The Room One Door Along

Opening

Vessa's wings were still open. She had not folded them since the braziers leaned, and nobody in the sanctuary had asked her to, and the long pale rectangle the mirror threw across the floor at first light had shortened to a strip by now and she was still standing in it. Around her the room had gone from a rite to a gathering without anyone deciding it should: Zuktind in his father's-generation coat with the black cloth on the sleeve, Telno with her hands still not quite steady from the prayer, Yeltsu and Rathenfall a little apart, the way they had been a little apart all morning, and the High Priestess of the Temple of Bahamut with the last of a meat pie in her hand.

And Lissandra, who had asked a question nobody had answered.

She had asked it with the new hand — pointed with it, gold and silver in the thin lines Zuktind's father had cut, at a wing that had not worked for five years and now did. Telno. You could do that?

Zuktind had already argued the case against, in the open, the way he argued everything. A wing was bones that had knit wrong and could be made to knit right. A hand that had been burned out of the world in a magical explosion was not a wing. It was a harder thing, and it would take more faith, and he did not think — he had said this gently, and it had not sounded gentle — that Telno was there yet.

Hugto set the pie down.

"Yesterday," she said, "I heard, in this order: that a god spoke to your brother. That the cult is moving on the north. That there is a window of some months for something to happen — something big. That you are carrying a letter from the Platinum Father himself, to a dragon whose name I have never heard anyone say out loud."

Zuktind lifted the letter, the way he lifted it every time it came up, as if the weight of it were proof. "To Tamarand," he said. "King of Justice."

"And today," Hugto said, not looking at the letter, "I see my old acolyte conjuring divine magic well beyond her years." She looked at Telno, and then at the wings, and then back. "I would not say that regrowing a hand is so very far from the power of our Lord that is flowing through this room right now."

The Hand That Would Not Come

It was not a yes. Telno knew that; she had grown up on this woman's sentences. But it was not a no, either, and Lissandra heard the difference before anyone else did.

"Well," Zuktind said, slowly, turning it over aloud. "High Priestess, if you believe that — then I suppose we could try." He looked at his sister. "If Telno is willing. She would be the one acting as our Lord's conduit."

Telno looked at him with an expression that was mostly surprise. You want me to try it right now?

"It's up to you," Zuktind said. "And it's up to Lissandra."

Lissandra did not make them wait. "For as much as I am loving my new hand," she said, and there was a smile in it that did not quite survive the sentence, "I would love to have my own back." She unfastened the prosthetic — the catches Zuktind had designed so that she could work them one-handed — and set it on the pedestal beside the mirror, and held out the stump of her forearm into the light as if presenting it for inspection.

Telno looked around the room. Vessa, who had been on the receiving end of this an hour ago, came and stood at her shoulder and told her, low and fierce, that she could do it, that she had done it already, that the room had seen her do it. Zuktind knelt where he had knelt before and began to pray. Telno drew breath, and found the words, and reached for the thing she had reached for at dawn —

— and there was nothing there.

Not a refusal. Not a closed door. Only the particular, humiliating emptiness of reaching into a purse you have already spent, and the silence of a sanctuary full of people who had all leaned forward at the same moment and now did not know how to lean back.

Lissandra's arm stayed out a second too long. Then she drew it in.

It was Hugto who moved first, and she did not move quickly. "Telno, child. Slow down a little." Her hand came to rest on the back of Telno's neck, briefly, the way she had probably done when Telno was nine. "You have used a great deal of power today already. Perhaps you should rest before attempting a magic like that again." A glance at Zuktind, dry. "As your brother said. Regrowing a limb is not an ordinary task."

Telno nodded. She could not have spoken. She looked at Lissandra, and Lissandra looked back, and said it before Telno had to: "Perhaps we should try again tomorrow."

Nobody argued. Lissandra picked the prosthetic up off the pedestal and fitted it back to her arm with the practiced three motions, and flexed the fingers once, and said, mostly to the hand, "If it doesn't work tomorrow, I still love this one."

Zuktind broke the quiet the way he usually did — by declining to. He looked around at the others and asked whether anyone else had anything to say; he wanted to give them the chance first. Rathenfall said he could not think of anything. Yeltsu said nothing.

