease inevitably comes to ruin beneath a mountain of tasks no mortal can ever hope to accomplish. It is worth noting however that a life dedicated to productivity and hard work comes to the same end, hence why I shall ever fight for what I believe in, and do my very best to do nothing at all.”

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame on his third day of mucking the Imperial Stables

Idrina had all but killed me. She wanted to take another shot at it and she wasn’t hiding that fact. The reptilian survival center I’d built into my brain was screaming at the idea that I was within eyesight of her, much less weapon deployment range. So why, in all the ten thousand hells, was my bedraggled heart beating quicker at her claim that I was a worthy opponent?

Worthy opponents were people she wasn’t going to hold back against.

That was terrible.

I’d seen how she’d fought the Decent Cadet. I couldn’t fight like he could. If she didn’t hold back about 80% of her strength and speed I’d be rebuilding body parts for weeks after our next clash.

And my stupid lips were joining in my heart’s conspiracy, curling up into a friendly smile which Idrina absolutely did not return.

“Let’s see what exercises they put us through tomorrow,” I said. It was a promise. If the Cadets were setup to fight each other – and there was zero chance the instructors weren’t going to inflict that on us at the first opportunity – I was promising that we’d have another deadly little dance.

And I was looking forward to it.

I had no excuse for that. It was completely irrational. I had no reason to want to fight her again. I had been dreading that exact eventuality. I was still dreading it.

But…

Nope. I was not following that line of thought. 

“You okay with me taking in your brother?” I asked, desperately casting about for anything that would steer the conversation somewhere, anywhere, else.

Idrina’s blank expression flickered through a brief moment of puzzlement before returning to neutral.

“He did that to himself,” she said.

“Any idea why?” I asked. That might have been an insensitive question, Mellina, Yarrin, and Narla all apparently had less than favorable relationships with their families, and from what I’d seen in Doxle’s house, the Ironbriars were kinda big on House loyalty.

“He had never been one to do his duty,” she said.

There was anger in her words and longing in her scent, and for once in my life I managed to stop myself before I said anything really stupid.

The awkward pause that my silence left in the conversation was broken by Proctor Jalaren rapping on the podium atop the small stage in front of us and the Imperial Elites who’d appeared at the head out of each column of Cadetlings coming to attention.

Idrina straightened up and took on a statue-like solemnity, while I followed Narla’s example and turned to face forward, standing somewhat less causally than I had been.

“People will offer you congratulations on passing the Trials and taking your new roles as Imperial Cadets,” Jalaren said, his voice no longer magically amplified but still loud enough to carry to the back ranks of the cadets. “They are mistaken. They do not know that your trials have only just begun. By this time next year, half of you will no longer be Cadets. Some will have had the sense to purchase a more comfortable position, and the wisdom to be content with being able to claim that you ‘attended the Imperial Academy’. Others will too broken to function as viable soldiers. The other half will be no more worthy than the rest. Those who proceed into your second year will bear the scars of your training and the knowledge of exactly the sort of suffering you can endure.”

As welcoming speeches went, it really wasn’t.

I wondered if Jalaren was overselling how bad training would be so that the proto-Cadets would be braced for and able to weather a somewhat gentler reality. After the bloodbath the Trials had been though my suspicions ran more towards the idea that he was underselling what we had to look forward to. That could explain why all of the third year cadets seemed to be irrationally aggressive.

“If this is not what you thought you were signing up for, I say to you leave now. I say this knowing that you will not. ‘I’m different, I can take it’. Each of you believes that and each of you are wrong.”

Well, he had me pegged there at least. 

Not that I was interested in enduring years of misery and suffering just for the privilege of being used as one of the Empire’s very special attack dogs. I just needed to get inside the Academy and have the time I needed to search it thoroughly. 

If I could pick up Trina’s scent again? If I could follow it back to its source? I…I honestly had no idea what would happen then. I’d certainly be willing to drop out of the Academy, but the fact that she was here, or had been here, was so impossible that I couldn’t imagine what the future beyond discovering the answers I was looking for could be.

I drew in a long, searching breath and found her scent only in my memories. It was here, just not on the winds that blew in the setting sunlight.

