“There’s got to be a better way of doing this,” Kaija complained, the morning after they’d taken the third ward. “We should be taking the entire guard, and we should be sending half through ahead of you, to make sure there’s no ambush waiting.”

“We might be able to enchant something that would hold a tether to one waystone,” Liv mused. Her boots were wet, soaked by walking out of the alliance encampment, across grass and scrub that glistened with dew. She’d chosen to leave from the rocks at the base of the waterfall out of two competing needs: Kaija’s insistence that she be guarded when she used her tether to Bald Peak, and Liv’s own desire to avoid being too public with that bit of magic.

It was probably a losing battle, she knew. Ever since they’d had to plan for the possibility that Ractia would use a tether to flee Nightfall Peak to another waystone, the secret Elder Aira had taught her had begun to come out, at least among the commanders. Now that Aariv had used the same magic to escape, in full view of a hundred alliance soldiers, there was no way to stop rumors from spreading among the rest of the soldiers, as well. It seemed like many of the things the Eld had kept private were destined to be revealed over the course of this war.

“The difficulty is that even most Eld don’t have the mana to pull it off,” Liv continued. “How many rings can you hold, Kaija?”

A few paces away, Wren, Ghveris, Arjun and Miina waited for them, huddled together against the morning chill, and doing their best to pretend they weren’t close enough to hear Liv and the head of her guard arguing. Ghveris had a great bundle of canvas and poles, wrapped in rope, slung across his immense, armored back.

“Twenty-one.” The armorer crossed her arms and held her head high, and Liv had to admit that she had reason to be proud. That was than more just about any of the mages guild below the level of master, and even some of them.

“If you cast no other spell at all, that’s just enough to use a mid-sized stone like the one at Bald Peak,” Liv explained. “One ring to make the tether, which, yes, I could show you how to do; and twenty to actually activate it. But the moment you use any other magic, you won’t have enough to pull it off. Now, how many other guards can hold that many?”

Kaija frowned. “I’ve got them to the point that there isn’t a single person with less than thirteen rings of mana,” she said, and Liv could hear the pride in her voice. “But twenty-one is a tall order.” She turned, and scanned the guards forming a perimeter around where they spoke. “Akseli! Lina!”

Two of the guards forming the perimeter broke off from the others and trotted over, carrying their polearms. It was hard to get a good look at their faces beneath their helms, but Liv recognized them both at a glance. She’d spent enough time with them since leaving Whitehill, after all.

Lina was a dark-skinned woman with hair cropped close to her skull, so as not to get in the way of wearing a helm. She was from Al’Fenthia, Liv could tell at a glance, but her features were different enough from Elder Aira and her direct descendants that Liv guessed her family had mixed with some of the other houses, somewhere along the line.

Akseli, on the other hand, had the pale skin and white hair of House Syvä, but his gray eyes were straight from Soltheris. Liv had spent a quarter bell comparing notes with him at one point, and determined that they were second cousins through her grandfather’s younger sister - though it was actually more complicated, because Syvä’s later children, after she’d escaped Celris, had a different father. Akseli’s Vædic blood, what little of it he had, had actually come a generation later – it was all horribly complicated, and they’d needed to sketch out a diagram for Liv to get it straight.

“Both of you can hold twenty-one rings?” Liv asked, and each nodded in confirmation. “Alright. I’ll show the three of you how to make a tether when we get to Bald Peak,” she relented.

“Thank you.” Kaija nodded, apparently now satisfied.

Liv extended her arms to either side. “Everyone grab on,” she grumbled. The requirement of physical contact was somewhat obnoxious, but the convenience of being able to return to the waystone from anywhere was just too good to pass up. She’d been seriously considering tethering herself to not only Bald Peak, but perhaps Feic Seria and a few other stones as well.

By the time Ghveris had turned his bulk sideways, there was only just enough room for the other six to crowd in around Liv and get an arm on her. “Nesēmus,” she said, and light obliterated the world.

☙

Liv blinked away the disorientation of coming back to the world.

It was late morning in the Aspen Valley, later than in Varuna, and so there had been more time for the sun to warm the air. Everything was fresh and green on the slopes of the mountains that surrounded the valley, save where Liv could see the white trunks of the aspen trees, or at the very top of Bald Peak itself, which was bare rock, in some places the color of pale sand, in others the gray of exposed granite.

At the base of the mountain and near the waystone, however, everything was a bustle of activity. Workers from the Hall of Bricklayers and Masons – Liv could tell because they were using wands to lay foundations – were hard at work laying out the sketch of what would one day be a college.

To Liv’s surprise – though perhaps she should have expected it – Matthew was waiting at the edge of the waystone. Kaija, Akseli, and Lina immediately fanned out to the edges of the white stone circle, positioned at three points of a triangle to keep watch in all directions.

