Corminar stared down at the wooden model of the Dawnwoods, paling, the truth of what I’d just told him setting in. ‘No…’ he whispered. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s the only explanation, Cor,’ Val said, hand on his shoulder. ‘Sulla wasn’t lying. And what else could the Golden Canal Project have been for? A real act of charity?’

  The elven ranger shook his head. ‘Fools,’ he muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fools,’ he said again. ‘All of us. All of my kind, too, to have trusted Amira in these supposed “diplomatic efforts”. We should have looked to the larger picture, to how the pieces interconnected. We should have known this was coming.’

  ‘Cor, we couldn’t have—’ Val started, but Corminar turned away from the table, snarling with anger.

  ‘We most certainly could have! Or is it not our proclaimed occupations to distrust Players?’

  ‘We did distrust her,’ I said, backing Val up. ‘We fought in a war to remove her from our home. That was our distrust.’

  ‘Your home,’ Corminar corrected me. ‘The Tundras are your home.’

  ‘And yours. You know as well as I do that you’ve not been welcome in the Dawnwoods for a long time, now. That’s not your home anymore.’

  ‘Styk…’ Val said. She flashed me a look that said she didn’t think I was helping.

  ‘OK, fine, look,’ I continued. ‘That’s not the point anyway. The point is that we’ve been fighting. We’re not fools, we were just… misdirected. What matters is what we do next. And I reckon we’ve got to do what heroes do.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Val asked.

  ‘We follow.’

  * * *

  ‘Coo-ee!’ I shouted, standing on the docks by the last seaworthy ship, jumping up and down. ‘Over here, you big idiots!’

  A face popped over the side of the ship—a woman wearing Goldmarch armour. ‘Oi!’

  ‘What, should I not be here?’ I asked, playing oblivious.

  ‘No you bloody well should not be here,’ she replied. Then she turned to others on the ship. ‘Enemy on the pier!’

  This was what I’d set out to achieve, so at that I turned and jogged slowly away from the ship. The guards took their sweet time in following, balancing clumsily on the plank that joined the vessel to the docks.

  I turned, running backwards. ‘Nice secret bunch of dockyards you have here! Would be a shame if someone, I dunno, reported them to Duchess Yua of Lenktra, wouldn’t it?’ The guards were following already, but I couldn’t resist rubbing it in a bit further.

  Once my pursuers were on land, I began to sprint properly, turning around the corner of a tall wooden palisade wall… and bumping straight into more guards.

  ‘Oops.’

  ‘Yeah, bloody oops,’ the tall soldier I’d just collided with replied, then he began to swing his sword towards me.

  I responded by opening a portal beneath my feet, and I smiled and waved as I dropped through it, coming to land on the platform of a watch tower up above.

  ‘Missed me!’ I shouted, to both the pursuers from the ship and to the man I’d bumped into. I glanced back at the vessel, and the four familiar figures creeping on to it, rushing for the capstan. They’d needed a few minutes of peace before they could raise the anchor and drop the sails. They’d needed someone to goad the guards into chasing them away from the last seaworthy vessel.

  Fortunately, I could be very annoying when I wanted to be—and I had the portal magicks to effectively evade capture. It really hadn’t taken the Slayers very long at all to realise that this was the correct course of action.

  ‘He’s up there!’ the woman who’d first spotted me shouted, pointing up to the watch tower.

  ‘Hi!’ I waved back at them, conscious of the soldier at her side raising his bow to point at me. Just as the ranger could fire, I opened another portal in the way of the attack, pointing the arrow back at the man who’d shot it.

  He stumbled backwards, looking at the arrow pointing out of his right upper arm. ‘Oh,’ he mumbled.

  I risked another look at the ship, not wanting to look too much in case it tipped off the Goldmarch soldiers. Val, Lore, Arzak and Corminar were all now at the capstan, beginning to turn it, though it looked like the warrior and the barbarian were doing most of the heavy lifting. There was a clunk, clunk, clunk noise as they lifted the anchor, and if I wasn’t distracting enough, the soldiers were going to realise that this wasn’t being done by people from the Goldmarch.

  ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘What are you waiting for? Come up here! We can have a nice chat.’

  The woman in charge gestured for her soldiers to begin to climb the ladder up, but it was a long way to go.

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  I made a show of tapping my foot impatiently—an act that really got on the woman’s nerves—before calling out, ‘This is taking too long! Want me to help?’ Before she could answer, I opened a portal underneath the first soldier’s feet, bringing her up to the top of the watch tower with me, where I proceeded to arc my knife forward in a Stab.

  But the soldier recovered quickly, and she brought her blade around to meet mine, smashing it out of the path of attack, but not quite out of my grasp. I attacked again, hoping my weapon being smaller meant that I’d be quicker on the attack, but that hope was unfounded. She turned on the spot to avoid the attack, and as she came back around to face me once more, she lunged with her sword.

  I was rapidly running out of time to defeat her—four of her five colleagues would soon be up the ladder, and I’d be surrounded. In this enclosed environment, I wouldn’t be able to guarantee portalling away without someone following. I had to act now.

  But I’d planned for this. And it had been exciting to find a use for an ability that I didn’t get to use all that option, what with most objects seeming to be magically reinforced, these days.

  With the flick of my wrist, I opened up a portal at the top of the ladder, but this wasn’t one of my usual Local Portals. This was a Portal Slice. The metal ladder was sliced clean through, and began to creak. The soldier up on the platform with me baulked, eyes wide, as she saw what had just happened. For a moment, when the ladder didn’t immediately fall, I thought I was going to have to shift around the platform to get a look at the bottom of the ladder too, and slice through there. But then the creaking got louder, and louder, and the base of the ladder began to warp and bend, sending the four soldiers tumbling towards the ground.

  It wasn’t enough to eliminate any of them, but it bought me some time.

  The soldier on the platform lunged with her blade once more, and I had just enough time to lean to one side to avoid the attack. But I wouldn’t keep being that lucky.

  I risked a glanced over to the deck of the seaworthy ship, and then I saw the signal: Val jumping up and down and waving both hands in the air. They were ready to go. As the soldier raised her blade to attack me once more, I opened a portal behind me and stepped through it, out onto the deck of the now-stolen ship.

  But a hand poked through before I could close it.

  The woman pushed herself through the closing portal, gritting with determination, and stumbled out onto the deck. ‘Stop!’ she cried. ‘In the name of Empress Amira, leader of the—’

  She didn’t finish that order because Lore collided with her chest, tackling her towards the wall of the captain’s cabin. Before they could hit the wall, I opened another portal—conscious that I’d depleted a lot of my mana reserves already—and summoned its partner at the edge of the ship.

  Lore and Goldmarch soldier both fell through the portal and over the rail, tumbling towards the sea below. In a fraction of a second, I closed the last portals and opened one last pairing—one that caught Lore in mid-air and caused him to come out rolling across the deck.

  From the water below, I heard a huge splash.

  6x soldiers of the golden empire escaped!

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  Between the soldier’s barked order and the new notification, I realised that the Golden Kingdom was no more. It was the Golden Empire now, what with Amira having parts of the Gentle Tundras in her domain already, and the Dawnwoods surely about to fall to a sea force they could not have seen coming.

  Niamh’s plan was coming together, and the only chance that the elven homeland had was that she could be stopped by a witch, a gentle barbarian, a narcissistic ranger, an orc warrior who would really rather be knitting, and… me. Whatever I was, these days—simply a bladespinner, a hero, or the spawn of a Player?

  As the western banks of the Iron Sea faded into the distance behind us, I closed my eyes and breathed. At my side, Val, squeezed my hand, though this time even she didn’t say a word.

  We were heading for war once more. The real war.

  Except, this was one we had no hope of winning.

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