Kraken Mage Omnibus

BOOKS 1-3

TEA & POTIONS

ROBIN HUTSON

Copyright © 2024 by Royal Guard Publishing LLC

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Kraken Mage 1

Chapter

One

Rain streamed down from the starless blackness above Death Lake. Green, white, and red lightning forks slashed the sky, illuminating swirling cloud banks that churned and boiled like an angry sea.

Thunder boomed and the echoes leaped from peak to peak, shaking the jagged range that surrounded the dead lake. Broken crags and needle-sharp summits like nightmare teeth leaped into view, silhouetted for a moment by the livid lightning before vanishing again into darkness.

Foul magic was thick in the air, oozing from the water, filling the valley all around until it even reached the jagged peaks and defiled storm clouds high above.

In the lake, there dwelled a monster.

Alaria Hartwood crouched on the southern bank. Her steady, imperturbable gaze was fixed on the pockmarked surface of the water. Slowly, she pulled her leather sword glove from her right hand and lifted a little of the wet earth in her bare palm.

The earth was cold, sodden, and smelled of death. She squeezed the soil in her hand for a moment. As water ran from the soil and oozed between her fingers, she made a silent promise to the land.

Soon, the curse that has afflicted you will be no more.

The clod of wet earth fell back to the ground as she stood, pulled her leather glove back on, and dropped her hands to rest on her weapons. Her left hand sat on the hilt of Skyfang, her spell-woven ice-blade. Her right hand sat on the handle of Skyfang’s little sister, Earthclaw, a wytchsteel dagger that she kept for those moments when one legendary magical blade wasn’t enough.

Alaria Hartwood was a magnificent figure, a tall, lean warrior in her prime, dressed in steel ring mail and hard leather with a breastplate, gauntlets, and shin guards of gleaming steel. The metal of her armor glittered when the lightning flashed, and the rain made a sound like an industrious dwarven smithy as the drops hammered on the polished steel plate.

Blue and yellow runic inscriptions flickered on her armor, enchantments of swiftness, of guarding, of defense, and of strength. The enchantments, like the plate, the leather, and the mail that she wore, were all the work of her own hands.

Here stood a woman who was more than just a warrior. She was a crafter, an enchanter, a spell worker, and more. Alaria had achieved a high level of proficiency in many of the adventurer’s arts.

She wore no helm. Her shoulder length red-blonde hair was bound tightly and firmly at the nape of her neck so as not to get in the way when she fought, but she had never worn a helmet in battle. She wasn’t going to begin now.

The fight she was about to win meant more to Alaria than any other battle she’d ever been in. The monster she was about to kill was bigger, stronger, and more frightening than any she’d ever faced, and the bounty for the kill was so huge that she would have the freedom at last to pursue a long-held, secret dream.

Alaria was not afraid.

She’d trained for this.

She was ready.

Alaria Hartwood was about to slay Dbuk, the primordial kraken of Death Lake, and she was going to do it alone.

Dbuk the primordial kraken was an ancient evil, a demon from the dark beyond. Dbuk had forced his way through a tear in the fabric of reality, somewhere deep below the surface world of light and life, in the sightless caverns of the underworld.

Over countless years, Dbuk had crept through the deep places of the world, eventually finding his way to the surface here, in this once-pleasant lake that was now residence to horror and doom.

Dbuk had taken the form of a huge, tentacled thing. Those few who had seen him and had lived (and remained sane) to tell the tale described him as a giant creature of tentacles and dark red flesh, with a gaping mouth that bristled with gleaming silver teeth. But it was his eyes that they spoke of with the most fear. Deep within the shadows of the terrible creature, two gleaming yellow eyes burned with a ferocious, cunning, terrifying intelligence.

In Alaria’s mind, those two eyes burned as well. From the sound of him, those eyes were possibly his only weak point.

Before Dbuk had come, the fisherfolk who lived here had called this green place Lake Bounty, because of the abundance and quality of the lake’s fish, the cleanness of the water, and the fertility of the soil in the sheltered valley that enclosed it. For many years, people had lived in this remote border settlement in peace and contentment, making a good living from fishing and farming, and thanking the gods for being able to live in such a beautiful place.

Ten years ago, all that had changed.

Dbuk the primordial kraken had come up from the underworld and had found his way into the lake’s waters. The foul evil that pulsed from every fiber of his being had steadily polluted the waters, killing the fish, poisoning the land, and driving the people away. Nothing grew on the shores of the water now. No birds lived in reed beds at its banks, no fish swam in the deep water, and the packs of wild elk and boar that used to come here to drink now avoided the place at all cost. Even the wolves of the mountains did not come down anymore.

The only thing that lived here was Dbuk. He spent his time crouching like a great, evil, tentacled spider in the depths of the water, brooding on the completeness of the desolation he had wrought, pumping evil magic into the water and the surrounding land, and deepening the power of the curse he’d laid on this place.

Lake Bounty had become Lake Death.

Eventually, a delegation of villagers from the settlements that once flourished on the shores of Lake Bounty found their way to Crownheart City, the royal capital, gleaming in the green fields at the foot of the Golden Mountain in the heart of the kingdom of Sapheli. Emery Toll, the King’s Regent, took pity on the plight of these exiles from the distant western settlement. He sent a message to the Bloody Hand, the most elite guild of adventurers to be found anywhere in his domain, and promised an unprecedented reward for the slaying of Dbuk, seeking the restoration of Lake Bounty.

The head council of the Bloody Hand agreed that the guild would take the job on, and called for candidates to lead a team out on this most lucrative and prestigious task.

Alaria put herself forward and was granted the contract. It was expected that she would put together a team of at least ten other adventurers—after all, the reward was more than enough to do so—but to the surprise, horror, and chagrin of every other adventurer in the guild, she declared she would take the job on, alone. She set out at once for the western mountains, on foot, accompanied only by the party of eight commissioned King’s Witnesses, and their captain, an old veteran named Rolrick. These witnesses would accompany her and would verify that the deed was carried out. Without them, she could not claim the reward.

It was three hundred miles in as straight a line as possible from Crownheart City to Yallcrag, the only large settlement within a day’s march of Death Lake.

The journey was hard. It took the party eighteen days, walking eight hours a day on bad roads. Except for Captain Rolrick, the witnesses were young, newly commissioned, and had never been this far from home before. In the course of the journey, they lost all but three of the nine members of the witness team.

The first fell on day six; he caught a chill in a rainstorm and had to be left at a small village to be cared for by a helpful goblin shaman. A second member of the party decided that she wanted to stay and help look after him. If he died, she said, someone would have to take the news back to the family, and she resigned her commission and any chance of pay so that she could stay with the sick man.

Next, two members of the party fell in love with each other. They abandoned the mission on day eight, resigning their witness commissions so they could get married in a temple in the small village the party happened to be passing through. They declared that they would stay in the village and settle down together.

They wanted to set up a bakery in the village, and a third witness declared that he, too, had walked far enough and was resigning from his job. He knew how to bake, and the newly married couple promptly took him on as a store manager.

The final loss had been Janku. Janku was a young, strong, noble man. Unlike the others, who had dropped their commissions at the first chance, Janku’s main goal in life seemed to be to avoid his overbearing step-father’s attempts to make him resign his commission and marry a rich, older heiress.

Janku collected some mushrooms to cook one night, but he accidentally took a bad one and became very sick. Though Alaria had no doubt Janku would recover in a week or two, he could go no further and they were forced to leave him in the care of the tree-dwelling elf-maidens of Leafler Forest, whose land they were passing through at the time.

The elf-maidens of Leafler Forest were a community of ethereally-beautiful immortal elvish women who were famous for their opposition to traditional marriage and their insatiable desire to mate with young human males. Janku did not seem unhappy about his fate, and as the luscious elf-maidens surrounded him and led him off into their gleaming golden city in the trees, Alaria had a feeling that Janku wouldn’t be heading back to Crownheart City and his step-father’s marriage schemes anytime soon.

That left two commissioned witnesses and the head witness, the hoary old ex-soldier Captain Rolrick Hardnose. Rolrick could be relied upon to stick with Alaria since he was the head witness. As for the other two, the pay for them was now substantial, since the witness fee was to be split evenly among all members of the witness party who returned to Crownheart City with their commissions stamped by Rolrick. Rolrick was paid on a salary and didn’t take a share, so the remaining two would split the whole fee originally meant for eight. It was an attractive prospect and would allow them to retire from this hard job and set themselves up in some more pleasant occupation.

After the fall of Janku, Alaria felt confident the last two would stick with the mission. She’d been right. They’d walked with her and Rolrick to the bitter end, even when they left Yallcrag for Death Lake and the weather turned foul, even when the land became barren and blasted and lifeless as they approached black mountains that sheltered the domain of Dbuk. Even as the evil power of his magic started to beat upon their wills, pushing them back and making their guts churn with fear.

Even when the rain began to fall.

Alaria dropped her hands from where they rested on her weapons. She loosened her stance and drew Skyfang with a ring of steel. White ice magic ran up and down the blade of the huge sword, flickering like cold fire in the gloom of the storm. The rain hit the blade and hissed, vanishing in puffs of steam as if the metal were red hot.

The blade was not hot. It was cold enough to kill.

Alaria raised her sword as she slipped into the familiar ready state where she could use the magic she needed for this fight. Like clean water, magic power flowed through her, making her fingers tingle and her skin feel warm and alert.

She rolled her shoulders and smiled. This was going to be good.

This was going to be really good. And she could hardly wait to see the looks on the faces of the witnesses when they learned what she planned to do with her reward money.

If she chose to tell them, of course.

Skyfang flashed bright as Alaria accessed her Spirit class spells and cast Illumination, using her sword as a vector to channel the spell. A single blast of white light flashed up into the sky from her blade; a pure, clean light, not like the ugly lurid flashing of the corrupted lightning.

The light she sent up was a signal; a signal to Rolrick and the two witnesses, who huddled on the cliff above the road nearby, ready to witness history in the making.

A horn blast, harsh but clear, sounded from the cliff behind her where the witnesses watched. They had seen her signal and were ready to witness. Whatever deed she performed now would be recorded and carried back to Crownheart City to be reported to the Guild of the Bloody Hand, and to the King’s Regent.

They were ready.

Alaria was ready.

In a moment, the foe would be ready too.

Dbuk felt the signal magic. Alaria knew he felt it because she was aware of a shift in the sense of present evil that permeated the place. There was no break in the rain, no change in the lightning, but she felt the weight of Dbuk’s magic thickening in the air around her.

She cast another Spirit spell, High Challenge, and sent it spinning across the surface of the lake, manifesting as a ball of pure white light that dispersed into a cloud of white sparks over the lake’s center. Spirit spells were some of Alaria’s favorites, because they were the most varied, and the most able to be used for purposes other than brute force.

High Challenge interfered with any other magical influences that were nearby, drawing them in, and also subtly boosting the confidence of any other mages who were near. This had the double effect of making an enemy feel more confident than he should, while also boosting the confidence of any mages who fought alongside the user.

Confidence. Challenge. Were these concepts that a creature of Dbuk’s nature would understand? Would Dbuk the demon from the other side of the veil of reality be susceptible to a challenge? To a false sense of security?

Alaria felt an unwelcome but not unfamiliar prodding of doubt. She dismissed it. Perhaps in other walks of life, she might have listened to her doubting inner voice, but in this place she would not. She had no cause to lack confidence in her ability to destroy enemies, even one so great as Dbuk.

Destroying, yes, but understanding? the unwelcome voice pressed. You can kill, but what if that’s not enough? What if you make a fool of yourself here?

In that instant, she realized what was happening. She felt something foreign probing at her, groping at her deepest beliefs and fears about herself. An exploring psychic tentacle, sliding with infinite subtlety and cunning along the lower edges of her mind, seeking a way inside her very soul.

She drew on Spirit magic once again and cast Banish and Psychic Guard, and immediately the doubting voice was silenced. So, it turned out that Dbuk did understand confidence and challenge; so much so that he had tried to use a counter spell to undermine her confidence in herself, undermining her belief that she could meet the very challenge she’d traversed 300 miles to defeat.

The psychic threat had been knocked back, and it was time for something a little more direct. The light from the storm flashes above was no use for seeing by, and even though Alaria’s sword glowed brightly with white light, it wasn’t what she needed. She wanted some steadier illumination.

Drawing on the Fire school of elemental magic, she cast Glow Globe. A sphere of light six feet across and glowing like a bonfire manifested a few feet from her. A nudge of her will sent it sailing upward and out over the lake, and an application of Sustain from the Stone school of elemental magic caused the globe to settle in place and keep burning.

Sustain was a tricky spell, often overlooked by Stone school adherents, but she had made a point of mastering it. It was one of the few spells from the Stone school that wasn’t just about dropping increasingly large boulders on people in increasingly creative ways.

Not that there was anything wrong with squashing enemies with rocks, of course, but each of the elemental schools had a handful of spells with non-offensive applications.

Alaria always made a point of mastering them, not because of any pacifist tendency on her part, but simply because they were more challenging to learn and develop to a high level than the aggressive spells.

The light from the Glow Globe showed her a flat expanse of water, pockmarked all over by the driving rain. There was no sign of anything under the surface, no larger disturbance, no bubbles, no lights from below.

Yet she could feel him near.

She could feel his rage.

Alaria reached for another Spirit spell, Killer’s Sight. This was an all-out aggression spell, only for use in battle. As soon as she cast it, her vision changed. The whole scene was laid out before her as if bathed in a gray, pale light, the shadows very dark and edged, like an ink-wash painting.

In daylight, Killer’s Sight would have behaved differently, but in the darkness of the storm and the weird mix of colored lightning and Glow Globe illumination, the spell showed her this grayscale version of the world.

Grayscale, that is, with one important exception.

Under the water, outlined as a bright red silhouette, Alaria could see her enemy. Dbuk appeared to Alaria’s magically-enhanced sight as a hulking, bulbous, organic shape, his mass of tentacles flowing out behind his lumpy, roughly spherical body as he rushed toward the surface from the deeps where he had his lair.

The Killer’s Sight spell only lasted for a few moments, but a few moments was all she needed. By his trajectory and his speed, Alaria could tell exactly when and where Dbuk would surface.

She stood where she was, taking one long, slow breath, then another, letting her magic build to full capacity after the burst of spells she’d just cast. She was a highly accomplished mage, and it didn’t take long for her spellcasting capacity to replenish, but it didn’t hurt to take a moment and be fully prepared.

Dbuk’s anger grew stronger as he came closer. It was a thunderous, inhuman rage, a rage at all life that had been focused to a fine point directed solely at her. He hated her for defying him, for coming to his domain and challenging him, and particularly for managing to push away his psychic tentacles.

She kept the thought small, just in case there was some part of her mind that he was still aware of, but she understood that without meaning to, she’d turned his own trick against him. He had tried to undermine her by finding and amplifying her human weakness, that feeling that she was an imposter who wasn’t right to believe in herself.

By defying him, she had found his weakness—his uncontrollable anger at anything that dared to thwart him.

Alaria knew all about anger. She knew how it weakened a fighter, how it made people impulsive, rash, and arrogant. She knew how it powered an overwhelming first blow, but if that blow was avoided, the fighter with the cooler head would prevail.

Until now, Dbuk had never faced any foe that could win a fight against him, so he believed that he could unleash his anger with impunity.

That was about to change.

The monster exploded out of the lake a hundred yards from where Alaria stood. His magic surged, and a frantic flurry of lightning flashes exploded around him, illuminating his horrific form in a lurid, many-colored glare.

He was the size of a house, and that was just the main bulk of his body. The tentacles that flowed out behind him seemed to go on forever, ripping open the surface of the lake as they leaped like huge, striking serpents from the black water.

Water sluiced off his huge bulk, and his mouth opened in a scream that would have deafened her if she hadn’t cast Sound Barrier around herself.

She felt the impact of the sonic wave that he blasted at her. She turned her body to the side, making herself a smaller target for the blast. The earth around her feet was ripped up by the wave and thrown backward, and a lock of her hair came free from the tight bind at the back of her head. She grunted and leaned into the impact, but her feet stayed solidly rooted to the ground.

He came on, horribly fast, propelled forward by a writhing mass of short, rippling under tentacles that seemed to take the place of legs. He was a creature of chaos, with no order to him, no symmetry, except where his two yellow eyes glowed from deep within the writhing, gleaming mass of teeth and tentacles.

Dbuk was pure chaotic evil, manifested as a being of flesh.

The impact of Dbuk’s sound blast cleared a moment before he reached her. Fifty tentacles rushed her, coming from both sides, from behind, and from above, while in front his gleaming, gaping maw of silver teeth rushed up to fill her vision.

She cast Impact, the most basic of all the Stone school spells, shoving it outward in an expanding sphere in all directions except downward. Impact was a basic spell, and that made it easier to fill with huge amounts of strength.

In the hands of a master like Alaria, the spell was devastatingly strong.

The tentacles that had been about to grip her were flung back as easily as if they’d been no more than wet string, and the silver teeth that had been about to devour her shattered inward, huge, sharp sword blades of silver demon tooth flinging back down Dbuk’s throat.

He screamed, but this wasn’t a scream of attack. It was one of pain, of disbelief, and—if it were possible—of fear.

The Impact blast bought her the moment’s grace that she needed. With a twist of her magic, she brought the Glow Globe that still hung above them down on his back, channeling Fire energy into the magic as it descended. The Glow Globe hit him and exploded with a noise louder than the thunder above.

Fire burst outward from Dbuk’s back where the globe hit him, and the smell of burning flesh filled the air.

Alaria ran forward three steps and jumped, drawing her dagger Earthclaw as she did so and slamming the blade into the flesh of one enormous tentacle. The tentacle was as thick as a tree trunk and slick with horrible slime. She could never have gripped the tentacle with her hands, but she kept ahold of the handle of Earthclaw as he did exactly what she had hoped, instinctively drawing his tentacle up and away from the pain, back toward his face, and lifting her into the air as he did so.

In a moment, Alaria was where she wanted to be—right above his eyes.

She jerked Earthclaw free and dropped onto the scorched patch on the top of his monstrous form where the globe had hit him. Dbuk was retreating, the propelling under tentacles moving him backward, toward the deeper water.

Alaria only had the space of a heartbeat to make her move, but that was all she needed. She had landed only inches from his gleaming yellow eyes.

Tentacles came at her to intercept her, but even their whiplash speed was too slow. Putting all the strength of her body behind the blow, she rammed the tip of her sword in through the Dbuk’s right eye and drove it home, right up to the hilt.

The tentacles flailed in the air as he lost control of them, lashing the air convulsively, but Alaria was not done.

There was a brain in there, a large one and Alaria had stuck her sword through the eye socket to get at the brain with more than just cold steel.

Skyfang was a vector for magic. She poured her power through the sword into his brain, shaping the magic White Heat, one of the most devastating, concentrated fire spells she possessed, and made even more powerful by the sword’s contrasting ice enchantment.

The magic flowed in, and the result was instantaneous.

Dbuk’s tentacles ceased writhing in the air. His remaining eye abruptly went out, and the curved, bulbous surface of his body where she crouched became unbearably hot.

Steam and flame poured from lines of small holes that ran the length of his head. She hadn’t seen them before, but she realized they must have been like the gills on a fish, allowing him to breathe in the water of the lake.

Alaria pulled Skyfang smoothly free from the ruined eye socket and, sword in one hand and dagger in the other, leaped away from the wreck of Dbuk. She landed in the freezing water of the lake, stumbled two steps, and then found her feet.

The water was chest-deep here, and she moved as quickly as she could away from what was left of her enemy. She surged out of the freezing water onto the bank, sprinted away a hundred yards from the lake edge, and then turned, just in time to see the last doom of the creature she had slain.

Dbuk’s hulk was shaking and spouting flame from all directions, and in the moment Alaria turned he exploded, sending shards of superheated bone and hunks of charred, bloody flesh soaring in all directions. Blood and gore splattered her in a thick, disgusting shroud, and she was grateful for the teeming rain which immediately sluiced the foul stuff from her face.

She blinked, casting another smaller Glow Globe so she could see again.

The new light showed her a shapeless mass floating in the shallows of the lake, a pulpy, unrecognizable sludge that was all that was left of the creature’s earthly shape. Whatever else Dbuk had been—a spirit, a demon of some kind—was hard to know for sure, but the sense of deep and present evil that had permeated the lake and the valley had immediately vanished.

Alaria was confident that whatever Dbuk had been in essence had been destroyed along with the physical manifestation of his monstrous body.

The evil in the lake was gone.

But there was something else here.

Something that she hadn’t seen before.

Something that was coming toward her.

Alaria tensed, seeing a ball of swirling blue and white light that suddenly rose out of the carcass of Dbuk and fired straight at her. Even her unparalleled fighter instincts were not enough to stop this thing, whatever it was.

Tentacles lashed outward from the ball of light. She raised her sword to counter it, but the thing just ran right past the blade.

Right past the blade, and straight into her chest.

“Mistress? Mistress Alaria? Alaria, wake up!”

Her eyes snapped open, and she saw a wrinkled, bearded face leaning over her, staring down into her eyes. He was silhouetted against a bright, clear blue sky.

The air was cold, but the sun was shining. There was a bad smell in the air, like overcooked meat.

Alaria’s fingers closed instinctively around the handle of Skyfang, gripped in her right hand, and Earthclaw in her left. She sat up, feeling dizzy, and looked around.

It took her a moment to recognize the lake now that the storm was gone and the sun was shining, but there was no denying the fact that she was lying in the same spot where she’d been when that ball of light had hit her.

The man who’d been standing over her was Rolrick Hardnose, the captain of the king’s witness party. A little way off, the two remaining witnesses were looking at the scene, their eyes wide and their faces pale.

Alaria reached up and touched her face. Her hair and her skin were still wet, and the ground around her was covered in the jellied remains of Dbuk. The carcass of the monster still floated in the shallows not far off, and even her Glow Globe still hung in the air above it, unneeded now that the sun was shining.

I can’t have been unconscious for more than a few moments, she thought.

“How long, Rolrick?” she said. “How long was I out?”

“Minutes, only,” the old man said. “We saw you fall after you killed the beast, and then the clouds were rolled up and thrown away and the sun came out, and we came down. We thought you’d been killed, Mistress.”

“Not I,” Alaria said, grunting as she got to her feet. She glanced at the shapeless, unrecognizable wreck of Dbuk. “He is, though,” she added.

She dismissed the Glow Globe and took a rag from her belt pouch. She wiped her hands, then wiped the gore from her blades and sheathed them. The rag was disgusting now, and she dropped it, taking a few steps toward the lake.

Her feet squelched in the jellied remains that coated the ground, stinking and beginning to steam even in the cold sun.

“Ugh, this stuff is everywhere.” She looked in disgust at the remains of Dbuk, floating in the lake and spread out all over the land around. The witnesses and Rorlick were up to their knees in it, and despite the rain that had washed it from her face, Alaria’s gear was caked with the foul muck.

Suddenly, she felt very tired. She just wanted to get back to town. There, she’d give her blades, her armor, her clothes, and herself a proper clean. She’d treat Rolrick and the witnesses to the best meal the Yallcrag town inn could offer, then she’d get a good night’s sleep and set out on the road again tomorrow, before dawn.

With luck, the journey back to Crownheart would be quicker than the journey here.

Soon, she would be rich, and she could leave Crownheart City and the Guild of the Bloody Hand behind her as she pursued her dream.

“Are we done here, Captain Rolrick?” she said. “Shall we go?”

“Aye,” Rolrick said. “There’s no need to linger. Not unless you’ve any trophy you wish to take from the corpse.”

Alaria shook her head and turned away, squelching away up the slope back toward the pass that would take them away from this place and back toward town.

A trophy, she thought, remembering the glowing globe of light that had flown toward her and been absorbed into her chest. I think I’ve taken a trophy already, without even intending to.

Tentacles.

She had absorbed a tentacle power from Dbuk. A tentacle power that could become hers, if she could only learn to control it.

Tentacles. She could feel them twisting inside her mind, flowing through her. They were the remnant of a power he’d held, something that had been a part of him.

Now, they were a part of her.

That had not been planned. She didn’t know how it would manifest yet, but she had no doubt she would find out.

She had come here to kill a monster for money. She had earned the money, but she had gained something else as well.

This was going to be interesting, but it would not change her plans. Her plans now made all the more sense. Now, she had a new power she had to learn from scratch, and that was never easy.

“What’ll you do now that you’ve beaten Dbuk?” Rolrick asked. He was a little out of breath after jogging through the muck to catch up with her. The other witnesses came along more slowly behind, speaking together in low voices.

“I’ll go back to Crownheart and get the reward,” Alaria said. “What else would I do?”

“I mean after,” Rolrick said. “You know, what’ll you do with the reward? You’ve earned a fee that was meant to lure in a team of ten elite adventurers, and you’ve earned it all by yourself! Honestly, Mistress, I’ve been witnessing adventurers taking out monsters for years, and I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was amazing! What will you do next, retire?”

She gave him a cool look, then relented and laughed. “Retire? No, I don’t think I’ll retire. I’ve got a different idea.”

“Bigger monsters?” he asked. “Traveling overseas to seek even greater foes? Setting up your own adventurer guild?”

Alaria shook her head. “Not exactly. I’m looking for a different kind of challenge.”

“And what is that?” Rolrick asked, unashamedly curious.

Alaria grinned. “You know what? You’re very nosy, but I think I’ll tell you anyway. I’m going to buy a house. Somewhere quiet, somewhere warm, somewhere with a nice garden.”

“I thought you said you weren’t going to retire?”

“I’m not. I’m just going to use my skills for something new.”

“Hmm,” Rolrick said thoughtfully. “It’s very unusual. But you know what, if you’re looking for somewhere warm and quiet to settle down, I can think of just the place. It’s far from the capital, on the outskirts of the kingdom, really, and very quiet and peaceful. A beautiful place, not far from where I grew up, many years ago.”

Alaria raised an eyebrow at the little man. “Really? It sounds ideal. What’s the name of this paradise?”

Rolrick grinned. “Have you ever heard of a town called Brighthill?”

Chapter

Two

Alaria Hartwood lifted her gloved fist and knocked on the door marked Brighthill Property. The place looked worryingly empty. Alaria had an appointment, and it was the middle of the morning, not to mention the fact that she’d paid hard cash yesterday and had the signed and witnessed deeds to the property in her shoulder bag. She’d have expected someone to be here to meet her, but the door was locked. She could see through the window that the office was uninhabited.

She stepped back from the door, looking upward at the second-story window of the little wooden building. That window was also dark. Alaria squinted and dropped her left hand to rest on the hilt of her legendary sword, Skyfang… only Skyfang wasn’t there.

The blade is back at the inn, she thought. Now there’s something that’s going to take a bit of getting used to.

She hooked her thumbs into her belt instead and tapped her foot on the cobbled street. Where could they be?

Alaria was about to step forward and knock on the door again when she sensed someone approaching from behind. It took work not to immediately spin round. Instead, she waited until she heard the scuff of a foot on a stone. She carefully put a smile on her face and then turned.

Just like someone who was not a legendary monster slayer might have done.

“Hello,” a voice said as she turned, and Alaria saw that the newcomer who had spoken was a dark-haired, pretty woman a few years younger than herself. She had very dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a small, neat nose above a mouth that seemed to have been made for smiling. She was wearing bright colors that contrasted with her dark hair and eyes; a yellow tunic, red trousers, and a light golden scarf with a blue pattern. Pale leather sandals wrapped around her feet, and Alaria noted that she’d painted her toenails the same red as her trousers. A thin gold bangle graced one of her ankles.

In her arms, she was carrying a huge lump of gleaming stone. It was shaped like a huge egg, and from the way the woman’s muscles flexed, it appeared heavy. Its shape made it difficult to carry since there was nothing to grip.

“Hello,” Alaria said to the woman and tried her best to keep her smile natural.

There was a moment’s awkward silence.

“Are you here to see Grenko?” the dark-haired woman asked.

Alaria felt her smile become genuine. She chuckled. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m here to see someone about the place I’ve just bought. The house with the garden and the shop attached, up near Willowman’s Creek? But I don’t know about anyone called Grenko.”

The woman laughed and rolled her eyes. “Trust me, you’re here to see Grenko,” she said with certainty. “But he’s not bothered to be here to see you. I don’t know why he does this… oh, never mind. I know the place you mean. I can help.”

She approached the locked door of the property sales office and tried to reach into her pocket for the key, but she couldn’t do so while maintaining a grip on her gleaming stone egg.

Alaria stepped forward hurriedly. “Here, let me,” she said, reaching out to help.

Even as Alaria stepped forward, the stone slipped out of the woman’s grasp. Alaria reached out to try and catch it… and then it happened.

“Woah!” the woman shouted in fright and leaped back, abandoning her stone entirely.

A thick, dark tentacle had slid from the sleeve of Alaria’s forest green traveling robe, past her gloved hand, and in a flash had wrapped itself around the heavy stone with no more apparent effort than if the stone had been made of paper.

Alaria felt the tentacle take the weight. The new appendage had emerged lightning fast from the skin above her right wrist, inside her sleeve, and had acted independently of her to catch the stone. Now that the instinctive catching of the stone was done, the tentacle was in her full control.

She could feel the tentacle as if it was a limb, as if it was part of her. Which it was, of course, but that was another thing that was going to take some getting used to.

“Sorry,” Alaria said, feeling bad for having scared this woman. “Didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“Uh, no, it’s okay,” the dark-haired woman said shakily. “It’s good, I mean, thanks! I’d have been very unhappy if that cherezio had smashed. It’s pretty fragile.”

“Really?” Alaria hefted the thing in her tentacle, testing her control over the new appendage as well as testing the weight of the object. “It doesn’t look very fragile.”

“Oh, it is. Very fragile indeed.” The dark-haired woman took the key from her pocket and quickly opened the door, then reached out for the cherezio. “I can take it back now.”

It took a careful effort for Alaria to control the tentacle so that it came smoothly round to offer the stone to the young woman. Alaria lurched slightly, struggling with the control of the tentacle but trying her best to remain cool and collected.

After more than a decade of deadly combat, swinging a sword or loosing an arrow was simple in comparison to this newfound power Alaria had gained.

The woman reached out a little hesitatingly, her eyes on the tentacle, then with a quick movement, she took the cherezio from Alaria’s tentacle and held it in her arms. As soon as the weight was gone, the tentacle retracted into Alaria’s sleeve. She felt the tentacle slip back into her arm, vanishing as it did so, disappearing from existence. It wasn’t a part of her, not really. Or rather it wasn’t a permanent part of her. It was a part of her that manifested and then disappeared again, as needed.

It was going to take some getting used to.

The young woman went into the office, and Alaria followed, her heavy boots making a deep, hollow noise on the wooden boards in contrast to the light, almost noiseless tread of her new acquaintance’s sandaled feet.

The woman stepped forward and placed the thing she’d called the cherezio into a metal stand on a wide wooden desk in the middle of the room. The stand seemed custom-made for these things, and Alaria saw that there were crumbs around the base of the stand, crumbs that looked like they had come from whatever usually rested on it.

Crumbs. Did that mean it was some kind of food?

“There we go,” the woman said. “Now maybe Grenko will manage to get up in time for his appointments again.”

Alaria had no idea what the woman was talking about, but she wasn’t about to ask. She had been around more than a bit in her time, and she knew that the world was full of all kinds of strange creatures with odd needs. Whoever—and whatever—Grenko was, this cherezio stuff was essential for him.

“Good, that’s done.” The young woman smiled at Alaria and then seemed to remember herself. “So rude. I just realized I never introduced myself.” She stuck her hand out to shake. “My name’s Mia.”

“Alaria,” Alaria said, reaching out her hand. Mia withdrew her hand a little and glanced warily at Alaria’s sleeve.

Alaria laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and shake your hand with a tentacle.”

Mia’s eyes widened, and then she hurriedly shook Alaria’s hand. “I didn’t mean…” she began.

“Neither did I,” Alaria assured her. “Honestly, the tentacle thing is pretty new to me—it’s going to take a bit of getting used to.”

“A new pet, is it?” Mia asked, looking warily at Alaria’s back as if there was something hidden under her clothes.

“Oh, right, I see what you mean,” Alaria said after a moment of confusion. “No, the tentacles aren’t from some other creature. It’s me who has them. I’m the one with the tentacles.”

Mia’s eyes went even wider. “For real?” she asked breathlessly. “That was a part of you?”

Alaria nodded. She had felt embarrassed at first, but the young woman looked so impressed now that Alaria felt a flush of pride. And after all, why not? It was her who had slain the Primordial Kraken with Skyfang and gained the power of tentacles, wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t she feel a bit of pride in her achievement?

Because it doesn’t belong to you, the old part of her whispered. Some skill, perhaps, but a lot of luck, and a lot of help from the work of the ancestors. Not your victory, not really.

She frowned and carefully put that old voice to one side, as she so often had to do. That critical voice was her constant companion. No matter what she achieved, no matter what heights she reached, that old part of her was always there to take the edge off whatever she’d achieved.

“I hope I’ve not given offense,” Mia said quickly, seeing the way Alaria’s expression had changed.

“No, no, not at all. It’s nothing to do with you, it’s just… Well, let’s not talk about it just now. Should we wait for Grenko? I’m eager to get the keys.”

“The keys, yes!” Mia said, snapping her fingers. “Of course, that’s why you’re here. Yes, the keys. Let’s see now.”

Mia seemed flustered as she opened drawers and looked through cupboards until she came upon a little rack of keys with different names written on paper tags stuck to the ends.

“Here we are,” Mia said. “This is the one we want, Number 4, Creek Road. That’s the one you mean, right?”

“That’s the one,” Alaria said. “We’re not waiting for Grenko, then?”

Mia shook her head. “We’d be waiting a long time if we waited for him. Come on, I’ll take you up there myself.”

“I know the way. You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to,” Mia said, smiling. “And it’s good luck, you know—to not go to a new home on your own,” she added. A lock of her dark hair had slipped in front of her face as she’d been looking for the keys. She tucked it back behind her ear as she asked, “You don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” Alaria said and was pleased to find that she did mean it.

She liked this young woman. Mia seemed happy, carefree, and fairly innocent in her way. That was refreshing after the kind of people Alaria was used to dealing with. She was pleased to have the opportunity to spend more time with Mia and find out more about her. Alaria knew—though she wasn’t particularly keen on admitting it—that she’d missed out in life by only having friends who were hard-bitten adventurers and monster slayers.

Alaria watched Mia in silence as the younger woman chatted brightly about nothing in particular while locking up the office. Then Mia turned to her and said, “Ready?”

“Lead the way,” Alaria said, gesturing to the right.

“It’s this way,” Mia said with a laugh and turned left down the dusty cobbled street.

The sun shone cheerfully on the little town of Brighthill as the two women walked through the streets. They didn’t pass many people. It was late morning on a hot day, and those who weren’t at their work were either sleeping late or pottering in their gardens.

Brighthill town sprawled lazily across the lower slopes of a range of hills called Bread Rise. The town itself was high up, and there was pretty much nowhere in the town that didn’t have a good view of the surrounding country.

Number 4, Creek Road had one of the best views Alaria had ever seen since it was up at the top of the town. It was also very much on the outskirts. That relative isolation, as well as the view, was one of the reasons she’d been so keen to buy it.

“It’s a beautiful little house up there,” Mia said, and Alaria realized that she’d lapsed into silence, as was often her habit.

“I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it,” Alaria replied.

Mia nodded. “I can understand that. I’d live up there myself in a heartbeat if I had the chance. But that kind of place is not for me, not on the money I make.”

Something seemed off about that. It seemed a strange comment to make to someone who’d just bought a house, even for a person as committed to informality as Mia was. There was something here that Alaria didn’t understand.

“The property business isn’t well paid?” she hedged.

“The property business?” Mia snorted. “Oh, yes, the property business is very well paid, if you can get into it. The only problem is that I’m not.”

“Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding something, but you’ve just got me the key to my new home from the property agent’s office. And you’re not in the property business?”

Mia cackled. There was no other word for it. The sound might have irked Alaria if it had come from anyone else, but from this young woman, it was somehow alluring. Alaria couldn’t resist the smile that tugged at her lips as she waited for Mia to catch her breath enough to speak.

“Yes, I see how that looks,” Mia said. “That’s a fair assumption. No, as it happens I’m not in the property business, I’m in the helping Grenko eat business, and that doesn’t pay nearly as well as selling houses.”

Alaria was no less baffled than she had been a moment before.

“It’s like this,” Mia said, taking pity on Alaria’s obvious confusion. “My aunt and uncle own a food and supplies store in Richvale, the village a little south of Brighthill. Look down there, you can see my village from here.”

She pointed, and Alaria looked. Brighthill town rolled away down the slope below them, petering out into glowing fields of purple and yellow crops with little rivers and belts of shining light beam trees in between. The land rose and fell, and the road twisted along between the fields and trees until it reached another settlement, a much smaller one, tucked between the fields a mile or two from the edge of Brighthill.

“Grenko needs his cherezio, otherwise he can’t do anything,” Mia said. “My family’s shop supplies it to him. That’s why I have a key to the property office, so I can let myself in and put the cherezio on the stand for him.”

The cherezio, and what exactly Grenko might be, was another mystery, but at least Alaria now understood how Mia fitted in. That would do for now.

“So you’re nothing to do with Brighthill Property at all?” Alaria said.

“Nope.” Mia grinned. “I just supply Grenko with his food.”

“But you’re coming up here to see me into my new place?”

“Yep.” Mia nodded. “Like I said before, it’s good luck to have company when you go to a new house.”

Alaria was touched. She smiled at the young woman beside her. Mia didn’t have to do any of this. It was such a simple, friendly act. Alaria wasn’t used to such things in the world she came from.

“I feel like I’m having good luck,” Alaria said. Mia glanced at her, smiled, and ducked her head, not meeting Alaria’s eyes.

“There’s your new place,” Mia said, pointing. “Let’s go and check it out.”

Chapter

Three

The sun was becoming relentless as Alaria stood and looked at her new home. Number 4, Creek Road was a rambling homestead, a small group of buildings corralled within a lichen-blotched wall of red stone.

At the center of the group of buildings stood a big, two-story stone cottage with a sloping roof of red terracotta tiles. The walls were thick and built of the same red stone as the outer wall and similarly blotched with lichen, though in a much better state of repair.

Several smaller outhouses could just be seen further back from the road, behind the house. The whole homestead was shaded by many large, mature jengberry trees that grew throughout the grounds, their glossy purple leaves making a gentle hissing sound as the warm wind moved through them.

The clean, sharp smell of the trees’ leaves suffused the air. The sound of the wind in the trees mixed with the sound of the waters of Willowman’s Creek, the little river that ran along this edge of town, and partly ran through the grounds of Alaria’s new property.

Off to the right of the main group of buildings, there was a smaller, more modern structure that faced straight onto the road. This little building was very small and made of wooden planks rather than stone, similar in style to Brighthill Property’s offices, and the other commercial buildings down in the center of town.

The door to this building was closed, and there were heavy shutters over the single window. Above the door, a darker rectangle of wood showed where there had been a sign blocking the sunlight that had bleached the rest of the building. The punch holes where the sign had been fixed in place could be seen as well, but the sign itself was gone.

Alaria nodded to herself, enjoying the first look at the homestead now that it was truly hers. She’d seen it yesterday, of course, in the company of a nervous young man from Brighthill Property who’d showed her around, and then had taken her back to the office to sign the deeds. When she’d calmly proposed to pay the full price of the property in gold on the spot, the little fellow had nearly died of shock, but he’d managed to hold it together long enough to take her payment with as much gravitas as he could muster.

There had been a witness to the transaction, thankfully; an old golem with an eyepatch who’d been sitting outside in the sun chewing beschel and gazing over a day-old bulletin scroll. Alaria had called the golem in and made him witness the transaction and sign the receipt.

The golem might not have been the most reliable witness in the world, but the young fellow had never seen so much money in one place in his life before. If he decided to abscond with the gold, she didn’t want any questions over whether the transaction had taken place or not. She had her deeds and her receipt, signed and witnessed, and that was where the matter ended.

Beside her, a flash of movement drew her thoughts back to the present. Mia was pulling her blue and yellow scarf up to cover her head and the back of her neck.

“It’s going to be another hot one today,” she said quietly.

Alaria glanced around. Mia was right, it was going to be another hot one.

The sun was high in a deep blue sky, and the little town was beginning to bake. The heat haze distorted the view of the red terracotta tiles of the town roofs below. Further off, it turned the farmlands into a shimmering mirage of color.

Alaria experienced an unexpected shift in perspective. Here she stood, in boiled leather armor, heavy boots, gloves, and a traveling robe over all, bareheaded with the sun beating down on her head and neck, and barely noticing it. This was not the normal way of things for other people.

People in Brighthill didn’t experience the heat in the same way Alaria did—of course, they didn’t. Alaria looked again and saw that Mia was making an effort to stand straight and tall, but that in truth the heat was beginning to make her wilt like a flower in dry earth.

“Come inside,” Alaria said decisively. “You’re right—it’s turning hot, and we’ve had a long climb uphill. Let’s get under the shade of those trees and get some shelter from the sun.”

Mia’s relief was evident in her face, though she tried to conceal it with a carefree smile. Alaria could have kicked herself. She was so in the habit of treating everyone around her as if they were tough, well-equipped adventurers that she hadn’t given any thought to the needs of this young townswoman, even though Mia had been kind enough to walk up here with her.

“Come,” Alaria said. She marched forward, jingling the keys in her hand on their heavy iron ring.

The first key was a crude, black iron affair. As she slipped it into the keyhole of the tall wrought-iron gate, she felt something. She paused for a moment, looking keenly at the key and listening to the sound it made as she turned it in the lock.

Yes, definitely a trace of an old enchantment on the key. Nothing recent, nothing even close to recent. She would probably not even be able to tell what the spell had been meant to do, but it was still something to know that at some point, someone had enchanted the key to this outer gate.

“Interesting,” she muttered.

“Something about the key?” Mia asked.

“Uh, yes.” Alaria hadn’t meant to speak her thoughts out loud. “Nothing important though. Let’s go inside.”

They got under the shade of the jengberry trees as they approached the house, the iron gate clanging closed behind them. Here on the grounds, things were less oppressively hot.

There was a winding path leading from the gate to the house, but on either side of the path the grass had been untouched for at least a season, and it had grown tall and full and thick, swaying in the wind.

Gold and silver butterflies flicked here and there through the tops of the grasses, leaving little sparkling trails of light in their wakes. Bees the size of Alaria’s thumb hummed slowly between the bright wildflowers scattered throughout the thick grass.

It was still warm, but moisture permeated the air here, kept from evaporating by the shade of the trees. The sound of the creek was nearer now, and the noise mixed with the chirring of insects from the woods beyond the creek.

Mia pushed her scarf back from her head and mopped the moisture from her brow with it.

“Phew,” she said, smiling up at Alaria. “That’s better. You don’t seem to feel the heat so much, Alaria.”

“I guess not,” Alaria said with a small smile. “Shall we go into the house first, or would you rather have a look at the grounds?”

Mia gave her a quizzical look. “It’s your place. What do you want to do?”

“The grounds. I’d like to have a closer look at that creek we can hear.”

They rambled through the grass-grown grounds together, keeping to the shade of the trees and enjoying the dappled coolness of the leaves shade and the keen smell of the trees. Though it was true that Alaria didn’t suffer as much in the heat as other people, she could still feel it, and she still enjoyed the relief of the shade.

The house was big; not enormous, but big enough to give plenty of room to spread out in. The grounds, too, were generous but not huge; big enough to do something with, but not so big that they’d be hard to maintain.

The pair explored the outbuildings, though Alaria didn’t bother opening them all up—each was locked with one of the keys she held on her keychain and it would have been a tedious job working out which key was for which outhouse. That would be a job for another time.

“Over here,” Mia said, “here’s the creek.”

At the back of the grounds, facing the woods that covered the top of Bread Rise ridge, the red stone wall was lower, and in parts it had completely crumbled, leaving big gaps through which the thick undergrowth of the woods beyond was beginning to encroach.

Through one of these gaps, a fast, clear stream rushed along a stone-lined channel. The water was deep enough to sit down in, and it was fast, though the channel was relatively narrow. The bank had been built up and reinforced with stone, with places where steps led down to the water and flat stones had been laid to sit upon. The creek ran through the garden for a distance of ten yards, curving gently and then vanishing out through a low arch in the stone wall.

On the other side of the creek, a corner of the grounds was entirely enclosed between the creek and the outer wall. It looked as if there might have once been a little bridge crossing the water at some time, but it was long gone. On the other side of the water, Alaria spotted a stone bench, nearly completely hidden in the tall grass.

Mia cried out in delight at the sight of the water, and to Alaria’s surprise she kicked off her sandals and jogged across the space between them and the creek. Alaria followed more slowly, impressed by the young woman’s abandon and enjoying her simple pleasure in the sight of the water.

When Alaria reached the water’s edge, Mia was sitting on the bank, her loose-fitting red trousers hiked up around her knees and her small feet and slender calves plunged into the clear water. A tall jengberry tree, growing near the bank, cast its dappled shade across Mia and the water.

“It’s lovely,” Mia said. “Join me?”

The water did look inviting. Alaria glanced around. Again, she dropped her left hand to rest on the hilt of her blade and found it wasn’t there.

Curse it, she thought. Can’t you get away from thinking there’s always going to be some kind of threat? This is a safe place. You’re not here to kill monsters or root out a wytch sect. Relax, for once.

“I don’t think I’ve ever just sat and bathed my feet in a stream,” Alaria said. She hadn’t meant to say it, it just came out, and she felt as surprised as Mia looked.

“You’re an interesting one, you know that?” Mia said quietly as Alaria sat down by the creek and started unlacing her heavy boots.

“Oh yes? How so?”

Mia snorted with laughter. “How so? Come on, you show up in a small town buying expensive property with gold, in full. You don’t feel the warmth of the sun despite your heavy clothes, you say you’ve never bathed your feet in a stream, and if that wasn’t enough, you just happen to sprout helpful tentacles now and again. I think that counts as interesting, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Alaria said. “Perhaps less so where I come from than where you come from. I think you’re the interesting one.”

“What, a girl from a small town with no experience of the world, no job, and no prospects beyond supplying cherezio to a grumpy glimmertoad? I find that hard to believe.” She splashed her feet against the water, causing clouds of some sort of light gray substance to form near the surface for a moment then dissipate in the flowing stream.

Alaria was surprised at the bitterness in Mia’s voice. “Truly. I do think you’re interesting, maybe because I’ve never really known anyone like you before. The only people I’ve ever spent time with were… Well, people like me.”

“And just who exactly are people like you?” Mia said, squinting up at Alaria as the older woman worked at unlacing and unstrapping her boots.

“Adventurers,” Alaria said simply. “Monster hunters, daemon slayers, dragon tamers. Warriors of Melyor’s light. You know.”

“Not really!” Mia squeaked, then splashed her feet some more and cackled. “You’re an adventurer?”

“I am… I was… an adventurer. I’ve decided to make a change.”

“What, you’re retiring?”

Alaria shook her head. “Not exactly,” she said with a smile, “but I want to do something new. I don’t want adventuring to be the only thing I do anymore. I’ve had enough of the road; I want to settle in one place, make a home for myself.”

“In Brighthill?” Mia’s disbelief was clear in her tone.

“That’s right.” Alaria felt slightly annoyed at Mia’s disbelief, for a reason she couldn’t quite pin down. Perhaps, she thought, it’s because you’re struggling to believe it as much as she is.

Alaria’s boots were very well made. They were hard leather on the outside, reinforced with strips of enchanted metal that made them both flexible and hardwearing, but also reduced their weight for the wearer. The soles were thick leather, studded with iron nails. The boots came halfway up Alaria’s calves and laced up the front with a heavy black cord. It took a bit of time to take them off, but now she set them to one side.

Her socks were also heavy-duty, hard-wearing, and of the very best quality. They were black wool, triple layered, with an inner lining of gloomsprite skin enchanted for water resistance.

All the enchantments were done by Alaria herself, of course, and the boots and socks—like most of her other gear—were the work of her own hands.

“That’s some scar on your leg,” Mia said in a small voice as Alaria rolled up her green trousers.

Alaria sat down on the bank beside Mia and plunged her feet into the stream. The water was deliciously cool, a wonderful sensation after having been wrapped up in heavy adventurer’s gear all morning. The strange light gray clouds appeared for a moment in the water around her feet as she plunged them in.

“The work of the matriarch of a cursed crone coven,” Alaria said, pointing to the scar, high up on her left calf. “That was years ago.” Then she chuckled. “It was bad, but you should have seen the other girl.”

Mia laughed, amazed, and Alaria found a smile growing on her lips again. She enjoyed how impressed Mia was with her. She couldn’t define what it was, but there was something pleasant about having this attractive, interested young woman looking up at her with those wide, dark eyes.

Something very new.

“You really are an adventurer,” Mia breathed.

“All my days,” Alaria confirmed. “Started learning to fight when I was just a young girl. I showed a talent for it, and where I came from… Well, let’s just say that there were plenty of opportunities to build that talent. I got a place in a swordmaster’s school, learned fast, joined an adventurer’s guild, and started setting out on quests. I’ve been pretty much on the road ever since.”

“You mean you’ve never settled down? Never done anything except traveling and adventuring?”

Alaria shrugged. “I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve stopped at times to follow up that learning. I spent a year with a leatherworker, learning her craft. I spent another year with a dwarven blacksmith and armsmaster down in the black mountain country. I’ve spent time learning from enchanters, pyromancers, elemental mages, and… others. But I never settled for more than a year or so. I always wanted to learn my skills and then take them straight out onto the road, take them out to fight new foes. I feel different now.”

“Why?” Mia asked.

Alaria splashed her feet in the water. She looked up at the blue sky through the dappled haze of the jengberry trees. She listened to the sound of the stream, the sleepy chirring of the insects, and the soft, warm wind moving the leaves and hissing in the long grass.

“This is nice.” She sighed, leaning back and lying down on the grass. “I guess that’ll have to be a good enough reason for now.”

Chapter

Four

In the top room of the house, Alaria found a mirror. It was not a very good mirror, nor a very clean mirror, but it was tall enough to show her a reflection of herself in the dim light from the grubby window.

She stared at the reflection, her attention caught by the strangeness of the sensation—it felt like a long time since she’d looked at herself in a mirror. The reflection showed her a tall woman, well-built, with muscled shoulders and arms, broad hips, and long legs made for charging or standing her ground, but never for running away.

She smiled, and the reflection smiled back at her. Full lips, big blue eyes under a mop of shoulder-length, red-gold hair. Good teeth—another rarity with the kinds of people she was used to associating with.

Alaria struck a pose, her hands going to her waist again, though this time she remembered that her sword wasn’t there. She stuck her shoulders back and her chest out. She had good breasts, too, though you couldn’t see it under her green robe and leather armor. That was something she’d always enjoyed about her body, but still, she always made sure that her clothing and armor held them firmly in place and didn’t show them off.

Good breasts were great, but it didn’t help to have them swinging around when it came to dealing the death blow to a primordial kraken or a monstrous mushroom-maddened mountain boss troll.

Some adventurers liked to show off their breasts to the world with low-cut tunics or even metal armor that displayed their generous cleavage. That wasn’t Alaria’s way. Those girls rarely made it past the first few levels. They liked the idea of fighting. They thought adventuring was sexy, fun, and impressive. Then things got ugly and they dropped out, choosing some safer, more prosaic profession instead.

Not Alaria.

She knew from the start that her femininity was neither an advantage nor a hindrance in her chosen path. She had trained herself to fight and to win. That was all.

She did look good, though, she thought as she watched the dusty reflection in the mirror. There was a strength to her, a power that was more than just the physical power in her arms and shoulders. A confidence that came from the things she’d done, the enemies she’d fought and defeated, the adventures that she’d come through alive.

The power she’d gained.

With one gloved hand, she reached up and pushed her golden hair back from her brow. She tucked a bit of it behind her ear, then realized that the action was much like what Mia had done back in the property sales office.

Why did that memory stick out in her mind so strongly? It gave her a strange feeling, one she didn’t recognize. Not unpleasant, just new.

Lots of new things happening now, she thought.

“Alaria?” Mia called up through the hatchway to the little attic room. “You up there?”

“Yeah,” Alaria called down through the entrance hatch. “I’m here. I’m coming down.”

She heard the ladder creak and turned to see Mia’s dark eyes blinking in the gloom of the attic room. “Pooh, it smells of dust up here,” Mia said. “You find anything interesting?”

“Not really,” Alaria said. “What about you?”

“The stove in the kitchen is good, and there’s a nice dining table, but the furniture in the living room is very bad, and the bedroom is no better. Time’s getting on, what are you going to do about sleeping tonight?”

“I’ll work something out,” Alaria said, realizing she hadn’t thought about it until now. “Whatever I do, I guarantee it won’t be as bad as some of the places I’ve slept over the years.”

She thought about it for a moment. “I have my camping gear back at the inn, and I’ll need to go back there anyway before nightfall. I could throw a sleeping mat down in front of the fire in the living room here, or even camp out in the garden, that could be nice. Or I could stay at the inn again, but that seems a bit silly since I have the whole house here. Do you know where I can buy good furniture?”

“Not here in Brighthill,” Mia said. “You need to go out to Hopeford for that kind of thing.”

“Hopeford. Yeah, I passed through there on my way out here. Quite a big city, all pink and white stone, right on the river. About a day’s ride from Brighthill, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. You’ll find what you’re looking for there, I don’t doubt.”

“Do you know where to go?”

“Depends,” Mia said. “You’re not short of coin, are you? So probably Grendast. He’s the best furniture maker in the city, no doubt about that. You’ll get good chairs, a sofa, all that kind of thing.”

“And a good big bed,” Alaria added. “I want a bed with a good mattress and plenty of room!”

Alaria left the attic, scooting down the ladder and landing with a thump on the wooden boards of the hallway floor. Mia was oddly looking at her.

“What?” Alaria asked.

“Oh, uh… nothing,” Mia said, then changed her mind. “Just… you said you wanted a nice big bed with plenty of room?”

“That’s right. When you’ve been sleeping in camps and at inns for as long as I have, you start to dream of having some comfort and room to stretch out. Now I have a place of my own, I figure I want a nice big bed and a good mattress. Come on, let’s go look at the bedroom again.”

The house had two stories and a set of small attic rooms under the sloped roof. The attic rooms would get too hot in the day and too cold at night to be good for more than storage, but the first floor was cooled by the thick stone walls and the wooden shutters over the windows, and it was here that the generous master bedroom could be found.

The two smaller rooms on the first floor could be used as spare bedrooms, or perhaps as a study or a library, but Alaria was pleased with the size and the feel of the main bedroom.

“So,” Mia said hesitantly as she followed Alaria into the bedroom, “you’re not wanting a big bed because you’re expecting… company?” She croaked a little on the last word, and Alaria turned her head to look at her.

“Company? What, company in bed?”

“Yeah,” Mia said a bit hoarsely. “You know, like a husband or… you’re not married?”

Alaria laughed. So that was what Mia was getting at. “A husband? No, I never did find a use for one of those. Not really my area, I’m afraid.”

“No?” Mia squeaked.

“Never found the time,” Alaria said, dismissively. “Anyway, I was always more interested in fighting monsters. What use is a husband for that? Can’t hit a monster over the head with a husband, can you? Better to have a sword or an axe for that.”

For some reason, the subject made Alaria uncomfortable, but Mia seemed intensely interested in the idea. Alaria was making a joke of it, but in truth, the fact that she’d never clicked romantically with any of the men she’d come across in her travels irked her. She’d always felt that she should be interested, but she just wasn’t.

Mia laughed. “I suppose not. I… ow!”

Alaria turned fast, hearing her new friend’s cry of pain. All thoughts of her lack of marriage fled, and she was happy to let them go. Instinct made her scan the area for threats, a heartbeat before the thought that told her how ridiculous that was.

Mia was hopping, one foot in the air, across the floor toward the remains of the old bed. This was a broken-down wooden construction that must once have been very fine, but was now good for little more than firewood. Still, it had the remains of a greasy, straw-filled mattress on the frame, and Mia seemed in need of somewhere to sit down.

“Dammit,” Mia hissed through clenched teeth as she wobbled over to the bed frame and sat down on the edge. “I should have followed your example and put my sandals back on.”

“You can’t rely on the state of old floors in a building like this,” Alaria said as Mia sat on the creaking bed frame. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know. It’s my foot. It hurts like crazy.”

“Here, let me see.”

She clomped over to the bed in her big boots and knelt on one knee in front of Mia. Mia lifted her right foot and braced it on her left knee, leaning over to look. She’d left her sandals by the creek, preferring to pad about barefoot in the cool interior of the stone house. Alaria had advised against that but hadn’t pushed the point. In the moment, she’d felt that she was again being overcautious, and letting her adventurer’s instincts take over when she should learn to relax.

As it turned out, this time she had been right.

“Oh, no!” Mia said with a note of panic in her voice as she looked at the injury. Her eyes went wide, and her skin paled.

A deep, ragged cut about an inch and a half long ran across the soft part of the ball of her foot. It was an ugly injury, and as Alaria looked at it, a thick drop of dark blood pooled at the edge of the cut and dripped to the floor, followed quickly by another, and then another.

Alaria glanced up at Mia’s face. The girl was shocked by the injury, the pain, and the sight of blood. She was as pale as if she was about to pass out.

Probably hardly ever seen blood before, Alaria reminded herself. Not her own, nor anyone else’s.

“Easy,” she said aloud. “You’re okay, this is a problem we can solve.”

“It is?” Mia asked desperately.

“Of course,” Alaria said. “Trust me.”

From where she knelt, she looked up at Mia and smiled at her. She was struck very suddenly by Mia’s scent. She smelled good, like pine sap in the hot sun. Her clothes smelled freshly laundered, and Alaria was very aware of the closeness to her. It gave her a strange sensation in her chest. What was that?

She dismissed it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t relevant to the crisis of the moment.

“I’m going to touch your foot, okay?” she said.

Mia gave a small, tight nod. Her skin was very soft and warm under Alaria’s hands, and Alaria was keenly aware that in comparison, the skin of her own hands was calloused and toughened by years of sword drills.

“I’ve got you,” she said. “I’m going to need you to do something for me so that together we can fix this.”

“It really hurts,” Mia said.

“I know, but I need you to focus on me, not on the pain. Trust me, I know what I’m doing here, but I need your collaboration, okay?”

“Okay,” Mia said. Tears were coming from her eyes now, rolling down her cheeks. Her mouth quivered, but her eyes were fixed on Alaria.

“Alright,” Alaria said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to breathe together. You understand? We’re going to breathe in sync together, nice and steady. Like this…”

She breathed in, then out again with a steady rhythm, then in, then out. By the third breath, Mia was breathing in time with her, and by the fourth, she had calmed down. Alaria could feel the tension in the younger woman easing, and with it, she felt the magical connection between them lock into place.

Relief bubbled through her. That was what she needed.

“Good,” Alaria said quietly. “Now, this is going to hurt a bit, but stay with me, keep breathing in rhythm, and it’ll be over in a moment.

“Okay,” Mia said quietly.

Alaria held Mia’s foot in both her hands, keeping her breathing steady, for Mia to follow and looked into the wound. She activated her Healer’s Sight ability, and saw that, as she had suspected, this was more to the injury than just the cut. In the wound, a splinter of wood from the ragged edge of a floorboard had lodged under the skin. To Alaria’s vision, for the moment that the Healer’s Sight spell lasted, the splinter glowed with a greenish light.

This was the main risk when inexperienced healers got over-enthusiastic. You could heal a wound over, but if there was something lodged in the wound, healing over it could do more harm than good. That was why Healer’s Sight was the most important part of a healer’s spellset, but it was less interesting and harder to master than the more showy wound-knitting spells, so it was too often overlooked by novices, with disastrous consequences.

She raised her right hand off Mia’s foot, keeping her grip on the younger woman’s ankle with her left hand.

Then something happened that she was not expecting.

A pleasurable tingling sensation ran down both Alaria’s arms, starting at her shoulders and running through the insides of her arms to her wrists. Two tentacles manifested, appearing out of the skin at her wrists and slithering out from her sleeves.

Mia made a little sound of surprise that was almost a laugh.

Alaria hadn’t been expecting the tentacles, but she had to admit they would be helpful.

“Do you mind them touching you?” she asked.

“No,” Mia said immediately, her voice breathy and deeper than it had been a moment before.

Alaria took control of the tentacles and used them to wrap Mia’s foot and hold it firmly in place. As the firm grip of the tentacles slid across the skin of her bare foot, Mia gasped, then made an effort to make her breathing regular again.

“These tentacles are useful,” Alaria admitted. She smiled up at Mia, who was watching her intently, her lips parted and her eyes shining.

“Now, keep your breathing nice and steady for me,” Alaria said. “We’re going to do it.”

Alaria waited and counted the three in her head. When she was aware that Mia had brought her breath back into sync with Alaria’s own, Alaria performed two spells in quick succession: Dull Pain, then Draw Poison.

She had to move quickly with these, because neither of them lasted very long, and a lot of the power of this kind of magic relied on the part played by the person being healed. That was one of the reasons why healing magic was so difficult.

It wasn’t just a case of firing off a spell and the injury being healed—you could do that with a potion, but not with a spell. When it came to healing magic, the symbiosis between healer and healed was the most important factor in the duration and effectiveness of the necessary spells.

Mia didn’t know that. Few civilians did.

Even the most brutal and savage damage-dealing member of an adventurer team had the rudimentary synchronization training that they’d use if they ended up needing to be healed with magic in the heat of combat, but with Mia, the synchronized breathing was the only thing that kept the spell moving. When it started to hurt, Alaria couldn’t rely on Mia to keep her breath in play for long.

Mia gasped as the Dull Pain spell took effect, a blur of orange light flashing around Alaria’s hands as she cast the spell, the light then absorbing into the flesh of Mia’s foot. Next, Draw Poison had a reddish hue, and it worked immediately, pulling the wood splinter from the cut in a spray of dark blood and dropping it into Alaria’s outstretched hand.

She glanced at Mia, who was staring down at her with eyes like a pair of twin full moons.

“Keep the breath going,” Alaria said, and Mia nodded. They took one more big synchronized breath together, and then Alaria cast Heal.

Mia threw her head back and cried out at the shock of the sensation as yellow light poured through the wound. Blood spouted from the wound for a moment, soaking Alaria’s robe, then the cut knitted together and vanished as if it had never been.

Mia groaned and then flopped back on the musty bed, panting. Alaria knew the sensation well herself. Having a wound healed wasn’t exactly pleasurable, but it was deeply satisfying.

The wound was gone without a trace. There wasn’t even a mark on the flesh that had been healed.

Alaria let Mia’s healed foot carefully down to the ground and looked at the bloodstain on the floor. She was very glad she’d been able to heal the injury, and fast. Alaria hadn’t said so to Mia, and she probably wouldn’t, she decided, but she’d seen wounds like that fester if not treated fast, with terrible consequences.

“Hey,” she said, standing up and leaning over to look at Mia lying on the bed. “That mattress is nasty, come on, let’s get you some air.”

Mia laughed. She was lying with her arms spread out on the bed, her eyes closed, a faint sheen of sweat on her forehead. She opened her eyes and held out her hand, and before Alaria could do anything about it, a tentacle had reached out and gripped Mia’s hand, helping her to stand.

“Healed by a tentacle mage,” Mia said, still holding the tentacle, and putting her weight gingerly on the foot that had been injured a moment before. “Now there’s something I didn’t expect to happen to me today.”

Chapter

Five

The sun shone down on the homestead, casting deep shadows from the trees and the house onto the grounds. Alaria and Mia sat out back, where a low wooden porch stuck out from the back door leading from the kitchen and the pantry. This side of the house faced northwest and was continually shaded by the trees, so it was significantly cooler than the front of the house.

There were a couple of ramshackle old chairs out there, but they didn’t look safe to sit on. Instead, the two women sat with their feet hanging off the edge of the porch. Mia had taken her sandals off again and laid them on the wooden floor of the porch next to her. The long grass brushed her bare feet.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Mia asked.

“Do what?” Alaria said.

“What do you think?” Mia laughed. “The magic. The healing spell.”

“Oh, the healing spell…” Alaria smiled, remembering Deerhorn Mountain, Grandmaster Hellebore’s castle, and the kindly but exacting old healing master who had taught her.

“I learned to do that piece of magic in a place called Daithun. There’s a castle there, a fortress where healing magic is practiced and taught. It’s called the Castle of the Ancient Heart. It’s the center of the practice of healing magic, the place you go to if you want to learn that kind of magic from those who know it best.”

“But that’s not the only magic you know?” Mia asked.

Alaria looked at her. She was surprised for a moment, but then she had to remind herself that this girl didn’t know anything about adventuring, except to think that it was exciting.

She smiled. “I know lots of magic,” she confirmed. “Not just the healing set.”

“What else can you do?” Mia’s voice was dripping with curiosity.

Alaria shrugged. “There’s a basic set of elemental combat skills that are pretty much required for all adventurers. They’re just what you’d expect, fire, earth, water, air, stone, metal, and spirit. Then there are the enchanting magics—those are some of my favorites. I’ve worked hard to get good at those, and most of my gear has some enchantment or other, all by my own hand. There’s a lot more range in enchantment, you see. The combat spells are a hundred variations on blasting the enemy in the face with whatever element you’re using, but enchantment, well, you can get subtle with that.”

Mia’s eyes were wide as she looked up and down Alaria’s clothes. “Your clothes are enchanted?”

Alaria nodded. She kicked her feet up, showing her boots.

“These boots are enchanted, for a start,” she said. “And my socks, too.”

“What do they do?” Mia said breathlessly.

“The enchantment in the boots makes them feel lighter than they are, and the socks have an enchanted lining that makes them waterproof.”

“Waterproof socks? That’s it? Your enchanted clothing is waterproof socks?” Mia seemed disappointed.

Alaria threw back her head and laughed. “You don’t think that’s impressive enough? It’s easy to see you’ve never had to tramp through the Forsaken Swamps, girl. I can tell you, half an hour there in those sandals of yours and you’d be very glad of enchanted waterproof socks.”

Mia laughed too. “Sorry. That was mean. I thought you were going to say something really awesome, that’s all.”

“It is awesome!” Alaria insisted. Then she grinned, seeing Mia’s sardonic look. She was feeling less burdened by care and by the past than she had been earlier in the day. It was something about having done the successful healing magic. That was always a thrill, and it made her feel confident and mischievous.

And perhaps you’re just relaxing a bit, at last, she thought. There would be nothing wrong with that.

“How about this,” she said in a challenging voice, hopping off the porch and standing in the tall grass of the overgrown garden, facing Mia. “If you want to see something enchanted that’s really awesome, I’ll show you, but you have to help me out to make it work.”

“Oh, okay!” Mia said. “I’d love to see. What are you going to show me?”

For an answer, Alaria swiftly unclipped the belt of her green robe, then reached up and undid the brooch that held it at her throat. She reached behind herself and loosed the knot at the back of her neck, then lifted the robe and smoothly pulled it over her head.

“Gbvkh!” Mia croaked. The noise was halfway between a squeal and a groan, and her hands flew to her mouth.

Alaria stood in the grass, her robe in her hand, dressed now in her leather armor.

“Pardon?” Alaria asked.

Mia seemed befuddled, and she had gone red in the face, but as Alaria casually hung her robe over the porch banister, Mia got ahold of herself.

“Uh, nothing,” Mia said. “Just, er, something in my throat.”

“Oh, right,” Alaria said. “Well, this armor is enchanted, and it’s what you might call awesome. Here, let’s see now…”

She cast around the base of the porch until she found what she was looking for—a small stone just big enough to fit in her fist.

“Here,” she said and tossed it to Mia, who caught it neatly in both hands. “Now, throw that at me, aiming for the body rather than the face, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, but I couldn’t!” Mia said.

“Go on,” Alaria urged. “Honestly, it’ll be fine. Come on, I can’t show you this unless you help me out.”

“Okay then,” Mia said, a little doubtfully. Then her eyes narrowed, and she seemed to get on board with the game. “Okay,” she said, more confidently this time. She hefted the stone, judged the distance, and then threw.

The Flaming Defense enchantment in Alaria’s leather chest plate did exactly what it was supposed to do. Before the stone could reach Alaria, a searing sheet of red flame leaped up in front of her, appearing out of nowhere with a hiss and a crackle. The stone hit the barrier, there was a loud crack, and then it flew off in a different direction as if it had been hit with a bat.

The flash of flame was gone in an instant, but before Alaria or Mia could react, there was a tinkling of glass from somewhere nearby, followed by a shout of dismay.

“Oops,” Alaria chuckled, her sense of mischief no less active than it had been a moment before. The cry of dismay was followed up by a stream of unintelligible angry shouting, and the sound of somebody approaching at speed through the overgrown grass.

“Hey, hey you,” the shouting resolved into comprehensible words as a short, broad, angry-looking figure strode into view. “What d’you think you’re doing up here, breaking windows and causing a fuss?”

The newcomer was a little creature, no more than three feet high, pale-skinned, red-haired, with a flaming red beard. He looked mostly human, but his eyes were an unsettling dark red color, and they twinkled with outrage as he strode up to the two women.

“Well?” he demanded. “What do you have to say for yourself? This is private ground, this is, and… oh, why, but it’s Miss Quell.”

He’d been stopped mid-flow by the sight of Mia, and his face softened from an expression of anger to one of reproving disappointment.

“Oh, why, Miss Mia Quell, I’m surprised at this,” he said, shaking his head. “What’s the meaning of it all? I’d have not thought you capable of this kind of thing. And who’s this? Someone has been leading you astray, have they?”

His expression hardened again, and he glared up at Alaria. He was dressed all in an eye-wateringly bright shade of green, and his outraged, disapproving aspect was so comical that Alaria struggled to keep a straight face.

“You’re a leprechaun?” she asked.

“And you’re a human,” he stated. “And this is Miss Mia Quell, and I’ve just asked you what you mean by breaking my windows and trespassing on private property! Are there any other obvious facts you’d like to review before you answer my question?”

“I’m very sorry if you’ve been inconvenienced,” Alaria said, politely.

“Inconvenienced?” the little man burst out. “Of all the…”

With a theatrical display of effort, he got hold of himself. He closed his eyes for a moment, inhaled a long, long breath, then opened his eyes again. “Please,” he said with an exaggerated air of extreme patience, “do go on.”

“Well, the fact is that I’ve bought the place,” Alaria said. “Mia—Miss Quell, as you call her—was kind enough to come up and show me around. The stone was entirely my fault, though. I was showing off a piece of equipment that I own; it deflects projectiles. I had Mia throw a stone, my armor deflected it, and… well, I’m afraid you’ve seen the result.”

The leprechaun’s manner had changed completely. He stood with his mouth open, a look of horror on his face. “You’ve… you’ve bought the place? This place? The place we’re standing in now?”

Alaria raised her arms and gestured expansively, taking in the whole homestead. “This place right here,” she confirmed.

“Miss Mia?” the leprechaun said hoarsely, looking to Mia for confirmation.

Mia nodded her head.

“Oh,” the leprechaun said and stood as silent as if he’d been turned to stone.

The silence grew uncomfortable.

Alaria looked at Mia. “So, you two know each other?” she asked.

Mia was glaring at the leprechaun with undisguised annoyance. “We do,” she said icily. “This is Mr Timeous Groof.”

The sound of his name jolted the green-clad figure from his reverie.

“Aye,” he said hastily, “aye, that’s me, Timeous Groof, at your serv… I mean, uh, pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”

Alaria raised her eyebrow at him. He’d been about to say, “at your service,” but then thought better of it, and well he might. Leprechauns were members of the faerie folk, and all knew that such people were all too easily trapped into servitude by cunning magic users.

“You don’t need to fear entrapment by me,” Alaria said. “I’m not interested in gaining a leprechaun thrall.”

The little man’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Swear it?”

Alaria nodded. “I swear.”

Suddenly the leprechaun brightened again. “Ah, well, that’s excellent! Very good news! Right, well then. Good.”

He plastered a fixed grin onto his face and stared around at Alaria and Mia, then at the house, then at the grounds. He tapped his black-booted foot and whistled tunelessly through his teeth.

Alaria chuckled. “Why don’t you show me your broken window, then?”

“Hah, ah, no, well, there’s no need for that. It’s, uh, it’s your window now, you see.”

“I don’t see—” Alaria said.

“What Tim is trying to tell you—” Mia began.

“Mr Groof, if you please!” the leprechaun cut in, with a bit of his old outrage coming back again.

“What Mr Groof is trying to tell you,” Mia repeated heavily, “is that he’s been squatting on your property, I guess in one of the outbuildings. Now that you’ve bought the place, he requires your permission before he can leave. Isn’t that right, Timeous?”

“Ah, quite right, quite right!” the leprechaun squealed. “Yes, that’s the truth of it, yes. Can’t leave without the permission of The Owner.”

He sketched a nervous bow toward Alaria. “Unable to leave without your gracious permission, my lady.”

“Don’t call me that,” Alaria growled. If there was one thing she hated, it was being called My Lady by anyone.

Timeous Groof leaped back a pace and squeaked in fear. “Just as you like, just as you like!” he said. “Of course, your wish is my command and suchlike, but now if you wouldn’t mind just kindly granting the permission, and then I’ll be out of your hair quicker than you can say… well, quickly, anyway. Gone, I’ll be gone, fast.”

Alaria looked hard at him. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You want my permission to leave, but you want something else.”

“He wants you to give him permission to leave without telling him that he can’t come back,” Mia said. “He’s a leprechaun, he needs the door left open, so to speak if he wants to be able to come back. If you allow him to leave but don’t tell him to stay away, then he’ll be allowed to come and go as he pleases.”

“I thought that was vampires?” Alaria said, then she snapped her fingers as she remembered. “No, they need to be actively invited in. So, Mr Groof, you don’t need to be invited in, you just need to not be told to stay away. Well, that clarifies things wonderfully.”

“Ahh!” the leprechaun squealed. “No, please don’t banish me! I would much prefer to be able to continue to come and go freely. After all, there’s the stream—so delightful!—and the long grass, and the lovely jengberry trees and their bountiful harvest in the summer!”

“You have all that in the woods, Timeous,” Mia said. “What’s your game? Why were you in here in the first place?”

Timeous suddenly changed from frightened to obstinate and defiant. He crossed his arms, planted his feet, and stuck out his lower lip. “Ain’t telling you,” he said, then closed his mouth tight.

Alaria looked at Mia. Mia rolled her eyes and waved a hand dismissively.

Alaria shrugged.

“Timeous Groof,” she said in a deep voice. “On the condition that you never return within the bounds of these walls without my permission, you may leave, and leave now.”

With a squeal like a scalded cat, Timeous Groof turned and fled at top speed away from the two women. White light and a cloud of golden stars trailed him as he ran, his wail fading as he leaped from the low place in the wall. Then a moment later he reappeared, his angry face bristling at them through the gap in the wall. He glared, stuck his tongue out, then stuck up two fingers at them in a rude gesture.

“To nine hells with both of you,” he yelled, “you’ll never find it without me!”

Quick as lightning, Alaria stooped and picked up another stone. She cast a Pyrotechnic Projectile onto the stone and then lobbed it full force in the direction of the angry, red-bearded face. Timeous squealed and fled as the stone crashed into the wall a few feet from where he’d been, exploding in a mass of flames that quickly dissipated.

“Oh, you need to watch out,” Mia said, staring up in the direction Alaria had thrown the stone. “You need to be careful of fires. It’s so dry up here, even a small spark can start one.”

Alaria smiled. “You don’t need to worry. It’s just an illusion. Not all magic is real—that spell was just a trick. Now, come on, let’s see what this leprechaun was hiding.”

Chapter

Six

Mia was very impressed with Alaria’s display of power. She disliked Timeous the leprechaun intensely, and she had been very pleased to see Alaria getting the better of him. For her part, Alaria was happy that she had learned something new about the world from Mia.

For her part, Alaria had already been becoming more impressed with Mia by the minute, and this incident with the leprechaun had made her more impressed than ever. Mia’s knowledge of the way to deal with him had been very useful. There was nothing like learning something new to make Alaria like a person. Particularly when it came to monsters, Alaria considered herself something of an expert, but there was no denying that her knowledge of the lesser beings - the ones she didn’t expect to have to fight with - was lacking.

Though knowledgeable, Alaria was not jealous of showing off that knowledge to the world. She was always pleased to learn more, and she didn’t care where that knowledge came from. Every piece of knowledge was valuable, and this new understanding of leprechauns was no exception.

They went looking for the outhouse where Timeous had been hiding out

As they headed toward the outhouses, Alaria with the keys in her hand, Mia following along not far behind, it became clear that this wouldn’t be a simple job. Alaria jingled the keys in her hand and then began flipping through them, looking at all the different ones. There were only three that were distinctive, and she knew which locks they opened - the front door, the back door from the kitchen, and the front gate. The rest were all smaller keys, cheaply made and, apparently, all cut from the same sized key blank. They were hard to distinguish from each other.

“These outhouses aren’t particularly securely locked up,” Alaria said, as she looked closely at the lock on the nearest one. “And all these keys are pretty cheap, pretty poor quality. I’d say that the previous owner used the locks for nothing more than keeping animals out, rather than for any serious security. But there’s something odd about this.”

“What?” Mia asked.

“Well, look,” Alaria said, holding up the bundle of keys and then gesturing to the outhouses. “There are only six outhouses, and that one smaller shed over there, but there are at least 20 keys in this bundle.”

She counted quickly, then announced, “This ring has 27 of these little black keys. Now why would there be so many keys for so few locks?”

Mia shrugged, looking baffled. “Why do you think there would be?” she asked.

“The only reason I can think of,” Alaria guessed, “would be to hide the keys that really open locks in among a bunch of duds. Though I have to admit it seems an odd security measure, particularly since the locks are so cheap. A person who wanted their outhouses to be secure would have done better to simply buy better locks.”

She began systematically trying keys in the lock of the first outhouse. “Who owned this place before me?” she asked.

“No idea, I’m afraid,” Mia said. “Does it matter?”

“It didn’t,” Alaria said. “But when I saw that front gate key I realized it does matter. It might matter quite a bit now.”

“Oh really?” Mia asked. “Why’s that?” Before Alaria could answer, Mia said, “The house has been empty for as long as I’ve been coming up here, and that’s a good few years. There used to be a shop in that building out front - the little wooden hut thing – though I never saw it. I’ve heard that the place was owned by a kind of recluse once. Some people used to say the place was haunted by a restless spirit, but I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t?” Alaria asked, surprised. “Why on earth not?”

Mia looked confused. She looked narrowly at Alaria, as if she suspected the older woman was having her on. “Well, that kind of thing is all nonsense, that’s why,” she said firmly. “There’s no such thing as restless spirits in the world. There may have been ghosts in the old days, the days of sagas, but not now.”

Alaria snorted a disbelieving laugh. “You don’t see much of the outside world up here in Hope River Valley, do you? No ghosts in the world? Really?”

“Really,” Mia said. Then she did a double-take and looked hard at Alaria. “Wait a minute, are you saying there are such things as restless ghosts and hauntings in the world? You’re not mocking me?”

“Of course!” Alaria said. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude or patronizing or anything. I wouldn’t want to mock you, and I shouldn’t have laughed. I’m just surprised to find that you haven’t come across the fact of ghosts before. In my adventures, I’ve often come across ghosts that haunt all kinds of places. I’ve freed some of them, too, and had to kill others.”

“You’re making that up!” Mia protested.

“Never,” Alaria said with a grin. “I don’t lie - or at least I try not to, not unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“Ghosts are really a thing?”

“Sure,” Alaria said. “And this old house is a classic place for a haunting.”

“Back up for a minute,” Mia said, frowning. “Why did you start asking about who owned this place? You were going to say why, then we got distracted. You said it had something to do with the gate key?”

Alaria grinned. “That’s right,” she said. “Thanks for the reminder… Ah, look, this key matches this shed.”

While they’d been talking, she’d been testing key after key in the lock of the outhouse. Now, a key she’d tried had clicked in the lock and turned with a rusty grinding sound. The door swung open. She and Mia both looked inside and saw… nothing. Nothing but a faintly damp-smelling darkness.

“There doesn’t seem to be much in here to be worried about security,” Alaria mused.

Without thinking about it, she reached a hand in and conjured Minor Light. A soft glow immediately manifested around her hand, shining out onto the space within and lighting it up so they could both see. It looked as if she was holding a candle, but there was no visible source for the light except Alaria’s outstretched hand.

“Woah!” Mia exclaimed.

Alaria was confused. She peered more closely into the shed.

“What?” she asked. “I’m not seeing anything, just a rusty garden fork and a few rags.”

“Not that,” Mia squeaked. “That!”

“What??” Alaria demanded, uncomprehending.

“The.. The… The light!” Mia eventually got the words out and pointed at the glowing spell around Alaria’s hand.

Alaria laughed, suddenly understanding. “Oh, gods, this?” she said. “Oh, this is nothing.”

“Nothing?” Mia squealed. “It’s not nothing, Alaria, it’s amazing! You made a light with your hand, just like that! It’s fantastic!”

Alaria shrugged, feeling bashful at Mia’s total admiration. “I’m glad you like it, but it’s really not that big a deal. It’s just magic. The spell that I threw at Timeous is much harder. This is really basic stuff.”

“Basic,” Mia breathed, shaking her head. Then she laughed. “I can tell you this, Alaria. You may think we’ve not seen much of the world in the Hope River valley because we don’t know about ghosts and hauntings, but you’re the one without much experience of people if you think that little trick there counts as no big deal. That’s awesome!”

Alaria chuckled. “I’m glad you think so,” she said. “I guess you’re right, too, and it’s a valuable lesson to me not to forget the importance of other people’s perspectives. You’re right, I guess I’ve gotten a bit too used to my ways over the years. My knowledge of the world is limited, just in different ways.”

She smiled as she snuffed out the light of the spell. “I’m glad you’re comfortable with seeing my magic, Mia,” she said. “Not everyone would be so accepting of it.”

“I know,” Mia said with a smile. “But I am. You can trust me on that.”

Alaria took a stub of wax pencil from her pocket. With this, she marked a number 1 on the key, and wrote the same character on the wooden door, beside the lock.

“Now I won’t forget which key goes with which lock,” she said. “Come on, let’s try the others. I want to find which shed Timeous Groof was messing around in, I don’t want to get distracted, but it’s going to be valuable to check out what’s in the sheds, if anything.”

“Speaking of getting distracted,” Mia said with a cheeky smile, “what about the gate key? Why was it important?”

Alaria laughed. “You wanted to know why I asked about the previous tenant of the house,” she said. “Of course. Well, take a look at this key.”

She shuffled the bundle of keys on the keychain and held up the gate key, letting Mia see it.

Mia shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t see anything different about it,” she said. “Except for its size, of course. It’s so much larger than the others, and it’s a different shape but… Well, I don’t see any magic on it, if that’s what you mean.”

“I’d not expect you to,” Alaria said. “But I wondered if maybe…”

She trailed off. She didn’t say so, but a sudden secret flicker of hope had flared up for a moment that Mia might see a trace of the magic in the key. That was unexpected. Mia’s admiration of Alaria’s magic was immense, and while on one level it was satisfying to feel, on another level it made Alaria feel lonely. It made a gulf between the two of them, where Alaria had something that set her very much apart from Mia. She didn’t want a gulf between them, she realized. In a flash of insight, she saw that she wanted to be close to Mia, not separated by some strange, deep chasm of magic that they didn’t share.

The thoughts passed through Alaria’s head in the blink of an eye. She smiled, pulling her thoughts back to the question at hand.

“Anyway,” she said, “this is an enchanted key. In my days of training, I learned not only how to do magic, but also how to detect it. I can see it, and I can feel it, and unless the trace is very weak, I can tell what kind of magic it is that I’m looking at.”

Mia’s eyebrows went up. “That’s impressive,” she said. “So you’re saying that you can see something on this key? Some kind of magic?”

Mia leaned forward as she spoke, thoughtlessly lifting a hand to tuck a lock of her raven-black hair away behind one ear. Mia’s scent washed over Alaria as Mia leaned forward, and Alaria found herself breathing deeply. There wasn’t just the pleasant smell of whatever scent Mia wore. This time, there was also the unmistakable smell of Mia’s skin. She smelled clean and warm and the smell did something to Alaria. Something in her movement and her smell made Alaria feel very strange. The feeling was contradictory – it felt very alien, and yet at the same time she recognized it, as if it were the triggering of some instinct that she knew on a deep, fundamental level.

That contradiction made her head spin. When Mia straightened up, she found Alaria gazing at her with a strange, hungry look in her eyes. A slow, knowing smile crept over Mia’s face. “I definitely can’t see anything,” she said in a husky voice.

Alaria tried to speak and croaked instead. She cleared her throat noisily. Why did she suddenly feel so awkward? This made no sense. Internally, she scolded herself, focusing on the solid center that she always called upon in moments of stress.

There it was, the quiet place. She let it surround her.

With a breath, she calmed, feeling her heart slowing and the sweat that had unexpectedly dampened her palms drying as quickly as it had appeared. She looked away and began trying keys in outhouse doors again, glad that the moment of intense sensation had passed, yet in some way feeling that she almost missed it already.

“The front gate key is enchanted,” she said gruffly. “Or at least it was. The enchantment is not there anymore. Either the spell is very old and has faded through lack of use, in which case it was probably done a long time ago, or it’s more recent and it was actively removed by the enchanter who made it - perhaps when they moved out. I’m opting for the first option since you say the house hasn’t been occupied for a long time.”

She matched the key she was trying to the shed, swung the door open, and shone a light inside again. Again, nothing. She wrote a number 2 on the key and the shed door and carried on to the next one.

“It takes a skilled enchanter to work keys and locks,” she continued. “That’s not simple magic by any measure. So, I’m interested. Whoever lived here before me was a powerful and skilled mage, and as a magic worker myself that makes me want to know more. You see?”

“Of course,” Mia said. She smiled, looking questioningly at Alaria. She had a beautiful smile, Alaria thought and felt a slight resurgence of that feeling she’d had a moment before. This time, it felt less unexpectedly disconcerting. It felt pleasant, and she was able to keep herself together and stay on topic.

“There are things I can do to find out more,” she said, “magic that I can perform to learn about the person who lived here before me and magic I can do to find out if they’ve left any other spells in place on the house or the grounds. But it’s not simple magic. It takes preparation, and there’s no guarantee it’ll pick everything up. The vectors the original mage used for their spells…”

Mia was looking lost, and when Alaria used the word vectors, Mia cleared her throat and said gently, “I think you might be forgetting again who you’re speaking to. I don’t know anything about magic, remember?”

“Of course,” Alaria said. “Sorry.”

“Is it dangerous?” Mia asked.

“What, that magic that the other mage left?” Alaria asked. “It could be, yes. There’s no guarantee they haven’t left traps and the like around in the house. It’s potentially dangerous, yeah. That’s why I wanted to know more about who the previous owner might have been.”

“I see,” Mia nodded. “Well, I know who would know.”

“Oh yes?”

“Grenko, who owns Brighthill Property.”

“Of course!” Alaria said, snapping her fingers. “Thanks, Mia. I hadn’t thought of that. He would be the most likely person, wouldn’t he? I’ll go talk to him in the morning… what are you laughing at?”

Mia was grinning broadly at Alaria. “I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that you’ve never spoken to a glimmertoad before.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because if you knew anything about the kind of creature that Grenko is, you wouldn’t expect to find him available for a chat in the morning.”

“Why on earth not? Is he nocturnal or something?”

“Something like that,” Mia said. She took a breath to speak and then stopped. “You know what? I’m not going to tell you. I think I’ll just take you to meet him instead. There’s not much I can say that will prepare you for the real thing. We’ll go together. I’ll introduce you.”

In the past, Alaria might have found this withholding of information irritating, and she’d have never been able to tolerate being kept in suspense before an encounter. Alaria was a creature of information and preparation, and she prided herself on never walking into a situation without being as prepared and informed as she possibly could be.

But now, things were different. She was no longer Alaria the warrior. She was Alaria the homestead owner, and that meant that she could relax a bit and allow Mia her bit of fun. After all, Grenko wasn’t an enemy to fight. Alaria could wait.

“Very well,” Alaria said, smiling. “I look forward to meeting him.” She felt pleased with herself. She did not have to feel irritated. She was no longer the warrior, no longer the person who had to always be on the lookout for the next fight. She could ease up a bit.

She clicked the key in the third lock, swung the shed door open, and glanced inside. There was nothing in here either except a few rusty old garden tools – a spade with a broken handle, a few small hand tools, and a garden fork leaning against the far wall of the shed.

Alaria smiled at the homely collection, relaxing her shoulders and breathing out. She looked around the homestead garden again, taking in the sheds and outbuildings, the cozy home, and the overgrown grounds. This was her world now. Even her blade Skyfang was back at the hotel.

She was weaponless and safe.

Alaria was about to speak when she saw Mia’s eyes going suddenly wide. A look of terror filled her face, and she flinched back. Immediately, Alaria was on the alert. Mia raised her hand to point over Alaria’s shoulder, and Alaria felt the skin prickling on the back of her neck as she whirled around to see where Mia was looking.

Damn, she thought. So much for the peaceful life.

The irony was not lost on her. A moment before, she had been congratulating herself on no longer being a fighter. And even as she’d thought it, here, in the very heart of her homestead, a monster had appeared.

And her sword was not at her side.

Chapter

Seven

“Mia, duck!” Alaria cried, but the warning came too late. The creature that came at them was a whirling mass of bright yellow and green flames, formed roughly into the shape of a humanoid figure. It held up one blazing hand and fired a gleaming beam of white light straight at Mia.

Horror flooded Alaria. She reached for Inhibit Casting, a Spirit spell that would catch another mage’s sending and fling it back, but she was too slow.

The spell hit Mia straight on, and the creature hissed in satisfaction.

It was not clear exactly what this creature was. Alaria could tell that it was some kind of wisp demon, but there were enough different kinds of wisp demons that she couldn’t tell straight away what it would be able to do. Each different kind had its power, and there was no way of knowing what power one had until it started casting spells.

For now, it was enough for Alaria to know that the monster was quick. She had been caught off guard, at home, thinking that she was safe in the warm summer sunshine of her new life.

The spell that hit Mia had frozen her in place, her hand raised, one finger pointing at the wisp demon, her face frozen in a look of terror and shocked surprise.

Not killed, Alaria thought, glancing at her friend. She’d been put in stasis.

She looked around quickly and saw that it was as she had suspected. At first glance, all was the same as it had been a moment before, but Alaria knew better than to accept information at face value.

The biggest tell-tale sign was the keys. She’d dropped them as soon as she’d realized there was danger. Now they hung a few inches from the ground, frozen in mid-fall.

A bee, weaving its way from flower to hive, hung motionless like an insect preserved in amber a few feet to Alaria’s right. The leaves of the trees above her head were as still as if they were in a painting. Above, a flight of birds hung suspended in midair, silhouetted against the rich, deep blue sky.

“Time weaver,” Alaria said, glaring at the wisp demon. So that was its special power.

The monster hissed and swept suddenly toward her, swiping at her with one burning hand. Flames rippled out from the hand and took the form of five long, terrifying blades.

Alaria leaped back out of the way, hearing the monster’s burning claws sing through the air just in front of her face. She passed Mia, then ducked forward again, retaking the ground she’d just yielded and blasting the time weaver with Howling Gale, a powerful spell from the school of Air magic.

Air magic was not her specialty, but she could still use it. When fighting a creature that stopped time, the first priority was to get things moving again. The more motion in the space around the time weaver, the more difficult it was to maintain the time-bending spells. For getting things in motion, air magic was the place to start.

The blast of wind hit the monster like a brick wall. The time weaver hurtled backward, staggering. Time dilated around the monster and its flames swept back away from Alaria, making it look like a monster made of seaweed, flowing in a rip tide. For a moment, Alaria thought she saw the leaves above move again then grow still.

The spell was weakening.

Alaria leaped in, using the moment she’d gained to rip through the wisp demon with a Lightning Bolt spell, an old favorite from the school of Fire. Using fire spells against a fire monster was perhaps not the best idea, but Lightning Bolt was a good, reliable attack, and it hit the time weaving wisp demon in the center of the chest, spearing the monster through and driving it further back.

She had no weapon other than her magic. What she wouldn’t have given for a sword!

In the outhouse she’d just explored, there was an old garden fork. It was a rusty, broken-down tool, and Alaria would not have attempted to dig over a vegetable bed with it, but for this purpose it might serve. But the problem was that Mia was between her and the shed. To get to the tools in the shed, she’d have to yield the ground between herself and Mia, putting Mia and the monster face to face. The monster reeled, stunned by her last attack. Did she have enough time to get into the shed and get the garden fork before the monster recovered itself enough to attack again?

Then she realized that she didn’t need to. She had another power, one that she hadn’t used in a fight yet.

With a flick of her willpower, she conjured a tentacle.

The sensation was a little like casting a regular magic spell, but there was a physical difference. Casting was always satisfying, but not like this. This time, casting a tentacle made her body quiver with pleasure. The new limb made a sloppy, slick noise as it flew out from her upper body, manifesting from the space between her neck and her left shoulder.

She grunted with effort as suckers snapped onto the garden fork and whipped it back toward her. She grabbed the fork in one hand and cast Transfigure. This was a Spirit spell that had its uses at times, despite generally being seen as pretty niche. It made objects take on the form of something they were not for a short time, but it didn’t actually change the fundamental nature of the object, and it took a toll on the object being used.

It didn’t truly change an object into something else. That was a power beyond the reach of any magic Alaria had ever heard of.

But this power would do for now.

The garden fork took the form of a sword. The sword flowed into her hand, and at the same time she used her new tentacle to whip out and smack the time weaver around the head. The weaver staggered again, but the monster recovered quickly, and before Alaria could follow up with another blow there was an unmistakable time ripple around the creature’s head and then a faint pop as displaced air rushed into the space that the monster had occupied only a moment ago.

When a monster you’re fighting freezes time and shifts instantaneously from one location to another, you don’t stand about looking for where it’s gone to. Alaria knew that the only place the monster would not be, was the place it had just left.

Dashing forward, Alaria put herself in the very spot the monster had just vacated. Now she could afford to turn and look for it. As she suspected, the time weaver had placed itself right behind her, and if she’d been a moment slower it would have had her head off with its flame claws.

As it was, it was standing right next to Mia.

A gleeful chuckle of pure evil gurgled from the depths of the monster, coming out from the place where its face would have been if it had one.

It raised a clawed hand above Mia’s head.

Alaria cast Ice Spike, and an icicle as thick as her forearm and as long as a javelin fired from her left hand and smacked through the monster’s center, driving it back and making it stumble against the wall of the outbuilding from which she’d just retrieved her garden fork. The flaming claw that would have cut Mia in two made a hiss like water on hot metal as it sliced through the edge of the shed instead.

The Transfigure spell had changed the garden fork in her hand into a sword, but it was not a particularly good sword. In fact, she’d have been embarrassed to use it in any other situation, and the thought flashed through her head that she was glad none of her old adventurer allies from the Guild of the Bloody Hand could see her now.

She almost laughed. A smile tugged at the edge of her mouth, and the creature, seeing this, became enraged. It recovered and dashed forward. That was all the opening Alaria needed to put her garden fork sword to use. She darted out to meet the creature.

For an experienced and proud warrior like Alaria, the sword in her hand was embarrassing. She was used to the noble length of Skyfang, her legendary blade of power. Now she held a short, stabbing sword of the kind used by back street thugs in the tough metropolises far to the south of the rich and peaceful place where she now lived. The sword was rusty, and the handle was loose. There was no denying the fact that it had a distinct feel of the broken old garden fork to it.

She wouldn’t have wanted to wield it for long in battle, but the blade only had to do one thing. It only had to act as a vector for her magic. Alaria gathered her power and focused it into the blade, then channeled the most powerful Quench spell she could summon. In the moment before she clashed with the monster, she gave the magic one more boost of power, pushing all the energy she could through the blade and overcharging the spell as she slammed the weapon into the center of the creature’s mass.

This time, there was no question of the monster dodging out of the way. It was coming at her, enraged by her confidence and the fact that she’d bested it so far. It hissed like an angry snake, but Alaria was cold, calculated, and complete. The blade punched home, driven by the force of her strong arm and the unstoppable power of the magic. Quench was a deadly spell for a fire monster. This attack was driven by the strength and skill of Alaria’s sword arm and the force of the monster’s attack. The hit was unstoppable.

Water burst through the monster, splashing out all around the blast of the spell smashed the monster apart from the inside. Fiery goo flew in every direction, and Alaria flung out a forest of new tentacles to shield Mia from the attack.

The debris splattered around the garden, hissing and spitting like burning fat. There was a rank, caustic smell in the air, and Alaria was blinded for a moment by the flash.

Then it was gone. The monster was dead.

Alaria blinked. A bee buzzed past her head. Birds called to each other as they launched from the branches of a tree, and a warm wind blew in from somewhere and shifted the leaves above with a gentle rustle. There was a clank as the bunch of keys hit the ground where Alaria had dropped them, just before the monster’s time-freezing spell had taken effect.

The spell was broken.

“Alaria, look out!” Mia screamed. She staggered a few steps forward, pointing, then stopped. “Alaria?” she asked, looking about herself in disorientation and confusion.

“Here,” Alaria said, feeling breathless. “I’m here.” She glanced about the garden. The flames that had burst from the monster and hurtled out all around the garden were gone, leaving nothing but wisps of smoke that were quickly dissipating in the warm air.

“I…” Mia said, turning and staring in confusion at Alaria. “I could have sworn…”

“Come and sit down with me over here, Mia,” Alaria said. Being caught in the web of a time weaver was a disorientating experience, and though Alaria had done her best to minimize the friction between the moment Mia had gone into the time freeze and the moment she had come out of it, there was still going to be some unavoidable confusion. It was important to address it straight away.

Mia nodded, trusting Alaria. She put her arm on Alaria’s arm to steady herself and Alaria lead her over to the porch. They sat down together, Mia sitting carefully as if she were afraid of falling over, and Alaria sinking beside her, feeling spent. That last casting had taken the strength out of her. She’d pushed a great deal of power into the Quench spell to create an overpowered casting at the end. It had been worth it. The time-weaving wisp demon had been a strong enemy, and Alaria hadn’t wanted any possibility that the demon would survive that strike. But she was feeling the impact now. Magic like that didn’t come without a physical cost.

“Where did you get that sword?” Mia asked, seeing the blade that had been the result of the Transfigure spell. Alaria looked down and saw that she was still holding it. She was surprised to see it still in existence. That last spell should have broken it completely, and yet here it was.

“Interesting,” Alaria muttered, placing the sword on the ground next to her. Then she turned to Mia. “Let me tell you from the beginning what happened just now.”

In simple, quiet words, Alaria explained what had happened. This was the best thing to do. Disorientating as the experience of being time-frozen was, there was long-established evidence that not understanding what had happened led to even worse confusion further down the line. There wasn’t anything to be gained by trying to hide what had happened.

Still, she told her story with a sinking heart, even as her energy increased. She had been getting on so well with Mia, everything had been going so nicely, and she’d been enjoying the building friendship and the strange, unidentifiable tension between them. Now, it seemed inevitable that Mia would think she was crazy, at least for a while. Time dilation was a weird magic that often had unpleasant and unpredictable consequences. The people affected by the spell remembered the time they spent enchanted, but in a fragmentary way that came back to them in bits and pieces later on. At first, they often dismissed the person explaining what had happened as crazy or malicious. But if it were not explained, they might go mad, assaulted in dreams and quiet moments by frightening, fragmented memories that they didn’t understand.

The story didn’t take long to tell. By the end of the telling, Alaria felt physically better, but a cloud had settled over her heart. She was braced for Mia’s reaction, but Mia sat still and thoughtful, then reached over and put a gentle hand on Alaria’s shoulder.

“So you saved my life,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”

The darkness lifted from her heart in a moment, and Alaria couldn’t ever remember having felt more pleased and more surprised.

“I suppose I did,” she acknowledged. “And I saved my own life too. But you don’t think I’m crazy?”

“Crazy? No, of course not. I think was aware of what was going on in a strange, unconscious way – as if in a dream – and now that you’ve told me, I know that it’s real. Did you expect me to think you crazy?”

“I’m afraid so,” Alaria said. “It’s the more common reaction in that situation.”

Mia gave Alaria a long, thoughtful look, then smiled. “I suppose I trust you,” she said. “We’ve only known each other a few hours, but I feel I can trust you. Trust you to tell me the truth, and to protect me, too.”

“You can trust me,” Alaria said, and the earnestness in her own voice surprised her. “I promise you that.”

There was a moment of silence that was tense with anticipation and the weight of many things unsaid.

“Why was it here?” Mia asked after a moment. “That thing, that time weaver demon. Why did it come here?”

Alaria thought about it for a moment. What with fighting the creature and explaining to Mia, she hadn’t actually thought about it.

“Well,” she said eventually, “I guess that it was put here by the previous owner. As I said, the last person to own this house was likely a magician, a powerful spellcaster. People like that have secrets. Whoever that person was, they left magic in this place. They enchanted their gate key, for a start, and I suspect that there are other spells woven through the fabric of this place, too.”

“So you don’t think the wisp demon was drawn here by the remnants of the mage’s power?” Mia asked. “You don’t think it came here from outside?”

Alaria shook her head. “I don’t think so. A wisp demon in an etheral creature, and such things don’t exist naturally in this world. They’re thralled creatures, deliberately created by sorcerers using magic. They’re not independent beings of their own.”

“Thralled?” Mia asked. “I’ve never heard that term before.”

“The word means enslaved,” Alaria explained. “It’s a word that comes from the dwarven language originally. It was their magic, the creation of stone men and mountain demons to do their will and fight or work for them. Thrall beings. It’s an unpleasant magic, not something I know how to do or would want to do, and not something that was ever encouraged in any school I was ever trained at. The fact that our mysterious former mage left a thralled being here does not make me feel well-disposed toward them. It’s ugly magic, and I’d be very surprised if there aren’t other nasty surprises for us elsewhere in the house.”

Chapter

Eight

Once they had rested from the fight with the wisp demon and were both fully recovered, they returned to their search for the key that would give them access to Timeous’s hideout. It took Alaria and Mia a little while to find the outbuilding that had been hit by the stone. They found it tucked away on one side of the grounds, away from the creek, where it couldn’t be seen from the rest of the garden. Here, one might store lumber and do messy jobs. It was a practical, working area floored not with lawn but with bare, packed earth. A low fence surrounded the space, and there was a spot where there might have been a chicken coop at some point.

There was also a sawn tree-stump here, covered in countless dents where it had been hit by an axe. The surrounding ground was all pulpy, rotted sawdust, and wood chips. Nearby, an almost empty log store awaited the winter’s firewood.

Not far from this wood splitting area, they found the shed where the window had been broken. The stone had ricocheted when it had hit the fire spell. The force of the impact had carried it right across the garden, past the house, and through the side window of a shed.

Alaria tried the door and found it locked, then set about finding the key.

“Oddly, the leprechaun should have been able to get in,” she said. “Surely Timeous Groof didn’t have a key?”

“Well, he’s a leprechaun,” Mia said.

“What d’you mean?” Alaria asked. “Don’t leprechauns need a key the same as everyone else?”

“No, not at all,” Mia said. “So long as he’s not been told not to enter, he can just walk right in. Locks don’t work for people like him. You really didn’t know that?”

“Truly,” Alaria said, shocked. “I had no idea. Damn, I’m glad you got me to tell him he couldn’t come within the bounds.”

Alaria took out the bundle of keys that Mia had found for her back at Brighthill Property and began trying them one by one against the locks.

“I don’t mean to be rude or anything, you know that, right?” Mia said, “But I’d really love to know more about all this magic you can do. The spells you used to defeat the wisp demon, well, I didn’t see them because I was in stasis, but I’d love to know more about them. And yet there seem to be these really surprising gaps in your knowledge. Would you mind telling me a bit more about your magic? What it is, how it works, that kind of thing?”

Alaria glanced up. She met Mia’s eyes and smiled warmly. It was nice to feel that warm smile growing there on her face, genuine and easy. There was something about this girl that just did that to Alaria, that made her feel truly easy in herself. Usually, she was prickly about answering questions about her skills, but Mia’s guileless interest was different from the kind of questions other people had asked her in previous times.

Usually, people asked her about her skills and talents as if she were some kind of curiosity, something to be gawked at in passing. That kind of interest did anger her, and she gave that kind of questioner short shrift.

But not Mia.

“Ask what you like,” Alaria said. “I’ll answer.”

“Well, why don’t you know?” Mia said, sounding flabbergasted. “I mean, really, how can you not know about leprechauns? I thought adventurers were clued up on all the different kinds of creatures there are in the world, but you seem ignorant about leprechauns. Sorry… I didn’t mean…”

“Mia, I just said it’s fine.” Alaria grinned. “I am ignorant of leprechauns, it’s true, but I know a lot about other supernatural creatures. The reason’s simple—I’ve never had to fight a leprechaun. I know about monsters that I might have to kill, Mia. I don’t clutter up my mind with knowledge about creatures that I’m not going to come across in the course of my adventuring.”

“Oh,” Mia said. She thought for a moment. “Yes, yes, I suppose that does make sense. But leprechauns do attack people, don’t they? Some of them, at least?”

“No doubt. But they’re low-level creatures, Mia, and they’re not likely to cross my path.”

Mia looked at Alaria with new eyes. “You’re saying you don’t know about them because they’re so much lower level than you? You wouldn’t fight them?”

Alaria shrugged. “More likely they wouldn’t fight me. I’d fight them if I had to, to defend myself, or to defend a friend. But as an adventurer, I worked for people, I didn’t just fight whoever crossed my path. I was an adventurer, a quester, and that means that you get hired to fight things appropriate to your skill level.”

“Ah, I see,” Mia said. “Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. You’re a specialist, like my aunt and uncle specialize in food. They don’t know anything about… oh, I don’t know… clothes, for example. Even though they come across clothes often, they know little about them. They could maybe mend some clothing or even make a crude garment if they had to, but no one would hire them to do so, because that’s not their specialism.”

“You’ve got it in one.” Alaria smiled. “So, if some leprechauns were getting out of hand, attacking people or something, you’d dispatch some adventurers who were of an appropriate level to deal with the threat. The adventurers would benefit from honing their skills, and whoever hired them would pay a fee appropriate to their talent and the challenge of the job. Now, wisp demons I do know about, and I can identify them and fight them off because I know about them. Luckily for both of us! Ah, finally!”

As she was speaking, a key clicked in the lock and the door swung open. Alaria peered warily inside, but there was no sign of anything unusual, just the same junk as had been in the others. There was a broken chair in one corner, and a rolled-up rug in another. On the floor, some straight timbers were left over from some construction project, and near the door, a litter of empty bottles from which a faint smell of alcohol drifted. The glass window had been shattered by the rock, and a spray of broken glass glittered on the floor in the dim light.

“Would you look at that!” Mia exclaimed, peering in. She pointed to the wall opposite the window, where a small, round hole had been punched straight through the wood. “Your stone broke the window and then went right on through the wall! I never thought it would be that forceful.”

“It’s a powerful spell,” Alaria said.

Mia tried to move past her into the shed, but Alaria held an arm out to stop her.

“Easy,” she said to Mia. “Your shoes are still on the porch. I don’t want you wandering in here in your bare feet with all this broken glass around. You don’t want me to have to heal you again, do you?”

Mia stopped, but she looked at Alaria consideringly. “I don’t know,” she said quietly after a moment. “The healing was very impressive, and the sensation was… I don’t know… not pleasant exactly, but it was intense and very interesting. I think I wouldn’t mind you healing me again if it came to it.”

She laughed playfully, but Alaria caught a very intense look in her eyes for a moment as if she was keenly interested in Alaria’s reaction to her comment.

“I guess it’s on you, then,” Alaria replied, “but I warn you, that was a surprisingly successful healing. I didn’t expect it to go that smoothly. With someone like you—a civilian, I mean, who’s not had any training—it’s hard to do magic healing effectively. Usually, you need a potion to get such good results.”

“A potion?” Mia asked breathlessly. “You can make healing potions?”

“Oh, yeah,” Alaria said. “Good ones, too. But I don’t have any at the moment, otherwise I’d have healed you with it.”

She had entered the shed, while Mia—despite her words—remained outside.

“How do you do it?” Mia asked.

Alaria was examining the ground closely, looking for some clue as to why the leprechaun might have been hanging about here.

“What, how do you make healing potions?” Alaria asked. “Well, you need several ingredients, and they need to be harvested correctly, and then mixed in a bowl at a very specific temperature, and there are spirit elemental spells that need to be cast at every stage in the process. It’s tedious and there are a lot of stages to it, but it’s not actually all that complicated if you know the forms.”

“Huh,” Mia said. “Would you show me?”

Alaria’s head snapped up, and she looked at her young companion in surprise. “You want me to train you how to make healing potions?”

“I think I would,” Mia said, a new determination coming into her voice. “And I think I’d like you to teach me the other things, too. I’d like to be able to cast spells, Alaria. Is there any reason why you can’t?”

Alaria stopped and straightened up. “No,” she said quietly. “No reason at all. I just… Well, I suppose I never thought anyone would want to learn my craft from me. I find magic interesting, of course. I like it a lot, and I’d love to teach someone else, but it’s also quite dry and technical; it can be frustrating and takes a lot of practice. It’s not a small thing, it’s not something I can teach in an afternoon. It would take weeks, maybe months.”

“I could do that,” Mia agreed, easily.

Alaria frowned. “But what about your aunt and uncle? What about the food shop you help them run over in Richvale? Don’t they need your help?”

“Not really. They do pretty well themselves, and there are plenty of other people in Richvale who’d be happy to have the work. I just help out here and there, I don’t really have a job there. I support them, I help them, but I don’t actually do all that much.”

“What about the cherezio?”

“Oh, anyone could do that.” Mia laughed. “You know as much about the local food business as you do about leprechauns. No, they let me deliver the cherezio to Brighthill because they know I like the walk, and because I always offer. There’s no reason for it to not go in one of the regular carts that run between the towns. I have some friends here in Brighthill, too, and I usually spend the day with them after I’ve run the errands for my aunt and uncle. I don’t really have a job, and they’d be happy to know that I was training toward something more worthwhile.”

“Hmm,” Alaria said. “I guess I ought to think about it a bit.”

To tell the truth, taking time to think about it was the last thing she wanted to do. The only thing she wanted to do was say yes. She liked Mia and wanted her around, and the thought of having her help to get the homestead up and running as a productive potion lab was very attractive.

Alaria had been resigned to the idea that her new venture was going to be a lonely one. She hadn’t even considered that it might be anything else. But the idea of this companionable, cheerful, curious young woman about the house was like a ray of bright sunshine gleaming in a dim and solitary room. Mia, always talking and helping, always about the place with her ready smile and her loud laugh, her intelligent questions, and that warm, pleasing scent…

“Thought about it yet?” Mia asked, grinning.

“Yes, actually, I have,” Alaria said, realizing, as she said it, that it was true.

“And?”

“And I think it would be great. I need some help around here anyway, and that’ll be the best way for you to learn. You can be my apprentice and my assistant. You’ll help me out, and in return I’ll teach you what you want to learn. Oh, and I’ll pay you, too, so you can start saving a bit and…”

Mia laughed and shook her head. “You don’t need to pay me, Alaria. It’s an apprenticeship, that’s not how it works.”

“Really?”

Mia looked at her as if she wasn’t sure whether Alaria might be joking or not. “Were you ever paid for any of the learning that you did?”

“Well, no, I guess not,” Alaria said.

“Where did you learn potions?”

“Malgour’s Temple.”

“And did they pay you there?”

Alaria smiled.

The memories came back to her of deep snows outside, cold stone underfoot, the long hours bent over herbals, the endless drills at the practice benches…

“No, they certainly didn’t,” she said. “But to be fair, I got a bed and three meals a day.”

And Katrine was there, the thought intruded. With a vividness and immediacy that she thought had faded, Alaria remembered the girl who had lodged in the room above her for part of her first year at Malgour’s Temple. Katrine Blacklake was the daughter of the headman of some barbaric mountain vale tribe, but she had been a beautiful, intelligent, hard-working woman, nothing like the skin-clad mountain men who had brought her to the temple that first day, a few weeks after Alaria’s arrival. The whole time she’d been there, Katrine had been silent, unspeaking, unreachable, and Alaria had felt… what had she felt? Jealousy? Envy? Or something else? Whatever it was, that feeling had worked its way deep, deep into her soul, and had never truly left her.

She’d been young then. The potion school was one of the first things she did in her magical training, potion alchemy was one of the first skills she’d learned. She’d never spoken a word to Katrine Blacklake; Katrine Blacklake never spoke a word to anyone. The mountain woman had learned her lessons with an almost fanatical intensity, quickly outpacing the other apprentices. But for some reason, Alaria had never been able to get Katrine out of her mind.

When the silent girl graduated to the journeyman level and was no longer sleeping in the next chamber, it was a relief for Alaria, and her own studies improved immediately. She never saw Katrine again, except for one time during the graduation ceremony, but an image, an impression of the fierce, dark-haired girl had settled into a corner of Alaria’s mind and lived there ever since.

“Alaria?” Mia asked. “You okay?”

“Sure,” Alaria said. “I was just remembering the old days, my old training. But that’s all in the past now.” She took a breath and looked Mia in the eye. “Okay, you’re on. I’ll supply the food, and board too, if you want it, though I guess you’ll be happy to come in from Richvale if it’s not too far for you.”

Mia tilted her head to one side. “I guess that would be best at first,” she said with a smile. “Okay, you’re on. I’ll be your apprentice.”

“Great,” Alaria said, and as she said it something flamed up in her heart, something she’d left buried for a very long time, something she’d never quite understood.

Something good.

Chapter

Nine

They spent the rest of the day pottering around the premises, looking at each room in a bit more detail, and coming up with a list of things they would need to buy when they went to the town. It was clear to both of them that a trip to Hopeford would be needed before they could move into the house in comfort.

Mia was very impressed when she discovered that Alaria did not need to write things down. Every item that was needed was logged in her memory.

“Where did you learn that skill?” Mia asked in amazement. “I can’t remember a list of three items long without writing it down.”

Alaria just shook her head and smiled. The truth was that she hadn’t been taught memory at all. Her memory had always been good, and she’d trained it systematically over the years, never discussing her technique with anyone. She had developed her own system of remembering things, and now she could take a list of items like this and store it with complete confidence that it would stay in place.

After some discussion, they agreed that they’d go through to Hopeford the day after tomorrow. That would give Mia a chance to let her aunt and uncle know she’d be working with Alaria from now on and to find someone else to pick up the odd jobs that she normally did at the shop.

“Can you ride?” Alaria asked.

“Not well,” Mia admitted, “but it’s not something that’s done around here. There are a few ponies and some bigger draught horses for pulling carts in the village, but people either walk or ride on the back of carts. Nobody rides horses. I suppose you’re a competent rider, though?”

Alaria shook her head. “That’s something I’m not very good at. That’s one skill I don’t have. How long does it take to walk to Hopeford?”

“Three, maybe four hours. You could do it in a morning,” Mia said doubtfully, “but people generally don’t anymore. Not in small groups, at least.”

“Are the roads very bad?”

“Oh, it’s not that—it’s the koblins.”

“Koblins? You mean kobolds. Or goblins?”

“No, no, koblins with a K. You’ve not heard of them? They’re kind of a mix between kobolds and goblins, hence the name. Middle-sized, about the height of a leprechaun, but vicious. There’s a gang of them nearby, about midway between Richvale and Hopeford, and they’ve attacked travelers on the road. They don’t go for people who travel in large numbers, though, and that’s why people always travel by carts and never on foot.”

Alaria frowned. “The King’s Guard don’t do anything about it?”

“The King’s Guard of Hopeford aren’t particularly effective at the best of times,” Mia explained, “and anyway, all the koblin attacks have happened just outside Hopeford’s jurisdiction, so the guard wouldn’t do anything anyway.”

“How long’s this been going on?” Alaria said.

“Oh, a few years. People just go on carts, it’s easier.”

“I’ll walk,” Alaria said, her expression darkening. She dropped her hand to the space on her belt where her sword should have been, then scowled when she found it wasn’t there.

“Come on, let’s call it a day here,” she said. “I need to go back to the inn to get my gear anyway, and I think I’ll eat and sleep there for another few nights, at least until I get my new furniture delivered. Walk me down to the inn?”

“Great,” Mia said. “I’ll be glad to.”

They walked slowly down the hill together, enjoying the slight easing of the temperature and the golden light that flooded over the valley below, turning the farmland and villages of the Hope River valley into a beautiful, hazy dream.

The air was warm, but not so stiflingly hot now. True sunset wouldn’t happen for a while yet, but because of the angle that Brighthill village sat at relative to the sun, the air-cooled pleasantly almost as soon as the sun began to dip toward the west. There was a lovely smell in the air, a combination of sharp jengberry, warm stone, and the smoke of cooking fires starting up in the houses around them.

“This is so nice,” Alaria said as they stopped for a moment, looking out over the town and down into the valley beyond. Off in the distance, they could see the sparkle of the Hope River, and a hazy patch of smoke behind a hill in the distance that showed them where the city of Hopeford lay.

“I’ve never gotten bored of the view from here,” Mia agreed. “It really is gorgeous.” She hesitated, then looked at Alaria with questioning eyes. “Will you really walk alone through the koblin area?”

Alaria nodded. “I’m not afraid of creatures like that. I could eat a team of twenty goblins for breakfast, with ten kobolds on the side. I’m not afraid of them. The main thing I am afraid of is that they would take one look at me and not attack.”

“You’re afraid of that?”

“Yeah. Look, I’m a very accomplished fighter. If they’ve got any sense at all, they’ll see that, and they’ll not fight.”

“Why not just walk through, then, and avoid trouble?”

Alaria sighed. “As a trained fighter, I have a responsibility to protect people, even if I’m not employed to. I said before that I wouldn’t usually fight low-level enemies, and that’s true, but this time I’ll make an exception. Unless that is, you know of any low-level adventurers about here who are looking for a challenge.”

“You sometimes get adventurer parties crossing Brighthill,” Mia said, “but they’re generally just going from one place to another, and they don’t stay for long if they stay at all. They come over the hill, near your new place, actually. But there aren’t any local adventurers. If there were, I suppose they would have fought the koblins before now.”

“Exactly. So, I may as well do the local area a favor and see to the threat myself. After all, I may get some loot from it.”

“Loot?” Mia asked.

“Yeah, you know, loot. Like when you kill an enemy and take his stuff, that’s called looting, and the stuff you get is called loot.”

“Oh,” Mia said in a small voice. Then she took a breath and looked up at Alaria. “I’m scared to walk through the koblin area, Alaria. I don’t want to do it.” She spoke fast as if she was saying something difficult. She looked warily at Alaria, as if she expected the older woman to be disappointed in her.

“That’s understandable,” Alaria said. She wasn’t disappointed at all. It made total sense to her. “You’ve never seen me fight, and you’ve no fighting experience yourself, so it would be crazy not to be scared.”

“But I don’t want to let you down,” Mia said, urgently. “If you go into a fight, I want to be able to back you up.”

Alaria couldn’t help but smile. “Girl, if I go into a fight with a bunch of koblins, I don’t want you anywhere near. It would be fun if you could get a safe vantage point to watch from; I confess I’d quite like to show you what I can do when I get going, but it would need to be a safe spot a good way back.”

“Wait, you’re sure you wouldn’t want me to fight with you?” Mia said, sounding both relieved and a bit guilty at the same time.

“I’m very sure,” Alaria said. “No offense, Mia, but having you fight as well would not be a good idea for either of us. Having someone else to look out for is never a good thing in a fight, it always makes it harder, and when the person doesn’t have fighting experience, it can be really dangerous. If you would like to learn to fight, that’s another matter. I could teach you, and then one day we could fight side by side, but I think I’d like to deal with these koblins on the way to picking up the new furniture for the house the day after tomorrow, and there’s no time to teach you before then.”

“Okay then,” Mia said. “Well, in that case, there’s actually a ridge not far from the koblin den where I could watch. The road climbs up a hill.” She raised her hand to indicate a long, slow slope, then brought it down sharply. “After the ridge, the road drops steeply into a kind of cleft in the road. That’s the danger spot. It’s surrounded by wild woods, and all the koblin attacks have happened there.”

“You think you’ll be safe if you stay on the ridge?”

“Definitely.” Mia nodded. “The carts usually leave a watcher at the top of the ridge, so that if they are attacked, the watcher can run back to town and raise the alarm. There’s another ridge on the other side of the ambush spot, and people coming from Hopeford do the same thing in the other direction.”

“It’s appalling that nothing’s been done about this. It must have a huge impact on trade between Brighthill and Hopeford.”

“Oh, it does,” Mia agreed. “And the other villages around here too. There’s another route that people sometimes take, south to Grenvelle and then up past Bishop’s Lean, but that can take two days, so it’s hardly worth it. Everyone just waits until there’s a crowd who wants to go, and then they go together. The koblins seldom attack caravans—they only go for people in groups of five or less.”

Alaria nodded. “Still, they might be able to work out who and what I am by looking at me,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ll need to consider my options here and work out what will be best to do.”

The rest of the evening passed uneventfully enough. Mia said goodbye outside the inn and proposed to look in on a friend in Brighthill before walking the mile or so back to her aunt and uncle’s home in Richvale village.

“I’ll tell them the good news,” she said, “and I’ll see if there’s anything I need to sort out before I can come and start working with you permanently. Otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow.” They agreed that Mia would come back through the next morning, but until then Alaria was looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

Alaria paid for another two nights’ dinner and board at the inn, which was quiet despite the good weather. The landlord at the inn was a tall woman, a little older than Alaria, with very long golden-red hair that she kept tied up in an elaborate braid at the back of her neck.

Her name was Beth, and she was a human at first sight, but when she turned and strode off away from the bar to the kitchen to give the dinner order to the chef, Alaria was surprised to see a long, elegant tail swinging behind her. Beth must be one of the catkin people, feline humanoids who hailed from the far south of Sapheli, past the Glowering Mountains. The catkin loved warmth and solitude, but in recent decades they’d come north, many of them taking up roles in jobs that were normally held by other peoples.

How Beth had ended up as the landlord of the inn at Brighthill was a story that Alaria would have liked to hear, but Beth seemed prickly and not the kind of person who was keen to answer questions about their past. She was interesting, though. In Alaria’s experience, and in all she’d ever been told or read about them, catkin people were a lot more catlike than Beth appeared to be. They had fur on their faces, whiskers, and the kind of pointy, almond-eyed faces that one associated with cats, not humans.

Beth didn’t look like that at all. Apart from the tail, you’d have never realized she was anything but a human. The ears were interesting, too. Usually, the catkin had cat ears, but Beth’s were very clearly human; small, shapely, and on display as her hair was pulled back into its braid.

Alaria liked Beth’s bluff, no-nonsense manner. She was not the kind of person who prevaricated, and Alaria could tell that she had seen a bit of the world and knew what she wanted in life.

When Alaria asked if it would be possible to have a few more nights at the inn and apologized for the inconvenience, Beth snorted and said that there was no inconvenience.

“More’s the pity,” she grumbled as she made a note in the book that Alaria would be staying a few more nights. “I tell you, if this was five years back, you’d have been lucky to get a space in the byre where I keep the donkey, but this year you could have most of the inn for the week and no one would be put out.”

“You’re saying that custom has gone down in recent years?”

“Yes, dear, that’s what I’m saying,” Beth answered, with a touch of sarcasm.

Alaria smiled. “Why?” she asked simply.

“These damned koblins,” Beth replied immediately. “They’ve been infesting Daeron’s Pass and the woods around for four years now. Before that, you’d get travelers out of Hopeford who’d come out here for their holidays, get a break away from the city and all that, you know?”

Alaria nodded. “But no more?”

“Well, they can’t, can they? If they want to come out and stay for a night or two, they need to wait until a cart is going, and even then, it’s difficult to get a cart back. Used to be you could walk between here and Hopeford in four hours, maybe three if you were spry and the day wasn’t too hot. Now, you need to wait until there’s a cart run, and then bounce along on the back of a wagon with goods and a bunch of other people. No one wants to do that unless they have to. The koblins have ruined the holiday trade for me, and a few more years like this will be enough to sink me. Even one year, if the trade continues like this, maybe.”

Beth glanced down at the heavy scabbard that now hung from Alaria’s belt. In the scabbard was the legendary ice blade Skyfang, which Alaria had retrieved from her room earlier.

“I tell you,” Beth said, “if you’re handy with that blade, there might be work for you down at Daeron’s Pass.”

Alaria smiled. “You took the thought right out of my head. Psychic, are you?”

Beth grinned, showing a set of very fine white teeth that had a distinct feline shape to the fangs. “Not psychic, dear,” she said, “but it’s clear you’re a woman who can handle herself.”

She leaned across the counter. “This town’s been needing someone with a bit of guts. Will you really go down there?”

“Aye,” Alaria said. “I really will.”

Chapter

Ten

The next day, Mia and Alaria met at the inn and walked together through the sleepy Brighthill morning, up to the homestead. As they passed Brighthill Property, Mia glanced through the window.

“Oh, look,” she said, sounding surprised. “Grenko is up! That’s early for him. Come on, we’ll go see him.”

Alaria didn’t know what Mia had seen that had alerted her to Grenko’s presence. Glancing through the window herself, she didn’t see any sign that anyone was in. It all looked dark and empty, but Mia seemed very sure, so Alaria shrugged and followed her friend’s lead. She was keen to meet the glimmertoad – whatever that might be – and even more keen to find out anything she could about the person who had owned her house before her.

Mia tapped on the door, but there was no reply, so she took out her keychain and opened the door with her key.

“Mr Grenko?” she called into the gloom.

There was no reply. Mia called out a second time, but this time her voice was less polite. “Grenko, I know you’re in here. Come out, I want you to meet a new friend of mine.”

As she followed Mia inside the dark space, Alaria saw what she’d missed before. On the floor near the desk there was a wet line of footprints, and mixed in with the wet prints there were crumbs of cherezio. This was the clue that had alerted Mia to Grenko’s presence.

A strange, swampy odor filled the building. Alaria leaned forward and looked more closely at the footprints, then she smiled. They were not the prints of a human, that was certain. They were the prints of a very large, web-footed creature who seemed to have four feet, two big ones at the back and two small ones at the front.

These were the tracks of a glimmertoad, she had to assume, though she had never seen one and was far from sure what to expect.

“Grenko?” Mia called again, sounding a little worried now. “It’s odd that he shouldn’t come out,” she said to Alaria. “He’s reclusive, and doesn’t like the daylight, but he’s not rude. These prints show that he’s been here very recently. Come with me, let’s follow the tracks.”

They walked carefully through the shadowed office building, going first into a back room that seemed to be used exclusively for the storage of documents in large wooden filing cabinets. The prints led them through this back room and along a short corridor. The smell became stronger, and at the same instant they both became aware of a strange gurgling, choking sound.

Mia made a small noise of alarm in her throat and dashed forward. She pushed a door open and ran through into the chamber beyond, Alaria following quickly behind.

“Oh, gods!” Mia shouted. “Grenko! What’s wrong?”

She dropped to her knees beside the large, bloated figure of an enormous toad who lay in the center of a large, well-appointed room. The toad glimmered with a pale blue light that Alaria assumed must be the reason he was called a glimmertoad.

The room was comfortable, but it was clearly set up for the comfort of an amphibious being, not a human. Instead of a bed, there was a long, deep pool with flowering plants growing in the water, set into the floor near a curtained window. On the other side of the room, there was a generously sized desk, strangely shaped, with a big, wide wooden seat designed for the glimmertoad sitting next to it.

Clearly, this was Grenko’s office, and his living quarters combined. It was impressive and the way it was adapted to fit the needs of a glimmertoad doing very human activities was interesting, but Alaria couldn’t hang about to admire the décor. The occupant of the room was in dire trouble.

