Chapter 2

Ariadne finished fastening the latches on the armor, then waited for Barat to return.

“Is last one,” he said in his thick accent, hefting the bundle he carried—another of the Mage Knight panoplies Ariadne had been carrying with her since Tir Yadar.

“Help me set it up.” She needed more time with him before she sent him on his way to his next task.

Corec trusted the man—now that he’d been freed from Rusol’s influence—but the soldiers and settlers wouldn’t want their enemy’s commanding officer wandering free without supervision. Barat was meant to be seen working off his debt, with the understanding that he would eventually join Kevik’s fledgling order of knights.

He helped her drape the last panoply over its stand, and together they secured enough of the latches to hold it in place. That made nine sets of armor arranged in two neat rows. The spare panoplies had been stored in crates for months, but Ariadne had finally had a chance to get stands made for them, and Corec had allowed her to partition off part of the cellar into a separate room with a locking door. The matching swords already hung from hooks set along the wall.

“King Rusol has armor like this,” Barat said suddenly. “And a blade.”

Ariadne froze in place. “Mirrorsteel?” she asked. “Where did he get it?” Very few sets of mirrorsteel armor had ever been made, and nearly all of them had belonged to the Mage Knights.

“I do not know.”

“Have you ever heard the name Thedan? Or Ephrenia?”

He shook his head.

“You’ve told us Rusol’s an elder witch and demonborn,” Ariadne said. “Is he a wizard, too?” She’d never heard of anyone with three magics, but if Rusol was a Mage Knight, he’d be a more formidable foe than the group expected.

“He does not mention to me,” Barat said. “But I do not think so. He asks questions to wizards as if not knowing answers.”

Ariadne nodded. She’d have to tell Corec, but there was nothing else she could do about it for now. If Rusol was defeated, perhaps she could retrieve the armor. For now, she had nine other sets that still needed new bearers—which reminded her of her real reason for requesting Barat’s help.

“You are from the elder witches north of Larso, yes?” she asked him. This would be her first chance to follow some advice Ellerie had given her a year earlier.

He wrinkled his brow. “We say elderfolk. Mother was of clan, Father was of Larso. He sent me to Northtower to become knight instead.”

Ariadne retrieved the spell book Ellerie had found for her in Terevas—a book that, judging by the notes in the front, had once belonged to a Chosar Mage Knight, though not one whose name she recognized.

“Read this,” she said to Barat, opening it to the first spell.

“I do not know these letters.”

“I’ll teach you,” she said, pointing. “Ill-us-trant.” She couldn’t read the whole spell for him or she’d end up casting it instead, with the words becoming an indistinct whisper. She’d have to take it one part at a time.

If the test was successful, she could get help from Ellerie or Bobo to write up a list of sounds in Western matched to the symbols of the wizard language for Barat to learn from, but for now, she just wanted to know.

It took a while, but eventually they made their way through the short spell. “Illustrant ac tenebras, tenebras atque illustrant,” Barat said.

There it was. He hadn’t cast the spell—that would require building up the right pathways in his mind—but there’d been an echo of power in Ariadne’s arcane sight. Barat wasn’t just an elder witch. He had wizard blood as well, and having both meant he was likely descended from the Chosar. More importantly, it meant he could be trained as a Mage Knight.

Ariadne wouldn’t accept just anyone, though.

“Tell me,” she said, “what did your knighthood mean to you?”

The puzzled expression on his face suggested it was going to be a long conversation.

“Lady Ellerie, welcome back to Tir Yadar.”

“Thank you, Dorgt,” Ellerie said. Hildra’s son and his team had set up their main camp in the fortress complex, near what Ariadne referred to as the World Fountain. “I brought you something.” She handed over two freshly printed and bound books.

The stoneborn man raised his eyebrows as he peered at the titles. With his clerk’s suit and clean-shaven face, he looked more like a short human shopkeeper than a dwarven explorer and wizard.

“They’re done so quickly?” he asked.

“It didn’t feel quick to me.”

Dorgt laughed. “I’ll let Sanna read these first, since she’s compiling our own research. We’ll make sure we don’t duplicate your work. We’ve made it farther in than your notes suggested. I found a number of artifacts and systems that were clearly once enchanted to power the city, but the enchantments are long gone. Mother will be disappointed.” Hildra was due to arrive the next day, with help from Leena.

“Have you had any more trouble with the locals?” Ellerie asked.

“We had to rescue another group from Livadi that didn’t bring enough supplies to make it here and back,” Dorgt said. “I let them look around, then gave them enough food to get home. I believe it’ll be less of a problem in the future. Your friend Shavala has grown out ten miles of grassland. That’s enough to feed our own animals, so we’re turning this into a permanent outpost. I trust our deal still stands?”

Ellerie nodded. “Varsin Senshall and his brother understand that finding Tir Yadar doesn’t grant them any right to claim it for themselves. If anyone has the right to the city, it would be Ariadne. She’s content for the stoneborn to have a presence.” Ariadne had been more than happy with the idea of her people’s descendants returning to their ancestral home, but Ellerie didn’t want to sound too eager—she still wanted certain concessions out of the arrangement.

Dorgt looked down at the books he still held, hefting the smaller of the two. “This one, right?” he asked. “We haven’t told our people the truth yet. The fact that Tir Yadar is mostly underground lends credence to the idea that we lived here once, but the rest of it—the Chosar—I don’t know how they’ll react.” He snorted. “Some people still believe the old nonsense that we were birthed from stone itself.”

“If it’ll cause problems, you don’t have to say anything,” Ellerie said. “Just wait for copies of the book to make their way around. If people don’t believe it, then they don’t believe it.”

