“This,” Liv said, looking down from the broken walls of the bridge onto the lake that filled the river valley. “This is where I need to be.”

Behind her, the dark serpent of the Airaduinë river stretched on endlessly into the dark jungle, winding its way east until, somewhere in the distance, it spilled into the ocean. Before her, however, the reservoir created by the ancient dam was painted gold in the light of the setting sun. Liv wondered just how far south she’d come from Al’Fenthia, that the days lasted so much longer. The western mountains were just visible as hazy shadows in the far distance, and the water sparkled with ripples of golden reflection.

Her father leaned against a piece of shattered stone at Liv’s side. His braids were tied back, and he wore a shirt of light linen, which caught and billowed in the breeze just like the fabric of the dress she’d been given by the House of Keria.

“We have a starting place, now,” Valtteri said. His words were quiet, nearly as soft as the distant sounds of their people working to carve a fortress out of the wilderness. “So long as we can hold this waystone, we can move warriors and supplies between our home and Varuna. If we lose this, there’s no way we can fight a war.”

“Even with ships?” Liv asked. She caught glimpses of motion in the water below – the shadows of great jungle fish, far larger than anything she’d ever seen in mountain streams.

“Forty-two days at sea,” her father responded. “Call it ninety for a journey here and back. That’s three months, Liv. If I sent a request for anything – shoes for horses, say, or arrowheads – that’s the soonest supplies would make it here. And if the elders back home had information for me? Just as long to send a message and then get a response. There’s no way to fight a war like that. Nevermind the fact we would start losing ships at sea, sooner or later. No way to avoid it, with a voyage that long.”

“And all the while, she can connect any two waystones she wants,” Liv said, extending the thought out loud. “She could wait until half our army was at sea, then strike back home, or here. I think I understand.”

“Ractia’s been using the rifts against us this entire time,” Valtteri agreed. “To move her followers out of the north, when they hit Soltheris.”

“To attack Coral Bay,” Liv said, and her father turned toward her, brow furrowed. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. So much has happened. Three of her lieutenants came to steal Vædic machinery from the tidal rift. I killed Karis there, and Calevis at the Foundry Rift.”

Her father lowered his eyes, and Liv could see the muscles in his forearms flex as his hands tightened on the ancient stone of the wall. “I thought I was keeping you safe from this,” he admitted, “by leaving you behind. That it would give you time to learn, so that you were better prepared when you did finally come west. I knew I couldn’t keep you away forever. But while I’ve been crossing the ocean, and forcing our way through the jungle, you’ve already been fighting the war back home.”

“It’s just like you said.” Liv reached out and placed her hand over his. “She took advantage. That’s why the rift near Al’Fenthia is erupting right now, too.”

“We believe so, yes,” Valtteri confirmed. “Half the troops we’d intended to bring through the waystone have been forced to remain behind. I trusted Airis and his son to go and deal with it – it’s their home, after all. And I sent Keri to help them while I held things here.”

“Well, it isn’t dealt with,” Liv said. “And Ractia’s now got more than enough Antrian war-machines to throw at you here, while she keeps half our people pinned on the other side. Wren says this mercenary – Manfred – that he knows what he’s doing commanding troops. She’s got him and the Dakruiman priest still, at the very least. Cultists, however many of Wren’s people have stayed with her. It’s more than enough to launch a major strike here and push us off the continent.”

Valtteri chuckled. “When did you become a strategist?”

“I’m not, really,” Liv admitted. “But I can see patterns when they’re in front of me. I wouldn’t win duels if I couldn’t do that, at least. She uses eruptions as a distraction, then sends her people to do something. At Benedict’s coronation, when nearly all the Lucanian nobility was in one place, she set off the Gull Island Rift. That kept them all focused there, and half the professors and students away from Coral Bay. She created the opening, and then struck. So here, again - The Garden of Thorns is the opening. Next comes the strike.”

“How many war machines, again?” her father asked.

“Seventy or eighty,” Liv said. “I don’t think any of them will be like Karis, though. Not as smart as him.”

“I would expect them to come through the waystone,” Valtteri said. “A few days isn’t enough time to move a force like that through the jungles.” It was clear from his tone that Liv’s father was now speaking from experience on that subject. “But she doesn’t seem to be in a rush. Happy to grind our forces down with an unexpected eruption.”

“The fact she can cause an eruption whenever she wants is one of the biggest things working against us.” Liv frowned. “If we could stop that - if we could take control of the rifts out of her hands, that would go a long way.”

The warm evening breeze caught at her hair, and teased the fabric of her dress, and Liv took a moment to simply enjoy the feel of it on her arms. It was so nice that she didn’t realize, at first, how quiet her father was.

“What?” Liv asked, searching his face.