"Well," Zuktind said. "We will see whether it can be done, all in good time. In the meantime — we have an appointment at the barracks."

He had half turned toward the great doors when the High Priestess spoke to his back.

"Before you rush out of here." She had picked the pie back up, which somehow made it worse. "Everything I mentioned — I heard it standing in a corridor. So you come to my temple, unannounced, and do not even share with me what you are doing. The girls have told me that you carry books. Documents, taken from the cult." She let that sit. "Do you not want my insight? Or do you think there is little wisdom to be had from my side of the room?"

"Never, High Priestess." It came out of Zuktind too fast. "I would never think you unwise. You are one of the wisest of us all."

"One of."

"I — the only one who could be wiser is the Elder, and she only has that through her years. You have it because you are wise beyond yours. Her wisdom comes from —"

"Calm down, Zuktind." Not unkind. "No need to stutter. Show me what you have."

He reached into the bag of holding and stopped, because he had reached for a thing and could not, for a moment, have said what the thing was. Papers. Books. There had been a warehouse in Neverwinter, and a raid, and a river, and a great many things had come out of it that he had never had the leisure to read. He had put them away. He had put them away carefully, and now he stood in front of the one person on the mountain who could read them and could not name them.

"The ledger," Hugto said, watching him. "Vorath and Meridian's. The girls said." And then, because she was a paladin and not a scholar, and did not sit down in sanctuaries: "Not here. Come."

The Name in the Ledger

She took them through a low door behind the pedestal into a room that was nothing like the sanctuary. No precious metal here, no vault, no mirror. Three cases of bound records, a rack of scroll tubes, and one shelf of things too old to be shelved with the rest, each wrapped in its own cloth. A table. Chairs. Vessa came, because Zuktind had looked round at the others and nobody had objected — Yeltsu had said so out loud, carefully, as if it were being written down — and she folded her wings at last to fit through the door and did not seem to mind.

Hugto lit a second lamp for the table. In a room where the light already cost nothing, it was a courtesy, and everyone who had grown up in a temple understood it.

"I am not a scholar," she said, "and I am not a magistrate. I am a paladin who keeps records. The only thing I know how to do properly with a claim is put it beside a document." She put both hands flat on the wood. "So. Everything you took from the cult. On the table. All of it."

Zuktind laid it out. The ledger. Meridian's draft report. The sealed note nobody had opened. Papers he could not have described and did not try to. Hugto pulled the ledger toward her and read it the way an officer reads a requisition — down the columns, fast, not pausing at the numbers.

Then she stopped.

She went back three lines. She put one claw on the page and left it there, and she did not say anything for long enough that Telno, who knew this woman, recognised it as the thing she did when she was deciding how much to say.

"K.J.," Hugto said. She looked up — at Telno, mainly, and then at all of them. "Interesting. What do you think?"

"The only K.J. I know of," Zuktind said, "would be the term. King of Justice. But that makes no sense. They would have nothing to do with Tamarand." He was working it through in the open, as he did, and it was audible when he arrived. "They're opposed to him. They're the cult. Tamarand is an agent of Bahamut. They are agents of —" and he did not finish the name, in that room.

"Unless they were being sarcastic," said the High Priestess, turning the ledger around so that the column faced them, "it is clearly some kind of fund they are running. Look. They are putting money into this K.J. operation. There is money going out of this business, to this." A pause with nothing soft in it. "I doubt they are making donations to his hoard."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Vessa, who understood perhaps a third of it, understood the tone.

Zuktind said, half to himself, that they had confirmed Meridian dead — her body had washed up on the riverbank the next morning. Vorath had never been found. Dragonkin could hold their breath a long time. Part of him, he admitted, wished the man had escaped, so that they might have caught him and put this ledger in front of him; they should have searched the river; why was hindsight always the sharper eye —

"If he escaped," Hugto said, not looking up, "he is with his friends by now."

She went on through the pages. The Talon, which the party had taken for an enforcer. The Witness. Transit to the north. Zuktind told her about the altar in the Spine of the World, the one Mira's maps had pointed at, and about what he believed the cult meant to do there: open a door between planes wide enough to bring their great nemesis through it.