“I thought you were going to be in Varuna for longer than this,” Matthew said. He was smiling, Liv noticed, for the first time that she could remember. That told her that Triss must be doing better, without even needing to ask.

“We won’t be staying,” Liv told him, opening her arms to accept a quick embrace. “We’re only here to use the waystone, on our way north. Triss is better?”

Matthew nodded, once he’d released her and taken a step back. “She is. She’s feeling well enough to actually be restless, now. Steris, the Elden healer, has been letting her walk around the corridors with me. Liv, have you seen everything that’s up there?”

“No.” She shook her head. “There hasn’t been time. Just the control room, the waystone, and the medical beds. I feel like I never have enough time for anything, anymore,” Liv admitted.

“After the war is over,” Matthew promised. “We’ll go up there together, and I’ll show you a few things. I’ll make certain to write down everything we find, too.”

She nodded. “Can you have someone send Keri a note, and let him know I was here?” Liv asked. “Have you heard anything about how he’s doing?”

“From what I know, he’s got an ambassador from Freeport to deal with,” Matthew said, “which I don’t envy him. I also know his – former wife? – and his son came through here, on their way to Whitehill, and then went back again.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Liv winced. “I don’t envy him that. But I would have liked to see Rei again. Alright, take a step back. I need to show my guards how to do something, and then we’re on our way to the Tomb of Celris. We won’t stop back here, we’ll go directly to Varuna again.”

Matthew nodded, and retreated back off the waystone.

“Kaija, bring them in,” Liv ordered, and walked to the very center, away from the sigils along the edges. Only once the three Eld had crouched down next to her did she begin. “Feel what I do as I do it,” she told them. “You reach down into the center of the waystone with your mana, and you should be able to feel an enchantment down there that acts like a kind of hook, for you to attach yourself to. It takes a ring of mana to maintain the connection, so you won’t have access to that until you actually use the spell.”

As she talked, she reached down with her own mana, and set herself a new tether, to replace the one she’d just used. Then, Liv sat back and observed as Kaija did the same. There was a bit of fumbling, but on the third try, the other woman made it work.

“Good,” Kaija said, and nodded. “You both think you can do that?” When the two guards nodded, their commander continued. “I’ll hold a tether to here. Akseli, you’ll set one at the Tomb of Celris. Lina, you’ll take Feic Seria.”

“Are you ready to move, then?” Liv asked.

“Yes, but this time you’ll let us go through first,” Kaija said. “Wait to see whether the stone lights back up before you come. If it does, that means we’ve had to pull back.” She reached for the sigil that would activate the large stone on the heights above the frozen ravine, but Liv shook her head.

“No,” she said. “We’ll be using this stone.” She took Kaija’s hand and moved it over. “Directly to the throne room. I added it to the Bald Peak stone just for trips like this.”

Then, Liv stood up, and with Ghveris, Wren, Arjun and Miina, stepped off the waystone. While the blue light built around her three guards, she scanned the construction, trying to imagine what the buildings would look like when they were complete. She would have enjoyed taking a more personal hand in planning the campus, but she trusted Lia Every and Sidonie to have made good decisions. She wondered, for a moment, how much of the money she’d left him Keri had already spent, and whether there was more coming in.

The waystone flashed, and Kaija, along with the other two guards, vanished. Liv and her friends stepped back onto the stone, and she waited for just a moment to see whether it would begin glowing blue. When there was no immediate sign of an incoming group, Liv touched the same sigil she’d directed Kaija to. Miina and Arjun joined her to help carry the load, since Kaija had used up whatever magical charge had built up since the waystone had last been used.

“Come back soon,” Matthew called, through the rising blue light.

“As soon as Ractia’s dead,” Liv shouted back to him.

☙

The shift from the cacophony of ongoing construction to the utter silence and stillness at the heart of the Tomb of Celris was striking – nearly disorienting. Liv stepped off the dais upon which Celris’s throne had been set, with the waystone buried beneath. The mana here was thick, and being plunged into it immediately eased her muscles. She did her best to restrain a sigh of relief.

High overhead, the arched ceiling was lost in darkness. Shattered ice, scattered across the floor, lay where it had fallen during her battle against the ancient shade that had lingered there for so many years. The wreckage of the winged Antrian, off to one side, was frosted over, and the only light came from the sigils and mana stones that glowed on the walls.

“Never thought I’d come this deep,” Kaija muttered, her breath puffing out visibly in the cold.

“How long are we staying here, exactly?” Miina asked, wrapping her arms around her torso, and visibly giving a shiver.

“Long enough to find the inscriptions I need,” Liv said.