“Why will we do this to you?” Jalaren asked, and shockingly all of the mini-Cadets understood that it wasn’t a question they were expected to answer. “We will hurt you and break you and even possibly kill you because what emerges from this Academy as an Elite will be required to face far worse than that.”

Again, fantastic sales pitch. Definitely a job I was all in on signing up for.

Also he was lying.

The Imperial Elites had a mythic reputation, but according to Grammy Duella that dated back to a time when the Empress still ruled, and the Empire was beset by foes who only champion level troops could engage with. The original Imperial Elites could slay an army alone and in the squads they worked in, could withstand the oldest of dragons and the most terrible of summoned Fiends.

No one bothered messing with the Empire like that anymore though. At least not within the Empire’s boundaries because no one wanted the headaches of dealing with Reaving Storms (and everyone was afraid that if the Empire fell, those storms would roll across the rest of the world too).

The Empire had holdings outside its centuries old borders, but those were defended by the Imperial Foreign Legions, aka the expendable and largely non-magical troops drawn from the common masses who were paid handsomely for however brief a time they managed to survive.

I knew Grammy’s view of the Empire came with a heaping helping of biases – there were reasons she lived in a cottage in the middle of the forest and they weren’t ones that involved either love or tolerance for what the Empire had become. Even trying to correct for those though, I felt she was probably more right than not. If the Imperial Elites were able to live up to their mythology, the Cadets wouldn’t have been so eager to murder the weakest of the applicants. 

There was nothing disciplined or admirable about the pack of killers the Academy had assembled to represent the output of their instruction. Nothing worthy at all about them in fact, unless you were a Great House lord looking for people who would happily kill to advance your interests.

A stupid smile crept back onto my face. 

I was better than them.

Well, me and Narla. 

Idrina had said so.

I scowled the smile away. I could not afford to let myself buy into that line of thinking. It didn’t matter if I was better than them. No one would care about that if they knew what I really was. They would simply kill me, without hesitation or regret.

“Your suffering will begin tomorrow,” Jalaren said. “For tonight, you will find your place in the dormitory of the Great House which spoke for you. Your senior Cadets have arranged welcome dinners for you all. I suggest you enjoy your repast, make what allies you can, and sleep the last peaceful and sound sleep you will enjoy for the next three years. Cadets dismissed.”

We had no training, and no organization, so that of course signaled ‘The Great Milling About and Going Nowhere in Confusion’ as a mass of clueless students tried to figure out where to go and who to follow.

Over the disordered din of the crowd, amplified voices began to call out the names of the various Great Houses which had been present to speak for the Cadets. Lightstone was first, probably because the House’s ego could have filled the entire assembly area we were in. Greyfall, Ironbriar, Greendell, Astrologia and the others were heard from next, in some cases repeatedly as the Senior Cadets came to collect their new fledglings.

House Riverbond didn’t have any Senior Cadets though.

Nor did House Riverbond have a dormitory, at least not as far as I knew.

Somehow Yarrin, Mellina, and Ilyan made it through the crowds to meet up with Narla and I though.

“Inspiring speech,” Narla said. “Are we supposed to sneak out with our tails between our legs now, or just sometime before dawn do you think?”

“I doubt they’re going to let us sleep until dawn,” Yarrin said. “Especially not this year.”

Because this year they had a whole bunch of extra Cadets that they needed to get rid of still.

“Have we worked out where we’re sleeping at all?” Mellina said.

“The ground’s nice and flat here,” Ilyan said gesturing to the rapidly emptying field around us. 

The few proto-Cadets who were nearby gave derisive laughs at that before scurrying off to their new Houses sheltering arms. 

“I feel like House Riverbond should be able to do a whole lot better for you all than just this,” I said gesturing to the lonely desolation around us. 

“Pfff! You didn’t ask for any of us, and we all know you didn’t have time to prepare for this,” Narla said.

“Yeah, if I wanted to make someone feel bad, I would have signed up with Ironbriar,” Ilyan said.

“We can do better than this field too,” Mellina said.