Hugto did not answer at once. She set down what she was holding. The warmth of the room did not change, but she did, and it was hard to say afterwards whether it was the priestess or the paladin who spoke — Telno, who had been taught this at nine, thought it was the paladin.

"The Dragon Queen is chained."

There was a full stop after it that you could have leaned on.

"That is the oldest thing this house teaches. Before the founding — before this mountain — the Plated Father and many other gods cast her down into Avernus, and she cannot leave it." She looked at Telno. "You were taught that at nine. I taught it to you."

"I understand that is what we were taught," Zuktind said, carefully, formally, a man addressing a rank. "But then what else would they want to bring through so vast a portal?"

"I don't know," said Hugto. "But it cannot be her."

That was where it might have stalled, in the way that hard questions do when the people who could answer them are not in the room. But two people who had not been in the sanctuary at dawn were in this one, and one of them had ink down the side of her hand.

Lissandra stepped forward with a bound record from the shelf she had been allowed to open the night before. Mira came behind her with the look of someone who had not left the building and did not intend to mention it. Between them, in the order they had found it, they laid out what the night table had yielded.

The temple's books ran back to the founding, Lissandra said. And in the earliest years, the arrivals were logged by the floor. Names. Dates. What they carried in. Then, four hundred years ago, the entries simply stopped. Nobody had written down why.

Mira, dry: those same early years listed supplies coming up, from something the scribes called the lower house. Eleven years of it. Grain. Lamp oil. Then that stopped too. Nobody had ever written down where the lower house was.

"And this one is mine," Mira said, and tapped the page. "There is no map of the valley in this building. Not an old one. Not a bad one. Four centuries of a town with a valley under its window, and nobody has ever drawn it."

"It makes sense that we wouldn't have," said Zuktind — and then, because he was among his own and forgot, for a moment, that Vessa Ondrix was standing beside him, he said the rest. "The ferals live there. They're dangerous. They eat humanoids and turn their skin into leather."

Mira's pen did not stop. Lissandra's hand, the metal one, closed.

The Road We Lost

Hugto let the silence go exactly as long as it needed to. Then she said, in the tone of someone confirming a thing she had always known and never had cause to say:

"Indeed the valley is not mapped. Because, as Zuktind says, we do not venture there. We avoid it as much as we can, and there is no reason to go." She reached up to the shelf of wrapped things and did not take anything down. "And — yes. The circle was cut around four hundred years ago. It was a gift from the Platinum Father himself. It is said he made these circles so that we could move between the houses of his faith — a network. It passes through Claw Ridge. It passes through Charfield Valley." A small pause, and something in her voice that might, in a less disciplined woman, have been enjoyment. "And you might be surprised to know that it passes through Vaasa."

"Through what?"

"Zuktind." Hugto did not sigh, but it was close. "You must keep better track of the things you are chasing. Where did I tell you the King of Justice lives?"

He was already in his notes. "The wilderness of — Vaasa. It's here. It's in my notes." He looked up. "So we could get to Vaasa from here. We wouldn't have to make the whole trek."

"You could. Indeed."

Zuktind was doing arithmetic aloud — the months, the window, the difference between arriving in time and arriving in the nick of it — and he did not see the High Priestess's face change. Telno did. It was not anger. It was closer to disappointment, and it was aimed with care.

"It would be nice, Zuktind," Hugto said, "if your beloved had not taken the book with all the sigils in it when she left."

He stopped.

"Wait. So we can't use the portal to reach Vaasa."

"No. You cannot. Not with anything in this archive."

Zuktind sat down. He had not meant to. "Then I suppose we have no choice. We go back and find her first —"

"There is one other choice." Hugto's claw went to a lower column of the ledger she had not been reading. "We did not come to live on this mountain from the start. Dragonkin lived in Charfield Valley as well. We had a temple there, before this one." Flat, and she did not soften it. "A ruin, by today. But there may be records there. Of those sigils."

"The ferals will have destroyed it," Zuktind said. "With their obsession for —" the name, again, unsaid. "Wonderful. Into the den of them, then."

Yeltsu, who had been quiet enough that the DM of the room had almost forgotten him, said mildly that Zuktind had a great many friends now who could go down there with him. Rathenfall said nothing, which meant yes.

