The sun rising over the eastern mountains painted the curtain walls atop Bald Peak in shades of gold, pink and orange. Below the bare rock of the peak, stands of yellow-leafed aspen, interspersed with yellow pines, rustled in the autumn breeze. At the base of the mountain, on the rise overlooking the river, a flare of light from the waystone guttered and died, leaving behind a small group of horses and riders. The tiny figures of workers crawled across half-finished buildings, already hard at work.

“That’s the second group of the morning, already,” Miina said, from where she leaned on the stone of a crenel, in between two merlons. A scorpion of Elden make loomed just over her shoulder, the wood carved with Vædic sigils to sustain several enchantments. Liv’s cousin was dressed in the latest thing to come out of the dressmaker’s shop in Whitehill: a gown in the Lucanian fashion, made using silk brocade in the Elden style. The blue fabric was worked with images of trees in multiple seasons: bare branches for winter, buds for spring, a healthy and full canopy of leaves for summer, and a few scattered remnants for harvest. Liv still found the fusion of influences a bit jarring, and wasn’t convinced it would last.

Thora, standing a few steps behind them, was dressed more conservatively. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in any household in Freeport – but then, Liv knew from her own upbringing that servants were sometimes far more conservative than the barons or knights who employed them.

“How is that brooch working?” Liv asked, turning away from the view for a moment. She glanced down at the other woman’s wrists and hands for just a moment, and was relieved to see none of the telltale darkening of the veins which would indicate mana sickness.

“It’s wonderful,” Thora said, reaching up for just a moment to touch the brooch with her fingers. It consisted of two parts: a setting in mana-drenched gold, which had first been excavated from the young mines in Baron Baudwin’s territory, and a polished oval of white mana stone, taken carefully from an ancillary vein in the rock beneath them. Only the gold of the setting had been engraved with sigils to form an enchantment, work which had been done by a jeweler to Liv’s exacting specifications.

The enchantment itself, which Liv had done using Aluth, had been based upon the notes she’d taken at the Tomb of Celris, combined with her own work on creating her archmage spell. If it worked as she intended, it would pull in wild mana from Thora’s immediate area and saturate the mana stone, charging it while taking some of the burden of adapting to high density places from Thora. On its own, it wouldn’t be enough to keep someone safe from the depths of a rift; but as a tool to support Elden mana channeling techniques, Liv’s hope was that it would make spending time in the rift safer. The greatest difficulty was that the mana stone components would need to be switched out regularly, and Liv was still hesitant to allow much mining.

“It makes the depths feel like a shoal,” Thora continued, clearly taking time to choose her words carefully. “And the shoals feel almost like normal, your majesty.”

“Good,” Liv said. “I expect that we’ll be spending most of today down at the campus, so that should give you a bit of a reprieve, as well.”

The ring of steel on steel carried across the courtyard, from where Keri was practicing with Olavi and a few of Liv’s guards. Liv allowed her gaze to drift over in that direction, even though she knew that doing so would bring a flush to her cheeks. There was enough of a morning chill to the air that she hoped everyone who saw her would assume that was the cause of the spots of color.

Since they’d returned from the Hall of the Ancestors, Keri had pushed himself to return to spear-training every morning. It had worried her, at first, and Liv had even gone so far as to make Arjun watch over him the first few days.

“It’s a good thing,” her friend had assured her. “He put in a lot of work with Mistress Trafford to get to the point where he could walk again, but he needs to rebuild muscle tone, to work on his balance, and his grip strength. He lost a lot of weight while he was up on the ring, and in the chair. The biggest thing is to watch out that he doesn’t hurt himself falling, or get so frustrated that he gives up.”

And there had been falls – Liv had been there for two of them. The instincts that Keri had spent decades training were all wrong, now, and while he knew that intellectually, that didn’t always help him overcome the reflex to parry or step in a certain way during a sparring match. When his body couldn’t keep up with the demands he placed upon it, that was when the difficulties happened.

And though there had been frustration – often accompanied by Elden curses which Liv’s father had never taught her – the anger had never, so far as Liv could tell, put Keri in any danger of giving up. Instead, those feelings pushed him to work harder than she was sometimes comfortable watching.

“It’s nice he’s getting some muscle tone back,” Miina murmured, coming up on Liv’s side and elbowing her. “He was so skinny at first you could count the ribs.”

Below them, Keri was bare-chested and gleaming with sweat, his long hair plastered to his forehead where it had escaped the braid he wore for these mornings in the yard. Puffs of faint fog escaped his mouth with every breath, but Liv knew from her own experience just how hot he’d be running after this kind of exercise.

“You shouldn’t be watching like this,” Thora grumbled, ever the guardian of Liv’s reputation.