“There is something,” Valtteri said, his words so slow that Liv felt like they’d practically been dragged out of him. “But I don’t know if the one for the Garden of Thorns even still exists, or where it would be.”

“One of what?”

“Your grandfather had a story from his own mother,” Valtteri explained. “That each of the original Vædic rifts had a sort of key. Not the places built later in the war, or the ones that sprang up where the old gods died. The old places of power, where the Vædim made their homes. A key that would allow a favored servant – a sort of seneschal – to control the magic there while a master might be away. My father believed that one of those keys was at the bottom of the Tomb of Celris.”

Liv’s mind flickered along the permutations of that thought, connecting what she already knew about her family. “Is that what my aunt was trying to find?” she asked. She remembered what she’d seen in the darkness between waystones, after her grandfather’s death: a plain silver circlet, on the temples of an ancient skull.

“She had a vision,” Valtteri said, his voice rough. “When she first went to the edge of a rift to become a woman. She saw herself beneath the ice, deep in the tomb, taking something from the corpse of our ancestor. But it didn’t happen, Liv. She chased after a prophecy that didn’t come true, and she died doing it.”

Liv turned away. Only the last sliver of the sun was visible over the mountains, and the clouds were aflame. Somewhere behind them, the first stars would be coming out.

“What if it wasn’t her that she saw?” Liv asked.

Her father took her by the shoulder. “What are you thinking,” he demanded, when Liv turned to face him.

“Everyone always says that we look so much alike,” Liv said, the horrible thought only becoming complete when she finally spoke it aloud. Like a spell. “What if she went down there because she saw me?”

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Though her father had tried to convince her it wasn’t true – and Liv had wanted nothing more than to believe him – the awful certainty had burrowed deep into her stomach and settled there to nest, like some kind of feral creature. Her aunt had died because of her. Livara of the Five Blades had seen a girl that looked just like her in the bottom of a rift, and gone chasing a destiny that turned out to be only death.

And it hadn’t stopped there. Like ripples from a stone tossed into still water, grief had touched everyone in Liv’s family. Her grandparents, who had to carry the weight of losing their eldest daughter for decades. Her father, so torn by grief that he’d been sent out of Elden lands to find himself again – and instead, he’d sought solace in a human girl. Would Liv even have been born, if her aunt hadn’t made the mistake of following that vision?

The thoughts were dizzying, circling round and round in Liv’s head so that she was hardly aware of where she was or what she was doing. She said goodbye to her father, somehow, and made her way back to the waystone, but couldn’t recall any of the particular words, nor even the walk through the encampment. No one stopped her.

She found herself before the sigil for Al’Fenthia, the same one Airis ka Reimis had shown her decades before, when Liv had only been a little girl. Liv touched her hand to it, and let the mana stream out of her. This was a small waystone, no larger than the one at Bald Peak, and she could fuel it herself easily, even if it hadn’t been half charged already from the ambient mana of the shoal. It was a relief when light obliterated the world around her.

In the darkness between the spaces of the world, Liv cast about searching. Grandfather, she thought, reaching, stretching into the darkness. Aunt Livara. If she’d had a body to scream their names, she would have shouted until her throat was raw, but there was only emptiness, and she was little more than a stray thought in the vast silence.

But something turned toward her.

A great mass, in a place that had no mass, no shape, no boundary or body, turned to regard Liv for the first time with – not interest, precisely, but at least awareness. It was the slow movement of a glacier, hardly even perceptible, but for the creaking and groaning of the motion. Cold. So very, very cold.

And then Liv gasped for breath, catching herself just in time not to fall, her boots scuffing the waystone at Al’Fenthia as she stumbled. Someone caught her by the arm, and Liv leaned into the support until she’d recovered enough to trust herself.

“Are you well?” He was a soldier of House Keria: Liv could see that by his armor, all enameled wood instead of metal plate, and his dark, braided hair. She doubted he’d ever been sun-burnt a day in his life.

“Thank you,” Liv said, taking deep, slow breaths like Master Grenfell had taught her when she was a child. “I – I’m sorry. I just learned something upsetting,” she admitted. A small part of her observed that all those summers with her grandparents had made her comfortable enough with the Vakansa dialect that she spoke it automatically, now, when addressed in that tongue.

“Do you need an escort out of the foreigners’ quarter?” the soldier asked.

Liv was about to refuse, but realized that she’d only walked the route once – and she knew that there were Lucanian soldiers here. Hunting her. “Yes,” she said. “That would actually be very helpful, if it isn’t a bother.”

“Elder Aira told us to watch for your return, and provide you an escort,” the man said, and at his call, a half dozen armored men and women fell in around them.

“That was very considerate of her,” Liv said. She wasn’t certain how long she’d been in Varuna, but it seemed quite late now that she’d returned to Al’Fenthia. There were hardly any Eld on the streets at all, and no children. She imagined them tucked into bed by their parents - whether human or Eld, and wondered whether they had rag dolls and cats to cuddle with.