"True," Zuktind said, and heard it. "True. And I am a great deal stronger than I was the first time I went through there. When I left this town I had to sneak along the very edge of the valley, under the cover of night. If they had seen me, I would have been destroyed. Things are different now."

"If we still need to sneak," said Yeltsu — and he touched the harmonica at his belt, and Vessa, who had heard about the harmonica, looked — "I have something that might serve. Or —" measured, thoughtful, as if listing options for a purchase — "I could use it to scare them a little. You remember I still have the roar of the white dragon stored in this."

Lissandra said, quietly, that she hoped so.

"Well," said Zuktind, standing again, "now that we have a plan, I think we should take our leave. We do still have an appointment —"

"I am not here to hold you, Zuktind." Hugto had not moved from the table. "But if you should ever wish to discuss how you intend to approach an ancient great wyrm of a gold dragon —"

He was three steps from the door. "I — understand. We will come back for that."

"Are you anxious, Zuktind?"

He turned around. "What do you mean?"

"No matter. We can speak of it later. If you wish to leave, I cannot keep you."

He stood in the doorway for the space of a breath. Then he came back and sat down.

"Now that you mention it, you make a good point. It might actually be best to discuss it now. The barracks can wait a little longer — it was not fixed to a particular hour." He put his hands on the table, the way she had. "So. How would it be proper to go about handing the Platinum Lord's letter to a great wyrm like Tamarand?"

She let him say it all first. That he was certain they could not simply walk into a lair and announce a letter. That he wished he could prove it was from Bahamut and could not, because the only proof would be to open it, and to open the Platinum Lord's letter when he was not its recipient would be sacrilege. Hugto listened to that last with her hands behind her back and said only, "Far be it from me to ask you to."

Then she sighed, and gave it to him.

"My advice is not to walk up to him if you see him. Have the letter ready in your hand. Go in daylight — so that he does not take you for thieves. Because remember, and never forget it: Tamarand may be the King of Justice, but he is a dragon. An ancient dragon. With treasures that he loves and will protect without mercy."

"Understood."

"Never at night. Never in bad weather — nothing that could look like cover. Never from above, as if you were scouting his territory. Open country. Show that you are not afraid to be seen; let him see you coming for an hour before you arrive. If he comes to you, show him your open hands, held away from your body, so that he cannot think you are hiding some trick. All of you." A glance across the table. "Including the cat."

Zuktind laughed, once, and it surprised him.

"And name the sender before you name yourselves. Say that you are there on behalf of Bahamut himself — that you are not petitioners, but couriers. And I heard —" she stopped, and turned her head, and looked directly at Telno's wrist — "that you carry a sign, as well. A token. A sacred thing."

The room went very slightly still.

"As I heard from yesterday," Hugto said, and her eyes went to Lissandra and Mira and came back, "it has changed a great deal."

The Mirror on Her Wrist

"It was a shrine mirror," Zuktind said, when Telno did not — earnest, exact, reciting a history he had lived. "It had been stashed in the hoard of two black dragons. We took it out of there meaning to set up a shrine of our own, back at our base. But before we ever managed that, it — decided. It changed on its own. Or more likely by the Platinum Lord's own will. Into something that could help us directly."

"Can you make it a shrine mirror again?"

"I —" Zuktind looked at his sister. "We had not thought to try."

So Hugto worked with Telno on it, there at the table with the ledger still open between them, and it was Telno, after a time, who found the way in. Not a word. Not quite a gesture. Something closer to consent — the same thing she had done at dawn, turned inward. The bracelet warmed on her wrist. The little mirror dangling from it caught the second lamp. And then it was not on her wrist; it was on the table, and it was not little, and it was not flat.

A bowl. A shallow, domed dish of platinum, exactly the shape of the thing on the pedestal in the sanctuary one door along — the thing Telno had walked past every day of her novitiate.

"Huh," said Zuktind.

Telno turned it over in her hands. It was a mirror again — flat, plain, the size of a plate, Bahamut's mark on the back where her thumb found it. She thought about what she had been taught a shrine mirror was, and it became that. She thought about carrying it, and it climbed her wrist and settled and was a bracelet.

"I think I like it this way," she said. "It's very useful."

Hugto said nothing. But everyone at the table saw the thought cross the High Priestess of the Temple of Bahamut, and it was this: that she had held the office for thirty-one years, and there was a platinum mirror on a pedestal in her own sanctuary, and she had never once tried to attune herself to it.

