When Liv, Sidonie, Kaija, Piers and the rest of the soldiers who’d accompanied her to Ashford appeared on the waystone beneath Bald Peak, it was clear at a glance just how unprepared they’d actually been to receive the refugees.

The wall around the stone was sufficient to give Whitehill guards a chance to launch a wave of crossbow bolts at any incoming enemies the moment they appeared, but there was a complete lack of outbuildings in which the wounded could take shelter. Servants, children, and Ashford soldiers in bloody bandages had been hustled out through the single gate onto the snow-covered bluff above the Aspen River.

Liv dragged herself through the clusters of standing people, huddled together in an attempt to shield themselves from the wind. Now that the fighting was done, and she’d thrown nearly all of her remaining mana into activating the tether, the heavy weight of exhaustion dragged at her. She wanted nothing more than to find a place to lie down and sleep.

But there was no time for that - not with hundreds of people out in the open, and most of them hardly dressed for the cold. A mountain winter like this would kill the first of them in less than a bell, without shelter and a source of warmth. It would start with the old and the young, the wounded and the sick, but the deaths wouldn’t stop there.

Liv looked up to the peak, where the curtain wall and courtyard were nearly finished. The barracks up there was large enough to shelter a good number of people, but if she took humans who didn’t know how to handle mana into the rift, she’d simply be condemning them to a slower death by mana sickness.

“You’re back!” Rose skidded across the trampled snow, clouds of fogged breath pouring out of her mouth. She raised a hand to Liv’s cheek, and her glove came away red with blood.

“I’m fine,” Liv assured her. “It’s nothing. But I’ve got no mana at all left, and we can’t leave these people out in the open. We don’t have anywhere to house them here, but Whitehill’s too far to walk -”

“Forget that,” Rose said. “What do we do if the army that attacked Ashford comes through the waystone?”

Liv shook her head. “That won’t happen.”

“She broke the waystone before we left,” Sidonie said, coming up to one side of her friends.

“If you broke the waystone, how did you get back?” Rose asked, and then caught herself before Liv could even answer the question. “You used your tether.”

Liv nodded. “So as I said, they won’t follow us. But that means we need to figure out what to do about all these people, and we don’t have long.” She bit her lip. “I need mana, first of all.” She set off, picking her way through the crowd toward the mine road that led up to the cut into the mountain.

The purposeful stride of the three young women - and, if she was being honest, probably the silver circlet and the group of Elden warriors Kaija led at their heels - quickly attracted attention. People began to shout out to them.

“Where do we go now?” a woman cradling an infant beneath her cloak called.

“I need a chirurgeon here!” a soldier shouted, from where he was kneeling next to a wounded comrade.

It was almost a relief for Liv when someone she actually knew hurried to catch up with her.

“What’s the plan?” Bryn asked. Her arms were clutched about her chest against the wind that whipped across the lower slopes of Bald Peak.

“Once I get to the shoals, I’ll pull in all the mana I can from the rift,” Liv began. “Then I’ll come back down and begin sending people to Al’Fenthia. Sidonie, you can go across with the first wave and find Airis. They’ve at least got shelter and food there.”

“You’ll kill yourself with mana sickness!” Bryn objected, and then looked confused when neither Rosamund nor Sidonie spoke up along with her.

Liv shook her head. “No. I survived doing it years ago, before I had the crown and -” she stopped herself. While it was true, she had survived pulling mana directly from Bald Peak once before, that was only because Triss had been there to save her. Otherwise, the mana sickness would have killed her.

She looked down at one arm, raised it up and pulled off her glove. The veins and of her wrist weren’t even slightly discolored, and she’d pulled massive amounts from mana from the minor rift at Ashford. Aira had told her that her Vædic heritage was growing in power, and that had been after only what happened beneath the Well of Bones. Liv couldn’t imagine that destroying Celris had done anything but accelerate the process.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, and continued pushing herself up the mine road.

“But how many times can you activate the waystone?” Rose asked her. “Twice? That isn’t going to be enough to move these people.”

“You can bring back soldiers from Al’Fenthia,” Liv said, turning to Sidonie. “They can help share the load. And once everyone’s safe - someplace warm, with wounds bound so they don’t bleed out - we can figure out how to get them all to Whitehill.”

“It’s the best plan I can think of,” Sidonie agreed.

“I have an idea,” Rose said. “There’s supposed to be a vein of mana stone linking the rift and the waystone, isn’t there? Running underground? Only the miners cut it. What if I use Stai to restore the connection?”

Liv was breathing hard now, and soaked in sweat beneath her winter clothing. “It wouldn’t charge immediately,” she huffed. “But any mana we can get will help. Do it. You should wait here, Bryn.”

