In the Field Marshal’s Shadow

Stories from the Powder Mage Universe

BRIAN MCCLELLAN

“Hope’s End” copyright © Brian McClellan, 2013. All rights reserved.

“The Girl of Hrusch Avenue” copyright © Brian McClellan, 2013. All rights reserved.

“Green-Eyed Vipers” copyright © Brian McClellan, 2015. All rights reserved.

“The Face in the Window” copyright © Brian McClellan, 2014. All rights reserved. First published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #140 on February 6th, 2014.

“Return to Honor” copyright © Brian McClellan, 2015. All rights reserved. First published digitally by Orbit Books, January 2015.

All stories contained within are a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and scenarios are either products of the authors imagination or used fictitiously. All resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Typesetting and ebook conversion by handebooks.co.uk.

Contents

Hope’s End

The Girl of Hrusch Avenue

Green-Eyed Vipers

The Face in the Window

Return to Honor

Hope’s End

Eighteen years before the events of Promise of Blood...

Captain Verundish contemplated killing herself.

The pistol sat in her lap, the muzzle loaded, the flint cocked and the pan primed.

It would be a simple thing to put the barrel in her mouth, angle it upward to her brain, and pull the trigger. Some poor infantryman would have to clean the blood and bits of bone off the back of her tent—or maybe they’d just take it down and burn it. Her body would be sent back to Adro, where...

Well, why concern herself with the details? None of it would matter to her.

She wrapped her fingers around the butt of the pistol that had belonged to her grandfather, the grip worn and smooth to the touch, and she was glad that she had so little family left behind to mourn her. Would they mourn her after she took the coward’s way out?

Would Genevie remember her mother?

A letter lay on the table beside her cot. The sender was a man who legally called himself her husband, but had no further claim to that position beyond the letter of the law. Verundish wanted to burn the letter and erase everything it said.

A familiar voice called out a greeting to someone else outside her tent. Verundish shoved the pistol beneath her pillow and brushed flecks of gunpowder off her lap just as a man threw the tent flap aside.

Captain Constaire ducked inside, removing his hat with a flourish. He was a tall man, willow-thin with long brown hair tied back over one shoulder and the playful eyes of a prankster. He wore thick mutton chops that touched the corners of his lips and his uniform hung loosely from his wiry frame.

He stepped over to her and bent low, kissing her on the mouth, smothering her protestations. She found herself kissing back after a moment, and far too soon Constaire pulled away, a grin on his face. “Love,” he said, “I’m just stopping by on my way to see General Tamas.”

Verundish raised her eyebrows. “The promotion?”

“I think so,” Constaire said. He drew up to his full height, his head pushing up the top of her tent, and mimed as if he were throwing a cape over his arm. “The next time we meet, I shall be Major Constaire.”

Verundish leaned back on her cot and regarded the man. “You’re a fool.”

“But you love me anyways.”

“I’m not a smart woman.”

He paused, as if he sensed something amiss. “Verie?”

She gave a slight shake of her head to warn him off asking. He ignored her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me. Was it another letter?” his eyes went to the envelope on the table beside her cot. “That bloody bastard! What does he want this time? Is Genevie all right?”

“It’s nothing,” Verundish said quietly. Constaire was not making this easy. Better if she had no lover, no one to worry over her death. It would make things simple. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that this was only a soldier’s love. Eventually, the campaign would end and they’d both return home. Constaire would find a younger woman, and Verundish would go back to a cold house with a hateful husband.

Well. She wouldn’t have to go back if she killed herself.

Constaire threw himself to one knee. “Divorce him,” he said. “Marry me. I’m about to be made major. We could return to Adopest and take Genevie away from that monster.”

Oh, this fool. He only twisted the knife. “You’re not serious.”

“I am. Deadly so.”

If only it were so easy. But life, as her mother had always told her, was never easy. “He wants a divorce even more than I do,” Verundish said.

“Perfect! Apply for a divorce and marry me.”

“You know who my father is?”

Constaire seemed taken aback. “He’s a priest, I think you said.”

“Yes. He’s the priest who married us, and he’d have to sign the papers to authorize my divorce.”

Constaire’s face fell and he rocked back from his knees into a sitting position on the floor of her tent. “And he doesn’t believe in divorce. Is that it?”

“He thinks it’s a sin against Kresimir. He thinks it is better I weather this marriage of mine, with a husband who cheats and steals and lies and threatens to beat my daughter, than go through with a divorce.”

“I’m sorry to say it, my love, but your father is a fool.”

“I know. I’ve told him that to his face. Now you’ll be late to see the general. You better go.” She leaned forward and touched his knees, then ran a thumb across his cheek. “Come back when you’re finished and we’ll celebrate.”

Constaire left the tent with the spry step of a young man whose world was covered in gold. Verundish kept the smile on her face until he was gone, and then let it slide away like a weathered mask.

She picked up the letter and read the last paragraph.

Your father will still not grant us a divorce. I intend to wed my mistress by the end of the year. Either ensure our divorce or kill yourself. If I’m not rid of you within three months I will sell the girl to a Starlish slaver.

She had no idea how much time had passed, but Verundish was still staring at the letter when she heard Constaire’s voice call her name from outside the tent. She stirred, and registered the distant thump of Adran artillery as it pounded the Gurlish stronghold of Darjah. She could hear the clamoring of her fellow soldiers as they prepared the evening meal.

She had meant to be wearing considerably less when Constaire returned. She struggled to bring a smile to her face. It was the least she could do.

Wait. Something was wrong. Constaire never called her by her full name. He was the only one in the army with the gall to call her ‘Verie.’ He was the only man in the army she would allow to do so. And she couldn’t remember the last time he had asked before entering her tent.

“Come,” she said.

Constaire lacked his normal smile, and his eyes were sightless and haunted as he slipped inside. Verundish had seen a similar look on men who had lost a limb to cannon fire or watched a friend gunned down beside them.

“What’s wrong?” she said, tucking her own troubles into the back of her mind. Time enough to shoot herself later tonight, after Constaire had left.

“May I sit?” he asked. His eyes didn’t meet hers.

Verundish remembered all of the times he had swept into her tent and taken her in his arms, throwing them both down onto the cot in a fit of laughter. Her concern deepened. “Of course.” She straightened the blankets, and as she did she slid the loaded pistol beneath her pillow to a better hiding spot under her cot.

Constaire lowered himself onto the cot beside her. She took his hand, noting the way his tender white skin contrasted so deeply with the black roughness of her fingers. Constaire had never worked a day in his life, but Verundish did not hold it against him. It was his carefree attitude that had attracted her in the first place.

“They’ve chosen me to lead the Hope’s End against Darjah,” Constaire said.

Verundish’s breath caught in her throat. “No. I thought you were being considered for promotion!”

“If I survive, I’ll be a major.” The ghost of a smile crossed his lips and disappeared. He bent his head forward as if to pray.

Hope’s End. The leading charge against an enemy’s stronghold. The first through the breach—facing fixed bayonets, cannons, and sorcery. Members of the Hope’s End rarely survived the first volley, let alone the capture of the fortress itself.

“There’s nothing you can do?” Verundish asked.

Constaire shook his head. “The order came directly from General Tamas. I think,” his eye twitched, “that he does not like that my father bought me this commission.”

General Tamas was infamous for his belief that rank should be earned, not bought. He often put nobles in a place of danger in order to test their mettle. His stance had benefited the commoners beneath his command, and the men loved him for it. But this was going too far. Constaire would die.

“Why a Hope’s End? Why now?”

Constaire examined his boots. “Field Marshal Beravich has ordered the city taken immediately. I can’t imagine what threats he holds over General Tamas’ head.”

“When will it be?” Verundish asked.

“Three days from now. We’ll redouble our artillery until then. The Privileged say that they’ve found a weakness in the wall and will exploit it with sorcery the night of the attack. It will form a breach just large enough for us to enter the fortress.”

Verundish leaned back on her cot. The Privileged sorcerers, with their powerful elemental magic, might indeed be able to finally cause a breach in the wall. Yet a Hope’s End was a common enough tactic. The Gurlish would be ready.

“I should run,” Constaire said.

“They’ll brand you a coward.”

“I’d rather be a living coward than a dead hero.”

Verundish squeezed his hand. “You won’t get far. You know how General Tamas feels about deserters. He’ll catch you and hang you, and you’ll be both dead and a coward.”

“I can get away,” Constaire said. “I have friends...” he trailed off, as if considering his course of action.

“Don’t do it,” Verundish said.

A flicker of doubt crossed Constaire’s face.

“Spend the night,” Verundish said. “And promise me that you won’t do anything rash until tomorrow.”

She took Constaire in her arms, thinking she might have a solution for both of their problems.

General Tamas was not a man to cross.

The son of an apothecary, he was the first commoner to ever achieve the rank of general in the Adran army. The people adored him, and the king respected him. He was both a tactician and a fighter, and the only powder mage in the all the Nine to hold such a lofty position.

It was said that even the king’s cabal of Privileged sorcerers feared him.

They were right to do so. Powder mages could imbibe common gunpowder to make themselves stronger and faster than normal men. They could use their sorcery to float a bullet across an entire battlefield, killing their target at a mile or more. They were some of the most efficient and capable killers in the army.

It was the morning after Constaire had come to Verundish. She stood at attention in the corner of Tamas’ command tent with her hands at her sides, legs together, and back straight. The general bent over a large table with a map of the Gurlish terrain smoothed flat beneath his hands. His eyes scanned the yellowed paper for several minutes, his lips moving slightly as he did figures in his head.

“This map,” he said, breaking the silence of over fifteen minutes, “is almost two hundred years old.”

“Sir?” Verundish said.

“Two hundred years old, captain. We have the greatest army in the entire world, and we can’t get an updated map of the bloody area. Is there something you needed, captain?”

Verundish opened her mouth to speak, only for Tamas to cut her off.

“Darjah is one of the oldest fortresses in all of Gurla. The walls are laced with protective sorcery, the ground around the foot of the fortress thick with wards that could kill a man to step on them.” Tamas pushed himself away from the table and began to pace one end of the tent.

“Field Marshal Beravich has given me just half a brigade and only four Privileged sorcerers. A hundred men could hold Darjah against us, and the shah hiding back there has over a thousand. And seven Privileged. Seven!”

Tamas dropped into a chair at one end of the tent and cocked his head at Verundish. “Beravich loves watching me fail. Doubly so because it happens so infrequently. He doesn’t care how many men have to die in order for that to happen. Now, what did you want to see me about?”

Why would Tamas tell her all of this? Most officers would find it unprofessional to speak so candidly to one of lesser rank. Verundish cleared her throat.

Tamas held up a finger, cutting her off again. “I should tell you that I’ve had soldiers come through here all morning petitioning me to rescind my order that Captain Constaire lead the Hope’s End. I know you’re his lover. I don’t care how popular the man is, he’s leading the charge. Everyone around here has to put their life on the line sometime. Now is that what you came here about? To waste my time?”

The last thing Verundish wanted to do was exacerbate Tamas’ already foul mood. She fought down the urge to fight with him.

“Not at all, sir. I’ve come to offer myself as Constaire’s replacement.”

The chair creaked as Tamas leaned back, stroking his black mustache thoughtfully. For a moment Verundish thought she could see his thoughts turning behind his stern brown eyes as he reevaluated her.

“Intriguing,” he said, getting to his feet. “You’re a smart, brave young officer. You’ll likely advance through the ranks over the coming years as you prove your worth. Constaire, on the other hand, is a fop. He has no value to me. Why the pit would I let you die in his place?”

Young, he’d called her, though as a man in his forties, Tamas couldn’t be more than a decade her senior.

“Because I volunteered,” Verundish said, “And you know that a volunteer will more effectively lead the charge.”

“Is that a challenge I hear in your tone, captain?” Tamas asked. “No, don’t answer that. I always hated it when a superior officer made me choose between dishonesty and my pride. I won’t do it to you.” He paused to clean bits of black powder from beneath his nails. “Perhaps I have orders from my superiors that Constaire lead the charge.”

Verundish felt her heart beat a little faster. An order like that would only come from Field Marshal Beravich or from the king himself. Was Constaire involved in some kind of plot? Or had he been made a pawn in some nobleman’s maneuverings?

“I don’t, of course,” Tamas said, waving away the thought with a small smile. “Can I ask why, beyond some misguided sense of affection for that fool, you would sacrifice your life for Constaire?”

“Sometimes, sir, the attack succeeds. If it does, I’ll be up for immediate promotion. I’ll be a hero, sir.”

“That’s awfully optimistic,” Tamas muttered. He stood up, indicating that the meeting was over, and said, “I’ll take it under advisement, captain. You’ll have your answer by this evening.”

Verundish went through the rest of the day in a fog.

She had a way out. In two days she would lead a Hope’s End through the breach and into the face of musket fire and Privileged sorcery where she would be killed almost instantly. She would die a hero’s death and be given a hero’s burial, and Genevie could take pride in the mother she barely knew.

Her hated husband would release Genevie into the care of Verundish’s father and mother, and she would receive Verundish’s ample pension for the rest of her life.

If General Tamas gave her leave to lead the charge.

She was walking through the camp, reviewing her company, when Constaire found her.

He took her firmly by the arm, not saying a word, and steered her behind the relative privacy of a colonel’s pavilion tent.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, shaking off his grip.

“No,” he hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Constaire’s face was red with anger. In four years of campaigning together, she had never seen him so furious. “I’ve just been informed by General Tamas that you volunteered to take my place at Hope’s End. I won’t allow it!”

“There’s nothing you can’t allow me to do,” she said.

“You think me a coward?” Constaire stamped his foot. It was a terribly childish thing to do, and Verundish wondered if perhaps he needed practice being angry. “You think that I can’t do it? Why would you do something like this?”

She thought of all the reasons she could give him and put her finger to his lips. He was a coward, but that wasn’t the right thing to say at this moment.

“I don’t think you’re a coward,” she said. “But I know that this isn’t something you can do.”

“You would die in my place?”

His face was so raw in that moment that Verundish wondered if he had really meant it when he offered to marry her. She had assumed it was brash declaration, with nothing of substance to back it up. Soldiers didn’t marry each other. The chance that one of them would die was just too great.

“I would,” she said. She didn’t tell him that she would surely die by her own hand if not at the weapons of the Gurlish.

“No. I can’t have that. I may be a coward, Verie, but not enough to let you take my place.”

“You have no choice. The general has made his decision, it seems.” She was surprised that Constaire heard of it before she had.

Constaire straightened his uniform. “I will go to the general right now and demand that he let me lead the charge. It’s my right!”

“No one demands anything of Tamas,” she said.

“I will!”

She took him by the arm and put a hand on his chest. “Don’t, you fool. You’ll receive nothing but a reprimand from the general.” She lifted a finger back to his lips. “Now I have to put my affairs in order. Come see me tonight. If I’m to die in two days... well, I want to enjoy that time.”

The morning before the attack, Verundish was summoned to see General Tamas once more.

A fear gripped her as she approached his tent that he’d decided not to honor her request. That Constaire would still have to lead the charge, and that she’d have to put a bullet in her head to save Genevie.

When she arrived the two guards outside the general’s tent looked pensive and tight-lipped. One of them announced her, and then she was nodded through.

She ducked inside, the protest on her lips dying as she surveyed the room.

The general’s desk had been overturned, the floor and wall of the tent covered in ink, papers, and scattered gunpowder. The mighty oak table that had held his two-hundred year old map was cracked down the middle and an iron candelabra that had been perched on his desk was a snake of twisted metal.

General Tamas sat on a chair in the corner—the only unbroken piece of furniture in the tent—with his legs crossed, surveying the destruction with a sour look.

“Sir?” Verundish asked.

He looked up for a moment, then back to his desk. That desk was huge. It took four men to carry it, no doubt, and at least two to turn it over. Yet Tamas was alone.

The general stood up, clasping his hands behind his back.

“Captain,” he said. “Thank you for coming. I’ve just finished a conversation with Privileged Zakary, the royal cabal’s new beadle.”

It was no secret that the royal cabal and Tamas were kept from each other’s throats only by the king himself, but Zakary’s visit didn’t explain the broken table.

“Did he do this, sir?” Verundish said. She felt anger at the indignity of it. No one came to Tamas’ tent and disrespected him like this. He was a general. Her general!

“What?” Tamas seemed genuinely puzzled for a moment, following her gaze to the mess. “Oh. No, that was after he left. Someone will come and clean it up soon. Zakary stopped by to let me know that no Privileged would participate in the Hope’s End during the attack on Darjah tonight. They’ll provide distant support only.”

Verundish felt her breath catch in her throat. No Privileged? None at all? A Hope’s End was always accompanied by a Privileged—usually someone young and stupid, or incredibly ambitious—but a Privileged nonetheless. Without a Privileged of their own, the Hope’s End would have no counter to the Gurlish sorcery that would be flung at them from atop the walls.

Verundish forced a ragged breath in and out. She was going to die tonight. No question about it. This was what she wanted. But to know so baldly that her death would be in vain...

“Furthermore,” Tamas continued, “Field Marshal Beravich has forbidden me from taking part in the attack. I usually sit back about a mile, with the artillery, and shoot the enemy Privileged when they show themselves against the Hope’s End. But it seems I’m being denied even that.”

Tamas’ nostrils flared, and his voice rose as he spoke. “Bloody idiots just want to see me flounder. They throw away lives—good lives—just to spite me! The damned dogs. If I could kill every Privileged in Adro, I’d do it this instant.”

Verundish’s heart beat faster and she felt fear. Not for herself. No, her life was forfeit. But General Tamas was one of the few officers in the army that genuinely seemed to care for his men. He commanded loyalty from every rank, and he had seen to it that soldiers in his command could rise through the ranks by merit.

If the royal cabal ever heard him speak like this they would kill him in an instant, even if he did have the king’s favor.

She waited for a few moments for him to continue. “Sir?”

Tamas shook his head. “Captain, the point of a Hope’s End is to capture a fortress by surprise. It doesn’t work often, but it has worked. But not without a Privileged. Without a Privileged I’ll just be sending a company of men to their deaths. Guaranteed failure. But I have my orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re all right with that?”

“I’ll follow orders, sir.”

“I’m giving you a chance to back out, captain.”

“I’ll lead the charge, sir.”

Tamas’ eyes narrowed at her. “Why?”

Because if the Gurlish don’t kill me, I’ll have to do it myself. “I’d rather not say, sir.”

“Even if I order you?”

Verundish stiffened. “You’ve always respected the privacy of your men, sir.”

“Yes. I have.” Tamas turned to survey the mess that used to be his desk and map table and gave a long sigh. “You’re dismissed, captain. The Hope’s End will gather at dusk and attack at midnight. If you have not yet put your affairs in order, do so now.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Verundish paused in the tent opening and turned back to General Tamas.

“Sir?”

“Hmm?”

“Could you grant me a request, sir?”

“If it’s within reason.”

“Make sure my husband doesn’t get my pension. Make sure it goes to my daughter.”

Tamas considered this a moment, then nodded. “Sign a letter to that end, and leave it with my secretary. I’ll be sure it’s done.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The company that would make up the Hope’s End gathered as the sun set over the western edge of the desert.

It was a sad group. Half of them were malcontents—men and women who might end up on the gallows or spend years in prison if they hadn’t volunteered. The other half were ambitious young soldiers, stupid or desperate enough to hope that they might survive the night and see a promotion upon capture of the fortress.

Verundish wondered whether any of them had received the same chance at reprieve that she had.

General Tamas was there when they gathered. He watched them all with hands clasped behind his back, small sword at his side and pistol at his belt. His face was stony and unreadable, but when Privileged Zakary passed by not long after, the torchlight revealed the open hostility with which Tamas regarded the Privileged.

Two hours before midnight, a Kresim priest prayed for the group’s success, and the men were allowed to say goodbye to their friends and comrades.

Constaire found Verundish among the crowd. He wore his full uniform and carried a musket in one hand, with his sword buckled to his belt.

“Where the pit do you think you’re going?” Verundish asked.

“There’s still time,” Constaire replied. “Say the word now, and I will lead the charge.”

“No.”

Constaire shook his head. “Please, Verie. Don’t do it.”

“I have to.”

“No,” Constaire said. “You don’t.” He held something up for her to see. It was the letter she’d received from her husband three days ago.

“Give me that,” she hissed, snatching for it. “You have no right to read my private letters.”

He pulled it away from her grasp. “I had to know why you would do this. I know you don’t love me back, Verie. I knew there had to be a reason for this suicide.”

She slapped him. She hadn’t meant to, but a moment later he clutched at his cheek and stared at her like a hurt puppy.

She rubbed her hand. “I’m sorry.”

“I deserved that.”

Yes, he did. “It will be all right,” she said. “I have to do this.”

“I’ll challenge your husband to a duel.”

“He’d slaughter you.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“He would. He’s a skilled swordsman. It would take someone like... like General Tamas to defeat him.”

Constaire fell silent, and Verundish felt compelled to step forward, pulling him into her arms. “Why the pit am I comforting you, idiot?” she asked, feeling his tears on the back of her hands. “I’m the one going to my death.”

“I’m the one who has to live without you.”

Verundish shook her head. “Go back to your tent.”

“No. I’ve volunteered to lead the second wave. If you succeed in taking the breach, I’ll be right behind you. We’ll fight our way through the fortress together.”

“Pit. You really are a fool.”

A whisper went through the ranks for the Hope’s End to prepare. Verundish pressed her lips to Constaire’s and then headed toward the front line without looking back.

General Tamas waited for them by the artillery that would herald their attack. Behind him stood four Privileged, their white gloves etched with crimson runes that caught the dim torchlight. They regarded the Hope’s End with skepticism.

When the Hope’s End had fallen into ranks, Tamas addressed them.

“There,” he said, pointing to the fortress a mile behind him, “is our enemy. They sit assured in their towers, drinking to another day of our failure and thanking their heathen god that we don’t have the stomach to set ladders to their walls.”

“That ends tonight. Tonight, we will open a breach. We will swarm their fortress and put their shah and their Privileged to the sword.”

The Privileged behind Tamas shifted uncomfortably at the mention of killing their Gurlish counterparts.

“The fall of Darjah will destroy Gurlish confidence, and we will be one step closer to ending this damned war. And then, my friends, we will all go home.” Tamas seemed weary suddenly, and far older than his forty years. He smiled. “I’m done with this damned dusty land. I’m ready to go home and bounce my boy on my knee, and then take my wife upstairs where I can bounce her on my knee.”

There was a chuckle among the group.

“End this siege, lads,” Tamas said. “Get in there and break them once and for all and every one of you, living or dead, will be a hero in the morning.”

A quiet cheer went up among the company, and Tamas raised his hands for silence. “I’d be there with you if the king allowed me. By Kresimir, I would.”

That might have been a lie from any other general, but Verundish knew it for truth.

Tamas continued, “Captain Verundish will take you in. Follow her like you’d follow me.” He stepped away then, and gestured to Verundish.

Verundish raised her saber above her head. “No lights. Not a word. We move in darkness up below the walls, and wait for the thunder. When the wall falls, charge.” She waited for the nods, then lowered her arm. “Let’s go.”

Verundish moved across the rugged terrain between the Adran camp and the fortress of Darjah.

Her path was guided only by a sliver of moonlight, and the stars above her that glittered like the campfires of an army stretched across the sky.

They had been camped there for months, exchanging artillery fire with the fortress and mounting two assaults and, but for those attacks, the land had been left untouched. Jackals hunted in the long desert grass where hares and foxes had made their homes to hide from Adran soldiers.

A desert owl hooted somewhere nearby.

She led her company across several small gullies and then into a ditch that went right up to the base of the fortress wall. She had been told the ditch was a runoff from the fortress wells, a place where the Gurlish bathhouses empties into the desert.

They hadn’t mentioned that it also carried away human waste.

One man stopped to retch loudly from the smell, causing the whole company to squat down in the squalor in fear of an alarm. Atop the wall, torches outlined the shape of Gurlish guardsmen. None of them called the alarm and in a low whisper, Verundish ordered her company forward.

They reached the base of the wall and settled down to wait. Verundish unbuttoned the front of her uniform to get comfortable. No one out here would write her up for lack of discipline.

She guessed they had about fifteen minutes until it started.

It wasn’t long until Verundish heard one of her men squirming up the line toward her. She squinted into the blackness of the night, trying to determine who it was.

“Sir,” he whispered, putting his face near hers. The scent of onions on his breath and the sound of his voice told her that it was Grenatio, a soldier who had been given the option of the Hope’s End or a firing squad after stealing from a local family.

“What?”

“Sir, when you said that we wait for the thunder...?”

“The artillery.”

“Oh.” There was a pause. “That makes sense.” Grenatio wasn’t the brightest, it seemed. “Sir?”

Verundish suppressed a sigh. “Yes?”

“I’m afraid.”

“That’s natural.”

“Will it go away?”

“It will.” When a Privileged scours your bones clean with sorcerous fire.

There were a few minutes of silence, and Verundish looked up at the top of the wall. Still no alarm. That was a good sign.

“When will it start, sir?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

Bloody pit... “Any minute. Get to your position.”

The soldier moved his way back down the line, making enough noise to wake Adran soldiers back in their camp.

And still there was no alarm.

Verundish looked up at the black stone of the fortress walls and wondered if they would really be able to create a breach. Those walls were ten feet thick, reinforced by Privileged sorcery hundreds of years old. The Adran cannon had been firing on them for months without making so much as a crack.

The Adran Privileged said they could break the walls tonight. What would happen if they did not fall?

She heard a low whistle and had turned to shush her men when the first cannonball slammed into the side of the fortress wall above them. The impact made her stumble and she caught herself with one hand against the side of the gully.

It had begun.

Cannonballs and artillery shells rocked the fortress and shook the ground, causing the walls of the gully in which the Hope’s End crouched to shiver and slide.

The physical bombardment was soon joined by the crash of sorcery. Fire lit the night sky, and slivers of ice the size of a carriage blasted into the wall, weakening it further with alternating heat and freezing cold.

Verundish shielded her face behind the lapel of her jacket against pieces of rock, ice, and iron that ricocheted into their hiding spot.

