Someone had found Aisia clothing to wear. Liv suspected it had come from Sidonie’s things, as the skirt, shift, and bodice were in the Lucanian style, rather than the sort of hunting leathers that Wren and Soaring Eagle preferred. They had a few more camp chairs dragged in, three new goblets of wine poured, and platters of food set down on the table, covering up one end of the map.

  Arjun was rather particular about just what the woman should be allowed to eat. He shooed away the goblet of wine that was offered to her before Aisia could so much as reach for it, and poured her a cup of tea instead, from the pot Thora had kept warm next to one of the braziers. “Broth,” he said. “She needs broth and plain bread, to begin with. This woman hasn’t had anything in her stomach for longer than any of us have been alive. She needs to go slowly.”

  “And blood,” Wren added. When Arjun turned on her, she met his eyes and didn’t back down. “She was made to need blood, Arjun. It’s what keeps her young, lets her heal, and she’s probably already used too much shifting in and out of her bat form on the way out of the rift.”

  After a moment of thought, Arjun nodded. “You’re right, Wren. I should have thought of that. I’ve known you long enough. But I’d prefer she wait until she has something else in her stomach, first.”

  “Ask one of the guards standing watch outside to have all of that brought,” Liv said, turning to catch Thora’s eye. The maid nodded and hurried over to the entrance, where she pulled the canvas flap and the hanging cheesecloth aside so that she could duck out.

  Liv turned to Ghveris. “Can you help me speak to her? I know we had a hard time talking, when you first woke up.”

  The war-machine inclined his head. “Of course.”

  “So long has passed that language has changed,” Liv began, speaking Vakansa, and turning to look Aisia in the eyes. “Most of the people you hear speaking in this camp will use Lucanian, which didn’t exist when last you were awake. Anyone with ears like these,” she raised a hand and tapped a finger against the point at the top of her left ear, “will speak a dialect of Vakansa that you should at least be able to catch the meaning of.”

  “Cotheeric,” Aisia said. “The language of the overseers.”

  “We no longer call ourselves Cotheeria,” Keri said, from his place at Liv’s side. His tone was gentle, and he followed her example by speaking slowly and enunciating clearly. “Many of my people would become angry at that word.”

  “I meant no offense,” Aisia told him, after clearly struggling to parse his words. Her brows were furrowed. “And the Centh?oria?”

  “Humans, now,” Liv told her. “While your people have been called Great Bats, or Children of Ractia. Wren and Soaring Eagle, here, are of the Red Shield Tribe.” She sighed. “I’m certain you have questions.”

  “A few,” Aisia admitted, and then laughed. “More than a few. This place, the - hole? - we came out of. That is Corsteris?”

  “What’s left of it,” Liv answered. “Most people in the world call it Godsgrave, now.”

  Aisia repeated the word silently, her lips moving. “Fitting,” she decided. “It is... horrible.”

  “Which is part of what’s kept anyone else from finding you, or any other survivors,” Miina said, and then wet her throat with a long sip of wine. “I’m not certain if that’s a lucky thing or not.”

  “I will call it good fortune,” Soaring Eagle said, emphatically. “Anything that has led to finding more of our people, alive and whole, I am grateful for.” He turned to Aisia, reached out, and placed his hand on her shoulder. “When you and the others are fit to travel, we will take you to our village at Clear Water Cenote. There, all your questions will be answered, and no one will harm you.”

  “Though to do that, we’re going to need to get you back into that shared dream,” Liv said, “so that you can tell the others what you’ve seen here. We don’t want anyone coming out in a panic, getting hurt. You’re going to have to be a sort of spokeswoman for your people.”

  Thora and one of the regular soldiers, carrying a new tray with a steaming bowl and a hunk of fresh bread on it, ducked back in through the entrance to Liv’s tent, and the conversation paused for a moment while Aisia was served. A single glass vial, etched with sigils and frosted over, the contents a deep red color, rested next to the bowl.

