Wren shivered and turned her face into the soft fur that tickled her face. She shivered; Castle Whitehill wasn’t normally this cold, was it? If there was one thing Liv’s adoptive family was good at - other than getting embroiled in all sorts of trouble - it was keeping warm during the winter.

She hunched her shoulders against the chill, and the movement brought awareness of other motion: a rhythmic lifting and swaying, almost a rocking. She was all twisted up, and the mattress in the servants’ quarters was hard as a -

With one hand, Wren reached up, patting around the edge of the fur until she felt hard metal, chilled by the winter air. The last of her muzzy-headed dreams fell away like morning fog burning off under a rising sun, and she opened her eyes to find herself wrapped in furs, cradled against the broad, armored chest plating of Ghveris.

The Antrian juggernaut carried Wren as easily as - Wren scowled. She was not an infant.

“You wake.” Burning blue eyes looked down at her from deep within the shadows of the war-machine’s great helm, and not for the first time, Wren found herself squinting in an attempt to see more within the shadows.

“What happened?” Wren sat up in Ghveris’s arms, pulling one fold of the furs away from her face so that she could see. They were in the mountains, still, and climbing, a long line of shaggy northern horses stretched out behind them. Dark, snow-dusted pines and bare aspen trees, with their white trunks looking like bones, stretched out down the slope beneath them, and past the crest of the nearest rise, the land dropped away. Far, far below, the river valley was spread out, the distance dizzying at first glance even for someone who spent much of her time in the air.

“An ambush,” Ghveris answered. “Inkeris could explain better - a nightmare stone, stuffed full of too much mana, until it burst, like a dam in heavy rain. Then, crossbows from the heights.” He nodded his head, pointing Wren’s attention toward half a dozen Elden riders at the middle of the line with stained bandages poking out of their armor or winter gear, just visible. A strip of linen wrapped around a head wound, covering the brow just beneath the steel of a helm; an armored arm resting in a sling. The signs that their soldiers had not come through the assault unscathed.

Wren swung her head up to the front of the column, where she picked out Keri by the spear standing tall above his head and shoulders. The high winds whipped around the Eld line of march, carrying occasional flakes of snow.

“We’re high up,” Wren said. “Higher than we were.”

Ghveris nodded, and she felt the rumble beneath his breastplate when he spoke. “The Eld did not fall, only you and I. Keri wished to pursue, but would not leave us behind. Once the magic had passed, and I woke, I told him I would carry you.”

“Thank you, but I can ride now,” Wren said. “Put me down, please.”

The steady rhythm of the Antrian’s strides halted, and he lowered Wren to the ground until her boots found purchase in the snow. She adjusted the furs he’d wrapped her in, until they were tight around her torso but left her legs free to move, and then scampered forward up the line of march to the head of the column, with Ghveris stomping behind in her wake.

Keri was speaking to his seconds, but he broke off when Wren crunched through the crust of snow and ran up to the side of his horse, puffing billows of frost from her lips. “Good,” he said. “You slept long enough that I was beginning to worry.”

“I’m awake now, and I’d guess you’ll need a scout,” Wren said.

“Their tracks are clear enough, now.” Keri shook his head. “Take a few moments to recover. I want to make sure you have a clear head. Uncontrolled magic like that can be dangerous.”

At a wave of his arm, one of the Eld hurried up with Wren’s horse on a lead, and handed the reins to her. She hesitated, but if anyone was an expert in spells and enchantments - anyone other than the guild, of course - it would be the Eld of the North. Wren set her snowy-boot into the stirrup of the horse and swung herself up into the saddle.

“Why did it put me down for so long, but not anyone else?” she asked, and then had to repeat her words in a shout to be heard over a sudden gust of wind.

“Neither of you have any Authority to speak of,” Keri explained. “Even less than the average human, perhaps, because your people were never given the Gift of Tamiris. You’ve got no real defense against a word like Cei. When the enchantment broke, a pulse of uncontrolled magic erupted from it. Think of it like dropping a heavy stone into water - we all got splashed. But all of my people have been imprinted with at least one word of power. Even if we’ve not yet done any purposeful Authority training, most of us were able to shrug off the blast of a broken enchantment, without any intent shaping it.”

“So someone like Liv would have walked right through that trap,” Wren reasoned.

Keri nodded. “She’d have barely felt it. It’s the sort of tactic that might be effective against a troop of humans who’ve never been taught - which is probably why this Baron Erskine attempted it.” He glanced up to Ghveris. “I’m not certain why you woke up so much more quickly than Wren, however,” Keri admitted.

“Enchanted defenses,” the war-machine rumbled. “These bodies were created to fight Elden and human rebels who had imprinted words. Imposition of Authority is detected, and triggers a surge from mana-stone storage in an attempt to disrupt the spell.”

“Is there a limit to that?” Wren asked.

Ghveris nodded. “Mana storage is now at less than half capacity,” the Antrian admitted. “That defense will not function until my mana stone reserves have been restored.”