Gurlish screams told her that the enemy had sounded the alarm. Men rushed about on top of the wall, waving torches and yelling above the cacophony. One of them leaned over and tossed a torch over the wall, watching it fall to the ground below. It landed not far from the gulley that held the Hope’s End.

The Gurlish were trying to discover where the attack would come from.

Verundish knew it wouldn’t take them long to figure it out. When they did, a few dozen musketmen would be able to pick off Verundish’s men with little effort.

She prayed for the wall to fall.

She looked back on her men. One of them raised his musket and pointed it toward the men on the wall.

“Down, fool,” she hissed.

The report of artillery sounded close by. Verundish cursed their luck, and watched helplessly as a rocket soared into the air above the fortress and burst, lighting the desert as if it were day.

Her men were outlined by the light, their faces turned grimly upward. Back down the gully to where it widened into the desert floor, she could see a hundred yards off where the second wave—three whole companies—crouched at the ready in case the Hope’s End was successful.

They were all revealed by the light of the Gurlish flare. And now all would be lost.

A mighty noise suddenly shook the ground; a groaning as if the very bowels of the pit had opened to release its demons. To Verundish’s surprise, the wall gave way beneath the withering bombardment, bursting inward and scattering Gurlish soldiers.

“Climb, you bastards!” Verundish screamed, leaping to her feet.

She scrambled up the gulley and toward the base of the wall, where a mountain of rubble gave her purchase to haul her way up into the breach.

Cannonballs and sorcery shrieked around her, smashing the breach wider and wider with every strike.

Cut the bombardment, damn it! Verundish imagined charging into the breach only to be slaughtered by artillery and sorcery from her own camp.

All at once, the world fell silent. The focused bombardment ceased as the artillerymen adjusted their aim, and then suddenly continued at another point along the wall.

The breach was clear.

Verundish tripped, sprawling in the rubble that used to be the fortress wall. Adran soldiers rushed around her and suddenly she was hauled to her feet by her belt, her saber shoved back into her hand.

She didn’t have time to be embarrassed.

Gurlish soldiers appeared in the breach, and the first Adrans rushed them with fixed bayonets, the two sides tearing into each other with furious cries.

“Push!” Verundish cried. They had to secure the breach. They had to create a gap through which the second wave could pour. If they didn’t succeed in that, this would all be for nothing.

A Gurlish soldier leapt at her, swinging the butt of his musket like a club. She caught the swing with her saber and punched the man in the face, then followed by slicing viciously across his throat.

The Gurlish had not fixed bayonets. They hadn’t been ready for this attack. As impossible as it seemed, the Hope’s End suddenly had an advantage.

“Cut through them, boys!” Verundish urged, crossing blades with a Gurlish officer. The man was quicker than she by far. She managed to parry twice before he was past her guard, slicing down her left arm.

The man sputtered and fell, an Adran bayonet scrambling his bowels. Verundish pushed the corpse away, unable to mutter a thanks before Grenatio moved on. The onion-breathed man turned to shout over his shoulder.

“You’re right, captain! The fright is gone!”

They were inside the wall now, fighting for the courtyard. Without fixed bayonets, the Gurlish fell beneath the Adran soldiers like lambs before at the slaughter. Verundish paused to tie off the wound climbing her left arm, trying to wipe away the blood.

They could win. They really could win. The second wave would follow them through the breach and help secure the courtyard, and then General Tamas would bring the rest of the brigade through.

Suddenly, Verundish didn’t want to die.

A flash of light blinded Verundish. She stumbled back, blinking to clear her vision, and watched as Grenatio ran toward her with his body aflame, immolated by Privileged fire. His screams echoed in her head.

Verundish sought the source of the sorcery. A single Privilege could do in their whole company. Maybe even the second wave, too. It was madness trying to kill him, but it was the only chance she had.

Fire leapt through her men, setting their uniforms aflame and sowing chaos. There, where the courtyard gave way to a street: a Privileged stood in the opening, his gloved hands alight, fingers flickering as he dealt death to the Adran soldiers.

Her men scattered, screaming. None of them could face a Privileged. No one could. Nothing to do but run from a Privileged.

Verundish cursed the blood running down her arm, making her sword-hand slick, and switched her saber to the other hand. She threw herself to one side of the courtyard.

She got her back to a wall and crept, as quickly as she dared, toward the Privileged. She had one loaded pistol in her belt. One chance to fire, and she would need to get close enough for a sure shot.

The Privileged continued to lay about himself with fire. He wasn’t a strong one—no good at multitasking, otherwise he would have burnt the whole company at once. Verundish leaned her sword against the wall and drew her pistol.

The shot took the Privileged in the side. He jerked, falling to one knee, a startled look on his face. Then he turned his eyes toward Verundish.

She snatched up her saber and rushed him. He raised one hand toward her. The heat of sorcery licked at her face, and Verundish felt a twisting pain along her thigh as fire like molten glass hit her hard enough to spin her around. She stumbled forward.

Her saber took three fingers off the Privileged’s right hand. The Privileged screamed, and she slashed with all her might. The blade caught in the Privileged’s shoulder, knocking him over with the force of the blow. She wrenched the blade free and then stabbed it through his heart.

She stumbled again, nearly losing her feet. The pain at her thigh was unbearable. In her mind’s eye she saw the skin boiled and charred, the flesh warped. She dare not look at the wound, else she lose her nerve for the battle.

Looking back, she saw Constaire appear in the breach. Behind him the second wave swarmed inside with bayonets fixed, rushing past the dead and wounded to secure the courtyard and fight their way into the street.

Constaire caught her just as she fell. He stared at her, and then at the corpse at her feet.

“You killed a Privileged!”

“I...” Verundish didn’t know what to say. It seemed she had failed in her quest to die. She knew she didn’t want to die any more, but how could she save her little girl?

She looked up, seeing movement in the corner of her vision. On the walls above them, to either side of the breach, the Gurlish had returned. They had the high ground, and as she watched they began to fire into the Adran second wave.

“Get down!” she said to Constaire.

“We’ll fight them off. To the stairs, men!” He stepped away from her, drawing his sword.

Bloody fool. You’ll be dead before you reach the stairs.

There was a flicker of light up on the wall, alerting Verundish to the presence of another Privileged. Verundish coughed out a laugh. The futility of it all. The damned sorcerer would clear out the entire Hope’s End and the second wave.

The Privileged raised her gloved hands.

Her head exploded in a shower of blood. Verundish flinched at the violence of it, though it happened some thirty paces away. The Privileged’s body slumped, and a cry of dismay went up amongst the Gurlish on the wall.

A figure broke from the ranks of the Adran soldiers, smoking pistol in one hand. Barely even slowing from a run, the figure scaled the rubble that led up to the top of the wall. Small sword flashing, it fell amongst the Gurlish soldiers with inhuman speed.

Verundish couldn’t believe her eyes. Was this a demon from the pit? An angel sent by Kresimir?

The figure gestured with one hand and the powder horns of a dozen Gurlish infantry suddenly exploded, killing their owners.

She choked at the sudden realization. That was no angel or demon.

That was a powder mage.

General Tamas, ignoring his orders, had joined the fray.

Verundish let her head fall against the cool flag stones of the court yard as the pain finally overwhelmed her.

Verundish awoke in a strange room.

Nothing was familiar. The walls were cracked plaster and light came in through a high window. The room was not much larger than a prison cell and she wondered if perhaps it was a cell.

Had the Hope’s End ultimately failed? Had the second wave been slaughtered and pushed back? She remembered thinking she saw General Tamas join the fight. Perhaps he had been killed. There were, after all, five more Privileged inside the fortress. Was she now imprisoned within Darjah?

Surely the Gurlish would have just killed her.

Verundish wondered how much time had passed since the attack. She remembered screaming until her throat was raw and doctors forcing a mala pipe between her lips, blowing the smoke into her mouth. The pain had receded slowly, and the surgeons had gone to work on her thigh with their knives, and stitched the bloody cut up her arm.

She tried to turn her head with only marginal success, letting out an involuntary whimper at the pain it caused.

Why did everything hurt so badly? She felt like every bone in her body was broken.

The door to her room creaked open and a female voice said, “Ah. Colonel, you’re awake. Wonderful news. The field marshal will want to see you.”

Colonel? Surely, they must have mistaken her for someone else. A panic gripped her, and she struggled to move.

“Go get the field marshal,” the voice called out into the hall. Memories of her fevered surgery recognized this voice. One of the doctors. The doctor said, “Now, now. Don’t worry about moving. Your body is stiff, the muscles weak from disuse. You’ve been in and out for a long time.”

“How...” Verundish’s voice cracked, and a doctor moved into view. It was an older woman in an Adran uniform covered by a white smock. She bent over Verundish and brought water to her lips.

Verundish sputtered and choked, but managed to swallow a mouthful. When the doctor stepped away, she said, “How long?”

The doctor put a hand gently on Verundish’s shoulder. “The attack on Darjah was four weeks ago.”

“Four weeks?” She couldn’t help the urgency in her voice. The letter from her husband, before the Hope’s End, had already been five weeks old. In less than a month, Genevie would be sold to slavers. Verundish struggled to get up, her body shaking.

The doctor pressed her back down to her bed. “Wait, colonel. Please calm down.”

“I have to get up.”

“The field marshal will be here any moment, colonel.”

Field Marshal Beravich was coming to see her? What could he possibly want to see her for? “Verundish. I’m Captain Verundish.”

“I’m afraid not,” a male voice said from the doorway. “Doctor, please give us a moment.”

The doctor nodded and left Verundish’s side, only to be replaced with General Tamas. “Good morning, colonel.” Tamas said, sitting beside her bed.

“Sir?” she asked weakly.

“You’re a lieutenant colonel now, Verundish. The necessary paperwork was finished three weeks ago, though I’m waiting until you recovered to assign you to a battalion.”

That wasn’t possible. She couldn’t believe it. She had advanced two whole ranks. Surely she didn’t deserve that, not even after leading a Hope’s End. “I... thank you, sir.”

Tamas waved it away with one hand.

“Sir, was I really out for four weeks?”

“You’ve been in a mala stupor for much of that, in order to kill the pain. Getting seared the way you did by Privileged fire causes great physical and mental trauma on a regular person.”

“I see.”

Tamas nodded, his mind clearly elsewhere.

“Field Marshal Beravich?”

The corner of Tamas’ mouth twitched upward. “What of him?”

“Was he coming here?”

“I’m afraid Beravich is dead. Two days after we took Darjah his own forces were overrun by Gurlish partisans. He’s been avenged, I assure you.”

“Oh.” It took Verundish a few moments to process the information and grasp the implication. “Congratulations, sir.”

Field Marshal Tamas inclined his head in a modest gesture. He stood, stretching, and looking up toward the slash of light coming in through the window above them. “Now that you’re coherent, we’ll get you a proper room. They have to wean you off the mala. I’m told it will be several months until you’re fit for command.”

Verundish struggled to sit up and failed, the effort exhausting her. Several months? She had to return to Adro now. She had to get back before her hated husband could make good on his threat. Even the fastest of ships might not take her home in time.

Tamas cocked an eyebrow at her struggles. “Going somewhere, colonel?”

“Sir,” Verundish said, trying not to sound desperate. “I need to return to Adro. To attend to personal matters.”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that,” Tamas said. “You’re needed. I intend to finish this bloody war by winter, and then we’ll all get to go home.”

Genevie wouldn’t be there by then. She’d be gone, sold into slavery and used like a... Verundish squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hold back to tears.

“Colonel?”

“Sir?”

“Is there anything you’d like to tell me, colonel?”

“No, sir.”

There was several moments of silence, and Tamas remained facing away from her, looking up at the window. “Pride,” he said, “is a strange thing.”

“Sir?”

“We allow ourselves and our loved ones to suffer so much just to appease this feeling in our gut. Sometimes I envy those men who don’t let pride cloud their judgment.”

Verundish didn’t trust herself to speak.

Tamas continued, “The Arch Diocel of Adro owes me a favor. The paperwork for your divorce should go through” —he paused, as if considering the date— “within a week or two. Your daughter will be in your parents’ custody until you return. If I were in Adro I would challenge your husband to a duel and kill him myself. Children, I think, should be exempt from the petty bickering of adults.”

Verundish felt the tension in her body melting away and could no longer hold back the tears. “I agree, sir. Thank you.”

Tamas took a deep breath. “I don’t normally interfere in this way, but as you might know I have my own son, barely two years old. I take this kind of thing... personally.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, sir, how did you find out?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

Constaire. Of course. A man with no pride. The silly fool had just saved her life. Something stirred in Verundish.

“Oh,” Tamas added as he opened the door to go. “Major Constaire has asked me to marry the two of you. If you feel the same way, it could be done as soon as we have word of your divorce.”

Major Constaire. He had gotten his promotion for leading the second wave against Darjah.

Verundish couldn’t help the smile on her face. “It would be an honor.”

“Good.” A smile flitted across Tamas’ serious face, and then he was gone.

The Girl of Hrusch Avenue

Ten years before the events of Promise of Blood...

Vlora planned on stealing a gun.

The one thing that made Vlora truly happy was to sit atop the flat roofs of the gunsmithies in Adopest and watch them test-fire their rifles and muskets in the alleyway behind Hrusch Avenue.

The black powder smoke would rise up between the buildings and drift over her vantage point, the sulfuric scent filling her nostrils and instilling a sense of focus and energy. There was nothing quite like it. She’d once tried to explain to Amory, the headmistress of her boarding school, but Amory had dismissed it as a childish fantasy.

And though she was only ten years old, Vlora wanted a one of those guns.

Amory would never let her have one, of course. She never let Vlora have anything.

Vlora knew it was wrong to steal, but she needed a gun. She needed to fire it, and feel the stock kick against her shoulder and the black powder filling her lungs. She craved the music of the gunpowder blast in her ear.

The gunsmiths would sometimes leave a musket unattended for a few moments while they went into their shop to fetch more powder or bullets. Vlora knew that stealing one just meant waiting for the right moment. She could dash into the alley, snatch a weapon, and then be out and running down the street before anyone could catch her.

A musket or rifle was too big, too unwieldy. She wouldn’t be able to hide it beneath her skirts and surely someone in the street would stop her—maybe even one of the Bulldog Twins. And Vlora didn’t have anywhere at the boarding school big enough to hide a musket. If Amory found it, there would be pit to pay.

Vlora would have to steal a pistol.

She slipped from her hiding place, heading across the flat roof above the smithies, and climbed down the old copper drain pipe into the alley below. She headed out into the main thoroughfare and along the raised stone walk that fronted the shops of Hrusch Avenue.

The street was packed, the ring of horseshoes on the cobbles clattering over the cacophony of the crowd. Gunsmith apprentices sat on the front steps of their shops, showing off their masters’ wares: engraved hunting rifles or dueling pistols for the nobility, plain oak-stock muskets for the soldiers, blunderbusses for the country farmers.

Vlora let her eyes wander over the weapons. Displayed along the raised walks of Hrusch Avenue were dozens of models, just waiting to be snatched. There were too many people out here, though. Someone would call the alarm and she wouldn’t have time to lose herself in the throng before she...

Her eyes stopped at the mouth of the narrow alleyway that led behind the Hrusch Avenue shops. A pair of sandy-haired boys sat on empty powder barrels beside the alley. They were each about fourteen, with round, nearly identical faces and upturned noses, their eyes pinched with affected disdain as they watched the passing traffic.

The Bulldog Twins.

Hrusch Avenue belonged to the Bulldog Twins. At least, that’s what they wanted all the orphans and urchins to think. No one begged or stole on Hrusch Avenue without permission of the Bulldog twins and if they caught you alone, they’d beat you to a pulp.

Vlora had heard some children at the school whispering that the Bulldog Twins had once killed an orphan and tossed the body down a sewer drain.

She stopped and pretended to examine a pistol behind the glass of one of the shop windows, her hands behind her back, and hoped that they hadn’t noticed her.

“Oi!” she heard a familiar voice yell. “It’s Little Highness!”

One of the twins, who called himself “Trigger” and was discernable by the scar above his eye, dropped from his seat and headed toward Vlora, his brother “Bullet” at his heels.

Vlora felt her heart begin to race. With so many people in the street someone would surely help her if she cried out...

Amory always said that depending on the help of others was foolish.

Vlora decided that maybe, just this once, Amory was right. She broke into a run, cutting straight across the street. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Trigger take off after her.

She cut in front of a carriage and then under a barrel being carried between two men. When she reached the opposite side of the street, she sprinted down the raised walk in full view of the Bulldog Twins, then jumped back into the road. Tucking herself between a pair of carts laden with musket boxes marked for the Adran army, she waited.

It didn’t take long before the Bulldog Twins sprinted past her hiding spot.

She waited just a few seconds and then emerged, heading the other way down the street at a run. They would realize they had been duped sooner or later and come back this way.

Vlora dashed in front of a horse strutting down the center of the street at a cantor. She hoped to put it between herself and the Bulldog Twins—it was one more thing to keep them from seeing her.

Startled, the horse jerked its head away from her and then reared, whinnying loudly. Vlora reeled in terror as hooves pounded the cobbles and the rider fought to keep his mount under control.

“Piss and damnation!” The man cursed and jerked savagely at the reins, leading the horse to one side. “Blasted gutter rats.” He leaned forward in the saddle and Vlora only had a moment to throw her arm up before his riding crop came down.

The thin end of the crop sliced the length of her arm and she let out a scream. The man lifted his arm to strike again but his horse bucked, forcing him to hold on with two hands to keep from being thrown.

Vlora leapt to her feet and bolted into the crowd, tears streaming down her face. Her arm was soon covered in crimson and stung from her palm to elbow.

She paused at the end of the street and looked back, drying her tears for long enough to seek out the man who’d struck her. He was still in the middle of the thoroughfare, cursing loudly as he tried to get his horse under control. He wore a fine riding jacket and he had a flat, broad face covered in pock-marks. She took a moment to memorize that face.

Vlora left Hrusch Avenue and the scent of black powder and smoky smithies behind, crossing the bridge over the Addown River and into the Old City, where tall houses crowded together on narrow city streets, their brick facades in disrepair. It was in one of these houses that Vlora lived with a dozen other girls and the headmistress, Amory.

Amory was furious when she saw the blood on Vlora’s uniform. She cleaned and stitched the wound, then beat Vlora with a stick she kept above the fireplace and sent her to bed without dinner.

Vlora fell asleep thinking of the pistol she wanted to steal and that maybe she should use it on Amory—though she knew she never would.

Vlora awoke the next morning to the sound of her stomach growling, and she waited in bed for the church bell to strike seven. She knew if she bothered Amory too early she would end up with another beating.

Vlora had just gotten herself dressed when she heard an insistent knock on the front door of the school.

She cracked the dormitory door, careful not to wake any of the other girls in the room.

“Come in, sir,” Amory said in response to a man’s warm baritone voice.

Who would come to call at this early hour? The school doors were rarely opened before eleven. Vlora crept down the hallway, careful to avoid the creaky floorboards, until she could look from the landing down into the sitting room of the main floor.

Amory sat with her back to Vlora. Across from her was an older gentleman with dark hair, hawkish features and cold, dark eyes. He wore a black long-tailed jacket and pants, immaculately pressed, and a white undershirt with a folded collar. He held a top hat in one hand and a cane across his lap.

A suitor, perhaps? Amory used to receive men almost weekly. These days she only received one or two a month and she always said that her responsibility to the girls was going to keep her from getting married.

Vlora missed the man’s introduction, but she heard what he said next:

“I’m here to ask about a girl.”

“A girl?” Amory echoed with some confusion.

“Yes. She’s about this tall,” he held his hand up, “ten years old, with dark hair. A friend of mine informed me that she is under your care.”

Vlora felt her heart skip. None of the other girls her age had dark hair. He could only be describing her.

“You couldn’t possibly mean Vlora?”

“That was her name, yes.”

Vlora tried to recall giving her name to any strangers and remembered that there had been a man with dark skin and a reassuring smile that had spoken to her in the street outside the school. He’d asked for her name, and where she lived. That had been months ago, though. Were he and this cold-eyed gentleman connected?

Amory waved her hand as if Vlora were nothing of consequence. “She is my ward, sir. A ward of the state, really. Her father was a na-baron from the north of Adro. Her mother died in childbirth and her father died earlier this year—a pauper. None of her family wanted her, and the crown was loathe to send a child with noble blood to the orphanage. I am granted a small monthly pension in order to see to her education and upbringing.”

Vlora knew that Amory had a self-pitying smile on her face. She always did when she spoke of Vlora.

“She has no one to take her in?” the cold-eyed gentleman asked. “No one at all?”

“None,” Amory said. “I suppose she has me, but she’s an ungrateful child and so...”

“I’d like to buy her.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can tell that you love the girl dearly, but I’m certain that for the right price you’d be willing to part with her.” The man pulled a cheque book from his breast pocket and flipped it open.

Vlora tip-toed back to her room. She’d heard enough. The man meant to buy her, and she knew what that meant. The abbess at the Kresim abbey where her mother was buried had told her to avoid old men and their perversions.

She gathered her few toys—a wooden horse, a picture book that had belonged to her grandmother, and a ball made of Fatrastan rubber—and folded them into the sheets of her bed with several sets of clothes. It took a few moments to open her bedroom window without making any noise. All the while the drone of the adults’ voices were coming through the wall.

One of the other girls lifted her head from her pillow and asked where Vlora was going. Vlora told her to hush.

She slipped out the dormitory window, sack over her shoulder, and climbed down into the street.

Vlora’s mother was buried in the cemetery of Talien Square, an abbey in the district across the river, just north of Hrusch Avenue. It was not the first time Vlora had run away from the school since her father died. The priestesses at the abbey there were always very kind, giving her a cot to sleep on and warm bread in the mornings. When Vlora explained the conversation between Amory and the cold-eyed gentleman to the abbess, she was told she could stay for as long as she needed.

The abbess had never much liked Amory.

Vlora began spending her mornings with the abbess, studying the Kresim gospels, and her afternoons on the rooftop of the smithies in Hrusch Avenue, watching the gunsmiths test-fire their muskets.

Less than a week after she’d run away from Amory, she was in her usual spot, keeping an eye out for the opportunity to steal a pistol, when she spotted the Bulldog Twins skulking their way down Hrusch Avenue.

She saw their target immediately. The boy looked to be ten or eleven. He had black hair and a somber face, and he was walking alone down the raised walks in front of the smithies with a pair of books under one arm. He wore the uniform of a schoolboy with short pants cut off at the knees and long socks that almost made up the difference.

He seemed familiar, and Vlora thought she might have seen him once or twice before on Hrusch Avenue.

She shouted a warning, but it was lost in the noise of the city and the boy seemed deep in thought.

The Bulldog Twins closed in on him from behind. Each outweighed the boy by at least two stone, practically towering over him. Trigger came in from the right, smacking the books out of the boy’s hands, and then slapping him across the face. Laughing, Bullet took the books and tossed them into the street.

The boy whirled, a look of horror on his face.

Vlora knew that look, having seen it on so many one-sided fights. She anticipated what would come next: his face would scrunch up and he’d begin to cry, and the Twins would push him down into the mud and kick him until they grew bored of it.

But the boy cocked back one fist and punched Trigger in the nose.

Trigger reeled back in surprise, clutching his face. The boy stood his ground, hands held at his side, his teeth set in anger. Bullet leapt at him, grabbing him by the waist and throwing him to the ground. The boy kicked and punched, but he was outmatched.

Vlora couldn’t believe it. Someone was standing up to the Bulldog Twins. Not an adult, either, but someone her own age! She shimmied down her drainpipe and took to the street, only stopping long enough to snatch up a splintered musket stock from where it had been discarded in the mud.

Trigger watched while his brother wrestled the smaller boy, egging them both on. He turned toward Vlora just in time to take the old musket stock in the middle of the eyes. He crumpled in a heap on the porch.

Vlora planted one foot into Bullet’s ribs. It took two more kicks to get the other twin off the boy. Vlora grabbed the boy by the hand and helped him to his feet.

“My books!” The boy pulled away from her and ran into the street, dodging traffic, to get his books from the mud. He returned just as Bullet was picking himself up off the ground.

“Come on,” Vlora said.

They left Hrusch Avenue and lost themselves in a myriad of side streets in High Talien before Vlora felt safe.

“Why’d they attack me?” the boy asked as they stood gasping in front of a baker’s shop.

Vlora wiped some dirt off the hem of her skirt. “Because you’re smaller. Don’t you know about the Bulldog Twins?”

The boy shook his head.

“What’s your name?” Vlora asked.

“Taniel.”

“I’m Vlora.”

He was a little taller than Vlora, with a thin face and hair cut short in the fashion of a soldier. She saw that his knuckles were scuffed, and he had a black eye that had been there long before the Bulldog Twins got to him.

This wasn’t his first scrap.

The boy wiped his bloody nose, and Vlora immediately noticed that the moment of excitement had seemed to pass for him. His eyes were calm, and his breathing, while heavy, was measured. He glanced back the way they’d come as if he contemplated going back for another fight.

“The Bulldog twins are in charge of Hrusch Avenue,” Vlora explained. “They pick on anyone smaller than them. Except for the gunsmith apprentices. They know better than to do that.”

Taniel snorted. “No one’s in charge of Hrusch Avenue,” he said. “Not even the army. That’s what my dad says.”

“Well your dad is probably much bigger than the Bulldog twins.”

“He’d whip them even if they were adults.” Taniel lifted his chin. “My dad wins all his fights.”

Vlora smirked. She’d heard that claim before.

Taniel kept his chin lifted, his eyes daring her to question his word. He held her gaze a moment, then looked down at his books. They were covered in mud, and the cover of one was torn. He leafed through them sadly, and Vlora caught sight of practiced arithmetic and charcoal drawings of trees and animals.

“Sorry they got your books,” Vlora said.

“It’s not the first time someone’s thrown them in the mud,” Taniel sounded glum. “I’ll have to clean them up before lessons tomorrow.” He suddenly perked up. “My dad gave me money for dinner. He’s—” Taniel paused briefly to roll his eyes, “having a conference with my latest governess. Do you want to share a sweet roll with me?”