  “Slowly,” Arjun told her in Vakansa, and Liv noticed that his accent wasn’t terrible. She imagined that he’d had plenty of practice, speaking to patients from all across the north.

  Aisia nodded, tore off a chunk of bread, and dipped it in the broth she’d been given. She took the first bite with trepidation, which Liv found quite understandable, but once she’d actually gotten a taste of the food, the woman fell on what she’d been given like a farmer who’d survived a famine.

  “I want a route marked out down to the entrance we found,” Liv said, swapping back to Lucanian while their guest ate. She tapped one finger on the map. “We need to hold the position until we’ve gotten all the survivors out, and that could take a while. That means fending off not only the insects we fought, but also the wyrms. I have a few requirements for composition.”

  Soile nodded, reaching out for one of the quill pens and inkpots which had been placed around the table. “Tell me.”

  “You’re going to need at least one person with Savel with every team,” Keri began. “They need to be able to maintain enough light to drive shadows away from our soldiers. I’ll give you a list of who can handle it. The mana beasts will come up out of any shadow they can find, to ambush our people.”

  “Irav didn’t work the way we wanted it to, but any of the wyrm riders with the word of venom and an Authority strong enough to protect themselves and someone standing next to them will be invaluable,” Liv added. “Failing that, anything that can be used to make a shield, like Aluth or Cel. Hold our Kerian soldiers back to defend here, their seeds are essentially useless in this kind of rocky terrain.” Though she imagined someone as experienced as Elder Aira could find away, most of their soldiers were far younger.

  “Every group needs to have at least one Red Shield scouting,” Wren declared. “Preferably two.”

  Liv nodded. ‘Having guides in the air was the only thing that let us find our way through places that had a lot of steam vents,” she agreed. “And the teams need to be big. We’re not aiming for stealth here, we’re aiming to limit our losses.”

  “I’d normally say twenty,” Soile told her, looking up from where she was making notes.

  “Make it thirty,” Liv said, without hesitation.

  “That’s going to limit how many teams we can have out at a time,” Soile pointed out.

  “The restrictions on what words we need will already do that,” Liv said. “I want the entrance we found under guard and fortified as much as reasonable immediately. Aisia needs to rest and eat today, get a night’s sleep, and another meal in the morning before I’m comfortable taking her back into the rift.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “I’d prefer more than that,” Arjun grumbled. “But I understand why we need to move so quickly.”

  Aisia looked up at her name, glancing between Arjun and Liv. She’d finished off her broth and bread, Liv saw, and now had the glass vial of preserved blood in one hand. “It’s cold,” she said, tracing one finger over the glass.

  Liv swapped back to speaking Vakansa. “An arrangement my father thought up for Wren,” she explained. “The enchantment keeps the vial cold enough that the blood won’t thicken and clot.”

  Aisia nodded, popped the cork, and put the vial to her lips, tossing her head back. Once she’d drunk it all, she set the vial back down on her tray, winced, and licked her lips. “Not as good as fresh and hot,” she admitted.

  “I imagine not.” Having tasted her own blood on occasion, Liv actually thought that the prospect of drinking blood from others - even animals - must be downright vile, but she’d never say that where Wren could hear. “We’d like you to rest for the rest of the day, get a good night’s sleep, have a few full meals between now and the morning, and then head back out with us to begin pulling your people out.”

  “I will be ready,” Aisia promised.

  “Good.” Liv looked around the table, and spoke in Lucanian. “We have a plan. Let’s save as many of these people as we can.”

  ?

  For Liv, the waiting was difficult.

  She knew that no one in her party was ready to head back out into the rift, and that giving them less than a full day’s recovery would be pushing them quite hard. At the same time, she’d taken the best people she had in Varuna, the people she had the most faith in. If they’d all had such a rough go of it, Liv couldn’t help but worry that her soldiers would fare worse.

