Liv was not permitted to enter the Kaulris encampment until after the sun had gone down. She had considered forcing the issue, while the afternoon wore down, but at the core of things she wanted – needed – their support. And that meant she was going to be forced to do things their way.

With nothing useful left to do, at least until Elder Aira arrived, or the Red Shields, Liv had accompanied Keri, Rei, and her grandmother to the clearing where children of the Vakansa were permitted to play with each other during the council meeting. Set beside a babbling stream was a great jumble of artfully arranged boulders and logs, over and under and among which the children of every house climbed, hid, and tumbled.

Liv had found a clear spot in which to erect a miniature castle of ice, complete with two frozen knights standing guard at the gate, stairs up into a tower with a window ten feet above the ground, and a slide going out the back. Rei had run off with the others, and watching them had been enough to distract her from what was coming, until the sun set.

After forcing herself to eat half an evening meal, she walked out among the trees, away from the camp, with Kaija and a screen of guards to not only protect her, but also to make certain no one else wandered near and got hurt. Once Liv was certain she was alone, she let the stormwand spill wild mana out into the twilight forest around her, breathing it in until her headache diminished to the level of only a minor annoyance. Finally, Liv followed Keri into the unconquered camps, where he returned Rei to his mother for the night.

Half a dozen guards walked with them, a mix of Eld and human, as they passed on from the Mountain Home contingent, skirting the edges of the Asuris tents, the lonely cook-fire of the remaining Iravata, and the single unconquered house with which Liv have yet to interact.

“Veitha,” Keri told her, his voice soft. “Many of our ancestors were designed to be pleasing to the eye, and them perhaps most of all.”

Liv hesitated: she could hear cooking songs and cleaning songs drifting out of the camp. Not the songs her mother and Gretta had taught her, but perhaps the distant cousins of those songs. It stirred memories of working in the kitchens during the winter, a fire blazing in the hearth, people rushing about in every direction. For a moment, she wanted to walk into the Veitha camp and join them.

Instead, she let Keri lead her further out into the forest.

House Kaulris, unlike the other ten Elden Houses, did not cluster close about the amphitheater in a tight ring of encampments. They had raised their tents and built their cook fires out past the hard-beaten earth of the ring road, where the voices of the other Eld had grown distant.

Here, there was none of the bustle of the other camps. A single cook-fire, in the center of a cluster of tents, had been allowed to burn low, until only embers remained. Torches had been set out, pounded into the forest floor like stakes before being wrapped in oil-soaked cloth and lit on fire. The result was only enough light to cast long shadows, and a ruddy, flickering glow that did more to distort than it did to reveal.

A cloaked and shrouded figure waited for them: it could have been any member of the Kaulris, until Elder Raija spoke, and Liv recognized her voice from the evening before.

“No guards,” the woman beneath the veil announced, without preamble or introduction. “You may not bring any of the people you rely upon for comfort, or support. That includes you, Inkeris ka Ilmari. You may wait for her to return, but that is all.”

Kaija stepped forward. “How do we know that we can trust you?”

Raija’s shoulders shrugged carelessly. “Your lady comes here of her own choice. We have not lured or captured her. We are not your enemies, Captain of the Northern Raiders.”

Liv glanced to her side, and was surprised to see that the older woman was scowling, as if the title displeased her. “Why don’t you have them fan out in the woods around the camp,” she suggested, resolving to ask about it later. “You can protect House Kaulris and I at the same time. Just in case anyone tries to interfere.” She could tell that it didn’t make Kaija happy, exactly, but it at least gave them something to do.

“Leave your wand behind, as well,” Raija told her.

Liv lifted the stormwand out of the leather sheath on her belt, and handed it to Keri. “Anything else?” she asked.

“Remove your clothing.”

“You have to be joking,” Liv exclaimed, before she could stop herself.

“There is no humor here, Livara tär Valtteri,” the veiled woman said. “Clothing protects and conceals. It shields us from the elements, and from the eyes of others. Tonight, you must be utterly exposed, completely vulnerable. We will get at the truth of you – what remains when you are stripped of your guardians, your supporters, your tools and your armor, and all your pretensions.”

With a deliberate effort, Liv unclenched her fists, reached up to her neck, and began unbuttoning her bodice. If she’d been warned about this in advance, she would have made considerably different preparations before she came. At her side, Keri turned from her. “Don’t walk away,” Liv told him. “I’m going to need someone to carry all of this.”

She piled her bodice and overskirt up in his arms, her stays and underskirt, her shift and stockings and boots, until finally Liv’s bare feet rested on the dirt and dried leaves of the forest floor. She shivered, not from cold, but from the way Elder Raija calmly watched her throughout the entire process. She trusted Keri not to look, at least.

“The ring, as well.”

Without looking away from the other woman, Liv yanked her guild ring off her left hand and set it on top of the heap of clothing in Keri’s arms.