"Well." She straightened. "Do not expect there to be only one gold dragon in the wilderness of Vaasa. There are several. There have always been several. Perhaps the first one you meet will not be Tamarand."

"We'll keep that in mind," Zuktind said. "Thank you for making sure we know."

She looked at him a fraction too long, the way she had in the corridor two days ago. Then she shrugged, and reached for the current bound book, and uncapped an ink.

"One more thing, and then I will let you go to your barracks. This house keeps a record. Not for the city. Not for the Elder. For whoever is standing here in two hundred years." She looked up at Telno. "A relic of the Platinum Dragon came into this temple today, on the wrist of a girl I sent to Phandalin, through a floor nobody has used in four centuries. I am going to write that down." The pen did not move yet. "What I do not yet know is how much of the rest of it goes in."

Nobody answered. They were all still looking at the distance.

"You are thinking about the distance," Hugto said. "My advice is: stop. You need to use the same answer you used to get here. Only the coordinates you need are in the valley." She laid her hand on the case of bound records. "In these, we have descriptions of the valley from the years we lived in it. We have the stories of the valley that everyone in this town knows. But I cannot give you a map. I cannot point to where you must go."

"When we were as fallen as they are now," Zuktind said slowly, "we never thought to make one. Map-making only came to us after we came up here —"

"I'm good with maps."

It took a moment to find where the voice had come from, until she stepped up onto a stool at the end of the table and was suddenly at eye level with everyone. Mira Ashveil had her sketchbook open on her knee. She had had it open for some time.

"If you have stories," she said, "and books, and records describing the valley — as you say you do — I can make those into a map."

Zuktind, who could not help himself, said that most of it would be millennia of oral tradition written down long after it had been corrupted, because they had not had reading and writing either, when they were ferals; the ferals had always been too lazy to learn —

"Are you questioning," said the High Priestess of the Temple of Bahamut, "the accuracy of our records?"

"No. No. I'm saying — we wrote down what tradition we had, once we could. That's the best we have. It should be mostly accurate."

"Then I can help you," Mira said to Hugto, as if Zuktind had not spoken. And then, to Zuktind, because the plan was his: "What do you think? Should I stay in the temple and try to work out a map to this ruined temple of yours?"

"That would be very useful," he said. "When we finally go down there. To have at least some idea of where we are going. When I was in the valley I stayed to the edge and saw almost nothing of it."

"Then I'll try." She was already writing. "Lissandra and I haven't finished here anyway. We still have to fix the location of this place of theirs, and the timing of the ritual." A glance at Lissandra, who nodded: a great deal still to be calculated.

"You are welcome to stay as long as you need," Hugto said. "It seems you are on a very important errand from our Platinum Father himself." And then, to Zuktind, in the voice that had ruled on him two days ago: "It seems you have found a more important mission than the one you left with."

"I still hope to fulfil the first," Zuktind said. "But this one takes precedence."

"Perhaps you will manage both. Whatever the cult is trying to bring into this world, it is tangled with what you set out to do. We look forward to you bringing her back to face justice."

He did not answer at once. When he did it was careful, and it was addressed to a High Priestess and not to his sister's teacher.

"I intend to. Though the amount of justice I intend to bring her back to face is the exact amount she actually deserves — and there are things at work that make that a great deal more complicated than it looks. It would take far too long to explain."

Hugto's look was cryptic, and clever, and gave nothing away. "We would not wish it otherwise."

Zuktind turned to his sister. "Would you rather stay here with the girls, or come with us? We could use a healer if the sparring goes badly."

"Then I'll come," said Telno, and the four of them and Rusty went out through the low door, and through the sanctuary where a long pale strip of light still lay on the floor, and out into a town that had had a whole morning to hear about a wing.

That Was the Lieutenant

They walked the residential ring toward the barracks, and somewhere past the second turning Zuktind asked the question he should have asked in the sanctuary: the recruit who wanted to spar — had they caught her name?

Yeltsu had. Yeltsu was almost sure he had. He turned it over for a while, and it did not come. Rathenfall, asked, could not have said whether she had given one at all. They had sat at a long table with eleven people and two children and a fire and a great deal of bread, and a girl in a coat a size too big had asked how long it took to get good, and neither of them had held on to what she was called.