Liv couldn’t help but laugh. “If I haven’t been thoroughly ruined by having two previous lovers, I doubt the sight of one shirtless man will cause any further harm. In any case, King Roland had a daughter before he was ever wed. I doubt anything I do can hold a candle to a scandal like that.”

“King Roland wasn’t the first of his dynasty,” Thora shot back. “What people say about you matters.”

Liv nodded, rather than argue. She knew that Thora was speaking up because she cared: after eight years together, her Lady’s maid had earned the right to her opinions. But at the same time, she truly hadn’t done anything she’d consider improper with Keri.

The months since their return from the Hall of Ancestors had been busy ones, especially for Liv. Construction of the first two buildings, a dormitory for students and a hall for classrooms, which would form the heart of the new college at Bald Peak, had mostly proceeded without need for her direct input, especially once Elden workers from House Isakki had arrived. Acting Guild Mistress Lia Every had done most of the coordination on that end, though Liv had needed to take one morning to discuss the plans for the remainder of the mountain’s original peak.

That had left her with a dull stab of pain, since the original plans had been made with Rosamund, and Liv had imagined how much they might enjoy working together to create a place to live. The first floor of the peak was a tangible reminder of not only Rose’s absence, but everything that had been lost: whatever beautiful stonework the other woman might once have created her would now never come to be.

The Eld had done wonderful work: Liv wasn’t disappointed, particularly not with the beautiful paned windows, with arcs rising from the sides to points at the top, which were set into the graceful walls. She’d chosen to rely on the curtain wall and the imposing climb up the mountain itself for defense, rather than follow the old wisdom of leaving the lower floors of a keep absent of windows entirely. This way, the rooms and corridors were flooded with sunlight all day long, and whatever part of the keep she was in, the open blue skies were never far away.

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Construction was satisfying, in that it came with tangible signs of progress. Wrestling with how to tax the Elden houses, on the other hand, was an exercise in maddening levels of frustration. All of Liv’s plans for the future would never come to pass if they could not fund the alliance now

, and that was a constant struggle. Baron Baudwin’s gold mines had proved out the wisdom of Julianne’s investment, and that helped, but Whitehill’s chief export had always been mana stone, and Liv had yet to allow the Bald Peak mine to fully re-open, for a multitude of reasons. Instead, she’d sent most of the miners to Baudwin, where they could pursue veins of gold deep into the stone.

But building, essentially, an entirely new capital from the ground up was an expensive endeavor. The new college might someday bring in enough coin in tuition to support itself, but Liv doubted that would happen for years. On top of that, she’d promised Arjun they’d break ground on construction of the hospital before the frost set in, and that wasn’t the only obligation she had to fulfill. The red Shield Tribe and Elder Raija were both waiting for her to, essentially, save their people, and Liv privately thought they had entirely too much faith in her capabilities.

All of that, taken together with re-drawing guild charters, laying the foundation of a unified army, making plans for the first meeting of the reconstituted alliance great council, teaching a course of magical combat, and trying to find time to work on her own magic, had left Liv with very little time to pursue what she’d begun with the kiss she’d given Keri at the encampment of House Kaulris. She would have felt worse about it, if he hadn’t shown such incredible patience.

Over a meal of seared fish from Blacklake, that Liv had seasoned and cooked herself in the keep’s new kitchen, she’d poured out her feelings of guilt to him. While her eventual solar would be four stories up, once the builders had finished using the word of stone to shape the heart of the mountain, Liv had claimed a room on the finished first level to serve the function. She couldn’t absent herself from eating in the great hall, which had been one of the first rooms completed, very often; but she’d demanded a single night for just Keri and herself.

“I sometimes forget that you still aren’t entirely used to thinking on an Elden timeline,” Keri had told her, with a smile. They’d been sitting side by side on a cushioned bench that had been hauled up the inside of the mountain, up exhausting flights of stone steps, with their plates set on the low table at their knees.

“We’re both going to live for a very long time, Liv,” Keri had said. “I see you. I see everything that you’re doing, and how much work you’re putting in to build an alliance that will still be here in ten years, or fifty, or a century. I’m not upset with you; I’m proud of you.”

It had stilled her doubts for the moment, but she still felt as if she was neglecting him, and leaving things unsettled. For a moment, Liv considered walking down the stairs to the courtyard below, conjuring herself a blade of ice, and challenging him to a match. She’d lose, of course: her strength was spellcraft, not fighting sword-to-spear. But it would be fun, nonetheless. For a moment, she pictured the two of them wrestling, her sword in a bind, and tumbling down to the bare stone of the courtyard, Liv ending up on top – or, more likely, Keri pinning her on her back beneath him. It was an exciting thought – but she had things to do.