“Good.” The elder’s head – or at least her veil – nodded, and she extended a gloved hand. “Come with me, Livara. Young Inkeris, you may be assured that we will return her to you uninjured.”

Liv took the old woman’s hand, and was surprised to find that one of the fingers of her glove was empty. She let Raija tug her toward the fire, and then hesitated. “Keri, I’ll –” But her voice died when, upon looking back, she saw that an impenetrable barrier of boiling mist and darkness had fallen, past which she couldn’t see anything at all.

She turned back toward the fire, and caught sight of movement in the shadows, just out of the corners of her eyes. Animals? Other members of House Kaulris? Conjurations of some kind? She wasn’t certain.

“The last barrier will be the most difficult to lower,” Raija told her. “If you have stood against one of the old gods, Livara, I am certain that you could put up quite a bit of resistance to our magic, using your Authority. Perhaps you could hold off three elders; perhaps not. I am certainly not interested in finding out. It would waste the time of everyone involved, and leave us exhausted. So I will ask you to simply allow our spells to affect you.”

A cold night breeze blew through the camp, causing the torches to gutter and the mist to swirl. Once, it would have made Liv shiver and clutch her arms around her body for warmth, she was certain.

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“If I feel something like an attack, I will stop it,” Liv warned.

A thin, raspy laugh came from beneath Raija’s veil. “I don’t believe any of us wish to fight you, Lady of Winter. Now, look down at the coals.” The elder's gloved hand slipped out of Liv’s grasp.

She let her arm fall down to hang at her side, and turned to stare into what was left of a dying cookfire. Liv was certain that with a bit of tinder and a few breaths, she could get a flame back easily. Every time the wind blew through the forest, the coals brightened, glowing a vibrant, shining orange.

“What am I looking for?” Liv asked, turning back to Raija. But when she spun around, the elder was gone, and she was surrounded by only darkness. There were no stars overhead – blocked, perhaps, by the canopy of the forest. Mist crawled along the ground, so that even the flickering torches were each only a dim glow.

An Authority pressed upon her, and it was all Liv could do not to push back against it – to let Cel roar to life, crack frost along the ground, and bring the storm. Instead, keeping Elder Raija’s request in mind, she allowed it to engulf her.

“I’m happier without you, you know,” Cade Talbot said, striding forward out of the shadows from the left side of the fire.

Liv flinched backward, one hand to her chest, and managed to swallow a shriek before it came out. “What? Cade? How are you here?” She had a sudden urge to cover her body, though of course he’d seen her before. She hadn’t had quite so many scars, then, of course, and even at the time she’d found it hard to believe that he found her beautiful.

“I have a good wife, and a child coming,” her first lover said, pacing around her. His dark hair blended into the night, while his face was illuminated only partially by the glow of the coals. “A better wife than you’d ever have been. And my son will be entirely human, at least, instead of some kind of half-blooded freak.” His lips curled in a sneer.

“Why are you being so cruel?” Liv gasped. He’d never spoken to her like this – not on the day she’d broken things off, not even when she’d seen him later, at the battle of the south pass.

“Because it’s what you deserve,” Rose said, stalking up on her other side. “Look at you. You threw him away to go run off and fight, and you threw me away to be a queen. You never actually cared about either one of us, did you? Just tossed us aside the moment we weren’t convenient anymore.”

“That isn’t true,” Liv said. “I apologized to you, Rose. I know I should have talked to you first, but –”

“But I wasn’t important enough,” Rose interrupted her.

“We weren’t important enough.” Cade came up on her other side, and they both spoke together, in a chorus.

“And that’s why you’ll always be alone,” Keri said, walking up behind her.

Liv spun around, and this time she did pull her arms tight around herself, in a frantic attempt to shield her body. It was one thing to stand naked in front of her former lovers, but – “You’re not supposed to be here,” she told her friend. “You were supposed to wait outside.”

“Yes, holding your things.” Keri dropped her clothing to the forest floor, then kicked it aside with his boot. “I’m glad I can do that for you, at least, after you let me be crippled. I can be a walking wardrobe for you. A regent when you’ve got better things to do than sit on your throne. But certainly nothing more.”

Liv backed away from Keri, who she’d never seen so angry at her before, even when they’d argued in Al’Fenthia, and nearly ran into Rose. Suddenly, all three of them were advancing on her, shoulder to shoulder, forcing her away from the fire and into the darkness. She knew there must be tents around here somewhere – she’d seen them – but all she felt under the bare soles of her feet were dried leaves.

“You never loved me,” Cade told her. “You just liked the feeling of someone paying attention to you.”

“You allowed me to love you,” Rose snarled. “Like you’d allow a cat to curl around your legs, asking for a scratch. I can’t believe I was pathetic enough to settle for it.”