Zuktind found it a different way. He had been in this town three days, and every face in it was a face he had grown up beside, and he had been avoiding the arithmetic of who was missing. He did not remember the recruit. He remembered a boy.

"She's Darroth's sister," he said, and stopped walking.

The others waited.

"Darroth Vurr. He was one of my brothers in arms. He fell the day of the attack." Zuktind's eyes had gone bright and he wiped them with the back of his hand, impatiently, as if they had done it without permission. "I can see why she joined. To fill his shoes, probably. He was a good soldier. Almost as good a shot with a gun as I was." A breath. "He was a good friend. We lost a great many that day. May Bahamut rest his soul." And then, quieter, as if to the street itself: "He died a hero."

Telno said, very humble of you, and it was not entirely a joke, and Zuktind did not entirely take it as one.

The sound reached them before the yard did: not shouting. Breath, and wood on wood, and one voice counting. The training ground behind the barracks was the only flat piece of earth any of them had seen in Claw Ridge, swept and packed, a rack of practice weapons at one end that had been mended more often than it had been replaced. Twenty or so out in pairs. Half of them too young. And along the northern edge, the granite wall — where you could see, if you looked, exactly where the new work stopped.

Somebody spotted them before they were ten paces in, and the reaction ran down the yard in a wave: a pause, a nudge, heads turning. One of the older ones straightened up without meaning to.

A voice from somewhere in the middle: "That's the lieutenant."

And half a second later, quieter, from somebody else: "That was the lieutenant."

Nobody explained either sentence. The counting voice had stopped.

She was already there. She had probably been there an hour ago. She came across the yard at something between a walk and a run and stopped in front of them with a practice sword in each hand, and said, "You came," like someone who had made a bet with herself and lost it. "I told the sergeant. He said I shouldn't get above myself." A glance to her left, at a man with a spear who was looking at nothing in particular. "He also said he'd watch. He's over there pretending he isn't."

"We had things to do first," said Yeltsu, and meant it as an apology, and she took it as one.

She held out both swords, hilts first. "I couldn't work out which weight you'd want."

"Go first," Zuktind said to the others, before anyone could look at him. "Spar with them first. I have a special idea for the two of us. To honour your brother." And he went off toward the range at the far end of the yard, and left the swords to Rathenfall, because it was Rathenfall she had been holding them out to all along.

Rathenfall took one. "Fine. I'll take it, I guess."

People started getting out of the way.

The Spar

Zuktind did not see the first exchange, because an old corporal, grey at the muzzle — someone who had already been old when he left — walked over while he was still sorting through a box of practice weapons, and waited without interrupting, and then reached out, without asking, and touched the black cloth on his sleeve. Two fingers. The way you check a bandage.

"Who?"

Zuktind looked at him.

"Have we lost somebody?"

"It's —" and he understood the question all at once and answered it as fast as he could, which was too fast — "it's to cover my lieutenant's patch. Until I can get a proper veteran's patch from headquarters. So that nobody mistakes me for pretending I'm still on active duty."

The corporal looked at the cloth a moment longer. Before he could say what he thought of that, Zuktind heard a step behind him that did not hurry, and was not alone, and a voice said:

"Lieutenant."

He came to attention out of five-year-old reflex and saluted before he had turned all the way round. "Corporal —" and then he saw the man's shoulder. "Oh. You've been promoted since I left. Captain, then, is it?"

Ruskal did not return the salute at once. "You're on my ground," he said, "in that coat, and you want to spar with my recruits." His eyes went to the black cloth, and whatever he concluded from it he kept. "I'd have appreciated being asked."

"My apologies. I never — we lost — I lost a great many good friends in that attack. I'm sorry for resigning. But I could not leave the position filled while I was not here to fill it."

It was the sergeant, at the captain's shoulder, who answered — the same plain man from the long table, plainer still in daylight with a spear in his hand.

"If you resigned," said Marroth, "why do you wear the uniform?"

"Other veterans are allowed to wear theirs."

"Well." Not warm, not cold. "They haven't resigned, have they."