  The first group of thirty men and women left within the hour, and Liv watched them march out from the wooden tower which had been erected above the riftward gate in the palisade. Keri, Miina, and Thora went with her, and once the four of them had crammed into the watch tower along with the regular sentries, the place was rather cramped.

  “Olavi knows what he is doing,” Keri assured her. “He’s fought beside me for years. He won’t let them get into more trouble than they can handle.”

  Liv couldn’t help but sigh. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to sending other people out to fight for me,” she admitted. “It’s one thing if I’m right there with them, like on Nightfall Peak, but to just have to sit back and watch them leave...”

  “You need rest too, m’lady,” Thora pointed out.

  And despite how much she hated to hear that, it was true. A good meal had set the lingering headache from her ill-fated use of the Crown of Celris to a sort of dull, low throbbing, which Liv could almost ignore so long as she didn’t move quickly or push herself. But she was certain that it would take a full night’s sleep, with no journeys into enchanted dreams or fights against shadow-scaled wyrms with burning eyes, to set completely right again.

  Liv spent the afternoon and evening resting as best she could, with her cousin, Thora and Keri trading off the duty of keeping an eye on her. Each of them gave her a stern look the moment she looked likely to do the slightest bit of casting, so that she could almost have believed they’d all been rehearsing the same part for a theatre performance.

  Reports came back from the place where Ghveris had fallen through the rock, the first of them a mere two hours after Liv had seen her soldiers off at the gate. They’d made it to the sinkhole, where one of only two Elden soldiers who’d imprinted the word of stone was not only raising fortifications, but creating a braced stairway down which would be, in theory at least, capable of standing up under the weight of anyone they needed to move in or out. Liv doubted that definition of ‘anyone’ would include Ghveris, but it was a start.

  They’d had to fight off a dozen insects mana beasts, and one wyrm, and while there’d been injuries, no losses were reported in that first message. It was Wildcat who carried that, and the Red Shield was sent off to rest while the next group of thirty went out. Their task was to descend, mark the route to the chamber, and secure everything up to Liv’s wards. With a full sixty soldiers at the site, the severely wounded would be sent back for treatment, while the remainder set up camp to stay through the night, until Liv and her friends made their way back come morning. The whole while, Red Shield messengers flew back and forth, coordinated by Soile.

  “It sounds like they aren’t meeting nearly as much resistance as we did,” Liv grumbled, after she’d read what would be the last letter of the night. Thora was coming her hair out before bed, while two soldiers were clearing the remains of dinner from her camp table. Miina had unpacked a shift for her to sleep in and hung it from one of the wooden poles which held the pavilion up.

  Keri took a sip of wine. He was the last of her friends, commanders, or advisors to linger in her tent after they’d finished eating. “That worries you, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.” Liv started to nod, then stopped herself so that she didn’t end up with her hair getting accidentally pulled.

  “Have you considered that it could simply be the case we killed most of the mana beasts between here and that entrance to the undercity?” Keri asked her.

  “I have. But the last time I was confident we were safe, Ractia used Milisant’s body to try to kill me,” Liv pointed out.

  “Fair enough.” Keri looked down into his goblet, and swirled the dregs of his wine around. “There’s little we can do but to send out scouts, set a watch, and trust to them to do their jobs.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Liv said. “One of us could send our spirit out to see what we can find.”

  Keri set his goblet down on the table with a soft clink. “It should be me, then. You’re still recovering from using the crown.”

  Liv narrowed her eyes. “You ran yourself entirely out of mana,” she pointed out. “And the last time your spirit went roaming, I had to go pull you back to your body.”

  “That’s only because I was hurt,” Keri argued.

  “The two of you are ridiculous,” Miina broke in. “You’re exactly alike. Neither one of you is ever happy unless you’re throwing yourself into danger. You’ve got to be on the front lines, every time, and Trinity forbid you actually get a moment to rest. You fit together so well it's sickening. I’ll do it.”