Grenko the glimmertoad lay on his back, his pale, glowing belly exposed, his huge, powerful back legs lying limp on the ground and his wide mouth gaping open. He looked like he was dead, but Alaria could see the flicker of his heart beating through his pale skin, and his smaller forelegs waved vaguely in the air.

“What’s wrong with him?” Alaria said. “Do you know, Mia?”

“He has these attacks sometimes,” Mia said, her voice full of concern, “but I’ve never seen him this bad. He has some medicine for it, but I’ve no idea where he keeps it.”

Alaria frowned. “Do you know the name?” she said.

“What is the name of the medicine? It’s called drainwort essence, I think, why?”

Alaria didn’t answer. The room was cluttered, the desk covered in papers, and a dresser by the door covered in a mess of bottles and jars with all kinds of strange things in them. None of them were labeled. There was no chance of finding Grenko’s medicine quickly, but Alaria had an idea. In her impressive inventory of spells, she could usually find one that would fit the occasion, and now was no exception.

She cast Locate. When the spell reached back to her, asking for direction, she focused on the idea of Drainwort Essence. She’d been slightly concerned that because she had no information other than the name, she might not be able to make the spell work, but she needn’t have worried. Instantly, the spell took effect. A flicker of light caught Alaria’s eye. She glanced up to the top of the dresser. A particular little glass vial was glowing with a clean, bright blue color.

“There,” she said, leaping up and grabbing the bottle. “This is it.”

She handed it to Mia.

“This is it,” Mia said in surprise. “I remember seeing it before, but it’d have taken me a week to find it myself. How on earth did you know? No, never mind, you can tell me later. Here, Mr Grenko, here’s your medicine, come along and open your mouth for me, that’s it…”

Working with great care and attention, she eased the gasping glimmertoad’s mouth open and tipped a few drops of the essence in. Grenko immediately stopped waving his arms about. He swallowed loudly.

The moment he swallowed the medicine, the glimmering light that shone from his skin waxed suddenly bright, then faded again. He gave a long, gurgling noise of relief before sitting up and rolling over onto his front.

“Ugh,” he groaned, looking around. “Why, it’s Mia. Thank you, thank you very much.”

“That’s all right,” Mia said gently. “It was Alaria here who helped you. She found your medicine. You really ought to keep it closer to hand if you’re having these attacks. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “If I can just get over to my pool…”

He hopped the few yards to his deep, plant-bound pool and slid into the water until only his eyes and his mouth were showing. He groaned in relief, ducked his head under for a moment, then came back up. His eyes glowed a different color to the rest of him. They were a deep, lambent green.

“Oh, that’s better,” he said.

Alaria looked at the strange creature. He was enormous, a gleaming blue toad easily four feet across and six feet from end to end, but now he was submerged in his pool, all she could see were his eyes and the top of his head. She had hoped to get some information from him about the former occupant of her house, but she saw now that whatever had been up with him, he needed to rest and sleep it off.

“Yes,” he croaked in his deep, unnervingly human voice, and there was a tinge of unmistakable amusement to his tone. “I need to rest for a while, but I’ll tell you now, I don’t know anything about the person who used to own Number 4, Willowcreek Road. I’m sorry, Alaria.”

Alaria started back, surprised. “But how did you know that was what I was here for?” she began.

“You’re the warrior who bought the house,” he burbled. “Mia has told me your name. And now Mia comes here with you, even though she’s not scheduled to bring me a new cherezio. And she brings you and says she wanted me to meet you. Why else would you want to see me except to ask about the house? Something strange up there, I guess, and you want to know who owned the place before you, eh?”

Mia grinned at Alaria. Grenko’s ability to put two and two together like this was more than a little unnerving, but Alaria smiled too. He was right, after all.

“You’re right in every detail,” she said. “That’s very impressive. What can you tell me about the previous owner? I’d love to know.”

“I never met her,” Grenko said. “She was a magician, so they said, and she ran a little shop selling curious things, but I never knew her. I don’t even know her name. She owned the place for a long time, but we never saw her in town, and few people ever visited her shop, if any. Who she was and what she did up there, I have no idea.”

Alaria blinked, surprised to have drawn such a blank. “Do you know when she moved away?” she asked.

“Nine years back,” Grenko said. “Nine years, give or take, and she sold the house to me through an agent of hers, a little shadowy fellow with no face that I could see. He came down here and said his mistress wanted to sell the house, and would I buy it because his mistress wanted to move out fast and couldn’t hang about waiting for someone to come and buy it. And I said yes, of course, I’d buy the place, and I gave him a good sum for it, and the next I heard she was gone, and no one that’s looked at the house has wanted to buy it ever since. All very mysterious, though not very helpful to you.”

“The servant,” Alaria asked. “You said he was a shadowy fellow. What do you mean by that?”

“Shadowy,” Grenko said. “I mean that he was made of shadows. He was a creature of shadow, he was made from smoke and shadow and cloaked in black. Small, half your height only, and with no face visible, just a shifting mass of darkness.”

“His hands?”

“Gloved, always.”

“What about his voice?”

“Very polite,” Grenko said. “A deep voice, very clear and precise language, but strange, as if it was coming from far away. It gave me the shivers to hear, I confess, but it takes all sorts and I’m not one to judge. Some don’t like magic, but I don’t mind, so long as no one interferes with me. Only saw him that one time. He never gave me his name. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

“On the contrary,” Alaria said. “You’ve been of immense help. I know exactly what I need to do.”

“What does it all mean?” Mia asked as they made their way back up to the house.

Alaria shook her head. “I’ll tell you once we’re up there,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it out in the open.”

They got through the garden gate and shut it behind them.

“What is it?” Mia demanded, her eyes gleaming with interest and excitement. “What did you learn from Grenko? His words meant more to you than they did to me.”

“I guess maybe they did,” Alaria grinned. “It was the shadow man that put me on to it, though the presence of the wisp demon was a big clue already. The mage that owned this house before me was a high-level summoner, and her foundation powers are shadow and flame. Without that information, I’d have struggled to channel my finding spells to locate her and her magic. With that information, I know how to find at least some of her spells.”

“The mage was a woman,” Mia said thoughtfully as they walked together round the outside of the house and went in the back door. “Is that unusual?”

“Not so unusual,” Alaria said, “though I admit there are more male mages out there than female ones, and there are fewer female mages than there used to be, sadly. The fact that she was such a recluse is quite unusual. She didn’t want anyone to see her face, so much so that she even sent a summoned shadow servant down to handle the transaction. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Just that she didn’t like people, surely that’s not so crazy?”

They got into the bedroom and Alaria knelt on the floor.

“What are you doing?” Mia asked.

Alaria knelt right in the spot where Mia had hurt her foot. “If there’s one thing summoner mages like, it’s blood,” she said, “holding her hands out over the spot. “Your blood landed on the floor here, and I think that allowed the magic to be activated. There’s no trace of the blood on the floor, and that’s not an effect of the healing spell. I’d expect a stain, even if only a little blood had hit the floor, but you bled a lot before I healed you, and you can see there’s nothing.”

“The magic has absorbed the blood?” Mia guessed. Her voice sounded shaky. Alaria had to admit that it was not a particularly nice idea.

“That’s how the magic works,” she said. “But it means that there must be a spell laid over the floor, so if I can just…” She activated a variant of the Locate spell that she’d used to find Grenko’s medicine, but this time she tuned it toward magic. At first, nothing happened, but then she tuned the spell further, first attaching the concept of Summoning and then adding Shadow and Flame.

As soon as she’d finished the final adjustment, the thing she’d been searching for appeared.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “There we go. And I can extend the ability to show this to you” She cast Vision on Mia, tuned to show Mia what Alaria was seeing. Mia blinked in surprise and gasped in amazement as the spell took effect.

For a silent moment, two women looked in wonder at the sight that Alaria’s magic revealed. Across the floor there was outlined a golden web of magical threads, running here and there all over the boards, connected up by a series of bright, glowing spheres of gold.

“Gods!” Mia exclaimed. “What is it?”

“It’s the summoner’s spell storage matrix,” Alaria said. “This is the trap laid by the mage who lived here before. These threads join the spells together and hold the power within the network, and each of these globes represents a spell that can be activated if the right trigger is detected. She’s laid out a whole set of these meshworks all over the house, and probably outside as well. They’re activated by blood. I suspect they were here more as protection for the mage herself, rather than as a booby trap for people coming later.”

“You mean that if she was fighting someone and their blood fell to the floor, the spell would be activated and give her a summoned ally?”

“Exactly,” Alaria said, impressed at how quick Mia was to catch on. “I wonder why she didn’t deactivate it when she left? I’m going to deactivate it now, though - I don’t want a bunch of demons and monsters appearing out of the blue if I accidentally get blood on the floor. Practice is fine, but not at home.”

She reached down into the web, feeling through its machinations as she ran her magical senses along its length. As she’d thought, it ran into every part of the house, and there were dangerous spells laid at every intersection. It was a fine creation, a very skillful piece of work, and she almost felt bad for destroying it… Almost. It was dangerous, and it was the work of a mage who she was not at all sure she admired. She didn’t want it in her house.

She narrowed her eyes in concentration as she let her own power flow through the spell and find the heart of the magic, and then pinched the heart of the spell out with as much deft ease as if she had been pinching out the light of a candle.

“Woah!” Mia exclaimed, leaping back as the web blazed brightly for a moment and then vanished completely. “Is it gone?”

Alaria rose from where she knelt. She rubbed her ear, feeling as if she had just risen from underwater. “It’s done,” she said. “Do you feel that?”

“The place feels less stuffy,” Mia agreed, “less close.”

Alaria nodded. “The web of magic had been cunningly woven through the fabric of the building,” she said. “But it’s gone now. Whoever the mage was, we won’t see any more of her spellwork, I guess.”

“And the next challenge,” Mia said quietly, “will be defeating the koblins at Daeron’s pass. Are you still sure you’re ready for that?”

“Absolutely,” Alaria said. “We’ll meet at dawn and go there together, and by noon we’ll be in Hopeford buying furniture, and there’ll be a lot fewer koblins troubling travelers on the road.”

Chapter

Eleven

Mia and Alaria reached the ridge above Daeron’s Pass after ninety minutes of brisk walking. Mia was out of breath from the pace, but Alaria hadn’t even broken a sweat despite her heavy leather armor and the large sword that bounced along at her hip.

The sun was low in the sky. Dawn had broken early over the plain, but at this time of year, the sun hung above the horizon for a long time before climbing fast toward noon. It was very early, but Alaria had wanted to get going as soon as possible.

Mia had arrived at the homestead before sunrise and found Alaria ready to go, her sword on her hip and her green cloak thrown over her armor to disguise her martial aspect until they left town.

She needn’t have bothered. There was no one about. Brighthill was a sleepy little town, and the people didn’t rise earlier than they had to. Even the farmers who worked the crops in the fields between Richvale and Brighthill weren’t up as the two women passed.

Alaria and Mia skirted round the edge of Richvale and got on the Hopeford road just as the sun peeked over the eastern hills. Alaria wasn’t saying much. She was thinking of what Beth the innkeeper had said about the impact of the koblin invasion on her business over the last few years.

If the only impact had been the inconveniencing of travelers, it might not have been so bad, but seeing a small business like Beth’s at risk of going under made Alaria coldly furious. Beth paid taxes to the crown. Why were koblins allowed to settle in a forest and throttle trade while the crown troops did nothing?

Mia was content to hurry along in silence, glancing up in awe at Alaria now and again as they walked. The older woman was too deep in her thoughts to notice, but when, after an hour and a half of brisk marching, they reached the ridge, Alaria shook herself out of her reverie and slapped Mia companionably on the shoulder.

“Good job,” she said. “We’ve made good time. This is the place?”

“Yes,” Mia said, “but how did you know?”

Alaria gestured toward the view. “A high ridge after a long, steady climb, another ridge beyond, and down in the dip, a narrow pass with thick, wild woodland on either side. This has to be Daeron’s Pass.”

Mia started. “How did you know the name?”

Alaria laughed. “The innkeeper told me.”

“Who, Beth Rigby?”

“Yeah, the tall woman with red hair and the tail.”

Mia grinned. “She let you see the tail, did she? That’s interesting.”

Alaria almost asked more, but she pulled her focus back to the task in hand. She looked around the ridge.

“I agree that this is a safe vantage point,” she said. “There’s no chance anyone can sneak up on you here.”

The road on the top of the ridge was surrounded by flat, open ground and covered in low growing, pink and purple heathers that were already humming with bees. In front of them, the road ran steeply down into the pass below, but at every other point the walls of the pass were sheer and impassable. Daeron’s Pass was the only way across the clear, two-mile length of the valley.

“You still sure about this?” Mia said, looking over the edge down at the tops of the trees below. There was no sign of life, but that meant nothing. There would have been no difficulty hiding an army down there, the trees were so thick.

“Do I look like I’ve changed my mind?” Alaria asked playfully.

Mia laughed. “You don’t. And I have to say I’m looking forward to seeing your disguise.”

Alaria winked at her. “It’s the bit after the disguise that I’m looking forward to.”

She stepped away from Mia and composed herself. She took a few steadying breaths, and then sought inside her soul for the mask that would allow her to fool the eyes of her enemies. She found the mask, brought it to the forefront of her mind, and cast it with Cloak of Hiding.

The spellcasting was an act of will. There was no magic word, no physical action, no ritual to bring the magic into being. Alaria just reached for the spell, found it in her mind, and cast it. This was magic that had been trained into her, absorbed into the very fiber of her being through careful, dedicated practice. Her Spirit spells were some of the most advanced she had, and Cloak of Hiding was one of the first she’d mastered. She had a whole set of carefully developed masks that she could use with the spell, and she was exceedingly proud of them.

The mask that came into play now was called Hilda Beergard, an ancient, half blind woman who was partial to wandering around in isolated places while carrying large bags of gold prominently about her person. Hilda was Alaria’s favorite tool for drawing bandits out from cover, and this was the perfect opportunity.

In an instant, Mia found she was no longer looking at the tall, impressive, long-legged form of Alaria the beautiful blonde-haired warrior. Now she could only see Hilda Beergard, the ancient crone with stooped back, walking cane, and her great mass of steel-gray hair that hung lank about her bent and crooked shoulders. She had a pointed nose and a protruding chin, rheumy eyes, and an incongruous sack in one hand that clinked loudly as if full of coins.

Mia swore under her breath and took a step back. “By the gods, that’s amazing,” she whispered. “Is that really you?”

“Yes,” Alaria said, her voice creaking with age, “but it’s difficult to maintain without constant focus. I’ll go down now. Enjoy the show.”

Alaria began the walk down the road. It took a long time, for she was obliged to walk at the pace of Hilda Beergard, not of Alaria Hartwood, but eventually she got to the bottom of the pass and started out into the middle of the road.

She reached the middle, every sense on alert. She glanced back up and saw Mia silhouetted against the morning sky at the top of the ridge. She stopped.

“Ooh, my back,” she grumbled loudly, and stood in the road stamping her feet. “This bag of gold is too heavy for me to carry.”

Nothing.

“I’ll just have to put this big bag of gold down for a while,” she said, pitching her voice to carry.

Still nothing.

Don’t tell me the koblins of these parts like to sleep late as well, she thought. Time to break out the special weapons.

She lowered the bag of gold to the ground and then fumbled it, dropping it all at once so that it hit the path and spilled a tumble of coins out onto the road.

That did the trick.

A flicker of movement from her left, then another from her right. She made a show of stooping to pick up the gold, but actually just nudged the bag so more spilled out. The fat coins gleamed in the morning light, exerting their powerful Attraction enchantment as the sun hit them.

Three small figures rushed Alaria from behind, and two larger ones ran at her from the sides. They had leaped from the trees and now charged her in complete silence, blades drawn and ready to kill. Alaria had time to see their faces and to realize with a moment’s shock that these were not goblins, not kobolds, nor something in between.

These were tunnel-orks, and it was no wonder the people of Brighthill had never seen them before and had misidentified them. Tunnel-orks shouldn’t be up here in the north. They shouldn’t even be out of the mountains. They were also a slightly more challenging prospect than some kobold-goblin hybrid.

Still, they were not something Alaria Hartwood needed to fear.

In the blink of an eye, she dropped the mask and let the glamor spell slip away. The crone, the cane, and the bag of gold all vanished without trace.

In one smooth motion, she drew Skyfang. The blade glittered with power and magic as it leaped forward in her hand, dancing out and through the neck of the ork that came from her back right position. The air at the bottom of the pass had not yet been warmed by the sun, and it was cool and moistened by the surrounding trees. Green blood steamed as it fountained out and hissed as it splattered to the ground.

Alaria spun to face the ork that had come at her from the back center position and took his arm off at the shoulder. He staggered forward, his weapon clanging to the ground with his severed arm, his eyes bugging out in shock and pain at the unexpected transformation of his seemingly helpless foe.

Fire twisted around Alaria’s left hand as she cast Purging Flame, the incredible localized heat of the spell incinerating the third ork even as the tip of Skyfang danced in and out of the eye socket of the fourth.

The fifth and final ork managed to get close enough to raise his blade for a strike. He’d have run if he could, but his four companions had died so quickly that his own momentum had carried him in for his swing, and he had no choice but to follow through.

Or at least to try to.

Raising his sword allowed Alaria to see the weak spot in his armor under the right arm. She stepped forward, caught his raised sword arm in her left hand, and plunged Skyfang into his heart with her right hand.

The twang of bowstrings alerted her to the position of the archers that she’d known would be there. Maintaining her hold of the arm of the ork who she’d just killed, and keeping her sword lodged in his heart, she turned him fast, ducking and allowing him to take the three arrows that had come from the ambushers on the right flank.

As the arrows thudded into the ork’s sagging body, she glanced past them to see where the archers were hidden.

There was a flash of movement, but she couldn’t see the orks. Greenskins in green forest gear, against the dark green backdrop of undergrowth in dim light.

Another volley of allows came from the left, and she dropped her ork shield and let him slump bonelessly to the ground with a wet thud. Her sword leaped upward, and she cast the blade’s Ice Guard ability, catching the approaching arrows in a shimmering curtain of densely-packed ice crystals that shattered and crashed to the ground as the arrows hit it, taking the arrows down in the process.

Killer’s Sight. Alaria cast the combat iteration of the Sight spell she’d used when healing Mia the other day, and swept the perimeter. The spell gave her the clarity of vision that she’d lacked on her first sweep. Four archers on the left, three on the right, and a group of spear-armed orks hiding nearby, at least ten of these.

She spared a glance up at Mia, checking that her friend was still standing there and safe where she’d been a moment before. She was. Her silhouette was clear against the sky, leaning forward with an air of tension as she watched the fight.

Alaria used her left hand to cast Doom of Flame at the group of archers on the left and then charged toward the group on the right. They let off a flurry of arrows toward her. One hit her armor and ricocheted off, pinging through the air before lodging itself up to the feathers in a tree. Another met the edge of her sword and was severed by a twist of the blade’s edge. The third flew toward her head.

She would have dodged, but before she could do so, a tentacle slid from the neck of her leather armor and shot out toward the arrow with lightning speed. It caught the shaft in midflight and snapped it with a loud crack, then slithered back into her armor and was reabsorbed.

As Doom of Flame hit the other group of archers and incinerated them, the group she was running toward broke and fled, and the troop of spearorks that had been hiding in the trees leaped out toward her.

She swung toward them, and the archers who had fled immediately took up positions and got ready to loose again.

Alaria had hoped for this.

As she heard their bows twang from behind her, she dived to the ground and rolled onto her back in time to see the black feathered shafts passing above her face. As they passed her, she cast Multiply and then Burning Projectile.

The first spell caused the three arrows to turn into nine arrows, and the second (unlike its illusory version Flaming Projectile that had so scared the leprechaun recently) turned all nine of the arrows into deadly burning shafts of blazing light. The volley of arrows slammed into the spearorks as they charged, lighting up five of them and leaving five to be dealt with directly.

Good shooting, she thought as she waded in. The flaming arrows had caused the orks’ formation—such as it was—to break up, and she didn’t have any trouble dispatching the ones that were left. In a matter of seconds, the remainder of the spear troop were dead.

The three surviving archers turned to flee for real this time. Alaria stooped, grabbed up one of the ork spears from the troop she’d just killed, and threw it like a javelin at the retreating archers, casting Multiply as she did so. One spear turned to three, and—thud, thud, thud—three fleeing ork archers turned into three dead ork archers.

She looked around, but she knew instinctively that there were no more foes.

Alaria stepped out from the edge of the treeline where the last part of the fight had taken place. She turned the body of the nearest ork spearman over with her foot, looking for the clan symbol on his armor.

There it was; a crude blue emblem depicting a stylized clenched fist.

“Not a clan symbol I recognize,” she said aloud. “But where’s the boss? It’s not any of you, that’s for sure.”

Of the orks she’d fought, the only larger ones were the ones with the swords that had come at her at first. Though slightly bigger and fiercer-looking than the rest, neither of these was clan boss material.

“There’s something more going on here,” she said.

As a precaution, she cast Killer’s Sight again and scanned the trees, looking for more foes, but there were none.

She stood straight and waved to Mia three times. That had been their pre-arranged signal for when the coast was clear. Immediately, Mia left the ridge and began making her way down the hill toward Alaria.

Alaria returned her attention to the orks and set to work. By the time Mia had made it to the bottom of the pass, the corpses had been dragged to one side of the road and laid out side by side, their weapons on the ground beside them.

As Mia approached hesitantly, Alaria finished cutting the belt pouch from the last one and stood up, wiping her belt knife and then slipping it back into its sheath at her belt.

“Are you sure they’re all dead?” Mia asked.

Alaria looked from Mia to the orks and back again.

“Very sure,” she said.

“That was the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Mia said in a voice so quiet that Alaria had to strain her ears to hear it.

Alaria raised her eyebrows. She’d meant to show off a bit for her new friend, but she hadn’t meant it to be quite that impressive.

She chuckled, striking a pose for Mia, the legendary ice blade held out in front of her. “You’ve not seen anything yet,” she said.

Chapter

Twelve

Mia was quiet for a while as they walked out of the pass and back up the other side of the ridge. They had about the same amount of ground to cover as they had already, but they didn’t need to go as quickly this time as they had before, now that the ork threat had been dealt with.

“Will the pass be safe for travelers now?” Mia asked after a time.

Alaria shook her head. “I’m afraid not. There’s more to this story of the orks in the pass than meets the eye.”

“Orks?” Mia said. “I thought they were koblins?”

“People have named them koblins because that’s the best thing they could do to identify them, but they’re not kobolds or goblins, nor are they a hybrid of the two. Those were orks. Tunnel-orks, to be exact, and it’s very strange to find them in a wooded mountain pass like that. They usually live in… well, in tunnels. Hence the name.”

“But they’re not in tunnels here,” Mia said.

“Quite, but they definitely are tunnel orks. That was a better fight than I had expected. They were quite a challenging enemy. There were a decent number of them, and they were well armed and cunning. Orks are definitely a more worthy foe for someone of my skills.”

“You weren’t in any danger, were you?” Mia asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

Alaria shook her head. “Not really,” she replied with a smile. “They would have had to work a lot harder to get past me. But still, there’s no doubt that they are a danger to travelers, and I’m very glad that you alerted me to their presence.”

“You said there was more to this than meets the eye?”

“Absolutely. It’s like this. Orks work in a system of clans. Clans have a boss ork who’s in charge, and until he’s killed, there’s no getting rid of an ork clan once they’ve laid claim to a space. I think there must be a den somewhere nearby, somewhere that the local ork boss is living. He’ll be holed up somewhere overseeing the arming and armoring of his people, and overseeing the reproduction cycle. You know orks reproduce by spores? They need damp, warm places, like mushrooms. I killed a bunch of them there, but there will be way more where they came from.”

“So the boss wasn’t there?”

“No way. Those were grunts, the lowest of the low. Possibly even an offshoot group trying to do a bit of raiding on their own account, but I doubt it. There’s no telling how many there are in that woodland, and it’s going to take a bit more work on my part to get to the bottom of the mystery.”

“I’m glad I alerted you to their presence as well,” Mia said. She’d been serious since seeing the bodies, but now she brightened. “It was good to see you fight!” she went on. “I loved the flames. And that bit of magic you did with the sword, I saw the light sparkle on the sheet of ice that the blade threw up to catch the arrows!”

“That’s the native ability of my sword, Skyfang, a legendary blade made in the old days by master smiths.”

Mia suddenly laughed, then as Alaria grinned as well, Mia reached out and slipped an arm through Alaria’s and fell into step beside her.

“You’re a marvel, you know that?” Mia said. “All these years I’ve been living in a small town, hearing about the exploits of adventurers, and wondering if I would ever see one, and now here you are. You just walked right into town, with a magic sword, magic spells of your own, powerful disguises, and amazing fighting skills!”

“Don’t forget the tentacles,” Alaria reminded her.

“Of course, we mustn’t forget the tentacles,” Mia replied in a very serious voice, then they both burst out laughing.

Hopeford was the biggest settlement anywhere in the Hope River valley. The valley—a wide, flat land bounded on all sides by tall, snow-capped mountains—was warm, fertile, and sheltered from all bad weather by the enclosing peaks.

It was fertile arable land, and many people grew crops and raised cattle in the scattered villages and towns that dotted the gentle landscape. But because of the pastoral nature of the people who lived in the valley, it didn’t make sense for them to gather in large settlements. There were a few bigger towns, of course, places like Brighthill, or Gleamdon in the south, or Bonny, laying at the foot of the high crossing out on the eastern side of the great plain, but none of them even approached the size of Hopeford.

As the name suggested, the city gathered around the only place where the Hope River was shallow enough to cross on foot. In the ancient days when the first settlers had come down from the north and populated the valley, they’d congregated naturally enough around this low spot in the river. Here, they could move flocks of sheep and cattle from one side of the valley to the other, and they could also move cartloads of grain and animal feed and other goods from one side to the other.

In those days, the early settlers had used the river as their road if they wanted to go from north to south, but to travel between the east and west sides of the valley, one had to cross at the ford, and so over the years, people settled here. Hopeford began as a camp, then it became a waystation, then a village, a town, and then a city. The river still ran through the center of the city, and the eponymous ford was still very much in active use. The river ran almost exactly north to south where it passed through the middle of the city, it was reached by a wide, straight road that led from east to west, crossing the river at an almost perfect angle.

This road—called, appropriately enough, Ford Road by the locals—was joined by the road that meandered off west toward the slopes of Bread Rise, the range of hills where Brighthill town lay. Mia and Alaria arrived on foot at the outskirts of the city and walked proudly together, still arm in arm, up the center of this wide, white-paved street.

Alaria had wondered if they might not get some attention for walking into the city like this. After all, they were the first people to have made the journey on foot from Brighthill for over four years. But the people of Hopeford paid them no mind.

The city was beautiful. The whole place was built from a combination of pink and white stone, and the streets were either paved with this same stone or made from a crushed gravel of the same two kinds of stone mixed together. The place gleamed like a candy cake in the hot sun. All through the streets, trees of all different colors had been planted and nurtured to great size, providing shade everywhere for the citizens and visitors of the great city.

Alaria smiled as she looked around.

“It’s nice to visit this city,” she said to Mia. “I came through here on my way to Brighthill, but I didn’t stop. It’s good to be here with a bit more time to spend.”

“I know a nice place we could get something to eat if you like,” Mia suggested, but she sounded a little hesitant.

Alaria glanced at her and saw that she seemed to be blushing.

What’s bitten her? Alaria thought. Then she realized—of course, it must be the money. Of course, Mia was technically Alaria’s apprentice now, and Alaria had promised to pay for her food, but Mia didn’t know if that extended to treats like going out for breakfast in Hopeford.

I’ll have to make it very clear to her that I’m happy to pay for everything, Alaria thought. I don’t want to seem like I’m showing off about having money, but I don’t want her feeling embarrassed.

“Great,” Alaria said enthusiastically. “I wouldn’t know where to go. We’ll have breakfast, and by the way,” she added, trying to make it an off-hand comment, “it’s on me. You’re the apprentice now, so I’m buying the food—even the treats, okay?”

“That’s okay with me!” Mia said easily. “Thanks. But you really want to get breakfast together?”

“Sure I do,” Alaria said, surprised at how easily Mia had accepted Alaria paying.

“Great!” Mia said in a high-pitched voice that was almost a squeal. She gave a little wriggle of delight, glanced up at Alaria again with a massive smile on her face, then squeezed Alaria’s arm and pointed.

“This way,” she said. “You’re going to love it.”

Alaria allowed Mia to lead her through the city streets, first walking along the wide length of Ford Road until they came to the river, and then turning left and winding their way along narrow, white paved streets between low, square buildings with small windows covered by brightly painted shutters.

Alaria couldn’t understand Mia’s reactions. She’d thought that it was something about the money that was causing Mia embarrassment, but it was as if there was something else about the situation that was an issue for Mia.

Mia had very easily accepted the idea that Alaria would pay for the meal, but then she had repeated the question, asking, as if to make sure, whether or not Alaria wanted to have breakfast with her. What was that all about? Of course Alaria wanted to have breakfast together. Neither of them had eaten yet today, except for a snack on the road, and Alaria certainly was not going to go furniture shopping without anything in her belly!

Well, perhaps there was something about this situation that she didn’t understand. Perhaps there was some local custom that she was missing? She wondered whether she should ask Mia directly about it, but then decided against it. After all, her new friend didn’t seem embarrassed anymore. Instead, she seemed absolutely delighted, far more delighted than Alaria would have expected anyone to be at the idea of going out for some food together.

With the pragmatism that had been a defining feature of her character all of her days, Alaria put the question to one side for the moment. As far as she was concerned, it was something that she didn’t understand; a question that she couldn’t answer, so there was no point in pushing it further at present. Mia was happy and no longer embarrassed, and she seemed pleased to be able to show Alaria the restaurant that she had found. Alaria was content for the moment to leave it at that.

And after all, she thought, we have plenty of time. Mia’s my apprentice now, and she’ll always be around the new Homestead. Chances are she’ll move in there at some point, probably pretty soon.

The thought gave Alaria a strange kind of thrill in her chest. She felt her own heart beating quicker for a moment, and there was a strange feeling in her stomach, a kind of fluttering sensation that she wasn’t used to. She found herself giving an involuntary wiggle of excitement and pleasure, just like the one Mia had given a moment before, when Alaria had confirmed that she certainly did want to go out for breakfast together.

Alaria laughed. No, she giggled. She was surprised by the sound. That was not the kind of laugh she was used to hearing from herself. She felt suddenly playful, happy, lighthearted, and younger than she really was. Mia’s arm was still threaded through hers, and she gave it a squeeze, just as Mia had done earlier to her.

“What?” Mia asked, looking up at her. Her dark eyes were sparkling with some pleasant emotion.

“I don’t really know,” Alaria said, realizing that was the truth. “I’m just happy, I guess.”

“Me too,” Mia said, quietly.

She seemed about to say something else, but then they turned a corner and she saw the restaurant that they were heading for in front of them.

“There it is,” she said. “Come on.”

The restaurant was a tall building, three stories with a balcony floor on top that was shaded by a red and white striped awning stretched out on wooden posts.

The restaurant was built of the same white and pink stone as everything else in the city, but unlike many of the other buildings—particularly the residential ones—the windows were not as deeply laid into the walls, and they were also bigger. The walls were still very thick, and the windows had big wooden shutters painted a beautiful light purple. The shutters were thrown back, and Alaria could see inside the restaurant, where many small round tables were laid out on a polished wooden floor. The light was dim, and it looked cool and pleasant inside.

An elaborately painted wooden signboard above the main door proclaimed the legend: Jarack’s Restaurant, and underneath in smaller letters, the finest meals in Hopeford, early to late.

“We’ll go round here,” Mia said. “This is the nicest place to sit.”

She stepped forward, and her arm slipped out of Alaria’s as Alaria lingered, looking through the window. Instead of breaking the contact, Mia took Alaria’s hand and led her along. Alaria found the contact pleasant and comforting. She’d not thought holding hands was something that was done between friends, but perhaps customs were different in this part of the world. Most of her life had been spent in the merciless lands south and west of the Hope River valley, in places where gentler customs of friendship were not usually known.

Friendship in the lands Alaria had come from was a hard thing, a bond of toughness and loyalty, a bond of blood and shared hardship, not a gentle thing of going out for breakfast, or holding hands.

She felt suddenly clumsy and outlandish in her hard leather armor and her enchanted combat boots, with her sword in its sheath at her side, the sweat of battle and the scent of magic still on her clothes. There was a splatter of dried ork blood on her leather jerkin under her old green traveling robe, and despite the long and enjoyable bath that she’d had at the inn the night before, her clothes were old, dirty, and in need of repair.

Suddenly, she felt old, dirty, and in need of repair herself.

But Mia was leading her round the corner of the restaurant, to where a beautiful sight greeted them.

In a generously sized courtyard shaded by a grove of tall lemon trees, more tables sat on a wooden deck right by the flowing water of the Hope River. The water cooled the air and irrigated the ground nearby, and lush thick grass grew up beside the raised wooden platform where the tables sat.

Alaria glanced around and suddenly felt less out of place.

There was a dwarf here, sitting alone at a table in a corner, with a gigantic book in front of him and his war axe propped against the seat beside him.

A merman with his trident on the table before him sat with a beautiful merwoman, their long tails curled under the table. They leaned over the table, gazing into each other’s eyes.

Alaria was surprised to see that the merwoman wore only a light scarf around her shoulders. Her small breasts were clearly visible through the lightly woven fabric, and the merman’s muscled chest was also completely bare.

A bare-chested man is one thing, though in a city I’d have thought it surprising in any but a merman. But a merwoman with her breasts on show in public! That is surprising.

Where Alaria had grown up, women were very much encouraged to enjoy their bodies and to make the most of them. Revealing clothing was not uncommon, but to sit in a restaurant with one’s breasts on display would have been a large step too far. Even for those like merpeople or centaurs who, it was well known, never wore clothes, such practices would not have been acceptable in public.

“Alaria,” Mia said quietly, and Alaria felt the blood rushing to her face as she realized she had been staring at the merwoman’s breasts. Thankfully, neither the merwoman nor her partner had noticed, but the dwarf, sitting at his table in the corner, was giving Alaria a knowing look. When he saw her looking at him, he grinned slyly and wagged an admonishing finger at her.

Sleazy little swine, Alaria thought, narrowing her eyes and glaring at him fiercely.

His eyes dropped to her sword, then came back to her face for a moment before he hurriedly looked away and made a show of engaging with his book again.

Everyone knew that dwarves were sexless, reproducing through an arcane process and eventually sprouting up from holes in the ground like mushrooms, but that didn’t mean they weren’t above lewd and unpleasant humor about others. The dwarf had thought that Alaria was looking at the merwoman because she was attracted to her sexually. An absurd idea. Oh, the merwoman was beautiful, of course, but…

But…

The thought trailed off, like a path that runs into the white space at the edge of a map and then stops.

“Alaria,” Mia said, more insistently, and tugged at her hand.

“Sorry,” Alaria said. She realized she’d been standing staring into the distance, absorbed in her own thoughts. Now the mercouple were looking at her, but they lost interest and picked up their conversation again as Alaria allowed Mia to lead her away to a secluded little table by the water, under the largest of the lemon trees.

“Sit,” Mia suggested gently.

Alaria unhitched Skyfang from its clip on her sword belt and leaned it against the trunk of the tree, then sat.

Mia took the chair opposite her and reached out, placing her hand over Alaria’s.

“Are you okay?” she said. “What happened there?”

“I was just distracted by my thoughts,” Alaria said. “I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Mia said, but her gaze lingered on Alaria’s face a little. “So long as you’re sure.”

Alaria nodded.

“I’ll go order us some drinks, then, and get a couple of menus,” Mia said. She stood, but then Alaria abruptly reached out and took her hand before Mia could turn away.

“Wait,” Alaria said as she took Mia’s hand.

I like this custom, she thought, pleased with herself at how well she’d taken to the hand holding thing.

Mia smiled warmly. “Yes, dear?”

Alaria smiled. “While we’re here in town, I’d like to get some new clothes.”

Chapter

Thirteen

Evening had fallen and a welcome coolness was settling over Brighthill when Alaria and Mia found themselves standing outside the homestead once more after their day in Hopeford.

Dust hung in the air, and the sounds of hooves and creaking wheels from the cart that had brought them back from the city retreated down the hill, headed for the inn.

Mia yawned. “It’s been a productive day, wouldn’t you say?”

Alaria nodded. “We’ve got the furniture ordered, I’ve got a pack full of new clothes, and I’ve done some damage to the ork threat in Daeron’s Pass. Yes, I’d call that a productive day.”

“I got a fright when we saw that those ork bodies had disappeared, though,” Mia added.

Alaria and Mia had ridden back to Brighthill on a hired cart with a few merchants from the city who wanted to visit the town. When they’d rolled through Daeron’s Pass, there had been no sign whatsoever of the bodies from the fight earlier in the day. There were some splatters of dark blood on the ground, and scuffed footprints in the dust, but aside from that there was no trace of the competent, channeled violence that Alaria had meted out on her enemies.

The cart had ridden through at top speed, and Alaria had peered through the gloom under the trees, looking for signs of enemies, but there were no signs. She didn’t doubt that the pass was being watched, however, and she felt inordinately proud (though as usual she couldn’t quite put her finger on why) when she became aware that Mia had moved closer to her, as if for protection.

They made it to Brighthill without incident, and the cart driver had politely insisted on driving them the whole way up the hill to the homestead, even though all the other passengers had alighted at the inn. Alaria had her new clothes which she wanted to leave at the homestead rather than the inn, and anyway, Mia seemed keen to go back up to the house again as well, though she didn’t say why.

“The furniture will be arriving tomorrow,” Alaria said, thinking out loud. “I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t going to be today, but I’m glad now that it wasn’t. I was getting a bit ahead of myself. I’d be too tired to move a whole stack of new furnishings into the house tonight.”

“And you’ll need a bit of help, too,” Mia said. She smiled up at Alaria though the dimness of the evening. Then she lifted a hand and tucked a lock of hair away behind her ear again.

Alaria felt as if her heart had turned over in her chest.

What was that?

“Let’s go in,” Alaria said abruptly, and stepped forward, her bundle under her arm, the key rattling a little as she tried to unlock the gate. Her hand was shaking.

What was this feeling?

All day, from when Mia had taken her hand before their long, leisurely breakfast in Jarack’s Restaurant in Hopeford, Alaria had been getting this feeling. It was something like hunger, something like excitement, something like the satisfaction of mastering a piece of magic.

It was the feeling she used to get when she thought about her dream of having a home of her own, a place to settle and explore enchanting and potion making without the need to constantly make money to keep herself alive. A kind of yearning mixed with the excitement of a dream.

All day, every time she looked at Mia, she’d felt this thing. Every time Mia took her hand and smiled at her, leading her along a Hopeford street to show her some new delight, or laughing at some joke that Alaria had made, this feeling had surged up in her chest.

At first the feeling was pleasant, then it became almost painful, and now, after a long day, it was becoming exhausting. She didn’t know what it was, and she was not used to not knowing things that happened inside herself.

Now, she realized with a pang of shame, she’d hurried ahead to get to the gate because Mia’s smile had made that feeling surge up to the point where it was unbearable. If she’d stood there a moment longer, it would have overflowed. She’d have had to do something, but she had no idea what she could do to ease the feeling.

“Lari?” Mia called, jogging a few steps to catch up with her.

Alaria tried to speak, but couldn’t.

“Hey, hey, what’s wrong?”

Mia came up beside her and put an arm round her waist. With a shock, Alaria realized she was crying.

“Oh, gods,” she choked, laughing and sobbing at the same time. “I don’t know what’s come over me. I… long day, I guess. Sorry…”

“No need to be sorry,” Mia said gently. Her fingers came up to brush Alaria’s tears away. “It’s okay. You can talk to me about it if you want to, but you don’t have to.”

They were in the grounds now, halfway between the gate and the house. Under the trees it was darker, and Alaria was grateful for it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried, and especially not in this unexpected way, for no reason she could define.

“Let’s go round the back,” Mia suggested. “I could do with a breath of the air around that stream.”

The thought of the cool water after their long day was attractive. Alaria let Mia lead her around the side of the house. She put her bundle of clothes down on the back porch as they passed, then headed to the water.

Mia was wearing heavier shoes today, and tighter-fitting trousers. She sat on the bank and began to unlace her shoes, and Alaria did the same. Alaria had new, lighter shoes in her bundle, but for now she was just wearing her heavy fighter’s boots.

As she sat down, Alaria saw that the water had a strange color to it. In the dark under the shadow of the trees, it seemed almost to glow. She unlaced her boots, pulled them off, and sat down, plunging her feet into the water.

She gave a cry of delighted surprise. All around her feet, a cloud of beautiful, blue luminescence exploded into life, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Mia splashed her feet into the water too, and the same effect happened again.

“Wow, it’s beautiful!” Alaria said, amazed. She was completely taken by this new effect, and her overwhelming emotions of a moment before faded.

“You’ve never seen the glow before?” Mia asked.

“Never. Did you know about it?”

“Yeah,” Mia said, and Alaria could hear the smile in her voice. “I used to come up to the river, further downstream from here, with some friends. We’d swim in the river at night and see the lights. You’re right, it is beautiful. I’m glad you’ve not seen it before.”

“Why?”

“Because I get to show it to you.”

She took Alaria’s hand in the dark again, her fingers warm to the touch. Alaria was glad of the contact, though it made the unidentified emotion flare up again.

“Lari…?” Mia said carefully, after a long moment had passed. “Do you like this?”

“What?” Alaria asked.

“This,” Mia said, squeezing her fingers. “Me taking your hand like this.”

“Yeah. I do. It’s a nice custom.”

“A custom?” Mia sounded a bit confused, and also a bit amused. “What do you mean, a custom?”

“Oh, I just mean… Well, no one ever did that where I came from, so I assumed it’s a custom that’s traditional here in Brighthill.”

“People don’t hold hands in the Crownheart City?” Mia asked.

“Well, l…lovers do, but not just friends.” Alaria found herself hesitating over the word. “I like it, though,” she added hurriedly.

To her surprise and rising dismay, she felt Mia’s fingers pull away. Instinctively, she held on.

“It’s not customary for people who are just friends to hold hands in Brighthill either,” Mia said, a little stiffly.

“It’s not?” Alaria asked. She was now thoroughly confused. Never in all her career of fighting monsters and facing eldritch dangers had she felt so utterly lost. “But I thought…”

“What?” Mia asked. Her voice now sounded sharp and bitter. “What did you think?”

“I thought you were holding my hand because we were friends,” Alaria said, feeling—for reasons she couldn’t pin down—that the answer was more than a little lame. “You are my friend, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” Mia said. She sighed. “Of course I am.”

Mia let go of Alaria’s hand and splashed her feet in the water, sending up clouds of luminescence that lit up her face in brief flashes. Alaria saw that Mia was now staring glumly into the water.

Alaria had no idea what to say or do. She felt like she was walking through a maze that she’d never meant to stumble into, and worse, she felt that the way out of the maze was within her reach if she could only work out what to say.

She took a breath to speak, hoping that helpful words would come to her.

“You really don’t get it, do you?” Mia asked before Alaria could speak. “You’re not just saying that? You genuinely don’t know what I mean by taking your hand, or what it means to me when you take mine?”

“I really don’t,” Alaria confessed, relieved to be able to admit it. “I’m totally confused, Mia. It made me so happy that you held my hand and then you seemed so happy when I did it back that I thought it must be a custom, and I was glad, because I want to, but now you’re saying it’s not a custom and I don’t know what…”

Mia shifted to face Alaria, leaned over, and kissed her firmly on the lips.

The kiss was the key that unlocked the whole maze, and it unlocked more than that. The swelling tide of emotion and longing suddenly fell into place, and the shift in understanding was so jarring and complete that Alaria might have fallen into the stream if Mia’s arms hadn’t been firmly around her body.

Mia’s mouth was soft and warm, and Alaria responded to the kiss instinctively. Mia had unlocked a part of Alaria that she hadn’t even known was in there. Alaria leaned in and kissed Mia back, opening her mouth slightly and putting one arm around Mia’s slender waist, raising her other hand to the side of her head.

The water chuckled past as they explored each other’s lips, slowly, then with more excitement. Alaria felt her body respond to Mia’s touch. Her skin tingled with warmth and excitement, like the feeling of magic flowing through her when she was ready to cast a spell.

After what seemed an eternity, Mia pulled back slightly.

“Do you get it now?” she asked in a quietly teasing voice. She sounded husky and close, and her tone made Alaria’s skin tingle.

“I… I do,” Alaria stammered. “But I thought… that it, I thought, between women…”

“What, that women can’t be lovers? Can’t be together?”

“Well, yes. I mean, I know it happens sometimes, but it’s not common, not public. At least, that’s always how it was…”

“…where you came from,” Mia finished, her voice heavy with disapproval. “Yes, well, from the sounds of it, where you came from is a bit behind the times. We’re a bit more open to new ideas here in Hope Valley. You’ve done a lot, and seen a lot, but it seems you’ve still a lot to learn.”

“So it would seem,” Alaria said. “I’ve never even considered that being with a woman is something I could do, something I would want.”

Mia sighed. She put an arm around her and leaned her head on Alaria’s shoulder. “The other day, when we spoke about it, you said you’d never found any use for a husband.”

“That’s right,” Alaria said, wondering what Mia was leading up to.

“But I bet you’ve had some interest from men over the years, no?”

“Well, I suppose so,” Alaria said. “I was never interested in them, though.”

“No, I don’t imagine you were. And you never questioned why that might be?”

“I… no, I didn’t.”

“You’ve never been kissed?”

“Not until a moment ago,” Alaria said quietly. “But I think I’d like to again.”

Mia laughed, and the old lightness was back in her voice as she spoke. “I can’t believe you, Lari. Years of fighting monsters and adventuring in the world, and yet now, it turns out that you know as much about love as you do about leprechauns! Here, come here, let’s just…”

She pulled Alaria’s head down to her mouth and kissed her again, softly running her lips up the curve of Alaria’s jaw. “You’re beautiful, do you know that?” she whispered, then brought her mouth back to find Alaria’s again before Alaria could reply.

This time, her tongue came out to find Alaria’s lips, and Alaria tentatively explored with her own tongue. A moment later, they were kissing deeply, and Alaria could feel her heart beating faster and her breathing growing heavier. She ran her hands down across Mia’s back, down to where her waist narrowed, then out to where her hips broadened again. Mia made a little groan of pleasure, shifting her hips as Alaria gripped them firmly, then Mia leaned Alaria back, lying her down in the grass and moving on top of her, kissing her mouth and her neck, her hands tangling in her hair.

They stopped after a while, lying back together in the grass, Mia’s head cradling on Alaria’s shoulder.

“It’s okay?” Mia asked.

“Yeah,” Alaria said, feeling breathless and flushed. Her whole body was tingling with excitement. “Have you done this before? With a woman, I mean?”

“I’ve only ever done it with women,” Mia said. “I’m not interested in doing it with men. It’s just not for me.”

“I’ve never done it with a man or a woman,” Alaria said. “But, with women, how do you…? I mean, how does it work? Men have the…” she gestured at her own waist. “But we don’t…”

Mia sat up suddenly, her dark hair tumbling across her face as she looked down at Alaria. “Alaria Hartwood, tell me you’re joking,” she said, with mock sternness. “Please, tell me you don’t really think that we can’t do it just because we don’t have a man’s parts?” She stared into Alaria’s eyes, then shook her head. “By the gods, you really don’t know, do you?”

Alaria felt embarrassed and a bit flustered. “Look, Mia, I’ve been fighting monsters and learning blades and magic all my life. I haven’t had time to learn about any of it. All I know is that men and women get together and the man has his… you know… and he’s able to use that to give her pleasure… I mean, I’ve heard of women being together as lovers, I’ve heard that it happens, but I don’t know anything about how it’s done.”

“You’ve never explored on your own?”

“On my own? How could I on my own…?”

The moon had risen behind the hills as they’d been speaking and kissing, and now Mia leaned back and a glow of pale moonlight fell across her face. She smiled, and the smile was wicked and full of promise.

“You, my dear, have a lot to learn, and you’re lucky you’ve found just the one to teach you. It looks like I’m not the only person who’s going to be an apprentice around here.”

Chapter

Fourteen

Alaria’s head was spinning. She wanted to ask questions, to sit in silence, to kiss more, to understand what Mia meant by exploring on her own, but Mia suddenly stood up and took Alaria’s hand, drawing her up from her sitting position.

“Come on,” Mia said. “We’ve plenty of time to explore this, there’s no rush. Tonight, I want you to come and meet my friends. Are you up for that?”

On the way back from Hopeford, they’d talked about Alaria meeting Mia’s Brighthill friends. Alaria was keen to do so, but she was feeling a little disorientated by the recent revelations. It was hard to know exactly how she felt about anything else.

“Oh, uh, okay,” she said. “Where are they?”

“Down in Brighthill, silly,” Mia said gently. “Probably at the inn, or back at Clem or Yarrow’s place. How about getting changed out of those fighting clothes and coming to town with me for a bit?”

Alaria nodded, slowly. “Sure,” she said. “Okay.”

After all, she thought, this is a new challenge in its way. This is something that I’ve never done before.

They went into the house via the back door leading into the kitchen. Alaria had picked up a good supply of candles in Hopeford. She put her bundle on the huge table in the middle of the kitchen and unwrapped it, taking out a candle and holding her hand to it.

Conjuring a small flame didn’t even require an actual spell. All she had to do was tap into the Fire school of elemental magic, and focus some of the energy on the candle’s wick. Flame spluttered into life, and she handed the candle to Mia. Then she took another candle, lit it from the one Mia held, and nodded toward the stairs.

“There’s a mirror up there, in one of the attic rooms,” Alaria said, “but weirdly enough there aren’t any others in the house. Let’s go up and get it. I don’t want to dress without being able to see myself.”

They climbed the stairs, headed for the attic.

“That trick you just did with the candles,” Mia began.

“Not really a trick, but yes, what about it?”

“That kind of thing might be a bit unsettling for people who’ve not seen that magic before.”

“Like your friends?”

“Well, yes,” Mia said. “Oh, they’re all very open minded people, of course, but I’m just warning you not to be too showy with your spells.”

Alaria sighed. “Don’t worry, I’m used to it. You’d think that with all the magical races and people in the kingdom of Sapheli, folks would be more used to strange sights by now, but even in the cities a simple bot of magic like lighting candles with Fire magic can still get you some very dirty looks. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll be careful.”

“Thanks,” Mia said.

They reached the bottom of the ladder. Alaria handed Mia her candle, and Mia stood on tiptoes to kiss her quickly on the side of the mouth.

“Go on.” She laughed when Alaria stood staring and smiling at her.

“Oh, right,” Alaria said. “Of course.”

She climbed the ladder and got a hold of the mirror, a big, oversized piece of heavy glass encased in a poorly-constructed wooden frame.

“You sure you’re okay with this?” Alaria called down to Mia as she manhandled the mirror over to the edge of the hatch and rested it on the edge. “It’s pretty heavy.”

“I should be okay,” Mia said, peering up. “Just lower it down slow.”

Alaria grunted as she lifted the mirror and maneuvered it out over the hatch. She crouched, lowering it carefully through and letting the weight down as gently as she could. Mia stood below, the candles stuck in a wall bracket next to her. She had her hands raised up and her tongue sticking out one side of her mouth as she concentrated, readying herself to take the strain.

The frame failed.

There was a terrific crack, and Alaria suddenly felt the weight vanish from her hands. In a shower of splintered, rotten wood, the heavy glass slid from her hands and fell straight toward Mia’s upturned face.

Mia had no time to get out of the way. Alaria saw her eyes go wide, but Mia didn’t even have a chance to scream.

There was a single, terrible moment as the heavy glass pane fell toward Mia’s face, and they both knew what was about to happen… Only it didn’t.

Alaria cried out in shock as two enormous tentacles exploded from her own wrists, and another two from the place where her shoulders met her neck. They moved almost quicker than sight, and before Alaria knew what had happened, they had wrapped the sheet of glass and held it, only a foot above Mia’s head.

Mia screamed and leaped back. Alaria grunted with effort as the tentacles came under her control. As when the cherezio had fallen, the tentacles had manifested instinctively but then gave themselves over to her control a moment later.

Now, she was controlling all four tentacles at once. The sensation was new. She wobbled, almost dropped the mirror again, then got hold of herself. It was just like using hands, she told herself, just like using her own hands.

“Okay,” she said aloud. “Okay, I’ve got this.”

Carefully, she lowered the mirror to the ground and then swung out from the hatch and descended the ladder. The tentacles proved useful—she reached up and closed the hatch behind her with the two that came out from her shoulders.

Unlike previous times, the tentacles seemed to be hanging around after the immediate need was met. They curled around her waist, and the two smaller ones explored the corners of the hallway.

“Phew!” Mia sighed, wiping her brow. Her voice was shaky and her face was pale. “That was a near thing. Your tentacles saved my life!”

Alaria nodded. “The frame of the mirror broke apart. That was so stupid of me, Mia, I’m…”

Mia put a finger to Alaria’s lips. “Don’t apologize. It’s okay. Let’s get you dressed.”

At Mia’s encouragement, Alaria carried the mirror with her tentacles rather than with her hands. The tentacles had immense grip, and Alaria found that she was getting the hang of the smaller physical motions needed to control them in more subtle movements.

They got the mirror along the corridor and into the bedroom, Mia carrying the candles along behind. As she placed it against a wall at a good position to the light from the window, a new thought struck Alaria. She turned to Mia.

“The big bed!” she said, grinning. “You wanted to know why I wanted a big bed!”

“What?” Mia said, clearly thrown by the change of topic. “What are you on about?”

Alaria laughed. “The other day, when we came in here, I said about wanting a big bed and you asked if I had a husband who was going to be joining me. You asked that because you… because you wanted…”

Mia’s face had turned from confusion to a flirtatious smile. “What, Lari?” she said, coming over. “What did I want?”

“Because you wanted us to be… lovers… even then?”

“Mmm,” Mia said. “Lovers. Yes, I like the sound of that. Yes, you’ve got it. Even then, I was already thinking how nice you seemed to be, and wondering if I had half a chance.”

“More than half,” Alaria murmured.

Mia came up and put her hands on Alaria’s hips, drawing her close. “You’re getting the hang of this,” she said. Then Alaria squeaked in surprise as Mia smacked her hard on the butt and leaped away. “But now’s not the time! Let’s get you into your new outfit! I want to show you off to my friends.”

Alaria insisted on washing before she dressed, and she hauled water up from the pump outside and heated it by plunging a hand into the tub and using fire magic. Mia left her to it. Alaria was far from sure that she wanted Mia to go, but Mia reminded her that they had plenty of time.

“You’ve never done this before,” she said. “But I have. Trust me, it’s always better not to rush at the start.”

Half an hour later, Alaria came down the stairs, her hair still damp from her bath, wearing the set of very good clothes she’d bought in Hopeford. She had soft silk undergarments, a set of dark blue trousers, a shirt of crisp, cream-colored linen and a light green jacket over the top. There were good shoes, low heeled and made of soft, light brown leather, and a pair of good woolen socks. There were other clothes in the package that she’d bought, and more on the way that would arrive with the furniture order, but the outfit she had on now would be plenty to be going on with.

Alaria was pleased with how she looked, and with how she felt. It was pleasant and unfamiliar to be wearing an outfit that wasn’t made for fighting, and also wasn’t made by her own hands. It felt luxurious.

As she’d washed, she’d found herself looking at her body in a new way in the mirror. The things Mia had said still spun in her mind, but the almost painful feeling of longing wasn’t there anymore. It had been replaced by a steady, patient excitement. They would get to the next stage of their learning, but she could wait a little longer.

She dressed carefully, taking her time, and wishing that she had some scent to put on her body as she did so.

“Oh, wow,” Mia said as Alaria came down into the kitchen, holding a candle in one hand.

“You think it’s good?” Alaria said, holding her arms out and turning once to show Mia the whole effect.

“I think it’s great,” Mia said. “Really good. I wish you had some jewelry that would add to it, but I guess you don’t have anything like that here?”

Alaria shook her head, then frowned. “How did you know I wouldn’t have jewelry?”

Mia raised an eyebrow. “I just did.”

They checked the inn first, but the common room was quiet. Alaria recognized the old one-eyed golem who had witnessed the sale of her property, sitting in a corner by the fire with a group of other small creatures; gremlins, goblins, and one small, pugnacious figure with blazing red hair that could only be Timeous the leprechaun.

Alaria nudged Mia. “Look who’s here,” she whispered.

Mia rolled her eyes. “He’s always here.”

Whether Timeous Groof was deliberately ignoring them, or just hadn’t seen them, Alaria didn’t know or care. Either way, he wasn’t speaking to them, and that was fine with her.

Alaria and Mia went over to the bar together. Beth wasn’t there. Instead, the bar was in the keeping of a huge, hulking, scarred fellow with a shaved head and an underbite so pronounced that Alaria thought he must have an ork relative not too far back.

“Hi, Grezkull,” Mia said to this apparition. “Where’s Palo and Sasha and everyone? Not here?”

Grezkull made a show of shading his eyes and peering around the nearly empty common room. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say no,” he replied after a moment. His voice was an incredibly deep growl.

Mia slapped him playfully on the arm. “Where are they then? Yarrow’s? Clem’s?”

“How should I know, Mia?” he rumbled.

“Because wherever they are, you’ll be going after you’ve finished here, so you’ll have made sure to find out.”

“Hah! Discovered!” Grezkull said, laughing. “Very true, very true. They’re over at Clem’s place, playing Bazoo, I think.”

“And drinking Clem’s homebrew because it’s cheaper than the ale here, too, I bet,” Mia said.

“Undoubtedly,” Grezkull said. “See you there later?”

“Maybe,” Mia said. “Depends if we stay or not.”

“Ooh!” Grezkull said. It was an unexpected noise from such a hulking brute of a creature, and he followed it up with a salacious wink that was directed very much at Alaria.

“You want to watch out for this one,” he said to Alaria, nodding his head at Mia. “She’ll lead you astray if you’re not careful.”

“Oh, give over,” Mia said to him. “You’re hardly one to talk.”

“No, I suppose not,” Grezkull agreed, then went back to mopping the bar with a cloth.

Clem’s place was in an apartment not far from the inn, one of a block of residential buildings facing a small town square with a little fountain at the center. These buildings were two or three stories tall, and made from pale red stone, with deep windows. During the day, these windows would be shuttered to keep the inside of the buildings cool in the intense heat, but now it was night the windows were flung open. From the apartment on the top floor, the sound of laughter and music drifted into the street.

“We don’t have to stay for long if you don’t want to,” Mia said. “I want you to meet everyone, but I don’t want it to feel overwhelming for you either. I get that this is all a bit new.”

Alaria felt her shoulders relaxing. She hadn’t even known they were tense, but Mia was right, this was all very new, and she had been beginning to feel that intensely. She was very much out of her normal environment.

“Thanks,” she said, squeezing Mia’s hand. “I’ll just say if I want to leave.”

“Mia,” Alaria asked as they climbed the stairs toward the top floor apartment. “What do we say we are?”

Mia stopped and tilted her head on one side, looking at her. Then she squeezed her hand. “What, you mean this? What do we call this?”

“Yeah,” Alaria said, feeling embarrassed. “I mean, I’ve never had a… a partner before. Is that what we are?”

“Do you want to be?” Mia asked.

“More than I’ve ever wanted anything,” Alaria said. The words tumbled out of her and then suddenly they were kissing passionately in the cool dark of the stairwell, and Alaria found Mia’s hands exploring her body in a way they were much more able to now that she wasn’t wearing her leathers and chainmail anymore.

The touch was incredibly exciting. Alaria responded in kind, a bit clumsily at first, but then more skilfully, guided both by her own desires and by the little noises of pleasure and excitement that Mia made as Alaria touched her. She found the sensation of Mia’s soft skin under her clothing intoxicating, and Mia was nearly as carried away as Alaria was when suddenly a door opened up above and loud laughing voices spilled out.

Mia and Alaria sprang apart guiltily and straightened their clothes, laughing as they went on up the stairs with their arms around each other.

“Let’s say we’re together if anyone asks, okay?” Mia said.

“Okay,” Alaria agreed. She gave Mia a squeeze around the hip with one hand, and they headed up the stairs.

Chapter

Fifteen

The group who had come out of the apartment above brushed past Mia and Alaria with a hurried greeting, then carried on down the stairs, laughing together as they went.

“You know them?” Alaria said.

“I know most people in Brighthill and the surrounding villages,” Mia said. “Everyone gets together most nights in someone’s house or other. I go sometimes, not all the time.”

“You must have a lot of friends.”

Mia laughed. “I know a lot of people, but knowing a person isn’t the same as being friends. I only have a few real friends—Palo, Sasha, Emmie Yolksen. I like Grezkull, too, he’s alright. I get on well enough with most people, but it’s important to be careful who you trust.”

They went into the apartment and found a party in full swing. A group of musicians were improvising a fast tune in the front room while a larger group of people danced together nearby. Others sat on the floors or on couches, chatting together, or watching the dancers and listening to the music. The people were mostly humans, but there were a few elves and a few other creatures of goblin kind. Alaria didn’t recognize them.

A large group were playing a game on the floor of a bedroom. The game involved colored cards, wooden counters, and dice. This was Bazoo, and Alaria liked the look of the brightly colored cards and the intricately shaped counters. She had a feeling she’d like to learn to play.

Mia took her into the kitchen, and here Alaria recognized someone she knew. It was Beth, the catkin innkeeper. Beth turned away from the person she was talking to—none other than the nervous young man from Brighthill Property who had handled the sale of the homestead—and did a doubletake as she recognized Alaria.

“Wow,” she said, her eyes going wide. “You look great!” Then she frowned. “I mean, that is, not to say you didn’t look good before, I just meant, uh…”

Her elegant tail flicked back and forth like the tail of an agitated cat as she stumbled over her words. Beth was taller than Alaria, very slim, but with well-defined muscles visible in her forearms and shoulders. Her eyes were green, and her hair was a similar color to Alaria’s own, but redder. Her face was chiseled and sharply defined, and in this more relaxed, informal setting Alaria thought she could see more of the catkin in Beth’s face than she had seen before.

Beth wore the loose-fitting trousers in the same style that Mia had been wearing that first day. The style seemed popular with many of the women in Brighthill, and Alaria had seen a lot of people wearing them in Hopeford, too. Beth had a light linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show the definition in her forearms. Silver bangles tinkled on both her wrists.

Alaria thought she looked great. She was surprised to find that thought identifiable in herself. Since Mia had unlocked the mystery of Alaria’s own desire, Alaria was able to appreciate beauty in others and know what was happening when she did so.

“It’s good to be out of my fighting clothes,” Alaria agreed with a smile. “Mia helped me to pick some new clothes out when we went to Hopeford the other day.”

“Oh, right,” Beth said. She looked from Alaria to Mia then back again. “Oh, right!” she said again, grinning this time and taking a step back when she saw that Alaria and Mia were still holding each other’s hands. “Well, I’m glad to see you’re settling in,” she added with a wink.

The party was a peculiar experience for Alaria. She didn’t want to drink, and thankfully neither did Mia. Alaria mingled, getting to know some of the people in the apartment, but she found that she didn’t have much in common with any of them. She ended up mostly talking to people about Brighthill and her hopes for the homestead and the little shop building that was up there.

She shared the fact that she was a crafter and enjoyed making things, including potions. People seemed impressed with this, and pleased at the idea of a new shop opening up in the town. She didn’t talk too much about her adventuring days.

She met Palo, Mia’s friend, who was a young man with dark, curly hair and intense eyes. He and Sasha were a couple, but Sasha wasn’t here tonight, and Palo was distracted, wondering where she’d got to. He was jealous, worried that she might be getting together with some other man.

Mia slapped him on the shoulder and told him not to be so paranoid. “You know she loves you, Palo. She’s just scatterbrained and has gotten distracted with whatever else she’s doing tonight.”

“Hmph,” Palo said, unconvinced. “I suppose you’re right.”

Of everyone at the gathering, Beth seemed the most interested in Alaria. She came and sat with her, by the open window, when things had quietened down a bit. She asked about the koblins in Daeron’s Pass, but Alaria hedged, saying that she didn’t think the threat had been comprehensively dealt with.

“I’m pretty good with a bow, you know,” Beth said unexpectedly. “If you fancy a helping hand, I can always leave the inn in Grezkull’s capable hands for a few nights.”

Alaria was surprised. “Thanks. Maybe we could do that some time, but to be honest, I hadn’t thought much beyond tomorrow.”

“Why, what’s happening tomorrow?”

“I’m getting a load of new furniture delivered.”

Alaria and Mia parted from each other pretty late that night. After the party, they wandered the quiet streets of the town for a while, talking quietly, and often stopping to enjoy kissing and slowly exploring each other’s bodies with their hands and lips. Eventually, their path led them back to the inn, and Mia said she was going to go back to Richvale for the night.

“I’ll see you up at the homestead tomorrow morning,” she said. “The furniture is coming at noon!”

Alaria was not sure she wanted to part from Mia just now, but she reminded herself that they’d have plenty of time to get to know each other more, and that Mia had said it was best not to rush things. They kissed goodbye again on the steps of the inn, and Alaria went up to her room.

Next morning, Alaria woke early after a troubled sleep. She felt restless, unable to settle, her body tingling all over with a strange sensation that she didn’t recognize. She ate fast, then set herself to work.

When restless, physical labor was the only solution. She knew that well, and so she spent the morning ferrying her gear up from the inn to the homestead. Beth was up and about, whistling and singing to herself in the common room, and she greeted Alaria cheerfully but didn’t begin any serious conversation. Alaria was grateful for that.

Alaria borrowed a hand cart from the inn and loaded her gear in. Her heavy, enchanted armor plate—unused since the Battle of Death Lake—a bow and a quiver, plus a shield and buckler that she had never particularly got into using. The rest of her gear—sword, knife, chainmail, boots, and leathers—were up at the homestead already.

The day was already turning hot when she trundled the cart up the hill. It was mid-morning, and Alaria was surprised to find a little knot of people standing outside Number 4 when she rounded the corner and the homestead came into view.

There were four people standing outside. She recognized Mia at once, her heart leaping and her spirits soaring as soon as she caught sight of her. With her was Palo, the love-sick young man, and beside him was a woman Alaria didn’t recognize, but who she guessed must be Sasha. And with them was the unmistakable hulking form of Grezkull, the huge fellow who helped Beth out at the inn.

“Hello,” Mia said, skipping a few steps down the path to meet Alaria. “We were wondering if you’d slept in. We were just debating whether we should come down to the inn to find you. The day is getting hot, and Grezkull here doesn’t do well in the heat.”

“It’s the ork ancestry,” Grezkull muttered apologetically. “They don’t do well in the sun at the best of times.”

“You should have gone in,” Alaria said. “You could have waited in the shade, and even bathed your feet in the stream. I wouldn’t have minded.”

The four companions looked knowingly at each other.

“We tried,” Mia said. “But we couldn’t.”

“Really?” Alaria said, surprised. “What do you mean? I know the gate is locked, but you could’ve just jumped over the wall, couldn’t you?”

“Do you want to show her, or shall I?” Palo said, grinning.

“Oh, let me, let me,” Sasha interjected. “Hello, Mia, I’m Sasha. Sorry I didn’t get to meet you last night. Mia has told me so much about you. It’s so nice to meet you.”

Sasha was a surprising figure. She was small, the top of her head only just reaching Alaria’s shoulder, and she was extraordinarily beautiful. She had long, flowing curls that tumbled artfully down her back, and a broad pair of colorful wings, almost like those of a butterfly, folded across her shoulders.

But everything about her was shades of purple. Her skin was pale purple, her hair dark purple, her patterned wings a marvelous, dazzling shade of burgundy. Even the whites of her eyes were purple rather than white. She bounced up to Alaria and gave her a hug, beating her wings once as she jumped so that she could put her arms around Alaria’s shoulders properly.

“You’re a faerie?” Alaria asked, stunned to find one of the fae folk in this setting.

“Oh, not really,” Sasha said, waving a hand dismissively. “At least, my parents were, and I look like one, but being a faerie is more of a way of doing things, you know, and I don’t choose that. I’m just Sasha.”

Alaria was surprised by this to say the least, but she didn’t have a chance to ask questions about it because Sasha immediately demonstrated how she couldn’t get into the homestead. She flapped her wings and sailed up over the wall, only to hit an invisible barrier just as she passed over the top of the wall.

There was a crackling noise, like fire, and a bright flash of light, and Sasha bounced back, coming to rest on the top of the wall itself. “You see?” She giggled. “I got a fright at first, but it doesn’t hurt, it just kind of tickles.”

“And this happens for all of you if you try to climb the wall?” Alaria asked.

Mia nodded. “Even me.” She demonstrated, vaulting the wall only to have the same thing happen. A flash, a crackle, and she stumbled back to the ground.

Alaria frowned. “Let me try.”

She clambered to the top of the wall and stepped forward, but it was as if she’d hit a springy but impassable surface. The light flashed, and she felt herself pushed back, not roughly, but with a powerful elastic force.

“So weird.” Alaria took out her key and put it in the lock of the gate. She turned the key and opened the gate, then stepped through.

“Try now,” she said from inside. “Try to climb the wall now that the gate’s unlocked.”

Sasha obliged, flying up and over, landing comfortably in the thick grass on the inside of the wall.

“It’s the gate that does it,” Palo said thoughtfully. “You’d better not lose your key, Alaria, or you’ll not be able to get into your own property!”

“I’m just glad we can get in,” Grezkull said. He lumbered past them and headed for the back of the garden. “I’m going to dip my head in the stream.”

The others decided this was a good idea as well, but Alaria and Mia pulled the handcart in and closed the gate.

“I hope you don’t mind me bringing my friends along,” she said. “But I thought we might use a hand unloading the furniture, and they wanted to come.”

“Good idea,” Alaria said. “Don’t worry about that, I’m happy to have company. It’s nice to meet people in a smaller group than at the party last night, and it’s nice that they want to help.”

Whoops of laughter and splashing came from the stream at the back of the house, and Alaria and Mia walked round to see what was happening. Grezkull had immersed himself fully in the water, his great bald head sticking out of the stream, a beatific grin on his strange face.

Sasha hovered above the water, letting her purple-skinned feet run through the rippling stream, while Palo sat on the edge, splashing his feet. Alaria and Mia joined them for a little while, but before long Alaria decided that it was time to get to work.

The others were happy to help, and together they all piled into the house and started moving all the broken furniture out into the yard.

“We’ll stick it all in one of the sheds,” Alaria decided. “That one, I think. It’s closest.”

She pointed to the shed with the broken window where Timeous had been hiding out. She chose this one partly because it was nearest to the back porch, but also because she already knew which key to use for the door.

“This shed smells like leprechaun,” Grezkull growled as he stuck his head through the door. He was too big to go right inside the shed, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to anyway.

“Timeous Groof was in here when I moved in,” Alaria said. “I banished him, with Mia’s help.”

“Groof?” Sasha said and squirmed. “He’s a horrible little person. I don’t like him at all.”

“Me neither,” Alaria agreed. “Grezkull, you can actually smell him?”

“Uhhuh,” Grezkull said. “Always have been able to smell leprechauns. Not a good smell. Not a good talent to have.”

“Right,” Alaria said. “No, I can’t imagine it would be a good talent.”

She looked thoughtfully at Grezkull as an idea struck her.

“Hey,” she said, “Timeous said something when we banished him. He said you’ll never find it without me. And he was up to something. He tried hard to leave in such a way that he could return, but he wouldn’t tell us what he had been doing here.”

“Hmph,” Grezkull said. “These leprechauns, they’re supposed to have a thing about buried treasure. They sniff out gold that’s been buried by someone else, then they lay claim to it by digging it up and moving it. Maybe Timeous has a stash of treasure he’s hidden in this shed? He always has plenty of money when he comes down to the inn to drink, and he gambles, too, and loses, but he never seems to run out of cash.”

“Maybe there’s buried treasure here?” Sasha whispered.

“How would we find out?” Palo asked. “I could look around for a shovel,” he added doubtfully. “Do you have a shovel, Alaria?”

Alaria frowned. “I do, but I think there’s a quicker way. I’m, uh, I’m going to do a bit of magic, guys. I hope that’s not a problem. I thought I should warn you. It’ll be faster than trying to dig up the whole hut.”

“You do magic?” Sasha squealed. “Mia, why didn’t you tell us?”

“I wanted Alaria to be able to choose herself when to tell you.” Mia smiled.

“I’ll step away,” Grezkull said. “I don’t want to be too close. It’s risky.”

Sasha and Palo had no problem with it, however, and they came closer to see what would happen.

Alaria took a deep breath and readied herself. She might be about to find a leprechaun’s hidden treasure.

Chapter

Sixteen

The treasure-hunting spell was called Unveiled. It was, again, one of the Spirit-class spells, Alaria’s favorite class, and it was able to uncover all kinds of things. Really, the only limitation on the spell was that the object had to have been deliberately hidden by someone. If something had been deliberately hidden, then Unveiled would reveal the location.

“Ooh,” Sasha said as the spell manifested, and Palo gasped in surprise. The spell flowed with golden light around Alaria’s hands, and then slipped down to the floor. It hit the ground and spread like a pool of water, glimmering with sparks of golden light, until it coalesced into a specific spot on the floor in a far corner of the hut. Here, it hovered for a moment before dispersing.

“That was so cool!” Sasha said. “Can you do other magic?”

Alaria gave the purple faerie an inquisitive look. “I can,” she said cautiously. “Actually, I can do quite a lot of magic.”

“I’d love to see some more. Are you okay, Grez?”

“Yeah, that was okay,” Grezkull said, coming up. “I’m fine. It didn’t hurt at all.”

“Magic hurts you, Grezkull?” Alaria asked.

“Well, no… I mean, yes… That is, I was always told it would, but I never got close enough to find out.”

“Who told you?” Alaria asked. She scowled. She’d heard of things like this before. People telling their children that magic was evil or would hurt them. Again, Alaria was struck by the absurd incongruity of a world where magic was such a big part of the world, and also so despised by the ignorant.

Grezkull looked away and mumbled something unintelligible. He seemed upset, embarrassed, and ashamed all at the same time, and Alaria didn’t want to press him.

“Never mind, Grez,” Mia said gently, putting a hand on the big fellow’s arm. “There’s no need to worry about it now.”

“Exactly, no need to worry about it now,” Alaria said. She smiled at him. “I don’t think magic is ever meant to hurt, not unless it’s used as a weapon. Magic is like a knife, or an axe—very useful in a lot of situations, but dangerous in others, you see?”

“Yeah,” Grezkull said, his expression changing into a grin. “Yeah, I see. Okay, I’m not as scared now.”

“Good,” Alaria said. She smiled. “I might do a little more magic, in that case.”

“All right,” Grezkull said. “I’ll stay nearby, shall I?”

“If you like.”

Sasha patted Grezkull on the shoulder as the big guy sat down at the outside of the hut and Alaria went inside. Palo had retrieved a shovel from nearby, but Alaria didn’t think she’d need to use it. She sat on the earth next to the spot that the Unveiled spell had indicated and held her hands out over the dirt, feeling into the earth and using the Earth iteration of the universal Move spell.

Move directed a flow of kinetic energy toward a specific object or element, its effectiveness defined by the elemental magic school that the spell was coming from. Each elemental school had a version of Move, but this time Alaria was using the Stone school version.

She put the magic carefully into the soil below her hands, took a deep breath, and began to allow more power to flow through her arms and hands into the soil. She could feel the earth through the magic, reaching into it and moving the earth, grain by grain, piece by piece, until there was a flow of soil running under her hands.

There was a total silence as Mia and the others watched in fascination. The earth moved, flowing over the ground away from the center of the magic. Grezkull made a scared noise in his throat, but Palo and Sasha both comforted him and he stayed where he was. Mia came over and stood next to Alaria as she worked.

Slowly, the earth shifted away and piled itself neatly up at the sides. In its place, there was a fresh new hole in the ground, and at the bottom of the hole, something gleamed.

“Wow,” Mia breathed. “You did it. Look at that!”

“Definitely something,” Alaria said, bringing the Move spell to a close. She leaned over and reached down, catching the edge of the gleaming corner of what looked like a box.

“Hm,” she grunted. “Stuck tight. I wonder…”

She glanced up at Mia’s friends—her own new friends, too, she supposed—and gave them a very piercing look.

“You guys okay if I up the magic a bit here?” she said. “I’m going to do something that might be scary for you. I don’t want to freak you out or anything here.”

“Go for it!” Grezkull said, enthusiastically. Apparently he’d gotten over his fear of magic now that he’d been close to it a couple of times and seen that it didn’t have to hurt. “You’re a good mage, Alaria. What else can you do?”

Palo and Sasha glanced at him and smiled, and Alaria looked at Mia, who nodded encouragingly. “Go for it,” Mia whispered.

Alaria went for it. She had been thinking about how to spawn a tentacle at will, rather than just having it happen by instinct, and now she put the idea into practice. She concentrated, and a moment later she felt the pleasurable tingling sensation in her wrist, and a tentacle slipped out from beneath her cotton sleeve. The strange limb was dark, a rich brown like wet clay, nothing like the horrible red and black of Dbuk the kraken.

She was pleased that she’d been able to manifest the tentacle at will. This was the first time. Sasha squealed, Palo gasped, but Grezkull said, “Cool!” and tried to start forward, only to bang his head on the door lintel. He was too big to get in.

Alaria grinned at her crew and sprouted a few more tentacles. The new ones came out of her wrists and upper arms, acting like extensions on her arms, almost like extra hands. It still took some effort to control them, but she’d done it a few times now and she was at least getting used to the sensation.

Working quickly, she moved the earth out from around the box with one tentacle while using another to loosen the earth further down. She reached below the box with two tentacles and lifted it up, and this time—with the added benefit of the tentacles’ strength, it came up in a flurry of earth and small stones.

“You did it!” Grezkull said, clapping his hands together and grinning madly. “Bring it over here so we can see!”

“You’ve lost your fear, Grez, haven’t you?” Sasha said.

Alaria picked up the box in her tentacles and carried it out of the hut. Palo and Sasha seemed wary now, and they backed off, but Grezkull came forward eagerly, wanting to see what was in the box.

Palo glanced at Sasha, and they kept their distance. Alaria looked at them and withdrew the tentacles. They slipped back into her, demanifesting with a quiet hissing noise.

“It’s okay, you two,” Alaria said. “I know it’s a bit weird. I’ve never met anyone who can sprout tentacles either, and I’ve not been able to do it myself for very long. I hope you don’t judge me for it.”

“No, no,” Sasha said hurriedly. “Not at all. You don’t judge me for having purple skin and being a faerie who doesn’t live like a faerie. Why should I judge you for having… for being… for having… whatever in the name of the gods those things are!”

They all laughed, the tension breaking.

“You’re right, Sash,” Grezkull said. “I mean, look at me! I’m a half troll, half ork, half gods only know what monstrosity, and you all don’t mind me at all.”

“Except when you snore, Grezkull,” Mia said, and everyone laughed again.

“What are the tentacles?” Sasha asked, coming forward to look at the place where the tentacle had been a moment ago.

“They’re a power I have. A new power. A power I’m still learning about. I killed a monstrous beast that had usurped this power, and when he died, I gained this ability. It’s been very useful so far.”

“The tentacles saved my life,” Mia said quietly, thinking about the incident with the mirror.

“And Grenko’s dinner,” Alaria reminded her.

“Are you going to open the box?” Grezkull said eagerly.

Alaria laughed. “I guess so,” she said. She leaned over the box, looking more closely at it. The box she had uncovered from its hiding place was made of heavy dark gray metal, but as she ran a hand over it, bright colors appeared in the wake of her touch.

“There are words in the colors. Letters in some other language.” It was Mia who spoke. She had a hand on Alaria’s lower back and leaned close, looking where the colors ran bright and clear in the wake of Alaria’s touch. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

Alaria had found the catch of the box and was just about to pop it open when they were disturbed by a voice that came from round the other side of the house. “Hello? Hello? Can someone help me out here? Delivery!”

“Damn, the furniture!” Alaria said. She laughed. “I’d totally forgotten about that. Palo, go and see him, would you? I want to put this box away in the kitchen before I come round.”

Palo and Sasha went off to meet the delivery driver, and Grezkull followed, rolling his shoulders and cracking his knuckles as he got ready to lift some heavy things. Alaria took the box inside and stowed it in the corner behind the kitchen door.

When she came back out onto the porch, she was just in time to see Grezkull running back round.

“You better come quick, Alaria!” he said. “This guy needs a bit of help!”

Grezkull seemed alarmed. Alaria and Mia dashed round to see what the matter was. They found the delivery driver dangling in midair above the gate, suspended there as if by invisible ropes. There was a threatening flickering of blue light all around him, and he was holding a sheet of paper in his hand.

Alaria cursed inwardly. So, she hadn’t discovered all the remnants of the previous owner’s magic. Whoever the shadow summoner had been, she’d placed this protective spell over the gates as well.

“Ah, hello,” the young man said politely when he saw Alaria. “You’re the owner of the house? I’ve got a load of furniture here from Grendast, as well as some other purchases…” he glanced at his paperwork. “Ah yes, some packages from Menteric the tailor, some pieces from the art store, and, what’s this… ah, yes, some kitchen goods, pots and pans, that kind of thing. Here you go.”

He held the manifest out to Alaria, smiling politely. He was a young fellow, skinny and with a crop of red pimples on his face, but with a kind, open expression and striking blue eyes. His smile was relaxed and unforced, and on the surface at least, he didn’t seem at all perturbed by the fact that he was currently dangling at an odd angle some eight feet from the ground above Alaria’s garden gate.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the paper from him. She glanced over it, but didn’t really process the information it contained. In reality, she was wondering how to broach the topic of his predicament. He seemed very calm about it, but she suspected that his apparent coolness was taking more work than met the eye. She decided that opting for the direct approach would be best. “Uh, you seem to be suspended in midair,” she said as casually as she could.

“Yes, I do, rather,” the man said. “Most inconvenient. I have no idea how to get down. I’d hoped you might be able to help, being the owner of the house. Do you think you could pull me down? Would that work?”

“I doubt it,” Alaria said, “but we can try. Hold on…”

She reached up and grabbed the man’s hand and pulled downward experimentally. He came down a little, but then was pulled back up as if on an elastic string.

“Ow!” he cried. “That was painful. Nope, I don’t think you’re going to be able to pull me down. Not in one piece, anyway. Why, this really is most inconvenient. If it wasn’t you, then perhaps you know who created the enchantment that’s caused this? Perhaps you could petition them for help? The day is getting on, and I was hoping for a glass of beer at the inn before I start for home. I’m taking the long way round, you see, to avoid the koblin pass.”

“Yes, yes of course,” Alaria said. His question—about seeking the person who created the enchantment—had made her wonder. She had no idea who had made the enchantment, but she assumed it was something to do with the spell that had stopped her friends climbing the wall.

“I wonder,” she said thoughtfully, stroking her chin as she looked up at the dangling delivery driver.

“Surely you must have some spell that can counter the enchantment?” Mia said, and Sasha nodded excitedly. Grezkull was gazing thoughtfully at the fellow, as if wondering whether or not the application of a lot more force might do the trick.

“Perhaps Grez could try pulling him down?” Palo suggested.

“Yes, I was just thinking that!” Grezkull said enthusiastically.

“Ah, wait a moment now!” the delivery man squeaked, pulling his arms out of reach. “I don’t doubt you could do it, sir, if you tried, but I’m scared you might pull my arm off if it didn’t work!”

“Oh, yes, there is that,” Grezkull said, scratching his chin. “That wouldn’t be very good, would it?”

The delivery man shook his head, keeping his arms warily by his side. “I’d rather not, if it could be avoided.” His voice had begun to shake, and his eyes widened as his face paled. He was losing his cool.

Alaria suddenly snapped her fingers and laughed. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Silly when I think of it, so simple.”

“Alaria’s remembered the spell,” Sasha said confidently to Grezkull, who nodded.

“No,” Alaria said. “But I’ve got something even better. Grez, you stand here and get ready to catch him if he falls hard. Sasha, you fly up and guide him down if you can, and Palo and Mia, you stand either side just in case. It’s not too far a fall, but still he might hurt himself badly if the spell releases him too abruptly.”

The driver made a frightened noise. “Whaddayagonnadooo?” he wailed, then clamped his mouth shut. Up to now, he’d just about kept his cool, but now he was losing it completely.

“Take it easy,” Alaria said. “I’m going to unlock the gate. I’m pretty sure that’ll do the job, okay? Just relax and wait for my signal. Okay, ready? One… two… three…”

On three Alaria turned the key in the lock and opened the gate, and immediately the spell broke and the man tumbled out of the air, as if he’d been dropped by a massive hand that’d been holding him up there.

“Ahh!” he screamed, but Sasha held onto him to slow his fall and Grezkull caught him before he’d tumbled more than a foot through the air.

The big half-ork lowered the delivery driver down to the ground as gently as he could. Palo and Mia patted him comfortingly on the shoulder while he caught his breath.

“Ah, well,” he said, breathing hard and trying without success to regain his composure. “Good. Okay.”

He was panting, his eyes wide as he looked around at them, but after a few moments, he pulled himself together. He looked around at the strange group; the hulking form of Grezkull, who was beginning to sweat in the heat, Mia and Palo, grinning at him and patting him on one shoulder each, purple Sasha flying a few feet in the air on her huge burgundy wings, and finally Alaria, who held the gate open for him, beaming with satisfaction.

“Right,” he said with sudden decisiveness. “I’ve had enough of this. Er, nice to meet you all. If you don’t mind, I’ll just leave the carriage here.”

“But don’t you need to take it back to…?”

“No, no, I need nothing. If they ask for me at Hanson’s yard, tell them the job got too crazy for me and I quit. They can get someone else to deliver their stuff! I’m off.”

With that, the man turned and ran off down the road, not toward the town center, but away west, downhill toward the farm country.

Alaria and her friends looked at each other in bemused silence for a moment, then at the horse and cart loaded with furniture that the (now ex) delivery man had left standing in the road.

“I guess we’d better get unloaded and get the horse out of the heat,” she said. “But after that, we’re going to have to get this cart back to the owner. I’ve a feeling this is going to cause some rumors, if it causes nothing else.”

“Well, we can deal with that when we come to it,” Mia said firmly. “For now, we’ve got a house to furnish.”

Chapter

Seventeen

There certainly was work to do. First, they had to get the poor horse out of the heat. Grezkull was good with horses, and since he had access to the stable down at the inn, he volunteered to take the horse down there and see that it was fed and watered for today and tomorrow at least.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said, and unhitched the horse and led it off down the hill toward town.

The others set to work unloading. There was a lot of stuff. Alaria and Mia had gone a bit wild on their trip to town, and Alaria was happy to be able to spend some of the reward she’d been given for killing Dbuk. She had started out on their trip with plenty of money, mostly in the form of promissory notes on the Regent’s Bank in Crownheart. There was a money changer in Hopeford, and she’d changed a couple of the notes for gold and made all her purchases outright.

“You can’t be short of cash!” Sasha said bluntly as she looked at the stuff in the back of the cart. “And the rumor is that you bought this house outright! Is that true, Alaria?”

“Sasha!” Palo said, horrified at his partner’s directness.

“What?” Sasha said, glaring at Palo.

Alaria laughed. “Palo is shocked because most people don’t ask such straight questions about money,” she said. “But I guess you’re right. A small town like this, news gets around, and if I wanted to keep my wealth a secret I should have thought of that before I bought Number 4 in full with hard cash.”

“So it’s true, then? You bought the house outright?”

“Aye,” Alaria said. “The bounty on the monster I killed was big enough to allow me to buy and furnish a home. But it wasn’t much bigger than that. I’m doing okay, but I don’t have endless wealth. I’ve invested most of my money in this house and the furnishings. I've got enough to go on with, but I’ll need to make some money to keep myself going in the future.”

As they spoke, the friends unloaded the cart. Alaria used her tentacles for the heavier bits like the enormous bed frame, the sofa, and the wardrobe, but there were plenty of smaller items for the others to carry in too. They moved all the items into the downstairs hallway at the front of the house. On the left of the hallway was the kitchen, and to the right, a cozy living room. They moved the couch into the living room and put the rest of the stuff in the hall.

“What are you going to do to earn a living, then?” Palo asked, his shyness dispelled by Alaria’s frank answers to Sasha’s questions. “You’re not going to carry on adventuring, are you?”

“No, no,” Alaria said. “I’ll maybe do some small fights to keep my hand in, but nothing major. I want to open a little shop up here, selling potions and other crafted items—but mainly potions. I don’t think I’ll be selling to many adventurers, but there’s lots of other people who use potions, not just fighters. I think I’ll be able to make quite a good little business of it. Healing potions are always popular, and then there are strength potions and all sorts of other good things you can make.”

“I think that’s a great idea,” Sasha said. “There used to be a potion seller in Hopeford, but she gave it up years ago and there’s been no one since. People love potions, it’s the only kind of magic that regular people are okay with. Weird, that, but there it is.”

“So weird,” Mia agreed. “Why people are so uptight about magic, I have no idea.”

“Perhaps because they don’t understand it,” Alaria hazarded. “That’s often the way with people.”

They’d gotten distracted from their earlier task of unloading the old furniture from the rooms above, and now that the cart was unloaded they set about doing this. Grezkull came back with the news that the horse was well settled in at the stables down at the inn. He immediately suggested opening the leprechaun’s treasure, but Alaria said no.

“I want to get this furniture moved first,” she said. “It won’t take too long, and then we can have a look at the mysterious box at our leisure. Grezkull, maybe you could haul the cart round out of the road for now? We’ll take it back to Hopeford when we get a chance, with the horse, too.”

The afternoon passed in cheerful, companionable work. They all enjoyed themselves, and by the time the heat had gone out of the day and the sun had begun to dip toward the west, the house was looking transformed. There was an enormous bed with an excellent mattress and very luxurious white bedding, of the very best quality available. A well-made set of drawers with a dresser and mirror, and a big wardrobe completed the furniture in the bedroom, while a small armchair, a red rug, and a set of white curtains finished the room off.

Downstairs in the living room , the new couch had pride of place facing the hearth. Red curtains were tied back from the window for now, showing the view of the garden. Another rug was spread out in front of the hearth. Alaria felt the lack of a bookshelf and a desk for writing, but she hadn’t seen anything she fancied in Hopeford, and so she had decided to wait for the moment. In time, she would measure up the space and go back to the furniture maker to get something bespoke made for the house, perhaps converting one of the upstairs rooms into a study.

“This is looking great,” Palo said as the friends sat down around the huge table that took up a lot of space in the roomy kitchen. The kitchen was the only room where lots of new furniture wasn’t needed, but even here there were new things—pots and pans, knives and forks, spoons for stirring and jars for keeping dry goods, as well as many other useful things.

They hadn’t just moved the old furniture out and put the new furniture in, they’d also cleaned the rooms they’d been working in, dusting and sweeping and cleaning the windows. There might still be work to do in other parts of the house, but the kitchen, living room, and bedroom were all sparkling clean.

“I can’t thank you guys enough for helping out,” Alaria said. “I’m afraid I rather underestimated just how big a job furnishing a house would be.”

“That’s all good,” Palo said. “It’s been great fun, right guys?”

Sasha and Grezkull nodded enthusiastically, and Mia smiled at them all.

“How about opening that box?” she suggested.

“Good idea,” Alaria said, and she went to the back door and got the strange box from the corner where she’d stashed it.

The area of metal where she’d rubbed her hand was still colored in a strange pattern of yellows and blues that seemed to change when Alaria looked at it from different angles. She’d heard of metals that changed color when you touched them, and magic spells that responded to touch, but she’d never seen one in action.

“You said you thought there were words in the colored parts, Mia?” Alaria said. She leaned closer and looked at the bits of the box that were gleaming blue and yellow.

“I thought so,” Mia said, “but I don’t see any now.”

Alaria experimentally placed her hands on the metal again, but when she took them away the box remained unchanged.

“Try rubbing it,” Mia said. Alaria tried, and found that when she ran her hand over the surface—rather than just placing them on the box—the strange effect happened again.

“It’s so pretty,” Sasha breathed, as Alaria moved her hands here and there, feeling the rough, cold metal under her hands and seeing the glittering array of colors ripple out behind her touch.

“It is beautiful,” Alaria agreed. “Let’s see what’s inside.”

She had no doubt that there was something inside. The box had been heavy when she’d carried it earlier, and after all, who would bury an empty box in a garden?

Alaria found the catch on the side of the box and flipped it open. To her surprise, it moved smoothly, as if the mechanism had been freshly oiled. There was a satisfying click as the catch snapped up on a strong spring, and Alaria lifted the lid of the box.

They were all speechless as they leaned over and looked at the wonderful sight inside. The box was about two thirds full of gold and jewels. There were gold coins, gold chains, and bits of gold plate, and there were rubies, emeralds, and many other stones that were obviously precious but that Alaria could not put a name to.

“By the gods, it must be worth a fortune!” Mia gasped. “No wonder Timeous was so keen to keep his secret.”

Alaria reached into the box and took a handful of the coins and stones out, lying them on the table and looking at them closely for a moment.

“You’re right, Mia,” she said. “It is worth a small fortune. So this is what the leprechaun was stashing here. You guys all know Timeous, don’t you? I get the impression none of you like him very much. What’s wrong with him? What’s he about?”

“Oh, he’s harmless enough,” Sasha said. “Or at least, he’d never actively try to harm anyone, I don’t think. But he’s unpleasant and rude, and drinks too much down at the inn.”

“He’s a sleazy little guy as well,” Mia said. “Always trying to chat up any attractive women who come through the town.”

“But he’s not a robber or a murderer or anything like that?” Alaria asked. “He’s not stolen this treasure from anyone?”

“Gods, no,” Mia said. “He’s just a bit of an annoying character, but he’s not evil.”

“Hmm,” Alaria said. “Where does he live?”

“Not far from here,” Mia said. She pointed toward the back of the house. “On the other side of your wall, the woods go off a good way across the top of the hill and down the other side. We should walk out that way sometime—the views are pretty, and you can see the sea on a clear day. Anyway, there are several strange people who live in isolated dwellings in the deeper parts of the forest. Timeous Groof is one of them. He lives out there, but he comes into town in the evenings to drink and play cards at the inn.”

“What does he do?” Alaria said, “I mean, how does he make a living?”

“I don’t know,” Mia replied. “I guess he’s a leprechaun, what do they usually do to make a living?”

“Find other people’s treasure,” Grezkull put in. “That’s what he does. He has a magic item, some kind of scrying spell, like your finding spell, Alaria. It allows him to find things that have been lost or discarded, and he wanders about the roads and through the woods and fields, looking for things that people have lost. He collects them up and, well, I suppose we’re looking at the result.”

“You think this is his stash of treasure?” Alaria said. “Treasure he’d found and collected, not treasure he’s stolen.

“I think so,” Grezkull said. “It’d be a very odd coincidence if it wasn’t. That’s definitely how he makes his money anyway.”

“Right, that settles it,” Alaria said. “We must give it back to him.”

There was an outburst of surprised protest from everyone except Mia. She looked at Alaria and her eyes gleamed with admiration. Alaria held a hand up to quell the others.

“The world is full of strange creatures,” She said, “and everyone has their way of making a living. Some make it by harming others—like the creatures in Daeron’s Pass, or like Dbuk, the demon monster I killed to get my tentacle power—but many make a living in strange ways that don’t hurt others. Now, if our friend Mr Groof was a thief and a bandit, and we’d found his stash of treasure, I’d have no qualms at all about hanging onto it. But it sounds like he picks up things that have been lost by others, and he has magic that allows him to seek such things out. That does no harm to anyone as far as I can see, and I don’t think I have any right to take his stuff. After all, it must have taken him a long time to gather up all this treasure. I’d be a thief myself if I kept it.”

The others looked down, ashamed now that she’d explained it to them. “You’re right, Alaria,” Grezkull said. “It’d be wrong to keep it, even if he is a sleazy little annoyance.”

“Right,” Palo said. “Yeah, there’s no way we could take it.”

“It’d be stealing,” Sasha agreed.

“So we’re all on the same page, then?” Alaria said. The others nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “In that case, I’m going to put a locking spell on this box, that way we can safely leave it here for now. Then we’ll go down to the inn and tell the annoying leprechaun that he can have his treasure back by coming here to claim it.”

Mia walked arm in arm with Alaria as they headed down to the inn. She’d been quiet since the conversation about the treasure, but Alaria could feel that pride was radiating from her as they walked down together. The others wandered along behind, chatting with each other about the day’s events. Tonight’s gathering was going to be at Palo’s place, a small cottage not far from the edge of town at the bottom of the hill, and they were all looking forward to it.

Alaria didn’t think she’d be going to the party tonight. She had her newly-furnished house, and she wanted to enjoy it. With Mia, if possible.

They got to the inn and piled through the door, Beth greeting them warmly from behind the bar as they came in. “Did you get everything set up, Alaria?” she asked.

“We did,” Alaria said. “It’s looking good.”

“And this lot managed not to break anything in helping you?”

Everyone laughed. “It’s been great to have some help!” Alaria assured her. “Is Timeous Groof here tonight?”

Beth lowered her voice. “Aye, he is,” she said, “but he’s not in a good way. Seems mighty upset about something, and he’s not taken his normal seat for cards with the others. I know he can be annoying and a sleazebag, but he’s not a bad fellow really. Doesn’t deserve whatever bad luck has been eating him.”

Mia and Alaria looked at each other knowingly.

“I think I have a word or two that might cheer him up,” Alaria said. “Mia, will you come with me? I think it’s best if the others stay here.”

They found the leprechaun sitting on a block of stone outside the inn, round the back where there were some benches and seats for the use of patrons during the day. He was all alone, his head hanging on his chest, his little feet kicking listlessly against the stone where he sat.

Everything about him said he was miserable, and Alaria felt pity for him immediately. “Timeous Groof,” she said, and his head snapped up to look at her.

“Ah, it’s the lady of the manor,” he sneered, unpleasantly. “The banisher, the mistress of entrances and exits. Come to gloat over my downfall, have you?”

Alaria scowled. “A bit more courtesy from you, thank you very much. I’ve not come to gloat. Quite the opposite. I know why you were up at Number 4. I have something of yours up there. I’ve come to tell you that you can have it back if you come up to the house.”

Timeous leaped from the stone and stood gaping at her. “You’re serious?” he said. “You want to give it back?”

“Aye,” Alaria said. “And so long as you keep a civil tongue, I’ll even let you come into the house to get it.”

The relief on his face was all the reward Alaria needed. Unpleasant as he might be, and disliked in the town, it was still good to see him transformed from misery to relieved happiness in a moment.

“Let’s go!” he cried.

Since nothing else would do, Alaria and Mia rounded up Palo, Sasha, and Grezkull again and headed up to the house with the leprechaun leading the way, Timeous chattering merrily all the way.

When they got to the house, Alaria gave him very specific permission to come in, and the whole party went into the kitchen.

“Oh, by the sacred mushroom gods of the forest! My box!” The leprechaun ran forward and embraced the box, then attempted to open it. The catch didn’t work, and he immediately looked at Alaria with suspicion in his eyes.

“It’s just a locking spell I put in place to keep it secure while we were out,” Alaria reassured him. She passed a hand over the catch, removing the spell, and Timeous opened the box and gazed inside.

He gave a small groan of relief as he saw the treasure.

“You have no idea how long this took me to collect,” he said. “It’s the most wonderful gift that you’ve given me. I’m so grateful. You could have kept it, and there would really have been nothing I could have done.”

“I know,” Alaria said, “but I’m not… hey, what are you doing?”

To everyone’s surprise, Timeous had suddenly emptied the contents of the box out on the table. Then, his hands moving so fast that Alaria could hardly see them, he began moving coins and stones around into piles, muttering numbers under his breath as he did so.

“It’s all there,” Alaria said,scowling. “We wouldn’t steal your stuff.”

“I know that,” Timeous snapped, not taking his eyes from his task. “I’m a leprechaun, I don’t need someone else to tell me that my treasure’s all here… Ah, right, that’s done it.”

“Done what?” Alaria asked as Timeous swept half the treasure back into the box. The other half lay in five equal piles on the tabletop.

“The reward,” the leprechaun said, grinning mischievously at them. “You returned my gold and jewels to me, this is the reward. Half my treasure, divided evenly among those who could have stolen it.”

Alaria gasped, and the others cheered.

“I’ll be off then,” Timeous said, heading for the door.

“One moment,” Alaria said sternly. Timeous stopped, his hand on the door handle.

“Once you leave, you may not pass the bounds of this homestead again unless you have my express invitation.”

“Damn,” Timeous said under his breath.

“Nice try,” Alaria said. “So, we’re square?”

The leprechaun peered at her for a moment, then nodded once, turned, and scurried off the premises.

Chapter

Eighteen

Sasha, Palo, and Grezkull were in very good spirits when they left, their rewards from Timeous in their pockets. They were heading for the inn, then back to Palo’s house to start the evening’s party. They wanted Mia and Alaria to join them, but the two women said they wanted to stay back at the house. They had a few things to finish up, Mia said, and Alaria nodded.

A few things to finish up.

Nearly as soon as they had waved their friends off, they were back in the kitchen, and Alaria was on the table, leaning back with her legs parted as Mia ravished her with her lips and tongue. It was the most amazing feeling; Alaria now knew she had been missing this her whole life, and now she had discovered it, she gave herself over to the sensation with total abandon.

Mia was younger than Alaria by a few years, and she didn’t have the road-hardened muscle of Alaria’s fighter’s body, but Alaria found herself submitting willingly to the strength of Mia’s greater experience. She was intoxicated by the feeling of being explored, by the feeling of being discovered and ravished by her beautiful new partner’s skillful lips and hands.

Alaria’s hips were moving, and she felt warm and wet between her legs. She put her own hands on Mia’s back, lifting the shirt where it was tucked into Mia’s trousers and slipping her hands across the warm, silky skin of Mia’s back and the top of her ass.

Driven by a sudden impulse, Alaria decided to turn things around. She slipped from the table and used her own upper body strength to lift Mia into a sitting position on the table instead. Mia squealed with pleasure and surprise, then gasped and moaned when Alaria kissed her neck, then gripped the skin of Mia’s neck between her front teeth and bit down firmly.

Mia was breathing heavily, her mouth open and her hands on Alaria’s thrusting hips as Alaria began to unbutton Mia’s shirt. The crisp linen parted from the top down, revealing the tops of Mia’s small, perfectly made breasts. Alaria could see Mia’s dark nipples through her shirt, and she caught them through the linen between her fingers and thumbs, one with each hand, holding them firmly as she kissed Mia on the mouth.

Mia dropped her hand down between Alaria’s legs. The feeling of being touched there was so pleasurable and intense that Alaria almost pulled back, but instead she thrust forward, grinding onto Mia’s hand as she gripped Mia’s small breasts and kissed her neck.

In that moment, all she wanted was to be touched. Mia’s pleasuring was so perfect, the sensation so beautiful and new, and Alaria’s whole world narrowed to that point.

“Oh, Mia, why does it feel so good?” she gasped. “Is this how it’s meant to feel?”

Mia laughed breathlessly. “What?” she said, then she laughed again. “Gods, Lari, you’ve taken to this so easily, I’d completely forgotten you’ve never done it before. Yes, dear, it’s meant to feel that good. In fact, it gets much better.”

“Better? How can it be better?”

“Trust me, it gets better. Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”

Their clothes in disarray, their feet bare, the two women ran hand in hand up the stairs together toward the bedroom. They didn’t make it to the top of the stairs. Halfway up, Alaria looked at Mia’s nipples and the curve of her waist through her half-undone shirt, and began kissing her again, rubbing her ass with one hand and unbuttoning her shirt the rest of the way with the other.

At the same time, Mia got her hands into the button on the top of Alaria’s trousers and popped it open. She pushed Alaria’s pants part way down, revealing her silk panties, and then pushed those aside to touch her between the legs with her fingers, skin to skin.

That touch stopped Alaria in her tracks and made her cry out in pleasure. She emerged for a moment from the sexual trance she’d been in and gasped, “Bedroom, now!”

The two women, laughing, got off the stairs and ran along the corridor into the bedroom, tumbling together onto the crisp, fresh white sheets.

“Ooh, so comfy,” Alaria groaned, wriggling about in the virgin sheets. “I’ve never owned a bed of my own before.”

“I’m glad to be here with you for this first time, then,” Mia said quietly as she slid up next to Alaria and kissed her mouth again. While they kissed, Mia undid the last button on her own shirt and shrugged out of it. Then she sat up and gently pulled Alaria’s pants completely off and let them fall to the floor.

Alaria felt a thrill of new excitement at the sense of being so exposed to her lover. She raised her knees up and then let them drop to the sides, exposing herself completely to Mia. The decadently soft undergarments she’d bought—red silk panties with a lace frill at the top—felt delicious against her when she shifted her hips on the bed. Mia undid her own pants buttons and took her pants off, dropping them to the floor along with Alaria’s.

Mia was wearing nothing now but a pair of black lace panties, and her frill of neatly trimmed dark hair, as dark as the hair on her head, could be seen through the lace. Alaria saw that Mia’s legs were smooth and hairless. She knew some women did this—shaving their legs of hair with a sharp blade—but she’d never done it herself. She’d never felt the need to. Now, her first time undressing with a lover, she felt very grateful that her own body hair was so soft and golden that it could barely be seen at all.

Alaria gasped in pleasure and anticipation as Mia leaned over her, undoing the buttons on her shirt and gently pushing the fabric away to each side. Alaria felt her own breasts and nipples more sensitive and tender than she’d ever felt in her life before. When Mia took them firmly, one in each hand, and lowered her mouth onto them to tease the nipples one after the other with her tongue, Alaria moaned loudly in pleasure.

To have Mia’s tongue touching her nipples making her cry out was so arousing, so exciting. She gave herself over to the sensation, moaning out her pleasure and finding herself aroused even more as she let the lustful noises flow from her mouth. Then Mia reached down and pulled Alaria’s panties down to her ankles.

Alaria sat up to see, shrugging out of the sleeves of her shirt as she did so. Mia came up and lay beside her, slowly and firmly running her hand up and down the soft insides of Alaria’s thighs. The sensation was incredible, a deep, soul pleasure, different from the crackling magic feeling of Mia’s tongue on her nipples.

Then Mia slipped her hand between Alaria’s legs.

When Mia had asked Alaria if she’d never explored on her own, Alaria had been confused. She had no idea what Mia had meant, but now she discovered what she’d missed. Using her fingers, her thumb, and the palm of her hand, Mia explored for her, gently and wordlessly demonstrating all the different parts of Alaria to herself, and all the different notes of pleasure they sounded through her body.

Alaria threw her head back and cried out in pleasure again when Mia found her clitoris and began to gently massage it up and down.

“Oh, gods, Mia,” Alaria gasped. “Oh! How did I never know about this before?”

“Mmm, you’ve had other things to occupy you, that’s all,” Mia murmured. “Now you get to learn this as well.”

She increased the rhythm of her strokes, focusing on the clitoris but every now and then dropping her fingers to touch the lips of Alaria’s vulva, and even lower to slip a finger a little way inside her and bringing up the thick wetness to lubricate her clit again. Mia seemed to do this every time that Alaria felt she was reaching a kind of peak of pleasure. Mia’s instinct for this moment was exact, bringing Alaria down off that edge of pleasure just before it tipped over into something else.

Alaria’s mind was awash with the sensations of Mia’s touch, the desire for more, and the knowledge that this was something she could do—something real, something she had a right to, something that could be a proper part of her life. This was her, truly, lying here on the bed with her head thrown back, this beautiful young woman pleasuring her with her fingers and…

Mia dropped her lips to Alaria’s breasts again, touching them with her free hand and kissing them, flicking the nipples with her tongue and then biting down on them, gently at first, then firmly, then hard. At the same time, she changed the pace with her fingers, speeding up and groaning in pleasure herself and she felt Alaria’s pleasure build toward a stunning climax.

“Mia,” Alaria whispered. “Mia, oh, Mia, Mia!”

The wave built and built, but Mia kept going. Alaria’s whole body was consumed with the pleasure of her lover’s touch. She rode the peak of something for a long, timeless moment… and then it spilled over.

Alaria howled Mia’s name, gripping the bedclothes in her fists as the climax exploded through her. She ground her hips against Mia’s hand and arched her back as the muscles in her vagina and her belly clenched in pumping waves. The pleasure flowed over and through her, suffusing her, drowning her in a golden light of beautiful, indescribable sensation.

Wordless sounds escaped from her as she collapsed back down onto the bed, waves of pleasure and satisfaction making her laugh in breathless disbelief as her whole body tingled as if with magic about to be cast.

Mia didn’t say anything. Instead, she hugged Alaria to her chest and squeezed her, and the sensation of being squeezed like that around the middle grounded Alaria, bringing her back into herself and allowing her to speak again.

“Oh,” she said, when she found she had regained the power of speech. “So that’s how women can do it.”

Mia threw her head back and laughed. “It sure is!” she agreed. “One of many ways. Is that truly the first time you’ve had an orgasm?”

“Orgasm,” Alaria repeated. She’d heard the word before—read it in a book somewhere, she thought—but had never given the concept much thought.

“Yes, love, that’s what that’s called,” Mia said, patiently.

A sudden thought made Alaria sit up, looking at Mia with new excitement. Her hair was a cloud of red-gold around her head, catching the last rays of the sun that streamed in through the window.

“Can I do it to you as well?” she said, and Mia laughed in momentary disbelief and then leaped forward, kissing Alaria deeply on the mouth.

“You’re adorable, you know that?” she said. “Yes, you can do it for me, too. Do you want to?”

“I don’t really know how…” Alaria said, feeling suddenly shy.

“That’s okay,” Mia said. “It’s not that difficult. You can…” she blushed suddenly and looked away.

“What?” Alaria said, intrigued.

“You can do it with your tongue.”

“Oh, wow, okay,” Alaria said immediately. “Okay, I’d love to. Let me try.”

She remembered how she had been on the stairwell on the way up to the party the other night, how she’d used her own pleasure, and the way Mia’s body moved in response to her touch, as a guide to what she was doing. Alaria felt suddenly confident and happy, her body awash in the afterglow of her own orgasm. She took her time, slipping Mia’s panties off and kissing the velvety skin of her legs as she did so.

The dark hair between Mia’s legs was neatly trimmed and very soft, and Alaria nuzzled it gently before beginning to slowly explore Mia’s vulva with her lips and her tongue.

In a way, it was like going over what Mia had just wordlessly demonstrated with her hands. Alaria kissed and licked the different parts of Mia, enjoying the different tastes and feelings on her own lips, and moving her way up to the clitoris at the top. Pleasure and excitement flowed through Alaria as she found Mia’s clitoris and started to lick, experimenting with different speeds and pressures to see what happened.

Mia was making plenty of noise herself now, and Alaria found it incredibly exciting to see and hear how much pleasure she was giving to her partner.

The taste was exciting as well. She’d never considered that she might want to do this, and if someone had suggested it to her six months ago she’d have probably been appalled at the idea, but now she realized that the taste was clean, sharp, and beautiful. She gloried in it, moving in rhythm with Mia as Mia thrust her hips back and forth, grinding against Alaria’s mouth.

“Lari,” Mia gasped suddenly. “Lari, will you use your… you tentacles?”

Alaria laughed in surprise and lifted her head. “My tentacles?” she said.

“Yeah,” Mia said. She lifted her head, and Alaria saw that her face was flushed, her lips dark, her eyes shining. “Yeah,” she said again. “I want you to fuck me with your tentacles. I’ve wanted it ever since I first saw them. Will you do it?”

Fuck. Alaria knew that word. She’d never thought of doing it to someone else, and certainly not with a tentacle, but why not? All this was new, and pleasuring Mia was something she was very keen to keep doing.

She manifested a tentacle, having it slip from the side of her hip this time, to keep her hands free.

“Oh, gods, yes,” Mia gasped, throwing her head back as Alaria made the tentacle about as thick as four of her fingers and slid five inches of it inside Mia. Alaria moved the tentacle back and forth, guided by the thrusting rhythm of Mia’s hips, and returned her tongue to Mia’s clitoris.

Something strange happened then; Alaria found that the tentacle she was using to fuck Mia was pleasuring her as well. It was very much like the feeling she’d had when Mia’s fingers had been inside her, a deep, rhythmic pleasure that built with Mia’s pleasure, aroused by her arousal.

Alaria manifested more tentacles, sending a bunch of them up to wrap around Mia’s torso, squeezing her firmly, flicking her nipples with their tips. One slid up and found Mia’s lips, sliding into her mouth.

Mia groaned and took the tentacle into her mouth, sucking on it, sliding her lips up and down it and moving her tongue around its width.

Alaria was pleased with her control of the tentacles. She was getting the hang of this! She manifested a few more, and then had another idea. If she could fuck Mia with a tentacle, and Mia seemed to be enjoying it, perhaps she could do it for herself as well? She slipped one of the new tentacles down and slid it inside herself, matching that rhythm to the rhythm of Mia’s thrusting.

Now her pleasure reached new heights. Her hands were on Mia’s thighs, holding them firmly while she licked Mia’s clitoris in an increasing rhythm. Her own body sang with pleasure. Her own mouth was full of the soft, delicious taste of Mia. Her tentacle in Mia’s mouth was sending shockwaves of pleasure through Alaria’s body, her tentacle in Mia’s vagina was building to a climax, and with another set of tentacles Alaria was fucking herself, stimulating her own clitoris, and squeezing her own breasts as well.

More and more tentacles flowed out of her now, manifesting from her back and her sides, many different colors and thicknesses as she felt herself building toward another orgasm. A couple of big tentacles lifted her and Mia up off the bed as Alaria brought herself and Mia to their simultaneous mutual climax.

The second orgasm was even more explosive and powerful than the first for Alaria. She buried her face in Mia’s vulva and Mia ground her hips against Alaria’s tongue. They both moaned with pleasure at the same time, and Alaria felt her tentacles writhing and pulsing as the orgasm blasted through her and Mia at the same time.

It was the most incredible sensation. Alaria had never felt anything like it in her life, not even in her most satisfying exploits of magic. Afterward, as the wave subsided and she found herself again, Alaria demanifested the tentacles and the two of them crawled under the rumpled sheets together, bathing in each other’s presence.

Wordlessly, they snuggled up together, pulled the covers over themselves and dropped into a profound sleep, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Chapter

Nineteen

Mia and Alaria didn’t get out of bed for two days except for meal breaks. They got food and water from the kitchen and brought it back upstairs. Their bedroom became a pleasure house, an orgy of tentacle love and kissing, of orgasms and lust and ever-deepening connection. By the end of the second day of passionate and near-continuous lovemaking, Alaria felt she’d done a crash course on all the different ways she and Mia could pleasure each other. She’d learned more, in some ways, in those two days than she ever had in a year at any of the various academies she’d attended during her adventuring days.

They had done things together she would never have dreamed of in a thousand years. They had explored the tentacles and discovered that Mia could make Alaria cum just by touching the tentacles alone. She would stand over Alaria, touching herself with one hand while stimulating a tentacle with her mouth and the other hand, or she would kneel on the bed and have Alaria take her from behind with a tentacle or even two, while another came round to be pleasured by her mouth. Alaria found the sight of Mia pleasuring herself while sucking on a tentacle incredibly arousing.

But the pleasure was most intense for Alaria when Mia gave her an orgasm with her mouth and hands, and it soon became a favourite activity for Mia to use her tongue and lips to bring Alaria to a climax while Alaria used her tentacles to reach around and pleasure Mia, fucking her with one tentacle while stimulating her clitoris with another.

Mia loved to have the tentacles fill her mouth, and she loved to have them wrap around her and squeeze her tight while Alaria kissed her neck and ran her hands through her hair.

Some things they could do with the tentacles that Mia wasn’t so into. Mia told Alaria that some people were into being restrained during sex, sometimes while being gently (or even not so gently) spanked on the butt with a hand or an implement like a whip or a riding crop. She wasn’t into that kind of thing, she said, but there were certainly people who were.

“If you were ever with someone who liked that kind of thing,” she said on the second afternoon, as they lay resting in the bed after a particularly intense session, “you could do a lot with your tentacles.”

Alaria sat up and looked at Mia. “But I thought that would be… well, I don’t know exactly what you call it. But, not allowed, anyway.”

“It’s a bit taboo sometimes,” Mia said, “but people get up to all kinds of stuff in the privacy of their own homes. It’s not illegal to want to be tied up and spanked, Lari.”

“Oh, no,” Alara said. “No, I didn’t mean that. I meant… you know… being with someone else. Surely that’s not allowed. They call it… I can’t remember…”

“Cheating,” Mia said. “They call it cheating, people who are funny about that kind of thing.”

“You’re saying you’re not funny about that sort of thing?” Alaria asked.

Mia turned over in the bed, thoughtfully playing with one of Alaria’s nipples. Alaria sighed and snuggled closer, running her hands up and down the luscious curves of Mia’s body.

“I don’t think I’d mind if you were with someone else,” Mia said thoughtfully. “But I’m not sure that I’d want to be with someone else myself. I’ve never felt the way I do with you before. I feel like I want to see you have as much pleasure as possible, because I find it so exciting to see you enjoying yourself. I find the idea of you being with someone else really exciting, but personally I wouldn’t want to be with anyone except you.”

“Oh,” Alaria said. “I’d never considered that. I suppose I do have some catching up to do.” She frowned, taking a moment to really think about it. “I’m not sure I’d like you being with someone else,” she said.

“Then we’re both on the same page,” Mia said, and came up to kiss Alaria on the lips. “I don’t mind sharing you, but I want you to have me all to yourself.”

That gave Alaria something to think about, but she didn’t do much more thinking that afternoon. By the following morning, they were both feeling that they’d neglected the other things they had to do for long enough.

They did stop to have sex one more time before breakfast, and it was with a warm haze of post-orgasmic pleasure running through both their bodies that they heated water and washed together, before dressing and going downstairs to start the day.

A call from outside the property drew their attention away from the kitchen, and Alaria stepped outside to see who had come to visit them. To her surprise, it was Beth, the innkeeper, seeming a little flustered and with her face looking more catlike than Alaria had ever seen it before.

Beth looked Alaria up and down and seemed lost for words, opening and closing her mouth silently for a few moments before getting herself together to speak.

“Hi, Alaria,” she said, “Um, I came up to see if you were about—you and Mia. I have a message for you, it came in yesterday with a group of travellers who arrived by cart from Hopeford.”

“Oh, yes?” Alaria said. She walked closer and leaned over the gate. She saw Beth’s eyes flick down involuntarily, then back up again. Was Beth looking at her breasts?

Alaria wasn’t wearing anything on her top half except one of the linen shirts she’d bought from Hopeford, and she was aware that her nipples were probably visible through the fabric. Perhaps Beth was embarrassed by that?

But Alaria was on her own land, on her own homestead, and she felt empowered and unwilling to hide her newly discovered sexuality. She straightened up, feeling how the fabric of her shirt stretched across her nipples, and actually enjoying Beth’s discomfort as the cat woman took a step back, put a hand to her forehead and forced herself to look at Alaria’s eyes rather than her chest.

“You look great,” she said in a hushed voice, then blushed visibly. “Sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean that… I mean, I did mean it, but I didn’t mean to say it.”

“Thanks,” Alaria said. “That’s okay. What was the message?”

Could it be that Beth wasn’t uncomfortable or embarrassed at seeing Alaria’s body, but rather that she was attracted by it, even aroused? Beth certainly seemed flustered, but not in an unpleasant way.

Alaria smiled at her, and an answering smile blossomed on the cat woman’s face.

“The message,” Beth said, “yes, of course, the message. It was from Hanson’s yard in Hopeford. They wanted to know what happened to their horse and cart, and their driver. The horse is still in my stables, and Grezkull said you have the cart up here, but I guess Hanson will want horse and cart back sooner rather than later. What happened to the driver, anyway?”

“He ran off,” Alaria said. “Decided he didn’t want to do the job anymore and just ran off into the blue. He got a bit of a fright and I think it gave him a bad turn. There’s a bit of magic up here, you see, and he caught the wrong end of it without warning.”

“Magic?” Beth said. Her expression grew wary, but not hostile the way people’s expressions often went when they heard the word magic.

“Yeah,” Alaria said. “I was an adventurer, you know that.”

“I know you had a sword and did some damage to the koblins, but I didn’t know you used magic.”

“Well, I do,” Alaria said boldly. She went and leaned forward on the gate again, deliberately moving to show off her cleavage to the cat woman. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Lots of people might,” Beth said, swallowing hard. “But I don’t. I think it’s pretty great, actually, and I wish more people were okay with it. But I better get going. Sasha and the others were asking after you as well. They said they haven’t seen you, but they guessed you and Mia were, uh, busy.”

“We have been busy,” Alaria said, and couldn’t resist a grin. “But you can let them know we’re fine. We’ve a lot to do up here, but we’ll see you all soon, I’m sure. We were just about to have something to eat if you’d like to come in?”

“Ah, no, better not,” Beth said hurriedly. “Better get on the road myself, too. I just wanted to deliver the message. Bye, bye for now, goodbye!”

Flustered and moving quickly, Beth turned away and hurried off down the hill, her elegant tail flicking from side to side as she walked.

“Beth the innkeeper,” Alaria said to Mia as the came into the kitchen.

“What about her?” Mia asked. She was busy at the kitchen table, putting food on plates and pouring out some cool drinks.

“Is she… you know, into women?”

Mia looked up and grinned. “Beth’s into whoever will give her what she needs,” she said. “Men, women, humans, elves, orcs. She’s into some quite specific stuff, you know, but she doesn’t mind who she gets it from.”

Alaria sat down and Mia sat opposite her. Quickly, Alaria related the encounter she’d just had with Beth outside.

Mia sat back in her chair and laughed heartily. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I think that sounds like Beth has a bit of a thing for you. You should be flattered! She doesn’t usually take to people that quickly.”

“What did you mean when you said she’s into some quite specific stuff?” Alaria asked.

“Oh, she likes it rough, and she likes to be, well, dominated I think is the word. She likes it in all different places at once, if you know what I mean, and that takes some doing, because you have to get a bit of a group together to really satisfy her.”

“By the gods!” Alaria exclaimed. “I had no idea that was even a thing. She can’t get much satisfaction in a small town like this.”

“No, I don’t think she does,” Mia admitted. “I was once with Beth in Hopeford, when she had arranged what she called a party. It was really an event where she could get what she needed from a group of people. I watched… it was amazing to watch, even though I wasn’t excited by many of the people there, except Beth herself, of course. There were only a few women—I remember a gorgeous elf woman with all this golden hair and these little breasts… Mmm… but it was really hot to see Beth getting so turned on by being serviced by this group of people. I enjoyed watching that more than anything, even though I wouldn’t want to do it myself.”

She sat back and looked thoughtfully at Alaria, a slow smile spreading over her face.

“What?” Alaria asked.

“Oh, I was just thinking,” Mia said. “Beth needs at least four people to give her what she needs—six or more is better—but you could do it for her all on you own if you had a mind to.”

“How… Oh, you mean with the tentacles?”

“Exactly!” Mia said. “You could have tentacles coming at her from all sides, I’m sure she’d love that. And she does seem to be pretty into you.”

“She’s nice,” Alaria said, thoughtfully. “I liked her as soon as I saw her, actually, but I never thought about her that way.”

“Lari, you’ve never thought of anyone that way until I introduced you to the idea. Never mind what you did or didn’t think before. What do you think of her now?”

Alaria pondered. Beth was very different from Mia, physically as well as in character. Mia was carefree, quick to laugh, with a ready smile and a happy view of the world. Beth seemed more cynical, more reserved, less quick to trust and to give things away. Where Mia was still enamored of the world and all it could offer, Beth seemed to be a person who’d seen some harder times in life and was wary because of it.

Where Mia was dark haired and petite, Beth was tall and broad-shouldered, and her hair was red in some lights and almost gold in others. She had big breasts, bigger than Alaria’s, and her hips were broad, too. She was older than Alaria—probably not by much, though it was difficult to tell with cat people. She had good legs, long and shapely, and her ass had a delicious curve to it. Alaria found herself imagining what it would be like to give Beth what she needed. Tentacles here, tenacles there, tentacles everywhere…

She smiled. “Now I think of it, that’s a very attractive idea,” Alaria said. “And imagine the feeling of being able to do something for her that it usually takes five or six people to do? I mean, what a thrill that would be.”

“I think you’d be good at taking on the role that she needs,” Mia said. “She really wants to be controlled, to be dominated, but in a loving way, a way that feels safe for her. It might take you a bit of practice, but you could totally do it. I think it would be great. If it came to it, I’d love to watch.”

“I think I’d only do it if Beth was willing to let you watch,” Alaria said. “I’d make that a condition.”

Mia chuckled. “Oh, she’d be okay with that. She likes to be watched while she’s getting what she needs. That’s why she invited me to that party. I went along, and I enjoyed it, but like I said, there weren’t enough women for my taste. I only like women.”

“Oh really?” Alaria spluttered, laughing. “That’s interesting.”

“You believe it,” Mia said. “Beth was enjoying three of them, but I prefer my sexual partners with beckoning breasts, thanks very much.”

“But multiple tentacles…?” Alaria asked.

Mia got up and moved around the table, leaning over to kiss Alaria on the mouth.

“Those I can definitely handle,” she murmured, lowering a hand to loosen the buttons on Alaria’s shirt.

The sunlight streamed in through the window. They’d had some plans for the day, but now it came to it, neither of them felt like doing anything except enjoying each other’s bodies again.

Tentacles sprouted from Alaria’s back and her sides as Mia lifted her shirt over her head, and whatever plans they might have made were shelved as Mia drew Alaria’s mouth up to meet her lips.

Chapter

Twenty

“Wait,” Mia said as Alaria was about to lift her up and carry her upstairs.

Alaria stopped. “What?” she said.

“I want to do it out there,” Mia said.

Alaria looked around. “Out where?” she asked. “You mean in the garden?”

“Yeah,” Mia said. “Come on!”

Alaria was a bit unsure at first, but she followed Mia’s lead and let herself be drawn outside. After all, she thought, no one would come to watch them from the woodland side, and they couldn’t be seen from the road.

She grinned, enjoying the sensation of risk that came with moving out into the open. It was hot out here, the full heat of the day soaking the garden even with the shade of the jengberry trees. Mia kissed her firmly, putting her tongue in Alaria’s mouth as she moved her off the porch and into the heat of the sun.

“Come over here,” Mia said, breaking the kiss and then drawing Alaria over to the edge of the garden near the stream. As they got near the chuckling water, Mia turned and finished unbuttoning Alaria’s shirt. Alaria shrugged out of the garment, and Mia immediately dropped her head to suck hard on Alaria’s nipples, reaching in with her tongue to flick up and down on them and make Alaria moan with pleasure.

“Oh, Mia, that’s too good,” Alaria said.

“You like it out here in the sun?” Mia asked mischievously.

“I do,” Alaria said. “I love the way the sunlight feels on my skin.”

Mia stepped away, slowly unbuttoning her own top and then letting it fall to the grass, slowly licking her lips, her eyes fixed on Alaria and a small, coy smile on her face. She loosened her pants and let them drop to the floor.

Alaria moved forward, but instead of reaching out with her hands, she let two new appendages slip out from the space at the top of her hips, then two more, then even more. In a moment, a whole host of tentacles slid forward, slithering through the air as a whole set of new limbs, seeking Mia’s firm, sunlit body. Mia groaned in pleasure as Alaria used her new appendages to slide the lacy panties from Mia’s hips, slipping them down past her thighs and then sliding back up her bare legs, leaving a trail of slick, wet liquid in their wake.

Mia rubbed the wetness over herself, looking seductively at Alaria, who used a thumb to flip the catch that held up her own loose pants and let them drop to the ground. She stepped forward, naked. She hadn’t been wearing any underwear.