Zuktind opened his mouth and there was a crack of wood across the yard and every head turned, including the captain's, and Zuktind — who had, for one dishonourable second, thought about using the distraction to slip away to the range — did not. That would not have been soldierly. He addressed the captain again, formally, the rank in the right place this time. "Captain Ruskal. I request permission to —"

"Right now, Zuktind," said Ruskal, "you have permission to watch."

So he watched.

Kessyth Vurr came at Rathenfall the way the young do, all forward and no weight behind it, and he turned her sword aside without seeming to move and tapped her on the arm with the wooden staff — and then, because habit is habit, on the other arm, before she had finished being surprised by the first. Somebody in the crowd said did you see that, he's quick. He stepped back to open the distance and she lunged at his retreat and hit nothing but air; she came in again from the side and found his armour, or his reflexes, or both. He tried to shove her off her feet and she did not go — she spread her wings for the balance he had not accounted for and held, breathing hard, and the yard shouted her name.

She was fast. She telegraphed everything. He read the sword to where it was going to land before it left her shoulder, and put the staff behind her knee, and she went down in the dust, and everybody laughed, and Rathenfall reached down and pulled her up by the wrist and told her, in his flat way, that she had done well for the difference in their years, and to keep at it.

"I'm not done yet," she said.

He had already half turned away. She came at him with everything, and he saw it, and struck the sword out of her hand so cleanly it landed four paces off. "That was a good try. But I'm a bit too seasoned for a trick like that."

She went and picked it up. She stood a moment with her back to him, breathing. "Then I need to try something different," she said, to nobody.

And she turned, and stepped inside his reach where nothing in her training should have put her, and laid the wooden blade against the side of his neck.

The whole yard went whoa. Someone shouted Kessyth! and then everyone did.

Rathenfall stood very still. He looked down at the sword, and up at the girl holding it, who had gone bright as a lamp, and something in the stone of him moved.

"That was very good," he said. "I didn't see that coming." And then, because it was true and he was a paladin of Tyr and did not say things that were not: "You're much better than I thought you were."

He let her be the one to end it. She shook his hand, gravely, both of hers around one of his, and then broke and ran to her friends, who closed around her like water.

Marroth came over with the captain a pace behind. He looked Rathenfall up and down — the plate, the bearing, the way he had put a recruit on the ground without hurting her — and said one word, as if filing it: "Paladin." Then he thanked him, plainly, for the lesson. And then, because it was his job to ask: "I take it you didn't all come here just to spar."

"Permission to speak, sir."

Ruskal looked at Zuktind. "Granted."

"To honour the recruit's fallen brother, I'd like to teach her to be as good a shot as he was. If that isn't a problem."

"How long?"

"I can give a good lesson in a day. May I have the air guns at the range?"

Ruskal looked across the yard at the knot of young militia with Kessyth Vurr in the middle of it, laughing. "If you can get her away from her friends," he said, "you're welcome to them."

The Range

He waited until the celebrating had run its course. When she came, she came still glowing, still telling Rathenfall about the moment he had put her on the ground — you took me by surprise — and Zuktind stepped in beside her as close as he decently could.

"Kessyth. You've grown so much since I left." He said it the way you say a thing you have practised and are still not ready for. "You did your brother's memory proud today." A beat. "I'm not lieutenant any more."

"Lieutenant." It was out before she caught it; she bit her own mouth. "We heard you were in town. For some of us —" and she stopped, because she had a loose tongue and knew it, and finished anyway — "you are."

"If some of you still see me that way, I won't stop you. But I think we can make your brother even prouder. He was a good shot. Only the captain and I were better, and only by a little. Would you like to learn to shoot the way he did?"

"Sure."

He went to the box of ranged weapons and came back with an air rifle — a lighter, cheaper cousin of a musket, driven by air rather than powder, throwing pellets rather than balls; his father's idea of a practice gun, from the year he had brought guns to this town at all. He set her across from a target and took the lane beside it, and unslung the real thing.

"Watch my stance." He braced his legs. Spread his wings — not for flight, for stance, the way a mast is stayed. Set his tail out behind him against the earth. "Hold it up like this. Look down the sights — that little post at the end, that's your sight. Line it with the centre. Pull the trigger."

The musket went off like a door slamming. Every head in the yard turned again. The ball was dead in the bullseye.