Dorgt nodded. “That may be the best way to handle it.” He set the books down on a small, intact table he’d found somewhere. “Time for a tour? What would you like to see first?”

“How’s the excavation going?” From where she was standing, Ellerie’s view of the western side of the courtyard was blocked.

“The spot where the stone was melted, you mean? Are you sure it’s worth it? It’s going to be a lot of work, and I can’t imagine anything in there would be salvageable after so much time. Or with so much weight on it.”

“Fortress West was where the Chosar conducted all their magical research and teaching,” Ellerie said. “The wardens lived there too—at least part of the time. If anything in there had strong enough protective wards to survive, we should try to find it. A single spell book could justify the cost of the work. Ariadne just asks that any bodies you find be laid to rest respectfully.”

“We can try again, I suppose,” Dorgt said. “We’ve only made it four feet in so far, through where we think the main entrance would have been. Melted or not, shaped stone is hard to crack, and I don’t have any miners or stonemasters here.”

The barrens remained a significant impediment to travel, and perhaps digging out Fortress West would have to wait until Hildra and her son had convinced more of the stoneborn to come to the city.

Or maybe there was a simpler answer.

“I have an idea,” Ellerie said. “But we’ll need to wait until your mother arrives—we need someone who can open the warded door.”

Shavala walked among the young tershaya, trailing her fingers across their trunks as she checked on their health. Her little forest at Tir Yadar, which had started in a plaza near the center of the ruins outside the mountain, now stretched eastward into the barrens. Dorgt and his people, still surveying the area, hadn’t been pleased about the buildings she’d destroyed, but if the tershaya were going to flourish on their own, without regular tending, they would need a larger area.

She’d made a small start on restoring the nearby flatlands as well, continuing the work she’d done to grow grasses and weeds near the river and extending them to reach the tershaya and beyond. A self-sustaining ecosystem, one that could attract birds and other wide-ranging creatures, would require more than just trees.

The sound of running footfalls echoed from a nearby street, then grew quieter as whoever it was reached the wooded area. Shavala waved her arms to help the runner find her among the trees.

It was a stoneborn boy, the son of one of Dorgt’s animal handlers. “Miss Shavala!” the boy said, then stopped to catch his breath. “Mum said to tell you Lady Hildra is here.”

Shavala thanked the boy and sent him back to his mother, then began the long trek into the mountain, to the palace complex. Fortress Central, as Ariadne called it.

The fortress’s courtyard, where Dorgt and his people had set up their inner camp, was nearly empty, but beyond the statues of the old gods, the palace’s warded door now stood wide open. Shavala could hear the clerks’ voices coming from inside, speaking in excited tones at their first chance to explore the new area.

She slipped through the door unnoticed, then made her way through the maze of corridors in the northeast until she reached the second door which required a warden to unlock it. This one too was open, leading to a hexagonal chamber with three rooms branching off. The one to the left held only heavy-duty metal shelves, their purpose long forgotten. Ellerie’s and another woman’s muffled voices came from the room to the right.

It was the middle door, the heavily rusted one, that interested Shavala. Even before she reached it, though, her elder senses told her she’d arrived too late. She opened it to find a room full of dead and dying mushrooms, lichens, and mosses. The green light they’d once given off had faded away, and there were no glowing moths to greet her. The unique system of life which had grown around the staff for centuries had failed.

Shavala stood still for a moment, trying to hold back her tears. She’d known the work she’d done to keep the room alive was temporary, but this had been her first opportunity to return. The journey to Tir Yadar had taken so long that she couldn’t realistically go back right away. Later, after Leena had learned to take other people with her when she Traveled, Shavala had been busy caring for Risingwind, and then doing what she could to help the new settlers deal with land that had returned to the wild. Even if she’d come on her own, she couldn’t have made it through the palace door without a warden. Would Corec have come with her? It hadn’t occurred to her to ask him—she’d thought she had more time.

She made her way to the mound where the staff had once stood, casting out with her elder senses as she went, but none of the funguses she saw were in good enough condition to be nursed back to health. She could regrow them—she’d retrieved the staff from Zhailai after the battle—but what was the point if they’d just fail again? She couldn’t leave the staff here. It was too important to the elven people, and she still had a great deal of work ahead of her in Terevas if she was going to bring the tree bond back to the nilvasta. And even if she regrew the mushrooms, she suspected they could only live in a symbiotic relationship with the moths, and there were no more moths.

Then she caught sight of something she hadn’t noticed before. Hanging from the tallest mushrooms surrounding the central mound were cocoons, dozens of them, many still showing signs of life. How long would it be before they hatched? A week? Two at the most?

She quickly pulled her foraging sacks from her coat pocket and gathered every cocoon she could find, mushroom and all—the larvae would need the mushrooms to feed on. She added representatives of all the other funguses and mosses she could find as well, then hurried to find Ellerie.

If Hildra was here, that meant Leena had come as well, and she might not have left yet. Shavala’s work outside the mountain was done for now, and the sooner she made it back to the free lands, the more likely she’d be able to find a new home for the moths before they hatched.

“Careful,” Hildra murmured. “You’re almost to the door, then there’s a step down.”

Ellerie peered around from behind the tunneling golem. She’d learned it was easiest to control the golem while standing behind it. If she moved to the side for a better view, it would attempt to mirror her actions in a more exaggerated manner. Supposedly the Chosar had a way to see through the artificial creature’s glass eyes, but the note Ariadne sent back with Leena said she didn’t know how they’d accomplished it.