“Does Astrologia have a few rooms they’d rent us?” I asked. Holman had seemed to be on good terms with her, and she’d originally offered to have her House speak for me, so it seemed like that bridge might not be entirely burnt away.

“Oh, umm, no I don’t think so,” Mellina said. “They’re probably fairly cross with me at the moment.”

“You had something else in mind, didn’t you?” Yarrin asked. 

“We have a diverse and useful set of skills,” she said. “We don’t have to be given a dormitory if we can simply take one.”

“Fight one of the other Houses for their dorm?” Ilyan said. “Count me in!”

“Me too!” Narla said.

I sighed. I’d thought I was going to be the unhinged one in any group I wound up in. Instead I had not one but two House mates who were vying for that position. 

That they immediately exchanged a fist bump and a nod of approval with each other told me it was even worse than that though. They weren’t vying for anything, they were quite willing to share the position and inspire each other to go even further.

“Not to spoil your fun,” Yarrin said, “but I think there are dorm rooms which aren’t being used at all.”

“There are, but they’re locked up tight and warded against intrusion,” Mellina said.

“The wards won’t be problem,” Yarrin said. “Not if they can still be opened.”

“And the locks won’t be either,” Narla said, slamming her left fist into her right palm.

“Repurposing” some rooms from the Academy was a terrible idea and there was no chance at all that we’d get away with it. Someone was going to ask where we’d spent the night and whatever answer we gave the truth would be discovered, probably in short order.

And I simply didn’t care.

“Let’s go steal ourselves a dorm then.”

“There are but few constants in this life, and of them all it is the ineptitude of those in positions of authority which is the most comforting. True, most people find that reality annoying, and it is often a justified reason for mass homicide, but in its oh so dependable consistency one can find the latitude to get so very much accomplished.”

– Zindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame

So, I wound up with Idrina’s brother in my fledgling House. That was a fact that I was absolutely certain would cause me no trouble whatsoever. None at all. Idrina, for example, wasn’t going to take that as another insult against Ironbriar and break my poor twice battered heart again. House Ironbriar itself wasn’t going to join Lightstone and Greyfall in taking umbrage at their children who I’d collected under the banner of a House that I didn’t actually have a legitimate claim to represent. Everything would be fine. Completely fine.

I clung to that belief as the Trials wrapped up and Jalaren directed that the winning applicants, or perhaps the ‘surviving’ ones was a better term, were to line up up inside the Academy for our first orientation speech.

I wasn’t clear why we would need more than one orientation speech, but at this point the Imperial Academy working under a set of counterproductive and arbitrary rules failed to come as much of a surprise.

“I believe congratulations are in order,” Doxle said. “To all of you. You have taken the first steps on the path to true wisdom!”

That sounded complimentary, and the others seemed to take it in that light, but it wasn’t. Wisdom doesn’t come from making good decisions, it comes from suffering the consequences of poor ones.

“Are they going to let you into the Academy?” I asked, wondering if he would be tailing along after me from here on out.

“Lady Riverbond, there are precious few places in the Empire which anyone can me from, and the Imperial Academy is most certainly not one of them.”

I didn’t frown quite as hard as I could have. Having Doxle shadowing my every move was going to complicate the real work I wanted to do inside the Academy, but he wasn’t hiding his scent and so I had a strong guess as to what his next words would be.

“That said, there are also a great many places which I have little interest in visiting at present, and the Imperial Academy is most decidedly on that list as well.”

“Are you still responsible for my actions if you’re not around to stop them?” I asked. It was in no sense a hypothetical question, and I had no illusions that Doxle would mistake it for one. 

“Even more so than when we are together,” he said and offered no further edicts or reminders to be on my best behavior. Oddly that was more effective in convincing me to make sure I wasn’t caught doing the misdeeds I had in mind than any of the alternatives would have been.

“When will I see you again then?” I asked, the broken gears in my brain spinning in calculation of how much I could get done in whatever time I have available.

“Tomorrow night I should think,” he said. “Though circumstances could easily change between now and then.”

Since he was going to be able to take my magic no matter where he was, I wasn’t sure what could change that would lead to him find me sooner, but from how he seemed to get on with people I could easily imagine his return being delayed a while.