The sound of the stream mixed with the sloppy sound of wet tentacles meeting Mia’s soaking vagina as Alaria slipped a tentacle in and began fucking her. Mia lowered herself down to the ground, lying back in the grass and opening her legs for the pleasure that Alaria was giving.

Alaria knelt in front of her, leaning in to lap greedily at Mia’s clitoris, enjoying being so close as the length of the summoned limb slid in and out of Mia.

“Do it harder,” Mia groaned, and Alaria obliged, making the tentacle move in and out of Mia with more force.

“Oh, yeah,” Mia moaned. “Ah, fuck, Alaria that’s so good!”

She turned over, presenting her ass to Alaria, without Alaria having to come out of her even for a moment. Alaria came round the front, so that she could kiss Mia and then slide a tentacle into her mouth while she was fucking her.

The pleasure that flowed from the summoned parts of her was always a pleasant surprise. The double effect of having one tentacle sucked while another was fucking made her groan in pleasure as she thrust rhythmically from both ends. The juices flowed from the tentacles, and other ones slid all over Mia, soaking her in the juices.

Alaria used her hands to rub the thick tentacle juice all over Mia. It was like oil, slick and gleaming, and it covered Mia’s body and made her skin glisten. Alaria laughed as she took some of the stuff and rubbed it over her own face, feeling the warm, wet sensation of is as it got in her hair and the slick feeling of it on her lips.

Mia was going deep into the feeling of sucking and pleasuring Alaria with her mouth, and Alaria could tell that Mia was only a moment away from her first orgasm. She took the end of another summoned limb and used it to finger Mia’s clitoris, feeling pleased with the careful motor control needed for that. She was getting really good at controlling the tentacles now, and the power - though she’d never have thought before of using it in this way - was certainly coming in useful.

Mia suddenly clenched and pulled away from Alaria’s tentacle, her mouth open as she reared up, gasping and crying out in ecstasy as the orgasm took her, throwing her head back, her eyes closed and her mouth wide as the huge climax washed over her.

Alaria laughed in amazement and pleasure to see Mia’s orgasm. It never ceased to amaze her that her lover could hit such a powerful peak, and she loved to see it. There was nothing, she thought, so beautiful in the world as Mia having an orgasm. Her neat, small breasts stood up proudly in the sun as her head was thrown back, and the dappled sunlight washed over her white skin, turning her to glowing gold in the bright light of the afternoon.

The pleasure that it gave Alaria was physical as well as visual, but she wasn’t quite at the peak herself. She’d been too focused on watching Mia reach her climax. Now, Mia was panting and laughing as the wave of pleasure left her, and Alaria pulled out, giving Mia a chance to recover.

They were both covered in the thick juices that Alaria’s magic produced. The stuff was in their hair and made their bodies slick and gleaming, their hands running as smoothly over each other’s naked skin as if they were coated in oil.

“Let’s get in the water,” Mia said.

Alaria didn’t have to be asked twice. With the exertion of their fucking, and the baking temperature of the day around them, she was hot and could feel the sweat running down her back.

“Let’s do it,” she said, and immediately slid into the stream. Mia stood for a moment on the bank, looking down at Alaria. Alaria gasped as the cold water - surprisingly cold considering the heat of the day - surrounded her body. The water was deeper than it looked from the bank. She could stand on the bottom, but the water came up and over her breasts.

“Oh, this is lovely!” she said.

Mia smiled and slipped in beside her.

“Ah, it is good,” Mia said, ducking her head under the water and then coming up again, pushing her hair back from her face and blinking the water away from her eyes.

They put their arms around each other in the pleasant buoyancy of the water and kissed deeply. The stream flowed past them, mixing Alaria’s gold hair and Mia’s dark hair in a changing flow in the sunlight.

Then Mia dropped her hand and found Alaria’s clitoris. She began to work it, and Alaria moved back toward the edge of the stream, leaning against the soft, cool inner bank of the creek. She relaxed, the pleasure running through her from Mia’s fingers making her whole body tingle.

Mia laughed, a new idea coming to her. Without warning, she dropped her head under the stream and dived. Holding her breath, she gripped Alaria’s hips and put her mouth over Alaria’s clitoris to work it with her tongue.

She could only do it for a short period before coming up, but the sensation of the heat of Mia’s mouth, contrasted with the delicious coolness of the water, was incredible.

“I wish I could do that for longer,” Mia said. “That’s a very nice feeling being down there under the water, tasting you like that.”

Alaria laughed.

“What?” Mia said.

“You can be down there for longer if you like,” Alaria said.

“I don’t understand,” Mia said, confused.

“There’s a spell for it,” Alaria said. “A spell that means you can stay underwater for longer.”

“What, a spell that means I can breathe underwater?”

“Not exactly, but it means you don’t need to breathe while you’re down there.”

Mia’s eyes went wide. “Do it,” she said. “Go on, cast it on me.”

Alaria laughed. She wasn’t used to casting spells in the midst of sex, but she gathered herself and went for it, casting Amphibious Breath on Mia.

The spell made Mia tingle all over, and a flash of bright green light flickered around her nose and mouth.

“That’s it?” Mia asked.

“Give it a try,” Alaria said.

Looking a little doubtful, Mia ducked her head under the water. She kept herself down there for a moment, then a moment more, and then lifted herself back out.

“That works!” she said in amazement. “How long will it be in place for?”

“At least the next ten minutes,” Alaria said with a smile, and Mia grinned and dropped back under the water. A moment later, Alaria felt the warm pressure of Mia’s mouth and tongue, and she laid her head back against the grassy bank and closed her eyes, looking up at the leaves of the trees above and giving herself to the sensation of pleasure.

Something was happening above her, against the dappling trees. As she moved her hips and thrust back and forth with the pleasure of her lover’s touch, she became aware of a thickening in the air above her, slowly taking form between her and the trees.

It was magic. There was some magic happening up there, but she didn’t feel frightened or on the alert. She rolled her hips, then moaned in pleasure as Mia slid two fingers inside her and began to fuck her, gently and slowly at first, then more firmly.

Alaria watched the gray mist thicken and then take form. It took the shape of a woman, larger than life size. She was beautiful, about the same age as Alaria, and somehow familiar. She had long, dark hair and lighter skin, though all was done in the colors of the thick gray mist.

Alaria found herself building toward a climax as she watched the gray mist woman becoming clearer. There was a light in the woman’s eyes, a gleam that was not the sunlight. She was aware. She was watching.

The mist woman was clothed in robes, but as Alaria watched, the specter shifted and changed, like a cloud moving in the wind. The robes vanished, revealing the whole of the woman’s naked body for Alaria to see. The mist that had been the clothes wreathed around and then faded, showing every detail of the woman’s naked body to Alaria.

The mist woman put one hand to her lips, her tongue flicking out as she took her own finger into her mouth and started to suck on it the way Mia liked to suck on a tentacle.

Alaria’s hips rose up, and her feet left the floor of the stream as Mia gripped her hips and used the buoyancy of the water to hold her up with one arm while keeping the other hand fucking Alaria firmly and quickly with her fingers. Her tongue flicked tantalizingly up and down, keeping Alaria just at the edge of the level where her orgasm became inevitable.

Alaria felt that Mia was enjoying this almost as much as she was. Someone else was enjoying it too. Up above, the mist woman was touching herself, stimulating her mouth with her tongue and her fingers and rubbing herself fast between her legs with another hand.

Vaguely, Alaria wondered why she felt no fear or alarm at the manifestation above her. It offered her no threat, of course, but there was some magic here that Alaria didn’t understand, and that would normally have been enough to make her stop what she was doing. But now, Alaria was just enjoying watching the gray mist woman’s pleasure. The manifestation was bringing herself to a climax by watching Alaria. Alaria ran her eyes over the woman’s deep, firm curves, her luscious breasts, her strong shoulders and her waving hair that flowed out around her as she gazed down at Alaria, rubbing herself and bringing herself to an orgasm as she watched.

She smiled down at Alaria, that wicked grin leaving Alaria in no doubt that the mist woman knew exactly what she was doing. Her legs were spread wide, and as Mia brought Alaria expertly to the edge and then took her over, the mist woman threw her head back and opened her mouth as if she was roaring out her own orgasm at the same time as Alaria did.

Alaria thrust against Mia’s mouth and then bucked away as the pleasure took over her body. All was exploding color behind her eyes for a moment, then she blinked and opened them in time to see the spectral visitor raise a hand to her lips and wink at Alaria before vanishing, leaving only the waving, sunlit leaves.

Chapter

Twenty-One

Alaria didn’t tell Mia about the strange visitor who had watched them fucking in the stream until later that afternoon. When she did, Mia immediately jumped to the conclusion that Alaria had been carefully skirting.

“It must have been the mage who lived here before,” Mia said.

They were lying on the grass together, still naked, having spent the rest of the day dozing in the sun and waking every now and then to kiss and explore each other lazily, both saturated in their post-orgasmic bliss.

“I think so,” Alaria said, “though who and what she might be really, and how she could have manifested in that way, I don’t know. I’m just glad she didn’t decide to do anything more dangerous than watch us fucking.”

“Perhaps she can’t?” Mia suggested. “Perhaps the fact that you broke her web means that even though she can still see in, she can’t actually attack you?”

“Perhaps,” Alaria said. “Or perhaps she decided not to for some other reason.”

“Maybe she just likes watching,” Mia said. “I certainly do. She sounds beautiful. If she happens again, I’d like to see her.

It didn’t take Mia long to decide that she wanted to move in. So, a few days later, they went down to Richvale together with the cart and horse to bring Mia’s belongings from her aunt and uncle’s house up to the new homestead. Alaria was a bit nervous about meeting Mia’s family. Mia had made it clear that her aunt and uncle, though they were perfectly decent people, were not comfortable with the fact that Mia was only romantically interested in women. They were old fashioned people, and they preferred not to know what was going on in Mia’s sex life unless it involved “a man and a marriage,” as her aunt was prone to saying.

When they finally did meet, it was a little awkward, but it all went smoothly enough. Alaria was treated as the respected tutor, who would be taking Mia on as an apprentice. There was no suggestion that anything more was going on, and the old couple shook Alaria’s hand and thanked her for giving Mia the opportunity to make something more of herself than they could offer. They helped Mia and Alaria load up the cart and waved them off. Mia and Alaria trundled the short journey back from Richvale to Brighthill in the hot afternoon sun.

“You can stop smiling now,” Mia said to Alaria once they were on the road. “They can’t see you anymore.”

Alaria realized she still had the fixed grin on her face that she’d kept for the duration of the visit with Mia’s relatives. Laughing at how uptight she still felt, she dropped the fake smile and let her shoulders relax.

“Honestly,” Alaria said, “I’ve faced down every kind of monster you could think of—rabid werewolves, skeleton hoards, necromancers, hag covens, and of course the king of all the ugly bastards, Dbuk the primordial kraken—and yet facing your family felt more nerve-wracking than any of those. Why is that?”

“Maybe because you can’t resolve the issue with a sword or a blast of magic?” Mia suggested.

Alaria laughed heartily. “Yes, yes, I think you’re right. Gods, but I’ve really not learned that much about the world, have I? I thought I was really skilled and competent, but I’ve missed out on so much.”

“Hey,” Mia said, leaning over and kissing her on the cheek. “You’re very skilled in your specialist area, and there’s plenty of time to learn the other stuff.”

Once they’d brought Mia’s belongings back up to the homestead they decided they really ought to take the cart back to Hanson’s.

“A shame,” Alaria said. “I’ve got quite attached to the old horse, and the cart is useful, but I feel like we’ve hung onto them a bit too long.”

“You could buy them, I suppose,” Mia suggested.

“Too expensive,” Alaria said, shaking her head. “Or at least, too expensive for the use we’d get out of them. No, I spent a good portion of my capital on the house and furniture. There’s not going to be any issue with funds for at least a year, but I’m not going to make any more large purchases unless I really need to, not until I’ve got the shop open and have started making some sales.”

They took the cart back to Hanson’s the next day. Alaria decided she didn’t want to go through Daeron’s Pass again. She was feeling in the mood for taking it easy, not for killing tunnel-orcs, and anyway, she wanted to see a bit more of the country around her new home, so they took the long way round, avoiding Daeron’s Pass and Longwood Gulch entirely. This route took them south from Brighthill, through a succession of tiny hamlets and larger villages, round to a town called Grenvelle. At Grenvelle the road turned east and wandered lazily through hills and farmsteads until it hit the western bank of the Hope River at the larger town of Bishop’s Lean. Here, the road turned north, running parallel to the river until Hopeford, where it met the bridge and turned east again, heading for the cattle herding plains and ripe upland vineyards in the eastern half of the Hope River Valley.

The journey was very pleasant. With a fully loaded cart, the trip could sometimes take as much as two days, but Alaria and Mia did it in one, rolling into Hopeford and finding Hanson’s Yard as the sun started to dip toward the distant hills.

Hanson—the owner of the cart-hire business that catered to all the delivery businesses in the city—was very gracious about the extended loan of the carriage and horse, and very apologetic that the young delivery driver had abandoned both and run off into the blue.

“Silly young fellow,” he grumbled. “But young people nowadays—who can tell what kind of things are going through their heads?”

“Oh, indeed,” Alaria said solemnly. “Who could guess?”

They stayed the night in Hopeford. Alaria decided that they should stay in a very nice hotel for the evening, and go out for dinner together beforehand.

“What about your resolve not to make any more large purchases?” Mia teased her.

“Oh, I mean from my savings,” Alaria said, breezily. “Tonight’s treats are coming courtesy of a certain grumpy leprechaun!” She jingled the gold in her purse. It was the share Timeous had given her for returning his treasure.

Mia laughed. “Why, I’d almost forgotten about that! I should have brought mine as well.”

“You can pay next time,” Alaria shrugged, and put her arm round Mia’s shoulders as they went on the hunt for a hotel.

They got an unpleasant shock at the first place they tried. From the outside it looked lovely, but the owner was a grumpy, aged elf woman who looked them up and down and asked, “Two rooms?”

Alaria and Mia were holding hands as they walked up to the counter, and anyone could see that they were in love.

Alaria scowled at the old woman. “One room, please.”

“Ah,” said the old crone, narrowing her eyes at Alaria. “One room with two separate beds, then?”

“No,” Alaria growled, feeling her temper flare. “One room with one double bed, please. For me and my partner.”

A smirk flickered across the elf’s face. “We’ve no rooms available,” she said primly. “No rooms to fit your needs. Good evening.”

Alaria’s hand dropped to where Earthclaw, her dagger, would have sat if she’d been in battle dress. That was an old habit, and one that hadn’t manifested for a while.

“You serious?” she asked, quietly, fixing the old woman with her eyes.

“Absolutely,” the woman replied. “You’ll need to go elsewhere.”

In the street outside, Alaria was fuming. “She really just denied us a room because we’re a couple and we’re both women?” she said. “I can’t believe it!”

“You’ve changed your ideas quickly,” Mia said, a little sadly. “It’s not so long ago you were shocked at the very idea of two women getting together. Remember when I first kissed you by the stream? What was it you said? Where I’m from, it happens, but it’s not common, and not public?”

“Something like that,” Alaria admitted. Mia was right. She had forgotten, and quickly.

“In Crownheart City, how would it go for two women who walked hand-in-hand into a posh hotel and asked for a room with a double bed? Or two men, for that matter?”

“It would depend on the hotel,” Alaria said.

“Exactly,” Mia replied. She pointed as she spoke, and Alaria saw a pleasant, sprawling building set back from the road behind green, verdant grounds.

“Is that a more accepting place?” Alaria asked.

“It is,” Mia said. “We’ll get no trouble there, and it’s a really nice hotel as well, or so I’ve heard.”

It was really nice. The hotel was called Hopeford Home, and the manager, a small, alert human with a twisting handlebar mustache, glanced up and smiled at them as they walked in.

“One room? A double?” he asked before they had a chance to speak. “I have the very thing, a beautiful view of the river, quiet private garden area, all the amenities, perfect for a romantic evening in the city.”

Alaria smiled warmly at the man. “Thanks,” she said. “That sounds great.”

“Just the two of you?” he asked. “Anyone else joining you? Not a problem, but just let me know at the front desk if you’ll be requiring breakfast for a third—or even a fourth!” he winked.

Alaria raised her eyebrows at him. “Just us, this time at least,” she said.

“As you like,” he replied, and scribbled a note in his book.

After the initial upset, it took a little time for Alaria to adjust to the idea that she was in a relationship where she might not be treated equally by everyone she came across. Mia went out to the bar to get them both a cool drink, and Alaria lay on the bed, looking at the ceiling and thinking. This must be how it was for a lot of people, she reflected. She knew that in older times, even relationships between different races had been taboo—elves and orcs who wanted to get together had a terrible time, and if a cat person and a human fell in love, there would be no end of trouble.

Now, those days were all long in the past—at least in Sapheli—but despite that there was clearly still some prejudice in some parts.

Still, she didn’t let it ruin her evening. They had a wonderful time, and it turned out that sex in a luxurious hotel—not to mention outside in the private garden area that came with their room—was a new thrill altogether. They had a good dinner, an exciting night, and a wonderful breakfast, and the next day they caught a ride on a cart that was going back to Brighthill via the pass with a group of fifteen merchants and farmers returning from various missions in the city.

Again, there was no sign of goblin activity, but this time when Alaria and Mia bounced through the pass on the back of the cart Alaria found herself wondering again about the strange clan symbol on the tunics of the orcs she’d killed here, and about what other secrets the thick forest of Longwood Gulch might hold.

Then there was the question of crafting materials. She wanted to make potions, but even the best alchemist couldn’t make potions from thin air. For potions, you needed ingredients, and ingredients were most often found in places exactly like Longwood Gulch.

The tunnel-orcs hadn’t yielded much in the way of loot, but Alaria could feel in her bones that there was more to be found in the dense woods of this wild spot. She would need to deal with the orc threat sooner rather than later if she was going to be able to collect serious amounts of ingredients.

Ten days passed, and Alaria and Mia spent the time making Number 4 their home. They got a lot done together, working steadily at different parts of the project while still giving themselves time to rest, to eat, and to enjoy the beautiful grounds and making love together twice a day at least.

As the end of their second week together approached, they were looking at a homestead that was clean and tidy throughout, had a clean chimney, a set of neat, tidy outhouses (each with a key located and carefully labeled) and a stack of split firewood drying ready for the winter season. There was no need for a fire before the fall at the earliest, but in fall and into winter the north winds swept down from the mountains into the Hope River Valley, and it got cold in Brighthill and the other towns on Bread Rise.

There were paths cut in the long grass, though they deliberately left most of it as meadow because they both like the butterflies and the wild flowers, and the stones from the tumbled part of the wall at the back of the house had been gathered up and piled near the break. They took a good look at the bridge over the river at the back as well, but that wasn’t something either of them were able to repair. Bridge building was out of both their skill sets. Instead, they moved a couple of heavy stones into the stream to act as stepping stones, so that they could cross and sit on the little bench without getting their feet wet if they wanted to.

They saw their friends a few times, twice down at the inn when they went for lunch together, and once when Sasha and Palo came up to visit and helped out for the afternoon, but most of the time they were content with their own company. The others seemed to realize this, and were content to leave them be for a bit.

One person they did see a couple of times was Beth. She came up several times during that first fortnight, always with some excuse or some message, or some bit of news that she felt they should know. Alaria always invited her in, but Beth always seemed flustered and embarrassed and found a reason why she couldn’t just now.

Alaria wanted to make Beth feel at ease, but it was a difficult position to be in. She knew what Beth really wanted, and she kept trying to give Beth the opportunity to get it, but at the same time Beth kept flitting away like a nervous cat every time she got close. Alaria shook her head and smiled. They’d get there, she thought; Beth just needed time to work up to it. In the meantime, Alaria was content with Mia’s company.

One of the last jobs they did together was to clear out and renovate the little building that Alaria wanted to use as a shop. This was a small wooden structure built into the outer wall facing the street, built in a hexagonal shape with a small door and two shuttered windows.

There was an old wasp’s nest inside, but it was uninhabited and they were able to clear the little space out, clean it up, and get it ready for use again as a shop. When they’d first seen it, Alaria had thought it odd that it was built into the wall and not as part of the grounds. Now that she’d seen what had happened to the delivery man when he’d tried to enter uninvited, she realized why. Whoever had lived in this place before, they’d put enchantments on the front walls so that only the keyholder could walk in uninvited. That was why the shop needed to be facing directly onto the road.

“What about ingredients?” Mia asked as they stood together looking at the little shop building. They were tired, sweaty, and dirt streaked from a day’s cleaning, but happy and satisfied with their progress, too.

“Ingredients?” Alaria asked.

“Yeah. You said you need ingredients for your potions, and they have to be harvested in a very particular way. So, what about ingredients? You’re going to need some if you’re going to make potions. If we’re going to make potions, I should say.”

“You still want to learn alchemy from me?”

“Of course!” Mia said. “You don’t think I just said that because I wanted to get in your pants, do you?”

“It had crossed my mind…” Alaria teased.

“Hey!” Mia said, punching Alaria playfully on the arm. “I do want to learn potions. After all, I’ll have to have some new talents I can show my aunt and uncle.”

“Aside from all the talents you can’t show them,” Alaria laughed.

“Exactly,” Mia said. “So come on, what about it? Where do we go to harvest potion ingredients? And when?”

“As for where, I think for a beginning we should try the woods behind the house. They seem extensive enough that we’ll find at least some stuff we can use, though we’ll need to go further afield when we want to level up our production.”

“As for when,” she continued, glancing over to where the half moon was just beginning to climb the horizon, “how about right now?”

Chapter

Twenty-Two

“So, is now a good time for harvesting ingredients?” Mia asked.

“It is,” Alaria said. “Look up. You see how the moon is half-full?”

Mia looked up. The bright moonlight illuminated her face and cast her dark hair into black shadow. “I see,” she said, her lips slightly parted as she gazed at the moon.

Alaria smiled, put an arm around her, and gave her a quick, affectionate squeeze. “You can harvest ingredients at any time, but the best results are always at the half moon, the full moon, or the new moon. I don’t know why that is—I don’t think anyone does for sure—but there’s a theory that the moon influences the mana in the plants, making the plant mana more accessible to the magic of the harvester…”

She broke off, realizing that Mia was giving her a blank look. Damn, she thought. I’m getting ahead of myself. One thing I’ve never learned how to do is teach. Better start with the basics.

“Never mind the mana bit for now, let’s grab some equipment,” she said. “You okay to head out right now? You don’t want to stop for dinner or a wash or something first?”

“I’m game to go now,” Mia said. “I’m keen to learn. What equipment do we need?”

“A couple of canvas bags, and a sharp knife each. That’s all.”

“Will the new kitchen knives we bought in Hopeford do?”

“Perfect. The small ones, the ones we got for cutting vegetables.”

“There’s no sheath for them, we’ll have to carry them in our hands.”

“All the better. You shouldn’t sheath a knife that’s used for harvesting potion ingredients. You should carry it out in the open, in the light of the moon.”

“Doesn’t sound very convenient,” Mia commented.

“It’s not,” Alaria agreed. “Like I said, the techniques we use for potion creation are often obtuse and technical, and the forms can be difficult and inconvenient. That’s why potion creation—alchemy—is a prized skill, and why potions can be sold for good prices. It’s also why we don’t just collect ingredients wherever and whenever we happen to find ourselves. If you just grab ingredients in passing, the potion creation simply doesn’t work.”

They grabbed the equipment they needed and put their coats on, since it was a bit cooler now the sun had gone down. Mia wore her favorite sandals, and Alaria wore the light shoes that she’d bought in Hopeford. With a light canvas sack each and their harvesting knives glittering in their hands in the moonlight, they headed off into the forest.

To get there, they had to choose between going out to the road and then doubling back through the scrub outside of the wall of the homestead or crossing the stream in the garden by the new stepping stones and going through the hole in the wall. They chose the latter option.

The hole in the wall was ragged, as if a tree had fallen on it many years ago; the tree had been cleared, but the damage in the wall was never repaired. Alaria looked with interest into the woods beyond the gap wall. Sure enough, about ten feet away from the break in the wall there was the remains of a tree stump, upended by a long-ago wind and now all but invisible under a riot of bramble and climbing honeysuckle in full flower.

“The flowers smell so beautiful,” Mia said. “Can honeysuckle be used for any of the potions we want to create?”

“Honeysuckle flower is good for some potions,” Alaria said, “but not for anything that I was thinking of working on tonight.”

She thought for a moment. “Still,” she said, “it would be good to gather some. We’ll wait until we’re on the way back, though—the fresher the better. I don’t want the flowers banging around in the bag for the whole trip.”

They found that there was—if not a path exactly—then at least a thinner track in the undergrowth running into the woods from the wall. At first, Alaria wondered what animal had made the track. It seemed too small for a deer or a boar, yet too big for a rabbit or other small critter. And then there were the fallen branches which lay beside the track, as if they’d been carefully shifted. No animal did that.

“Of course, Timeous the leprechaun,” she said, snapping her fingers as she realized what the answer to the riddle was. “This must be the track he’s created by walking between his house and mine.”

“I wonder why he chose to stash his treasure box in your outhouse, rather than in his own home?” Mia wondered.

“Because of the enchantments around the outer wall, I’d guess.”

“But why didn’t the enchantments stop him?”

“For the same reason he didn’t need a key to get into the outhouse,” Alaria said. “You explained to me about his magic that allows him to bypass locks and keys. I didn’t know that at the time, but I guess that the same power allows him to bypass whatever wards and spells are placed on the walls of the homestead.”

“From the little I know of magic, that makes sense,” Mia said. “So, we should probably leave this path, then. If he’s made the path, then it’ll take us to his house. As much as I appreciate his gift of gold, I don’t think I want to visit him at home tonight.”

Alaria smiled. “Fair enough. Do you know your way around these woods much?”

“Not really. I used to spend some time here when I was younger—swimming in the stream, that kind of thing—but that was always down nearer the road, and I’ve not been up here for ages.”

“Let’s go this way, then,” Alaria said, pointing to the right. “There’s less bramble this way. That will take us away from the track, and it looks like we can get across the hill and over to a place where there’s a bit more of a clearing, and a bit more light.”

They traversed the hilltop, moving northeast through tall grass to where the trees became larger and more widely spaced. The moon shone in through the leaves and made the gaps in the forest gleam bone-white with bright moonlight.

“There,” Alaria said, pointing. “That’s what we’re after.”

Mia frowned; she was unsure what Alaria was pointing to. There was a clearing, yes, but little else that she could see except a big, flat stone in the middle of the clearing, sticking out of the thick grass like an uneven table.

“What is it?” Mia asked as they approached the big flat stone, their knives glinting in the moonlight and a warm wind stirring the long grass.

But Alaria didn’t reply. Instead, she passed the stone, laughing in pleasure and surprise. “The sea!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know you could see it from here. I had no idea it was so close!”

Mia joined her, slipping an arm around her waist and leaning her head on her shoulder. They stood together looking out between the trees. They were right at the edge of the forest, and a low wall divided the woods from a well-kept field of red barley. Here on the top of the Bread Rise hills, looking north and west over the little wall, they could see the long slope down to the coast.

Alaria had said the sea was close, but in fact it was at least fifteen miles away. Still, they could see it, they could smell it, and if the wind in the leaves dropped, Alaria even fancied she could hear the distant booming of the surf. From this vantage point, the water looked like crinkled silver foil glinting in the moonlight. In the daytime, the fields and belts of trees that filled the land between them and the sea would be a riot of color, but in the moonlight they were silver, white, and gray, with the roads and streams and shadows standing out hard, like black pen strokes on a printed page.

“We should walk down there sometime,” Alaria said. “Some day when we’ve got a bit of time and can start early. I love to swim in the sea.”

Mia smiled. “I’d like that. But won’t you tell me what’s so special about this clearing? You were going to harvest some ingredients, and show me the forms of the magic, remember?”

They walked back to the flat stone in the middle of the clearing.

“This,” Alaria said, slapping a hand on the stone’s mossy surface, “is called a witches’ table, or a witches’ workbench. I prefer table, personally. It’s a natural phenomenon, not an actual table, and you get them in most forests and woods if you look around for long enough. They’ll be a tree stump, or a flat stone, or sometimes even just a flattened mound rising up out of the grass, always in the center of a clearing. Whatever form they take, they’re the first signal that where you’re standing is a good spot to start harvesting. Witches’ tables focus the magic of a place, pulling it together and distributing it outward around the environment. The first thing to do when harvesting is to find a witches’ table, if you can, and begin there.”

“Because the ingredients you find there are going to be the most powerful?”

“Exactly. You’ve got it.”

“Okay,” Mia said, beginning to feel a bit impatient. “Shall we look for some ingredients, then?”

Alaria laughed, quietly. “And how would you do that?”

“With my eyes,” Mia said dryly, “but something’s telling me that it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Alaria had Mia sit on the witches’ table.

“I’m going to teach you an elementary magic spell,” she said. “You’ve never done any magic knowingly before, but I guarantee you’ll have done some unknowingly. There’s magic in everyone, Mia, and everyone has a pool of a magical resource that’s called mana. Not many people know about it outside of the spellworking community, but everyone has it. Once it’s unlocked, a person can access it and use it to power spells. I’m going to show you how to unlock yours.”

Many people—those who didn’t know or understand magic—would tell stories of the mana pool, that universal resource that any aspiring mage had to start by activating and tapping into. They said that it was a tangible resource, almost a physical thing, something that the mage could look at and gauge as if it were a bottle of water, or a loaf of bread.

This was, needless to say, nothing like the truth. In fact, the mana pool that mages had to draw on was much more like the capacity for willpower. It could be built with use, it could be replenished, and it could be depleted, but there was no way to see it, no way to look into it and know how much was left or what reserves a person might have available to draw on in a moment of need.

Mia didn’t see the need for this. Surely foraging for plants was foraging for plants? But Alaria assured her that it was necessary for harvesting to work with potion creation, and so Mia assented and agreed to be taught to activate and access her mana pool knowingly.

That night, the two women had their first real moment of friction. Alaria was very good at her specialisms, but she had never learned how to teach, and she went about it in rather a clumsy way. Mia, for her part, was used to being good at things, used to getting things right without much difficulty, and she was quickly frustrated when she found that she struggled to learn what Alaria was trying to teach.

But for all that, they managed to get there. Within half an hour of beginning, they had both worked out that they would need to go slower and be more patient with each other, and to accept that unlike anything they’d done together before, neither one of them really knew how this worked. Unlike everything else they’d explored together, neither of them were masters of the relationship between teacher and student.

Once they’d discovered how to be more patient with each other—and humbler about their relative abilities to learn and to teach—things flowed better. Within an hour, Mia had felt and identified the first stirrings of her mana. It was a new feeling, scary at first, but Alaria took her carefully through the steps.

Another hour, and Mia had mastered accessing the mana pool enough for Alaria to teach her an elementary spell.

“Usually, a mage would begin her training by just building her mana pool for several weeks if not months,” Alaria said, “but the reason for that is that most mages need to train into more powerful spells to begin practicing quickly. If you were training to be an adventurer, you’d be looking for fire spells, elemental destruction spells, that sort of thing. There’s no point even beginning those without a strong mana pool. But since what we’re doing is focused on potion creation, we can get away with teaching you a basic spell straight away.”

“I thought you said it takes months to master potion creation.”

“Oh, it does,” Alaria said. “I’m not proposing that you master anything tonight. mastery is something quite different. But the basic Locate spell in the Spirit school is quite easy. That’s all we need to do today. If you can get to a level where you can do that reliably, we won’t need to do anything else. That will be plenty.”

“I’d quite like to do the other stuff,” Mia said, thoughtfully. “The fire magic, and that kind of thing. The kind of thing that I saw you do when you fought the koblins… I mean, the tunnel-orcs.”

Alaria looked at her with interest. “Really?” she said. “I didn’t think that was your kind of thing at all. After all, you seemed quite afraid when it came to the fight in the pass that time.”

“Only because I don’t know how to fight!” Mia objected. “If I could do a bunch of magic the way you can, I would feel very differently about it. Could you teach me that kind of magic, too?”

“There’s no rule against it,” Alaria said. “Technically, anyone who can do the magic can teach the magic.”

“So long as they can have enough patience with their students to do so,” Mia said, teasingly.

Alaria glared for a moment, then laughed. “You’re right,” she said. “Teaching is a whole skill in itself. It’s good for me to learn that. It gives me more respect for the tutors I had when I was studying the stuff. The good ones, at any rate.”

“So, would you be able to teach me combat magic?” Mia asked again. “Would you want to?”

“Sure, if you want to learn it, I’d be happy to teach. It’s not that difficult, not really. Not if you have the patience and the will to learn the forms piece by piece and stick to them. It’s all about being systematic, and a lot of people don’t like doing that. People get agitated, they get excited, they want to get it all done now and get out fighting monsters before lunchtime the following day. To get really good at it takes years.”

“Maybe so, but what about just getting able to do it a bit? How long does that take?”

“Not as long,” Alaria admitted. “It mostly depends on the student. If you’re keen and want to learn I guess I could have you be able to do some kind of combat capable magic within a week or so if we give ourselves time to practice. But we need to do the potion-making first. We need to have some potions and start selling them so that we can have a source of income for our new homestead. Once we have that in place, we can have a bit more time to practice other things and pursue our other interests.”

“That sounds sensible,” Mia agreed. “And by learning how to do the potions, I’ll also learn how to develop and cultivate my mana pool, right?”

“Exactly,” Alaria said, pleased at how quickly Mia was getting the idea now, and how willing she seemed to be to put the work in. “Exactly,” she repeated. “So, shall we get started? I feel like I’m ready to teach.”

“Let’s do it,” Mia grinned. “I’m ready to learn.”

Chapter

Twenty-Three

Alaria taught, and Mia learned.

Every school of magic had an iteration of the Find spell, but the Spirit school had several. Spirit was the only school of magic that was broken down into several sub-schools. One of these was Alchemy, the formal name for the system of potion creation Alaria had learned in her years of training.

There was no question that Alchemy was one of the easiest branches to learn, and that Find was the easiest of the Alchemy spells available, but still Alaria was amazed at just how quickly Mia picked it up. It took the young woman less than an hour to get the form of the spell, and in less than two she could reliably cast the magic as many times as she wanted.

“This is great!” she said, her eyes shining with glee as she moved around the clearing, casting Find, harvesting the ingredients that the spell showed, and then resting for a few moments before repeating the process.

The Find spell acted similarly to the Killer’s Sight spell, which had been put to good use by Alaria in the recent fight with the tunnel orcs in Daeron’s pass. When cast, the spell showed up the sought-for items in bright colors to the vision of the caster, no matter what the ambient light of the environment.

The spell showed the ingredients up in one of three different colors—blue, green, or red. The ingredients that showed up in blue were for healing and other beneficial potions that directly affected the user. The green were ingredients for potions that boosted or depleted particular attributes—strength potions, vigor potions, potions of sight, perception, and stamina. The red ingredients were the dangerous ones, those ingredients that would be used to make poisons, exploding damage potions, or potions that summoned spectral warriors to a battlefield.

“Only pick the blue ingredients for now,” Alaria said to Mia. “It’s very important not to get the different kinds mixed up.”

“Why’s that?” Mia asked.

“Because if ingredients from different alchemy groups are mixed in the presence of a mage who intends to make potions—say, for example, in a bag on the way home—then you can get some very strange and dangerous results. Worse, when you do get home and mix the potions, you can end up with potions that look like one thing but do another. Imagine a healing potion that was actually a poison, or a strength potion that actually behaved as a sleeping draught. No, when we go out to collect ingredients, we go looking for only one thing at a time. We keep our different potion making sessions separate.”

“I had no idea it was so dangerous!” Mia said. “Healing potions that are secretly poisons! Nobody would want to buy from our shop if we made things like that too often!”

Alaria laughed. “You’re right, though I always learned it in the context of a fight. Imagine a warrior, wounded, backing off from the battle for a moment to swallow a healing potion and she finds out… Augh! It’s a poison!”

“That would be bad!” Mia laughed. “But I don’t see that it would be worse for a warrior than for some poor person who was ill and wanted a healing potion.”

“I see why you say so,” Alaria replied, “but there’s a good reason for it. The thing about poisons is that even the best alchemists can’t make them all that strong. You’re not going to kill even a sick person with a single poison potion, it would take two or three, unless they’re really at death’s door. In civilian life, a person looking for healing would be taking a potion long before their illness had gotten anywhere near that point. But in battle, it’s much more likely to have a person gravely wounded and needing a healing potion to get them back from the brink of death. In that scenario, having a poison masquerading as a healing potion really could take them out... What?”

Alaria had been looking at the moon while speaking, but now she looked at Mia and found that the younger woman was gazing at her strangely. There was admiration in her gaze, yes, but also a look that might have even been fear.

“I was just thinking,” Mia said, “I never really considered that aspect of adventuring. The danger, the risk of death or debilitating injury. The risk of pain. You must have seen some terrible things in your time. You must have known people who… who…”

“People who died?” Alaria said quietly. “Yes. I’ve lost friends, I’ve seen colleagues and others killed in the course of the adventurer’s life. But I think it’s worse when you see people injured, rather than dead. At least a fighter who dies out on a quest knows that they were out there pursuing what they wanted to do. Adventurers are a funny bunch, drawn from all walks of life. Lots of them are in it for the money, of course—there’s very good money to be made while adventuring. But a lot of them are out on the road questing as a way to escape from whatever other challenges they might have in life. You find people fleeing from the law, or from debt, or from any number of terrible situations. Adventurers are tough, but a lot of them are also very wounded people. I mean wounded inside, inside their heads and hearts, not in their bodies. Those kinds of wounds, healing potions can’t fix, but sometimes achievement and fighting on the road can. And if they can’t, then death does the job instead.”

She sighed. “But it’s when people haven’t yet been able to find what they seek, but then they get injured so badly that they can’t continue to be adventurers—that’s when it’s the worst. Those are the people that it’s hardest for. That’s why healing potions are so valuable, and it’s so important that they do what they are expected to do.”

“Have you ever been close to death like that?” Mia asked.

“It depends on what you mean,” Alaria said with a smile. “I’ve been in situations where I might’ve died, situations where I was close to being killed. Oh, yes, I've had more close shaves than I can count. But I've never been injured so badly that I was at risk of dying from it, and even those injuries that I have had have always been susceptible to the power of a healing potion.”

Mia smiled. “I’m glad,” she said.

“Me too!” Alaria replied.

“One more question,” Mia said. “You said that poison potions are not generally powerful enough to kill a person who is not already very badly wounded. What about healing potions? From the way you’ve talked about it, you seem to be saying that one healing potion would be enough to heal a person even from a very bad wound. Does that mean that the healing potions are much more effective than poisons?”

“Yes!” Alaria said. “Well done for noticing that on your own. That’s right, a general rule of thumb is that while it would take four poison potions to kill a normal human being outright, the damage done by three poisons can be negated by one healing potion.”

“No wonder they’re so popular!” Mia said with a grin. “Shall we continue? I feel a bit spent, I must admit, but I could cast a few more spells.”

Alaria shook her head. “If you’re feeling the fatigue that comes from spellcasting, that means it’s time to stop. Later on in your learning process, it can be beneficial to push yourself a bit beyond that initial fatigued feeling, but at this point it won’t do you any good, and it might even mean that you wouldn't be able to do more tomorrow. If you stop and rest now, your mana will replenish and you’ll be able to do more again quickly. Let's have a look at what you've got in your bag.”

They tipped out the contents of Mia’s canvas bag onto the witches’ table and had a look.

“This is good,” Alaria said. “We’ve got the makings of a good selection of healing potions here, well done. I’ll just cast around and gather a few more before we go, then we can head back to the house. Tomorrow, I’ll show you the next step in the potion creation process.”

The next morning, another baking hot day dawned over Brighthill. Mia and Alaria rose late. Mia was very keen on Alaria’s ability to heat water by magic. She had grown up all her life in a world where hot water was a laborious and time-consuming luxury to create. They had a big copper tub in the upstairs bedroom, and every morning Mia hauled water up and filled it so that Alaria could heat the water by magic.

Mia watched in fascination as Alaria plunged her hands into the water and concentrated for a moment. Bubbles began to rise from the water, turning in a moment from a small stream of bubbles to a powerful churning, as if the tub was a pot boiling on a stove. She drew her hands out quickly, and the bubbling subsided.

“I would absolutely love to learn how to do that,” Mia said.

“I can teach you that one too, if you like,” Alaria said. “It’s just a basic heat transfer spell from the Fire school, but I think you’ll need a bit more of a mana pool before you can reliably cast that. Let’s focus on the potion creation spells for the moment. Once you’ve spent a week doing those, we can think about other things.”

They spent the day working at the alchemy spells, using the ingredients that they’d collected the day before. They spent the next day at it, too, and the day after that, and by day four Mia was more than capable of doing the spells that were needed not only to find ingredients, but also to make and bottle potions.

It was—as Alaria had warned—a slow, sometimes tedious process, but Mia took to it. She’d never had to learn to do something quite so systematic as this, and Alaria was pleased and even a bit relieved to see how well she took to it. Alaria had been worried that Mia would find the process boring and decide that she didn’t want to do it after all, but actually nothing could have been further from the truth. When she created her first potion, Mia was so delighted that she danced about the kitchen with the potion in her hand.

Alaria grinned, remembering her own feeling of elation when she’d first achieved this milestone. Mia had done well. Most people took more than two weeks to learn what Mia had learned in less than a week.

Alaria didn’t tell Mia, but she herself had mastered the elementary potion making in less than two days when she had begun her own studies. But that was a long time ago, and under very different circumstances. Alaria had been a very unusual student, and there was no doubting that her rapid mastery of the potions part of the Spirit school was very out of the ordinary. Measured by that standard, Mia had been slow in taking nearly a week. By any normal standard, Mia had done very well. It made Alaria wonder what else she might be able to teach her new partner? Could they end up out fighting some monsters together?

The following day, they went out and collected more ingredients, leaving before sunrise to catch the mana that flowed through the earth and the plants at night. It was still close enough to the half-moon that the ingredients would be fairly potent. They gathered a good crop, Mia practicing her new spell and Alaria putting her own Find magic to use too. When they got back, they found an unexpected guest at the gate.

“Oh, hello, Beth,” Mia said to the innkeeper. Beth stood leaning on the gate and looking determined. “Will you come in? We were just about to make some tea, weren’t we, Alaria?”

“Of course we were,” Alaria smiled. “Wait a moment, let me get the gate for you. You don’t want to come in without the gate being opened, it can get a bit tricky.”

“Thanks,” Beth said with an effort. “I’d love to come in. I just came up to say hello, since you’ve always invited me in but I’ve never been, uh, quite able to.”

Alaria and Mia shared a quick, knowing glance.

So, this was the reason for Beth’s air of determination. Having been too nervous to come in before, she’d decided that she would come up with the express purpose of doing so this time. She’d nerved herself to come up and visit, and had evidently risen early and taken great care over her appearance before doing so.

She looked great, with a long, tight-fitting green dress that hugged her feline curves, and black leather boots that reached almost to her knees. Alaria had a glimpse of striped stockings above the boots. Her tail hung from the back of the dress, sweeping from side to side and adding to her elegance and her air of determination. Her red hair was loose except for a single braid that gathered the top portion of the hair at the back. She was wearing some kind of light perfume, and a scent like lavender and flowers followed her in as Alaria and Mia brought her in and sat her down at the table.

Alaria boiled the kettle on the stove while Mia and Beth sat and chatted over what had been going on in the town in recent days.

“We’ve been a bit out of the loop recently,” Alaria said, pouring tea and sitting down at the table. “I’ve been teaching Mia how to do potions, you see.”

“Oh, really?” Beth said. “Is that what all these ingredients are for?”

“That’s right,” Mia said. “Also, Alaria has tentacles,”

“Eh? What?” Alaria croaked, nearly spitting out a mouthful of tea. She couldn’t believe that Mia had just come out with that.

Beth was looking from one to the other of them, clearly a bit unsure about what was going on.

“Tentacles?” she said carefully. “Did I hear that right?”

Mia grinned mischievously and nodded. “That’s right. They’re really awesome, I think you’d like them. Why don’t you show her, Alaria?”

Alaria raised an eyebrow at Mia. She remembered what Mia had said about Beth and her sexual desires, and how Alaria’s tentacles could be put to good use in satisfying Beth. Mia was introducing Beth to the tentacles and clearly wanted to see how she reacted.

Alaria wasn’t sure if this was a good idea. If Beth’s reaction was bad, she might go down to the inn and spread unpleasant rumors or something. Still, there was no going back on having told her, and perhaps she’d be into it. After all, she had said that she didn’t understand why people were against magic and that she’d much prefer it if people were more accepting. And it was also true that Mia had gone to a sex party with Beth and watched her having a group sex session with multiple people. On second thought, Alaria decided, Mia probably knows what she’s doing. Cheeky little minx, though, to move on it without asking me first! I’ll need to have a word with her later about this.

“Very well,” Alaria said aloud. “Beth, would you like to see a tentacle?”

Beth giggled. “Yes!” she said, and as she spoke something strange happened. Her face, which looked human as usual, shifted a little. The human face appeared less clear for a moment, and another face showed through. It was a cat face, still recognizably Beth, but with the pointed features of a feline, striped fur, and even whiskers. Then it was gone, and Alaria was looking at the smiling human face of Beth again.

Alaria narrowed her eyes, the pieces snapping together in her mind. Here was Beth, a cat woman who looked like a human. At the party, Beth had looked more catlike than when Alaria had first met her. After that first meeting, Alaria had mentioned to Mia that she’d seen Beth’s tail, and Mia had said something like, Oh, she let you see that, did she? That suggested that Beth sometimes hid her tail from people, but Alaria had always been able to see it, and physically at least, it would be very hard to hide effectively, since it was large and full, and seemed to move with a mind of its own.

And all these facts were tied together by the fact that Beth—unusually for many people in the world these days—had no problem at all with magic.

Alaria nodded to herself. She would wait a moment and give the requested demonstration of her own magic first, but she wouldn’t wait long after that. She had discovered the cat woman’s secret.

Beth was a shapeshifter.

Chapter

Twenty-Four

Alaria saw in Beth’s face that the cat woman realized something had slipped. She gave Beth a reassuring smile and the ghost of a wink, and Beth smiled back, though still looked a little bit unsure. Alaria raised a hand and pointed it forward, then let a tentacle appear from her wrist.

The new appendage flew out from her wrist, leaped across the table, and lifted the teapot, bringing it smoothly round to pour a little more tea into Mia’s cup, then Alaria’s own, and then Beth’s. As the tentacle approached Beth, she made a small noise, somewhere between fear and amazement, and with a touch of something else—excitement?

“You’re getting really good at the motor control,” Mia said. “Much better that you were at first.”

Alaria nodded, letting the tentacle reabsorb into the flesh of her arm. “Thanks. I’ve had a decent amount of practice now,” she said. “And I’ve had them for a while.”

“What d’you think, Beth?” Mia asked.

“Uh, I think they’re awesome, just like you said,” Beth agreed. “How in the world did you learn to do that? I’ve not heard of that magic before.”

“And you know a bit about magic, don’t you?” Alaria asked, looking closely at Beth.

Beth met Alaria’s gaze and a slow smile spread across her face. As the smile appeared, she let her face change. The fur seemed to manifest around her eyes and mouth like the same way the tentacles manifested from Alaria’s hands—naturally, swiftly, and with that enthralling sense that magic was happening.

“How did you know?” Beth asked, as Mia gaped in amazement at the newly revealed Beth.

“I saw it a few times,” Alaria explained. “At the party, for one thing, and just now when you came in. It was as if there was another face under your regular one. Also, it was strange that you had the tail, and seemed to be one of the cat people, but you didn’t have any other cat person features. That struck me as odd from the start.”

Beth smiled. Her face was a classic cat person’s face now. She was still recognizably Beth, and Alaria was impressed by how well the shapeshifted glamor she’d been wearing had fitted her. Now, however, she had the classic cat person’s pointed ears, sticking perkily up out of her mane of long, red hair, which remained unchanged. Her face was covered in fine, reddish fur, and she had long whiskers that she preened back with one finger as she sat back in her chair and regarded her two companions languidly.

“It’s a relief to drop the act,” she admitted. “I get so used to looking like a human, and even trying to act like one, but it does get boring. I much prefer to be my own self when I can, but not everyone understands. You understand.”

“I do,” Alaria said. “Though I’ve rarely seen it done so well before. I only saw because I’ve been trained to spot these things. No one else would be able to tell.”

“Now just hold on a minute,” Mia demanded. “Let’s just hold onto the reins for a minute here. Can you two please explain what in the hells you’re both talking about? Beth, what is this? You look amazing, but what do you mean about dropping an act? And what are you saying, Lari, that you knew about something?”

“I thought you knew, Mia,” Alaria said.

“Clearly, I don’t,” Mia said dryly. “So, if someone wouldn’t mind explaining…”

“I’m a cat person, Mia,” Beth said.

“Yes, I was kind of getting that far by myself, thanks,” Mia replied. “But what about the other stuff? Oh, I knew you were able to hide the tail from some people, but this… wow, I mean, it’s amazing! This is how you truly look? And how did you hide it?”

Alaria smiled at Mia’s bafflement. “Beth is a shape shifter,” she said. “She has the power to disguise herself, to take on the appearance of something other than what she really is. A very useful skill, and done with great finesse, I have to say, for you to be able to choose who sees the tail and who doesn’t. Why did you let me see it when we first met?”

Beth shrugged and looked at Alaria under her eyelashes. “I guess I thought you were someone who could be trusted,” she said. “Like Mia here.”

Mia laughed. “I knew you were able to conceal the tail, because you told me, but I didn’t realize it was magic. So, this is what you really look like?”

“Depends on who you ask, I suppose,” Beth shrugged. Alaria was very aware of how much more confident Beth seemed now that she was in her true form. Was there something about the human glamor that made her less sure of herself? Alaria thought that was likely the case.

“I’m glad you’ve decided to let us see, Beth,” Alaria said. “You’ll never get any negative judgments from us here.”

“Hmm, no, somehow I didn’t think I would,” Beth said. “And now, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh, yes?” Alaria asked. She reached a tentacle out and used it to put the kettle back on to boil on the stove again, taking advantage of her particular powers to be able to do so without getting out of her chair.

Mia laughed. “You’d better watch out, Alaria,” she said. “That tentacle power will be making you get lazy if you're not careful.”

“I doubt that,” Alaria said. “And you know, it's all good practice. It's work, using the tentacles. It's not a shortcut. I think it's pretty cool to be able to put the kettle on without having to get up.”

“I’m jealous,” Beth said. “I think it’s an amazing power. Can you do more of them?”

“You mean more than one at a time?” Alaria asked.

“Yeah,” Beth said. She sat awaiting the answer with her mouth slightly open, as if the answer to the question meant a lot to her.

“She can do loads of them at once,” Mia said, her voice husky as she said the words.

Alaria rolled her eyes as Beth licked her lips unconsciously, seeing that Mia was completely aware why Beth was asking the question. There seemed to be something of an understanding between the two women, and given their past history together, that didn't seem too hard to believe.

Alaria was beginning to wonder if this whole incident had been prearranged by Mia and Beth to create sexual tension. She smiled at the idea.

“Never mind that for now,” she said, bringing the other two back on topic. “What was it that you wanted to ask me, Beth? You said you came up here with a specific question in mind?”

“Hmm?” Beth said, her thoughts having clearly traveled far from the subject. “Ah yes, that. Well, it’s about the koblins.”

“Orcs,” Mia corrected.

“Tunnel-orcs,” Alaria said, correcting Mia in turn.

“Of course,” Mia said.

“What?” Beth asked. “What’s a tunnel-orc?”

“A particular breed of orc that inhabits subterranean tunnels under mountain ranges, or in mountain passes.”

“Right,” Beth said, “and what does that have to do with koblins?”

“The creatures you’ve called koblins were called that because they were not quite goblins, not quite kobolds, but something in between, right?”

Beth nodded. “They’re tunnel-orcs. I’ve fought them—I went to have a look at them, as I think I told you, and I had a fight with them. I know about orcs—the aggressive kinds, at least.”

“Because there are plenty of other kinds,” Beth put in earnestly. “Plenty of orcs who are very pleasant, and not aggressive at all, you know.”

“So I’ve heard,” Alaria said. Then she added, “So Mia has told me.”

Beth looked from Alaria to Mia and back again, a scandalized smile growing on her face. “Mia,” she breathed. “You told her? About the… the orc party?”

“Aren’t you pleased I did?” Mia asked.

Beth spluttered for a moment and then laughed. “Well, actually, yes, I am. Because it means that Alaria knows about orcs. About the good kind of orc.”

“Exactly,” Alaria said. “But these ones are not such good orcs. They’re not the kind of orcs you’d like to party with.”

“Too small, I imagine,” Beth said sadly.

Alaria burst out laughing. “Can you two keep your minds off sex for a minute or two, please, so we can talk about the threat in Daeron’s Pass?”

“Sex, eh?” Beth said, her finger coming up to run along her lips sensuously as she leaned back in her chair, looking at Mia and Alaria in turn. “I didn’t know sex was what we were talking about.”

“It’s not,” Alaria growled, and Mia giggled.

“The creatures in Daeron’s Pass are tunnel-orcs, an aggressive breed of clannish orcs who work together to take out travelers and steal their stuff. So, not kobolds.”

“And definitely not sexy,” Mia added.

“Definitely not,” Alaria concurred. “Even for those who like the other kinds of orc.”

“Okay,” Beth said. “So, what about them?”

Alaria looked at the cat woman blankly. Beth was making eyes at Alaria, and Mia was trying not to giggle, partly at Beth’s flirtatious manner, but also at Alaria’s annoyance with the pair of them for not taking it seriously enough.

“What about them?” Alaria groaned. “You brought the subject up! I thought you said you had something to say about them?”

“Ah, yes, yes of course!” Beth said, sitting forward. “You’re right, I did have something to say about them, but I got distracted. Well, it’s like this, I was talking to Grezkull and Sasha and Palo the other night, down at the inn while it was quiet, and we were talking about the problems down at the pass and how difficult it has been for the merchants in recent years. We were saying something about it. Of course, everyone knows that you went down and killed a bunch of them, but it doesn't seem to make much difference.”

“Everyone knows that, do they?” Alaria said wryly. “And there was me thinking it was a secret known only to the three of us.”

“Oh, this is a small town, Alaria,” Beth said airily. “You can't expect any news to stay secret for long.”

“I suppose not,” Alaria said, rolling her eyes.

“Anyway, we thought that if you wanted to go back down and have another go, we would come with you. I can fire a bow, as I was saying, but I'm pretty good with a straight sword too, and I have one upstairs at the inn, along with my bow and plenty of arrows. Then there’s Grezkull. He’s a big fellow, and he can be handy with an axe. I've seen him chopping wood for the inn's fire in winter, and he’d take out a koblin—a tunnel orc, I should say—no problem if you gave him the chance. Palo and Sasha aren’t up for doing more than just helping out—keeping watch, that kind of thing—but I think that together, we could make a good go of it.”

Alaria sat back in her chair and looked thoughtfully at Beth. “Tell me,” she said, “Had any beer been consumed while this conversation was taking place.”

“No, none at all,” Beth said. Alaria began to smile when Beth added, “they had been drinking wine all evening.”

Alaria laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’d need to see your fighting chops, first, but I guess if you all wanted to we could. I was going to teach Mia a fire spell or two anyway, now that she’s built up some mana proficiency with the potion creation magic. If we go down and clear out the pass, we might even do a bit of good for the reputation of magic in this area. Mia, what do you think?”

“I’m up for learning the magic,” she said. “I’d love to. And I think Beth is right, I think that Grezkull would be very handy with an axe.”

“Tell you what, Beth, why don’t you bring the team up the day after tomorrow and we’ll see what they can do. Bring your bow and your blade and get Grez to bring something heavy. If he doesn’t have a war axe, I’ll get him one before we go. Then we’ll see what we can do against these orcs.”

“And what about Beth’s… other needs?” Mia asked, looking meaningfully from Beth to Alaria and back again.

A sudden feeling of mischief came over Alaria, and she looked at Beth as she replied to Mia. Beth’s mouth opened in a gasp of pleasure and anticipation as Alaria spoke.

“If Beth does as she’s told,” Alaria said, putting on a stern voice “then once the fighting is over, we’ll be sure to have her back here afterward and fulfill all her needs. With tentacles. Sounds good, Beth?”

Beth couldn’t speak for a moment. Then she caught her breath and stood up. “Gods, yes,” she said. “That sounds really good. I’ll go and tell the others. About the mission, I mean, not the… the needs. Yes, great. Oh my gods, this is going to be awesome. See you in a couple of days.”

She hurried off. Alaria and Mia looked at each other across their table full of potions.

“Well, that was unexpected,” Alaria said. “I guess we’d better teach you some combat spells.”

Chapter

Twenty-Five

Alaria and Mia got up early and walked out into the woods. They returned to their spot at the witches’ table. Here, they had privacy, and Alaria wanted to be able to work without fear of interruption. Training a new mage in combat magic took lots of concentration.

It didn’t take long for Alaria to realize that Mia was very good at this. After the experience with the potion magic, Alaria had been confident that Mia would be able to pick up the new magic quickly, but even she hadn’t expected her to pick it up this quickly. After that first morning’s practice, Alaria found herself shaking her head in amazement at Mia’s swift grasp of the principles of elemental combat magic. She was a natural. More than that, she had picked up the spells faster than anyone Alaria had ever known or even heard of. In the training schools and magic academies where Alaira had done her initial training, Mia would have caused a stir. In this clearing in the forest, Mia seemed nonplussed by her rapid progress.

At mid-morning they stopped for a break, Mia unpacking the food from the bag that they’d brought for lunch.

“How do you feel?” Alaria asked carefully, seeing Mia’s quick, energetic movements and her total lack of any sign of fatigue.

“Oh, I’m good,” Mia said airily. “Do you want this sandwich? It has jam, but I think I fancy this other one, with the ham.”

“That’s fine,” Alaria said. “I like that jam, and the bread’s really good too. But Mia, are you sure you feel alright?”

Mia looked up, frowning at Alaria’s tone.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Why shouldn’t I be alright? Do I look off or something?”

“No, no, quite the opposite, you look great! That’s what’s so strange! Mia, you’ve just learned three Ice combat spells and used them all several times, with amazing accuracy. You’ve learned the spells in record time and done a whole stack of magic without the least trouble, despite having never done anything like it before. I mean, you really should be exhausted.”

“Well, I’m not,” Mia shrugged. “I’ll pour this orange juice, shall I?”

She doesn’t realize, Alaria thought. And there’s no way she could realize either, not really. I only see it as amazing because I’ve been through the magic academies and have been told over and over again how hard it’s all supposed to be. For Mia, it’s just not that big a deal.

“I’m glad you feel good,” Alaria said, smiling. “It’s very impressive.” She understood at that moment that she shouldn’t over-emphasize how unusual Mia’s swift progress was. If Mia felt fine after all that magic, then that was a good thing and there was no need to crowd that out with a lot of worry. Perhaps Mia is a prodigy at magic, she thought. Perhaps there’s something special about her that allows her to learn fast and accurately in a way no one else can? Something in her ancestry?

Alaria said out loud, “I guess you must just have a massive talent for this kind of thing. If there had been more people like you about, back in the days when I was a full time adventurer, I’d have not been seen as so special!”

Mia laughed, came over, and kissed Alaria on the cheek. “You’re special,” she said, “trust me on that. Special in more ways than just the magical!” She had a ham sandwich in one hand and a glass of juice in the other, and she handed Alaria the juice. “Have your lunch. Anyway, when you were learning, you picked up the potion magic a lot quicker than I did the other day, didn’t you?”

Alaria was surprised. She thought she’d hidden that fact from Mia quite effectively. Apparently not. “How did you know?” she asked.

Mia grinned. “You tried not to let on, but I could tell that you’d expected me to take less time over it than I did. But you were a prodigy at that magic. Perhaps I’m a prodigy at this one?”

“Perhaps you are.”

They spent the rest of the day working away at the ice spells in the clearing. Mia had learned Ice Spike, Ice Block, and Freeze Enemy, all three basic combat spells from the Ice sub school of the element of Water school of magic.

Mia had initially suggested using the trees as target practice, but Alaria shook her head. “We don’t do that kind of thing,” she said. “Mages respect the world around us, and blasting trees with combat magic isn’t respectful.”

“How do we test the spells then?”

Alaria stepped back and cast Fire Minion, conjuring a tall, wraith figure made of swirling flame that flitted here and there among the trees. “You can cast your magic at that Minion,” she said. “It’s an advanced application of the Fire elemental school, but I have complete control over it. You can safely attack it without causing any damage to the environment, or to me.”

Mia was very impressed with the Minion and immediately wanted to learn a version of it, But Alaria shook her head. “I think even for you that might be a bit much on day one. The Minion spells are very advanced. Concentrate on destroying the ones that I create for now. You have a good grasp of these three elemental spells. If you can perfect the process of casting them fast and reflexively, that will be plenty when it comes to fighting the tunnel orcs in Daeron’s Pass.”

Mia had seemed disappointed at first, but she quickly became absorbed in the process. She practiced Ice Spike. This spell allowed her to shoot razor sharp icicles as long and as thick as her forearm. Her aim was exact, and she fired at the Minions and skewered them right through the center of their bodies with every shot.

Freeze Enemy did exactly what the name said—each casting of the spell sent a sphere of white light hurtling toward the enemy, freezing him in place. The freeze lasted for around 20 seconds. When it passed, the enemy might be dead, or just stunned, depending on his strength, but it bought time and gave the opportunity to hit the enemy with a blow from a different weapon.

Lastly, there was Ice Block. This was a shield spell, designed mostly to counter incoming projectiles. Mia would be working at range, and so she needed something that would block any counterattacks. Alaria used the Minion warriors to send bolts of flame toward Mia, and Mia quickly learned to react with the Ice Block spell, throwing up a glittering wall of ice that could take five or six impacts per casting before shattering.

The only sign of fatigue Mia showed was when she tried to cast the same spell repeatedly. Alaria stepped in, warning her that she needed to either vary her spells or take longer gaps between castings.

“You can cast different spells in quick succession, but casting the same one rapidly will drain you. That’s why we have Freeze Enemy. It buys time, and allows you to break up the Ice Spike castings. Always go for combos of different spells rather than the same one over and over.”

By the end of the day, she’d got more than a grasp of the new magic—Alaria could confidently say Mia had mastered the three basic elemental spells of the Ice school.

“How long did it take you to master those three?” Mia asked casually as they walked back together.

Alaria smiled. “Three weeks,” she said.

The next day, they rose early. Mia was keen to get out and practice her magic some more before the others arrived, and Alaria agreed to that. She was blown away by Mia’s magical stamina. There was no way Mia should be this good at magic, and Alaria still couldn’t quite believe it. Still, there was no question that Mia had mastered the spells, and that she displayed none of the signs of magical fatigue one might expect from overuse in a new user.

I’ll just go with it, Alaria thought, but at the same time she was glad that they’d created several Mana Replenish potions earlier in the week. It was possible that even with her obvious skill and resilience, Mia’s confidence might cause her to overdo things in the battle to come. If that happened, Alaria wanted to be sure there was a potion to hand that could undo any injury Mia had done to herself.

After a practice session in the woods, they went back to the house and had breakfast.

Their friends arrived a little before midday. Beth was in the lead, looking sleek and dangerous in a set of very well-made ranger clothes. She had soft leather boots, a green tunic over a leather jerkin, leather archer’s gauntlets, and a narrow, well-made straight sword in a sheath at her hip. She had her bow slung over one shoulder and a quiver of arrows on her other shoulder. Both looked as well made as her armor.

Behind Beth came Grezkull, carrying an enormous stone club. Alaria had only ever seen clubs like that in the hands of the trollmun warriors of Ranak Reskhell. That was a grim mountain region far to the south, past the borders of Sapheli, in the wild lands of Dunduk Mor, where trollmuns, goblins, and nameless horrors lived.

Grezkull looked very happy and excited. In fact, he looked like someone who was gleefully anticipating hitting an enemy over the head. He wore no armor. Instead, he was bare-chested but wearing dark leather trousers and heavy boots. His strange, orc-like face was set in a permanent grin of anticipation.

Looking less sure of themselves were Palo and Sasha, though Sasha seemed pretty keen. She was fluttering around Grezkull’s head, chatting to him in an excited, nervous voice. Palo, to Alaria’s surprise, had an axe in his hand. Alaria recognized the axe as a dwarf blade. It was the real thing, a sharp, deadly melee weapon designed for brutal, close-quarters combat, but Palo wore no armor, and Alaria saw straight away that he was no fighter. Despite its quality, Palo held the axe as if he wasn’t sure which end was which. He was more likely to cut himself on it than anyone else.

Alaria narrowed her eyes, checking out her contingent of warriors. Not the most vicious band of fighters I’ve ever seen, she thought, but they’ll work well together if I can put them all in the right roles.

Aloud, she called out cheerfully, “Hey, thank you all for coming! Good to see you all!”

Once everyone was in the grounds of the homestead, Alaria explained that she wanted them to come into the woods with her, to a clearing a bit nearer to the house than the witches’ table clearing. In this space, she would cast Minion spells to create targets and have everyone try out their weapons and their skills in that safe environment.

“If possible, I’d like to do a bit of direct sparring with blades, too,” she said, “but that can be done later. First, let’s head to the woods and see what you can all do.”

It quickly transpired that what they could all do was pretty much what it had looked like when they’d first come up the hill. Beth could shoot well with the bow and follow up with her sword, though her skill at range was noticeably better developed than her skill with the sword. Grezkull could hit things very hard with his huge club, and for all his (and the weapon’s) size, he was terrifyingly fast. To be fair to Palo, the young man did know which end of the axe was which, but that was the beginning and end of his knowledge. Sasha was fast, and her ability to fly gave her a unique role in their team, but as a fae she wasn’t able to kill.

This was one of the quirks of the fae people. Killing was simply not on the list of things they could do, any more than a human could fly. It wasn’t that she chose not to. Her choices didn’t come into it. If she’d tried to kill, it simply wouldn’t work. She could hold a weapon, but if she tried to swing it to do damage, it just fell from her hand and her arm went limp.

Sasha’s role was going to be support, that much was clear. She was very fast on her wings, and she wanted to help, and so Alaria decided that she should carry the bulk of the potions and fly from person to person, providing potions as they were needed.

Alaria laid out the roles that she wanted each member of her team to play.

“We’ll keep it simple,” she said. “Grez and I will take the front approach, Beth and Mia will provide ranged support. Palo will keep watch and warn us of any ambushes, and Sasha will deliver potions where they’re needed most. That way, we’ve got all the bases covered and we shouldn’t have any issues. Sounds good?”

It did. Grezkull was happy to be at the front, and Sasha was happy to be able to play a role despite not being able to deal damage. Mia and Beth got on well, and they’d complement each other as ranged support. Palo was relieved that no one expected him to fight.

“This axe was my father’s,” he said when Alaria asked him about it. “My father gave it to me as a gift when I moved away from the city and came out here to take up the job at Jeroliam’s leatherworks. I always liked the look of the axe, but my dad said it brought up too many old memories for him, so he’d prefer for me to have it and enjoy it.”

“It’s a beautiful piece,” Alaria said, hefting the one-handed battle axe in her right hand. The shaft was of hard, black wood, bound in beautiful red leather. The blade of the axe was of gleaming steel, roughened on the flat parts but shining smooth down to the cruelly sharp edge. Alaria knew better than to touch the edge of that blade. Dwarf weapons were not made to get blunt.

“How did your father come by this?” she asked, as she examined the intricate runes carved into the flat part of the blade. “It’s a special thing. I’ve rarely seen these weapons. Thankfully, fighting dwarves was never something I had to do.”

“My dad was a soldier in the dwarven wars that Duke Selden of Rickar fought on the southern borders, oh, thirty years ago now. He was a young man, a captain of a company, and he took this axe as a trophy from an enemy champion that he killed. He was wounded in the fight and invalided out of the army. He got his pension and moved up to Hopeford to retire.”

“I’ve heard of the dwarf wars,” Alaria said. “Thankfully that was a bit before my time. It was a terrible conflict.”

“My father always said it was a totally unnecessary war, too. There was no need for any of it, but the stubbornness of dwarves met the stubbornness of humans and… well, the results were terrible.”

“Very tragic,” Grezkull agreed, “but can we decide if we’re going to go and fight these orcs tomorrow, or today, or what? I’m really happy to be here, and I want to hit something. I’ve not hit anyone with my club for ever!”

He patted the head of his enormous club and gazed fondly at it. “For ever!” he repeated.

Alaria grinned. “Sure,” she said. “I think we’ve tested things out well enough. I’ve got a good idea of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, and it just remains to have a cup of tea back at the house and agree when to go.”

As they walked back, Alaria asked Grezkull about his weapon. “Oh, this little thing?” he said breezily, patting the gargantuan lump of stone that was his club. “I inherited this as well, actually, like Palo. See, my dad was a trollmun from over Pine Ridge way, off to the west of the Hope River Valley. This was his club.”

“My dad was a trollmun,” Grezkull went on, “but my mom was an orc boss from a little clan not far away. They had an alliance to fight some slime sprites who tried to take over their valley, and my dad and my mom just fell in love, I guess. Sweet.”

Alaria forced a smile and nodded. The thought of an orc boss and a trollmun warrior falling in love and copulating was not what she would call exactly sweet—they were two of the most feared races in the kingdom—but Grezkull was a nice fellow, and she liked him, so perhaps her assessment of the match wasn’t fair.

“And this was your father’s weapon?” she said.

“He called it the Big Hitter,” Grezkull said solemnly, “But I just call it a club. Seems like a small word for such a big thing!”

“You’re really fast with it,” she complimented him.

“Thanks. That’s the orc part of me.”

“You don’t wear any armor with it?”

He shook his big head. “I have a leather jerkin I can put over my chest, and I like to wear leather shin guards, too—Palo made them for me—but my skin’s tough. No koblin will get through me.”

“You maybe should wear it anyway,” Alaria said. “The koblin name is all wrong. These aren’t really anything like goblins or kobolds. They’re tunnel orcs, and they’re fast and fierce. By the way, you don’t mind fighting orcs, do you? It’s not against your principles or something since your mom was an orc?”

“Oh, no,” Grezkull said. “Tunnel orcs aren’t really orcs, not like I think of them. There’s a difference between spore-created orcs and the real, true orc people like my mom’s clan.”

“That explains something I was wondering about,” Mia put in. She’d been walking along next to them, listening to their conversation. “Alaria, you said before that tunnel orcs reproduce by spores, that they’re not, uh, sexual. That made me wonder, well, how could Grezkull’s mom be an orc? It also made me wonder about Beth’s uh, that is, about how orcs have…” She broke off, her face reddening with embarrassment as Beth glared at her. Mia had been about to mention the orcs that had been pleasuring Beth at the party. If orcs were spore-reproducing, like fungus, then what use did an orc have for a cock? She couldn’t say out loud, though, without revealing Beth’s proclivity for group sex with orcs, and she wasn’t about to do that in front of everyone.

“No,” Alaria said, smiling. “As Grezkull said, not all orcs are the same. Some are spore-created, and others are created in the same way we are. But I didn’t know, Grez, that orcs viewed each other differently because of that.”

“Oh, yes,” Grezkull said. “Spore-orcs aren’t real orcs, and I’d take them out as easily as I’d pull up a weed. They feel the same about us.”

They came to the gap in the homestead wall, hopped over, and headed to the kitchen. After seeing the strengths and weaknesses of her team, Alaria was confident they could press ahead. She sat them down at the table and talked over how she wanted to approach it. Within fifteen minutes, they had agreed that the team would stay over at the homestead, and that they’d all set out first thing tomorrow, aiming to reach Daeron’s Pass at first light.

Alaria was looking forward to it.

Chapter

Twenty-Six

Daeron’s Pass looked bleak and unwelcoming as they came over the ridge and looked down on the gray and black shadows of the pines in the gulch. The sun was just coming up over the far eastern mountains at the edge of the Hope River valley, but it would be at least another hour before the rays of the sun reached the grim woods below.

There was no sign of an enemy yet, but they all knew that the orks were down there, just waiting to pounce.

The tunnel orcs were unlikely to be fooled twice by Alaria’s feeble old traveling woman disguise. She had been in favor of using a different disguise and trying the same plan, but the others wanted Alaria to be one of the ambushers, because she was the most powerful fighter, and that way they would get the full benefit of her strengths in the initial onslaught.

So, they had formulated a new plan. This time, Sasha would be the bait, and Mia would go with her. The others would creep down into the pass under cover of a stealth spell that Alaria would cast. They would wait until the trap was sprung, before dashing out and attacking when the moment was right.

Given the ferocity of the orcs’ previous attack, Alaria has been a bit doubtful about this plan, and had pushed for going down herself in some other disguise. But the others had insisted. This was a good plan, they all thought. Mia wanted to be in the forefront, and she wanted to see Alaria’s stealth spells in action. Sasha agreed.

“Honestly, Alaria,” the fairy had said, “I can fly out of there as soon as things start to get scary, and Mia has her Ice Block shield to keep herself out of danger. If you and the others are close by, I think it will work really well.”

Alaria was forced to agree with Sasha on that. She definitely had confidence in Sasha’s ability to fly out of a difficult situation quickly if necessary, and she had equal faith in Mia’s ability to cast the Ice Block spell almost instantaneously, defending herself while Alaria and the others charged in. Mia’s grasp of Ice Block was superb—Alaria had never seen anyone cast the spell so quickly and so reflexively. So long as she was nearby, Alaria had to agree that it would almost certainly be fine, and that having the advantage of surprise was too good an opportunity to pass up.

“We probably won’t get another shot at this,” she had told her friends once the plan was formulated. “We’re going to need to follow up after the initial attack. We’ll need to press our advantage, go into the woods, and try to clear out the whole nest in one clean sweep.”

The others agreed to this too. “I want to finish them off as well,” Beth said. “This has been going on for way too long. We’ll do whatever it takes.”

Now, as they stood at the edge of the pass looking down at the forbidding woods, Alaria could feel the tension in her little group. The day before, when everybody had been at the Homestead discussing the plan of action, the approaching battle had seemed adventurous and exciting, and everyone was very sure of themselves.

Now, as they stood on the edge of the pass and looked down, Alaria was aware of the changing mood in her friends. Beth and Grezkull had both been in fights before, but nothing particularly large from what Alaria could tell. This fight was a step up for both of them. For Mia, Sasha, and Palo, it was an entirely new experience. Alaria would have to make sure her companions not only survived the battle unscathed but also had the best opportunity possible to enjoy it.

She had seen this before. As an experienced adventurer, it had sometimes been her task to take new fighters out on the road for the first time. It always followed the same pattern; the excitement and bravado beforehand, the fear and anticipation in the moment when what was about to happen became real to them, and then—with any luck—the excitement and exhilaration as the fight began, followed by the flush of victory afterwards.

In the old days, she would never have given fresh recruits an out. They would have come a long way to get to this point, and anyone who wanted to back out would’ve done so long before now. But this time, it was not new recruits at the adventuring academy that she was leading into battle. It was her friends.

This time, she definitely wanted to give them a chance to back out.

“Are you all still certain that you want to do this?” she asked. “If you have any doubts, now is the time to voice them. I don’t want anybody doing anything they don’t feel comfortable with. If you’ve changed your mind, nobody will hold it against you.”

There was silence in the little group. Nobody spoke, and a swift glance around her companions showed Alaria that determination and strength were the only expressions on their faces. They were quiet, yes, they were tense, yes, but they were not going to back out.

“We’re with you all the way, Alaria,” Grezkull said, and the others nodded.

“Let’s get these orcs cleared out of this pass,” Beth said. “I want my tourist trade revenue back at the inn again.”

There was a ripple of quiet laughter through the group.

“Very well,” Alaria said, smiling with the rest. “We all know our roles. Let’s do this.”

They stuck to the plan exactly. First, Alaria cast Concealing Veil over herself and her friends, hiding entirely from all enemy eyes. Alaria could see them, and they could see each other, and thanks to a particular twist of the magic, Mia and Sasha could see them as well, albeit only as shadowy forms near the edge of the tree line.

No enemy would even glimpse them.

They stuck close, closer than Alaria would have done if the people playing bait had been more experienced. She was close enough for Beth’s bow to hit a target in seconds, and for her own sword to be dealing death to the enemy straight away. If Mia had been an armored adventurer who could have held her own against a vicious goblin attack for a few minutes on her own, Alaria might have held off in the hope of drawing out as many enemies as possible, but Mia was her lover, and no matter how quick Mia was on her magic, Alaria wasn’t going to leave her facing the full onslaught of the orcs for a moment longer than was needed.

She kept her group close to the trees just in case there was some orc shaman with the group who could cast a Reveal spell. In that case, the proximity to the trees would at least offer a little cover. Alaria was using every advantage she had.

When Mia and Sasha got to the bottom of the pass—the spot where Alaria had been ambushed previously—they paused and stood, looking around. Again, there was no sign of any movement, and Mia decided she needed to add a little extra temptation to the trap.

“What an endearing spot!” she said loudly.

“Oh, indeed,” Sasha agreed. “Such a charming place to stop. Shall we have breakfast?”

“Let’s!” Mia almost shouted. “And while we do, we can count up this huge amount of gold and gems that we got in that last town!”

“Oh, yes!” Sasha bellowed. “Let’s count up all the gold and gemstones!”

Alaria heard a strange noise beside her and realized it was Grezkull sniggering. She punched him, and he shut up. Though she had to admit that Sasha’s play acting was funny, an inopportune noise at the wrong moment could get them all killed.

She looked up, glancing around, scanning the environment for threats. Nothing immediately visible… but then she saw something, a flicker of green in the trees off to the left, and another on the right.

It was the ambush.

She held a hand up, tapped Beth on the shoulder, and pointed to the other side of the path. Then she pointed into the trees, counting one, two, three enemies that she could see. Beth shook her head, indicating that she couldn’t see them, but that didn’t matter. Alaria could use her Target Painter spell to illuminate the targets for Beth once the fighting got underway.

Alaria nodded, then pointed to the position on the other side of the road that she wanted Beth to move to. Beth nodded and darted off in that direction. Alaria saw the moment of determination and grit that Beth had to build to make that move across the path. It was not easy for her, even though she knew that she was protected by Alaria’s spell. To her, she felt as visible as ever, and it was a leap of faith to cross the path in the open like this.

Alaria smiled. She admired Beth’s determination. It took guts to do that, even if she knew in theory that she was concealed. It took a lot of trust in Alaria, too.

Beth made it to her post. Alaria could tell by the change in her stance as she crouched behind a fallen tree just within the tree line that she, too, had now seen the enemy and was aware of them where they hid.

She crouched down, waiting for the moment. Mia had seen them too. She was tense and ready, waiting for the moment when the orcs would strike.

The ambush was perfectly executed. Alaria signaled to her group to move closer at just the same moment the orcs leaped from cover and dashed toward Mia. They did the same tactic as they had done when they’d fought Alaria—two coming from the sides, and three from behind.

The orcs rushed Mia, and for one terrible instant Alaria thought that she’d gotten it all wrong. She’d miscalculated. Mia was great at magic, confident, a natural. She’d never been rushed by a group of savage creatures determined to kill her, however, and that’s enough to make anyone freeze up.

And freeze up was just what she did.

She should have activated Ice Block instantly, shielding herself from the attacks, but she didn’t. She just stood, frozen in place, her eyes a wide, staring vision of horror. Alaria’s stomach turned over and her heart stopped beating. Then everything happened at once. Sasha screamed and flew upward in a straight line, leaving a trail of purple fae magic light in her wake. Beth loosed an arrow from her hiding place, taking the middle of the three rearguard attackers in the center of the back.

The action and the noise shocked Mia out of her paralysis, and Alaria could have screamed from relief. Ice Block flowed into existence around Mia, deflecting the sword blows that would have carved her into pieces if she’d been a fraction of a second later. The Ice Block spell was beautiful, perfectly executed, and there was no question that Mia had mastered it now—she could do it under pressure.

The moment of horrible risk was gone, and Alaria felt the world move again.

Another arrow snapped into the back of another of the orcs in the center, but Alaria saw that the orc archers in the woods to the right were readying a volley.

“Beth!” she snapped, “take out those archers. Grezkull, with me.”

Instead of storming into the group that was fighting against Mia, Alaria pushed herself to attack into the woods on the left of the path. Mia had sprung into action, and she didn’t need any help anymore. Beth would be able to deal with the archers, and if the orcs were using the same tactic as they had before, they’d have some spears hiding in the trees here…

Ah, yes, she thought. Here they are. Ought to change up your tactics from day to day.

The orcs had not thought to switch things up at all. Here in the trees was a group of orc spears and a group of archers… and something else. Was it a boss? Surely not. That wasn’t the style of the orc bosses Alaria had come across in the past, and she did have some experience of orc bosses.

There was something in the woods, though, something big, and it was hanging back.

As Alaria and Grezkull charged the spear orcs in the flank, Alaria let the concealment spell drop away. The spear orcs screeched as they saw how they had been tricked, but there was no time for them to reform. There were fifteen of them—more than there had been previously—but Grezkull waded in, swinging his club from side to side and taking out orcs with every sweep. The ones he missed scattered, and Alaria weaved in among them, finishing them off with a single slice each of Skyfang.

A glance to her left showed her that Mia was retreating, the remaining three orcs that had attacked her lying dead in the road. By the looks of it, she’d used Ice Spike to take out two of them, and Freeze Enemy to stop the third. Freeze Enemy had bought her time to follow up with the short, well-crafted sword that Alaria had given her to carry for close up work, and she’d dispatched the frozen orc with a single thrust from her sword.

The other two had been taken out by Beth’s arrows.

Now Mia was moving fast, doubled over to present a smaller target, backing up toward where Beth still crouched in cover, sending arrows flying toward the smaller archer unit on the left.

The archers near to where Grezkull and Alaria were fighting weren’t able to bring their weapons to bear, not without firing on their comrades. Alaria saw that there wouldn’t be any comrades in a moment, so she sent two Fire Minions screaming out to attack the archers, and then cast Hidden Enemy to see what the threat was deeper in the trees.

She could feel it… and then she saw it, outlined in red through the normal view of the trees. It was a big, hulking beast, eight legs at least, and keeping its body low to the ground. Was it some kind of massive spider? Whatever it was, Alaria would need to draw it out and deal with it directly.

Mia and Beth finished off the archers on the left and looked around for new foes.

Grezkull splattered the last of the spear orcs, and the Fire Minion warriors scattered the formation of the archers near Alaria. She twisted the Fire Minion magic, causing them both to explode in a sudden conflagration, burning the remaining archers in a single blast.

“With me!” she yelled, leaping back into the center of the path. “With me!”

The others ran over to back her up.

“Eyes up, watch the surroundings,” Alaria ordered. “There’s something coming out of the trees over there. Get ready. Stay back, follow my lead, and look out for enemies coming from other directions. This is about to get a whole lot more interesting.”

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

Alaria had been right; things were about to get interesting. As soon as she spoke, the monster came crashing out of the trees. It was a giant spider, that much was true, but it was the nastiest giant spider Alaria had ever seen, and she had seen a few. This one had a scorpion tail at its back, and each of its eight legs was tipped with a huge spike that dripped and glittered with poison.

The head was fat and hairy, gleaming with moisture and dripping with slime and pus that hissed and bubbled when it touched the ground, burning the grass to brown husks. A foul smell exploded out into the road as the spider burst into the open. The monster reared up and screamed, a deafening noise that was supposed to stun and even kill if it could.

Alaria threw up a Sonic Shield, keeping herself and her friends safe from the force of the blast. The impact shook the shield and made her step back, but she kept her friends safe.

All except Sasha.

The little faerie had been flying high above the action, keeping an eye on the surroundings, watching the fight, and looking for any signal of danger from Palo, who waited as a watcher on the ridge behind. Alaria, her friends, and Sasha herself for that matter, had all thought the air high above the battlefield would be safe. But the spider’s sonic blast expanded outward in every direction, including upwards. No doubt Palo would be safe up on the ridge—he was far enough away—but poor Sasha was taken out by the blast and dropped from the sky like a stone. Alaria saw Sasha falling unconscious from the sky above and caught her with a tendril of Water Net, a beautiful spell that created a soft but impenetrable mesh in the air, breaking Sasha’s fall and letting her down gently into the midst of the group.

Alaria had planned for Sasha to stay up high and come down to deliver potions as needed. She hadn’t expected Sasha herself to be the one who needed the potion. Would a healing potion even work on her? Sasha might not claim to really be a faerie, since she didn’t live in the way that was traditional for that folk, but in her body and her spirit she was undoubtedly a faerie, and that could cause problems when trying to use a healing potion designed for humans. Alaria had never really tried to use healing potions on anyone but humans before. She had no idea if it would work.

She was about to find out.

“Beth, take Sasha back into the trees on the other side of the path. Get her away from the fight,” Alaria ordered. She pulled a bottle from Sasha’s satchel of potions and gave it to Beth. “You give her this healing potion, pour it into her mouth, and get her to swallow as much of it as possible.”

Beth was about to say something, but Alaria shook her head. “Don’t speak. Do as I say. Do it now!” she snapped, as Beth hesitated a moment more. Alaria didn’t mean to be harsh, but life and death hung in the balance. She had no time to think, no time to be nice, and no time for her companions to do anything but follow orders without question or hesitation.

Beth’s eyes went wide, seeing this commanding side of Alaria for the first time. She didn’t hesitate anymore. She lifted Sasha and sprang away.

“Mia, go with them and cover them in case they’re attacked,” Alaria ordered. Mia didn’t hesitate. She followed Beth instantly.

And that was when the spider charged.

Hissing and spitting, its hideously gaping maw opened wide to show a forest of teeth. It chittered and screeched and then dashed suddenly forward, and at the same moment, a whole host of tunnel orcs rushed out from the trees behind the spider.

They must have been hiding in the trees, far enough away that Alaria’s detection spell hadn’t picked them up. Now they rushed into the battlefield, pouring in around the spider’s huge, horrible legs like a frothing tide around the prow of a ship.

“Grez, hang a left and flank the small orcs. Don’t get close to the spider. This enemy is mine.”

Grezkull dashed away, moving with incredible speed for his great size. Alaria planted her feet, awaiting the spider’s onslaught. In the moment she had before the monster reached her, she gathered herself and found a still spot, deep within her soul. She breathed, one long, peaceful breath, holding on to that peace and denying the horror in front of her with her breath.

It was one of the best lessons she’d ever learned in all her days training magic: no matter what she faced, no matter what monster was in front of her, she always had this; a breath, a peaceful place deep within her soul where no sword blade or monstrous appendage could ever reach.

Then it was on her.

She thrust Skyfang up toward the spider’s face and concentrated, pushing Light school magic through the enchanted blade. She channeled the energy into Searing Light and pushed it forward. The blast of light was like a star come down to earth for a moment. It hit the spider full force, searing a terrible bright doom into the monster’s many compound eyes.

As the spider flinched back from the light, Alaria switched to the Water school, activating the Ice sub-school and channeling power into an advanced version of the Ice Spike spell that Mia had gotten so good at. This was Ice Volley, and it sent fifteen huge shards of razor sharp, stone-hard ice smashing into the spider’s face. The spider’s charge foundered. It reared up onto its back legs like an angry warhorse, screaming, but not with the same focused force that had nearly killed poor Sasha.

This was a scream of pain, not a scream of attack.

Alaria hadn’t the time to even glance around and see if Sasha was all right, or if Grezkull was faring okay with his swarm of orcs. She had gained a moment, and she had to grasp that moment to damage this horrific creature as much as possible.

She spun in, twisting around and bringing Skyfang over in a sweeping arc to sever the nearest spider leg at the joint. Gristle crunched under the immense force of the blade, and even as she followed through with another cut at a lower joint on the second leg in line, she felt a stunning blow ringing off her back.

The runes in her plate armor carried the blow. She wasn’t injured, but she staggered forward, off-balance, barely managing to keep from being brained by a swinging blow from another giant claw. Reactively, she sent an unfocused blast of Stone school force magic thundering out around her in an expanding circle. It wasn’t ideal. She had been in under the spider’s guard, and this magic shoved the spider away out of reach of her sword arm, but she had no choice. It was essential to buy herself a moment of time to think, to check in with the battlefield, and to gather herself for her next move.

A swift glance around showed her nothing but good news.

Near at hand, Grezkull cheered as he swung his huge club from side to side, smashing crowds of orcs away with each crushing blow.

Further away, on the other side of the path, a dazed-looking Sasha was sitting on the ground, looking blearily round at the scene. She didn’t look well, but she looked alive. Beth was kneeling on the ground supporting Sasha to sit up, and Mia was standing over them, a look of fearsome determination in her eyes, ready to cast spells.

Seeing that look in Mia’s eyes made Alaria proud. Alaria felt relief flooding her as she saw that her friends were all still with her. She caught Mia’s eye in passing, and then gave her full attention to the spider.

The blast of Stone school force had done its job, knocking the spider off balance. The creature was wounded. Alaria had cut off two of its eight legs, as well as hitting it in the face with Ice Volley and burned its eyes with Searing Light, but still, the monster was rallying. All around, orcs with spears and swords rushed in, but the ones nearby had all been thrown backward by Alaria’s spell, and the others didn’t want to get too close to her.

Alaria felt the tide of the battle hanging in the balance. One decisive blow and these enemies would break and flee. One moment of hesitation, and they would rally, reform, and fight on.

She took her moment. She would strike the decisive blow.

Ducking down, she grabbed up a fallen orc spear and threw it straight toward the side of the spider. She cast Multiply, Flaming Projectile, and Speed as the spear flew. The spear became three flaming javelins, flying at the speed of a crossbow bolt. The three projectiles slammed into the side of the spider and vanished right up to their hilts in the heaving body.

Alaria followed up, swinging Skyfang left and right as she waded through the press of orcs between her and the spider. They didn’t want to fight. Those close to her tried to escape, and those further away tried to push their fellows forward. She heard a bellow from Grezkull, a cheerful battle cry as he stormed into the press on her right, smashing orcs away at every strike and hemming the crowded creatures into a narrow killing zone between himself, Alaria, and the spider.

Alaria closed the gap. She reached the spider, lopped off another of its legs at the joint, and then sprang forward, moving up to the creature’s neck. With a single sweeping blow of Skyfang, she beheaded the spider and then leaped back and away, avoiding the spider’s remaining legs as it lashed out in every direction as it died.

“Watch out!” she shouted at Grezkull, seeing a leg flicking toward him, but it was too late. A massive spider talon, lashing out blindly in the monster’s death throes, hit Grezkull squarely in the top of his left arm and slashed long and deep into his arm and the meat of his shoulder, barely missing the side of his neck as he leaped away with a cry of pain.

The big guy had been right about the smaller orcs—their weapons couldn’t touch him. The spider claw was another story. If the spider had been making a focused hit, it would have been worse, but even as it was it was bad enough. Grezkull roared in pain and staggered away, blood sheeting down his left arm from the shoulder. The orcs around him, encouraged by the sight of their enemy’s blood, swarmed up to the attack, their spears and swords jabbing at Grezkull as he stumbled backward, unable to defend himself for the moment.

If Grezkull had been alone, things would have gone badly for him.

He was not alone.

Alaria cast Fearful Spirit from the Spirit school of magic on herself, one of her favorite spells for use at a crucial moment of a battle. This spell cast a terrifying aura over her, causing extreme fear in the enemies that she fought against. She’d seen the spell in action when she was having tests fight against an instructor back in her Spirit magic training days, and she knew how scary Fearful Spirit was in the hands of a powerful mage. She poured power into the spell and roared a wordless battle cry as she charged forward, Skyfang raised to kill.

The orcs screamed, broke, and fled. Grezkull was still standing, and he raised his huge stone club in the air, roaring in victory. “Stay there,” Alaria ordered him, even as a flurry of arrows and Ice Spike spells came from the right, flying toward the retreating orcs. Mia and Beth had resumed their role as ranged support.

Alaria used her old favorite, Multiply, to turn Beth’s arrows and Mia’s Ice Spike blasts into three times their original number. The volley smashing into the backs of the fleeing orc warriors. She blasted Gushing Flame from her hands, sending twin gouts of roaring flame twenty feet out in front of her. She marched forward, sweeping the flames from side to side as she finished off the last of the orcs.

The orcs died, but the flames caught in the trees, sending up a flurry of sparks and smoke as the intense heat roared up the bark and kindled the branches.

“Damn,” Alaria muttered as the trees kindled into bright torches. That had not been intentional. She’d got a bit carried away with her fire magic and had forgotten the mage’s cardinal rule—respect nature, don’t destroy the environment unless you have to.

Did I have to this time? she asked herself. Not really, came the reply. She did the only thing she could do. She conjured a blast of Water Wave, as big as she could make it, and brought it crashing down over the burning trees. The water doused the flames in a moment, sending up a huge cloud of reeking, hissing steam. She had conjured a lot of water, and it rolled over the ground, splashing around the bodies of the dead orcs and coming up to her ankles where she stood.

Then all fell silent in that strange, abrupt way that is unique to the ending of a battle.

Alaria glanced around, double checking that no enemies remained. There were none, and so she ran back, splashing through the water and the orc blood to where Grezkull stood, leaning on his club in the midst of the devastation of battle. Sasha, Beth, and Mia all came over at the same moment. Alaria glanced up and saw Palo still standing on the ridge high above, looking down on the pass, his head craned forward as he tried to work out what was happening.

She waved to him, and then sent up an Illumination spell from her sword. The light flashed white in the sky above her. That was Palo’s signal that all was well, but that he should sit tight for now. A red light would have told him to flee and get help, and a green light would have told him to come down.

“Grez, are you okay, big guy?” Alaria asked as she reached him. He looked stoic, but the blood was pumping from his wound. It had only been moments since he’d sustained the injury, but his whole left side was covered in blood.

“I don’t know if I am,” he said, his voice sounding hoarse.

“Sasha, have you got a healing potion to hand?” Alaria asked. Sasha nodded and pulled one from, her satchel. It was a small, heavy glass bottle full of glowing bright blue liquid.

Alaria looked at it critically. “Better get two of them,” she said, looking up at Grezkull’s massive frame. “Drink that,” she told Grezkull, as Sasha handed the potion to him and rooted around in her bag for another.

Grezkull drank it. There was a flicker of blue light like flame around the edges of the wound, and the flow of blood began to lessen, but it didn’t stop.

“Another,” Alaria said, and Sasha immediately handed him a second potion. He drank this one down as well. That did the trick. The blue healing light flashed and flared around the edges of the wound, and the blood stopped completely. The light flickered back-and-forth along the edges of the cut, and the skin knitted together. It was as if they were watching the healing of a normal wound that might have taken place over the course of days or even weeks.

In a few moments, the wound had healed, and Grezkull was flexing his left arm experimentally and exclaiming in wonder at how quickly the healing had worked.

“Now one of the green ones,” Alaria said, and Sasha pulled out a little green bottle.

“This one?” she asked.

Alaria nodded. “It counters poison,” she said. “Those spider talons were thick with poison goo.”

Grezkull knocked the potion back and the color came back to his face. “I feel better now,” he said.

“Sasha, what about you?” Alaria asked. “I’m so sorry I didn’t defend you against that screaming blast from the horrible spider. It was unforgivable of me not to have considered the possibility of airborne attacks that might be able to hit you.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Alaria,” Sasha said. She fluttered over and gave Alaria a hug, then pulled back. “Ew, you smell pretty bad,” she said. “Spider goo doesn’t suit you.”

Everybody laughed. It was great to see that Sasha still had her usual cheeky sense of humor and inappropriate directness. Alaria moved toward Sasha, pretending she was going to get the horrible slime all over her.

“Spider goo!” she joked. “It’s coming for you!”

Sasha squealed and darted away. She was too fast for Alaria. They all laughed again, and then Sasha fluttered closer, becoming more serious. “It’s okay,” she said, “honestly. I don’t blame you. And it was your potion and your magic that saved me, so even if you are to blame for almost getting me killed, you can also take the credit for saving me, so I guess that makes us even, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” Alaria said. “Thanks, Sasha. But now we have a bit of a quandary. What do we do? We’ve stirred up the hornet’s nest, that’s for sure, and we’ve experienced a bit more resistance than I expected. What do we do now? If we continue and pursue the orcs into the forest, I’m not sure what we’re going to come up against. I wasn’t expecting that spider, and I certainly wasn’t expecting quite so many orcs to come out against us in that last moment. I’d like to think that we’ve taken them all out now, but I’m not sure. We’ve not seen the boss yet, and there may be other things in this valley that I can’t anticipate. On the other hand, if we walk away now, we have gone through an awful lot of effort and danger for probably not much gain, because the orcs will just respawn. If we want to follow up and consolidate our advantage, we need to do it as soon as possible.”

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

Hopeford City was its usual sleepy, sun-drenched self when Alaria marched in at the head of her team later that afternoon. They were bloody and muddy, fresh from battle, and their faces were streaked with the grime and set with determination.

It was only a few hours since the end of the fight in the pass, and the sun was just past noon. It was very hot, and they were glad to get into town and under the shade of the trees.

When Alaria and Mia had arrived here the first time, after their initial probing into the strength of the orc forces at the pass, Alaria had been struck by the fact that no one had seemed to notice them, despite the fact that they had come in from the west, on the road that led to the dangerous pass.

This time, things were different. Alaria and her team caused a bit of a stir—just as Alaria had planned.

Hopeford was not used to the sight of grim, gore-streaked warriors armed to the teeth and marching into town. The Hopeford King’s Guard, that stalwart body of soldiers who had managed to do nothing about the orcs in the pass for several years, were suddenly very much in evidence.

A troop of heavily armed men appeared from a side street within ten minutes of Alaria’s arrival and marched up to block her progress. Their leader was a man in his late fifties with a grizzled beard and a belly that said he did more eating and drinking than training.

“What’s all this?” the man demanded, blocking their path and laying a hand on his blade. He held up his other hand in Alaria’s face and stepped close, glaring at her with narrowed eyes. He kept his hand on his sword hilt as his men crowded up behind him.

Alaria was not impressed. The man was trying to appear intimidating and threatening. If he’d wanted to intimidate her, he should have stayed at a range where he could draw his sword.

“Take two steps back,” she said in a low voice.

“Huh?” he said, his bluster vanishing in his moment of confusion.

“I said, take two steps back,” Alaria repeated. “You can’t draw your blade from where you stand, and you can’t retreat because your men are in your way. You’re trying to scare me by getting up in my face, but at this distance I could break your nose and three of your ribs before you could get your sword halfway out if its sheath. Take two steps back. You’ve a well-equipped unit of guards behind you and they don’t all look as unfit as you. Use them. You’ve a good long sword-arm, though it could do with a bit of practice by the look of your belly and the state of your armor; use that too. Tell me your name and rank.”

The man swallowed audibly. The street was silent, and though Alaria had not spoken loudly, her voice carried. The little group of onlookers who had initially followed the guards was growing to a crowd.

Clearly, not much happened in Hopeford City, and the turning out of the guard to challenge armed strangers was a rare and interesting event.

The leader was still deciding whether to be sensible or stubborn. Alaria ran her eyes over him and his troop. “You and your men are tired and out of training,” she said. “Their armor is poorly maintained, and they don’t drill together often enough. They stand too close to each other, and none of them have any awareness of their surroundings. They block your route away from me, and they’re not ready to back you up if things get violent. If they tried to draw their blades packed up together like that, they’re likely to hurt each other. Your men are old, too, and so are you. The straps on your armor are degraded, the buckles are as rusty as your unit’s discipline. The men have their armor on squint, and that man there,” she pointed to a fellow with a vacant look who stood a little to her left, “hasn’t even had time to lace up his boots.”

The leader opened his mouth to speak, but Alaria continued. Her voice was getting louder as she saw that the townsfolk were pressing in to hear.

“Your guard house is really close by,” she stated.

“It is! How did you know?” a guard behind the leader asked, sounding more amazed and entertained than anything else. He grinned. “She’s a clever one, whatever else she might be!”

“Shaddup!” the leader growled, but without conviction. He looked at Alaria questioningly. “How did you know?” he asked, unable to resist his own curiosity.

Alaria took a step back from the leader, wrinkling her nose in distaste at the smell of stale alcohol on the man’s breath.

“I know because none of your men are out of breath,” she said, then she raised her voice so all the men could hear. “You took about eight minutes to get here. I’m guessing it took three for the alert to reach you, four for you to fling your gear on and two minutes for you to rush over here. Your gear is in a sorry state. You’ve all put your armor on in a hurry and run out here. You’re all unfit and out of training, and yet none of you are out of breath. If you’d had to hurry any more than a few yards, you’d all be coughing, sweating, and panting fit to burst.”

Her anger flared. “By the gods,” she spat, “how did a King’s Guard force get into such a state?”

She fixed her glare on the captain, narrowing her eyes and scowling fiercely at him. He stepped back from the intensity of her gaze and—just as she had predicted—bumped into the press of his soldiers behind him.

“Your name and rank,” she demanded. “Now.”

“Rorke,” the man said reluctantly. “Guard Captain Rorke.”

“All right, Guard Captain Rorke,” Alaria said with politeness that dripped sarcasm. “I’m going to see the mayor. I want a word with him.”

The crowd of civilians who had gathered to watch the drama followed eagerly. Captain Rorke, feeling the need to assert his authority in some way if he still could, harried his men to come along as an escort, but their discipline was so poor that they barely managed to be more than another part of the disordered crowd of civilians.

News travelled fast that something was happening, and by the time Alaria and her companions reached the river there were at least a hundred people following them. Mia, Beth, Grezkull, Sasha, and Palo marched proudly behind her, clearly enjoying every moment of this drama. Alaria was enjoying it too, in a way, but she also found it worrying. This was not what she had hoped she’d find in Hopeford, and she was less sure that she was going to be able to see her plan through.

The Hope River ran clean through the middle of Hopeford, with the ford itself at the center of the city. Hopeford was divided, naturally enough, into west and east by the line of the river. On the west, where Alaria and her companions now stood, all the commercial buildings were concentrated. Here there were the shops, the hotels, the restaurants, and all the other trades that supported those businesses. Leatherworkers and smiths, bakers, butchers, greengrocers, glassmakers, woodworkers, stonemasons, and every other trade you could imagine—all were gathered on the west bank of the river.

To the east was the residential area, and here the buildings sprawled away over the flat lands, street after street of quiet, tree-shaded houses; a lovely place to live.

The mayor’s hall was on the west bank, by the river, not far, in fact, from Jarack’s restaurant where Mia and Alaria had enjoyed a meal during their first visit to the city together. North of the restaurant, and near the river, a cluster of administrative buildings were gathered around the large, grand building that housed the mayor’s office and the city council chamber.

There were guards at the entrance of the council chamber too, and Alaria noted at a glance that they were at least in better order than Captain Rorke’s rabble. Perhaps there was hope yet in Hopeford.

“What’s this, Rorke?” the guard on the door said as Alaria led the whole crowd through the gate and up the broad drive to the grand front entrance of the council chamber.

Rorke shrugged. “Damned if I know,” he grunted, sullenly.

The guard gave him a contemptuous look and turned to Alaria. “Your name and your business?” he asked. He was not rude, but he was brisk. Alaria noted that his armor was in good condition, his posture straight, and that he kept her at a little over arm’s length. The other guards on the entrance kept to their posts and kept aware of everything else that was going on in the area.

Discipline. This was better.

“I’m Alaria Hartwood,” she said. “I’m here to see the mayor, and I want to see the ranking soldiers in Hopeford as well. Who are you?”

“I’m Captain Pell,” the man said. “What’s this about?”

There was a moment of total silence. Behind her, the crowd of citizens who had followed them this far leaned in to listen. Alaria could have heard a pin drop in the stillness.

“It’s about the infestation of Daeron’s Pass,” she said in a loud, carrying voice. “I’m here to raise an army to clear the gulch and make the pass to Brighthill safe for travelers again, and I want your help to do so.”

The mayor of Hopeford was not what Alaria had feared. He wasn’t corrupt or useless, he was just a little lazy and indolent. He had let his soldiery get slack through a lack of understanding of the need to keep up discipline, not through any deliberate mismanagement. Complacency, not corruption, was the problem here. The mayor liked the idea of clearing out Daeron’s Pass, and he was willing to make a show of helping, but he quibbled about the jurisdiction and cast doubt on whether any of his guards would be willing to go.

Alaria shrugged. “Let me talk to them,” she said. “Let me talk to the commanders. What’s the arrangement here? What’s the system? Who’s in charge of the fighters in Hopeford?”

Mayor Lancer was an active man in his sixties with a long gray beard and a gleaming bald pate. He invited them up to his office, but Alaria insisted on speaking to him on the step in the grand entrance to the council chamber, so that the civilians could hear the conversation. The mayor had shrugged and agreed, and now he stood awkwardly with Alaria on the top step of the grand entrance, the pillars and high wooden door framing them like actors on a stage. Rorke’s troop stood a little lower down on one side of the entrance, while Alaria’s friends stood at the other.

Alaria had thought that the civilians might drift away after the initial excitement, but it turned out that the opposite was true. More and more streamed in, until Alaria wondered if any of the Hopeford residents were not standing in crowd watching.

The mayor explained that he had 160 guards in the city in total, arranged into seven troops of 20 men each, including the officers. Each troop had a captain, but the final command rested with him, the mayor.

“So, there’s no military rank above the group captains?” Alaria asked.

The mayor shrugged. “Technically, there’s a commander of the whole force, but we’ve not seen him for a year. He commands the guard for this district and four others, and in practice he’s mainly in charge of the supply lines. But we don’t see much trouble, you know, and so he’s not needed very often.”

Alaria sighed. “Show me the captains, then. I want to see them all.”

“You’ve already met Rorke and Pell,” the mayor said, “but I’ll summon the others. They’re not all on duty, of course, but I’ll see what I can do.”

They were a mixed bag, these soldiers of the Hopeford guard. It didn’t take long for them all to be gathered together, since those who weren’t on duty were in the crowd and came forward as they heard Alaria’s words. As soon as Alaria saw all eight of them gathered together, the whole picture became clear. It was simple. The group captains, in charge of 20 soldiers each, were just given too much independence. Men like Rorke let their company slide, while men like Pell kept things in better order.

Of the gathered captains, there was one who stood out in Alaria’s eyes. She was Jessica Sola, captain of the 9th company. She was a beautiful woman, not tall, but strong and upright, with long legs, bright blue eyes and long, gleaming golden hair. She was off duty at the moment and wore an outfit of bright blue and white. Her clothing was clean and neat, and she was perfectly turned out without a hair out of place.

Alaria was impressed, and not just by Jessica’s beauty. Captain Jessica Sola had the air of a woman who knew what it was to be disciplined, even in civilian life. Neat and well-dressed as she was, there was no way she was slack when she put her armor on.

Of the others, there was Captain Pell, of course, and four others who seemed to care about the discipline of themselves and their men. The other two were Rorke and a man named Colic, who seemed even more of an embarrassment to the guard than Rorke was. But Jessica Sola was the one that Alaria was looking for. Mayor Lancer thought so too.

“Well, Captain Sola,” the mayor said as Jessica presented herself. “Here’s an ally for you at last.” There was a sneer in his voice, and Jessica glared at him with distaste, but she was polite to Alaria.

“What the mayor is trying to say,” she said to Alaria, “is that I’ve been pushing to make a move against the koblins of Daeron’s Pass for months, but the mayor here doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Not what I said at all,” Lancer protested. “My only objection was that we don’t have enough soldiers to make a dent in the koblins, and anyway it’s not in our jurisdiction. That’s my only issue with the plan. Our soldiers are not elites. We are a force of town guards, not of monster hunters. We’d need a leader, some elite soldiers, that kind of thing. With that in place, we could maybe gather enough strength to make an impact, but without it…” he trailed off, looking at Alaria in her gleaming, rune-inscribed, battle-bloodied plate with her legendary blade at her side.

Jessica Sola smiled at Alaria. “And that, I think, is where you come in,” she said.

Chapter

Twenty-Nine

Alaria and the team were back at Daeron’s Pass before nightfall, and this time they had a hundred armed and ready soldiers marching with them. Of the guard troops in Hopeford, Jessica Sola’s was in the front, Captain Pell marched with her, and another three of the more disciplined soldiers marched behind them.

The derelict captains Rorke and Colic had both refused to go, and Alaria wouldn’t have had them along anyway, since it was clear to her that they would be worse than useless in a fight. A hundred soldiers would be enough, Alaria thought, and so she’d asked one of the better guard troops to stay behind. Of the soldiers who were with her, it was clear that Jessica was the most respected of them all, and Alaria put her in charge of the soldiers and had her name an officer in her own troop to take the role of troop captain. She wanted Jessica to be in overall command.

They were too large a force for stealth, and so they marched straight up to the pass and crested the ridge about an hour before sundown. In the pass below, a horrible sight greeted them.

Hundreds of small orcs were scurrying around in the pass, and a few larger ones were lumbering here and there among the crowd. The orcs seemed to be doing something with the bodies of their fallen comrades, and it was with a sick feeling in her stomach that she realized they were eating their fallen comrades.

“Like I said before,” Grezkull commented. “Not even real orcs. Nothing like real orcs. No manners or principles.”

No cocks, Alaria thought, and couldn’t stifle a giggle.

Jessica raised an eyebrow at her. “Everything all right?” she asked.

“Fine,” Alaria said, looking at Mia, who seemed to be struggling to contain a laugh as well. Beth was grinning openly. The three women had all had the same thought at the same time.

“All right,” Alaria said, pulling herself together. “As we planned, then. Captain Sola?”

Jessica bobbed her head once and turned to the nearest guard troop. “On my signal!” she shouted. Short bows creaked as the back ranks of the troops prepared arrows. “Fire!”

A volley of arrows launched into the air, and Alaria cast Multiply as they soared overhead. Eighty arrows doubled, then tripled, and before they had reached the peak of their arc 80 arrows had become 240 arrows. Alaria cast Flaming Projectile, and then Lightning Speed, and the thick rain of arrows became a burning hail of deadly forceful shafts smashing down into the orcs.

The effect was instantaneous. Most of the orcs died in that first volley, but the ones that did not immediately turned and fled. They fled to the right of the path from Alaria’s perspective—the northern end of the gulch. Not one of them went in the other direction.

“The den is that way,” Alaria said with certainty. “In the face of a threat, they all went that direction. That’s where we need to go to find the heart of this nest.”

“The arrows,” Jessica said in a quiet voice. “How did that happen? Was that… was that you?”

Alaria looked at her with a long, hard look. Jessica met her eyes and blinked. “You’re a mage?” she said.

“I’m trained in the arts of combat magic,” she said. “Are we going to have a problem?”

“No,” Jessica said. “It was a bit unexpected, that’s all.”

“Take your soldiers down into the pass, Captain,” Alaria ordered. “Form up as we agreed and await my order.”

“Yes, commander,” Jessica said, her soldier’s discipline taking over and overcoming any prejudices she might have. “One thing, though,” she said. “Be careful what you show to the other soldiers. They didn’t see that, because they were a little further back, but they might not be able to accept a powerful display of magic on the field.”

“I understand,” Alaria said. “Now, the orders, please.”

“Yes, commander.”

At Jessica’s command, the soldiers marched down into the pass in good order. Alaria was impressed with their discipline. In fact, it was only a few of the guard troops whose discipline had become completely lax. Most of the guards had kept up their training and discipline, and most of the commanders were thankfully more of the Jessica Sola type than the Captain Rorke type.

The tramp of marching feet stopped as the soldiers got into the pass. As Alaria had planned, they formed up in a line, five groups of twenty soldiers each, four ranks deep and five abreast. It was a good sight. Alaria hadn’t seen this many soldiers deployed on a field for a long time. There had been a couple of times that she had been involved in larger battles, but that had never been her main area of operations.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Beth said.

“Very impressive,” Mia replied. “Though I hope that none of them get hurt. I wouldn’t want our little adventure to cause anybody any real harm.”

“Except these tunnel orcs,” Grezkull put in.

“Except those,” Mia agreed.

Alaria waited for the soldiers in the pass to turn and form up, ready to march into the trees. Once they were all ready, she turned to her group. “That’s our cue to move, “she said. “Everybody ready?”

“Ready,” all her friends agreed.

“Let’s do this,” Beth said.

As before, Palo stayed on the ridge above, but this time it had been agreed that Sasha would stay with him as well. Her wings were not good in trees. Under the dense cover of the grey forest, she would not be able to fly up and escape easily, nor would she be able to maneuver quickly to drop off potions. She would wait on the ridge, and the remaining potions had been distributed equally among Alaria, Beth, Mia, and Grezkull.

“Good luck, guys,” Sasha said. “Don’t die horribly!”

Alaria laughed at Sasha’s bluntness. “We’ll be fine,” she assured the faerie. “Sit tight, and we’ll be back soon.”

Alaria led her small team forward, along the top of the ridge north, away from the path, until they got to a point where it was almost too steep to climb down. “Here,” she said, “we go in here.”

They scuffled down the steep slope in the direction of the trees. Below, the soldiers had entered the tree line and were fanning out. Alaria’s plan was that the soldiers would sweep through the forest, pressing any enemies back toward the narrowest point in the pass, while she and her small team would act as an elite strike force, moving stealthily ahead of the main army, taking out any targets they came across, and seeking their boss, who Alaria knew would be somewhere in the valley, most likely in a tunnel or cave that opened out of the narrowest point in the gulch.

That was where she was headed. Sneaking ahead like this also had the advantage that she did not have to show her magic to the soldiers. Jessica might have been okay with it, but Alaria didn’t want to rely on the rest of them being okay with it. There was still prejudice against spellcasters, and she could do without any of that kind of trouble just now. She wanted to be able to press ahead and use her magic in peace.

They reached the tree line and Alaria cast Concealing Veil again, covering herself and her friends as they moved like shadows through the trees. They came upon one orc, a small creature who was waiting behind a tree. To his credit, he leaped out from cover and charged them when he became aware of them, only to be summarily dispatched by a single sweep of Grezkull’s gigantic club.

Aside from this one orc, there didn’t seem to be many about. Alaria was just about to say this when she heard yells and the clash of weapons from behind.

“The soldiers have found the rest of them,” she said. “Come on.”

The battle behind was going as planned. As Alaria and her friends moved north through the trees, they became aware of more orcs rushing past them, running toward the soldiers. There were quite a few of them, and Alaria wondered if it might not be best for her to leave off the hunt for the boss and go to aid the soldiers instead, but she decided against it. If they could take out the boss, they would be putting their skills to best use. The soldiers were probably able to handle most of what the orcs could throw at them, but whatever horror was lurking at the back of the valley and guiding the raiders of Daeron’s Pass, it was likely to be more than the Hopeford King’s Guard could be expected to handle.

“This way,” Alaria said. “Hurry.”

The others were looking a little doubtful now, too. Alaria remembered Mia’s words; she had said she hoped none of the soldiers got hurt. Well, Alaria hoped that too, but in a moment like this it was essential to stick to the plan and not let sentiment get in the way.

They were almost at the back of the valley now. The trees were thick, the foliage so dense that hardly any light could penetrate. They moved in a thick gloom, the sounds of battle now far away, fading behind them in the trees.

“What are you looking for, Alaria?” Mia asked. She sounded stifled, the stuffiness of the pressing forest was getting to her.

“That,” Alaria said. She pointed, and Mia’s eyes widened as, even through the gloom of the forest, she saw what Alaria was pointing at.

There was a path, a well-marked trail leading straight through the trees toward the end of the gulch. They followed it, and in a few moments, they came abruptly to the cliff wall at the back of the gulch. The stone was pale and damp, crumbly and covered in moss and fern and small trees. The path led straight up to the cliff wall and disappeared into the yawning black mouth of a cave.

“You sure about this,” Beth said in a frightened voice. “It looks pretty scary.”

“This is what we came here to do,” Alaria said. “But it looks pretty narrow inside. Beth, Grezkull, you two wait here. It’s no place for an archer, and you won’t have room to swing if you come in here, Grez. You two wait here. Mia, come with me.”

The others weren’t keen on this, but Alaria insisted. She was certain this was the right thing to do, and she wanted backup outside the cave if necessary. “Something may come out of here,” she said. “If it does, don’t hesitate. Be ready to shoot it down.”

Without further ado, she marched into the cave, Mia at her back.

What little light there was vanished almost as soon as they entered the cave. The entrance was wide, but the cave quickly narrowed and turned into a low tunnel. The ground was well walked, however, and so Alaria had no doubt that they were in the right place.

“This is the den of the orcs,” she said. “We just need to find the boss.”

Mia was scared but determined. Alaria could feel the tension in her, but also the determination to see this through to the end. She was proud of Mia. The young woman might be a natural at magic, but she had never done anything like this before. Even for someone who was a good magic caster, hunting an orc through a nasty dark tunnel was a scary experience.

“Not long now,” Alaria assured her. “You’re doing great.”

“Thanks,” Mia replied. A flicker of a smile crossed her face. “Just get us out of here alive, okay?”

“You got it,” Alaria said.

They came to a corner. Alaria peeped round and then pulled her head back.

“This is it,” she whispered. “The den of the tunnel orc boss.”

Alaria got ready. She took a moment to gather her magic together, then she stepped round the corner. Mia followed.

They were in a cave, a long, low-roofed chamber with damp walls, a rough ceiling and a floor smoothed with hundreds of years of the water that dripped from the ceiling. At the far end of the chamber sat an enormous, bloated creature. It was an orc, but an orc grown to a hideously exaggerated size.

Above the creature there was a light. At first, Alaria thought it was just some kind of simple light globe to illuminate the cave, but then she realized it was something else, something more. There was an awareness in that globe of light, and a terrible attraction in its spinning depths.

The orc was working on something, and Alaria saw that there was a lot of black spongy stuff coating the walls around where he sat. Even as they watched, he held up a hand. Light flashed from his fingers, and twenty orcs burst from the black fungus, running along the floor with swords in hand, straight toward the door. They saw Alaria and Mia and pulled up short.

The globe of light above the orc seemed to turn toward the intruders, then it flared brighter and Alaria felt that intense awareness deepening. The thing was aware of her for a moment. There was a hiss like a distant snake, and then the globe of light vanished, leaving the crude torch burning in a wall sconce as the only illumination. The sense of being watched vanished instantly.

The boss orc turned. He caught sight of Mia and Alaria, and he roared in rage to see that his sanctum had been disturbed. He suddenly bounded forward, his voice thundering with anger as he rushed forward to crush and kill, but Mia and Alaria got there first.

Alaria used Rain of Fire to take out the smaller orcs, and Mia fired Freeze Enemy at the boss orc. The basic ice spell wasn’t strong enough to stop him in his tracks—he was too high a level—but it hit him in the head and caused him to stop for long enough that she could get off an Ice Spike blast. That spell hit him in the head also, the sharp spike slamming into his forehead and causing him to reel back.

“Right in the brain!” Mia said. Alaria glanced at her. Mia seemed to be expecting a shot to the brain to take the orc down, but Alaria knew there would be no such luck. A creature like this didn’t have a brain exactly, and a blast like that, however strong, was only going to enrage it.

It was time for Alaria to step up, and step up she did. The orc had focused on Mia, since she had now hurt him twice, and he screamed and roared and thundered toward her his hands outstretched and his mouth gaping, the ice spike sticking out of his head like a ridiculous piece of ceremonial headgear.

Alaria saw her opening and she took it. She drew Skyfang in a flash, poured Starflame through the blade, and plunged it into the monster’s side. The fire magic poured into the creature through its foul hide, and Alaria forced all the pressure of her own power through the blade. She leaned in, magic and bodyweight combining, then cast Paralyze on the orc boss.

He froze like a stature, and she yanked the blade from his body.

He shuddered, steam and smoke hissing from his ears and flames flickering from his mouth. There was a rumbling noise in the cave.

Alaria turned to Mia.

“Run,” she said.

Chapter

Thirty

Mia and Alaria dashed through the tunnel and out of the cave mouth into the damp woods, pushed forward by the thundering blast of the explosion. They leaped into the open and nearly crashed into Beth and Grezkull, who were standing with their weapons at the ready, prepared to kill any orcs who came out of the passage.

As Alaria and Mia dashed out of the cave mouth, the flames flashed out after them, the force of the blast pushing them forward so they tumbled out into the grass at the feet of their friends.

“Get out of here!” Mia gasped as she struggled up, helped by Beth. Grezkull was about to reach down and help Alaria up, but before he could do so there was a terrific rumbling and crashing noise and they felt the very ground shaking below them. The earth bucked like a living creature, and Grezkull and Beth were knocked off their feet.

Alaria had just time to turn over onto her back. There was a deafening bang and she saw the explosion ripping up from the cave mouth, a billowing expansion of filthy black smoke and orange flames that reeked of burning hair and flesh.

The flames from the cave mouth would have fried Alaria and her friends in an instant, if Alaria hadn’t thrown up Air Block from the school of Air magic, creating a shield in the space in front of her and her friends. The shield blocked the flames from burning them all to a crisp, but it could not block what came next. In the moment after the flames cleared, Alaria saw a shower of rocks tumbling down from the slightly sloped cliff face. The force of the explosion had shaken the whole cliff, and huge boulders bounced down the cliff face and fell straight toward the four companions.

Death was only a moment away. The rockfall would crush them, and there was no way Air Block would save them from this threat. But there were other powers that could.

Tentacles burst from Alaria’s shoulders and arms, flowing out from the gaps in her armor and hurtling up into the air to grab the rocks and stop them in mid fall. The tentacles glowed purple and red and yellow, like they were on fire themselves. They were huge and thick, the biggest, most powerful tentacles Alaria had ever produced. The sensation of their manifestation was nearly overpowering, and Alaria cried out half in pleasure and half in surprise at the intensity of the feeling.

“Brazk!” Grezkull swore in the guttural trollmun language, before he fell over completely. He’d never seen the tentacles before. Beth made a small noise in her throat that might have been fear, but sounded more like sexual desire. Mia laughed in amazement, and Alaria let out a sigh of relief as every single one of the huge rocks were stopped in mid fall. A scattering of smaller boulders pattered like rain to the ground around them, then there was silence.

“Okay,”Alaria said breathlessly to her friends. “Just give me a minute here.”

She was lying on her back, no fewer than seventeen huge tentacles coming out from her body at various points, and she was balancing some very large rocks up above. Her motor control of the tentacles was much better now than it had been, but most of her practice had been during sex with Mia, and during crafting. Both of those activities were great for practicing fine motor control, but much less good for manipulating enormous weights at a great height.

As before, the tentacles had sprung forth mostly from instinct, but now that they’d saved her from the immediate threat, they had come over completely into her control. She had to work very hard to carefully lower them to the ground.

Before she could finish doing so, there was a shout from behind her and Jessica Sola burst into the clearing at the head of a small group of fighters. They all stopped dead, looking at the strange scene before them.

“What in the…?” Jessica breathed.

The tentacle power had been revealed through necessity. She wasn’t concerned about Grezkull—he was a staunch and loyal friend—but it was not guaranteed that Jessica or the soldiers would be okay with the tentacle power.

The only thing Alaria could focus now on was getting these rocks lowered to the ground safely. She had no space in her mind to give to any other considerations. Once that was done, she could worry about the consequences of revealing her tentacle power to Jessica, and to a bunch of Hopeford soldiers as well.

“Be with you in a moment,” she said through gritted teeth as she got control of the tentacles. She pushed all her focus into the job, and steadily lowered the rocks to the ground. She managed, but it was hard. When she was done, she withdrew the tentacles and scrambled to her feet.

“Uh, wow!” Jessica said, eyeing Alaria with wariness, but also some interest. “You did that?

Alaria nodded. There was no point in trying to deny it, of course. Jessica had already seen Alaria’s flame magic when they had attacked from the ridge at first, but she hadn’t seen the tentacles until now. She looked like it might take her a bit of time to get used to the idea, but unlike the soldiers behind her she didn’t look terrified, appalled, or both.

Instead, she looked interested.

“In my view,” Jessica said slowly, and loudly enough for the soldiers to hear, “a person must use everything in their power when it comes to saving lives. No one can judge a person for doing that, no matter how strange it looks to those who do not understand.”

There was a muttering of agreement from the soldiers. They still looked scared, but less horrified, and some of the braver ones nodded and smiled at Alaria.

“I agree with you,” Alaria said quietly.

“Hmm,” Jessica said. “I’ll bet you do. Well, I’m glad to see you safe and sound, however you managed it. My soldiers and I have done well. We’ve swept the valley clean. There are no more orcs here. What did you find in the cave?”

“The boss,” Alaria said. “It’s dead. With it gone, the spawning ground destroyed, and the cave system blocked off, there won’t be any more orc incursions. Did your force suffer any injuries?”

“Two,” Jessica said, her expression troubled. “And both are pretty bad.”

Alaria nodded. She reached into her satchel and pulled out two healing potions. “Give them these,” she said.

Jessica’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “You make healing potions, too? Thanks! This is great. Here, you, Raffles,” she called to one of the soldiers nearby. “Take these potions and give them to the two injured men from third troop, quick as you can, now.”

The man nodded. He took the potions and bobbed a bow to Alaria before turning and sprinting off.

“He’s the younger brother of one of the injured,” Jessica said in a whisper to Alaria. “Your potion healing his brother will make him less likely to spread bad rumors in the town about your magic.”

Aloud, she said, “I’m glad to hear you took out the boss. All the same, I’ll send a group of soldiers to come back and have a closer look tomorrow, once it’s daylight. What about you? Will you come back with us to Hopeford tonight?”

Alaria looked at her friends. “I think so,” she said. “There’s a particularly nice hotel I fancy staying at tonight.”

Grezkull, Palo, and Sasha wanted to go drinking with some of the soldiers back at Hopeford. Jessica Sola was keen to go out celebrating too and encouraged Alaria to come too, but Alaria excused herself, Beth, and Mia.

“I’d like to get changed and rest,” she said. “And I’d like my two companions with me.”

Jessica nodded thoughtfully, giving Alaria and her two companions a very piercing look. She seemed disappointed, and she seemed as if there was something she wanted to say that she wasn’t saying, but eventually she shrugged and said that if they fancied it later on, she was going to show Grezkull and the others a bar called The Randy Elf.

“It’s as good as it sounds,” she assured them. “A great place for fun if you want to experience the riskier side of Hopeford’s nightlife. It’s my kind of place,” she added with exaggerated emphasis, looking meaningfully at Alaria and then her two companions in turn.

Alaria was gaining more understanding of the way of things now, and she felt that it was clear what Jessica meant. The golden haired captain was making it clear to Alaria that she, too, was comfortable with relationships that didn’t follow the traditional structure.

Was it an invitation? Alaria smiled as she realized that a month ago, she’d never have given the idea a moment’s thought. Now she was pleased to find that she understood completely. Jessica was interested, and she was letting Alaria know.

A sudden hot surge of arousal flowed through Alaria. She shifted where she stood, feeling warmth between her legs, a tingling in the tips of her nipples, and a deep, aroused sensation in her hips. Jessica seemed to sense Alaria’s feelings. She tossed her hair alluringly, catching her full lip for a moment between her perfect front teeth. Then she turned and marched off, leading the others with her. Alaria smiled. In time, perhaps she’d add Jessica to her list of lovers. For now, she had promised Beth a reward for helping out with the battle. She couldn’t wait to deliver it.

The owner of the Hopeford Home hotel recognized her. When she’d visited before with Mia, he had asked if they might need a room big enough for three, and had made it clear that was not a problem. Clearly, the Hopeford Home was a more free-thinking establishment than some in the city.

“Ah, you’re back,” the owner said cheerfully, “and you’ve brought two friends this time. Excellent. I have just the room for you. Come with me, I’ll show you to it—a great view of the city, and with a hot water tub laid on, a nice big bed and plenty of cushions, too. A very popular choice for larger groups.”