“You know how I feel, don’t you?” Keri said, his eyes shadowed by the flickering light. They looked like endless pits. “It’s just easier not to admit it, because if you did, you’d have to make a decision. And you don’t want to do that. You’d rather ignore it.”

“No!” Liv shouted, though she wasn’t certain which of those accusations she was denying, exactly. But they were crowding up on her, and her heel snagged on an exposed root, making her stumble. They kept pressing forward, and she had the wild thought that when they caught her, they would rip her to pieces between them.

“Get away from me,” she snarled, and let the storm pour out of her body. Wind whipped around them, extinguishing the torches and the embers, swirling with heavy snow. Frost cracked across the ground, and icicles descended from the boughs of the trees overhead. All light and warmth and heat fled.

The trees around her were bare of leaves, and between the thin, grasping, skeletal fingers of their branches, which clawed up toward the sky, she could see the northern stars, and the curtain of colored light dancing, like it did at Kelthelis. Liv’s breath puffed in front of her, and in the light of the ring, and the moon, and the aurora, she could once again see the faces of her past lovers, and the man who was not yet.

Cade, Rose and Keri had been frozen into statues. Their arms were upraised as if to shield their faces, their eyes wide in fear and horror. In pain. They accused her, blamed her. They looked exactly like the statues she had found in the Tomb of Celris – all of those beautiful Elden women, once concubines of the Lord of Winter, preserved for twelve-hundred years as nothing more than ornaments in his cold, empty halls.

Lip trembling, Liv stepped forward and raised a hand. She touched Rose’s face, but there was nothing of softness to be found there, only ice. She tried Keri, next, and then Cade, but from not a single one of them could she feel any trace of heat or life.

The sound of hands clapping came from behind her. “Excellent. Now we can look at them whenever we like, and we don’t have to listen to their whining and complaining. We really should have done this ages ago.”

Liv whirled around, finding herself in the throne room where she’d fought the shade of Celris. The great vaulted ceilings stretched up into darkness above her head, and upon the dais rested the throne of her ancestor. Sprawled in the throne, wearing the silver crown of Celris, she saw herself, as if through a cracked mirror.

The Liv in the throne wore a dress of moonlight and frost, all shades of white and delicate blue, half opaque and half translucent. Her skin was a perfect shade of pale, with no scars left, and no blemishes. Her eyes burned as blue as those which lurked in the shadows of Ghveris’s helm, and her hair sparkled like new-fallen snow. She held the stormwand across her lap, resting idly in the delicate fingers of one hand, and at her feet was a yellowed, human skull.

Behind her, Kaija, Miina, Wren and Ghveris stood at attention, weapons in their hands, eyes fixed somewhere above Liv’s head, not actually seeing her. A chain of black iron ran from a ring set into the throne, down to where Princess Milisant knelt, collared about the neck, and otherwise utterly naked. Her pale back was a mass of criss-crossed, bleeding wounds, where the touch of a lash had ripped her open.

“What –” Liv couldn’t make either her mind, or her mouth, work properly.

“Oh, the skull?” her reflection on the throne asked, and poked at it with the toe of her enchanted boot. “That was Ractia, before we hunted her down and put an end to her. I’ve been considering whether I should have it made into a goblet. Not that I actually want to put my lips on something so disgusting, but there’s a certain amount of symbolism, isn’t there? The God-Eating Queen.”

“This is – this isn’t real.” Liv was ashamed that she hadn’t realized that right away, the moment Cade had stepped out of the forest. Of the three of them, only Keri could actually have followed her into the campsite – and he would have, too, she was certain, if he’d thought she needed him.

“Isn’t real yet,” the God-Eating Queen corrected her. “We both have Dā, even if you’re too afraid to use it. Trace the threads that run forward from this confluence, and see where you get yourself. A girl who’s so frightened that no one will love her, she pushes anyone who tries away. A queen who’s so determined to do anything that needs to be done, to defeat her enemies, that she’ll force her own people to kneel. Have you killed Juhani yet? I remember how good it felt to push him down, to force him onto the ground.”

“No.” Liv shook her head. “I haven’t killed him.”

“Yet,” the God-Eating Queen repeated. “You really should, though. It will make everything simpler. Just kill anyone who won’t kneel. Start with the north, and then move on to Lucania. After all, you can do it. So why shouldn’t you?”

Liv shook her head. “I don’t want this,” she muttered. “This is what they’re all afraid of, isn’t it? The Lady of Winter – that I’ll be just like Celris was.”

“Oh, we can be so much better than that old man,” the God-Eating Queen said. “He deserved everything he got. And we deserve – well, the world. All of the worlds.”

“I’m done here,” Liv gasped, and spun around, flinching away from the statues of her dead lovers. “Raija! I’m done! Let me out!”

Her voice echoed through the cold hall, reverberating off the stone and the ice, but no one answered.