“Send me an invite if you get married again,” I said as our spectator box touched down and my House started filing out.

“I assure you should I find a suitable spouse, well, honestly I’ll probably be divorced by the time you hear of it, but if there are invitations you will mostly likely receive one,” he said.

That was a joke. Or at least he meant it as a joke. Part of me wondered how often it had been the truth though. Part of me wondered what had broken a demon to make him be like that. And part of me had absolutely zero interest in finding out.

I waved a thanks to Doxle and set out to follow the others who were marching into the Academy with the much reduced crowd of applicants.

Or I guess we were fledgling Cadets now. That thought did not do wonders for my beleaguered insides.

Doxle gave me a small bow of his head and turned, vanishing halfway through the twist of his body.

“They’re going to line us up according to our scores,” Mellina said when I caught up to her. “Where should we meet up afterwards?”

“Where will they let us meet up?” I asked.

“Each House has it’s own dorm,” Yarrin said.

“All of them? Even the ones who weren’t speaking for anyone here?” I asked.

“No, just the sponsors, they…” and that was when the problem I’d noticed a moment earlier hit the rest of the people I’d spoken for.

“We don’t have a dorm, do we?” Mellina said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “To be honest, until Doxle spoke for me, I had no idea that was a thing the Riverbond family could do.”

“Maybe there’s an empty one?” Narla said.

“No worries,” Ilyan said. “We can just sleep under the stars if we need to. I had to do that for training a bunch of times.”

He had a point. It wouldn’t be the end of the world to spend a night outside. A courtyard in the Academy had to be more comfortable than a jail cell with magic dampeners clasped on your arms, legs, and throat. Looking at Mellina and Yarrin though I wasn’t so sure how well they’d do with a night of exposure to the elements. Narla might have a problem too, but her magic smelled like it was strongly biased towards the physical, much like Ilyan’s was, so low temperatures and exposure probably wouldn’t be an issue for her, though if it came to that I intended to ask to be certain.

“That’s a problem for after orientation,” I said. “We’ll work something out so that no one freezes or starves.”

I didn’t want to have to kick one of the other Houses out of their dorm rooms, but I was willing to keep all our options on the table for now.

The crowd funneled down into a single file line, which let one of the proctor’s (not Jalaren, he seemed to be entirely absent) sort us by checking our names against a list which reflected the points we earned from fighting in the proper quadrants.

“Riverbond? Row 1, position 2,” the proctor said and waved me through the checkpoint.

Narla followed me, having received ‘Row 1, position 1’ as her assignment. That placed us at the far left edge of a roughly square arrangement of new Cadets, most of whom were standing on disc on the group which bore their row and position number and facing forward towards the slightly raised stage in front of us.

It didn’t occur to me what our positions meant until I was standing on my assigned disc and I saw how the other people who had filled in were grouped. Yarrin was on the farther side of the formation, in the rightmost row and the furthest back position. Mellina was notably closer being in the second row from the left and midway down it. The other new Cadets were filling in the spots between us based on how well they’d done. That I was in the second highest spot, behind only Narla finally clicked and became terribly real when Idrina took the space directly behind me.

The rules for the scoring came back to me in a rush, fractured neurons knitting furiously back together and reminding me that ‘defeating’ the Cadet we were facing gave us the maximum possible point value.

“Congratulations on your victory. You fought well,” Indrina said. Her voice was flat and unemotional but her scent suggested she was being sincere?

I turned to try to read her expression because her tone and scent were too at odds for me to make sense of.

Catching her gaze did nothing to help that though. She wasn’t like the Lightstone rep, where he’d been surrounded by rigid walls of anger which the steel in his will prevented from ever being unleashed. From Idrina, I didn’t smell any rage, or at least not any directed at me. 

“You fought much better than I did,” I said, stating what was clearly the plain truth.

“I did not defeat my foe,” she said. 

“You also didn’t lose control,” I said. “And my surviving that was as much luck as power or skill.”

“He missed your heart, didn’t he?” she asked. “I wondered if he’d come close with the cut through your collarbone.”