“Sounds ideal,” Alaria said. “Lead the way.”

The owner led them up a flight of stairs and down a well-carpeted corridor. The place was very nice, with a deep red carpet, pale blue wallpaper, and dark wood tables with beautifully scented plants. It was very quiet. The owner bowed to them as he handed over the key to the room, and then turned and left them to it.

Smiling, Alaria turned and handed the key to Beth. “Open the door,” she said. Beth’s eyes went wide. She grinned. She liked being told what to do.

“Yes, mistress,” she said in a meek voice, and stepped forward to open the door.

It was Alaria’s turn to smile. This was going to be fun.

When they had first established that Beth wanted to be a part of their lovers’ group, Beth’s desires were very new to Alaria. Mia had talked it through with her, so Alaria now knew how to approach this kind of sex. Beth wanted to feel like she was not in control of the situation, Mia explained. She wanted to be bossed around, dominated, to not know what was going to happen next. This would create the tension she was looking for and give her the thrill of feeling unsafe, while in reality she was perfectly safe at all times. To do this, it was crucial to establish boundaries and to make sure she was safe at all times.

“You want to make her feel unsafe, while never actually endangering her,” Mia had explained to a baffled Alaria at the kitchen table back in the homestead. “You want to push her to her limits, but make it so that she can draw back at any time if she feels that she needs to.”

“And how in the world do I do that?” Alaria had replied. “Surely it would ruin the effect if I kept breaking character to check in with her?”

“Absolutely,” Mia agreed. “So in this kind of scene, before you start, you have to set up safewords, and if the person uses the safewords, they need to be respected unconditionally and immediately. It’s super important, because it allows everyone to trust each other and really give themselves to the scene.”

The concept had been entirely new to Alaria, but she got the idea quickly enough. Now, as they entered the plush room in the Hopeford Home hotel, Alaria remembered the conversation with Mia.

As soon as the door closed, Alaria spoke to Beth.

“Listen, Beth. In everything that’s about to happen, I want you to remember a few things. First, if at any point it gets too much and you need me to stop, just say the word stop. The whole thing will stop immediately, and you can do whatever you need in that moment. Got that?”

Beth nodded. “Got it,” she said in a husky voice.

“And the second thing is this,” Alaria continued. “If you don’t want to bring the whole scene to a halt, but you just aren’t comfortable doing something I’ve told you to do, you can say the word no to anything I ask you to do. If you say that, I’ll get you to do something else instead, but I won’t stop the scene entirely. Understand?”

“I understand.” Her eyes were wide and bright. She was gazing rapturously at Alaria, her lips slightly parted and flushed red with her arousal. There were pink spots high in her cheeks.

“Is there anything you want to say now? Anything you want to ask me to do or not to do?”

Beth looked at Mia, then at Alaria, and swallowed. “I’d like to pleasure Mia at some point in the scene. Mia, would you be okay with that? I really liked having you watching that time… but I’d like you to be more involved.”

Mia nodded. “We can do that,” she said.

“Okay,” Beth said. “That’s all I wanted to say. I… I’m all yours.”

Chapter

Thirty-One

Mia, Beth, and Alaria were all still wearing their battle gear. The first thing to do was to get into something more comfortable. In this scenario, something more comfortable meant naked, since they hadn’t brought a change of clothes and they were all sweaty, bloody, muddy, and dusty from the fight.

Alaria was very much in charge. She decided that she wanted to see Beth and Mia naked first, so at her request, they both stripped while Alaria watched. Next, they worked together to undress Alaria, helping her out of her plate, her chainmail, and her leathers.

The room was equipped with a wide, round tub that was big enough for all three of them, sitting by a tall window that looked out over a beautiful view of Hopeford. The tub was already filled with warm, scented water, and they all got in and washed thoroughly. Alaria first had them wash each other, enjoying seeing them soap each other’s breasts, and wash each other’s hair. Then, she had them wash her, soaping her hair, her arms, and her back.

Having both her lovers washing her together in this way was very pleasant. She was surprised to find that having them both serving her like this was deeply pleasurable in a way she’d never experienced before. She’d never been a person who enjoyed having servants in the traditional sense, but Mia and Beth were serving her now in a way that was like a game. It was fun to quietly order them to do things and have them both immediately and without question obey her commands.

Another surprise was the discovery that Mia was enjoying the dynamic too, though not as much as Beth. Mia was having fun, that was clear from her expression and the eagerness with which she obeyed Alaria’s whims, but Beth was really enjoying it. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing hard, and when Alaria ordered her to do something, she would let out a little moan of pleasure and bite her lip as she scurried to do her mistress’ bidding.

Lying back in the tub, Alaria asked Beth to bring her a drink of cool water from the carafe on the side. Beth leaped to it, standing up and stepping out of the tub. She had a great body. She still had her human aspect in place, but despite this the curves of her body and her lithe movements had a distinctly feline twist to them. She had long legs, wide hips, strong shoulders, and full breasts, and her red hair dripped with water as she stood up to get out of the tub. The room was lit by branches of candles, and the light gleamed and glistened from her wet skin.

Alaria licked her lips, enjoying the sight of Beth’s naked form. Opposite Alaria in the tub, Mia reclined as well, her body a sharp contrast to Beth’s. Mia was slight where Beth was broad, and her skin was pale and unblemished where Beth’s was tanned and freckled. Mia’s breasts were small and neat, perky, the nipples with a slight upward tilt, but Beth’s breasts were bigger even than Alaria’s, though they were still firm, shapely, and pert. The water ran down between them, running across her navel and down into the red bush between her legs. She reached for a towel, but Alaria held up a hand.

“No,” Alaria said. “Don’t dry yourself. You have to get the water while you’re still dripping wet. I like the way you look with the water on you.”

Beth gulped and nodded, then stepped from the tub and moved, dripping and steaming, to the side table. She got the water, then approached the tub.

As she stepped up to hand the glass to Alaria, however, she very deliberately messed it up, spilling half the water into the tub.

“Oh,” she said quietly, looking at Alaria through her lashes. “Oh, I’m sorry…”

Alaria was confused for a moment, but Mia spoke up. “She’ll need to be punished,” she said, and Alaria smiled. She understood what was going on now.

“Of course,” she said, then turned to Beth and spoke in a scolding voice. “You’ve messed up now, girl,” she said sternly. “I’m going to have to teach you a lesson.”

“Oh…” Beth said. She quailed, stepping back slightly as Alaria stood up.

“Stay where you are,” Alaria warned her. “I’m going to show you what happens when you don’t do as you’re told.”

She took Beth’s hair in her hand and gripped it firmly but not painfully in her fist. Holding Beth’s damp red hair in a firm grip, Alaria moved her over to the bed. Using Beth’s hair to guide her, Alaria bent Beth over the bed, so her knees were on the floor and her face and arms were on the bed.

“Mia’s going to watch you take your punishment,” Alaria said. Keeping one hand firmly on Beth’s head, she turned Beth’s face so that she could see Mia reclining in the tub. Then, with an open palm, she slapped Beth hard on the ass.

Beth had a great ass, round and firm, and Alaria found the noise of her hand slapping it very satisfying. Beth cried out in a mixture of pleasure and pain, and Alaria laughed. This was what Beth had wanted.

Alaria slapped her on the ass again, stinging the other cheek this time, enjoying the way the flesh rippled under the blow. Beth’s legs were parted, and Alaria could see that she was wet and glistening, flushed with arousal.

Alaria experimented with slapping Beth harder, finding that she not only could take it, but she really enjoyed it. Beth moaned with pleasure as she took the spanking, and her pleasure and excitement increased proportionally as Alaria increased the pace, the strength, and the frequency of the impacts.

“Are you learning your lesson?” Alaria said, leaning over and speaking into her ear. “Do you see what happens if you don’t do as you’re told?”

“Yes, yes,” Beth panted. “Yes, Alaria, I understand, I… ah!”

Alaria saw Beth’s open mouth and decided it was time for some extra appendages. She manifested one that slid out from the space on her lower back, and then let another four appear, moving around to grip Beth’s ankles and wrists, while the first one slipped into her mouth. Unbidden, a few more appeared, slithering across Beth’s body. Alaria ran her tentacles over her lover’s wet skin, using the tentacles to leisurely touch her all over, making sure that none of Beth’s body was untouched.

The tendrils were wet with thick, slippery juices, and the liquid soaked Beth, dripping down her body and making her slick to the touch. Alaria used a hand to grab Beth’s nipple, squeezing it hard and making Beth gasp in pleasure.

Beth saw the tentacle coming toward her lips and greedily took it into her mouth, gagging as she urgently sucked it in as deep as she could, and then moving her head back and forth, fellating the tentacle and moaning as she did so. Alaria felt a surge of pleasure through her whole body as Beth’s mouth worked the length of it, her deep moans vibrating the tentacle as it slipped back and forth against her lips and tongue. It was a very good feeling, and Alaria was again amazed by how the tentacles could give her such pleasure like this.

Mia got up and moved across the room, standing glistening with water as she watched the scene.

Alaria let a crop of new limbs slip across the room to fondle Mia’s legs and ankles. The appendages sprouted suckers that slipped up and took Mia’s legs and wrapped them, sliding up to fondle her ass and thighs.

Mia moaned in pleasure, watching Beth sucking and reaching her hands up to play with her own nipple’s as she watched.

“Mia’s watching you, Beth,” Alaria said.

“Mmf,” Beth said, her mouth full of tentacle.

“She’s watching you enjoying this. Suck the tentacle harder.”

Beth moaned and did as she was told. Alaria spanked her a few times again, then decided it was time for something more. She still had a tentacle holding each of Beth’s limbs. She extended the ones that held Beth’s ankles, making them reach out longer. They moved up her legs, wrapping around her calves and up her thighs, then pulling her legs apart.

“Oh, yes,” Beth gasped, pulling her mouth off the tentacle. “Fill me up, Alaria. Fuck me, please, fuck me with your beautiful tentacles!”

Alaria moved a slippery seeker up and teased Beth’s vagina with it, flicking the end in and out and making her groan with anticipation.

“Fill me right up,” she gasped again. “Make it really big.”

Alaria made it big. The tentacle was two inches across, and she slid seven inches of its length into Beth’s glistening vagina, making her wail and causing her wetness to squirt out and splatter the floor. Alaria scooped the wetness up on her fingers and rubbed it on Beth’s lips.

“Taste yourself,” she commanded as Beth, in ecstasy, licked Alaria’s fingers before having her mouth filled with a tentacle again. The tentacle ran with its own juices, the wetness slopping out of Beth’s mouth as she sucked in and moaned in pleasure, filled up from both ends with Alaria’s magic appendages.

Mia came over and got up on the bed. Beth was bent over the foot of the bed, her arms stretched out and her knees on the floor, taking a tentacle in her vagina and another in her mouth. Mia stretched out on her back on the bed, spread her own legs, and used a hand to pleasure herself, rubbing quickly up and down on her clitoris and tweaking her own nipples with the other hand as she watched Beth being thoroughly tentacle fucked.

Alaria suddenly found herself close to an orgasm, brought on by the tentacle arousal in Beth’s mouth and vagina, by the sight of Mia pleasuring herself, and by the feeling that she was deeply, passionately giving pleasure to these two very different women. She pulled out of Beth’s mouth, giving Beth a moment to breathe and bringing herself off the boil for a moment as well. She didn’t want to have an orgasm just yet, because even though she knew she would be able to again soon, she knew that the electric energy which was driving her now would dissipate after her first orgasm and would take a while to be regained.

She wanted to wait.

Using the strength of the magic summoned limbs, she lifted Beth up and flipped her over, placing her on her back on the bed, with her head not far from Mia’s vulva. Without ever breaking the tentacle contact, Alaria slithered her tentacles over Beth’s body, wrapping her arms and legs and running tentacles around her chest to grip around each of her breasts.

With an effort, she lifted Beth’s hips and raised her legs up in the air so her ass and her vulva were completely exposed. Beth was completely prone, unable to move or do anything, and she was enjoying it more than Alaria had ever seen anyone enjoy anything. Beth’s human glamor was slipping, and when Alaria put two tentacles into her vagina and fucked her with both at the same time, she lost it completely.

Beth growled, moaned, and thrashed her head around, her mouth open as if looking for something to fill it. Her tail whipped from side to side, and her skin turned from the freckled tan of a human to a fine, downy striped fur that covered every part of her except her nipples, her vulva, her lips, the palms of her hands, and the soles of her feet. Her face became long and catlike, and elegant whiskers appeared. When she opened her eyes, they were golden and gleaming, with black slit pupils.

This was Beth in her true form, but when she spoke it was the same voice that they knew, though throatier and deeper than usual.

“Imass,” she groaned. “Puddimass!”

“What?” Alaria said, “What are you saying? Speak more clearly.”

Beth heaved in a huge breath and forced herself to speak more slowly and clearly.

“Put one in my ass,” she said. “Fuck my ass with your tentacles!”

“Filthy wench,” Alaria scolded her, slapping her hard on the butt and making her squeal. She created a new tentacle just for the purpose, making it about an inch thick. We’ll start with this, she thought, and then see how Beth handles more.

Alaria had discovered that the default state of her tentacles was to be dry, but that if she willed it, she could cause them to excrete a slick liquid, much like the lubricating wetness that her own vagina produced when she was aroused. When she was having sex, they manifested with the slick arousal liquid without her having to will it. The tentacles she was using now all gleamed with lubrication and Alaria steadily and firmly penetrated Beth’s ass with it and began to fuck her.

The sensation of tightness around her tentacle was exquisite. At the same time, she was fucking Beth’s vulva with two other tentacles. She was about to put another one in Beth’s mouth when she had a different idea.

“Mia,” she said. “Sit on Beth’s face.”

Mia had been watching in pleasure and fascination, pleasuring herself with her hands as she watched, but now she came and knelt over Beth’s face. Alaria had flipped Beth over onto her back, showing off her fantastic breasts, and Mia was able to drop her clit onto Beth’s open mouth and lean forward, rubbing Beth’s clit and playing with her breasts.

“Oh, gods, yes,” Beth moaned as Mia lowered herself onto her mouth, facing Alaria. Mia moaned in pleasure as Beth set her mouth around Mia’s clitoris and started licking and sucking, grinding her mouth against Mia as she did so.

Alaria stood between Beth’s spread legs, watching the tentacles slip in and out of Beth’s ass and vagina. Now, she leaned over and fixed her mouth onto Mia’s, kissing her deeply while she reached down and clamped Beth’s nipples hard between her fingers and thumbs.

Her vagina was crying out to be filled now, and she created a tentacle just for that purpose, slipping it past her ass and feeling the tingle of pleasure that came from that contact. Interesting. Beth was crazy about being fucked in her ass—maybe Alaria should try it too?

Not just now, she decided, and filled her vagina with the tentacle, satisfying that desire. As she did so, Mia reached over and began to rub Alaria’s clitoris with one hand while rubbing Beth’s with the other.

Now all three women were pleasuring each other, Beth on Mia with her mouth, Mia on Alaria and Beth with her hands, and Beth as the center of the scene, with Mia filling her mouth and rubbing her clitoris, and Alaria clamping her nipples and fucking her in the vagina with two tentacles and fucking her in the ass with another one, getting steadily faster and faster all the time.

Alaria lost herself in the moment, letting more and more of her summoned appendages slide out all over the room. They seemed to want to come out, and she let them. Some had suckers that clamped onto different parts of her partners’ bodies, and others were clear of any suckers and slipped up to slide into a mouth or to play with a breast. One slipped up and slid into Mia’s vagina from behind, the juices from the tentacle and from Mia soaking Beth’s face as Beth licked eagerly at Mia’s clitoris.

All three of them were perfectly in rhythm with each other, their hips thrusting and their moans of pleasure syncing as they built toward their climax. Alaria felt the pleasure through the tentacles, though her own vagina and clitoris, and through her breasts as she manifested more tentacles to stimulate her own nipples. The sensation was all-consuming, and all she was aware of were the beautiful sensations in her body, the sight of the candlelight gleaming on the naked bodies of her two lovers, the musky smell of their fucking, and the sounds; Beth’s low, muffled groans, Mia’s small, high pitched cries, the wet, sloppy noises of the tentacles sliding in and out, and her own moans of pleasure as the three of them hit the edge of the climax together, teetered there for a moment, then exploded over the edge.

The orgasm went on and on, and Alaria let the tentacles do all they wanted, fucking and filling her and her partners, and squirting thick, clear arousal liquid all over all of them, and all over the room. The waves of pleasure flowed through Alaria, making her clench the muscles in her belly and her ass, and clenching rhythmically against the length of the tentacle inside of her.

Her partners’ pulses pulled new depths of pleasure out of her own summoned lengths, and she could feel the rhythm of their climaxes squeezing the parts of her that were deep inside them. She pushed the one that was inside her deeper, and then Mia reached up and slid two fingers into Alaria’s mouth.

That was new, and the sensation allowed her to reach a new peak of pleasure as she felt her mouth filled and drew her lover’s fingers deep inside her mouth. Then the wave peaked and passed.

Panting and laughing breathlessly and disbelievingly at just how good it had been, the three women collapsed in a heap together on the bed. They all crawled up the bed together and Alaria and Mia got on either side of Beth, squeezing her between them both as she came down from the immense peak they’d brought her to. Mia and Alaria kissed, then found that they both wanted to kiss Beth. Their tongues met in a three-way kiss, and Beth opened her eyes and managed to get a few words out.

“That… That was the best ever,” she panted. “I’ve never had it like that before. By the gods, Alaria, you’re good at that.”

Alaria laughed, then reached over and caressed the curve of Mia’s breast, running her hand across the white, flawless expanse of her lover’s skin, down across the curve of her hip, coming to rest on her neat, round ass. “I’ve had a good teacher,” she said.

Chapter

Thirty-Two

Birds sang in the jengberry trees outside the homestead. Insects hummed in the hot summer air, and the scent of wildflowers drifted in through the open window of the kitchen. Bright sunlight poured through the panes, but the stone-flagged floor and the thick stone walls kept the room cool. The other rooms in the house had the shutters closed fast, to keep the intense heat at bay, the kitchen was an exception to this rule.

The kettle bubbled on the stove. A large black cat lay like a pool of spilled treacle in a bar of sunlight in the middle of the floor.

Alaria was sitting at the kitchen table. The space in front of her was covered in potions and ingredients. There were three huge mortar and pestles, and two smaller ones. There were several sheets of paper on which various mushrooms, leaves, and flowers were drying. Several linen bundles about the size of Alaria’s fist hung from a wooden frame above brightly colored little ceramic bowls, their mashed-up contents dripping a steady stream of concentrated liquid into the bowls. Directly in front of her, laid out on a polished wooden tray, several powdered ingredients and a few drops of dark liquid were laid out in a very particular order, ready to be made into the final product.

Magic flickered around her hands as she cast the Coalesce spell from the Spirit school. This was the second last stage in potion creation. It was a spell to bring the ingredients on the tray together into one whole, mixing them in a way that no process of boiling or mashing could do.

The magic made a low hiss as it acted on the ingredients, and the black cat twitched one ear and languidly considered whether it was worth opening an eye as well, or if that was taking things too far. When no further hissing came, he gave the idea up. There was nothing that required his attention now, and he drifted back down into his profound sleep.

The Coalesce spell brought the ingredients together into a single whole, but that whole was not a stable, usable final product. No, the result of the magic was a sphere of flickering light, no bigger than the palm of one’s hand.

Alaria caught the ball of light. She placed her left palm under it, and the latent magical energy in her hand caused the ball to float about an inch above her skin, hanging there, flickering like a candle flame in the wind.

This was a delicate process. Mia had managed it more than once on simple potions, but the more complex the potion, the more volatile the coalesced ingredients became. The potion Alaria was working on was not simple, and she’d chosen to wait until Mia was out before attempting it. Any interruption could be fatal, and the ingredients for this potion had been a rare find. She wanted the best possible chance of success.

Keeping a light but firm touch on the magic that held the sphere steady in her left hand, Alaria reached over and took a handful of fine, gleaming sand up in her right hand. It was glassmaker’s sand, as good a quality as anyone could want. The sand was fine as crushed sugar, a beautiful off-white color, and it was the final ingredient in the potion creation process.

Ready with the sand in her right hand and the Coalesced ingredients in her left, Alaria cast Containment: Glass. This final spell was a very fine and delicate piece of magic, an Earth spell modified and combined with Fire and Spirit through years of study and trial by the experimentalists, those legendary mages who, over generations of diligent work back in the early history of magic, had tested and retested the techniques of magic until they were laid out in the systematized, recorded, and completely reliable form that today’s mages could benefit from.

The casting caused another hiss, louder this time, and accompanied by a sharp, chemical smell. The black cat did open an eye this time, his nose twitching as he watched Alaria warily from his spot in the sun. He wished she’d stop making unnecessary disturbances, but you couldn’t get through to humans, not when they were set on a task.

He saw the light flickering around her hands, the mist of transfiguration manifesting, and the bottled potion appearing as the mist was swept away. Alaria did not seem like she was going to do anything else, and she certainly was not going to get up and feed him, so he went back to sleep again.

Maybe tomorrow the human cat would visit. She understood him, and the humans understood her. Perhaps he would be able to impress upon her again that it was important for the humans not to make noise when he was sleeping in the sun. He doubted it. He didn’t quite get the human cat. She smelled like a cat, she spoke his language, but she behaved like a human, even to the point of not taking his priorities seriously.

Ah, well. The dark-haired human was out. Sometimes, when she was out, she came back with fish. Perhaps today would be one of those days.

Alaria sat back in her chair with a sigh of satisfaction. The potion creation had been a success. Here in the bottle before her was a rarity—a potion that would give the user the ability to understand the speech of animals for a full day, from sunset to sunset. The key ingredient, Lammas Moss, was very rare, and it only worked for the potion when it was in flower.

She’d been very pleased to discover a patch in the recently-cleared Daeron’s Pass, which the folk of Hopeford had, much to her embarrassment, now taken to calling Alaria’s Pass. Daeron, apparently, had done nothing more than live near the pass some forty years previously, and the locals felt that Alaria clearing it of orcs was a good reason for the pass to be renamed in her honor.

Lammas Moss was just one of the many rare and wonderful crafting ingredients that she’d found when she, Beth, and Mia had been able to explore the newly cleared valley at their leisure. For the first couple of days after the fight, they found themselves completely occupied with enjoying each other in the plush suite at the Hopeford Home Hotel. Eventually, they’d had no choice but to give in to the requests of their friends and the mayor of Hopeford to stop fucking each other with tentacles for at least a little while and to come back to reality.

Regretfully, and not without promising each other that they’d get together again just as soon as they could, they gave in to the requests.

It had all been very boring—to Alaria’s eyes, at least. The mayor wanted to give Alaria an award and what he called the keys to the city which sounded interesting but turned out to be an elaborately written certificate on a scroll, signed by him, and conferring no actual privilege or practical utility whatsoever. Still, her friends enjoyed the ceremony, and the mayor stumped up a financial reward for her and her companions to thank them for rousing the city out of its apathy and reopening trade along the west road through the pass.

They had to do the ceremony, however, and Alaria was at least pleased to learn that Jessica Sola had been promoted to the newly created rank of Chief Captain of the Hopeford guard. This put the whole guard under her direct command, and removed the effective independence of the individual guard captains. With this change in place, it was unlikely that the guard would slip into the state of indolence that it had been suffering from in recent years.

Jessica sacked Captain Rorke and Captain Colic, but gave them both a good payoff to keep them from becoming bitter about it in future. Since they were both only a few years from retirement anyway, neither of them were particularly put out by this.

At the end of the ceremony, Jessica had taken Alaria aside and hugged her, slipping a piece of paper into her hand.

“Here’s my address,” she said quietly into her ear. “I’ll be busy here for the next few weeks, putting the new guard procedures in place, but if you feel like visiting some evening, just yourself, come by. You can stay the night—I’d like that.”

Alaria hadn’t visited Jessica in Hopeford—yet. She’d been busy. There was a lot to do at the homestead, and in the weeks that had passed since the battle, Alaria Harwood had not been idle.

The sound of Mia’s voice singing a cheerful song drifted through the kitchen window as the young woman came in through the garden. She looked in the kitchen window as she passed.

“Hey, Lari,” she said. “You okay for me to come in?”

Alaria smiled. Mia knew that Alaria had been working on a complex and delicate piece of spell work, and she didn’t want to intrude.

“I’m done,” Alaria said. “Come on in.”

She stood up, scraping her chair on the stone. The cat gave a grunt of annoyance and turned over, scooting across the floor without getting up so that he could get back into the ray of sun that had inconsiderately moved off of his belly.

“Lazy lump,” Alaria teased him. A tentacle flowed out of her back and snagged a mug and a teapot from the sideboard. She lifted the kettle and poured steaming water over tea herbs as Mia came bustling into the room.

Mia hung her bag on a hook in the wall and kicked her sandals off as Alaria brought the tea over to the table. They embraced and kissed deeply. Mia smelled of the woods, and her mouth tasted of wild mint, sweet honey, and citrus.

Alaria held onto the kiss for a long time, her tongue exploring Mia’s mouth as her hands explored down Mia’s back and gently squeezed her perfect ass. Mia, in turn, ran her hands over Alaria’s body, bringing her hands up to touch Alaria’s breasts through the thin, light fabric of her summer shirt.

“Mm, it’s nice to get back home,” Mia said as they finally broke the lingering kiss. “Did your potion work?”

“It did!” Alaria said, gesturing to the table. “One Speech of the Beast potion, successfully concocted and ready for sale!”

“Do you think we have enough potions to open the shop now?” Mia asked.

Alaria shrugged. “I think so,” she said. “We’ve certainly got enough stock to open up some of the time, though we’ll still need to be able to spend a lot of time gathering and crafting, particularly if the shop is successful.”

“It will be,” Mia assured her. “Now that you’ve cleared the pass and caused such a stir in Hopeford, nobody will be able to resist your potions.”

“I hope so,” Alaria said.

“You’re letting self-doubt get the better of you again,” Mia chided her gently. “You need to watch out for that one, darling. There’s no need to doubt yourself. You’ve done well, and it’s only going to get better from here.”

Alaria hugged her. Mia was right. Alaria had been allowing her self-doubting voice to get control of her thoughts. There was nothing to be gained in that. The shop would be a success, Mia was right. And now that the valley around Daeron’s Pass was cleared, there was no lack of excellent and rare ingredients to collect. Alaria could make all the potions she desired, and with a bit of work, she was sure she could encourage plenty of people to buy them.

“You’re right,” she said. “Thanks. I guess sometimes I will still need a reminder from you, but you’re right. We’re doing well.”

“Of course we are,” Mia said. “Now, I’ve got a bunch of ingredients for potions in that bag, but I’ve also gotten sweaty, dirty, and scratched out in the woods collecting them. How about we go upstairs for a while? You can help me get clean, and then we can see what we want to do afterward. How about that?”

Alaria grinned. “That sounds excellent,” she said. “Just what I need after a morning’s crafting. Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

Half an hour later, moans of pleasure echoed through the house from upstairs. The cat rolled over and sighed. At least they weren’t doing it in here like they sometimes did. Recently, he’d been trying to sleep in the warm patch in front of the stove, and the two humans and the cat-human had all come in and started doing it on the kitchen table. He’d had to flee then, leaping out of the window and stalking off into the night, but usually they kept it to the upstairs rooms, and he could live with that.

The sun gleamed on the potions on the table, and the steam curled up from the untouched tea. Outside, the sun baked the little wooden shop building. The shutters were still closed, and the door was locked, but the whole building had been cleaned and freshly varnished, and above the door a new sign had been painted and hung.

In bright red letters the sign said Alaria’s Potions.

Below the shop name, a smaller sign that hung from the door read Opening Soon.

End of Book 1

Kraken Mage 2

Chapter

One

“Alaria! Alaria! Grozmikal has returned!”

Alaria Hartwood closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She’d been concentrating deeply, and it took a moment for her to rise from the conjuring trance. Magic glowed around her hands.

She blinked a few times, centering herself in the world around her before the door to the kitchen burst open, revealing the eager, purple-skinned face of Sasha the faerie, and behind her, Sasha’s partner, Palo. Palo was a human, and he went on two feet like anyone else, but Sasha was a faerie, powered with magical flight, and with two great, purple wings hanging behind her as a vector for the native magic of her kind.

Both Sasha and Palo were wide eyed and excited, and Palo waved a bulletin scroll - the Hope River Regular - in one hand.

“What’s all this?” Alaria said, turning with weary patience and an indulgent smile toward her hyperactive visitors.

“Grozmikal! Grozmikal!” Sasha squeaked.

“Grozmikal has returned!” Palo added, waving the bulletin scroll.

Alaria grimaced. On the table in front of her, a finely ground powder of Hell’s Breath mushroom lay on a sheet of thin, translucent parchment.

“Stop flapping that scroll around, Palo,” Alaria said, seeing the mushroom powder threatening to rise up and blow across the table. “These powders are delicate.”

“Oh, sorry,” Palo said. “But Grozmikal!”

“What is Grozmikal?”

“He’s returned!”

“Yes, I had got that far myself,” Alaria said patiently, “but I don’t know what Grozmikal is. I’ve never heard the word before, and so you telling me that he’s returned, whatever he is, doesn’t give me any more information.”

“But… Grozmikal!” Sasha exclaimed. “By all the gods of the glade, you’ve never heard of Grozmikal? Why, I never expected you to be so ignorant of something so obvious!”

“Sasha!” Palo scolded, scandalized by his partner’s total lack of tact.

Alaria laughed aloud. Sasha was often direct to the point of rudeness, but her own manner was so guileless and naive that it was nearly impossible to take offense at her bluntness. And it was true, after all. Alaria was ignorant of Grozmikal, whatever he might be, and apparently that was a big gap in her knowledge.

Sasha ignored Palo’s scolding. “So that means,” she continued, “that you must have no idea what we’re talking about!”

“You’re catching on!” Alaria smiled. “You might have worked that out sooner from the fact that I told you I had no idea what you were talking about, but I suppose that would have required you to stop talking and listen for a moment, and that’s a big ask for you when you’re excited!”

Sasha laughed merrily, her faerie voice like the tinkling of crystal chimes in the breeze. She fluttered up and down in the air, then stopped.

“Sorry,” she said, holding her wings still in the air. “Your powders. I didn’t mean to disturb them.”

“See?” Alaria said, folding the Hell’s Breath mushroom powder neatly into the paper and tucking it away. “You do listen sometimes. Here, Palo, give me that bulletin.”

Palo handed the scroll over. The Hope River Regular was a news bulletin scroll, one of several that served the Hope River valley, based in the city of Hopeford and distributed to the surrounding villages and towns of which Brighthill, where Alaria lived, was one. There was the Hopeford Hound, the Bishop’s Lean Bulletin, the Brighthill Inquirer, and the Sapheli Weekly Chronicle, among many others, and they all served to keep the residents of the valley up to date with the news both from the local area, from the rest of the Kingdom of Sapheli, and from the world outside.

Alaria ran her eye across the headline of the scroll, then sighed. The headline on the news bulletin read Grozmikal Returns! in blazing letters, but Alaria already knew that. It still didn’t mean anything to her.

Before she could get any further with the scroll, however, the back door that led from the kitchen out to the garden opened up, and Alaria looked up to see Mia stepping through. Alaria smiled. Mia was flushed with the gorgeous weather outside, and her face shone with a slight sheen of water. Her hair was damp, and she wore only a light, cream-colored shirt and loose red linen trousers. The toenails of her bare feet were painted red, and a gold bangle graced one of her ankles.

Alaria felt an instant rush of arousal as she looked at Mia, seeing the curves of her hips and the outline of her nipples through her light shirt. Mia had been bathing in the stream that ran through the garden. She looked healthy, fit, and radiant.

Mia was Alaria’s lover, and her love. They lived together here in the homestead at Number 4, Willowcreek Road, on the outskirts of the town of Brighthill. Though Alaria’s other lover, Beth, was also a part of their trio and very committed to Alaria, Beth was the first lover Alaria had found, and she was the first person who had even shown Alaria what sex meant. A life of questing, adventuring, and study had kept Alaria from ever discovering her own sexuality and desires. Mia had taught her, and as in everything else she’d done, Alaria had proved a quick learner.

“Hi,” Mia said, seeing Alaria’s look and putting more lust and seductive promise into that one word than another person else could have fitted into a whole stream of words. She approached the table, leaned over, and kissed Alaria full on the mouth.

Alaria met the kiss and returned it, her hands rising to grip Mia’s hips and draw her closer as their tongues met in the depths of the kiss. Desire flared between her legs, and she shifted in her chair.

A discreet clearing of the throat from Palo came at the same time as Sasha made a disdainful noise and said, “Excuse me! Other people in the room!”

Mia pulled away, laughing, and Alaria stuck a finger up at Sasha in a rude gesture.

“What about the bulletin?” Sasha persisted.

“Oh, yes,” Alaria said. She was holding the bulletin in her hand, but Mia’s arrival had made her completely forget it.

“What’s all this?” Mia said, looking at the scroll and the excited faces of Palo and Sasha.

“Apparently something has happened,” Alaria said, then glanced at the headline, pretending to refresh her memory. “Ah, yes,” she said with mock seriousness, pretending that she knew what it mean. “Grozmikal has returned. See?”

She brandished the scroll as evidence.

Sasha chuckled at Alaria’s play-acting. Of course, neither the scroll nor the words meant anything to Alaria, but she spoke them solemnly, as if she not only knew what they meant, but took them seriously as well.

“Grozmikal,” Mia said, her lip curling in distaste. “He’s such an asshole. I’m sorry to hear he’s back!”

“You’re not a fan of Grozmikal?” Sasha said, shocked.

“How could you tell?” Mia said sarcastically. “No, I’m not a fan of him or his exploits. I thought you knew that. He’s arrogant, self-absorbed, a show-off, and a massive sleazebag as well. And I don’t believe his stories, not for a minute. I don’t have to look far for a real adventurer. Grozmikal could kiss my ass - if I let him anywhere near my ass, which I wouldn’t.”

“Your ass is too good for him, by the sounds of it,” Alaria said.

“What, you mean you’ve not heard of him?” Mia asked, surprised. “The way you spoke, I thought you did.”

Alaria grinned at Sasha, who was giggling.

“I was just playing along,” Alaria said. “No, I’ve never heard of him.” She glanced down the first few lines of print in the bulletin scroll, but the printing was very poor, the typeface tiny and blurry, and the ink partially degraded by the heat and having been gripped in Palo’s sweaty hand on the way up the hill.

Bulletin scrolls were mass-produced and sold cheaply - they weren’t meant to last. From the little she could discern of the text, it all seemed to assume not only that the reader already knew who Grozmikal was and why his return was a big deal, but it also assumed that the reader was a massive fan of him and of his exploits.

The only bit of useful information took the form of a picture at the bottom of the sheet. It was a crude drawing, black lines with no shading, designed for the rapid printing and poor-quality paper of the bulletin scrolls. Alaria saw a representation of a beefy face with mutton-chop whiskers, a massive beard tied off into two plaits, and two small piggy eyes that peered out of deep sockets under forbidding brows.

Even in this crude representation, Alaria thought the face looked cunning, shifty, and malevolent.

“Who is he, then?” Alaria said, handing the damp scroll back to Palo, who scrunched it up and stuck it in his pocket. “You said he’s an adventurer, Mia?”

Mia nodded. “To be honest, I am surprised you’ve not heard of him. He’s pretty well-known around here, and I’d have thought he was well known in adventuring circles too. He’s a monster killer, and a particular enemy of the goblin tribes of the Ragdash, the range of mountains on the far east of the Hope River Valley. I don’t know how he’s so well-known, though. I guess it’s more to do with his own ability for marketing and self-aggrandizement than with any real skill in fighting.”

“But he killed Zontharb, the goblin chief, in single combat!” Sasha protested. “And he rescued the village of Jengberry Heath from a goblin attack. And don’t forget the siege of the Bloodbrood caves.”

“No proof, though,” Mia argued. “There’s no reason to think that he actually did any of that stuff. And even if he did, well, why should he be any more celebrated for it than anyone else? That kind of thing is the adventurers’ stock-in-trade. If he’s an adventurer, then that’s his bread and butter work. Why does it get him in the bulletins and celebrated when he visits a city, any more than a farmer who runs his farm well or a carpenter who makes a good table?”

“But he’s Grozmikal!” Sasha said, as if that explained it. “Ugh, perhaps you’re right,” she relented, realizing what she was saying. “Maybe he is just good at publicity. What do you think, Alaria? Does he sound like he’s unique among adventurers?”

“Unique?” Alaria said. “Not unique, no. If he has saved villages, killed goblin chiefs, and relieved sieges, then he’s certainly a high-level adventurer, and that’s a position of honor, but I have to say that I find the idea of him being celebrated and having fans rather odd. It’s not something I’ve ever come across before.”

“How did it work back when you were an adventurer?” Palo asked.

“I still am an adventurer,” she reminded him gently. “I’ve not retired, even though I’m not questing full-time anymore.” Sometimes, she had to remind herself of that, too, particularly in recent weeks. Things had been very quiet and peaceful since she and her friends had cleared out the orcs from Daeron’s pass.

“Okay,” Palo said, smiling. “How did it work when you were a full-time adventurer, then?”

Alaria chuckled. “For most of my career I was based out of Crownheart City. That’s the capital city of Sapheli, and it’s a long way south and east of this country backwater.” She grinned, taking the sting out of her words. She didn’t really consider the Hope River valley or the town of Brighthill to be a country backwater. On the contrary, she thought it was idyllic. She’d deliberately sought this northern valley out because it had been recommended to her as quiet, peaceful, and beautiful.

“Anyway, there were loads of adventurers there, of course,” she continued. “And they were organized into guilds. I was a member of one of the oldest and most famous of those guilds - the Guild of the Bloody Hand. Well, quests would come into the guild every day, from all corners of Sapheli. Some came to us at the Bloody Hand, and some came to other guilds. The guild council would decide whether to take a job or not, and if so, members of the guild would petition for the honor of taking on the contract. When we returned from fulfilling the contract we would be paid, and the guild would celebrate our achievements. Of course, when adventurers did particularly ambitious or exciting work, then word would sometimes get out, but in my experience it was much more common for adventurers to want the credit to go to their guild as a whole rather than to themselves as individuals.”

“Really?” Sasha asked. “But why?”

“Yeah,” Palo added. “Surely if you did something awesome, you’d want people to know about it.”

Alaria shook her head. “Not so much,” she said. “You don’t know much about adventurers, but they’re not the kind of people who seek fame and applause. If they wanted fame, there are many easier and safer ways to get it. Adventurers are students. They seek mastery - the mastery of the blade, of magic, of power. They want their guild to take the credit because what’s good for the guild is good for everyone. The kind of thing you’re talking about - fame, fans, getting your name in the bulletins - it’s not the kind of thing any adventurer guild I’ve ever heard of would approve of an individual looking for. And I didn’t know you had any adventurer guilds here in Hope River valley.”

Sasha and Palo looked at each other, then at Mia. “We don’t,” Palo said. “I’m certain of that. If there was such a thing, it would be in Hopeford, since that’s the main city. And if we had an adventurer’s guild, people would know about it.”

“So how does this Grozmikal get paid?” Alaria asked. “If there’s no guild, how does he get contracts? Unless he’s attached to a guild in some other district and goes there to collect his reward, but in that case, how come all his contracts are here in Hope River valley?”

“I don’t think he works through a guild,” Sasha said thoughtfully. “And I don’t think he takes on contracts, not in the way you’re describing. He does his own thing. In fact, I’ve heard that he makes his money by looting the enemies he kills, and from giving interviews and sitting for portraits. Oh, and selling his merchandise, of course.”

“Merchandise?” Alaria exclaimed, feeling utterly taken aback. “What, you mean mugs and things?”

“That’s right!” Sasha said brightly. “He has a whole range of goods with his image on them - Grozmikal mugs with his face painted on them, Grozmikal paintings showing scenes from his famous battles, Grozmikal books telling the stories of his exploits. He claims he wrote the books himself, but I suspect he pays other people to do that part for him. There’s quite a line in miniature figures of him, too, little statues and the like. People collect them and put them on their mantelpieces.”

Alaria laughed. “Don’t tell me you two have bought into this nonsense?” she asked.

“I may have a collection of figures,” Palo said defensively.

“And the books are rather good,” Sasha said.

“Don’t forget your three limited edition dishtowels,” Mia said dryly.

“And our portrait of him at the battle of Yammick’s Howl!” Sasha added.

Palo chuckled. “I have a pair of Grozmikal socks,” he admitted. Sasha and Palo were now enjoying how appalled Alaria and Mia were by their collection of merch.

“Oh, you have to be joking,” Alaria said. “Really? You collect this stuff?”

Palo chuckled. “They’re cool, Alaria, what can I say? Loads of people are into it. If it’s any consolation, I’d have a mug of your face too, any day. And an Alaria Hartwood teatowel.”

“Ooh, yes,” Sasha said. “And you could do a great book about the battle of Daeron’s Pass.”

“And what about the kraken you killed to get your tentacle power?” Mia suggested, deadpan. “I’m sure you could sell a cool diorama of you fighting the monster.”

And another of you and I fucking each other with the tentacles last night, too, Alaria thought, grinning, but didn’t say it aloud. Mia smiled back, and winked almost imperceptibly, guessing what Alaria was thinking about.

“Yes,” Sasha squealed. “Mugs, tea towels, books, models - you could get a whole range of merchandise, just like Grozmikal! You could sell it in your shop! I know a great painter in Hopeford, and the sculptor who makes the molds for the figures has his workshop in Bishop’s Lean, not far from here. You could…”

“No, no!” Alaria protested, interrupting Sasha’s flow. “Gods, what an idea! I’d hate that. Mugs and tea towels with my face on them? Ugh, no, it’s hideous.”

“Your face isn’t that hideous,” Mia said.

“Not my face, silly,” Alaria said, playfully pushing her. “The idea of having it on a towel.”

“What about Grozmikal, then?” Sasha asked. “Is he not really an adventurer, if having merchandise is so unusual?”

Alaria frowned and grew serious again. “I wasn’t sure at first,” she said. “It’s not unheard of for adventurers to work without a guild, or at least to travel far from home to work, but this… I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem right to me. He seems to have chosen to call himself an adventurer and then to operate in a part of the kingdom where not much is known about adventurers. If you wanted to take credit for being an adventurer without following any of the conventions, this would be the place to do it.”

“So you think he’s a fraud?” Sasha said.

“I don’t know either way,” Alaria said. “I wouldn’t want to prejudge the fellow, but it all sounds very irregular to me. Adventuring is a noble trade, and the conventions and rules are very important. If you want to call yourself an adventurer, you have to play by the rules. If not, you can just be a fighter and there’s nothing wrong with that, but calling yourself an adventurer when you’re just a fighter is… well, I’m not exactly sure what it is, but it’s wrong. I have to say, I suspect your Grozmikal is a fraud. How serious that fraud is I’m not sure – that depends on how much of his story is true. Either way, I’m interested and I’d like to find out more. I’d like a look at him. When is he due to arrive in Hopeford?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Palo said, glancing at his crumpled bulletin scroll then sticking it back in his pocket.

“Well, that’s good timing,” Alaria said. “Mia and I were planning to take a batch of potions through to Hopeford tomorrow anyway. We’ll get a look at this adventurer up close, I think. Then we’ll find out what he’s up to. If he is a fraud, he’ll not get away with it for long.”

Chapter

Two

Alaria and Mia were fucking in the upstairs bedroom next morning when dawn broke over the valley and shone into the town of Brighthill. They had woken up a little before dawn, both feeling hot and ready for each other, despite the fact that they’d been up until the small hours the previous night making love together as well.

A decent amount of time had passed since they’d first got together. Alaria had been inexperienced at first, even nervous, but no more. She had thrown herself into her exploration of what it meant to have sex, and had learned quickly what she liked and didn’t like.

It was a short list. In the first category was Everything and in the second, Nothing. At least, there was nothing that she’d tried so far that she would say she hadn’t liked.

Her biggest innovation was her tentacles. That was what set her apart from others, both as a lover and as a mage. In her first few weeks at Brighthill, she’d just been learning how to use the tentacles - they would appear spontaneously when needed, and she was clumsy in her control of them.

At first, she hadn’t seen them as anything more than functional - extra limbs, very useful of course, but no more than that.

But then had come the unexpected discovery that Mia found the tentacles a huge turn on. She wanted them, wanted to be filled by them, fucked by them, and to have them in her mouth. When Alaria had cheerfully agreed to this, she had discovered that the tentacles themselves gave her pleasure too. Slipping them inside Mia, into her mouth or between her breasts, or deep inside her vagina, gave Alaria pleasure intense enough that it could bring her to an orgasm without any other touch being needed.

Mia was as delighted with this discovery as Alaria was. Though having no interest in taking men as lovers, Mia did still enjoy being filled up. She was keen on using a few different things for that - hands were good, as was the carefully crafted dildo she’d created for herself before she’d met Alaria. But the tentacles were something special.

With Alaria’s ability to alter their size at will, to move them neatly and exactly, and to create as many of them as desired and more, the tentacles were able to satisfy Mia in a way she’d never been satisfied before. Added to that was the knowledge of how pleasurable it was for Alaria. Mia couldn’t get enough of the tentacle love.

Of course, the tentacles were useful for other things too, and Alaria was particularly proud of her ability to multitask. Mia was on top, and Alaria was lying back on the bed, gazing up at the magnificent sight of her lover. As the sun peeked through the gaps in the shutters, Alaria reached out with a tentacle across the room and flipped the shutters open, letting the golden sunlight flood the room, pouring across Mia’s naked body. The golden sun blazed across Mia, turning her flawless white skin to gleaming gold.

Her head was thrown back in ecstasy, and her hands were on her breasts, tweaking and squeezing her own nipples. Mia’s dark hair was completely disordered, scattered about her face from sleep and the energetic sex of last night and this morning.

Her vagina was filled with a thick, glowing purple tentacle, and the thick juices that both Mia and the tentacle excreted ran down the tentacle’s length, soaking Alaria’s legs and belly. She loved how messy their sex was, and she scooped some of the juices up and rubbed her own clitoris with a lubricated finger.

Alaria had mastered the art of causing a tentacle to form from the space just above her own vulva, allowing her to fuck almost (so she imagined) as if she’d had a cock of her own. Though she had no interest in having one, she recognized the utility of the placement. Having the tentacle appear from there allowed Mia to go on top like this, filled up and riding Alaria hard while Alaria lay back and enjoyed the show.

Mia was panting, bringing herself toward an orgasm with complete abandon. Alaria gloried in the sight of her gorgeous partner pleasuring herself, and the sight of Mia’s orgasm brough Alaria to her second climax of the morning.

They hit the pack of that wave together, Mia panting Alaria’s name while Alaria gripped Mia’s hips and growled like an animal, feeling the rich, deep flood of pleasure that ran through her whole body as she climaxed from the touch on her clitoris and the sensation of the tentacle that was inside Mia.

It was glorious, as beautiful as the dawn flooding the valley. Having the privacy of this house allowed them to give themselves to their pleasure with total abandon. Afterward, Alaria and Mia curled up together on top of the rumpled white sheets, not saying anything, but both glorying in the feeling of each other’s naked bodies, drinking in the scent of their lovemaking and the feelings of warmth and relaxation that came with it.

Alaria twisted her head to look out of the window. The sun was still low over the hills. Dawn came very early at this time of year, and there was no need to rush to get up. She reached a tentacle across and eased the shutters closed again. No rush, she thought as she let sleep drift over her again.

“Is Beth not coming?” Mia asked.

“She’s working today,” Alaria answered. “She and Grezkull have something to do at the inn, some renovation project I think. I would have helped them out today, but we have potions to deliver.”

They walked together down to the edge of town near Palo’s house, where they met Palo and Sasha and set out for Hopeford. Now that the pass that split the road had been made safe, travelers on foot could walk without interruption from Brighthill and the surrounding villages to Hopeford, the white and pink stone city that was the capital of the Hope River valley region. Alaria could tell that Palo and Sasha were edgy. It would take some time before those who had feared the pass for so long were able to relax and travel without fear, but Alaria knew it would come in time.

“For my part,” she said as they walked through the pass, “I see this a place to forage for ingredients now, more than anything.”

“There’s certainly many rare and wonderful things in the woods,” Sasha agreed, glancing from side to side in a hushed voice. Palo was hurrying, his arms stiff at his sides, his head ducked as if in anticipation of a blow. From the other direction, another small knot of travelers were approaching, and they too walked with heads down and shoulders hunched, fearful of the very place.

For four years at least, this gulley was impassable except with a large group, Alaria thought. I must have patience with them. It will take a long time for the memory of that fear to fade.

Alaria wasn’t afraid. A glance at Mia showed that she wasn’t either. Mia’s head was up and her eyes gleamed with pride as she looked around the gloomy, wooded gulley that they had cleared together. Alaria still wondered what the story was around the orc infestation of the pass. Tunnel orcs - a strange breed of spore orcs, nothing like the nobler and more intelligent mountain orcs - had set up camp here, based out of a cave network at the far end of the wooded gulley.

Alaria and her friends had killed the orc boss and routed the menials, destroying the cave network and making sure none had survived. In the process, they had caused the local guards of Hopeford City to awaken from their apathy and form up to fight, and that, too, was a good result. It meant that the city was a safer place to live now, and that the guards took more pride in their occupation.

One downside to this (as Alaria saw it) was that she herself had become well-known in the city, and in the district as a whole. She’d moved to Hope River valley and taken up her abode in Brighthill in the hope of having a quieter life. She wanted to dedicate herself to potion creation and the refining of the non-combat applications of magic, and to exploring the tentacle power that she’d absorbed when she’d killed Dbuk, the primordial kraken.

Now, she found herself something of a local celebrity, and she didn’t like it. Not for her, the adulation sought by Grozmikal.

“What are you scowling about?” Mia said, nudging her playfully. They had come up out of the gulley and were marching down the road together, toward the gleaming city of Hopeford, glowing like a jewel in the distance, as it reflected the morning sun from its pink and white stone walls.

“Oh, I was just thinking about how I’ve become well-known in Hopeford after the battle at the pass,” Alaria said. “I didn’t realize I was scowling.”

“You’ve become less careful to hide our emotions since you’ve been living here,” Mia said. “It’s good!”

“You must be relaxing,” Sasha said. “You had a bit of a stick up your butt when you first moved here, but Brighthill is teaching you to chill out a bit!”

Palo grimaced at Sasha’s bluntness, but then he grinned as a new through struck him. “Hey, Alaria, maybe if you stay popular, you can get as famous as Grozmikal! Thought anymore about that line of mugs yet?”

He cackled, leaping away as Alaria swiped at him. She still found the idea of selling promotional merchandise very unappealing.

Palo had only been joking, but when they arrived in Hopeford it turned out that he was nearer to the truth than Alaria would have liked.

“Alaria! Alaria Hartwood!” a squeaky voice from their right said as they walked into Hopeford, marching down the main street of the beautiful city. Alaria jumped, glancing down to see a small, wizened creature rushing toward her with a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. He wore very good linen clothes, clean white and with altogether too many silver buckles tinkling on his belt and his boots.

He was a golem, but not the usual kind of creature one thought about when one said the word. In older times, a golem had been a servant created by a mage to do his bidding, but in modern days this was no longer the case at all, and the golems were creatures of their own. Far from being mindless animations, servants created to do the bidding of some elemental mage, they were now independent people with lives, minds, and in many cases, jobs.

This one was a journalist.

“Hopeford Chronicle, m’lady, any comment on the return of Grozmikal?”

“Lady Hartwood, what do you think of the rearrangement of the city guard?” said another journalist - also a small, wizened, dried-up, stick-like golem.

“Alaria, will you be starting your own range of products now that Grozmikal is back on the scene?” said a third, a short, stubby human with an eyepatch.

Suddenly, Alaria was being swamped by the journalists of the Hopeford bulletins.

“I have nothing to say!” Alaria growled, though her words were drowned by the babble of questions. “Get out of my face! Next person to call me m’lady gets a black eye! The only thing I’m here to sell is potions, and as for Grozmikal, he can take his promotional mugs and stick them up his…”

“What she means,” Mia said forcefully, pushing herself in front of Alaria and addressing the journalists in a loud, carrying voice that made them all shut up, “is that she’s happy to see Grozmikal returned and she wishes him well. She’s pleased to see the city guard doing well, and she’s delighted to introduce her very own Hartwood brand potions, available from many reputable sellers here in Hopeford and the surrounding towns. That’s all for now, thank you, thank you…”

With Mia on one side and Palo on the other, and with Sasha bringing up the rear, Alaria found herself being hustled through the crowd of journalists and on down the street.

The journalists had gone from wide-eyed dismay when Alaria had snapped at them, to clucking approval when Mia had taken over, and they now parted before Alaria and her entourage, letting them through. Mia bundled Alaria into a nearby cafe and sat her down in a window seat.

“Get us some drinks, would you, Palo?” she said, and Palo nodded, heading for the counter.

“What’s the matter with you, Lari?” Mia demanded. “You can’t go threatening journalists with a black eye and telling Grozmikal to stick mugs up his butt. People like journalists, almost as much as they like Grozmikal. You need to be nice, you need to be sweet.”

“Exactly,” Sasha agreed. “You can’t be a grumpy bastard to them, or they’ll write all kinds of horrible stuff in their journals and then nobody’ll buy your potions and everyone will think your tentacles are weird.”

Mia chuckled. “Sasha is right, though she puts it more bluntly, as usual. These people may seem silly, Alaria, but they need to be managed. Like it or not, you’re getting a bit of a reputation as an interesting character around here, and unless you play nice in your interactions with people - especially the press - you’ll end up being shunned.”

Alaria scowled and drew a breath, but Mia spoke before Alaria could. “And don’t tell me you don’t care what they think of you,” Mia said sternly. “Maybe you don’t, but it doesn’t matter. They care what they think of you, so if you want an easy life and a successful business, you’re going need to rein in your instinct to threaten to punch reporters and stick crockery up celebrity adventurers’ butts, okay?”

“I really don’t like being called m’lady,” Alaria growled.

“Yeah, I was getting that,” Mia said dryly.

Sasha spoke up. “It’s better to be called m’lady than to be called the bitchy lesbian with the two girlfriends and the weird sex tentacles who lives on the outskirts of town and who was cool once but who nobody likes anymore because she punches reporters and disses Grozmikal… isn’t it?” Sasha delivered the sentence in one long, fast breath, gasping as she finished speaking.

Alaria’s face cleared and she laughed reluctantly. She felt her mood lightening as she did so. “You’re right, Sasha, it’s definitely better than being called that,” she agreed. “Now you put it that way, I can kind of see your point. Okay, okay, I’ll be nice. And if anyone asks me about having promotional products, I’ll just push my potions, okay?”

“And no punching reporters or adventurers!” Sasha reminded.

“No punching anyone, if you can help it,” Mia corrected.

Palo placed the drinks down on the table and sat down. “Hey, word travels fast,” he said.

“What d’you mean?” Mia asked, sounding worried.

“Oh, nothing bad. Everyone’s saying how magnanimous Alaria was when she was interviewed by the golem from the Hopeford Chronicle. Supports Grozmikal, new line of promotional potions, all that.” He winked at Alaria. “Looks like Mia’s the one to handle your publicity,” he said. “There was only one person near enough to hear what you tried to say before Mia stepped in. He wanted to print that you’d threatened to punch Grozmikal in the eye, but the word is that he was shouted down. You got away with it that time, but you’ll need to learn to be a bit more circumspect in future. You see…” he began, about to embark into an explanation.

“Don’t,” Alaria said, holding up a hand. “Sasha and Mia have already said all there is to say. I’m going to do my best not to punch anyone, okay?”

“Sounds good to me. Now drink up. The great adventurer’s return parade is soon, and I want to get a front row seat.”

Chapter

Three

“He’s a fraud,” Alaria said.

“How can you tell?” Mia asked. “I mean, I don’t doubt it - I’m not impressed at all with him, but how can you be so sure?”

Alaria narrowed her eyes and began to count the points off on her fingers. “He’s not wearing a guild insignia,” she said. “He has no scars except that big one on his face. He’s got really long hair and a big beard. He’s carrying a non-standard weapon set. His boots are too big, his gloves are all wrong, and he’s wearing… ugh, he’s wearing a Linerean neck stock.”

“The guild insignia and the scarring - well, I can understand those,” Mia said. “But the rest? Surely an adventurer’s hair, beard, and his clothing are his own business?”

“You don’t understand,” Alaria said, shaking her head. “It’s not that there’s a rule against it, but no adventurer who’s spent any time training will wear his hair like that. Honestly, nobody would last five minutes doing that. It’s like boob armor.”

“Boob armor?” Mia said with a laugh. “What the hell is boob armor?”

“Oh, you know, when women wear steel plate that’s made to show off their breasts.”

“I’ve never seen that,” Mia said, “but I think I’d like to like to. Nobody wears that around these parts.”

“You’ve never seen anyone wearing it because it doesn’t work. Nobody actually wears it, because it doesn’t protect you in a fight. Imagine me running around fighting orcs with my breasts out!”

Mia closed her eyes. “Okay,” she said, “I’m imagining it. Yep, that’s good. Mm, I’m imagining it.”

“I mean, it wouldn’t work…” Alaria said again.

“Wait, I’m not finished imagining it yet,” Mia said holding a hand up to stop her.

Alaria rolled her eyes and looked back at the spectacle. Grozmikal’s return parade was impressive, she had to admit. Or at least, it was at first glance. But when she looked more closely she could see that it was tacky and overblown, and it relied on lots of people hanging around the adventurer and making the parade look bigger than it was. Grozmikal was at the head of a group of about 20 soldiers who marched in well-ordered ranks.

The soldiers were dressed in gold-plated armor, like Grozmikal himself, and they were armed with spears and shields, but Alaria could tell by their sloppy timing and unsynchronized marching that they were no more real soldiers than Grozmikal was a real adventurer.

However, fraud or not, it was popular. Most of the citizens of Hopeford and, by the looks of it, from many of the nearby villages as well, had turned out to see the spectacle.

Everyone was talking about Grozmikal’s latest triumph. It was said that he’d singlehandedly slain a champion of Neroli the ice queen. She was supposed to have harnessed the power of chaos magic and set up a fortress in the mountain range of Yashir. Alaria didn’t know anything about the area that the people called Yashir, but she knew enough about magic to know that chaos power and ice magic didn’t go together.

Whether Mia and her other friends were willing to take her seriously or not, she knew that Grozmikal was no adventurer. In fact, she suspected that he wasn’t even a fighter.

He was taller than she had expected, but aside from that, the picture in the bulletin scroll had actually given her a fairly accurate impression of him. His face was bloated and porcine, blotchy red, with beady little eyes above his outrageous whiskers. He marched proudly at the head of his company, turning his head from side to side and waving beneficently at the crowd like a temple priest dispensing blessings.

His armor was good, she had to admit that. Of course, it was no adventurer’s armor - way too heavily decorated - and she suspected that it was not even real steel. He looked too unfit to bear the weight of a full suit of plate armor, never mind the gargantuan two handed blade that he carried on his back. She suspected some light composite metal plated with gold.

She leaned forward, her forearms on the back of the wooden bench where Mia sat. Alaria was standing, Mia sitting, and Alaia breathed deep, scenting the smell of her lover’s hair and skin. Today, Mia was wearing a citrus perfume, and Alaria could have breathed the smell all day.

Mia was sitting with her eyes closed, still apparently imagining Alaria fighting orcs in skimpy, ineffective armor.

“You’re going to miss the main event,” Alaria said, speaking into her ear.

Mia reached up and took Alaria’s hand, leaning her head on her arm as they watched Grozmikal strut up toward them and stop for a moment, waving from side to side and giving everyone a moment to gaze at him.

He’d been doing this the whole way down the road, stopping every few steps to wave and smile, making sure everyone got a chance to see him. Golem journalists dashed about in front of him, peppering him with questions, some of them sketching in notepads, others chatting to the delirious citizens who waved flags with Grozmikal’s face on them and jostled each other out of the way so they could get close enough to touch his armor.

The gold-plated warrior’s eyes swept across the bench that Alaria and Mia had chosen as their vantage point, and lingered for a moment before moving on. Alaria wondered about that. Had she imagined it? Mia had said he was a sleaze - had he just stopped to stare at them because they were sexy? Or was there something else?

Had he, perhaps, detected the presence of a real adventurer in the crowd?

A moment later, Grozmikal started walking again, his gold-plated and totally impractical boots clanking on the ground, the sun gleaming off his gold shoulder plates and winking on the highlights of his filigreed chest plate. He held an armored fist up in the air, and the soldiers behind him made a passable attempt at banging their spears on their shields in sync. The crowd cheered. Alaria scowled.

It was clear to her that Grozmikal was a showman, nothing more. Of course, if he wanted to make a display of himself there was nothing inherently wrong with that, but he was calling himself an adventurer, and that was wrong. That title was a hard-earned thing, a real thing, a thing that deserved to be honored an acknowledged. Even if it was not an official designation, it was still a title that Alaria had gone to hell and back to feel that she’d earned. Seeing this man use that title as a prop to boost his image made her feel a deep anger.

Theatre was harmless, if that was what it was. But this was not just theatre - this was deception, pure and simple, and it was a deception that dishonored her trade.

“Hey, Alaria, I got you something!” a voice said, jolting her from her thoughts. It was Palo, running up, gleaming-eyed and out of breath, his face bright with excitement. Above him, Sasha fluttered up and down, getting the best view she could of Grozmikal and his soldier guard.

Palo held something out to Alaria. She peered at it, unsure exactly what it was at first, then she groaned as she realized.

“Oh, you didn’t, Palo,” she said. “Tell me you didn’t buy me a Grozmikal figurine.”

Palo nodded enthusiastically. “And Sasha got you a mug!”

Mia laughed merrily as Alaria made a show of putting her face in her hands.

“Lighten up,” Palo said. “It’s a limited edition!”

Later, the gentle warmth of early evening found Alaria and Mia sitting in the shade of tall trees, listening to the sound of the river, and finishing off a very good meal.

It had been a good day. After watching the parade go past, they’d gone around the various shops that wanted to sell Alaria’s potions, unloading their stock and ticking off their order book, and collecting the cash from the sales on the previous batch. This was Alaria’s third delivery run to Hopeford with potions, and she was pleased that her goods were selling so well and that people were pleased with them. Healing potions were the most popular, but there were a few sales of strength potions, night vision potions, and one or two powerful virility concoctions that one healer sold discreetly to elderly gentlemen in need of a lift.

Sasha and Palo had gone out drinking with the other revelers, enjoying the festival atmosphere in the city, but after their day’s potion selling, Mia and Alaria had gone back to Jarack’s restaurant where they had eaten on that first day when they’d come to Hopeford together, before either of them had fully realized they were in love.

Alaria had placed the little Grozmikal figurine on the table beside her plate, and Mia had insisted that she should have her drink in the mug that Sasha had bought for her. Alaria had decided to try to be less grumpy about it and to play along, so she sipped ice-cold fermented berry wine from the hideous cup and eyed the little figure at the edge of the table. The wine was not strong, in fact it had hardly any alcoholic content at all, and that was how Alaria preferred it. She had never enjoyed being drunk, the few times she’d tried it, and these days she was happy to be able to have the mild, refreshing taste without the spinning head.

The restaurant was busy. Grozmikal’s return had brought many visitors for the day, and though there were plenty of restaurants in Hopeford many of the wealthier visitors had chosen Jarack’s as the place to eat. Alaria had thought she and Mia would be lucky to get a seat, but she was both pleased and a little unnerved to discover that because she was Alaria Hartwood who had cleared the pass and reformed the city guard, the owner was able to immediately provide her and Mia with a table in their favorite spot by the river.

“Always available for you, Alaria,” Jarack had said, ushering them with a flourish toward their table.

Now, as she sat digesting her meal, sipping her wine, and gazing at the Grozmikal figurine, she found that she understood the so-called adventurer in a way she hadn’t before.

“Access,” she said to Mia, “He gets access, like we did tonight when we got this table. Access, adulation, fans. I bet he gets whatever he wants around here when he sweeps in - his favorite table at restaurants, his favorite meals, his favorite rooms at the inn, women, gold, respect… It’s nice being recognized, being given a table. I can see how a person could get addicted to that, how they might take it too far and tell a pack of lies to keep having it.”

“You really think he’s a fraud?” Mia asked.

“I know he is,” Alaria said. “But I suppose I’m realizing that in a way, I can’t blame him.”

“And is he really doing any harm, even if it is all an act?” Mia added.

Alaria shrugged. “Who can tell? I don’t know enough about him to say for sure. I’d like to find out a bit more about him before I make a judgement. I mean, lying is never good, but if all he’s doing is telling tall tales to get attention and sell his tacky souvenirs, well, is it really so bad as all that?”

“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Mia said. “There’s something else here, isn’t there? I think it’s the fact that he’s calling himself an adventurer that gets to you the most.”

“It is,” Alaria admitted. “But even then, adventurer is a title, but it’s not a formal title, no matter how hard I feel I worked for it, and no matter how respected it is down in the capital.”

“You’re mellowing,” Mia said with a smile.

“Must be the wine,” Alaria joked, hefting the Grozmikal cup and draining the last of her non-alcoholic drink.

They were getting ready to leave and head back to their favorite hotel when there was a commotion over by the entrance to the restaurant’s garden seating area.

“Oh, gods, it’s not him, is it?” Mia said, peering over the heads of the other diners, who had all turned to look.

“Ugh,” Alaria said. “It is him. And Jarack is bringing him over here. Damn, he must think we have something in common. Ah, damn it, I didn’t want this. I should have anticipated it.”

“Too late now,” Mia said. “Here he comes.”

Alaria cringed as she realized that she’d not removed the figurine or the mug from her table, but it was too late to do anything about that either. She plastered a smile on her face and stood as Jarack, the owner of the restaurant, made an elaborate bow in their direction and presented the tall figure of Grozmikal the so-called adventurer.

“Mr Groz, here is the woman I was telling you about,” Jarack gushed. “This is our very own Alaria Hartwood, adventurer, savior of the trade route through Daeron’s Pass. I’m so glad to be able to bring you together.”

“We were just leaving,” Alaria said ungraciously. She felt acutely uncomfortable, and it was making her rude.

“Nonsense,” Grozmikal boomed. “Sit, sit, I’ve heard so much about you!” Then, to Alaria’s surprise, he leaned over the table and spoke in a quiet, rapid voice, so that Jarack wouldn’t hear. “Please, I would very much appreciate a quiet word with you. Will you stay just for a little while at least?”

Alaria and Mia glanced at each other and then Alaria nodded. There was more to this than met the eye, and she was intrigued. She nodded once, then spoke in a loud voice so Jarack could hear. “Of course, Grozmikal, it’s always a pleasure to meet a fellow adventurer. Jarack, some more drinks are in order, I think!”

“Straight away!” Jarack beamed, and bustled off.

“Thank you,” Grozmikal said, sinking into his chair. “Thank you very much for agreeing to stay.”

His voice was quiet and relieved, very different from how it had been a moment before. In fact, everything about him was different. Now that there was no one close by, he sank into his chair like a man crushed under a heavy burden. He took a deep, steadying breath and straightened up again, carefully flattening his beard out on his knees. His eyes caught sight of the figurine on the table, and the mug, and he shuddered at the sight of them.

Jarack reappeared leading a train of lackeys, and in a moment Grozmikal had regained his jovial, theatrical persona. He boomed jokes at the waiters, slapped Jarack on the back, tipped extravagantly, and beamed around at everyone until they had all left, and then he immediately dropped the whole act and sighed again. Listlessly, he picked up a stuffed vine leaf from a plate and bit into it.

“Mm, that’s good!” he exclaimed. “I’m hungry.”

His appetite and his interest had been reignited by the taste of the food, and he began to tuck in. Alaria and Mia watched in silence as he quickly and tidily polished off the bowl of vine leaves, then soaked the oil up with some bread.

Wiping his hands on a napkin, he smiled shamefacedly at them. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “Starving. Nothing all day.”

“That’s all right,” Alaria said. She couldn’t figure out what he was about, and she didn’t know quite how to proceed. She decided to put the ball in his court.

“When you sat down, you seemed as if you had something important you wanted to say to me. What is it?”

He nodded, then closed his eyes for a moment as if steeling himself for some hard task. He opened them again and looked at Alaria.

“You’re an adventurer,” he stated. “A real adventurer, with a guild. I heard you were in the Guild of the Bloody Hand down in Crownheart City?”

Alaria nodded. “I still am a member, though I’m on hiatus and I don’t expect to be contracting for them again.”

“In that case, adventurer, I have a quest for you.”

Alaria didn’t like the sound of this. “What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously.

He leaned forward in his chair and whispered. “I need your help,” he said. “I need the help of a real adventurer.”

“To do what?” Alaria asked.

“To save me. I need you to save me!”

“Save you? Save you from who?”

“From Neroli, the Ice Queen of Yalish!”

Chapter

Four

Alaria found her voice first. “Wait a minute,” she demanded. “Just hold on one damn minute. You need to be saved from the ice queen? I thought you were supposed to have just come back from defeating the ice queen. That’s what everyone is saying.”

“Oh, come on,” Grozmikal snapped. “You don’t believe that, do you? No, I know you don’t. I can see it in your eyes, you’ve more sense. You’re a real adventurer.”

“Are you saying you’re not?” Mia put in.

Grozmikal looked at her for a long moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m not. Alaria is right. It’s a fraud, an imposture, a gimmick, a marketing trick.” His eyes went back to Alaria. “You know. You understand.”

“I thought that there was something wrong about you,” Alaria said slowly. “Yes, I confess I thought it was all an act from the first I heard of you. The statues,” she gestured to the little figurine. “The statues, the mugs, all the merchandise… It’s just not the way of a true adventurer. We don’t do things like that. We don’t seek that kind of attention.”

Grozmikal nodded. “Go on,” he said.

“I think you came up here to pretend you were something you were not. Sapheli is a big place, and Hope River valley is very far away from the parts where real problems happen, where there is real work for adventurers to do. There are no guilds, there’s no action, and the community of the valley is pretty well insulated from the world outside. Few people come from outside, and few people leave. What better place to pretend to be something you’re not?”

“But we’ve heard of adventurers here,” Mia protested. “Everyone knows what an adventurer is.”

“Yes,” Alaria said, “but before I came, had you ever seen one?”

Mia shook her head.

“Aye, and there’s something else,” Alaria said. “The orc infestation in the pass. If you’d been a real adventurer, you’d have cleared that out for the good of the locals. As it was, you went off to defeat so-called threats on the borderlands of Hope River valley. You told tall tales about your exploits, but you never fought the real threat that was present here in the town.”

Sudden anger flared in her heart as she looked at his shame-faced expression. “Was any of it real, Grozmikal? Have you ever wielded a blade at all? Were any of the stories true? What drove you to this? And why are you telling me about it now? How can you justify any of this? Come on, explain yourself. I won’t help you unless I know the whole story about what’s happened here.”

He nodded, dipped his head and closed his eyes for a moment as if gathering himself, then leaned forward to speak confidentially to them. Before he could utter a word, however, Mia’s eyes flickered up and to the left.

“Wait,” she said quietly. “Say nothing yet.”

Alaria had spotted the approaching newcomers as well, and the fact that Grozmikal remained so entirely unaware of them was the final proof - if any were needed - that he had no fighter’s skills. He had no situational awareness at all; two people had approached him from behind, and he had not even noticed.

“What?” he asked, dully.

“Behind you,” Alaria said. “I think they might be fans…”

He looked crushed for a moment and then gathered himself. Alaria had to admire the resolution it clearly took to plaster his jovial air on once again and get so quickly into character. Whatever else he might or might not be, he was a good actor. It had clearly taken a lot for him to admit his fraud to them. He seemed crushed under the burden of his problems, and to be able to switch back into character from that fragile place took an ability that Alaria didn’t have.

There’s no way I could be so dishonest, she reflected. And after all, it’s probably a survival mechanism. Whatever else he’s mixed up in, if the people of Hopeford found out he’s not what he says he is, they’d probably tear him limb from limb.

The newcomers were two fashionably dressed and extravagantly made-up women. Their dresses were sheer and left little to the imagination, and their necks, wrists, fingers, and ankles dripped with gold and silver jewelry. They were attractive in their way, Alaria thought - attractive aesthetically - but from their vapid laughter and artificial smiles, she guessed there was not much going on below the surface.

She narrowed her eyes and began to scowl, but Mia kicked her under the table. “Be nice,” she hissed out of the corner of her mouth, and Alaria realized Mia was right. As with the incident with the journalists, it wouldn’t do to start insulting these fashionable citizens of Hopeford.

One of the women was blonde, and the other dark. The blonde one took the lead, stepping up and putting the tips of her fingers on Grozmikal’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you, but we just had to come and say hello,” she gushed.

“We’re such huge fans of yours,” the dark-haired woman added, fluttering her eyelids and smiling seductively at him. “We have some merchandise of yours that we’d just love for you to autograph for us… but it’s, uh, back at our hotel.”

The blonde woman gave a throaty laugh and put her hand on her friend’s hip. “If you’d like to come and see us later, you could sign our merchandise there,” she added.

On cue, as if it were a practiced move, the dark-haired woman leaned forward and slipped a little card under the edge of Grozmikal’s plate. She whispered in his ear, then turned and she and her friend sashayed away, giggling together and glancing back over their shoulders at the famous man who sat looking deeply embarrassed opposite Alaria and Mia.

He pulled the card out and made a sound of distaste.

“Of course they’re staying at the Hopeford Home,” he groaned. “That’s where I’m staying. I’ll have to spend the whole rest of my visit avoiding them, or more likely I’ll have to give them at least a couple of hours tonight to make them go away. It’s one of the most onerous parts of this whole charade, the women.”

“Sorry, what?” Alaria asked. “I’d have thought you’d jump at the chance to spend the night with them. Most men would.”

“Well, I’m not most men, am I?” he snapped, clearly nettled. “Look,” he continued a moment later after gathering himself. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“Same place as you,” Alaria answered.

“And same place as them,” Mia added, nodding toward the two women who were just leaving.

Grozmikal brightened. “That’s good!” he said. “We can go back to the hotel together and talk in privacy, and maybe the word will spread that I’ve already been seen with two attractive women, and the rest of the gold-diggers of this damn city will leave me alone.”

“Hey, back off, you sleazeball,” Mia snapped, growing angry. “Don’t you realize we’re not interested in you? Ugh, is that all this is about? You’re just trying to get us into bed with you?”

“No, no!” Grozmikal said, holding up his hands. “I’m not interested in that at all! But if I’m seen with you two, then it means the others might leave me alone!”

“You sure?” Mia growled, her eyes narrowed.

“Honest,” he assured her. “I’m… that is… Well, I’m really not that interested in women at all. I’m much more interested in men, but that doesn’t fit with my image in the town.”

Mia snorted with surprised laughter. “You’re attracted to other men? Not women at all?”

Grozmikal shrugged. “I can be attracted to women sometimes,” he said, “and when it’s necessary, there are some potions I can use to help me to… anyway. But I’ve never been that interested. And I’ve only ever been in love with… Look, can we not talk about it anymore?”

Alaria felt a sudden stab of pity for this man. He was a deceitful scoundrel, that much was clear, but there was something going on with him and whatever it was, he was clearly in way over his head.

“Let’s go,” she said, making her decision. “We’ll go back to the hotel together. That’ll hopefully save you some unwanted attention, and it’ll give us the chance to hear your story in privacy as well.”

“Thank you,” Grozmikal said sincerely, with a deep sigh of relief. “Thank you very much.”

Alaria rolled her eyes. “Come on, then,” she said, and stood. She had been looking forward to getting back to the hotel and spending a sexy night with Mia, but that was clearly going to have to be postponed. She wanted to know Grozmikal’s story.

If she was being completely honest with herself, she wanted to help him.

They caused quite a stir leaving the restaurant and heading through town together. The gold-armored soldiers from the parade were waiting outside the restaurant, three of them, dressed now in lighter armor without as much decoration, and armed with short-bladed swords and small, round buckler shields. They had expressionless eyes, and they paid no heed to Alaria and Mia beyond an initial glance.

Grozmikal led the way, booming and joshing with everyone who approached him. Alaria felt embarrassed to realize that everyone thought they were going back to the hotel to have sex with him, but Mia spoke to her quietly and made her realize the necessity of it.

“It won’t do any harm,” she whispered in Alaria’s ear, “and it may even do some good. I want to help him too, so let’s just play along.”

“Oh, very well,” Alaria grumbled. “But if he tries anything on once we get back there, I’ll have his head off - and I don’t mean the one on his shoulders.”

Mia sniggered, and one of the stoney-faced guards looked at her, then away.

“I don’t think much of these bodyguards,” Mia whispered.

“Odd, aren’t they?” Alaria replied.

“It’s almost as if they’re watching him to make sure he doesn’t get away, rather than protecting him,” Mia said.

“I was thinking just the same thing,” Alaria replied under her breath.

They knew the manager of the Hopeford Home hotel. In fact, they’d been here so often now that he was almost becoming a friend.

“Hello, Sinjin,” Alaria said, and Sinjin smiled and spread his arms in welcome. He was a small, alert man with a huge handlebar mustache, a red face, and small, alert eyes. In fact, he rather resembed Grozmikal in a way, though he was much smaller.

Grozmikal’s armor might have been fake, and the man himself wasn’t in anything remotely resembling good physical condition, but he was big, and not just in his belly. He had broad shoulders, long arms, and he was tall, even for a human man, at well over six feet. His enormous white beard and mass of hair added to the effect, and it was this extravagant facial hair and the small, gleaming eyes that made him resemble the hotel owner more than anything.

“Alaria and Mia,” Sinjin the hotel manager beamed, “and in the company of my good friend and valued customer, Grozmikal the adventurer! Welcome, welcome, all of you. Alaria, you’ll want your usual suite? Or shall you be sharing with Grozmikal this time?”

He gave a sleazy wink that seemed to take in the whole lobby. Several other patrons had slowed or stopped altogether to take in the spectacle of the famous adventurers arriving in the hotel in each others’ company. At Sinjin’s words, there was a muttering of salacious laughter in the crowd.

“We’ll be doing both,” Mia said, stepping forward and taking charge before Alaria’s temper could manifest again. “We’ll take our usual suite and we’ll be spending some time with Grozmikal in his rooms.” She gave an excellent impression of a horny simper toward Grozmikal, and he attempted a flirtatious laugh in return. Alaria made do with not breaking out a mass of tentacles and killing a few of the gawpers to let off steam.

Fame, she thought. How could I let this happen? I moved out here for an easy life, now there’s going to be gossip about my imagined sex life in the damn bulletins.

As if on cue, a golem journalist team - sketcher and scribbler - appeared from a side room and began sketching and scribbling for all they were worth.

“Come along, dear,” Mia said sweetly. “Let’s go see what Grozmikal has in his room for us. I bet it’s really big, don’t you?”

Alaria could feel a vein in her forehead pulsing. “Undoubtedly,” she said with ice in her voice, then smiled a ghastly smile. From the corner of her eye, she saw the two women who had tried to chat Grozmikal up earlier. They were both looking disappointed and appalled at Grozmikal’s choice. Alaria looked that way and met the eyes of the blonde one.

“Bitch,” the woman mouthed at her, and her dark-haired companion sniggered.

Alaria felt her lip curl and her fists clench, but before she could get herself in trouble Mia hustled her through a door and up a corridor. Suddenly, it was just Grozmikal, Mia, Alaria, and the two ever-present guards. They walked up the corridor together in silence, climbed a flight of stairs, and finally came to rest in front of the double door to Grozmial’s suite. The two guards took up their positions, one on either side of the door, and Grozmikal opened the door and led Mia and Alaria inside.

It was a very nice suite, even more luxurious than the one Alaria was used to staying in. Grozmikal flopped into an armchair by the window and poured a drink from a glass bottle on a side table next to the chair.

“Ugh,” he said, “thank you both so much for playing along. That must have been a nightmare for you both.”

“It wasn’t great,” Alaria said, “but I think Mia handled it better than I did.”

Grozmikal gave a weary smile. “You did fine. Thanks for not killing anyone. I could tell you wanted to.”

“What’s all this about, Grozmikal?” Alaria said. “Come on, we’ve gone through all this nonsense to get back here with you and get some privacy, so you may as well tell us the story now.”

“I will,” he said, “but I’m waiting for one more person first.”

Alaria’s eyes narrowed and she glared at him. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What are you saying?”

But before he could answer her, there was a creaking noise from the far corner of the room. A bookcase built into the wall swung back, and a figure stepped into the room.

“Sinjin!” Alaria exclaimed as the hotel manager walked forward into the light of the lamp. “What in the hell are you doing here?”

“I thought it best to come along as well,” Sinjin said. “Groz has some explaining to do, and I think I do too. Take a seat,” he suggested, gesturing to a comfortable couch opposite Grozmikal’s chair, as he himself sat down on a cushion and leaned against the wall.

Alaria did so, then waited.

“Do you want to start, Groz, or shall I?” Sinjin said, looking at Grozmikal.

Grozmikal sighed. “I owe it to them,” he said. “I’ll start. It’s time for me to tell the whole story.”

Chapter

Five

“It was only a joke at first,” Grozmikal said.

“A joke?” Alaria asked in disbelief.

Grozmikal nodded. “I didn’t think anyone would be so taken in by it, but they were. I thought… Well, I thought it would be a way to impress people, and maybe to make a bit of money if it worked out. I thought people would see it for what it was - an act. I’d be like a street performer, a juggler, someone who does tricks. No one would think it was actually real, but they would be entertained, and they might be willing to pay a bit of money for the privilege. But people were completely taken in. They believed it, believed it completely! And so, I kept saying it, kept pretending that I was something that I wasn’t, and kept pretending that my trips away were actually monster hunting runs. I made up stories and had a writer down in Rivermile make them into books. That was a success. It started making real money, and then Amelie, the sculptor down in Bishop’s Lean, started making the figurines and the mugs.”

“Groz was drinking too much back then,” Sinjin put in. “Not that it’s any excuse, but he was.”

“And he isn’t now?” Alaria said icily, seeing Grozmikal filling his glass from the bottle on the side table for a second time.

Sinjin shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Not even close. He’s doing much better these days, aren’t you, Groz?”

Grozmikal nodded sadly and sipped. “In this department, at least,” he said, waving the glass morosely in the air.

“Sorry, Sinjin, where do you fit into all this?” Mia asked.

Sinjin shrugged. “Pretty simple, really,” he said. “We’re brothers.”

“So that’s it!” Alaria said.

Sinjin nodded. “We grew up out in the sticks, a place called Bertee, down in Novareg.”

“I know Bertee,” Alaria put in. “I did some work there a few years back. Quite a few years back, now I come to think of it. There was a wych bandit coven occupying a cave system out there. I had the contract to take them out.”

Grozmikal smiled. “I think we’d have been long gone by then, eh, brother?”

“Yeah,” Sinjin said. “No doubt. Anyway, we came north, and I ended up taking on the hotel here, and making a success of it. But my brother, well, he…” Sinjin trailed off.

“I got in with a bad crowd on my travels,” Grozmikal said. “I learned that there were easier ways to make money than by working for a living. I learned to lie, to take people in, to have confidence when I made up stories. I’ve already told you how that ended up. It worked, and then it escalated.”

“Yes, you’ve told us that,” Alaria said, growing impatient with the slow pace of Grozmikal’s thoughts, “but where does Neroli the ice queen fit in? What about her? You said you needed saving from her, and that was some kind of mission for me?”

Grozmikal glanced furtively toward the door, then back at Alaria. He sipped his drink, and then sighed.

“The men outside, they’re her soldiers, aren’t they?” Alaria asked. “They’re here to keep an eye on you?”

Grozmikal nodded. “They follow me around, make sure that I do what she wants.”

“But they don’t come into your room,” Alaria said.

He shook his head. “Thank the gods, no, they don’t. When they think I’m having sex with the women of Hopeford, they leave me alone. But they wait outside the door so that I can’t get away.”

Suddenly he broke out of his depressed, maudlin state and shouted, slamming his glass down on the table beside him. “Damn it, Alaria, I’m in a cage! A cage with golden bars, but it’s a cage all the same. I’m going to go crazy! If it wasn’t for Sinjin here, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Sinjin winced at his brother’s outburst and glanced at the door. “The rooms in these upstairs suites have the best soundproofing that money can buy,” he said, “and a lot of them have secret entrances and exits like this. It’s for the privacy of guests, but it comes in handy in moments like this, as you can see.”

Alaria nodded. “I do see,” she said.

Mia frowned. “But why can’t you just leave through the escape corridor?” she asked.

“The others wait outside,” Grozmikal said with a shake of his head. “There’s a contingent of twenty guards who travel with me. Two wait here outside the hotel door, but the rest are scattered all round the town. There’s no escape, Alaria, no escape.”

Grozmikal put his head in his hands for a moment and then reached for the bottle again.

Alaria stood, her red gold hair flicking to the side and her eyes flashing with anger as she moved forward. She grabbed the bottle out of his hands and stepped back across the room, putting it firmly down on a sideboard where Grozmikal would have to pass her to get it.

“The ice queen,” she said firmly. “Tell me how you got mixed up with her.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry. Well, I’m ashamed to have to admit this, but basically, I started to believe my own stories. Everyone thought I was a real adventurer, a fighter, a powerful champion. I started to believe it myself. How hard can it be? I thought. I know, I know,” he said in reply to Alaria’s scornful look. “It was a stupid thing to think, but drink and madness and ego will do strange things to a person.”

“That’s true enough,” Alaria conceded, her anger cooling as she remembered some of the depths she’d seen people sink to over the years, and even some of the parts of her own personality that had threatened to dominate her at points in her life. She had only avoided them through strong will, and she’d had the advantage of having very good trainers and mentors throughout her early career. She should not be so harsh on this man for falling foul of those same weaknesses that she’d managed to avoid. He was only human, after all.

“So, you tried to take on the ice queen for real?” she prompted him.

“I went out there,” he said. “Traveled in that direction, reached the foot of the mountains. Even went in a short way, before I came to my senses and realized that what I was doing was insane. I turned around and tried to flee but… but she caught me. Her guards caught me and brought me to her. She’s a powerful psychic, I think. A mind reader. She casts magic on the people who come within her domain, and she can read their motives, their desires. She read me like a book.”

Alaria nodded thoughtfully. Psychic magic was a subclass of Spirit school magic. It was not actually psychic ability in the sense that was normally meant by the words. When people spoke of psychers, they usually meant people with the ability to do telepathy - reading the thoughts of others, and sending one’s own thoughts out to be received. But psychic magic was not like that. In reality, true telepathy was a gift, not a skill that anyone could learn. Some elven peoples - such as the tree dwelling elf maidens of Leafler forest, or the Neldorem of the low countries of Encala - were true telepaths, but those people were born with the ability. It was native to their species, like a dog’s sense of smell or a cat’s ability to always land on its feet. A human could not learn a spell to be a telepath, and the ice queen, from all Alaria had heard of her, was a human.

“Tell me about her magic,” she asked. “How did she read you?”

“She had a crystal globe,” he said. “She looked in that, and it told her all she wanted to know.”

Alaria nodded. So, Neroli the ice queen was a Spirit mage, and a good one at that. No amateur would be doing crystal globe work, but the presence of a crystal globe showed clearly what the nature of her power was. She was not a psychic. She was a Spirit mage, using powerful targeted scrying spells to look into the minds of those weaker than herself.

“What of the rumor that she’d summoned Chaos magic?” Alaria asked. “The story is that she has brought up a Chaos champion, and you defeated it?” She didn’t believe the story, since Ice magic - indeed, any elemental magic - didn’t go well with the Chaos magic powers. However, if there was any truth in it, she wanted to know before she embarked on some kind of mission to kill this woman.

“I don’t know anything about Chaos magic,” Grozmikal said. “Really, I don’t know much about any magic. But there’s a weird feeling in her fortress up there in the mountains, a weird power.” He shivered, the shadow of old fear plain on his face. “I’ve seen her do some things - the mind reading magic, and summoning the ice demons. Then there is her ice guard, that’s the soldiers who are outside the door here. They… I don’t know. They’re cold, emotionless, like automatons rather than men, but they can fight, I think, though I’ve never seen them pressed.”

Alaria frowned. There was a lot to unpack here, but he was clearly not someone who understood much of what he was looking at when it came to magic, and so she couldn’t rely too heavily on his account. Best to bring it back to his tale.

“So,” she said, “what happened when she caught you?”

“She read my desires. She read my soul. She was pleased that I didn’t want her sexually, and that endeared me to her, I think. So she said, at least. She said she was sick of men who lusted after her, since none of them could ever satisfy her. So she decided not to kill me, and instead she said she had decided to give me what I wanted.”

“Money? Reputation?” Alaria guessed.

He nodded. “It was like a game for her. She would set up attacks on the villages and border towns around the feet of the mountains, and then she would withdraw at the last moment and I would show up to take the credit. The attacks happened really fast, at night, and it was chaotic and messy, so it was easy for me to sweep in and make it look like I’d defeated the enemy without the people of the villages ever having to see any real fighting.”

“But I don’t get it,” Mia broke in. “Why? What’s the point of any of this? I mean, I can see why you did it, and I suppose I can kind of understand why she wanted to as well, but it doesn’t seem to get her anywhere in the long term. How long has this been going on?”

“Oh, not that long, really,” Grozmikal said. “I’ve been pretending to be an adventurer for two years, but I’ve only been in Neroli’s grip for about nine months. I want out. I want to stop doing it, it’s ridiculous. I’ve made plenty of money and I can retire and do something real for once, but now she won’t let me. I think she knew before I did that I wanted out, and she started sending this troop of guards with me everywhere.”

He paused, his eyes shifting from side to side. He looked evasive and unhappy, and Alaria narrowed her eyes at him. “What is it?” she said. “You’re concealing something. Come on, out with it. Don’t hold back.”

“Hm,” he said. “Well, I… Look, it’s what she said she’d do if I tried to escape. She doesn’t just have the soldiers like the ones outside. They’re not her main weapon. She has an army of these ice creatures - demons or monsters or something, I don’t know. But they’re horrible, creatures with no capacity for sympathy or mercy. They do her bidding, always. And she said… she said that if I ever tried to escape, she’d turn them on the villages of the mountain marches, for real this time. And so I… I’ve stayed, and kept doing it.”

“He’s been nearly broken by it,” Sinjon said, “but he’s stuck in there, for the sake of the mountain villages. You have to help him, Alaria. When I learned what you really were, a true adventurer, one who helps those in need and saves people from terrible enemies, well, I thought we’d found some hope in a hopeless situation.”

A weary sigh escaped Alaria. She picked up the bottle from the dresser and gave it back to Grozmikal, but he didn’t immediately drink. Instead, he put the bottle down on the table next to him and looked hard at her.

“Will you help me?” he said.

“I will,” Alaria replied. “I will.”

Back in their room a little later, Alaria and Mia talked the business over.

“I don’t like it,” Mia said. “But I see that you have to go. But I’m not sure if I’m up to this, Alaria, and that’s what I really don’t like. It’s horrible to have to say so, but even with the magic that I’ve learned so far, I don’t think I’m up to facing this ice queen with you. Tunnel orcs are one thing, but this Neroli and her ice demons, well, it all sounds a bit out of my league.”

Alaria was surprised and relieved to hear Mia say this. From Grozmikal’s description of the ice queen, Neroli sounded like an enemy who could only be taken on by highly experienced adventurers, and for all the progress Mia had made at learning magic, highly experienced was something she was not.

“I thought I was going to have to argue with you about it,” Alaria laughed. “I was going to say that I don’t think you should come with me, but it seemed pretty mean to not let you come along if you wanted to.”

“I do want to,” Mia said. “But I don’t think I would be able to help much. I learned a few combat spells early on, and that was great, but this sounds… Well, it sounds like I would need more than just a few spells to be helpful here. Unless you would teach me some more - some fire spells, maybe - but I think you might want to set off sooner than that.”

Alaria frowned, thinking about it. “We can’t let Grozmikal go back to her after this. There’s no way he’d be able to fool her into thinking that he hadn’t told anyone. But it’s about a week’s journey to the southern mountain marches, and I guess we could train on the way. You’re very fast. I guess if we got to the bottom of the mountains and we felt that you hadn’t come on enough then you could stay behind?”

“Oh, yes, that’s a better idea!” Mia agreed happily. “Yes, you can teach me how to do fire magic on the way, and hopefully by the time we get there, I’ll be able to contribute. If not, I’ll feel less bad about not coming in, because at least I’ve tried.”

“We’ll need more than just us to come along,” Alaria said. “But I can’t ask Beth - she’ll be too busy with the inn, and anyway her skill with a bow wouldn’t be enough in a fight like this. This is going to be a battle of magics.”

“All the same,” Mia said, “You might need someone who can fight in the traditional way, too. Surely Grezkull could look after the inn. Beth might relish the chance to get out and fight herself.”

Alaria grinned. “I suppose she might, now you mention it. But Grezkull surely would have to be convinced to stay, then, and he’s not going to want to stay either.”

“You’re right,” Mia said. “If there’s the chance for adventure, he’ll want to come along. He’s got the taste for it since the fight at Longwood Gulch.”

“What’ll we do, then?” Alaria said. “Someone will have to stay behind.”

“I think I know just the people to do it,” Mia said with a smile.

Chapter

Six

“There it is,” Alaria said. “Brighthill. I thought I was in for the quiet life, but there’s still work for me to do, it seems. It’s going to be a quick stop off, and then we’ll be on the road again.”

Mia smiled and gave her a squeeze around the shoulders. “You’re too kind-hearted, that’s your problem,” she said. “If you weren’t so keen to help out poor Grozmikal, none of this would be happening.”

“I still think that fraud deserves whatever he gets,” Sasha the faerie grumbled, fluttering her purple wings as she followed along behind them. Palo snorted laughter but said nothing.

“That’s because you know little of life,” Alaria said gently. “Grozmikal isn’t a villain, just a fool who got in over his head.”

“You’re well prepped for the journey, at least,” Palo said, changing the subject. With the ever-blunt Sasha as his girlfriend, he had become a skilled diplomatist over the years.

“We are,” Alaria agreed. They’d done some shopping in Hopeford before leaving, and the orders would be transported to Alaria’s homestead in Brighthill. “We’ve got enough food and supplies, as well as warm-weather clothes and some potions of my own making. The only thing that remains is to convince Beth to leave the inn for a couple of weeks and come with us.”

“Palo and I are trustworthy,” Sasha said. “I’m sure Beth will see that. Anyway, she’ll want to come along with you.”

“As will Grezkull,” Palo added. “I’d rather have him stay and help us out - I don’t know much about running an inn, except pouring drinks, but Grezkull knows it inside out.”

“Not much chance of him staying, I guess,” Mia said.

“Whatever happens, we’ll have to leave soon,” Alaria said. “Grozmikal is staying in town for a couple of days, but I want to get on the road ahead of him. We may need to kill his guards to free him, and I doubt we’ll be able to do that without alerting Neroli.”

“You want the element of surprise?” Sasha asked.

“Always,” Alaria nodded. “With such a small group, and so little information about what we’re walking into, we want to keep ourselves as secret as possible for as long as possible.”

“To be honest,” Palo said, “I’m glad to be staying here and looking after the inn. I’d rather have our job than yours.”

“You don’t have that job yet,” Alaria cautioned. “And if I’m any judge, Beth is going to take a bit of convincing before she agrees to leave the inn in your capable hands.”

Alaria wasn’t wrong.

Beth’s green eyes flashed, and her red hair blazed as she listened to Alaria’s proposal in the dimly lit tap room of the Brighthill inn. Outside, it was midmorning. The inn was quiet, and Alaria and her companions had come straight here.

“You want me to leave this inn, my pride and joy, the result of years of work, in the hands of these two?” Beth demanded when Alaria explained her plan.

“It’s only for a few weeks - three, at most,” Alaria said patiently. “And you know Sasha and Palo.”

“I do. That’s the problem.” Beth narrowed her eyes at the faerie and the human. Sasha simpered and fluttered her wings, and Palo grinned. Beth’s expression was thunderous.

“I don’t know what you two are grinning at,” she growled. “I’ve known you since you were a baby, Palo, and Sasha, I remember when you were nothing more than a gleam of purple light in your mother’s knapsack. If you think I’m going to leave my inn in your hands…”

“But Beth, don’t you want to come on the adventure?” Mia asked.

“Yes, damn it! Of course I do! Why d’you think I’m so pissed off? I want to come with you more than anything, but it’s tourist season and I can’t leave the inn with these two nincompoops! No offense, guys,” she said to Palo and Sasha, realizing that she was perhaps being a little harsh, “but you couldn’t pull a pint to save yourselves, either of you, and as for making beds...”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Palo said, making a show of glancing over his fingernails and leaning nonchalantly on the counter. “I’ve watched you do it plenty, and then there have been a few times… Ow!” Sasha had jabbed him in the arm with a finger. For once, she was being the diplomatist.

“What times?” Beth demanded, glaring at them both. “Come on, you, out with it.”

Alaria had to suppress a grin at her friends’ discomfort. She kept quiet, waiting to see what this new development would be.

Palo glanced apologetically at Sasha. “There have been a few times over the years,” he explained to Beth, “when you’ve left the bar for whatever reason, and we’ve wanted pints, so… well, I sometimes go behind the bar and serve a few.”

“Quite a few,” Sasha added helpfully. “But we always make sure to pay. He really is good at the pints.”

“You cheeky swine!” Beth exclaimed. “You serve yourselves drinks when I’m not looking? I had no idea!”

“And I can make beds very well, thank you,” Sasha added haughtily.

“Not as well as Grezkull,” Beth grumbled, but Alaria could see that the cat woman’s resolve was wavering.

“Grezkull will want to come too, I suppose,” Beth continued morosely. “There's no chance that I'll be able to convince him to stay behind and keep an eye on these two while I go adventuring. That would be mean. He does so like hitting things with his club.”

At that moment, a side door opened. Sunlight flooded from outside and with it came Grezkull, dusting his hands off and ducking his head so that he didn't bang it against the door lintel. He was a huge figure, half troll and half orc, and bigger than either. But he was a kindly giant, though it was true he could be effective with his gigantic club when he wanted to be.

“What are you all discussing in here?” he asked, peering around at them curiously. “It sounds serious, whatever it is.”

Quickly, Alaria explained. Grezkull listened attentively, nodding every now and again and looking thoughtful. After she was finished, he scratched his chin and sat down on a barstool which creaked alarmingly under his enormous weight.

“Grozmikal, a fraud,” Grezkull marveled. “And you all are going to fight the ice queen and free him. Well, I suppose I’ll have to stay behind and let you go, Beth. It wouldn't be right to take your place, and that way you can be confident that the inn will still be standing when you get back.”

“You’d do that?” Alaria said, touched by his generosity.

“It’s a sacrifice,” he said, making a dramatic gesture with one hand, “but I will.”

“Oh, thank you, Grezkull!” Beth said with a grin.

Mia laughed. “Grezkull, Neroli’s domain is up in the mountains, and it's likely to be pretty freezing up there. This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that you hate the cold?”

“Hadn’t crossed my mind,” Grezkull said, pretending to be shocked. “Just, er, a good deed, that’s all.”

A moment later, even he had to laugh. The tension in the room broke. Beth would be able to come along with Alaria and Mia, and Palo and Sasha would have some experienced guidance as they took on the temporary responsibility for the inn.

“I’m sorry, guys,” Beth said to Sasha and Palo. “I shouldn’t have been so mean to you. I’m sure you’ll do great. I was just upset because I so wanted to go with Alaria, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

She gave Palo and then Sasha a quick hug each. There were no hard feelings.

“I have a confession to make,” Sasha said candidly as Beth broke the hug. “I’m terrible at making beds.”

“Why you…!” Beth exclaimed, swiping at her with an open palm. Sasha squealed with laughter and darted out of the way.

“Not to worry,” Grezkull said. “I’m great at it. I’ll show you how. You’ll quickly get the hang of it. Palo, are you really good behind the bar?”

“Oh, yeah,” Palo said, giving Beth a cheeky wink. “Lots of practice.”

Fire coursed through the warm air, bursting from Mia’s hand and sizzling as it smashed into the large, unmoving target that Alaria had conjured up. The flames struck the target dead center and licked outward, and the target vanished with a hiss.

“Well done!” Alaria said. “That’s damned impressive, Mia.”

“Thanks,” Mia grinned, “What’s next?”

“You feel you’ve got the hang of Firebolt?”

“Don’t you? I’ve done it five times now.”

“I think you’ve got the hang of the casting,” Alaria said. “The aiming and control will come later, but we can practice those on the road. For this afternoon, it’s most important for you to get the form of things.”

Mia nodded, looking thoughtfully at the spot where the target had been a moment before. “It was quite a big target,” she said. “And the magic feels pretty volatile.”

“Most spells from the school of fire are,” Alaria said. “So, it’s all the more important to work on the control. Usually, we’d stop here and I’d have you execute Firebolt over and over until it was second nature, but this is slightly different from the usual way of doing things.”

“Because I’m so fast, you mean?” Mia grinned.

“Partly,” Alaria said. She couldn’t resist a smile, though another part of her knew how crucial it was for Mia not to slip into arrogance. She also knew from bitter experience how hard it was for anyone to ever take on such advice. Most of the time, a teacher was better letting pride pass, at least at first.

“You are unusually fast at learning magic,” she said, “but also, we simply don’t have much time. I need to train you in the forms of at least three Fire spells today. If you weren’t as fast as you are, there’s no way we could even attempt this. It would kill a less able student. But you…” she shook her head, amazed again at Mia’s swiftness. “Well, let’s try something else.”

The afternoon progressed, and Mia learned Searing Storm, Blazing Blade, and Mage’s Inferno with the same alacrity as Firebolt. Four spells in, and several hours of training, and even Mia with her unprecedented casting capacity was beginning to feel fatigued.

“Oh, I think I need a rest,” she said, leaning on a tree. She wiped her brow. Alaria looked closely at her, seeing that she looked pale and drawn.

“Here,” Alaria said. “Take this.”

She pulled a small, silver-gleaming bottle from her pouch and handed it to Mia.

“A magic replenishment potion?” Mia asked. “Is that necessary?”

Alaria, though a little fatigued, was still able to cast. She raised a hand and used Mage Assessment, a simple scanning spell, to view Mia’s status.

The spell caused a light to manifest around Mia’s head, a light that only Alaria could see. From the strength of the light and its color, Alaria could assess the level of mana that Mia had. She was concerned that they’d pushed Mia too far, depleting her mana beyond the level that was safe. What she saw alarmed her. The light around Mia’s head flickered and guttered like the flame of a dying oil lamp.

“The potion is definitely necessary,” Alaria said. “Go on, take it.”

Mia shrugged, popped the cap, and drank the potion down. Instantly, Alaria saw the light around Mia’s head strengthening and returning to a steady blue glow.

“Thank the gods,” she breathed.

“What?” Mia asked.

“I think you were in danger there,” Alaria said. She took a breath to speak, but at that moment there was a sound from behind them. Mia jumped and turned, raising a hand instinctively.

There was a figure emerging from the trees on Alaria’s right. Before Alaria had the chance to recognize who the figure was, Mia had raised her left hand. There was a tremendous bang, and the fire of an Inferno spell flooded from her hand, blasting across the space between her and the newcomer.

“Mia, no!” Alaria shouted, but it was too late - the spell was cast.

The figure dived to one side as quick as a cat, then executed a perfect forward roll and flowed forward. A blade glinted in the sun, rising to Mia’s throat, even as Mia’s Inferno spell smashed into a clump of bushes and set it alight.

Fire roared up from the bushes. The blade glinted at Mia’s throat. Mia’s eyes went wide.

The mysterious figure was unrecognizable. It wasn’t that Alaria didn’t know who it was, it was that she couldn’t know. She perceived there was someone there, but even though the person was right in front of her, she could not process a single recognizable detail.

It didn’t matter. Alaria was the best, fastest, and most deadly warrior this side of Crownheart City. She didn’t need to know who she was fighting to be effective.

In a moment, her right hand was on the stranger’s wrist, twisting. She jammed her leg into the back of the figure’s knee and shoved, pushing the attacker down and back, away from Mia. At the same time, she grabbed the back of the figure’s neck. In a moment, the attacker was incapacitated.

And then the strangest thing happened. There was a flicker of dissonant light over the stranger’s form, and the confusion was gone. Both Mia and Alaria knew exactly who they were looking at.

“Beth!” Alaria gasped. The cat woman dropped the knife, her eyes wide as she looked up into Alaria’s face. Alaria let Beth go, and Beth staggered back.

Alaria glanced left and dropped a Quench spell on the fire that Mia’s spell had started. Water fell from the sky and a great cloud of steam hissed up as the flames died.

“What the hell?” Mia demanded.

“Beth?” Alaria said.

Beth was sitting on the ground, breathing hard, looking distraught.

Alaria leaned down and helped the cat woman to her feet. Beth had dropped her human form entirely, and the fine fur and thin stripes of color that marked her true face were showing clearly.

“What’s wrong?” Mia asked gently. Together, Alaria and Mia put their arms round Beth and held her for a long moment while she pulled herself together.

“I’m sorry,” Beth gasped a few moments later. “I could have killed you.”

“Only a moment after I almost killed you,” Mia reminded her. “Honestly, I don’t know what happened, I really didn’t mean to cast that spell.”

Alaria spoke up. “I don’t know what happened either, but I know what’s happening now. What’s happening is we’re going back to the house. Whatever the explanation for all this is, it’ll go down better with a cup of something to wash it down.”

Chapter

Seven

Beth sat at the kitchen table, looking unhappy. Mia sat next to her. Though Mia was trying to be kind and sympathetic, she couldn’t quite get past the fact that Beth had, only a moment before, held a knife to her throat. Even for close friends, that was not the easiest thing to forgive.

“Don’t worry, you two,” Alaria said. “I’m sure we will work all this out. For now, let’s just have a cup of tea.”

With these words, Alaria manifested tentacles from the space between her shoulders and neck. She was only wearing a light day robe, and the new appendage slipped easily from the confines of the fabric. Alaria winked at Beth as she reached the tentacle across the room and used it to put the kettle on to boil.

Next, manifested another tentacle and she reached over, using this one to pull together a teapot and mugs for herself and her two friends. She made a show of reclining in her chair and letting the tentacles do the work, though of course she was truly the one controlling them. A flicker of a smile reached Beth’s mouth as Alaria, without looking, poured the hot water into the pot and got everything on a tray. She lifted and carried the tray over with her tentacles, setting it down on the table in front of them.

Beth grinned. “Thanks,” she said, her voice sounding a bit stronger. “I think I need it.”

“Me too,” Mia said as she poured. She placed a cup in front of Beth. “I’m really sorry for trying to blast you with an Inferno spell. Really, I didn’t mean to do it. I wasn’t even aware it was about to happen. We’d been training, and when I turned and saw you there. I didn’t recognise you. I got a fright, and… Well, I released the spell without meaning to.”

“Your instincts kicked in,” Beth said, nodding. “And so did mine. It’s easy to understand. I’m really sorry I pulled a knife on you. I didn’t mean to either, but…”

“Instinct?” Mia said.

Beth nodded. “Instinct.”

“Well, no hard feelings then, eh?” Alaria said. “But I must say, I’d like to know a bit more about these instincts of yours, Beth. I knew you had shapeshifting powers, and I’ve seen them in action of course, but I didn’t know you could do that. Speaking professionally, as it were, I’ve rarely seen anything so impressive. I’ve known some shape shifters, but they were all into overly showy magic - turning into giant beasts, taking the form of animals, that kind of thing.”

A tentacle slithered out of Alaria’s wrist and crept up to lift a teacup. She used the slithery appendage to lift the teacup to her mouth and drank, thoughtfully.

“I can do that kind of thing,” Beth said. “Or at least, I used to be able to. I’m pretty well out of practice now. But what you saw was the application of shapeshifting as a stealth magic. Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I invented that way of using it, but I’ve certainly pioneered it over the years.”

“Tell me more,” Alaria suggested, and Mia nodded encouragingly.

Beth looked at her two companions and sighed, then she laughed, sounding a bit ashamed. “You’ll think it’s silly,” she said, “but even though we’ve shared so much of ourselves, and our bodies, and learned to be so vulnerable together, I’m still reluctant to share this.”

Alaria remembered how long it had taken her to trust and settle into her quiet life in Brighthill after her years of adventuring. “I don’t think it’s silly at all,” she said quietly.

Beth smiled gratefully at her. “Well, here goes. You might not know this, but the cat people that I hail from, they hate shapeshifters. They really abhor them, and they hunt them down and kill them when they can.”

“But I thought shapeshifting was a native magic of the cat people? Why do they hate them so much?” Mia asked.

“I never got a chance to hang around and find out,” Beth said dryly. “As soon as I came of age, I discovered that I was one. But at the same time, I discovered that there were others, shapeshifting people who were on the lookout for new ones. They saved me and helped me to escape, and taught me how to use my gifts.”

Her face took on a pained look, and she glanced away. “They were all killed,” she said hoarsely. “My friends. They were hunted down and I was the only one who escaped.”

“By the gods,” Mia breathed. “Oh, Beth, I’m so sorry.”

Alaria remembered what she’d thought when she first saw Beth - the cat woman had seemed an unusual kind of person to find in the Hope River valley, so far from the land of the cat people.

Here was the explanation.

“Your protective magic became instinctive?” she asked.

“Completely,” Beth agreed. “That’s why I was using it in the woods when I came to find you, even though I knew that I was safe. It was years ago - nearly twenty years - that I escaped my homelands, but the habit has grown in me. I’ve used my shapeshifting magic to appear human, and to conceal my true nature from most people, but the heart of my skill lies in the ability to baffle the eye in the way that you experienced earlier. It’s kind of my own way of doing things.”

“And you’ve got finely honed defensive instincts,” Alaria said. “You never let on about that, but I see now why you didn’t. You’re good with more than just the bow.”

Beth nodded. “I’m fast with a blade, too,” she agreed, then added, “but not as fast as you.”

Alaria grinned. “I think you may just not have had as much recent practice,” she said. “We can work that up on the road, if you like. It would be good to practice with swords. Well, it’s a lesson to us all. Beth, your instincts saved you from being fried. Mia, you are good at magic, but it’s crucial you learn control. And for my part, I need to be more careful with how I teach. I’ve shown you the form of some very dangerous spells, and it’s not going to be any good for anyone if you can’t choose when you let the blasts off.”

She pushed her chair back and stood, and the others did the same. Beth looked a bit teary after telling her tale. Mia came over and hugged her, and Alaria came over and put her arms around them both.

“It’s okay,” she said, putting her mouth to Beth’s head and speaking softly. “You did well to tell us. Now we all know, and there’s no hard feelings.”

Mia stroked Beth’s face, and Alaria felt Mia’s other hand coming round to touch her ass gently. Alaria chuckled and lowered her face down, and the others both joined her in a three-way kiss.

“Enough!” Alaria laughed a moment later, as Beth’s hips moved suggestively and Mia’s exploring hand moved lower. “Much as I’d love to take you two to bed, we have work to do. There’s a journey to prepare for and the packing won’t do itself! I want to set off first thing in the morning.”

They got to work. A cart had come earlier that afternoon, delivering the supplies that they’d ordered from Hopeford, and it didn’t take long to get things ready. Alaria and Beth were both experienced travelers, and they took charge of the packing. Meanwhile, at Alaria’s request, Mia set to work in the kitchen, working her way through their stack of gathered ingredients and creating potion after potion as the evening trailed away into night. They would need a good supply of potions for this trip - as many as possible, Alaria had said - and Mia now had the skills and the experience to fill that niche.

While Beth and Alaria packed, Mia concocted. The sharp scent of potion-making and the bright lights of the magic made the kitchen into an arcane crafting laboratory. Mia whistled and sang as she worked away at her crafting, hardly even noticing when Beth and Alaria finished the packing and came through.

“Oh, hey, you two,” she said, looking up and smiling. “I didn’t even hear you come in. I’m just about done. Here, help me out with the rest of the packing. There’s some food in the oven, and after that, maybe we can find the time to bed together. It’s important to get an early night, and I can think of a few other things I’d like to do before sleep as well.”

The sun was high, and the afternoon was well underway when they left Hopeford behind them and strode along the east road between well-kept hedges and fields of grain that glowed purple and red in the sun. The trees gleamed with magic, too, their gold leaves giving off a strange, ethereal radiance even in the full light of the sun.

“I’ve never been this far east before,” Mia said, sounding a little awed. “It’s beautiful! Is the whole of the Hope River valley this well-kept?”

Alaria shook her head. “I came in this way,” she said. “Though I entered the valley at a further point on the eastern fringe of the border mountains. The central area of the valley around Hopeford and on either side of the river is well-maintained, and most of the land is managed and cultivated, but once you get further out there starts to be less and less order to the land. The road is good the whole way, but it’s around the villages and settlements that you see the real cultivated areas, like this.”

Mia looked at Alaria with a small smile. “You’re different, you know,” she said.

“Huh? What d’you mean?” Alaria said, caught off guard.

Mia grinned. “Out here on the road, I mean. You’re becoming an adventurer again; a traveler. It’s pretty sexy.”

Alaria gave a mock-scowl. “Oh, you like it, do you?” she said. “Well, don’t forget, it’s serious business as well as being sexy. And I think it’s time you practiced a bit of control of your magic, too. See, we’re coming up to a bit of road where there aren’t any houses for a good while. You can get away with casting a few spells, but I want you to begin by practicing controlling the flow of power, okay?”

For the rest of the day, they walked and Mia worked at control. There were wide gaps between the houses, and the road was quiet and straight, so there was no danger of being seen doing magic and getting into trouble. Mia learned to hold her magic in check. It took effort at first, and she was struggling to get a hold of the technique of it, when Beth stepped in and mentioned how she kept control of her shapeshifting magic. After all, she had to keep the appearance of a human on all the time, and that took some doing.

“It’s rather like swimming,” she said thoughtfully. “If you tense up and try really hard, it doesn’t work, but if you can relax and let yourself flow through it, letting it happen and guiding it, then it becomes easier. So easy, in fact, that you forget that you’re doing it and it becomes natural, even in sleep.”

The focus of the training had Mia doing an exercise where she brought magical power to her fingertips as if she was about to use it, but then didn’t cast a spell. To be ready to cast, but not to do so, was the essence of magic, but with a volatile destruction magic like the School of Fire, this could spill over into stray spells if the mage’s control was not immaculate. Alaria was ready with a warding version of the Quench spell, so that she could catch any stray fire magic that Mia accidentally let loose, but she didn’t have to use it except once when Mia, trying to concentrate and be loose at the same time, tripped over a stone and let fly with a Firebolt accidently.

Alaria caught the magic and stopped it from going any further, while Beth caught Mia’s arm and saved her from a fall.

“Thanks,” Mia said to both of them.

“I see how you happened to almost fry me in the forest the other day,” Beth laughed. “That’s an impressive spell!”

“It would be better if I could control it more,” Mia said.

“You’re getting there,” Alaria said encouragingly. “Don’t worry about it. This is only the first day of practice at keeping control like this. Give it a day or so.”

“We’re coming toward a village,” Beth said, shading her eyes and pointing ahead. The sun was dipping toward the east west, and the light gleamed golden highlights in her red hair. “Well spotted,” Alaria said. “Best that we leave the magic practice for now, I think.”

Magic was commonplace in Sephali, and nobody had any problem with enchanted crops, trees, and creatures. But magic practitioners were a different issue altogether, and were often looked down upon and even feared by some. It wouldn’t be any good to be found walking into a village casting spells.

They carried on through the village, hoping for an inn, but there was nowhere to stay. A kindly old woman sitting on a step near the edge of town told them there was a good inn in the next village, so they carried on a few more miles as evening fell. Though they had gear for camping and sleeping outdoors, the lands were too well-cultivated and ordered for that yet. They’d have had to camp in someone’s crop field, and none of them wanted to do that. The village inn they found was basic but comfortable, and they were happy to take that option.

They took separate rooms. Hope River valley was an open-minded place, more so than many parts of Sapheli where Alaria had been, but still, three women who wanted to take a room together and fuck loudly enough to wake the neighbourhood were likely to raise eyebrows, especially in a parochial village inn such as this one.

Next day, they breakfasted together at the inn, then set out. They might not have raised any eyebrows by being sexy, but they certainly had raised a few eyebrows by being so heavily armed. Alaria had Skyfang, her legendary sword, on her belt, and Beth had her longbow on her back. Mia carried no weapon, but there was something about the way she carried herself now that demanded respect. She was no longer just a village girl. Now, she was a mage in training.

The villagers didn’t exactly give them a wide berth, but they saw that they were not quite the ordinary run-of-the-mill travelers, and eyed them with interest. Alaria and her friends were happy to get back on the road.

All that second day they walked steadily, not pushing themselves, but not dawdling either. Mia practiced her magic control, and Beth shared insights from her own experience as a shape-shifter, and as the time passed, Mia started to feel more confident.

“I’m getting the hang of this,” she said, holding her magic close to the surface but not letting it boil over into a spell.

Alaria glanced around. There was no one nearby, and no houses for a mile in each direction. They were safe. Keeping her Quench spell at the ready, she reached around and made to trip Mia with the end of a tentacle.

“Damn it!” Mia swore, stumbling forward, but she didn’t fall, nor did she release the spell. To Alaria’s eyes, there was a flicker of potential around her hands, but the spell didn’t release.

“Did you just trip me?” Mia demanded as she recovered herself.

“Did you let your spell slip?” Alaria countered.

“No,” Mia said, sounding delighted and surprised. “No, I didn’t!”

Alaria rubbed her hands together. “You really are getting the hang of this.”

They made good progress that day. The road was flat and straight, the heat of the day was mitigated by a slight cool breeze, and they had covered the best part of 20 miles and left the last village far behind them. Almost imperceptibly, the fields and hedgerows had given way to a wild, uncultivated land of woods, clearings, and little rivers, with only the odd house here and there along the road.

That night, the land was wild enough that they were confident that they could camp safely, without annoying anyone. They tramped off the road, through the woods, until they found a grassy clearing by a chattering stream, just a mile from the road. Here, they set up their camp, pitching one large tent, though that was mostly for a place to stash their gear. It seemed unlikely to rain.

They were all hungry, and they got a good fire going and made a large meal.

Afterward, they all lay back together on their blankets. The stars wheeled overhead, and the moon was rising. The air was warm and the air smelled of summer.

“Hey,” Beth said. “We’re far enough away from town that you should be able to practice your magic a bit more freely.”

“It’s true,” Mia said, sounding mischievous. Alaria felt Mia’s hand on her thigh, and the touch sent a jolt of arousal through her body. “And now that we’re a bit further out of town, there’s something else we might be able to do more freely too.”

Chapter

Eight

The stars shone down brightly, and the fire crackled. There was a little breeze in the air, but the heat of the fire made up for any coolness in the air. And then there was the heat that was building between them. Mia had been right. They were far enough from the road or any nearby houses that they could probably get up to whatever they wanted out here without the risk of being seen.

The three lovers lay back together on their blankets, looking up at the stars. Beth was in the middle, Alaria lying next to her with her head pillowed on Beth’s arm. Mia lay on Beth’s other side, her hands playing with a tress of Beth’s long red hair.

“Mm,” Alaria said, “it has been a while.”

“Two days!” Mia said, laughing.

“It’s been longer for me,” Beth said. It was true. She’d been obliged to return to the inn the night before they’d left, because Grezkull and the others needed some help working out which beer barrel was which. She’d stayed at the inn that night in the end, and so hadn’t been able to join Alaria and Mia in bed that evening.

“I’ve missed being dominated by you,” Beth said in a husky voice. Her throaty voice dripped with desire, the sound not unlike a cat’s purr. Alaria sat up slightly, looking around. Beth was lying on her back still, looking up at the stars. Mia had sat up as well, and was looking at Alaria with lust in her eyes.

“I’ve missed doing it to you,” Alaria said, and Beth made a small sound of pleasurable anticipation.

“I’ve missed watching,” Mia admitted. “It’s so hot, seeing you two together like that. Really, there’s nothing quite like it.”

Beth moved, shifting her hips on the blanket, and Alaria was suddenly very aware that unlike Beth, neither Mia nor herself were wearing much. Alaria had changed into a loose dress for the evening, a sheer fall of light green linen that was very comfortable, but wouldn’t have been much use for walking or fighting in. It was one of the items she’d bought in Hopeford. It hugged her curves and, looking down, she could see how the firelight showed up the details of her own body through the light fabric.

Mia was similarly dressed in only a light shift, and hers was even more skimpy and revealing than Alaria’s. Alaria’s was at least a dress that covered her down past the knees and came up over her chest. Mia’s was more like a light underskirt, a white wisp of a garment with lace at the edges that showed off her long, elegant legs. The firelight flickered on her firm, pale body, and Alaria could see the shadow of the soft hair between her legs, and the outline of her dark nipples through the fabric.

Mia shifted on her blanket, leaning up to rest on one elbow and watch Alaria and Beth.

Beth raised her head and looked at the others. “I’m feeling positively overdressed,” she admitted.

Everyone laughed. It was true. For some reason, Beth was still wearing her boots and her hard-wearing traveling pants. She had on a jacket of thick, rough cotton and a practical jerkin of leather that would have stopped an arrow, but wasn’t the sexiest garment in the world.

“How come you didn’t get changed earlier?” Mia asked, reaching over and tugging at Beth’s jacket.

Alaria grinned. “She was too hungry,” she said. “Just like a cat to go straight for the food.”

“Miaow,” Beth said sarcastically, glaring at Alaria. “I’m no cat. But you’re right, while you two were off washing and getting changed, I was left with the responsibility for getting dinner on.”

“That’s definitely a valid way to view it,” Mia acknowledged with mock seriousness.

Beth glanced at Alaria, as if waiting for something. Alaria smiled and sat up. Mia still leaned on her elbow, her hair tumbling down and gleaning in the firelight, watching eagerly.

“Beth,” Alaria said. “You remember your safe words?”

Beth nodded.

“Tell me,” Alaria demanded.

Beth swallowed with an audible gulp before replying. “If I want the whole scene to stop I can say stop,” she said, sounding breathless and speaking in a low, hurried voice. “If I want to do something else but I don’t want the scene to stop entirely, I can say no and you’ll change what you’re doing without stopping the scene.”

“Spoken like a very good girl,” Alaria said. Her voice deepened to a growl. “You better remember those words, because I’m going to push your limits now, and nothing else you can say will get you out of this.”

She smiled, enjoying the sensation of putting on this dominant, powerful personality. At the core of Beth’s desires lay the need to be dominated, to be controlled, but it had to be done in such a way that even when she felt like she was being pushed, even to the point of feeling in danger, she was always completely safe in reality. It was a game they played, to simulate a sensation of helplessness, because Beth was so turned on by it. Alaria was putting her dominant personality on like an act, and Beth loved it.

Mia smiled as she watched the events unfold and the tension increase. With the boundaries in place and the roles established, Alaria took control of events.

“Beth, take off your boots but leave your stockings,” she said. “I’m going to have you strip piece by piece while Mia watches.”

Beth, breathing hard, her eyes gleaming with excitement, did as she was told, unlacing her heavy boots and setting them out of the way.

“Now the pants and the jacket,” Alaria commanded. Beth complied, quickly.

“Tell her to take the jerkin off next,” Mia said from the sidelines. “I want to see her breasts.”

“Do it,” Alaria said, and Beth stripped off her jacket and her leather jerkin. “And the rest,” Alaria said, and Beth finished taking off her top layers.

“Faster,” Alaria demanded as Beth struggled with a clasp. “Faster, or I’ll see you learn your lesson later on.”

Beth smiled at that, and made a show of trying to speed up, but she was trembling. “You’ll… you’ll have to help me,” she said in a small voice.

Alaria didn’t move, but she sent two tentacles racing out from her arms and used them to unbuckle the clasp at the back of Beth’s neck. The jerkin slipped easily to the floor, and Alaria used her new limbs to pick it up and place it over with Beth’s boots.

With a shaking hand, Beth pulled off her undershirt, and her full breasts slipped out, gleaming in the firelight, the nipples large and dark with the warmth of the fire and her own arousal.

Another command, and Beth’s pants and panties joined the rest of her clothes. She was wearing long, red lace stockings. Alaria took one glance at them and decided they should stay.

As usually happened during sex, Beth’s shapeshifted human appearance began to slip. When Alaria commanded Beth to kneel in front of her, the glamor disappeared completely and Beth was revealed in her true form. As a cat person, she was beautiful, a gorgeous feminine humanoid covered in fine, sleek grey fur with many neat stripes. She had a long tail that whipped about as if it had a life of its own, and pointed ears that stuck up through her mass of vivid red hair.

Beth knelt, and Alaria let tentacles flow from all over her body, flowing out from her wrists, her arms, her shoulders, and her hips. They reached out to Beth and began to explore her all over. The new appendages were of all different colors, and in the firelight they glowed with Alaria’s arousal. Some of them had suckers that gripped onto Beth’s skin, while others were smooth and slid all over her, exploring every inch of her body, slipping up to tease her nipples and her lips, and down to tease her clit and make her gasp and moan with pleasure.

This was just the beginning. Alaria felt herself growing wet at the sounds of Beth’s pleasure, and saw that Mia was now playing with her own nipples through her white dress, and running a hand over her own body as she watched the drama playing out. Alaria chucked another log on the fire with a free hand, never taking her eyes off Beth. The cat woman was moaning, gasping in pleasure as she knelt on the ground, her legs spread, the tip of one of Alaria’s tentacles moving teasingly around the entrance to her vagina as others slid over her body, squeezing her breasts, rubbing her ass, and firmly grasping the insides of her strong thighs.

Alaria felt the sexual pleasure through her tentacles too. It was incredibly arousing. She reached one tip up and ran it along the edge of Beth’s lips, feeling the softness of Beth’s mouth through the magical appendage. Beth opened her mouth and Alaria slipped the glistening tentacle in. Beth groaned in satisfaction as she started to bob her head back and forth, running her lips up and down the tentacle’s length, sucking on it, and running her tongue round and round, making Alaria moan with pleasure. As Beth settled into her rhythm of giving oral sex to the tentacle, Alaria took the other one that had been teasing her vulva and thrust it deep inside.

Alaria moved round, positioning her body so her hands were in reach of Beth’s ass. Then she ran her hands over Beth’s body, enjoying the slick feel of her skin. They were both soaked now, covered in the slick, oily secretions that ran from the tentacles when Alaria was aroused. The stuff smelled faintly perfumed, mixing with the smell of their skin and their arousal, and the smells of woodsmoke and the forest around them.

Out of the corner of her eye, Alaria saw Mia changing position. Mia slipped her white shift up over her head and then sat back, completely naked with her legs spread wide and her knees up, rubbing her clit slowly with one hand and tweaking her nipples with her other hand as she watched Alaria fucking Beth. In the firelight, she looked magnificent.

Beth was in heaven, filled from both ends, and with several other tentacles trying to push their way into her mouth. Alaria had noticed that Beth liked the intensity of the feeling of many of Alaria’s wet new limbs trying to enter her, even if there wasn’t room, so she made sure to give Beth that sense of being overwhelmed.

Alaria pushed the effect some more, bringing a host of new tentacles up. They dripped and gleamed with slime in the firelight, and Alaria used her hands to spread Beth’s ass. Beth liked to have her ass filled as well, and so Alaria called on the slickest, wettest tentacle she had. She brought it up and ran it gently round and round Beth’s asshole, watching the firelight and the slick tentacle juice gleaming on the skin. Then she pushed it slowly but firmly inside.

Beth squealed, her mouth full of tentacle, and pushed her hips back, grinding down on the new entrant. Alaria concentrated, making all the tentacles thicker, spreading out inside Beth to push her sensations to new heights.

“Oh, fuck,” Mia gasped. “I’m going to come just watching you.”