“I will raise the tent,” Ghveris rumbled. “There are enchanted stones marked with Vær. They will warm the air.” The war-machine unslung the burden he’d carried from Varuna, and began to unwrap the ropes and canvas, revealing bundled supplies.

“And I will help,” Miina declared. “Anything to get warm quicker. Does this really not bother you, Liv?”

Liv shrugged. “I don’t really notice it anymore. I’ll let you all get set up.” She closed her eyes, and let the silver crown on her brow reach out and connect with the ruins. There was so much here that – like the ring in the sky – she suspected they could spend an entire human lifetime studying it all.

Of course, it would probably be much easier, not to mention faster, if they had an actual Vædim, like Ractia, to explain it all. To teach them. She hadn’t seriously considered taking the goddess’s offer, but Liv would be lying if she said it wouldn’t be a loss to give up all that knowledge. She sometimes wondered why the Trinity hadn’t explained more before they left.

She set off along the tunnels, letting the crown guide her to a place where damage to the walls had left more of the underlying Vædic script exposed. Liv was dimly aware that Kaija had sent Lina to shadow her, but now that she actually had a chance to dig into her ideas, she was too eager to work to mind.

Liv took out her notebook, and spread it on the ground, then set a corked bottle of ink and a quill pen out beside it. There were her notes, scrawled out quickly and waiting to be added to.

“He used Vær,” Liv realized, after a moment, muttering to herself. “But I don’t want a three word spell, and I think I can fake it with Cel…” She uncorked her bottle of ink, and found that it had already started to freeze. With her left hand, Liv made a blue columbine from ice, set it aside, and channeled the minute amount of waste heat the spell had generated into the bottle. It was easy to make ice here, but much harder to find any heat at all.

Her quill scratched against the pages. Liv copied down everything she thought she might possibly need, even the inscriptions surrounding the sections that she really wanted. She didn’t know when she might be able to come back to the Tomb, and she didn’t want to regret leaving anything unrecorded.

By the time she and Lina finally made their way back to the throne room where she’d fought Celris, the tent had been raised. Ghveris sat outside, keeping watch, so Liv assured Lina that she could go inside and get warm.

“I’ll be safe out here,” she promised, and took a seat next to the war-machine, crossing her legs, to begin playing with the pieces of her spell. From inside the tent, she could hear the murmur of voices greeting the new arrival.

“Will you tell me your idea?” Ghveris rumbled, after a long moment.

Liv didn’t raise her eyes from her work. “When I freeze something, I end up with what my father called waste-heat,” she explained. “It’s the heat we take out of, say, water to turn it into ice. Cel lets me manipulate it, a bit.” She paused. “Actually, I suspect someone could use Vær to freeze things, if they wanted to. The two words seem like a matched set. They aren’t even the only ones – but that’s something else. Anyway, I knew that Celris had a way of converting heat to mana, and that’s what I came here to get.”

A sort of humming, rattling sound came from deep within Ghveris’s torso. “You use mana to cast a spell. It makes heat. You turn the heat into mana. You have the mana back?”

Liv shook her head. “No, there’s going to be mana wasted, and heat wasted, I’m certain,” she said. “And that isn’t enough, anyway. That’s a piece of it. I’m going to set it up so that the new mana is immediately used – probably with an incantation in the future tense,” she explained, jotting down more notes as she goes. “But I’m worried about making it too complex. I’m worried I’ll lose control of it, or that something will go wrong. So whatever I do with that surge of mana, it has to be practically fool-proof. As few moving parts as possible. I thought about a spray of frozen shards that duplicates, like a second wave? But that fails the simplicity test. I’d have to take into account targeting, they’d be some amount of time after the initial cast.”

“You wish to not have to aim,” Ghveris said. The great machine thought for a long moment. “I did not see what happened at Godsgrave,” he said, eventually. “I have only heard the stories.”

“Silica did,” Liv pointed out. “She saw it from a distance. Stars streaking down from the sky, a great explosion, and then chunks of burning rock thrown up, only to land miles away, punching holes through the jungle floor.”

“When Tamiris dropped the sky,” Ghveris asked, “did he particularly care about aiming?”

“I suppose he made sure he’d hit the city,” Liv reasoned. “Or at least close to it. From the sound of it, the explosion was so big that a near-miss would have been just as bad as a direct hit.” She raised the feather of her quill-pen to her lips while she thought. “You think I should just drop something out of the sky?”

“You have said you can reach up to the clouds,” Ghveris reminded her. “That is not so high as the ring, but it is very high.”

“I would need a shape,” Liv muttered. “Something that will fall fast and straight, and not be blown off course by the wind. Something like –” She thought of Keri, and smiled. Carefully, she wrote a single word on the page: Næv’bel.

“Something like a spear.”