“That was bad,” I said. “But the sword he was fighting with was a problem all on its own. He did something to it I’ve never seen before. Transformed it, but he didn’t look like he was using magic. Or at least not his own.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, tilting her head slightly and focusing on me completely.

“Yes. The sword had its own magic. I can’t tell you what kind of magic it was or what it was capable of doing, but I am sure it was external to him.”

“They give the Cadets new enchantments to test sometimes, but I’ve never heard of one being used in a Trial before, or one that has its own Hollowing. I thought the only tools they gave the Cadets for the Trials were standard mana amplifiers.”

I hadn’t known there was a thing called a ‘mana amplifier’, standard or no, but I kept that to myself.

“If I can find another one, I can examine it closer and with a clearer mind,” I said. “I don’t believe my wounds threw off my perceptions that much, but it would be good to rule that out.”

“Are you wounds healed already?” Idrina asked.

“Mostly,” I said. “The major damage is okay now, but there’s a lot of minor injuries that I need to work on still.”

I wasn’t sure why I was admitting weakness to someone who was responsible for a decent portion of it and was demonstrably capable of inflicting far worse on me. I had to chalk it up to my brain not being fully rewired yet.

Also Idrina wasn’t conjuring spears at the moment, and that made her seem a thousand times easier to talk to than she’d been the last time we’d been within melee range of each other.

“We should spar then,” she said.

Because that was definitely something that wouldn’t leave me bleeding out on the ground with multiple fatal puncture wounds to deal with.

“That depends, are you going to break my heart again?” I asked.

“Would it matter if I did?” There was no animosity in the question from what I could tell, just genuine curiosity.

“It’s not terribly pleasant,” I said.

“What we do isn’t meant to be pleasant,” she said.

“I’m aware,” I said and gestured to the drying blood stains I was wearing over pretty much all of the clothes I’d been given.

“We should spare so that we can improve,” Idrina said. “If we hold back, we won’t learn as much.”

“Do you want me to improve though?” I asked.

“You are a Cadet now,” she said as though that explained everything.

“After today I don’t have a particularly high opinion of Imperial Cadets,” I said. “Present company excepted.”

I don’t know why she was an exception. As far as I could tell she was just as bloodthirsty as the rest of them. 

Except, in her it wasn’t really bloodthirst.

I drew in a long breath through my nose and tasted a world of determination from Idrina but not a single whiff of sadism.

“They don’t matter,” she said. “They’re not worth measuring anything against. Most of them.”

“Who is then?” I asked.

“Only a few people,” Idrina said. “Two of whom are starting in this line in front of me.”

“Our victories can bring us comfort, while also planting the seeds for future defeats. Should we fear victory then? No, of course not. That would be stupid. Making ourselves small and terrified, and losing because we’re too afraid to win is a living death. Striving to win, knowing that it will bring even greater challenges? It’s the Fool’s Path, but with the world we live in, is there anyone wiser than fool who embraces what they are?”

– Zindir Harshek Doxle

I don’t know why it came as such a surprise to me that the Cadet I’d brutally murdered would have a younger sister. Great Houses had a lot of kids. It made it easier to sell a few off to other Houses or swap in a spare when one or more of them got killed. 

It should have been reassuring too that Narla was looking at me with a happy and hopeful expression. Announcing that I’d killed her brother was clearly not the beginning of a blood vendetta’s declaration.

On the other hand, she’d hit someone hard enough that with one punch she caved in an armored chest and had sufficient force remaining to launch the rest of the corpse a good thirty feet off the platform.

I was hard to kill, and somewhat stupidly aware of that fact. There were extremes of force however that I would have a hard time tolerating and staying away from Narla Lightstone seemed like an incredibly wise course of action if I wanted to make sure I never wound up getting turned into a bag of jelly.

“Sure. Why the hell not,” I said, fully taking leave of my senses.

Jalaren scowled at me and waited.

“I don’t think that’s formal enough to count,” Mellina said.

“House Riverbond will speak for the applicant,” I said, feeling honestly bad for the nonsense Jalaren apparently had to put up with on a continual basis.

Jalaren shook his head and sighed. It wasn’t hard to see why. I was making a hash of his carefully controlled (and probably bought and paid for) trial process.