“Which will have to wait until we return to Whitehill,” Keri pointed out. “I presume spending time in the shoals of a rift will get you right again?”

“Correct.”

“Then you’ll just have to do without.” Keri reined his horse in, and pointed ahead - downslope, Wren realized. They’d reached the crest of this particular slope while they’d been speaking, and she hadn’t even noticed.

The trail of the Lucanian raiders hadn’t led them through a pass, per se, Wren saw, but along the lower slope of one of the mountains that ringed the valley. She wasn’t certain whether the locals would class the descending summits beneath them as mountains or hills, but the downward trajectory was clear. Baron Erskine was leading his men back out of the range, south into the lowlands of Lucania. She could actually see the troop of men riding far beneath, like a line of ants against the snow.

“Can we catch them?” Wren asked.

“We’re going to try,” Keri answered.

☙

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The chase that followed was long and grueling, and by the second day Wren thought that she had never been more cold in her life. No matter how she wrapped herself in furs, the high mountain winds always found a way in to chill her skin. Riding on horseback kept her boots out of the snow, and marginally dry, but it also meant she wasn’t moving her own body to generate heat.

She took a single flight, on the second day, once Keri was certain there’d be no lingering effects from the detonation of the enchanted stone. Bat-wings were more resistant to cold than most people might have expected, and Wren had the advantage that her body drew on the power of the blood she drank in order to heal her, and keep her in good physical condition.

That didn’t match the dozens of ways in which a true northern bird was adapted to the environment. Once again, Wren longed for an allied bloodletter to help her; she was certain that with the form of a snowy-owl, she’d have been able to circle the Elden line of march for hours at a time, keeping a close watch out for more ambushes. Instead, she was forced to retreat back to her saddle and her furs, shivering and miserable. Even if she’d wanted to push herself further, she didn’t have the blood for it.

They hunted as best they could along their line of march, and Keri’s soldiers were clearly accustomed to finding game in such harsh conditions. It was a rare evening when a brace of rabbits, their winter coats peeled away, didn’t turn on a spit over their campfire; or a bird brought down by one of Wren’s arrows. Each kill was good for a few gulps of hot blood, but there was no larger game to be had - at least, not without slowing down for a proper hunt.

And though the Eld were well-trained, Wren herself found making camp in the winter snow an exercise in absolute misery. Before they could lay out tents or build a fire, a place had to be swept clear of snow, using short handled bundles of twigs that the Eld carried along, wedged into the straps of their saddles. The hand-made brooms were used to push the snow out of the way, but it was cold, wet, exhausting work made worse by the fact the sun was always descending by the time that Keri called a halt.

If she’d been by herself, Wren was confident that she would have died a dozen times over. Blood and Shadows, she doubted that she’d even have been able to get a fire lit. The wood they found was always half soaked and half frozen, and without Elden magic she didn’t see how anyone would have ever been able to get it alight. One warrior spoke an incantation that caused steam to erupt from each branch, and beads of water to sizzle out and drip down onto the snow. Another conjured fire without need for flint or steel, and the magical flames caught as easily as whale-oil in a lamp.

Then came an evening of stretching your frozen feet as close to the fire as you could get them, trying to dry out the sodden wool of abused stockings. Wren turned her boots to every angle in turn, trying to get them warm and dry without actually setting them on fire. All the while, she thought about Liv’s need for mana-rich food, and kept one eye on how closely the Elden warriors rationed their supplies. While mountain hares might fill her belly, she knew they wouldn’t keep the Eld healthy in the long run.

And, of course, the fires only burned in the evening and in the morning, after they’d made camp and before they rode out again for another day of pursuit. For all of the intervening hours, there was no heat to be had. At least when she slept, in a tent with the Elden women who’d come from Mountain Home, Wren could press herself in tight, skin to skin with Linnea or one of the women whose names she barely knew, until they both stopped shivering.

Were they closing the distance? She thought so, but it was difficult to tell. However many hours had been wasted while the Eld waited for Ghveris’ defenses to wake him, and while they dressed their wounds, it had been enough for Erskine and his remaining raiders to open a daunting lead. They must have been just as miserable as Wren was, but they showed no sign of slowing or stopping.

The cough came on the third day, and it was a little thing at first. Wren ignored it; she’d lived through plenty of fevers in her time, most often brought on by the bite of insects that laid their eggs in the still, stagnant waters left by the River Airaduinë when it receded after a flood.

By the time they came upon the town and the road on the fifth day of the descent, it had become a wet, hacking cough that left Wren short of breath and trembling, hunched forward in her saddle without any attention or awareness to spare for what was happening around her. Ghveris never left her side, by that point, a silent, snow-encrusted sentinel who paced her northern steed for mile after mile.

She didn’t even realize that it was to Ghveris that Keri was speaking, rather than her, until the conversation had nearly passed her by. They’d reined up in a grove of pines, close enough to the village that the smell of woodsmoke was clear to taste on the air, and Wren was staring down at a red fleck of blood on her glove before the words began to make sense.