“Sure,” Vlora said.

Taniel came around again three days later, accompanied by another boy. The other boy had long, reddish-brown hair and was a little taller and broader of shoulder than Taniel. Vlora saw them coming from her hiding spot above Hrusch Avenue and went down to meet them.

“This is my brother, Borbador,” Taniel introduced the other boy. “You can call him Bo. He’s a good fighter. He’ll help us if the Bulldog Twins come around.”

Bo extended a hand, and Vlora shook it. It seemed like a very grown-up thing to do.

“I haven’t seen them for a couple days,” Vlora said. “I think they’re scared after the licks they got.”

Taniel’s somber face suddenly lit with a grin. “My dad taught me how to fight. He says never to start a fight if you know you can’t win.”

“But you do anyways,” Bo said.

Taniel sniffed and shot Bo a look. “Bo’s not really my brother. He’s my best friend, but he does live with us. Bo was from the orphanage. He’s a street kid, like you, even though he doesn’t live on the street any more.”

“Oh,” Vlora said, feeling her cheeks turn red. “I’m not a street girl.”

“You’re not?”

“My parents were...” she stopped, remembering how the other children always called her “Little Highness” when she told them her parents had been nobles. “My parents are dead. I live at a school for girls, but I ran away.”

Taniel nodded seriously. “Governesses and teachers are all the same,” he said. “I don’t like governesses. We have a new one every couple of weeks.” He shared an unreadable glance with Bo. “Why did you run away?”

Vlora was about to explain when she spotted someone over Taniel’s shoulder. “Quick,” she said, “over here.”

They ducked into the nearest alley and Taniel peered out into the street curiously. “Is it the Bulldog Twins?”

“No,” Vlora said, “It’s a noble.” She held out her arm for Taniel to see the long gash running the length of it. It still throbbed whenever she moved her arm and it was only now starting to heal. “He did this to me when I scared his horse.” The very thought of it made her angry.

“Which one?” Bo asked.

Vlora pointed to a man on horseback in the middle of the thoroughfare. She wouldn’t forget his pockmarked face.

He was riding a different horse from last time and he wore a white uniform jacket with gold epaulettes. A sword hung at his side. His shoulders were wide, and his blonde hair was tucked back beneath a white and gold bicorn.

“That’s Baron Fendamere,” Taniel said.

“You know him?”

“I’ve seen him before. My dad knows him.”

“Is your dad a noble?” Vlora looked Taniel up and down. He didn’t seem like a nobles’ son. Nobles’ sons didn’t wander around the city by themselves.

“No, he’s a powder mage. He doesn’t like nobles.”

Vlora didn’t know what a powder mage was. Before she could ask, Taniel went on.

“Dad says there’s nobody crueler in the Adran nobility than Baron Fendamere. See that sword at his hip? Dad says he’s a hab... hab...”

“Habitual,” Bo prompted.

“Habitual duelist. He’ll fight anyone he can. Dad says that on campaign in Gurla, the baron would kill women and children for sport.”

Vlora spotted a steaming pile of horse dung on the cobbles nearby.

“Want to throw shit at him?”

The boys agreed, and they each gathered up a handful of manure and slowly stalked Fendamere down the street as he rode along at a slow canter.

Vlora ducked behind a pair of barrels and turned to her accomplices. “Ready?” she asked.

The two boys nodded, and they stepped out from behind their cover and each of them aimed and threw. Bo’s shot missed, while Taniel’s slapped into the baron’s white uniform jacket and Vlora’s smacked wetly against the back of the baron’s neck.

The baron whirled, a roar on his lips, but Taniel was already sprinting down the street. Vlora followed hard on his heals, Bo taking up the rear.

“Can you climb?” Vlora asked between breaths. Not waiting for an answer, she swerved down an alley. “This way!”

She shimmied up her drain pipe to the roof above Hrusch Avenue. Taniel and Bo followed her up.

They lay low for some time, watching the baron rage in the street below, kicking over powder barrels and display stands, cursing those damned gutter rats. He looked everywhere for them, enlisting the help of several shop apprentices, before finally giving up and heading off.

Bo slipped away not long after, saying something about an older girl he meant to see.

When Bo had gone, Vlora led Taniel to her spot above the alley where the gunsmiths test-fired their muskets. The alley was empty, but the residual smell of gunpowder made Vlora feel happy.

They threw pieces of broken clay shingles off the rooftop, listening to them clatter in the alley below.

Vlora remembered what Taniel had said earlier about his father. “What’s a powder mage?” she asked.

“You don’t know?” Taniel pulled his arm back and threw a piece of shingle across the alley, where it hit the slanting roof of the opposite building and rolled back down, catching in a gutter.

“Of course I do,” she said. “I was only joking.”

“Oh.”

She waited a few moments, then felt guilty for the lie. “I don’t, really. I just didn’t want you to think I was stupid.”

“Well,” Taniel said, “Everyone should know what a powder mage is.”

Vlora looked down at her hands. He did think she was stupid, didn’t he?

“I mean, so I’ll tell you,” Taniel went on. “A powder mage is a man who can manipulate gunpowder with the force of his mind,” Taniel said. “He can breathe it and taste it and it makes him stronger and faster than regular men. A powder mage can shoot bullets over great distances, miles even!” Taniel leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially. “Powder mages can even kill Privileged sorcerers.”

Vlora had been enjoying his story until then. She turned away and folded her arms.

“What?” Taniel asked.

“You do think I’m stupid.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. Nobody can kill Privileged sorcerers.”

“Powder mages can. They have.”

“It’s not true.”

“They can! I swear it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because my father is one, and he has killed Privileged before. And someday, I’m going to be a powder mage.”

Vlora still didn’t believe it. Privileged sorcerers were the most powerful people in the Nine. They could level cities with the flick of their fingers. Who could possibly kill one of them? She tried to imagine what it would be like to kill someone as powerful as a Privileged when a sudden thought sparked in her mind like flint striking steel.

She leaned close to Taniel. “Can a woman be a powder mage?” she asked in a whisper.

“Sure. My mom was a powder mage, too. When she was... alive.”

Vlora tried to contain her excitement. She shifted closer to the edge of the roof so that her feet dangled over. “I’m going to be a powder mage.”

“You can’t,” Taniel said.

“Why not? I thought you said women could be powder mages.”

“Some women can. Only people with the talent can be a powder mage. Dad says it’s very rare.”

Vlora sniffed. “I want to be a powder mage.”

“Sorry.”

They sat in silence for some time before Taniel got to his feet. “I should get home. I’ve got school in the morning.”

“Thanks for throwing shit at the baron with me,” Vlora said.

Taniel smiled at her. “Let’s do it again soon.”

Amory caught up to Vlora the next week.

Vlora was in Bakerstown. She’d found a twenty krana coin in the street and planned on buying a hot pie to share with Taniel and Bo. The coin clutched in one hand, she had her face pressed up against a baker’s front window, peering in at all the delicacies.

Someone grabbed her by the ear and jerked her backwards. Vlora felt a thrill of fear run through her. Had the Bulldog Twins caught up to her? Or maybe the cruel baron?

She was whirled around only to find herself eye to eye with the headmistress.

Her light brown hair, normally straightened and tied back with a ribbon, was loose and blowing in the breeze. Her eyes were narrowed at Vlora, and the corners of her mouth turned down sharply, her cheeks red.

“You stupid girl,” Amory snapped at her.

Vlora had never seen her so angry.

Amory still had her by the ear. She shook her, hard.

“That hurts,” Vlora said.

“Too bad,” Amory said. “It’s not the worst of it. You’re going to get the stick every night this week. You remember the last time you ran away? I told you I’d lock you in the cellar for a month, and I meant it.”

Vlora tried to pull away, but Amory had a strong grip on her ear. “You’re not going to lock me up. You’re going to sell me.”

“Sell you?” Amory said. “Wait, what’s this?” She grabbed Vlora’s hand and pried it open to reveal the twenty krana coin within.

“That’s mine!”

“Not anymore,” Amory said, tucking it in her pocket. “You probably stole it, you little brat. It’s mine, now, for all the trouble you caused me. Now come along without a fuss.”

“No.”

“No? Don’t make me beat you in the street! And don’t even try to run,” she said when Vlora tried to jerk away. “I know you’ve been sleeping at the Talien Square Abbey. You’ve got nowhere left to hide.”

“You’re going to sell me to an old man!”

“I’m not going to sell you.” Amory looked toward the sky, as if beseeching Kresimir, then fixed her gaze over Vlora’s shoulder.

She did that whenever she was lying.

Amory began to pull Vlora down the street. Vlora let herself sag, falling to the ground as a dead weight.

“I’ll drag you the whole way home,” Amory warned, and began to do just that.

Vlora jumped up suddenly and kicked Amory in the shin as hard as she could.

Amory squealed and let go of Vlora, clutching at her leg. “Brat! That’s two months in the cellar!”

Vlora was already running. She had outrun the Bulldog Twins many times. She knew she could outrun Amory.

It wasn’t until she was half way to the Talien Square Abbey that she remembered what Amory had said. The headmistress knew where Vlora had been sleeping. It would be the first place she’d look, and though the abbess didn’t like Amory she would have no choice but to hand Vlora over to her.

Vlora had no place to go, and Amory had taken her money.

For the next four days, Vlora slept on the roof tops above Hrusch Avenue.

The days were pleasant but the nights were cold and Vlora knew that winter would come in just a few months. She would freeze to death without a place to go.

She loathed the idea of returning to Amory. She would rather die in the snow and ice.

She was hungry every day without the bread that she used to get from the abbey. She knew what it was like to go a day without food—Amory made her do it all the time—but her stomach tied in knots the second day, and the third day she was shaking and weak.

At the end of the third day an apple cart overturned on Hrusch Avenue, and Vlora was able to get there before the Bulldog Twins, snatch up several big, red apples and carry them in her skirts back to her hiding spot.

It was on the fifth day that she spotted Taniel in the street. He was strolling along, wearing his school uniform, and looking inside barrels and under carts as if he were trying to find something.

Vlora scanned the streets for the Bulldog Twins, but there was no sign of them. Just as she was about to call out to Taniel, someone else caught her eye, causing her to duck down.

It was the cold-eyed gentleman. The one who wanted to purchase her from Amory.

He stood beside the door of a gunsmith’s shop, speaking quietly with the gunsmith. His hands were clasped, back straight, and unlike that day two weeks before he was now wearing a sharp, dark blue uniform with silver trim—the uniform of an Adran army officer—and he had a small sword at his side and a pistol tucked into his belt.

Vlora poked her head out of her hiding spot. Taniel was further down the street, and the gentleman’s back was to her.... She waited a moment, and the gentleman suddenly nodded to the gunsmith and then began to head down the street, away from Vlora.

She waited until he’d entered shop further down the avenue before calling to Taniel.

Taniel looked around in confusion, then up to her. He waved.

Vlora shimmied down her drain pipe and stopped in the alley, suddenly conscious of her dirty state. Her uniform was torn and muddy, her face unwashed for these four days, and her hands shook a little from hunger.

She couldn’t let Taniel see her like this! She’d told him that she wasn’t a street girl....

It was too late. Taniel came into the alley and he grinned at her. “Hi Vlora.”

“Hi.” She found the grin funny on his normally serious face, and she realized that dirty clothes were something Taniel wouldn’t care about. It made her happy. “Were you looking for someone?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Taniel said. “Bo is hiding somewhere. He said that if I find him before he’s finished his fruit cake, he’ll share it with me.” Taniel seemed doubtful that he’d manage it. “He eats pretty fast, though.”

“I could help,” Vlora said.

“I’ll give you some of the cake if you find him,” Taniel said.

Vlora nodded, trying not to seem too eager.

They rushed into the street and began checking everywhere that a boy could conceal himself. Vlora knew all the best hiding spots—she’d used them to avoid the Bulldog Twins. She checked the old wine cask in the third alley, and under the wooden steps in front of Durn’s Smithy. She even checked back up on the rooftops.

They both kept an eye out for the Bulldog Twins, and Vlora watched especially for the cold-eyed gentleman. She saw him once, but he was leaving Hrusch Avenue on foot and so she didn’t worry too much.

Taniel finally sat down on the raised walk, his chin resting on one palm. “Bugger,” he said. “I can normally find him. He probably cheated.” He nodded at Vlora, as if it was decided. “Bo likes to cheat. He says that people who play fair always lose.”

Vlora nodded back, but she was feeling sick. All the running around had reminded her how hungry she really was, and the promise of fruit cake had made her hopeful.

Her chest suddenly heaved, and she found herself fighting off tears. She knew she had to go back to Amory.

She’d have to take her punishment, locked in a dark cellar for two whole months. Amory might even sell her to the cold-eyed gentleman.

But at least Amory would feed her.

“Are you all right?” Taniel asked.

Vlora rubbed her nose on the back of her sleeve. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” She wasn’t going to show Taniel her weakness. No one liked a weak child.

“Are you hungry?” Taniel asked.

Vlora wanted to jump up and scream ‘yes,’ but she just shrugged her shoulders. “A little.”

“There’s a meat pie vendor around the corner,” Taniel said. “I could go get some money from my dad and then we could share one.”

Vlora hugged herself, wondering if Taniel could see inside her head. How could he know she was so hungry? Was it that obvious?

They began to walk toward the end of Hrusch Avenue, but Taniel suddenly stopped, ducking to one side.

“The Bulldog Twins?” Vlora asked, joining him in a smithy doorway.

“No,” Taniel said. “It’s Baron Fendamere. See? That’s his coach.”

The one-horsed coach sat at the end of the avenue. It was black with gold trim, and had running boards along both sides and a driver cloaked in crimson sitting up on the coach box. Baron Fendamere’s pock-marked face stuck out of one window, and a gunsmith brought out a long brown package, tied with white string, and began to lash it to the roof of the coach.

“Do you want to get him?” Taniel asked.

“Maybe we should just go get a meat pie.” The cut down Vlora’s arm had finally healed, leaving just a wide, pink scar behind it. She did want to do something to the baron, but she wanted to eat more.

“Wait here,” Taniel said.

He returned a moment later with a long steel bar, like the kind Vlora had seen through the windows of the smithies that gunsmiths used to make musket barrels. Taniel could barely carry it, but he had a mischievous grin on his face.

“Watch this,” he said.The baron’s coach was moving now, coming toward them down the cobbles. Taniel jumped into the street and, as the coach moved past, thrust the steel bar into the spokes of the back wheel.

The wheel suddenly stopped and several of the spokes snapped, the coach lurching forward and then coming to a skidding halt as the driver reined in the horse. The door to the coach burst open and Baron Fendamere appeared, his pock-marked face red with anger.

Taniel took off down the street.

Vlora was just three steps behind him when she felt someone grab her hair. Her legs came out from under her as she was roughly jerked backward.

She stared up into the baron’s eyes, seeing the promise of violence within them. She tried to pull away, but he had her firmly by the hair.

He stank of sweat and strong perfume.

“Got you,” the baron said.

He threw her to the ground and put his boot on the back of her neck. Vlora’s face pressed against the hot cobbles, and she heard a whimper escape her mouth. Further down the street, Taniel had turned to look and now stood, mouth agape.

“You’re next, boy,” the baron yelled.

Taniel ran.

“Get another coach,” the baron said to his driver. “Hop to it, man. Commandeer one if you have to, I’m not standing in the streets with these mongrels any longer.”

Vlora felt the boot press down hard against her neck, and then the weight was gone and the baron jerked her to her feet.

“Don’t think I don’t remember you, girl,” he said, tightening his grip on the arm that still bore the scar he’d given her. “You startled my horse and then threw shit at me, and now you’ve broken my carriage...”

Vlora screamed and bit his wrist.

The baron let go just for long enough to crack her across the jaw with the back of his hand. “Scream all you want, girl. No one is going to help you.” He leaned in to her, close enough that she could feel his hot breath, reeking of wine, against her neck. “You’re going to be great sport for my dogs, girl. I’m going to take you out into the country tomorrow and watch as they tear you apart.”

A coach clattered down the street, the driver yelling for people to move out of his way, and pulled up beside the ruined coach. The driver leapt down and opened the door for the baron.

Baron Fendamere took Vlora by the back of her neck and threw her violently into the cab. Vlora immediately scrambled for the opposite door, fumbling for the latch, but the baron leapt in behind her and pushed her onto one of the benches.

“You’ve got spirit, girl. You’re going to give my dogs a chase.” He thumped his fist on the ceiling. “Maybe I’ll cut off one of your feet first, and watch you hop across the field as they come after you.”

The baron looked out the window, his eyes far away and a smile on his lips.

“Damn it, man,” he said suddenly, thumping on the roof of the coach again. “Why aren’t we moving?”

The driver said, “There’s a boy in front of the horse, sir. He won’t move.”

“Run him down, then,” the baron bellowed.

A voice called out from the street, steady and cold above the racket of the city.

“If you run over my son you’ll be dead where you sit. Baron Fendamere, step out of the coach, if you please.”

The baron leaned forward and slapped Vlora, leaving her ears ringing. “Stay here,” he said, kicking open the door. He raised his voice to address the man outside. “Who the pit do you think you are?”

“You know me, baron.”

“Oh,” the baron said, stopping just outside the carriage. “You.”

There was a noise at the opposite door of the coach and it suddenly opened. Taniel and Bo stood there, eyes wide. Vlora could have sobbed with joy.

“Come on, Vlora,” Taniel said.

She ducked outside with them and crept away from the coach. When they’d gotten far enough, Vlora broke into a run, only to come up short at Taniel’s shout.

“Wait!”

She stopped and turned. Taniel and Bo had hidden themselves behind a stack of musket boxes just to one side of the coach. Reluctantly, Vlora joined them.

“Sorry I ran,” Taniel said. “But I went and got help.”

“Who?” Vlora asked.

Taniel pointed into the street. “My dad.”

Vlora’s heart almost stopped when she looked.

It was the cold-eyed gentleman in the army uniform. He stood just a dozen paces from the coach, his hands clasped behind his back, legs planted firmly. The similarities between Taniel and this man were suddenly apparent—the dark hair, the serious faces, and the lean build.

“Do you need something, Tamas?” the baron was saying. He was still beside his coach, one hand resting on the hilt of his small sword.

“That’s ‘field marshal,’ to you, baron,” Tamas said, lips beneath his black mustache twitching. “We’re not on a named basis.” His cold eyes bore into Fendamere, as if the baron were beneath him in every way. It was the same look that Vlora had seen on the baron’s face when he looked upon commoners.

“Leave off, field marshal,” the baron spat the last two words. “If you need me, you can call upon me in the morning.”

“Your coachman was about to run over my son,” Tamas said.

“He broke my coach,” the baron said, thrusting a finger toward the discarded coach on the other side of the road.

Tamas turned toward where Vlora, Bo, and Taniel were hiding. “Taniel,” he called. “Come here. You too, Bo.”

Vlora hesitated behind the musket boxes as the two boys joined their father in the street. What was she to do? Taniel stopped half way to his father and gestured urgently for Vlora to join them.

She stood slowly, composing her dirty skirts around her knees. Chin held high, she followed Taniel to his father.

Baron Fendamere sneered, stepping toward her, and she almost ran.

“Baron!” Tamas barked. The man stopped. “Now,” Tamas looked at his son. “Apologize, Taniel.”

Taniel swallowed, wilting under his father’s gaze. “I’m sorry, baron.”

Tamas nodded sharply and turned to Fendamere. “I’ll have the coach paid for. Be on your way, baron.”

“That girl,” Fendamere said, pointing to Vlora, “is coming with me.”

“No she’s not.”

“What?”

“She’s not.”

“And who is to stop me?”

Tamas lay a hand on the hilt of his small sword.

“I won’t hesitate to kill you, field marshal,” Fendamere said, “King’s favorite or not. You may be the field marshal, but you’re still a low-born commoner.”

“Duel me, then.”

The baron seemed taken aback by the calm with which Tamas spoke the words.

“If you win, you can have all three children. Set your dogs on them. Whatever you like.”

“You think you’re good enough?” Fendamere scoffed. “You’ve a reputation, field marshal, but you know I’m better.”

Tamas spread his arms, as if welcoming the baron’s challenge.

“There’s no honor to be had dueling with you,” the baron said slowly, as if sensing a trap. “You’re a damned powder mage. I know your vile kind. You’d use sorcery.”

Tamas raised a hand. “I won’t. I swear it.”

“When?” the baron spit at Tamas’ feet.

“Now. I haven’t had an ounce of powder all day.”

“Seconds?”

“Your coachman can be yours. My son can be mine.”

“You’d have me slaughter you in front of your boy?”

Tamas tilted his head to one side. “Taniel,” he said without looking at his son. “Tell the baron the terms of the duel.”

“Small swords,” Taniel said, as if he were used to this, “in the street. No sorcery. Agreed?”

The baron snarled at Tamas and tugged at the fingers of his gloves as if this were the final insult. “Agreed!” He whirled toward his coach and threw his gloves and jacket inside, then removed his belt and drew his sword.

Tamas turned toward Vlora and the two boys and began unbuttoning his jacket. His hands didn’t shake like Vlora thought they might, and his mustache twitched with the corner of his mouth. Something else had entered his cold eyes, and Vlora thought...

Did this amuse him?

Tamas handed his jacket and belt to Bo, then checked his pistol and gave it to Taniel.

Tamas winked at Vlora and drew his sword, turning back to the baron.

The two men circled each other on the cobbles, and for the first time Vlora noticed that a crowd had gathered. Gunsmiths all down Hrusch Avenue had left their shops to see the fight. Drivers had stopped their horses to leave space for the men to fight.

Vlora could hear whispers among the crowd. Tamas’ name was spoken with reverence, while it seemed that everyone knew the baron—his swordsmanship, according to one smith standing behind her, was legendary.

The baron dashed forward suddenly, and Tamas set his back leg, off-hand held out to one side for balance, and met the charge.

Vlora could feel her heart beating hard as the two men locked in combat. She didn’t know the first thing about sword play and dueling, but she thought that despite his confidence, Tamas was bound to lose. The baron was bigger and stronger, and Tamas seemed to barely turn his sword thrusts.

She looked around the crowd to figure the best path for escape. If Tamas died, she, Taniel, and Bo would be at the baron’s mercy and she didn’t have any intention of being here when that happened.

And what if Tamas won? He had tried to buy her from Amory. What did he want her for? A field marshal was an important man—she knew that. What could he possibly have planned for someone like her?

The fight went on in earnest, the two men’s swords ringing like the strike of a smith’s hammer on steel, and Tamas seemed to be tiring. He fell back before the baron’s advance, the corners of his eyes tight with concentration.

The baron knew he had the upper hand. A smile spread over his face and he suddenly lunged, sword-arm flat, fully extended for the killing blow.

Tamas’ body suddenly seemed to sag and Vlora felt the scream in her throat and waited for the blood on his shirt.

But Tamas stepped past the thrust, as casual as a man out for a stroll, his sword arm a blur.

His sword flicked once. Twice.

He thrust.

The baron dropped to his knees, staring at the clean blade of his sword in confusion. He put his off-hand to his throat where the crimson poured down to soak his white shirt, and then touched the spreading stain just below his heart.

The baron gurgled once and collapsed on the cobbles.

“Send word to the king and the baron’s next of kin,” Tamas said to Fendamere’s driver, “that Baron Fendamere died in a duel with Field Marshal Tamas. If the king wishes to speak to me about the circumstances, I am at his disposal.”

Tamas cleaned his sword on the baron’s pantleg and turned away from the dying man as if he were already forgotten. He gestured to Bo for his belt and jacket, then took the pistol from Taniel.

The exhaustion Vlora had seen in his eyes during the fight was gone.

He wasn’t even winded.

“Taniel,” Tamas said, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief, “introduce me to your friend.”

Vlora stood poised, ready to run. Taniel took her hand and squeezed it reassuredly. “This is Vlora,” Taniel said. “Vlora, this is my dad, field marshal of the Adran army.”

Tamas returned his handkerchief to his pocket and gave Vlora a short bow.

But Vlora stared at Baron Fendamere. His body still twitched on the cobbles, one hand pressed to his throat. She’d never seen a man die before.

She wanted to wrench herself away from Taniel and run, but her feet seemed nailed to the cobbles.

Tamas stepped between her and the baron and knelt. It took every bit of her courage to keep from shying away. He put a finger under her chin and lifted it so that she matched his gaze.

“Why did you want to buy me?” she asked.

The corner of Tamas’ mouth lifted in half a smile. “Is that why you ran away from your school?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Her gaze went over Tamas’ shoulder, to the baron bleeding out on the cobbles. Fendamere’s coachman was at his side, but it was clear that nothing could be done for him.

“Trash such as that does not deserve a second glance,” Tamas said. He drew her gaze back to his face. She was struck that his eyes no longer seemed so cold and distant. Friendly, even. Despite her fears, she suddenly found that she liked this man, in the same way that she had liked Taniel upon their first meeting.

“I’ve made the arrangements,” Tamas said, “and you will be coming to live with Taniel and Bo and myself. Would you like that?”

Vlora would, but she was still suspicious. “Why do you care about me?”

“Because you’re a very special girl.” Tamas drew the pistol from his belt, flipped it around in his hand, and held it out to her, butt first. He shook it. “Here.”

She reached out, hesitantly, and took it from him.

The grip was worn from use, the pan stained from powder and the barrel long-since lost its shine.

“Do you like the feel of that?” Tamas asked.

She nodded. It felt... right. Like something she’d always been meant to hold.

“Vlora,” Tamas said, “The pistol is yours, my girl. You’ll need it if you are going to be a powder mage.”

Green-Eyed Vipers

Eight years before the events of Promise of Blood...

The Baroness Petara loved a good party. She loved the color, the wine, the music; the giddy blur of faces and the gaudy splendor of gilded furniture. The halls of Skyline Palace were lit this evening by hundreds of candelabras and all the nobility of Adro were in attendance, dressed to the nines and preening like haughty birds. At an event like this, Petara loved to assume an air of distracted boredom and watch the flock of vain young men fall over themselves to entertain her.