They’d nearly come to the cut itself, and Liv felt an immediate sense of relief when she stepped into the shoal of the rift. A tension she hadn’t even been aware of building, in her shoulders and neck and even temples, began to melt away. It was a pity she wouldn’t be able to stay in the higher mana density for long.

Mana roared into her with Liv’s first purposeful breath, and the crown connected with the rift, renewing her awareness of every part of it. She could even feel the - root? Heart? - from which the mana stone grew, now that she knew what to look for.

Rosamund scrambled past her, into the cut, and Liv closed her eyes to let her mind trace the veins of mana stone. “The right tunnel,” she called out. “That’s where they cut the connection.” She thought Rose might have nodded, or said something back in response, but Liv didn’t have any attention for that. Instead, she pulled more and more mana into herself until she was stuffed to the brim. Another glance down at her exposed veins still showed no trace of discoloration.

“How are you doing that?” Bryn gasped, but Liv only shook her head and set off back down the mountain. Walking up had taken too long: they needed to be moving faster, and she couldn’t hold enough mana to send two groups through, anyway. She conjured a disc of blue mana, and once everyone was on it sent them skimming down the road so quickly they had to crouch rather than stand.

Liv took them up over the heads of the mass of refugees, as much to get attention as to save time. “Bring the children and the wounded!” she shouted, and maneuvered the disc over the walls that surrounded the waystone. They leapt down, one after another, and Sidonie accompanied Liv out onto the disc, where they waited at the sigil to Al’Fenthia.

It took too long to load the white circle of mana stone, and Liv knew that people were freezing at the foot of the mountain. A few? Dozens? How many were bleeding to death of their wounds?

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In the end, it was simply too large of a problem for her to solve alone. Just as she’d had to leave good soldiers to die at Ashford, she was going to have to let more people die beneath Bald Peak. Liv knelt down to touch the sigil, and the waystone drank her mana eagerly.

“Send a group back for the next wave as soon as you can,” Liv said to Sidonie, and then pushed her way out of the mass of people. An explosion of light carried them away to the Eld, and Liv swayed on her feet for a moment from pure exhaustion.

Kaija took her by the arm. “Are you alright?”

“I’ll survive,” Liv said. “I’ve just forced a lot of mana in and out of my body in a really short time. I’m going to need to rest once this is all dealt with.”

She took a deep breath, and with the armorer at her side, stepped out through the gate to address the crowd of refugees huddled on the snow.

“Next group!” Liv shouted. “Wounded and children, forward!”

☙

The remainder of the day was a grueling, maddening blur, filled with small victories which nevertheless were never quite enough.

Liv’s faith was rewarded - both in House Keria at Al’Fenthia, who immediately began sending soldiers through to fuel the waystone, and in Rosamund, who succeeded in linking the mana stone vein from the rift all the way down to the foot of the mountain. It left her with a case of mana sickness nearly as bad as any Liv had ever seen, by the time Rose was done, and they sent her off as part of the fifth wave to be treated by Elder Aira.

But no matter how fast they moved, the entire operation was a brutal race against time that had been doomed from the very beginning because Bald Peak simply didn’t have facilities adequate to receive refugees. Could something have been built while they spent nearly a month fortifying the top of the mountain? Liv honestly wasn’t certain, and she knew that she was going to be chewing the question over in her mind every night while she tried to sleep, for a long time.

Not dozens, but scores of people bled out from their wounds or died of the cold before they could be sent along to the healers at Al’Fenthia. It was Sidonie, of course, who got Liv a final number, while a combined group of Elden and Whitehill soldiers set five great pyres alight under the ruddy light of the setting sun.

“Twelve hundred and fifteen people came from Ashford,” Liv’s friend explained, carefully holding her notebook open with her gloved hands. The mountain winds caught the smoke from the pyres and blew it south toward Whitehill. It occurred to Liv that she needed to see whether Piers or his men had sent a bird to let Matthew and Julianne know what had happened.

“Of those, nearly half were wounded,” Sidonie continued. “I expect that proportion would have been much higher, if it weren’t for all the servants and children - non-combatants - who came through.”

“How many died?” Liv asked, unable to keep from gritting her teeth in anticipation of the answer.

“Eighty-seven died of their wounds or from frostbite in Al’Fenthia,” her friend said. “One-hundred and fourteen here.”

“Died here while waiting for transport.” Liv squeezed her fists so tightly that, if it wasn’t for her gloves, she was certain her nails would have drawn blood.

☙

Though it shouldn’t have surprised Liv, that wasn’t even the worst of what she felt before the bloody day was over. A party from Whitehill arrived while the pyres were still burning, and it included not only Matthew, but both Arjun and Master Grenfell. Liv’s old teacher was the first one down out of the saddle, and he rushed over to Liv with an ashen face and wide, desperate eyes - an expression she’d never thought to see from him.

“They attacked Ashford?” Kazimir Grenfell demanded, seizing Liv about the shoulders.

