Liv’s headache was waiting for her when she woke, and only built over the course of the morning as she climbed the mountain slope toward the third ward and barricade. Loosening the enchantment which restrained the mana inside the stormwand helped to ease the pain, but Liv knew she was already pushing the limit of how long she could spend away from a rift. Once she’d taken the ward down, a trip back to Feic Steria would be necessary.

Soile, the Elden commander from Al’Fenthia, trudged up the forested slopes at Liv’s side, with Ghveris and Arjun a step behind. Kaija and two of Liv’s guards walked about twenty paces in front of them, along a game trail that had been found and mapped by the scouts before the main force had ever crossed the desert. Wren was already somewhere ahead of them, along with a screen of a dozen scouts who were meant to find enemy movements before they could be taken by surprise.

Behind them, stretched back along the game path like the long tail of a serpent, came a hundred soldiers, walking two abreast. There were Whitehill crossbowmen, archers from Soltheris, knights from Valegard and Ashford, and infantry from Al’Fenthia. Liv wondered, in an idle moment, just how different the game trail looked after they’d passed. March an army back and forth a few times and she imagined it would start to take the shape of an actual road.

They’d left the second ward behind at least a bell before, and Liv had paused there just long enough to let the soldiers rest their legs, while she took a look at the black iron. The palisade still half-stood, pieces of it hanging broken where they’d been damaged by alliance spells. The ditch in front of the palisade hadn’t yet been filled in, and the grass and brush all around the area had been trampled, burned, or otherwise ravaged by the ambush that had taken place there.

The retreat had been so chaotic that over a dozen bodies had been left behind, to cool overnight. By the time Liv and her troops found them, flies were buzzing around the corpses of their comrades, and she’d detailed twenty men to transport them back down the mountain for funeral rites and to be burned on pyres.

And while the sight of the corpses – necks torn open by feasting bats – had been horrible, what kept tumbling through Liv’s thoughts as they hiked back and forth up switchbacks, all across the side of the mountain, was that the sigils in the iron hadn’t looked carved, or etched, or hammered. The gently curved lengths of iron that Brom, Sir Randel and the others had dug up from the ground hadn’t shown any sign of being fitted together, bolted, or coming in separate pieces at all.

“You’re only half here,” Soile murmured, from her place to Liv’s left.

“My great-uncle threw out a list of words he suspected Ractia can use,” Liv replied. “Most of them were pretty obvious – of course she’s going to have blood magic. But he listed a word I’ve never seen used before, as well. Ais is the word for controlling iron. I thought it might be a stretch to assume she had it, but now that I’ve seen the wards myself, they look like they were shaped by magic. I’ve seen someone use the word for silver, and it was just like that. It’s such an odd choice though. I can understand why she’d have Aluth, it’s just too useful to be able to manipulate raw mana. Water and wood – some of her choices don’t make sense to me.”

“Trying to predict what two-word spells she might use?” Arjun asked, from behind them.

Liv nodded. “It would be nice to have a guess or two, at least, before we fight her. Some idea of what to expect.”

A cougar slipped out of the brush just ahead of them, padding out onto the game trail, and Liv nearly blasted it with a spell before she realized that it was Wren. She put a hand on her chest, up against her enchanted steel breastplate, and exhaled.

“You scared me,” she admitted.

Wren collapsed into blood, and then elongated into her human form, falling into step to Liv’s right, just at the edge of the path. Three abreast was wide enough they could only barely fit. “Sorry,” the huntress said. “But we’re coming up on the third palisade.” She removed a frosted glass vial of blood from her belt, popped the cork, and drank it back in a single swallow.

Liv knew that her father had made certain fresh blood from slaughtered animals was stored so that Wren had an ample supply. With their supply lines stretching out across the high desert, and the game around the base of Nightfall Peak rapidly being hunted to depletion by the army, she wasn’t certain how much longer those vials would last.

Soile held up a single fist, at the same level as her helm, and the column behind them shuffled to a halt. “We can’t stay here long,” the dark-haired eld told them. “We’re vulnerable to an attack, stretched out for the march like this.”

Liv nodded, then turned back to Wren. “Did you get a count of how many are there?”

“More than ten,” the huntress said, with a snort. “As far as I can tell they pulled back the forces they used yesterday to this palisade, and they’re waiting for us. Hard to get a count on my own people, they’re probably roosting up in the trees, but I caught sight of a couple. Call it two dozen Lucanian crossbows, twenty Antrians, and as many again just cultists with no real armor and junk for weapons. Call it a hundred, maybe a touch more.”

“We should bring up more soldiers,” Solei cautioned. “You usually want at least a three to one advantage to assault a fortified position. More, for one of your Lucanian castles.”

Liv shook her head. “No, I’ll break their walls. And if we’re right about their commander’s plans, they’ll begin retreating as soon as they lose the advantage of their position. They’re here to bleed us, not fight to the death.”