Petara loved that the rest of the women in the hall knew what she was about and were helpless to stop her, even when their own husbands threw themselves gallantly at her, requesting the honor of a dance or offering her a drink.

Some of the men enjoyed her sporadic flirting. Some of them were there to gain favor—she was a cousin of the king, after all—and even more of them hovered around hoping to spend a night in her arms. She didn’t blame them. Even in her late thirties, Petara was one of the most beautiful women in the room, and a wealthy widow.

On a normal night, she would have taken at least one of the young men home with her, or up to one of the hundreds of spare bedrooms on the second floor of the palace. This, however, was not a normal night. She was not going to be the midnight conquest of some idiot duke’s son. She had her own hunting to do.

The very best of hunters knew when to wait and let their prey come to them. And Petara was the best.

She gave a titillated laugh at something lewd the man next to her whispered in her ear. “I’m sure I couldn’t,” she said, giving him a sidelong glance that told him that oh yes, she certainly could. What was his name again? Frederik. How unoriginal. But he was the third son of a duke with lucrative trading contracts and he had some wonderfully strong arms. Petara liked to mix business and pleasure when she could.

She leaned over to Frederik and whispered, “Call on me at my manor in the Routs tomorrow night at eleven.” Without waiting for an answer, she extricated herself from his arms and stood against a marble pillar, stretching languidly in a way that would give Frederik all sorts of ideas. She smiled at him over her shoulder, snatched a glass of sparkling wine from a passing servant, and left the stuffy sitting room and the dozen or so suitors all vying for her attention.

It was a relief to be away from them, if she was being honest with herself. The simpering and flattery got old. Petara wasn’t some brainless bauble to be impressed by flattering words, even if she did act the part most of the time. She went out into the hall, sipping her wine thoughtfully, making a mental inventory of the faces she didn’t know. She threaded her way into the nearest ballroom, stopping to greet friends and rivals, then went half way up the grand staircase and turned to watch the dancers on the floor below.

She let her eyes wander the room, stopping briefly on a dark blue uniform in one corner. No. That wasn’t the man she sought.

She found another blue uniform and, with a nervous pit in her stomach, checked the face of the man wearing it. Once again she was mistaken. Her disappointment annoyed her. She felt like a girl at her first masquerade, heart aflutter.

She buried the annoyance beneath a smile, then proceeded on to the next ballroom, and then the next.

It was in the third that she found the man she hunted. He was hard to miss—a person much like herself, to whom lesser men and women flocked, clamoring for his attention. His presence in a room demanded such. He was tall, with salt and pepper hair and skin darkened by campaigns in the Gurlish sun, his face weathered by the elements and battle. He wore the dark blue uniform of an Adran soldier with a sword at his hip, and the gold epaulets of the field marshal of the Adran army.

Everyone in the room had their own opinion of Field Marshal Tamas. Some of them worshiped him. More hated him. At least half a dozen actively plotted his death. The nobility in general thought he was an insufferable upstart who had tricked the king into letting him lead the nation’s armies—a despicable worm burrowing its way into the royal apple.

Petara had no illusions about the field marshal. She never had, not since she first saw him on parade when she was still a girl and him a already a colonel. She could still remember that moment clearly, barely seventeen and feeling her heart pound in her chest as he rode by, her cheeks flushing when he glanced her direction. Others whispered that this low-born officer couldn’t possibly rise higher in the king’s graces but she had known almost instinctively that he would someday be one of the most influential men in the country.

So she waited. And nine years ago, when the opportunity presented itself, Petara aided the Kez plot to execute Tamas’s wife.

She felt herself flush, as if merely thinking it in the same room as Tamas would tip her hand to him. She dismissed the notion immediately. Tamas was a brilliant tactician and a natural leader of men, but only passingly adept at politics. Very little subtlety when it came to intrigue. Beneath his cold exterior he was a passionate, even brutal man and if he had so much as suspected her involvement, she would have been dead years ago. He didn’t know—he couldn’t know.

It made the prospect of bedding him so much more thrilling.

She took up her spot on the staircase, adopting a bored expression, watching him out of the corner of her eye as he moved across the room, greeting and shaking hands. His face was steel, only breaking character to flick a smile as he kissed a young woman’s hand. The girl’s father sweated visibly behind her. Everyone knew Tamas’s reputation with the young noblewomen.

The field marshal moved past the girl, hard eyes sweeping the floor. He glanced upward once, and Petara was sure he’d seen her. Lady Petara, the widow baroness; standing alone, statuesque in a low cut, damask dress, a string of pearls brushing against her décolletage. Petara knew Tamas. She was far too good of a target for him to ignore.

She thought back over the years since his wife’s death. Petara and Tamas never slept together, despite both their reputations for dalliances and their mutual eligibility. Petara had avoided him diligently—without looking like it, of course. She wanted to leave him for as long as possible. Let his grief pass. Let his star in the government continue to shine. Let him get older, lonelier.

The timing was perfect. Her informants said that he was growing more receptive to the idea of a second marriage. Despite their hatred of him, more than one noble house already spoke of sacrificing their prettiest daughters for a chance to snag Tamas’s influence.

Petara would bed him tonight. Give him something to remember. And then, over the next few months, they’d have more chance meetings. Another dalliance, then another. Petara would shift her interests to align with his, and influence his to align with hers in all the smallest ways. It might take years, but a man of his intelligence wouldn’t help but see the advantage in a marriage. She could give him more children and leave them a legacy that would be the envy of every other noble house. Petara need only be patient.

Tamas was heading toward her now. He shook off the last of his sycophants and ascended the stairs. He passed behind her, and Petara felt a spike of indignation. He was going to walk right past, without a second glance!

“Lady Petara.” The voice was clipped, formal.

She took a deep breath. Of course he wouldn’t walk past. Not a man in this room could do that to her. Petara looked at him over her right shoulder. “Why, Field Marshal Tamas! I didn’t see you there.”

Tamas was several steps above, and looked as if he’d only just noticed her. His mind was probably off on some campaign in Gurla. He came down two steps and gave her a half bow. “Good evening, my lady.”

“Good evening, field marshal.” Petara looked up at him, batting long eyelashes, daring him not to start sweating. She knew what that look did to men. “How are you enjoying the party?”

“Very entertaining,” Tamas said, his voice deadpan. His eyes moved down her body, lingering at her hips, and then returned to her eyes. He wet his lips with his tongue.

It was the tell Petara was waiting for. I have you, she thought to herself. “They can get repetitive, can’t they?” she asked casually, affecting a stifled yawn.

“A bit.”

She let her eyes go to the glass in his hand. Mild cider. The field marshal was a teetotaler. Hadn’t drank in years. It annoyed her. Men plied with a little drink were so much easier to control. But, she reassured herself, this wouldn’t be a problem. Tamas never let sobriety prevent him from enjoying the company of beautiful women. She said, “The dancing, the champagne. We’ve seen it all before, you and I.”

Tamas half turned to look out over the ballroom. He seemed disinterested in the dancing below. He gave her body a sidelong glance. “Many times,” he said.

She searched his eyes, looking for something in them. Any kind of warning that he knew what she was about. Not the bit about sleeping together. He knew exactly what type of woman she was, just as she knew what kind of man he was. Winding up in each other’s arms was almost a given.

No, she searched for a flicker of hate. Of disgust. Anything to warn her away. He wouldn’t try anything, of course. Not in Skyline Palace. No one would be so brazen with the royal guard no more than a shout away at all times.

There was nothing in Tamas’s eyes but his steely calm. It was unnerving in its own way, but it meant that she had nothing to fear from him.

Petara felt a chill move down her spine. He had no idea about what she’d done to implicate his late wife! How exciting!

She raised her eyebrows, turning away from her view of the dance hall as if a thought had just occurred to her. “You know that I’m an amateur naturalist, don’t you?” she asked. The next part of this little game. It was never as simple as, Would you like to go upstairs with me? There always had to be some kind of verbal dance that would only lead to the inevitable. Tamas’s recent return from Gurla had provided just such an excuse.

Tamas sipped from his glass. “I’d heard rumors to that effect.”

Petara let herself sway a little closer to Tamas, brushing his arm with her own. “And I’ve heard rumors that you brought a number of rather stunning samples back from your latest campaign in Gurla.”

“I did.”

“Tell me, what did you bring back?”

He glanced down at his cup. “Several dozen baloa tree saplings, for one. Only a few survived the journey. Remarkable tree. Grows inches every day. Can get to be enormous with the right care. I fear they’ll all die in our environment. Too cold.”

“Trees?” Petara asked, feigning a yawn but giving him a hint of a smile. “Is that it?”

“Of course not. Several carcasses on ice for dissection at Adopest University. Badgers, goats, big cats. Half a dozen types of rodents. All sorts of interesting curiosities from that side of the globe.” Tamas downed the last of his cider then looked none-too-subtly down the front of Petara’s dress.

She shifted to give him a better view. “Nothing alive?”

“I did, actually. A rather rare snake. The green-eyed viper.”

Petara’s informants had told her this was the case, but she faked a look of astonishment. In the world of Adran naturalists—and it was a popular hobby among the nobility—a green-eyed viper was about the rarest Gurlish animal brought to this part of the world. It was probably worth two hundred thousand krana. She took him by the arm, affecting the besotted eccentric. “I must have it!”

Tamas blinked at her. “You must? I wish it was mine to give. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not yours?”

“Well, it is mine. But it’s meant as a gift. Everything I’ve brought back is going straight to Prime Lektor at the University.”

“Prime Lektor? That old goat?”

Tamas stiffened. “Prime is a friend of mine.”

He was friends with the vice-chancellor of the University? She’d not actually known that. Prime Lektor was little more than a trumped-up teacher but he had some influence. Petara could use that. “I’m sorry,” Petara said, pouting. “I didn’t mean it.” She pressed herself a little closer.

“No, no,” Tamas said, body relaxing. He discarded his cup on a servant’s tray and broke his stony facade for the first time with a small smile. “He is an old goat. But really, I can’t part with the snake. Prime wants it so badly.”

“I’m sure the university can get another. What have they paid you for it? I’ll pay twice as much!”

“My lady, it’s not about the money.”

Petara leaned forward. “Then what’s it about?”

“Well, really...” Tamas trailed off. His eyes dipped to her cleavage again. “Really, it’s just a matter of...” He paused.

“Let me examine it at least,” Petara said. She had to stifle a grin. Seeing Field Marshal Tamas stutter—if she got no where else tonight that thought alone would keep her warm. How delicious! She continued, “You know how rare they are. I’ll be the envy of every naturalist in Adro.”

“It’s a very dangerous animal,” Tamas said, finding his tongue again.

“Come now, I won’t touch it. Unless you want me to.” Petara resisted an eye-roll.

Tamas looked around the room as if considering her request. She could see the color in his cheeks. The stupid innuendo had its desired effect. “I suppose you could come and call tomorrow night,” Tamas said.

Frederik was supposed to come to her home tomorrow night. Petara could cancel that appointment, or... “It must be this evening.”

“It’s already quite late.”

“Have a servant fetch the creature. Carry it here in a box. We’ll take it upstairs to one of the spare rooms where it won’t endanger any of the guests. Really, you must.”

Tamas tilted his head. His eyes had stopped wandering and he examined her curiously, as if wondering whether she was still flirting or really was this eccentric. “Are you absolutely certain?”

“Of course!”

They sent a servant running to Tamas’s home and got more drinks, chatting quietly. Within twenty minutes Petara had strung her arm through Tamas’s. He made no effort to extricate himself. Within forty minutes he’d finally handed his damn hat off to a servant and had one hand in the small of Petara’s back, fingers brushing her ass gently from time to time.

They chatted with Deliv dignitaries and made small talk with some of Petara’s merchant friends. Tamas even talked business with a pair of his generals and Petara listened in, fascinated. Someone else might find this kind of thing boring but not her. She was born for strategy and logistics. In a few years this could be her life and the mere thought made her dizzy. She and Tamas, arm and arm, could conquer the world.

A few hours passed before the servant returned. He carried a wooden crate just big enough for a pair of boots. Petara could feel the sparkling wine do its work, her footing not entirely secure, and Tamas’s own cheeks were flushed from the heat of the ballroom. The servant led them upstairs, far down one of the many side corridors, and into a cool room where he lit the candles and the fire before leaving them alone with the crate.

Petara eyed it, a thrill of excitement going through her. She only cared a little for the snake itself. Sure, it was a curiosity. Someone with a little less brains might even find it as enthralling as she acted but, after all, it was just a snake.

She chided herself for the pretense. Tamas was obviously interested in her. Maybe she could have just asked him to go upstairs. Only her training as a proper noblewoman, something ingrained from a young age, made her go through the motions.

But the pretense was over now. They were alone. Tamas stepped over to the crate and Petara intercepted him, pushing up against him, intertwining her fingers in his. She looked up, lips full, mouth slightly open. “Field marshal,” she said, “I hope I’m not being too forward.”

“No,” Tamas said. “I think not.”

Petara felt an involuntary purr in the back of her throat as he pulled her close to him. Their first kiss was long, deep, and lingering. She’d been with dozens, maybe even hundreds of men. Each had their own strength, their own attraction. She’d even been with a few Privileged in her time, but never a powder mage. She could already tell this was going to be an experience to remember.

Tamas pulled away. She followed him, mouth open, but he took her hand in his and held it up to the light.

“These fingers,” he said. He lowered his lips to them, kissing her fingertips one by one.

“What about them?” she asked.

“They’ve done so much.”

Petara frowned. “Oh?”

“Really, I’m quite impressed.” He continued to kiss her fingers, but Petara felt a dip in her eagerness.

“Are you now?” she asked.

“Oh, very.”

She felt a sudden prick against her palm and pulled away from Tamas. “What was that?”

Tamas showed her his hand. He held a tiny, hollow bone needle between two of his fingers, and she stepped away from him to examine her palm in the light of the candle. The scratch had drawn the smallest bit of blood. Her heart was no longer racing with excitement, and she was overwhelmed by her own annoyance.

“Why did you do that?” she demanded.

Tamas produced a clay vial from one pocket and sunk the needle into the wax inside. His steel visage was gone. His face was soft, kindly. Maybe a little bit tired.

“It’ll only take a moment,” he said. “There. You should be feeling it now.”

Petara tried to back away but found her feet frozen, her hands stiff. No part of her body would obey her, not even her eyelids.

“Absolute paralysis,” Tamas said. He removed a pocket watch from his jacket and set it on the table next to the crate. “You should be dead in about two minutes.”

Petara tried to move, to call for help. To beg. Nothing came out. She couldn’t even breathe. She felt the sweat beading on her brow. She wanted to tell him that the royal guard were patrolling this hallway. That whatever he dared could come to only ruin. He couldn’t possibly get away with this.

Tamas took a powder charge out of his pocket and unwrapped it slowly, like a thoughtful child unwrapping a candy. He sprinkled the black powder on his tongue then put the wrapper back in his pocket.

Petara remained frozen in place, her limbs locked. She couldn’t even collapse to the floor. All she could do was watch.

Tamas drew his dagger and flipped the latch on the crate. He removed a smaller box from within then flipped the latch on that one as well, letting the top spring open.

He struck faster than the eye could see, the tip of his dagger plunging into the box and staying there for several seconds. Petara was transfixed. She tried desperately to remember how much time had passed, but her mind had grown foggy. How long had he said? A minute? Two? This must all be a joke. Surely he wouldn’t kill her, not where everyone could see his crime.

“She called you her friend,” Tamas said.

She? Petara wondered. Who?

Tamas’s hand dipped into the box and came out with the limp body of a small snake, no longer than his forearm and as thick around as a man’s thumb. It was a pretty creature with a repeating pattern of scales across its back that looked like so many green eyes. The tip of Tamas’s dagger had pierced its brain, killing it.

He stepped over and lifted her hand up where she could see it. “Erika spoke of you often,” he said, lifting the snake and pressing on either side of its jaw with his thumb and forefinger. The tiny mouth opened to reveal two fangs. Tamas pressed them against the palm of her hand where he had cut her. She felt the twin needles bite into her flesh. “She said you were one of the smartest women she knew—clever, forward thinking, with an iron resolve. She trusted you, and said you could help us forge a new world. She went to a Kez guillotine with no knowledge of your betrayal.”

Tamas examined his handiwork. From Petara’s viewpoint there was no longer a scratch on her palm. Just two tiny pinpricks. The horror of it dawned on her even as her mind grew more frantic and confused. The venom on the needle was from this very snake. Tamas would tell everyone that she had opened the box overeager, and against his wishes tried to grasp the creature. It had bitten her, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“I would ask you why you did it, but now...” Tamas shrugged, waving the tiny fangs of the snake under her eyes.

Because I wanted you for myself. Because she didn’t deserve you.

Tamas leaned forward. The tired kindliness was gone from his eyes. They were harsh, angry. He put his lips next to her ear. “I bet you’re wondering how I knew. Well. I know a lot of things. The ‘hunting accident’ that killed your husband? Lord Lindberg’s financial ruin and apparent suicide? Lady Soliat foreswearing her title and joining a Kresim convent?” Tamas snorted. “I don’t care about your murders or machinations. I’ve killed and ruined enough nobles myself to make even you blush. What I care about is that Erika called you her friend, and you sent a courier to Duke Nikslaus to let him know where she would be so he could arrest her. That’s all that matters.”

Tamas dropped the limp snake and crushed it under his boot. Petara felt his fingers on her chest, and she was pushed gently backward, her body finally collapsing onto the bed behind her. Her vision became cloudy, her eyeballs burning from not being able to blink. There was a pain deep in her chest.

Tamas appeared above her. “It would be so much more fitting to kill you with all the others. But that’s still years away, and I wanted this to be personal. Goodbye, Lady Petara.”

Petara tried to croak out something—anything—but her body still disobeyed her. How had this night gone so wrong? What was her misstep? How had he known about her involvement?

It had been a trap, and she’d walked straight into it. Pit, she’d led him by the hand up to the room where he would kill her.

She was still fighting with the indignity of it all when darkness finally claimed her.

Tamas stared coldly down at the corpse for several seconds before remembering the bitterness of the kiss. He made a face and spit into the fireplace, wiping his lips of Petara’s taste and hoped that Erika would forgive him for that.

He thought she might.

He checked the clay vial before returning it to his pocket. How would it look if he accidentally pricked himself with that venom? He shook his head, chuckling mirthlessly, letting his gaze fall back on the body. Petara really had been a striking, intelligent woman. She would have made a formidable ally. He might even had married her if he’d never come across her involvement in Erika’s death.

But Tamas did not forget. He did not forgive.

Tamas glanced at Petara’s corpse one last time before opening the door.

“Help!” he called. “Help! There’s been a terrible accident!”

The Face in the Window

Two years before the events of Promise of Blood...

Taniel stepped down the gangplank of the merchant galleon into his exile.

He pulled at the collar of his cut-across coat and unbuttoned the front, letting it hang loose as he hurried to the end of the dock. He had not expected the Fatrastan spring to be so hot and humid and was eager to find a cool pub where he could hide from the sun and wait.

More than a month by ship from Adro, then another two weeks touring the Fatrastan coastline, and Taniel didn’t care if he never saw a ship again. The quarters had been too cramped, and the only thing to keep him occupied had been drawing in his sketchbook and shooting seagulls. The view of the coastline had been nice enough, but Taniel was a soldier and a powder mage, not some foppish noble’s son. The landscape meant little to him beyond defensible positions.

This was the frontier—a wild place with immense trees that had never seen a woodsman’s ax, red-headed natives that would kill you at a wrong glance, and immense open spaces where you might not see another soul for weeks.

It might have been exciting, if Taniel wasn’t so angry with his father for sending him here in the first place. A ‘tour,’ Taniel’s father had called it. Time for him to see a little bit of the world between terms at the university.

Taniel saw it more like an exile. It would be half a year until he saw his fiancé and his homeland again. Half a year before he was back with his friends, skipping out on university classes to float bullets with Sabon, or spending nights with Vlora. It was going to be a long six months.

New Adopest, the city beyond the dock, bustled with excitement that Taniel couldn’t quite place. People spoke in hushed whispers, and boys and men were running back and forth. Everyone seemed to have a rifle or musket. Strange to see so many weapons in a city. Even one on the edge of the wilderness.

He’d seen the whole of New Adopest from the water, and it wasn’t immense. Perhaps fifty thousand souls. The docks took up more space than the city did. All around him ships were unloading immigrants or taking on raw goods to ship back to the Nine. The city had been founded by Adran colonists over a hundred years ago, but then the Fatrastan territories had been sold to the Kez less than six months ago. Taniel couldn’t imagine that made the colonists very happy.

He caught sight of a bronze statue of King Ipille of Kez, standing thirty feet high to look out over the harbor. As he watched, a young man climbed the base of the statue and dropped his pants to piss all over Ipille’s feet. Taniel chuckled at that, and waited for the Kez gendarmes to appear out of the crowd and chase the man off.

None did.

Perhaps it was a festival day. That would keep the gendarmes occupied, and would certainly explain all of the excitement around the city. His father had talked about colonial towns having a certain vibrancy that the big cities of the Nine lacked. Maybe that was it.

“Taniel! Taniel!”

Taniel glanced around for a moment, confused, before remembering his chaperone. The idea of some stranger looking over his shoulder suddenly seemed distasteful, and he wondered if he could lose her in the city.

He pulled his bicorn hat over his face and headed at a brisk walk toward the closest pub. He had almost reached the building and its dark doorway with the promise of cool ale and anonymity, when he felt someone tug on his jacket.

“Taniel? Oh, yes, it is you. I can see your mother’s face in you, my dear.”

Taniel sniffed and tried to stifle his annoyance. “Dine?” he asked the old woman at his elbow.

She gave a half-bow, half-curtsy. “Dina, my dear,” she said, putting emphasis on the ‘a.’ “You’re Tamas and Erika’s boy.” It wasn’t a question, and Taniel wondered if he really did look that much like his mother. That’s what his father had always said, but his memories of her were sketchy at best.

Taniel tipped his hat. “Ma’am, a pleasure to meet you.”

Dina looked to be about fifty and wore a man’s jacket and a loose-fitting skirt that went down to her ankles. Her Adran was slightly accented and Taniel had to remind himself—regretfully—that his mother was, or had been, half-Kez, and as his mother’s cousin, Dina probably came from that side. Dina’s boots looked like they had plenty of wear to them, and she wore a Rope of Kresimir pinned to one breast.

A priestess. Delightful.

“A pleasure indeed,” Dina said. She paused, a hand on his shoulder, and looked him up and down. “I haven’t seen you since you were a boy. You probably don’t remember me at all.”

He didn’t.

“Look at you,” she continued. “A man, now.” Her eyes fell on the flintlock rifle slung over his shoulder, and when she next spoke it was in a loud whisper. “Tell me, do you take black powder like your parents?”

“I’m a powder mage, yes.” And proud of it, too. Taniel could shoot the hat off a farmer at over a mile with a musket. Farther, with a proper rifle and little wind. A snort of gunpowder let him see in the dark and made him faster and stronger than ordinary soldiers.

Dina seemed a little put off by this. “Ah,” she said, before forcing a smile back onto her face. “Well, we won’t let that stand in the way of good company. Let’s take you home for the night and get you a good meal. Regretfully, I’m going to have to put you back on a ship tomorrow morning.”

“What?”

“You’re going back to Adro tomorrow.”

Taniel felt his sour mood shift and had to struggle to keep the grin off his face. Home? He could leave this gods-forsaken land behind and...

Dina kept talking. “War has broken out.” She lowered her voice and leaned close. “The colony has rebelled against the Kez crown and declared that they’re a free country. It’s the damned busybody merchants and the commoners who are going along with it.” Louder, she said, “You can stay with me and my husband tonight, but I...”

“War?” Taniel cut her off. “With Kez?”

“Well, yes.”

He felt his eye twitch, and he forgot every thought of home.

“Where do I sign up?”

Taniel had to shoot the buttons off a scarecrow at eight hundred yards to convince a colonial major that he was, indeed, a trained powder mage. It irked him that the man’s ears perked up at the name of Taniel’s father, but Taniel buried his pride, and three weeks later he was a captain in the Fatrastan militia, assigned to a company heading out toward the wetlands.

He wondered whether his father would be perturbed that Taniel had gotten involved in someone else’s conflict, or proud that he’d taken the initiative.

Taniel hoped it was the former.

He stepped along in marching ranks beside the almost two hundred members of his new company. With his rifle shouldered and his knapsack tied to his belt, he was the only one keeping any kind of a marching rhythm. The rest of them trudged or shuffled at their own paces, the column stretching out almost half a mile down the winding road.

He took a glance behind him. The tall trees—oak, maple, and ash—were well into their early summer greenery, keeping visibility low.

Word had it that the Kez army was patrolling these roads. If fifty cavalry rounded the bend in the road behind them, the whole company would be run down before they could scatter.

Sloppy soldiering.

But then, these men weren’t soldiers. They were farmers and vagrants fighting for money or land, so that the so-called Fatrastan Coalition could win their independence from Kez.

“You smell that?” Dina asked.

Taniel cast her a sidelong glance. Despite the sweat on her brow, Dina walked along at an easy gait as if she were on an afternoon stroll. The old priestess didn’t seem like much, but she’d needed less rest on this march than any of the militiamen.

Taniel had been impressed, and more than a little annoyed, that she had come along when he enlisted in the Fatrastan militia. She had insisted that the men needed spiritual guidance, and Major Bertreau agreed.

She had promised to be his chaperone, she said. Wouldn’t want to let his father down, she said.

Kresimir forbid, anyone let his father down.

“What in Kresimir’s holy name is that smell?” a militiaman asked. A few others grumbled the same question, and Taniel lifted his nose to the wind. Nothing but road dust and unwashed frontiersmen. What could it be...

There. The scent hit him like a runaway cart full of cow shit. It was a heavy, earthy smell, like damp leaves and manure that had been sitting all winter and then suddenly disturbed.