“House Lightstone speaks for the applicant,” the Lightstone rep repeated. “She is ours by Right of Birth Investiture.”

What that was supposed to mean, I had no idea, but Doxle bristled at the words and started to get up. Before he could contest them however, Enika spoke up from the Ironbriar box.

“You will want to withdraw that claim Synoda,” she said. “Or have you forgotten the responses the Scion of a House is allowed to make to an attempt to assert ownership over them?”

“Oh! What can I do?” Narla asked. From her posture she was unconcerned and undiminished by whatever stratagem her House rep was trying to pull on her.

“You can declare War on your house,” Enika said.

“Don’t be absurd. She can’t declare war on us. She’s ours,” Synoda Lightstone said.

“I’m afraid she’s correct,” Doxle said. “The second paragraph of the Right of Birth Investiture is quite clear on the remedies the offspring is provided. Should she force you to sue for peace, she may name any price up to half the wealth of the Great House as her prize.”

“She will not declare war on us,” Synoda said.

“Like hell I won’t!” Narla said. “Like I said, I’m not interested gramps. Leave it at that or I will War all up and over your face.”

“And who would support you?” Synoda asked. “You cannot stand against your whole House by yourself.”

“She won’t be alone,” I said, standing up too because if everyone else was getting to be all dramatic I didn’t see why I should miss out.

I honestly didn’t expect Mellina and Yarrin to stand with me as well, and I absolutely did not expect about half the applicants to rise from their seats too.

You’d think that sort of moment would feel amazing, and you’d be right, but I was also keenly aware that things were escalating a lot quicker than I had any hope of keeping a handle on, and part of me was dearly hoping they’d escalate even further, which was absolutely a bad sign.

“Take this path and you will be cast out,” Synoda said, entirely unphased by the small army that had risen to have Narla’s back.

“Yeah, I know, that’s fine,” Narla said. She probably didn’t need to add in the dismissive shrug, but the stifled rage it induced in Synoda I’m sure made it was worth it.

“House Lightstone withdraws its offer. Narla Lightstone is dead to us and will be stripped of position and title, to no longer enjoy the shelter and protection of our house,” Synoda said. As threats went it wasn’t even slightly subtle.

I wasn’t sure if he actually possessed the authority to disown her, but it seemed pretty likely that whoever did would back up his words.

“The applicant has an offer still standing,” Jalaren said, struggling to drag the proceedings back to the sham of formality they’d worn in other years I imagined. “Does she accept.”

“Hell yeah, I mean, yes, I accept Riverbond’s offer,” Narla said and started walking towards the edge of the platform nearest us.

Strangely, no one jeered her this time or suggested that the disc wouldn’t be able to hold her weight. Shocking to see that the Cadets did in fact possess some rudimentary survival instincts.

I knew Doxle could not have been expecting this outcome, but the fact that he’d rented a spectator’s box will room for all of us and more left me wondering about that.

“Thanks for speaking for me,” Narla said when she got to the box.

I could have said something like ‘sorry about killing your brother’, except I really wasn’t, so I nodded to her instead. 

Yeah, I probably could and should have said something insightful or clever or cool but I’m not that good with words. 

 “Think we can spar later?” she asked.

It sounded an awful lot like ‘I just killed a guy with one hit can I try hitting you next’, but Narla seemed so ernest about it my response left my mouth before my brain had any input on it.

“Yeah. I’d like that,” my mouth said with zero help from any higher functions whatsoever.

So, I was going to die.

But the smile that lit up Narla’s face was really a sight to behold.

I’d said the right thing?

That didn’t seem likely, but…

I turned my attention back to the arena where the next match was getting underway. They had to bring in a new Cadet on account of the corpse shaped hole in the schedule the last one had left.

The one that arrived on the platform was heralded by the other Cadet’s loudly proclaiming his strength and that he should ‘kill that little puke’, meaning presumably the applicant.

For about half the flight from the box to the arena, the Cadet played up the cheer, but by the time he stepped onto the platform he was looking much more subdued.