Alaria looked over. Mia was spread out on the blanket, fucking herself with her fingers and rubbing hard at her clit with her other hand. As Alaria turned her gaze on Mia and fixed her with her eyes, Mia bit her lower lip and threw her head back, her hips thrusting convulsively on the blanket as an incredible, powerful orgasm blasted through her.

“Oh, yes!” she shouted, “Ah, fuck, yes! Oh!”

She flopped back on the blanket, then sat up again. Alaria decided to turn things around - literally.

With the incredible strength that the tentacle magic gave her, she reached down and flipped Beth over onto her back, then sent out new limbs to catch Beth’s legs and wrists and pull them out away from her body.

Beth was now completely helpless, her ankles and wrists bound by Alaria’s magic. She was in ecstasy, her head turning from side to side as she pleasured one tentacle after another, never quite able to get them all in her mouth at the same time. Alaria kept Beth’s ass, mouth and vagina filled, and gestured to Mia to come over and help.

Mia grinned, moving with a loose, post-orgasmic grace through the firelight until she stood over Beth. Beth’s eyes were fixed on Alaria, and she watched hungrily as Alaria and Mia shared a long, slow kiss.

“Finish her,” Alaria ordered, and Mia nodded, then dropped to her knees and lowered her head between Beth’s legs. With a loud, sloppy noise, she tongued Beth’s clit, and Alaria, watching, knew suddenly that she, too, was not far from her climax. She reached down and started teasing her own clit, and then knelt by Mia, her free hand running over Mia’s warm, smooth body until it found her ass. Alaria slipped her hand down and pushed it into Mia’s pussy. Warm, soft and soaking wet, Mia engulfed Alaria’s hand, pushing back on it as she moaned and filled her mouth with Beth’s clit.

Alaria was getting pleasure from five different directions - the tentacles in Beth’s mouth, the ones in her ass, and the ones in her vagina, and from her own hand pleasuring herself as she watched Mia going down on Beth.

She timed her own thrusts with Beth’s hips and her increasing moans, working so that she tipped over the edge into a mind-blowing climax at exactly the same time that Beth did. As they came, Alaria felt Mia rubbing herself into a frenzy of pleasure, and a moment later, Mia came a second time, groaning with the force of the orgasm as she lost herself in the pleasure.

A minute later, when Alaria came to herself, she was sitting upright. Beth was quivering in her arms, laughing quietly, and Mia was draped across Beth, leaning her head on the cat woman’s generous breasts and running a hand back and forth across her firm belly. Tentacles were sprawled around on the ground all about them, and the fire had sunk to a red glowing mass of embers.

Alaria felt the cool air blowing through the trees. She felt it more keenly now that the fire had died down. It was deliciously cool on her hot skin.

She was soaked. They all were. Sweat, tentacle juice, and their own wetness combined to make them all into a glorious, sticky mess. Her hair hung in rat-tails behind her head. Beth’s hair was everywhere, her gray fur gleaming soaked in the glowing light of the embers.

Alaria roused herself and laughed. “You okay, Beth?” she said, giving Beth a squeeze.

“Yeah,” Beth whispered. “Thanks, Alaria, I’m doing great.”

“Good, I just wanted to check in there, because that was intense.”

“I love it like that,” Beth said. “Honestly, Alaria, it’s never been so good. In all the time I’ve been having sex with people, I’ve never experienced anything even close to what I feel with you.”

“She’s had a good teacher,” Mia put in, with a mischievous wink.

They got up and wandered naked together to the stream, hand in hand. The water was cold, but it was refreshing, and they all got in up to their necks, enjoying the cold water and the cool night air, scrubbing the sex sweat and tentacle fluids from their own and each other’s bodies.

Back at the camp, they all lay down together in a heap, cuddled up naked under the stars. The freshly rebuilt fire crackled with clean, bright warmth, and they put their arms around each other and dropped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Chapter

Nine

“You’re doing great,” Alaria said.

“Really?” Mia asked, surprised out of her thoughts. “What makes you say that just now?”

“I can sense you holding the magic just at bay, keeping the power in your hands but not casting. It’s become second nature to you, just as I’d hoped.”

“Wow,” Mia said, “I didn’t realize that you were so aware of that. I don’t think I was even aware of it.”

“That’s the point,” Alaria explained. “You weren’t. I can only see it because I was looking, and because I have an innate ability to be aware of other magic. You’ve gained and built your power, and now you’ve developed the control over that power as well. You’re doing it exactly as intended, and you’re well on the way to becoming a more than competent spellcaster in the Fire school. Well done!”

“Thanks,” Mia said with a shy smile. “I’m pretty pleased with myself, to be honest. I ever thought this was something I would do. It’s good to feel like I’m getting somewhere with it!”

“You sure are,” Alaria said. “I think it’s time you start practicing your spells for real, now that you have the control in place. But not on the road. When we stop for the night, we’ll try and stop with a bit of extra time to practice.”

It was two days since their lovemaking session in the clearing in the forest, and four days since they’d set out. They were about halfway to the mountains where Neroli had her base. Already, the distant shapes of the mountains off in the distance could be seen rearing up and turning the bright blue of the horizon to dim shadow.

The whole of the Hope River valley was surrounded by mountains on every side. Calling it a valley was technically accurate, but it stretched the concept somewhat. It was a valley, but it was enormous, a wide, circular flatland, miles and miles across, with the Hope River running from north to south, splitting the plain down the middle. The mountains around the valley were tall and in many places impassable, though they were pierced at several points by high, narrow passes that acted as roads between the population of the valley and the world outside.

To the south and west, the mountain range was a fairly narrow but immensely high, steep range, giving way quickly on the other side to rolling, fertile coastlands. On the north-west, not far from Brighthill, the sea came rolling through a break in the mountains to create what could almost be described as an enormous tidal lagoon.

To the north and east, the mountains ran away off up the coast in a huge, deep range hundreds of square miles across, running right up to the sea and curving around to cover all the land as far as anyone had ever explored.

It was toward this north-eastern range, a most forbidding and perilous place, that Alaria and her friends were bound.

“Do you think we should stop?” Mia asked. “Give Beth a chance to catch up?”

“Yeah, good idea,” Alaria said. They had just crested the top of a long ridge, and Alaria shaded her eyes as she looked down from the height.

“What are you looking at?” Mia asked.

“That,” Alaria said, pointing.

Mia came over and leaned on Alaria’s shoulder, putting an arm around her waist. “It’s just a forest,” she said. “What’s bitten you? You seem disturbed by the prospect.”

Alaria nodded. “You can’t see the magic in that forest, but I can. My ability to see magic is not a spell that can be taught. It’s a facility that comes with being well-practiced with magic. I can see the effects of magic, even from a distance.”

“The way you saw the enchantment on the key back at the homestead, or the fact that I was holding my own power at bay just a moment ago?” Mia asked.

“Exactly,” Alaria said. “And this is another example. To you, that forest down there just looks like any other wood. But to me, it’s dripping with magic, and not magic I recognize. I have a feeling you might have a chance to practice your spells before too long. Our road goes right through it.”

“It does,” Mia said, squinting. “And there isn’t any place we could go to avoid it, either. The land is steep and rocky on either side, and it would take days to go around.”

“That’s time we don’t have,” Alaria said. “We can’t go around. Grozmikal will be on the road behind us. If he were to pass us by while we took a detour, it would be disastrous.”

“What are you two looking at?” Beth asked, coming up behind them.

“That forest,” Alaria said. “Do you see it?”

“Hmm, I do,” Beth said. “It has an ill-favored look.”

“I was thinking the same thing. There’s an unwholesome magic about it,” Alaria said. “I can sense it.”

Beth had needed to stop for a while, but she’d assured them she’d catch up. Alaria was pleased to see that Beth was now completely in her cat person form. She didn’t feel the need to hold her human appearance anymore, at least not while she was on the road with her two lovers. That was a sign of growing trust and love between Alaria and her, and it made Alaria very happy to see.

“Do you know anything about this wood?” Alaria asked.

Beth shook her head. “I’ve traveled the valley a fair bit, but most of my trips have been in the other direction. But look there, the forest is thick, and it’s long, but it’s not that broad, and the road can’t go through it for more than a mile at the most. It can’t be that dangerous. Grozmial must go through this woodland every time he goes to see Neroli - this is the only road east. And look, there’s a village just beyond the wood, you can see the smoke rising. I think we should just set out, don’t you?”

“I don’t think we have much choice,” Alaria said darkly. “But be wary. Places that are safe for villagers and for the likes of Grozmikal might not be safe for people like us.”

“People with magic powers, you mean?”

“Exactly. Dark magic responds to light magic, Beth. We may stimulate some magic that Grozmikal does not. You keep your bow to hand, and your blade as well. And Mia, you’ve grasped the control over your raw power admirably. Be ready to direct it against a foe.”

For her part, Alaria stopped and unpacked something from her bundle. It was her chainmail, a long, gleaming garment of polished steel rings that was enchanted to pack down impossibly small and light.

She put it on and strapped her leather jerkin over it. She’d opted to leave her heavy chest plate behind on this trip. That was not something that could be enchanted to be smaller than it was, and in the fight that was to come in the mountains, Alaria guessed that speed and dexterity were going to be more useful than brute armor strength, so she packed light.

Her legendary enchanted blade Skyfang was at her hip, and Earthclaw, a razor-sharp wychsteel blade that was Skyfang’s companion, was in its sheath on the other side of her belt.

With all her gear on, Alaria looked like an adventurer, and she felt like one again, too.

Beth looked comfortable in her leather ranger armor as well, a set of heavy boiled leather that would make short work of any but the heaviest blows.

Only Mia looked a bit uncomfortable. They had bought her some armor and a sword from an armor crafter in Hopeford. Like Beth’s, Mia’s gear was hard leather, reinforced here and there with steel studs. It was chosen for speed and maneuverability, since Mia was never going to be in melee unless things went terribly wrong.

Their roles were well worked out - Alaria was the damage dealer, and she was also the one who could take damage. With her incredibly powerful magic, her heavier armor and weaponry, and her unmatched experience in the field, she was the one to take the lead in any battle.

Beth was more of an all-rounder. Her role was as a scout first and foremost. She was swift and silent on her feet, an impeccable shot, and also deadly fast with a blade if she needed to be, but her strength was in the rear, backing up Alaria at range, lending her aid where it was most needed, and looking out for Mia as well if that was required.

Mia’s role was dedicated ranged support. She had a great deal of power she could harness now, and she knew how to use it, though her repertoire of spells still wasn’t that big. She would stay clear of any close fighting and use her ranged Ice and Fire spells to back up Alaria in close combat. Meanwhile, Beth would use her bow and her blade to back Alaria up as well, to take out specific enemies from a distance, and to protect Mia if needed.

The only thing that Beth was not sure about was using her Shapeshifting magic.

When Alaria had asked about that, Beth shook her head. “I’ve only used it to look like a human for so long, I’m not sure how good I’ll be at it. I’ve used my human glamor, or I’ve used the stealth effect that you saw in the woods back home in Brighthill the day before we set off, but that’s all I’ve done with it for years. I’m not sure about using it to transform into other shapes. I’m very out of practice with that kind of thing.”

Alaria took that on board. She wasn’t disappointed - she was too pragmatic for that - but she had to confess it would have been useful to have an active shapeshifter on the team. Someone who could transform into various different animals at will could be very useful.

But Alaria was a woman who knew how to utilize the resources she had at hand, and make the best of them.

“We can’t make any particular battleplan,” she said as they approached the edge of the forest. “It’s hard to tell what we might come up against, but my sense of the magic in this place tells me that it’s concentrated off to the left of the road, near the far side of the trees. That suggests that we might get lucky and avoid trouble if we stick to the road.”

“Then again,” Beth said grimly, fitting the string to her bow, “we might not.”

They descended from the ridge and entered the magic forest. Alaria felt the malevolence of the trees as soon as she stepped under the canopy. There was no question that whatever magic was here, it was intended to harm, and yet she had no choice but to push her and her companions through the forest if she wanted to come out the other side and reach her destination.

Alaria felt the magic keenly. The others felt it as a vague sense of dread and oppression that made them shiver, but nothing worse than that.

Despite the pressing evil that seeped from the trees around them, it did seem at first like they would get lucky and avoid trouble. They walked warily but quickly for a mile before anything began to happen. When it did begin to happen, it happened with a vengeance.

About halfway through, when they were in the midpoint of the forest and as deep in as they were going to get, the trees began to move.

Mia saw it first. She hissed a frightened breath in between her teeth and pointed with her left hand. “Look there,” she said. Alaria and Beth both looked.

One of the trees - a big one a few strides away from the left of the path - was swaying as if it was being blown about by a wind. And yet there was no wind, all the other trees were still.

The tree was a mighty oak, but of the strange type that were native to the hot northern climates of Sephali. A dry oak, it was called, because of the way the bark grew light and crinkly, resembling dried out paper.

“There,” Alaria said. “That’s our first challenge.”

“Shall we try to pass it and see if it’ll let us through?”

“Yeah,” Alaria said, “It’s not on the path - yet. Above all, we mustn’t leave the path. I think we’d better try to pass this tree so long as it’s not blocking the path, but be on your guard. It’s the first challenge, but I don’t think it’s going to be the last.”

They pushed on, past the writhing dry oak and on along the path. The tree didn’t seem interested in them at first - it let them pass without doing anything to them, but only once they were forty feet on down the path did they realize what the plan was.

The dry oak suddenly burst forward through the smaller trees around it, pulling up its roots and moving like some giant octopus as it slithered across the ground and planted itself firmly on the road behind them. At the same moment, a group of smaller trees - more like saplings than anything else - rushed forward to block their way. These were almost humanoids, tall as Alaria, but with long, whip-like branches and roots that moved them along like hosts of little feet.

“Tree demons!” Alaria said.

They made an unpleasant skittering sound as they moved, and now even Beth and Mia could sense the oppressive ill-will that this forest had for them. There was no doubting that the forest was full of magic, and that the magic had been turned against Alaria and her friends.

“Mia,” Alaria said, “we’re going to have to kill them. They will kill us otherwise. I don’t like killing trees, and these ones have been animated by some external force. It’s not their fault, and I regret that, but we’re left with no choice.”

“Do you want me to take the lead?” Mia asked.

Alaria nodded. “It’s a good opportunity to practice your new fire spells. Try to keep the spells tightly focused if you can, but do whatever you need to do. Trust your gut. We don’t want a massive conflagration if we can avoid it, but you might have to get pretty destructive to get us through this.”

“Got it,” Mia said, looking grim and determined. She looked a bit scared too, there was no denying that, but she also seemed pleased to have the opportunity to try out her new spells. Alaria felt her gathering her magic around herself, and preparing to cast.

“Hold,” Alaria said suddenly. “They’re behaving aggressively, but they haven’t attacked us yet. We can’t attack first.”

She approached with her sword still in its sheath, her hand out, palm upward, speaking in a loud voice. “We mean no harm!” she called. “Let us pass in peace, and we will take nothing from the forest. We respect the trees, and the guardians of the trees, and we will do no harm if we are not threatened.”

The answer was decisive. The whole group of humanoid saplings rushed at them, screeching like angry demons. Alaria leaped back. She swept Skyfang from its sheath, but didn’t strike.

“Mia!” she called in a deep, commanding voice. “Destroy them!”

Mia let loose with fire magic.

Contrary to Alaria’s initial instruction, Mia began with Inferno, and Alaria smiled. Mia had taken on the most important instruction - to use her gut. The situation had changed, the enemies had clumped up, and now Inferno was the most appropriate spell. Inferno was an area-of-effect attack that exploded out from the center of the group of enemies, throwing burning tree demons in every direction with the force of its power.

The path was suddenly obscured by a thick, dense black pall of smoke. Alaria used Gust, a mild spell from the school of Air magic. A puff of wind shot out from her hand and cleared the way of smoke. Broken sapling demons lay scattered about on the ground, but there was no sign of any more for the present.

“The path’s clear,” Alaria said teresely. “Let’s move.”

The group set off at a run, charging through the remains of burning tree demons and on, up a slight slope and round a bend in the path where a large, pointed rock blocked the way. From behind them, they heard a bellowing, angry sound as the dry oak set off in pursuit.

Then, suddenly, there was a terrible creaking and groaning all around them and every tree in the forest began to move with unnatural purpose.

The rage of the enchanted forest had been unleashed.

Chapter

Ten

Trees came at them from all around. There were more than a hundred of the humanoid, sapling-type demons, but there were also many that were much larger. From behind, the dry oak lumbered down the path toward them, roading and bellowing like an angry bull. From all sides, the humanoid sapling demons charged in, while from the front, a group of three larger trees attacked in formation.

Further back, there were many much larger trees, but these seemed to be holding back for the moment. There were too many of them, and they couldn’t all attack at once. They seemed to want to let the smaller, more maneuverable ones attack first.

Alaria was forced to step in now. There were too many of the enemy for her to take a back seat and let Mia and Beth handle the fight. She waded in, swinging Skyfang from side to side and cutting her way efficiently and without remorse or hesitation through the press of attacking enemies.

For her part, Mia began using Inferno to good effect. The press was at risk of closing around her and Beth, but Alaria’s attack drew the attention of the monsters and they focused on her instead. Mia sent a rapid succession of Inferno blasts at the press of foes nearest her, clearing some space. Every time she hit with the spell, it increased slightly in power, and the fifth blast was so loud and powerful that it rocked the ground under her feet.

“Switch up!” Alaria shouted. “Switch up! You’ll wreck yourself if you just use the same one over and over!”

It was a well-known feature of destructive magic that the same spell used again and again in quick succession caused the spell to increase in power, but also increased the amount of mana each casting needed to draw from the casting mage. Mia knew this in theory, but she’d never tested it in practice, and Alaria could tell that Mia was at risk now of falling prey to the allure of more and more powerful spells.

It was too easy for a mage - particularly a novice - to forget the danger of this magic and overdo it, depleting their mana and destroying their chances of fighting again for days.

Mia heeded Alaria’s warning. She nodded once in acknowledgement and switched to Firebolt, a much more targeted spell. With this spell, she concentrated her fire on the three larger foes, the ones who were on the road, blocking the way, but not attacking just yet.

They were waiting in the wings, however, and so Mia concentrated on them. Fireball was a less draining spell, and so she managed a few in quick succession before she needed to change to something else. Next, she moved over to Ice Spike, sending three-foot-long javelins of razor-sharp, steel-hard ice to smash into the large demons.

The three elite tree demons staggered back, glancing from side to side under the hail of fire. Alaria smashed through the final press of sapling demons, using a blast of raw force at the last moment to send the last of her foes hurtling away from her to scatter broken across the forest floor.

The three larger demons were in disarray, and Alaria saw that she didn’t need to do anything there to finish that fight. Beth and Mia had that in hand.

She looked around for new threats. Ice, then fire, then ice again flew past as Mia blasted away at the group of three, and Beth hung two steps back to Mia’s right, her bow in her hand, ready to take out any other threats but content to keep her eyes open and protect Mia as was needed.

Alaria narrowed her eyes at the dry oak. It had been waiting too, holding its position and glaring down on the fight, but now it started to move. As it came on, it changed. Dry, crinkly tree bark changed and became more like the living hide of an animal, and the blank space in the front of the creature shimmered and changed and became a face, with a wide, gaping maw and two very large, very cunning yellow eyes. The mouth was filled with gleaming teeth, incongruous white and clean in the hoary skin of twisted tree bark. A long, red tongue lolled out.

This was no tree anymore. She knew it for what it was. This was a dryad, a tree spirit that took the form of an oak tree but was, in fact, a powerful and insane entity bent on destruction.

A sprint took Alaria past the spot where her friends held fast, Beth watching the situation so that Mia could concentrate on the three tree demons. The trio were not managing to make any headway. As soon as any of them tried to advance, Mia sent a thundering combo of ice and fire spells to stop them in their tracks.

As Alaria passed, she saw Mia knocking back a mana potion to replenish her power. Alaria reached into her own pouch and pulled out a Strength potion, swallowing the sweet mouthful of liquid and feeling a sudden burst of immense physical power and energy rushing through her.

Driven by the burst of energy from the potion, she dashed forward, moving with the speed of the wind. She raised a hand to fire a stream of burning flame at the dryad that had been the oak tree. The flames scorched the dryad’s side, and as Alaria got closer, closing on her target, the monster turned and noticed her properly for the first time. It let out a growling roar of displeasure and turned with a lurch to face her.

The fire blast hadn’t made a great deal of difference, but at that moment there was an explosion, followed by another, and a glance over Alaria’s shoulder showed her that the three large tree monsters Mia had been fighting were reduced to one.

The remains of the others smoked in wet chunks all over the path, and the final one was swaying irresolutely as Mia hit it with Firebolt then Ice Spike, over and over in merciless succession.

Alaria knew that the dryad’s hide would be hard to pierce, and she didn’t want to take any chances. She charged, swinging Skyfang round in a great two handed blow, and pouring a searing blast of raw fire energy through the edge of the blade as she did so. Her magic made the blade sharper and more deadly than ever.

The edge of Skyfang ran with flame and hissed as it connected with the dryad’s side, and the blade scored a massive gash in the barky skin. Black blood flooded from the wound, and the tree monster roared in anger and pain as it stumbled backward, then lashed out at Alaria with one huge limb. Alaria raised her sword to parry the blow, then cut upward, pushing wind energy into the blade and using all of her potion-enhanced strength to put weight behind the blow. The sword sheared through the creature’s hide and severed the limb, and Alaria leaped out of the way of the caustic blood that gushed from the severed stump.

The dryad expected her to retreat, but she didn’t. Instead, she leaped forward. Despite its injuries, the dryad pressed the attack and tried to get its mouth of huge, jagged teeth near to her face. She took advantage of the sudden closing of the distance to get close enough for a death blow.

The thing’s long, red tongue whipped out like a vine to wrap around her upper body, but she slashed upward quickly and the lashing tongue retreated. She leaped up and, with a mighty blow, plunged the razor tip of Skyfang into the creature’s mighty maw and upward, through the roof of its mouth, hilt-deep into whatever it had that passed for its brain.

The sword went right through the hard part of the creature’s mouth and into something soft. Alaria didn’t hang about. She yanked the blade back and leaped away, knowing that a creature like this would have a terrible death-spasm and would lash out uncontrollably in the moment of its destruction.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mia and Beth rushing up, but they were too late to help. The foe was defeated.

The dryad thrashed about, its huge limbs banging the ground with enough force to crush a man to jelly. She was out of the way now, though, and the dryad’s death spasm only lasted a moment. Suddenly, the remains of the monster grew still, but to their surprise, it didn’t slump to the ground as a broken corpse. Instead, it transformed.

The gaping maw vanished, the glowing yellow eyes went dark and became two knots in the bark, and the wounds that Alaria had dealt it vanished. A black shadow passed up through the air, like smoke from a dying candle, and there in the middle of a path was a perfectly normal and unenchanted dry oak tree.

“The spirit of the dryad that inhabited this tree has been banished,” Alaria said with satisfaction. “Now the tree can return to its peaceful life.”

“I’m afraid the same can’t be said for the three that I killed,” Mia said, not sounding regretful at all. “They’re all blown into bits!”

She gestured proudly to where the remains of the troom of three tree demons had occupied the road. There was nothing remaining except a blackened patch of ground, and several large, smoking chunks of wet wood scattered about on either side of the path.

“You did great,” Beth cackled, slapping Mia on the back. “That was the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. You’ve learned the magic so fast!”

“Alaria says I’m the fastest learner she’s ever seen - when it comes to magic, at least!”

They all laughed. Alaria glanced around. “Let’s press on,” she said. “We’ve done well, but I’m not confident that there isn’t going to be worse ahead before we get out of this forest. Come on.”

She led the way, and the others followed warily, Mia on her left and Beth on her right, keeping their eyes open for signs of further threat. But as they pressed on, nothing happened. They were able to get to the top of the next rise and down into the dell without issue, and after another fifteen minutes of swift but wary walking, they saw the end of the road.

The light of the outside world could be seen as a small point of light at the end of a long, straight mile of path, around which the forest pressed close.

“Stick together, and stay wary,” Alaria said, but again, as they moved forward through the forest, sticking to the path, they were not assailed by anything except the sense of watchfulness and hostility that emanated from the shadows under the thick trees.

They were less than a hundred yards from the edge of the forest, and almost ready to congratulate themselves on their escape, when the path burst up into the air in front of them and a massive, hulking shape hauled itself up through the resulting gap.

The monster was huge, a terrible creature with a mass of long, whipping, vine-like limbs and a body of dark wood. It had a nightmare face, all grinning teeth and rolling red eyes, and as it pulled itself up out of the ground, thick drool ran from its mouth and hissed and smoked where it hit the ground.

“It’s a sentinel!” Alaria shouted. “A major tree demon, only found in forests with the most ancient enchantments! I had no idea there was anything so powerful in here.”

She could have cursed herself for not anticipating this. There had been something about the haze of evil magic she’s seen above the forest, something that promised more than just the usual creatures one might find in an enchanted wood. A sentinel was an ancient spirit, grown over scores of years in the soil of an enchanted forest, and found only in the most ancient and powerful of places.

Alaria glanced at her two friends. They both looked scared but determined. They would do their best, Alaia knew, but she doubted very much whether either of them was ready for a foe such as this.

She thought of Dbuk the primordial kraken. Now there had been a foe. An ancient spirit that had crawled through the very veil of reality to live in the form of a great tentacled beast, poisoning the world around it.

Alaria had killed Dbuk with a single blow, near enough. She could handle this.

“You two stay back and cover me,” she ordered. “This is a dangerous foe. I’ll need to use everything I’ve got to defeat it. We must use everything we have at our disposal here. Don’t hesitate to use potions. Beth, use your arrows, and if you see an opening for your shapeshifting powers, just go for it, don’t wait. It doesn’t matter what we use up here - we can resupply. Any advantage we can get may mean the difference between life and death.”

Beth and Mia listened to Alaria’s advice. Mia took a Mana Resilience potion, giving her an extra pool of mana to draw from for a limited time, and a Tactical Imperative potion, giving her more speed, physical strength, and awareness of her surroundings. Beth drank down a Hunter’s Eye potion, giving her a boost to her already-excellent aim and draw speed, and she also took a Tactical Imperative potion.

Alaria was still under the influence of the Strength potion that she’d taken, but she had a special one in her pouch that she’d been saving - Pain Resist. She didn’t like the fact that she had to take this, but there was no question that it made sense. She was unprepared for this monster, and she was going to have to take a hit or two to get close enough to kill it.

Mia raised up her hands and conjured Inferno. She sent the spell blasting through the air toward the monster. The sentinel roared in anticipation of the fight and charged, and Alaria raised Skyfang and ran forward to meet the creature’s charge.

The battle was on.

Chapter

Eleven

Mia’s Inferno spell hit the sentinel square in the face. An immense explosion blasted out from the monster’s center of mass, and for a moment most of the beast was obscured by the pall of black smoke that followed the explosion. Alaria slowed her pace for an instant hoping that the creature was finished, but there was no such luck. The sentinel burst through the smoke, roaring and waving its arms about. The Inferno spell hadn’t made any difference to it at all!

“By the gods,” Mia yelled. “It’s immune to that?”

“No,” Alaria shouted back, “but you need to target more carefully. Remember your control! I’m going in!”

With that, she charged in, swinging her blade left and right as she batted away the crushing swings of the monster’s huge limbs. There was a ringing sound like swords being drawn from their scabbards, and six of the monster’s huge limbs sprouted blades easily six feet long each.

The new blades came down at Alaria in a flurry from all sides. She repelled outward with a crude blast of force magic, knocking all the limbs back, and then followed up with a Bafflement spell, a spell from the school of spirit magic that was one she didn’t use very often. The spell took effect, slowing the creature and causing it to be unaware of her for long enough that she could get in and take out one of its bigger limbs. The huge chunk of wood fell to the ground.

She activated her tentacles, sending them blasting out around her to bat away the many limbs that the sentinel was trying to hit her with. If she hadn’t had the tentacles, it might have been a different picture, but with them in play, she could fight the monster on its own terms. It had many arms, but so did she.

To Mia and Beth, Alaria was a blur of spells and swinging blades as she fought the huge beast. For all its size, the monster was deadly fast, but Alaria was faster.

“I’ve never seen her fight like that,” Mia said, amazed. “When we fought the koblins in the valley outside Hopeford, I thought she was impressive, but she can’t have been using even a fraction of her ability then.”

“I wish I could get an arrow off,” Beth said, peering forward. There was no chance that she could fire a decent shot into the mass of swirling limbs and fighting branches that was the tree-sentinel. “I can’t see a damned thing.”

“And there’s no point me blasing off spells from a distance if the damn monster is immune even to an inferno spell.”

“Alaria didn’t say it was immune,” Beth reminded Mia. “She said that you had to target its weak spots.”

“And how the hell am I supposed to know what its weak spots are?” Mia snapped. She was frustrated, feeling helpless as she watched her lover battling a monster and didn’t feel able to help out.

“I have an idea,” Beth said, glancing around. “There’s no other enemies about. I think I’m going to try and scout a bit.”

“Scout? How?” Mia asked.

“I think I may be able to find my way into using my old shapeshifting power. I was thinking about it recently, after that incident in the woods up at the homestead. I used to be able to transform into animal forms. I’m going to try that again. Then I can scout ahead and see if I can find a weak spot for you to target.”

“Got it,” Mia said. “Go for it. I can look after myself. Even if other enemies come, I can hold them off pretty well with the magic I have already. It’s worth the risk if you can find me a spot to hit on that monster. Go on!”

Beth nodded once and then closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating. She’d not done this for a long time, not since the bad old days. When she’d come to Hope River valley, and found herself a home in Brighthill, she’d wanted to forget those old days, and the use of her magic was just a reminder of hard times that she’d rather forget. But now her lover was in danger, and her other lover, Mia, was in distress because she couldn’t help.

Suddenly, the old magic was more than just a reminder of hard times. Suddenly, Beth’s old magic might just become a life-saver.

With a flick of her will, she activated the long-latent power. She felt her body change, the familiar feline form that she was so used to wearing shifted and became something altogether lighter and more transient. Beth transformed, utilizing the ancient magic of the shapeshifters to take on one of her all-time favorite forms - a tiny, inconspicuous hummingbird.

A rush of delight flooded her as she darted forward, remembering how to use the tiny bird’s wings to propel herself forward. She caught a current of warm air and soared upward, turning her head momentarily to catch sight of Mia’s astonished face. Then she focused on the target, the horrible tree-sentinel that was bearing down on Alaria even as Beth flew in close to get a good look.

Mia’s jaw had nearly dropped to the floor when Beth had transformed into a bird. She had heard of shapeshifters, and she knew - in theory - that Beth was one of them, but she’d never seen anything as weird and wonderful as the sight of the red-haired cat woman vanishing and turning into a bright blue hummingbird.

Now, she stood on guard, hearing the crashes and roars and grunts from Alaria’s battle with the sentinel, but forcing herself to remain conscious of her surroundings. If any other enemies decided to appear, she’d be ready for them.

Suddenly, the progress of the battle changed. Mia had such confidence in Alaria that it hadn’t crossed her mind that her lover would not prevail in any fight against a monster. But suddenly, Mia saw Alaria being lifted up into the air, swinging from one of the tree sentinel’s many branches. Alaria’s tentacles lashed out from left to right, catching at the tree sentinel’s arms and pulling them away, but even the unbelievable strength of her tentacles couldn’t keep Alaria safe from the monster. She couldn’t get free. The sentinel seemed to be adapting to Alaric’s attacks.

Mia could have yelled out loud in frustration. She could feel power boiling around her hands, ready to be released, but she couldn’t risk firing it at the sentinel, and not just because the monster didn’t seem to be affected by the spells she’d fired already. Now, there was the added challenge that Alaria was up near the monster’s head. A destructive spell might well hurt Alaria as much as the sentinel!

Keep your head, Mia told herself. This is the control that you’ve been training for. There’s no point blasting off spells without knowing what you’re doing, and that’s why you need to have control over your magic. You can do this.

At that moment, almost as if in response to her thought, she saw a flicker of brilliance blue, like a spark of bright crystal flashing through the air toward her. A moment later, she saw the shape of a gleaming bluebird that rippled and changed and turned into Beth.

“Thank the gods,” Mia said. “What did you learn?”

Beth came over to Mia and leaned in, pointing at the sentinel so Mia could look along her arm and see exactly what she was looking at. “You see that?” Beth said. “There, at the point where the creature’s arms join the body? That’s the weak spot. You hit the monster there, and I’ll bet it will do some damage.”

Mia had a memory of chopping kindling from branches as a child. “Like with an axe,” she said. “You lop off the smaller branches from the trunk by hitting it at the join. If you hit it higher up, it just springs back…”

She crouched to get a better aim, feeling the Tactical Imperative potion working well, increasing her ability to aim and be certain of her shot.

Alaria thrashed out suddenly, a blast of magic flaring out from her as she put a monumental effort into resisting the monster, then she hung limp again as the monster’s huge limbs closed around her.

Mia fired.

A blast of red hot, living flame seared the air as it streaked across the gap between them and smacked into the spot right at the base of the monster’s massive arm, where it met the body.

The effect was instant and devastating, and gratitude flooded Mia’s whole being as she saw a writhing tree limb detach from the sentinel and fall crashing to the ground in a splinter of wood and destruction.

“You did it!” Beth said fiercely. “I’m going in. Keep it up!”

Beth suited her actions to her words, dashing forward with her bow in her hand, and blasting off shot after shot toward the monster. Her bowshots were deadly accurate, slamming into the weak joins in the sentinel’s arms.

The arrows were not as powerful as Mia’s spells. Beth needed to fire off several shots to even weaken the join, and then another few before the arm fell, but still, having attacks coming from both sides made the sentinel less able to react.

Mia cam up behind Beth, moving as close as she dared and targeting the limbs that held Alaria.

Then, just as she was getting close enough to Beth that she would have been Abe to reach other and touch her, she saw something. It was like a thin brown smoke that drifted over the ground, but if she moved a step back, it vanished. Beth was just moving into the cloud, but she didn’t seem to see it.

Mia narrowed her eyes, and peering seemed to bring the smoke into greater focus. Yes, there was no doubt about it. There was a thick pall of the brown smoke around Alaria, and the smoke around Beth was gathering around the cat woman’s head.

In an instant, Mia put two and two together. She dashed forward without hesitation, grabbed Beth, and hauled her back. Beth was already going limp, but Mia got her out got her out of the influence of the horrible brown magic just in time. Beth shook herself like a damp cat and glared around as Mia fired off a couple of ice spikes to freeze two of the sentinel’s arms, before chopping them down with fire blasts.

“What was that?” Beth gasped.

“Some kind of magic influence that paralyses and slows you down,” Mia said. “it gathers round you if you get too close.”

“Must have been how the damn sentinel got Alaria,” Beth growled. She cursed and then stooped to pick up a fallen arrow and notch it to her bow. Mia took out another of the creature’s arms.

At that moment, the monster leaped back, dropping Alaria and howling. Mia and Beth rushed forward, and Beth got off a stunning shot that went smack through the eye of the sentinel. The creature roared and staggered even further back, and as it retreated Mia saw the terrible brown haze retreating as well.

“We’ve got it on the run!” she shouted. “Come on, Beth!”

The two women started forward, pursuing the fleeing sentinel. Alaria rolled over, coughing, and then leaped up. Her sword Skyfang was still in her hand. Through all the time she’d been in the clutches of the sentinel, she’d never once let it go.

She swayed, and Beth caught her.

“Mia!” Beth shouted. “A potion, quick!”

Mia reached into her pouch and pulled out a healing potion and a mana boost potion. She cracked the tops off them and poured them into Alaric’s slack mouth. Glowing light flared up around Alaria, and glowing liquid dribbled out of one corner of her mouth, but then she straightened and her eyes opened.

She looked around wildly or a moment as if she didn’t know where she was, then she came to herself again.

“The tree?” she asked.

Beth pointed. “It’s on the run,” she said.

Alaria glared. “We’ll see about that,” she said. She leaped forward, sprinting down the path toward the fleeing sentinel. The tree was ig, but it was slow, and it was hindered by the fact that it had lost a few arms and had an arrow sticking out of its left eye.

Alaria caught it easily, and with a single mighty leap she flew through the air toward it and slammed her blade into its back.

Magic flowed from the deadly edge of Skyfang and the monster roared as the sword plunged deep into its hide. A thundering explosion boomed from the monster, and it flew apart, huge chunks of wood ripping into the trees and smashing holes in the canopy above.

Beth and Mia both ducked, and when they stood up again they saw Alaria standing in the middle of the road, surrounded by the smoking debris that had, a moment before, been her enemy.

She was holding something in her left hand. It glowed a deep and verdant green.

“What’s that?” Beth said in wonder as she and Mia approached cautiously. “What have you got in your hand?”

“The heart of the forest,” Alaria said. “It had been enchanted by some evil power, but no more. The way is clear, and the heart of this forest will never be in thrall to evil magic again.”

Chapter

Twelve

As the three companions stumbled out of the woods following their fight with the trees, there was a grumble of thunder from high above. Alaria looked up. A steady, warm rain began to fall.

Despite the potions she’d taken, Alaria was unsteady on her feet. Her clothing was tattered and her skin was scratched. Her hair was matted with the thick, unpleasant-smelling ooze that the sentinel’s arms had been covered with, and she limped with her left leg.

“It’ll take more than a healing potion to recover from that fight,” she said with a pale smile. “I need a rest and a sleep.”

She leaned on Mia and Beth as they made their way slowly up the road in the pouring rain. “That brown miasma that the sentinel exuded knocked me out cold. It was a powerful magical influence that I wasn’t expecting. I knew there would be something there, but had no idea it would be so strong. Even a tree sentinel shouldn’t have such a powerful miasma of magic as that, but I still should have guessed.”

“Let’s just get to the village,” Mia said gently, exchanging a worried glance with Beth. It was not like Alaria to be so fretful and self-blaming. Mia hoped very much that the words were just exhaustion from the evil influence of the tree’s magic, and that with food and a rest, the influence would wear off.

Thankfully, the village was not far from the treeline, but still it felt like it took them a long time to get there. When they finally did, they were soaked, cold, and hungry, but the rain had at least had the effect of washing the goo from the tree sentinel off of their skin. The warm light spilling from the small, deep set windows of the village inn called to them invitingly.

Beth had some suspicions about the kind of welcome they might receive. After all, this was a small village in an out of the way part of the world, and the villagers were unlikely to see travelers often. Three heavily armed travelers fresh from the thick of a battle might not go down too well rolling into the village inn at the close of the day. But her fears were groundless. The village of Nearwood was more used to travelers than Beth thought, and they were kindly folk, always ready to help out people in need.

Night was falling, the day’s work was done, and the inn was full. At a glance, Beth could see that there were no other travelers here. Everyone here was local. There was something about the way folks carried themselves that told her the people were at home here; she knew it from running an inn herself. There were perhaps twelve or fifteen patrons sitting at tables or on stools by the bar. Many of them were quite elderly, men with long gray or white beards, and women with weather-worn faces from years of outdoor labor. But a few of the younger folks were sitting at the bar, and two of these leaped up and came over to help with looks of genuine concern on their faces.

One was a well-built man with a big, bushy brown beard and heavy brows. He had the hands and build of a forester, but there was something in his lithe movements that suggested the swiftness of the hunter. The other was an elf woman who looked young at a glance, but whose eyes showed the wisdom and far-sightedness that only comes with years.

“Get her a chair, Rurik,” the elf said to the human, glancing at Alaria with her penetrating eyes. “She’s exhausted.”

“Aye, Mira,” the man called Rurik said, “I’ll do that.”

He grabbed three chairs and hauled them over to a free space near the fire, and gestured for the three women to sit. When they did so, the elf-woman Mira nodded approvingly.

“Sanya will get you something to eat and drink,” she said, gesturing to a pretty, alert young woman who was looking after the bar, “and then you’d better tell us what’s happened to you. It’s clear you’ve been involved in some kind of trouble. I’ll wait until you’re refreshed before saying more, but before I do, I have to ask - is our village in any danger?”

Beth looked at Mira. “We were attacked by monsters in the nearby woods,” she said. “But we fought them off. I don’t know what that means for the safety of your village…”

Mira’s sculpted eyebrows rose in surprise. “The trees attacked you?” she said. “I’m glad you made it out. That’s a rare occurrence, though it does happen. But no, the village is safe from the trees, there’s nothing to worry about there. Thank you. I’ll let you eat in peace, I think, then perhaps we can have some conversation about you and your road ahead.”

The food was good; very good, in fact, and Sanya, the young woman who brought it to them, made sure that they had plenty and made it clear that there was plenty more too, if they wanted it. She offered them beer, but they all refused, asking only for water. Sanya seemed to approve of that. She brought them water, another basket of bread, and then left them in peace.

Alaria was impressed with the restraint of the villagers. It was clear from their glances that they were interested in the newcomers, but they didn’t bother them with questions, nor did they stare. Instead, once it was clear that no more help was needed, they returned to their ale, their games of cards, and their quiet talk. Only once Alaria and her friends had worked their way through several bowls of stew, two generous baskets of good bread, and a prodigious pot of steamed greens and mushrooms, did the elf-woman approach them and ask politely if they were prepared to speak.

“The villagers of Nearwood are courteous,” Alaria said, inclining her head toward Mira. “Thank you for giving us the time we needed to rest. I’m very tired, but I’m willing to have some conversation with you before sleep.”

“Thank you,” Mira said. She sat, and as she did so she nodded to Rurik, who moved over from the bar, a tankard of ale in hand, and sat down beside her.

Beth, Mia, and Alaria waited expectantly for the elf-woman to speak, but she did not. She just gazed at them quietly, a small smile on her face, her whole posture radiating patience and peace.

Eventually, Alaria spoke. “Won’t you ask whatever questions you have?” she said.

Mira’s smile widened. “Do I need to?” she returned gently.

Alaria smiled. “I suppose not,” she said. She sighed, then settled back into her chair. “We are traveling to the domain of the Ice Queen,” she said. “Neroli’s influence has come to my attention, and I’ve decided that I ought to do something about it. She’s been causing trouble for some friends of mine, and I’m going to see to it once and for all.”

Rurik laughed, a warm, throaty sound, very genuine and pleasing to hear. “Mira knows how to ask questions without asking,” he said. “But if you go up against the ice queen, you’ll find yourself in competition with Grozmikal, the adventurer. He passes through here often, and I have to tell you, he’s got his sights on Neroli. He’s a bit too fond of this,” he hefted his tankard, ale slopping over the side, “and when he’s had one or two too many and found that there are no wenches who are willing to jump into bed with him, he gets maudlin and starts talking about how he’s going to kill Neroli. You ask me, there’s something not right about him. We’re quiet folks here in Nearwood, and I was born here, but unlike most, I’ve traveled a bit and I’ve seen some of the world. I’ve been south, and seen how adventurers operate, and this Grozmikal is an odd one, that’s all I’ll say.”

Alaria narrowed her eyes. This was unexpected. She hadn’t considered the idea that anyone else might have gotten wind of Grozmikal’s imposture, so well had he taken in the good folks of Hopeford. But there was another possibility, too. This man - pleasant as he seemed, and much as she instinctively liked him - was not necessarily all that he seemed. There was a possibility - unlikely though she had to admit - that he was a spy for Neroli, and that he was fishing for information.

I should have checked before I came in here and started talking, she cursed inwardly. I’m out of practice, wandering in and running my mouth about my mission.

“If you know about adventurers,” Beth said smoothly, “then you’ll know that competition is part of the joy of our trade. Grozmikal may be wanting to put a stop to the ice queen’s activities, but there’s good reward for anyone who does. We want to as well, and Grozmikal will have to be fast if he wants to get ahead of us.”

Alaria smiled. She was pleased with Beth’s easy covering of Alaria’s potential blunder. Subtly, Alaria allowed a trickle of spirit magic to flow from her right hand, and shaped it into a stealthy Truthseeker spell. This was not a particularly powerful or reliable piece of magic, and it could not be expected to work on a mage, but it would work on a regular human. Whatever else Rurik the forester might be, he was not a mage. Alaria was confident enough in her own ability to detect magic to be sure of that; there were no magicians in the tavern with them.

The Truthseeker spell flowed through the air in front of her, moving subtly across the bodies of Mira and Rurik. Only Alaria could see it. To her relief, the magic glowed a bright, clean blue color - the signal that there was no dishonesty in the person that the spell was directed at. She smiled. It still made sense to be subtle, and Alaria was glad that Beth had picked up on that as well, but they did not need to worry about Mira or Rurik being spies of the enemy.

“It’ll be no bad thing if someone puts a stop to Neroli’s activities,” Rurik continued. “And I’m glad to hear you say you’re going out to do just that. If you ask me, Grozmikal is more interested in his own glory than in the safety of the villages. I have a few cousins in the villages that hug the foothills of the mountains, and they say that the fuss he makes after saving one of the villages is ridiculous. They’re happy to have allies, of course, and the ice queen’s demon wolves are terrible creatures, right enough, but the villagers are not helpless. I’ve read some of Grozmikal’s books, his accounts of the adventures, and he makes out that the villagers are all lined up like helpless lambs for the slaughter, and would be turned into mincemeat in double-quick time if he wasn’t around to wave his magic sword and save them all.”

“Then it’s not true that the villages need his help?” Mia asked innocently. “I know Grozmikal is a bit of a blowhard, but I didn’t think he’d make up something like that.”

“Well, don’t get me wrong,” Rurik said, “the foothill villages aren’t exactly fortresses, but they’re not helpless either. The folk there can fight. They have some stout retired warriors who train up the younger folk to fight, and most of the villages have built up defenses - stone walls, lines of ditches, that kind of thing. They’re used to being raided by the mountain tribes, or by orks, or by passing bandits. It’s not a safe bit of the country out there. Oh, don’t mistake me, they’d not hold out against an army laying siege, but these wolves of Neroli are just hit and run raiders, not organized troops. The way Grozmikal tells it, well…”

He broke off, shaking his head disapprovingly. Then he took a mighty slug of ale, sat back in his chair, and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked at Mira, who had not said a word through all this.

Now, she spoke. “What Rurik says is true,” she said with a nod. “We in Nearwood know the mountain villagers, and Grozmikal’s account of them is not accurate. But it’s also true that Neroli has increased the number of her raids in recent months, and the villagers out there are afraid that something larger is coming. Grozmikal’s help is welcome, and still more so because the mountain villagers don’t know that he misrepresents them. They just see him as a warrior who often shows up at the right place at the right time.”

She paused for a moment, and Alaria wondered if Mira guessed more than she was saying. But the elf woman continued. “Whatever Neroli’s motivations are, there are many who fear that she is brewing something bigger, something that even their fortifications and Grozmikal’s presence can’t allay. And there are rumors, too, that the reason Grozmikal does not confront Neroli is because he wishes to continue fighting the ice wolves and saving the villages. Some say that without Neroli, he would have no enemies for him to fight, and that it’s his lust for battle that stops him going into the mountains to defeat the source of the trouble. Whatever the cause, something needs to be done about her.”

“Can you tell me anything about her, Elder Mira?” Alaria asked, and Mira smiled at the use of the honorific. “Who is Neroli? How did she come to be up there in the mountains causing trouble for the locals? How long has she been there? Do you know?”

Mira made a movement with her head that was neither a nod or a shake. “I know some of the things you ask,” she said. “I’ve lived in these lands a long time, and I’ve seen other lands before this one. I’m older than I look, as you have guessed. But of Neroli, all I know is that she used to be an admirable person, the daughter of a great ruler, and the heiress to a kingdom. She should have been a queen in truth, but magic tempted her, and she lost her way.”

Mira frowned, and Alaria saw the distrust of magic that was sadly so common to the people of Sapheli these days gleaming in her eyes. “Neroli trained in the unwholesome magic schools, and became enamored of dark powers.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “She worshiped demons, and gained their powers, and always she quested for a means to preserve her beauty and her youth, unchanged, unsullied by the ravages of the years.”

Her voice had taken on the rhythmic cadence of a story teller, and Alaria listened with pleasure, despite the flash of annoyance that had flared up in her at Mira’s evident ignorance of the true nature of magic. Given the way the world thought of magic these days, Alaria could hardly blame Mira for that.

“In her desire to maintain her youth and extend her life,” Mira said, “Neroli sought out spells and incantations of preservation, and she found them through the magic of ice. Ice protects and preserves all things, as we know, and she delved greedily into the power of that terrible magic. She succeeded, so it’s said, and she is as beautiful physically as she ever was. Time has never sullied her, the years have never tarnished her beauty, but she has been tarnished by other powers. Her body is beautiful, but her mind is twisted and evil, given over entirely to the ruinous powers of spellcraft.”

“And let that be a warning to you, as well,” Rurik put in. “Adventurers you may be, but don’t be tempted by the power of magic spells.” He held up a finger and wagged it didactically at them. “Keep yourselves clear of magic, and you’ll keep yourselves in the right!”

Alaria smiled at them both.

“Thank you,” she said, a little stiffly. “I’m sure I’ll take your advice.”

Chapter

Thirteen

The next morning, Mia and Alaria were cuddled up together in the large, generous bed that the inn had provided for them. It was early, but still it was later than Alaria would usually sleep when on a journey. After yesterday’s adventures, however, she was feeling the need for rest.

She yawned, shifted in the bed and pulled the covers a bit further up, enjoying the cool sheets and the cozy warmth as she dozed. Mia snuggled into the warm space on Alaria’s shoulder. Alaria smiled. She kissed the top of Mia’s head, enjoying the warm smell of her lover’s hair.

“Lari, why do people hate magic so much?” Mia asked, shifting a hand down to rest comfortably on Alaria’s warm, full left breast.

“They don’t hate magic, dear,” Alaria said quietly. “They just don’t understand it, and so they fear it. That’s not the same thing as hate.”

“Like how people don’t understand that it’s okay for us to be lovers?”

“Exactly. But then sometimes, you get people who do understand, the way you did with my magic. And that’s always good, right?”

Mia nodded sleepily. “And sometimes people do understand that it’s okay for us to be lovers. Like here at the inn,” she said.

“Exactly.”

The night before, they’d been wary of letting on that they were lovers by asking for a room with a big enough bed, but they needn’t have worried. The young woman who tended the bar, Sanya, had forestalled their concerns by introducing them to an enormous ork woman who she introduced boldly as “Grarokya, my wife.”

Not just two women in a couple, but one of them a human and one an orc! That was - if not unheard of - certainly unusual. What was definitely unheard of (in Alaria’s experience, at least) was for such a couple to feel safe and comfortable living so openly together, particularly in a small village such as this.

“I hope you don’t have any problem with staying at an inn run by a couple in a relationship like ours?” Sanya said quietly to Alaria. “We in Nearwood are open-minded in our views, but not all travelers are. She placed a hand protectively on her wife’s arm, and gazed challengingly at Alaria. “If there’s any problem…”

Perhaps, Alaria thought, looking up at the tall, broad figure of Grarokya, her size and strength have something to do with how well they’re accepted in town.

“I have no problem at all,” Alaria said. “In fact, if you can house us, it would be great to be able to have a room with a bed that’s big enough for three. That’s for me… and both my partners,” she gestured at Mia and Alaria, who both stepped up beside her and each put an arm around her waist.

Sanya’s eyebrows went up, but Grarokya grinned, showing her fierce tusks. “They’re just like us,” she said to Sanya in a deep but melodic voice. “I saw as soon as they came in. Can’t believe you missed it.”

The inn didn’t have a room with a bed quite big enough to sleep three, but Beth didn’t mind. “Actually, I could do with a bit of time to myself,” she said. “And it would be nice for you and Mia to get some one-on-one time.”

It was one of the peculiarities of Beth’s nature that she needed more time to herself than most people. She liked to be alone to wash, for example, and though she loved to curl up and doze with Alaria and Mia, for serious sleeping, she preferred to be alone more often than not. That was the cat-like part of her nature expressing itself, Alaria thought, and she was happy to let Beth do what she needed. She was also pleased that Beth had recognized that Alaria and Mia hadn’t had much time where it was just the two of them for a while.

She smiled at the thought. They were doing well in their relationship, and so far they hadn’t really hit any major bumps in the road. They were all good at communicating with each other, and no one ever felt like they had to not say anything that they were thinking. Alaria couldn’t think of a better way of doing things. After all, communication and respect were the keys to a healthy relationship. Everyone was different, and everyone had different needs and desires at different times. Everyone learned to respect that, and so they were able to forge a long and lasting bond.

“I’m glad we’ve got a bit of time to ourselves,” Mia said quietly, echoing Alaria’s thoughts. “It’s so nice that Beth is part of our group now, and I don’t know where I would have been without her during the fight, but it’s precious to get some time just the two of us. I’m glad Beth said that yesterday. I don’t think I’d realized I was missing time just with you until now.”

“It’s lovely,” Alaria agreed. Then a tickle of doubt nudged her, despite what Mia had just said. She realised that she was experiencing an echo of that old, self-critical voice that she thought she’d left far behind. She shouldn’t indulge it. At the same time, it was good to check in around it, so she sat up a little and said what was in her mind.

“You’re still okay with this?” she said to Mia. “The relationship being the way it is, I mean, and the way we’re including Beth? I’d want you to say if you weren’t, you know.”

Mia was quiet for a long moment before replying, and Alaria knew she was really thinking about it. “Yes,” Mia said seriously, after she’d given it some consideration. “I really am okay with it. More than okay, I think it’s great. It’s so good that you’ve been able to make Beth so happy. And of course, it’s all just so sexy. I love how it feels when all three of us are together. She’s so lush, and it’s so hot the way you fuck her with the tentacles. I’m so turned on by watching you together. But the feelings I have for you, Alaria… they’re different. I have a lot of affection for Beth, and I think she’s really beautiful, and I love it when we’re all three together, but I don’t think I’d ever want to have sex with Beth without you being there. I’m glad Beth’s part of our group, but it’s you I’m in love with…”

She stopped, suddenly, realizing the words that had just slipped out, and feeling the note of tension that had come into Alaria’s body. They had never quite said those words before.

“Yes,” Mia said, smiling. “It’s true, and it’s good to say it. I do love you, Alaria. There, I’ve said it now. I feel like I should have said it sooner, really.”

“I love you too, Mia,” Alaria said simply. “I’ve never had anyone to say that to before now, but there it is. You’ve taught me so much. When I think back to how I was when I first came to Brighthill… I was like a different person then, so uptight, so… I don’t know… so repressed!”

“I think you just hadn’t found that part of yourself yet,” Mia said. Her hand had been resting warmly on Alaria’s breast under the covers, but now she began to move it lazily around, her fingers tracing a slow, sensuous circle around Alaria’s left nipple. “You’ve taught me a lot, too, you know,” she said. “Helped me find parts of myself that I didn’t know were there.”

“Really?” Alaria said, doubtfully. “Like what?”

“Like the magic,” Mia said. “And the ability to fight, to stick up for myself. The confidence to learn magic and use it. I never was confident like that before. It’s true,” Mia pressed, as Alaria took a breath to begin objecting, “I’d never have been able to find that confidence without you. I’ve never felt a love like this before, and to know it’s reciprocated makes me feel so secure and safe. I’ve had lovers, lots of them, and even some more serious relationships, but it takes something special to call it love and really mean it. If I didn’t have the confidence in myself that you’ve given me, I don’t think I’d be able to say that.”

Alaria thought about it, then nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “I never really thought about it like that, but you have come out a lot more confident in the recent months while I’ve known you. The magic is a gift you didn’t know you had, right? And being a lover is something I never knew I could do.”

“We’ve shown each other that we both have those things,” Mia said. “We’ve brought them out of each other. That’s a good basis for love.”

As she spoke, the hand that had been playing with Alaria’s nipple moved away and slid downward, sliding across the smooth skin of Alaria’s firm belly and then down to the warm tuft of dark blonde hair between her legs. Alaria was already aroused from the touch on her nipple and the intimacy of their talk, but now Mia’s fingers began confidently exploring her clit, and the feeling made her buck her hips and gasp in pleasure.

Mia lowered her head, her tongue finding the nipple that she’d been working on with her fingers a moment before. Mia licked back and forth on Alaria’s nipple, flicking it with her tongue as she drew wetness up with her fingers and spread it all over Alaria’s clit. The slick feeling on her clitoris combined with the warmth of Mia’s tongue on her nipple sent bolts of pleasure through Alaria’s body.

“Oh, it feels so good,” Alaria moaned.

“Yeah,” Mia said in a sultry voice. “I know it does.” She chuckled as she shifted, pushing the bedsheets back and exposing Alaria’s gloriously naked body to the morning sunlight. Alaria looked down, propped on the pillows and enjoying the sight of her own body in the sun, and of Mia moving expertly over her, using her left hand and her tongue to explore Alaria’s body, all the while using her right hand to rhythmically pleasure Alaria’s clitoris.

Alaria was so happy. She didn’t think she’d ever been this happy. She gave herself up completely to the sensations, opening her legs and closing her eyes, letting her hands run over Mia’s shoulders and through her hair, and then come up to touch her own lips and tongue as she felt Mia drop her head lower, and a moment later Mia’s tongue was on her clit, moving around in a playful, exploratory way before settling into a deep, steady, rhythmic licking. Mia’s other hand came down and slid inside Alaria, touching that spot a few inches inside and level with Alaria’s clit, that always brought such a special extra level of pleasure.

A wordless moan of pure sensual joy escaped Alaria’s lips, and then, to her surprise and delight, Mia said, “I’m going to do something new,” and brought her other hand down to touch Mia’s asshole. Mia’s finger was slick with Alaria’s running juices and with Mia’s own saliva, and Alaria was more relaxed than ever, so there was no problem as Mia slid a finger inside Alaria’s ass and then started to work it gently and experimentally, pleasuring Alaria that way as well.

The sensation was intense. For a moment, Alaria wasn’t sure if she liked it, but a moment later, she was sure that she did. Mia was fingering Alaria’s ass with one hand, her pussy with the other, and all the while tonguing her clit with ever increasing speed. The intensity of the combined sensations was immense, and Alaria found herself gripping her own nipples and squeezing them fiercely, biting her lip hard, then putting her hand down to grip a handful of Mia’s hair and push her head down harder into her pussy.

The sudden orgasm carried Alaria off with immense force, and she moaned as she climaxed, finding that her tentacle magic suddenly kicked in and sent a host of new appendages flinging out all over the room. She had no control over them at first, and they thrashed around wildly, a host of gleaming, brightly-colored new limbs that leaked glowing, glittering, many-colored magical fluids and left shining patches of liquid where they landed.

“Oh, gods,” Alaria panted as the tidal wave rolled back. “I always wondered what Beth saw in that but… oh, wow!”

Mia cackled mischievously as she came up, her lips dripping with Alaria’s juices, her hair wild where Alaria had gripped it hard in the moment of their passionate climax. She wiped her mouth and rose, kneeling, dropping her slick hand to her own clit and starting to pleasure herself.

She looked magnificent. Alaria lay spent, her whole body buzzing with the orgasm she’d just had, and gazing up at Mia, drinking in the sight of her. Her lover knelt, her back straight, one hand between her legs and the other at her mouth. Her small, firm breasts were pulled up high on her chest by her posture, and her dark hair - which had grown out since Alaria had first met her - was spilling over her shoulders, the ends starting to bounce in big ringlets, tumbling back as Mia let her head roll back and moaned in pleasure. Mia’s skin was perfect, utterly flawless in a way Alaria wouldn’t have thought possible, and it was unusually pale for someone from this hot part of the world. A ray of warm sunlight from the window shone directly onto her, picking out the beautiful details; the impossibly soft downy hair that covered her skin, the single love spot that graced her left shoulder blade, the beads of sweat that gleamed like diamonds in the channel between her breasts.

Their eyes met and Mia giggled, and Alaria was suddenly moved to sit up and gather up the slick, wet tentacles that had manifested at the point of orgasm and put them to work.

A line of shining blue tentacle juice dripped across Mia’s flawless white skin as an electric blue appendage traced a sensual line across her breasts and her belly before finding its way to her pussy and slipping inside to begin fucking her. Another - a purple one this time - curled around her shoulders and reached up to tease her mouth.

Mia reached hungrily for it with her lips, and Alaria teased her, keeping the tip just out of reach of Mia’s mouth. Mia moaned in pleasure and anticipation as Alaria worked the tip back and forth, slicking Mia’s lips with the juices, then Mia made a muffled growl of satisfaction as Alaria slid the end of the blue tentacle deep into her lover’s mouth.

It wasn’t long before Mia, too, was grinding her hips and bucking toward her own massive climax. She had dropped forward onto all fours, and Alaria was fucking her from behind with the purple tentacle and filling her mouth with the blue one. A pair of red tentacles, both glowing with magical light and dripping with slick red liquid, flicked back and forth at Mia’s nipples before wrapping her breasts and holding them firmly, the tips of the tentacles squeezing the nipples hard.

Mia’s groans of pleasure were muffled, but they built to a peak anyway and Alaria felt her own pleasure - that special pleasure that came from tentacle stimulation - rising as well. As Mia clenched around the tentacle in her pussy and thrust deep onto it with her hips, she sucked on the one in her mouth and moaned, vibrating the one in her mouth and adding a new layer of sensation. Alaria let herself go as well, riding the wave of a second orgasm that was just as intense and beautiful as the first, but in a completely different way.

Alaria dropped her head back onto the pillow again, laughing breathlessly as she took the tentacles back out again and demanifested them. Mia dropped forward, gasping in pleasure and then crawling up to find the warm place on Alaria’s chest where she’d been pillowed before they’d begun their lovemaking session.

The sun moved across the floor, shining in through the window. Outside, the world was clean-washed from the rain the night before. The sky was blue. Alaria rolled her head toward the window as she felt herself dozing off again. Today was going to be a good day to travel… but not yet.

Chapter

Fourteen

They made a late start that day, and none of them regretted it. They felt good, happy to be out and about and on the road once more. Things felt different now, somehow. Alaria felt that they’d come through a trial together. The battle with the trees had of course been difficult in itself, there was no doubting that, but there was something more, some deeper bond that she felt growing between her and her two lovers. They had become a team.

This was something she’d known before, of course. When new initiates joined a guild, they were sent out with a more experienced adventurer to get their first taste of battle and that initial bonding experience was considered very important. Sometimes, people died in that first encounter. Most of the time, new friendships and loyalties were born - friendships and loyalties that lasted for life. Sometimes.

Something of that nature had happened to her and her lovers now, she knew. It was real - a sense of deep and lasting bond which had not been there before. People grow stronger when they suffer together, and stronger still when they come through the other side.

The trio stopped on the hill above Nearwood and looked back down on the village. Smoke rose from the chimneys in the early afternoon sunlight, and a few folks moved about in the streets. In the market square, they saw a spark of red, and Alaria knew who it was.

“Look there,” Alaria said. “It’s Mira.”

“How can you tell?” Mia said. “It’s so far away.”

Alaria smiled. “That dress,” she said. “No one else was wearing such a strong red.”

“She surely can’t see us up here,” Mia said. “Not dressed in green and brown on the hillside like this.”

But even as Mia spoke, the tiny figure raised a hand in farewell.

“She’s an elf,” Alaria said. “They have far sight. She can see us up here as clearly as we can see each other, I guarantee it.”

She raised a hand as well, then wrapped her cloak around her. There was a chill in the air that had not been there in the village.

“I’ll miss that place,” Alaria said as she watched the tiny red form of Mira turning and walking away. “They were some good people.”

Mia nodded and put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll be back soon enough,” she said. “We’ll deal with Neroli, and then before you know it, we’ll be back at Nearwood, and then onward, home to Brighthill.”

Alaria nodded and turned away.

Throughout the conversation, Beth had said nothing. She was not looking at the village. Instead, she was standing staring out toward the mountains with her back turned toward home. She was wearing a long dark green cloak, and she pulled it around herself and shivered as she looked at the road ahead.

Not far from where they stood now, perhaps two day’s walking at most, there loomed up the threatening wall of the mountain range that walled in the Hope River valley to the northeast. The Cold Range, the local people called it. Cold Range. From here, it certainly looked the part.

“I never thought I’d see snow at this time of year,” Beth said gloomily.

“Don’t you like the snow?” Mia said in a teasing voice. She was joking and trying to cheer Beth up, but it didn’t work.

“I do not,” Beth growled. “I’m a cat person, and we don’t like the cold. That’s one of the reasons I chose Brighthill, and the Hope River valley in general. It’s nice and warm.”

“Those mountains don’t look nice and warm,” Alaria agreed. “I wonder how deep into the mountains Neroli’s domain is. For all their speculation and knowledge of her backstory, Mira and Rurik were pretty unhelpful when it came to practical information.”

“Aye,” Beth grumbled. “But that’s the way in, no doubt.” She pointed toward the huge, looming mountain that reared up, brooding over the plateau lands and darkening the horizon with its shadow. “We can’t miss, so if we’re going to go, let’s get on with it. It’s farther away than it looks, I’ll bet. Come on, let’s try to put some miles behind us before bed. We needed the rest, but we’re behind schedule. We don’t want Grozmikal to catch us up.”

They pulled their cloaks around them and strode off toward the mountains. The weather had changed completely from the intense heat of a few days before. Hope River valley was known for its baking summer heat, but the whole time they’d been on the road, they’d been climbing a subtle but steady slope. Now, they were much higher above sea level than they would be at Brighthill, and they were in the long, undulating plateau lands that flowed up to the mountains.

Here, the weather was different. Summer in the foothills of Cold Range was like Fall in Brighthill, and this close to the mountains, a chill wind blew down on them from the high peaks above. The wind smelled of snow and clean air.

Unlike her companions, Alaria didn’t find the snow and ice off-putting. Many of the colleges of magic where she’d studied over the years were high in the mountains. She liked the way the cold braced up her energy and made her feel alive. The mountains were challenging places, places where strange and unexpected things might happen. There was a depth of silence to be found up there that could not be found anywhere else. She’d never in all her journeys found anywhere quite like the mountains, and a part of her soul suddenly sang out with pleasure at the prospect of getting up there.

Smiling, she strode ahead. Mia and Beth shared a glance as they hurried along behind, and Beth grinned and rolled her eyes affectionately. Whatever they might think of the mountains, their companion was happy, and recovered from her battle with the sentinel, and that was worth a great deal to both of them.

They made good progress toward the mountains that day, not speaking much, stopping now and again to rest their legs and have a quick bite, then pressing on. Alaria was buzzing with the sense of adventure, and the excitement of approaching the destination. Beth and Mia were still wary, but Alaria’s excitement was infectious, and they found that there was a new speed in their steps and a new strength in their limbs as they strode out together.

As they walked, Beth and Mia, both found themselves gazing at Alaria. Their lover had pulled her cloak up around her hips, and they were both enjoying the sight of her strong legs in their tight pants, the high boots that hugged her calves making a bright click, click on the path as she strode along.

Realizing that they were both dreamily checking out her thighs and her ass, they glanced at each other and smiled. Tonight, that glance said.

The land they were walking through was rough, rugged country, much harsher and more unforgiving than the rest of their journey. Spurs of rock jutted from the moss and thick heather on either side of the path, and little streams ran into large, boggy patches on this high upland moor. There were no people. They passed no one on the road all that first day, though they could see trails of smoke from villages hidden in folds of the mountain foothills far away and they knew that they might have the chance to see one of the mountain villages for themselves before their journey’s end.

As they walked, Mia practiced her magic control. She was doing well at it, keeping a tight control on her power as she walked along, and every now and again at Alaria’s invitation firing off a spell in the direction of some phantom that Alaria conjured up for the purpose.

Night came, and right on time they found themselves a spot in a little scrubby woodland that grew on a larger rocky outcrop a little way from the path. This was not quite a hill, but it was big enough that they could shelter in the trees and be hidden from sight unless someone actually came right up to them. They were drawing closer to the mountains, and the nearer they got, the more wary they became.

They pitched their tent, and this time it was not just for the sake of their baggage. They lit a fire, Mia kindling the blaze with a tightly controlled burst of fire magic, and then sat together in the shelter of the tent, cooking and eating and talking quietly together.

“That was impressive magic you did back in the woods, during the sentinel fight,” Alaria said to Beth. They hadn’t had a chance to talk about it yet, and Beth glowed with pride at the compliment.

“I confess I was pretty pleased with it myself,” she said. “I didn’t think I could do that anymore; it’s been a really long time. I didn’t think you were aware of that at the time.”

“I was,” Alaria said with a shudder. “That tree’s magic paralyzed me and dulled my magic, but it didn’t knock me completely unconscious. I could see what was going on. You transformed into a hummingbird and gave Mia the information she needed to be able to weaken the creature’s arms. I haven’t thanked you yet, but I do so now, both of you. You saved my life.”

Beth and Mia both smiled. “It was a scary moment,” Mia said. “But without Beth’s transformation I’d never have known what to do.”

“It was a joint effort,” Beth said. “We did it together.”

“DO you think you can do it again? Transform into animals, I mean?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Beth said, “and I think I can, but I’m reluctant to. You see, I don’t know much about my magic, but there’s something about it, something draining, something so tiring… I did it in a moment of desperation back then, but I don’t know if I could do it now, for example. Afterward, I was so spent… I don’t mean physically, but mentally, and in my soul, there was something really deeply drained afterward.”

Alaria nodded. “I don’t know much about the shapeshifting magic either,” she confessed, “but if it’s anything like any other magic, then I guess that it draws on a reserve of power, like mine does. With regular spellcasting, we use what’s called a mana pool, and that is the resource we need to use our powers. With your shape shifting, perhaps it’s the same. If you have some reserve of mana that you use for shapeshifting - or even just something similar, even if it’s not exactly the same mechanism - then it makes sense for you to feel drained afterward.”

At that moment, there was a sound of howling that came from the open plains around them.

“Wolves,” Mia exclaimed, pulling a bit closer to Alaria. Beth, whose form was completely cat-like again - she had given up her human form entirely - hissed and the short, sleek fur on the back of her neck stood up. Her tail lashed around violently, and her eyes glowed as she glared out and around, through the trees and out into the plains beyond.

“They’re far off,” Alaria said quietly. “Off to the north, in the direction of the mountains. I remember Rurik saying that Neroli’s creatures were ice wolf demons. I wonder if we’re hearing her hunting packs.”

“Grr, I hate wolves,” Beth said. She was shaking. Alaria hadn’t thought of this. Of course, as a cat, wolves and dogs were particular dislikes of Beth's; she tolerated the domestic dogs and hunting dogs that were found lying lazily around in Brighthill, looking for scraps and getting into mischief, but a pack of full-sized wolves out in the world was another matter entirely.

They took turns on the watch that night. On the journey earlier on in the day, both Mia and Beth had been feeling sexy and turned on at the thought of what they would get up to that night, but the cold, the howling of the wolves, and the steady, unpleasant wind that blew down off the mountain quenched any thought of libido. The fire was a low glow of embers, and Alaria volunteered the first watch. The others crawled into the tent together and curled up under the same blanket.

Alaria glanced into the tent, a small smile on her face as she took a cross-legged posture with a blanket around her shoulders and settled to the watch. Mia and Beth were close, even more so now that before the battle in the trees. She was not jealous. She knew that they were only sexually attracted to each other as a part of their grouping with her. That was the most important thing. They were a team, but they were bound to her, romantically, sexually, and as fighters.

But she was glad they were friends and were able to take a bit of comfort in the physical closeness to each other. She needed to think more than she needed to sleep, and she settled down to do just that.

When dawn came, it found her still in her cross-legged posture where they’d left her the night before. She was gazing out into the land south beyond the trees, and all was silent except for the sleepy song of a few birds and somewhere, far off, the bellowing of an elk in season.

Mia crawled out of the tent first, followed by Beth. Alaria reached over and picked up the little camping kettle that she’d put on the fire to keep warm. She had their small metal mugs, and she poured hot water over tea herbs.

“Hey,” Beth yawned, putting an affectionate hand on Alaria’s shoulder. “Did you watch out here all night?”

“I did,” Alaria said quietly. “But that’s all right for me to do once in a while. I needed to think things through.”

“And what did you come up with?” Mia said, sipping her tea.

“A plan,” Alaria said with a smile. Drink your tea before it gets cold. I’ll make us some breakfast. Then I’ll take a sleep myself, I think, and you two can do the work.”

“But… you don’t want to get on the road fast?” Mia said, confused.

Alaria shook her head and smiled. “I’ve got another idea. I’m not going to wander into the mountains and search around, waiting for Neroli’s guards to come get me. I’m going to get them to show me where to go instead.”

“Wait a minute,” Mia said, “you don’t want to go up into the mountains and hunt out her domain? I thought that was exactly what we were going to do!”

Alaria smiled and threw a couple of sticks on the fire, then began unpacking some food. “Let’s eat something,” she said. “And I’ll explain.”

As they sat around the fire and had tea and prepared some breakfast, Alaria talked them through what she wanted to do.

“The presence of Grozmikal on the road has been a complicating factor this whole time,” she said, “and it’s one that we’ve not been able to address. I’ve been looking for a way to deal with that factor the whole time, but I’ve not come up with a viable idea until now.”

“And now?” Beth said, expectantly.

Alaria took a sip of her tea and smiled. “Grozmikal is going to show us the way.”

As they ate breakfast, she explained her plan. Grozmikal was on the road behind them. He had said that every time he arrived at the mountains to report, Neroli brought him in blindfolded, so he didn’t know the way in for himself. He thought that there was a passage not far from the start of the Cold Range, and that passage led through to the heart of Neroli’s domain, but he didn’t know where the entrance was or how to get to it on his own.

“The most sensible thing to do,” she explained, “is to wait for him to pass us on the road, then follow when she comes to bring him in. That way, we don’t need to find the way in for ourselves. He’ll lead us to her,” she said.

“It’s risky,” Mia mused. “If Grozmikal goes in there and talks to her, I think that he’ll let slip that he told us about his situation. That’ll be fatal.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll let it slip,” Alaria agreed. “In fact, from the sounds of it, I don’t think he’ll need to say anything himself. I think she’ll know as soon as she looks at him. But we’ll be there, ready to take her on straight away. It’s a risk, and we’ll have to get the timing just right, but I don’t think there’s any other way. If we go up there and wander about looking for her, we’ll likely not find her, and we’ll lose the element of surprise. If we kill Grozmikal’s guards out here in the wild, she’ll very probably be alerted to the fact, and then she’ll have time to fortify her domain, or to flee. And then, she might make good on her threat to destroy the mountain villages in earnest, because she’ll have thought that he was trying to escape. That was her threat.”

“I see what you mean,” Mia said, sounding a bit gloomy. “You’re right, there’s no other way to do this. But I do hope we can do this without getting Grozmikal killed. For all he’s a bit of a useless specimen, his heart’s in the right place. Despite hating himself for it, he’s carried on with this farce for the sake of the mountain villages, and that shows that he’s a good person at heart.”

“I agree,” Alaria said, “And I hope we can do this without him getting killed as well. If we can follow him closely and get into her domain at the same time that he does, then I think I think we probably can. But we don’t know much about her or her domain. There are a lot of unknowns here, and that means taking a few risks.”

Chapter

Fifteen

“I think you’re right,” Beth agreed. “And I think that we’ve got enough power and enough smarts between us that we’ll be able to make a good go of this. I’ve been thinking about my shapeshifting power, too, after you asked about it last night. I said that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it without the pressure of the urgent situation, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. You were talking about the resource that’s needed to use the magic, and I was thinking about that, too. I think that it’s the focus that’s needed rather than any specific resource.”

“Focus?” Alaria asked, interested. “What do you mean?”

Beth sat back, gathering her thoughts for a moment, then began to explain. “It’s like this,” she said. “For a long time, I’ve been using my human form to disguise my true nature. That’s the only shapeshifting that I’ve been using, but I’ve used it a lot over the years. Now, I’ve been listening to you and Mia talking about your magic, and I have an idea of how this mana thing you talk about works. Mana is a resource that you have inside yourself, and you use it to power your magic. And your store of that resource builds with time and with use, right?”

“That’s right,” Alaria said. She could see where Beth was going with this, and Mia was listening with rapt attention as well.

“You’ve been practicing your magic this whole time, Mia,” Beth said, “and your mana has grown stronger as you’ve practiced, meaning that you can cast more spells. By that logic, the fact that I’ve been using my human form so much over the years means that I should have an immense pool of shapeshifter’s mana, but I don’t. Or at least, based on the way I felt after using my magic to transform into a hummingbird and scout the other day, it sure didn’t feel like I had a huge pool of resources to draw on. I was exhausted.”

“Kind of like I felt after doing my first attempts at multiple spellcasting,” Mia mused.

“So, you think there’s something called focus that you need?” Alaria prompted.

“Right,” Beth said. “Exactly. I don’t think it’s like mana at all. I think it’s about the internal state that I’m in when I activate the spell. See, when I put myself into my human form, I always take a moment to center myself before doing so. I’ve gotten so into the habit of doing it that I don’t even really think about it. I don’t realize I’m doing it, but it’s still an essential part of my process. When I lose that centered state, that focus - when we’re having sex, for example, or when I’m asleep - that’s when the shape I’ve taken on weakens. It becomes impossible to maintain that focused state, and so I don’t. But when I was ready to transform the other day, I knew what I was about to do, but I didn’t even take a moment to stop and focus. I just dived right in, and I think that’s why I was so exhausted by the magic.”

“If that’s so,” Alaria said thoughtfully, “and it makes total sense that it would be, then I guess there must be a whole host of exercises you could do to increase the strength and duration of your focused state. There must be generations of people who have had this magic and have codified and worked out the details of the exercises that are needed to create the focused state. If only shapeshifters weren’t so persecuted in the lands of the cat people, you’d have been able to benefit from that learning.”

Beth looked away sadly across the windswept upland moor. “If my kind were not persecuted in my homeland,” she said, “there are a lot of things I would have been able to benefit from.” She shook herself - a very catlike action - and returned to the present, dismissing her sadness. “But you’re right,” she continued, “there are things that can be done, and I think that I should experiment a bit with the shapeshifting before we go further. If I can achieve a focused state and take on different shapes at will, it could be really useful. It’s not good to be relying on stress to get focused. I want to be able to do it when I choose to, not just when circumstances dictate. And I want to be able to use my power and not feel drained and exhausted afterward.”

Suddenly, her face changed, and she looked doubtful. “But I don’t want to hold you up,” she said. “I know that you and Mia are both already good at your magic, and I understand if you don’t want to wait for me to get a grip on mine. If you decide that I should wait and not do any more shapeshifting…”

“Hey,” Alaria said, noticing with alarm that Beth was slipping into a shameful, self-critical mode, very different from the confident, decisive state she’d been in a moment before, “nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I’m really glad you brought up the subject of your powers, because I was just about to ask you to do some shapeshifting on my behalf, but I wasn’t sure you would be up for trying because of how badly you were affected afterward.”

Beth brightened immediately. “Really?” she said, “You were? Oh, but that’s great!”

“Yes, really!” Alaria laughed. “So don’t you go telling yourself that your powers aren’t useful, or wanted, or anything like that! I’d have come off very badly in that encounter with the tree sentinel if you hadn’t been there to lend a hand. I’m sure that your powers will be of great use again. And yes, right now, I have a job for you that only a shapeshifter can do.”

Beth grinned. “I’m ready for it. What do you need me to do?”

“Gather your focus, take on a bird form, and then scout. I need you to find Grozmikal.”

Half an hour later, Mia and Alaria were sitting quietly to one side of the camp, giving Beth the space she needed. On the other side of the camp, Beth sat cross-legged on a blanket, her long, elegant cat’s tail curled around her knees, her eyes closed, and her hands folded in her lap. She was meditating, building focus using an exercise that Alaria had shown her, an exercise that was usually used to help mages gain awareness of their mana. It was interesting to Alaria to realize that this exercise had other purposes too. There was no question that it was helping Beth to find the focus she needed as well.

Suddenly, Beth opened her eyes and spoke into the stillness. “I’m ready,” she said with complete certainty.

“That exercise worked, then?” Alaria asked.

Beth nodded. “It worked perfectly. I’d forgotten this feeling, but I recognize it now. This is the state I need to be in to shapeshift into new forms effectively. There’s no doubt about it, I can do this now. With practice, I’ll be able to achieve this kind of focus more quickly, but for now, this exercise will do.”

She stood up and stretched, spreading her arms out and smiling up at the sky. Her cat’s features glowed in the light of the afternoon sun, and the wind rippled her red hair and played with the edges of her cloak.

“I’m ready,” she said again. “I’m going scouting.”

There was a rippling in the air around her, and a bird appeared in the space where she’d been a moment ago. It wasn’t a hummingbird this time. This time, it was a hawk.

The hawk was bright and elegant in the sunshine, with long tail feathers dappled the same red as Beth’s hair. It had a fierce, gleaming beak as sharp as a dagger, and it tipped one bright eye at Alaria and Mia and then spread its wings, lifting up into the air with no apparent effort at all.

The hawk did a long, leisurely circle around the rock, cawed once, and then darted off over the land, climbing and climbing until it vanished in the sky above.

“What power!” Mia said enviously. “To be able to transform into a bird at will!”

“I know,” Alaria said with a smile. “But different people have different powers, and the ability to shapeshift has come with many other problems for Beth. She can take the form of animals, but she’s paid for it by being driven out of her homeland and seeing all her friends slaughtered. I don’t know if I’d been willing to pay that price, even for such a power as she has.”

Alaria had been up all night, so she slept while Beth was away, and Mia kept watch.

Mia was glad to see Alaria resting, but as soon as she was alone, Mia began to feel the oppressive silence and loneliness of this barren spot. She stood up and walked around the little rocky outcrop of hill on which they were camped, keeping her cloak on and her hood up, partly because of the cold, but partly also because she had begun to feel isolated and exposed up here. She shivered, thinking how easy it would be for some spy to look down and see her from where she stood.

But she defied the feeling, pushing it away and drawing instead on the newfound confidence that came with the magic Alaria had taught her. What Alaria had said the other morning as they’d lain in bed together was true. Mia had grown. She’d grown in confidence as well as power, and she’d uncovered new parts of herself that she hadn’t known were there. She was becoming a different person - a stronger person, a person more willing to defy fear and take risks in a good cause.

She smiled wanly. Grozmikal, a good cause? That was perhaps rather stretching a point. But, she reminded herself, it wasn’t just him. Neroli was cruelly toying with Grozmikal, using him as a plaything for her own amusement, but though Mia, Beth, and Alaria would do their best to save Grozmikal, he wasn’t the only reason they were on this mission. They were also here to save the mountain villages, and to avert whatever else Neroli might do. After all, a powerful, crazy, cruel ice queen, a mad sorceress - who could tell what damage such a person might do if they were not stopped by a team of competent adventurers?

The thought was an encouraging one, though not, perhaps, quite as encouraging as she would have liked. With a sigh, she sat down on a rock on the top of the hill, gathering her cloak around her, and settled in to keep watch. She was on the highest point of the rocky bluff, and she could get a good view from here, but the top was covered in a thick growth of dense, wind-bent bushes that shielded her both from the cold wind, and from the sight of unfriendly eyes.

She turned her head to look back west in the direction of Nearwood. The road stretched like a piece of string away through the heather and moorland, and many miles off she could see where the land dropped away and became lusher and kindlier again, a green haze where lay the more populated parts of the Hope River valley.

Looking northeast now, in the direction that they were headed, the road ran on toward the mountains. Suddenly, Mia sat up. She peered out over the moorland in the bright, cold sunlight.

There was someone on the road.

In both directions, the road had been empty the whole time they had been here. Since leaving Nearwood and looking down on their allies standing in the market square and waving them off, Mia and her companions had seen not another living soul except for the small birds that soared high overhead, the occasional elk in the distance, and once, high above, a circling eagle.

Now, there was a figure on the northern road.

And what a strange figure. Mia resisted the urge to leap up and stare, since that would have exposed her to view. Instead, she huddled down in the bushes, staying still and shading her eyes as she examined the figure from her hiding place.

She was looking at a tall, thin person with very long black hair hanging down from underneath a deep hood. The person was too far away to tell for sure if it was a man or a woman, but despite the distance there was something feminine in the way the figure held itself. The figure wore a strange garb - white all over, the purest white Mia had ever seen, except for a few splashes of blue on the upper arms. The shadow of the hood and the long hair obscured the face.

For a long time, Mia stared at the figure. As she looked, she became more and more certain that it was a woman. The long hair, the floating, ethereal lightness of the clothing, and the unmistakable femininity of the stance all contributed to the impression, and Mia began to think of the figure as she.

But which she? There could be only one. Surely, down on the road, that must be Neroli. Mia shivered. Should she go wake Alaria? She felt that she should, but she was afraid to move, deadly afraid, in case the mysterious figure should see her. There was something indefinably horrible about the figure, something ghostly, as if it were a wraith or a restless spirit that was standing still as a statue in the road, clad all in white with her long, long black hair hanging loose beneath her deep hood. She had never believed in ghosts until Alaria’s words back in the homestead, but now she couldn’t help but think of that conversation, and of Alaria’s blithe certainty that of course, ghosts were everywhere in the world.

The stillness of the figure in the road was unnatural, and it made Mia think of dead things.

The thought made Mia shudder again, and she felt a creeping cold crawling up her back and making her dread the stillness and loneliness of this place. She was just about to move away and go get Alaria when the figure suddenly turned, moving at a pace that was so fast it seemed hardly human, and strode away toward the mountains again.

Mia watched for another minute, feeling that sense of supernatural dread easing with every yard that the mysterious figure retreated. After less than a minute, the figure dwindled to a vague white speck on the road, then vanished completely from sight.

“Mia,” said a quiet voice, and Mia nearly jumped out of her skin. Her hand went to her hammering heart as she looked around and saw Alaria coming warily up the slope.

“By the gods,” Mia said. “You frightened me.”

“Sorry,” Alaria said, “but I had to come up quietly. I felt something in my sleep.” She hunkered down in the bushes next to Mia and gazed out toward the mountains. “Did you see anything?

“I think it was Neroli,” Mia said, pointing north. “She was on the road…”

She explained what she’d seen, and the strange, paralyzing fear that the sight of the figure had induced in her. Alaria looked darkly north.

“Spirit magic,” Alaria said. “Spirit magic used in ways that it was never intended. The creation of fear is possible with Spirit magic, but it’s both immoral and against the teachings of the masters of magic, the ancient ones who codified and laid out the magical tenets that we are supposed to follow. It was that fear that I felt in my sleep.”

“It was Neroli, then?” Mia asked. “Neroli pushing out some fear spell with her magic?”

“It must have been,” Alaria said. “It’s too much of a coincidence. I know of no other magic that could induce terror at such a distance. She must know Grozmikal is coming and have come out to spy on him. Or perhaps she’s felt something of our coming as well, and decided to come and see what we are.”

“Couldn’t it have been some… ghost?” she said, hesitating over the word. She remembered her scorn at the idea of ghosts, back in the warm and safe environment of the homestead back in Brighthill. She felt a lot less amused by the prospect out here, gazing over the grey, windswept heathland toward the looming, forbidden mountains, the eerie figure of the white-clad woman out on the moorland road, still as stone.

Alaria smiled and put her hand on Mia’s shoulder. “It might have been,” she said, “but I don’t think so. Ghosts inspire fear up close, but rarely from that kind of distance. If there had been a ghost out there, you’d have felt it, but it would be a rare spirit that could paralyze you with fear from a half of a mile away. No, I think that if there was a ghost out here on the moor with the power to strike that kind of terror into people, then the people of Nearwood would have warned us of it. No, I think it’s most likely that you caught a glimpse of our enemy.”

“I wish I had seen her,” Alaria continued after a moment’s thought, “but perhaps it was better not. If I had been up here, she might have seen me or felt me and been able to do some kind of pre-emptive attack. I don’t want that to happen when we’re not at our full strength.”

“Speaking of which,” Mia said, looking up at the sky, “I wonder where Beth is. It’s been a while.”

“It has,” Alaria agreed. She looked up at the sky, gauging the position of the sun through the clouds. “She’s been gone for at least an hour. I wonder…”

She stopped, then gave a small laugh. “Look up there,” she said, pointing south. Mia looked and saw a small black dot in the sky, arrowing toward them. As Mia and Alaria watched, they saw the small dot dropping into a long, clean dive. The shape resolved into that of a hawk with bright red tail feathers. The hawk plummeted like a stone, then pulled up at the last moment and landed gracefully on the hilltop.

As she landed, Beth transformed. One moment, she was a diving bird. The next moment, she was her old self, a tall, elegant, lithe-bodied catwoman with her long red hair flowing down over her green ranger’s cloak and a look of pure satisfaction on her wise, beautiful face.

Her eyes flashed with pleasure and satisfaction. She grinned at them both.

“Grozmikal is coming,” she said. “He’ll be here within the hour. And there’s something else. His brother Sinjin is following him.”

Chapter

Sixteen

Mia and Alaria were full of questions, but Beth held up a preemptive hand.

“Wait,” she said. “Before you ask any questions, let me tell you the rest. Sinjin isn’t alone. He’s with a team of people from Hopeford - mostly civilians, but some of the soldiers too, as well as what looks like a group of folk gathered from various assorted villages they’ve passed on the way. They’re following Grozmikal and his guards at a distance, but I don’t think Grozmikal and the guards are aware of Sinjin and his troop.”

Alaria spoke, her tone urgent. “How far away are they?”

“Not far,” Beth said. “I saw them on the road about midway between here and Nearwood village. They look unhurt, so I guess Grozmikal and his guards passed through the wood without incident and spent the night at the village. Whether Sinjin and his group camped near the road behind him I don’t know, but they’re all coming this way, and they’re making good speed. If you want to get down there and intercept them, you’ll need to move fast.”

Alaria nodded once. She glanced at the little tent with their gear stashed inside it and made a snap decision. “Leave the tent and the camp. Take only what we need for a fight - weapons, water, some food, and any healing supplies. Bring the potions, and take your cloaks too, so that we can try to be disguised when we wait in ambush for Grozmikal and the others. Beth, we have news to tell you as well, but it’ll have to wait until we’re on our way to the road.”

Beth was confused, and it showed in her face. When Beth had left, Alaria’s plan had been to fall in behind Grozmikal when he passed and then follow him into the mountains, remaining unseen. If this was still the plan, it made no sense to leave their gear in camp. Alaria seemed to be making ready to fight straight away, rather than following Grozmikal at a discreet distance as planned.

It took Beth a moment to master her curiosity, but she did so. She didn’t question Alaria. Alaria was the leader, and the most experienced fighter and adventurer among them. Beth would do as Alaria said, and she would do it gladly. She knew she would get an explanation in time. She smiled as she realized how much she’d come to trust Alaria now, and then hurried on to see to the preparations.

In less than ten minutes they were ready, and with their cloaks wrapped around their shoulders and their hoods up to conceal their hair and faces from view, they moved swiftly and stealthily down from their campsite and onto the moor.

When viewed from above, the ground had looked almost uniformly flat and featureless aside from the dense vegetation, but it was not as flat and featureless as it looked. In fact, it was heavy going for travelers on foot. The moor was covered in thick heather that had grown and grown until it was tall enough to reach above to Alaria’s waist. The covering of heather was broken here and there by tall, thick bushes with long thorns and sprays of alarmingly yellow flowers that smelled richly of sweet vanilla and were full even now of fat bees heavy with pollen, stocking up their larders for the early highland winter.

Here and there, hidden under the thick heather, there were dips and troughs in the ground, but because these were filled by heather to the same level as the surrounding ground, it was hard to see them until one was almost on top of them.

Their camping spot was a good half mile in a straight line from the road, but progress was slow and difficult. Alaria and her companions had to pick their way carefully through the undulating, overgrown moor. As they moved, they watched the road north for signs of the enemy and the road south for signs of Grozmikal, and the ground beneath their feet for treacherous hidden dips that might catch an unwary step at any moment.

For all the difficulties, they still made good progress. As they picked their way along, Alaria explained the new developments to Beth in a hushed voice.

“Mia saw a tall, strange-looking woman on the north road, about a half mile from our camp,” Alaria explained. “I was asleep, and I didn’t see her, but I felt a frightening presence from her, and we both think it must have been Neroli.”

“She’s come out to spy on Grozmikal?” Beth asked.

“Or on us,” Mia said, “If she’s gotten wind of the fact that we’re out here looking for him.

“Now I understand why it’s essential for us to move right now,” Beth said. “If there’s any chance she’s aware of us, then trying to follow him into the mountains is just too big a risk. We have to separate him from those guards before any more time has passed.”

“It’s not what I’d planned,” Alaria said, “but Neroli has forced our hand. We had little enough information to begin with, and now we have even less, so we’re going to just get ourselves to the road and into a position where we can respond to whatever happens and intervene as needed.”

“We’re nearly at the road now,” Beth said. “There’s no sign of anyone yet.”

“Tell me more about Sinjin and his party,” Alaria said. “That is a surprise. I wonder what he’s doing out here? Did he and his group look like they were making ready for a fight? Did they look aggressive or angry?”

Beth frowned and made a non-committal noise in her throat. “I don’t know about angry,” she said, “but they certainly didn’t look particularly happy about things. Sinjin especially looked worried, but also determined, I thought. They looked ragged and strained, as if they’d crossed a good distance without many stops, and without enough food.”

“And were they armed and armored?”

“Yes, though not well. I suspect they just picked up whatever they could find for weapons. There was some chain mail, and a few of them had slightly better swords, but mostly they were poorly equipped.”

Alaria frowned. “You’re describing a group who had left in a hurry, perhaps on impulse, but certainly without having much time to plan and equip.”

“Oh, definitely,” Beth said.

“I wish I knew what had prompted them to leave,” Alaria mused. “Something must have happened, and whatever it was, it must have been very unexpected. How many of them were there?”

“I counted twenty-four, including Sinjin,” Beth said. “So, not a large party, but still enough to make an impact if they decided to attack.”

Alaria nodded and crouched down. They had reached the edge of the road, and they stopped in the heather and hunkered down, waiting for something to happen.

She didn’t like this, not one bit. She liked to be as prepared as possible when she went into a confrontation. She liked to know what was going on. But now, she was going into this situation with no idea what was about to happen, or what the motivations were of the various players she had to deal with.

Grozmikal was really the only known factor in the situation, and that was thin comfort. She listed off the things she could rely on him for, and found the list painfully short. She could rely on the fact that he would not know what was going on. She could rely on him being unaware of both Sinjin’s presence and of Neroli’s. She could rely on him being under the full control of his twenty guards. And she could rely on him being either incapably drunk or nursing a debilitating hangover.

“Damn,” she cursed. “I have no idea what we’re about to walk into here.”

“I know,” Beth said, hearing her friend’s rising frustration, “but don’t worry. Let’s wait here by the road until Grozmikal approaches. It won’t be long now. Do you want me to shapeshift into a hawk again and see if I can spy him?”

“Yes, please, if you feel able,” Alaria said, then she could have kicked herself. “Beth, I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t even asked you how you’re feeling after your shapeshifting session.”

“Never mind that,” Beth said with a grin. “This is the moment for action, not health updates.”

Alaria laughed, but she was genuine in her concern for Beth. After all, it had only been a little after her last shapeshifting session that she’d begun to feel unwell. “But you are okay?” she pressed. “Not exhausted from the magic?”

“Not at all,” Beth said with a grin. “I feel exhilarated. The focusing technique you taught me made all the difference. Now, let’s leave any more chatting until later, okay? I suspect we’re about to have a fight to win.”

Beth suspected correctly, but the fight came more quickly and unexpectedly than any of them could have guessed. As before, Beth transformed and darted up into the air, circling round once and then dropping toward the ground again, but at the very moment she began to descend there was a terrible screeching noise and a creature much bigger than Beth in her hawk form appeared, apparently out of thin air, only a few yards from her.

The creature was black, shaped like a giant bat, but covered in oily black feathers like some huge bat-bird hybrid. It was easily three times the size of Beth in her bird form, and it darted toward her and attacked with claws and teeth. The shimmering that accompanied Beth’s transformations appeared around Beth and the attacker, and then Beth was in her catwoman form again – sixty feet up. The attack had caused her to lose focus and now she was falling like a stone.

Mia gave a cry of dismay, and fear clutched at with icy fingers at Alaria’s guts. She pushed it away. This was no time for fear. Beth was tumbling through the air and when she hit the road she would be dead, or severely injured. There was no walking away from a fall like that, even for a cat.

The horrible bird creature that had attacked Beth was clearly stunned and frightened by her sudden unexpected transformation, and it reeled away, shrieking horribly like a tormented soul.

At least that was one threat that was backing off.

A smile twitched Alaria’s face as the memory of the first time she’d met Mia flashed through her head, the first time she’d manifested a tentacle in the face of an emergency. Now, she felt the familiar, pleasurable sensation again and reached her left hand up. From the space between her sleeve and the leather gauntlet around her forearm, a huge, thick tentacle suddenly flowed.

The new limb was black, and unlike the sex tentacles, it was dry, since there was no advantage to having the surface slick with lubricant in this situation. Suckers manifested on the surface for better grip as it hurtled through the air between Beth and Alaria, catching her in a firm, unbreakable grip, stopping her fall, and bringing her gently back down to earth.

A sudden roaring, growling noise came from their left - the northward direction, toward the mountains - and at the same time, human shouts from the right, the direction of the Nearwood. Figures appeared from both directions. On the right, the familiar figure of Grozmikal in his ridiculous gold-plated armor was easily recognizable, surrounded by his stony-faced guardians, but on the left, the newcomers were a group of figures that were not human at all.

“Mia, look out!” Alaria called, but Mia didn’t heed the warning. Seeing that Beth had been saved by Alaria’s tentacles, Mia leaped out into the path and turned to face the enemies who ran in from the northward direction.

Alaria pulled Beth unceremoniously down and propped her upright on her feet. The bird monster gave a loud caw and turned to fly away, but Alaria reached up and sent a small, deadly accurate Firebolt through the air to impact the creature. It exploded in a cloud of black feathers and acrid black smoke. A flash of white magic accompanied its death. That flash was enough to make Alaria certain beyond doubt that it had not been any random denizen of this bleak moorland. It had been some kind of magical creature, and more than likely it had been created and directed by Neroli.

“Beth,” Alaria said. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she gasped, pulling herself together with a visible effort. “I’m fine, I’m good. Thanks for saving my life.”

“My pleasure,” Alaria said with a grimace. “Now, let’s save Mia’s life.”

She nodded in the direction of the road.

“Right,” Beth said, then chuckled, the color and life coming quickly back to her face to replace the blanche of terror. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

Mia was standing in the road, her legs braced, her arms stretched out, a fire spell building on each hand. Her stance was determined and resolute, but determination and resolution would only get her so far.

She was facing a serious challenge.

Twenty monsters were coming at her along the path. They were tall, broad shouldered, and only vaguely humanoid. Thick spines of black hair covered their dark gray flesh, long arms hung from their shoulders, and their backs were bowed. Long and dog-like heads, with long yellow fangs and glittering, evil, intelligent eyes swept from side to side with cunning, predatory intention.

“Werewolves!” Alaria said.

“What, for real?” Beth exclaimed. “I didn’t think such things existed!”

“Later for the explanations, I think,” Alaria said.

“Right, yes,” Beth agreed, and the two of them sprinted across the tufted heather toward Mia’s side.

They arrived at Mia’s side the moment she released her two Inferno spells at the charging enemies. The magic slammed into the monsters who were bunched together, charging without any sense of organization or discipline. Two explosions boomed out from the places where the spells impacted, and werewolves flew away in every direction, smashed to bits by the explosions. Six had been killed, and the remaining fourteen wavered for a moment before the largest one - a huge, grinning, almost reptilian-looking creature - bellowed in rage and charged forward, leading his fellows on.

Mia danced back behind her companions. Double casting spells was something she’d been working on for a while in theory, but she’d never actually had the chance to put it into practice yet. It was draining, but it allowed the spellcaster to access new levels of power that she didn’t have before, and with the right approach, it could be a devastating weapon. It was particularly when - in a situation like this - the spellcaster had back up and could rest for a moment to let mana regenerate between blasts.

Alaria’s sword Skyfang glittered with cold magic and the intent to kill monsters as she swept it from its sheath. She charged forward, heading straight for the leader, but as she did so she sent a whipping forest of tentacles out to either side of her, lashing at the werewolves, grabbing their feet and tripping them, and grabbing their arms and necks.

Pain seared through her as one of the werewolves got his teeth into one of her tentacles, and she screamed as she charged the leader and demanifested the tentacle, causing it to vanish completely.

The leader she charged was fast, but she was faster, and the pain and anger of her tentacle injury drove her on. The big werewolf lashed his razor claws toward her, but she ducked under one of his blows and brought her blade up to parry the other. The parry turned into a slash, and bright blood spouted out onto the ground as the werewolf leader’s clawed hand fell to earth and vanished in a puff of black dust with a faint pop.

That was all she needed to know. These were not real creatures at all - they were spirit creatures. They were real enough in the sense that they could kill and be killed, but they were created by ephemeral spirit magic. The magic of Neroli.

Alaria turned her blade and slashed upward, catching the monster under the neck with the top of her blade and driving upward in a deathblow.

The creature staggered backward, screaming wetly through a mouthful of gushing blood as it died, then vanishing abruptly as the magic that held it together dissipated.

At the same moment, Alaria used the tentacles that were ensnaring the other werewolves and pulled them as tight as she could, crushing the life out of them. They died, and as they did so Beth and Mia finished off the last remaining few.

Beth had her bow and arrow, and her shots were clean and true, killing werewolves with shots through the eye. Mia used alternating fire spells and ice spells to knock over two more, and then they all stepped back.

Sudden silence fell.

This enemy, at least, had been defeated.

Chapter

Seventeen

“Stay wary,” Alaria cautioned her friends. “We’ve killed one group of enemies, but we don’t know what else she may throw at us.”

“Look to the south,” Beth said quietly.

Alaria looked. Grozmikal and his guards were advancing hurriedly toward where Alaria and her friends stood. Alaria looked them over.

The guards were as expressionless as usual in their strange, segmented plate armor. As before, they gave Alaria a sense of magic that was somehow wrong, though she couldn’t put her finger on how. They rang strangely against her senses, almost as if they were Spirit creatures, created by magic the same way that the bird or the werewolves had been. That was a troubling thought. The creation of creatures through Spirit magic was a known and accepted practice, and even humanoids like the werewolves were part of that practice. But there was not supposed to be any ability to create humanoids. That was a forbidden practice, and it was supposed to be that the spells used to create animated creatures under the control of a mage were actually unable to create a creature that resembled a human.

Whatever the case, these creatures were wrong. Alaria didn’t think that even Neroli could create a creature that looked so much like a human. She would have to revert to her original theory, that these were thralls – human beings ensnared and enslaved by magical power. That was ugly magic, and forbidden, but at least it was possible.

Grozmikal’s eyes were side with a mixture of surprise, fear, and recognition as he approached. He knew them. He recognized them. He did not know what to do, and his capacity for deception, despite his long months of practice against the populace of the local towns and villages in Hope River valley, was on the point of deserting him.

And then Alaria saw it, wrapped around the left hand of one of the guards - a blue tendril of magic. She looked at the guard. He was a man of medium height and medium build, clean-shaven, dark-eyed, and entirely indistinguishable from any of his companions except for the thread of blue magic running from his hand out into the world.

The blue magic went from the guard to wreathe around Grozmikal first, running from the guard’s hand out and around Grozmikal’s head and neck, and particularly around his mouth. After that, the tendril ran up into the air and off toward the mountains, vanishing in the blue sky.

Blue magic. Spirit magic. She recognized the spell immediately.

He has a communication spell in place, she thought. The spell stretches up into the air and away to the north. He’s Neroli’s line of communication with the guards. And if she has a line of communication, then chances are that she knows we’re here.

“The game’s up,” she said quietly to her friends. “Don’t ask me how I know, just trust me that I do. Neroli can keep track of Grozmikal’s location, and it’s possible she can even hear every word that he speaks.”

She could have kicked herself. Why didn’t she look for something like this back in Sinjin’s hotel in Hopeford? The thought hadn’t been in her mind that Neroli might have some way of tracking Grozmikal’s location and even listening in on his very words, but this blue light could mean nothing else.

Alaria had known that Neroli was a highly advanced spirit mage, but she must be a mage of unprecedented power and subtlety to achieve this. To maintain that kind of spell over such a large distance was not a small feat. Despite the cruelty and caprice of the woman’s actions, Alaria felt a stab of admiration for her power. Whatever her motives and her actions, Alaria couldn’t help but admire her technical mastery.

She admired her companions even more, however, and she allowed a smile as she saw the stoic resolve with which they absorbed this new and unexpected news.

“Follow my lead,” she said quietly.

She began to walk toward Grozmikal and his party, thinking at a furious pace as she did so. She had to assume that Neroli could hear what Grozmikal said through her magical connection. Neroli might even be able to hear all that Grozmikal could hear. Assuming the spell had been in place back in Hopeford, then Neroli knew all about Alaria, her friends, and her plan.

A sudden doubt came to Alaria. If that was the case, then the ice queen knew everything, including the fact that Grozmikal had made a plan to escape her clutches. Why, then, hadn’t she acted on her threat to him? The mountain villages hadn’t been burned. From what the people of Nearwood said, there hadn’t been any word of any new attacks at all for some time. If there had been more trouble, Alaria would have heard of it from the residents of Nearwood village.

Something didn’t add up here. Perhaps, she thought, Neroli doesn’t know it all. Perhaps the communication spell is not as advanced as I’m giving it credit for.

If that was the case, then things might look a little more hopeful. Even if Neroli was not aware of everything that passed around Grozmikal’s location, however, she was almost certainly aware of them now.

And even if she doesn’t know who we are, these guards will recognize me and Mia.

It was essential to behave as if they were friends already - indeed, as if she and Mia were sexual partners of Grozmikal, since that was the role that they’d pretended to play back in the city.

She grimaced internally. Well, at least I only have to play that for long enough to get close to them. Close enough to kill them.

She had decided already that she had no choice now but to execute the guards on the spot. She’d hoped not to have to do so. If they were enthralled men, as seemed likely, then it was a sad thing to have to do. Once freed, men under such a spell can recover and get their lives back, given time. If she could have saved their lives and given them the chance at redemption she would have done so, but she didn’t see any way that she could. There were twenty of them, twenty blades within arm’s reach of Grozmikal, and all of them under Neroli’s command. Any one of them could kill him at a stroke, and she could not allow that to happen. After all, despite the unorthodox way she’d received the mission, she was still an adventurer. Her quest was to save Grozmikal if she could, as well as to remove the threat of Neroli’s actions from the surrounding villages, and if that meant killing the enthralled guards, then that was what she would do.

If she could, she must save Grozmikal’s sorry skin.

“Why, if it isn’t our friend the adventurer from Hopeford!” she cried pushing feigned joviality into her voice. She raised a hand in greeting as she moved forward, steadily closing the gap between them. “You’ve come all the way out here on your mission. What a strange chance that we should meet you here, you and all your loyal soldiers!”

She made a show of inclining her head toward the enthralled soldiers, who regarded her and her companions with all the expressiveness of twenty wooden posts. Her skin tingled in anticipation of attack, and she was very glad of the presence of Beth and Mia at her back.

She closed the distance - twelve yards, ten, eight… Grozmikal’s face was a picture of confusion and fear, but he suddenly seemed to realize the necessity of playing along.

“Well met,” he said in a strangled voice, and treated Alaria to a hideous parody of a smile. “Uh, how unexpected to meet you out here! And did I see you fighting some monsters?”

In that moment, something seemed to click for him, and he got a little more into the role. “I don’t know how I feel about you depriving me of enemies to fight,” he exclaimed, attempting his old booming voice. Something of his former bluff manner came back as he spoke. “After all, I’m Grozmikal, the number one adventurer in Hope River Valley, and you better not be trying to usurp me!”

Alaria pulled up within two strides of him and then stopped. She smiled, and looked him right in the eye. “Hit the ground,” she said. “Now.”

Grozmikal’s eyes went wide, but there was only a moment’s hesitation before he obeyed. As he dropped, Alaria manifested a huge, terrifyingly strong tentacle and poured all the strength and power that she could muster into it. She fired the tentacle out to her left, then whipped it round like a massive club, straight at the heads of the guards.

She saw the blue communication spell glowing brightly for a moment, but that was the only reaction from any of the guards. They looked as nonplussed as they always had, as unresponsive in the face of death as they were to everything else. It was a sad thing to have to kill them. She was good at keeping her emotions from getting in the way of her fighting prowess, but still the pang of regret was unavoidable. As unavoidable as their deaths.

But Alaria was in for a surprise. She had expected the tentacle to bowl the guards over, to stun them, and then she would wade in and finish them off with spells and steel. Instead, the stunning blow smashed through the guards as if they had been made of paper, and the lack of any resistance to her blow made her stumble to the right, thrown off balance by her own attack. She righted herself, pulling the tentacle in and making it vanish, then sweeping out her sword.

There was nothing to attack. The guards were gone. They’d crumbled into piles of grit and red dust as soon as they’d been hit.

Grozmikal had squeezed his eyes closed when he’d dropped to the ground, but now he opened them and peered up and about himself, blinking in bleary bewilderment.

“What in the…?” Beth asked. “Where did the guards go?”

Mia stooped and lifted a handful of reddish-brown dust. “They’ve disintegrated,” she said, “they’ve just turned into heaps of dry earth and dust!”

“They were golems!” Alaria said in amazement. “And I don’t mean what we usually mean by golem. We think of golems as one of the peoples of the world, harmless creatures who live and breathe and are born and die like any we do, but originally, the word meant something quite different.”

She gestured to the piles of dry, dusty red earth that was all that remained of the twenty armed men who’d stood here a moment before. “In the old days, there was a spell where a powerful mage could create and animate a servant out of the very mud and soil of the earth. The creature was called a golem. But the magic was lost a long, long time ago. I didn’t think that anyone could still do it.”

“Apparently Neroli can,” Mia said, dropping the dirt with a look of distaste and wiping her hand on her pants leg. She glanced down at the quivering, prostrate figure on the ground “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Grozmikal, do get up.”

Grozmikal was peering about between his fingers. He looked to Alaria for confirmation, waiting for her nod before he got unsteadily to his feet. He wobbled when he stood, and she put out an arm, helping him to stay upright.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly, in a voice that was very unlike his usual one. He coughed, wiped his mouth, looked around, and then suddenly his back straightened. “They’re gone?” he asked. “The guards are definitely gone?”

Alaria gestured at the piles of dry earth on the ground. Grozmikal prodded one cautiously with a foot, then, when nothing happened, he kicked the nearest one savagely, sending a cloud of red earth scattering about on the path. “You’ve saved me,” he said in a choking voice. “You’ve saved me. I’m free at last.” Then he sat down on the ground and started to cry.

Mia looked away, scanning the road to the north. Alaria pitied Grozmikal, but she didn’t comfort him. She couldn’t afford to take her eyes off the surroundings.

It was Beth who stepped in to comfort him. She crouched beside Grozmikal and put an arm around his shoulders.

“Easy,” she said to him. “You’re safe now. They can’t get you anymore.”

“What about the… gulp… the mountain villages?” he said, his voice thick and unsteady. “Won’t she destroy them now that she knows I’ve escaped? She’ll know. She’ll find out! Then she’ll kill all those people and it’ll all be my fault!”

He looked around, wildly, his eyes large as dinner plates and dilated with fear.

“We’ll stop her, don’t worry,” Beth said gently. “Here, drink some water. It’ll do you good.” She unhitched her waterskin from her hip and handed it to him, then stood and spoke quietly to Alaria.

“What’ll we do with him?” she said quietly. “He’s in a bad way. His mind’s nearly broken by this. We can’t just leave him, but we dare not take him with us either.”

“We’ll have to wait for Sinjin and his followers,” Alaria said. “We need to find out what’s going on here, and why they followed us. Hopefully they’ll be able to take him off our hands and look after him. But you’re right, he’s in no state to do anything. Poor guy. He’s been at the end of his resources for a while now.”

“He’s tougher than he looks,” Beth said. “I think he’s probably tougher than even he realizes.”

Alaria nodded. She hoped Beth was right, though she was less certain. “What did you see when you scouted, before that bird thing attacked you? Did you get a glimpse of Sinjin?”

Beth shook her head. “No,” she said, “but I didn’t get a chance to look. I’d only managed a glance about before that thing hit me. But they can’t be far now. When I saw them earlier in the day, they were less than an hour behind Grozmikal, and they looked like they were making haste to try and catch up with him.”

Alaria nodded. “They’ll be here soon, then. I don’t think we can do better than wait for them to arrive. We need to give Groz a rest as well.”

“Let’s wait off the path, at least,” Mia said. “I feel like I have a target painted on my back out here.” She glanced at the trembling figure of Grozmikal, and didn’t say more, but Alaria and Beth both knew what Mia was thinking. Neroli had shown herself that very morning - it was most likely that she had been directing the attack by the werewolves, and for all they knew the ice queen was nearby still, watching them.

Grozmikal, however, was in such a piteous state that the mere mention of Neroli’s name at this moment might be enough to send him over the edge. Alaria looked around and then made a decision.

“Mia, you’re right,” she said. “This is no place to wait. Come, we’ll go back to the camp.”

Mia looked doubtfully at Grozmikal and then at the rough half mile of terrain that lay between them and it. She was about to speak, but Alaria shook her head. “Don’t worry, Mia,” Alaria said. “I think I’m fit for the challenge. Come, Grozmikal, stand up and let me help you. We’re going to go back somewhere comfortable and get you some rest.”

With that, she reached out her hand to help him to his feet and a dark green tentacle slipped from under her tunic, wrapping around Grozmikal and securing him firmly but comfortably. Then she set off, walking with remarkable speed and confidence across the difficult ground. Beth and Mia, at Alaria’s request, waited in the heather near the road. Twenty minutes later, Alaria was back with them.

Alaria came upon them so suddenly and silently that they both jumped.

She grinned. “See, Beth? You’re not the only one who’s stealthy. Have you seen anything while I’ve been gone?”

“Nothing,” Mia said. “No sign of Sinjin and his followers, and no sign of Neroli or anything else.”

Alaria noticed that Beth didn’t offer to scout again. She’d been badly shaken by her experiences with the evil bird that had attacked her the last time, and she wasn’t volunteering her services again. Alaria decided not to suggest it either, at least not until they’d had a chance to talk the experience over.

Just then, Mia gave a hiss of intake breath and tapped Alaria on the arm.

“Look there,” she said. “Look to the road. There’s someone coming.”

Alaria looked. It took her a minute to identify the ragged, hurried-looking travelers who were marching at a determined speed up the road toward them, but there was no mistaking the figure who strode out ahead, armed with a sword and a long, heavy wooden staff.

Sinjin had caught up with them at last.

Chapter

Eighteen

Sinjin and his buddies weren’t taking any chances. They had that hyper-vigilant, paranoid air that Alaria associated exclusively with inexperienced fighters who didn’t know what they were up against and were afraid to find out. She narrowed her eyes and glared at them as she saw them stop and take up poorly ordered fighting positions.

One man - a peasant in a roughspun tunic - was armed with a pitchfork. Another younger man - his son, by the resemblance in their chins and noses - was standing next to him, armed with a tool that looked like it was for whisking eggs. The father braced his pitchfork and accidentally jabbed his son in the buttock with it. The son yelped and leaped forward, prodding an older woman who was armed with a bow. The archer let loose the arrow she’d drawn with a twang of bowstrings and a yelp of annoyance.

The arrow sailed through the air, and Alaria reached up a hand and used Freeze to stop its passage through the air. The arrow hung still in the air, unmoving.

The others of Sinjin’s group were thrown into confusion and amazement at this display of magic, and two big, heavy-set men with crude swords looked like they were prepared to steam in and take Alaria on.

She rolled her eyes and didn’t put her hand to her blade.

“Sinjin,” she called, looking directly at Grozmikal’s brother, who was out in front. “Call your men back.”

Sinjin didn’t respond immediately, but then he looked more closely at her, and his eyes went wide with recognition. “Alaria!” He cried in amazement. “Is it really you?”

“It sure is,” she said, “but unless your goons want to get hurt, I’d call them off.”

“You two, take it easy,” Sinjin said in a brusque voice to the two men who had stepped forward. “She’s not our enemy. I can’t think of anyone better to have met out here than Alaria and her companions.”

He strode forward, his face still serious but his eyes sparkling with relief at having met her. When they got close to each other, he embraced Alaria impulsively, and there was a murmur of approval from the armed civilians behind him.

Alaria saw them loosening sword belts, smiling, and dropping their tense posture.

“You better tell your folk to stay alert,” she said quietly to Sinjin. “Don’t you have any soldiers there who can keep discipline? This place isn’t safe.”

Sinjin looked back over his shoulder and rolled his eyes. “Delf! Farrow!” he called. “Keep the group in order. Keep watch. We can’t afford to let our guard down yet.”

A man and a woman dressed in the distinctive gear of the Hopeford city guard stepped up and began to impose a bit of order on the armed civilians. Alaria saw with approval that the folk responded well to the orders of Delf and Farrow, and she turned her full attention to Sinjin.

The little innkeeper was not quite the jovial, rotund character he had been when she last saw him, but he still had some red in his cheeks and a twinkle in his eye, and his outrageous handlebar mustache was still in place, though it looked a bit the worse for wear. But he’d lost weight, and his skin had an unhealthy look to it, as if he’d been on the road for a few days and hadn’t had enough food or sleep. Which, she supposed, was probably exactly the case.

“Grozmikal is with us,” she said without preamble. “His guards are dead, and he’s sleeping over there, at my camp on that rocky outcrop.”

“Oh, thank the gods,” Sinjin exclaimed. “I thought… Oh, when we went through that horrible wood and I saw the signs of battle, I thought he’d tried to take on the menace of the trees. But then when we got to the village and he told us that Groz had passed through, I knew that he must have not found it…”

“Found it?” Alaria said. “Found what? No, on second thought, don’t answer,” she added, raising a hand. “We need to hear everything in its proper order so we can make a plan. Will you gather up your people and have them walk out with us?”

“Aye, I’ll do that,” Sinjin said.

“Mia, Beth,” Alaria said, “I want to leave the road for a while and regroup. We’re going to take everyone back to the camp and not take any further action until we know what the hell’s going on here. I’m happier now that we seem to have seen off Neroli’s attack and gotten Grozmikal into some kind of safety, but we need to have an eye on these civilians. Beth, take the rear, Mia, you take the lead, and I’ll hold the left flank. We need to shepherd these civilians through the undergrowth and keep a lookout for any attacks.”

“You don’t think there’s something hiding in the heather for us?” Mia asked.

“No,” Alaria said. “That doesn’t seem to be Neroli’s style, and anyway I’m wise to her magic now. If she had creatures waiting for us out in the moor, I think I’d be able to feel their presence. I think we’re safe from attack that way. We’ll go carefully, all the same, but I think the only thing we’re going to find out there is some rest and a few much-needed answers.”

It was slow going with the troop of armed civilians that Sinjin had brought along, but they made it, and an hour or so later they were all settled at the rocky outcrop where Alaria and her friends had camped. Alaria took charge and set the two soldiers to watch from the high point while the rest of the civilians were told to take their ease on the lower slopes of the rocky outcrop. Alaria, Mia, and Beth joined Sinjin at the main camp, where Grozmikal still slept the sleep of the greatly relieved, face down and snoring in the tent where Beth and Mia had slept the night before.

“Let him sleep a while longer,” Alaria said. “He’s had a hell of a time of it. Whatever happens, I mean to make sure that he can retire and take it easy after this, like he wanted to. I’ll see to that.”

They built up the fire, cooked some food, made tea, and didn’t talk of anything very significant for a little while. Alaria was happy with that. It seemed important to just take a little time to relax and not do anything overly important. They’d all had an exhausting couple of hours.

Grozmikal awoke to the smell of the cooking, and he, too, seemed happy to take a little while to concentrate just on the important tasks of eating and drinking tea. He was very surprised to see his brother at first, but Alaria said firmly that explanations would wait until after they’d eaten, and after hugging his brother warmly, he agreed to that.

The fraudulent adventurer was no longer wearing his golden armor. He’d taken it off and stacked it outside the tent, and now he was barefoot, dressed in simple woolen pants and tunic, with a light cloak around his shoulders. He looked like a different man now, sitting there eating soup with a wooden spoon in the grass by the campfire. All traces of his egotistical adventurer character were gone. None of that had been genuine, but despite that it had always colored his behavior in all of Alaria’s other interactions with him. Now, the real Grozmikal was coming out.

He looked like he might have been a refined merchant, or a philosopher, perhaps a librarian. He even resembled some of the old mage practitioners that Alaria had studied under. He was older than he looked normally as well; Alaria suspected that make-up was part of his deception, making himself look younger than he truly was.

She had variously felt revulsion, pity, irritation, and anger toward Grozmikal, but before this moment she had never felt anything akin to interest in him for his own sake. Now, looking at him for the first time completely stripped of his disguise, his hero act, she saw that there was a real person in there. A likable person. Probably quite a good person, really, once you got past all the nonsense.

Alaria glanced at Sinjin, and saw that he was watching his brother, a strange, unreadable look on his face. He, too, saw the real person in there - had done so all along, presumably. Now, she saw that he was also realizing that the real Grozmikal was at last coming to the surface.

She cleared her throat and spoke. “So,” she said, not beating about the bush. “Time for a few answers.”

“I’d love to know what’s going on,” Grozmikal admitted. “I knew that you were in front of me, Alaria, because they told me in Nearwood village, but I had no idea what your plan was, and so I was completely surprised when you popped up on the road in front of me! Not as surprised as I was to see you though, Sinjin,” he added. “I had no idea you were on the road behind me. How did that come to be? And who are all the folk you brought with you? I never thought of you as a war leader.”

He laughed, a light, quiet, relaxed sound, nothing like the booming guffaw of the great Grozmikal, hero of Hopeford. The sound was pleasant, and Grozmikal seemed startled by it and looked around momentarily, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was him who had laughed.

Alaria smiled. “I’d like to know the answer to Grozmikal’s question too, Sinjin,” she said. “I was as surprised as him to find out that you were on the road behind us. I think that since you and Grozmikal both know enough about what I’ve been doing, you may as well start with an explanation.”

“That’s easy enough to do,” Sinjin said with a shrug. He looked at Grozmikal. “Truth is, brother, I found your book.”

“My… my book?” Grozmikal said with confusion on every line of his face. What book?”

“Your diary, Grozmikal,” Sinjin said. “And I read all about the Heart of the Forest, and how you got it, and how you lost it, and what you were going to try to do now that Alaria was going out in front of you.”

Grozmikal’s face was a picture of shock, shame, and surprise, but he mastered himself in a moment, and his expression changed to one of relief.

“Oh, Sinjin,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have told you… I…” He trailed off, lost for words.

“You should have,” Sinjin said without any trace of anger. “But you didn’t, and here we are. You wrote all about it in your journal, though, and you didn’t think I’d find that, but I did, and so here I am.”

“What is this?” Alaria demanded. “What’s the story? What book? What’s this secret, Grozmikal?”

He seemed unable to speak. After a moment, Sinjin sighed. “I’ll tell it, shall I?” he said, and Grozmikal nodded, then hung his head.

“Turns out,” Sinjin said wryly, “that my brother hasn’t been completely honest with me or with you. Remember how he told us that he ended up in Neroli’s clutches because he believed his own bullshit and thought he could go into the mountains and tackle her?”

“Yes,” Alaria said, “and then he was caught and teamed up with her to boost his reputation, and for her amusement.”

“Right,” Sinjin said. “Well, it turns out that there was something more to it than that. Grozmikal stole something from her, didn’t you, brother?”

Grozmikal nodded, but remained silent.

Sinjin continued. “Once he’d gained her trust, he found that there was a gemstone she kept close to her all the time, a big, green stone that glittered and sparkled like an emerald in the sun. It was called the Heart of the Forest, and she’d brought it from her homeland and poured a lot of her own power into it. Well, he pinched it and squirreled it away, and she lost a lot of her power.”

“Wait a minute,” Mia said suspiciously. “I thought she was all-seeing, and there was no chance of deceiving her?”

“Evidently she’s not quite as all-seeing as my brother here made out.”

“She has one weakness,” Grozmikal said. “She also likes to drink. We used to get drunk together, but one night she had too much, and I pretended and didn’t drink as much as I made out. When she fell asleep, I took the stone, then left first thing the next morning. I was well on my way by the time she woke up, and I think she didn’t suspect it was me who’d stolen it for at least two days - not until it was too late to get it back.”

Alaria kept quiet. She resisted the urge to smile, and to draw from her pocket the beautiful, mysterious enchanted emerald-like stone that she’d harvested from the tree-sentinel after their battle in the forest. She had no doubt that it was indeed the stone that Grozmikal had stolen from the Ice Queen, but she wanted to hear the rest of the story before she revealed it.

“Well, what happened?” she said.

“I… took it into that little forest west of Nearwood village, and it went crazy as soon as I got into the woods. The trees seemed to respond to it, there were hundreds of them, and they came at me like… ugh, it was horrible. The stone grew so hot it burned me, and I had to throw it away. One of them ate it, the tree just leaned over and swallowed it up. And then it was gone, and the whole forest went quiet again, though I felt it was laughing at me the whole way…”

“He got back to Hopeford and did his playacting, and then went back to see Neroli again.”

“And she knew it was you who stole her gem?” Alaria said.

Grozmikal nodded. “She knew,” he said. “She knew fine. There was no fooling her, oh no. And that was when it began. She made me confess, and I had to tell her that I’d lost it. When I told her what had happened, she went into a towering rage, and then she said that I’d pay for what I’d done, and I’d never be free again, because I’d betrayed her.”

Alaria glared at him. “I’m beginning to have some sympathy for this woman after all!” she said. “Honestly, Grozmikal, what in the hells did you think you’d be able to do with it?”

“Get magic,” he said shamefacedly. “Oh, I know it was stupid, but that’s nothing new. Look, I resented her because she had all this power but didn’t seem to want to use any of it, so I stole the stone… I had no idea what it really was, what it meant to her, and I had no idea how to use it anyway. But now it’s lost. I’d thought that if you went to the woods ahead of me, you might fight the trees and retrieve it, and then you’d have got it back and I wouldn’t have to tell anybody that… that….”

“That it was all your fault in the first place?” Alaria said icily.

“Basically,” he admitted. “I just didn’t want anyone to know how much of an idiot I’d been. I wanted people to see me as the victim, not as someone who deserved it. But it’s the truth. At first, we were actually quite good friends, but I messed that up, and then lost the gem I stole. But Alaria… I saw signs of battle in the woods. Scorch marks on the trees, bits of wood everywhere, and they said in the village that you’d had a fight with the trees…”

He looked with such piteous hope in his eyes that all Alaria’s anger went suddenly out of her. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the gemstone. She held it up, then gave a disbelieving laugh.

“Of all the ridiculous outcomes,” she said, “this is the one I expected the least. Damn it, Grozmikal, your plan almost worked. You manipulated me into going into that wood ahead of you, and I did fight the trees, and I did retrieve the stone, and if it hadn’t been for Sinjin here finding out the truth by accident, I suppose you’d be spinning me a yarn and trying to get me to give you the gemstone so that you could take the credit and get back into Neroli’s good books, and no one any the wiser?”

Grozmikal looked heartily ashamed. He went crimson and hung his head, but at least he had the good grace not to deny it.

“You almost got us all killed!” Mia spat at him. “You total asshole!”

“Easy, Mia,” Alaria said. “He knows what he’s done. Look at him, he doesn’t need anyone else to tell him.”

Mia was furious. Alaria had never seen her so angry. With a curse, Mia stood, stamped on the ground once, then turned and stormed off up the hill.

Beth rose as if to follow her, but Alaria put a hand on her shoulder. “Give her a minute to cool off,” she said. “I’ll go to her soon, but let’s give her some time to herself for a minute.”

Beth nodded and sat back down, glancing after Mia, then returning her attention to the council of war. “Well,” she said. “Now that we know the truth, and Alaria has got the stone, what are we going to do? Alaria, what do you think?”