“That’s the swamp,” Dina said, chewing on a bit of reed she’d plucked from the roadside. “The Tristan Basin, they call it. Over six thousand square miles of forested wetlands. The smell gets worse as you go.” She glanced at him, as if that might change his mind about going into the interior.

“How much do you know about the swamp?” Taniel asked.

“My husband and I did some preaching here when we were younger. You see, back then....”

“I see. I’d better check in with the major.” Taniel jogged up the column before Dina could launch into one of her long-winded stories.

Major Bertreau sat on her charger where the road emerged from the trees and crested the hill they’d been climbing. Her face was passive, but shifting eyes betrayed her nervousness and she gently ran her fingers along the thick scarred bruise on her neck. The scar that none of the men dared talk about.

She was originally from Kez, but from one of the mountain towns so close to the border that she might as well be Adran. Like many of the soldiers enlisted in this war, she claimed to be thoroughly Fatrastan now.

And like every Kez citizen that had signed on with the rebelling colonists, she had a death-mark on her head.

Bertreau pulled her collar up to conceal the scar on her neck and acknowledged Taniel with a nod. “Captain.”

“Major,” Taniel said.

“Looks like we’re here.”

The hillside below them gradually gave way to a thick stand of cypress trees growing out of a marshy, shallow lake. The forest seemed to stretch on forever from their vantage point, and Taniel quickly realized why the Tristan Basin was a perfect place from which to conduct their raids: it was immense.

Nothing was going to follow them into that swamp.

“Past the cypress are miles and miles of sawgrass,” Bertreau said. “Grasses taller than a house, and so thick you can’t hack through it with a sword.”

Bertreau’s fingers slowly crept back to her neck. She was a handsome woman with gold hair braided over one shoulder and pretty, round cheeks. Taniel had noted her wandering eye and guessed that had he not mentioned his fiancé waiting back in Adro, Bertreau would have had a go at him by now.

“The savages better be true to their word,” Bertreau said. Her lips twisted slightly when she said ‘savages.’ “If we head into that swamp and they’re not there to guide us, we’ll all be dragon food by tomorrow night.”

“Dragons?” Taniel asked.

“Swamp dragons,” Bertreau said. “Big lizards. Longer than a horse. Their jaws will snap a man in two.”

Taniel fingered the bayonet case at his hip. No one had said anything about giant lizards. Snakes, yes. He didn’t like the idea of them, either, but in a powder trance he was faster than a striking snake.

Was he stronger than one of these swamp dragons?

Taniel removed a snuff box from his belt pouch and tapped a line of black powder out on the back of his hand. He snorted it in one breath and felt the world warp and twist beneath his feet. He spread his feet to brace himself, and a moment later the world came into focus sharper than it had been before.

He let the powder trance take him fully, and he looked out across the Tristan Basin again. He could see a big boa in the top of a cypress over a mile away, sunning itself, black forked tongue darting in and out.

“Any word from the savages in the Basin, sir?” Taniel asked. “Or our outriders?”

Bertreau looked down the road back the way they’d come. “Should be back by now.”

Taniel took a step closer to Bertreau’s mount. “We need to tighten up this formation,” he said. “If the Kez catch up to us like this, we won’t get the chance to be eaten by swamp dragons.”

Bertreau snorted. “I know my way around a company of soldiers, captain,” she said, her voice suddenly cold. “And despite your talents and your father’s name, I don’t seem to remember you having bloodied your hands before.”

“My apologies, major,” Taniel said, forcing down a retort. He wasn’t here to tangle with Fatrastan officers. He was here to kill Kez soldiers, and if Kresimir was kind, a Kez Privileged sorcerer.

Bertreau lifted her eyes to the road curving down the hill toward the morass. “Our destination should be right down there,” she said. She lifted a hand and called to a man nearby. “Sergeant, bring the men in tight at this hilltop. We’ll rest momentarily, and then I want a smart march into Gladeside. The town should still be ours, but who knows where we’ll run into a Kez patrol. We’ll garrison the town and wait for contact with the Basin savages. Can you--”

She cut off at the sound of hooves coming up the road behind them at a full gallop.

Taniel could very clearly see the small gelding maneuvering its way through the soldiers sprawled across the road. Taniel wondered why they bothered calling them a ‘rear guard.’

The rider reined in beside Major Bertreau, a narrow-faced young man clearly exhausted from the long ride. “Five companies on foot, major,” the outrider said when he’d caught his breath. “Kez colors.”

“Of course they’re Kez,” Bertreau snapped. “We don’t have five companies in this neck of the country. How far are they?”

“They’ll be here by tomorrow afternoon.”

Bertreau looked up at the sun. It was well past its zenith and headed down to the western horizon.

Taniel noted the outrider shifting nervously in his saddle. “What else is there, soldier?”

“Well...,” he said, glancing at Taniel’s rifle and the silver powder keg pinned to his breast. “See, there’s a problem...”

Taniel felt his gut tighten. “Privileged?”

The man nodded.

“Well,” Taniel said, forcing a smile on his face, “that’s why I’m here. I’ll put a bullet in his eye from over a mile out.”

Taniel’s mouth tasted sour as he remembered that he’d been hoping for a Privileged just a few minutes ago. Privileged were not something to hope for. A single Privileged had potent elemental sorcery at his call and was more dangerous than ten companies of Kez soldiers. They could call fire and lightning down on his company as easily as Taniel could float a bullet.

“I don’t want him getting that close,” Bertreau said. “Sergeant, a double march down to Gladeside. We’ll quarter there tonight and head into the swamp at first light. With or without our savage guides.”

Taniel looked back the way they’d come and had to remind himself that there wouldn’t be a company of dragoons coming up that road any time soon. They were safe.

For now.

If their savage guide was waiting for them in Gladeside, then they’d be deep in the swamp by tomorrow night, and by the end of the week they’d be raiding Kez towns up and down the length of the Tristan Basin.

And if the Privileged caught them out in the open, they’d all be dead before they could load their muskets.

Taniel sat on a bench in the corner of the wide room of the common house, his foot tapping out the rhythm of the pub song the other soldiers were singing. The room was dimly lit by fireplace and candle and smelled like ale and wet dog, and every so often the singing would be drowned out by the hammer of a particularly fierce shower of heavy raindrops on the roof above.

He put a few finishing touches on the sketch of Bertreau he’d been working on, brushing softly with the stub of charcoal to shade the rope scar on her neck.

Three weeks of stealing glances when she wasn’t looking, and he was sure of it: sometime, probably not more than a few months ago, someone had tried to hang Bertreau. Her neck hadn’t snapped when she hit the end of the rope, and they had cut her down.

Why had they cut her down, he wondered.

She sat across the common room, nursing a mug of local ale and bobbing her head to the song but otherwise keeping herself aloof from her men. A bit of black powder still in Taniel’s system gave him just enough of a powder trance to see the details of her face clearly.

A squat, wide-shouldered barrel of a man slid onto the bench across from Taniel and dug a stubby finger into his ear, wiggling it about. Sergeant Mapel had told Taniel that his parents had originally been from Brudania, but his mother had been a dark skinned Deliv, and he favored her ebony complexion.

He grinned, dimples forming at the corners of his black cheeks. “If the major catches you drawing her...”

“She won’t,” Taniel said, taking his eyes off his battered, leather-bound sketchbook just long enough to look down his nose at Mapel. “Any word from the savages?”

A worried scowl crossed Mapel’s face. Their savage liaison should be here, ready to lead them into the swamp in the morning. In exchange for Hrusch rifles, ammunition, and powder, the savages were going to give the company succor from the Kez and help them raid Kez-held towns along the Tristan Basin.

A good prospect for the war, if the savages showed up before the Kez.

“We did hear from the coast,” Mapel said.

“And?”

“The Kez burned Little Starland to the ground.”

Taniel let his hand fall away from his sketchbook. He’d sailed into Little Starland less than two months ago. It had been his first experience in this new land—a trade city of some eighty thousand souls and growing by the day. Little Starland had financed the university in Fatrasta. A university not all that different from the one Taniel attended in Adro.

“To the ground?” Taniel heard himself echo.

“Nothing left.”

Taniel felt anger burning in his chest. His finger itched to pull the trigger of his rifle, a Kez Privileged in his sights. A shot of fear followed it, and a small voice asked: What if I miss?

“The Kez,” Mapel said, “win wars through shear force and brutality. They use fear to keep...”

“I know all about the Kez,” Taniel snapped. He closed his sketchbook and stowed it in its seal-skin pouch, fearful that he might tear it apart in a rage. “I know the Kez are a vindictive, cruel people who seek to master everything in their sight.” He fell silent, his hand resting on the butt of the pistol tucked in his belt. He’d bought it in Little Starland.

“Taniel,” a soft voice said.

“What!” Taniel rounded on Dina, the word coming out far louder than he’d meant. He took a deep breath. “What?” he asked again, quieter this time but unable to force the impatience from his voice.

“Bad time for it, priestess,” Mapel said to Dina. “I just worked the captain here into a lather.” Mapel had pushed back his bench as if ready to run. “Seems he has a particular hatred for the Kez.”

Taniel shot Dina a warning glance. Don’t you say a damn word...

“The Kez executed his mother,” Dina said, dropping onto the bench beside Taniel.

Mapel made an “oh” expression with his mouth.

“You have no right.”

Dina met his anger with her head cocked to one side in a challenge. “She was my cousin,” she said. “I have every right.”

“And so you avenge her by trying to convince me to turn back every night? To sail back to Adro, where I’ll have to look my father in the eye and tell him I had the chance to kill Kez and I didn’t take it?” Taniel knew he shouldn’t yell at her. She was just trying to do what she saw as right. Besides, she was almost old enough to be his grandmother.

Dina hesitated, and Taniel knew that’s exactly what she had come over here to do.

“I’m a priestess, not a warrior. War is a young man’s folly, and I have children, and my children have children. I’m only here now because your father asked me to chaperone you, and I’m a woman of my word.”

“Don’t you want to protect your children from the Kez?” Taniel glanced toward Mapel for an agreeing nod, only to find that the sergeant had slipped off. He cursed the man silently.

Dina raised an eyebrow. “I am Kez,” she said.

“But you’re...”

“With you? Here, now? I know. I told you, I’m a woman of my word.”

Taniel blinked in confusion. “But the Kez will execute you if they find you with the...” Taniel trailed off, suddenly realizing what a risk she had taken coming out here with him. All the while hoping to convince him to leave the war.

Taniel said, “If the Kez catch me trying to slip out of the country, they’ll execute me on the spot. You know how they feel about powder mages.” He refused to associate Dina with the Kez as a whole. She was family, after all.

“Do you think they’d risk your father’s wrath a second time?”

Dina had no idea how little Taniel’s father cared for him. “I think they’d jump on the opportunity to bring him to his knees.”

“I have a friend who’s been smuggling tobacco for years, to get around Kez tariffs. He could get you back to Adro safely.”

“I...” Taniel broke off.

He was going to get his first chance at Kez blood. He’d sworn to himself that he’d not return to Adro without at least a dozen notches on his rifle. If Dina got herself killed by the Kez, he wasn’t going to let that weigh on his conscience.

“I’m going outside,” Taniel said.

He snatched his rifle and knapsack and headed out onto the front porch of the common house.

Outside, the rain had managed to clear the air of the swamp smell. Half a dozen militiamen lounged under the awning, smoking pipes or cigarettes and staring sullenly out into the deluge. They knew they had to go out into the swamp in the morning, and none of them were relishing the idea.

Only one bothered to acknowledge Taniel.

Damned sloppy discipline.

Taniel stared into the night for a few moments. The rain managed to conceal most everything that the dark did not, and nothing but rough shapes stood out—the town buildings, most of their lanterns doused for the night.

His eyes caught a shadow in the middle of the road. He frowned and focused on that shadow. A person, maybe? Why would they be standing there in the rain?

Taniel kept his eyes on that shadow, afraid it might disappear if he looked away, and tapped a line of black powder out on the back of his hand.

He snorted it.

The shapes of the town buildings sprang into sharp relief as the powder trance washed over him, the rain brightening as if he’d shone a lantern on it, and the shadow became a girl.

She couldn’t have been more than fourteen, her shoulder-length hair soaked through, a satchel slung over one shoulder. Her skin was pale and covered with small grey freckles like tiny flecks of ash, and Taniel guessed that in the light of the day her hair would be red.

A savage girl, nothing more.

Then why was his heart racing? An instinct deeper than any of his senses screamed danger at him, and without realizing he was doing it, he found himself poised to run.

The girl met his eyes across the space, through the rain, and Taniel began to lift his rifle, not quite sure what he was going to do with it. Shoot a little savage girl? He didn’t kill children, and it would surely turn their guides against them, ruining this entire expedition.

Taniel braced himself and opened his third eye to look in to the Else and see where sorcery was touching the world. Everything suddenly shifted, the darkness brightening to become a myriad of pastel colors that revealed the presence of nearby sorcery.

The girl glowed with a dull light.

She was a sorcerer.

He’d heard of savage sorcerers. Bone-eyes, they called them. No one knew much about Bone-eyes, beyond that they had a magic different from Privileged elemental sorcery or powder mages’ gunpowder trance.

What was she doing out in the rain like that?

Taniel turned to ask one of the men smoking under the awning if they could see the girl, when something caught the corner of his vision.

Halfway up the road, on the hillside above the town, Taniel could see a strong glow of color in the Else.

“Privileged!” Taniel screamed, and threw himself to the muddy street as lightning sliced through the air and slammed into the common house behind him.

The explosion left Taniel’s ears ringing, and he struggled to get to his feet. Most of the common house was scattered across the street in pieces of debris not more than a foot long. What remained was on fire, and Taniel could hear the screams of the dying and wounded.

He helped pull someone to their feet—one of the militiamen who’d been smoking on the porch—and struggled to open his bayonet case. Where there was a Privileged there would be Kez soldiers.

He struggled to blink the echo of the lightning from his eyes, willing them to adjust to the darkness once again. A few moments later, and he saw the Kez soldiers running down the road into the town. They wore canvas ponchos over their tan uniforms and they had their bayonets fixed.

The Fatrastan militia was heavily outnumbered. Even without the Kez Privileged, the entire company would be decimated in minutes.

“Run for the swamp!” Taniel said.

“Are you mad?” a militiaman asked.

“It’s the only chance, damn it. Into the cypress!”

Taniel rushed into the smoldering remains of the common house. Survivors were picking themselves up off the ground, their weapons in hand. Taniel couldn’t find Major Bertreau in the chaos, but he snatched Sergeant Mapel by the shoulder.

“The swamp,” Taniel said, pointing in the direction opposite of the charging Kez soldiers.

Mapel nodded and began bellowing the retreat.

“Dina,” Taniel shouted. “Dina, damn it!” He kicked a bench out of the way, checking the charred bodies that had taken the brunt of the sorcery.

“Here.”

The old priestess was already on her feet, directing others after Sergeant Mapel.

Taniel suppressed a sigh of relief. He didn’t want a relative’s life on his hands, even if she was a Kez. “Have you seen Bertreau?”

“Out front,” Dina said.

Taniel dashed back into the street to find Major Bertreau organizing a line of some twenty men to meet the advance of Kez infantry.

“We have to lose ourselves in the trees,” Taniel shouted at her.

Bertreau drew her sword. “This is the rear-guard. Go on with the rest!”

“It’s suicide!” Taniel’s words were swallowed by a blast of lightning striking a nearby building and the accompanying roll of thunder. In the light, he thought he saw the same savage girl standing off to one side, her back to the swamp.

Then the Kez were on top of them.

Taniel turned a bayonet thrust with the stock of his rifle and cursed himself for not fixing his own bayonet when he had the chance. His heart hammered in his ears as he spun his rifle to hold it by the barrel, the way he’d been taught, and brought the stock down across the Kez soldier’s face.

Steel clashed and screams filled the air. Taniel drew the pistol from his belt, his powder mage senses telling him that the powder was still dry, and fired it into an infantryman.

Major Bertraeu turned suddenly and thrust her sword, and Taniel was bowled over by the dead weight of the Kez soldier that had taken her blade to the heart.

He pushed the man away and, not taking the time to thank Bertraeu, deftly slipped his bayonet out of his pouch and over the end of his rifle, twisting the ring to feel it slide into place. He dropped his weight onto his back leg and set himself, slipping past an infantryman’s thrust and driving his bayonet into the man’s eye.

With the powder in your veins, his father had said, you’ll be faster than other men—it’ll be as if they are moving under water and you are not. You know this feeling from your training, but you won’t in truth understand until you’re in a real melee.

Taniel suddenly knew what his father had meant. He could feel himself reacting faster than the others around him, even than Major Bertreau’s experienced sword. It was like battling children.

They didn’t stand a chance.

Don’t let yourself become overconfident. Trust yourself to react quickly, and you’ll kill them before they even realize what they’re fighting.

Taniel cut through three more infantry before there was no one else to fight. More Kez were coming down the road, but the militia had managed to fend off the first platoon.

Bertraeu stared at him, wide-eyed. “Pit, you’re fast,” she said.

“The swamp,” Taniel said.

“To the trees!” she yelled. “Run for it. Leave the wounded.” She winced as she said it.

They sprinted down the town streets, chased by sorcery. Lightning flashed, and fire soared overhead in streaking balls that detonated among the buildings with the strength of exploding mortar shells. Taniel considered finding a place to hide from the pursuing infantry and taking a shot at the Privileged, but he knew that it would be a stupid risk. He might be able to try once he’d lost the infantry in the swamp.

He caught sight of an old woman limping ahead of him.

“Come on, Dina, you have to move faster!”

Taniel threw his shoulder under Dina’s arm and half-carried her onward. The limp was a bad sign—an open wound in the swamp would put her on her way to a slow death by disease or a quick death by natural predators.

Fatrastan militiamen passed them at a sprint, trying to save their own skins in the relative safety of the swamp. Taniel recognized several members of Bertraeu’s rear guard. He and Dina were the last of the survivors to retreat.

Taniel could see the edge of the cypress forest looming out of the darkness just ahead. He was ready for the land to drop beneath him, the water of the Tristan river splashing beneath his boots, but the steep slope came up so quickly that he still tripped and tumbled down it. He landed on his back in the water, sputtering and cursing.

He scrambled about for his knapsack and rifle, recovering both. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Dina croaked.

His powder mage senses told him that most of his charges were wet. He paused only long enough to snort a pinch of powder from one of the few dry ones, renewing his trance.

Go easy on the powder, his father had always said. Even the strongest mage risks dependency and powder blindness.

Taniel banished that thought. No time for that kind of caution now.

The darkness left few secrets for him with his trance-enhanced sight, but the tumble down the hill had reminded him to be cautious. Slowly, he and Dina began to navigate into the swamp.

“Keep to the solid ground,” Dina said. “You won’t be able to see anything beneath the water. Sinkholes are common—they’ll pull you right down. Take it one step at a time, and if you feel your one foot start to sink, step back to firm ground.” Her voice came out as a raspy rush. “One foot at a time... oh, Kresimir, give me strength.”

“We can’t stop,” Taniel said as Dina began to fall.

“I’m all right,” Dina insisted. “Keep going. There will be frequent hummocks of dry land rising above the water—that’s the best place to rest.”

Taniel’s next words died on his lips as he caught sight of the savage girl he had seen in the street before the battle. She stood a couple dozen paces off, just like she had back in the town, facing him, catching his eye, her face emotionless. Taniel felt like cold fingers were tracing their way up the small of his back.

“Do you see...”

“I can’t see a blasted thing in this darkness,” Dina said. “You’re a powder mage, you’ll have to guide us on.”

“Here, I...” Taniel looked away for just half a moment, and the girl was gone.

There was shouting behind them, and Taniel knew he had two choices: move faster and risk stepping in a sinkhole, or take it slowly and let the Kez soldiers catch up with them.

A quick glance back showed that the Kez had entered the swamp about a hundred yards behind him. They carried lanterns, hooded against the rain.

Taniel would have to outrun them, risking the sinkholes and swamp dragons.

There, up ahead. The savage girl again. Taniel fought his fear with anger. Who the pit was she? What did she want? Why was she haunting him?

“There’s a girl,” Taniel hissed.

Dina clutched at him. “What did you say?”

“A savage girl. She’s up ahead, watching us.” He wanted to say the word “spirit” but fought against it. He didn’t need to scare Dina. Priests were notoriously excitable about this kind of things. “I’ve heard stories...”

“This is no time for superstition,” Dina said. “She must be one of the tribe, here to guide us. Follow her!”

Taniel stepped forward, only to feel his leg sink into the mud up to his knee. “Sinkhole!” He tried to step back, but too much of his weight had been on his front leg, leaving him with no leverage.

“Don’t move,” Dina said. Her raspy breathing filled Taniel’s ears, and he could feel her grasp him by the shoulder. “I’ve braced my feet,” she said. “I’ll pull on you now. Just wait until...”

Light suddenly blinded Taniel, searing Dina’s face into his vision. He felt the grip on his shoulder disappear, and he fell back into the mud, arms flailing for purchase. His right arm sank through the murk and he thought he might be sucked down forever, before one fingertip touched something solid.

He forced himself to freeze. Struggling would only make it worse. He focused on floating in the water above the sinkhole, one hand with a firm grip on a rock beneath the water. It was the only thing keeping him from being pulled down.

Pushing with that one hand, he felt his face break the surface and took in a ragged breath.

Calm, he reminded himself. He had to breathe slowly and work his way away from the sinkhole.

He remembered Dina’s face in the lightning—mouth open, eyes wide, features ashen—and he knew that she had likely been dead by the time she hit the water.

His eyes were caked shut by mud, and there was a pain in his side that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Had he been shot? Perhaps he had twisted something when he fell.

He could hear the splash of footsteps near, and his heart thundered like a volley of musket fire. All his training and his magery yet here he was, helpless to move in the mud and water. Someone could just walk up and push him down.

“Look at that, my lady,” a male voice said in Kez. “Cut right in two. Excellent aim.”

Another voice, female, and educated by the enunciation, said, “Is it the powder mage?”

“Hard to tell, the body is sinking fast. Can’t see the face.”

The body. Dina.

The woman sniffed. “There were two out here. Did I get them both?”

A few moments passed, and Taniel knew they were looking for him. From their voices, they had their backs to him. Taniel forced himself to breathe as quietly as possible and prayed to Kresimir they wouldn’t turn around.

“This is a deep sinkhole, my lady. Can’t feel the bottom with this pole. He must have been sucked down into the mud. See how quickly the corpse disappeared?”

“I want evidence of the powder mage’s death. Mark the spot. I’ll come back in the morning and raise the corpses.”

“The swamp dragons or snappers might have them by then, my lady.”

“Just mark the spot. We have more hunting to do.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Taniel waited, barely able to breath, and tried not to imagine the mud slowly sucking him under.

The two left, their boots splashing in the water, and Taniel listened to other soldiers shouting in Kez. The search carried on for at least an hour, and he remained still, only years of practice standing at attention allowing him the discipline to do so.

His side ached fiercely, and he knew he was losing blood. How much, he couldn’t be sure. The pain grew as his powder trance wore off. He shivered in the chill of the swamp water.

The sounds of searching soldiers were not long gone when Taniel felt something move past one foot. It was a soft feeling, like satin sliding across his skin, and he immediately thought of everything that they’d told him lurked in these swamps: snakes, snappers, and swamp dragons.

No more waiting. He had to get back to solid ground, find his rifle and kit if he could, and then work his way further into the swamp before morning. He moved slowly, pulling his leg toward him. With his whole head finally above the water, Taniel scrapped the mud from his eyes. The world was dark, his powder trance gone. His clothes were soaked and his muscles stiff, and something touched his leg again.

Even half-blinded by mud and cloaked in darkness, Taniel could see the figure of the savage girl standing on the bank, not three feet away.

Fear shot through him. Several moments passed, and Taniel forced himself to look her in the eye as he reached out with one hand, searching for firm ground. Then something snagged him by the leg and pulled. The scream didn’t have time to leave his mouth before he went under.

“Where are you leading me, girl?”

It was early in the morning, and the swamp teemed with life. Taniel limped along ten paces back from the savage girl, scanning their surroundings. He spotted a pair of swamp dragon nostrils poking up from the water and shuddered, remembering the teeth that had seized his leg last night.

The savage girl had already adjusted their path in order to go well around the creature.

She’d been silent all night, watching him carefully whenever he spoke but never replying. He wondered if she understood Adran, or if she could speak at all. Had she made any sort of war cry when she’d dove into the mud and killed the young swamp dragon with two strokes of her machete?

Taniel couldn’t remember. He’d been too busy struggling to get away.

He was lucky the beast had only snagged his pantleg. Otherwise the gash in his side would be second concern over a missing foot.

Taniel’s powder trance was wearing off. He’d maintained a trance all night, sniffing from his last bit of dry powder every half hour or so, but he knew that if he took any more he risked not having enough to fight Kez if they ran into any patrols.

He still clung to the hope of finding survivors from the militia, despite not having seen any sign of them all morning. His questions about them to this girl had all gone ignored.

He stopped to catch his breath, sitting on the bowed old roots of a cypress tree. His clothes were dirty and soaking, his rifle lost in the swamp; only his kit, wet knapsack, and a single pistol to help him survive.

And this savage girl.

“Wait,” Taniel said.

The girl turned and shook her head sharply, gesturing ahead. It was the first indication that she’d understood anything he said. She pointed between herself and him then made a walking motion with her fingers.

“I need to treat this wound,” Taniel said. “It’s going to be a problem if I don’t.” It was already a problem. He risked disease, infection, and bloodloss with every step he took; he only pushed on because he knew he had to get as far from the Kez as possible.

The girl splashed toward him, and he pulled his shirt up to show her the wound.

It wasn’t pretty. Mud-caked and angry red, it crossed his left side just below his arm, almost six inches long. The mud might have saved his life, preventing him from bleeding out over the last seven or eight hours, but infection was his greatest worry now.

The girl motioned for him to follow and led him to a hardwood hummock—a rise in the land about three feet above the water and fifty paces long. She began gathering dry sticks immediately, pulling down dead tree branches and plucking them from the highest point of the hummock.