She reached up to put her hands over his, but didn’t try to escape his grasp. “There’s a lot of confusion,” Liv told him, doing her best to keep her voice calm and even, despite her own bone-deep weariness. “Lady Dasella, Cyr, and Lenota, are all safe in Al’Fenthia, along with their cousin Bryn.” She’d gone out of her way to make certain she learned the names of the children, just for this moment.

A small amount of the tension in Master Grenfell’s body subsided, and Liv felt even worse for what she knew was to come next. “What about Isaac - is there any word of him? My nephew was in Freeport for the princess’s wedding, he’d have to come by another route. I haven’t been able to reach his dreamstone in days -”

Liv tried to keep her face from showing it before she got the words out, but something must have shown, because the old man’s fingers tightened on her shoulders. “The Ashford soldiers say he’s dead, Master,” she said. “They say Genevieve Arundell killed him in front of the entire court. They only just managed to get word of it before Benedict’s army hit them.”

All of the blood seemed to drain out of Kazimir Grenfell’s face, and his eyes lost their focus, as if he was staring at something that no one else could see. Liv stepped forward and threw her arms around the old man, clasping him to her tightly. After a moment, his hands fell from her shoulders to return the embrace.

“My nephew,” he murmured, voice breaking. “My brother’s baby boy. I remember the first time I held him, Liv. I was in my third year at Coral Bay, and they let me go home for the birth. He was so small I could tuck him in the crook of one arm -”

Grenfell’s body heaved against Liv as the old man began to cry in horrible, body-shaking sobs. She craned her neck to look past his shoulder, meeting eyes with first Matthew, then Arjun and Sidonie. Her friends took a step back, turning toward the rift, and she could just catch the beginning of Sidonie speaking to Arjun as they left.

“I want you to take a good look over Rose, if you can...”

Matthew, however, came up on Grenfell’s side, and wrapped his remaining arm around the old mage. “I’m so sorry,” he said, quietly.

“Thank you,” Kazimir said, after a moment. “You’re a good boy, Matthew. And you, Liv. The two best students I’ve ever had.”

Matthew couldn’t help let out a bark of laughter. “Liv, I understand. But you must have been saddled with some truly awful children to say that about me.”

Grenfell’s arms loosened, and he stepped back from Liv just enough that he could put an arm on each of them. Liv saw that the old man’s eyes were red and bloodshot. “I’m not talking about magic skill, my boy,” he said. “You’re both good people. I’m proud to have had a part in raising you.”

Liv shifted to slip one arm around Matthew, and the three of them stood there for a moment, holding each other up against the mountain wind. Her thoughts drifted back to an uncounted number of afternoons at the Old Oak, with books spread out on a wooden table, pots of ink and quills. Master Grenfell with a glass of apple brandy, perhaps, or a local wine. Matthew, smooth-cheeked and lanky despite eating everything in sight, with two good arms.

“We won’t let this go unanswered,” Matthew said, and there was steel in his voice. “I promise you that, Master. I’ll see that woman dead if I have to do it myself.”

“No, my boy,” Grenfell said, clasping Matthew about the back of his head so that their foreheads touched and their eyes met. “She’s mine. You hear me? That woman killed my -” he choked over the words. “She killed my nephew. I’m going to burn her alive until there’s nothing left but a spot of grease on the ground, and then I’ll spit on it for good measure.”

Matthew nodded, and then the two men were hugging, leaving Liv, for the moment, on the outside to watch them.

She nearly said something right then.

Out of the three of them, Liv knew that she was the only one who had actually seen Genevieve Arundell fight, if only in brief moments. The way the woman had conjured a golden blade of coherent mana from the end of her staff, and then charged forward to clash with Jurian. The whirlwind of mana-blades, moving with such speed that they could be perceived as only blurred streaks of light, that had been her archmage spell. The upper story of Blackstone Hall exploding outward, raining chunks of stone down to the sea below, in a cataclysm of blue and gold magic, striving against each other. Kazimir Grenfell had never wanted to be a fighting mage, and he wanted to face that?

But most of all, Liv now felt she had some understanding of what it would take to actually face an Archmage and come out the other side. She’d tested herself against the Authority of the shadow of a dead god, against elders of more than one Elden house, and against Calevis, amidst the ancient machinery of the Foundry Rift. And before leaving Whitehill to build fortifications at Bald Peak, she’d practiced against both her old teacher and Lia Every at the same time.

Liv didn’t have a doubt in her mind that Geneveive Arundell’s Authority would crush both Matthew and Kazimir Grenfell at the same time. She didn’t think it would even be a contest.

But, she decided, now was not the time to tell them that. Better to do it once her old teacher had a chance to grieve his nephew, and clear his mind.

Instead, Liv remained silent, wrapped her arms around her old teacher and her adopted brother, and held them both close.