They were in sight of the great gates between the trading district and the rest of the city, where the towering trees stretched up into the night, as if they would touch the shining ring overhead, when two soldiers hurried over from the Lucanian encampment.

“Stop!” a man shouted, and Liv saw the way the Elden warriors immediately bristled.

“This is Al’Fenthia,” the warrior at Liv’s side called back. “You do not give orders here, firefly.”

“That girl is a wanted criminal,” the Lucanian insisted, but the Eld tightened around Liv in a living, walking shield. “She’s a murderer.”

“It’s a lie,” Liv spat back. “I killed only one person, and that’s because he attacked me with a sword. It was self defense. If you want to know who killed Jurian of Carinthia, go ask Genevieve.”

“Keep moving,” the warrior who’d gathered Liv’s escort said quietly. “Back away, foreigners. Your southern laws have no power here.” Several of the Eld around Liv loosened swords at their hips, exposing the first few inches of steel.

Grumbling, the Lucanians were given no choice but to fall back and return to their camp, but Liv knew both Genevieve and Benedict would be aware of precisely where she was within a day or two, at most. However long it took the Lucanians to pay for passage through the waystone for a messenger to Freeport.

It was only after the gates had been closed behind her that Liv felt comfortable again. Most of the Elden warriors remained in the trading quarter, but the one man who’d helped her on the waystone walked with Liv through the darkened city, leading her toward the great tree where the home of Airis ka Reimis and his family was built high above the streets.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t even asked your name,” Liv said. “And you’ve helped me so much tonight.”

“Linneas ka Severi,” the warrior answered. “You, on the other hand, require no introduction,” he said. “Those with a direct line to one of the old gods are rare enough already - but you may be the only person with the blood of the Vædim on one side, and human heritage on the other.”

Liv had only just begun getting used to how some of the students at Coral Bay treated her - she sincerely hoped that she would not become famous among her father’s people. “There are more half-Eld here in Al’Fenthia than anywhere else, aren’t there?”

“While that is true,” Linneas said, “None of them are directly descended from Elder Aira. And when members of other houses, with Vædic blood, do visit, they rarely spend much time in the trading quarter. Wait.” He held up a hand in front of Liv, to bring her to a halt.

She thought they were close to the tree where her friends were staying, but it was also her first time in the city, at night, and Liv wouldn’t have trusted her instincts not to get her lost. Coming from their right, however, she could clearly hear the pounding of hoofbeats.

“An attack?” Liv asked, spinning to face whatever was coming her way. She drew her wand from the leather sheath hanging from her belt, and held it up in front of her. If mana beasts had gotten past the walls of the city, surely some sort of alarm would have sounded, so that people could take shelter? In Whitehill, it would be the bells at the temple of the Trinity.

Three horses, each with a rider, moved into the circle of light cast by one of the lanterns hanging from the tree branches overhead. The leader reined his steed to a halt, and Liv was relieved to recognize him.

“Keri,” she said, sighing in relief. Liv hadn’t seen him since her grandfather’s funeral, and the young man in front of her now made a very different impression from her first sight of him on the beach at Freeport, seven years before. Then, he’d looked the very image of foreign nobility, in armor polished to a shine, with not a hair out of place.

Now, even in the dim light of the lantern, Liv could see that his face was streaked with grime and dried blood. His armor was even worse, battered and dented like he’d tumbled from the top of Bald Peak down to the very bottom, hitting every rock on the way. She didn’t recognize the warrior to either side of him, a man and a woman, but neither looked to be in any better shape.

“Liv?” Keri blinked, clearly not quite able to process her presence. She recognized the look: it was one she’d worn herself more than once, after being pushed to her absolute limits. “I have to speak to the council.”

“You look like you’re about to fall out of that saddle,” Liv grumbled. “Linneas, which tree is it? That one?”

The Elden warrior nodded. “You’ve got a good memory.”

“For everything but names,” Liv couldn’t help remark. “Get those two seen by healers, fed, and in beds, please. Keri, get down off that horse.”

Linneas inclined his head in something between a nod and a bow, and stepped forward to gather reins in his hand.

“Airis can’t hold much longer,” Keri said, as Liv tried to tug him down out of the saddle.

“I’m taking you to speak to Aira, and she will tell the elders,” Liv said. “Now get down. If I let you walk up those stairs, they’ll find you with a broken neck tomorrow morning.” She conjured a disc of pure mana, glowing blue in the night and streaked with gold. She sat down on it, raised it up to the level of Keri’s knees, and tugged until his weight shifted and he collapsed onto the platform with her. Then, Liv sent the disc of mana up above the streets, toward the boughs of the trees above, and the platform upon which the manor was built.