“No fire,” Taniel said, dropping his kit. He felt his eyelids droop. He needed to rest, or take more powder. “Can’t risk them seeing the smoke.” He got to his feet, only for the girl to push him to the ground with one strong shove of her palm. “Ow.” Pit, the girl was strong.

Twenty minutes later she had a fire going and was feeding it dry twigs. She rummaged around in his kit without asking and came away with his small cookpot.

Taniel was too weak to raise a word of protest.

She put a pot of water over the fire and headed off into the swamp, giving him a hand-signal to stay. He chuckled at that. “I’m not going anywhere, girl.”

She was back sometime later, sporting a cut piece of vine about as thick as her wrist. She lay it on the ground and sliced it open lengthwise with her machete, expertly plying the white, soft pulp from the center.

Taniel watched her work. This vine was some kind of local medicine, perhaps?

Natives always know the land better, his father’s voice came to him. They can find fresh water in the desert, and they know which animals are poisonous. They have herbal remedies you’ve never heard of.

Careful, though. They can also kill you while making it look like they were trying to help.

Well, this girl had already had her chance to let him die, and he wouldn’t get out of this Kresimir-damned swamp without her.

Taniel cleaned the wound with the boiled water, then cut away charred and torn flesh with his knife, taking a hit of powder to help with the pain. The girl packed his wound with the innards of the vine, then used the skin of it like a bandage, wrapping it around his chest and tying it on the other side.

He sat back, watching her as she went to throw rocks at a swamp dragon creeping up their piece of dry land. A numbness spread through his side, and Taniel clutched his pistol to his chest. He needed to stay awake.

No telling how many Kez were patrolling this swamp, or if the Kez Privileged was out here, scouring the basin for him herself.

Taniel woke some hours later. By the sun shining through the cypress overhead, he guessed it was past four o’clock.

The pain in his side was gone, the numbness having spread to leave his left arm only passably useful. The narcotic the girl had packed into his wound was a strong one.

The girl herself was nowhere to be seen, and the swamp was uncharacteristically quiet. He pushed himself to his feet, finding his pistol already in his hand. He checked to be sure it was loaded, the barrel clear and the charge dry.

A small hit of powder set his mind ablaze and his blood pumping, but he could still feel sluggishness in his limbs.

A strong narcotic indeed.

He knew he should preserve his powder, but the trance would give him strength and help him think, and the allure of the heightened senses that came along with it was too strong to ignore.

A noise brought Taniel’s head around. Up in one of the trees, above where he’d been sleeping, the savage girl perched on a branch like an owl, with her machete sheathed. She held a reed in one hand about as thick as the charcoal Taniel used to draw in his sketchbook and was slowly tapping it against the tree trunk, head cocked as if listening to something.

She pointed at him, then gestured at the ashes of the fire.

Taniel snatched his pot and stowed it with his kit, then kicked the ashes into the water.

The girl shimmied down the weathered grey trunk of the cypress, landing lightly on bare feet. She held up four fingers and pointed toward the south, then scurried off the high ground. Taniel didn’t have a chance to respond before she disappeared beneath the water. Nothing remained but a few ripples and the long, trembling hollow reed that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

The distant splashing of someone approaching through the swamp caught Taniel’s ear. He moved to the far side of the cypress once he’d pinpointed their location, then crouched and waited.

They were coming right toward him. He tapped out a line of black powder on the back of his hand, snorting it to bring his powder trance to a vibrant hum, then leaned back around the tree.

There were four of them. Three Kez soldiers, spread in a triangular formation with one of them on point picking his way carefully through the water. A fourth man trailed along behind the trio, his hands bound and linked by a rope to one of the soldier’s belts.

The prisoner was a savage. Taller than the girl by far, with a wiry build and thin bony shoulders, Taniel guessed him to be about twenty-five years old. He had short, pale-red hair cut above his ears and the same ashen, freckled skin as the savage girl.

The trio of soldiers traveled in silence, their concentration focused on watching for swamp dragons and snakes. Their bayoneted muskets were held at the ready.

Taniel waited for them to come, from his hiding place behind the big cypress. He had his pistol and nothing else. Should he let them pass, staying hidden like the girl? Or should he try to capture them, and save the savage? He could ignite the powder in their muskets with a thought, killing or wounding all three at once, but he wasn’t particularly skilled at directing blasts, and that risked hurting their prisoner.

If it came to a fight, the three were better-armed. They might be able to best him.

Taniel pressed his back to the cypress and slowly moved around the trunk, keeping it between himself and the three soldiers.

The splashing suddenly stopped.

“Someone has been here.” one of them said in Kez. “Are those ashes?”

The splashing drew close to the hummock. “There was a fire. See this bootprint? Someone’s been here recently. One of those damn rebels.” He switched to Adran. “You, savage. Who else would be coming through here today?” A pause, then, “You hear me, boy? I know you understand.”

There was the dull smack of a musket butt striking flesh, and someone grunted but did not cry out.

“Are they warm?” one of the soldiers asked in Kez.

Taniel heard one of the soldiers climb onto the hummock, mud squelching beneath his boots. Taniel’s breath came fast and short, and the man suddenly stepped into view. Slowly, so as not to attract attention, Taniel leveled his pistol.

The soldier bent over the remains of Taniel’s fire; stuck his finger in them. “A little warm. They were here just a few hours ago. I...”

His head twisted and his eyes grew wide at the sight of Taniel.

“Set it down,” Taniel said in Kez.

The soldier dropped his musket.

“Who’s there?” one of the others demanded.

“A rebel,” the Kez said. “He has a pistol on me.”

“Put down your muskets!” Taniel shouted.

The soldier licked his lips and met Taniel’s eyes. “There’s just one!” he yelled as he dove to the side. Taniel tracked his movement, watched him snatch up his musket and turn to aim.

Taniel squeezed his trigger, felling the soldier with a shot to the heart.

He spun toward the other two, flipping his pistol around to take it by the barrel, feeling the heat burn his palm. He had half a second to decide whether to ignite their powder, killing them both and risking their prisoner, or to cross the space and attack. He’d have to duck past their bayonets and use his only weapon—the butt of the spent pistol.

The water beneath the soldiers erupted. The savage girl came up swinging, her hair whipping about as she hamstrung one soldier with her machete, slit the other’s belly, then returned to the first to cut his throat.

The action had taken half a heart-beat, faster than Taniel could follow, and both men were down.

He and the girl dragged the bodies onto the hummock.

The savage prisoner hadn’t flinched during the short, brutal fight, even leaping on the soldier Taniel had shot to finish him off with his bare hands. His eyes flicked over the three bodies with disdain, and Taniel guessed he was used to killing.

“I am Milgi, of the Stillwater tribe,” the male savage said, his voice deep, his Adran barely intelligible.

“I’m Taniel. Captain with the Fatrastan militia. And powder mage.” He added the last bit to give his words more weight, but wondered as he clasped hands with the savage whether they even knew what a powder mage was. He clasped hands with the savage.

The girl had already set about stripping the bodies of anything useful. Milgi stayed off the hummock, knee-deep in the water, and Taniel thought he saw a bit of fear in his eyes when he looked at the girl.

“Were you the one who was supposed to meet us in Gladeside?” Taniel asked.

“Yes. Your company arrived early, and the Kez--” Milgi paused to spit on one of the bodies-- “caught up to you before we did.”

“Did anyone else make it out?” Taniel asked.

“Most of the company. My brothers are leading them to our village as we speak.”

Taniel let out a sigh of relief.

Milgi went on. “I was looking for you when these three caught me unawares. It was...”

“Embarrassing?”

“Yes.”

The girl found one of the soldier’s powder horns. She popped it open, checking the powder, then resealed it and tossed it to Taniel.

Taniel caught it with one hand. “Can you take me to them?”

“I can,” Milgi said.

“Excellent. Let’s get going before we run into another patrol.”

Taniel took the best of the three muskets and fixed the bayonet. He preferred rifles—they were more accurate at the range that made powder mages so deadly, and the straighter he shot, the less work he had to do to float the bullet. The musket would have to do, though.

They left the bodies to be discovered by the Kez, if the swamp dragons didn’t get them first. “Fear,” Milgi had said, when Taniel wanted to hide them. “Doubt. The swamp frightens them already. This will make it worse.”

The girl ranged ahead of them as they picked their way through the swamp, wriggling her hand at them to indicate a snake or swamp dragon to avoid.

“What’s her name?” Taniel asked Milgi, pointing toward the girl. Milgi had been watching her for some time, and there was a hint of wariness in his eyes.

“Ka-poel.”

“Strange name. Strange girl.”

“Truthfully, I did not expect to find you with--” Milgi lowered his voice. “Her.”

“I thought she was one of you?”

Milgi’s next words were slow, hesitant. “She is. And isn’t. She has no place in our tribe. A foreigner, from across the narrow sea far to the west. But she is a Bone-eye, and we cannot shun her.”

“A Dynize?” Taniel asked.

“Yes.”

No one knew much about the Dynize, save that they were a great empire west of Fatrasta, and that their borders had been closed to foreigners for decades. The savages of Fatrasta were their distant cousins—their looks and their languages similar but as different as Kez and Adro.

Taniel noted that the girl had half-turned her head toward them while she moved quietly through the swamp. She’d been listening.

“Can she speak?”

“No.”

Taniel felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find Milgi had stopped. “She’s not to be trusted,” he said.

“She saved my life. More than once already, and the day’s still young.” Taniel’s wit faded when he noticed Milgi didn’t catch the humor in his words.

“Not to be trusted,” Milgi said again, before heading on.

Taniel hurried to catch up with him. “Do you know anything about the Kez companies that attacked us?”

“Only what your major told us this morning, when we found your men. Five companies. Over a thousand muskets, and one Privileged.”

“Major Bertreau survived? I’m glad to hear that. Is your village deep enough in the swamp to hide us, if they decide to come looking?”

Milgi scowled. “From the men? Yes. Further in the basin, the water is deep and the hummocks are few. It would take a thousand men years of searching to find us.” He paused. “But when I was captured, I pretended I did not know their tongue and listened to the soldiers speak to each other. They said that their Privileged was going to burn her way through the basin.”

Taniel felt a coldness in his gut.

“I’m sure they won’t find us,” Milgi said, waving his hand as if to dispel the fear.

Taniel knew Privileged sorcery. He knew what they were capable of. His father had told stories about some of the strongest cabal heads from the Nine—men who could slaughter thousands with a casual gesture.

He’d felt that Privileged’s power last night when she attacked the company. Not as strong as a cabal head, but no pretender, either. She could lift the earth, burn the trees, and part the water, giving her men safe conduct through the swamp and finding the militia and savages no matter where they were hiding.

“We have to go back,” Taniel said.

Milgi stopped and stared at him.

“Are the Kez camped in Gladeside?” Taniel asked.

“Yes,” Milgi said, “but we can’t go back. They won’t find us deep in the swamp. Nothing to do against a Privileged but hide.”

“I’m a powder mage.” Taniel didn’t feel so well. His side ached, his head was light from little food, and his feet hurt. He hadn’t been dry since last night, and the idea of being anywhere near that Privileged scared the piss out of him.

But if he didn’t go back, his militia company and their savage allies would die.

“Privileged.” Milgi wagged his finger under Taniel’s nose as if Taniel were a slow child. “You don’t have a Privileged, and you can’t fight them.”

“Powder mages,” Taniel said, repeating what his father had reiterated over the years, “were made for one thing: killing Privileged.” He forced the words out, wondering if he still believed them. Sitting in a barracks, listening to his father’s stories, it had been easy enough to think he could kill a Privileged. But with nothing between him and their sorcery but a mile of space and single bullet, he wasn’t feeling so confident.

Milgi seemed torn. He looked the way they were going, then back the way they had come. “No,” he said firmly. “There is no shame in hiding from a Privileged. We can’t fight them.”

Taniel began heading back. “I’m going.”

“Then you go alone. You’ll never find your way.”

Taniel attempted to get his bearings, but Milgi was right. It was easy to get turned around in this swamp. He didn’t know the terrain, and he didn’t know how to spot swamp dragons and snappers hiding in the water.

“Ka-poel!” he shouted, startled to find the girl already at his side. “Ka-poel. Can you lead me back to Gladeside?”

She gave Milgi a mocking smile and nodded.

“She has no fear,” Milgi said. “She will get you killed.”

Ka-poel narrowed her eyes at Milgi, and the man took half a step back.

“I don’t have time for fear right now,” Taniel said. “I have to kill someone.”

He could have sworn that Ka-poel’s green eyes twinkled at that.

“I need to come out of the swamp either north or south of Gladeside. Two miles away would be best—somewhere I have a clear shot at Gladeside, and an easy path back into the swamp.”

Ka-poel listened, her brow furrowed, then gave a short nod.

She led them back the way they had come, leaving Milgi behind. The water was still, the day windless, and Taniel spoke to try and forget the pain in his side.

“It all looks alike,” he said. “How do you know where you’re going?”

Ka-poel pointed to her eyes with two fingers, then to the forest. She indicated a nearby hummock of gumbo and inkwood trees, then pointed to a uniquely twisted cypress rising out of the swamp to their left. She jabbed a finger behind her, toward a boulder that lay on its side in the water.

“Landmarks?” Taniel asked.

She nodded.

That’s how he’d been taught to track and survive in unfamiliar land, but the landmarks in this swamp seemed few and far between. He’d have to try harder, it seemed.

She stopped him as dusk fell, halting him with the flat of her hand. She pointed toward the sky, then traced the path of the sun until she pointed at the ground.

“It’ll be dark soon?”

A nod. She made the walking motion with her fingers and indicated the forest around them, then drew a finger across her throat.

“Very dangerous after dark.”

Another nod. She gave him a small smile, then spread her hands. What did he want to do?

“Can you see well in the dark?” He remembered her guiding him through the swamp last night, away from the Kez searchers.

She wobbled her hand uncertainly. Somewhat.

“The powder,” Taniel said, drawing a line of black powder on the back of his hand and taking a snort. “It lets me see in the dark almost as well as I can see during the day. Let’s keep going. We’ll make camp outside the basin. I’m not completely comfortable sleeping here with snakes, swamp dragons, and Kez patrols.”

Ka-poel nodded.

The sun had set before they managed to clear the swamp. Climbing the hillside that marked the edge of the Tristan Basin, they made their way to a hilltop some quarter of a mile away from the swamp edge and set up camp as best they could with no fire and no bedding.

Taniel took first watch.

He didn’t bother waking Ka-poel for a second watch. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

Shooting a Privileged, his father had once said. It seems like the easiest thing in the world. Just like shooting a target.

You’ll do well to remember, though, that the most deadly thing in the world is an angry Privileged.

Don’t miss.

Because if you do, he’s going to decorate the landscape with bits of your corpse.

Taniel sat with his back to an oak tree, watching the distant town of Gladeside. It was a little over two miles away in the darkness. With a strong enough hit of powder, he could see the Kez sentries at their posts, just outside the town.

The remains of the common house had been cleaned up. A few houses had been burned down, and a pair of corpses had been strung up on a scaffold in the center of the town.

Rebel sympathizers, most likely. Probably the mayor—he had given Taniel’s company succor, after all.

The Kez were anything but subtle.

White tents were pitched throughout and around the town. Taniel counted them, just to be sure. With two to a tent, Taniel pegged their number at almost a thousand. Five companies and a Privileged, just like he’d been told.

A force to be reckoned with.

He let his eyes wander around the outskirts of the camp, singling out their sentries. One was picking his nose. Another’s lips were slightly parted, and though Taniel couldn’t hear it, he knew the sentry was whistling to himself.

Taniel had been on sentry duty before. Anything to keep yourself awake.

He rolled his eyes back in his head and let out a slow breath, then opened his third eye to see the Else.

The world became awash in pastel colors. Throughout the town and in the swamp immediately next to Gladeside, swatches of faded color stood testament to where the Privileged had used sorcery the night before. One of those swatches marked where Dina had died.

In the town itself, Taniel could see several dull, lesser spots of color. Knacked—men with minor sorcerous power. There was usually at least one in every company. Their skills always proved useful in any army.

His eyes stopped on one bright dot in the Else.

The Privileged. She was inside one of the houses, probably sound asleep in a feather bed.

He could try a shot right now, while she was asleep and unmoving. It would be the easiest thing.

But even if he managed to float the bullet through a window and around the corner—almost impossible at this range—he’d still afterwards have to flee into the swamp at night. He’d already tried running into the swamp in the dark once this week. He didn’t relish a second attempt.

He glanced at the girl.

Of course, he’d get her killed, too. He should have sent her back into the swamp hours ago. This was something he had to do alone.

“Ka-poel,” he whispered, some time later.

It was now near dawn. He could see the slight brightening on the eastern horizon, the moon dipping to the west. The Kez soldiers in the camp were beginning to stir.

He shook the girl awake. She was on her feet moments later, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, her red hair bedraggled.

“It’s time,” Taniel said. He listened to his stomach growl. It had been thirty hours or more since his last meal. The numbing vine Ka-poel had pressed into his wound had long ago lost its potency, and now his whole body hurt. His side felt tight, the arm stiff.

This wasn’t going to be an easy shot.

He settled himself on the hilltop beside a maple tree and pointed the musket’s barrel toward Gladeside, resting it on one thick, gnarled root.

“I have one shot,” Taniel told her. “If I miss, the Privileged will be alarmed and raise a shield around herself. I’ll try again regardless, just in case she’s sloppy, but that first shot is the only good one I’ll have.”

He glanced at Ka-poel to see if she was listening. She’d laid down on her belly beside him, watching the town.

She nodded to him.

“Two shots at most,” Taniel said. “And then we run for it.” He pointed down the hillside toward the basin. “She’ll send her soldiers after us. We have to move quickly. With a little luck we’ll be gone by the time they reach us. They won’t be able to track us in the swamp.”

Taniel checked the musket for the fifth time—the pan was primed, the barrel loaded, and the powder dry. Not all of that was necessary for a powder mage, but each bit of preparation made the shot a little bit easier.

He settled the butt of the musket against his shoulder and sighted down the barrel toward the house where he’d seen the Privileged.

Taniel opened his third eye.

The smudge of color that represented the Privileged was still in the house.

Taniel could hear his heart drumming in his ears. This wasn’t melee—there wasn’t a surge of black powder and adrenaline pushing him through the fight, years of training taking over to help him through the kill.

This was a calm, meditative shot.

The smudge of color was moving. Taniel closed his third eye and watched the house from the outside, focusing on the front door and the window facing him. Through the open window, with his powder-enhanced vision, he could see a washbasin and a tall mirror and one post of a bed.

Taniel lowered the musket and tapped out a line of powder and snorted it; felt it calm his nerves.

Back to his vigil. There was some movement through the window, and the Privileged came into view.

She was not at all what he had expected.

She was thirty at the oldest, younger than Major Bertreau. Her face hadn’t been marred by years of sorcery and cruelty, like most Privileged Taniel had met. Her nose was small and pinched. She wore a night shift, sagging to bare one shoulder, her blond hair curled and wild around her head. She splashed water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror for a moment.

Taniel regretted his sorcerous sight; cursed the black powder that gave him the power to see his target with such clarity.

She looked like a girl Taniel knew from university. Soulin. In fact, she could have been Soulin’s older sister. She had the same color hair, the same slight features, and even looked to be a similar height.

The barrel of his musket wavered. His hands were shaking.

He let his head fall away from the stock and closed his eyes a moment.

Ka-poel was staring at him. She scowled and made a pistol with her fingers, pointing at Gladeside.

Shoot.

Taniel took a deep breath and slowly let it out, setting his cheek against the rifle stock.

The Privileged was still in her room. She had finished washing her face and stepped away from the window, only to reappear a moment later wearing a clean shirt.

She stepped to the window, fluffing her long hair with both hands.

Taniel remembered the Privileged’s dry, matter-of-fact voice as she had spoken of corpses. He thought of Dina, and the look of surprise on her face as Privileged fire cut her in half.

He thought of Dina’s husband and children, who would never even see her body.

And he could never forget that it had been a Kez Privileged who, long ago, had presented his family with his mother’s head in a box.

The crack of the musket startled him, as he had barely felt his finger pull the trigger. An expanding cloud of black smoke rose overhead, filling his nostrils with sulfur.

He counted silently, burning the extra powder in his powder horn to keep the bullet floating far longer than any regular musket ball. A slight pain began in the back of his head as the effort of keeping the bullet up taxed his sorcery.

Powder mages normally used small caliber bullets and rifles with a high muzzle velocity, to be sure that the bullet hit their target before their target could hear the shot.

But with a standard Kez infantry musket, the bullet would hit the target about the same time as the sound.

As long as she didn’t see the puff of black smoke rising above him, giving away his position.

She didn’t.

She was still standing at the window, enjoying the morning air, when the bullet entered her left eye and blew the back of her head across the mirror behind her.

Taniel didn’t wait for the sentries to figure out what had happened. The extra few minutes could mean the difference between getting away and being captured. He was on his feet in a moment, running half-crouched down the hillside in a straight beeline toward the Tristan Basin, with Ka-poel on his heels.

He heard his father’s voice in the back of his mind as Ka-poel led him into the swamp, the sound of Kez trumpets blaring the alarm behind them.

You’ll feel guilty about that first cold, calculating kill. After all, they never even saw the bullet coming.

Taniel was chilled, and it had nothing to do with the cold of the morning.

You’ll feel guilty on the second one, too, said his father’s voice. And the next. I lost that guilt around my twentieth, and I think part of my humanity died with it. Hopefully, my boy, you’ll keep it longer than I did.

“I didn’t,” Taniel whispered.

Ka-poel cast a questioning glance over her shoulder.

“Let’s get to your village,” Taniel said. “And get it prepared. They’ll send another Privileged eventually. I’m going to be here to kill that one, too.”

Return to Honor

Immediately between the events of Promise of Blood and

The Crimson Campaign...

Captain Vlora stood the first honor watch over the grave of her fallen comrade.

She could feel the cool breeze of a summer storm blowing away the heat of the day. The small graveyard with its high brick walls cast deep shadows in the moonlight, but a sprinkling of black powder on her tongue gave her catlike vision. Powder mage sorcery enhanced her senses, calmed her nerves, sharpened her reflexes, but right now she just wished it would help her forget.

Vlora wore her dress uniform—dark Adran blues with silver buttons, red trim, and a silver powder-keg pin. Her rifle rested on her shoulder, a pistol and sword at her belt, and arms and shoulders at attention. The breeze tugged at her black hair pulled back in a tight braid.

The gravestone was a marble monolith nearly six feet tall, tapered to be slightly thinner at the top. It bore a stamp in the likeness of her own powder-keg pin and the name Special Commander Sabon.

She felt a grimace cross her face.

Sabon. The man who, nine years ago, had first noticed her as a little orphan girl with an unnatural inclination toward guns, and had directed Field Marshal Tamas to seek her out. The man who had been like an uncle to her—a little distant, like Tamas himself, but always willing to show her a new trick with gunpowder or switch between the roles of friend and superior officer as needed.

She could still remember looking out the window of her carriage and seeing the first shot of the ambush blow Sabon’s brains across the gravel drive of Charlemund’s villa. She could close her eyes and hear the screams of soldiers caught in the initial volley, remember how her heart had thundered in her ears as she fled, dragging a wounded soldier toward cover.

She wished that Charlemund had not been captured. That he was still out there so she could find him and wrap her fingers around his throat and make him suffer for all the lives his betrayal had cost.

She wanted to take the next few weeks to grieve properly for Sabon, but she did not have that luxury. Not with a war on. The most she could do was stand a four-hour vigil at his graveside.

The whine of the iron cemetery gate brought Vlora back to the here and now. She lifted her eyes to find a figure standing just inside the wall. He was a tall man in his sixties with gray hair and a mustache. He wore a uniform that matched hers, save for the golden epaulettes on his shoulders, and he carried a bicorn hat under one arm.

Vlora fought to keep herself outwardly calm. Sabon had been the field marshal’s closest friend, but she expected Tamas to avoid the grave during her watch.

“Good evening, sir,” Vlora said.

Tamas didn’t answer. He came to stand beside the monument, looking down at the mound of earth. He remained in silent contemplation for nearly five minutes, still as any of the obelisks in the graveyard, before he seemed to notice her presence.

“I have work for you, Captain,” he said tersely, without a word of greeting.

Their relationship had been more than strained since the end of her engagement to Tamas’s son. The brusqueness was expected, but it still stung. To have a man she once considered her adoptive father behave so coldly, even in private, kept Vlora up at night.

“Sir?” she asked.

“I’m leaving for the front in the morning,” he said.

“I’ll have my things ready to go,” Vlora said.

“You’re not coming yet.”

Vlora swallowed. She didn’t like the sound of that.

“A Prielight guard escaped the battle at the villa,” Tamas said, glancing down at the grave. “A man named Wohler.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wohler means to go to the enemy with all of the intelligence that Charlemund gleaned during the meetings of my council, including troop movements and supply records. We’re not entirely sure how much information he has, but we know it has some value. I want you to find him. Capture him. Secure that intelligence and then join me at the front in a week.”

“Are you certain you want me on this, sir?” Vlora had no delusions. She was one of Tamas’s best powder mages, invaluable on the battlefield. To have her hunting spies seemed like a waste of her talents.

Tamas made fists with both hands. She could see him trembling. “Taniel is in a coma. The enemy knocks on our southern gates. I can barely stand the sight of you, yet here I am. Yes, it’s important.”

Vlora avoided meeting his eyes. “Yes, sir. Sir, the ambush at the villa was a week ago. Wohler may already be over the border.”

Tamas visibly brought himself under control. “Our borders are closed, and Wohler is a cautious man. He’ll be waiting for the fighting to start so he can sneak over in the chaos.” Vlora opened her mouth, but Tamas seemed to have anticipated her next question. “It’s important,” he said, “but I can’t spare any more men. You are completely on your own.”

Vlora did some mental math. If he wanted her to join him at the front in a week, that only left her three days to find Wohler. “And if I fail?”