“I know exactly what we’re going to do,” Alaria said. “We’re going to go see Neroli, I’m going to give Neroli her gem back, and Grozmikal’s going to do something he should have done a long time ago.”

“What’s that?” Beth asked, though she thought she already knew.

“He’s going to tell the truth, say he’s sorry, and promise never to do it again.”

Chapter

Nineteen

The only thing that remained to be answered was how Sinjin had ended up out here with a bunch of civilians at his tail. The answer to that was simple. He had let it slip that he was going after Grozmikal, to help him, and a couple of people had decided that they were going to go and help as well. They had set out after Sinjin, backing him up, and following him. They had an idea that Grozmikal - who they idolized - was in some kind of difficulty, and Sinjin had realized that he couldn’t tell them the truth without betraying his brother’s shameful secret, so he had no choice but to humor them.

“It turned out pretty lucky in the end, really,” he admitted. “There were a couple of occasions where the help of a committed team of helpers was very useful. It’s only a short journey, I know, but I’m not an experienced traveler, and it was good to have some other people about.”

“And they gathered others on the way?” Beth asked.

Sinjin nodded. “They seemed to have the idea that their hero Grozmikal was in trouble and needed help from his loyal fans. They’re all in total awe of him, you know, and I don’t think anything could change their opinion of him. They want to help him, and to see him in action, too.”

Alaria mused on it for a moment, then smiled. “Well,” she said, “if they’re up for a stiff journey, maybe we can help them to get what they came for, and more besides, but I’m not sure about how much danger I’m up for putting them in. I’ll need to have a closer look at them first. We don’t want anyone getting killed on this mission if we can help it.”

She left Grozmikal and Sinjin with Beth at the camp. The Grozmikal fans were gathered around the low slopes of the camp hill, some sleeping, some still eating, some laying about and chatting to each other in low voices. The two or three professional guards who were with the group were mounting something that looked a bit like a professional watch.

Alaria shook her head and pursed her lips as she looked down at them. These were no seasoned travelers. She was going up into the mountains. She had decided that she could benefit from having a few witnesses for what she was going to try to do, but she didn’t want anyone to get killed for it. She would have to be careful about who she brought with her if she wanted to get the outcome she desired.

On the top of the outcrop, standing at a distance from the few civilians who had been set as watchers, Alaria found Mia standing aloof from the others, her hands behind her back, staring out at the mountains. She was as still as a statue, but Alaria could tell from the set of her shoulders that she was crying.

Moving gently, Alaria walked up beside Mia and put an arm around her shoulders. Mia was stiff for a moment, then leaned into Alaria and placed her head on Alaria’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Mia said quietly. “I didn’t mean to fly off the handle like that. I shouldn’t have stormed off. But when I think of the way he used us, manipulated us… You could have died in the forest because we went into that situation unprepared. If he’d just had the guts to tell the truth and ask you straight out to go and get the crystal for him, this whole thing could have been avoided and you wouldn’t have had to put yourself in such horrible danger.”

“I know,” Alaria said, “and I’m angry at him too. Or at least I was.”

“You mean you’re not anymore?”

Alaria tilted her head from one side to the other, considering the question.

“It’s difficult to put into words,” Alaria said at last. “It’s not that I don’t feel I have a reason to be angry at him - I do. And it’s not that I’m not angry at him, either, not exactly - it’s more that I know the anger is not worth anything. Do you see? Me being angry at him doesn’t move me any closer to my objective. It’s what I feel, but it’s not of use to me in this situation, so I’m able to not let it affect me.”

Mia made a noise that was more of a laugh than a sob. “You’re a marvel, you know that?” she said, wiping her eyes. “You can put your emotions to one side like that…”

Alaria laughed. “Not all the time,” she said. “When it comes to my love for you, and my care for Beth, then I do find my emotions getting in the way. He endangered you two as well, and that does make me mad. But I trained long and hard to get control of my emotions, so that I could fight with a clear head whatever happened. That’s what we need to do now - to have clear heads. I think that I can tie this whole situation up and have nobody be any the worse off, including Grozmikal. For Sinjin’s sake as much as his, I want to forgive Grozmikal for his idiocy and help him out of this situation. I think he’s been punished enough by Neroli. She doesn’t need any help from us to make him feel worse, but she might need some help from us in another area.”

Mia looked curiously at Alaria, her interest caught by this enigmatic statement. “You mean by returning the jewel?” she asked.

“That’s part of it,” Alaria said. Then she smiled. “I think Neroli might be quite misunderstood. We may have to fight her, but we may also have to help her to see that there’s a different way of living from the way that she’s chosen. She’s a powerful mage, and whatever her errors, her power and her achievements in magic gives her the right to have respect from us.”

Mia looked thoughtfully at Alaria. “If you say so,” she said. “Very well, I’ll put my anger to one side now. I see that for Sinjin’s sake, if nothing else, I must try. He loves his brother still, and he’s always been very kind to me - to both of us. He would be terribly hurt if anything bad happened to Grozmikal, and I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

She sighed, then smiled and hugged Alaria tight. “Thanks, Lari,” she said. “It’s been a difficult few days, but it feels like we’re on the home stretch now.”

“It sure does,” Alaria agreed.

Early the following morning they were on the road. Alaria was in the lead, Mia and Beth at her sides and Grozmikal and Sinjin following not far behind. Sinjin’s ragtag band of followers came along last.

There were many fewer than there had been the day before. Alaria had gathered them together the previous evening and explained to them that she was going into the mountains, and that it was going to be cold, dangerous, and hard. Grozmikal made a flowery speech about how they had helped him to find his brother and his helpers, but that the road ahead would be full of peril and that he didn’t expect anyone to come with him who didn’t want to.

That had been enough to winnow the group down to eight; the guards Delf and Farrow, another guard called Pin, and seven civilians, two from Hopeford and five who had been gathered up from the various villages the travelers had passed through.

Alaria looked these last few over, and whittled the group down still further, assuring the villagers that there was nothing more to be done, and no need to continue. She paid them all a gold coin each for their trouble, and - feeling a bit bad about it but sending the necessity - placed a small spirit spell on each coin that made them more susceptible to her messaging. She didn’t want a whole host of people she didn’t know following along with her, but she did want some witnesses.

That had got the group down to only the three guards and the two Hopeford civilians. Alaria already knew vaguely about the guards. Farrow and Pin had both been at the Battle of Longwood Gulch, where Alaria had cleared out the tunnel-orcs with the help of the town guard, led by Jessica Sola. Delt was one of the mayor’s hall guards, a captain that Alaria had spoken to a few times in the aftermath of that battle. They were all three reliable soldiers, and their only flaw was their fanatical adoration of Grozmikal and their desire to save him from harm.

The other two were an odd pair. One was the baker’s journeyman apprentice, a small, round, red-faced woman with dark curls and eyes like beads of jet. She was called Pie - apparently, she had no other name - and she was engaged to be married to the guardsman Pin. Alaria chuckled at this - Pie and Pin made an amusing couple, but they were also clearly inseparable, and it was touching to see how they doted on each other. For all her round red face and cheerful demeanor, she was a glint in her eye and a straightness in her posture that told Alaria she was a tough, doughty woman who would not balk at danger. Quite apart from the fact that Pie and Pin would not be separated, their toughness and intelligence made Alaria happy to have them both along.

As for the last member of the team, he was an unexpected figure, not the type of person Alaria would have expected either to be an admirer of Grozmikal and his exploits, or particularly keen to go traipsing off up into the mountains at the end of summer in search of adventure. She had a good chat with him, and finding that he was neither a Grozmikal maniac nor an inexperienced townsman, she was happy to let him stay with the party as well.

He was very tall, thin as a bean pole and with a long, straggling gray beard that grew from a craggy, lined, weather-worn face. He wore a blue robe that fell to his ankles and was decorated with many tiny stars and moons, sewed in silver thread. He had a deep black cloak overall, and when he raised his hood to cover his head, his great mass of snowy white hair flowed out from under it like a river gushing from a culvert.

His name, he said, was Rannek Stickler. It was an odd name for the folk of the north, but he freely admitted - in an accent that seemed to be partly from everywhere in Sapheli and a bit from everywhere else as well - that he wasn’t a native and had traveled far before settling in Hopeford.

“I’m older than I look,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, and she chuckled, taking his bait.

“I hope you don’t mind me saying so, Rannek, but you must be very old indeed if you’re older than you look.”

“Hah! And so I am,” he said, grinning and showing her his small, yellowish teeth. “I am very much older than I look, and I know very well that I look very old already.” He chuckled, enjoying the dancing wordplay as the sentence tripped off his tongue, almost as lilting as a song.

He was a librarian, and he ran the small library of scrolls and collected local knowledge in Hopeford. “It’s a small enterprise,” he explained, “and not particularly popular. But I maintain the archive on behalf of the mayor, and the records of births and deaths, marriages and adoptions, and the tax receipts are enough to keep me busy during the day. To tell the truth, however, my main purpose in being the librarian of Hopeford is to have a quiet place that’s well supplied with inks and paper and comfortable chairs. I have my own project, you see, and this line of work facilitates my ability to carry it on.”

“And what is that project?” Alaria asked.

“It’s what brings me out here,” he said, gesturing around at the moorland, the open sky, and the mountains looming up nearby. “I collect stories, I collect history, I write them down and I collate them. I’m writing a history of the Kingdom of Sapheli, but I’m also writing the stories of the people and places that I meet in my travels. I’ve had my eye on Grozmikal for a while - an interesting fellow, around whom interesting things happen. When I heard that his brother was setting out after him with a group of citizens, I decided I would take the chance for a journey and an interesting experience. This Neroli, the Ice Queen, sounds like an interesting character too, and if I can get a look at her and something interesting to write about, then I’ll be well rewarded for my pains.”

Alaria liked this strange old man, and she spent a good amount of time chatting with him as they walked. She established that he wasn’t exactly a fan of Grozmikal - not in the way that the others were, at least - but that he admired Grozmikal’s talent for publicity and was interested in the way that he captured people’s imaginations. He skirted delicately around the idea that Grozmikal might not be exactly all he made out, and Alaria didn’t mention the fact either. As far as Alaria was concerned, the only people who knew Grozmikal’s dirty secret aside from herself were Mia, Beth, Sinjin, Grozmikal, and Neroli. She had decided early on that none of the fan base would hear the truth from her, and she was glad that Rannek was keen to be discreet about it as well, though it was clear he suspected something even if he didn’t know for sure.

For his part, Grozmikal had donned his armor again, and he walked stoically beside his brother, the pair speaking quietly together with their heads lowered. Beth and Mia walked together as well, a little away from the main group. Alaria was pleased to see that Mia had apparently completely given up her furious dislike of Grozmikal for the moment, and was as merry and cheerful as ever, laughing and joking with Beth as they walked along together, often arm-in-arm.

Alaria was also glad to see that Beth had not reverted to her human form, even though there were other people here now. She was still in her cat form, and though some of the people gave her interested glances now and again, none of them seemed to recognize her as the well-known innkeeper of Brighthill. Alaria was pleased to see the upright, confident way both of her lovers held themselves now. Things were changing for them. Their relationships had brought about new dimensions to both of their characters.

And to her own as well, she mused.

They walked all day except for one brief halt. For a long time, it seemed that the mountains were not getting any closer, but then, abruptly, they crested the top of a long slope they’d been climbing all day and found themselves looking down into a shallow valley that stretched along the front of the wall of the Cold Range, like a ditch before the defensive wall of a fortress. A few dark lakes were scattered about in the base of the valley, and the road ran right down into it and then straight back up, headed for a narrow pass high up in the mountains. The mountain wall stretched up and up, dark and ominous in the evening light. It was cold, and a solemn silence fell over the little party as they stood looking up at the dark, looming fastness.

They had reached the final stage of their journey.

Chapter

Twenty

It was evening. The valley below looked forbidding and unfriendly, but not as forbidding or unfriendly as the mountains. Alaria was tired, and her companions were tired, and in the gloom of the swift-falling evening, a cold breeze was coming up.

Mia spoke aloud what all the companions were thinking. “Shall we backtrack a little and find a safe place to camp?” she asked.

“No,” Alaria said. “We go on.” She spoke loudly enough that the others would be able to hear, and she turned slightly toward them so that they could see she was speaking to them as well. “We go on,” she repeated more loudly, scanning the dark that was gathering around them for any sign of movement.

“In any other circumstance,” Alaria explained, “I would be for stopping, camping, and waiting until dawn before going on. We’re tired, and no one wants to tackle this gloomy valley as the night falls. But all this day I’ve felt the eyes of Neroli on us. She’s watching our progress, she’s monitoring us as we go on, and there’s no question that she knows we’re here. I believe that she can hear me now, as I speak, and so I say this: I want an audience with her. I want to speak to her, woman to woman, and find if we cannot make a good situation out of a bad one. I want to have peace with Neroli, and I want her to be able to hear me out.”

“What if she fights us?” said Pie, the baker’s apprentice. She was sticking close to her partner, the guardsman Pin, and they both looked scared.

“If she wants to fight someone, she can fight me,” Alaria said, “not you. I think Neroli is a powerful mage, and I think she’s a person who has made some mistakes, but I don’t think she’s cruel or malicious for the sake of it. I think she knows right from wrong. I think that if she’s looking for an opponent, she will have the courage and the honor to pick on someone of her own skill level. Isn’t that right, Neroli?”

She addressed these final words over the shoulders of her companions, her eyes suddenly sparking bright with challenge as she glared into the dark. The others all turned in fear and amazement.

At first, they saw nothing, then they gave a gasp as, out of the gloom, a figure appeared.

“That’s her,” Mia gasped. “That’s the woman I saw from the camping spot!”

It was a terrible figure that presented itself, moving slowly out of the gloom as if revealed by the removal of a dark cloak. It looked like a woman, but she was unnaturally tall - nearly seven feet - and she had long black hair that hung down past her waist, covering her face. Her head hung forward, and her bare feet hung limply a few inches from the ground.

Her shoulders were slumped, and her arms hung limp. The white and blue gown dripped moisture steadily onto the ground.

If a drowned woman had been pulled from the water and hung up in front of them, she could not have been a more horrifying sight. Still as a statue, the image hung before them, and then a slow, croaking voice spoke.

“I hear you, Alaria of Brighthill,” the voice said. It creaked and grated like the sound of gravel scraping over stone. “I hear you, and I accept your challenge. You wish to fight? You will see that I don’t pick on the weak unless they deserve it. You will see that I have earned my reputation for magic and my right to my power. You will see that I am so much more than you have thought. You wish to fight? You will learn a lesson that you do not wish to learn.”

“I always wish to learn,” Alaria said boldly. “But I do not wish to fight, as you will know if you were truly listening to me. Surely one so wise and powerful as you wouldn’t mishear my words. Perhaps it’s you that wants to fight? If you, I won’t shy away from your challenge. But it will be you who chose conflict, Neroli of the mountains, not I.”

The apparition laughed. It was a horrible sound, like bubbles of marsh gas popping through mud. “I who chose conflict? Very well. Will you come up? You speak well, and perhaps we shall fight each other before the end, but first, I think I want to talk more comfortably. Perhaps there’s something in your desire for a parlay. Come, then. Follow my emissary, and then we will see what we will see.”

The drowned apparition flowed forward. Sinjin the other witnesses balked and got out of the way, but Alaria and her companions - and Grozmikal, to his credit - stood their ground. The horrible creature was completely still, moving forward as if suspended from an invisible rope that hung down from the sky above. A chill, and a smell of death accompanied the apparition.

As it passed, the voice gurgled from the creature again. “Follow,” it said, “if you dare. Then we shall see if you are really all you say you are. Come, Alaria, and show me what you’re made of.”

The voice was teasing and challenging, and Alaria rolled her eyes and strode out after the retreating apparition’s back, following it down the path into the valley. She didn’t look back to see if the others were coming. She had to trust their willpower now. She trusted Mia and Beth to follow her wherever she went, and Grozmikal was inured to the ways of the Ice Queen, so he would follow. Sinjin might be afraid, but he’d follow his brother after having come so far to help him, and his companions would follow him rather than be left in the dark on the edge of this valley.

As she walked, she reached surreptitiously down and loosened Skyfang in its sheath.

“Steel is such a crude weapon,” the voice from the apparition said, though it had not turned or made any movement other than its steady progress forward.

That confirmed what she had suspected all along. This was not Neroli. This was an apparition, the result of a spell that Neroli was casting. Neroli herself was watching the whole scene from somewhere else, probably enjoying every minute of it.

“Steel may be a crude weapon,” Alaria retorted, “but the creation of horrors to scare the uninformed seems a crude use of advanced Spirit magic.”

The low, gurgling sound that passed for a laugh came again from the apparition. “You see through my little games, Alaria,” the voice said. “And maybe you are right, but I grow so bored up here, and one has to have a little fun… Very well. Follow the path to the top of the mountain pass. It’ll be very dark by the time you get up there, but I’ll leave a light out for you. You’ll see the entrance to the tunnel there, and one so perceptive as you should have no problem finding your way in. I look forward to meeting you in person, Alaria the farsighted.”

The apparition vanished, and Alaria glanced over her shoulder to see, with satisfaction, that her little band were still following in good order, looking scared and determined.

“You’ve done well,” she told them, and was pleased to see how their faces visibly brightened at her words. They trusted her and cared about what she thought of them. “You’ve done very well. We’re almost at the end of the road. Neroli may try to send more apparitions to scare us before we get to the heart of her domain, but stay strong and follow me, look out for each other, and we’ll get to the end of the road together.”

They gave a ragged cheer, and Mia hid a grin behind her hand. Even Grozmikal smiled. He had improved a great deal since he’d admitted his folly and cast himself on the mercy of Alaria. There was color in his face again, and he walked with a straighter back, though there was still a shake in his hand and Alaria saw that he had a small metal flask that he drank from regularly.

Well, that was a vice that took more time to break than the vice of cowardice. Alaria would give Grozmikal time to finish getting himself together. She couldn’t expect too much from him all at once.

The path led straight down into the valley, and the darkness became so thick that the party stopped and lit the rag-and-oil torches that they had brought. Alaria considered telling them not to bother. After all, it was the easiest thing in the world for her to conjure a Light Globe to illuminate the way for them. But she was of the opinion that people shouldn’t rely too heavily on magic for mundane tasks when it could be avoided.

Anyway, getting the torches out, getting them lit, and organizing who would carry them; all this gave the companions a sense of agency, and that was important. They were afraid, they were unsure of themselves, and they didn’t know what they were walking into. Giving them the sense that there was something they could do - even if it was just lighting torches to guide the way - changed their feelings and took the edge off their helplessness and fear.

They walked the path through the valley and came up the other side without incident. It was longer than it looked, and it took the best part of an hour and a half to reach the narrow pass up on the other side of the valley that they had seen earlier that day. By the time they reached the pass, it had grown very cold.

Unnaturally cold, Alaria thought. This isn’t just the cold of the mountains at night. There’s something more to this.

Her companions were feeling it too. Subtly, she reached for her Fire magic and sent a low-level field of magical warming influence flowing out round her. The others all visibly relaxed as soon as the magic touched them, and Alaria smiled to herself.

Very good, a voice said inside her mind, and she almost jumped out of her skin. The voice chuckled quietly. You didn’t expect that, did you Alaria? the voice continued. You didn’t think I’d go this far into the forbidden realms of magic, did you?

I didn’t think so, no, Alaria thought back at the voice. I didn’t even realize it was possible.

Oh, it’s possible, the voice replied. Though I confess it’s not the best idea. But you’ve handled this all very well, so I’ll relent. I’ll remove the spell that enhances the cold, and you can bring your people in without fear of further hindrance. I promise.

Can I trust your promise, Neroli? Alaria asked sternly.

The telepathic echo of a laugh running through her head was the only reply. The voice was gone.

The voice had been so different from the gurgling creak of the drowned avatar that Neroli had sent before. Alaria felt certain that the voice she’d just heard in her mind was Neroli’s true voice. It was deeper than she’d normally expect from a woman, but in a throaty, sultry way, not harsh at all. It was a warm voice, and not the kind of voice one would expect from an Ice Queen at all.

She shook her head as if to clear the cobwebs. Neroli had slipped inside her mind so effortlessly and spoken there as if It was the easiest, most obvious thing in the world. It was not. Telepathic magic was far from common. In fact, it was almost unheard of. Partly this was because it was very difficult to do, but also this was because the magic itself had been banned by the mage council of High Olmer, decades ago now, and nobody who wanted to hold onto their reputation as a mage in Sapheli went against the decrees of the council.

“Lari?” Mia said quietly, coming up behind her.

“Sorry,” Alaria said. “Distracted for a moment. Let’s press on. It can’t be far now.”

The followers were more comfortable now that Neroli had dropped whatever magic she’d been using to make the cold worse than it naturally was, and they came forward with more confidence. After about a mile of steady climb through the narrow pass, their torches casting weird shadows on the high, looming walls, they saw something up ahead.

“A wisp light!” whispered the guardsman, Delt.

“It’s a spirit of the mountains,” Pin muttered, and Pie gave a little whimper of fear.

“We should go back,” Guardsman Farrow whispered under his breath.

“Let Alaria decide what this light is, and what we should do,” the voice of Rannek Stickler the librarian cut in. He spoke firmly and with authority, though not harshly. “Remember that Neroli said there would be a light to guide us to her domain. Perhaps this is it. And if it is some spirit, then I at least am confident that she has the ability to deal with it.”

The old librarian’s words put some new confidence in the companions, and they nodded and muttered agreement among themselves.

Alaria smiled at him. “Rannek is right,” she said to the others. “We have nothing to fear. You don’t know it, but before I came to Brighthill I fought worse than mountain spirits. I was an adventurer for years, and I’ve fought and defeated enemies that would make a mountain spirit turn tail and run. Come on. This is the last lap. Stick with me, and we’ll come through, and when you get home, you’ll all have such a tale to tell that all this fear and suspense will have been worth it.”

That got a few smiles. The companions straightened up and glanced around, a new sense of challenge in their eyes.

“Come on,” she said, and stepped out toward the light.

Very impressive, Neroli’s voice said in her head again, then fled before Alaria could respond. This time, the laugh that echoed in Alaria’s mind wasn’t the throaty chuckle she’d heard previously. This time, it was the squealing cackle of a prankster.

Alaria couldn’t help smiling. There was something irresistibly charming in the voice. Mischievous, yes, and definitely a little mad, but attractive somehow, too.

As Alaria reached the flickering pale blue wisp of light that had been left to guide her way, she saw that there was a narrow doorway in the rock, so tall and thin in fact that it would be impossible to pass though it two abreast. The light hung above the door, flickering a little in a way that had nothing to do with the steady wind blowing down the pass.

Alaria looked up at the light, then through the door into the darkness beyond. She had reached the domain of the Ice Queen. Alaria and Neroli were about to meet.

Alaria was rather looking forward to it.

Chapter

Twenty-One

Come in, Neroli said to Alaria, speaking through her mind-to-mind connection, then fled again.

This time, Alaria reached after her, looking for some way to catch hold of her and find the magic that brought their minds into connection. She felt something, nearly getting a grip on the esoteric mind-joining magic, but then Neroli slipped away again evading Alaria’s grip, and leaving nothing but the sense of distant laughter echoing in her mind.

Alaria frowned. I’m coming, she thought, but the words only echoed around inside her own mind.

“Let’s go,” Alaria said to her group. “We’re almost there. This is the end of our journey.”

She moved forward, remembering her words to Mia on the hilltop. Back then, she had said that she was able to put her emotions to one side and not allow them to get in the way of her fighting prowess. But now, there was some question over how able she was to do that. There was something about Neroli’s laughter, her teasing, mischievous voice, that made Alaria feel an annoyance and an interest that threatened to get right in the way of her abilities.

She had to keep herself centered. She didn’t know what Neroli was, not really. She wasn’t able to tell if the ice queen was genuinely playful, or if she was using the playful, teasing tine as a front for something more sinister. She couldn’t let herself be distracted.

They walked through the narrow arch in single file, but the corridor opened out quickly and they found they were able to walk along in a row together, filling most of the space as they went warily on. They were all alert to the possibility of attack - none more than Alaria - but they did not meet with any resistance as they came on. The corridor was gloomy and cold, but there was a light that emanated seemingly from the very stone of the walls themselves. It was bright enough to light the path on its own, but the travelers kept their torches lit anyway. Aside from the illumination, there was also the comforting warmth and the homely color of the light. None of them were willing to give that up unless they had to.

After only a few minutes of walking, they came to a set of stairs, carved in the same blue glowing rock as the rest of the chambers that they walked through. Grozmikal made a small noise in his throat. He sounded both frightened and angry.

“Groz?” Alaria asked. “You know this place?”

“This is the stair up to her chamber. They always brought me in and turned me round and round with a blindfold on, and I would open my eyes and see this chamber ahead of me. But now I see it was just a trick. There wasn’t some big secret. It was just a hole in the side of the path all along.”

“How little you know, Grozmikal,” said a voice from above them. They all looked up the stairs in surprise. The voice was as rich and warm as honey in summer. “How little you know. This entrance wasn’t there before tonight. You think I can’t decide when and where an entrance to my domain appears? How little you know. But why don’t you and your friends come up? Then perhaps everyone will know a few things that they didn’t know before.”

There was a threat in those words, and Grozmikal quailed visibly. Alaria glanced swiftly at him. She thought quickly. Neroli had been listening in on their conversations. She knew that Alaria wanted to resolve the situation without Grozmikal having to be exposed as a fraud, even to the witnesses. Neroli was letting Alaria know that she had leverage. Alaria nodded quietly to herself, then spoke, projecting her voice up the stairs.

“We’re coming up,” she said. “We have some things to tell you, as well. Hopefully we can all say our piece without anyone getting hurt.”

There was no reply. With a nod of her head, Alaria gave Mia and Beth the order to fall back and watch the rear of the column. She herself took the lead, with Grozmikal by her side.

As they walked up the stairs, Alaria reached out and touched Grozmikal’s hand. Without a word, she slipped the pouch containing the Heart of the Forest into his hand.

He glanced at her, and their eyes met. His face was hard to read, except for the gratitude that shone through his eyes. He smiled wanly and she winked at him.

“Nearly over now,” she reassured him, not caring if Neroli could hear her or not.

The stairs were broad and tall, and they were all breathing hard by the time they reached the top. In front of them was a blank wall. Alaria took a step forward, glanced around, and found that the corridor opened out to the right. She stepped that way, and then gasped in amazement.

She was in the throne room of the Ice Queen.

The others crowded in behind her, forgetting their fear in their amazement at the splendor of the chamber. Alaria was not sure what she’d expected, but whatever it was, it was not this!

Instead of an austere throne room or a mad mage’s chamber of secrets, the throne of the ice queen was an ice sculpture garden. Everywhere ice had been carved into representations of living plants so lifelike it was hard to believe that they were not real. Ivy and creeping flowering vines festooned the walls, and young trees grew from graceful pots in uneven rows along the side of the hall. The floor was flagged with huge stones, three yards square each, but all over the flagstones the pots with their trees, vines, and plants broke up what would otherwise have been an oppressively large and intimidating chamber. Instead - if it had not been for the cold - Alaria would have enjoyed the space. It was beautiful - but not as beautiful as the woman sitting in the huge, ice-carved chair at the end of the hall.

Neroli. If the room had been a surprise, its occupant was much more so. She lay sprawled on the large ice carved throne at the far end of the hall, a perfectly formed woman, petite, with a round, symmetrical face, full lips, and huge blue eyes that flashed with intelligence, amusement, and anger. Her hair was almost as red as Beth’s, but it was tightly curled and cut fairly short, so that it tumbled down around her ears but didn’t reach her shoulders.

Her breasts were generously sized, but were not out of proportion with her body, and she wore a low-cut dress that showed them off to full advantage. Her dress was pale blue, like her eyes and the light that glowed out of the ice sculptures in the room. It was gathered up around her waist, showing her elegant legs, strong thighs, and her small feet, as well as the beginning of the curve of her ass.

One arm lolled off the edge of the huge carved chair where she sat, the other toyed idly with a small object. Alaria couldn’t quite make it out at first, but when she looked closer and realized what it was, she couldn’t help smiling.

It was a Grozmikal figure, one of the collectable miniatures of the fraudulent adventurer that had done so much to add not only to his popularity, but also to his wealth.

There were two ranks of the stony-faced soldiers in the room too - one on either side of the chair. Alai recognized them as the product of the same forbidden magic that she had encountered before. Neroli dabbled in banned aspects of Spirit magic to create these creatures - abominations, Alaria thought. Golems.

She took two steps forward and was about to speak, but before she could do so Neroli swung her beautiful legs off the edge of the chair and stood up, her dress falling to cover her ankles as she did so. She strode forward, the dress swinging out to show her leg right up to the hip. It was slit up one side to be more revealing.

Emotions again. A year ago, Alaria wouldn’t even have noticed Neroli’s display of her physicality, but the revealing dress now sent shivers through her. Neroli was very beautiful, but there was something unearthly about her too, something that set her apart from the other women Alaria had known as lovers. She glanced to the left and right and saw that Beth and Mia were equally stunned by Neroli. They glanced at her, and Mia smiled, a flicker of a wink around her left eye.

Alaria made an effort to rein her feelings in. She looked at Neroli and drew a breath to speak, but Neroli spoke before Alaria could. To Alaria’s surprise, it was Grozmikal she spoke to, not Alaria. Her voice was as deep and sweet as it had been when she’d spoken directly into Alaria’s mind in the corridor earlier that evening.

“I’ll give you one chance to speak,” she said. “Say the right thing, and the outcome you desire will be yours. Speak wrongly…” her voice trailed off threateningly. She glared at Grozmikal, and to his credit he didn’t flinch. Alaria saw his right hand gripped tightly around the little bag which held the Heart crystal of the forest.

“I’ve brought you what you desire,” he said, his voice only shaking a little. “I’ve brought you the item that you need. And… and I apologize. I’m sorry, Neroli. We were friends, and I didn’t respect that. Here is the crystal. I don’t ask you to forgive me, but I ask you to let me carry on in peace, to go my own way. Will you take this?”

He held it out. Her eyes were hard as she looked at him, but the hardness of her expression didn’t detract in the least from her beauty. She was staggeringly good-looking. She stepped up and reached out for the little bag that held the crystal. Her hand shook slightly as she did so.

“Really?” she asked, breathlessly.

“Yes,” Grozmikal said simply. “I got it back for you. That is, I, er, I got Alaria here to get it back for me. The challenge of the final quest turned out to be a little too much for me.”

Alaria resisted the urge to smile. Grozmikal had almost taken the credit for her attaining the crystal but had pulled back from doing so at the last moment. He looked at her, and she rolled her eyes.

Neroli took the bag from Grozmikal and shook the green nugget of gleaming crystal out into her hand.

“It really is…” she breathed, and a tear formed at the corner of her eye.

Alaria frowned. What was this item that meant so much to her? Grozmikal had said that the Heart of the Forest was some major part of Neroli’s power, but it seemed more even than that. It seemed to be deeply meaningful to her.

Neroli dropped her head over the gemstone and sobbed gratefully, then she stepped away from Grozmikal. She looked at him for a moment and then sniffed and wiped her eyes, getting control of her tears.

“All right,” she said. “You’ve done what I asked. You can go if you want to. I’m done with you.”

And with that, she turned away, facing Alaria.

Grozmikal stumbled backward, looking sick with relief. Sinjin caught his arm and helped him to get to his feet again. The witnesses watched with interest and confusion equal on their faces. They didn’t know what was going on, and Alaria saw Sinjin whisper to his brother. Grozmikal regained control of himself and stood up straight again, his hand drifting toward the flask on his belt then pulling away again. Though she hadn’t heard the words that Sinjin had spoken, Alaria could tell what they had been. Sinjin had reminded Grozmikal that it was important to keep his strength up, to keep up appearances. After all, the witnesses didn’t know what was going on here. If Grozmikal was to retain his reputation as a tough adventurer, it wouldn’t do for him to be fainting away at Neroli’s words.

Alaria glanced at the others. The guards Pin, Delf, and Farrow, as well as Pie the baker, were all gazing at Grozmikal in frank admiration. Rannek Stickler, the old librarian, had an unreadable expression that Alaria took to mean he knew more than he showed on his face. She trusted him, however, not to go blabbing and ruining Grozmikal’s carefully nurtured reputation.

Beth and Mia were keeping ahold of themselves, but they were also affected by what had just happened. A few days on the road, and their adventures, had helped them to know what to prioritize, however. They looked around the chamber, one eye always on the guards - the golem creatures that stood with their hands close to their blades, their stony eyes fixed on the travelers.

Grozmikal pulled himself together and stood straight, looking as noble as possible. Sinjin glanced up and smiled at him, looking proud of his brother in this moment of pressure. Neroli ran a hand through her curling hair, cleared her throat, and looked closely at Alaria.

“You got this?” she said, holding the green gemstone out on her palm. “You retrieved the Heart of the Forest?”

“On Grozmikal’s behalf,” Alaria said. “Yes, I did.” And that was true, though not exactly in the way that it sounded. Grozmikal had managed to manipulate her into getting the Heart of the Forest. She had done the quest for him, but without actually knowing that she was doing so at the time.

Neroli narrowed her eyes. She reached into a pouch that hung from her belt and took out a small crystal globe.

“There’s no need for that,” Alaria said. “If you want to talk more about this, we can do so, but let’s do it in a bit more comfort and privacy, shall we? My friends here are tired, and hungry, and so am I for that matter. We’ve brought you this precious item back, Grozmikal has helped to do so, and now you must promise to leave the mountain villages in peace. That’s what Grozmikal has come to do. He wishes to get your promise of the safety of the mountain villages. I want that too, and that’s why I’ve helped him to get you the Heart of the Forest. We’re giving you the gemstone in exchange for your promise that you’ll stop attacking the mountain villages and give up your evil plans.”

Neroli’s mouth twitched. She suddenly was inside Alaria’s mind.

Are you serious? You want me to pretend to give my promise in front of witnesses to save Grozmikal’s reputation? You know I don’t want to harm the mountain villages. Why do you care about Grozmikal?

Alaria replied, speaking through the mind link. I want you to give the promise and save his reputation. I want you to do it because it will help his brother. His brother has been kind to me. I want to save Grozmikal. You need to give the promise. I know the full story, but you have the gemstone back now. Come on, you’ve punished him enough. Make the show for the witnesses. Please.

Neroli looked hard at Alaria for a long moment, then she nodded once and turned to Grozmikal with a dramatic wave of her hand.

“Very well,” she said, theatrically. “I give you my promise. Grozmikal, you’ve managed to succeed without a fight. By returning the Heart of the Forest to me, you’ve gained the safety of the mountain villages. I, Neroli, promise this before these witnesses. The villages will come to no harm at my hand, and it’s all down to you.”

She bowed slightly toward him, and he grinned in satisfaction. The Hopeforders all burst into cheers and spontaneous applause, even Rannek Stickler, though his eye gleamed with a knowing twinkle.

Sinjin slapped Grozmikal on the back and congratulated him.

Then Neroli stopped forward and spoke quietly to Alaria. “And now, my dear Alaria, I think that it’s time you and I had a little chat… in private.”

Chapter

Twenty-Two

After the tense exchange in the throne room, Alaria was surprised to see that Neroli now changed her approach completely. She went from being terse and angry to being the very soul of politeness. Once the decision had been made and she had said what she needed to say to free Grozmikal from his bonds and give the witnesses what they wanted to see, she seemed to be content to continue in this vein. Clearly, Neroli was not someone who did things by halves. She had chosen her course of action, so now she would stick to it.

Alaria was still wary of her, but she was more and more impressed by Neroli as the Ice Queen (the name was beginning to seem less appropriate by the minute) dished out orders to make the visitors comfortable. She spoke to the golems, who moved quietly and efficiently around the chamber, moving icy plant sculptures and pulling out a long table and chairs, then bringing food from stores and laying it out on the table.

“It’s only cold stuff, I’m afraid,” she said with a quirk of a smile, “can’t seem to keep a fire going in here no matter what I do. But maybe that’ll change soon. Anyway, you should all sit and refresh yourselves. You won’t be harmed now, you have my word on that, and so please do make yourselves at home. I wish to have some private conversation with Alaria. If you need anything, ask one of the guards. Anything you need will be done. After you’ve eaten, you’ll find a comfortable dorm through that door over there. I may be some time.”

She turned on her heel after making this speech and then leaned in to speak quietly to Alaria. “Come with me,” she said. “I’d like to spend a little quiet time with you, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Alaria said. “There are some things I’d like to discuss with you too. But not alone. Mia and Beth come with me.”

Neroli looked both women up and down, then looked back at Alaria with a flicker of disappointment, tempered by a questioning look. “Very well,” she said. “They may come too.”

She turned away and walked quickly to the far end of the chamber. There, to the left of the throne, there was a low door, and Neroli pushed this open and ushered Alaria and her friends through. Inside was a comfortable little chamber - or at least, as comfortable as could be achieved in a room carved from stone, where the walls gleamed with ice and the bed looked like it had been sitting outside in the frost. There was a deep couch near the bed, and a deep armchair on the other side. There was a hearth, but no trace of any fire within it.

Neroli sat uncomfortably on the side of the bed. She sighed. “I’ve gotten used to it,” she said, “but I do hate the cold. Don’t you?”

Alaria was surprised. “I thought you were the ice queen,” she said. “That seems an odd thing for an ice queen to say.”

“Ice queen,” Neroli snorted. “We just made that up because it sounded cool. I’m no ice queen, Alaria.”

“But… this place, the ice sculptures, the frost…” Mia gestured around the frozen little room.

“Not my choosing,” Neroli said. “At least, not directly.”

“Wait a minute,” Alaria said. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. You said we made that up because it sounded cool. Who’s we?”

“Why, me and Grozmikal, of course. Who else?”

“I see,” Alaria said.

“I’m not sure that you do, dear,” Neroli said with a smile. “Do you know anything about Forest magic?”

“What is that, some Spirit school variant?” Alaria asked.

Neroli reached into her pocket and took out the Heart of the Forest gem. “It’s nothing of the kind,” she said. “It’s a new form of magic, a school of magic completely unrelated to any of the known schools. I found it. I discovered it and cultivated it, and I used some tricks that made certain… people… rather uncomfortable.”

“Then it’s the Forest magic that caused you to be cast out from the magical community?” Beth asked.

Neroli’s eyes flashed. “How did you know that?” she snapped. “What do you know about the magical community, cat woman?”

Beth bristled visibly, her fur rising and her lip curling. Mia glared, but Alaria waited, and a moment later, Neroli’s anger vanished.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t snap, and I shouldn’t call you cat woman as if it were an insult. You’re right to be annoyed. I’ve been up here on my own too long. But you’re right, and you caught me off guard. I was thrown out by the magical community, both for my experimentation, and for… my other kinds of experimentation as well.”

She looked away, sadly, and chewed her fingernail for a moment before she remembered herself and came back to them. “I wanted to do something good with my magic, something worth having been chucked out of the academy for. So, I came here, to this barren place, and I started to experiment. I started to create new trees, new landscapes. I developed my magic, using this gemstone as an anchor and a vector for my powers. It was harder than I thought it would be, but I was good at Spirit magic too, and I was able to recruit helpers.”

“Helpers,” Alaria said. “You mean the golems and werewolves?”

Neroli shrugged. “Spirit creatures,” she said.

“I don’t approve,” Alaria said.

“Damn your approval!” Neroli burst out. “No one has ever approved of me and my choices, and what good has it ever done me or them to listen to that? I don’t need your approval. Have you any idea what it feels like to be an exile from every community you’ve ever tried to be a part of? I was thrown out of the magic academy. I was thrown out of my home village, I was made a reject in the towns where I stayed, then I came up here and tried to do something good, and when I thought I’d made a real friend for once, he fucking betrayed me and stole the source of my power! Fuck your approval, Alaria. I don’t need it or want it. Have you… have any of you… ever had any idea what it feels like to be so fucking alone?”

“I do,” a quiet voice said. Alaria looked away from Neroli and saw that it was Beth who had spoken. “I understand exactly what that feels like.”

Her quiet words took the wind out of Neroli’s fury in an instant. “You… you do?” Neroli asked.

“Yes,” Beth said. “I was rejected by my kind for a magic that I owned, and it wasn’t even something I chose to do. It was something in my blood. I had no choice.”

“You’re a shapeshifter,” Neroli said. It was not a question.

Beth smiled. “You know about the cat people and their attitude to shapeshifters, then?”

“I do,” Neroli said. “It’s about as friendly as the attitude of the Corullian mountain people toward women who aren’t interested in men.”

There were a few things in that statement, but one of them popped out at Alaria first. Corullia was the name of the place where Alaria’s first romantic love had come from, Katerine, the woman who’d trained at the same school as her for a year before moving on to who-knew-where.

“You’re from Corullia?” Alaria asked.

Neroli nodded. “I am, and it’s been a curse for me. There in the mountains, the people are hard to each other, and my family wouldn’t tolerate the fact that I didn’t want to marry a man. I’ve never been interested in men. It just never worked for me. Oh, I had no problem with the idea of looking after children, not on principle anyway, but the idea of having to be together with a man and all that… I just felt like I wanted to touch women, to be in love with women, but when I expressed that to my friend in the village, she… she told everyone, and they drove me out. Said it was unnatural, an affront to Bel-Shala’s good graces. Said I had to leave, or they’d kill me.”

Beth smiled sadly at Neroli. “When I first let on that I was a shapeshifter, the exact same thing happened to me. Nenya, my stepsister, was the woman I trusted more than anyone. I told her, but instead of keeping my secret she betrayed me. She said that it was better for me to be purged from the village than to have my foul taint spread among the others. But I guess in the other area, it was better. Actually, Nenya thanked the cat gods that I wasn’t attracted to men, because it meant I couldn’t spread my taint by having children. I was driven out by the intolerance of the cat people. But at least I can give them credit for not being prejudiced against me for being attracted to women.”

“Wait, you’re into women as well?” Neroli said, sudden surprise flashing across her face.

Beth smiled. “Yes…” she said slowly. “Though not exclusively. I have liked all kinds of people before I met Alaria here. Now, I’m only interested in her. She’s able to do everything I need.”

“With my help, sometimes,” Mia put in, smiling quietly and putting a hand out onto Beth’s leg.

Neroli’s huge, wide blue eyes went bigger and wider than usual. “Wait…” she said huskily, “you guys are all into women?”

“Only women with tentacles,” Mia said, and Beth laughed.

Neroli looked confused. “I don’t understand,” she said.

Alaria smiled. “You may understand better soon,” she said. “But before we discuss our sexual preferences any further, tell me a bit more about that gemstone, the Heart of the Forest. You said you were trying to do something with it. What were you trying to do?”

“To grow trees,” Neroli said. She laughed. “Silly, right? I wanted to make the mountains forested. I wanted to make the Cold Range warm. And I was getting somewhere, too, before this Grozmikal came along and pinched my stone. He lost it, you know?”

“We know,” Alaria said. “But I don’t think it’s silly to want to make the mountains warm. Over-ambitious, perhaps, but not silly.”

Neroli smiled. “Maybe. But I’m glad to hear that you approve. Oh, never mind, I’m sorry for shouting at you earlier. But I’ve worked so hard at my magic and I’m so sick of people looking down on me for my achievements. And what harm is there in the golem magic anyway? Or the spirit magic to create creatures?”

“It’s ugly magic, Neroli. You must know that, surely. You can’t pretend that the creatures don’t feel anything, but it’s horrible for them to be trapped like that, confined in the skin of a being so temporarily…”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But I don’t keep them around for long. The spirits I use are far from conscious, it’s not as evil as it seems from the outside.”

“Hmph,” Alaria said. “I know a good bit about spirit magic, and I’m not so sure that it’s as benign as you make its sound. But perhaps we can agree to disagree. Tell me about your Heart of the Forest crystal. What does it take to activate it? You seemed delighted to get it back, but what will you do now that you have it?”

“I’ll need to recharge it,” she said, then sighed. “I have a… technique of my own that I use to get power into the crystal. I’ve tried various different approaches, and this is the best one I’ve found.”

“Won’t you share the technique with us?” Alaria asked, wondering why Neroli was being so cagey.

Neroli chuckled. She leaned back on her bed, looking more comfortable than she had done for a while.

“Well, I can do,” she said, “but are you sure you want me to? I think it would be best if you told me a little more about the relationship between you three first, then I’ll share my technique.”

Alaria glanced at Beth and Mia, who both shrugged. The request was odd, as none of them could imagine what relevance their relationship had to Neroli’s crystal charging technique, but Alaria saw that neither of them minded.

“We’re lovers,” Alaria said. “Beth and Mia are both my lovers, and sometimes we make love together, all three of us.”

Neroli pointed to Beth and Mia. “But you two, not on your own?”

“Never without Alaria,” Mia said.

“I see,” Neroli said with a nod. “But you don’t have any objection to other people being involved?”

They all looked at each other, and it was Mia who spoke. “We value communication,” she said. “Communication and care for each other’s feelings. If there was another person involved with Alaria, Beth and I would not want to stand in the way, but we would all discuss it, and we would all want everyone to be comfortable with it.”

Neroli’s eyebrows went up. “That’s healthy!” she said. “And does that work?”

“It does,” Alaria said. “It has worked well, so far. But what are you getting at? What does any of this have to do with your magical charging technique.”

“It’s simple,” she said. “I discovered this technique when I was out I the forest one time, on my own. You see, after I was driven out of my village, I headed north and west, until I came to the college of magic. The one thing my village hadn’t had a problem with was my being involved in magic, and so they had allowed me to train some basics of spirit spells, and I’ve gotten quite good at it. I knew where the college was, and I thought that my best bet was to go there and see if they’d let me get in and study. Well, when I was at the magical college for the first time there was a girl there who I just couldn’t get enough of. She wasn’t interested in me, of course, though she knew I liked her. She was too superior for all that, and wasn’t interested in taking a lover at all, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and I found that I could use my Spirit magic to create a kind of trance state for myself, where I could fantasize about her and have the fantasy come almost to reality.”

“The spirit dreamer’s trance,” Alaria said. “Another piece of spirit magic long thought lost.”

“Maybe so,” Neroli shrugged. “I certainly never heard about it in the course of my studies. But I would go far from the college, because the masters at the college could feel the presence of the trance, and I wanted to not be caught. I would walk out into the woods, and once I was an hour from the college walls, I’d find myself a sheltered spot and… well, I’d set to work.”

“Set to work? What do you mean?” Alaria asked.

Neroli seemed to make a decision at that moment, and she hopped from the bed and padded across the cold stone floor in her bare feet. She opened a drawer on a side cabinet and took out a small object wrapped in soft cloth.

“You don’t approve of spirit technology,” she said teasingly. “But I think you might approve of this.”

She placed the object on the bed and unrolled it so Alaria could see. It was about five inches long and about an inch thick, cylindrical, but with a softly rounded end. It was carved from clear crystal, and it had a slot in the base that looked about the perfect size for the heart of the forest. Alaria realized what it reminded her of. It looked like the same size and shape as the tentacles she created to pleasure Mia and Beth, and herself.

Surely this couldn’t be some kind of sex device? What could that have to do with charging up the Heart of the Forest?

“This is how it works,” Neroli said. She placed the Heart of the Forest gemstone in the slot at the bottom of the strange device and pushed. The heart of the forest slipped inside and snapped into place with an audible click.

Then Neroli passed a hand over the head of the device and a quiet, constant humming noise emanated from the device.

Alaria looked at Beth and Mia. Beth looked scandalized, which was pretty funny considering her sexual proclivities. Mia looked knowing. Alaria was putting two and two together now. This was some kind of sex device, and apparently Beth and Mia both knew about it already.

As always, Alaria grumbled to herself.

Neroli leaned against the bed and held up the device, toying it against her cheek and running it past her lips as it hummed gently.

“In the forest, I found that my pleasure could be harvested. Sex is powerful, and sexual pleasure is a raw and immensely potent form of energy. The better the pleasure, the more power can be harvested and put to use. That’s what I discovered. So, I designed this device, a spirt-driven machine designed to heighten pleasure for the person using it, with a space inside to place a chargeable crystal to gather the energy. What do you think, Alaria? Do you approve of my device?”

“I’m not sure that I disapprove,” Alaria said. She couldn’t resist a smile. “Are you saying that you want our help to charge up the Heart of the Forest crystal now? I think I do approve of that.”

Neroli’s smile turned into a grin of satisfaction. “I like to be watched,” she said. “Will you three watch me? It’s cold for this kind of play, but if I can get some power into this crystal, I think we will soon be able to make the atmosphere much warmer in here.”

Chapter

Twenty-Three

“Wait a moment,” Alaria said. “Let me get this right. You want us to watch you while you pleasure yourself with your crystal charging device?”

“Exactly,” Neroli said. “I want all three of you to watch. Is that something you’re willing to do for me?”

Beth and Mia looked at Alaria. “We’ll do what Alaria wants,” Mia said, and Beth nodded. “We’re hers when it comes to this kind of thing.”

Alaria let a small smile spread across her face. “I think we can do that.”

“You’re sure it’s okay?” Neroli asked, suddenly unsure. “I mean, we’ve only just met. I don’t want to make you feel like you need to do something you’re not comfortable with.”

“Oh, I’m comfortable,” Alaria said. “Mia, Beth, are you comfortable?”

Mia and Beth both nodded. Beth smiled. “We may have only just met, but I feel like I know you already. We’ve been chasing you for so long.”

Mia laughed. “And it’s a pity that you’ve felt so alone for so long. There’s no need to feel alone anymore. We can give you what you need.”

Neroli looked shy suddenly. “You don’t know how much it means to me to hear those words,” she said. “It’s been so long since… since I’ve had anyone care about my feelings like that.”

Alaria smiled. “Take your time,” she said. “I had a feeling we would end up getting to know each other better, though I didn’t think this was quite the form it would take. But we’ll watch you. You better put on a good show, though.”

Neroli gave a sharp intake of breath at these words. Evidently, she also liked to feel dominated, as Beth did. Alaria took a seat on the couch next to Beth and Mia and Neroli slowly began to lift the hem of her dress. She was standing with her back against the edge of the bed, her feet bare on the stone floor, but Alaria could feel the heat coming off her. There was Spirit magic in the room, a powerful spell that allowed Neroli to keep herself warm in a way that Alaria had never seen before. There was more to be learned about Neroli and the strange way that her magic manifested itself, and the way that the different elemental parts meshed together into the whole to become her spells.

She was a renegade, a woman who had made magic her own in a new and wholly original way. She’d even created a new form of magic - Forest magic, not a variant on an existing spell class, but an entirely new magic school, powered by the raw, beautiful energy of sexual pleasure.

The dress slid up as Neroli teased her lips with the steadily vibrating power crystal. Alaria smiled and Neroli met her eyes. The ice queen’s legs were a sight to behold. Alaria found herself growing wet as Neroli shifted the beautiful soft blue fabric to one side, revealing her red-gold pubic hair and spreading her legs so that she could find her clit. She rubbed her clit with the fingers of her left hand while she rolled the vibrating crystal sex toy down across her breasts, moving it back and forth across the nipple of her left breast. Alaria felt Mia’s hand on her thigh. She shifted in her seat. She was still wearing all her battle gear, and it would be supremely un-sexy to start clattering chainmail and fighting with leather straps and brass buckles. This was Neroli’s moment, and Alaria wanted Neroli to be able to enjoy it fully.

She responded to Mia’s touch by reaching across and touching Mia’s leg as well. Wordlessly, Beth stood up and moved around to sit on the other side of Alaria and began rubbing her other thigh. None of them made any move to undress - it was too cold for that, anyway - but they got closer together at least and kept their hands on each other, all turned on by Neroli’s show.

The ice queen freed a luscious breast from her low-cut dress, and it spilled out tantalizingly from the fabric, the nipple dark with arousal. She brought her left hand up. It was slick with her own juices, and she kept her eyes fixed on Alaria as she tasted them and then rubbed them all over the tip of the vibrating crystal. With the application of the juices, the crystal started to glow with a faint, warm light, and Alaria watched in fascination as Neroli pulled her other breast free of her dress and lowered the crystal.

She slipped it inside herself with a gasp of pleasure, and then began to fuck herself with it, not slowly, but rapidly and hard, pausing every now and then to grind the vibrating length of it inside her. She was clearly so aroused by being watched by the other three women, and her arousal was a massive turn-on for them as well. Beth and Mia were both grinding against the couch, and Beth - whose armor was much less intense than Alaria’s - reached a hand inside her pants and began to pleasure herself with her fingers, keeping her other hand firmly kneading the inside of Alaria’s thigh.

Mia was breathing heavily, and she had undone one of the straps on her leather jerkin to get a hand in to play with her nipples. Her lips were dark red with her arousal, and her face was flushed.

Neroli was having trouble keeping her dress out of the way, and she sank to the ground and sat with her back against the bed frame, pushing the silk to one side. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, and the slit up the side of the dress went. So high that she was able to just push it completely to one side. She spread her legs, pushing the vibrating crystal in and out of her pussy and rubbing her clit so fast that her hands were a blur.

“Come… come over here…” she gasped. “Come and stand over me.”

Alaria stood, and so did Mia, but Beth was now thrown back on the couch, bringing herself to her own climax.

“Oh, fuck,” Beth groaned, pulling herself up from the couch and dragging her hand up from her panties. She was grinning, and she staggered a little when she came over to where Mia and Alaria already stood over the prostrate and furiously masturbating Neroli.

“When you’re done,” Beth said, “I want a shot of that vibrator next.”

Neroli gasped out a laugh of sheer pleasure and enjoyment. “You’ve got it,” she said. “So long as Alaria gives her permission.”

The thought of begging Alaria for permission was too much for Beth, and she immediately stuck her hand down her pants and started fingering herself again.

“Oh, fuck, that’s so fucking hot,” Neroli said. She lay on her back, her eyes running from one to the other of them, but always fixing themselves back on Alaria. “Oh, oh, I’m going to come, I’m going to… Ah!”

The orgasm blasted through her like one of Alaria’s Firebolt spells, and Alaria smiled and rubbed Mia’s ass with her hands as she watched. Neroli bucked hard, her spine arching and her hips rising up into the air.

Alaria leaned over her, staring down hard at her, meeting her eyes. She saw the intensity of the moment build even further, taking Neroli to new heights of pleasure and making her vibrating crystal pleasure toy buzz even faster.

Neroli flopped suddenly back down again, grinning like a mad woman and cackling with sheer pleasure and joy and relief at her satisfaction.

“Oh, gods, but that was needed,” she gasped. “It’s just not the same without being watched, and for some reason I’ve never managed to create a woman with my spirit magic. Men, animals, but never women.”

“How about later for the magic chat,” Beth said. “I really want to try your crystal.”

Neroli shifted up so she was sitting against the bed again, the crystal in her hand. The toy had stopped buzzing and vibrating, but it glowed with a warm light still, and the green Heart of the Forest crystal in the base glowed with its own light, the bright emerald green of dawn on a summer canopy.

She placed a hand on the underside of the crystal shaft and twisted, and the Heart of the Forest dropped out.

“Oh, thank the gods for that,” Neroli breathed. “Beth, one moment and you can ask Alaria for permission.”

She stood quickly, then held the crystal in her left hand, palm up, and passed her right hand over it. Alaria felt magic, but it was so deftly done that she saw nothing, nor was she able to trace the pattern by which it was done. Usually, magic was like a set of actions in a puzzle that resolved the game, or the changes of chord that resolved a musical phrase. And usually, Alaria could see and feel every step in the resolution of a magical spell, but this time there was nothing, no information at all that she could glean from the actions. She had witnessed magic, magic of a supremely skillful execution, but her normal skill had apparently deserted her.

“Oh, I’m good,” Neroli said, catching Alaria’s eye. Alaria was aware of a sudden change in the room. There was a shift in the air, as if a door had been opened and closed very quickly. She breathed and realized that the smell of the room was different too. It had changed from the chill of cool stone and the sharp smell of ice to the warm, rich scent of a woodland in summer.

And the temperature had changed.

“Can you use a spell to light the fire?” Neroli asked.

“I’ll do it,” Mia said before Alaria could reply. She stepped toward the wide hearth, striping off her outer layer as she went. She’d already got through a few of the straps while Neroli had been pleasuring herself, but now she undid the last few and swung the leather jerkin off, setting it carefully on the floor beside the hearth.

There was a fire laid in the hearth - a heap of kindling and dry twigs, building up to bigger sticks at the top of the pile. Beside the hearth, in a practical, undecorated wrought-iron hopper, a stack of dry firewood logs stood ready. But the fuel looked as if it had settled in the hearth weeks ago and was covered in the same film of frost as everything else.

Neroli had said that she couldn’t get a fire to light in the room no matter what she tried, but she had done something with the heart of the forest crystal, and Alaria thought that now, a fire would be able to be kindled in the long-cold hearth.

Sure enough, Mia crouched next to the hearth quickly and passed her hand over the stacked kindling. It only took a moment, but Alaria was proud of how well-controlled Mia’s use of the magic was. She gathered and let out just a tiny amount of power, and immediately a flame lit in the fine tinder and licked up, crackling sweetly as it found the larger wood.

Mia stepped back. Neroli held up the Heart of the Forest. All the light had gone out of it.

“Needs recharged again,” she said. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for the job. Alaria, what do you say?”

The flames roared up across the kindling and Mia stooped to carefully stack a few pieces of the larger wood on the fire. Pockets of pine sap crackled and popped, releasing a momentary hiss of sugar-rich moisture, and a soft smell of pine woods into the air.

“I think that you’ve got a prime candidate to help you charge the crystal up again,” Alaria said. “It doesn’t take anything out of the person?”

“No more than is already taken out by orgasming,” Neroli said. “That’s the wonder of the magic.”

“Can I, Alaria?” Beth said.

“Say please,” Alaria said, sternly.

Beth’s eyes went wide, and she almost choked on the word in her excitement. “Please…”

Alaria held the tension for one more beautiful moment, then gave a quick nod. Neroli handed over the buzzing crystal toy and looked at Beth. “Can I watch this time?”

“Yeah,” Beth said. “Alaria, will you do the tentacle thing?”

Neroli looked from Alaria to Beth in surprise.

Alaria smiled at her. “A power of mine that you may not have seen before.”

She let a long tentacle slide out from the gap between her leather jerkin and her pants. Neroli gasped in amazement, and Mia smiled.

“Let me help you with your armor,” Mia said as Alaria caused the tentacle to divide into several and sent them twisting hard around Beth’s body, roughly pulling her clothes off and exposing her to everyone’s view.

“Wow,” Neroli breathed, “that is new.”

Beth spread out on the floor, spreading her legs wide and pushing the vibrating crystal shaft inside her. At the same time, Alaria slipped the tip of a tentacle in her mouth and pushed another one inside her pussy along with the vibrating crystal toy. Beth made a deep noise of pleasure and began to greedily suck at the mouthful of tentacles.

Mia deftly pulled buckles aside and unclipped leather straps to get Alaria out of her armor, and at the same time Alaria used the fingerlike protrusions on her summoned limbs to pull aside the last bits of Beth’s armor, leaving her wearing only her thin undergarments. Her knickers were pushed to one side, and at a nod from Alaria, Neroli dropped to her knees and slipped them off, hanging them loosely over the back of the bed.

Now that Beth was naked apart from the light shift she wore under her clothes, Alaria used the tips of tentacles to grip her upper arms firmly and manifested a few more that gripped her ankles and slipped up the length of her thighs, securing them and pulling them outward so that she was fully exposed for all to see.

“That’s so good,” Beth gasped as she pulled her mouth away from Alaria’s tentacle for a moment. “Oh, that’s so good. Fill me up, just fill me right up!”

Alaria did what Beth asked, pushing three tentacles into Beth’s mouth, and sliding another one into her vagina alongside the vibrating toy. Now that Alaria’s tentacle was in there with the toy, she could feel the vibrations through the summoned limb, and that, alongside the pleasure that came from having three jostling for the attention of Beth’s tongue, sent waves of pleasure through her that she leaned into, enjoying the sensation.

Mia and Neroli worked together to undo the cinch that held Alaria’s chainmail in place, and they caught it as it slipped down to the ground and moved it to one side. As they did so, Beth came hard, writhing her ass about on the stone floor and making muffled grunts of animal pleasure around a mouthful of tentacle.

The Heart of the Forest crystal blazed out with green light as Beth, panting and laughing breathlessly with pleasure, pulled the crystal toy out of herself and held it up.

“That’s the kind of magic I like,” she said.

“What about you Alaria?” Neroli said coyly. “What do you think of my new invention?”

Alaria’s body was buzzing with anticipation. She looked at Beth lying nearly naked on the floor, her body soft and lush as she wriggled about in the aftermath of her orgasm. She looked at Neroli, whose spectacular body was unveiled completely now, except for the light, lacy blue shift that she’d pulled on after she’d had her first orgasm.

She looked at Mia, who was gazing at the gently vibrating toy with wide eyes, parted lips, and flushed cheeks.

She smiled. “I think I approve,” she said.

Chapter

Twenty-Four

Alaria hugged Beth as the cat woman stood up and wriggled with pleasure as the aftereffects of her spectacular orgasm ran through her body. “I’m going to get by the fire,” she said, and, very catlike, sprawled out on the thick rug that lay in front of the hearth. Mia looked at Neroli, then at Alaria.

“I think I’d like a go of that marvelous toy next,” she said. “Is that okay, Alaria?”

Alaria nodded, but she looked closely at Mia. She could see that there was something in Mia’s face… she wasn’t quite saying everything.

Mia smiled as she saw Alaria recognizing that she hadn’t said quite everything she wanted to. She smiled. “I think I’d like you to use it on me, Alaria, rather than doing it myself. Is that okay?”

Alaria smiled. “Yeah,” she said, “I think I’d really like that. Let me just get out of the rest of these clothes. It’s pretty warm in here.”

“And it’s about to get warmer,” Neroli added. She popped the Heart of the Forest out of the bottom of the vibrator and again passed her hands over the crystal in a series of motions so swift that Alaria could not have told the magic that had happened even if she’d tried.

Neroli popped the Heart of the forest back into place and handed the slick vibrator to Mia. It was wet with both her and Beth’s juices now, but Mia didn’t mind. She’d taken her clothes off completely, and her unbelievably white skin glowed with anticipation and the new heat of the room.

“That’s some really impressive spell work, Neroli,” she said. “Sometime, I think I’d like you to show me how that’s done.”

“Sure,” Neroli said. “But first I think I’d like to eat your pussy while you pleasure Mia. It’s been a long time since I tasted a woman, and I’ve missed it. Does that work?”

Alaria laughed. A year ago, she’d have been completely scandalized by such words, if she’d even known what they meant. Now, she guided Mia to the couch where Mia lay back, spreading her legs and handing the vibrator to Alaria. The device started buzzing in anticipation as Mia slowly rubbed her pussy with one hand and played with her lips with the other hand.

Alaria dropped her panties to the floor and kicked them to one side. The last blast of Forest magic had increased the temperature in the room even further, and the last traces of the ice that had bound the floor and walls was gone. The ice sculpture plants in the corners and on the mantelpiece above the fire had changed, and no longer looked like they were carved from ice. Instead, they showed their true nature - lush green foliage and healthy brown bark - young trees and vines, the first experiments of Neroli’s Forest magic.

Alaria knelt on all fours in front of Mia, who gasped and moaned in pleasure as Alaria slipped the vibrating crystal toy inside her and began to move it back and forth. Alaria started to lick Mia’s clit, while using a tentacle to dribble slick juices over Mia, soaking her and making her skin gleam in the light of the fire.

Mia murmured words of enjoyment and pleasure as she rubbed the slick tentacle juice all over herself, lubricating her breasts and rubbing her nipples with the smooth liquid while Alaria worked her pussy and her clit with vibrator, tongue and lips. Alaria heard the sound of Neroli getting into position behind her, and then a warm flush of pleasure ran through her as the gorgeous Forest mage’s tongue found Alaria’s own clit.

Neroli flicked at Alaria’s pleasure, teasing her clit with a few firm licks and then dropping down to lick the entrance to her vagina, running round and round the outside of it and making Alaria ache for something inside her. She knew that it would be her turn on the vibrator next, and she was looking forward to it. She wanted to hold off from climaxing until she could use the vibrator, and Neroli seemed to realize this as well.

Neroli was very good at this. Alaria thought that she must have had some practice somewhere, despite having been driven out of her village for loving women. She would ask about it… later.

As Alaria worked Mia’s clit and ran the vibrator in and out, Neroli teased her closer and closer to an orgasm, but every time, Neroli stopped just before Alaria tipped over the edge. This was new for Alaria. She’d tried holding off before - sometimes she’d stopped the pleasure just before a climax, but never this many times. She felt that she was teetering on the edge of something enormous, but every time she was about to come, Neroli pulled back just in time.

“You like that?” Neroli asked through a laugh, as Alaria groaned in a mixture of pleasure and frustrated anticipation.

“Yeah,” Alaria gasped. “You’re bringing me so close!”

Neroli dropped her head down again and continued licking and kissing, but this time she also reached both her hands up and wrapped them around Alaria’s breasts. She gripped the nipples firmly and held them tight, and the feeling sent a new luscious wave of sensation through Alaria’s body.

Alaria manifested a group of purple tentacles from her lower back, and they ran around to slide all over Mia and Neroli at the same time. Alaria couldn’t put one in Mia’s mouth - she was too close to an orgasm, and the stimulation from Mia sucking on her tentacles would send her over the edge.

The sensation of edging was too much. It was a beautiful feeling, but it separated her from reality, and she found herself floating, as if she was not really in the room anymore. Sensual pleasure surrounded her, the taste of Mia and the feel of her, the vibration of the crystal in her hand, the feeling of Neroli teasing and running her tongue and flicking and squeezing her breasts and nipples at the same time.

Then Mia came, grinding hard against the vibrator as Alaria covered her clit with her mouth and sucked and licked for all she was worth. Mia slid from the couch, almost liquid, and then came round and brought the vibrating toy up to slide inside Alaria’s pussy. The sensation of the toy slipping inside her, the vibration that ran through her from the inside out, and the steady, rhythmic licking of Neroli’s tongue against her clitoris brought Alaria straight into her orgasm in seconds.

The vibration stimulated every part of her insides, and Mia reached around and slipped two fingers into her mouth, her skin tasting of tentacles and pussy as she sucked on them hard and heard her own voice moaning with immense pleasure. She felt her tentacles moving around involuntarily, running all over the bodies of Mia and her new lover, Neroli. Then Beth was there too, the delicious sensation of her soft, short fur beautifully different against Alaria’s skin.

Wordlessly, they crawled up onto the bed together. The sheets were soft and warm, like the rest of the room. Beth had built up the fire. There was no sign now of the cold, inhospitable environment of earlier that evening. Neroli smiled and popped the Heart of the Forest crystal out of the vibrator. She passed her hands over it a few times, then made a small, satisfied noise in her throat.

“It worked,” she said. “The crystal was completely drained after having been consumed by the trees, but now we’ve recharged it to the point where it can create a self-perpetuating loop of power to recharge itself.”

Alaria sat up. Neroli was leaning against her, the Heart of the Forest in her hand glowing brightly, the vibrator lying on the bedclothes nearby. Beth was sprawled between Neroli and Alaria, with Mia cuddled in on the other side. The sight of such a wealth of naked bodies around her made Alaria gaze in wonder, almost distracted from the idea of magic, but the pulled her attention back to what Neroli was saying.

“So, you don’t need an orgasm per spell?” Alaria asked.

Neroli shook her head. “It worked like that at first, but then I worked out that once it’s been charged and used for magic a few times, the Heart of the Forest sets up its own charging loop, allowing the continual deployment of magic over time. That’s what I was trying to do up here. The idea was to repopulate the forest up here and then set the charged crystal in the middle of the forest, allowing it to power the growth and changes over time. Eventually, the forest would change the environment up here so much that it would be able to keep going on its own, and there would be no need for me to come back and continue topping up the charge.”

Alaria laughed. “Not that charging the crystal seems to be particularly onerous.”

“Hmm,” Neroli said, reaching over and running a hand over Alaria’s nipples and then down over her firm belly. “I’ll say it’s not.”

“What now, then, Neroli?” Beth asked. “What will you do now that you’ve got it back?”

Neroli shrugged. “It’ll take a little work for me to get the last of the planting done up here, but now I have the crystal back, I should be able to pick up where I left off. I’ve been working on this for a long time and I’m almost ready to go. There’s a spell I’ve been working on that will make the whole section of mountain become forested. Then I’ll have done what I came here to do, and I can… well, I can see what happens next, I suppose.”

“You think you’ll stay up here?” Mia asked. “It seems kind of lonely.”

“I’ve been up here so long,” Neroli mused, “that it’s hard to know what else I could do. But no, I don’t think I’ll stay here. I think that it would be better if I came down from the mountain. I thought that I would be rejected wherever I went, but it seems like that’s not the case anymore.”

“It’s still the case in some places, but not where we are. We’re in Brighthill, a nice little town west of Hopeford. I have a house there, a big place, up in the hills above the town.”

“Oh,” said Neroli in a small voice.

Alaria smiled. “You could come there with us, if you like,” she said. “I mean, you could come and stay there with us. It’s warm, and we have the place to ourselves. No one will bother us there.”

“Are you sure?” Neroli said. “I wouldn’t want to intrude…”

Alaria smiled and squeezed her round the shoulders. “I’m sure,” she said. “I don’t think there would be any objection. What do you say, Mia? Beth?”

Mia reached over and took Neroli’s hand. “I think it’s a great idea, Alaria. There’s plenty of room, and if we decide we want a bit more space, then there are other places in Brighthill where Neroli could make a home nearby if she wants.”

“And the people there, do they mind women who want to have sex with other women instead of with men?”

“Not everyone is as open minded as we are,” Alaria said, “and it does well to be discreet, especially about the tentacle part, but people respect each other’s privacy out in Brighthill. I don’t think there’s any reason to be worried about that. Actually, there seems to be more prejudice against people who use magic than there is against people who have different sexual preferences.”

“Really?” Neroli said. “That’s surprising. I never heard of anyone being worried about magic before.”

Alaria was surprised. She had gotten used to everyone being a bit prejudiced against magic, and the idea that Neroli thought this was unusual was unexpected. Alaria knew that there had been a time when people had been less prejudiced against magic. Indeed, within the last hundred years or so, magic had been positively encouraged. It was only within the last fifty years that the prejudice against magic users had built and become common.

Alaria remembered what the woman in Nearwood village had said, and a new thought came to Alaria’s mind.

“Just how long have you been up here, Neroli?” she said.

Neroli rolled to one side, her beautiful curls bouncing away as she pushed them back from her face. She looked young, a woman in her early twenties, at the peak of physical perfection. Her skin was a rich, light brown covered in freckles, and her perfect teeth, her thick hair, her full, generous breasts, and her flat belly and strong thighs all contributed to the air of perfect youth and health that she emanated. But there were gaps in her story, and things that could not be accounted for if she was truly the age that she looked.

“It’s hard to say exactly how long I’ve been here,” she said quietly. “I lost count for a while. But it’s been at least fifteen years, maybe a little more. I was twenty-eight when I came up to the mountains for the first time, I think, and I’m not sure, but to be honest I think that forty-three is probably a conservative estimate for my age.”

Mia sat up and gazed at her in amazement. “But you look about twenty-one!” she exclaimed.

Neroli smiled shyly. “A side-effect of the Spirit magic, and of the Forest magic too. I’ve combined them in ways, and… but you don’t want to know all this, do you? It’s just my hobby, my experimentation with magic. Surely it’s not interesting to you.”

Alaria gave Neroli a very seeing look. “If what you mean is that you don’t want to let out your secrets yet, then just say so. We won’t force you. But you’ve clearly experimented widely and come up with some very innovative new ways of doing magic. That’s very impressive, and I understand if you don’t want to let on about it all at once.”

Neroli looked relieved. The openness and relaxation that had come after their beautiful group sex session had changed her character completely from the uptight, slightly mad character she’d seemed when they first came into her throne room. At Alaria’s questioning, some of that tension had come back again, but with Alaria’s reassurance Neroli relaxed and settled back into her comfortable spot on Alaria’s shoulder. Beth, who had not spoken but had only been listening to the conversation, reached up and comfortingly stroked Neroli’s thigh, then held her hip in a firm, reassuring grip. Alaria squeezed her around the shoulders, and Mia reached over and took Neroli’s hand.

“Don’t worry, Neroli,” Mia said. “It’s going to take you a bit of time to get used to trusting people again. That’s okay. We’re here for you, and we’re going to look out for you and make sure you’re okay.”

Neroli looked in amazement from Mia, to Beth, then up to Alaria.

Alaria nodded. “Really,” she said. “You’re safe with us. You can take your time, but you’re not ever going to have to be alone and without friends again.”

Chapter

Twenty-Five

“What do you mean, he’s gone?” Alaria demanded.

It was the morning after her lovemaking session with Neroli and the others, and the four of them had risen late and headed out into the main hall. Here, they saw the changes wrought by the powering up of the heart of the forest crystal; flowers and vines and young trees in pots, all transformed from hard, cold ice sculptures into real, living green plants.

They also found their little party of travelers, minus Grozmikal and Sinjin. The two brothers were gone. According to Rannek Stickler, they had left not long after Alaria and her friends had gone into Neroli’s bedchamber.

“We tried to notify you, but the door was locked, and when I listened, I heard… well, I heard sounds that made me think you wouldn’t want to be disturbed by anyone.”

Alaria glowered at him, and he smiled serenely.

“I can’t believe he just upped and left,” Alaria said to her companions, talking quietly and a little way away from the witnesses, so that they couldn’t overhear.

Neroli shrugged. “I can,” she said. “It wasn’t a good time for him. Too many memories. I guess he wanted to get out before I relented of my promise. The fool. He should have known me well enough to know that if I told him he was free, it was the truth. Not that he returned the favor by being honest with me.”

“He was terrified of you,” Beth said quietly.

Neroli smiled. “Yes,” she said. “And I confess that it brought me satisfaction for a while. It was the first time I’d ever been able to take revenge on someone who had wronged me.”

“Did he know what it was when he stole it?” Mia asked.

“The Heart of the Forest? No. He just knew that it had power, and he wanted to get power for himself. Oh, he was drunk when he took it. What a pathetic specimen of a man.”

Her beautiful face turned less beautiful with her anger and hatred toward Grozmikal.

“He isn’t all bad,” Alaria said. “You know that he put up with your tormenting of him much longer than he had to, because he couldn’t face the thought of the mountain villages being burned if he escaped from you. I really think he’s a better man than you give him credit for. Anyway, you had plenty of revenge against him. It’s time to put that to one side now. It’s over.”

“You’re annoyed at him now, though,” Neroli said mischievously.

Alaria scowled. “Yes,” she said. “It seems ungrateful, after everything I’ve done to save him. But I suppose I can understand it. And perhaps Sinjin thought it best, too. Ah, well, they’re gone, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“I could easily track him,” Neroli suggested airily. “I have a Spirit magic variant that can project my sight out and follow him wherever he goes. I could find him, and send a terrible spectral vision to torment him for going off so ungratefully?”

“No!” Alaria said, horrified. “Honestly, Neroli, I admire your experimentation with magic and your invention of new ways of doing things, but you really must get hold of your tendency to do evil things to Grozmikal. I admire your desire to regenerate the forest up here in the mountains. I think that’s a good thing, and I think you should do it. But after you’ve done it, I think you need to spend some time learning how to regulate your impulses a bit more. You’ve gotten too used to being evil, and you’re going to need to relearn some principles to guide your magic.”

Neroli looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling, where a beautiful flowering vine was twisting across the stone, a cloud of sweet pollen drifting down from it in a bar of sunlight that shone in through one of the shafts high up in the chamber ceiling.

“You’re probably right,” she said. “Being lonely will do strange things to a person. Okay, you have my word, Alaria. I’ll finish up my work here, but I’ll limit myself to forest magic. With your help, I’ve managed to recharge the Heart of the Forest enough that I’ll be able to deploy the final spell. It’ll take about a month, then I’ll be free to do whatever I want. I think I’ll take your offer and come out to Brighthill with you. How would that be?”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Alaria said, looking thoughtfully at her. “You’ll be welcome when you come.”

The witnesses were keen to be on their way. They’d seen the palace of the sorceress they still thought of as the Ice Queen, and they had (as they thought it) seen Grozmikal, their hero, return a precious gemstone to her. They thought that this was the result of a quest that he’d been set, that she’d asked for his help, and he’d delivered. Alaria, despite her annoyance at Grozmikal’s slipping away in the night, was not going to disabuse them of that impression. All along she had been keen to save Grozmikal’s reputation if she could for no other reason than that she thought he’d suffered enough for his folly. She also thought that he was more likely to learn the lesson from his folly and stay out of trouble in future if he was left alone and allowed to get on with things and start a new life somewhere else. Forced to face his shame in the eyes of his many fans as well as the eyes of those who knew his dirty secret, he might well end up returning to his old habits of drink and falsehood. She wanted to give him the best chance at reform she could.

Alaria was at first unsure about leaving Neroli on her own up in the mountains, but she assured them that she would be fine.

“It’s probably better, really,” she said. “I work best when I have space to think, and anyway,” she added with a laugh, “I don’t think I want to be always looking over my shoulder and wondering whether Alaria approves or not! I’m flattered that you’re impressed with my work, Alaria, and that you want to learn about it, and I’m happy to teach you in time, but for the moment I think it’s going to be best if I work alone. When I come out to you, we’ll have plenty of time to look at how my new magic works. And if you want, I’ll even let you write it all down and codify it into a system that can be taught to others. You’d like that, I think, wouldn’t you?”

Alaria chuckled. “Actually, yes, I would,” she said. “I may disapprove of some of the things you’ve managed to do with your magic, Neroli, but I deeply admire your talent and your ability to get things done. I was always taught that magic was a set thing, that there wasn’t new magic to be discovered. There was plenty to learn, plenty of new forms and so on, so I let it be and never questioned whether or not it was true.”

“But now you’ve learned differently?” Neroli asked.

“I was already learning it,” she said. “Mia here taught me as well - she showed me that the things I’d been taught about native mana pools and learning spells were not all entirely accurate. But enough of this. Come on Mia, Beth, we’ll gather the companions and see them safely home to Hopeford so that they can promulgate the legend of Grozmikal, and then we’ll get ourselves back home to Brighthill, and we’ll hope to see you within the month, Neroli, okay?”

Neroli smiled. “If not before,” she said. “Safe travels. And Alaria… Thank you. Thank you all. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, but I realize now that there’s a new life waiting for me. I’m not at all sure any of that would have happened without you three.”

They all hugged and held the hug for long enough that the warmth and closeness of their four bodies began to make them regret their decision to leave. But Alaria was firm with herself, and the others. The companions needed to be seen safely home, and there was no telling what kind of difficulty they might get into without some adventurers to look out for them. Alaria and her companions would have to leave.

The journey back was not as arduous as Alaria had thought it might be. The magic of Neroli seemed to have had an influence that stretched far beyond her mountain dwelling. As if a warm wind of growth and renewal had flowed down from the mountain, they found the valley below and the moorland beyond warmer and more full of life than it had been before.

Alaria had a quiet word with Rannek Stickler on the way. He was the only one who she suspected of knowing more about the story than he was letting on, and she wanted to be certain that he wasn’t going to blab Grozmikal’s secret to the world. She made him promise, quietly as they walked the last stretch of road on the way to Nearwood, that he wouldn’t embarrass her or Grozmikal by telling the true story.

“I do realize the truth, at least most of it,” he said, “but I’m content. I’ve seen some interesting things, and I’ve traveled to a new land, and that was all I wanted to achieve on this trip. I’ve done both of those things, and I’m happy with that. There’s no need for me to take it further.”

“Will you write an account of everything you’ve seen?” Alaria asked.

“A complete account, you mean?” he said. “Yes. But I’ll put it in a locked box where I only store my most sensitive papers. You can trust me, Alaria. No word of the true story of Grozmikal and Neroli will reach the public from me.”

Alaria looked at him for a long moment, then smiled. She was satisfied. If there was one thing she knew how to do, it was how to tell if a person was being honest. Rannek Stickler was. “Thank you,” she said. “You do understand why?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I understand. I would do the same in your shoes. Don’t worry. I approve, and I understand. The secret is safe with me.”

The journey was not eventful. In fact, nothing of note happened to disturb them on the road. The people of Nearwood welcomed them gladly, and the companions passed through the forest beyond without incident, and into the wild lands between the border country and Hopeford.

It was dull for Alaria and her companions, because it was hard to get away from the witnesses, and so they couldn’t indulge either in sex or in free conversation about everything that had happened. It was a good day when they came through the beautiful and tamed farming country into sight of Hopeford for the first time. The three companions all cheered, and the witnesses hurried forward, chatting excitedly, relieved to be within walking distance of home. It had been a long adventure for them, and more than any of them had expected when they had first set out. Now, they were about to get home, and they all had good stories to tell.

The first place that they went when they got into Hopeford was straight to Sinjin’s hotel. They walked through the ornate grounds and up to the front door.

“The place is still open, anyway,” Mia said.

“Did you think that Sinjin might have gone away entirely, with Grozmikal?” Beth asked.

“I thought it was likely, yes,” Mia said. “He seemed so committed to helping his brother, I thought that if Grozmikal had gone away for good, then Sinjin might have gone with him, to keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t get into any more trouble, you know?”

“Sure,” Beth said. She was looking up at the hotel front. “To be honest, I thought that was the most likely outcome as well. But here’s the hotel, still open and large as life. I guess we will be able to get some answers from Sinjin, if we get nothing else.”

“I’m not sure I would like to promise that,” Alaria said. She was a little ahead of her companions and was peering in through the glass fronted door into the lobby. “There’s someone in here who I recognize, and it sure as hell isn’t Sinjin.”

Beth and Mia crowded forward to get a look. “What do you mean?” Beth asked.

“See for yourself,” Alaria said, gesturing toward the door.

Beth had taken on her fully human form again, using her Shapeshifting powers to hide her true nature as a cat person. Despite how comfortable she had become in recent days in her true form, the people of Hopeford knew her well enough that even in her cat form they might recognize her. She didn’t want to risk that. Even though people of this part of the world were tolerant of different kinds of people, she wanted to retain the anonymity that she had long prized.

Her human face reflected in the glass door as she approached, and her long red hair was tied up in a tight, practical tail toward the top of her head. She was not wearing her gear - none of them were - but her clothing was a bit worn and stained from travel. they were all looking forward to the opportunity for a wash and some clean clothes. They hope they would get it from Sinjin’s hotel, along with the answers that they sought.

But as Alaria had spotted, it was not Sinjin who met them at the reception desk in the front lobby. There was no sign of the small, mustachioed brother of Grozmikal. Instead, a very different but equally familiar face stared in surprise and delight at them from behind the desk.

“Jessica Sola!” Beth said in surprise.

“Hello, Jessica,” Alaria said as she and her two companions approached. The woman behind the desk was tall and beautiful, with long hair that gleamed like polished gold even in the dimmed light within the hotel entrance lobby. She was wearing a simple green dress that hugged her lithe figure off her strong shoulders and her neat, tight breasts to good advantage, without showing any more skin than was necessary. Somehow, Jessica managed to appear incredibly refined and sexy without apparently making any effort to do so.

“Alaria,” Jessica said with a smile that showed her perfect teeth through her full, red lips. “It’s good to see you again, and you, Beth, and Mia, too. I hear you have been away on your adventures. Welcome back.”

“Thanks,” Alaria said, “but I have to confess that I’m very surprised to see you here. What about your duties in the guard? Where is Sinjin?”

“The answers to those questions are linked,” Jessica said, enjoying the eagerness with which Alaria and her companions listened to her words. She was pleased to be able to give them the answers that they wanted, and even more pleased to be able to create a bit of tension before doing so.

She laughed, gently, and relented. “Sinjin has moved away,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to own a hotel - it was always my plan to save up enough money to buy a place either here in Hopeford or somewhere further afield. So, when Sinjin came back and wanted to sell up as quickly as possible, and for a very good price, he knew exactly where to come. Me and Sinjin are old friends, and he knew that my spell in the guard was coming to an end. He also knew that I had saved a bit of money, but nothing like the amount of this place is worth. Still, I think in the end it was worth more to him to get a quick sale and be able to get away. I was surprised as anybody would be when he knocked on my door in the middle of the night two nights ago, in a fever of haste and offered to sell me this place on the spot.”

“Wait, Sinjin sold you the hotel? And now he’s gone?”

“Gone for good, so he said,” Jessica smiled. “And I’m not one to complain. He said he’d had enough of town life and wanted to do something new. Had some family commitments or something, he said. Although I don’t know what family he had aside from that adventuring brother of his. Anyway, I was happy enough to take him up on his offer. He was willing to give me the hotel for what I could afford, and so you may be sure that I took him up on the offer before he could change his mind! It could not have come at a better time for me. I’ve had a good career in the guard, but I didn’t want to renew my commission, and I was already looking at using my meager savings to get something small that I could build up from the ground. Then, this came along. Honestly, this is my dream come true.”

“But where is he?” Alaria said. “Did he say where he was going?”

Jessica shook her head. “Made quite a point of not doing so, actually. Said he didn’t fully know yet, and even if he did, he didn’t want to tell people. If we hadn’t known each other for so long, I would’ve been a bit worried about that. I would’ve been concerned that he had got into debt or something and was trying to pass the business off for as much as he could make quickly before he made his getaway. But I know Sinjin. I know he’s a good fellow, and I know that the business is doing very well so I took him out his word and signed the deeds on the spot that very night. He left immediately, heading out on the river road, south down past Bishop’s Lean. He’ll be long gone now. As I say, it was three days ago.”

“They must have got a head start on us,” Alaria said to her companions, “and have walked very fast to get back to Hopeford a full three days before we did.”

“He did seem pretty tired and footsore,” Jessica put in helpfully. Then her expression darkened. “Hold on a minute,” she said. “He doesn’t owe you money, does he? That’s not why you’re so eager to get hold of him? I’ve been right through the books of this place and found no question of anything out of order, but…”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Alaria assured Jessica hastily. “I had hoped to catch him before he went away and say a proper goodbye, that’s all, but there is absolutely nothing that I will say against old Sinjin, and I’m very glad to see that you are in charge of his hotel now. I can’t think of anybody better suited.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Jessica said, very pleased at the compliment. “But now, I am forgetting my host as a hotelier! You lot look pretty weary and footsore as well. Do you want a bath, a room for the night, a change of clothes?”

Alaria considered for a moment. “No, actually,” she said. “I wanted to see Sinjin, but now I’ve found he’s not here, I think I wanted to press on back through to Brighthill. We’ve been away for a good while, and I’m very keen to get home.”

Epilogue

The homestead at Brighthill was a very welcome sight when they approached. It was evening, and they were weighed down with their gear and with the packs of food and supplies that they’d bought when they were in Hopeford. They had food for the night, and for the next few days, as well as fresh supplies of soaps and shampoos that they’d bought from a new soap shop which had opened up in Hopeford while they’d been away. They were all very much looking forward to a bath.

They got in and got busy. The house smelled dusty and unused, but it wasn’t too bad. Alaria stepped through into the kitchen and stopped, smiling. This was a new feeling.

“What?” Mia said, grinning at Alaria as she came into the kitchen and dropped her bags off. “Good to be home?”

“Not just that,” Alaria said. “It’s the first time I have come home. This is the first time I’ve ever come back from an adventure and found a place like this waiting for me; a real, true home that’s mine. Before, I had my room at the guild house, or the place that I was staying for a while, or even a space in one of the colleges where I was studying, but never anything like this. Not a real home.”

“Now you have not only a home, but a person to come home to,” Mia said, standing up on tiptoes to kiss her on the lips.

They got settled in. Beth had gone straight down to the Brighthill inn, suddenly consumed with paranoia about what Grezkull, Sasha, and Palo might have done to her beloved business while she was away. Alaria was confident that there would be no problem, but Beth - who had been perfectly relaxed about it the whole time they’d been away - had suddenly apparently lost her nerve at the end and had run off toward the hotel, muttering about what she would do to Sasha and Palo if her inn wasn’t still standing.

Two hours after they’d got back to the homestead, Mia and Alaria heard a knock on the door. It was Beth, smiling and happy.

“All well at the inn, then?” Alaria asked.

“Oh, yes, all fine,” Beth said easily. “I don’t know what I was worried about. They’re good kids, really, and Grezkull kept them right.”

Alaria laughed. “I’m very glad to hear you say so!” she said. “I told you they would be able to run the inn for a couple of weeks in your absence. There was nothing to worry about.”

Beth shrugged. “I suppose not,” she said, “but that business means the world to me. You know how it is when you care deeply about something - you can’t help but think of the bad things that might happen when you leave it in someone else’s care. I guess it will take me a bit of time to learn to fully trust others. Maybe that’s part of what comes with having had a tough start.”

“Like Neroli,” Mia commented.

They had a good diner. There was plenty of food from their supplies, and plenty of good firewood ready to build up a heat in the oven. An hour later, they were all sitting around the dinner table, drinking sweet tea and digesting.

“So, what’s next?” Beth asked.

“What do you mean?” Alaria replied. “Bed, I think.”

“No,” Beth laughed. “I don’t mean what’s next tonight. I mean what’s next for you? You’ve saved the idiot Grozmikal, and saved his reputation too. You’ve saved Neroli from her bitterness and self-imposed exile up in the mountains, and you’ve inadvertently helped Jessica Sola to get a place of her own in Hopeford, just like she always dreamed of. What will you do next?”

“Something a bit more sedate, hopefully,” Alaria laughed.

“Well, and what does that look like?”

“I want to get my shop on the go,” Alaria said. “I came to Brighthill with the dream of setting up a potion shop here, and I’ve started well. Mia is well able to make the potions too, and we’ve built up a decent little list of wholesale customers in Hopeford, but I’d like to be able to sell direct from the house.”

“And Neroli?” Beth asked. “You think she’ll really come here and visit? You think she’ll stay?”

Alaria shrugged. “It’s hard to tell for sure,” she said. “But I know this. She’s not someone who goes against her word. I think that she’ll come to us, yeah, and when she does, I think she’ll need our help to get settled in.”

Alaria leaned forward over the table and looked at her two companions. “How is that for you two?” she said. “Are you okay with it? I know that you’ve both said you have no problem with me continuing to take new lovers, and you were all pleased to have fun with her when we were in her stronghold, but we’ve all had the chance to cool down a bit and think about it. Are you still okay with it all? Do you still want to have Neroli as part of our group?”

Mia reached across and put her hand on Alaria’s. “I think it’s a great idea,” she said. “I think we should welcome her, and she can become part of our group. Not just for her sexual prowess, but also because of the magic she holds. I’ve always said I was comfortable with you taking other lovers, so long as I can still be here and live with you.”

Alaria squeezed her hand tightly. “And what about you, Beth, what do you think about it?”

“I’m with Mia,” Beth said. “I’m your liver, Alaria, and I’m happy to see you happy. I don’t want any other lovers myself, except for if we all get together as a group, but I’m happy to go with your judgment if you want to bring Neroli in, then I’m fully in support of that. She has to bring her vibrator though!”

They all laughed, and Alaria stood and drew both her lovers together into a tender hug. They were three loyal companions and lovers now. Soon, hopefully, they would be four.

“So, I guess that’s what’s next,” Alaria said. “Not just the potion shop, but also the welcoming of Neroli properly into our circle and helping her get settled here in Brighthill.”

“Whatever happens,” Mia said, “It’s going to be a sexy time for everyone.”

They all laughed. Beth made a little noise of arousal, but then pulled away. “No,” she said, “I must go down to the inn. I’ve not had a look at the books yet, and I want to check over everything tonight. Grezkull and his team have done very well, considering, but there’s a few little things I want to get in order before taking over again tomorrow. And I’m looking forward to my own bed, too, if I’m honest.”

They saw Beth off into the evening, and then looked at each other.

“Just us, then?” Mia said.

“That’s good for me,” Alaria replied. She leaned in and gave Mia a long, sensuous kiss, then turned and led her off up to bed. As she stepped up onto the stairs, a tentacle twitched out from under her cloak and ran up the side of Mia’s thigh. Mia laughed and put her hand on Alaria’s hip.

Laughing, they both ran up the last few stairs and tumbled into bed.

Soon, there would be new things happening - Neroli would visit, and perhaps she would even stay and settle in Brighthill for good. They would learn her magic, and perhaps discover new magic too. And they would finally get the shop up and running and sell the best potions the area had ever seen to the people of Brighthill and Hopeford, and even further afield if possible.

But for now, they had each other, and that was enough for both of them.

Kraken Mage 3

Chapter

One

Alaria Hartwood reached a tentacle across the kitchen and unlocked the back door that led out to the garden. The sound of an axe chopping firewood came from outside.

“Mia?” she called. “Mia, there’s someone at the front gate, could you get that?”

“I’ll get it,” Mia called back, and Alaria closed the back door to keep the heat in.

Alaria smiled as she returned to her work. The kitchen table in front of her was full of potions in the process of being created for a list of wholesale orders to shops in the local town. Without looking, she used a tentacle to reach across the cluttered, cozy kitchen, and to pull open the door of the big, black iron stove that dominated one edge of the room. She tossed a couple of split logs in and clicked the door shut again.

She picked up a couple of ingredients - a dried hawkswood mushroom and two sprigs of deadknot holly - then looked up as she saw someone outside the kitchen window. It was Mia, passing the window at the side of the house with the wood-splitting axe over her shoulder, her collar turned up and her dark hair invisible beneath her dark green woolen hat. She was on her way to the front gate to greet the visitor.

A moment later, Alaria heard voices at the front door, and the thump of boots in the hall. She put the potion ingredients down and turned toward the kitchen door as it opened.

Mia stepped in, looking flushed and beautiful from working in the cold. Behind her came the elegant form of Beth, the innkeeper of Brighthill. Beth was Alaria’s lover, as was Mia. Alaria wasn’t into favorites - they were too close and serious for that - but it was true that while Mia and Alaria lived together at the Homestead, Beth stayed at the inn that she owned most nights, and so that made them a little less close in some ways.

There was no question of their affection for each other, however, and Alaria stood and came over to put her arms round Beth and kiss her fondly on the head, then passionately on the lips.

“You two are going to get me all turned on doing that,” Mia said playfully.

“And is there anything wrong with that?” Beth asked with mock-seriousness.

“Only that I’m supposed to be splitting firewood, and Alaria’s supposed to be finishing this batch of potions for Hopeford Herbals this afternoon. You know what will happen if we go up to bed instead.”

“I do know what will happen,” Beth laughed, licking her lips and eyeing up Alaria’s tentacles with a lustful look. “But thankfully for everyone’s productivity, I can’t stay for long. You two aren’t the only ones with work to do today.”

“Busy down at the inn today, is it?” Alaria asked, returning to the table and reaching over to the stove with her tentacles to put a kettle on and pour warming tea herbs into a pot.

“I’ll say. Never seen the place so full, if I’m honest. Not that I’m complaining, but this cold makes it harder to manage. We need so much firewood, and we’re not well supplied with it - we’re not used to these kinds of cold spells here in Brighthill. Nice and warm in this kitchen, though!”

Beth flopped down in a chair and pulled off woolen gloves, woolen hat, wool scarf and heavy leather jacket. She put her scarf, hat, and gloves on the table beside her, and hung her jacket on the back of her chair.

The kettle boiled and Mia, who was still standing, poured water into the pot and served up the tea onto the table with a few mugs, and a plate of little biscuits that she’d baked the day before.

“This weather is so strange, isn’t it?” Alaria said. “When I bought a place in Brighthill, I came here partly for the heat. I was told it was always sunny in the Hope River valley, and yet here we are, barely into the fall, and it’s as cold as winter in the southlands!”

“Unnatural,” Beth said with a shake of her head, curling her furred fingers around the teacup. Her tail moved around thoughtfully, hanging through the space at the back of her chair.

Beth’s had begun life in the lands of the cat-like humanoid people who hailed from a land far south of the Kingdom of Sapheli where Alaria had spent most of her life. She was a cat person in body, but she’d left all loyalty to that people behind her long ago. For cat people to leave their homeland was unusual, but for Beth it had become essential.

Beth was a shapeshifter. She’d been born with the power, and for some reason that nobody fully understood, the cat people hated shapeshifters and killed them outright whenever one was born among them. On discovering her powers, Beth had been left with no choice but to flee her homeland when she was little more than a child. She’d fled with a group of other cat-shifters, but they’d been caught and all her friends had been killed - only Beth had managed to escape.

After years of hard wandering, she’d found her way to Brighthill, a hot, pleasant little village on the northern slopes of Bread Rise, a range of hills on the edge of Hope River valley. Here, Beth had set up the local inn, and had done well for herself. When, more recently, Alaria Hartwood had decided to retire from her life on the road as a professional adventurer and buy a little house in Brighthill, she had found Beth well established as the village innkeeper. Alaria and Beth had hit it off straight away, recognising that they were both, in thier way, outcasts and wanderers who were looking for a little peace. They’d become friends.

After Mia - who had grown up near Brighthill and whose life had been much more peaceful than Beth’s - had helped Alaria to discover the joys of loving other women, Alaria and Beth had also become more than friends. They took their first steps into being a group of lovers somewhat tentatively, but by now they were firmly established, confident in working as a team either in the bedroom, at home, or on the road.

Not that Alaria wanted any more adventures on the road, or so she assured herself anytime the open country and the sense of adventure beckoned her. She’d come to Brighthill for a quiet life, with the goal of fulfilling her dream to become a potion maker, and also of exploring her ability to manifest tentacles, a magic power accidentally absorbed during her final battle with Dbuk, the primordial kraken. She’d made progress with the tentacle power, and had made the first steps toward establishing a successful potion shop, but so far, the settling down and staying off the road had not been so successful.

Since she’d moved, adventures kept getting in the way.

First, it had been an infestation of tunnel-orcs in the Longwood Gulch, blocking the trade road that ran west from Hopeford City to the villages of Brighthill and Richvale, and the inhabited lands beyond. Then it was the fraudulent adventurer, Grozmikal, whose ridiculous exploits had caused Alaria and her companions to travel to the far north-east of Hope River, into the mountains, to confront Neroli, the Ice Queen.

It was now a full five weeks since their encounter with Neroli. Rather than finding a fight, they had found a misunderstood, very beautiful, and sexually very frustrated woman, who had wanted nothing more than to have a passionate lovemaking session with Alaria and her two companions. Neroli was a very skilled mage, but she was also very much a renegade, and she had been driven out of the magical community of Sapheli for experimenting with magic that was forbidden and dangerous. She’d been betrayed by Grozmikal, who she’d thought was her friend, and she’d taken a cruel revenge on him, taking advantage of his own mistakes and humiliating him.

Alaria and her companions had been able to resolve that situation, allowing Neroli to feel vindicated, but also allowing Grozmikal to keep the little that remained of his pride intact.

Alaria had been hoping to hear from Neroli before now. Neroli had promised to contact Alaria and her friends just as soon as she had finished a particular piece of experimental magic she was working on, and Alaria had been looking forward to it. Neroli was a gorgeous woman, a passionate lover, and a skilled mage, and Alaria was keen to spend time with her again and to see if she still wanted to come and visit Brighthill, and maybe even move in nearby and give up her reclusive ways up in the mountains. She’d expressed a strong desire to do so before they’d parted, now that she’d seen the error of her ways, but that had been weeks ago now and they hadn’t heard from her. Alaria knew that time changed many things, and she was not certain that Neroli would still want to join her here in Brighthill, and take up the quiet life.

Beth lifted her tea and drank deeply. As a shapeshifter, and as someone who was wary of showing her cat form to others, Beth usually wore the aspect of a very tall, elegant, beautiful human woman. In the company of Alaria and Mia, she dropped this pretence and reverted to her true form, a beautiful humanoid feline whose whole body was soft, short gray fur peppered with thin black stripes. Aside from her elegant tail, Beth’s face was the most cat-like part of her, but even this was very human in some respects - her mouth, for example, remained full-lipped and sensuous, and though her ears pointed up above her head, they did so through a thick head of rich red hair.

The rest of her body - despite the gray fur and the tail - was very much a woman’s, and Alaria loved Beth’s generous breasts and her fine, well-filled out ass, her strong thighs, wide hips, and her firm belly. Beth was a beautiful woman in whatever form she chose to take, but Alaria liked her in her true form best, because it was in her true form that she let go of her inhibitions the most and gave herself fully to whatever she was doing at the time.

“This is good tea,” she said, putting her cup down and then refilling it from the pot. “I’m like you, Alaria, I came here to Brighthill for the heat, and most years it’s been totally reliable, but not this year.”

They both looked at Mia, who laughed and held out her hands. “Don’t look at me!” Mia said. “I may be a native of Brighthill, but I don’t control the weather. I agree, it’s very strange. In all my life I’ve never seen the winter come on so strong and so sudden. You know, it’s always a bit colder here in winter, and the seasons do usually change quite quickly, but not this cold, and not this fast. Usually the fall goes on for weeks, and it’s very pretty.”

“Have you been able to get enough firewood for the inn, Beth?” Alaria asked.

“Hmm, it’s tight,” Beth said. “That is, we always try to make sure we’re a year ahead, and we always try to have a bit extra, but even with both those things in place it doesn’t seem like we’re going to make it through the winter. I don’t plan to have the fire on for another eight weeks, usually, but the whole inn is like an ice block if I don’t burn the main hearth constantly at the moment. I’ve sent out messages to all the suppliers within delivery range, and even a few who are a bit too far away to deliver, but they’re all swamped with orders. Everyone is scrambling to get logs. It seems like we’re going to have a super cold and early winter and a firewood shortage this year!”

Mia drank off the last of her tea and put the mug in the sink, then glanced outside through the back window. She hadn’t taken off her jacket or hat, and she took her heavy leather work gloves out of her back pocket now and pulled them on. “Speaking of which,” she said, “I better get back to work. There’s a lot to get through.”

“Fair enough,” Beth said. “I ought to get back down to the inn as well, but I before you go, Mia, I’ve got the mail, and there’s one letter that’s addressed to both of you. I wanted to walk up and see you both anyway, so when this bundle of letters came through, I thought I’d just bring them up personally.”

In Hope River valley - and in Sapheli more generally, for that matter - the postal service usually centered around the local inn. It made sense, because that was also where even the smallest village would have berths for a horse and a rider. There was no standardised system, however, and the postal service was not reliable. There was no guarantee that a letter would get through, and even if it did, it would often take a very long time to do so. Still, it was reliable enough that people used it when they needed a message sent. For more important messages, a courier could sometimes be hired by those that could afford it, but for the common people the inefficient postal service usually had to do.

Beth took a bundle of letters from her coat pocket and handed them to Alaria. Alaria picked up a sharp blade that she’d been using to cut herbs.

“Thanks, Beth,” Alaria said. She severed the twine that the bundle of letters was tied with, then shuffled through them.

Most were nothing special - there was a bill from a carpenter in Hopeford who’d done some repair work on the house the week before, another was a letter requesting Alaria’s presence at a formal dinner held by the mayor of Hopeford, and a third from a person in the village of Bishop’s Lean who had once written up Grozmikal’s highly fictionalized exploits and published them under Grozmikal’s name. Now that Grozmikal had apparently retired (or vanished into the ether, destination unknown, depending on how you looked at it) the writer was out of work. For weeks now he had been hassling Alaria with offers to produce popular fiction based on her adventures instead, in exchange for half the proceeds. Alaria was not interested in his offers and scowled at the letter.

There were two that did interest her, however. One was a long, thin, blue envelope, with her name and address written in a beautiful, cursive, feminine hand, and decorated with three love hearts and an x in the bottom corner. The other was a larger envelope addressed in a poor hand, but one she didn’t recognize.

“This one is addressed to both of us,” Alaria said, looking at Mia.

“Open it,” Mia urged, looking interested.

Alaria cut the envelope open and pulled out the letter.

“Look at that!” she said as she glanced over the text. “It’s from Grozmikal!”

Grozmikal had stolen from Neroli, after she had thought they were friends. She’d repaid him by tormenting him, forcing him to humiliate himself by continuing to pretend to be an adventurer when he was truly nothing of the sort, and had long ago come to regret his folly in setting up as a fraud in the first place. With Alaria’s help, Neroli had agreed to free Grozmikal, and the fraudulent adventurer had immediately fled with his brother Sinjin and had not been heard from since.

Now, Alaria smiled as she read the letter.

Dear Alaria, Mia, and Beth,

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write, but you’ll understand that I’ve been busy finding a new place to stay and getting set up in my new life. There have been some ups and downs, but we’ve found somewhere good to stay, and we’re settling in. Sinjin is still with me, and he’s going to stay. He’s even thinking of setting up another hotel here. I’m looking for a new trade, but I’m lucky that the money from my “adventuring” days is enough that I don’t need to worry about money for a while. I’m concentrating on recovering from the difficult times, and on getting my health back. I’ve stopped drinking, and I’ve started training with a sword properly, just because I enjoy it and it’s good for me. I’m doing a bit of gardening, too. It’s very warm here.

Best wishes,

Grozmikal

“He doesn’t manage to tell us where he’s settled,” Mia pointed out. “Though if it’s somewhere warm, it can’t be too far away. The further south you go, the colder it gets. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be,” she added with a glance out the window at the cold, gray day.

Alaria flipped the envelope over. “No return address either,” she said. “Interesting. I wonder if he doesn’t want us to know where he’s gone?”

“I suppose that would be understandable,” Beth said. “He had a difficult time here, and he’s probably gone somewhere where no one knows anything about him. I can imagine him not wanting to send his new address to us. Maybe he wants to wait a while before telling us where he lives?”

“Maybe,” Alaria shrugged. “But I hope he does tell us someday. He’s a bit of a fool, I’ll grant you, but I like his brother Sinjin a lot, and I think even Grozmikal might be quite an interesting, tolerable person once he’s stopped playing the adventurer.”

“Who’s that other letter from?” Mia asked.

Alaria picked up the blue envelope. She took her little sharp herb-cutting knife again and slid the blade along the top of the envelope. Then she took out the letter.

A slow smile spread across her face as she glanced over the words.

“It’s from Neroli,” she said, “and she’s asking us to come visit her. She says she has something to show us.”

Chapter

Two

Beth and Mia both leaned forward in interest. They had both also been very taken with Neroli, once they had gotten past the fact that she had been pretty evil to Grozmikal, and definitely had some chaotic evil tendencies. Grozmikal had rather brought it on himself and had risked Alaria’s life by manipulating her into regaining Neroli’s lost crystal, and so the three women found themselves willing to forgive Neroli her evil tendencies and her caprice in taking revenge on Grozmikal. More willing, at least, than they had thought they would be when they had been on the road out to her domain.

It helped that she was incredibly sexy and had invented a magic vibrating sex toy that gave the most spectacular orgasms, but they were all certain that this was not the main reason. Not at all.

Whatever the truth of it, the night they had spent with Neroli had been a powerful experience for all of them. They had felt a lot of sympathy for her, misunderstood and rejected by society as she was, and they wanted to help her get back to a life where she felt included again. That was why they’d all been supportive of Alaria’s decision to invite Neroli to come to Brighthill.

Neroli had wanted to wait for a month at the most, to complete her great work of reforesting the mountains with magic, but that was five weeks ago, and they had heard nothing. Now, Alaria pointed to the date on the letter.

“This was written a fortnight ago,” she said. “In other words, three weeks after we left her.”

“Read it out loud,” Mia urged.

“Dear Alaria,

I’m writing to ask you to come out here again. I know it’s not what we planned, but I’m so close to the completion of this work and I’d love for you (and Beth and Mia if they’re able to come) to see its fulfillment, since you played such a big role in allowing me to get the work to this point. Also, I think that for the final stage, it would be good to recharge the Heart of the Forest a little more before putting it in place, if you know what I mean. I realize now that my calculations on that point were not completely accurate, and it would be very helpful (and, of course, very pleasant) if you and your companions were willing to help me out with that again.

I realize that I’m leaving it a bit late to write this letter. The Postal Service is notoriously unreliable, and it’s possible this letter will not reach you in time. However, I will wait a few weeks depending on how things develop. When you get this, do try to come. It would mean a lot to me for you to be here.

Neroli”

“What do you think?” Alaria asked. “Should we go?”

Mia gave her a look. “I thought you said you were sick of adventuring on the road and didn’t want to do any more journeys for at least a year.”

Alaria grinned. “Well, but this is hardly an adventure. It’s just a visit to a friend.”

Beth laughed. “I can’t go,” she said. “I’d quite like to. I’d love to see Neroli’s great work completed. But the inn is so busy at the moment, and with the crisis in the firewood supply, it wouldn’t be responsible of me to go off gallivanting, even if it is less of an unknown adventure than it was last time.”

“That’s fair,” Mia said. “I would go, but don’t you think it might be better for one of us to stay and keep working on the potions? If we both go, the house will be empty for another week at least, and we have orders that we said we would fill over the next fortnight. We don’t want to get a reputation for being unreliable, and there is good money to be made from these next orders, anyway, particularly with the new warming potions that are so popular with this cold snap.”

Alaria nodded. “You’re right, Mia,” she said. “You’re right. We ought not to go. I’ll write to Neroli and tell her that we can’t come this time, though I wonder how long it will take for the letter to reach her.”

“No, no,” Mia said, “that’s not what I’m suggesting at all. You should still go. I think it would be great if you were to go. I’m saying that I can stay and look after the potion operation while you’re away, and you can go and see Neroli’s forest project being completed.”

“And help her to recharge her crystal, too,” Beth said, sounding disappointed at missing that part. Neroli’s Heart of the Forest crystal was recharged by placing it inside a vibrating magic sex toy, the intensity of the orgasm being the main factor in how much of a charge was achieved for the crystal. Beth particularly enjoyed this process and was clearly disappointed not to be able to be involved.

“Don’t worry,” Alaria said. “If she’s still up for coming through to Brighthill once her project is complete, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to play with her special toys. You’ll get the chance to help her out again, I’m sure. But Mia, are you sure you are up for staying here and doing all that work? It seems like quite a lot to take on.”

“Oh, sure,” Mia said, easily. “I’m not concerned about that. After all, the potions that are in the orders we need to fill for next week are all very easy stuff, there’s nothing in there that I’m not confident in doing. We have plenty of ingredients, so we don’t need to put time into gathering and collecting, and I’m more than capable of making the potions and handling the deliveries over to Hopeford. I think it’d be good for you to get out. You say that you’re not wanting to be out on the road anymore, but I think you’re secretly getting itchy feet.”

Alaria glanced out the window toward the road that led down the hill through town. Following that road would take her out of town and on to the city of Hopeford. Next, she could follow it through the well-tended farmlands to the east of Hopeford, and beyond into the wildlands that led up to the mountain villages. Mia was right - for all her protestations that she wanted a quiet life, Alaria had found herself secretly pining for the road recently. She smiled as she realized that Mia had seen that before Alaria herself had.

Mia grinned. “Well?” she said. “What d’you say? Are you up for it?”

“If you’re sure you’ll be okay with the orders and everything…”

“Of course I will,” Mia said. “I wouldn’t say so if I wasn’t sure, I promise you! Now go on, I’ll finish these potions and I’ll do the firewood later. You go and pack.

“If you need a hand with the firewood,” Beth put in, “I can send Grezkull up to help you. He’s good with an axe, and I know he’ll be happy to come up and support.”

Grezkull, Beth’s sometime employee and partner in the business of the Brighthill Inn, was an immense half troll, half ork, a gentle giant, but with a particular proclivity for swinging axes.

“Thanks, Beth,” Mia said. “That would be a great help. Then I can concentrate on the potions.”

“Great,” Beth said. “For my part, Alaria, I think Mia’s right. You have been pining for the road recently. It’ll be good for you to get out and travel again for a bit.”

“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful,” Alaria said. “But I think you’re right. It’s strange. I came out here for a quiet life, to settle, and to get away from being on the road all the time. I don’t know why I feel like traveling again, but I feel bad about it. I’ve settled down here with you two, and I’ve got everything I want here in town, everything I had been looking for. Now that I have that, why do I find myself wanting to leave again?”

“It’s only natural,” Beth said. “You shouldn’t feel bad about it. You lived that way of life for a long time, so it’s a huge change to suddenly stop doing all that and stay in one place all the time. It would be wrong to expect to not feel any desire to get out on the road again. Imagine if someone had lived a settled life for many years and then set out on the road adventuring. Even if it was everything they had ever wanted, would you blame them for feeling homesick now and again? Of course you wouldn’t. It’s the same thing. You are a traveler down to your bones, Alaria. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to go on the march now and again. This is a good opportunity.”

“Thank you,” Alaria said, feeling suddenly very moved. Beth and Mia both smiled at her.

They know me better than I know myself, she thought. Now that’s real love and companionship.

“You better get packing,” Mia said. “There’s still a good bit of daylight left. If you move fast, you might still get to Hopeford before dark.”

Now that she was committed to her course of action, and now that she had received the reassurance she needed from her lovers, Alaria found herself able to fully enjoy the excitement of the preparation for a journey. It was true, what Beth had said. The road was in her blood, and no matter how settled and happy she felt in the Homestead at Brighthill, they would always be a part of her that would want to travel.

Alaria was a masterfully efficient packer, and within half an hour she had gone from being cozily settled at the kitchen table with no thought of traveling in her mind to being packed, armed, and ready to set out. She didn’t expect trouble. The road was safe these days, and there was no reason to think that she would end up having to fight, but still she strapped the legendary sword Skyfang onto her belt, and on the other side she added Earthclaw, the small dagger companion blade of Skyfang, equally magical, equally deadly, but tiny in comparison to the great, two handed Skyfang.

It did not take her long to decide against bringing her plate armor, but she did have some trouble deciding whether or not she should bring her chainmail surcoat. On balance, and after discussing it with Mia, she decided against it. After all, it was a lot of extra weight to wear if one was not expecting to get into combat.

“And also,” Mia said, “you’re such a skilled fighter and such an advanced level mage that even if you do get into a fight, you’re unlikely to need much in the way of armor. You’re better to travel light and rely on your expertise in battle if you need to defend yourself.”

Alaria agreed, and so when she was ready to set out, she was just wearing light ranger armor, well-crafted from boiled leather. This armor wasn’t the work of her own hands, and that fact made her a little uncomfortable at first. Alaria was not just an expert fighter and a master of magic; she was also a highly skilled crafter and metalworker. Her boots, her armor plate, and a lot of her chainmail (though not all of it) was the work of her own hands, and she was proud of it. She was a good leatherworker, and more than capable of producing fine leather ranger armor, but it was a time consuming process, and time was one thing that she had not had a lot of since moving to Brighthill.

Before they’d set out for the mountains to confront Neroli, they’d decided that Mia needed some new armor, and they’d gone to a leatherworker in Hopeford to get what they needed. Alaria had been so impressed with his work that she’d bought a set for herself as well, and it was this that she now wore as she hitched her pack and prepared to leave.

She said goodbye to Mia on the doorstep of their homestead, still amazed by how generous and helpful Mia was being by taking over the potion making and looking after the house while Alaria went off gallivanting. Resisting the temptation to ask for the hundredth time whether Mia was sure it was okay, she hugged her lover tightly and set off down the road at a swift pace.

The recent cold snap was a shock for the village of Brighthill, and for the region generally. The buildings weren’t built for it, and neither were the people, and so the village streets were deserted, despite the fact that it was still relatively early. Smoke puffed from all the chimneys, and all the shutters in all the houses were closed tight. A few folks, wrapped up tightly in woolens and furs, hurried past on essential business, but no one gave Alaria more than a cursory nod, if they noticed her at all.

As she passed Beth’s inn, she glanced through the window and saw that the place was crowded, the fire blazing red in the hearth at one end, and the folk - particularly the oldsters - gathered hard by the blaze. She debated going in quickly, but decided against it. She’d said her goodbyes to Beth up at the homestead earlier that afternoon, and it would be hard to do so again. She was keen to make some progress and make the most of the remaining light.

Glancing up at the gray sky, she hoisted her pack a little higher on her shoulders and took a deep breath, marching away from the cozy lights of the village, past the last few houses, and over the little wooden bridge that crossed the chattering stream at the foot of the hill.

A great sense of freedom washed over her as she left the village, and Alaria had to remind herself of what Beth had said earlier that day. You’re a born traveler and you lived on the road for many years. It was only natural for her to feel liberated as she stepped out onto the road again, and there was no need to feel bad about it.

She felt free, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Chapter

Three

Alaria made good time into Hopeford, doing the journey in a little over two hours. Usually, it took at least four, but she was traveling light, and she was traveling alone, and she could walk very fast if she wished to. The sky was darkening as she approached the city, the gray clouds giving vent to a fine spit of rain, and a cold wind whipping up from the south to push the rain about unpredictably and throw it in her face if she raised her head under her deep hood.

She was glad to see Hopeford, and gladder still to get to the hotel that had previously been owned by Grozmikal’s brother Sinjin, The hotel was now run by Jessica Sola, formerly of the Hopeford Guard, and Alaria’s good friend.

Jessica welcomed her warmly when she entered. “Of course we have a room for you,” she said when Alaria enquired if there were any vacancies. “We keep a few rooms aside specially, only for particular friends of ours, and you are one of them for sure. The place is pretty full otherwise, but you’ve always got a bed here, Alaria.”

“Thanks,” Alaria said, smiling. Jessica grinned back, meeting her eye with a gaze that was almost a challenge. When Alaria had first met Jessica, they had been fighting side by side at the battle of Longwood Gulch. Back then, she had thought Jessica was being quite suggestive in her way of talking, and she had wondered if Jessica was keen to become her partner the same way Mia and Beth were. Now that she looked in Jessica’s eyes and saw that glint there again, she was sure of it. She was also sure that she was happy to have this opportunity to follow up.

“Let me see you to your room,” Jessica said briskly. “But when you’ve finished getting settled in, how about having some dinner with me? Would that be okay if I joined you for your evening meal?”

Alaria could see that there was more than just the desire for friendship in this request. Jessica had something she wanted to discuss, but she wasn’t saying so explicitly. That was out of character - usually, Jessica was the frankest, most direct of people. Perhaps there was something she wanted to talk about in private? Alaria wondered if Jessica was going to propose they go to bed together.

Alaria nodded. “Sure,” she said. “That would be good. It will be good to have the chance for some quiet talk.”

Jessica looked relieved, in a way that made Alaria think that a sexual encounter was not what she was going to propose. “Good, good,” Jessica said. “That will be very welcome. So, thirty minutes, then? Here’s your key, I’ll show you to the room.”

Half an hour later, washed, dressed, refreshed, and with an excellent appetite, Alaria found herself in the comfortable surroundings of the restaurant at the Hopeford Hotel. Though Jessica had taken over the hotel five weeks ago, she had not changed anything - much to the relief of the staff and the patrons. The hotel had thrived under Sinjin’s management, and it was known far and wide as one of the best places to stay in the neighborhood. Jessica was not one to put her mark on things by making changes just for the sake of it.

The head chef was named Bernal. He was a black-bearded, heavy-set dwarf who was unusually tall for his kind, and had lived in Hopeford and been in charge of the hotel kitchen for a decade. Sinjin had recruited him, and had treated him well, and Bernal liked nothing better than overseeing the large dinner services that that Hopeford hotel was famous for. He smiled and waved at Alaria as he peered out of the kitchen door, seeing her sitting down.

Five minutes later, she was tucking into a starter of braised duck and perfectly cooked root vegetables with an incredible sauce, and she was just finishing this off and wiping out the bowl with some crusty brown bread when Jessica approached and sat down opposite her.

Jessica asked for a meal as well, and the two women didn’t trouble with too much talk but ate their main courses together in companionable silence. Only afterward, when Alaria had eaten a small strawberry tart with fresh cream, and had ordered a second cup of sweet tea, did Jessica broach the subject she’d been leading up to all night.

Jessica had ordered a drink of Bazzak, a powerful spirit made by the silvan folk of Delwere in the southeast of Sapheli. It was a dark amber color and very strong, and there was only a finger’s width of the liquid in Jessica’s glass. She tipped a little water into the glass and swirled it, holding it up so Alaria could appreciate the way the color gleamed between red, amber, and bright gold depending on how the light hit the liquid.

“Some people say that it’s best without any water,” Jessica said, “but I always think that adding a drop brings out the flavor.”

She sipped, made a face, added a little more water, sipped again, then sat back in her chair with a sigh of satisfaction. Alaria smiled at her and drank her tea.

“You don’t drink alcohol?” Jessica asked.

“Never agreed with me,” Alaria said. “Not that I don’t like the flavor, and I appreciate the variety and delicacy that’s available, but no, I never enjoyed it.”

“Well, I always hated tea,” Jessica said with a smile, and they both laughed.

There was an awkward pause, then Jessica took the plunge. “Alaria, I’m glad you came by. There’s something I’ve been wanting a bit of advice on, but I’ve not known who to ask. You… well, you’re an experienced person and you’ve seen the world, and I know that you’re good hearted and discreet, and a person who will go out of her way to help out a friend…”

Alaria nodded her head in acknowledgement of the compliment. “Careful,” she murmured. “You’ll be making my head swell. But I appreciate you saying so. What is the issue? I’ll be happy to listen, at least, and advise if I can.”

Jessica nodded, glanced from side to side, then abruptly stood up. “It’s easier if I show you,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

“Oh, okay,” Alaria said, surprised. “Of course. Where do we need to go?”

“Down to the basement,” Jessica said. “Sorry, I know this is a bit weird. Will you come?”

Alaria nodded. “No problem,” she said, reassuringly.

Jessica thanked her again and then turned and led the way.

They crossed the restaurant, went through the kitchen where head chef Bernal gave them a curious glance but said nothing, then through a back door that led out into a small square that was walled in and not accessible to guests. It seemed mostly to be used as storage for lumber and empty crates, but in one corner there was a swing hatch leading down to a cellar.

“This is the old cellar,” Jessica explained. “There’s a new one over in the other wing of the hotel, and since it’s closer to the bar and the kitchen that’s the one we use for most things. This one is so old that no one has been down for ages, but I came down here when I first took over the place. I wanted to explore the whole building thoroughly, you know, so I came down here…”

The hatch swung open, and Alaria followed Jessica down a very old flight of stairs. Jessica fumbled for a lamp, and Alaria resisted the temptation to pull out a magic spell to light their way. Jessica knew that Alaria was a magic user, and she didn’t seem to have the same ignorant prejudice against spell workers that many shared, but still, Alaria was of the old school of thought, and believed that if there was a mundane solution to a problem, then that should be chosen before a magic solution was implemented.

Jessica swore under her breath as the first match she tried went out before she could light the lamp. She tried again with more success, and the dirty yellow glow of an oil lamp illuminated the scene. Alaria peered down into the cellar as Jessica held up the light.

“This is old,” she said, looking at the narrow steps that were worn a full two inches in the center from countless treading feet. “It must have been in use for a long time before it was abandoned.”

Jessica proceeded carefully down the steps, holding the lamp up. “This part of the building is older than the rest,” she explained. “I don’t know exactly how much older, but if you look closely, you can see the change in the stonework between the old portion of the building and the newer wings. I think there’s been a hotel here for over a hundred years, but this part we’re in now is the very oldest, and we don’t use it much, even upstairs, because the stonework is degraded and there’s some dampness in the rooms. We mostly use it for storage and the day to day work of maintaining the hotel. The laundry is up there, that kind of thing… ah, here we are. Mind your step at the bottom, it’s quite uneven.”

As she got to the bottom of the stairs, Alaria looked around. They were in a long, narrow basement room, floored and walled and roofed with stone, and with an unpleasant damp smell pervading the air. There was not much in the room. At one point, it must have been used for the storage of wine or spirits, because there were lines of old barrels stacked at one side, all empty now and some collapsing to bits with age.

Scattered about the floor Alaria saw some old timbers and some moldering straw, and in one corner a stack of something that might once have been ledgers but was now not much more than damp pulp. She wrinkled her nose. The contrast between the comfortable restaurant upstairs and the damp, disused basement was unpleasant, and not particularly welcome.

“Sorry,” Jessica said, seeing her expression. “It’s not very nice down here, I know, but it is easier to show you. Come down to this end of the basement.”

Alaria followed Jessica past the piles of rotten wooden barrels and past stacks of old discarded lumber. The basement was longer than it had first appeared, and Alaria found a strange, uncomfortable sensation creeping over her as she followed Jessica further from the hatch that led back up into the outside world. Her skin prickled, and the air felt colder than she would have expected, even for this underground chamber in the cold weather.

“You feel it?” Jessica said. “Horrible, isn’t it?”

Alaria saw that Jessica was pale in the light of the lamp. She looked unhealthy and frightened. Her golden hair seemed to have lost its luster, and the confidence had gone out of her posture. Alaria’s unease deepened.

“Just what is this, Jessica?” Alaria asked. “I do feel it, and I don’t like it. You look unwell.”

“And I feel unwell,” Jessica replied. “I always do when I come down here, but it passes once you get back into the open air. Here, see? It’s here.”

They got to the end of the long underground chamber, and here, to Alaria’s surprise, there was another door. It was nothing special to look at - a low, crudely made door of thick dark planks, reinforced with studs of iron, and with a plain, dull iron ring for a handle. Despite its inconsequential appearance, the door gave Alaria the most unpleasant feeling. Just looking at it made her stomach churn and her heart beat faster. Dank sweat beaded on her palms.

Jessica took a breath through her nose, steeled herself, and reached forward to turn the handle. She pushed the door open, and Alaria was struck by Jessica’s courage. Alaria was an adventurer with a great deal of experience who had, in her time, explored some very dark corners of the world and fought some very dark creatures, and even she was afraid. Jessica was just a hotelier, formerly of the Hopeford town guard, and yet she mastered her fear and turned the handle on the horrible little door, lifting the latch and letting the door swing open.

The door opened outward, and a wave of cold fear swept out like a breath.

Magic, Alaria told herself sternly. You’re experiencing the effect of magic. Keep it together and remember that you’re here to help your friend.

The thought gave her courage, and she straightened herself and pushed away the unreasoning urge to turn and flee as far and as fast as she could from the chamber beyond the door.

“It’s worst out here,” Jessica said, her voice sounding thick, almost choked. “But inside…”

Alaria nodded and reached out for the lamp. Jessica hesitated for a moment then handed it over. The door was only wide enough for one of them, and Alaria forced herself to go through first. Jessica came in right behind her and stood nearby. Neither of them wanted to be any further from the light or from each other than they had to be.

“There,” Jessica pointed. “This is as far as I’ve ever got. What is it, Alaria? What in the hells is it?”

The room was small, square, and completely empty. The walls, floor, and ceiling were of the same stone as the rest of the basement and were featureless except for one thing - a block of stone, three feet square, was set into the center of the wall opposite the door. All the rest of the wall was made from rectangular grey blocks, roughly finished and of a fairly standard size, but this square was bigger than all the rest, and unlike the others it was made of a stone that gleamed black and smooth in the light of the lamp.

In the center of the black stone there was a simple, jagged rune, three sharp lines projecting at right angles from a sloping downward stroke. Alaria looked at the rune, and her stomach churned. She felt sick, and for a horrible moment she thought she was going to bring up her dinner.

It wasn’t that she recognized the rune - far from it. She’d never seen it before and didn’t know what language it was or anything about it. It was, on the surface, perfectly innocuous - just four sharp lines cut into a block of stone. But despite this, it was all Alaria could do to bring herself to look at it without breaking down.

“When did you find this?” she asked in a thick, shaking voice. She felt like she was speaking through treacle.

“The first week I was here,” Jessica said. “I just left it alone, except one time when I came back in daylight to see if it had the same effect. It did, of course. Do you have any idea….?”

“I’ve never seen or felt this before,” Alaria said, shaking her head. She tried to summon her magical sensing abilities, which usually were there instinctively, but she couldn’t focus, and the exercises she usually used to center herself before a spell wouldn’t fix themselves in her mind.

She shook her head and forced herself to take a step closer.