“- cannot fly. She is too weak,” the Antrian insisted, his words punctuated by the hiss of steam.

“I’m fine,” Wren said, straightening in her saddle until she was mostly upright. Her chest hurt. “I can fly. What do you need?”

Keri turned away from Ghveris to regard her, and Wren hated the fact that she could see worry in his eyes, in the frown that wrinkled his brow. “They can’t be more than a few miles ahead of us,” he explained. “But that would be enough time to rouse the town ahead, and begin to prepare defenses. I need to know whether they’ve stopped to make a stand, or continued on.”

A great rumbling, grinding sound came from within Ghveris’s armored torso, and the war-machine moved to position himself between Keri and Wren. “No,” the juggernaut insisted. “She is sick. We need to make camp until she recovers.”

“It’s fine,” Wren said, raising one gloved hand and placing her palm on his steel pauldron - a gesture she would have been too short to accomplish, if she wasn’t on horseback. “I’ve got one quick flight in me,” she promised. “There’s been enough blood from the squirrels and hares for that. I’ll take a quick look, and then fly right back.”

“You are certain?” Keri asked. “I do not wish to risk you unnecessarily, Wren. My soldiers know how to hunt, and they can be quiet, unseen when they need to be. We can’t build a fire so close to the village, but perhaps -”

“I said I can do it.” Wren scowled. She refused to be useless or the subject of his pity. In a single motion, she shrugged off her furs, passed the reins of her horse to Ghveris, and then let the change overtake her. Her body collapsed into blood, and then she beat black winds against the air, rising up into the winter sky.

She circled once, twice, to get her bearings and enough height that humans would not see her unless they looked up. Then, Wren turned and followed the trails of gray wood-smoke to their source.

The village looked much the same as Fairford or, Wren imagined, any other town in the north of Lucania. There were cottages made of stone and wood, with steep roofs of thatch, slate or clay tile. The occupants must have swept them regularly with brooms, for Wren could see no encrusted drifts of snow piling up atop the houses.

There were pastures marked by wooden fences; barns for livestock to take shelter from the elements; and even a smithy, where the sound of a ringing hammer carried up into the sky. The settlement was not walled, Wren could see that at a glance.

She could also see the dozen men with crossbows hiding on the roofs, or keeping watch from loft doors in the barns. Wren banked south, and made out a much smaller group of riders, with twice as many horses as men, continuing on the snow-covered road that led further into the lowlands. To Benedict’s army, she imagined.

A fit of coughing came over her - Wren couldn’t remember the last time she’d coughed or sneezed in bat form, because she didn’t usually change shapes while she was sick. For a very good reason. The spasming in her chest caused her to reflexively pull her wings in and lower her head, and she began to fall out of the sky.

It was all Wren could do to get her wings out again before she hit the ground, and she skimmed along above the snowy fields at the edge of the town to steady herself, then beat for height again. For the first time since she’d been a child, she was afraid to climb above the trees, and so she made her way back to Keri, Ghveris, and the rest of the company like that, barely ten feet from the ground.

Wren beat her wings to slow herself, abandoned her bat form, and collapsed onto her empty saddle, hacking and coughing up gobs of phlegm. Ghveris caught her in her furs, and it was a good thing he’d been waiting to wrap them around her body, or she would have tumbled down out of the saddle.

“He left a dozen men behind with crossbows,” Wren managed to get out, in between coughs. “Took all of the horses and the scouts he had left and rode out again.” Ghveris’s steel-encased arm pulled her against the plate of his chest, as if to shield her from the wind, and she allowed it to happen.

“Left to slow us down,” Linnea muttered, and Keri nodded.

“With extra mounts, a man like him won’t hesitate to ride them into the ground.” Keri shook his head. “We’ve lost them.”

“No!” Wren gasped, but it was a moment before she could continue. “We ride around the village. I’ll guide you.”

But Keri was already shaking his head. “No. If we keep pushing, we’re as likely to be caught ourselves. Erskine’s reversed our positions - now we’re the ones on hostile ground, with wounded and sick. He’ll resupply at every town between here and where the bulk of their army is encamped, while we have to camp and live off the land. The best thing we can do now is to make it back to Whitehill and tell Liv and her family what we’ve learned.”

A low whistle came from the edge of the pine grove, and every one of the Elden warriors drew a weapon. Wren reached for an arrow from her quiver, but found herself doubled over hacking again.

“Two riders approaching!” Olavi hurried back from the edge of the pines, crouched low.

“Hold,” Keri commanded, raising his hand. “We don’t know -”

“Ho, the pines!” a man’s voice called, in Lucanian. “We’re friends!”

Wren furrowed her brow, and forced herself upright. Two people, swaddled in winter cloaks, picked their horses between the trees of the grove. One of them pulled back her hood, and a cloud of pale blonde hair fell out.

“Lower your weapons - we’ve been looking out for you,” Tephania Lane called.