“Then so be it,” Tamas said simply. “The war will go on, and the enemy will have a new advantage.” Tamas turned on his heel and left Vlora alone to finish her watch in the graveyard.

She watched him leave and worked to steady her breathing. Three days until she could head to the front, where she would arrive either with an extra notch on the stock of her rifle or empty-handed.

This mission would give her a chance to clean up after the villa, to give Sabon’s death some kind of meaning. If she read Tamas right—and she had known him for many years—this was an olive branch. Perhaps a test of sorts, a chance to win her way back into his good graces.

She had better not fail.

Vlora could count the number of people she considered friends on one hand. She’d been a loner as a child, and through her teens she’d never really needed anyone but Taniel. It was four in the morning, a full twenty-four hours after receiving her assignment, and she was wishing she had spent a little more time developing other relationships.

She had wasted the entirety of the last day canvassing the city for any sign of Wohler, only to find out the man—like her—had no friends in Adopest. All his known associates had been members of Charlemund’s guard and were either dead or captured, and none of the captives knew where he might have gone to ground. His wife and family lived in Brudania. Vlora had exhausted every lead she could think of.

Which brought her to the officer’s mess in downtown Adopest. The mess was surprisingly busy at this hour of the morning. Most of the officers were shipping to the front within twenty-four hours with their commands. The room was filled with the sound of drunken laughter, heated conversation, and gambling—soldiers enjoying their last hurrah before heading toward the front.

The tables nearest the door went silent as Vlora passed. She tried not to notice, giving a few of the men a thin smile, and headed over to the bar, where the barkeep eyed her silver powder-keg pin before pouring her a beer.

She turned around and leaned against the bar, letting her eyes roam over the large room with its vaulted ceiling, crimson drapes, and white tablecloths. It was lit by half a dozen chandeliers, the fireplaces roaring to take off the chill of the approaching storm.

The occupants of more than one nearby table noticed her gaze and they none-too-subtly pulled in an open seat or even glared back at her, openly hostile.

She told herself that they weren’t worth her time. She had work to do, and nothing was going to distract her from it.

She found the person she was looking for at the other end of the room, sitting at a small table by herself, an open book in her hands. Vlora drained her beer, ordered two more, then threaded her way through the tables.

Colonel Verundish was a striking woman with black skin and long, straight black hair. She wore a white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar and cuffs, her uniform jacket hanging over the back of her chair. She looked up over the top of her book as Vlora took the empty chair across from her and set both glasses of beer on the table.

“Hi, Verie,” Vlora said.

“That’s Colonel Verundish to you, Captain,” Verundish responded coldly. Her eyes went back to the book in her hands.

That hurt. Vlora closed her eyes and took a deep breath, fighting off the urge to leave. Would it be so bad to fail this assignment? Surely Tamas would have put more men on it if he really thought Wohler had intelligence of importance.

Would her success even gain her the approval she desired?

Giving up would be the easy way out. She would only fall even further in Tamas’s eyes and—perhaps more importantly—in her own.

“Colonel Verundish,” Vlora said. “I need your help.”

Verundish turned a page. “I’m surprised you’re showing your face around here after what you did to Taniel.”

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that there’s anyone in this Kresimir-damned army that doesn’t know?”

“That you cheated on the field marshal’s son? Everyone’s favorite powder mage, who just so happens to be on the verge of death?” Verundish snorted.

Vlora stared at her glass, feeling the anger boil in her blood. This was a waste of time. She had no friends here. “Not that it’s anyone’s goddamn business.” Her voice rose sharply at the end, and Vlora found herself gripping the edge of the table. She was trembling.

The outburst drew enough glances to make Vlora’s cheeks grow warm. She stood up. “But yes,” she continued calmly, “I did do that. It was a foolish, juvenile mistake that has cost me the respect of everyone I hold dear.” She turned to go.

Verundish sighed and set down her book. “Sit down.”

“No, it’s fine,” Vlora said. “Forget I was here.”

“Sit. Down.”

Against her better judgment, Vlora returned to her seat. She gripped her glass to keep herself from shaking with anger.

Verundish noticed the extra beer Vlora had brought her and picked it up. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she said, letting out a sigh, the cold demeanor softening a little. “I’ve made a few myself. What do you need?”

Vlora drained the rest of her second beer to give herself courage. “I’m looking for someone,” she said. “A Prielight guard by the name of Captain Wohler.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“It should. He was the head of Charlemund’s personal guard.”

Verundish turned and spit at the mention of the name. “Traitorous sack of shit.”

“Agreed,” Vlora said. “Wohler escaped the battle at the villa, and he’s got a whole case of army intelligence that he’s going to hand to the enemy. I have three—sorry, two days to find him and capture him.”

Verundish idly flipped the pages of her book with the fingers of her right hand, drumming the fingers of the left on her glass. “I don’t know where he is,” she said. “And believe me, I’d tell you if I did. Everyone in this room wants to get a hold of one of Charlemund’s men after what happened to Commander Sabon. Anyone who escaped has been keeping out of sight.”

“Shit,” Vlora said.

“My guess is the Prielight guards are hiding in some church cellar. Maybe even Kresim Cathedral. Any place that will give them sanctuary.”

“Think they’ll stick together?”

“Wouldn’t you, if the city suddenly turned hostile?”

“No,” Vlora said. “I’d ditch everything I owned and hide out in plain sight.”

“Yeah, well, you were tutored by Tamas. Normal people don’t think like that. Normal people are like sheep. They huddle.”

Vlora nodded unhappily. If Wohler was hiding out with a group of his compatriots, he might be easier to find, but capturing him would be a whole other story.

“When do you leave for the front?” Vlora asked.

Verundish shook her head. “No time soon. I’m on special assignment with a few squads. I’ll be staying in the city.”

“If I can find Wohler,” Vlora said, suddenly hopeful, “could you give me a squad of your men to help me bring him in?”

Verundish considered this for a moment, then reached around and pinched the shoulder of her uniform jacket. “See this?” The jacket had a pin with a chevron over a powder horn. Vlora had seen a couple of those around, but she didn’t know what they meant.

“I’m part of Captain Olem’s new Riflejacks,” Verundish said. “Special company that reports directly to Field Marshal Tamas. I can’t pull those men away from their duty.” She paused, barking a quiet laugh. “Not unless you’ve got seventy-five thousand krana on you.”

“Seventy-five?” Vlora asked. “That’s your price, eh?”

Verundish waved her glass. “Everyone has one.” She paused, waited a beat, then chuckled. “I joke, I joke.”

Vlora had the feeling it hadn’t been entirely in jest. But even if Verundish were serious, where would Vlora get that much money?

“Really,” Verunish said, “I wish I could help.”

Vlora swore to herself. Verundish had been her best shot. There was no one else around who would help her without a direct order from Tamas, and he had made it clear she wasn’t getting help. Which meant she had to locate a company of Prielight guards and then carve through them herself in the hopes of finding Wohler. Even for a powder mage, it sounded like a good way to get killed.

“Well,” Vlora said, tapping her empty glass. “Me too. I better get moving. Thanks anyway.”

“Wait,” Verundish said.

Vlora paused halfway out of her seat, then lowered herself back down.

“He probably won’t lend you any men,” Verundish said, “but if anyone can find where the Prielights are hiding, it’ll be Captain Olem. I’d suggest you see him.”

“Olem? He’s Tamas’s personal bodyguard. You think he’d help me?”

Verundish shrugged. “Olem’s a good man. Try him. Never hurts to ask.”

Yes, Vlora said to herself. Yes it does. She lifted her head to scan the room. “Is he here?”

“Pit, no. Olem doesn’t like officers’ messes. They make him uncomfortable. He’ll be at the Giggling Pig over on Flatfoot Lane.”

“That’s the worst bar name I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s not a bar. It’s a whorehouse.”

Of course. Where the regular infantry spent their time. Vlora opened her mouth to protest the earliness of the hour when she remembered that Olem’s Knack—his minor sorcery—was that he needed no sleep, a fact that made him an ideal bodyguard for Tamas.

Vlora was trying to think of another excuse to not ask Olem for help when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up, and then up some more into the bloated red face of a major wearing the red-striped Adran blues of a dragoon. The man’s jacket was undone, and he smelled of whiskey and sweat. Vlora sought to remember his name. Emerson. Major Emerson.

“Captain Vlora, you are not welcome here,” he said, pausing between words so that he didn’t slur.

Vlora opened her mouth. She had been about to say she was just leaving, but a spike of anger had broken through her carefully measured calm. She felt her eye twitch. She would take this shit from Taniel’s family and closest friends, but Emerson wasn’t one of them. Just some idiot trying to curry favor with the field marshal by publicly humiliating her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m an officer in the Adran army. I am as welcome here as you.”

Emerson drew himself up. “I shall show you the door.”

“No,” Vlora said, looking pointedly at the hand on her shoulder. “You won’t.” She removed a powder charge from her pocket and bit the end, the sulfuric taste of the powder spilling out onto her tongue. She felt a surge of energy and a heightened buzz as her senses sought to take in every smell, sound, and sight in the room all at once. She mentally brought the powder trance under control and stared up at the major.

“I said you should leave,” Emerson slurred.

“I’ll leave when I’m damn well ready.”

“I am your superior officer,” Emerson said. “I order you to leave.”

“And I’m a powder mage. Field Marshal Tamas is my superior officer. Remove your hand, or I will remove it for you.”

Through the whole exchange, Verundish had remained quiet. At Vlora’s threat she stood up and took Emerson by the arm. “Go sit down, Major,” she said. “You’re drunk.”

Emerson jerked his arm from Verundish’s grip and tightened his own on Vlora’s shoulder. His whole body trembled. “Remove yourself, or I will throw you out the door.”

Vlora reached up and grabbed Emerson by the front of his shirt. She kicked out with one foot, knocking his knee sideways, and brought his face down onto the table with enough force to knock the wind out of an ox. He bounced with a drunken shout, somehow still conscious, and struggled to reach for her.

Vlora leapt to her feet and hauled Emerson up to his, holding him by both lapels, then slammed him down into the table. She was half his size, but the powder trance would allow her to manhandle five men just like him. A second thumping took the fight out of him completely.

“Vlora,” Verundish said sharply.

Vlora’s hands were wrapped in Emerson’s jacket, her arms shaking with rage. She could barely see through a cloud of red.

“Vlora,” Verundish repeated, louder this time.

Vlora let out her breath and released her grip, stumbling backward. The whole room was staring at them. She’d assaulted an officer in front of dozens of witnesses. Even if she was on Tamas’s good side, she might not have gotten away with it. Now…

Verundish caught her by the arm. “Time for you to step outside,” she said.

“Yeah,” Vlora muttered. She suddenly felt very small and far away, like she was looking at her actions from another place and time. How could she let herself be provoked like that?

Vlora allowed herself to be escorted to the door, where Verundish took her by the shoulders and forced her to meet her eyes. “I’ll see what I can do to clean this up. Go on. Don’t worry about this trash. You’ve got work to do. If anyone can help you find Wohler, it’s Olem. Tell him I sent you.”

The Giggling Pig was a large whorehouse down where the Ad River flowed into the Adsea, just north of the docks in Adopest. Vlora had been in a few seedy parts of the city—either exploring with Taniel or on assignment for Tamas—but she usually stuck to the streets. She only had to open the door to see this was going to be a whole new experience.

Soldiers lounged about the great common room with prostitutes of both sexes, all in various states of undress. Like the officers, the infantry preferred to spend the night in vice when they knew they were shipping off the next day. The drink flowed freely and dice rattled. Raucous laughter filled the room, and it smelled of beer and sex.

Vlora took a deep breath of outside air and stepped inside. She half expected the whole room to freeze, turning to look at her, like when the villain steps on stage during a comedic play. But the only person who seemed to notice her was a tiny old woman in a rough-spun dress and apron.

The woman’s head bobbed in a half curtsy, taking in Vlora’s rank insignia and silver powder-keg pin with sharp eyes. “Good evening, Captain,” she said. “My name’s Madame Gourina, and welcome to the Giggling Pig. What’s your pleasure this morning?”

Vlora licked her lips, wondering when was the last time she shared a bed. Oh, right. That asshole she let seduce her, putting her in this whole mess. “I’m looking for Captain Olem,” she said.

“And who can I say is looking for him?”

“Captain Vlora.”

Gourina gave her a pained look. “Captain Olem? I haven’t heard of him.”

“Excuse me? You just asked…”

“I’m old and addled, Captain. You’ll have to excuse me, I must not have heard you at first. Now, if there’s not something I can get for you, I really must see to my other patrons.”

Vlora snorted. Did she have a reputation that reached even into this shit hole? Or… “You can tell him that it concerns Field Marshal Tamas.”

Gourina seemed to perk up at that. “Well, now. Why didn’t you say so? I’ll go see if he’s around.”

Vlora didn’t wait for the old woman to come back and find her. She followed her toward one of the many back rooms, waving pipe smoke from her face. Olem, it seemed, couldn’t be bothered if it didn’t have to do with Tamas. Not that Vlora blamed him. He had only been made Tamas’s bodyguard and aide in the last few months. He had Tamas’s ear, and that meant that everyone who wanted anything from Tamas probably came looking for him.

Gourina went down a passage at the back of the room, then knocked on a door before entering. Vlora stole up the hallway after her. She feared what she’d see inside, but she’d already come this far. An eyeful of the captain wouldn’t kill her.

She was surprised to see a rather spacious room with a round table and half a dozen men and women quietly playing cards. The room was lit by a fireplace and a handful of torches. There were two privates, a sergeant, a pair of lieutenants, and Captain Olem with his back to the open window, a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip.

Olem was a man of medium height, in his mid-thirties, with a pleasant, boyish face made serious by a neatly trimmed beard, though military regulation forbade anything but a mustache and muttonchops. He had a reputation as a soldier’s soldier, preferring to take food and recreation with the men rather than with the officers, and of course there was his Knack, which kept him from needing sleep.

Vlora imagined he played a lot of cards.

Olem’s head was tilted, listening as Madame Gourina whispered in his ear. He glanced toward where Vlora watched from the hall. A smile crossed his face—the kind a man gets when he tells himself a joke in his head—and he lifted a hand to Vlora, gesturing her inside.

Vlora squeezed past Gourina.

“Beer for the captain,” Olem called after Gourina as the madam left. “Unless you’d like something else? I don’t recommend the Starlish vodka. Tastes like troll piss.”

“Beer is fine,” Vlora said. “Thank you.”

The card game had stopped. Six sets of eyes stared at her expectantly, and Vlora was suddenly afraid of a repeat of what had just happened in the officers’ mess. Olem broke the silence. “Care to join us?”

One of the lieutenants, a middle-aged woman with short hair, cleared her throat. “We’ve got a full table.”

“Room for another chair,” Olem said, shooting her a glance.

“No thank you, really,” Vlora replied, eyeballing the lieutenant. “I just needed to see you briefly, if I may.”

Olem nodded, raising one finger. He squinted at his cards for a long, silent moment, then tossed one of them down on the table faceup.

“Son of a bitch,” the sergeant said, tossing his own cards down in disgust.

The crack of a smile appeared on Olem’s face. He gathered a handful of coins from the middle of the table and scooped them into a pile in front of him. “I’ll be back for the next round.”

Vlora followed him out into the hallway, where Madame Gourina brought them both a glass of beer. The glasses were dirty and the beer bitter, but somehow it tasted better than what she’d been drinking at the officers’ mess.

“Step into my office,” Olem said, kicking open the door across the hallway. He stopped, made a face, and said, “Let’s go down the hall.”

Vlora caught a whiff of some ungodly smell before following Olem to an empty room near the end of the corridor. He opened the window and ashed his cigarette out it, then sat on the rumpled bed, gesturing for Vlora to take the chair.

“Thank you,” Vlora said, sipping her beer. “You know, I expected a little better out of a man of your reputation.”

Olem’s eyebrows rose, and Vlora immediately cursed herself silently.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. Powder mages didn’t get drunk, not like other people. But that didn’t mean a third beer had been a good idea. “That didn’t come out like I meant it to.” She once again felt herself going red. Here she was again, wasting more time. Tamas’s message had been clear—she wasn’t getting any help. No sense in even looking for it. “Sorry, I should go…”

The shadow of a smile appeared on Olem’s lips. “No, no. I’m curious where you’re going with this.”

“Look, I’m sorry, it’s just…” she trailed off.

“Go on,” Olem said. The smile grew. She expected it to turn cruel or condescending, but it touched his eyes in a way that said he was laughing with her and not at her.

Vlora looked around. Well, she was here, wasn’t she? Might as well dig her grave a little deeper. “The whorehouse. You’ve got a reputation as a gentleman. Private in your, er, affairs.” Pit, she didn’t even know if he was married.

“I come here for the company, not for the whores,” Olem said.

“I thought the whores were the company in a place like this.”

“They’re better people than you think, but I’m here for the infantry. Far more fun to play cards with people in that room over there”—he jerked his head—“than with anyone at the officers’ mess. There are exceptions, certainly, but…”

“Like Colonel Verundish?”

Olem nodded. “Like Verundish. You know her?”

“We’ve been friends for a few years. Took me under her wing when I started taking soldiering seriously. She’s the one who recommended I come find you, actually.”

“Oh? So what kind of help are you looking for?”

He didn’t question her coming to him, even though he knew better than anyone that she was on Tamas’s shit list. Vlora silently thanked him for that. “I’ve got an assignment to find a man named Wohler. He was the head of Charlemund’s personal guard until the villa, and now he’s on the run. Tamas wants him brought in.”

“And the field marshal sent you to me?”

“No, that was Verundish. Tamas, well, he made it clear I’m not getting any more help.”

Olem cocked one eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Look, I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t for Verundish. She said you might know where the guards are hiding out in the city. I honestly don’t have any idea where to start, and…”

“And?” Olem urged.

“And I have to leave to join Tamas on the front in two days. If I fail, Wohler gets away.”

Olem took a drag on his cigarette, found it had gone out, and relit it with a match. Smoke curled out his nose, his eyes narrowed, and he stared thoughtfully at a spot over Vlora’s shoulder. The silence dragged on for nearly a minute as he puffed hard, smoking the cigarette down to his fingertips before discarding it.

“Look,” Vlora said to break the silence, “I don’t want to put you in a position of going against Tamas.”

“This Wohler,” Olem said as if he hadn’t heard her. “You’ve asked after any friends or relations he may have in the city?”

“Yes,” Vlora said. “I interrogated his captured compatriots and asked around at a dozen different chapels. He doesn’t have anyone he would go to ground with.”

“Everyone has someone,” Olem mused.

“Not everyone,” Vlora said quietly.

Olem glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She was going to hate him if there was pity in his eyes, but he merely rolled a new cigarette and held it out to her.

“Don’t smoke,” she said.

He shrugged and lit it for himself. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment before his face lit up. “Attached to a retinue a thousand miles from home. The man’s going to have a mistress.”

“You think so?”

“He’s a captain in the Prielight guard. He certainly will have the money for one. If he doesn’t drink or gamble with anyone else, then he has to have a woman somewhere in the city.”

It made sense. Vlora slowly nodded, a flutter of relief in her stomach. “It’s worth a try. I’ll go ask around.”

“You’ll need help,” Olem said. “Two days isn’t much time. We better get moving.” He left the room before she could say another word.

Back in the card room, Olem gathered his coins. “I’m out for the night, friends,” he said. “Duty calls.”

“Tomorrow night?” the sergeant asked.

“Plan on it. I’ll send word if I can’t. See you all then. And Filly, stop picking your damn teeth every time you have a shit hand.”

The group chuckled, and Olem stepped back into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him.

“You don’t have to leave your game,” Vlora said.

“This sounds more important,” he replied.

“Really, I can manage on my own. I was told I wasn’t getting any more help.”

Olem shrugged. “It’ll be unofficial, then. Things are always easier with two. Let’s go find out where Wohler takes off his boots.”

Six hours later, Vlora stood in a doorway across the street from a cobbler’s shop in one of the more affluent parts of West Laden, a district of Adopest. It was nearly two and a half days since she last slept. Her hands trembled and her eyelids felt heavier every minute, and she had to take progressively more powder every hour to keep from collapsing.

The mistress, it turned out, owned the cobbler’s shop. Only one of the captured church guards had known about her, and he’d been reluctant to give up the information. Olem had helped persuade him.

Vlora wanted nothing more than to kick down the door and rush inside, but Olem had insisted they do things right and had rushed off to see another one of his friends.

She checked her pocket watch. Ten after noon. She’d give Olem another fifteen minutes before she headed inside.

Afternoon traffic was heavy as everyone sought to get their daily errands done before the storm that had been threatening for almost two days finally broke. Vlora could tell it was going to be a big one, with thick sheets of rain that rivaled the monsoons in Gurla. The old soldiers called it a hundred-year rain.

More than one company of Adran soldiers passed her on their way out of the city. No one recognized her in her civilian clothes, hat pulled down and greatcoat buttoned against the wind. Vlora was thankful for that. She’d not heard anything else about her conflict with Major Emerson, but when she next reported for duty, she couldn’t imagine anything less than a formal reprimand. Would Tamas strip her of her rank?

She thrust the thought from her mind as Olem slipped out of the crowd and joined her in the doorway, flashing a folded piece of paper.

“Warrant,” he said by way of explanation. “New government regulations requires us to have one of these for entry into a civilian’s home.”

Vlora was impatient to be through the doors of the cobbler shop, either to lay hands on Wohler or to question his mistress. “Why bother?” she asked.

Olem seemed taken aback. “We’re not savages. We want the people to trust us, not fear us.” He snorted. “How would you like someone bursting into your place of business with no more authority than a common thief?”

“I wouldn’t like anyone of any authority bursting in,” Vlora said. “But I don’t mind doing the bursting.”

“Double standard,” Olem countered. “Are you ready?”

Vlora unbuttoned her greatcoat to reveal the two pistols and the sword at her belt. By the bulkiness she saw under Olem’s coat she guessed he carried the same.

“You sense any powder in there?” Olem asked.

Vlora closed her eyes, reaching out with her sorcerous senses toward the cobbler’s shop. She moved down into the cellar and up into the second floor, where the owner likely lived. “Powder charges upstairs,” she said. “Could be Wohler, but it could also just be a pistol the mistress keeps for protection. If either of them tries to use it, I’ll suppress the ignition. Ready?”

Olem nodded, and Vlora led the way across the street.

A bell rang as Vlora pushed open the door. The main floor of the building was one large room with two windows in the front and a staircase leading upstairs tucked into one corner. The room was a workshop with benches and shelves, and hundreds of pairs of shoes in various stages of repair, each of them carefully tagged with a name and date.

A woman with long dark hair, wearing trousers and an apron, sat next to one of the benches with a pair of shoelaces in her hands. She looked up, a word of welcome dying on her lips as Vlora drew her pistol.

“Cobbler Karin?” Vlora asked.

The woman threw her hands up, scrambling backward. Vlora leapt forward and caught her by the wrist, twisting it around behind her with one hand and shoving her against the workbench.

“Where’s Wohler?” she demanded.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about!”

“Captain Wohler, where is he?”

Olem drew his pistol and ran upstairs. Vlora heard his footsteps up there, her senses attuned to the powder she’d sensed earlier, waiting to suppress the shot if someone was waiting in ambush. Olem returned a moment later, shaking his head.

Vlora leaned forward, her mouth next to Karin’s ear. “Where,” she said, “is he?”

The woman shook her head. She was trembling.

“Let her up,” Olem said.

Vlora opened her mouth to protest, but Olem’s scowl silenced her. She released Karin’s wrist and stepped back. “Sit down,” she told her.

Karin returned to her seat and looked up at the two of them.

Olem said gently, “We’re soldiers in the Adran army. My name is Captain Olem, this is Captain Vlora. We have a warrant here for Captain Wohler’s arrest.” He took the folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Karin.

“If you’re soldiers, where’s your uniforms?”

Vlora produced her silver powder-keg pin. Karin’s eyes narrowed. “What are the charges?” she asked, raising her chin. She rubbed her wrist and shot Vlora a glare, having apparently recovered from and now resenting the manhandling.

“Treason,” Vlora snapped.

“It wasn’t treason!” Karin said. “He didn’t choose to be part of Charlemund’s guard. It was an assignment.”

“During which he arranged an ambush that saw dozens of Adran soldiers killed.”

“I don’t believe you,” Karin said.

“Maybe it was just an assignment,” Olem said with a quiet, reassuring voice. “But now he’s carrying documents of national importance that could do a great deal of damage to the war effort. We have to bring him in.”

Vlora chewed on the inside of her cheek. She could see the calming effect Olem’s demeanor had on the girl. Doing her best to level her tone, Vlora said, “We’d prefer to bring him in alive. If he tries to flee, we can’t guarantee his safety. Do you know where he is?”

The bell on the door interrupted whatever Karin was about to say.

“We’re closed,” Vlora said over her shoulder. “Come back tomorrow.” She cast a quick glance toward the door, then returned her gaze to Karin.

Karin stared at the doorway, so Vlora took another look.

A man in his early forties stood there in a greatcoat and tricorn hat. There was a piece of bread in his mouth and a pie in one hand. His eyes were wide at the sight of Vlora and Olem, and he reached for his sword with his open hand.

“They’re Tamas’s soldiers,” Karin blurted.

Vlora spun, raising her pistol as Captain Wohler hurled the pie at Vlora and jumped backward out the door. Vlora dodged the flying pastry and pulled her finger off the trigger as Wohler disappeared into the noonday traffic on the street. Without looking back, she flung herself after him.

The wind and impending storm had everyone carrying umbrellas and wearing hats and greatcoats, and Vlora would have lost Wohler immediately if she hadn’t seen the hem of his coat disappearing around the corner into the alleyway to her left. She sprinted after him, fumbling for a hit of powder, and skidded around the corner in time to see Wohler run into traffic on the next street over.

She sprinted after him, keeping an eye on his hat and greatcoat. He might have lost her if he had stopped and tried to blend in, but he had elected to run.