Kaija scampered back to join them, crouched low to the ground. “If you make yourself obvious, you’re just asking for Ractia’s lieutenants to come after you.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Liv said. “Let Aariv or Manfred or whoever come out. If we can pick one of them off now, that will make things simpler when we get to the top of the peak. Solei, you have command of the troops. Wren, Ghveris and Arjun are with me. Kaija, your job is to give us room to work. I’d prefer not to take a crossbow bolt from behind, if we can avoid it.”

“Give me a moment to re-arrange our lines,” Solei said, and snuck away. Behind them, at her commands, soldiers began breaking off the game trail and picking their way through the woods and the underbrush, forming a wide line of advance.

“They’re going to move more slowly off the path,” Wren warned.

“Then we’ll give them time to advance,” Liv said. She drew the stormwand from the sheath at her side, and reached up to the blue sky above with Cel. She could have called lightning down out of a clear sky, using the wand, but she didn’t actually think they had any chance of surprising the enemy. Liv had taken advantage of Wren’s scouting abilities often enough that she knew just how useful having a few spies in the air, circling in bat form, could be. If she couldn’t take the cultists unaware, she would just have to use overwhelming force.

By the time the line of alliance soldiers had advanced to within sight of the third palisade, a swirling mass of dark, rain-heavy clouds had gathered overhead. Light flickered across the sky, and thunder rumbled. The wind had picked up, and it shook the trees, making the leaves sigh.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

The enemy had chosen a natural choke point, as they had for all of their other defenses. The game trail broke out of the trees into an open area, where only tall grasses and scattered bright flowers swayed. Here, the ground on the right dropped away suddenly, falling fifty feet or more to green slopes below. The tops of trees, visible just below the edge, promised a battering, tumbling fall to anyone who went over.

On the left, a rock face rose up thirty feet, leaving only an open, flat space of about the same width. This had been spanned with a wooden barricade, in front of which had been dug a ditch, which was then set with sharpened wooden spikes jutting up out of the earth at the bottom. There was a single gate of wood, to permit the passage back and forth of Ractia’s troops along the mountain trail, and above it had been built a rough scout tower of logs, with slits left for crossbows to shoot out from. Somewhere beneath all this, buried, if Wren’s scouts had the right of it, just in front of the ditch, would be the black iron ward.

“What’s this one do again?” Liv asked Wren.

“Fills your lungs with water,” the huntress said.

Liv nodded. “Alright. I’m going to take control of it, and then hit their walls. When you see the lightning hit, have them charge,” she told Soile. “Arjun, Ghveris, do what you can to keep those crossbow bolts off me.”

As she had at the pass, before the parley, Liv stretched out her Authority and felt for the wards. They were nasty things, and she was impressed to actually find three nested lines, buried with perhaps five feet between them. She woke Dā, and just like she’d done with Baron Henry’s wards, ensured that these wouldn’t be killing her people any time soon.

Ghveris, in the meantime, broke out of the trees first, setting himself in front of Liv, where he knelt, and the familiar blue pane of a mana shield flickered into existence. Liv stepped out after him, with Wren prowling to one side as a cougar, Arjun to the other with his wand in hand, and Kaija ringing them with Liv’s guards.

The moment they were visible, a shouted command rang out from the palisade, and was followed immediately by a volley of crossbow bolts and the sharp, staccato bark of the shoulder-mounted weapons fired by the Antrian war-machines. Ghveris’s mana shield rippled and flashed under the onslaught but, at least for the moment, held. It was too small to catch everything, of course, and bullets and bolts flew past them to either side, into the wood where Soile held back the troops in advance of their charge. Liv hoped that not too many people had been hurt.

She raised the storm wand, and brought it down. “Lucet Cvelia o’Mae!” Liv shouted, just as Julianne had taught her to do. Lightning flashed down from the clouds overhead, followed only a heartbeat later by the sound of thunder, and Liv shaped it into a great spinning wheel of crackling light. With another wave of her wand, the wheel, parallel to the ground, shot forward over the wards and the ditch and crashed into the wooden palisade.

The enemy fortification exploded – there was simply no other word to describe it. Splinters of wood flew in every direction, the watchtower over the gate fell backward, and the wooden gate, now burning, tumbled back through the soldiers who had been crouched behind the wall. With a thought, Liv created a bridge of ice over the ditch, and then soldiers behind her rushed forward, shouting as they came. Liv let them pass her, and then strode forward to follow.

She tried not to hear the wailing of dying men and women who had been thrown to every side by her spell. They looked like rag dolls dropped in haste, and left at the corner of a child’s room, limbs splayed awkwardly – save that these were real people, with burning shards of wood jutting out of their eyes or throats or thighs, blood pumping out of the puncture wounds. Some of them were burned, their flesh charred by the lightning as Master Grenfell’s had been at the pass. One man screamed as he fell over the edge, his voice trailing off and then finally stopping suddenly.