His opponent wasn’t anyone terrifying or impressive. He was a commoner who I’d seen shift his hands into claws and scratch lightning from the air. The shapeshifting part had caught my attention because of its similarity to what I could do and lightning was intriguing because, well, lightning. It’s just bright and cool to see.

Their fight wasn’t a slaughter. Not on either side. The Cadet wasn’t exactly holding back but he also wasn’t going for cheapshots or low blows. Which may have simply been from a sense of self preservation. Two Cadets had died already. Overextending themselves for flashy effect or to sneak a kill in might have served the Cadets well in earlier years but I don’t think anyone was all that eager to become Corpse’d Cadet #3.

In the end, the applicant managed to score a few points by fighting in the colored quadrants and the Cadet managed to keep those points to a minimum by forcing the applicant into unfavorable spots more often than not. It wasn’t the best performance in the trial but it was far from the worst and House Greendell and Astrologia both offered to speak for the applicant with the applicant choosing Greendell.

For all the action and demonstrated peril, the battle felt relatively calm, as did the next several which followed it.

About fifteen fights later there was a moment that looked like it was going to turn bad – the applicant was knocked to the edge of the platform and she only barely caught the edge. All the Cadet would have needed to do was step on her fingers and she would have plummeted to a painful impact (though possibly a survivable one, given her magics). Instead the Cadet took a step back which gave Jalaren the moment to speak and declare the fight over by virtue of forfeiture. 

Either falling off the platform wasn’t a serious enough failing to remove the applicant from consideration, or my poaching a few of the applicants had left the Great Houses hungry to snatch up what they could get before I made any other offers. 

In this case it was Astrologia whose offer was accepted and the Trial continued.

It wasn’t until and dozen fights, as we were getting reasonably close to the end of the applicants that someone else I recognized was called to the arena, though I didn’t notice that till I saw him step off the transport disc.

“Ilyan Ironbriar” turned out to be the name of Idrina’s brother.

He drew the same Cadet that she had and from the looks of it had been expecting that, offering the Cadet a cheerful little salute, which the Cadet returned as a small head bow.

Their fight grabbed my attention from the first exchange.

Like with Idrina, neither fighter was holding back and neither one was throwing anything except killing blows or attacks meant to open the other up for a killing blow.

And yet neither had any interest in harming the other.

Okay, maybe no interest in killing the other. From the hits that they had to let get past their guard, they were kicking and pummeling the hell out of one another with zero remorse shown. 

What they were not doing though was using any obvious, external magic. The speed they moved at and the forced behind their blows was clearly magically enhanced, but from the demonstration they were putting on, it seemed like both of them had exceptionally strong body enhancement magics, to the extent where any other abilities would have been a lesser option to choose against the other.

After all the bloodshed, more violence shouldn’t have been at all appealing, but the dance the two bodies in the arena spun through was undeniably beautiful. To me at least. Each move was so aware of the balance and speed and force involved. Nothing they did was impossible or relied purely on magic to jerk their limbs around. It was a sublime blend of natural motions and magical augmentation, showing what the human form was capable of when it could be pushed to its utmost limits. 

Where the individual hits were too quick to follow, the overall pattern read as cleanly as a book, the dialog between the two fighters one of respect and even a subtle teasing back and forth.

It took me till nearly the end of the fight to really understand the conversation between the two of them though. They were having fun. Standing on the edge of overwhelming catastrophe, the two idiots were all but bursting out in laughter with one another. 

I’d been concerned about fighting Idrina again, but watching her brother tangle with the ‘Decent Cadet’ (as I’d started to call him in my head), gave me a visceral understanding of what a bad idea it was to mess with their House in general.

Where Idrina was frankly terrifying though, Ilyan somehow wasn’t. He fought with the same steely-eyed focus as she did, but something was missing from him, or maybe missing from her.

It would not be healthy for me to hang around either one in an attempt to discover what that quality was, and I knew that. 

So.

Of course.

When it came time for the Houses to speak for Ilyan.

Of course he had to make things difficult.

Because why would my day ever, under any circumstances, get simpler?

“Hey, before you ask if anyone wants to speak for me,” he said, “can we check with Riverbond? Cause I kinda want to join them.”