  Liv immediately shook her head. “No -”

  “What, you think I don’t know how?” her cousin interrupted. “My mother taught me, same as your fathers did. And out of all of us, I did just about the least casting today. All I did was hold one ward in stasis and dissolve a few beetles that got past Wren and Ghveris.” Miina walked right up in front of Liv and stared down at her, as if in challenge.

  “Fine,” Liv said, after a moment. “Fine. But do it here, where we can keep an eye on you in case something goes wrong. Come lie down in my bed.” She waved Thora off, stood up, and led the way over to her cot, where she pulled aside the flap of canvas which closed her sleeping area off from the rest of the tent.

  Keri dragged over two camp chairs, and set them next to the cot. “If you’re not back by the time the watch changes, one of us will go after you,” he warned.

  Miina, in the meanwhile, kicked off her boots and got herself settled back on Liv’s pillow. “You would really think that a queen would bring along a better bed than the rest of us,” she grumbled. “You could have had something disassembled and brought along in the wagons, with a real mattress.”

  “My apologies for not being more spoiled,” Liv told her cousin, and couldn’t help but roll her eyes. She settled into the rightmost camp chair, next to Keri.

  “Alright. Here I go,” Miina said, and blew out a great breath. Liv watched her cousin close her eyes, and she reached out with her Authority ever so gently.

  “Has she gone?” Keri asked.

  “It’s not like touching yours,” Liv admitted. “She doesn’t let me in the same way. It’s like the difference between putting my hand against a castle wall, and putting my hand into the river. But yes, I think she’s off. At least, as far as I can tell.” A thought occurred to her. “Why don’t we have groups of Eld doing this all the time, scouting?”

  “Two reasons,” Keri answered, adjusting himself in the camp chair with a creak. “Three, maybe, now that Ractia’s in the world. The first is that it's always been a rite of passage, not something to be done casually. The second is that you can’t always control where you go very well, and sometimes it can be difficult to come back.”

  Liv grinned. “So I recall. And I suppose the last is that Ractia could probably kill someone just as easily by finding their spirit as any other way. Still, it might be something worth looking into. Like anything else, I imagine people get better with practice. And if we keep the scouting to short distances and brief journeys, that would lessen the dangers. I’ll talk to Soile about it in the morning.”

  Keri nodded. “I wanted to ask you -”

  Miina opened her eyes and sat up, then shook her head, sending her blue hair flying out around her.

  “That was quick,” Liv remarked.

  “Mmm. I didn’t have to go far,” Miina told them. “Say, Liv, Silica’s the only wyrm left from the first clutch, isn’t she?”

  Liv and Keri exchanged a glance. “That’s what I understand,” she said.

  “Someone’s gotten something wrong, then,” Miina said. “Because there’s a black wyrm the size of your castle nestled right up at the bottom of the crater.”

  volume nine is off and running!

  here. I am more available there than I am here.

  Dramatis Personae

  Livara T?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Mountain Queen, and Lady of Winter. Did not bring a special bed. [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]

  Aisia - Great Bat who has been locked in a dreamworld by Ractia for a thousand years. So, so many questions.

  Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. His life would be easier with jello. [18 Rings of Mana]

  Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath - Formerly a Great Bat in service to Ractia, now the remains of his body form the heart of an Antrian juggernaut. Linguistic consultant. [Mana Battery: 10 Rings]

  Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. Cautious about the idea of a spirit-scouting corps. [20 Rings of Mana.]

  Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. Spirit quest! [21 Rings of Mana]

  Soaring Eagle - Husband of Calm Waters, father of Blossom. Red Shield Tribe. Goal in sight!

  Soile - A Commander of House Keria, now essentially Liv's general. Forming squads. [17 Rings of Mana]

  Thora - Lady's Maid to Liv. Enforcer of recovery time.

  Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Pioneered blood rations!