It was the enemy Antrians who held firm, of course. Their mana shields and metal armor had protected them from the worst of the flying pieces of wood, and now they formed a bulwark of two ranks. Ten in front kneeled, their mana shields merged together, while ten behind opened fire with their weapons.

The volley brought down some of the alliance soldiers, though perhaps not as many as the enemy might have been hoping for. Elden warriors raised walls of ice or wood, behind which both they and the Whitehill troops took shelter. Half a dozen lances of boiling light connected the outstretched hands of Bælris warriors with the Antrian mana shields, which flickered and cracked under the assault.

Liv was just about to break the Antrian formation when the Great Bats of Ractia swept in from behind, seeking to take the alliance troops in the rear. But Soile had been waiting for this, and had held back a line of Whitehill crossbowmen to fire a volley at the cloud of incoming bats.

Most of these Red Shields hadn’t acquired the same alacrity in changing form that Liv’s friend had: where Wren would have simply collapsed into blood and let the volley pass through her, fully half the bats fell out of the sky and tumbled to the ground. They hit the grass already shifting, however, those who weren’t already dead, and the colony of bats became a charging tide of bears, wildcats, and wolves.

“Do you see him?” Liv asked Wren, as they both scanned the battlefield.

Wren shook her head, unable to speak in her cougar form, and then launched herself back toward the treeline. She tackled a smaller wildcat, jaws locked around its throat, and the two of them tumbled away through the brush in a chorus of yowls and hisses and slicing claws.

Liv’s guards moved to engage the charging animals with their halberds and magic. She caught a glimpse of a red wolf skewered on a spike, a bear being harried by three people at once, dancing around it and stabbing at its back wherever it wheeled. But she could already tell that wasn’t going to be her fight: she could feel another person’s Authority pushing back against hers. Leaving Kaija to protect her back, she cast about until she found an old man in the robes of a priest, picking his way across the battlefield.

The wind teased Aariv’s wild white hair, and his forehead was painted in the same manner that Vivek Sharma was accustomed to, though rather than yellow, this paint was a vibrant crimson, as if the old man had splashed himself with blood.

“I know you,” the priest called, once he was within shouting distance. “The girl who fought us at Coral Bay. The Great Mother has been quite impressed at all you’ve done. You killed both Karis and Calevis, did you not?”

From Ghveris’s shoulder, his weapon barked, barrels whirling, and half a dozen Iravatan soldiers tumbled to the ground. “I will hold your flank,” the war-machine promised, rising to his feet and extending his enchanted blade.

Arjun, on the other hand, walked at Liv’s side as she turned to approach the old man.

“And Pandit Sharma has told me about you,” she told him. “Though I don’t understand how a priest of the Trinity can stomach serving one of the old gods.”

“Don’t you?” Aariv asked, cocking his head to one side with a tremulous smile. “I should think that it would be quite obvious. Lord Tamiris gave humans magic so that we might live up to our full potential. Do you think that we’ve done that? When you look at the world around you, can you honestly say that we have not fallen short? Do you not think that he would be disappointed, if he saw us now – hoarding words of power, in service to traditions that haven’t changed in hundreds of years? And don’t you think Sitia might want us to make a change? – isn’t that why you joined the mages guild, Arjun Iyuz?”

Arjun shifted uncomfortably at Liv’s side. “I went to learn to be a better healer,” he said. “Not to help a blood goddess kill people.”

“Surprised that I know your name, as well?” Aariv shrugged. “You shouldn’t be. We have plenty of spies in Lucania – though perhaps less now than a year ago. Another obstacle you’ve thrown in the Great Mother’s plans, Livara.”

“One more after today,” Liv told him. Days and days of practicing with the elders made the casting simple: wings sprouted from her back at the same time as a cloud of swords froze into existence, hovering around her, spread out to either side of her shoulders.

“You shouldn’t be so quick to fight me,” Aariv said. “I wasn’t sent to kill you. I was sent with an offer.”

“I can’t think of a single thing your goddess could offer me that I’d ever want,” Liv snarled.

“Can’t you? The single greatest source of knowledge in this entire world offers you the chance to learn from her, and you can’t think of any question you would ask?” Aariv shrugged. “How to fix the ring, perhaps? What needs to be done to the Great Bats and the Eld so that their populations stop dwindling? You can’t imagine the medical knowledge she has. And then, of course, there’s this: she knows you’ve started changing, Livara. You’re already at least as much Vædim as you are human or Eld. Astonishing, really, that you’ve stumbled along so far on your own. But she can take you the rest of the way.”

Aariv extended a hand. “Call your warriors off. Come with me and speak with her. Let Ractia show you how to become a goddess.”