And he was fast, she had to give it to him. He maneuvered through the press of bodies with the learned deftness of a bodyguard, barely slowing despite the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic. Vlora bowled her way through with the strength of a powder mage, curses following her.

She gained on Wohler until she was right on his heels. Just one more person to shove out of the way and…

Wohler whirled so quickly that only an instinctual jump backward saved Vlora’s life. The tip of his sword whooshed inches from her throat in three quick slices. He pulled back on the third slice, and Vlora took the chance to draw her own sword and attack.

Wohler parried her thrust, then performed a riposte that nearly skewered her. They exchanged a flurry of blows, Vlora’s frustration growing as her advantage in strength and speed only barely kept her even with him. A woman screamed and men shouted as she and Wohler hacked at each other, ignoring the widening circle of onlookers around them.

Tamas had once told her that a sufficiently skilled fencer could hold off a powder mage, but she’d never believed him. Now she had the chance to witness it firsthand. She kept trying for the pistol in her belt, but every time her off hand wandered too close, Wohler would press the attack.

Vlora tried to read his patterns, learn his tells, seek out some kind of weakness. It didn’t work. Wohler’s technique seemed to change every few heartbeats, and it was the only thing she could do to keep up. She could feel herself weakening, the days without sleep fouling her speed and concentration. Any second he would get the better of her.

Wohler’s foot moved back and she saw the same riposte he had used a moment ago. She would let him follow through and then counter his thrust. She almost barked out a victorious shout as he batted aside her attack and pushed forward.

The bark came out a cry as Wohler’s blade sliced up the side of her hand to the hilt of her smallsword and neatly disarmed her. She stumbled back, forced to dodge as he followed with a thrust and then a second. Her off hand snatched for her pistol and drew it as she fell.

Wohler threw himself sideways into the crowd of spectators that had grown around them. Vlora hurled a curse and lowered her pistol, forcing herself into the crowd after him, snatching for a handkerchief to wrap around her bleeding hand.

She leapt onto a nearby sidewalk and hooked her good hand around a lamppost, pulling herself up to look around. No flutter of a greatcoat, no hats moving violently to reveal a hasty retreat.

She had lost him.

Back at Karin’s cobbler shop, Vlora found Olem picking strawberry pie off the front of his greatcoat. He had a fresh palm print on his cheek and a sour look on his face. Shoes had been thrown everywhere, display benches knocked over. It looked like there had been a wrestling match.

Karin sat in the corner sulking, hands tied behind her back, the rope looped around the leg of a workbench.

“What happened here?” Vlora asked.

“She leapt on my back the moment you took off after Wohler,” Olem said. He picked up a shoe and used the sole to scrape pie filling off his shoulder. “And thanks for dodging that pie, by the way. I caught it with my chest. Wohler?”

“Lost him,” Vlora said.

“And I’m glad you did,” Karin said. “He’s a good man.”

Vlora held up her hand, wrapped in a bloody handkerchief. “Your good man just attacked an Adran soldier. If I see him again, I’m going to put a bullet through his eye.” She began pacing the room, kicking discarded shoes out of her way. “Where will he have gone?” she demanded.

Karin shrugged.

Vlora wanted to go slap the smug look off her face. She looked at Olem.

He picked up the pie pan with the remnants of the pie still in the bottom and dug out a chunk of it with his finger. He chewed thoughtfully before offering the pie to her. Vlora shook her head.

“We’ll have to start from scratch,” Olem said.

Vlora paused in her pacing. Maybe not, she thought, going over and taking the pie pan out of Olem’s hands. “Hold me back,” she said in a whisper.

She whirled, hurling the pie against the wall. “No, we don’t,” she said angrily. She pointed at Karin. “We have her. We’ll take her to the nearest barracks and let the soldiers go to work on her.” She began to advance on Karin.

Olem threw an arm across her chest. “Back off, Captain,” he said.

“We’ll find out where he is,” Vlora said. “She knows. She must know.”

“That’s not how we do things.” Olem set his shoulder and shoved her back roughly, putting himself in between her and Karin.

Vlora bore her teeth at him. “Then I’m going to tear this place apart until I find those files.”

“No,” Olem said, shaking his head. He seemed to get what she was up to. “We need another warrant for that.”

“Piss on the warrant. She attacked you!”

“Just a little scuffle,” Olem said. “Nothing to throw her to the wolves over. No sense in ruining someone’s life for protecting their lover.”

Vlora barked a laugh. “That lover is endangering Adran lives. Out of my way.”

“Outside!” Olem said. “Now.”

Vlora locked gazes with him, forcing every bit of anger onto her face. She held the pose for a few moments before looking over Olem’s shoulder at Karin. “We’ll be back in a few hours with that warrant, and the city police. We’ll see how you like this place torn apart brick by brick.” She whirled around and stalked out into the street.

She waited out there for about five minutes before Olem joined her. He took her by the arm and led her away as if by force, keeping his grip until they had gone around the corner.

“You know,” he said, “I was eating that pie.”

“Sorry. Do you think she fell for it?”

“Shit, probably. I thought you were going to go through me to get to her for a moment.”

“We better hope she did too,” Vlora said.

They doubled back and entered a milliner’s shop across the street from the cobbler’s. Vlora took up a position by the front window and watched for Karin.

“Can I help you?” the milliner asked.

“Just waiting for a friend,” Olem said, pulling out a pocketbook and handing the hatter several bills.

“I see,” the milliner responded. He made himself busy in the back of the shop, keeping an eye on them.

Olem came up beside Vlora and hooked a thumb in his belt loop, a new cigarette clenched in his lips. “That intelligence might be inside the building,” he said. “Our best bet is to get some men and ransack the place.”

“I thought you said we needed a warrant?”

“I was just playing along. The warrant we have already covers a search.”

Vlora bit her lip. It was tempting. A partial victory was still a victory. “Tamas wants the intelligence and Wohler,” she said. “I’m not gonna hand him just one.”

“And if we lose them both?”

“Then I’m in deeper shit than before.” Vlora shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t think I can get much deeper.”

Olem took the cigarette out of his mouth and blew a smoke ring. “Yeah, I think you can,” he said with a wry smile.

“That’s really not reassuring.” Vlora resisted the urge to ask him what Tamas had said about her, and if there was anything else she could do to win back his trust. If Olem had anything to say, he’d say it when he was ready. Until then, Vlora could only hope she was making a good impression.

Not that she had any confidence that she was.

“How’s the hand?” Olem asked.

Vlora lifted the handkerchief. “Superficial cut. Lots of blood at first, but it won’t slow me down.”

“Have a surgeon take a look at it, make sure it doesn’t need stitches.”

“It won’t.”

“Better safe,” Olem countered.

They fell into a comfortable silence for the next twenty minutes. Olem watched the street, and she watched him chain-smoke through several cigarettes.

“It would be awfully lucky if he decided to come back,” Olem said, breaking the silence.

“And stupid,” Vlora said. “He’s not that dumb, and I’m not that lucky.”

“He a good fighter?” Olem asked.

“Damn good with a sword. Didn’t have an ounce of powder on him, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Maybe lead with a bullet next time.”

“I plan on it.”

“Good,” Olem said. “Wait. Karin’s looking out the window.”

Vlora sidled up to the front window of the hat shop and took a peek. “She see you?”

“I don’t think so. There she is.”

Karin emerged from her shop with a large, black bundle under one arm. She was wearing a green dress and a matching hat pulled down to hide her eyes. She stopped outside her shop just long enough to lock the front door, then looked both ways before heading down the street.

Vlora and Olem followed at a distance.

Karin hailed a hackney cab at the next corner. Vlora kept after it on foot until Olem caught up with a cab of his own, and she jumped onto the running board, head up so as not to lose Karin.

They crossed the river and wound through the dock district, taking a few erratic turns before heading north along the riverbank, up past Kresim Cathedral. They continued north to the outskirts of the city, stopping in front of a small chapel about a quarter of a mile from the river.

Karin left her cab, still clutching the bundle, and went inside the front door of the chapel.

“Think that’s the hiding spot?” Olem asked.

Vlora watched the chapel for several moments. A man in a bicorn and overcoat loitered on the street beside the door to the chapel, smoking a pipe, a wine bottle on the ground beside him. “Only one way to find out,” she said. “Roll me a cigarette. And give me your hat and coat.”

“Should I ask why?” Olem asked, already removing his coat.

“Because they’re older than mine, and bigger. Pit, give me your shirt too. Baggy is better. Driver!” she called. “Take us around the corner.”

She had the cab drop her several blocks from the chapel, well out of sight, leaving her weapons inside with Olem. She hunched her shoulders and tucked her hair up, then, armed with Olem’s hat and cigarette, headed back toward the chapel.

She approached slowly, walking without a purpose, pausing every few moments to look up at the sky and mutter angrily to herself until she came up even with the man sitting outside the chapel with his pipe and wine bottle.

“Hey, mister.” She coughed, pulling the cigarette out of her pocket. “You have a match?”

The man had watched her approach, eyes intent, but at her request he looked past her, up and down the street. He took a swig from his wine bottle. “No. Get out of here.”

“Come on,” Vlora whined. “Don’t be all high an’ mighty. Yer smokin’ a pipe. I’m not sober, but I’m not stupid either.” He didn’t respond, so she reached for the front door of the chapel. “Maybe ’em damn priests’ll have un.”

“Wait, wait.” The man sniffed once, then patted his pockets. She caught a glimpse of a brass belt buckle and a flash of purple, then the polished butt of a pistol, before he came up with a match.

“Thank ya,” Vlora said, striking it on the brick of the chapel before heading slowly on her way. She took a long drag at the cigarette, hoping the man didn’t see her shake and stumble as she held in a lung full of smoke. She blew it into the air over her head, trying to look nonchalant.

The cab picked her up three blocks later, and she discarded the cigarette before getting inside, wiping her mouth. “How the pit do you smoke those things?”

“Habit,” Olem said.

“Maybe I should ask why.”

“It relaxes me. Find anything out?”

Vlora stripped off Olem’s jacket and shirt. He had the decency to blush when she caught his eye as she buttoned up her own shirt. He turned quickly to look out the window. Vlora snorted a laugh. “The man outside is a lookout. He’s wearing a Kresim church belt buckle.”

“Our missing Prielight guards, eh?”

“That’s my guess.”

“Think Wohler will be inside?”

“Well, Karin went in there with something. That’s gotta be it. Now that we’ve spooked Wohler out of his hiding place, it seems likely he’ll come here for safety in numbers.”

“Agreed,” Olem said.

“And now he’s going to be surrounded by Kresimir knows how many of his fellow Prielights.”

“Sounds like we have a problem,” Olem said.

Vlora smiled at the way he said we. It felt nice to have someone on her side. Seemed like ages since that had happened. “Right,” she said. “I think our best bet is to spook him, get him to run. Flush him into the open so I can get a shot at him.”

“Even if we succeed,” Olem said, “It won’t take long for his friends to figure out there’s only two of us. We won’t be able to recover either him or the intelligence.”

Vlora sucked on her teeth, forcing herself to think. She could feel the lure of the easy way out—giving up—tugging gently but persistently at the back of her mind. She fought it down. She needed this victory for when she arrived at the front.

To the pit with the victory and Tamas’s approval. This was about catching the man who caused Sabon’s death. She would do this for the late commander and all the other men who died in the ambush.

“Would you be able to bring anyone else into this?” Vlora asked.

“How many?” Olem asked.

“As many as you can. I know what I’m asking, and if you can’t, I perfectly understand.”

Olem seemed to mull this over for a few moments. “Prielight guards are excellent fighters,” he said. “Some of the best in the Nine.”

“I know.”

“We don’t know how many are inside.”

“I know that too.”

“Nor do we know if there are any civilians inside. Spouses, mistresses, diocels, or even children.”

“We’ll have to go in through every entrance,” Vlora said. “Surprise them, keep them at bayonet’s length until we can disarm the lot. They’re not protecting anyone, just hiding out. They have no reason to die in a fight.”

Olem began to roll a new cigarette. He was quiet for a time before meeting Vlora’s eyes and giving a sigh. “Well. What the pit is the use of forming an elite fighting unit if we don’t give them some practice?”

Vlora kept watch on the chapel from a safe distance while Olem was gone. She could feel the weight of the air, see the rolling storm clouds moving in off the Adsea. The long-delayed storm would be here any minute.

Just in time to foul gunpowder and make the cobbles slippery. Perfect weather for a fight.

Olem returned two hours later, leaping from a hackney cab. Inside, Vlora counted three more faces, and two more hackney cabs had pulled to the side of the road to wait with the first one. It was beginning to get dark, and it was drizzling lightly.

“He’s in there,” she reported to Olem. “Came in about twenty minutes ago. Karin left ten minutes later, but Wohler is still around.”

“Unless he went out the back,” Olem said.

“True,” Vlora conceded. “Did you bring me a rifle?”

“I did.”

“How many men do you have?”

“Thirteen was all I could gather on short notice. I couldn’t find Verundish, but she’s supposed to be staying out of sight.” Olem snapped off a salute that was half mocking. “Orders, Captain?”

“Send four men around back to take care of the lookout they’ll have there,” Vlora said. “Tell them to do it quietly, and to be ready for anyone who makes a run for it.”

“My boys are a bit conspicuous. Either lookout is going to see us a mile away.”

“That’s what we’re for.” Vlora hitched her belt up so that the tip of her sword wasn’t visible beneath the hem of her greatcoat, then took one pistol and slid it up the sleeve of her coat, barrel first. “I want them to be in position around back in three minutes,” she said. “Tell your men to start counting.”

Olem snapped off a barrage of quiet orders to the men in one of the cabs, and it headed to the next street over, behind the chapel.

Vlora gave them a minute and a half before she took a deep breath. “Take my arm,” she said.

Olem raised an eyebrow and put his arm out for her to loop hers around. Together, they walked around the corner and headed toward the front door of the chapel.

The rain began to fall a little heavier, and Vlora drew herself closer to Olem, feeling the warmth of his body beneath his greatcoat. “Lower your head,” she said. “Pretend you’re talking to me.”

“But I am talking to you,” Olem said.

Vlora punched him lightly on the shoulder.

“If you get any of my men killed,” Olem said, “I’m going to be very cross.”

“I’ll do my best not to,” Vlora said.

The lookout had spotted them. He was watching their approach, but he hadn’t gotten up from his spot near the door.

“This is nice,” Olem said, looking up at the sky. “I mean, the weather could be better. But the company’s not so bad.”

“Contrary to popular opinion,” Vlora said.

“Quite so,” Olem replied cheerfully.

They were coming up beside the chapel and the lookout was eyeing them just a little too keenly. One hand itched toward the pistol hidden beneath his coat.

Vlora turned suddenly to Olem and got on her toes, kissing him. Olem’s eyes went wide, and when Vlora pulled away, she said, “Let’s get married!” in a loud voice.

The lookout made a sound in the back of his throat—a strangled laugh at the look on Olem’s face, perhaps—and studied his boots.

Vlora dropped the pistol she had hidden up her sleeve, catching it by the barrel. Her swing took the lookout in the side of the head before he could call out, and he slumped to one side.

Vlora wiped the blood off the butt of her pistol. Behind her, Olem rubbed his lips. “Well, that took me by surprise.”

“Him, too,” Vlora said. The two other cabs pulled up in front of the church and Adran soldiers poured out. They fixed bayonets to their rifles, trying to keep the pans dry against the rain. Vlora readied her own rifle. “Fifteen seconds!” she said above the sound of rain hitting the cobbles.

The soldiers spread out, three on each side of the front door, the rest moving along the north side of the chapel and taking up positions below the windows.

Vlora reached out with her senses, taking stock of the powder inside the chapel. There was plenty of it in there—at least a hundred charges and several powder horns. She guessed there were as many as ten Prielight guards inside. None of the powder was moving, which meant they weren’t falling into position for an ambush.

“Five, four,” Vlora counted down, tensing.

Vlora’s powder mage senses picked up a sudden shout from the other side of the chapel, and then the unmistakable sound of soldiers scrambling inside. Olem’s men had tipped off the lookout around back.

“Shit,” Vlora said. “Now!”

She slammed one shoulder into the door, only to find it barred from one side. A vision of disaster flashed through her mind—of Olem’s men around back being overwhelmed and killed, of Wohler and his compatriots fleeing, of a running chase in the street that took more lives.

Olem stepped up beside her. “One, two!”

Vlora set her feet and the two of them slammed into the door together. It burst inward, and Vlora leveled her rifle as Olem’s soldiers streamed in behind her.

She took in the building—the chapel was one large room, with pews in the middle and an altar to Kresimir at the front. The pews had been covered in blankets to form makeshift beds. Eight men and women, some of them still wearing the purple of the Prielight guard, scrambled for their weapons.

Vlora detonated the powder of the first Prielight to snatch up her pistol. The crack of the blast rang in her ears and the woman stumbled back with a scream, clutching the remains of her hand.

Glass broke as Olem’s men shattered the windows along the side of the chapel and thrust the barrels of their rifles through the openings. The blast of a rifle went off in Vlora’s ear, and a second Prielight guard stumbled and fell, sword half-drawn. Olem kept his smoking rifle raised, bayonet forward.

The rest of the Prielight guards froze in their places.

The entire entry had taken fewer than five seconds. Vlora searched the room, and panic set in. she didn’t see her target.

He had to be in here somewhere. Maybe in a cellar? Hiding behind the altar? Unless he’d gone out the back before the ambush, or managed to slip out just as they arrived.

“Where’s Wohler?” Vlora demanded.

“Right here.”

Every sense pricked as Vlora felt the tip of a blade press ever so gently against her throat. Her breathing grew shallow and she fought the urge to jerk back, not trusting her reflexes to be fast than Wohler’s. She’d seen what he could do with that sword.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see that Wohler had been concealed by the door as it burst open. No one had swung to cover that side of their approach. Sloppy. Wohler was still half-behind the door now, his arm extended to press the tip of his sword against her throat.

“I can kill every one of your men before you kill me,” she said.

“Detonating their powder?” Wohler asked. “Certainly. But they’re not my men. Just church guards.” Vlora reached out with her senses. Wohler didn’t have an ounce of powder on him.

“Sir,” one of Olem’s men outside the side windows shouted. “I have a clear shot.”

Vlora could feel the tip of the sword tighten against her throat.

“Stand down,” Olem shouted. “Damn it, I said stand down!”

“Drop your rifle, woman,” Wohler said.

Vlora lowered her rifle to the floor.

“Have your men drop their rifles,” Wohler said to Olem.

Olem snorted. “That’s not going to happen.”

“I’ll kill her,” Wohler said.

“And we’ll kill you,” Olem responded coldly. “And we’ll make sure it takes a very long time. Nobody wins that way.”

Wohler sneered. “You have a proposal?”

“Give us the intelligence you took from Charlemund’s estate and we’ll let you walk free,” Olem said.

“Like pit we will,” Vlora said. “He killed Sabon.”

Wohler ignored her. “Bloody Charlemund hasn’t brought me anything but trouble. You can have the intelligence. You swear on your honor as an officer?”

“I do,” Olem said. “None of my men will come after you.”

Vlora felt the prod of the blade and had to take a step to the side to keep from being skewered. Wohler forced her into the middle of the room as he came out from behind cover, the two of them moving together. Wohler, his blade still in place and his eyes on Olem’s soldiers, bent over one of the pews. He lifted a thick case and threw it to Olem’s feet.

“Olem,” Vlora said, “I don’t like this.”

Olem picked up the case and leafed through the papers inside. “You don’t have to like it, Captain,” he said. He nodded to Wohler. “I gave my word as an officer. You can go, Captain Wohler.”

Vlora’s body trembled with anger. How could Olem let this man walk free? Did he really think her life was worth letting Sabon’s killer get away? She watched for a break in Wohler’s focus, but his sword blade was unwavering.

Wohler directed Vlora’s movement again with the tip of his blade. He grabbed his jacket and threw it over one shoulder, then took his hat and forced Vlora between Olem’s soldiers and out into the rain.

They walked together out into the street and down to the end of the block. Vlora waited for the pain of the thrust, for Wohler to take his chances with killing her and making a run for it. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Olem’s soldiers watching their retreat from the door of the chapel.

“Wohler!” Olem’s voice called.

Wohler stopped. He peered back through the rain.

“Wohler,” Olem repeated. “I gave you my word that none of my men would come after you. I forgot to tell you: Vlora isn’t one of my men.”

Vlora let her right leg drop out from beneath her and brought her left arm and shoulder up, slapping the blade away from her throat. The fingers of her left hand grasped the hilt of his small sword. Wohler jerked back, sawing the blade along her arm, slicing through her jacket and into the flesh. She knew that to let go would allow him to bring the tip around to thrust at her chest.

Instead, she jerked on the hilt, bringing Wohler to her. She slammed her right fist into the side of his face. The blow should have broken his jaw, but it glanced off and the two of them stumbled together, tripping on the curb.

Wohler’s forehead connected with Vlora’s nose. She felt a crack, and tasted the blood streaming down her chin. Wohler rolled away from her, slipping from her grasp. He slashed halfheartedly toward her as he leapt to his feet, then dashed down the street.

She wasn’t going after him unarmed, and he knew it.

Instead, Vlora sprinted for the chapel.

She burst past Olem and the soldiers, ignoring Olem’s worried inquiry, and snatched up her rifle before heading back into the street.

She looped the rifle over her shoulder and hauled herself up the metal gutter of the chapel, her left arm slippery with blood, staring up into the black sky. The rain was coming down in sheets as she gained the roof, scrabbling up the slick tiles until she reached the apex.

Her hat had fallen off in the climb, and she had to wipe water out of her eyes. Her left arm was torn up by Wohler’s sword, so she propped it lamely on the apex of the roof and lay the barrel of her rifle across it, sighting down the street the way Wohler had gone.

She stared into the gloom, worried she’d taken too long.

“Come out, you bastard.”

There he was, emerging from an alley four streets over, running for the cover of the next building. He was over three hundred yards away. An easy shot for a powder mage in good conditions. But against a moving target, in the rain and the gloom? Vlora took an extra sniff of powder, willing all of her focus on the running figure. He’d reach the next alleyway and be out of her vision in thirty paces.

Twenty-five.

Twenty.

Fifteen.

Vlora remembered the first time she ever shot in the rain. Target practice when she was thirteen, up near the King’s Forest. She had trembled with anxiety, worried about disappointing Tamas. Sabon had stood next to her, the rain dripping off his hat, and whispered for her to focus on her breathing.

Vlora didn’t pull the trigger—the powder in the pan was already soaked. She set off the dry powder in the barrel directly with her mind, then focused on the flash in the barrel, stabilizing the bullet with her sorcery, letting the energy of the powder charge carry it forward. It cut through the rain, covering the distance in a moment’s time, then blew through Wohler’s left ankle.

Vlora let the muzzle of her rifle drop and watched as Wohler gave out a cry and fell to the ground.

She wasn’t giving him the luxury of an easy death.

Vlora was awoken by the swish of her blinds being thrown open, and the cruel morning sunlight stabbed her eyes about half a day sooner than she would have liked. She wiped the drool of the side of her mouth and lifted herself onto her elbows, squinting over her shoulder.

“Who the pit is it?”

“Olem,” a voice said.

She rolled over, clutching the sheet to her chest, and held up a hand against the light. The smell of cigarette smoke pricked her nostrils. “Olem?”

“That’s what I said. Looks like you had quite a party last night.” Olem stood by the window, dressed in his uniform, hat under one hand.

Vlora looked around at the piles of clothes and discarded wine bottles. Her head pounded, and she couldn’t remember much of anything after dragging Wohler screaming through the streets and delivering him to the Adopest police. “It takes a lot to get a powder mage drunk,” she said.

Olem lifted one of the bottles and held it to the light. He swirled the contents and sniffed it, then took a swig.

Vlora tossed the sheet away and reached for her pants, pausing to smile when Olem turned hastily away from her nudity. She pulled on her shirt and boots, then stood up and ran her fingers through her hair, trying to make herself presentable. Olem offered the half-empty wine bottle. She took it with a word of thanks and took a large gulp.

Foul.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “We caught Wohler, didn’t we?”

“That we did. Good work. The intelligence is secured and Wohler will be talking to our boys about any of Charlemund’s other secrets he may be privy to.”

“So, uh, what are you doing here?

“I thought you might like to go get some breakfast down the road.”

Vlora raised an eyebrow at him. “Oh?”

Olem gave her a grin. “Indeed. You’ll want a full stomach. We’ve got a long way to ride today.”

“We?”

“I’m done with my recruiting, and my men and I need to be in Budwiel in four days. I thought you might want to come with us.”

Vlora blinked lazily, her mind still trying to catch up. That’s right, she had captured Wohler, which meant she was welcome back at the front. She gave a sigh of relief. Two days ago she had all but resigned herself to failure. Now she had succeeded, with Olem’s help.

To be honest, it felt like a hollow victory. It was all for what? To impress Tamas and go to the front, where she could get back to killing? No, she reminded herself. It was so Sabon could rest easy.

“Was this meant to be a test all along? Were you here to watch me?”

Olem looked around for someplace to ash his cigarette, then opened the window to do it outside. “No,” he said. “I was told to bring you if you succeed, leave you if you failed.”

“And you weren’t supposed to help me?”

“I was told not to, actually. But I figured that was just the field marshal’s mood talking.” Olem extended a hand. “Shall we?”

Vlora clasped the hand. “Breakfast first?”

“I don’t start the day any other way. Besides, there’s going to be a battle at Budwiel, and a damned big one. I figure it can wait for a good meal.”

For more in the Powder Mage universe:

Promise of Blood

The Powder Mage Trilogy

Orbit, April 2013

The Crimson Campaign

The Powder Mage Trilogy

Orbit, May 2014

The Autumn Republic

The Powder Mage Trilogy

Orbit, February 2015

Forsworn

A Powder Mage Novella

January 2014

Servant of the Crown

A Powder Mage Novella

June 2014

Murder at the Kinnen Hotel

A Powder Mage Novella

November 2014

Table of Contents

Hope’s End

The Girl of Hrusch Avenue

Green-Eyed Vipers

The Face in the Window

Return to Honor