The black stone seemed to radiate malignant intent. It was like walking toward an unsheathed blade - every inch of her body tingled in anticipation of an attack, but none came.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said suddenly. “I can’t think straight. We need to talk about this, but not here.”

Jessica took Alaria’s arm and, wordlessly, led her out of the chamber. She closed the door and latched it. It took every bit of effort Alaria could muster not to run as, still arm in arm, they walked as fast as they could back to the steps and up, out, into the blessedly cold fresh air.

Chapter

Four

Sitting in a little side-room near the lobby some time later, Alaria and Jessica drank hot tea in silence. It was taking Jessica some time to get over the fright of what had just happened. Alaria had, at least, some reference in her own long experience of weird and frightening places. She had fought in a tomb of an ancient hesparaux where she’d felt something similar - a terrible miasma of fear that she’d had to master. But there was something about the sensation of being down in the basement room at the Hopeford Hotel that was unlike anything she had ever felt before.

“There’s an intensity to it,” she said. “A malevolence that’s quite new to me. I’m impressed that you were able to go so near it, Jessica.”

“I’ve always had more than my fair share of courage,” Jessica said shakily. Her face was beginning to regain some of its color, and her hand trembled as she poured herself a second cup of tea. “Still, I thought it was bad the first time, but just now it was worse. I’m glad I showed it to you. It’s not the kind of thing I wanted to share with just anyone, but I confess that it had been weighing on my mind terribly. I needed to tell someone who I could rely on.”

“You can rely on me,” Alaria assured her. “I’m glad you told me, too, even if the experience was horrible. I don’t think I’d be comfortable with something like that on my doorstep, and not knowing about it.”

“You knew Sinjin pretty well, didn’t you?” Jessica asked.

“Fairly, but he never said anything about that basement room.”

“Do you think he knew about it?”

“It’s hard to imagine him not knowing, considering how long he was here. But maybe he just put it out of his mind?”

“Or maybe,” Jessica said thoughtfully, “it wasn’t as bad before as it is now.”

Alaria looked with interest at her. This was a new thought. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, there were all those barrels in the cellar. Barrels for wine and beer and preserved fish and fruit - I had a good look at them the first time I went down. They were in use once, not too long ago, though they’re starting to rot and go to pieces nowadays. But the cellar was in use during Sinjin’s time. I asked Bernal, the chef, if he knew anything about it. I didn’t tell him what I’d experienced down there, but I dropped hints and told him I’d found an old cellar that seemed like it had been used for storage. He thought for a moment and then said that the place had been used some time ago - quite a few years ago - but that it had been abandoned because it wasn’t as convenient as the new cellar at the front of the new building that we use now.”

“Did you ask him if there was anything else wrong with the old cellar?”

Jessica nodded. “He said that the air down there was bad. The decision had been made because there was a bad smell down there, and Sinjin wanted to move storage entirely to the new area. But the only thing Bernal knew about it was the idea of a bad smell, which doesn’t exactly sum it up.”

“Not really,” Alaria agreed. “But I see why you think it might not have been as bad before. If a cellar had made everyone who went down there feel as creeped out as we did, then everyone would know about it, and there wouldn’t be any question about the reason for it being abandoned. So, why would it be getting worse?”

Jessica said nothing.

“What will you do?” Alaria asked into the silence.

“I’ll do what I have done - keep the cellar locked, keep it out of use, and if anyone asks about it, I’ll say that there’s a bad mold infestation and it’s not suitable for the storage of food anymore. I’ll not go down there, and I’ll not tell anyone else. But what do you advise, Alaria. Do you advise anything?”

“Not much beyond what you’re proposing,” Alaria said. “Keep it locked, keep quiet about it. I want to have a think about this. Whatever you do, don’t go asking around about it too much. You see, if you start asking about it, people will become curious, and might even start trying to go down there themselves. Whatever it is that’s causing the terror down there, it’s potentially really dangerous. You don’t want to put anyone at risk. For my part, I think there’s one person I will talk to about it - the librarian, Rannek Stickler.”

“I don’t think I’ve met him,” Jessica said.

“He keeps himself to himself,” Alaria said. “He runs the archive house on behalf of the mayor, but he’s a collector of local lore and legends, and he’s very discreet. I think that if anyone knows about it, it’ll be him. He came with me on my trip north with Grozmikal to confront Neroli, and I got to know him then.”

“If he knows anything, will you tell me?” Jessica asked.

“I’ll do better. If he knows anything, I’ll get him to come see you. How about that?”

“Sure,” Jessica said.

“Great,” Alaria said. “I need to be going in the morning, as soon as I can. I don’t have time to stop over and investigate this properly - I’m on an errand and I’m a bit overdue already. The library is on the edge of town, so I’ll go early tomorrow and it’s better if I can get away without backtracking.”

“Where are you headed?” Jessica asked, looking interested. Alaria wasn’t sure if she also looked just a little disappointed, but she couldn’t tell for sure.

“Out east,” Alaria said. “I’m going to check in on a friend.”

The next morning, Alaria was up, breakfasted, and on the road within an hour of the sunrise. The seasons changed fast in Sapheli, and though the cold was unusual for this time of year, the season was changing, and the endless sunshine of high summer was fading into memory.

The sunrise, noticeably later than before, was pale and ghostly behind the pall of thick pearly gray clouds, and a fine gossamer of dewdrops blanketed the city. Alaria was glad of her heavy cloak, and she cast the hood over her head and snuggled the collar warmly about her neck as she strode out into the streets of Hopeford.

She’d sent two letters the night before. One had gone by messenger to Rannek, asking him for an early appointment this morning. He’d replied promptly by the same messenger, telling Alaria that he’d be glad to see her again, and would be in his office at the library at the time she had named.

The second letter had been to Mia at the homestead, and that letter had been left with Jessica, for delivery with the regular mail. It just said that Alaria had made it to Hopeford and would be setting off early the next morning for the eastern mountains. Alaria would try to send another letter back as she made her way east, but the further she got, the less chance there was of the letters getting back to Brighthill before she did. She wasn’t planning to be gone for long.

Strange, how the day before she had been feeling elation at being on the road again, though it had been tempered by guilt and a feeling that she was being ungrateful for the wonderful home life she now had. This morning, with the wreaths of mist swirling about her boots in the empty Hopeford street, she actually felt a little homesick. She was already missing the cozy kitchen, the smell of potions, the fat black cat who slept on the corner by the stove, and the warm, exciting presence of Mia always nearby.

What a mess of contradictions we humans are, she thought to herself, smiling.

Her boots made hardly any sound on the cobbles. Other people’s shoes rang like the striking of hammers against this kind of road surface, but Alaria had worked enchantments into the soles of her boots to make them stealthy and silent. Only the faintest susurrus of shifting cloth, the slight creak of the leather from her sword belt, and the sound of her own breathing disturbed the perfect stillness of the morning street.

The thought of that terrible little room under the hotel was troubling her. She tried her best to give herself up to the day, to be fully present, and to enjoy the crisp cold and the sense of being on the road again, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of horror that the rune on the stone had induced. The feeling clung to her, dripping from the corners of her mind like the uneasy memory of a half-remembered nightmare.

And then there was what Jessica had said about it. It might not have always been that bad. And what was the conclusion to be drawn from that? If the sensation in the basement hadn’t always been that bad, then something had changed. Something that brought a sensation of debilitating terror to any who drew near. The stone was not new, neither was the door. The basement was as old as the hotel, if not older…

Alaria’s footsteps slowed. If not older. Could that be a clue to the nature of the mystery? Was the basement - or at least, the room with the rune block - part of some structure that had stood on that spot before the Hopeford Hotel had been built? Was the stonework older than the whole rest of the hotel, older than the city itself, perhaps?

That was a fruitful line of thought. Alaria forced herself to remember every detail she could of the cellar, and of the little room. The cellar and the room had been walled, floored, and roofed in the same way - roof and floor of broad gray stone slabs, walls of rough-hewn rectangular blocks of a similar stone. Most of Hopeford - the above-ground part, at any rate - was built of white or pink sandstone, quarried from a range of low hills a few miles upriver and brought on barges down to the ford during the era when the city was being built. Alaria had never been in a Hopeford cellar before, and she supposed it was perfectly reasonable to assume that the once under the hotel was normal for the city, but it was also true that she’d never seen any other examples of that dark, gray, rough-cut stone anywhere else in the city.

The door to the frightening chamber with the rune block was unusual. It had looked fairly nondescript when she’d first seen it, but that style - thick planks with reinforced iron studs - was not something she’d ever seen in Hopeford or in any of the surrounding towns or villages.

The black stone block with the rune, of course, was like nothing she’d ever seen before. She didn’t know what kind of stone it was, but it was certainly something that she’d never seen around here before.

She arrived at the library full of her speculations, and stepped up to the small side door where Rannek Stickler’s personal office was. A warm light glowed from between the shutters that covered the narrow window beside the door, and as she knocked, Alaria saw a shadow move across the light. A moment later, the door opened, and the tall, spare figure of the librarian appeared in the doorway.

“Come in, come in,” Stickler said, grinning through his long gray beard, his small, intelligent eyes gleaming with pleasure and interest from his deeply lined, ancient face.

He stood aside to welcome her in, and she found herself in a small, cozy study, cluttered with books and papers. At first, she only saw the books and papers, as she would expect from the room of an archivist and librarian, but quickly she started to notice that there were many other projects in evidence in the room as well.

Plants in pots occupied many corners of shelves and side tables. They leaned toward the window, trailed down from high corner shelves, or climbed busily up custom-build trellises that had been erected against the walls to give support.

Paintings - finished and half-finished, and some barely started - were peeping out of corners and from under stacks of papers, and one impressive piece occupied an easel at an angle to the window. Other smaller paintings peeped out from underneath it, and a small sketch pad with a number of partial landscape studies in pencil was propped against it in one corner.

Leather straps were piled on one corner of the huge desk that dominated the center of the room, and a bottle of linseed oil teetered on the edge of the desk next to a half-finished carving of a dog leaping up in the air.

There were tools everywhere; paintbrushes and paint pots, sharp knives, leather punches, bundles of feathers for quills, and some tools that Alaria didn’t recognize. Something that looked like a bellows but was placed upright nowhere near the fire, a two-handed saw that seemed to be made of carved bone, an instrument like a telescope, but set in a frame that pointed down toward the table.

The room smelled of fresh mint, of dry paper, of oil, herbs, clean linen, and of the pine logs that crackled merrily in the enormous hearth.

Clearly, Rannek Stickler was a man with many interests. It was equally clear that he was not used to visitors in his study. The place was cluttered, but it was clean, and there was none of the sense of a reclusive hermit that one might expect in such a space. Rather, the room felt alive with interests and with work underway. For all the large number of projects in evidence, none seemed abandoned.

Rannek was completely unashamed of the clutter. He shifted a stack of books topped with a fine ceramic vase full of what looked like bleached human teeth from a chair by the desk.

“Please, sit,” he invited her cordially, gesturing to the chair. “I was just about to have some coffee, would you like some?”

Alaria thanked him and took the small cup of dark, richly scented coffee that he handed to her. She had never been a particularly enthusiastic coffee-drinker - not like some people in the region - but she sipped at her cup and found that the powerful flavor was pleasant. As she sipped, she enjoyed the warming, stimulating effect that the drink had on her mind.

“What’s brought you here?” Rannek said without preamble. He looked her up and down. “You’re dressed for a journey. Anything I can help with?”

“Not with the journey,” Alaria said, “but I’ve come across something by chance that wants looking into, and I’d like to ask you about the history of the city, and to see if there’s anything you know about a certain building - the old part of the Hopeford Hotel - and about a certain rune, three lines joined to a tail…”

She sketched the rune in the air with a finger.

To her surprise, Rannek’s eyes went wide, and he froze in his chair with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. “Why do you ask about that?” he asked in a hoarse voice that was very unlike his usual tone. “What have you heard?”

“Why, Rannek, are you okay?” Alaria asked, full of concern. “You look ill.”

He put his coffee down untouched and reached out with a sudden convulsive grip to take her hand. “What have you heard?” he repeated. “Please, tell me.”

She looked him in the eye for a moment and then nodded. She gently removed her hand from his grip and patted him comfortingly on the knee.

Whatever it was about her story that scared him so much, she knew one thing at least. If she was looking for information, she’d come to the right place.

Chapter

Five

“Jessica, the new owner of the hotel, is a friend of mine,” Alaria explained. “She took over the hotel a few weeks ago, and when she explored the premises fully, she found a disused cellar under an old part of the building. In the cellar, there’s a door that leads to an empty chamber. Built into the wall of the chamber, there’s a block of stone carved with a strange rune that I don’t recognize. For some reason, the room with the rune induces a terrible fear in Jessica and me.”

“Who else knows?” Rannek asked. Alaria frowned. Clearly, he knew something about this - possibly a lot about it - but he was in such dreadful earnest that she decided to let him keep his secrets for the present. She would find out all in time, she was sure.

“Jessica has told nobody but me. The head chef at the hotel knows about the cellar, but there’s nothing to suggest that he knows about the room with the rune, or that he’s ever felt the sense of dread occasioned by being there. I don’t know if Sinjin knew about it, but he’s left town now, and I don’t have any way to contact him.”

“So only you and she know?” Rannek said.

“And you, evidently,” Alaria reminded him.

“Of course, of course,” Rannek said. He seemed relieved that the word had not got out to anybody else, and the news had allowed him to calm himself a bit. He drank his coffee and took a long, steadying breath.

“It’s imperative that this does not get out,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone else. We must make sure Jessica doesn’t tell anyone else. There’s something here that I can’t fully explain, but the fact that you’ve felt the terror… that means that it’s beginning to wake up.”

Alaria felt a cold creeping sensation over her skin. “Rannek, what the hell?” she said. “What’s beginning to wake up?”

He didn’t answer straight away. Instead, he stood and walked to a corner shelf. Here, from a section stuffed with folders, he drew out a file and flicked through it until he pulled out a single sheet of paper with a drawing on it. He held it up. Four lines, three coming off the tail of the fourth. The rune on the stone.

“Is this the rune?” he said.

Alaria nodded.

Rannek folded the paper over and, keeping it in his hand, walked unsteadily to the chair, where he sat down again and poured himself a little more coffee. “This city of Hopeford,” he began, “is around 500 years old. For a hundred years before the founding of the city, the valley was inhabited by nomadic people who drove grazing flocks from pasture to pasture, and for a hundred years before that, the valley was not inhabited at all. When the first ancestors of the founders of Hopeford found their way into this valley, they found a lush and verdant landscape, covered in rich grass and full of many wild fruits and herbs and vegetables all running wild in the land. There were excellent woodlands, and marvelous grazing land, and the river running through it all.”

His voice had taken on the cadence of a master storyteller, and Alaria leaned back in her chair, drinking her coffee and enjoying the sound of his voice, and watching the light from the blazing fire play across his lined, ancient face. His eyes were distant as he spoke, almost as if he was recalling something from long ago in his own past.

“At first, the people who came here, the ancestors of the founders of Hopeford, thought they had come to a land that had not ben inhabited before. But some of them said that there must have been people here before and said that they had found their traces. There were stones, they said, black stones with sharp, angled corners, too exact and regular to be the work of nature. Sometimes, people might find a pile of these worked stones as if there had been a building once before, and sometimes, they would even find a corner of a wall built in this black stone, but that was rare enough.”

“The people were content to leave the stones where they were,” he continued. “They had little interest in the past, or in stone, and for three generations they herded their cattle and traveled the grazing lands, and if some people found sometimes a rusted sword half-buried in the mud, or disturbed what seemed like a grave of bones overly large for a human, they left them where they were and went on their way. Only when the children of the first herders began to settle did they start to care about the stones. Then, they found them useful, and sought them out. They harvested the stones as once they had harvested wild berries and used them - pre-cut and regular as they were - to build their houses. Long ago.”

“In the years since then, the memory of what the founders’ ancestors discovered here was long forgotten. Cities rose and villages were formed, and over the generations peace reigned uninterrupted for 500 years. Five centuries of peace! Do you know how rare that is, child? Do you know how we would have yearned for even five days of peace, back in the days before…”

He stopped as if realizing what he was saying. “Before what, Rannek?” she prompted him.

“Before the founding of this city. Before the ancestors came here to settle. Before… before the fall of Lakshyr, the kingdom that once ruled this land, from the fortress of the bloody ford on the border river.”

He closed his eyes and sighed, deeply. Then he held out the paper to her. She took it and unfolded it. On one side was the rune, as she had seen already, but on the other was an arrangement of lines and dots that it took her a moment to recognize as a map… a map of the Hope River Valley.

“But this is all different,” she said, confused. “There’s the Hope River, right enough, and this black dot here should be Hopeford, but there are other dots all up and down the river here, just as big as Hopeford, and there are no cities there. Down here, the river curves in a way that’s all wrong, and all the rest of the towns and villages are different. There’s no sign of Brighthill, or Richvale, though this dot here might be the village of Bishop’s Lean…”

She looked up at her companion, the map still clutched in her hand. He looked sad and thoughtful, but he managed a smile as she met his eyes.

“Rannek,” she continued, “this is a map of a different country, isn’t it? This is a map of a country that was here a very long time ago, before Hopeford.”

He nodded. “The city on the map is not Hopeford,” he said. “Indeed, the river on the map is not the Hope River, and the crossing is not the Hope Ford, though those are the names they came to be known by. The river is the Jagetai, and the city is Khartun, and the ford next to Khartun is the Bloody Crossing, where King Aul Redblade slew his rival, Prince Tern, and took the Kingdom of Lakshyr for his own.”

He reached out and took the paper from Alaria’s hands, turning it gently over to show the rune. “This was his symbol. This was this symbol of his kingdom, and it was emblazoned on every shield and banner of his army. It was carved in blood on the map of this land. From the mountains in the south to the sea in the north, King Aul Redblade, and his sons after him, conquered their way to a bloody dynasty right across the lands we now call the Hope River Valley. This place, Hopeford City, was once the site of their capital, the great and terrible fortress city of Khartun.”

“You’re saying that this place, the place that we all call Hope River Valley, was the heart of an ancient kingdom for hundreds of years before any of the ancestors of the people who are here now even came here?”

She looked at the rune again. “And you’re saying that this rune was their symbol, so the stone in the basement of Jessica’s hotel… Rannek, what is it?”

“It’s a tomb,” he said. “Under this city, Alaria, there are many tunnels and crypts, the remains of the old buildings that the people built here. These are the places where the people buried their dead, the places where they hid their treasures… and hid themselves in times of trouble. The lands were different then, and the people different too. Khartun was a fortress city, but in the end, it was… destroyed.”

“Destroyed? Destroyed by what?”

“By the person…” Rannek leaned forward, his voice with its strange accent going hoarse and hard. “By the person whose body rests in the tomb under the hotel. The person whose bones are sealed behind the black stone. The person whose foul magic pushes out such fear into the atmosphere and the minds of any who even come near, now that his curse has come back into the world… now that he is waking up!”

Alaria frowned, her natural skepticism coming to the fore. She held a hand up. “Now just wait a minute, Stickler,” she said. “Apart from anything else, how on earth do you know this? I see this map and this rune, and I’m not accusing you of being a liar, but really? You surely can’t have gotten all this from collecting stories and lore from Hopeford? Nobody knows about all this, and yet you’ve got names and dates and a map, and the gods know what else. Who are you? How do you have any of this knowledge.?”

He held out his hand, and Alaria saw on it a large, gold ring embossed with a symbol. It was a serpent swapped around a symbol… that same symbol she’d seen on the block in the cellar and on the back of the map. The Rune of the Kingdom of Lakshyr.

“I am… the only one left,” he said. “I am a Keeper, one of nine whose task it was to watch and wait over the tomb of the final ruler of Lakshyr, the terrible King Sanuk, herald of the wet plague. He was the last king, and he became enamored of foul magic. He brought down disease and pestilence on his kingdom, and everyone in Lakshyr died. Their enemies devoured them and destroyed their cities and fortresses, but before they could take over the valley, they died too. The wet plague… It was the most terrible disease. It spread on the air, and those who contracted it died within days. None survived. King Sanuk was first, and he was interred in a humble tomb, as was the tradition of the kings of his line, in a crypt under the castle where he lived. His tomb was sealed with black star-stone, and carved with the run of his realm, but within a month of his death his whole kingdom was gone, and within two, there was only one living person left within the valley… me.”

Alaria was dumbfounded. “You?” she gasped. “But that would make you 800 years old!”

A glint of Rannek’s old humor came into his eye. “I did tell you when we first met that I was older than I looked,” he said.

“But… eight centuries? What are you, Rannek?”

“I was a man, once, a man as you see me. But the Kingdom of Lakshyr was one of discovery and science, and they found an elixir that could extend life beyond all reason. As far as we could tell, the elixir extended life without limit. If the bearer did not get himself killed by conventional means, then no disease or old age would do it. There were nine Keepers, nine people appointed to the horrible task of surviving the wet plague and the destruction of everything we’d known, and keeping watch for Sanuk’s return. But there was something wrong with the elixir. The others… they all caught the plague and died. Every one of them. I thought I was finished, too, I thought that if their elixir had failed then there was no way mine would keep me alive, and yet it did. I buried them, my eight companions, with my own hands, in graves that have been lost to the changing of the land and the passing of the centuries. But I survived.”

“You were to watch for the return of the plague king?”

“Yes,” Rannek said with vehemence. “To watch for the return of King Sanuk. He had something, some vessel of magic that was the repository of his power, and he took it with him when he was buried. I don’t know what it was, but we of the Keepers knew that his essence did not leave the world - it went into this device, whatever it was, and stored his spirit for the future, so that he might come back to trouble the world again. He was the worst of devils, Alaria, a madman, but a madman with the most immense and dangerous power the world had ever seen. Somehow, he harvested magic power from the world around him and used it to give himself strength. But whatever the magic was, it drove him insane. It was horrible, and we knew that when he came back to trouble the world again, someone had to be here to know what he was, and what the consequences would be if he was not stopped!”

“So, all these years - all these centuries - you’ve waited to see the signs?” Alaria asked.

He nodded sadly. “I didn’t know exactly where the tomb was, but I know by certain calculations that the time is soon, though I thought we still had perhaps a decade. There was some speculation that the tomb might have been in the mountains, and when you went there, I took the chance to follow you and see what passed, out in the Cold Range mountains. And then this unnatural cold came, which was a herald of his coming, and I grew afraid. Still, I didn’t know exactly where he was buried, but now that you have come to me with this tale of the room with the tombstone and the terrible fear it brings you, I have no doubt. Whether it’s fate or just good fortune that caused it, for whatever reason you are the one who has stumbled on the tomb of the old king. And the fear that comes from him is the last sign that I need. He is waking, and for the survival of the whole of the valley - and maybe for the whole world - he must be stopped.”

Chapter

Six

Alaria gave Rannek Stickler a long, careful look. She had seen madmen before - she’d even had to fight some of them. She had seen liars too and had to fight a few of them as well.

As she gazed at Rannek there was nothing in his manner that made her think he was a madman or a liar. Oh, he was unconventional, to be sure, and his tale was incredible, but the world was a wide and strange place, and few people had seen as much of it and all the wonders it could hold as Alaria Hartwood.

As she watched him, she let a small Spirit spell slip from her fingers and reach out to wrap around him. It was a spell to find out untruth, to uncover falsehood. He sat still, looking as intently at her as she was looking at him, but gave no sign that he was aware the magic was being used on him. The spell, which began blue and was to change to green if there were lies or falsehood in a person, remained blue.

“Tell me about this elixir,” Alaria asked.

Rannek gave a small, mirthless laugh. “I don’t know how to create it,” he said, “if that’s what you want to know. I think it was something to do with vampires. Oh, they existed in my time, you needn’t look so shocked. We worked with them - they weren’t all bad. One of them had a relationship with a human woman, but not a predatory one. They worked together and discovered that the blood of a vampire had strange effects on humans. There was magic involved, and other ingredients, but the result was to create a creature that had the healing properties and unnatural longevity of a vampire, without the disadvantages - no burning up in daylight, no need to kill or drink human blood, that kind of thing.”

“Sounds useful, for sure,” Alaria commented.

“It would have been great if it had worked - on all of us, I mean. It’s been a lonely story, mine, and you’re the first I’ve told it to in all these years.”

Alaria sighed. “Oh, Rannek,” she said. “I wish it hadn’t been me. I didn’t come here because I wanted to save the world, I came here for a quiet life! I want to set up a potion shop and have a quiet time with my girlfriend in my nice new Homestead, not go about saving the world from some thousand-year-old undead menace.”

“800 years old,” Rannek stated.

“Stickler by name, stickler by nature?” Alaria said resignedly.

“Sorry,” Rannek replied, and flashed her a smile, the first in a long time. “But who else can I tell? You’re here, and by fate or chance you’re the one who’s seen the rune and come to me with the information. I can’t fight King Sanuk myself - I’m just a watcher, not a fighter. I was meant to have eight companions to aid me in this decision, but it’s just me. What can I do? I have to ask you to do it.”

“How long do you think we have?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to say for sure, but still some time, I think.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He’s only just started to wake up, and he’s been asleep for 800 years. I think that he won’t come to all of a sudden. I think that the signs we’re seeing - the unnatural cold, the sense of danger and fear in the cellar - are harbingers of the coming storm, not the storm itself.”

“Then in that case I’m going to carry on my mission,” Alaria said decisively. “I’m going back east to find Neroli. Before we left, she said that she had something she needed to do, a magic work that she wanted to complete.”

“The forest, yes,” Rannek said.

“You knew?” Alaria asked in surprise.

“I did,” he said. “She told me about it. I had some quiet talk with her before we left - a remarkable person - and I asked her to explain to me what the secret was behind the plants that had been frozen and then came straight back to life. She explained to me about the Forest magic that she’d invented and explained that her goal had been to cover the Cold Range in trees and bring life to the mountains in a way it had never been before. An admirable goal, I thought. Back when this was the kingdom of Lakshyr, the mountains that are now called Cold Range were forested, and they were extremely beautiful. There is no doubt that it would be good to see that.”

Alaria considered offering for him to come with her to see the forest. She had just decided that it would be better for her to travel alone when he pre-empted her.

“Sadly, I cannot go,” he said. “If she succeeds, and if I succeed, then maybe one day I’ll travel there in peace. But now that the tomb of the mad king has been found, it’s going to be my job to stay here and watch for signs. I said earlier that I’m no fighter, but I may have some power to slow his progress toward waking. Or rather, this ring might.” He held up his gold signet ring with the image of the serpent coiled around the Sanuk rune. “There are ancient spells on this ring that… No, I ought not to tell you. It would be too dangerous. This magic is mine alone.”

Alaria nodded. “Very well. Rannek, thank you for telling me about this. I’m glad you think we have a little time. If this is what we’re going to have to do, then I want Neroli here as well. She’s more than a Forest mage. She’s a highly accomplished magic worker, and she and I found that we had a lot in common when we met at her domain in the mountains. If there’s going to be a fight with some magical creature, I want her on my side.”

“This Jessica who runs the hotel,” Rannek asked as he showed Alaria to the door. “Can she be trusted? Do you think I should tell her?”

“I trust her,” Alaria said. “And she’s been very discreet about this so far, when many people would not. I think you should tell her what you’ve told me. After all, she has a right to know what she’s dealing with. You may be able to help her, but she’s unlikely to want to let you do so if she has no idea what’s going on. Yes, go, tell her. I think that’s the right thing to do. I’ll go and get Neroli, and when we get back, we’ll deal with this past-it plague lord.”

“Thanks, Alaria,” Rannek said, looking visibly relieved. “I’ll do as you advise. Good luck on your journey, and I hope to see you back here with Neroli very soon.”

She took her leave of him and headed off into the city again. He’d given her a lot to think about, and she thought best while walking. She’d spent more time than she’d intended with him and was now getting on the road later than she had hoped, but the information was worth it. Besides, she could cover ground quickly, and she was traveling light.

The city was waking up around her as she left it, the merchants pulling carts into the central daily markets, and many people walking through the cold to get to their places of work. There were smells of cooking in the air, and the calls of children, barking dogs, and the rattle of cartwheels pulled across cobbles. The sounds were crisp and sharp and clear in the early winter cold.

It was hard to think of this city as being the location of an ancient kingdom, so different from the current one. Hearing the sounds of the populace rising to another pleasant day of their lives, it was hard to imagine that this had not always been a place of peace and prosperity.

Unfortunately, when she thought of that malignant sense of evil in the rune chamber, it was all too easy to imagine that peace being shattered.

She shuddered as she tried to banish thoughts of the cheery morning shouts of the citizens turned to screams, the homely clatter of cartwheels on cobbles turned to the clash of cold steel and the whine of arrows and the crash of catapults. Peace was a fragile thing, easily broken. If the old king’s ghost reawakened and came forth, she had no doubt that he would bring the sounds of war to this land again. How he would do it, she did not know.

She did not want to find out.

Quickening her pace as she crossed the ford bridge and headed east, she thought of her recent words to Rannek. Was she making the right choice? Should she not abandon her trip to see Neroli, and instead concentrate on immediately meeting the threat posed by the return of the ancient evil?

No, she thought, you’re doubting yourself again. Rannek was very clear - you have some time yet. There’s no need to rush in. He knows what he’s talking about - after all, it’s been his job for all these centuries to wait for this moment. If he says that we have time, then we have some time. And Neroli’s magic, and her inventiveness and talent for experimentation, will be essential.

She remembered an old maxim about never risking your entire fate unless supported by your entire forces. Neroli was part of Alaria’s forces now. She had promised to come to Brighthill and give up her reclusive life, so soon as her project in the mountains was done. Now, Alaria would hold her to that, and ask her to go further and help the people of Hopeford to avoid a terrible fate.

For what it was worth, Neroli had been involved in her own way in duping the people of Hopeford into thinking that Grozmikal was something he was not. It hadn’t done any harm to the Hopeford people - oh, it might have separated them from some of their money, but it gave them an entertaining hobby and a lot of enjoyment, and that was worth a lot. But still, Neroli had not acted particularly morally, and whatever her reasons for her conduct, Alaria thought that she’d seen Neroli turn over a new leaf in the time they’d known each other, and so she was hopeful that the former Ice Queen would be prepared to step up and help Alaria to defeat an evil undead ghost king.

She smiled to herself, pleased with that idea. Neroli was a good person, really. She was a bit mad, as might be expected of someone who had been living such a reclusive life for so long, but she was a genius too. That, of course, was another reason why she might be seen as a bit mad.

Neroli had invented an entirely new kind of magic - Forest magic - and she had found a way of powering that magic with the force unleashed by sexual energy. Alaria smiled even more when she remembered the wonderful group sex that had ensued when she, Mia, Beth, and Neroli had met for the first time.

She shifted her stride a little, becoming aware suddenly of her own clitoris and her nipples as blood and energy flushed to those erogenous zones of her body, as the memories of a sea of warm female skin and the softness and wetness of their group lovemaking flooded her mind.

Ah, it’s going to be good when all four of us get back together, she thought, and quickened her pace even further.

She’d eaten a good breakfast at the hotel that morning before her conversation with Rannek, and she had some trail rations in a pouch at her belt, so she didn’t feel the need to stop for any food until much later that day. Alaria was a seasoned traveler, and though she wasn’t as used to walking as she had perhaps once been, she’d made sure to keep in as good condition as she could during her recent weeks of relative inactivity.

As the miles slipped by, she was pleased to feel that she was still fit for long, brisk walking. The sun rose, still hidden behind the gray clouds, and then climbed to noon, and Alaria passed through the outer farming lands and into country where the villages were farther apart and the untended spaces between the fields were longer and wilder.

She marched on as the afternoon grew older and enjoyed the feeling of pressing on through the beginnings of tiredness and the desire to stop. Her own strength was something she’d always been proud of. She strode on, aware that she’d long passed the place where she, Beth, and Mia had stopped on their first day’s walking when they’d set out on this same journey. To be fair, that day they had set out much later, but still, Alaria was pleased to feel she was making fast progress. She no longer regretted her decision to travel alone. She’d always found it the fastest way.

The next day, she arose early from her makeshift camp behind a hedge at the side of the road. She was stiff from yesterday’s walking, and something had bitten her on the shoulder in the night. The bite itched unpleasantly. She took some cooling unguent from a vial on her belt and rubbed it on the wound, feeling better.

Before dropping off to sleep last night, Alaria had called to mind the image of Neroli, stripping naked and lying back on a bed while Beth and Mia pleasured her with their mouths and tongue. Alaria had pleasured herself, using her fingers, and using a tentacle, slick with the lubricating juices it produced, to tease her ass.

The orgasm she’d brought herself to had been spectacular, and she realized as she lay dropping off to sleep afterward that it was important to keep having regular orgasms, even when she was away from her partners. Mia had only relatively recently introduced her to the concept of sex and had helped her to come to understand the vast capacity that her own body had for pleasure.

In the years before that, she’d been a fairly hard-bitten and - if she was totally honest with herself - a fairly grumpy and uptight person. She’d been effective at adventuring, but she’d been far from what you could have called happy, and from day to day in her life, she had few real pleasures.

Now, she couldn’t help but wonder how much that had been due to the repression of her sexuality. To keep herself relaxed and happy while she was on the road, she resolved to make time for self-pleasuring. Soon enough, she would be back with others who could join her for lovemaking, but for now, he had plenty she could explore on her own.

Chapter

Seven

When she’d set out, Alaria had known that she’d make better time than she had on her previous journey, because she was traveling light, and traveling alone. Still, she had not expected to move this fast. By the end of the second day, she was within sight of the woodland where they’d fought and where she had retrieved the Heart of the Forest (unwittingly, as it turned out, on behalf of Grozmikal.)

She pushed herself to go a little further, passing the woods and then, after thinking about it for a moment, skirting round the outside of Nearwood, the village that had shown her and her friends such hospitality beforehand. Though she wouldn’t have minded seeing the villagers again, she didn’t feel like talking that night. She was tired and wanted to camp out under the stars again.

The cold had eased as she’d traveled east. This was very strange, since she’d been climbing steadily toward the mountains the whole way. She couldn’t explain it, but there it was - she’d have expected it to get colder, but it had gotten warmer. When she got up onto the long moorland plateau that was the last stage before the mountains, she looked up and saw the stars gleaming from the sky above, the great thick band of the Gods Path gathered in the center, and countless other stars thick in the sky all around.

It was flat up here on the plateau, and there was nowhere to shelter really, so Alaria just slipped off the path and into the heather. The heather was as tall as her knees out here, and she was able to snuggle down into it and drop straight to sleep.

In the morning, she woke with the first gleam of the day. She hadn’t slept long, and she was yawning as she bundled up her gear and got ready to carry on. The morning light was gray and faint, and the moorland was covered in thick mist that obscured her view of the mountains, all except the whitened peaks with their permanent dusting of snow.

She drank deeply from her waterskin and set off, hitching her pack up and enjoying the feeling of the stiffness from yesterday’s walking clearing from her legs as she got moving again.

The light grew steadily brighter, and the mountains drew steadily closer, but the mist didn’t clear. It was only as the sun finally climbed over the peaks and shone down into the moorland that the thick gray fog began to break up and scatter.

And that was when Alaria saw what she’d come to see. That was when she got her first glimpse of Neroli’s forest.

She stopped, staring up at the mountains, now only a mile or two away. She’d been here only about two months before, with her companions, and the mountains had been impassable, ugly gray faces of jagged rock with nothing to relieve their vast emptiness but the shadows of valleys high up, and the occasional flash of a waterfall far away.

Now, their entire surface was covered in trees.

There must have been a hundred thousand of them - maybe more. They covered the slopes in a single massive green blanket, and Alaria gazed in wonder at the change. From the slopes of the mountains, a rich scent flowed, sweet pine sap, clean air, and the smell of growth.

“Beautiful, ain’t it?” said a voice from behind her, and she jumped, for she had been unaware of anyone approaching.

A glance showed her an old man, weatherbeaten and with a grizzled gray beard and small, thoughtful eyes. He was dressed like a shepherd, even down to the long, crooked stick in his left hand, but she could see something else under his green robe - the handle of a short sword. There was no sign of anyone else nearby.

“You mean the wood?” she said. “Aye, it is beautiful. And it’s new, too, I’d say.”

The man grinned. “New, aye, that it is. New, and magical.”

“What do you think is the reason for it?” she probed, though she herself knew well where the wood had come from.

“Why, everybody around here knows the reason, no doubt about that,” the shepherd said. “It’s Grozmikal, that’s the reason. He’s defeated the witch of the mountains, her that called herself the Ice Queen, and now that she’s dead, the trees are able to return. I’m from one of the mountain villages over yonder,” he gestured vaguely away toward the southeast of where they now stood, “and we know that it’s Grozmikal we have to thank. Are you going up into the forest to have a look, are you?”

Alaria made a noncommittal gesture. “I may,” she said. “If it’s a magical wood, it’ll be worth seeing.”

“Well, if you do, make sure you give thanks to Grozmikal!”

He turned away and wandered off down the path away from the mountains, singing quietly to himself. Alaria shook her head in amazement. Grozmikal defeating the Ice Queen, indeed. Well, she supposed she had only herself to blame. After all, it had been her idea to try to resolve the situation between Grozmikal and Neroli without damaging Grozmikal’s reputation. He had presented himself as an adventurer, as the savior of the mountain villages, and he had made it known that it was his ambition to defeat Neroli, the Ice Queen of the mountains. With all of that in place, it was not unreasonable for the locals to think that he was the cause of any beneficial thing that happened for them.

She sighed. The consequences of success, she thought, wryly, and, casting a glance over her shoulder at the rapidly dwindling figure of the singing shepherd, she rolled her eyes again and set off swiftly, headed in the direction of the mountains.

It didn’t take her long to cover the last few miles. When she reached the deep valley that ran along the front wall of the mountains called the Cold Range, she found that it was not only the mountains that were now forested.

When she had stood here previously, she had looked down on a barren, unpleasant landscape, a bare prospect of stunted grasses and dark lakes in the bottom of the valley. Now, she looked down upon a beautiful young woodland of birch, beech, ash, and oak. Even with the sun hidden behind the grey clouds, the trees shone green as if they were lit from inside by an internal light. It was a beautiful sight. Birds flitted here and there through the canopy, and a warm green smell like a summer meadow drifted up on the rising air.

Alaria stepped down into the valley with pleasure, and with no trace of the trepidation that had marked her previous trip. She found that the path she had walked before was still there. Apparently, the magically created forest had respected the existing path. Alaria looked around herself as she walked. There was no sign that the trees were magical. It looked like any other young wood in summertime. When she got to the other side of the valley and began to climb, the trees did not change, and indeed the whole walk right up to the narrow mountain pass through which she would pass to reach Neroli’s domain was forested with a thick display of beautiful new growth.

She reached the entrance passage that had, on her previous visit, led into the throne room – as they had thought of it as at the time - of the Ice Queen. Instead of a cold light burning above the entranceway, now there was a growth of flowering vines that almost concealed the doorway. They were covered in huge white and purple flowers that gave off a sweet, heady scent.

The changes she saw here were all to the good. There was no suggestion of malice, evil, or threat, and that could certainly not have been said on her previous visit. Feeling pleased and looking forward to her encounter with Neroli, Alaria entered the passageway and walked swiftly along it, up the stairs and round the corner, and into Neroli’s domain.

“Alaria!” said the familiar voice of her friend. “You made it! I’m so pleased! I was just about to give up on you. I was actually going to try to finish the work myself today and head out toward Hopeford and Brighthill tomorrow. Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come. It will be so much easier with you here.”

Alaria had been gazing at the chamber in astonishment. Here, more than anywhere else, the change in the region was apparent. It had been an austere stone chamber before, but now it felt like a natural cave, damp from a warm spring that splashed out of one end of the chamber and gathered in a deep, mossy pool before running off through a natural channel and disappearing through a crack in the wall near the door. The walls and floor were carpeted with bright green moss, and in the top left hand corner of the chamber there was a wide crack which let in the sunshine from high above.

“This is lovely!” Alaria said, turning to look in the direction where Neroli’s voice had come from. “I can’t believe how much it has all changed. This is all the result of your forest magic?”

“It is,” Neroli’s voice said.

Alaria looked around for her, but still couldn’t see her. To the right of the chamber, in the direction where her bed chamber had been previously, there was a thick growth of ivy and vines hanging down from the ceiling. From this, there came a rustling noise, and Neroli stepped out into the open.

“I’m the Ice Queen no more,” she said, holding out her arms and doing a slow turn so that Alaria could see her full glory. “I’m the Queen of Forest magic now.”

The change that had come over Neroli was as impressive - if not quite as complete - as the change that had taken place in the rest of the landscape. She was still recognizably the same person, and the same could not be said for the valley, the mountain, or indeed this chamber in which they now stood. But while she was still the same person, she looked very different. Her body had filled out, for one thing. Previously, she had been a very slim woman, not unhealthily so, but aside from her rounded hips and breasts everything about her had been narrow and long. Now, her curves had filled out. Her breasts and hips were bigger, but so were her thighs and her arms. Her face had always been round, but now it, too, had filled out. Her hair was the red-gold of summer straw, and the big, bouncing curls had grown long and tumbled about her shoulders and down across her light, revealing forest green dress.

The skin of her face and hands had darkened. Nearly ice white they had been before, but now they were the rich tanned color of a woman who spent a lot of time outdoors.

She looked so full of health and life that Alaria felt a sudden pull in her chest that was more than lust. Neroli seemed to feel something similar, and she suddenly ran a few steps forward through the chamber, her bare feet silent as they padded through the thick moss carpet of the chamber.

Neroli gasped as Alaria caught her up in her arms, and in a moment their mouths had locked in a passionate kiss. Neroli’s mouth tasted of honey and apples and forest fruits, and her skin was soft and warm under Alaria’s hands. She was wearing only a light dress, and Alaria could feel the curves of her, and the warmth of her body through the fabric. She smelled clean and fresh, and her hair was soft and gave off a minty smell as Alaria ran her hands through it.

“Oh, gods, it feels good to be near you,” Neroli gasped, and Alaria, feeling the confidence that came with her own practice and self-knowledge gained in the last year under Mia’s tutelage, went with her instincts and laid Neroli down in the moss right where they had met in the middle of the chamber.

Neroli made little noises of pleasure as Alaria pulled her thin dress up and over her head, leaving her naked on her back on the thick carpet of mossy floor. All she wore was a green crystal on a chain around her neck that Alaria recognized at the Heart of the Forest. Neroli’s hands moved deftly at the belt that held Alaria’s cloak closed, and with a few swift movements worked the catch and had the belt off and flung it away.

Alaria felt Neroli’s hands inside her clothes, and, pausing for a moment, she reached down and worked the leather clasps and the laces on her boots and on her light leather armor in record time. She shrugged out of her cloak and tossed her armor aside, kicked her boots off and undid the clasp on her pants.

Laughing, Neroli sat up and tugged Alaria’s pants off, then grabbed the light undershirt she wore and pulled that up over Alaria’s head as well.

The atmosphere of the cave was warm and damp, and the moss was cool against her skin as she and Neroli lay down together, naked and glorying in each other’s bodies. Neroli’s hands were all over her. She explored Alaria’s body hungrily with her lips and tongue, sucking on her nipples and licking the warm space between her breasts, nibbling on her shoulders and then dropping her head to cover her clitoris with her mouth and start licking it with her tongue.

Alaria lay back, enjoying it for a moment, then shifted. Moving swiftly, she reversed her position so that she could pleasure Neroli with her mouth at the same time as Neroli pleasured her.

Neroli gave a muffled squeal of delight and opened her legs to let Alaria get close, and then the two women were locked into giving each other pleasure. Alaria could feel the crystal Neroli wore about her neck pressing into her skin. It was fixed in place between them, slick with the sweat that now rushed from them as they exerted themselves in the warm chamber. Fleetingly, Alaria wondered if the Heart of the Forest needed to be put in the crystal vibrator before it could take power from the energy released at the point of a very good orgasm.

She hoped not. The power taken up by the crystal was equivalent to how strong the orgasm was, and this one was about to be very, very good.

It didn’t take long for either of them. Neroli had - as far as Alaria knew - been up here on her own for five weeks, and for a woman of such a voracious sexual appetite as her, that was a long time. Alaria had been without an orgasm for only a day and a night, but for her, that was long enough.

It was the sounds Neroli made that set Alaria over the edge, as well as the finger she thrust inside Alaria in one smooth movement, stimulating the special spot inside, just behind her clitoris. The two women rocked into a massive simultaneous orgasm, making the cave walls ring with the echoes of their shouts of pleasure.

As they rolled away from each other, laughing, onto their backs in the soft moss, the Heart of the Forest glowed as bright as a star.

Chapter

Eight

“You know,” Neroli said a little while later, as they reclined together in the warm, fresh water of the natural hot spring in the corner of the cave. “I hadn’t planned that, but it’s perfect, really. I couldn’t have asked for better.”

They were stretched out opposite each other, their backs to the edges of the pool, reclining with their arms stretched out, their backs and shoulders pillowed against the mossy sides of the pool.

Neroli’s hair had darkened with the damp of the water, and the green Heart of the Forest gem glowed steadily on its chain between her breasts, which were submerged just past the nipple in the warm water. Alaria’s feet played with Neroli’s under the water.

“What d’you mean, you hadn’t planned that? The sex? I’m glad you enjoyed it…”

Neroli chuckled. “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I did enjoy it, of course - how could I not? But I meant this.” She touched the gem at her chest. “It couldn’t have been more perfect for this.”

“Ah, I see,” Alaria said. “The charging of the gem.”

“I’d wondered if you’d bring Mia and Beth with you again,” she said, “but to tell the truth I had a feeling you wouldn’t, and I’ve learned to listen to my feelings. I have a kind of premonition ability, I’ve realized. I think it comes from my spirit magic. Anyway, I’ve been saving myself up for you, because I knew that it would be good, and because I needed a good large dose of pleasure energy for the crystal before setting it in place and leaving it to power the forest’s growth. The more intense the pleasure, the more power goes into the crystal, as you know, and so it was important that the final dose was really good. It was, and wearing it on my chest like this, having it between us the way we did, meant that the crystal was able to benefit from both our pleasures, at the same time. And so, as I say, it couldn’t have been more perfect.”

Alaria laughed, and Neroli flashed her a mischievous smile. “You’ll be glad to know I’ve given up my creation of Spirit creatures and golems,” she said. “I know you never liked that, and I thought about it after you left… I think I see your point. There’s true Spirit substance trapped in the creations, and as a mage, I have to admit that Spirit does have consciousness. We can use Spirit to power quick spells, but the creation of permanent or semi-permanent sentient creatures is… immoral. There are some creations I still rely on Spirit for and can’t get rid of yet, but unless it’s essential, I’m going to try and not use it to create creatures.”

“You’ve kept your Spirit vibrator, though?” Alaria asked, a little anxiously.

“Oh, yes,” Neroli said. “You didn’t disapprove of that, did you?”

“Certainly not,” Alaria said seriously. “A most admirable use of power.”

“Why thank you,” Neroli said with mock seriousness. “But you’re right, that device used a Spirit spell as the initial motive force, but the kinetic energy that makes it vibrate isn’t based on trapped Spirit.”

“It’s a wonderful application of Spirit kinetics,” Alaria said enthusiastically. “You know I studied at the Castle of the Ancient Heart, and at Malgour’s Temple?”

“You studied in Daithun?” Neroli asked with sudden interest. “Under Master Hellebore?”

Alaria nodded. Deerhorn Mountain in Daithun was where Master Hellebore’s Castle of the Ancient Heart was located, were far away from Hope River Valley, about as far as it was possible to get and still be in the known world. It was there that she’d learned Healing magic, and at Malgour’s Temple, not far away, where she had learned Spirit spells.

Neroli laughed. “A small world it is, after all,” she said. “I studied with Master Hellebore too. Master Hell-of-a-bore, we used to call him… until he overheard us one day, of course.”

“But he was a good teacher, don’t you think?” Alaria asked.

Neroli looked away, then looked back, a new resolution in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “But you know, until this day, I’ve never admitted it, not even to myself.”

Alaria gave her a questioning look.

“I was a rubbish student,” Neroli continued. “I always found it easier to blame the masters for my failures, and I always said that I could have learned healing magic if I’d wanted to, but the Master made it so tiresome that I couldn’t be bothered. The truth is, I couldn’t be bothered anyway, and no amount of good teaching would have changed that.”

Neroli sighed. “I bet you learned well, though,” she added, sounding a little jealous.

Alaria nodded. “I worked really hard at it, and didn’t have much fun, but yes, I learned it. I can do it, but I’m not that great at it. I’m no prodigy, I just worked really hard.”

Neroli looked a bit sad. “I am something of a prodigy,” she admitted, “but I never managed the other part, the working hard part. Hard work without talent can yield results in time, but talent - even genius - without hard work…”

“You’ve had results, though,” Alaria said encouragingly. “In your Forest magic, and I’ve seen some amazing things from your hand in Spirit magic. I may disapprove of the use of the golem spell, because it was banned, but the fact remains that no one knows how to do it - but yet you seem to have been able to.”

Neroli grinned. “Yes. Yes, that was rather good, wasn’t it?” she said. “And I did work hard at that. I have to give myself credit for it. I’ve just never been able to work hard at something unless it really grabs me, you know? It means I’ve done well in some areas, but in others I’m completely lacking.”

“I know what you mean,” Alaria said, though she didn’t add that it was not through personal experience. She had never been a person who had needed to be enthusiastic about a topic before studying it. If something needed done, she did it, whether she wanted to or not. But she knew from experience what Neroli was talking about. She had seen plenty of people in her time who, like Neroli, were only able to apply themselves if the topic interested them in the moment.

It may perhaps have led to less impressive overall outcomes in the long term, but it at least they were having more fun.

“So, you studied at the Castle of the Ancient Heart too, did you?” Neroli said. “And at the Temple of Malgour. You must be a good Spirit mage as well, then.”

“It was always my favorite kind of magic,” Alaria said. “Yeah, I’m pretty good at it, if I’m being honest. It always seemed like the form of magic with the most potential. There’s a lot that I can’t do, though. For example, the ability to induce fear, create visions, and see from afar - you did all those things when me and my crew were coming out to see you the last time, but I have no idea how.”

Neroli grinned. “Yes, the telepathy - you didn’t approve of that either, did you?”

“It felt like a violation,” Alaria said. “No one should push themselves into the mind of another without consent.”

“Ah, but what about with consent?”

“That’s another matter,” Alaria conceded. “But you didn’t have my consent then.”

Neroli shrugged. “I confess it,” she said, “but I thought you were my enemy at that point, since you came with Grozmikal, who I hated. I was a bit mad then, I think, but I feel better now. It was something to do with the loss of the Heart of the Forest, you see. I had put so much effort and hope into what I would do with the power in the crystal, when I lost it - when it was stolen, I should say - I felt like many years of work had been wasted, and I lost a lot of hope for my own future.”

“That’s enough to make anybody act in ways they might regret,” Alaria said with sympathy.

Neroli looked closely at her, tilting her head from one side to the other, then smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “And believe me, telepathy magic is not that difficult, and with consent it could indeed be incredibly useful.”

“It’s really not that difficult?” Alaria said. “Why, I thought it was impossible if a person wasn’t born with the innate skill.”

“That’s what we’ve been taught, and that might even be what the people who told us so believed, but I don’t think I was born with the innate talent. I certainly have no reason to believe that I was, and remember, when I talked to you inside your mind, you were able to reply, and I was able to hear you. And so, either both of us had a latent ability for telepathy that we did not know about, or it’s possible without being born to it, you see?”

“I do see!” Alaria said, impressed. “Tell me about the vision you sent to us on the road, the drowned woman who spoke your words to us and pushed out such a powerful atmosphere of terror around her.”

Neroli narrowed her eyes. “What is it?” she said.

Alaria didn’t understand the question. “What’s what?” she said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“There’s something else. You’re asking the question about the magic that I did, but it reminds you of something else, something that troubles you. Something about an atmosphere of terror?”

The room under the hotel. The rune carved into the slab of black star stone. The waking ghost of the ancient plague king.

By the gods, this woman is perceptive, Alaria thought. I hadn’t even fully realized that I’d been thinking of that, but of course I had. In truth, she did wonder if there was some connection between the magic that Neroli had done and the magic that brought about the aura of fear from the ancient king’s tomb. Was it the remnant of some kind of fear inducing spirit spell that brought about the terrible sensation of being in the room?

“You’re right,” Alaria said quietly. “There is something else, something I wanted to ask you about. Something that has just come to light on my journey here.”

Neroli nodded, looking concerned. She seemed to see the seriousness of whatever it was that Alaria wanted to say.

“The, uh, the magic that sent the illusion of the drowned woman to you was a simple enough thing,” she blurted out suddenly. “And the adding of the voice and the fear aura is just a case of bolting on those spells to the initial illusion… Really, it’s quite simple, and I can show you how it’s done. You would know how to do it yourself if they had taught it, but I have no idea why they didn’t. Maybe they didn’t know how. A lot of my magical experimentation has come from that kind of thing – the adding together of different spells to create new and innovative combinations. But really, it’s nothing important, and I can show it to you on the way back.”

“You still mean to come back to Brighthill with me, then?” Alaria asked.

Neroli looked suddenly troubled. “If you still want me to?” she asked. In the moment she spoke those words, something changed in her. Her expression changed, and she looked worried. Alaria was seeing her insecurities showing themselves in a way she had not seen them before. Previously, Neroli’s insecurities had manifested through her behavior; she had acted out in evil ways, tormenting Grozmikal, creating golems, and using her magic to frighten the locals, even if she never intended to do them any actual harm.

Now, her insecurities were coming out in a different way. Alaria saw in her eyes the rejected child, hounded out from her village because of her sexuality, hounded out from the magical study institutions because of her experimentation in new forms of power, rejected, and now expecting rejection again after having allowed herself to trust.

“I would have begged you to come back with me if you’d changed your mind,” Alaria said, the words coming from her in a rush. “I’ve not stopped thinking about you since we left you, and the others have seen it in me as well. I want you to come back to Brighthill with us more than anything, and… Well, now I have discovered that there is another reason it’s essential for you to come back, beyond just my own desire.”

Neroli relaxed again, and Alaria saw the play of emotions across her face. Neroli saw how her own insecurity and fear of rejection had manifested in the moment, and she saw also how it was not necessary now, with Alaria, to be afraid of being pushed away.

She smiled. “I’m glad,” she said in a husky voice. “When I first came up here to the mountains, attitudes in the world at large were rather different from what they are today. I didn’t expect ever to be able to come back down to the world and be allowed to just be who I am, but you’ve shown me that it’s something that is possible. I’m scared, but I’m willing to try it.”

“We won’t let you come to any harm,” Alaria promised. “And you’ll like Brighthill. It’s warm. Well, it’s normally warm.”

“Normally?” Neroli asked. Alaria nodded.

Neroli frowned. “There’s that thing again,” she said. “There’s something going on back in your home region, something that frightens you. You need my help with it?”

Alaria nodded. “There is,” she said, and then the whole story came out. She told Neroli everything from the start - the unnatural cold, the request of Jessica Sola that Alaria come and look at something in the basement, then the feeling of fear, the rune, and the terrifyingly illuminating conversation with Rannek Stickler.

Neroli sat still listening closely throughout the telling. When Alaria was done, she sat thinking for a few minutes, then spoke quietly.

“That explains something else,” she said, “something that I was wondering about, but had just put down to some environmental phenomenon. I tried to spy on you,” she admitted with a shy smile. “I tried to push my ability to see things at a distance further than I ever have before. Usually, my abilities are very good and can extend even past the forest next to Nearwood Village, but this time I could not even get beyond the borders of my own woodland. As soon as I pushed my view beyond that, it was obscured by dense, white, freezing fog. If I tried to push the fog aside, I was assailed by this terrible feeling of fear and doubt. I stopped trying.”

“You think that’s something to do with the rise of the plague king?”

She shrugged. “It seems likely, doesn’t it? All these other strange effects - the fear, the unnatural cold - can be attributed to his reawakening. Why not this? It would make sense for his magic to baffle any kind of farseeing spell. That could be a defense against the kind of magic that his enemies used in the old days.”

“That makes sense,” Alaria said, “though I would be wary of jumping to conclusions too quickly.”

Neroli’s smile held a lot of hidden meaning as she stood from the tub. “There, you and I differ,” she said. “I do jump to conclusions. If the conclusion makes sense, I run with it. I don’t agree with the principle of doubt by default. I know a lot of magic tuition is based on that idea, but I think it holds us back. We need instinct, intuition, and quick action if we are not to become stagnant in our practice.”

She was breathtakingly beautiful as she stood to her full height, the warm water running down her skin, rippling between her breasts and flowing over her belly and her broad hips and strong thighs. She put her hands on her hips and looked down at Alaria, basking in the other woman’s admiration.

“It’s nice to be appreciated,” she said with sincerity. “It’s been a very long time since anyone has looked at me like that.”

“I could look at you like that all day,” Alaria said, and she meant it.

“Well, well, it sounds like we don’t have time for that,” Neroli countered. “I think we should place the crystal here in the chamber and then be on our way without delay. From the sounds of it, your undead plague king might decide to make his presence felt any day. Anyway, I’ve been looking forward to this journey. Come on, we have one last thing to do, and then I can say goodbye to my mountain dwelling for good.”

Chapter

Nine

Neroli walked to the middle of the cave and picked up her green dress from where it lay on the floor. It was damp from the moss, and she was dripping wet from the pool, but she threw the garment over her shoulders anyway. Alaria watched in surprise as Neroli pulled the damp dress down over her body without ceremony, then flipped the Heart of the Forest out of her bosom.

Alaria rose from the pool more slowly, picking up her clothing and drying herself before pulling in on. Clearly, neroli was about to set the Heart of the Forest in place. Alaria expected some impressive magic, but Neroli just looked at her and said, “Are you ready to leave?”

“No,” Alaria said, “but I can be in a minute. You don’t want to do anything more? Pack, or…”

Neroli dismissed her concerns with a shake of the head and a wave of one elegant hand. “Dress,” she commanded peremptorily. “Once you’re ready, we’ll go.”

Alaria dressed, as quickly as she could, though she was surprised at Neroli’s haste. Once she was ready, she hitched her pack on her back and stood by the door.

“Ready now?” Neroli said.

“Well, yes,” Alaria replied. “But…”

Neroli interrupted. “Move to the door. Once I place this, we’ll want to exit this chamber pretty quickly.”

Alaria was confused. Neroli was still wet from her soak in the pool, and he was wearing almost nothing, just the lightest green dress that didn’t even come down past her knees.

“But…” Alaria began to object.

“Move to the door,” Neroli said. “Let me worry about me.”

Alaria shrugged and moved over to the exit. She waited to see what Neroli would do. To her surprise, her new lover didn’t perform any elaborate ceremony or ritual. Instead, she just held the Heart of the Forest up and yanked it from its chain, then lobbed it as hard as she could into the back of the cave.

“Run!” Neroli shouted and dashed past Alaria and out of the chamber.

Alaria didn’t need any extra encouragement. As soon as the crystal was free of its chain, it fired out a blinding green light, and the whole chamber began to shake. Neroli was very fast, haring down the steps and along the corridor at a dead sprint with Alaria close behind her. From the chamber above, they heard a rumbling, booming noise, and the whole corridor trembled as if the very earth was a living thing that was about to wake up.

“What in the…?” Alaria began.

“I’ll tell you all about it once we’re out!” Neroli shouted back.

Alaria saw the sense in this and saved her breath for running. They exited the tunnel at speed and turned right, dashing down the path through the trees. As they ran, Alaria saw a blinding flash of light from behind them and felt herself shoved forward by the shockwave of an explosion. She kept her feet and kept running, and so did Neroli, and in a few minutes they were far enough away that Neroli seemed to think it was safe enough to stop.

They both stood with their hands on their knees for a moment, panting from their sprint and laughing.

“That was ridiculous!” Alaria laughed. “What in the world…?

“I was just setting the crystal,” Neroli shrugged, but her face was mischievous. “I told you it would be dramatic.”

“I didn’t think it would be that dramatic. Honestly, I’ve never seen magic happening like that before, not outside of combat spells at least.”

“Come on,” Neroli said, “let’s walk while we talk.”

They headed down the path at an easier pace. “What does the magic do, then?” Alaria asked.

“Look around,” Neroli said, gesturing to the trees. “Can’t you see it?”

Alaria looked and found that she could see. To her eyes, magic was a visible thing, something that shone through and showed itself to her if she looked in the right way. On her way up, she’d been surprised to find that these woods did not seem to be particularly magical, but now it was different. As she gazed around, she could see the green tendrils of magic power flowing up through the trunks of the trees to the tips of the branches and out through the leaves. The Forest magic trickled down like a fine mist of rain back to the ground, a self-perpetuating loop of magical energy running from the ground to the top of the trees and back again.

“This magic is from the crystal?”

Neroli nodded. “It takes a great deal of energy to set the reaction going. That’s why I had to create the Heart of the Forest crystal and charge it with as much energy as I could manage. I needed the most immense burst of power to initiate the reaction, and you see why it was advisable for us not to be in the chamber when that power was first released.”

“I do see,” Alaria agreed. She glanced back up the mountain. “So, the energy is released from the crystal up in that cave, and it flows out into the world through the fabric of the mountain and into the trees?”

“Exactly,” said Neroli. “Very good! It’s simple magic really, just the utilization of extreme force. A vast amount of power directed through a vector which is larger than anybody would ever have thought of using before.”

“The mountain?” Alaria said.

“Right. When we were taught magic, we were taught that vectors were things like wooden staffs, swords, or our hands, or small things like jewelry, crystals, and the like. All those are useful, of course, but the more power you are dealing with, the larger the vector that’s required, and it becomes seriously large once you get to the level of forces released through sexual energy.”

“Really?” Alaria said. “I had no idea that the energies involved were so large.”

“Huge,” Neroli confirmed. “Once you get them going, that is. At first, the energy is small, but you build and build, adding new energy on top of new energy, and it comes to a point where the energy you’re storing up in a crystal is enormous, and needs a vector the size of a mountain before it’ll work. Anything smaller would just break under the pressure of such huge forces.”

“I see,” Alaria said, nodding thoughtfully. “It’s a remarkable discovery.”

Neroli looked pleased. “There’s a sexless dryness to the way magic is studied and taught, I think. If mages were a bit freer, if they allowed themselves to have more fun, I think it would be a very different practice. I’m sure mages do have sex now and again, but I never met any at the academies who seemed like they were particularly sexual beings.”

“And it’s very much discouraged at the academies, among the students.”

“Discouraged?” Neroli snorted. “That’s putting it mildly. In my experience, anybody with a sexual thought is outright banned from continuing. How you managed to become so sexy and accomplished, I don’t know.”

Alaria laughed and put an arm around Neroli’s shoulders. “I’ll tell you this much, I sure didn’t learn it at any of the institutions where I studied.”

“No?” Neroli said. “Who taught you, then?”

“Mia,” Alaria said. “She awakened it in me for the first time. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I had never had sex with anyone, not even with myself, until this year. It was Mia who taught me how.”

Neroli pulled back and looked at her, disbelieving. “You’re joking. You didn’t even know you were into women?”

“I didn’t know I was into anyone,” Alaria said. “But once Mia helped me to understand what was going on with me, I got a lot of practice.”

“Wow,” Neroli said. “Now there’s an example of talent combined with hard work bringing good results, right?”

Laughing, they carried on down the hill into the valley.

When they got to the other side of the the valley, Neroli stopped and looked out.

“I’ve not seen anything but forest for weeks,” she said. She turned and looked up at the mountain, smiling proudly like an artist who steps back to admire a painting from a distance. “It is good, isn’t it?” she said.

“It’s excellent,” Alaria said. “I’m amazed you managed to cover such a large area in so short a time.”

“Another self-perpetuating piece of magic,” Neroli explained. “I didn’t cover the whole area myself, not at all. I cast a small spell at the entrance to the cave, and guided its spread, though pretty roughly. It has good results.”

“Self-perpetuating magic,” Alaria said, shaking her head in amazement. “It’s an entirely new concept for me.”

“As it is for everyone,” Neroli said. “As far as I can tell, I invented the idea. It’s another application of the concept of layering. You were impressed by the creepy vision that I sent you while you were on your way to see me that first time, but that is a simple application of the same technique - several spells layered on top of each other to create something new. To create a self-perpetuating spell, you layer the same spell on top of itself over and over again, creating a chain. Each spell has its effect, but it also generates another instance of the same spell. That’s why you need so much energy to power them, because you need to feed in enough energy at the start to run the whole chain. The more energy you can put in at the beginning, the longer the spell will run.”

“But something like that drowned woman illusion, you weren’t using sexual energy to power that, were you?”

“No, no,” Neroli said. “That was just a traditional set of Spirit spells, the only innovative thing being that they were layered together. That kind of thing doesn’t need huge amounts of energy. It can be done with the simple, regular mana pool reserves. I have a fairly well developed internal resource of traditional magical energy, too.”

“Of course,” Alaria said quietly, rather overwhelmed by all of this information.

A lot of what Neroli was saying contradicted so many things she had thought set in stone about how magic was done. Unlike any other magic worker she had ever encountered, Neroli tossed aside tradition, dogma, and established technique. She discussed her new ways of doing things as if they were nothing major, no big deal, and yet Alaria was blown away by how Neroli had taken the building blocks of magic and created an entirely new structure of technique and application.

“You’ve revolutionized magic, you realize that?” she said.

Neroli glanced at her. “I’m not sure,” she said with a shrug. “I’m doing it differently for myself, but does that count as revolutionizing magic? I don’t think so. Once other people start doing things in a more open minded way, start experimenting and using my techniques to discover their own ways of doing things, then I might say that what I have done has revolutionized magic. As far as I can see, all I have done is come up with some very personal techniques of my own. Can somebody who invents a new musical instrument but doesn’t show it to anybody be said to have revolutionized music? I don’t think so. If I ever have the opportunity to teach, then, maybe, I will be able to revolutionize magic.”

With these words, Neroli turned away from the forested mountain and, with a resolution and decisiveness which Alaria was beginning to realize were core elements of her character, she strode off along the moorland path, not even glancing back once.

They got about two miles down the road, walking in companionable silence, mostly, before it hit Alaria that Neroli wasn’t wearing any shoes. She had run out of the cave in bare feet and her light dress, and now she was marching along the stony moorland road under the gray sky, in air that nobody could call warm, in nothing but the same damp clothes she’d set out in.

“Neroli,” Alaria said, stopping suddenly. “Aren’t you freezing?”

“Eh?” Neroli asked, looking sharply at her. “What do you mean? I told you I don’t like the Ice Queen thing.”

Neroli looked hurt. Clearly, she’d been deep in thought and Alaria had disturbed her from those thoughts.

“No, no,” Alaria assured her. “I didn’t mean that. But just… well, your clothes!” She gestured helplessly toward Neroli’s bare feet. “You’re not wearing any shoes, and that dress is so light! It’s cold, I don’t understand how you aren’t uncomfortable.”

Neroli glanced down uncomprehendingly at her feet, then seemed to finally realize what Alaria was on about. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Sorry! I was miles away when you spoke, thought you were referring to my unfortunate history as the Ice Queen. No, I’m not cold, or at least I wasn’t until you pointed out that I should be. Part of the benefit of Forest magic, that. Just a minute, I think you’re right, I should dress myself more sensibly.”

Alaria looked around, as if expecting Neroli to produce a wardrobe full of clothes from somewhere, but Neroli just held up her hands into the air and Alaria felt the rush of spirit magic flowing through the air. Neroli’s hands glowed blue, and as she had once before, Alaria tried to follow the pattern of Neroli’s spell, but it was too deft and subtle for her to be able to see.

Alaria blinked. Neroli was dressed as a traveler - a very fashionable traveler. She had thick leather boots with good soles that were lined with fur at the top. They looked supple and supportive. She had a good, fur-lined cloak of dark forest green, and a woolen jerkin and pants underneath. She even sported a long, thin sword at her belt.

She held out her arms. “Better?” she said. “It certainly feels better.”

“It looks good,” Alaria said, stunned by the transformation. “It looks amazing… but how did you do it? I’ve never heard of anybody manifesting clothes with spirit magic before.”

“Not surprised to hear it,” Neroli said. “Do you think the sword is a bit much?”

Alaria shook her head. “No, I think it looks good, and I think it’s wise to have one even though these roads are fairly peaceful. Do you know how to use it?”

“Oh, no, it’s purely decorative. I don’t even know which end is which. If we run into any trouble, I will use my magic to deal with it, not a sword. That’s one skill I never learned how to use. Not like you.”

“Would you like to learn bladework?” Alaria asked. “I could teach you.”

Neroli nodded. “I could do. In exchange, I’ll teach you how to layer spirit spells together. Sounds good?”

Alaria nodded. It did sound good. Neroli was a marvel at magic, and Alaria wanted to learn what she had to teach. Whatever Neroli might think, her innovations were revolutionary. If Alaria could learn to apply Neroli’s discoveries to her own magic, it would change what she did beyond recognition.

And whatever happened, if the undead plague king woke, Neroli’s innovations were going to become very useful indeed.

Chapter

Ten

Alaria had expected the journey back to take longer. For reasons she couldn’t quite place, she had imagined Neroli would be a slow traveler, someone who would need a lot of rest time, and who would quickly become footsore.

Nothing could have been further from the truth, much to Alaria’s delight. Neroli stomped down the road with a steady pace that matched Alaria’s own, and though she groaned and stretched out her legs by the fire when they camped, she never slowed nor complained of discomfort on the road. When Alaria asked her gently on their second day out from the mountains how she was doing physically, she smiled and said she was doing just fine.

They passed Nearwood Village and walked through the forest there, then traversed the wildlands and got back to the farmlands east of Hopeford in record time. Alaria had never thought to do the journey so quickly, but here it was - on the evening of the third day after they set out, they were tramping down the road toward the Hopeford bridge, and within half an hour, they were on the terrace of the Hopeford hotel, being served a meal of roasted lamb and mashed potatoes by Jessica Sola herself.

“No new events since I was here last?” Alaria asked.

“What, you mean with the horrible little room under the cellar?” Jessica said. “There have been some new developments, actually, but they’re likely to put you off your food, and I can see that you’ve both been traveling hard these last few days, so finish your dinner and then we’ll talk.”

She smiled warmly at Neroli and winked conspiratorially at Alaria before she left them. Neroli’s gaze lingered on Jessica as the blonde hotelier walked away.

Alaria smiled. “What do you think of her?” she asked.

Neroli looked at Alaria. “It’s what she thinks of you that interests me,” she said. “She’s very into you, don’t you see?”

“You think so?” Alaria asked. “I’ve wondered about that in the past, but any time we’ve been alone together she has always had some important business to discuss, and we’ve never had the opportunity to explore it further.”

“I’d suggest you make the opportunity,” Neroli said with a mischievous grin. “If she is as interested in you as I think she is, then it would be a worthwhile encounter.”

“What about you?” Alaria asked. “You’re not interested yourself?”

“I’m only interested in you.” Neroli spoke with a finality that did not leave any room for questions. “I like the arrangement that you have with Beth and Mia, and I’d like to be a part of it. I enjoyed being with them when you were there, but since I met you, I don’t think I would want to be with anybody else without you around. That’s a new feeling for me. I was surprised at myself at first, but I’ve had plenty of time to think about it over these last five weeks. If you’re willing to have me, and if your companions are willing as well, then I can’t think of anything I would like more than to join your group and be your lover.”

Alaria was deeply moved by her words. She’d never thought that she would inspire such feelings in anybody outside of the sphere of combat, though she had inspired great devotion and loyalty in the people who had followed her back in her adventuring days. Now, she saw this beautiful woman - dressed anew in a dark blue, low-cut gown with a fine silver chain around her neck - with her curling hair tumbling like sea foam across her face, and she suddenly found tears running from her eyes.

“It’s so beautiful to be told that,” she said, surprised to find herself suddenly sobbing freely. “By the gods,” she muttered, “I’ve not cried in years, but it’s just so touching. Thank you, Neroli. I’m so happy that you want to join me, I’m so happy that you want to become one of my companions along with Mia and Beth.”

They both stood suddenly, awkwardly bouncing the table between them and pushing their chairs back. The other diners on the terrace looked up and smiled as they stepped up to each other, put their arms around each other and kissed passionately, in full view of everyone.

There was a murmur of approval from the diners around them, and some scattered applause. Alaria and Neroli broke their kiss and looked around them. The applause increased in volume.

Alaria was happy, and Neroli was blown away. She had become a recluse from a world where her sexuality made her anathema to the people in her home village. Now, she found herself able to kiss another woman and express her love for her in front of a restaurant full of people and meet with nothing but gratitude and appreciation.

There were still places in Hope River valley, and even in Hopeford as a whole, where the love between two women or between two men - or love between members of two different peoples, for example an orc and an elf - would be frowned upon, but the Hopeford Hotel has always made a point of welcoming people whose sexual tastes were not necessarily the traditional ones. Sinjin had been an open minded man, and he’d made a point of designing his business to be welcoming to all. Jessica Sola was not likely to change that.

Alaria smiled around the hotel, then she caught Jessica’s eye. Jessica was standing in the doorway to the restaurant terrace, clapping along with the rest of them. As Alaria watched, Jessica reached up a hand to her eye and dabbed with a white handkerchief at a tear of her own.

“I’m sorry to have to ask this,” Jessica said after their table had been cleared away, “but it would be a great comfort to me if you would come with me and give me your opinion on the new developments that seem to be coming from my creepy underground world-ending ancient tomb king chamber.”

Alaria chuckled at her choice of words. “I take it Rannek Stickler has been along to see you, then?”

“He came that very morning after you left,” she said. “He told me all about it, and he even went down into the chamber himself. The effect of his presence was actually quite impressive. I went down with him, but I didn’t approach the door this time. He went ahead, quaking in his boots at the terror of the thing, but then he held up that ring of his and said some words, and I immediately felt the sense of fear lessen. It was still there, but it was less… I don’t know… less visceral. He seemed pleased, and he told me that the ring has some power at least to slow down the progress of the king’s awakening. That seemed to be his number one priority, slowing things down. He doesn’t seem to think it can be stopped, but he seems to think the most important thing is to buy time before the awakening happens. He was very keen on you coming back, Alaria, and on you coming too, Neroli.”

Neroli nodded in acknowledgement of the compliment. “I hope I’m able to help,” she said, modestly.

“Oh, you will be able to help, don’t doubt it,” Alaria said. “I’m very glad you’re here too, and maybe we can visit Rannek tomorrow and let him know.”

“No, you won’t be able to do that,” Jessica said, shaking her head. “I’m afraid he’s gone away. He said it would only be for a day or two, but it’s been more than that now. He went away the day you left, and that’s nearly a week ago.”

“He didn’t say what he was going to do?” Alaria asked.

“He didn’t mention anything about it. I asked him, but he was very cagey about it. I think he had some idea that he would be able to get help, but I don’t like the fact that he’s been gone longer than he said.”

“Nor do I,” Alaria said, “but one thing at a time. We’re back, at least, and we can come and have a look at whatever this new phenomenon is at least.”

“Thanks,” Jessica said. “Though it’s more of a listen than a look… but come along. It’s this way.”

Neroli and Alaria followed Jessica through the restaurant as Alaria had done before, through the kitchens and into the older part of the building. This time, however, Jessica didn’t lead them out into the little disused courtyard. Instead, she took them along a corridor that skirted round the outside of the courtyard and into a storeroom with a stone floor and wood paneling on the walls. It looks as if it might have been used as a bedroom once but had not been for a very long time. Now, it appeared to be used for the storage of old linen that was no longer in use but was too good to throw away.

“If we just stand here for a few minutes, you’ll hear it for yourself,” Jessica said.

They all stood silent in the little room, listening hard. Alaria could hear her own heart beating, and she could hear Jessica’s breathing, and the slight shifting or Neroli’s dark blue dress. Then, just as she was about to ask how long Jessica thought they might have to wait, she heard it.

From under the stone floor, a voice was murmuring. It sounded like somebody chanting, some kind of long, slow litany being repeated over and over again, and with a dry, grating sound that was horrible to listen to. It did not sound like the voice of a person, but the voice of some kind of ancient stony creature with a heart of marble and a tongue of bone, chanting out an incantation that would conjure a terrible spell.

And that, Alaria reflected, probably was exactly what she was hearing. Whatever the true nature of the undead being that slept uneasily in the chamber below their feet, it was a terrible creature, and they were hearing its voice.

She drew a breath to speak, but Jessica held up a hand. “Wait,” she whispered in a hoarse voice. “Make no sound.”

Alaria held her tongue and waited, listening to that horrible grating voice droning on and on in a nasty, dead rhythm. She had almost come to the point where she could have said where she thought the sequence of repeated words began and ended, when there was a new sound.

Thump.

It sounded for all the world like the muffled blow of a hammer coming through a stone wall, and it punctuated the end of the rhythmic chanting. Alaria’s eyes went wide, and she jumped as she felt a pressure on her arm, but it was just Neroli slipping a hand under her elbow and getting close. Neroli was trembling.

Thump.

The verse that was being repeated had eight lines. Alaria listened, and though she could not make out the words, or even the language that they were spoken in, she could make out the cadence of them, and she was convinced that it was an eight line, rhythmic verse being repeated over and over again.

And every time the repetition was completed…

Thump.

Alaria counted four of these loud, muffled impacts, then the voice abruptly stopped.

She took a breath to speak again, but again Jessica held up a hand and put a finger to her lips. Alaria waited, Neroli trembling in fright beside her, in terrible suspense to see what would happen next.

The voice had fallen silent, the thumping noise had also stopped, but there was one more horror for them to hear. Alaria shuddered from head to toe when she heard it.

A long, low, wet laugh, infinitely cunning and full of knowing malice and deep, endless patience. It rolled out under the floor below them, sounding horribly close, as if the laughing person’s face was directly under the stone slabs, and if they raised one of the slaps, they’d see him right there.

The laugh was much closer than the sound of the voice had been, and the thumping. It sounded near enough to touch.

Jessica shook her head and kept her finger to her lips but gestured with her head towards the door. Alaria and Neroli were more than happy to follow Jessica out, and Alaria was very pleased to see that Jessica locked the door carefully behind them and slipped the key into her own pocket.

“No one else has a key?” Alaria asked.

“Not anymore,” Jessica said. “Some of the men who handle the laundry had keys to that room, but I confiscated them all, said the room was going to be used for something else and the keys were needed for the new staff.”

“Has anyone else heard those horrible sounds?” Alaria asked.

“Just me,” Jessica said. “Thankfully. I only heard them because Rannek asked me if there were any chambers in the hotel that were directly above the cellar room with the rune slab. I took him to this one. It’s not been used in ages, and thankfully none of my staff have been in here for weeks. Nobody minded when I took the keys back.”

“That was the first night you heard this sound, then?” Alaria said.

Jessica nodded. “Rannek asked that I go to the room at night and listen for half an hour, to see if I could hear anything. I didn’t know what he meant, and he didn’t tell me.” She shuddered. “I can’t tell you how frightening it was that first time, but I knew that someone needed to listen and take note of what happened. It was exactly the same that time as what you heard just now, the chanting, the thumping, and then the laugh. I’ve heard it every night nice Rannek left, but it only ever happens once per night.”

“You’re so brave to go in there every night!” Neroli said. She was still trembling with fear after hearing the terrible sounds.

“It’s strangely not as bad the second time you hear it, and by the third of fourth time you get used to it. I think there’s something in it that casts a spell of fear the first time it happens, but the spell weakens after that. Anyway, when Rannek didn’t come back, I took it as my duty to go in there every night and keep an eye on things… Or an ear, perhaps I should say.”

“I could do with a drink,” Neroli said.

Alaria nodded. “Let’s go and sit down somewhere,” she said. “The restaurant?”

“I think I’d prefer to go up to our room,” Neroli said.

Jessica thanked them both and said she understood. “I’ll have one of the waiters bring a bottle of something up to the room for you,” she said. “I’m sorry to have had to make you hear that before bed, but it seemed really important not to delay.”

“That’s okay,” Alaria said. “We understand.” She looked at Neroli, who was still pale and holding tight to Alaria’s hand. “But I think for tonight, we’ve had enough horror, and we’re going to take the rest of the night off.”

Chapter

Eleven

Neroli had suffered a serious fright, and she had a hard time settling down. Alaria was surprised to see it. Until now, Neroli had seemed hard to frighten. She was more likely in the business of being frightening to others, rather than being frightened herself. But that night, it seemed that something was on the mind in a way that Alaria had never thought she would see.

She didn’t want to talk about it yet. They got up to their room, and Neroli poured an over-generous glass from the bottle that Jessica had provided. Alaria eyed the glass disapprovingly and poured tea for herself.

Neroli knocked back a third of her drink and then sat back. She was ensconced in a deep, comfortable chair, with a little footstool on which she propped her feet. The room was like all the rooms at the Hopeford Hotel - comfortable, spacious, tastefully decorated, with a large window looking out over the hotel garden. Alaria noted gratefully that this room’s window did not look anywhere near to the abandoned courtyard, and place where the entombed king was slowly waking.

Once she’d had a chance for her drink to kick in, Neroli calmed a little and looked at Alaria. “Sorry,” she said. “You don’t like people drinking, do you?”

Alaria tried to be honest. “I don’t like it when people use it to give themselves courage,” she said. “I don’t mind it when people use it just because they enjoy the sensation. That’s different. But when people use it to deal with emotions that they should otherwise have to face… but it’s not for me to disapprove, I realize that too. Other people have their own choices, and I can disapprove all I want, it doesn’t make it wrong.”

“That’s fair,” Neroli said. “But if you’d seen what I’ve seen…”

She trailed away, sipping more thoughtfully at her glass now and gazing into the hearth. Since Alaria had been away, the cold had not improved, and there was a big fire blazing in the hearth and making the room warm and comfortable.

Alaria sipped her tea. It was very good - stimulating black tea from the south-eastern border, flavored with jasmine and mint, and sweetened with honey. She looked at Neroli, knowing that she would speak when she was ready. A question now would be inappropriate. There was no need to ask. Neroli wanted to tell.

At last, Neroli sighed deeply and reached into a pocket. “You won’t approve of this, either,” she said. “Open a window, would you?”

Alaria frowned, unsure what was going to come next, but she stood quietly and went to the window, popping it open and letting the cold outside air in. Then she went to the hearth and threw another log in.

Neroli pulled a long, wooden smoking pipe from a leather pouch, and a little twist of dried herbs. She stuffed the end of the pipe and waved her hand over the end of it, conjuring enough heat to light the herbs.

A strange, woody smell drifted from the pipe, and Neroli sat back, puffing carefully until the pipe was well-lit, then drawing long and thoughtfully at the smoke. She didn’t inhale the smoke immediately, Alaria noticed, but drew it into her mouth and let it drift sensuously out again, and then at the end of the puff she would breathe a little of it in and hold it for a second or two before letting it trickle out.

“Smoking,” Alaria said. “I’ve seen it done before, but rarely this far north. Where did you learn the habit?”

“Oh, I learned it from one of my fellow students at Ancient Heart,” she said. “A Maganya woman who couldn’t wake up in the morning or go to bed at night unless she’d had her smoke.” She laughed, then coughed. “It’s very relaxing, very… grounding. Would you like to try it?”

Alaria shook her head. “Not for me,” she said. “But you carry on. I don’t disapprove. The smell is quite pleasant.”

Neroli offered a nod of thanks, and her curls bounced in the firelight as she did so. The light illuminated the smoke as it curled around her lips and drifted up to their ceiling. Alaria thought it looked beautiful. There was something immensely sensual about the way Neroli enjoyed this strange, foreign delicacy.

“You and your Spirit conjuring,” she said. “You never cease to amaze me.”

“What, my mysterious phantom storage pouch, you mean?” Neroli said with a laugh. “Yes, I know, it can be a bit surprising for people who haven’t seen it before. It’s not that the stuff isn’t there, it is real, it’s not like the clothing that I can melt and change as I need. I keep my other belongings in a place I call my Spirit pack. It’s a place that only exists in the Spirit realm, a place that’s completely closed off from this world, but exists alongside it. I can keep my tools there, some small supplies - like my pipe and smoking herbs - and some keepsakes that I enjoy having near me.”

“But the clothing, that’s something different?”

“The clothing is a piece of magic of my own design which I’m very proud of, but which I suspect comes too close to the kind of Spirit magic you disapprove of.”

“The use of pure Spirit for the creation of material objects?” Alaria asked.

“Exactly,” Neroli said. “And perhaps in time I’ll decide that I can dispense with it, because it does very much rely on pure Spirit being trapped in a physical form, albeit a physical form that changes fairly often.”

“But only to appear as different kinds of clothes,” Alaria said.

“That’s right,” Neroli agreed, rather apologetically. “And you’re right, pure Spirit has sentience of its own and keeping it confined in a physical form for a long time is cruel, there is no two ways about it.”

“Perhaps,” Alaria offered, “you could get some regular clothes that suited your taste, and you could keep them in your Spirit realm storage, your Spirit pack? Then you wouldn’t have to carry them around, but you’d also not be relying on trapped Spirit sentience to clothe yourself?”

Neroli puffed out a cloud of smoke and nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “I could do that.” Then she lolled her head toward Alaria and narrowed her eyes. “But I’ll have to find some kind of work, you know. I’ve not yet found a way to create gold out of thin air.”

Alaria laughed. “You don’t need to worry about that. I have plenty of money to be going on with, and I have the potion business, too. We can afford to get you some nice clothes.”

Neroli sat forward. “What, really?” she said. “You’d do that? I didn’t realize you were wealthy.”

“I’m not,” Alaria said. “But I have enough to support my partners, and I’m making more. You may come and live with me without any worry that you’ll have to go without.”

Neroli sat back, thoughtful. “Wow,” she murmured. “I hadn’t thought about that. I’ve gotten so used to using magic to see to all my wants, that I’d never even considered doing it any other way. But I suppose it is better if I can. It’s not… I don’t know. It’s not right to only rely on magic for one’s keep.”

“I think it does strange things to people,” Alaria said. “That’s why I’m always careful not to use a magic solution when a mundane one will do. But,” she added, holding up a hand as she saw Neroli’s slightly shame-faced look, “that’s my choice, and I make it for myself. Others must make their own choices, and it’s not for me to make those choices for them. Each to their own. But if you want to, I’m more than happy to take you on a trip clothes shopping in Hopeford.”

Neroli smiled. She sat back in her chair and finished her drink, then absent-mindedly poured herself another one. Alaria finished her pot of tea, rose, filled the kettle and let it boil (all the rooms at the hotel were equipped with their own kettles for boiling water at the hearth) and poured fresh hot water over the brewing herbs in her pot.

Neroli finished her pipe and got up, moving toward the heath with the careful steps of one who isn’t used to regular drinking. She crouched and gently knocked the dregs of her pipe out into the hearth, then reached down to put the pipe away, as if she was tucking it into her belt. Alaria smiled, seeing that instead of going into her belt, the pipe vanished into thin air, just as if it were disappearing behind a screen that wasn’t there.

In the journey, she’d gotten accustomed to seeing Neroli perform this remarkable procedure, though she didn’t think she’d ever fully get used to it. Until now, she hadn’t prevailed on Neroli to explain it, noticing with amusement how Neroli didn’t seem to notice that there was anything odd in it at all, and didn’t seem to feel the need to mention it.

Now, Alaria sat back in her chair, and Neroli sat back in hers, cradling her drink between her palms and gazing thoughtfully into the fire.

“When I was a little girl,” Neroli said, “we had a ritual in the mountains that was supposed to tell the future. It wasn’t taken particularly seriously, I have to say, and when it came my time to do the ritual, I didn’t think it was much more than empty form. But when I went into that cave and saw the elders of the village waiting for me, masked and robed for the ritual, I found that I was taking it seriously. Very seriously. I felt that something very important rested on the moment, and I felt suddenly humbled. I approached the lead elder, and she handed me the Cup of Bringing. It was a foul brew of some herbal potion to make the user see visions. The effect didn’t last long, I knew - minutes at most - and the most important thing for the outcome of the ritual was how bravely the candidate took the potion.”

Neroli smiled at the memory. “I was just a child then, but the impression I gave to the elders was very important to me. I took that cup and drained it, keeping my back straight and my head up, and making sure that they all saw how brave I was. It only took a moment to have the effect. I looked around the cave, expecting to see something different, to see some vision or change in the place around me, but I saw nothing unusual.”

Her face darkened, and her voice went hushed. “Then I heard it,” she said. “That sound, that… that voice. Muttering words in rhythm and then the thump that punctuated the end of each repetition. Four times, and then the long, cruel laugh, the voice suddenly so close as if it was in the very floor under my feet. Then it was over, the sound gone and the buzzing, heady, drunken sensation of the vision cup fading from my body. The elders asked what I had seen, and I said nothing, but I had heard something. I told them what I’d heard, but they didn’t understand it, and because they didn’t understand, they decided there was something wrong with me, something strange about my mind that meant the vision ritual didn’t accept me.”

She sighed, drank off the last of her glass, and put it down on the table next to her with a sharp click. “I suppose that was one of the reasons why they thought I was wrong and decided that they didn’t want me in the village anymore.”

“But you heard it?” Alaria said. “You heard… that? The noise we just heard in the room above the tomb?”

Neroli nodded. “That was what I heard. The ritual was an important coming-of-age ceremony. People were meant to see their future, a key moment in their destiny, that kind of thing. They would see themselves slaying a monster, or saving somebody, or raising their kids. Whatever their most important role in their life would be, they’d see it in their vision ritual. Me, I saw nothing, but I heard that damned voice, the same voice we heard tonight, in the very same way.”

“And you think it means…” Alaria began.

Neroli finished for her. “I think it means that I’m in the right place at the right time,” she said. “Whatever is in that chamber, I think that I’m destined to play an important role in bringing it to an end. The ritual shows us the most important thing we’ll do in our lives. For me, the most important thing is being here with you, to hear that sound and then play my part in defeating whatever evil it represents. I’m glad I’m here, but… I’m afraid.”

“Were you frightened when you heard it in the ritual?”

“Terrified,” Neroli said, nodding slowly and staring into the fire. “The feeling has never really left me. Even in all the years since, when I’ve been focused on many very different things, all my different projects and all the inventions and experimentation - even then, the sound of that laugh has always echoed somewhere in my mind. When I heard it tonight…” she shuddered involuntarily, and with a twitch of her hand she changed her dark blue dress into a warm woolen gown, and a green shawl that she wrapped around her shoulders.

“No wonder you were terrified,” Alaria said. “That’s a horrible shock.”

“I’d almost stopped believing it, you know? It’s been so long, and though I’ve never forgotten that sound, it seemed like it didn’t have much relevance to my life anymore, not really. But tonight just brought it all back with a vengeance.”

“Still,” she continued, suddenly brightening, “the fact remains that if I heard it then and now, I hear it here in Hopeford with you, then I must be in the right place at the right time, and if I am, then you must be too, since you brought me here! That’s an encouraging thought, once you get past the fear and the darkness that hearing the sound brought up. Do you think so?”

“I do,” Alaria said with conviction. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s to not dismiss the rituals and ceremonies that small groups and isolated cultures create for themselves. There is magic in that kind of thing, real magic that works and that counts for something. We are fools if we ignore the messages that come from those kinds of rituals. I’m very glad you told me about it, Neroli, because it confirms for me what I originally thought. When Jessica first told me about this new threat, and when Rannek explained the nature of it to me, I actually considered not coming out to see you, and staying here instead, to keep an eye on things.”

“What changed your mind?” Neroli asked.

“The fact that I knew your powers would be essential in whatever fight is going to come. Whatever happens, and whatever the waking of this creature brings, if I am going to defeat it and save the people of Hopeford, I need to be backed up by all my strength. And that means not just me, Beth, and Mia. That means you, too. That’s why I came, and now I see that I was right, not only for myself, but because your vision ritual predicted this. Whatever happens, I know that we are in the right place at the right time, and as you say, that is an encouraging thought.”

Chapter

Twelve

Neroli’s lips were soft as silk. Her mouth tasted of wine, mint, and sweet smoke herbs. Alaria laid her down on the bed in the hotel room, the fire crackling as the new logs Alaria had just put on caught and burned brightly. The warm glow of the fire was the only light in the room, except for the light of the moon that filtered in through the half-open window.

Alaria had not thought Neroli would be up to making love tonight, after the fright she’d had, but the talk and the explanations had relaxed her, and she was willing and ready under Alaia’s touch. Alaria gently stripped the gown from her, leaving her completely naked and exposed.

Neroli had a thing about being exposed. She liked to be watched, to be seen while she took pleasure. Alaria was still wearing her underwear - a nice set that she had kept in her pack for a night like this, when the traveling was over and she could relax. Neroli had devoured Alaria with her eyes as Alaria had undressed, but seemed to enjoy the fact that she was completely naked while Alaria was not.

The firelight flicked across Neroli’s naked body as Alaria took her time exploring. Neroli and Alaria had only had two opportunities for sex - one in the cave with Beth and Mia as well, and once just the other day, when they’d met up again for the first time. Both had been passionate, almost rough sessions, but tonight Alaria felt like taking her time.

She began at Neroli’s mouth, kissing her slowly and deeply. Their tongues exploring each other got Neroli more and more excited, and Alaria felt Neroli’s hips rocking back and forth on the bed as Alaria moved her mouth down over Neroli’s shoulders and down to her breasts, sucking on her nipples and running her tongue round and round them.

“Bite them,” Neroli breathed, and Alaria did so, gently at first, and slowly increasing the pressure until Neroli gasped and arched her back. Then she maintained the pressure on the nipple and slipped two fingers down to find Neroli’s vagina. Neroli was warm and wet, and Alaria spread the wetness around to lubricate Neroli’s clitoris and began to stimulate her by rubbing round and around it, then flicking it once or twice, before teasing around it again.

Neroli’s hands were all over Alaria. Her fingers ran through Alaria’s hair, across her shoulders, caught her breasts and kneaded them, pulling firmly on her nipples in a way that made a burst of pleasure shoot down through Alaria’s belly to her own wet vagina.

Alaria moaned and manifested a couple of tentacles, letting their natural lubrication become even more intense, and letting the slick wetness from them flow onto Neroli’s body. The skin gleamed where the oils from the manifested limbs dampened Neroli’s body, and Alaria rubbed the slickness onto Neroli’s breasts, making her gasp with pleasure.

Neroli looked up, raising herself on her elbows so she could look at Alaria.

“Let’s get these off,” she said in a hushed voice, and without waiting for Alaria to answer she reached down and slipped Alaria’s underwear off, tossing it over the side of the bed.

Alaria and Neroli put their arms round each other, pulling close, enjoying the sensation of their soft breasts pushing together, their smooth legs wrapping around and tangling each other, and their hair - straight red-gold, and tangling curls - mixing together around their heads.

Kissing turned to deep excitement, and Neroli suddenly shifted so she was on top of Alaria. “Try this,” she said, smiling, and Alaria nodded, wondering what Neroli was about to do.

Neroli gently but firmly pushed Alaria’s legs apart and then, wrapping her own legs around Alaria’s hips, she lowered herself onto Alaria so that their pussies were touching, and began to grind back and forth, stimulating them both at the same time.

Alaria was blown away by the sensation, and by the view that she had from here of Neroli’s body. Neroli’s big breasts bounced in rhythm as she moved her hips back and forth, back and forth, bringing them both steadily to a higher and higher level of pleasure, but doing it slowly enough that neither of them were going to climax too quickly.

The sensation flowed through Alaria, making her body tingle and making her moan with pleasure in time with Neroli’s thrusting. Neroli’s curly hair bounced as she threw her head back, moaning faintly, then louder as she moved them both higher and higher.

Alaria found that as often happened in moments like this, her tentacles took their own path and flowed up toward Neroli’s mouth, running around her breasts and leaving slick lubricating fluid on her skin as they did so. They moved up and began to tease Neroli’s lips, and Neroli opened her mouth and brought one tentacle in. She groaned with pleasure, enjoying the feeling of being filled. She leaned over toward Alaria, putting her hands on Alaria’s breasts and filling her hands, holding her nipples firmly and moving her hands gently as she rode Alaria and sucked the tentacle, bobbing her head back and forth to pleasure Alaria by stimulating the tentacle along the shaft, and flicking it with her tongue to stimulate the tip at the same time.

Since Neroli’s breasts were within reach, Alaria reached up and filled her hands with them, running her fingers over the nipples and enjoying the way it made Neroli gasp when she gripped them a bit harder. Her tentacles were in Neroli’s mouth, but others were slipping around her hips, pulling at her ankles, and rubbing up and down on her ass.

Neroli was loving the tentacles. Alaria could see that the presence of the restraining grip on her ankles was a big turn on for her, and so Alaria sent a big more length into the summoned limbs and slid them about the ankles and up to the thighs, wrapping Neroli’s legs tightly and giving them a good squeeze, while not actually restricting Neroli’s movement.

As Neroli felt the pressure increasing, she pushed harder with her hips, and Alaria felt herself moving suddenly toward climax. Neroli’s eyes met hers, and they locked. Neroli was so beautiful, and the sight of her mouth full of Alaria’s tentacle, as well as the noises she made as she sucked on it, brought Alaria to the edge and tipped her over.

At the same time, Neroli couldn’t withstand the sight of Alaria’s orgasm. As Alaria came, Neroli did too, and their simultaneous climax made them both buck and grind against each other, their moans of pleasure loud and wild in the quiet of the room.

The orgasms blasted through them both, and Alaria felt like hers would never stop. Wave after wave of jerking, convulsive pleasure coursed through her, and she let herself give voice to it in a way she didn’t think she ever had before. The sound of her own voice, combined with the sight of Neroli climaxing, set her off again, and she found - to her own surprise - that she was teetering on the brink of a second climax. Then she toppled over the edge of that climax, too, and she was coming again.

This time she pulled back, feeling her clit too tender to take anymore, and rolled over onto her side, laughing breathlessly as Neroli dropped down beside her and put her arms around her, embracing her from behind.

“That was amazing,” Alaria said. “I didn’t know I could do that.”

“You came twice, didn’t you?” Neroli asked.

Alaria nodded. “I’ve always pulled away after the first time, but that just there pushed me over the edge a second time. That was an amazing position.”

“You liked that?” Neroli said in a husky voice in Alaria’s ear. “I’m glad. I liked you wrapping my legs like that, and filling my mouth, too… mmm, that was something else. Next time we do that, will you…”

She hesitated. “Go on,” Alaria said. “You can ask me.”

“Will you pull my hair?”

Alaria laughed. “Sure thing,” she said. “Next time we’re doing that, I’ll make sure to remember.”

She turned over so they were facing each other and found Neroli’s mouth for a kiss. The fire had burned down, but they were both hot from their exertion, so Alaria didn’t bother getting up to put another log in. They shared a long, deep kiss, then Alaria pulled the light blanket over them both and drifted into a deep, peaceful sleep.

Brighthill looked welcoming in the morning sunlight the next day, as Neroli and Alaria made their way along the stretch of road leading to the bridge that would bring them home into the town. The light was better today, though the day was still overcast and cold, and they could see the red roofs of the town shining and the pale stone of the buildings glowing as they made their way up to the edge of town.

They had checked in with Jessica briefly before heading off. She had not slept well, disturbed by the experience of hearing the strange sounds the night before, and not, apparently, having the benefit of a passionate lovemaking session to help her drop off to sleep. Jessica had promised that she would send on any news directly if anything changed, and also that she would keep an eye open for Rannek Stickler and send word to the Homestead at Brighthill if he showed up.

Alaria found the disappearance of Rannek one of the most troubling aspects of everything that had happened over the last few days. There was certainly no question that his intentions were good - she had tested that out with a spell during their meeting - but the fact that he had said he would be back in a couple of days and the fact that a week had now passed since then made Alaria wonder if something had happened to him.

She asked Neroli as they walked whether she couldn’t use her far sight spell to have a look for him and see if she could discover what had happened.

“I could try,” Neroli said, but she sounded doubtful. “I told you that I had tried to see you from afar with my magic, but I couldn’t get the spell to work. It was as if I was looking into a dense, freezing fog, and I felt a sense of terror and unease as I was doing the spell, and so I stopped. I can try, once we get back to the Homestead, but I suspect that the fog that blocked my ability to see far with magic is something to do with the awakening of King Sanuk.”

“You think so?” Alaria said. “Why?”

“Because of the sense of fear and impending doom that came upon me when I attempted to use the magic. It was too close to the sensation that I felt just now when we heard the laughter. Those feelings are related, I would swear it. I think that whatever spell he is weaving as he wakes up, it has an influence on my magic.”

She turned and looked up at Alaria, as if a sudden thought had struck her. “You don’t seem to have any problem casting spells, do you?”

“I haven’t actually done much magic since I left the Homestead,” Alaria said, “but I was doing plenty of magic before I left, and the unnatural cold had come down before then. I feel pretty certain that the cold is also a consequence of his waking up, and if that’s so, then it would make sense for any other influence, such as me not being able to do magic, to have manifested around the same time. You see what I mean?”

“I do,” Neroli replied thoughtfully. “Well, we have plenty of time to experiment once we get home. Whereabouts do you live?”

Alaria pointed up the hill, to where a single large building could just be seen on the outskirts of the village, partially hidden by a thick belt of woodland that covered the top of the hill. “See that building up there? That’s where I live. It’s a bit out of the way, no neighbors nearby, and I like it like that. It gives plenty of privacy.”

Neroli grinned. “I can see how that would be an advantage,” she said. “I’m looking forward to seeing Mia again, and Beth, too. Do you think they’ll be there?”

“Mia almost certainly will be,” Alaria said, “but Beth is more likely to be at the inn. Anyway, we can find out soon enough. Come on. I’m looking forward to getting home.”

They marched up the hill together, Neroli admiring the architecture of the village, Alaria enjoying the sensation of being back in her hometown once again. She had only lived here for less than a year, but it definitely felt like home. Some people greeted her as she passed, waving out of upstairs windows, or nodding pleasantly to her as she passed them in the street. Neroli got a few interested looks, but she had transformed her magical shape-shifting clothing to take on the form of standard traveler’s leather armor, much like Alaria’s, and so she didn’t look particularly remarkable as she marched up the hill by Alaria’s side.

When they got to the top, Alaria put her hands on her hips and sighed deeply, taking a moment to enjoy the sensation of gazing at her home. The Homestead looked as it had ever done, though now, of course, it looked a lot more lived in than it ever had before Alaria had come here. There were curtains in the windows, fresh paint on the door and window frames, and it was clear that work had been done in the garden.

Alaria listened, and looked out for any sign of Mia, but there was none. There was no sound of voices, or of work going on, and the front door was closed, and so were the windows. This was not unusual, of course, considering the sharp cold of the weather, but there was also no smoke coming from any of the chimneys, and that was unusual. Alaria might have expected to see Mia keeping the place closed up tight during the day because of the cold, but she would have expected to see the fires on.

“It’s strange,” she said, “but it looks like Mia isn’t here.”

They entered by the front gate, Alaria noting that there were still remnants of the problematic defensive spell in place around the gate and the wall. In fact, if she hadn’t known better, she would almost have said that the spell seemed stronger than it had been before. Neroli looked around with pleasure as Alaria let her up the garden path and opened the front door. She stepped inside, and immediately felt that something was wrong.

“There’s no one here,” she said. “And look, Mia’s hat and boots aren’t there.”

“Perhaps she’s just gone out for something?” Neroli suggested.

Alaria didn’t say anything, but she didn’t think that was the case. The house did not feel like a place where somebody had just popped out for half an hour. It felt like it had not been lived in for some days. It was cold, and the air had a musty, unchanged spell.

“Come in here with me for a moment,” Alaria said. She went into the kitchen and saw to her surprise that not only was there no work out on the kitchen table, but there was no sign of any ingredients, nor any of the tools - the mortars and pestles, the knives, the strainers, and the special boiling pots - that they used for making potions.

She hardly needed to move over to the stove and place her hand on it to know that it was cold. As she had expected, it was as cold as marble. She opened the little door on the front. It had been cleaned out.

“It looks like she’s not been here for days,” Alaria said aloud. “What can this mean?”

“Someone’s not too bothered,” Neroli said with a smile.

Alaria looked around sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, I just noticed your cat. See, someone has been feeding him, at least.”

Alaria looked, and saw that in his spot by the stove, curled up in his bed, was the big black cat that had apparently come with the house. He was a strange beast, who never seemed to require anything specific from Alaria or Mia, and who always seemed to be able to find his way in and out of the house whether the doors or windows were closed or not.

Now, Alaria saw that he was curled up in his bed, a picture of contentment, and next to the bed was a little bowl with the remains of some meat, and another with fresh water.

“Someone’s been in to feed the cat,” Alaria said thoughtfully, “but everything else has been closed up.”

“Something must have happened,” Neroli said. “Something that forced Mia to leave the house for a bit, and she has asked somebody else to come in and feed the cat. That’s the most likely explanation.”

“I agree, but what could it be that’s called her away?”

Neroli shrugged. “Does she have any family living nearby? Could something have happened to one of them that has made her have to go?”

Alaria gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “Yes, she does!” she said. “She was raised by her elderly aunt and uncle, who live in a village nearby, a place called Richvale. They are both quite old, and something could easily have happened to one of them that would have made Mia have to go there and stay for a bit. By the gods, I hope that’s not the case. They are a nice old couple, and Mia is very attached to them.”

“I think we’d ought to go find out straight away,” Neroli said.

Alaria nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “Come on. We’ll go straight down to the inn and see Beth. She’ll know what’s going on.”

Chapter

Thirteen

Alaria’s hand was on the front door when they both heard the noise from upstairs.

Thump.

They looked at each other. The sound was way too much like the noise that had come up from under the floor of the old storeroom in the hotel. It was disturbing, but neither of them had any doubt that they must investigate immediately.

Wordlessly, Alaria took the lead, her hand on her dagger, since the quarters were much too cramped to attempt drawing Skyfang. If there was blade work to be done, it would have to be done with Earthclaw.

Thump.

They exchanged another glance and Alaria saw the fear in Neroli’s eyes, but also the courage and determination to follow Alaria and find out whatever this new threat might be.

Thump.

They made it up the stairs, walking very stealthily and keeping to the edges of the steps to try to avoid making the stairs creak. They got to the top of the stairs and Alaria peered round the corner, glancing in the direction of the main bedroom, and of the smaller guest bedrooms which had never been brought into active use.

The noises had stopped but they seemed to have been coming from one of the spare rooms. Alaria nodded in the direction of the nearest room, and neroli nodded. Together, they made their way in that direction. They slipped inside, but there was no sign of anyone. The other room yielded just as little result. Not only that, but there was a fine layer of dust on the floor that was illuminated in perfect detail by the bright, cold sunlight streaming in the window. It was undisturbed.

The rest of the upper floor, and even the little attic room upstairs, yielded no further clue to the possible source of the sounds. Even when Alaria cast a spell to look for hidden influences in the room, she saw nothing. After ten minutes of fruitless searching, they went back downstairs.

Alaria poked her head back into the kitchen. The cat slept on, snuggled up in his bed by the stove. All else was unchanged. With a shake of her head and a sign, she opened the front door and went out.

“It was too much like the noise from the tomb,” Neroli said, voicing the thought they were both having.

“I know,” Alaria said, “but I think we need to be careful about how we think of that. The thumping sound from the tomb was in both our minds, and it’s almost inevitable that we should think of it. But there’s no reason to think they’re connected.”

“Except for the fact that we see a whole range of influences over this land, coming from that tomb - or whatever is in it.”

“That’s true,” Alaria conceded. “But did you feel any of the fear that’s gone with the other influences from the tomb?”

Neroli frowned, then had to admit that she hadn’t. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I felt unease, of course, but nothing like that fear. The fear from before is really distinctive, there’s no question about how powerful and pervasive it is. That was nothing like the fear I felt last night when Jessica showed us the room.”

“Right,” Alaria said. “I agree. Come on, there’s some mystery here that I’m not comfortable with. I want to know what the hell’s going on.”

They found the solution when they went to the Brighthill inn. It was closed except for those who had stayed overnight, and the breakfast room was quiet, with a few visitors eating and drinking, most of them keeping as close as they could to the fire to benefit from the warmth.

Alaria and Neroli stepped into the common room of the inn, and someone they didn’t recognize looked up from behind the bar. He was a short, stout fellow, and it took Alaria a moment to realize that he was actually one of the dwarven people. He had a black beard and bright, black eyes, and he looked them up and down with undisguised impatience.

“The bar’s closed, ladies,” he growled, “and unless you’re wanting a room for this evening, I can’t help you.” He spoke in a brusque, harsh tone, and Alaria was shocked that Beth would ever let someone so rude be in charge of her common room.

“I’m not here for a meal or a room,” she said, rather sharply. “I’m here to see Beth, the owner.”

“Hmph,” the grumpy dwarf said. “Have you an appointment?”

“I’m her friend,” Alaria said. “She’ll be anxious to see me.”

“Hm. Just wait here, please.”

The dwarf turned and stomped grumpily out of the room. Neroli looked in surprise at Alaria. “You know him?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“Never seen him before in my life,” she said, and then she realized it wasn’t true. She had seen him before! Dwarves were rare in the northern lands. They had their own domains in the mountains, south and west of Hope River valley, and it was unusual to see one in this region. But Alaria remembered a moment when she and Mia had been first getting together.

They’d gone to Hopeford on a trip to look for furniture, Alaria having just bought the house in Brighthill, and Mia took them to her favorite restaurant in the city. Alaria had seen a black bearded dwarf sitting at a table in the restaurant, leering at her and making suggestive glances at Mia. Could it be the same fellow?

Alaria frowned, thinking back hard to that afternoon. Yes, she was almost certain of it. It was the same person. Quite apart from the fact that there were very few of his kind in Hopeford, he had a peculiar scar above his right eyebrow which she had noted at the time without even being fully conscious of it. Yes, she thought, it was him.

At that moment, a side door opened, and Alaria was relieved to see a familiar face.

“Sasha!” she called, and the newcomer flinched slightly, as if she hadn’t expected to be called. Sasha was a faerie, a very purple being, about half the size of a regular person, and with wide wings that acted as a vector for magic that allowed her to fly.

Normally, Sasha was the most bright and cheerful of people, but now she looked harassed and unhappy. Her face brightened visibly when she saw Alaria, however, and she hurried over.

“Am I glad to see you!” she said. Her skin was purple, as were her wings, her hair, and her clothes. The whites of her eyes were a slightly paler purple than the rest of her. Her pupils were a wonderfully dark shade.

“What’s up, Sasha?” Alaria said. “You look worried.”

“And I am worried,” Sasha replied. As she spoke, she glanced furtively about herself, as if she was afraid of being overheard. “But you’ll sort things out, I know you will. Where’s that bully Zargkul?”

Alaria’s frown darkened. “Zargkul?” she asked. “You mean that dwarf with the black beard?”

Sasha nodded, and at that moment the door behind the bar opened and Zargkul himself stepped through the door. The moment he saw Sasha, his expression became thunderous.

“Beth can’t see you,” he snapped to Alaria. “She’s busy, and doesn’t want to be disturbed.” Then he turned his attention to Sasha.

“You,” he boomed at the faerie, “what are you doing there? Get back to work! What have I told you about standing around gossiping to the customers? Damn it, one of these days I’ll have to show you the back of my hand, you little…”

Sasha gave a squeal of fright and leaped back as Zargkul bore down on her, moving across the bar with frightening and unexpected speed for someone so heavily built. He raised a hand as if to strike Sasha.

Alaria’s hand shot out and gripped his wrist in a vice-like grip.

“You better watch your tongue, you bastard,” she hissed. “That’s my friend, and I won’t see anyone raise a hand to her. You have a problem with that, you can step outside with me right now and settle it.”

Her voice was ice, and both Neroli and Sasha had backed off from the confrontation. The guests in the common room had turned to watch. You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed Alaria’s words.

Despite the legends about that folk, dwarven people are not actually that short, perhaps only two heads shorter than a full grown human man. Zargkul was tall for his people, and Alaria was not a particularly tall woman, so the two of them were nearly at a height. Zargkul was livid with anger, but he sneered at her, raising one lip to show a line of ugly yellow teeth.

“Step outside, eh?” he growled, and clearly was not afraid of her in the least. “I don’t need to step outside for the likes of you. I can deal with your kind right here.”

With a lightning-fast movement, he’d drawn a knife from his belt with his left hand and brought it up in a single swift motion toward Alaria’s heart. It was a killing blow, no doubt about it. Whatever else Zargkul was, he was not a person who believed in half measures.

But Alaria was a master fighter. She’d given him the chance to get out of the confrontation honorably, but she’d also seen the bulge of the knife under his shirt long before he’d thought of reaching for it. She let him get it out of the scabbard and begin his thrust. Then she let go of his right wrist and caught up his left, twisting it suddenly so he cried out in pain.

The knife dropped to the ground with a clang. Alaria was able to control Zargkul’s body now, as he would move wherever she placed him, to avoid more pain to his wrist. He yelled as she turned him toward the door, then putting herself behind him, placed another hand on his shoulder and propelled him forward at speed. He hit the door with a bang and tumbled out into the street.

Alaria followed.

“I’ll give you another chance,” she growled, feeling the flame of her anger burning bright, pushing her forward. “Get up, and I’ll give you the chance to fight me honorably.”

He was furious. “Damn you,” he roared, and leaped up from the ground, running at her with his fists clenched.

Alaria dropped into a low stance and raised her fists. He tried to go for a low blow, aiming a vicious kick between her legs, but he was a brawler, no finesse to him, and she side-stepped his hit easily and replied with two straight left jabs to hit right eye and a tight right hook to the jaw that sent him staggering backward.

“Ooh, you…” he groaned, but then he turned and came back for more. This time Alaria punched him in the mouth, a neat left-right-left, then followed up with a blow to his throat that she pulled just enough so as not to kill him. He gagged and fell on his backside, glowering up at her through his swiftly swelling eye.

“Had enough?” she growled. He turned his head to the side and spat teeth. She loomed over him, hauling him up by the shirt front and glaring into his face.

“If I ever see your ugly face in Brighthill or Hopeford again, I won’t hesitate, understand? If you value your life, get out of here and don’t come back.”

He glared at her for a moment longer then nodded once, dropped his eyes, and stumbled to his feet. Without a backward glance, he lumbered off toward the bridge and out of Brighthill.

A cheer from behind her made Alaria turn, and she saw Sasha and Neroli standing in the doorway, with a few of the customers from the common room behind them.

Alaria smiled, rubbing her bruised knuckles. She’d enjoyed putting Zargkul in his place, of course. Sasha was a tiny creature compared to him, and he was a bully and a thug to try to hit her. But now that the fight was over, she felt a deep sense of unease settling over her again.

How had Beth come to hire such a person to run the bar? Where was Beth? Where was Mia?

Alaria wanted answers. Thankfully, Sasha the faerie was on hand to provide them.

“What’s going on here, Sasha?” Alaria asked as she approached.

Sasha flew anxiously up and down in the air in front of the door. “I’ll tell you all about it,” she said. The customers drifted back to their tables to continue their breakfasts, and Neroli and Alaria sat down on the bench outside the front door. Sasha perched next to them on the armrest of the bench, looking anxious.

“The illness came through the village not two days after you left,” she said. “And that same day, Zargkul showed up here, offering his services.”

“Illness?” Alaria said. “What illness?”

“It’s not anything serious, I don’t think,” Sasha said, sounding a little doubtful, “more like a bad cold than anything else, but it puts people in their beds, and they can’t get up. Mia got ill the day you left, and by the second day Beth insisted that she come down here and rest up. She’s upstairs, asleep hopefully, and Beth is too. Grezkull got ill the next day, and Beth too, and since Zargkul was here and made out like he was a pleasant fellow, she was happy to employ him. But then the illness got worse, and Beth and Grezkull were both in no state to give orders. They just slept all the time, and Zargkul was able to start throwing his weight about, saying he had Beth’s authority for this, and Beth’s authority for that, and all the while with a sneering, knowing look in his face that made me feel sick inside. Not that he’s done much work - all that’s fallen on me. I’ve barely managed to find the time to go and feed your cat up at the Homestead.”

“What about Palo?” Alaria asked. “Is he sick too?”

Sasha sobbed suddenly. “I don’t know!” she exclaimed. Palo, her boyfriend, was a very quiet, patient young man who had a heart of gold, and they were very attached to each other. “Palo was helping out here, but the day before yesterday he went off to Hopeford. He was worried, and he thought that he should try to get news of you, and try to get a message to you, perhaps, so he went off to the city, and he’s not come back! Three days! It doesn’t take that long to get to Hopeford and back - he said he’d do it in a day!”

“This stinks,” Alaria said. “Neroli, there’s something fishy going on here. I don’t like this at all. We’re going to need to use our magic to get to the bottom of this. I suspect that the dwarf is putting a spell on the town. We must find the source of the magic that’s making the townsfolk sick, and we must do it fast.”

Chapter

Fourteen

Neroli was looking at Alaria with a strange expression on her face. It was a mix between admiration and distaste. Alaria saw the expression, noted it, then put it to one side. She would deal with it later. Now was not the time for emotions. Now was the time to find out what was going on in the town and fix it.

She stood and walked into the common room, running her eyes across the travelers who sat at their tables finishing their breakfasts. There was no one particularly suspicious there. A glance was enough to show Alaria their professions.

They were merchants and traders, travelers and scholars, families on the road, people on holiday despite the bitter cold. The people looked back at her, some meeting her gaze, some looking swiftly away. Alaria subtly turned her right hand outward and sent a truth-seeking spirit spell their way. The blue tendrils of the spell spread out through the room, touching each of the people one by one and remaining blue.

Alaria turned away. None of these were involved in the plot.

“Sasha,” she said. “Is there anyone else in the inn at the moment? Anyone else beyond these good people?”

“Only the people who work here,” Sasha replied, counting off the names on her fingers. Myself, obviously, Mia and Beth in bed upstairs.”

“No one else?”

“No.”

“Good. How long since the first case of illness?”

Sasha now counted on her fingers. “Five, six… no, seven days ago now. It started day after you left, and that was eight days ago, so they’ve been ill for seven days.”

“Right. And that dwarf who I’ve just sent packing arrived that day too?”

“No, he arrived the day after, the same day Grezkull became ill.”

Alaria nodded. “Okay. And you’ve been here that whole time? Here at the inn, I mean?”

Sasha thought about it. “Except for one day - the day after Beth fell ill and had to take to her bed. I went home for an hour and packed some things, because Palo and I knew we were going to be staying here for a little while to help out.”

“And in all that time, the dwarf Zargkul was here?”

“He never left.”

“Anyone else ill? Or just Mia, Grezkull, and Beth?”

“No one.”

Alaria thought for a moment. Her two companions watched her closely, Sasha with complete confidence, waiting to hear what she would say next, Neroli with more than a trace of that strange reserve Alaria had noticed a moment ago coloring her expression. Well, Alaria would deal with that later. Right now, she had work to do.

“Neroli,” she said, taking Neroli’s arm and leading her away a little, out of earshot of the civilians, “you know your way around spirit magic better than anyone - I want to use a Spirit spell to track down the source of the illness. I think it’s a spell that’s been placed on the town. Initially, I connected it with the King in Hopeford, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t make sense for his rising to affect Brighthill before it affects Hopeford, and it makes even less sense for it to affect my friends before it affects anyone else. No, this is something different. So, I guess there’s a sigil of some kind somewhere in the town, and I want to find it.”

Neroli looked her in the face, her eyes moving as if she was searching for something. Then she swallowed hard and dropped her gaze.

“Yes,” she said stiffly. “I agree with you. Whatever this is, it’s localized, and the most obvious way to create a localized effect would be with a power sigil placed here or somewhere nearby. It would be hidden, of course, and probably have a few layers of guarding magic over it, but that’s not difficult to break.”

“The hard part will be finding it initially,” Alaria said. “I’ve got a few spells that can do it. There’s the simple Seeking spell, but that’s quite localized. And then there’s Threat Finder, but that’s not really designed for this kind of thing… what? You have an idea?”

Neroli was giving Alaria a new funny look now. She was smiling.

“I have an idea, yes,” she said. “It’s simpler than using finder spells. You go to the source, then follow the line back.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No? Then let me show you. Sasha, where are the patients? Where is Grezkull, and Mia, and Beth?”

“Beth and Mia are in their rooms upstairs. Grezkull is at home. He lives down the road from here, about five minutes away.”

“That will be better,” Neroli said. “Alaria, you know where Grezkull’s home is?”

“I do…”

“Then let’s go there straight away. Sasha, stay here and keep an eye on things. Don’t worry, I think we’re going to get a solution to this problem pretty quickly.”

Neroli was not talkative as Alaria took her down the street to the cottage where Grezkull lived on his own. Or at least, she was not very talkative to Alaria. She muttered to herself as she walked, talking aloud in snatches of different languages that Alaria didn’t recognize, gesturing with her hands, throwing out little blue puffs of magic that trailed from her fingers like smoke or cold flame.

Alaria could see that she had some plan, some improvisation in mind, and was working up to something impressive. She didn’t push conversation. Neroli was an artist, and when it comes to dealing with artists, it’s best to let them have their own way as much as possible.

Suddenly, before they’d even reached Grezkull’s front door. Neroli abruptly stopped and pointed to the ground. “Ah, there it is,” she said. She looked at Alaria, her face shining with enjoyment and satisfaction. “Do you see it?”

“No,” Alaria had to admit. “I see nothing.”

Neroli frowned. “Damn, it was supposed to be visible to both of us. I must have… just a moment.”

She held up her left hand, three fingers raised, and then held out the right hand, palm downward, clenched into a fist. Alaria had that same impression as she had felt the first time she saw Neroli performing spells. She sensed that magic was happening, but it was too smooth and subtle for her to be able to follow the workings.

Alaria couldn’t help but grin at the subtlety of it. There was nothing quite like seeing a very skilled mage at work. “That’s so impressive,” she said quietly.

“It would be if I could get it to work,” Neroli replied grumpily. “Just at the moment, I’m not sure… ah, that’s it.”

Alaria blinked. For a moment, the whole of her vision was obscured by a network of gleaming lines of every different color imaginable. They connected everything – not just that, they connected every bit of everything. Everything from the smallest pebble on the road to the huge banks of cloud in the sky was interconnected by a dazzling and incomprehensibly intricate web of many colored lights.

Then it was gone, and there was only one connecting line left. While the others had been beautiful to look at, this one was an ugly, sludgy brown, and it stretched along the ground about an inch from the surface of the street. It looked like somebody had spilled some kind of hairy brown sludge on the ground, trickling it in a thick, nasty line right down the middle of the street.

“You see it now?” Neroli asked.

Alaria tried to speak but found that her voice wasn’t working. The glimpse she had seen of the extreme interconnectedness of all things had been too much for her. It had been so dazzling, and so beautiful at the same time, and all of her carefully built talents for putting her emotions to one side deserted her in a moment.

She coughed, swallowed, moved her tongue around in her mouth. Neroli reached up to her mouth, looking at her quizzically, and then passed a hand across Alaria’s lips. Suddenly, Alaria could speak again, and more, she felt like she was back in control of her body and her mind. Yes, the web of interconnectedness had been incredibly beautiful, but they were here with a job to do, and no matter how beautiful it had been, they could not be distracted from the task in hand.

“That’s better,” Alaria said, finding her voice again.

Neroli looked as if she wanted to see something more but decided against it. “An unintended side-effect,” she said apologetically. “We can talk about it later. That line will take us straight to the source of the contagion.”

“You were right,” Neroli said as they followed the brown sludgy trail back up the street towards the inn. “There is some kind of magic influence over the town, and that’s what’s making the people fall ill. I guess you are right also that the magic has been tailored specifically toward you and your friends. If we hadn’t found it out, no doubt we would have fallen ill as well, and very soon.”

“Chances are it was meant for me,” Alaria grumbled, “and my friends are just collateral damage to them.”

“Who would wish you ill like that?” Neroli said. “And they must have powerful magic if they’re able to do this. Sigils of disease and contagion are hard to master. Whoever it is, we’re up against a proper magic worker.”

“Nothing like your skill though,” Alaria said. “I’ve never seen anything like what you showed me a minute ago.”

“Oh, don’t change the subject!” Neroli scolded. Alaria noticed that the creation and improvisation of a new spell seemed to have improved her mood, and there was no trace of that strange distance that had grown between them a moment before, back at the inn.

Alaria grinned. “You want to know who might wish me harm, and also have a solid grasp of contagion magic? I’m afraid there are too many candidates to name. Before I came here and tried to settle down, I spent a great deal of time on the road fighting against all kinds of different enemies. I certainly pissed off a wide range of people, and there are plenty of them who are more than capable of tracking me down and setting up this trap.”

Neroli stopped. “You think it’s a trap?” she said.

Alaria slowed. “Now you mention it… I didn’t mean a trap in that sense, but… you’re right. We might be walking into a physical ambush. What if we’re supposed to find the spell sigil, and that creates some other kind of magical attack that specifically targets me?”

“We need to be very careful,” Neroli said. “Come, let’s follow the line for now. It goes to the inn, all right, but then it moves away again.”

“It goes up the hill,” Alaria said. “Look, there, it’s headed round there and into that house.”

They stopped, looking at the building. It was a low, single-story dwelling that looked like any other house in Brighthill. Alaria frowned. She’d never noticed that house before, and didn’t know who might live there, but there was no question the line of illness went right up to the door and disappeared inside.

She reached down and unhitched her dagger from its belt, then walked round the side of the house. She saw with approval that Neroli had changed her clothing again, giving herself a suit of light chainmail and leather, and equipping herself with a wooden staff that could act as a vector for spells.

“We’ve got to be careful,” Alaria said in a low voice to Neroli. “If there’s going to be a physical attack, let’s go round the back and at least see if we can get the element of surprise.”

Alaria walked round carefully, followed by Neroli. There was no fence around the house, though it stood a little clear of its immediate neighbors and had a small amount of cultivable garden around it. It didn’t look like there had been any attempt at gardening done here for a very long time.

The house seemed beak and disused. There were light colored blinds over the windows, as well as a thick layer of dust. Alaria looked in one of the windows but could see nothing. With Neroli following her closely, her staff at the ready, Alaria made her way round the house to the back door.

Here, she glanced at the lock and found it was a simple, old-fashioned one. She narrowed her eyes.

“I think the time for subtlety has passed,” she said. “I could pick that lock with magic, but you know how I feel about using magical solutions when a mundane solution is available.”

Neroli raised her eyebrows questioningly at Alaria.

Alaria flashed Neroli a grim smile, took two steps back, and then rushed forward and kicked the door hard, striking the paneling with her heel, just above the lock. The wood split and crashed in, and there was a shattering of glass. At the instant the door caved in, the windows on either side of the door shattered, and dark figures leaped out. They were small, almost goblin sized, and they were swathed in black so Alaria couldn’t see who or what they were.

Their long, curved swords were clear enough though, and Alaria was forced to give ground as the black-cloaked attackers rushed her, swinging their blades and shouting in a language she didn’t at first recognize.

She parried to right and left, kicked out with a boot and tripped an assailant, knocked another one down with the flat of her sword, and shot Fireball at another one. A glance at Neroli showed her backing off, a look of fear in her eyes.

Of course, Alaria thought, for all her genius at magic, she’s seen very little combat.

“Give ground!” she called to Neroli. “Back off, I can handle it.”

Neroli didn’t need to be asked twice. She got well out of the way, retreating until her back was against a low wall that protected the neighbor’s garden from peering eyes.

Alaria turned and swiped with her blade, satisfied that all her enemies were in front of her and nothing was going to target Neroli. She gave herself to the fight.

She didn’t know who or what these attackers were. She didn’t know why they were attacking her. But one of them aimed a killing blow at her face with his wickedly curved blade, and all the other questions ceased to matter. She was a warrior. These were her enemies. She would kill them.

And kill she did. She had forgotten how much she missed it, this deadly dance of blades. The enemies were no match for her skill, but there were plenty of them, and they were fast.