"Now. See if you can copy me. I'll be right here."

Her first shot was nowhere. He put the musket down and came over and said the thing you say — nobody gets it on the first shot, nobody — and then, more usefully, took her hands and moved them. Higher. Arms out at this angle. The sights at eye level, the wings and tail bracing the recoil. "Think you've got it?"

"Think so." She took a breath.

The pellet went through the centre ring.

"Excellent." Zuktind was grinning like a boy. "Your brother didn't shoot that well on his second try."

"I don't know," said Marroth, from behind them, "that he had such a good teacher standing beside him."

"The captain, Darroth and I all had the same teacher," Zuktind said, and did not look round to see what the captain made of that. "My father. When he first brought guns to the village. He taught us the best he could, from what he'd learned out in the world." He looked at Kessyth. "Do you want to keep shooting at targets? Or go to the next step?"

"What's the next step?"

"Cork pistols. Practice guns, for sparring. Father brought those too." He went back to the box and did not find them, and dug, and found them at the very bottom, under everything, where they had been since the last people who used them had stopped coming to the range. He blew the dust off two. He handed her one, and a pouch of cork.

"Centre of the ground. Backs together. Pistol up, in front of your face, ready to draw. On three we walk three paces and turn. Whoever turns first, shoots first."

Her wings were trembling very slightly. Not fear.

"One. Two. Three."

One pace. Two. Three.

She was faster. He had half turned when the cork hit him full in the face, hard enough to sting, and the yard erupted — cheers, and some laughter, and someone whistling. He fired back through watering eyes and put a cork somewhere into the middle distance.

"I swear I haven't lost my touch!" He was laughing too. "I swear."

"It seems," Marroth observed, "that you underestimated our recruit. She has her brother's talent."

"Do you want to continue?"

"After a cork in the face? One's enough."

So Zuktind came to attention, and saluted her, and then bowed — deeply, deeper than a lieutenant bows to a recruit, as deep as respect allowed. "I concede." And when she puffed her chest and said it was a good lesson: "You truly are your brother's sister. I'm certain he's smiling down on you, proudly, this very moment."

She went back to her friends. He put the air rifle away, and the cork pistols on top of the box this time, where they could be found.

Closing

Yeltsu had been watching all of it from the rail, the way he watched most things — carefully, storing it. When Zuktind came back he said, measured as ever, that she was very good; and that he was still itching to spar with her himself, because he had told her he would, and a thing said was a thing owed.

"Give her time to celebrate."

"I will." A pause. "For my turn, I might try some magic."

"That's not fair."

"The ferals won't play fair."

"— True," Zuktind allowed. "They do have sorcerers now. Draconic bloodlines." He frowned. "Not warlocks. Sorcerers."

"Then I want to use my turn to help her be ready for that." Yeltsu took the practice sword from Rathenfall, who surrendered it without a word, and then — because a bard who has thought about being a boss with two attacks does not stop thinking about it — drew his own dagger, tore a strip from the hem of his coat, and bound the blade in it, round and round, tight, until it was as blunt as the wood. "Nothing strong," he told Zuktind. "Cantrips, mostly." A faint smile. "Not vicious mockery. I save that for people I don't like."

He crossed the yard to where Kessyth Vurr stood among her friends with two lessons in her already, and waited until she noticed him.

"Are you ready to spar with me?"

She looked at the cloth-wrapped dagger, and the harmonica at his belt, and the bard holding a practice sword like a man who had learned swords from books. "Sure," she said. "I guess it's a day full of new experiences."

"Just so you know — I'll be using magic. I want you to be ready for the ferals that have it now. Because they do."

She squared up. He stepped closer.

Behind them, one door along from a sanctuary, a cartographer sat at a table under a second lamp with four hundred years of somebody else's stories open in front of her, drawing a valley nobody had ever drawn. Somewhere beyond the granite the ferals had a ruin with a floor in it, and somewhere further than that a woman who had once been captain of this yard carried a book of sigils that was the only road to a king. And on the swept earth of the training ground, a nineteen-year-old with two lucky hits and one good morning behind her lifted a wooden sword toward the third stranger to offer her something, and the yard, which had not gone back to work, leaned in to see what magic looked like.