“Let’s head down, then,” Liv said, and summoned a shining blue disk of coherent mana, floating just above the stone of the parapet. Once Miina, Thora, and two of her personal guard – who’d been hovering just out of sight – joined her on it, she lifted it over the crenellations with a thought, and then sent them all skimming down the mountainside, just over the tops of the Aspen trees.

☙

The minimum age of admittance to the College at Bald Peak had been set, after some discussion with Mistress Trafford, Miina, Keri and Guild Mistress Every, at eighteen for students of full human blood; thirty-nine for children of one human and one Elden parent, based mostly on records of Liv’s own growth; and seventy-four, in the case of full-blooded Eld. To encourage attendance, Liv and Lia Every had agreed that anyone who had fought for the alliance, or anyone whose parent had, would have their time at the new college paid for entirely by the crown. As a result, they expected a full two dozen new students.

Liv had wanted to be there for admissions, but Sidonie had pointed out to her that her presence was likely to be more of a disruption than a help. She kept herself out of the way by taking possession of one of the newly built classrooms in the academic hall – there had been a proposal to name it Summersett Hall, after Henry and Julianne. There, she received Bryn Grenfell in a private audience.

The two guards took up stations outside the door, in the corridor, so that they could control who entered, while Miina and Thora remained with Liv as she unrolled a newly-drawn map of alliance lands on the professor’s desk at the head of the room.

Bryn gave her a curtsy upon entering, which Liv did her best not to roll her eyes at. While the Eld were not accustomed to the idea of having monarchs, those who had once called themselves subjects of Lucania had very quickly begun to treat her with all the same courtesies they would once have used for King Roland, or – before his fall – Benedict. While Liv found it tiresome, she also didn’t want to embarrass any of them by refusing.

“Your majesty,” Bryn greeted her, once she’d straightened. “How can I serve you?”

“I’m told your aunt and her people are settling in well,” Liv began. “I’m hoping to visit her once I’ve returned from Freeport.” That was a trip she’d managed to put off until after the new students had arrived, thankfully.

“The winter will be the test of that,” Bryn observed. “The first winter in a new barony is always the one that kills. There’s hardly enough of anything – food, firewood, even shelter.”

“I have plans for that,” Liv said, reaching out her arm to trace a finger from point to point on the map. “House Syvä has long used sledges and sleighs drawn by northern horses through deep snow. We’ll have supplies shipped from Al’Fenthia to Valegard using the waystone, and bring in the horse teams, drivers and sledges the same way. They can get the supplies up into the mountains from there. It would be easier if the Eagle’s Nest rift had a waystone, but I have some thoughts about that, as well.”

Bryn’s shoulders visibly relaxed. “I’m glad they’ll have support. They’ve been through enough already. But I’d planned to stay here at the college.”

“That’s fine for this winter,” Liv told her. “You’re going to need time to plan, in any event, and I’d rather you begin in the spring.”

There was a moment of silence. “Begin what?” Bryn asked.

“Take a look at this map,” Liv said. “What do you see? Or rather, what do you not see, Bryn?” She tapped her finger at Cold Harbor, just beneath Mountain Home, and then at Soltheris, and then Liv waited.

“We don’t have any ports,” Bryn said.

“We don’t have any ports, yet,” Liv corrected her. “And you’re going to fix that, Baroness.” She couldn’t help but smile as she watched Bryn blink, open her mouth, and then close it again.

“I won’t ever be baroness,” Bryn said. “My cousins –”

“I have nine Elden houses and only three barons,” Liv said. “Plus one duke, in my brother. I may not be able to achieve perfect balance in our great council, but I would like to get a little closer than that. I’m naming you baroness of – well, wherever you decide to make this happen.”

“I thought we were going to use waystones –”

“We will,” Liv assured her. “But until we can find a way to build more waystones wherever we need them, and see them consistently powered with mana, we’re also going to need roads, and at least one port. It wouldn’t have been a problem if either Mountain Home or Soltheris joined us, but since neither of them did, we’re going to have to make our own. Julianne gave House Crosbie a second barony, now I’m giving a second one to House Grenfell.”

“Thank you,” Bryn said.

“I’m not certain you’ll still be thanking me after you realize just how much work I’m giving you,” Liv warned her. You can start with maps, but you’re going to have to actually go and visit some of these places in person. And you also need someone who can talk to you about harbours and sea charts. To that end – Miina?”

Her cousin hurried across the room to the door, opened it, and admitted the second person that Liv had sent for, who must have only just arrived.

Coram Athearn entered, a great leather case under one arm, and doffed his sailing hat in a rather overdone bow. “Your Majesty. What an honor to see you again.” His obeisance made, the captain of the Annie Gallant straightened, and flashed a wide grin.