She spun and weaved, her blade singing in her hand, and the attackers fell by twos and threes to her swings. One caught her a glancing blow on the upper arm, but her armor turned it. Another hit her in the leg with his sword, and that one bit home. She was aware of the warmth of blood, and some part of her registered that she’d been wounded, but it was not the part of her that was in charge now. That part of her fought. That part of her killed the enemy.

Those two were the only ones who landed blows. There were no others. What we forget about sword fighting is that if the enemy lands a blow, it leaves him open to our answer. This is double true for groups of enemies. For every blow landed by the mysterious robed figures, Alaria took out four of them and moved to a better position. They were not hits taken from carelessness, they were calculated hits taken because they allowed her the crucial steps she needed to position herself for her next strike.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute before they were all dead. How many? She did not know. They lay, huddled black heaps like discarded rags all around her feet. Fifteen? Twenty?

She looked up, and her stomach felt like it was about to drop out through her feet.

Neroli was gone.

Chapter

Fifteen

Alaria swore under her breath and dashed to the spot Neroli had been.

No one.

She dashed to the side of the house and peered round.

No one.

She looked at the blank open door at the back of the house. It was the only answer. She charged in.

“In here,” said a voice from the front hall.

Alaria lowered her blade. It was Neroli’s voice.

“You’re all right?” Alaria gasped. Neroli was crouching in the front hall of the building, the front door propped open behind her and the pale sun shining in.

“I’m fine,” she said, gesturing to the door. “While you were entertaining yourself with those attackers, I came round the front and opened the door - by magical means, I might add, I have no scruples about using magic to open the door even if the option of kicking it in is still available to me.”

Alaria shrugged. She was grinning, immensely relieved to find Neroli unhurt, but still managing to keep her emotional responses at a distance, as she felt was essential for this kind of situation.

Neroli gestured to the floor. “I’ve found the spell,” she said. “Do you recognize this style?”

Alaria came over and looked. To her eyes, there was a circular design visible on the floor. It looked like it had been burned into the floor with hot metal. There were a series of letters mingled together in a very stylized way, and the outer edges of each letter glowed with a sickly green color.

“Yeah, I know that,” Alaria said without hesitation. “That’s Luft Madsen’s work.”

“And who might he be?” Neroli asked.

Alaria shrugged. “An old enemy. He ran an organized crime syndicate back in Crownheart City, back in the early days when I was just coming up in the guild. We used to get all kinds of jobs back then from the town guard, cleanup jobs, you know?”

“No,” Neroli said. “I don’t know.”

“Right,” Alaria said. “Well, the city guard of the King’s Invigilators or some other official body would root out a cell of gang members working in a part of the city, doing work for one of the bosses. They were all insulated from each other, so no cell knew what the other was up to. It was clever, really, because it meant that even if you found one - smuggling goods, say, or threatening people for money - you could never find out from them where they were sending the goods, or who they were getting their orders from, because they didn’t know. Anyway, when the city guard or whoever found these cells, they’d give them to an adventurer guild to clean up. Hence, cleanup jobs.”

“Okay,” Neroli said. “I understand. And I take it you cleaned up a fair number of this… what did you call him?”

“Luft Madsen.”

“I take it you cleaned up a fair few of this Luft Madsen’s cells?”

“I did better than that,” Alaria said. “That wouldn’t have been enough to make him come after me now, all these years later. No, I did more than clean up his cells. I cleaned up him. I saw the pattern in the cells, started following strings, and in the end, I broke his whole operation up and got him the death penalty.”

She snorted in disgust. “I was naive as hell back then. The death penalty. He escaped from the highest-security prison in the Kingdom of Sapheli, the night before he was due to be hanged, and he was never heard of since. The only death penalty you can inflict on someone like that is the kind that comes from a blade in the neck at short range, without warning. I had the chance; I should have taken it. Now, he’d traced me, and this is his revenge.”

She reached toward the horrible sickness spell that polluted the floor of the small dwelling, but Neroli reached out a hand and gripped her arm with convulsive strength. “No!” she cried, appalled. “What are you doing?”

“I was going to break the charm, of course,” Alaria said.

“But can’t you see what that would do?”

Alaria looked again. The charm was very obvious, very clear. It wove a spell with Alaria at its center. The illness would affect those around her, and those she cared about, and once she’d seen them all die, it would take her. If she found the spell first, it would release a horde of spirit-created fighter demons to try to kill her with blades, and if that did not work…

“By the gods!” Alaria exclaimed, pulling her hand back as if she’d been burned. “I never saw that!”

“You need to learn to look more deeply into magic,” Neroli scolded her, sounding like a schoolteacher telling a careless student off. “You’re very good at the parts you’re good at, but you’re not creative with it. That’s not a problem for you, and I don’t blame you for it. Creativity isn’t encouraged in the formal study magic, but you need to remember that other people do use creativity, and the spells they create are not always the spells you would create. Some have hidden depths.”

Alaria nodded, feeling suitably chastened. Within the deeper structure of the spell - the spell that she had been about to thoughtlessly reach in and break - was a deep, subtle, hidden effect. If the spell was broken, it would take the lives of everyone it had latched on to.

“What do we do?” Alaria asked. Her barriers were suddenly down, and she found herself crying in a moment, the thought of what she’d come so close to doing wrenching at her.

“You start by giving yourself a minute to pull yourself together,” Neroli said. She stood. “The spell isn’t going anywhere. Come here, come outside for a moment.”

Neroli led Alaria out the front door. There were a few people standing in the street, looking to see what the disturbance was. Alaria felt Neroli moving the magic around again, but again she didn’t know what the spell was. Then the people who had gathered to see what the drama was all lost interest at the same time, and wandered off, back into their homes.

Alaria chuckled and wiped her nose on a tissue. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“I do,” Neroli said. “You lost your grim exterior.”

“My what?”

Neroli sat her down on the front step of the house. She felt shaken up, but not too shaken to be amazed by how effective Neroli’s diversion spell was. People walked past them in the street and paid them no more attention than if they have not been there at all. Alaria knew the form of that spell, and she could do it well enough, but Neroli performed the magic with an effortless grace that was beyond Alaria.

She had never seen magic so smoothly and deftly performed.

“Your grim exterior,” Neroli said. “You rely so much on keeping your emotions at bay when you’re in action that you’re not used to feeling strong emotions when you’re in the midst of a fight.”

“Well, no,” Alaria said. “I’m not.”

She realized something. “Is that why you were looking at me funny earlier?”

“Was I?”

“When I first started planning to find the rune somewhere in the village, you gave me a look almost as if you were… repelled.”

“I’d never seen you like that before. When I heard that Mia and Beth were sick upstairs, I thought you’d run to them, but you didn’t. You just went cold as ice and started making a battle plan.”

“But you see why?”

Neroli made a face. “I mean, yes, I see why in theory that might look like the right thing to do, but Alaria, darling, don’t you see the difference? If you’d gone up to them straight away, you’d have seen the line running from them and you’d have known for sire that it was a spell causing the illness. That way you might have found the source even sooner, but you didn’t think to do that. You were ready to start sweeping the village with Finder spells until you hit on the sigil.”

“You didn’t decide to go up and see them,” Alaria said, hating the surliness that crept into her tone, but somehow unable to stop it.

“But I already knew that I’d be able to see a line running from them to the sigil. I went to Grezkull because I knew it would be easier to see, because it wouldn’t be confused by any other connections.”

“You’re saying that if I hadn’t put my emotions to one side when I learned that there was trouble, I’d have found the source of the trouble sooner?”

“I’m saying that you’re wrong to always put your emotions aside, yes. I’m saying that you would do better if you didn’t rely on keeping that emotionless exterior. And yes, I was put off when I saw you do it earlier today. I thought you seemed cold and heartless, and you’re so not like that as a person that it was difficult for me to see. You understand that?”

Alaria sighed. “But look at me now! Here I am, not putting my emotions to one side, and I’m weeping out here in the street while there’s work to be done!”

“Feeling your emotions won’t stop you doing the work you need to do,” Neroli said. “You’re feeling them particularly strongly right now because this is new for you, you’ve not felt this before, and so it’s overwhelming. But look, do you think I can do these creative feats of magic that you’re so impressed by, without having my emotions involved? Do you think what I do is the result of a cold, calculating state of mind? I don’t doubt that being able to not have your mind clouded by your emotions is useful in a fight, but you slip into that state even when you’re not actually fighting. As soon as there’s any threat, you drop into that state, and that’s where it limits you, not in the moment of action.”

“If I’d been a bit less emotionless, I might have been more careful just now, when I was about to break the rune.”

“Exactly. You might have been more able to take a moment and see the trap that had been laid for you. Luft Madsen has left a subtle trap hidden within the spell, but he’s been guided by his emotions while doing it, and I was guided by mine while looking at it. One of my biggest emotions was fear and mistrust, and guided by that, I was able to look again at the sigil and see the trap hidden within it. You see?”

“I do see,” Alaria said. She was feeling all kinds of emotions now - anger, fear, shame, elation, affection, excitement… It was a cacophony of feelings, all rushing in to claim space now that she had put her natural defensiveness against emotion to one side.

“How do I pull my head together and get some clarity, without pushing these emotions to one side?” she asked, helplessly.

“Maybe just do it with less aggression,” Neroli suggested, her voice gentle. “You can take charge of your emotional state, that’s been shown clearly. You don’t have a problem with that. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can accept that you feel all these emotions, but still remember that you are in charge, not them. Does that make sense?”

Alaria nodded. She drew herself up, straightening her spine and taking a handkerchief from her pocket to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. She took a few deep breaths and looked around, feeling the flood of emotions quieting almost immediately.

“That’s the way,” Neroli said, approvingly. “You see? You can do it. Now, come on, let’s have a look at that sigil.”

They went back inside the house and crouched down next to the evil spell rune that was burned into the floor.

“Relax and let your instinct guide you as you examine it,” Neroli said. “There’s no rush. You’ve defeated the fighters, and the real trap is here. You’ve seen it now, and it’s down to you to deconstruct this sigil in such a way that it doesn’t trigger the trap and kill the people who it’s connected itself to. We can do that together, but I think you need to take the lead. This is designed for you, and you know your enemy, after all.”

Alaria nodded. She breathed a few deep breaths, inhaling through her nose and carefully exhaling tension through her mouth as she examined the unpleasant spell sigil.

“It’s made in layers,” she said quietly, as she felt her heartbeat slowing and her breath deepening. Before her eyes, the spell sigil seems to rise up from the floor slightly, the different elements moving apart from each other. She could see into the construction of the magic, into the architecture of it.

“There’s one thing I will say for Luft Madsen. He’s subtle. He’s waited a long time to take this revenge, and he’s built this trap very carefully. Let’s see now…”

Guided by her intuition, Alaria reached for the component parts of the magic and eased them slightly further apart from each other. Part of her was surprised that it had worked. Instinctively, she blocked that part, but a moment later she let it through, allowing the surprise and elation to be felt.

She chuckled. “I haven’t ever done magic this way before. There’s no form to it, no set way of doing it. I can just use my willpower and guide my influence on the magic using that willpower. Nobody ever told me it could be done this way.”

“Nobody ever taught me that either, but they never taught me anything else either, and so I learned it for myself, because it was the only way I could. I imagine it’s like sword fighting - you learn forms and practice them, but when you’re actually in a fight you let your instinct drive your actions, informed by the techniques and practiced moves you’ve learned, but not limited by them.”

“You act from a place of necessity, not a place of form,” Alaria said, remembering the phrase from one of her sword masters in the later years of her weapons study. “If you let form dictate action, you limit your options unnecessarily.”

“The same is true in magic,” Neroli said, “but for some reason it’s harder to see, and those who teach it don’t acknowledge the fact.”

“I can see the different components of the spell,” Alaria said, “and I can see the part that’s meant to trip me up, the part that kills if I deactivate the whole thing at once.”

“You have to deactivate that part alone,” Neroli said. “Do that first, and then the rest should be easy. If you don’t, Mia, Beth, and Grezkull will all die.”

Chapter

Sixteen

“It’s such a cruel trap,” Neroli continued. “What worse thing could Luft Madsen do to you than having those you care about die at your own hand?”

“He’s a cruel man,” Alaria said. “One of the cruelest I’ve ever come across. He should have been killed, but that’s the nature of that kind of person. They do tend to survive.”

She examined the part of the spell that would - if the spell as a whole were broken - execute Alaria’s friends with one stroke. The kill switch was an ugly piece of magic, so far from anything that was permitted in the magic schools that Alaria could not see any analogue in her experience for it. The magic was entirely new.

Using the newly discovered willpower magic that Neroli had helped her to see, she looked more closely at the kill switch, zooming in on it and looking at all its different elements. There was something…

“It’s a layer,” Neroli said helpfully. “The person who has crafted this has discovered the technique of layering different spells on top of each other. See how the trigger mechanism works? The destruction of this part of the sigil over here triggers the kill mechanism over here.”

“I do see,” Alaria murmured, “but there’s something else, something that makes me uneasy.”

Neroli withdrew slightly. “I don’t see anything else,” she said.

“But I do,” Alaria insisted. It was interesting to realize that within this space, a half-trance state as she looked very closely at the spell, she could feel Neroli’s awareness next to hers, a bright spark of intelligence focused on the same point as Alaria herself was. Alaria frowned.

“Look here,” she said, and rather than pointing with her finger to guide Neroli’s eyes, she pointed with her will, directing Neroli’s magical awareness.

“Oh!” Neroli exclaimed. “By the gods, I never noticed that.”

“Do you know what it is?” Alaria said. “I don’t recognise it.”

“It’s a communication spell,” Neroli said immediately. “It sends out a pulse, a signal to someone. If this part of the spell is discovered, it signals to…”

She broke off, a look of horror in her eyes.

Alaria met her gaze. “It’s a backup plan. They have someone in the presence of the sick people, someone whose job it is to kill them if this trap is discovered.”

“Zargkul!” they both said together.

“He can’t have gone far,” Alaria said. “Quick, Neroli, we need to deactivate this kill switch and get back to the inn.”

Working together, driven now by their fear for their friends, they examined every aspect of the kill switch spell that they could see, combining their awareness to make sure there was nothing else they were missing before they put the spell out of action.

There was not. They forced themselves to do a careful job on the spell, but after a couple of minutes they were both convinced that they were on the right track.

The spell was a layer, tacked onto the underside of the contagion spell. Alaria severed the connection between the layers, using her willpower to drive a highly focused Fire spell through the connection. This combination of the improvisational willpower magic with the focused spell style from a specific school was new, and Neroli smiled as she perceived Alaria’s approach.

“Excellent,” she said. “You’re picking this up quickly.”

Alaria stood. The layer was broken, and with a twist of Fire magic she incinerated the isolated kill switch, then let the searing magical flame consume the rest of the spell.

“Now,” she said, “to find Zargkul.”

They left the little house at a run and dashed down the street. The inn was not far away, and Alaria was aware of Neroli using her magic to form a Finding spell that was centered on Zargkul. This time, to her surprise, Alaria found that she was able to see the workings of Neroli’s magic. Until that moment, she had always been baffled by Neroli’s working, but her newly discovered way of seeing magic seemed to allow her to see through that aspect of things, and to see to the heart of what Neroli was doing.

“You’re using the signature that was left on the kill switch to find him,” she said.

Neroli grinned. “Very good,” she said. “That was a unique call that was left on the kill switch. I can use that to make my Finder spell unique to him. If all I had to go on was my brief impression of him from the ten minutes I was in his company, it would be nowhere near as good. But this is perfect. There’s no escaping us this way.”

She cast the spell, and Alaria felt again that she’d modified it so Alaria would be able to see the result as well.

It worked perfectly, and the result made them both cry out in fear. The result of the spell came in not as a blue line or a bright light or anything like that. It was just an intuition, strong and undeniable, that flooded into both of their minds at the same time. It was more than an intuition. It was knowledge.

Zargkul was already at the Brighthill inn.

No words were needed. They sprinted at full speed down the cobbled street, Alaria driven by sudden terror. Fear flooded her, but she allowed it in, allowed it to drive her toward her goal.

Neroli was fast, but Alaria outpaced her. They approached the hotel. The door was open. Alaria dashed inside.

Sasha was lying propped against the bar, unconscious. Blood stained her head, and her skin was pale. One of the guests was kneeling beside her, dabbing at her forehead.

Another guest looked at Alaria. “Upstairs!” he shouted, seeing her panicked look. He pointed to a door at the back of the common room, half open, leading to the stairwell to the upstairs room.

Alaria was through the door and up the stairs. She was in the corridor, looking wildly about.

“That way!” Neroli said, coming up behind her. Alaria looked where Neroli pointed, and saw, sure enough, another door half open. She charged forward, dashed into the room, and saw Zargkul, poised over the bed with a long knife in his hand.

But he was not alone.

The knife was raised, but he grappled with another figure, a slight figure, who fought him with all the anger and abandon of a wild animal. A young man, curly haired, who gripped the knife arm with all his might, while furiously trying to butt his head into Zargkul’s face.

It was Palo.

Beth was on the bed, deeply asleep, but there was no trace of the brown thread of sickness in the room. Beth didn’t look ill, just sleeping.

As Alaria appeared in the doorway, Zargkul saw her. Palo’s back was to her, and he didn’t see her, but Zargkul’s eyes blazed and with a sudden convulsive shove, he hurtled Palo back to land sprawled across the bed. Beth’s eyes opened suddenly, and she stared about in confusion. The knife descended.

Alaria tackled Zargkul around the waist, slamming into him with the full weight of her body and her fury before he could land his knife blow. They careered backward and went smack through the glass window. Glass shattered, and Zargkul flailed as he tried to stab at Alaria with his knife.

They fell, and Zargkul landed on his back with Alaria on top of him. He was winded, and his head banged off the cobbles. Alaria rolled away from him, bruised and winded but - as far as she could tell - otherwise unhurt. They were in the outside seating area at the back of the inn, an enclosed, cobbled space surrounded by a low wall and small, carefully pruned jengberry trees.

Alaria tried to stand and found that she couldn’t. She tried again, lurching to her feet this time and finding that her left leg wouldn’t obey her.

She growled in pain. The wound that she’d taken in the fight at the house earlier had opened up again, and the pain was suddenly intense.

Zargkul rolled over, coughing, then hauled himself up and looked around. He saw Alaria and charged at her.

She was leaning against a chair in one corner of the area, and as he ran at her she swept the chair up and smashed it against the side of his head in a sweeping blow. The chair came apart, shattering into pieces, and Zargkul stumbled to the side. He still had his knife in his right hand, but the hand slackened, and he almost dropped it as the chair impacted him.

Alaria lunged forward. The pain in her leg was excruciating, but she was able to make it forward and get within reach of him. She swept out Earthclaw, her small dagger, as she charged.

Zargkul made one last effort, his fist clenching around his knife and his left hand coming up towards her face, but her charge was too fast for him and before he could make good on his attack, she was under his guard and Earthclaw had punched through his windpipe and back out again.

She slashed downward at his right hand, seeing the dagger continuing to rise despite the killing blow. Blood bubbled from the wound in his neck, and he made choking sounds.

Alaria pushed a tentacle out from her upper right shoulder and caught the left hand that still reached for her face, while her dagger slashed the tendons of his right hand, causing him to drop the knife.

He staggered back, her tentacles gripping his left wrist. His eyes rolled back in his head and all expression was lost from his face, but he didn’t fall. Instead, with a sudden convulsive lurch, he attacked again.

Alaria was thrown off-balance by his second attack. She’d expected him to fall, but somehow, he was still standing, still moving, still attacking.

It was horrible. A moment before, he had been attacking with the focused intent of a normal enemy - not a pleasant thing to be faced with, but something that Alaria was at least used to. Now, she was being attacked by a corpse, and it came at her with no more care for its own body than if it had been being used as a club in the hand of someone else.

The body of Zargkul attacked with its mouth gaping open, trying to bite her face, trying to sink its teeth into her neck. She gave ground, too shocked for the moment to do anything else, then she used the tentacle she had around the thing’s wrist to turn it around, yanking it off balance.

The undead being staggered to her right, unbalanced by the sudden jerk that she had given to its wrist, and she raised Earthclaw again and punched the dagger three times into the creature’s left side.

Kidney, liver, left lung, she thought as the blows hit home, perfectly aimed, and blood spurted out from the wounds, showing that Zargkul’s heart was still beating. Surely that’s got to put you down.

It did not. The monster flailed at her, its arm whipping at her like a bludgeon, the hand flopping about horribly like a dying fish on the end of the arm.

Alaria moved back and suddenly let go her tentacle grip, as a searing pain cut through her from the tentacle back into her neck. The tentacle reflexively pulled away, and she demanifested it, horrified by the sudden jolt of pain. The undead corpse of Zargkul had not done anything to the tentacle - the tentacle had not been bitten or hit - but the left wrist which the tentacle had gripped a moment before was now smoking as if it had just been pulled from a furnace.

“What in the hells is this?” Alaria said aloud. “Why won’t you die?”

She staggered back, her left leg feeling useless under her.

Then she remembered the conversation that she had just had shortly before with Neroli. She tapped into the instinctive feeling for magic that she had begun exploring, allowing that sense to overly itself on her regular senses.

Immediately, she saw what she was up against. It was not what she had thought. She thought she was fighting a very tough dwarf with some extra magic, perhaps. Now, she saw that Zargkul was being driven by an external force.

There was a dark, dry, dusty looking cloud of shadow around his heart. And there was something more. The dark shadow connected out into the world. It reached back toward the city of Hopeford.

She didn’t have much time to think through the implications of that. She didn’t need much time. The implications were clear. Whatever was happening with Zargkul, it wasn’t some plot of Luft Madsen, the former crime boss of Crownheart City. Madsen had played his hand, and he had lost the game. This new development was something else. Something connected with the awakening of King Sanuk.

Fire, she thought. Whatever this thing is, won’t be able to survive complete incineration.

At the same time as she had the thought, she heard a voice from above and spared herself a split second to glance up. Beth, Mia, and Neroli were all looking out of the smashed window of Beth’s room. Neroli was calling to Alaria, “Fire! Use fire!”

Alaria didn’t have to hear that suggestion twice. Instinctively, she reached for a Fireball spell, but then she pulled back. Instead, she reached for the intuitive grasp of magic that she had recently discovered in herself. She allowed her fear of the lumbering undead before her to drive the magic, finding that the power in her emotion actually made her ability to cast the spell stronger.

She drew on the Fire school, but she didn’t direct it through any traditional taught form of the spell. Instead, she allowed intuition to drive the formation of the magic, channeling the power of fire in its raw form right into the still beating heart of the lumbering undead monster in front of her.

Zargkul halted mid stride, and then exploded from the inside out. Fire blazed up through his core, turning him to a single column of black ash in a moment. There is a deep thump, and the explosive force of the spell blasted outward, showering Alaria and the courtyard in a pall of thick, greasy black ash.

“Ugh,” Alaria said in disgust. Wiping the stuff from her face, she looked up again. Neroli was grinning, but Mia and Beth both looked worried and confused. Alaria stumbled suddenly, the pain in her leg cutting through the feeling of victory.

She sank to the ground, cursing with the pain, and was about to reach into her pocket for a healing potion when suddenly, blackness crept from the corner of her vision, and she felt like she was floating.

Going to pass out, she thought vaguely. Now there’s something that’s never happened before.

Then everything went black.

Chapter

Seventeen

Hands lifted her. She was carried, feeling as if she was floating. Faces drifted before her, faces of adventurers she’d known, people she’d fought with, enemies she’d killed, teachers who had shown her the way.

Katrine. She saw the severe black hair and the earnest expression that were so characteristic of the first woman she had ever loved, before she had even known that loving women was a thing. Katrine had been a student with her at the academy, an incredibly hard-working, diligent woman, who had not had any time for anything but work. She had lodged in the room above Alaria, and the whole time she had been there had been a torment for Alaria.

She hadn’t known why at the time. She’d had no idea. But the whole time that Katrine had lodged near her, Alaria had found it impossible to focus on work. Katrine invaded her dreams and her waking equally. There had been no hour of the day when Alaria had not seen the fine, clean-limbed form of her neighbor, the sharp, clear, intent features, the small, sensual mouth, the perfect hands.

Alaria did not know then that love was what she felt. Alaria did not know what love was, except in the abstract. Love was something other people did. Something that happened to merchants and farmers, to kings and queens, to nobles and to paupers, but not to her. Love was one of the many emotions that she had learned to push to one side.

Only Katrine had managed to bring up the feeling so strongly that Alaria could not ignore it, and even then, having no reference point in her experience and no understanding that it was perfectly natural and not uncommon for a woman to love another woman, she didn’t recognize it for what it was.

At that time, all she had known was that when Katrine left after twelve months, Alaria could breathe again and return her focus to her work. Katrine, the most diligent and hard-working student that the college had ever seen, completed her exams in record time and was moved to an institution for advanced learners. The relief was as powerful as the sadness that settled over her, and - if she was being really honest with herself - that was when she had learned to put her emotions to one side.

Sadness she did know, and she knew how to suppress it. When, later years, Alaria was training weapons in the Slayer’s Guild of Anshir, her tutor, Master Venance, was impressed by how well she took on the lessons about not letting her emotions get in the way of combat. Little did Master Venance know - indeed, little did Alaria know - that she had been practicing ever since Katrine left the Castle of the Ancient Heart.

As she floated above the ground, her past unspooling like a painted tapestry through her mind, she saw Katrine again, as clear as if she was in the room with her. Katrine had aged, as Alaria had. She was still beautiful, but she had filled out. The lines of her face were less angular, her limbs were less thin, and her back was bowed a little with long study. Her hair was shorter, but it was the same inky black, and her posture was as eager and thoughtful as ever.

She was bending over a mortar and pestle, grinding something in the bowl with the pestle in her left hand, and flicking through the pages of an arcane text with her right. Symbols glowed with eldritch colors from the fine vellum pages. A little away from the book, a burner glowed with a blue flame under a little copper pot. Red steam that glittered like powdered crystal rose from the pot.

Alaria watched this vision in fascination. She knew that she was dreaming, but it was so real. Any time she had thought of Katrine, it had been as the youth she had been when Alaria had known her for real. This was different. It was as if she was seeing Katrine as she really was, right now, today, in this moment.

“You are,” Katrine said, without looking up from her work. “Do you think so little of your own abilities?”

There was a smile in her voice, but it was tinged with sadness as she spoke on. Alaria had never heard her voice more than a few times in reality. Now, it had deepened, and it sounded hoarse, as if from lack of use.

“You have been so resistant to your own better qualities, Alaria,” Katrine said. “I’ve never been able to get through to you. Your imagination, your intuition, your sensuality, your capacity for love. These are the true drivers of magic. Without these, none of the rest would be possible. The tutors and magic academies do not understand what they’re dealing with. They codify and standardize as if magic was a collection of insects on a cork sheet. What other science, what other part of human endeavor doesn’t combine imagination, emotion, and intuition with codified technique? No building would be built, no music made, no medicine or mathematics or astronomy - none of it would happen without imagination and emotion. But magic? They think magic begins and ends with a set of formulas, and they reject all who try to do differently, all who try to do better. Those who stay and succeed do so with an amputated, truncated version of what magic truly could be. What it should be.”

Alaria couldn’t speak. Somewhere, she was laid on a table. The vision of Katrine faded, and she clawed desperately after it, like a sleeper reaching after a pleasant dream. Her mind slid away from the vision, her hold on the vision slipping like fingers on oiled glass.

“Easy,” a voice said in her ear. “Easy, Lari.” It was Mia. Alaria reached out and found a warm, familiar hand holding hers.

“Her hand’s so cold,” Mia’s voice said, shocked.

“She’s lost a lot of blood,” said another voice, a voice she didn’t know.

She sank again.

Katrine was moving across that dark room. The copper pot stull bubbled on the table, and the book sat open at a page of glowing blue and green diagrams, but the mortar and pestle had been emptied. Katrine held the contents in her hand. It dripped dark liquid onto the floor, a compact mat of crushed plant matter.

“You’re back?” Katrine said. “Good. It’s difficult to reach you, but you’re in the right place now, I’m confident of that. You’re in the right place at the right time, with the right people around you. I just hope I can finish this in time to find my way through to you…”

Thump.

Alaria was in the kitchen at the homestead, hearing that strange sound from up above - the sound that turned out to be nothing at all.

Thump.

She was in the room at the Hopeford Hotel, standing with Jessica Sola, Neroli next to her, holding her hand and shaking in fear.

Thump.

She was in Rannek Stickler’s room, surrounded by his clutter, but he wasn’t there, and the fire in the hearth had burned to nothing. The plants wilted in their pots on the sills.

Thump.

“She’s waking up,” Beth’s voice said.

“Oh, thank the gods,” Mia said.

Neroli muttered what sounded like a prayer of thanks.

“She’ll be exhausted for a day or two while she builds her strength back,” said the voice Alaria didn’t recognize. “Don’t let her do anything if you can help it. She needs lots of fluids, lots of salty broths and stews. Get her to eat as much as possible, and drink as much water as possible, but no alcohol. And one other thing - don’t let her use any healing potions. She’ll want to, but this is not the place for them. She needs real healing, and she’ll only get that if you get her to rest.”

Thump.

The undead king in his stony bed, a skeletal, armor-clad hand banging rhythmically on the stone ceiling of his prison, while haggard lips chanted an ancient incantation.

“Lari?”

She woke to a warm, scented darkness.

“Don’t try to sit up, dear.” It was Mia speaking. The scent in the air was Mia’s skin. There was a hint of rosewater and lavender, a scent of beeswax, honey, and cloves.

“Easy,” Mia said, and Alaria felt her moving about in the bed. “I’m going to put on the light. Mind your eyes.”

There was a sudden flare, painfully bright, and the smell of a match. Then a candle flickered into life, settled, and cast its warm, steady glow across the room. Alaria’s room. Her own bedroom at the Homestead.

Mia sat beside her in the bed, the white blankets rumpled in her lap, her hair sticking up everywhere. She was so beautiful it made Alaria want to cry out, but she coughed dryly instead and reached weakly in the direction that she thought the side table might be.

Mia smiled and reached the other direction, and Alaria heard the sound of water splashing. The noise was tantalizing. She looked in that direction and saw a glass of water in Mia’s hand.

With Mia’s help, Alaria sat up. She drank. Her mouth was parched, but she could only drink in small sips at first. Why was she so weak? She remembered the fight, remembered hitting Zargkul with the chair.

She smiled at that memory, drank some more. What had happened next? The dwarf had not died, that was it. She’d had to burn him. There’d been something…

The black shadow around the dwarf’s heart, keeping it pumping. Then the pain in her leg, stumbling…

Katrine.

She’d seen Katrine in a room, and Katrine had spoken to her. She’d talked about imagination and magic, and being in the right place at the right time…

Alaria couldn’t remember. She drank more water, felt stronger, drank more.

“Damn, but that’s good,” she gasped as she finished what was in the glass. Mia immediately poured more and handed it to her, and Alaria drank that glass off more comfortably.

The water seemed to give her strength, and she sat up, blinking and looking around.

“It’s late?” she asked.

Mia nodded. “Very,” she said.

“How long since…”

“Not long. The fight at the inn happened this afternoon. You’ve slept most of the day.”

“We’re at home?”

Mia nodded again. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

“I don’t know…” Alaria said, putting a hand to her belly. “Not really, no. I might be soon. Tell me what happened? Where’s Beth? Where’s Neroli? Is Grezkull okay? What about Sasha and Palo?”

“Everyone’s fine,” Mia assured her. “There’s plenty of time to discuss everything. Neroli gave us a quick run-down of what happened in Hopeford. Poor Jessica! To have taken over her dream business and then to find that it’s inhabited by some undead king…”

Thump.

The sound was just in Alaria’s head, but it made her flinch.

“I think I am hungry, actually. Shall we go downstairs?”

Mia looked doubtfully down at where Alaria’s leg was hidden under the blankets.

“I’ll be fine,” Alaria said. “It doesn’t hurt too badly.”

“Okay,” Mia said. “The healer said that moving about would be good for it.”

“There we go, then,” Alaria said with a smile. “Come on, I feel like sitting in the kitchen together. You up for that?”

Mia grinned. “Sure,” she said. “There’s some food there for us too, some leftovers from earlier. That’ll do well for us. Come on, I’ll help you downstairs.”

It wasn’t all that easy to get downstairs. Alaria hadn’t been lying when she said her leg didn’t hurt, but as soon as she moved, it began hurting. She flinched, gritting her teeth as Mia helped her down. Alaria was grateful that Mia didn’t suggest stopping and going back up. When they got to the kitchen, Alaria flopped into a chair and propped her foot up on a small stool.

“Maybe I should think about sleeping in the sitting room tonight,” she said, “rather than climbing those stairs. This hurts like crazy.”

Mia nodded. She lit candles and began to heat food on the stove. The cat, awakened from his slumber by their arrival, got up and stretched. He looked around, came over to greet Alaria with a rub of his head, then paraded a circuit of the kitchen. He checked his food bowl, drank a little water, then spent some time sitting with his tail around his paws, watching Mia intently.

His head began to nod, and his eyes to close. He stood, shook himself, and went back to bed, turning round twice before settling down to sleep again.

As she prepared food, Mia began to speak quietly. She told Alaria what had happened.

“After you took out the undead dwarf,” she said, “you collapsed. Beth and I were confused about what was going on - we’d been asleep for days - and Palo had taken a blow to the head and was unconscious. Neroli took charge and led us downstairs to help you. Sasha had woken up and had dashed out into the courtyard with a kitchen knife as big as herself in her hand. I tell you, I’ve never seen anyone looking so fierce! She was almost disappointed when she realized that you’d turned Zargkul to a pile of greasy ash, and there was nothing for her to take a swipe at.”

The pot on the stove bubbled, and she tasted a little from the edge of the pot on a teaspoon, then began to slice bread onto a wooden board.

“We carried you in under Neroli’s direction and laid you on the big table in the common room. One of the guests, thankfully, was a traveling doctor, and he bandaged you up and stitched the wound in your thigh. He said you’d lost a lot of blood, and needed to rest for a day or two, and he said no healing potions! Just plenty of rest, plenty of fluids, and good salty stews.”

With these words, she placed the bread on the table and began to serve up the stew into two bowls.

“Once you were out of danger, he saw to Sasha’s wounds. She was okay, thankfully - she tried to get in Zargkul’s way when he came back, but he punched her and knocked her out. Palo had come back just a few moments before, and had gone up to see Beth, and it’s just as well for her. Apparently, he was able to hold Zargkul off until you came. He’s okay too, pretty beaten up and shaken, but there’s no lasting damage.”

“What happened to him?” Alaria asked as Mia placed the stew in front of her. Mia sat down too and started into her bowl of stew.

“He was kidnapped,” she said. “It seems like there’s been a plot against you that’s been going on for a while. He was lucky to escape.”

Chapter

Eighteen

Alaria felt sickened by the prospect. Her friends, hurt, kidnapped, their lives endangered, all because of the machinations of Luft Madsen, her enemy from years and years ago. She was glad Palo was okay.

“He was kidnapped on the road to Hopeford?” she asked.

“On the way back,” Mia said. “Just near Longwood Gulch, actually. They seemed like bandits at first, but he thought they were too organized, and there were other, richer travelers on the road who they weren’t interested in. Thankfully, a contingent of Hopeford guard were patrolling that way, and they saw the signs of a struggle by the road and decided to investigate. They rescued him.”

“And he came straight back here?”

“With the guards,” Mia said. “They’are at the inn now, as well. Beth and Neroli are both there, too, and Grezkull. Neroli told me all about the sigil that was making us sick. Apparently, now that the sigil is broken there’s no residual effect of the illness. We’re all completely fine, except for feeling a bit weak from a few days without much food or exercise. Sasha and Palo have come off the worst. They’ve gone back to Palo’s place to rest and sleep it off.”

“Palo saved Beth’s life,” Alaria said. “If he hadn’t got there when he did, Zargkul would have… ugh, it’s horrible, I can’t even say it.”

“Eat your stew,” Mia said.

Alaria did.

It took a couple of days for Alaria to get back to full strength. Her leg still hurt, but she healed remarkably quickly, and three days after she’d first been carried back to her home, she walked unaided out into the garden with Neroli, Mia, and Beth. Grezkull was minding the inn, and Sasha and Palo, who were both well recovered, were helping him.

By now, everyone was up to date on everything that had happened. Neroli, Mia, and Beth had spent a good amount of time discussing things, and Alaria had found it useful to have time to reflect. She had never been good as staying still, but enforced inactivity, she found, was needed. By day four, she woke feeling strong.

That was just as well.

She went down to the garden with Skyfang and began drilling with her blade. There was something to be said for practice exercises. If nothing else, they were good for strengthening and limbering the muscles, and she felt in need of both. Mia and Beth were in the kitchen. Grezkull was down at the inn with Sasha and Palo today, and Neroli was out in the woods behind the house, exploring. She’d already come across Timeous the leprechaun and had apparently charmed him so much that he hadn’t even tried to make any sleazy comments about her.

Alaria moved with the blade.

It also gave her time to think, or rather, to not think, but to give her mind the chance to settle. She felt lie a different woman after her recent adventures. Something had shifted. As she moved through her sword drills, she thought of the changes that they’d all gone through, learning about each other, and about themselves, and about the past of their region, too.

The blade hissed through the air as she ran through her movements, instinctively.

Every day, they’d had a note from Jessica. Every day, that note had said that there was no change at the Hopeford Hotel, and also no sign of Rannek. So, when the messenger appeared at the gate and rang the bell, Alaria sheathed her blade and walked briskly around the house.

She smiled at the memory of why they’d put a doorbell in place. There was a spell on the gate and the wall that meant anyone who tried to enter without a copy of the key on their person was suspended in the air above the gate, immovable until a key was placed in the lock. Early in their time here, an unfortunate delivery man had fallen foul of that magic, and shortly afterward they’d put up a bell and a little sign that said Do not open the gate! Ring the Bell! in big red letters.

She came round to the front of the house, pleased to notice that she was hardly limping at all, despite the wound to her thigh only a few days ago.

What’s another scar between friends, eh? she thought. She looked up.

It was not a messenger at the gate.

It was Jessica Sola.

Alaria hurried forward. Jessica was white as a sheet. She’d been leaning on the garden wall, knowing the danger of trying the gate for herself, and when Alaria opened the gate to let her in, she staggered forward, looking very bad.

“Jessica,” Alaria said. “What’s happened?”

“It’s Rannek,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “He’s dead.”

In the kitchen, Mia and Beth made Jessica comfortable, and served her a strong cup of coffee. Alaria sat down beside her and took her hand. Jessica leaned forward, putting her head on Alaria’s shoulder for a moment, then began to speak.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “But I kept feeling that I had to go into the cellar itself. It was horrible. Every night I went to the little chamber above the tomb and listened for that voice, that horrible creaking voice doing its incantation, and the thump, thump, thump, of the thing banging on the stone lid of its tomb. I couldn’t not listen, but last night afterward I had this dream… I couldn’t sleep without having the dream. I saw the cellar door opening, and a bright, golden light shining up. And I felt I had to go down there, just had to, but every time I did, I woke up.”

She took a drink of her coffee. Beth reached out and put a hand on Jessica’s shoulder, and Mia came and stood behind her chair. Jessica seemed to take strength from their touch. She heaved in a deep breath and went on.

“At first light, I woke from the same dream for the hundredth time, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay there, thinking about it, getting my courage up, but before long I realized I had no choice, so I got up, got dressed, and went out. The first thing I noticed was that the cold was less. Not gone, but less. There was a strange feeling in the air, and an odd smell, like burning. I went to the cellar, and there it was, open, with gold light filtering up through the open door.”

She stopped for a moment to collect herself. “I should have thought it was the same dream again, but everything was different. I knew I was awake. I could feel the air on my skin, I could feel the weight of my clothes and smell the damp of the morning dew. It was quiet, but I could hear birds singing nearby. The light wasn’t as bright as it had been in the dream. I had to pinch myself and work my courage up, but I… I went down. I got into the cellar and lit the lamp, but I needn’t have bothered. There was a light shining from one end of the cellar, so bright that I could hardly look straight at it.”

“I approached the light. It was Rannek. He was lying stretched out on his face in front of the door to the tomb chamber, his right hand with the snake ring pointing at the door. The light was coming from the ring. I ran to him and put my hand on his neck to check the pulse, but as soon as I touched his skin, I knew he was dead. He was cold as marble.”

She shuddered. Wordlessly, Beth poured her some more coffee, and Jessica drank half of it down at a gulp. She looked at the cup. “This is good coffee,” she said in an odd, half-asleep voice.

Alaria and Mia glanced at each other. Jessica was in shock. She’d told her story, but the shock was now interfering with her ability to think clearly.

“You came straight here?” Alaria asked. “You left him there, in place?”

“I couldn’t do anything else,” Jessica said. “I couldn’t have moved him - he’s too big - and anyway I felt sure that his ring was exerting some effect over the thing in that chamber. The light was so powerful…”

She trailed off, gazing into space for a moment, then blinked. “I closed the cellar door behind me and locked it. I don’t know how he got down there, it was locked before, and I don’t know how he died, there was no wound, no blood, no…”

Jessica’s voice had gone rapidly from her measured retelling of events, to a jagged, breathless, rapid delivery that was very unlike her usual tone.

“Easy, easy,” Alaria said. “You’re all right, but you’ve had a hell of a shock, and you need some proper rest. Come here, come on…”

She helped Jessica up, and Jessica burst into tears and collapsed into Alaria’s arms. Alaria’s leg twinged, and she grimaced. Beth moved to her side to help her. Together, they got Jessica into the living room and laid her down on the couch.

She lay staring up at the ceiling for a moment. Alaria let magic trickle around her fingertips and reached forward to Jessica’s eyelids.

“Sleep, now,” she said. “You’re safe. I’ll take it from here.” Immediately, Jessica dropped into a deep, peaceful sleep.

In the kitchen, they sat down and made a plan.

“Someone needs to look after her,” Alaria said. “But I need both of you with me.”

“Grez, Sasha, and Palo will be happy to take it in turns,” Beth said. “I’ll ask them. Jessica knows them from the battle too, she’ll be okay with that.”

Alaria nodded. “I agree,” she said. “Jessica needs time to rest and get over this. I underestimated the effect all this would have on her. She’s another one who’s too good at concealing her emotions, but now we’ve got her here, we can make sure she gets a chance to recover.”

Beth stood up. “I’ll go down to the inn right now and tell the others what’s happened.”

“And we’ll find Neroli and get ready to leave. We’ll meet you at the inn as soon as possible.”

Within half an hour, they were on their way. Sasha was up at the Homestead looking out for Jessica, who was still fast asleep. Grezkull and Palo were together in charge of the inn, and Alaria, Neroli, Mia, and Beth were walking fast through the midday sun on the road to Hopeford.

The road was quiet, and the three of them didn’t say much. Alaria’s leg was hurting within the first hour of walking, but she gritted her teeth and kept quiet. After they’d been on the road nearly two hours and were approaching the halfway point, they heard the rattle of a cart on the road behind them and saw Albus Greenleg, an elderly fruit merchant with a business in Hopeford, trundling along the road.

He was a cheerful old man with a gray beard and, as his name suggested, bright green skin on both his legs. This was a family trait, so he said, though how one came to inherit such an odd feature was more than Alaria could guess, and Albus didn’t volunteer the information. He was a pleasant old fellow, however, and Alaria knew him vaguely from her dealings in Hopeford, so when he hailed them cheerfully and offered them a lift on his cart, they were glad to accept.

“It won’t be that much faster than walking,” he said, “but it’ll be a little faster, and easier on the legs. Speaking of legs, when I was a lad, my grandmother, she had the greenest legs of all the family, and it used to be a favorite activity of hers to get them out and show them to all the young men around. She was a good-looking woman in her day, and even when I was a lad, and she was a bit older, she still had her charms. Grandma Greenleg, we used to call her. Now, there was this one man she had her eye on, and he like the look of her too, and so the story went…”

Albus launched into a tale that was so absurd and hard to believe that Alaria wondered whether he wasn’t making it all up. It didn’t matter. He was a very entertaining storyteller, and even if it was all nonsense, it was fun to listen to. It took their minds off the grim business at hand, and it had the added advantage of keeping him busy. So long as he was talking and telling stories about his incongruously sexy Grandma Greenleg, and her many implausible sexual conquests, he could not ask them what they were about.

There were many nosy, prying people in Hopeford who wanted nothing more than to know and gossip about any business that was not their own. Thankfully, Albus was not one of them. All Albus wanted was to hear the sound of his own voice, and if he made people laugh, that was a bonus.

Alaria was very grateful to him, for more reasons that he knew. They arrived in Hopeford a good hour sooner than she had expected and made straight for the hotel.

“D’you think his grandmother really got up to all those things?” Neroli said, looking scandalized. “I mean, really - with the butcher’s apprentice and the blacksmith’s two apprentices, all at the same time?”

Mia laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’d not have thought having bright green legs would have been that attractive, but different people are into different things, eh, Beth?”

Beth glared at her and blushed, prettily. “I wouldn’t have minded a butcher and two blacksmiths at the same time, back in the old days,” she said, “but these days, there’s only one person I need.”

She squeezed Alaria’s hand, and Neroli smiled at them all.

Alaria was pleased to see how well her group of lovers were bonding, but she was also aware that there was business to attend to, and not pleasant business at that.

“I think I’d have liked to have a go at satisfying Grandma Greenleg back in those days myself,” she said, “But leaving Albus’s dirty stories and his improbable relatives to one side for the moment, shall we concentrate on the task at hand? For all I know, we’re about to walk into a battle with an undead king, and I need my wits about me.”

“Do you think she had a green…” Beth began.

“Beth!” Mia scolded her affectionately, and Neroli laughed out loud.

“Alaria’s right,” Neroli said. “We need to have our wits about us. I don’t know what we’re about to walk into here, but whatever it is, it’s going to be ugly.

Chapter

Nineteen

The assistant manager of the hotel was an elf - another fairly unusual creature this far north. She was called Dethelwyr, and she was tall, elegant, beautiful - and very much married to an eleven man. Dethelwyr knew that Alaria, Mia, and Beth were all lovers, and she had nothing against it herself, but she made it very clear from the outset that she wasn’t interested.

All the women slightly regretted this, but they respected it. For now, they were all business. Alaria said that they’d come on a mission from Jessica, and that they needed to have a look at one of the cellar rooms.

Dethelwyr allowed them graciously to go wherever they pleased. She knew how much trust Jessica put in Alaria. Before they headed into the hotel, Alaria stopped and asked, “Dethelwyr, how many people are in the hotel at the moment, including yourself and the staff?”

“Oh, about a hundred,” Dethelwyr replied. She glanced at the guest book on the table near her. “Most are in at the moment. Some are out shopping and the like, but I’d say about a hundred people are in the building at this time.”

“And what is your procedure in case you have to evacuate the building?”

Dethelwyr looked surprised and a little frightened. “We have an alarm system. There’s a bell that rings, and everyone makes their way to the assembly area outside. Why, is there something I should know?”

“It’s possible we may have to trigger that alarm system,” Alaria said. “I hope not, but it’s possible. Can I do so from the old wing of the hotel?”

“You can do so from anywhere in the hotel,” Dethelwyr assured her. “You see that green bellpull in the corner there, over by the front door?”

Alaria looked and saw a thick, green-dyed cord hanging from the ceiling in a corner of the lobby.

“That’s one of the alarms,” Dethelwyr explained. “There’s nowhere in the hotel that’s more than a hundred yards from one of those. If there is an emergency, pull one of them and the alarm will sound, and everyone will leave. But if you think there’s going to be a need to evacuate, perhaps I should do so now, rather than waiting?”

Alaria considered for a moment, then shook her head. She didn’t know what she was up against here, and any sign that anything was out of the ordinary here might alert her enemies to the fact that there was trouble brewing. If there was a need, she’d trigger the alarm.

“Best not to,” she said in as cheerful a voice as she could muster. “No need to alarm anyone unnecessarily.”

“Just as you say,” Dethelwyr said, but she sounded uncertain.

Alaria nodded politely to her and then led her companions into the body of the hotel. Neroli took the lead, and Beth and Mia followed at a distance. Of the four of them, only Alaria had actually been inside the chamber before. Neroli had been above it and had felt the fear, but Neither Beth nor Mia had been close before.

“There’s likely to be a feeling of intense fear when we get inside,” Alaria said. “It’s some effect of the magic that’s on the room. You’ll need to resist it as much as you can, but it’s perfectly reasonable to be frightened, and if you feel you can’t go any deeper in, please just say. It’ll be safer for you to go back and take a different role if you have to, so don’t worry about it if you need to, okay?”

The others nodded. They walked to the door that led through to the courtyard, bypassing the kitchens this time because Alaria wanted to make as little stir as possible. She led her team to the corridor and through the door, noting the green alarm cords at several points, including one just inside the door to the courtyard.

“Mark that,” she said as they passed it. “If things get hairy, we might have to use it. I don’t want any collateral damage.”

“There’s some connection between the undead creature who is sleeping in that tomb, and the spell that kept Zargkul the dwarf fighting long after he was dead,” she continued as they entered the courtyard. “A spell like that - raising the dead, animating corpses - is a sign of extreme power on the part of the caster, and also of a kind of magic that isn’t practiced anymore in Sapheli. If we go in there and start stirring up trouble, I want an out. I don’t want a bunch of civilians getting caught up in it.”

The others nodded. Beth left the door to the corridor slightly ajar so that if the evacuation bell needed to be rung, they could get to it quickly.

The courtyard was empty, and it looked pretty nondescript now that they were standing in it looking around. The cellar door was closed and locked, as Jessica had said. Alaria cursed that she had not thought to ask for the key.

“Jessica was in no state to give it to you,” Neroli said. “We’ll have to use a magical solution.”

“Be wary,” Alaria said. “King Sanuk is awake in there - he might be able to detect the presence of a spell and prepare for us.”

“I’ll be discreet,” Neroli said.

Alaria liked the way Neroli took charge of the situation. She didn’t hesitate but went straight away to the door and crouched next to the large padlock. She passed her hand over the lock, and it glowed brightly for a moment. Alaria noticed that though there was a visual effect, the spell made no impression whatsoever on her own magical senses.

“A cloaking spell,” Neroli said, “layered in place before the lockpicking spell is activated. Simple enough if you think about it.”

Alaria nodded. “I didn’t sense it at all.”

“Let’s hope that means that old bony hands down there also didn’t sense it,” Neroli said. She flashed them all a smile and pulled the cellar door open. “After you, ladies,” she said. She was speaking lightly, but she couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice. She knew there was terror here.

“I’ll go,” Alaria said. “Jessica keeps a lamp here, I think. Ah yes, here it is.”

She went the first few steps down the stairs and took the oil lamp up. She was surprised to find that it was lying on its side as if it had been knocked over, but she was able to light it with a match. She held it up while moving carefully into the cellar. The scene was as Jessica had described. There, at the far end of the long, narrow chamber, Rannek was stretched out flat on the floor, face down, his right hand with its gold ring stretched out toward the door that led into the tomb chamber.

Alaria looked about. There were a few details that Jessica hadn’t mentioned, or hadn’t managed to mention, at least.

“Look how the barrels and the lumber have all been knocked over, rolling toward the entrance like that,” she said, pointing to the piles of stuff that were stored everywhere in the cellar. The old barrels, and the piles of wood and other junk, had all moved.

“It looks as if the cellar had been tipped up in the air and then put back down again,” Beth said.

“Or as if there had been some very powerful blast of force from that end of the chamber,” Mia answered.

Alaria looked at the mess. “You’re right, Mia,” she said. “That’s probably the answer, isn’t it? Rannek came down here to see if he could challenge the evil in the chamber. He did challenge it, but whatever happened, there was some huge blast of force, and it threw everything down to one end of the chamber.”

“Didn’t Jessica say the doors were standing open?” Neroli said. “That might have been Rannek leaving them open, or it might have been the force of the blast that pushed them open.”

“I don’t feel much,” Beth commented as they moved forward. “Do you?”

Mia shook her head, and so did Neroli.

“You’re right,” Alaria said. “I don’t feel anything either. I’ve got a sense of trepidation, but there’s no trace of that really awful terror that we had on the go before. Nothing like it at all.”

“I’m glad,” Neroli said. “I can quite happily do without that.”

They approached the end of the chamber cautiously, but there was no question, the sense of terror and fear were gone. They came to where Rannek lay. Alaria stood looking down on him. His ring glowed brightly, sending out a glow of golden illumination into the dark space.

“Poor Rannek,” she said. “He waited all this time to warn people of the coming of Sanuk, and this is how he ended. He must have come down here not long after he said to Jessica that he was going away. I wonder why he didn’t tell her he was coming down here?”

She crouched and put her hand uselessly on his neck. It was, as Jessica has said, as cold and hard as marble.

“Lari,” Mia said quietly. “The door is open.”

Alaria looked up. Mia was standing in front of the little wooden door, peering into the chamber beyond. Alaria stood and joined her, peering in through the entrance. “You’re right,” she said, holding up the lamp. “And what’s more… Wow, look at the stone!”

They all looked. Neroli cried out in surprise.

“The symbol from the ring!”

She was right. The rune on the stone had changed. Before, it had just been the rune of the ancient kingdom. Now, a serpent had wrapped the rune. It was the symbol that was on Rannek’s magic ring, the ring he’d said had some magical power over the undead King Sanuk.

“Is there any way to see what kind of magic happened here?” Alaria said out loud. She hadn’t meant to direct the question at anyone, but Neroli answered anyway.

“It’s a bit out of my area,” she said. “You could try Finder spells, but that’s likely to show you that magic did happen here, but not what kind.”

“I thought so too,” Alaria said. She leaned closer to the block of stone. “I’m not encouraged by the fact that the fear has vanished. I don’t like it. It’s too much like some kind of trap.”

“You don’t think this is all some kind of elaborate trick, do you?” Mia asked.

“No,” Alaria said, “but it’s a really big change. Honestly, last time I was in here you could barely breathe it was so bad. Now, it’s as if there’s nothing here.”

She slipped her fingers along the edge of the block of stone, trying to see if it had moved at all. She straightened up, shaking her head.

“This hasn’t shifted at all,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happened here, but whatever it is, this is a block of stone that has not moved.”

“I wonder if Rannek managed to set a spell on the stone to properly trap King Sanuk in his tomb for good,” Beth mused. “That would explain the serpent wrapped around the rune, and the great explosion of force that has so clearly happened here.”

“In that case,” Alaria said, “What about the sound of the thumping and the incantation?”

They all looked at each other in sudden horrified realization.

Mia spoke the words that were in all of their minds. “The thumping noises started after Rannek came down here and did this spell! He’s sealed the tomb from this side, but what about from up above?”

“To the room above the chamber!” Alaria said. “Quick!

They all raced back along the long cellar chamber, dashing up the steps and out of the door. Alaria stopped long enough to blow the lamp out and place it back on its shelf, and to click the padlock closed again over the entrance to the cellar. She would return for Rannek’s body later, but for now she didn’t want him disturbed by anyone. Then she followed the others out of the door and back into the interior of the hotel.

They scared a couple of hotel guests as they charged round the corner, but then they shoved the door open that was marked Staff Only and were in the part of the building that was completely given over to storage and background work.

“Here’s the room,” Alaria said. She opened the door gingerly and peered around the edge.

“Oh,” she said.

“What d’you mean, Oh?” Mia demanded. “Let me see!”

She looked in.

“Ah,” she said.

“That’s not anymore helpful,” Beth snapped.

Neroli chuckled. She and Beth put their heads through the door.

“Oh, shit,” said Beth.

In the little room, the stacks of unused bed linen had been pushed carelessly to one side. The slabs of the floor had been lifted up and lay on their backs on the floor. There was a scattering of dust over the floor.

A long, black opening yawned from the floor, the shape and size of an open grave.

Neroli chuckled again, but there was a fatalistic ring to it now.

“Looks like King Sanuk has left the building,” she said.

“And it looks like we have to find him,” Beth agreed.

“The clock is ticking,” Alaria said. “But at least here, we can use a bit of magic to track him down.”

Neroli and Alaria began work on the spell at the same time, while Beth and Mia carefully approached the grave. Mia looked over the edge. She blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust before she confirmed, “It’s empty. There was a coffin in the bottom of the grave - looks like it was built from lead. It’s… it’s been broken out from the inside. By the gods, it looks like it was exploded out with the most immense force…”

Neroli and Alaria met each other’s eyes and began to work faster. The spell was a simple one - identify the target, cast the Finder spell focused on that target, and cast it. Neroli, of course, added some extra decorations to the spell to make it more effective.

“We take the initial Finder spell, that’s good enough as it is, but then we layer a Seeking spell with a focus on intention, and that will show us what he means to do at the same time. Next, we layer on External Influences…”

“What the hell is External Influences?” Alaria said. “I’ve never heard of that one. No, don’t tell me. It’s something of your own invention?”

Neroli bowed her head in acknowledgment. “If it works, we’ll know also if there’s anyone working him from outside, or if he’s working on his own. Okay, ready? You take the lead. You cast and then I’ll layer on as the spell deploys.”

Alaria was not entirely certain that taking this as a learning opportunity was the best idea, but she recognised that Neroli was trying to teach something important, so she went with it.

“Ready when you are,” Neroli prompted.

Alaria took a steadying breath. Mia and Beth were watching in trepidation.

She cast the spell.

Chapter

Twenty

As the magic deployed, Neroli slid her own spells over the casting. For the first time, Alaria truly understood what Neroli meant by the term layering. She placed the other spells quite literally on top of Alaria’s base spell. Alaria was reminded of a painter, layering one color on top of the other to create an entirely new shade.

She laughed spontaneously, struck by the sheer neatness and beauty of the improvisation. It really was art. Neroli was a master at the art of magic, and she used spells like a painter used pigments.

“Brilliant,” she breathed.

“Never mind that,” Neroli said, though she colored slightly and couldn’t help a smile at the compliment. “We’ve done the easy part. Now what do you see?”

Normally, Alaria would expect a Finder spell to point a path toward the objective, but this one didn’t. Instead, Alaria was suddenly transported from the place where she sat. She lurched backward, her body consumed by a moment of terrible vertigo as her awareness was launched upward, unable to keep a grip on her surroundings.

She heard Neroli’s concerned voice, but she couldn’t make out the words. The vision was too strong.

Below her, she saw Hopeford, white, pink, and gleaming in the cold afternoon sun. The river glittered like a silver chain, the woods like little brush strokes of forest green between patchworks of bright fields.

In a back alley between two commercial streets, something was moving. It was a human figure, dark and cloaked in rags, moving with a jerky, half frozen walk, but with a terrible sense of purpose. As she looked, she saw a line of gleaming dark gray light laid out in front of the shambling figure. This was the figure’s path. The path ran a complex zig-zag pattern through the back streets, avoiding any places where it might be seen, until it reached a low hill on the outskirts of town, a little way back from the river. Here, it stopped.

As soon as Alaria had managed to follow the path with her eye, her perception was wrenched away. She saw an orange circle overlaid on her vision, outlining a small house on the other side of town, set back from the road behind a wall. The orange circle flashed, and there was that horrible sense of vertigo again as Alaria’s view of the city zoomed in painfully close, and terrifyingly fast.

She saw through the roof of the house. She saw the upper story of the house, bare of furniture, and three figures sitting cross-legged on the floor. They were surrounded by candles and wore heavy dark hoods, but on the floor in the middle there was a man she recognized. He lay on his back, his arms stretched out, his face blurred by a rictus of pain.

It was Luft Madsen, her old enemy from Crownheart City. Older, yes, and his face distorted by agony, but it was him.

The vision shifted, and she slammed back into her body with a jerk.

“What happened?” Neroli asked, her voice full of concern. “Are you all right?”

“The spell worked,” Alaria croaked. “I know where he is. I know where he’s going. And I know where the external influences on him are located. Damn it, that was intense.”

She hauled herself to her feet.

“Let’s move,” she said. “There’s no time to lose.”

“What happened?” Neroli demanded. “What did you see? You just checked out there.”

“The spell pulled me out of my body,” Alaria said. “But I saw him, I saw Sanuk. He’s moving northwest through back alleys, avoiding detection and heading for a hill on the edge of town. But there’s something else there, too. Luft Madsen is here. I saw him in a house on the opposite edge of town. I think he must have been shown by the External Influence layer that you put on the spell. He must be influencing the course of events. I don’t know if he’s doing so willingly. There are some people with him, they seem to be using him as the vector for some spell, a spell they’re using to control Sanuk.”

“Wait, Luft Madsen is controlling Sanuk?”

“He’s being used to control Sanuk. He didn’t look like he was enjoying it.”

As she spoke, they reached the lobby.

“All well?” Dethelwyr asked anxiously from her position behind the desk.

“Everything is fine here, at least,” Alaria said. “No need for evacuation.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Dethelwyr said. “Should I take a message for Jessica when she returns, or…”

“No need,” Alaria said. “Sorry, can’t stop, we really must be on our way.”

“But…” said Dethelwyr, but Alaria and her companions were out of the door and running down the street.

“Wait a moment,” Mia said.

Alaria stopped. There was urgency in Mia’s voice that couldn’t be ignored.

“Where do we go?” Mia demanded. “If Sanuk is being controlled by Madsen, or if Madsen is being used by others to control Sanuk, or whatever, then should we go to the source of the control, rather than following Sanuk?”

“We don’t know what Sanuk might do on his own, if he’s released from the control spell,” Beth said.

“But we do know that whatever’s going on here, Alaria here is the focus of it,” Mia said. “The malice doesn’t come from Sanuk himself, not directly at least, whatever Rannek thought. The malice comes from Luft Madsen, or the people who are controlling him. So, we ought to go to the source. Whatever Sanuk will do when he’s released from the control of Madsen and hit cronies, it won’t be focused on Alaria.”

“We could split up,” Neroli said doubtfully.

“No way,” Alaria said. “If there’s one thing I know about situations like this, it’s that you should never split your forces!”

“What, then?” Mia asked. “Sanuk is headed for one end of town, and your Luft Madsen is on the other side. What do we do?”

Alaria made the decision. “We go to Madsen,” she said. “It’s the only choice. Mia is right, whatever’s going on here, there’s some focus on taking out me and those I care about. I think that Madsen is exerting some control spell over Sanuk. We’ll take out that control spell, then see what happens.”

With the decision made, they turned toward the southwest of the city, running fast through alleys and main streets, crossing marketplaces and dashing through open pedestrian walkways lined with shops and restaurants. Hopeford was a prosperous town, and there was a lot to it beyond the central area where Alaria and her companions usually spent their time.

Alaria also didn’t know her way around all that well, but thankfully Mia did, and she took them the fastest way to the district Alaria had described.

“There,” Alaria said, pointing. “That’s the house.”

They ran forward, not bothering to try to take the element of surprise. There was, to Alaria’s eyes, a black line of dark magic stretched out from the top window of the building. She hadn’t seen it until now, but now that she was here, she needed nothing beyond her own native ability to perceive magic to see it.

She pointed. Neroli glanced up, looked confused, then moved her hands, working a subtle spell. Interesting, Alaria thought, she can’t see it without using a spell, but I can.

That was one to bookmark for later. Neroli’s eyes went wide as she saw the spell.

“Black magic!” she said. “True black magic! Oh, Alaria, be careful in there.”

Alaria was about to reply when the harsh, jarring clang of a bell rang out over the city. First one, then another, then another began to clatter their panicked call out over the roofs of Hopeford.

“The city alarm bells!” Mia cried. “Something’s happened!”

“They started from that direction,” Beth said, pointing northwest. “The direction that Sanuk was headed.”

“Come on,” Alaria said. “Let’s finish this once and for all.”

The other citizens in the streets were running toward the alarm bells, heading into the center of the city, calling to each other in frightened voices, but Alaria and her companions moved against the crowd. Beth’s shapeshifting shimmered, and she dropped her human form, becoming a pure cat woman as she pulled her bow from her back and nocked an arrow.

Mia drew on her magical ability, a red fire spell gathering around her right hand and a blue ice spell manifesting around her left. Neroli shifted her right hand, and the staff that she used as a spell vector shimmered into existence, ready for use.

Alaria drew Earthclaw. Whatever happened in that house, it was going to be too cramped for Skyfang. She let her magic flow to her fingertips, raw power ready for use in whatever way was needed.

The building was squat and seemed short, despite its two stories. It was an unremarkable house of pink and white stone, like all the other buildings in Hopeford. As they approached, Alaria noted in a detached way that the building was older than the ones around it. That was why it seemed smaller. It was sinking slightly.

Subsidence, she thought. This building’s foundations have slipped, but the ones around have not.

There was something in that, something relevant, but she had not the time to pursue the thought. Her squad were ready for battle.

Alaria kicked the door in and charged into the house. To hell with subtlety, she had decided. Whatever was going on here, it required to be resolved with speed and maximum force.

“Upstairs,” she said tersely.

“Look out!” Beth said at the same time, and her bow twanged as she loosed an arrow through the eye of a man who came at her from a side door, a dagger glinting in his hand.

The attacker was dressed in very black robes, like the two upstairs that Alaria had seen in her vision. Another came from the other side, and Mia released a highly focused Ice Spike that took him in the neck. He crumpled to the floor like a sack of rocks.

“No time for this, no time!” Alaria said through gritted teeth as more attackers flooded from the adjoining rooms. She gained the stairs.

“Go on!” Beth shouted. “We’ll hold them here!”

She and Mia turned at bay. Beth drew her shortsword, dropped into a fighting stance, and parried a blow from an attacker. At the same time, Mia retreated up the stairs a little and took a position to give Beth covering fire.

Don’t hesitate. The thought came to Alaria from somewhere else, somewhere outside herself. That was the advantage of putting her emotions to the side. That was what it gained her. That principle was the core of her success in combat.

Don’t hesitate. She didn’t have to crush her emotions to do that. She just had to remember.

She took the remaining steps three at a time, Neroli hard on her heels, the sound of dying men and the sizzle of fire magic filling the cramped space behind her.

The door to the chamber of magic was half open, and Alaria charged in, feeling the delicate balance of the black magic in the room snapping like an overstretched cord as she entered.

On the floor, just as she had seen in her vision, Luft Madsen, her old nemesis from the days in Crownheart City, lay on the floor. He was surrounded by signs burned onto the boards of the wooden floor. His skin and clothes were soaked in sweat, his eyes squeezed shut, his face a terrible vision of pain.

The three black-robed mages who sat on the floor around him were guiding the spell. The room was full of the black magic, tendrils of horror snaking out from their backs and heads and hands like evil versions of Alaria’s tentacle magic.

They leaped to their feet as one, and Madsen stopped writhing on the floor. He flopped as limp as a wet rag to the ground and rolled onto his side, groaning in pain, then began to crawl out of the circle.

“Don’t let him break the conjuring!” one of the black-robed figures called.

“Too late for that,” Alaria snarled. “You’re finished.”

She spun and threw Earthclaw at the furthest mage. The dagger slammed into his chest with a meaty thud, and before it had done so, she swept out Skyfang and sliced the second mage’s belly open through his robes with a single, clean sweep. The third went for the window, leaping toward it like a swimmer going into a dive.

Alaria went after him, slamming the bloody tip of her sword through his back with no more compunction than if he’d been a practice dummy in a training yard. She pulled the blade out, turned, and brought it down on the neck of the man whose belly she’d opened, killing him with a mercy stroke.

Neroli was watching from the doorway, wide-eyed. For all her experience with magic, combat and killing was not something she was used to.

“Get him out of that damned conjuring circle,” Alaria ordered, pointing to Luft Madsen.

Neroli nodded, hesitated for a fraction of a second, then stepped into the room. Alaria crouched and retrieved Earthclaw from the chest of her fallen enemy, then moved swiftly past Neroli and into the corridor.

Black-robed figures pressed Mia and Beth on the stairs. Beth was doing well, holding them at bay with nothing but her short sword, and Mia was firing off Ice Spike and Fireball in rapid succession, but the press of enemies was too great for two people to hold off alone. Alaria’s allies were looking scared, and they were giving ground.

Alaria found fury rolling into her chest, and she welcomed it. “Give way!” she called, and Beth and Mia both immediately leaped back up the stairs.

The enemy flooded up the stairs for a moment, then Alaria was among them. She held Skyfang in one hand and Earthclaw in the other, and used them both, ignoring the fact that it was really too narrow a space for this kind of work.

It was a slaughter, fast, brutal, and terrible. Alaria gave no quarter, and the enemy had no time to ask for any. Before five minutes had passed, the entrance lobby of the small building was silent, and twenty-five enemy fighters lay dead, piled up on the stairs and in the narrow space of the lobby.

They were all wearing the same jet-black robes, and they all looked similar - narrow-featured men with black eyes and small noses, and all with similar short, bristling black beards.

There was no time to stop and wonder at them. Alaria would find out all she needed to know soon enough. For now, this part of the threat had been eliminated.

She could get answers later. For the moment, she needed to save Hopeford from an undead king.

Chapter

Twenty-One

“Alaria?” Neroli called from upstairs.

Alaria looked up. “What is it?” she said.

“You better come,” Neroli said.

Alaria glanced around. “Mia, Beth, you okay?”

“No injuries,” Mia confirmed, and Beth nodded.

“Step outside, try and find out what’s going on.” They immediately did as they were asked, while Alaria leaped up the stairs and back into the room where the magic had taken place.

Madsen was leaning up against the wall, looking done in but alive. Neroli was crouched next to him, helping him to drink little sips from her waterskin.

He rolled his head to look at her and his mouth opened in a pained smile.

“Alaria Hartwood,” he groaned. “Thank the gods. You’re alive, and they’re not. Thank you. Thank you for saving me.”

“Tell her what you just told me,” Neroli urged.

“Sanuk,” he croaked. “He means no harm. He’s been… used. Used like I’ve been used. They took him and exploited his magic, they made him their tool… But he’s unleashed something now, under their command, and he doesn’t know how to stop it. You must save him, Alaria. Save him… like you saved me.”

He suddenly slumped down, his head lolling, in a dead faint.

Alaria gestured in exasperation. “Save the undead king?” she said. “Really?”

“So it would seem,” Neroli said with a shrug. “We’ll have to leave Madsen here; we can’t take him with us.”

“We can take him outside, at least,” Alaria said, looking round at the bloody mess of the little room. She stepped over and picked him up, slinging him over her shoulder as if he was no more than a bag of potatoes.

“Come on,” she said to Neroli. “But brace yourself, it’s not pretty.”

Carrying the unconscious form of Madsen over her shoulder, Alaria headed down the stairs with Neroli following. She heard Neroli swallow hard when she saw the destruction that Alaria had dealt in the hallway. She was as glad as anyone could be to get out of that house of death.

They laid Madsen down on the ground, leaning against the wall of the house. “There’s nothing more we can do for him just now,” Alaria said. She looked around for Beth and Mia and saw them hurrying over.

“We spoke to a guard,” Beth said. “He told us a wild tale. Over on the northwest of town, where that hill is that Sanuk was headed for? Well, apparently there’s a whole army of undead coming out of the hill. They’re shambling down into the city, and they seem like they’re going to overrun the place.

“We’ve dealt with one threat,” Alaria said. “Let’s deal with this one. Come on, we’ll have to run.”

As they dashed through the streets, she told her companions as quickly as she could about what Madsen had said. As far as she could tell, some other force - these black-robed people who had attacked them in the house - had been manipulating Sanuk, somehow using Madsen as a vector, and causing Sanuk to raise an army of the undead without really meaning to.

“As you do,” Mia said, rolling her eyes. “Honestly, to think we were just trying to set up a quiet little potion shop.”

They all laughed. It was the most bizarre situation to find themselves in.

“Hopefully this time, we really can get a quiet life,” Alaria said.

“Once we’ve saved the undead king from accidentally raising an undead army to eat our local town,” Mia said.

“Yep,” Alaria agreed. “Just so soon as we’ve done that.”

They got straight to work. Alaria glanced around as she and her team moved at a steady trot through the city streets. There was no doubt about it now - the town was roused. People were moving through the streets in groups. The elderly and the very young were moving in the direction of the mayor’s palace - the only defensible structure in the town - while everyone else seemed to have armed themselves and were moving north-west, in the direction that Alaria had seen Sanuk moving during her earlier vision.

She smiled, seeing the professional, steady pace that her small team made now. Beth, Mia, Neroli; they had gelled together now as a team, and they had grown individually too, as fighters and as people. She approved of the loose, ready stance that Beth and Mia had naturally now, relaxed and alert, not tense, but ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice if needed.

Neroli was less experienced at combat. Alaria was coming to realize that for all her talents, Neroli wasn’t a fighter. She sickened at the sight of the blood in the house a moment ago, and though she had enjoyed playing the villain when she’d been tormenting Grozmikal, actual violence was not something she took to easily.

That fact made her actions and the way she carried herself now even more impressive. She was steady, ready for anything, alert as the others were, though not as practiced at keeping an eye on an evolving situation. As they moved through the city, Alaria observed how Neroli kept unconsciously tensing up, her shoulders hunching and her head lowering, and how every time this happened, Neroli caught the instinct and stopped herself, deliberately loosening her posture and straightening her back.

She’s learning from Beth and Mia, Alaria thought. Then another idea intruded itself, too. She’s learning from me, as well.

For all her time as an adventurer, she’d never thought of herself as a leader. She’d never considered that the people following her were taking the cue for their actions from her, nor that they were learning how to hold themselves, how to respond, by watching her.

Unconsciously, she was setting the example the whole time. She was the leader, of course. On some level, she knew that, but she’d never consciously thought of it. The idea shifted her perspective dramatically. She had a huge responsibility to these people, beyond that of a lover or a friend. She had a responsibility to them as a soldier.

A responsibility to keep them alive, yes, but not just that. The responsibility of a fighting leader was harder than that. It was to keep them alive, but it was also to make sure that if their lives were risked, they were risked in a good cause. If they died, it had to be worth something.

That idea was almost enough to make her turn and flee. Damn it, she thought, why did Neroli have to teach me to get in touch with my emotions? This was so much easier without these feelings!

But of course, that was wrong too. It was the fact that she suppressed all emotions in a fight that had nearly caused her to fall into the trap back at Brighthill, triggering the spell that ended the lives of those dearest to her in one stroke. There was a balance here, a balance to be struck between emotion and cold calculation.

It was a balance Alaria had not had much practice at.

“To your left,” Mia said sharply, a moment before Alaria had the chance to call the threat herself.

From an alleyway between two buildings, a group of shambling undead staggered, groaning like a winter wind through a badly fitted window. They were horrible to look at, pathetic and pitiable in one sense, but also nightmarishly ugly and threatening in another.

The undead were corpses, mostly bone but with a few fragments of leathery skin and wisps of gray hair still clinging to them. Some of them were naked, just skeletons with no weapon except their grasping, crooked fingers. Others wore leather or furs, or rusted mail, and some were armed with old swords, long straight swords of a style that was unfamiliar to Alaria.

“I count twelve… no, fourteen,” Alaria said. “Beth, Neroli, watch the flanks. Mia, use your Fire magic to destroy them.”

Mia was happy to oblige. As the others dropped back into position to both the flanks, Alaria stood ready with Water magic in case Mia’s Fire spells got out of hand.

Alaria needn’t have worried. Mia’s grasp and focus on her magic was superb, and she carried out Mia’s orders with surgical precision. A gust of warm air moved around Alaria as Mia held her hand up, gathering elemental heat and channeling power through the school of Fire magic. Then she turned her spells on the shambling undead, and the flames took them and burned them up as if they’d been made of paper and dry grass rather than metal and bone.

Alaria felt something go out of the undead when Mia burned them. She could almost see it, a gust of dark wind that whirled around the small square where they stood, caught on an updraught and dispersed in a breeze off the river.

“Did you feel that?” Alaria asked Neroli.

“Feel what?” Neroli asked. She seemed distracted, but not in a bad way. Her eyes were gleaming as if she’d just had a flash of inspiration. “Oh, the animating magic? Yeah, I felt it. Pretty basic stuff, if you ask me. Not even as good as the animating layer I used to use on my golems, and I’m no expert at animation!”

Alaria gave a short laugh of surprise. “You know all about it, I suppose?” she chuckled.

Neroli blinked. “Uh, yeah. Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound full of myself,” she grinned. “I was thinking about something else. Do you think you could shield me for a minute? I want to try something.”

“Shield you?”

Neroli nodded. “The hill that Sanuk was headed for is near, but there are plenty of townsfolk about. I’d like to try some magic, but I don’t want to be seen doing it.”

“Okay, where do you want to go?” Alaria asked.

She looked around, then pointed to a little area of green space that could just be glimpsed between two houses. “There,” she said. “Come on, this’ll only take a minute.”

Alaria nodded once, and at her nod Mia and Beth fell in beside Neroli, guarding her as all four of them - Alaria bringing up the rear - moved warily up the lane and entered the little park.

Hopeford was full of little public green spaces, and this one was nothing unusual. Three trees - a large jengberry tree and two small apple trees - shaded a grassy area no more than thirty feet square at most. A little stone fountain, simply carved of the pink stone typical of the city, bubbled peacefully at the center of the garden. Two or three small benches were dotted around the area, tastefully shaded by flowering shrubs to give their users a bit of privacy.

“That one will do,” Neroli said decisively, moving toward the bench that offered the most privacy.

As they moved toward it, Alaria heard men and women shouting orders, and the clash of metal on metal. A troop of Hopeford city guard ran past the entrance to the park, weapons drawn.

“Whatever you’re about to do, you’d better be quick,” Alaria warned. “It sounds like things are heating up.”

Neroli flashed a sudden grin, full of mischief. “It shouldn’t take long,” she said. “You can help by standing there, next to me, and watching.”

Alaria put herself where Neroli had asked, while Mia and Beth took up stations at either side, keeping guard, but also watching with interest to see what Neroli was about to do.

Neroli flung herself down on the bench and, to Alaria’s complete amazement, reached a hand into the air and activated her magic transforming outfit… making it vanish entirely. In a moment, she was completely naked, sprawled on the bench, her legs parted and her hand stimulating her clitoris. With her other hand, she reached back and drew from her Spirit pack the crystal vibrator that she had used to charge the Heart of the Forest. The Heart of the Forest crystal was gone - it was in the cave back at Cold Mountain range - but Alaria saw that there was another crystal snapped into the vibrator’s charging station.

Mia giggled, and Beth licked her lips. Alaria opened her mouth and closed it again. Her instinct had been to protest, but now she saw where Neroli was going with this. She wanted to charge a spell crystal. She had some Forest magic in mind, and to use it, she needed the power that came from her own pleasure.

“Oh, wow,” Neroli moaned as she slid the humming vibrator inside her. “This is so hot. I’ve never done it in such a public place like this before.” She glanced around, then up at Alaria.

Alaria couldn’t resist. And, of course, it was practical, because the sooner Neroli climaxed, the sooner the magic would be ready. With a grin and a glance around to make sure they were not observed, Alaria knelt and put her mouth on Neroli’s left breast. The nipple was warm and erect, the soft texture and the gorgeous smell of Neroli’s skin and the sense of her arousal was a dizzying contrast with the cold air and the danger and violence of the recent fight.

The sensation was refreshing. Alaria was bloodied and tired from the recent fight, but she found her spirits lifting, and she almost laughed at how strange it was to be doing this mid battle.

Alaria felt Neroli’s left hand in her hair. Her nails rubbed across Alaria’s scalp and her fingers caught handfuls of Alaria’s hair and held her head firmly on Neroli’s nipple. Alaria flicked Neroli’s nipple with her tongue and sucked hard, and she felt Neroli bucking with the sudden pleasure of her climax.

Magic flowed, and Alaria felt it strongly. She lifted her head, looking around and seeing a flash of green magic pouring from the trees down into Neroli’s body. As the peak of the orgasm passed, Neroli collapsed, panting, and pulled the vibrator gently out.

Beth and Mia were watching, both with small smiles on their faces as they kept an eye open on the surroundings. Neroli smiled blissfully up at them. She moved her hand, and her light armor reappeared on her body. She popped the crystal out of the base of the vibrator and slipped it into a little leather pouch which she hung from a cord around her neck.

Accessing the Spirit pack, Neroli let the vibrator vanish, then she stood up. Her face was a picture of relaxation and pleasure. She patted the leather pouch that now hung round her neck, hidden under her clothes.

“This should be interesting,” she said, her eyes alight with excitement and interest. She marched toward the park entrance, taking the lead now with a new confidence. She moved so quickly that the others were caught off guard.

She turned round and grinned at her companions. “Let’s go,” she said.

Chapter

Twenty-Two

Outside, the city was in turmoil. People ran here and there, civilians armed with whatever weapons came to hand, or guards with armor and swords but little training beyond that required to quell unrest or deal with bandits. From the north-west, the direction of the hill, the noise of hundreds of undead voices moaning flowed through the air.

It was a horrible noise. To Alaria’s senses the whole air was full of the flickering black shadows that represented the foul magic which raised and animated the undead. It was a scene to scare anyone, but Alaria found that her spirits were high and unaffected by the frightening surroundings. A glance at her friends showed her that they felt the same. The unexpected interlude had brightened the mood of the whole group, and they swaggered into the chaos, all four grinning from ear to ear as they marched toward the center of the action.

The people noticed their confident attitude and their incongruous grins as well as their weapons and armor. Those around Alaria and her companions made way for them, and then fell in behind them. A few people muttered her name, and there were some cheers as Alaria smiled around at the gathered folk and held up Skyfang. She wasn’t going to take time to stop and try to organize them - that would have taken too long - but she was happy to see that they all fell back and let her take the lead. She was confident she could handle even a large force of shambling undead. She could not say the same for the civilians and the city guard.

She strode forward. The crowd followed. Mia and Beth came in behind her, a few steps behind her on either side. Neroli walked next to her. Neroli’s eyes gleamed with excitement. Alaria spoke quietly to her.

“What are you planning?” she asked.

“Something that’ll help us all,” Neroli answered. “I don’t want to say,” she added. “I want it to be a surprise.”

Alaria drew a breath to protest then decided against it, deciding instead to let Neroli do whatever was going to do. Artists, she thought, and rolled her eyes. Best to let them approach things however they think is best if you want results.

They approached the hill. Even from a distance, they could see that it was literally crawling with the shambling corpses of the undead. Where they’d all come from, she didn’t know, but wherever they’d come from, there were countless hundreds of them, and Alaria suddenly felt a flash of doubt. Powerful as she and her friends were, and slow as these undead might be, she had never faced down an army of hundreds before. The sheer weight of them might be enough to break her.

She glanced back over her shoulder. Maybe she should stop and try to organize the townsfolk.

She could see that the undead were corralled onto the hill by a thick surrounding hedge and ditch, broken only at a single point, where a wide path led through the hedge and down toward the city. At the point where the path passed through the hedge, some intrepid guardsmen had erected a hasty barrier of wooden carts, and the undead seemed unable to work out that this was the weak point in the circle.

As Alaria approached, she recognized the lead guardsman who had taken charge of the barrier. It was none other than Pin, one of the guards who had accompanied her on her quest to Neroli’s domain in the mountains.

On that trip, he had been a jovial, rotund young man, quick-witted and always ready with a joke. He was not joking now.

“Alaria, thank the gods you’ve come,” Pin said. “I don’t know what to do. We’ve blocked this entrance, and they don’t seem smart enough to know this is the way through, but it’s only a matter of time.”

“We have to find the creature that’s the cause of all this,” Alaria said. “We need to take out King Sanuk. He’s in there somewhere.”

She looked up at the wall of milling undead that she could see through the gap in the hedge. She remembered the delirious words of Luft Madsen, saying that she needed to save Sanuk, but then she shook her head.

“I need to find the undead king, and then kill him,” she said.

She turned to Neroli. She’d been about to ask if Neroli might help with a Finder spell to locate Sanuk, but Neroli was shaking her head.

“I have a better idea,” Neroli said. “A much better idea.”

She raised her hands, and Alaria saw that she held the little Forest magic crystal in her left hand.

“No!” a hoarse voice yelled from the crowd behind them. They turned and saw a figure pushing through the crowd, surrounded by a little group of people.

Alaria felt her eyes popping and her mouth opening. There was no mistaking who was coming through the crowd. There was Jessica Sola, her golden hair loose and flowing out behind her. There was Sasha, her purple skin, clothes, and hair glowing brightly with the internal light that was native to her faerie kin. There was Palo, Sasha’s partner, still looking bruised and sore from his recent adventures, but moving decisively through the crowd. At his side was Grezkull, the huge half-troll, half-ork using his thick arms and wide bulk to shift the gawking people out of the way.

And in the middle of them, staggering and looking pale and drawn, but very much alive, came Rannek Stickler.

The ancient librarian held up both his hands in a warding gesture, and Alaria noticed that his golden signet ring was gone. His face was desperate. “No!” he cried again. “Neroli, you mustn’t kill Sanuk! Don’t destroy him!”

Neroli’s smile broadened, and green magic crackled around her hands.

“I’m not going to,” she said.

Magic flashed from her. The concentrated force harvested from her recent orgasmic climax lashed out of her hands as raw Forest magic, and this time Alaria did see some of her workings. It was still too fast to follow in detail, but for the first time she saw what was happening. Spells layered on spells, all channeled through the prism of Forest magic and driven with the immense harvested life power of Neroli’s physical pleasure.

“Done,” Neroli whispered, her voice full of satisfaction.

There was an odd noise, a deep whump that was too deep to really be heard. Alaria felt the sound. She blinked. Something had changed… the light? The smell in the air? Both, she decided.

She looked around. It was very quiet suddenly.

“Neroli?” she said. “What have you…”

Then she saw it.

The hill, which had a moment before been covered with so many undead that the ground could not be seen, was now covered from end to end with trees.

There was too much to explain, too much to find out, too much to ask, and not enough answers. The city had been thrown into panic, and there had been reports of several groups of undead roaming the streets aimlessly and attempting to attack anyone they came across. They had to be hunted down and the city secured before anything else could be done.

Rannek was exhausted, as one might expect of someone who had been dead for a week and had just returned to life. He asked only to return to his library and rest. “I’ll explain it all in a little while,” he promised. “But now, I could sleep for a week.”

Jessica winked at Alaria over Rannek’s shoulder. “I’ll see him home,” she said.

Alaria nodded, and knew that she’d learn more - and sooner - from Jessica and the others than from Rannek.

Neroli wanted to go through the wood and have a close look at it. “To make sure the spell is properly fixed in place,” she said. She took Beth with her. Palo, Sasha, and Grezkull were ready to go with Alaria, but instead she asked them to aid in the hunt for any remaining undead. Sasha’s ability to fly would help with that, as would Grezkull’s strength, and Palo wouldn’t be parted from Sasha now.

So, it was just Mia and Alaria alone who went back to find Luft Madsen. He lay where they’d left him, curled up by the side of the wall of the house where the battle had taken place, fast asleep. Alaria looked down at him, shaking her head.

“What a tangle,” she said. “He’s exhausted, we’ll get nothing from him now. And I feel exhausted myself, to be honest.” She looked around, and seeing the door that lay on the ground where she’d kicked it off its hinges, she lifted it and rolled the unconscious Madsen onto it.

Together, Alaria and Mia carried the sleeping man through the streets until they reached the Hopeford Hotel.

A little later, Mia and Alaria walked hand in hand through the dense forest that Neroli had conjured on top of the hill.

“If I hadn’t seen it happen,” Alaria marveled, “I’d have never believed that this wood had been conjured up here out of thin air earlier this very afternoon.”

“The forest does seem old, doesn’t it?” Mia agreed. “Look at the moss on the roots, and the thick lichens on the lower branches! It looks like it’s been here for a century.”

There was no clear path through the trees, but they headed uphill, enjoying the coolness and damp of the dense wood. When they got to the top of the hill, the trees opened out into a broad clearing. Alaria looked up, feeling a surprising heat on her face.

“Would you look at that!” she exclaimed. She pointed up, and Mia whistled in amazement.

“We’ve got blue sky again!” Mia said. “It’s not winter, but fall, as it should be.”

Balance seemed to have been returned to the world. The deep, aching cold and the gray cloud that had oppressed the whole of Hope River valley for weeks now had vanished, replaced with the deep, pleasant warmth of late fall weather. The leaves of Neroli’s newly created woodland were just beginning to turn.

“There they are,” Mia said, smiling, and pointed to a spot next to the largest tree in the whole forest. It was an enormous jengberry tree, and that was when Alaria noticed that the whole forest was jengberry and apple trees, just like the trees in the little park where Neroli had gathered the energy for her spell.

Where Mia pointed, Neroli was sitting with Beth at the base of the huge tree. Neroli and Beth looked up when they saw Alaria approaching. Neroli smiled.

“What d’you think of my forest?” she said. She looked tired but happy.

“I think it’s beautiful. How…?”

Neroli grinned. “You surely must have worked it out by now.”

Alaria pursed her lips. “The undead,” she said. “You turned the undead into trees.”

Neroli nodded.

Alaria continued. “It’s your version of a combat spell,” she hazarded. “You’re not into fighting, you’re not experienced at it. You’ve never practiced combat magic to any serious extent. But when you saw Mia’s Fire spell earlier, you saw the process of a combat spell and realized how you could modify your Forest magic to act as an offensive spell. This is your version of a Forest attack spell?”

“I saw that Mia’s spell changes the physical state of the thing that’s being attacked. Fire doesn’t destroy, exactly - it changes the state of the matter that the target is made from. I came to realize that through observation early on, but I’d never applied it to combat magic.”

“So, instead of turning your enemies into smoke and ash, you’ve turned them into trees?” Mia said.

“Nicer, don’t you think?” Neroli said. “And it fills the other criteria, too, the one that Rannek said was crucial. He said Don’t destroy Sanuk. Well, I haven’t.” She reached a hand round and slapped the trunk of the tree. “Here he is, alive and well. Better, in fact, than he ever was before.”

Alaria looked up at the huge tree. It was a jengberry, its leaves glowing in the light of the sun, and high up there were already a whole host of little birds flitting about in the branches. A deep, pleasant sense of peace flowed out from the huge tree.

“Is he aware?” Mia asked.

Neroli shook her head. “Not of what he was. He wasn’t really anything anymore - not a being with individual identity or self-awareness. He was animated, but not more than that.”

“And you wanted to know if your spell had properly fixed in place, you said?” Alaria asked. “Has it?”

Neroli nodded. “Beth and I have had a good look about,” she said. “There’s no sense that any of the trees retain the malignancy of their nature when they were the undead. The spell has worked.”

As it turned out, the spell had worked even better than Neroli had thought. When they made their way back to the Hopeford hotel, they passed here and there small outcrops of trees in very odd places - growing through a building, or in the middle of a street, or hard by the wall of a house. These, as they rightly guessed, represented the groups of undead that had slipped out through the gap in the hedge before Neroli had cast the spell.

The magic had not just extended to the undead on the hill - it had gone as far as the borders of Hopeford and even beyond. On the outskirts of town, two days later, three mature apple trees and one jengberry tree were found growing in the middle of a cornfield. The farmer had not been out to the field for a few days, but he swore that there had never been any trees there, and since they appeared to be at least thirty years old, he didn’t think he would have missed them.

In the months and years that followed, many superstitions and traditions would grow up around the trees. The people who had witnessed the spell in action unanimously thought that the trees had appeared and destroyed the undead. The story went that an ancient tree-spirit who lived in the hill had risen to protect the people of Hopeford from the undead menace. Apart from within their small circle, Neroli never got any of the credit, and she never wanted any of it either. All that mattered to her was that the trees were not cut down, and the rumors and myth around them just about guaranteed that.

For the moment, though, all Alaria and her friends wanted to do was to wander back through the city in the evening and find their way back to the Hopeford Hotel. Answers would wait.

Chapter

Twenty-Three

Rannek Stickler joined them for breakfast at the hotel. To Alaria’s surprise, he was looking much better than yesterday. He seemed to have lost weight, but his eyes were bright, and his voice was strong, and his face had lost that drawn, haggard look that it had shown yesterday.

They had a big table to themselves, outside on the terrace, where they had a view of the city’s white stone buildings gleaming down toward the river. Everyone was there; Alaria, Mia, Beth, Neroli, plus Grezkull, Sasha, Palo, and Jessica, and, of course, Rannek. The only missing face who might have something to add was Luft Madsen, and he was upstairs, still asleep. A doctor was in attendance, keeping an eye on him, as were two Hopeford city guards, who Alaria had deputized for the task. Madsen had already slipped through her fingers once and had ended up causing her no end of trouble. She wasn’t going to let that happen again.

“This all looks excellent,” Rannek said as he settled down. “I’ve got a serious appetite!” He reached for a plate and began helping himself to toast, butter, jam, bacon, and scrambled eggs. He poured a cup of coffee and beamed around at everybody, looking very pleased with himself.

“So, all’s well that ends well, eh?” he declared.

Alaria raised her eyebrows at him. “Maybe,” she said, “but I’m not going to be fully satisfied until I know what actually happened with you and Sanuk. You were dead, Rannek. How the hell did you come to be at the hill yesterday? And why did you say we had to not kill Sanuk?”

“Ah, well, yes, I suppose I do owe you an explanation,” Rannek said, his mouth full of toast and bacon. He chewed, swallowed, washed his mouthful down with half a cup of coffee, and cleared his throat.

“It’s simple, really,” he began.

Alaria rolled her eyes. “Whatever it is, I doubt it’s simple.”

“No, no, really,” Rannek said. “It is. But I’ll begin at the beginning. I was dead. You weren’t wrong there. After Jessica and I spoke about the threat of Sanuk, and she showed me the chamber, I realized that there was only one course of action available to me. I had to use the power in my ring to seal the tomb shut. That spell would only work when Sanuk was in the process of awakening. I knew it was time. I went home and prepared the spell, and that night, after all was quiet in the city, I returned to the hotel and sneaked down into the cellar.”

“Why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do?” Jessica broke in. “I might have helped you!”

“Too dangerous,” Rannek said, shaking his head. “The ring contained some very old magic, magic that was linked to the awareness of the spell itself. If I’d told you, you’d have had no choice but to aid me, because the ring would have drawn your life force out of you as well, simply because you knew what was happening. I couldn’t have that. The risk was mine alone.”

“You knew the spell would kill you?” Alaria said.

“Not for certain. I knew it would draw on my life force, but my life force has been artificially extended and amplified by the elixir I took all those centuries ago. It doesn’t work the same as other people’s life force. No, I knew that it was too dangerous to involve anyone else, but I thought there was a chance I could use the spell and survive. I was wrong.”

He shuddered. “It’s not pleasant for me to recall, but I managed it. I deployed the spell, and the magic caused the tomb stone to be sealed immovably in place. Sanuk could not get out, or so I thought, but the spell drew on my life force, and it did, in fact, kill me. I dropped to the ground and felt myself rising through the ground above my body, floating up over Hopeford and into the sky. It was a marvelous sensation, and I felt satisfied, because I thought that I’d done my duty and succeeded in my role. But I was wrong. I felt the sensations around me change, and I was pulled out from my upward trajectory into the place between places - the hall of the ancients, where I found the spirits of the other eight Keepers, those who had been supposed to watch with me, but whose elixirs had failed, leaving me as the only one left. It was good to see my old friends again, but I was surprised and horrified to learn that all had gone awry. We were not fighting Sanuk’s natural reawakening. The prophecy had been usurped, and the magic that would have awakened Sanuk was being used by someone else.”

“What are you saying?” Mia asked, enraptured by his tale. “You mean there’s some other force at work here? One that we know nothing about?”

“The red brotherhood,” a harsh voice said from the direction of the doorway back into the hotel.

Alaria and the others turned to look, and they saw that none other than Luft Madsen himself stood in the doorway. He was flanked by the doctor and the two guardsmen, one of whom had a firm grip on Madsen’s upper arm.

“Sorry, Alaria,” the guard said, “but he insisted he needed to see you. We thought it best to bring him down, rather than leaving him to come and ask your permission.”

“You did right,” Alaria said with a nod. “Madsen, there’s another chair here, come and sit, and tell us what you have to tell.”

Luft Madsen was a short, powerfully built man with very dark hair and eyes, and very pale skin. He might have been overweight once, but the privations he’d been through recently had stripped him of that. He nodded gratefully to Alaria and sat at the table where she indicated.

Alaria turned to the guards. “You can wait by the door, if you would,” she said. “I don’t think he’s going to try to escape now.”

“That’s right,” Madsen said. “I’m not interested in running away, so you don’t need to worry about that. Well, I’ll just help myself to some of this food while I tell you my part of the story, if you don’t mind.”

Alaria gestured to him to go ahead, but there was no need, as he was already shoveling fruit and bread onto his plate. She looked at Rannek, and he nodded to show that he didn’t mind Madsen taking over the story.

“All right then,” Madsen said. “So, the red brotherhood. They were a group of mages who got hold of some old documents in a library in Crownheart City, some papers that told of this ancient king, Sanuk, and his power to raise the undead. They were renegade mages, you understand, people who had learned magic from the best, but then had chosen to put it to cruel uses. They experimented with new forms of spell work. I had gone to them, you see, because I wanted my revenge… Revenge on you, Alaria.”

He glanced at her, looking a bit shamefaced, then looked away again. “After I escaped jail in Crownheart, when you made sure my gang was broken up, I traveled far and built up my resources again, until I had enough money behind me to take on in a big endeavor. I hired the red brotherhood to help me design a spell that would be suitably cruel for me to take my revenge on you. They helped me track you down, they helped me plant the spell that would make your friends sick, but would kill them when you broke it… It was horrible, I know, but getting revenge on you had been my driving motivation for years.”

Everyone at the table was looking at him stoney-faced now. He seemed to feel the hostility, but he kept his eyes down and ate quickly as he spoke.

“They betrayed me,” he said, “as I realize I deserved. They didn’t care about me, but they had discovered a new way of doing magic, one that was powered by the strength of individual emotions, rather than by a person’s mana pool.”

Alaria exchanged a glance with Neroli, who was listening to Madsen with fascination. Clearly, the red brotherhood had stumbled upon an approach to magic that was like hers, though with very different intentions, and a much darker technique.

“They wanted my hate,” Madsen said. “They knew I hated you, Alaria, and they wanted to harvest that hatred and use it to power a spell. What the spell was, I didn’t know, but as they helped me to lay the trap sigil in Brighthill, they managed to find a way into me, through the magic that I was doing. They used that way in to trap me and bring me back here, and they began their foul ritual. What their goal was, I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was being used to fuel their spell with no more compassion than if I’d been a tub of oil to fuel a lamp. I still don’t fully understand what the spell was that they were trying.”

“They were trying to hijack the magic of Sanuk,” Rannek said, picking up the thread again. “They needed a huge amount of power to do so, and they needed it to come from a dark source. So they used Madsen’s hatred of Alaria. The ritual took a long time to enact, and thankfully you, Alaria, came back with Neroli in time to track down the brotherhood before they could make full use of their power.”

“What did they mean to do?” Luft asked.

“My friends in the hall of ancients were not certain,” he said, “but it seemed that they wanted to get the power to raise armies of undead - a power only King Sanuk has. If they could take control of him, they would be able to control the power and raise an army so large that they could have done pretty much whatever they pleased. That hill - unknown to the residents of Hopeford - is one of many in this region that contains the bones of countless people from the old kingdom. I imagine that the red brotherhood would have taken over the whole of Sapheli, given the chance.”

“But you helped,” Madsen said, looking at Rannek. “That much I do know. They spoke your name, they said that you had upset their plans, and they had to find another way to get Sanuk out. I had no idea what that meant at the time, of course, but I think I understand now. All I knew was that Sanuk was like me, a person being used by the brotherhood.”

“If you hadn’t sealed the tombstone, Sanuk would have been released much sooner?” Jessica said, looking at Rannek.

“I believe so,” Rannek replied. “The red brotherhood had to change their ritual, forcing Sanuk to smash his way out over the course of a week, something that would never have happened if Sanuk had been acting under his own volition. I was trapped, a soul adrift in the hall of the ancients where the ghosts of the other Keepers dwelt, but between the nine of us we managed to create a spell that was powerful enough to send my soul back into my body. It took time, but we managed it. I had to come back to warn you.”

“Why did you need us to not destroy Sanuk?” Neroli asked. “It was just good luck that I’d prepared a spell that would stop him without destroying him, I had no idea that it was so important to you. Why was it so important?”

“You remember the unnaturally cold winter that had settled over the land?” Rannek asked. “That was part of his awakening magic. It was tied to his life force, and it was an unintended consequence of the red brotherhood’s plotting. They had awakened him, but in doing so they had triggered all the consequences of that awakening. If his malignant life force had been released into the world - as it would have happened if his body had been destroyed - then the magic that created the winter would have become fixed in place. Hope River valley would never have seen summer again.”

“And the red brotherhood?” Alaria asked, looking again at Madsen.

“Dead,” he said. “At your hand. They made a show of having many members, but it wasn’t true. Nearly all of the people they claimed as members were created through spirit magic. They weren’t real people. The only real ones were the three who you burst in on when they were enacting the ritual. The three you killed.”

“That explains something else,” Beth put in. “When the guards went back to the house where the ritual took place, there was no trace of the massacre that had happened there. There were just the three bodies upstairs, and no sign of any of the others.”

Mia shuddered. “They sure seemed real enough when they were trying to kill us,” she said.

“That’s the nature of spirit magic,” Madsen said with a shrug. “But they were just creations, all the same. The three who caused all the trouble are dead, you can be sure of that.”

“What about the people who kidnapped me?” Palo asked, speaking up for the first time. “I went to see if I could get a message to Alaria through Hopeford, but on the way I was grabbed by bandits and held captive until the city guard came and freed me. What was all that about?”

Madsen snapped his fingers. “Ah, yes!” he said. “I do know about that. I overheard them speaking about it. The red brotherhood hired the bandits to watch the road. They didn’t want any word getting back to Alaria, because they had to get as much time as they could to free Sanuk from his tomb. They were angered because the bandits refused to kill you. The bandits said that murder wasn’t in their contract, and if the red brotherhood wanted you dead, they’d have to pay more.”

Palo shuddered, thinking how close he’d come to a sticky end.

“You did great, Palo,” Alaria said. Then she stood and looked around the table. “You’ve all done amazingly well. I can’t thank you enough, but I also owe you all an apology. If it wasn’t for me and my difficult past, none of this would have happened. You’ve all gone through terrible danger and suffered through this adventure, but if not for me, you’d all have gone on living peaceful, quiet lives here. Thank you all.”

Jessica smiled at her. “You’re forgetting something,” she said. “Rannek, if the red brotherhood hadn’t intervened, when would Sanuk have woken up of his own accord?”

“It’s hard to say for sure,” Rannek said, “but I guess it would have happened in the next eight to ten years at the most. It was due, by all the predictions.”

“And what would have happened then?” Jessica prompted.

“Well, if someone had noticed the sense of fear around the tomb and word of it had got to me, then perhaps I would have been able to go and use my spell to lock the tomb closed. But remember that I had no idea where the tomb was located. In all these years, I’ve never been able to find it. I would have suspected that it was coming, because I knew the unnatural winter was a sign of his awakening, but without knowing where the tomb was, I’d never have been able to seal him into his tomb using my spell.”

Jessica spoke again. “And why did you know where the tomb was?”

Rannek frowned, not knowing what she was driving at. “Why, because you found it and told Alaria, and Alaria came to me and asked me about it.”

“And why did I find it when I did?”

“Oh… I don’t know.”

Jessica looked around. “Mia?” she asked.

A slow smile dawned on Mia’s face. “You found it because you were doing a tour of the hotel. You were looking at the whole premises, and that’s why you investigated that disused cellar.”

“And why was I touring the premises?”

“Because you’d just taken it over.”

“Because…”

“Because Sinjin had moved away in a hurry.”

“Neroli?” Jessica said. “Why had Sinjin moved away in a hurry?”

“Because Alaria had freed Grozmikal from me, and Sinjin wanted to go away with Grozmikal and rebuild their lives somewhere new.”

“And how did Alaria end up freeing Grozmikal?” Jessica pushed.

Beth spoke up. “Because she had moved here in the first place, and had gained the trust and respect of Mia, and me. We told her about Grozmikal, and that led her to Neroli.”

“And through the journey to Neroli, you and I met,” Rannek said to Alaria. “If not for that journey, you’d never have come to me for answers when Jessica presented you with the problem!”

“Rannek,” Jessica said. “If Sanuk had awakened naturally, do you think he could have been stopped?”

“Perhaps,” Rannek said, “but not without great loss. It’s likely that Hopeford and the surrounding lands would not have survived in anything like the form that we know them now.”

“So, you see, Alaria,” Jessica said. “It’s us that should be thanking you, not the other way round. Yes, if you’d not come here, then none of this would have happened. We might have lived in peace for another five or ten years. But then Sanuk would have awakened, and there would have been no one here to stop him. In fact, you’ve saved us - all of us - from a terrible fate that not even Rannek here could have stopped. If you hadn’t come to Brighthill at the exactly right time, Hope River valley would have been defenseless when King Sanuk awoke of his own accord. You’ve not endangered us, Alaria. You’ve saved us all from a terrible fate.”

Alaria looked around at the grinning faces of her friends. Even Luft Madsen looked impressed. She smiled. “I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t seen it like that, but it’s true. There’s a chain of consequences running the whole way back through all our lives that lead us to this moment. We can never know how our actions will affect things, so we just have to do the best we can with what we have each day. We just need to do what’s right.”

“You might even say that I helped a bit,” Luft Madsen chipped in. “If I hadn’t held onto my hatred of you all these years, then the red brotherhood wouldn’t have been able to use me to make Sanuk wake up sooner than intended. Who knows, if Sanuk had woken up in ten years, everything might have been different. Perhaps I can take some credit for saving the valley as well!”

Alaria looked at him coldly. “Perhaps,” she said. “If you forget the reason for your hatred of me. You were running a violent extortionist gang in Crownheart City, which I broke up.”

“Perhaps if I hadn’t been doing that in the city, you’d never have ended up here?”

“More likely I’d have ended up here anyway, and Jessica would have found the tombstone, and I’d have spoken to Rannek, and we’d have been able to pre-empt Sanuk’s awakening without any of the suffering and danger caused by the red brotherhood,” she said, sternly. “Your part in this has been to enable the red brotherhood and bring us within a hair’s breadth of disaster. I don’t think I’m going to credit you with any of the success, Madsen. You should be happy with the fact that you’ve got away with your life.”

Madsen held up his hands and grinned sheepishly. “Fair enough,” he said. “You’re right, I suppose. Well, I can tell you this. All hatred I ever had for you is gone, Alaria. I’m sorry that I held on to that for so long. Their magic burned it out of me. And there’s something else, too - it’s true what you said about doing right. I always knew, deep down, that what I was doing was wrong, even back in the days when I was running a gang in Crownheart City. I’ve seen the error of my ways now. I can see that you should do what you know is right, even if it’s hard, and if you aren’t sure, you should look to others as your example. I’m not going to go wrong again.”

Alaria let a trail of truth magic flow subtly from her fingers and trickle around him as he spoke. To her surprise, she found that he was completely in earnest.

She held her hand out to him. He hesitated for a moment, then stood and shook hands with her. He looked around.

“I’ll be off, then,” he said. “If that’s alright with you?”

Alaria nodded. “Where’ll you go?” she said.

He shrugged. “West, probably. I’ve heard there’s lots of nice little villages out past the west wall of Hope River valley. I’m a good scribe, and I’ve got an eye for detail and a head for numbers. I’ll be able to find something.”

Rannek looked with interest at Madsen. “I have a better idea, if you’d be willing,” he said suddenly. “You say you’ve a head for numbers and can write?”

Madsen nodded. “Always have,” he said.

“We should talk,” Rannek said. “Instead of going west, I think I might have a job for you right here in Hopeford.”

Chapter

Twenty-Four

“Luft Madsen as Rannek’s trainee librarian,” Alaria said. “There’s one outcome I’d never have anticipated.”

“Would you have anticipated any of these events?” Neroli asked with a twinkle in her eye.

“No, I suppose not,” Alaria admitted. “I can testify to his skills as an organizer, at least,” she added dryly.

“Thanks!” Luft said. He looked around, grinned at Rannek, who winked at him. Then, instead of leaving, Luft sat down again and filled his plate for a second time.

“There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” Alaria said. “Jessica, how did you get here? Last I saw you, you were at the Homestead being looked after by Sasha and the others. What happened?”

“I had a dream,” Jessica said. “It was the strangest thing, but I dreamed I saw a woman working in a laboratory of some kind. She was very beautiful and had dark hair, and I felt like I’d been brought there by some magic. She was very urgent, she said that she had a message for me, that I had to go to the hotel and open the cellar again. She said it was essential, there was no one else who could do it.”

Alaria’s eyes widened. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a laboratory? That was too much like her own vision of Katrine, the girl who she’d loved back at the academy. She remembered that when she’d passed out after her fight with Zargkul the dwarf in the Brighthill inn, she’d seen a vision of Katrine. She couldn’t remember exactly what Katrine had said, but she’d said something about being in the right place at the right time. As events had unfolded, that had certainly come to seem prescient, but at the time Alaria had thought it was only a dream.

Jessica saw the change in Alaria’s expression. She hesitated, but then carried on. “Grezkull here was with me when I woke from the dream,” she said. “I managed to convince him that we had to go.”

Grezkull, the big half-troll, had not spoken throughout the breakfast, content to listen and steadily work his way through several helpings of the vast amount of food that was laid out before him. Now he wiped his mouth, sat back in his seat, and nodded.

“Jessica was terribly earnest,” he said. “I wasn’t keen on letting her go, since she seemed like she was still in shock, but she convinced me.”

Jessica laid a hand fondly on his arm. “I made it clear that I would go whether he approved or not,” she corrected, “and so he agreed to come along.”

Grezkull grinned. “That’s true. We grabbed Sasha and Palo from the inn on our way and came straight over. Don’t worry, Beth, we left Sally Selwick in charge of the inn - she’ll be fine for a couple of days.”

Beth rolled her eyes but said nothing. Sally, a young, keen woman from the village, was clearly not who Beth would have chosen to look after the place for a few days, but given the circumstances, Beth seemed willing to let it pass.

“Anyway,” Grezkull continued. “We accompanied Jessica all the way to Hopeford, as fast as we could go, and we made it to Hopeford in record time. We went straight to the hotel.”

“Poor Dethelwyr,” Jessica said. “First, I ran off to tell you all that Rannek was dead, leaving her in charge, then I was rushing back again and running straight to the cellar. I never told her anything about what was going on because I knew how important secrecy was. She must think I’m going mad. Anyway, I went straight to the abandoned courtyard and unlocked the cellar door, and there was poor Rannek, banging on the hatch and shouting himself hoarse.”

“Of course,” Alaria said. “We locked the door again after we’d seen Rannek’s body down there. We didn’t want anyone to disturb you, Rannek,” she said apologetically to him.

“I thank you for the thought,” Rannek said. “But when me and the other eight Keepers worked our magic and sent my soul back into my body with renewed life force, I immediately jumped up and ran to the exit. When I found it locked, I panicked. I thought that after everything that had happened, I was still going to be defeated. But who is this strange woman who appeared to you in a dream, Jessica? It seems that if not for her, we wouldn’t be looking at such a good outcome. If I hadn’t got out, Sanuk may have been destroyed outright. Who is this messenger? I know nothing about her.”

“I think I might,” Alaria said. “But I want to be sure before I speak any more about it.”

Rannek gave her a long look, then nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s fair,” he said reluctantly. “Well, I don’t know if there’s anything more to tell. I’m not certain that my extended life force will last much longer. I’ve not felt the same since I was sent back, and I will not be sad to depart. When I return to the other eight, then the nine Keepers will be together again. We’ll have completed our mission and can go leave our watch and go on to the next stage, to our rest in the true world of the dead. With me returned, the others can move on from the hall of the ancients. I think it’s my responsibility to leave a capable person to take over from me. Luft, do you think you’d be willing to come back to the library and begin now?”

Madsen stood up. “I’ve nothing better to do,” he said happily. “I’ll be glad to. It’ll keep me out of trouble,” he added, with a wink at Alaria.

She rolled her eyes and waved for him to go. She couldn’t quite bring herself to fully trust him, but she trusted her spell, and she knew he was telling the truth. Whatever else he might have done, she had to admit that he’d been through hell at the hands of the brotherhood. Luft Madsen had paid in pain for his crimes and his folly many times over, and she would not stand in the way of him building a new life and trying to do better in future.

“All that remains, then, is for us to find out who this mysterious messenger woman is,” Jessica said, looking at Alaria.

“I think I can do that,” Alaria said, “but it will take a bit of doing. I’ll need some time.”

“I have the hotel to see to, and Dethelwyr could do with a day off,” Jessica said. “But I’ll be happy to help out if you need. Send a message and I’ll come over if you need me. Otherwise, I’ll come visit you once I’ve sorted things out here. Maybe even later today, if I can.”

They made their way back to Brighthill that afternoon. It was a cheerful journey, and they took their time, chatting together and enjoying the walk and the heat of the sun after all the days of cold that they’d had recently.

All had worked out well in the end, and the only thing remaining to tie up was where Katrine fitted into the plot. Alaria didn’t speak about it until they got back to Brighthill. Palo, Grezkull, and Sasha were willing to carry on looking after the hotel, because Alaria said she needed Beth at the homestead.

Once she was alone again Beth, Neroli, and Mia, Alaria told the story of who Katrine was to her. She’d spoken a little about it before, but now she went into the story in more detail.

“I never thought I’d see her again,” Alaria said as she walked around the garden with her lovers. “When I had that vision, I dismissed it, thinking it was nothing more than a dream brought on by exhaustion and blood loss. But now that I think back on it, I realize that she said something about trying to reach me. She said it had been difficult to reach me… and… and…”

Alaria trailed off, trying to think what Katrine had said to her. You’re in the right place at the right time, Alaria was confident she’d said that. And, It’s hard to reach you, she’d said that too.

“Emotion… she said that my capacity for emotion was the driver of magic,” Alaria remembered suddenly. “She said that those who study magic had got it all wrong, that they’d missed out the most important part - emotion, passion, feeling…”

“I think I’d like to meet this woman,” Neroli said. “Her ideas seem to align with mine.”

“There’s definitely something there,” Mia said. “I was amazed to hear about how the red brotherhood used Luft Madsen’s hatred to power their spell. Doesn’t it prove that powerful emotion can power magic - powerful feelings of any kind, good and bad?”

They looked at each other. Alaria had stopped and was looking up at the trees.

“What is it?” Mia said quietly.

Alaria blushed despite herself. “When I was just starting out here, when you and I had first gotten together, Mia…” She reached out and took Mia’s hand before continuing. “We were out here, making love on the grass. I lay on my back, looking up, and I had a vision of a woman looking down at me, as if she was made of gray smoke, hanging below the trees. She was… she was pleasuring herself, and watching me, and she climaxed at the same time as I did. I thought at the time that she looked familiar, but I also thought that it was just some kind of half dream, brought on by the pleasure of what I was feeling. But I remember her now. I know why she looked familiar. She looked like Katrine.”

“What are you saying?” Mia asked.

“I’m saying that I think Katrine was trying to get through to me somehow, even then. I don’t know why, or how, or where she’s been trying to get through to me from, but she was trying to reach me somehow. We need to find a way to reach back, back to her. I think that for some reason, this garden is a good spot to do so.”

They all looked at each other, and slow smiles grew on all their faces. They all instinctively knew what they could do to raise power for a communication spell.

“Shall we do it here first?” Alaria said.

“Here to begin with, then inside, then back here again?” Neroli suggested. She was already reaching up to free her hair from its tie. “It’s very hot today. I think a dip in the stream could be nice.”

One by one, garments fell to the grass as the four women moved toward the stream. Neroli seemed to enjoy the process of stripping, and even though she had no need to do so, she took her clothes off one by one rather than just using magic to demanifest them. By the time they got to the stream, all four of them were naked. They slipped into the water, all three reaching out to run their hands over Alaria’s body.

Alaria tilted her head back and sighed in pure ecstasy as she felt three mouths, three pairs of hands, and three pairs of breasts running over her skin, pressing against her body, stimulating her nipples and running over her ass, her thighs, and her hips.

She slid tentacles from her waist and her wrists and ran them out over the bodies of her lovers. She let the juices from the manifested limbs run thick over their bodies, and then watched as Mia and Beth faced each other, rubbing the slick fluids all over each other’s breasts as they looked at Alaria.

Neroli lifted Alaria up onto the bank of the stream, pushing her legs apart and dropping down to lick her pussy and tongue her clit. Beth and Mia climbed dripping out of the water came to lie one on either side of Alaria, Mia rubbing Alaria’s breasts and holding her nipples tightly, Beth leaning over to kiss her, exploring her mouth and lips with her tongue and her fingers, and running her fingers through Alaria’s hair.

Alaria could feel her lovers’ bodies though her tentacles, as she explored their breasts and hips, then thrust a tentacle into each of their pussies and began to fuck them all gently but firmly, increasing the tempo of her thrusting as Neroli built the oral stimulation to a greater peak with her tongue.

The sun warmed her skin, and the feeling of the cool water flowing past her feet was delicious. She looked up at the trees, and as she felt the pleasure build, she remembered what Katrine had said, and she remembered the feel of Neroli’s Forest magic, and even of the spell that flowed from the hateful magic circle created by the red brotherhood and powered by Luft Madsen’s hate.

All those spells had a feel to them, and now, as Alaria was swept away on a wave of sensual pleasure, feeling her lovers’ bodies and flowing like the water of the stream toward her own climax, something clicked inside her like a key turning in a lock.

She saw how it could be done - magic, not as a stylized ritual, not as a carefully thought-out sequence of actions, but as an instinctive, unconstrained reaching, an action as intuitive and emotionally driven as this lovemaking.

As she felt her lovers pushing her toward her climax, Alaria suddenly felt that the power they were building could be used to reach out in a moment, to bring her awareness to anywhere in the world, even to places not in this world exactly. Places that were other to here.

She reached out of herself at the same time as her orgasm broke over her like a wave.

She found Katrine, at the same moment that Katrine reached and found her. Their wills met in a place that was not a place, and Alaria felt a sudden lurch in reality as something fundamental shifted. She blinked, panting, feeling sweat dripping between her breasts. Her eyes opened as Neroli licked the sweat from between her breasts and came up to kiss her.

Alaria tasted herself on Neroli’s lips.

“We’ve got company,” Beth said.

They looked around. There were two newcomers in the garden. One was Katrine, standing looking very pleased as she gazed at the luscious naked group standing dripping by the stream before her.

The second newcomer was none other than Jessica. She was red in the face and looking flustered.

Alaria stood, her body singing with the pleasure of her recent climax, and the satisfaction of her successful magic.

“Katrine,” she said.

Katrine nodded once.

“And Jessica,” Alaria said with a smile.

Jessica, often so confident and flirtatious in the past, seemed at a loss for words. She didn’t know where to look.

“It’s okay,” Alaria said gently. “You’re both welcome.”

“The gate was open…” Jessica said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“This house is always open to you,” Alaria said. She glanced at her companions, then back at Jessica. “You’re welcome to join us, both of you.”

Jessica’s mouth opened, then she grinned, shrugged, and reached up to tug at the brooch that held her jerkin in place. Katrine threw her hood back and reached down to unbutton her boots.

Alaria smiled. Today was going to be a good day.

Chapter

Twenty-Five

Rebuilding magic from the ground up was not going to be a quick job, but Aaria and her friends didn’t mind. They had time.

It turned out that Katrine had been on the same path as Neroli and even the same path as, in their unpleasant way, the red brotherhood had been. Katrine had been an exemplary student, but she’d quickly realized the secret that most magic users overlooked their whole careers. The mana pool was not the only way to power spells. Magic could be made from energy of all kinds. Power and potential that could be drawn from all different kinds of human experience.

She understood why this information was suppressed. As the red brotherhood had shown, negative emotions could be used as easily as positive ones, and very dark spells could be achieved by utilizing dark emotions. There being no way to ensure that didn’t happen, the knowledge had been suppressed.

But Katrine - like Neroli - had disagreed with that approach. The true power of magic was in the magic of feeling, of emotion, and even if there were bad things that might be done, that didn’t mean that the whole subject should be simply ignored.

That was more dangerous than being open about it and trying to find a way to make it work.

Katrine had rebelled against her tutors, and had gone it alone, but her experimentation had taken her into difficult areas. There had been opposition, and she’d been hunted, tracked by the agents of the powerful mages on the council of magical authorities, who wanted to suppress the secrets that she’d discovered. She’d fled, and come here, to Brighthill.

“To this very house, in fact,” Kartine said, as she told her story, sprawled luxuriously on cushions in the living room of the homestead at Brighthill, the day after she and Jessica arrived. The first day had been taken up with passionate lovemaking, all six of them enjoying each other’s bodies to the fullest extent possible.

As well as Katrine, Jessica was a great addition to their group. She was crazy about Alaria’s body, and Alaria was completely blown away by how passionate Jessica was for sensual pleasure. Neroli, Beth, and Mia introduced her to the tentacles, and together, Jessica and Katrine both enjoyed having tentacles inside them for the first time, while Neroli, Mia, and Beth watched.

They each took turns being the focus of attention, and they spent time just improvising, doing whatever suited them. First, during the day, they made love upstairs in the bedroom, then outside in the stream again as darkness fell and the luminescence in the water flashed and sparkled around their bodies. It grew chilly after sundown, and they went inside and lit the fire in the living room, slowly and languorously exploring each other at a slower pace. They slept, then woke, and made love again. At some point, Mia made everyone breakfast, and they sat round the kitchen table together to eat, no one saying anything of any consequence yet.

Back in the living room, they drifted into another round of sex, before finally lying back together in the afternoon, sprawled about on each other’s bodies and on the cushions, with the windows open and the sunlight pouring in to illuminate their naked bodies.

That was when they got to talking, and Katrine told her part of the story at last.

“You lived here, in this house?” Alaria asked in amazement.

“Not for long,” Katrine said, “but yes, the mysterious mage who lived here before you… that was me!”

“It’s a strange coincidence,” Alaria said.

“Hmm, I’m not sure,” Katrine said. “Coincidence is too short a word for that kind of thing, I think. The more I do in this life, the more I come to think that there’s some kind of guiding hand at work in many seemingly random things that happen. Anyway, I didn’t live here for long. Though I was here long enough to put some magical defenses in place - which you found, I think?”

Alaria remembered the fire demon that she’d fought on the first day she and Mia had been up here, and the strange effect on the gate that made anyone who tried to open it without a key fly up into the air.

Mia laughed. She reached over and placed a hand on Alaria’s breast, gently cupping the nipple, and laid her head on her shoulder. Jessica, who lay cuddled into Mia on the other side, snuggled in closer too, her hand reaching across Mia’s belly to rest on Alaria’s hip.

“The fire monster, the booby-trapped gate, they were both you?” Alaria asked.

“Both me,” Katrine said.

“What happened next?” Beth asked.

Katrine’s expression darkened slightly. “I made a mistake - or so I thought at the time - but I realize now that perhaps it was better this way. We never really know how things will turn out in the end, do we?”

Katrine sighed, and cuddled in closer to Beth and Neroli, who were on the other side of Alaria from Mia. “Gods, but it’s good to be close to other people again. Anyway,” she said, rousing herself to continue the story. “I tried to use my powers in a way that I wasn’t ready for. I tried… Oh, but it sounds so over-ambitious now, I almost hate to say it out loud. I tried to cheat death. I reached out and tried to see what was beyond this world, what was beyond this life.”

“Wow,” Neroli said. She had been toying with a lock of Alaria’s hair, her other hand resting lightly on Beth’s left breast, but now she sat up. “You tried to use emotion magic to go beyond the confines of the world?”

“Emotion magic,” Katrine said. “That’s as good a name as any for it, I suppose. I called it intuition work, or raw magic, when I called it anything at all. But I suppose it is driven by emotions - or perhaps one should say feelings - pleasure isn’t really an emotion, is it?”

“Semantics!” Jessica protested sleepily from her cozy spot leaning against Mia’s warm body. “Get on with the story!”

Everyone laughed.

“Well, I got pushed out of this world and into the next, but I discovered what Rannek and his Keepers discovered - there’s a place between this one and the realm of the dead. When we die, we go to a place that’s not part of this one, not even connected to it, but if we don’t fully die, or if by magic we manage to go out of this world without dying, we come into an in-between place. There are lots of people there, lots of rooms and halls and chambers, like a huge castle, but they’re all closed off from each other, and you can’t travel between them. You can come back to this world, sometimes, with the right magic, and if the right conditions are met you can go into the true beyond, and die for real, but you can’t travel between the different sections of the between place.”

“You worked out how to communicate between them, though?” The question came from Neroli who was sitting up, listening avidly. Her hair was a cloud around her head. A shaft of sunlight shone across her, making her wild curly hair a luminous halo, and lighting up her perfect breasts and her smooth belly.

Alaria felt a stirring between her legs as she looked at Neroli, and lost the thread of the tale for a moment. Neroli saw her looking. “Not now, you!” she scolded, playfully, though she squeezed Alaria’s breast as she said so, making Alaria gasp in pleasure.

Katrine laughed. “A little more, only,” she said. “I did manage to communicate with other parts of the between place. I was able to get messages through to the hall of the ancients, where the Keepers were. I used my own emotions to drive magic in the between place, and found that they were powerful there, more than in this realm. I was able to transform the space I found myself in, create tools and equipment, a whole magical laboratory, in fact, where I could work. Always, I was trying to find a way back, but I realized that the only way through was if the right conditions were fulfilled on the other side - this side, the side where we are now. The Keepers explained that to me. They had to see Rannek fulfill their quest. If he did so, and died, then they could all go on to the next level. I worked out that on this side, if I wanted to come back to life, I needed someone who really felt something for me to reach out to me, with only the intuitive power that feeling magic can bring. You, Alaria, were the only one who could do that. You were the only one I ever knew who truly loved me - not that you knew it at the time, nor did I let you near.”

Alaria looked at her. “I did love you,” she said. “You knew? Even though I didn’t?”

“Even back then, I was already on the path to doing magic in a different way,” Katrine said. “I was already exploring how I could drive magic with something other than my mana pool. Yes, I knew how you felt about me, but I shied away from it. It frightened me, and I used that fear for my own spells instead of following up on your feelings for me. I’ve regretted that ever since…”

She paused for a moment, then came back to herself.

“That’s about it,” she said. “When I found myself in the between place, and realized that you were the only one who could help me, I concentrated my magic on finding you. It took a long, long time, but I got there, and realized that you were on a path that paralleled the path of the Keepers and Rannek. I watched, but it was only rarely that I could get through to you, and I had to rely on fate to show you the way to true magic - the magic of feelings.”

“True magic,” Alaria breathed. “That’s the best name for it.” Neroli was massaging her left nipple again, and Mia leaned over and began doing the same with the right nipple.

“This will truly revolutionize magic,” Alaria sighed as she felt pleasure move through her again. “Now we’ve discovered too much of this for it to be repressed anymore. We’ll change things forever with this knowledge, and we’ll find a way for it to be used for good. But not yet…” she added with a throaty laugh.

Her lovers all moved in toward her. The sight of them was breathtaking in the sun. Everywhere she looked, she saw a different part of one of them. Mia smiled and kissed her, Jessica leaned over and rubbed the insides of her thighs, and Beth leaned back, touching herself as she watched.

Alaria sent a tentacle out and wrapped Beth’s ankles with it, making her lean back and open her mouth in a moan of sensual pleasure.

Their uncovering of a new way of being mages would cause the whole practice of magic to be rebuilt from the ground up, but that would take time.

No rush, Alaria thought, as Mia moved on top of her and slid a hand down to feel the wetness between Alaria’s legs.

Rebuilding magic from the ground up could wait another few hours. For now, Alaria was happy to have things just as they were.

She had the whole rest of her life ahead of her.

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https://www.facebook.com/groups/LitRPGReleases

https://www.reddit.com/r/litrpg/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/LitRPGsociety